Environment and Economics: a hot topic.

It may be that economists and ecologists speak very different languages. The gap of understanding seems as big as that between Vulcan and Klingon. Nowhere does this seem more apparent than in the exchanges between Dr. Joseph Romm (Physicist, owner of the Climate Progress blog) and Dr. Matthew E. Kahn (Economics, Professor at UCLA and owner of the Environmental and Urban Economics blog.

At issue is the question of whether the capitalist system of markets will enable us all to adapt to the realities of climate change. Kahn's main thesis seems to be that, "cities and regions will adapt to rising temperatures over time, slowly transforming our everyday lives as we change our behaviors and our surroundings". Maybe Miami will be under water, but spring in Fargo might be nice. He has described this at some length in a recent book: Climatopolis.

This is beginning to look like a pissing contest between two academics intent on preserving their reputations. It would be a mistake to leave you with that impression. This is very serious and we had better get it right the first time. There might not be a second chance.

T split the rest of this comparison as well as some comments on what it means for Green Politics off the main page and you can read it here:



Romm has reviewed Kahn's book twice. After the first scathingly negative review
(Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future [Not!}), Kahn accused Romm of the sin of reviewing a book that he had not yet fully read. So, Romm read it cover to cover, and then wrote another review that was sharper than the first.(Review: Climatopolis: How our cities will thrive in the hotter future by Matthew Kahn is not a good book)

Kahn could hardly be expected to refrain from a reply.

Joe Romm is a smart angry man. He throws some new punches at my Climatopolis. Under the scenario that greenhouse gas concentrations reach 1000 ppm (which sounds high and if we reach that number this would take place in the year 2200?), some of the scenarios he sketches may play out. He makes some reasonable points about tightening some of the raw calculations but he ignores two key facts about my book. In the next edition of the book, I will address his points but in no way do his points detract from the book's core thesis. Capitalism will help us to adapt to climate change. Out of self interest, we will rebuild our future cities in places that are less at risk from climate change and we will be pro-active in embracing strategies to protect ourselves from different dimensions of climate change . (Bold emphasis is mine.)

In particular, Greens need to sort this out clearly and to put forward candidates who understand not only the science that is telling us why our climate is changing, but also the long range economic issues at play. I am not convinced that we have found or developed more than a couple of candidates who might qualify on both counts. That will have to be the subject of later posts.

I will admit that I too have not read Climatopolis. I do follow both Romm and Kahn's blogs on a regular basis, especially since Kahn did some of the best initial economic analysis of the effect of California's AB 32 (p.55 of the PDF linked.)

While I support the Governor’s broad AB32 goals, I am troubled by the economic modeling analysis that I have been asked to read. AB32 is presented as a riskless “free lunch” for Californians. These economic models predict that this regulation will offer us a “win-win” of much lower greenhouse gas emissions and increased economic growth.

Kahn describes himself as a rational expectations economist. That is where my gut tells me that he is wrong. His expectations are that people and companies will have the economic ability to adapt, making rational choices for long range gains rather than taking. The trouble with climate change is that it does not respond to quarterly report. If capitalism and it's response to market signals is going to determine how we adapt, we had better have a longer range view than that of a hedge fund supercomputer tweaking seeking advantage in a fraction of a point.

Kahn talks about how we make decisions when "we know that we do not know." It is my experience that most of us do not do that very well, especially when the goal is for some general greater good rather than being specific as to our selves, our families, our work. People tend to delay those decisions until the threat is imminent. By the, with climate change, it may be too late.

I don't have statistics to back up my conclusions, only some observation of human behavior through much of my 70 years. If we can not count on governments having the financial ability to provide for adaptation, and we also can not count on corporate long term decision making, we had better be building resilient local communities that can whether the storms to come.

Contrary to what contrarians say

There is a tendency, especially among those who view themselves as being shut out of the system, to accept any and all contrarian positions and to reject the word of authority. No one is more capable of walking the along this contrarian path than Steven D. Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of the new bestseller "SuperFreakonomics."

The authors are working the talk show circuit, appearing this AM on GMA where they pontificated on the effectiveness of car seats for children (marginally better than seat belts) while they suggested that regulations got in the way of finding more effective solutions to the real problem, that of keeping our children safe.

They picked a rather benign example for the show, easy to understand and illustrate. They ducked the major issue, that of climate change, even though it is headlined on the cover of the book (subtitle: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and why Suicide Bombers should byLife Insurance.)  The exerpt that GMA gives you to read is clearly about climate change with no chance of their having to answer questions.

Climate Scientists cited in the book have loundly complained that their positions were mis-characterized or even invented out of the rarified air of contrarian polemic.  Climate Progress's Joseph Romm, himself a physicist and one time official of the Dept. of Energy, has made extraordinary efforts to set the record straight, outlining in great detail just where Levitt and Dubner got the facts wrong, beginning here, and continuing again, and again and again.

