Collide-a-scape

In the run-up to next month’s Rio Earth Summit, we’re going to see a steady stream of bad news about the global environment. When that happens, let’s hope that some of our respectable media do more than regurgitate NGO press releases and talking points.

Alas, the Guardian shows us what not to do in this article on a report jointly produced by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Zoological Society of London, and the Global Footprint Network. The Guardian piece is merely a platform for the report’s highlights. It provides no outside assessment of the claims made.

For example, evidently, the NGO report asserts that populous urban centers are bad for the planet. Here’s what the Guardian says:

The world’s cities have seen a 45% increase in population since 1992, according to the Global Footprint Network, and urban residents typically have a much larger carbon footprint than their rural counterparts.

Really? And all this time I thought that my Brooklyn footprint was on the lower end of the scale. I’m surprised to hear that my humble apartment in a high density neighborhood and my reliance on mass transit and local shopkeepers is contributing to a carbon footprint larger than that of non-city dwellers. Perhaps I should consider moving my family to the country or the suburbs, where a bigger house would support more children and a place to put all my fun stuff.  True, we’d require several cars to meet our transportation and shopping needs, but I’m sure that wouldn’t raise our overall carbon footprint by much.

Yes, now that I think of it, I bet that a free-standing tudor or colonial in a bucolic setting, in a county with abundant strip malls, would be much better for the global environment (including the preservation of biodiversity).

Sarcasm aside, I started reading through the NGO report, but  got hung up at this sentence in an introduction by Jim Leape, Director General of WWF International:

We can meet all of our energy needs from sources like wind and sunlight that are clean and abundant.

Okay, stop right there. I’m going to have to get back to you on the report after I quit choking on that assertion.

Here’s the thing about the upcoming United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+ 20, because it’s the 20th anniversary of the first such gathering:  We’re going to hear a lot about how “the earth is going downhill,” as Leape says in this CNN story. There’s also going to be much hand-wringing over the conference’s downsized goals and chaotic logistics, as this AP dispatch suggests.

It would be nice if equal attention was paid to how humanity fit into the picture, and not just as a blight on the earth. Environmentalists should keep in mind that the have-nots of the world don’t yet have the luxury of being concerned with biodiversity or carbon footprints.

Two seemingly disparate events this week underscore major shifts in the climate discourse–at least in the U.S. One is the defeat of Senator Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican primary. The other is this NYT op-ed from NASA climate scientist James Hansen.

What’s the connection? Well, each, in its own way, illustrate the newly established battle lines of America’s climate debate. I explain why in my latest post at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media.

When a questionable story gets rolling and takes on a life of its own, you can usually count on journalists to check it out thoroughly. Not that debunking it necessarily puts an end to the matter, as we discovered with President Obama’s birth certificate and the global warming hoax cooked up by thousands of scientists. Some stories, no matter how discredited, remain believable for certain audiences.

A case in point is the story of India’s shockingly high farmer suicide rates being blamed on agricultural multinationals and GE (genetically engineered) crop technology. The short version of this story is that hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have killed themselves after the GE cotton crops they switched to either failed or didn’t produce a high enough yield to offset their costs, thus putting individual farmers (and their families) in massive debt. This assertion, which has been percolating for nearly a decade, rocketed far and wide in 2008 after the UK’s Prince Charles hooked his personal anti-GMO campaign to a very real and tragic story in rural parts of India.

That indebted Indian farmers have taken their own lives in horribly high numbers is true. But it’s a complex story that surprisingly few in the media have attempted to unravel. This has allowed anti-GMO activists to build and propagate their farmer suicide/biotech narrative without much journalistic scrutiny.  In a minute, we will see where this has led.

So shortly after Prince Charles made his claim in 2008, the Daily Mail, a bastion of melodramatic and scurrilous journalism, parachuted one of its reporters into India for a first hand look-see. That resulted in a story headlined:

The GM Genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers committing suicide after using genetically modified crops

The piece had all the hallmarks of the Daily Mail’s standard dreck: It was one-sided, biased, sensationalist, and egregiously irresponsible. No matter. On the web, it has had a huge and useful afterlife for GMO opponents.

