Collide-a-scape

At what point will climate change advocates wake up to the fact that they are chasing their tails?  At what point will the various camps reassess the dominant assumptions that inform their positions, namely:

1) It’s a communication problem. If only scientists would get some media training, if only journalists didn’t do such a crappy job informing the public, if only the Moranos and Anthony Watts of the world didn’t exist…and so on.

Forget it. None of that makes a difference because people already get that global warming is a problem.  Michael Tobis and his ilk believe they are on the front lines of a communications war, fighting the good fight against the likes of George Will and “unhelpful” reporters. They will be going round in circles for quite some time. Tobis & company believe that all they have to do is find a way to break through the fog of misinformation and misdirection. That the path to daylight is paved with a better understanding of climate science.  This belief rests on the assumption that Joe Q. Public is willing to engage in the complexities of climate science. Keep dreaming, guys.

2) It’s a lack of political courage. Bill McKibben best represents this view. He bemoaned political cowardice during and after Copenhagen. James Hansen thinks this way too. The assumption is that today’s political leaders should have the courage to fundamentally reorder the world’s economy to head off a problem that won’t truly be evident (in terms of real impacts) for decades.

Any historical evidence that politicians have ever acted so decisively and proactively? (No, Teddy Roosevelt setting aside forests and protecting wildlife doesn’t qualify, because that only happened in response to something that could be seen and felt–e.g., overexploitation of natural resources.) The complicating factor here is that no world leader can afford to act unilaterally anyway, given the planetary scale of the problem.

3) It’s a tactical war. Joe Romm, for all his bluster, is really the point person on this front in the U.S. (Communications is a subset of his tactics.) Romm, as anyone who follows Climate Progress knows, has calculated that the most feasible way to reduce carbon emissions is through a cap and trade mechanism. It’s the only policy prescription that he believes is politically feasible. Moreover, he has further calculated that a number of unfortunate political compromises will have to be made in order to get cap and trade implemented. (And even then, there’s no guarantee.)  This explains his camp’s embrace of the U.S. Congressional climate bill, which many climate advocates believe is not nearly strong enough to ward off catastrophic climate change.  On this point Romm agrees, but again he calculates that the legislation will be improved over time, probably in the near future when climate change becomes more apparent, thus creating the necessary political conditions for more concrete action.

So Romm engages in tactics that he evidently feels are necessary to advance this incrementalist strategy. The problem here is, what if he has miscalculated? Hansen certainly thinks he has. And so do Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, who have recently laid out a sweeping counter argument at Foreign Policy Magazine.

What will be interesting to see on this score is what happens if Congress doesn’t pass the climate bill, which seems increasingly likely. If it is passed, I’d say Romm’s side won the tactical war and only time will tell if they made the right or wrong calculation. But if the bill is defeated, then is there a reset in climate change strategy?  Can the forces advocating for a carbon tax (led by Hansen?) or a massive federal investment in R & D (led by the Breakthrough Institute) line up influential allies to help advance their respective cases? Will Romm & company double down on cap and trade and fight just as hard to get it enacted in the next Congress? He might be among the few in his camp who would relish another battle. He seems to have a natural affinity for political blood sport.

Meanwhile, whither international negotiations? Even if the U.N. is removed as the key driver of the process, which is what is now being increasingly suggested, it’s still a safe bet that weak carbon emission targets will eventually be the result of any binding treaty. Does anybody really see China or India signing on to anything that might impede their economic growth (especially absent a U.S. climate bill)?

So at some point, you have to ask yourself: are the tactics getting you what you want? Huge gambits have been made on the U.S. passing a cap and trade bill. What do you do in Mexico City later this year if there’s no U.S. climate bill? At what point do you stop chasing your tail down this path?

Now I’m someone who believes that taking Bush & company out of the picture crystallizes the big picture. It was so easy to blame Republicans for eight years. Obviously, we can’t do that anymore, since Democrats control all the levers of power. Nonetheless, we often see Romm still puffing up the Republicans as meanie obstructionists to climate legislation. They’re a convenient foil, I suppose.

But the true villains nowadays to climate advocates are skeptics, or as they are more commonly referred to, “deniers.” True, Morano and Watts have given voice to these climate naysayers, but blogger Tobis and science commentators like Chris Mooney overemphasize the Morano effect. Another convenient foil. After all, putting the onus on climate skeptics takes it off climate advocates and their failure to mobilize greater engagement and action on climate change.

William Connolley is one climate blogger who doesn’t make this mistake, but he still falls prey to a false assumption that is widely held by climate advocates:

Everyone really knows the world is getting warmer and it is our fault. The endless slew of press stories to and fro makes little difference to this. Goverment policy continues onwards like a juggernaut and isn’t touched by gossip. Witness the tiny impact the CRU email hacking had, in the end. It all seemed so exciting for a day or two. The obvious fact that people are reluctant to cut their CO2 consumption by not flying off on holiday is just the same as people still putting lots of butter on their toast and salt on their chips.

Notice who bears the blame here: all of us, because we’re not changing our behavior. What’s ironic about Connolley’s statement is that his example of the buttered toast and salted chips is actually proof of why we don’t change our behavior. Because, in fact, nobody stops larding on the butter or gorging on french fries until their health goes south.  (More people probably stop eating steak due to gout than to a concern for animal welfare or the environment.) That’s the way we humans operate. And that’s the way we think about climate change. It’s a distant problem, a growing danger, sure, but not one that can be felt or fully appreciated in the present. Sort of like the Milky Ways and Dr. Peppers I consume in large quantities. Man, I know I’m gonna pay for them one day, but that doesn’t stop me.

