Risking climate changer

We have just gone through an election cycle that saw Democrats lose seats in Congress as well as a large number of state legislature majorities. Greens had races where we came close, like Ben Manski in WI but it was an election when voters rejected liberal or progressive. candidates of any party.

One of the results was the ascendancy of a group of Tea Party backed candidate with a cheering section of ideological purists eager to "take our government back." A mixture of populism and near anarchic libertarian dogma, a majority of these new Congress Critters are so locked in to the ideal of a government so small that you can drown it in a bathtub that they ultimately reject anything that could possibly upset that view. The biggest threat to this view of government comes from Climate change where the financial risk is so great that it could bankrupt any government. They either hold on to the view that climate change is a hoax designed to continue public funding for university scientists or it is a Al Gore initiated plot to force socialism on the public.

In a must read post at Climate Progress, Joe Romm laments the fact that the media spends more time on climate scientists than on the climate science itself.

But for those interested in the real climate science story of the past year, let’s review a couple dozen studies of the most important findings. Any one of these would be cause for action — and combined they vindicate the final sentence of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

So what can Greens do to save humanity from itself? It is not enough to just change your own personal life style and hope that it catches on.

A colossal blunder from Obama?

I have really begun to think that Obama has made a colossal blunder in the way that he has chosen to handle climate change. It would seem to me that his presidency will be evaluated by history on the manner in which he has reacted to this crisis. It won't be Iraq, Bush's war, nor even Afghanistan… now known as Obama's War. It won't be health care. But those are the issues on which he has chosen to spend his time and his political capital.

It could be argued that he did not choose Iraq and Afghanistan. True about Iraq but he certainly has, from the days of the campaign, chosen to play in Afghanistan.

It is the focus on health care that concerns me and makes me question his judgment. It has the ring of a young man trying to prove that he could get done what Clinton could not, taking Obama forever out of Clinton's shadow.

But this is not issue number one. It won't determine the fact of our economy, or of our comfortable lifestyle. Climate Change will. Failure to address the biggest elephant in the room is a way to be trampled and I don't want my children to suffer for Obama's failure to take his biggest challenge head on.

In the mean time, opposition to Obama has had the opportunity to hone their economic arguments about big government and the costs to the tax payers. If the opposition to the economic bailouts has this ring, and the opposition to health insurance reform has this ring, what do you think will be the key element of the Republican opposition to doing anything about climate change? I can just hear Boehner and McConnel droning on now while Glen Beck stirs up the troops by labeling them "Commies".

There is only a very short time between now and the next meeting of the United Nations Climate Change Conference - Copenhagen. The best Obama can bring to the meeting is a flawed bill from the House of Representatives, a draft of a bill from the US Senate and a history of having climate change treaties not being ratified in the Senate. The prospects are bleak.

At this point, Obama has yet to expend any political capital to try and get a climate change bill passed in the Senate. Most of the heavy lifting about the economics of this issue has been carried by Joseph Romm at the Climate Progress blog. Even today, Romm cited Entergy CEO J. Wayne Leonard on Climate Change.

We are virtually certain that climate change is occurring, and occurring because of man’s activities. We’re virtually certain the probability distribution curve is all bad. There’s no good things that’s going to come of this. But what’s uncertain is exactly which one of those things are going to occur and in what time frame. In the probability distribution curve is about a 50% probability that about half of all species will become extinct or be subject to extinction over this period of time. What we will never know on an ex ante basis is whether or not man be one of those casualties or not.

We condemn Wall Street for taking risks with our economy — risks that all of you are trying very hard to reverse — but at the same time we’re taking exactly the same kind of risks, with no upside whatsoever, with regard to our climate, failing to practice even the basic risk management techniques in terms of climate change reduction.

In the same post, he quotes Carol Browner as saying it would be a “big mistake” if Congress passed a clean energy bill without a cap on emissions.