One month after the Daily Mail piece appeared, the Guardian reported on a new study suggesting that,

if anything, suicides among farmers have been decreasing since the introduction of GM cotton by Monsanto in 2002. “It is not only inaccurate, but simply wrong to blame the use of Bt cotton as the primary cause of farmer suicides in India,” said the report from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington DC. “Despite the recent media hype around farmer suicides,” it added, “fuelled by civil society organisations and reaching the highest political spheres in India and elsewhere, there is no evidence in available data of a ‘resurgence’ of farmer suicide in India in the last five years.”

It also found that the adoption of pest-resistant Bt cotton varieties had led to massive increases in yield and a 40% decrease in pesticide use.

“What we argue is that it’s far more complex than simply adopting a technology,” lead author Guillaume Gruère told New Scientist magazine.

Indeed, the story of those Indian farmer suicides is exceedingly complex and multi-causal. In another study published several years ago,  K. Nagaraj, an economist at Madras Institute of Development Studies in Tamil Nadu, examined data from 1997 to 2010 in one of the regions hardest hit by farmer suicides. He concluded:

The answer to the question as to why the farmers are committing suicides? lies in a combination of factors such as crop failure, shifting to more profitable but risky (in terms of output, quality and prices) cash crops like cotton/ sugarcane/ soyabean, exorbitant rate of interest and other terms and conditions of loans availed from money lenders, lack of non farm opportunities, unwillingness to adopt to scientific practices, non availability of timely credit from formal channel, absence of proper climate/ incentive for timely repayment of bank loan, etc.  At some places even though water is available but can’t be exploited fully due to insufficient power supply.  Huge expenditure on children’s education and sudden demand of money for health considerations and marriage, etc. in the family are also major contributors for stress in farming community.  Inconsistency of rainfall during monsoon,absence of support mechanism for marketing of agriculture produce also contributed to uncertainty and financial risk of the farmers.

These farmers and their families are among the victims of India’s longstanding agrarian crisis.  Economic reforms and the opening of Indian agriculture to the global market over the past  two decades have increased costs, while reducing yields and profits for many farmers, to the point of great financial and emotional distress.  As a result, smallholder farmers are often trapped in a cycle of debt.  During a bad year, money from the sale of the cotton crop might not cover even the initial cost of the inputs, let alone suffice to pay the usurious interest on loans or provide adequate food or necessities for the family.  Often the only way out is to take on more loans and buy more inputs, which in turn can lead to even greater debt.  Indebtedness is a major and proximate cause of farmer suicides in India.

Nonetheless, William Pentland at Forbes was critical of the report’s thrust and acidly noted (in a dig at GMO opponents):

Despite what many may believe, most companies – agribusiness included – prefer to keep their customers alive and prosperous.

Now if you want to know how widely the meme of biotech culpability in India’s rural tragedy has spread, just google Indian farmer suicides. But at the top of your search, I recommend you read the Wikipedia page titled, “Farmers’ suicides in India.” It is quite evenhanded.

Which brings me to media coverage of a new documentary called Bitter Seeds. The fawning reception to it in various quarters is uncritical and not surprising. For example, here’s the write-up in Grist:

The film follows a plucky 18-year-old girl named Manjusha, whose father was one of the quarter-million farmers who have committed suicide in India in the last 16 years. As Grist and others have reported, the motivations for these suicides follow a familiar pattern: Farmers become trapped in a cycle of debt trying to make a living growing Monsanto’s genetically engineered Bt cotton.

As anyone doing a modicum of background reading would learn, that statement is a tad simplistic, to put it charitably. But the narrative of Monsanto’s villainy and the dark side of GMO crops is unquestionably accepted and reinforced at places like Grist.

But that’s on Grist if it’s content to mostly nod approvingly at the talking points of advocacy campaigns. By now, its readers should know what to expect.