Unfortunately, we have some sort of propensity to believe what we read on the internet, or in a book, as long as it is positioned as being critical of accepted knowledge.  Thus, we have the anti-vaccine movement when the facts show that vaccines have save millions of lives.

Sometimes, being a contrarian makes good sense.  It allows investors to buy low and sell high.  But, it also pays to due your homework and invest your energy in those ideas, issues, products that have solid evidense of their truth behind them.  The argument that climate contrarians must be right just because a contrarian named Galileo was right does not make sense.  It is a false anology just like SuperFreakonomics is leading us down a false path.  The consequences could be fatal.

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.
  

Climate Change - What to do

On a local, Santa Clara County, Green Party email list, someone requested that we discuss what to do about the climate change meeting in Copenhagen. Below the fold, you can read my response. I thought it important enough to repeat here and will also utilize facebook, twitter, Green Change and any other site to get more people to look at it.


I am glad that people are looking to take some action regarding the December, 2009 Climate Change meeting in Copenhagen. If that is what stirs up attention, then it is good, because climate change is the biggest problem that we face as a nation, in the long run much more significant than health care.

In fact, with the prospect of the meeting in Copenhagen providing the replacement for the failed Kyoto accord, the key events start today. Today we are supposed to get the first released copy of a new climate change bill that bears the name of Barbara Boxer and John Kerry. From what I have read, this is a stronger bill than the one that was passed by the House of Representatives.

What to do:
Make sure that you are working from a base of knowledge, not just reacting to the latest stir-em-up notification. The easiest way to do so is to follow one of the following blogs:

• Climate Progress - owned by Physicist Joseph Romm, Sr. Fellow in the Center for American Progress. The link takes you to his announcement of the Boxer - Kerry bill. aka Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act.
• West Coast Climate Equity - A British Columbia based, low volume cite with strong backing. Dr. James Hansen (N.A.S.A.) and Bill McKibben are on the board. The link provided is to a post that contemplated the possibility of failure in Copenhagen, something that Romm's optimism will not allow him to do.
• RealClimate - This is for those who want to understand the facts about the climate change events themselves and how to interpret the data. It is written by and for climate scientists and those in the media who need to know the facts.

There are two very serious problems inherent in the entire process.

One deals with the possibility that the the US delegation will have to go to Copenhagen without having a bill through Congress. The Republican delaying tactics that you now see in the Health Care process will surely be used to prevent dealing with Climate Change in any substantive way. Boxer and Kerry will be pressured to water down their bill just to get any bill through Congress before Copenhagen. In particular, with an exact 60 votes, the Democrats will need the vote of the King of Filibusters, Robert Byrd, to invoke cloture and shut off debate. Byrd is from West Virginia and will sell his vote for removing any and all restrictions on coal... the biggest source of CO2 in the US. Note: Sec. of Energy Chu has been quoted that he would rather his family live next to at nuclear power plant than one that burn coal.

The second problem is the fact that Boxer - Kerry still has provisions for fossil fuel subsidies and nuclear loan guarantees. At Climate Progress, Romm has expressed the opinion that nuclear is so completely expensive that no more nukes will be built anyway, so having something in the bill is not a very big issue. I disagree... or let me say that he trusts Congress more than I do. Both of these would have to go before I would support the bill.

Then, if we really believe that Green Jobs as promoted by Van Jones, is part of the solution, if we really believe that individuals should have the right to generate their own solar / wind power and sell that back to the local utility, if you really believe, as did presidential aspirant Kent Mesplay, that radically distributed power sources is a national security goal, then we need to pressure the California State Legislature to pass AB 560, which the Democrats allowed to die in the State Senate Committees this past term. Current law cuts off net metering for individuals when the amount of power sourced in that manner reaches 2.5%. We will reach that next year for PG&E. AB 560 would raise that to 5%. It is time that every member of the state legislature gets to know us personally, since we need to camp in their office until they agree to get this done. That is the essence of thinking globally, acting locally. It is the essence of community based economics.

Last night, I posted information about the nuclear position in Boxer - Kerry. I will continue to use California Greening to post positions regarding global warming and California's water crisis along with actions that need to be taken to pressure our legislatures, both state and national, to act for the people and not just troll for contributions.

How long can you tread water?

That quotation from Bill Cosby's well known recording of a conversation between God and Noah. I will use it as the point from which I dive in to a sequence of reviews of current issues. Of course, this one is Global Warming (Climate Change? Climate Disruption?) and it's associated Sea Level Rise.

Take the jump (Read more!) to get the story in a less entertaining presentation.


On Tuesday of this week, the US Global Change Research Program will release a report on Global Climate Change Impacts in United States. This is the subject of Joe Romm's blogging at Climate Progress today. Romm is putting his focus on Sea Level Rise and what we are learning from the fact that the Greenland Ice Sheets are melting faster than anticipated.