I agree with her assessment. I just don't think that this Congress has the courage to do that. There are too many who are too willing to compromise too much for the sake of another vote. So, we will invest in oxymoronic clean coal technologies until we figure out that it is too late. We will shift to burning wood at our power plants because it will be called a "renewable" and the CO2 will fill the skies as before.

This the the issue where science and politics are on a collision course. We must not let the politicians win. How I wish that there were Green willing to stand up and challenge Barbara Boxer in the Senatorial Race this year. Her Republican Opposition seems to be demonstrating their ineptitude at every turn, though Fiorina could bankroll whatever she wants for as long as she wants. DeVore might have the so many manic Republican votes locked up that she will drop out rather than throw good money after bad and we know that DeVore's solution to everything is to go nuclear.

The challenge from a Green would be all about doing the right thing, about standing for ones values and not the value of a contribution. If done right, it would be about correcting Obama's big blunder and saving humanity.

It's blog acton day and this is my contribution.

350 or what?

A Santa Clara County Green recently asked me what the Green Party was going to do on the International Day of Climate Action sponsored by 350.org. Sadly, as far as I have found, the answer is "nothing." We seem to be able to generate more passion for the prosecution of a Dick Cheney than we can for preventing 100 million deaths from the effects of global warming. That, my Green Friends, is an abdication of our history as Greens and our responsibility to the earth.  At best, we had a timely press release about the shortcomings of the Kerry - Boxer bill currently in the Senate.

In the middle of all of this, I continue to get fund raising letters from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Natural Resources Defense Council to stop global warming in order to save the polar bear. If that is what it takes to be successful, then we would have solved it a long time ago. It illustrates just how out of touch with realities some well intentioned environmental organizations really are. Such framing of this issue allows climate change deniers and ecology destroyers to position the discussion as people vs. polar bears. The specie headed for extinction may well be our own. The problem is that our world is warming now and concerted, effective efforts are required… now.

Consider the problems of the Biloxi-Chitimacha tribe in Louisiana.

For at least 170 years, Isle de Jean Charles—a narrow ridge of land lying between Bayou Terrebonne and Bayou Pointe-aux-Chene in southeastern Louisiana’s Terrebonne Parish—has been home to members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha tribe, native people related to the Choctaw and part of a larger confederation of Muskogees.

But the tribe’s history is about to take a dramatic turn due to climate change.

Albert Naquin, chief of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha, recently announced that the group plans to leave its ancestral island homeland and build a new community behind levees on higher ground. He told the Associated Press the decision came because the community was flooded five times in the past six years. About 25 families now live on the island, a number that’s fallen in recent years due to the constant flooding associated with global warming.

I will discuss the issues around the magic of 350 and what we have to do in order to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at that number… or even 450. But you will have to click on Read more! to get to it.


Throughout the discussion of climate change, the avoidance of catastrophic warming hinges around our ability to stop the increase in atmospheric CO2 at 350 parts per million. The implications of that number and our possible ability to achieve it, were discussed today by Joseph Romm at Climate Progress.

The bottom-line on the technical side: Decarbonizing by 2050 is possible with, roughly, the suite of technologies now available or on the near-term horizon. Very aggressive policy, however, will still be required very soon to drive down the costs of renewables, to redesign cities, reimagine transport and agricultural systems, and insure that all efficiencies are captured. Doing all this gets the world to 350 by 2200. Taking the additional steps to achieve negative emissions (and 350 by 2100) would require the development of large-scale, cost-effective sequestration technologies that go well beyond reforestation.

Two impending events bring climate change to the front page. One is the upcoming (Dec. 9, 2009) United Nations meeting on Copenhagen that is supposed to see the approval of a new treaty to supersede the Kyoto Accord, which the United States Senate failed to ratify. The other is the fact that the U.S. Senate finally has draft legislation to discuss. Known variously as Kerry-Boxer after it's two main sponsors or as the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (a name that surely disguises what should be it's primary objective), this bill fails to even mention a goal of achieving the magic number of 350.