For those interested in just how intellectually bankrupt (but also incredibly persistent) the larger narrative of the GM cotton “failure” in India is, read this essay by Cornell University’s Ron Herring. He concludes:

The answer to our puzzle about farmers adopting disastrous technologies—perhaps the most rapid global adoption of any technology in history—is that the disasters exist entirely in the ideational imaginary of transnational advocacy networks. Nevertheless, the narrative of Bt-cotton catastrophe in India is coherent and globally distributed; it catches attention and compels action. It is also without any empirical or biological basis.

Which goes to show that on certain issues like genetically modified crops, social activists and green writers are masters at post-truth politics.

Some of you may be familiar with Portlandia. If not, here’s how the Oregonian describes the satirical IFC show:

It’s a comic portrayal showing a town populated by compulsively organic foodies who interrogate their restaurant server on every detail of the chicken they’re about to order; aggressive bicycle commuters; humorless proprietors of feminist bookstores; and self-righteous animal activists.

One hilarious scene comes at the beginning of season one:

It’s basically a sketch show, a send-up of the (stereotypical) unconventional residents of Portland, Oregon, who have come to reflect the city’s culture. With a little tweaking, it could just as easily be set in Berkley, California or Boulder, Colorado. As one web reviewer writes of Portlandia:

You have met some of the characters before…self involved do-gooders, aged hippies, counter culture losers, the politically correct, protect the dogs but forget the people, people variously stuck in the 70s,80s and 90s all offbeat and most amusing.

If someone were to create a spoof of today’s green culture, the self-consciously hip, do-gooder types who aim to save “mother earth” for future generations (rather than, say, the billions of people already in dire need of a helping hand), it would be called Greenlandia.

The world of Greenlandia also has many colorful, similarly zealous characters, such as No Impact Man and Julia Butterfly Hill. Others are celebrities who have greened their lifestyles on behalf of the planet. Today, green culture in America is a bit schizophrenic, embracing politically correct consumerism but also admiring righteous self-deprivation.

A big problem for the U.S. green movement is that its culture is easily parodied. For example, watch this devastating South Park episode titled, “Smug Alert.” Being associated with the green movement is now seen as problematic for some, like this person who writes at Grist:

I believe in climate change. I ride my bike everywhere, I work at a solar company, I buy organic and local when I can. I am young, liberal, and idealistic. But I’m not an environmentalist.

In Europe, Environmentalism is a political force to contend with. In the United States, it is mocked and marginalized.

There might be a lesson for greens to take from Portlandia. One blog, noting the self-serious culture Portlandia riotously depicts, muses:

What’s interesting about this show is that it might slowly kill off some of the stories that coastal liberals live by (e.g. being ultra-attentitive to our food supply chain, radical political correctness, the gap between liberal attitudes and behaviors, etc.).  It makes a lot of those stories seem ridiculous, fringe and downright silly.

A spinoff called Greenlandia could do the same for greens and the stories they live by.

Bud Ward, the editor of the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, weighs in on the Heartland billboard furor:

What stands out amidst the initial widespread revulsion is that the criticisms of Heartland’s effort came not only by the usual cadre of what climate skeptics dismissively call “warmists,” but also by those ideologically in synch with the group. In addition to their disgust with the message, of course, came their disappointment that the billboard had handed Heartland’s many adversaries a useful weapon of criticism.

Indeed, this disappointment is quite evident in the comment threads at various blog sites. I think I read one person ruefully lament that there was no way to unring this bell. And Heartland can’t stop the bell from ringing, either, because it has thus far refused to acknowledge its blunder, much less apologize. It seems it will get worse for them before it gets better (if at all).

On an unrelated note, I have a short piece up today, as well, at the Yale Forum. It’s about an enterprising journalism project that I’ll be watching with much interest.

Lastly, also new at the site is discussion of the “striking” results of a recent study that found six distinct climate change storylines that have played out on broadcast television news the last decade. It’s an important data point for climate media scholars and everyone else interested in how climate change gets translated on TV. As the piece explains:

The premise of the study is that we humans are, whatever else we are, story-telling animals: We make sense of, form beliefs about, and establish our stances on issues such as climate change less on the basis of reason or experience and more on the basis of the stories we subscribe to. Moreover, the news media are, whatever else they are, purveyors of story, always on the lookout for a narrative angle that will capture the attention of viewers, listeners, or readers.