I suggest following the link and reading Romm's post as well as the sources he cites where subscriptions are not required. This is Romm's conclusion:

The entire U.S. should be planning on SLR of 5 feet by 2100 on our current emissions path. And the eastern United States should plan on the very real possibility that total sea level rise will exceed 6 feet.

There are many areas of California that will be affected, beach communities, homes on the edge of bluffs, but none of them is close to that which will be suffered by the California Delta. The oft-mentioned pumps at Tracy that suck the water from the Delta and send it down south for drinking and irrigation are only 7 ft above sea level. Salt water intrusion into the Delta will significantly raise the costs of providing water. Those who oppose desalination for environmental reasons may have no choice other than moving somewhere else.

I see effects from the changing climate all of the time. As a backyard orchardist, I note that the trees are having to adapt to different cycles of weather. On a recent weather TV weather report, they commented that the ocean outside the Golden Gate was 10 deg. F warmer than normal. Rather than warming the land, however, it is increasing out humidity allowing the fog to roll in further, deeper and holding down the temperatures now. Logical consequence, but not what many might anticipate.

As Greens we all need to step up our presence in this war. It is a war, against Planet Earth, and sadly, we are winning. As Willie Loman's wife says in Death of a Salesman, "Attention must be paid." Willie died a suicide. As a human race, might we also be suicidal?

Are we making Climate Progress?

For all the efforts, it would seem that we are beginning to get somewhere. It feels like we are when Tom Friedman refers to Joe Romm's Climate Progress as the "indispensable blog".

Still, I am beginning to wonder if blogging, and twittering is not the new opiate of the people, making them feel good about doing something while the real power is applied behind the scenes to achieve other goals. Yes, I know that I am blogging about this, but the irony is that this is the one outlet that is open to me.



While Friedman is referring his readers to Climate Progress, Times reporter Andrew Revkin has an article on the Heartland Institute sponsored International Conference on Climate Change (Denial). It was a pretty one-sided gathering, reported honestly. What Revkin showed is that there is a large group of people who listen to a minority of scientists and are willing to swallow anything.

Many participants said that any division or dissent was minor and that the global recession and a series of years with cooler temperatures would help them in combating changes in energy policy in Washington.

It appears that the real goal is to not change policies, rather than to understand what is really happening.

At the same time, those of Friedman's readers who follow his link to Climate Progress will find that Romm is a Sr. Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Thus, the name of the blog... Climate Progress. If they were willing to dig around a bit, they might find their way to Romm's opinions on the future of coal or on advisability of pursuing Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) as a way to continue the use of coal despite its proven contributions to greenhouse gas emission.

But I am against anybody thinking that CCS is going to be practical or affordable anytime soon, against people relying on the “false sense of security,” as the Economist put it, that CCS is likely to be a major contributor to national or global CO2 emissions reductions before, say, 2030

While Romm, the scientist, is writing this, the Center for American Progress where he is a Senior Fellow, is making the case for CCS as good policy. Carbon Capture and Sequestration 101 is more than the tutorial that it's title makes it appear. It is a statement of policy imperatives.

Widespread CCS deployment—in combination with other policies to reduce CO2 emissions and diversify energy sources—could be invaluable in meeting our emission reduction goals for greenhouse gases and would encourage the export of CCS technology around the world, particularly to developing nations such as China and India, many of which are depending on low-cost coal to fuel economic growth. The Bush administration’s discontinuation of FutureGen, a power plant employing IGCC, set the process back, as it would have been the world’s first functioning power plant to demonstrate the feasibility of CCS technology. To take the reins on this emerging technology, we must start now with an aggressive program of proper legislation, demonstration projects, and funding backed by political will.

There is a big difference between Romm (a physicist with experience in climate research) and Kenneth Berlin or Robert Sussman. The latter are high powered Washington Lawyers. Berlin's practice at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom has been to represent corporations who were trying to minimize the effects of environmental regulation.

I will believe that we are truly making progress when the Center for American Progress (CAP) puts Romm front and center, rather than their top notch legal protection team. Given the close connection between CAP and the Obama administration, I fully expect to see Romm ignored and the lawyers prevail, carrying us one step closer to Climaticide.

Avoiding water wars.

One of the blogs that I closely follow is Climate Progress, principle author Joseph Romm. It is particularly relevant since Romm is a physicist specializing in climate and also is associated with John Podesta's Center for American Progress, a close Obama ally. While I may disagree with him on the policy implications, I trust Joe to get his facts right.

I am also a fan of good crime fiction and he caught my interest with a post headed "Murder, she wrote." That post wrote of a climate researcher / blogger named Johnnie Rook, a man who is dying and wants to be assured that the world he lives behind will be one in which his grandchildren can live. Poignantly Rook continues to provide good input on climate even as he knows his end from cancer will be relatively soon, his current treatment is only pallative.