At least the Green Party U. S. has taken the authors to task. Unfortunately, the voices raised against any bill are well organized and loud. An astroturf organization that calls itself Energy Citizens is already attacking all climate change legislation over the erroneous assumption that it will "raise prices and kill jobs".

The facts are very much against Energy Citizens. The post at Climate Progress references a larger study from the E3 Network that conclude just the opposite. The Economics of 350 is too long (50 pg) for a quick read, but worth the time to go through it. They summarize it this way.

This report demonstrates that the 'go slow' recommendations are unjustified. A number of economic analyses,
informed by recent scientific findings and using reasonable assumptions, suggest that more ambitious targets and quicker action make good economic sense. The warnings about climate change are growing steadily more ominous — but it has not, as a consequence, become impossibly expensive to save the planet. We can still afford a sustainable future.
The bad news about climate change relates mostly to the costs of inaction. As greenhouse gas emissions grow, it is the cost of doing nothing that is becoming unbearable, not the cost of taking action.

So, where are we? Well, it seems that President Obama has demonstrated his ability to deal with more than one thing at a time, but Congress has not and at this time, the one thing seems to be health care. As important as that is, the single thing that Congress could do to reduce future health care costs is to fix Global Warming. A study from the Univ. of Oregon puts the number conservatively at $1.3 Billion. This underscores what Romm was saying.

What is a good Green to do? Start by contacting your elected officials at every level: local, state, federal. Here are some talking points that we need to use:

• Climate Change is a moral issue that goes far beyond saving polar bears.  Future generations will evaluate us as to whether we were able to rise above selfish concerns and work toward a sustainable future. 
  
• Climate Change is an economic issue and the cost of doing nothing exceeds the cost of  managing toward a goal.  That should be apparent if you read this post and followed the links to the hard data. 
  
• No climate change plan at any level is acceptable if it does not show how it can achieve 360 ppm of CO2 and the date by which that will happen. 
• No climate change plan at any level is acceptable if it does not deal with the energy load that arises from building operations.  This goes far beyond Green Jobs or turning your roof white. It means that we have to be involved with every planning commission and zoning change request in every community to ensure that it meets with the most stringent standards as defined by Architecture 2030 and the American Institute of Architects.  No organization is doing more of the right things than Architecture 2030 and for all of the 1000 Mayors that have signed  U.S. Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement , no community has fully achieved what they pledged. I know my own City Manager down played the fact that our Mayor was an early signatory to the agreement and did not feel bound to it since there was no City Council discussion / vote prior to his signature.  Hold their feet to the fire.
  

What to make of the DOE nomination?

The nomination of Steven Chu as Energy Secretary became official today. It has been rumored, written about, etc. for weeks. There are several items worth noting.

To begin with, every scientist I know, including one who works in DOE, are elated with Chu's nomination. It will be the first time that a scientist heads the department of government that has the most to do with science. It seems to many to be a final vindication for all that they suffered as they endured the Republican War on Science, as author Chris Mooney called it. Chu was one of the very active Nobel Laureate who supported and worked for a Science Debated 2008 as part of the presidential nomination process. It did not happen, though it should have. Mooney comments at DeSmogBlog.

There is another group of global warming activists, like Joseph Romm of Climate Progress, who are also laudatory, given the fact that Chu has always been very active in research for sollutions to global warming and energy. He gives us 5 reasons he thinks Chu is a great pick.

Yet I find the most vocal members of the EcoAction Committee of the Green Party to be adamantly against Chu for his being actively pro Nuke. Very few are looking at this objectively. Perhaps this post by Mark Flanagan is one. We have to consider that the previous name for the Department of Energy was the Atomic Energy Commission. So, it is worth watching.

It is my opinion that the story has yet to be written about Steven Chu. It would be nice to see a scientist work from the facts of the physical world rather than the political calculus of what is possible as they consider what needs to be done.

I look for Chu to do more work on nuclear storage. That is necessary in any case, especially if we move to decommission weapons. I would be very surprised to see even one new nuclear reactor break ground while he is Secretary. Then I have been wrong many, many times.