That’s right. Journalists are always on the prowl for a good story. People who accuse us of left/right/center bias should never forget that. What we care about, above all, is the story.

That also explains why the current Heartland saga or Climategate, or the latest weather disaster are always natural story fodder.

There was talk that the much maligned (but heavily trafficked) Huffington Post gained some journalistic cred after it snagged a Pulitzer Prize this year. We should keep in mind what makes the Huffpo engine run. As the LA Time’s Tim Rutten wrote:

The bulk of the site’s content is provided by commentators, who work for nothing other than the opportunity to champion causes or ideas to which they’re devoted.

We should also judge the “internet newspaper” on the substance of its overall content. Take the Huffpo’s UK science edition, for example. If it has an editor (much less a science editor), I’d be shocked. There are two stories fronted recently on its page that are so bad they read like parody. One of them is by an editor of a fashion website. Her piece argues that

Victorian, matter-based, Darwinian model of evolution is backward-thinking and flawed given the recent leaps and bounds in metaphysical sciences and physical historical evidence disproving linear evolution. The ideology we randomly mutated from ocean slime to our knuckle-dragging neanderthal long-long lost cousins to our current incarnation is one that’s been dogmatically accepted into mainstream evolutionary hegemony without challenge until recent years.

Wait, it gets better. The whacky builds on the whacky, to this near the end:

Everything is energy – including us. Life is the interaction of magnetic vibrational fields and our evolution is subject to the cosmos, not random selection. There have been peak sunspot emissions and coronal mass ejections in 2012 so it’s little surprise humankind is awakening.

Unlike Darwin, the Maya, ancient Hindus and Hopi Indians recognised evolution/time as cyclical. There is overwhelming global, physical evidence that vast, advanced civilisations preceded us: the technology in which to create, many of today’s engineers assert we do not possess.

The audacious lunacy of the article seems to surprise even PZ Myers, who deconstructs it in typical fashion. It was his post that got me poking around Huffpo’s UK science section, where I came across the weirdest thing I’ve ever read on global warming. It’s by a musician who leads off his piece (and stay with it, just for fun) this way:

This past February, 2012, on the day after the Superbowl, I achieved enlightenment on a flight from Ushuaia Argentina, the southernmost city in the world, headed back to The United States.

It wasn’t the first time I’d achieved such a glorious and all encompassing perspective; that moment where you think and figure less, and simply just are. a being. being; experiencing your interconnectedness to all things; realising what you are is only that you are. and in that; everything.

The first time I experienced it was in a bath tub in New York City. For no reason to my knowledge I suddenly saw how every tile surrounding the tub was made, manufactured, and grouted with love. I saw how the plumbing was only made possible by a plumber who either loved his job or his family, enabling him to do such a fine job connecting the pipes from below the city streets all the way up to the 23rd floor where I was pruning in the tub. Behind every detail I saw an act of creation by a creature who was a product of creation itself. The material world seemed less material and appeared to me as it really was; an extension of my experience, that which I sometimes call my Self. I didn’t float in the tub figuring it all out or making anything up, it was just a clear and present stream of consciousness that brought me to tears; eventually twisting its way down the drain and leaving me just as watered and weighed down by the gravity of being human trying to maintain or make sense of the memory, as I was uplifted only moments before.

Everything about this, from the lack of copyediting, to the long, nonsensical wind-up, wouldn’t be tolerated at a respectable high school newspaper.

You know who’s laughing loudest? Arianna Huffington, who probably can’t believe she’s making millions off of dreck like this.

UPDATE: 5/7: Climatewire reports that Heartland “faces a mutiny” from donors and its Washington staff over the Institute’s billboard campaign, which it abruptly cancelled one day after it was unveiled. The billboards triggered massive outrage and scorn from across the political spectrum.