Still, for all his story makes us care what happens, and for all the work Rook has done to warn us of what is going to happen with the climate, he steps into deep mud when he tries to be prescriptive about how to avoid the water wars and the feces wars.

Click Read more! for an analysis.


Rook does a very good job in describing the scope of the problem with particular attention to the way that it has been positioned by vested interests. The choice of the Klamath River potato / salmon war was a wise one, because it illustrates the way that unintended consequences accompany political tinkering. Choices seemed easy when the crisis could be defined as farmers / food supply against fish.

Aside from the ecological impact, such decisions also affect our food supply and individual livelihoods. Cheney stepped in to tinker with the science so that instream uses were canned in favor of diverting water to the farmers. The collateral consequences of this tinkering were 77,000 dead salmon, the federal government declared a “commercial fishery failure”, Congress provided disaster aid of $60 million to the fishermen and $15 million to farmers to not farm in order to reduce water usage.

It is obvious that wiser solutions are required, solutions that consider long range impacts on entire ecosystems and not just individual uses at a given location and a particular point in time. That is what ecology is all about.

Unfortunately, when Rook tries to define his own solutions, he makes the same mistakes, putting people outside the ecosystem instead of including us along with all other life. He ignores the manner in which bio-regions exist and proposes gigantic infrastructure spending to redistribute the fresh water that we have rather than to consider changing the distribution of water needs, of reducing usage, of not planting cotton in the desert and all of the other dumb things the people do.

We would honor Rook by taking action now to prevent as much of the coming climate change as we can, hopefully before it becomes a climate collapse. We would honor all life by learning to live with the planet we have instead of re-distributing it's resources in unsustainable ways. We have done enough of that already.

The Long Road: Part 2. Pogo was right

The most quoted line from Walt Kelly's Pogo strip was surely "We have met the enemy and they are us." At the time, his comments were directed at the Vietnam War. Today, Kelly's target would surely be the manner in which our consumer society is driving us further and further along the path to 850 ppm of CO2.

There is a real question of whether or not we can solve this problem through technology. God forbid that we might have to change our lifestyle. For more of this discussion and some references to appropriate reading material, click Read more!.


Sorting through the various threads of meaning in the consideration of global warming, you find that while there is solid agreement as to the scope of the problem that we are facing, there is little agreement as to what to do about it.

There are now two books about global warming with the same title: Hell and High Water. One is by US physicist Joseph Romm. The other is by Alastair McIntosh, a professor of human ecology at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Both seem to be worth reading. I have just finished Romm's book but only have read reviews of McIntosh's.... including one by Romm.

The choice of titles is indicative of more than just the feeling of terrible consequences. If you read Romm's Hell and High Water you quickly understand just how much data from so many sources that all indicate what is happening to warm our world. When sea level rise inundates that entire countries; when it causes the mass migration of tens of millions of people; maybe then we will understand just what the high water is. You don't want to think about the meaning of hell in this context.

Romm never answers his real question. Will we have the political will to do what we know needs to be done. At the present time, I think that the answer is "not yet." When Nancy Pelosi can say that the House can pass a cap & trade bill, but not this year, you know it has not really sunk in. My source for that is Romm's Climate Progress site.

McIntosh has a different focus. He is looking at the human, individual, psychological aspect of the problem. Reviewer Simon Butler cites this passage.

McIntosh writes that “the central thesis of [his] book is that climate change cannot be tackled by technical, economic and political measures alone”. What is also required is a coming to “grips with the roots of life and what gives it meaning”.

So McIntosh subtitled his book Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition. At least, he ends the book with some hope. I wonder if he asked Pelosi if she felt a sense of urgency about this or not.

My conclusion to this is that the politicians will never solve these problems left to their own devices. This is the time when people must change. More than any other politician I have read about recently, the Green Party Canada's Elizabeth May has the right attitude if not the power to implement the right policies. She understands that climate change and weather are not the same, but are connected. She understands that each of use have a role to play, including convincing our neighbors that it is time to get really, really worried.

So for all the reporters on your gift list, please send them a copy of Global Warming for Dummies. Early reports from those who gave it to sceptical in-laws are that they started worrying about idling the car and the life-cycle impact of the gifts they were giving. And a friend in BC has started a very handy reference site for the latest on climate science. Since she couldn’t get out of her house due to the snow, she had lots of time to post recent studies and graphs to the site: http://westcoastclimateequity.org.

I have a feeling that it will be in my lifetime, and I am drawing social security, when the problems we face now: the Israeli / Hamas conflict in Gaza, the genocide in Darfur, the War on Terrorism in Afghanistan, the attacks in Mumbai...the events that fill our news screen each day... will all seem trivial.

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.