[UPDATE: 5/5: Widespread condemnation of the Heartland billboard campaign (including from Republican politicians and well-known climate science critics) prompted Heartland to discontinue the billboard ads. In a statement, Heartland President Joe Bast called the billboards an "experiment" and intentionally provocative. He also did not express contrition:

We know that our billboard angered and disappointed many of Heartland’s friends and supporters, but we hope they understand what we were trying to do with this experiment. We do not apologize for running the ad, and we will continue to experiment with ways to communicate the ‘realist’ message on the climate.

Will this staunch the bad publicity and the erase the stain on Heartland's name? Unlikely. Bast's unrepentant response and obvious spin is well short of the damage control a PR expert would advise.]

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Remember when I had fun pointing out the classy way Anthony Watts noted that “Charles Manson is an advocate for global warming”? And remember when Watts, in typically disingenuous fashion, associated climate activists with Osama Bin Laden? I mentioned that bit of ugliness here.

Well, that’s all minor league stuff compared to the new Heartland Institute billboard campaign that Leo Hickman discusses in this Guardian piece. Hickman strikes exactly the right tone:

It really is hard to know where to begin with this one. But let’s start with: “What on earth were they thinking?

This is what saner heads in the climate concerned community were asking when Peter Gleick did what he did earlier this year. The thing about the climate wars is that each side can always count on their opponent to shoot itself in the foot. That’s on striking display again, today.

UPDATE: I’m keeping tabs on responses/posts/stories as they come in.

5/4, 2:15pm EST. Andrew Sullivan says the billboard campaign illustrates what has become of the Right wing: “A refusal to acknowledge scientific reality; and a brutalist style of public propaganda that focuses entirely on guilt by the most extreme association.”

Little Green Footballs strikes a similar note: “The Right discovers an all new level of nutso creepiness.”

Wonkette has some fun playing along with the Heartland game. Ben German at the Hill tallies reaction from environmentalists, who mouth what you would expect. Same for Joe Romm, but he raises the stakes for climate skeptics: “These ads are so extremist that failing to denounce them is an implicit endorsement of the worst kind of hate speech.”

Charles Pierce at Esquire suggests the Heartland ad campaign is beyond the pale and unmatched on the political spectrum. “This is not the ‘mainstream.’ Both sides do not do this. There is no ‘other side’ to this argument.”

Stephanie Pappas at Live Science has reaction from climate scientists. Anthony Watts at WUWT calls the Heartland billboards a “huge misstep,” but (surprise, surprise) focuses all his outrage on his opponents, for their “hypocrisy.” Watts’ post is a texbook case of classic misdirection. It reaffirms his partisan bent. ***Check back in a few hours for more reax.

 430pm EST: Heartland President Joe Bast emails Anthony Watts to say that the billboards will be discontinued today. In the comment thread of that post, it is notable that WUWT readers overwhelmingly disapprove of the billboard campaign, citing its offensiveness.

Fox News runs story that leads off:  ”The Heartland Institute has released a shocking new billboard ad campaign that equates global warming belief with some of the most notorious killers in modern history.”

The Huffington Post playfully mocks the billboard tagline. Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones reminds us of the not so long ago time when the Heartland Institute was asking for everyone to be civil and respectful.

8:30Pm EST: The strongest condemnation from someone often associated with the climate skeptic sphere has been issued by Ross McKitrick at Climate Audit. It came in the form of a letter addressed to Heartland President Joe Bast. Here’s an excerpt:

This kind of fallacious, juvenile and inflammatory rhetoric does nothing to enhance your reputation, hands your opponents a huge stick to beat you with, and sullies the reputation of the speakers you had recruited…You cannot simultaneously say that you want to promote a debate while equating the other side to terrorists and mass murderers. Once you have done such a thing you have lost the moral high ground and you can never again object if someone uses that kind of rhetoric on you.

Andy Revkin has a post at Dot Earth titled, “The Short Hot Life of Heartland’s Climate Billboard.” It includes an email exchange between Andy, Tom Yulsman (who says some very smart things), and myself.

5/5, 1145am EST: In the Washington Post, Anthony Watts says the Heartland Institute “is suffering battle fatigue.When you’re suffering battle fatigue, sometimes you make mistakes.”  In the LA Times opinion section, Dan Turner writes that Heartland “has decided to stop even trying to be credible in order to attract publicity.” Wendy Koch of USA Today writes:

So much for reasoned debate! The Heartland Institute, a controversial group known for trying to discredit climate science, unveiled — and then 24 hours later withdrew — billboards that compared people concerned about global warming to mass murderers.

5/6, 9:30am EST: At his blog, Andrew Montford says the ”reverberations are going to be felt for quite a while.” Then he proceeds, Anthony Watts style, to demonstrate his partisan tendencies by devoting the rest of his post to similar guilt-by-association tactics by climate advocacy blogs. As Leo Hickman lamented on Twitter [shorthand cleaned up] to Montford, “very sad that you, too, like Watts, couldn’t resist a ‘comparison’ drive-by rather than simply condemn.” After I seconded this, Montford tweeted: “I’m trying to understand why Heartland’s actions [are] considered so much worse than the others.”

I’m trying to understand how he can’t see the difference. Heartland’s posters were part of a public advertising campaign that included a detailed explanation for why Heartland believed they were appropriate. While Heartland has discontinued the billboards, it should be noted that they have not apologized or renounced the message they conveyed.

I know the environmental movement will have truly matured when the leader of a big mainstream green group can say something like this:

We won’t meet the carbon targets if nuclear [power] is taken off the table.

That’s from Jeff Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Here’s the opening to the Guardian story:

Combating climate change will require an expansion of nuclear power, respected economist Jeffrey Sachs said on Thursday, in remarks that are likely to dismay some sections of the environmental movement.

Prof Sachs said atomic energy was needed because it provided a low-carbon source of power, while renewable energy was not making up enough of the world’s energy mix and new technologies such as carbon capture and storage were not progressing fast enough.

Incidentally, it appears that the headline in the Guardian article is incorrect (as was pointed out by Jesse Jenkins on Twitter), since nothing in the piece supports Sachs suggesting nuclear power is “the only solution to climate change.” Anyway, should be interesting to see what the reaction to Sachs is from various enviro/climate quarters.

Is there an example from human history of a culture taking action with the intended beneficiaries being two or more generations downstream, when there’s no benefit or maybe even sacrifice to the current generation?

I haven’t been able to come up with one, and I suspect we’re just not genetically programmed to worry about two generations downstream. That may be the heart of the problem.

This is MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel, in an interview at the NYT Green blog, on the vexing climate change conundrum. The whole piece is worth reading. I think what he says above speaks to one big reason why it’s so hard for climate change to get traction with the public. And that’s why, I believe, climate activists have latched on to the extreme weather/global warming campaign. It makes climate change more tangible and less distant. But that’s a problematic frame, as I recently discussed here.

In his interview with Emanuel, Justin Gillis writes:

Part of our discussion centered on rhetoric. A favored tactic of contrarians, and especially skeptic bloggers, is to set up what scientists like Dr. Emanuel consider to be straw-man arguments that they can then knock down.

We routinely read, for instance, that climate scientists are predicting imminent catastrophe, the deaths of millions, mass starvation, galloping sea-level rise and so on. The goal seems to be to paint the scientists as alarmist so that when a catastrophe does not materialize right away, they are made to seem foolish.

This is a bit of a strawman itself, for it’s true that the climate science community doesn’t make such predictions. But high profile surrogates for climate science routinely talk in catastrophic terms. Also, let’s not forget, to cite just one example, this highly publicized report released in 2009 (reviewed by the IPCC chairman and other notables), which the Guardian reported on (like others) without the least bit of critical assessment:

Climate change is already responsible for 300,000 deaths a year and is affecting 300m people, according to the first comprehensive study of the human impact of global warming.

But wait, I thought that such immense tragedy from climate change was not yet upon us? So I’m confused when Gillis, in his interview with Emanuel, writes:

Not only do most scientists not predict imminent catastrophe as a result of the warming of the planet, they formally acknowledge a wide range of uncertainty in the potential outcomes. Catastrophes of all sorts are among those possible outcomes, but few scientists claim these are certain, much less imminent.

Do you see what I’m getting at? There’s a lot of double talk going on, which no doubt confuses the public.

On the one hand, influential figures that shape climate discourse claim that global warming is already killing hundreds of thousands of people a year. On the other hand, we hear that climate scientists are unfairly accused of being alarmists. Well, guess what: The people that speak tacitly on behalf of climate science are often alarmist (with a little help from the media), and that’s where the impression comes from.

So where does the climate science community come down on the potential danger of climate change? Here’s Emanuel in the NYT article:

I can say that my field is almost unanimous in saying that we are facing serious risk. Things could turn out to be fine — I hope they do. But there’s no evidence at all that would support an assertion that we’re not facing serious risk at this point.

I would agree with that. And I bet many rational-minded people along the climate spectrum do as well. So where do we go from here? Well, that’s the rub, concludes Gillis:

Scientists like Dr. Emanuel argue that the exact magnitude of the risk cannot and will not be quantified until it is too late to head off the potential ill consequences. Until society learns to think of the problem that way, the political discussion about climate change is likely to remain paralyzed.

True, but it might help if we could debate the magnitude of the risk without getting sidetracked by all the tenuous claims made about consequences of climate change purportedly happening right now. That may not be the heart of the problem, overall, but it’s a problem.

When an institution remains wedded to a bygone era and unresponsive to change, It becomes irrelevant to people’s lives.

Like the Catholic church. Many Catholics in the West don’t take the church’s anachronistic doctrine to heart. If they did, 98 percent of Catholic women wouldn’t be using birth control. Now when people criticize the Catholic church, they’re talking about the Vatican. They’re not talking about your local church, or your priest. Or Sunday School. They’re talking about the rigid ideology that keeps the Catholic church–the institution–in the dark ages. It is an ideology that, as recently demonstrated, brooks no dissent or deviation.

Environmentalism has an ideology that is similarly rigid and outdated. It has to modernize to keep from wasting away. This is what I recently argued here and here. The sum of these two pieces add up to a general critique of environmentalism, of its institutional creed. Numerous environmentalists, particularly those working at the grassroots level, took offense at what they asserted was a one-dimensional portrait of the green movement. I will defend that portrait in a moment, but first I want to say that many environmentalists are indeed doing very important, mostly unheralded work. I know this because I worked at Audubon magazine from 2000 to 2008, where I helped bring many of their stories to light.

So when some responded angrily that I was unfairly caricaturing environmentalism, I can appreciate why they would take my critique as a personal slight. That said, I’m disappointed that many reflexively dismissed the thrust of my argument. The most common complaint on twitter and in blog comments was that I concocted a strawman, which infers that I painted a portrait of environmentalism that wasn’t true.

Let’s look at that charge closely.

In the main, here’s what I argued, but in broad strokes, as one science journalist pointed out on twitter.

Environmentalism is anti-technology. By this I mean anti-nuclear power and anti-genetically engineered crops. (I haven’t even broached the anti-fracking fervor that environmentalist groups have embraced as their latest cause du jour.) These are, as I wrote in the Discover essay, “two technologies that experts say will be necessary to expand” to meet global energy and food demand. If, for example, reducing carbon emissions is your objective, I have a hard time understanding how you do that in the near to medium term without nuclear power. Others wonder, too, how that can be pulled off.

If providing food for additional billions of people in the coming decades (while not overtaxing already overtaxed land and water resources) is something you care about, I have a hard time understanding how you do that without biotechnology. Others, wonder, too, how that can be pulled off.

Do any mainstream green groups support either nuclear power or GMOs? On the contrary, many greens continue to either oppose outright or scaremonger on both the nuclear and GMO crop issues. So on two key environmental concerns–energy and agriculture–mainstream green groups turn their backs on existing technological solutions for ideological reasons. They are either opposed to nuclear or silent about the misinformation spewed by their more excitable colleagues. (Nice relevant comment on this by one reader over at the Discover thread.) Same goes for biotechnology and GMOs. Where’s the strawman here?

The eco-disaster narrative. Anyone who pays attention to the messaging of green groups and their spokespersons quoted in the media knows that the main frame is doom: Ecosystems are on the verge of collapse, species are going extinct every day, the climate is nearing dangerous tipping points. Sure, of late we also hear happy talk about green jobs, but mostly we get an unending litany of dire warnings about the state of the planet. The result: People tune out or throw up their hands in despair. Still not seeing a strawman.

The de-growth brigade. In my Discover piece, I discussed the positions of a leading environmentalist and a well-known environmental think tank, their arguments being that growth in developed countries needed to be cut back. (Similarly, reducing consumption is also one of the principal recommendations of the UK’s Royal Society report released last week.)  A commenter at Discover scoffed that I was relying on “academic types.” I countered:

It’s disingenuous to suggest that there is an important distinction to be made between environmental think tanks and advocacy groups. There is not. You suggest that such think tanks and “academic types” (as I have cited) don’t characterize environmentalist thought or have much sway with environmental advocates. That’s like saying conservative think tanks and conservative thought leaders don’t influence conservatives or conservative rhetoric.

I also find it curious that you would downplay the importance of environmental writers and academics/scholars/thinkers, which belies the history of environmentalism. From its origins, the environmental movement has been hugely influenced by a number of scholar/scientists, from Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner to E.O. Wilson and Bill McKibben.

Speaking of the history of environmentalism, Joe Romm, in his odd post (he goes to great lengths to tie my Discover essay to the New York Times, because Andy Revkin briefly noted it at his Dot Earth blog), says I got it all wrong about environmentalism:

This analysis, which would have been relevant 20 years ago, is simply the opposite of the truth today.

Indeed, anyone who follows the history of the environmental movement knows that the most serious complaint offered against it these days is that it has become too corporatist and too focused on the techno-fix. I’m not saying I agree with that critique 100%, but it has far more truth to it than this critique.

If you look at the major environmental groups — the ones with the power and money that this analysis purports to be about — they all work closely with industrial corporations, generally take lots of industry money, and they aggressively supported a climate bill that was absurdly pro-technology and pro-industry, that was business friendly and market oriented.

It’s true that the big green NGOs have cozied up to corporate donors, including the fossil fuel interests that Romm & company love to demonize. Which is funny when you consider that the Sierra Club was recently outed for taking $25 million from the gas industry. Romm’s parent organization drank from the same trough, it turns out.

But none of these corporate ties has much to do with the brand of environmentalism I’m describing–the one that is opposed to nuclear power and biotechnology, unrelentingly catastrophist, obsessed with carbon footprints, and still besotted with romanticized notions of nature.

As for Romm’s take on the Royal Society report, well, you might want to compare it with a few others, such as Mark Lynas, author of the recently published book, The God Species: Saving the planet in the age of humans. I’ll also take up the report’s specifics in a separate post. They are worth looking at in more detail.

Meanwhile, there’s another study out recently that environmentalists would do well to pay attention to. It’s the one that found young people are turning off to environmental issues. This quote in the AP story from Mark Potosnak, an environmental science professor at DePaul University in Chicago, caught my eye:

It’s not so much that they [young students] don’t think it’s important. They’re just worn out. It’s like poverty in a foreign country. You see the picture so many times, you become inured to it.

M. Sanjayan, a lead scientist with the Nature Conservancy, made a similar point in USA Today:

…our rhetoric is relentlessly about “less.” Limit your footprint. Reduce your consumption. Why are we surprised that, for the majority of American youth, protecting nature seems a joyless exercise in deprivation?

Yes, environmentalists, why are you so surprised (and scornfully dismissive) when even some of your own colleagues point out how irrelevant you’ve become?