My point is, we are are a reactive species. Yes, we ought to start paying more attention to our lifestyle habits if we want to lick the climate change problem. But we won’t make much progress on that end until we figure out how to overcome the limitations imposed by our evolutionary brain.

UPDATE: William Connolloy informs me that I have misunderstood his point–that, in fact, he too is saying there is a cognitive disconnect between certain behaviors and the future risk associated with them.

Which will win: peak oil or global warming?

If you follow both narratives in the blogosphere, which is where the debate is most kinetic, you already know that peak oil and global warming are flip sides of the same coin.

I come at this mainly as a journalist, but also as someone who is interested in archaeology and the collapse literature of recent decades. I’ll leave the modern-day parallels to Jared Diamond, though I tend to think he oversimplifies his case studies.

What fascinates me about the respective peak oil and global warming narratives is that both revolve around the same meme: that civilization is on the fast track to collapse, unless we make systemic changes to the way we live. The peak oil camp take the argument to its logical extension and talk earnestly about such things as overshoot, or carrying capacity. The gobal warming camp dabbles in this debate, but because they have a big tent (which must accomodate politicians), their overriding goal is to replace the world’s carbon economy with one that doesn’t spew greenhouse gas emissions. And hey, that is plenty formidable.

Still, in the global warming camp, there is no real engagment with underlying, socio/economic forces. There really can’t be when much of the rest of the world (understably) aspires to live like average Americans. Copenhagen is proof of that. Ironically, Andy Revkin, one of the few persons who has used his prominent platform to expand the intellectual sphere of the climate change debate, is often pilloried by hardcore climate advocates. Some of them hold to the notion that Revkin, despite a stellar body of work on the energy & climate change beat, has aided and abetted the guys in “black hats.” Go figure.

This recurring complaint against Revkin is part of a deeper animus that the the global warming camp has towards the media at large. The peak oil folks, for their part, are fighting just to be relevant. It’s mind-boggling to them that nobody but them seems to get the dire trajectory the world is on.

But some pretty famous climate scientists feel that way too about global warming.  Thus, as far as representatives from these two camps are concerned, the race to doomsday is on. Which will get their first? Will it be when the global demand for oil exceeds the supply, or will it be when the carbon load in the atmosphere tips a baking planet into ecological and social mayhem? Go ahead, flip a coin.

It’s the 21st century and we’re still getting simplistic, cliched depictions of natives in Hollywood movies like Avatar. How is it possible that people are enthralled with this one-dimensional, sci-fi clunker?  I succumbed to the hype last night, mainly because I wanted to see what a $260 million dollar movie looks like. Aside from the special effects, what’s the big deal? The dialogue alone was unbearably cheesy. The plot was dull and predictable.

I suppose anyone who romanticizes Nature and Native Americans will buy into the movie’s schmaltz. But if you’re looking for an antidote to that, read David Brooks’ column on Avatar. He nails it. Also, David Price in Counterpunch makes a nice connection between the movie’s anthropological angle and the Pentagon’s controversial Human Terrain program.

Avatar does share some similaries to the much more engrossing and smartly made District 9 (especially the forced eviction theme). Now that movie stayed with me for weeks afterward.

I’ve been following (and writing about) the battle over Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon since 2004. The place is so loaded with incredible rock art and other archaeological riches that it would be a national park if the landscape wasn’t a checkerboard of federal, state, county and private owners.

Then there’s the huge natural gas reserves that are the center of a long-running dispute between the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Bill Barrett Corporation, a Denver-based oil & gas company, and a coalition of preservationists.  Well, earlier this week, all the parties reached a compromise agreement that allows the gas drilling to go forward with more stringent safeguards. Lots of people have been publicly crowing about this deal, but behind the scenes, there’s much grumbling and even outright accusations that the preservationists got rolled by the BLM and the gas company.

The mainstream press mostly centered on all the backslapping. No reporters have taken a critical look at the details of the agreement. So I read the document myself and then started making calls earlier this week. My previous reporting on Nine Mile Canyon has revealed some shady behavior on the part of BLM, so I was curious to learn if this new accord represented a true depature from Business as Usual. What I found out is that most of the preservationists who signed the accord did so pretty much holding their noses. Anyway, for more perspective, read the story I just wrote for Archaeology Magazine, which takes a hard look at the perceived failings of this highly vaunted deal.

The controversial wind farm proposed off of Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, will have to overcome yet another hurdle, this latest one thrown up by the National Park Service, which announced yesterday that the Nantucket Sound was eligible to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  It’s an extraordinary ruling on several levels, which should be evident by this summation in the NYT story:

Known as Cape Wind, the project is the nation’s first planned offshore wind farm and would cover 24 square miles in the sound, an area roughly the size of Manhattan. The park service decision came in response to a request from two Massachusetts Indian tribes, who said the 130 proposed wind turbines would thwart their spiritual ritual of greeting the sunrise, which requires unobstructed views across the sound, and disturb ancestral burial grounds.

Nantucket sound, which encompasses more than 500 square miles, is the largest body of water nominated to the National Register of Historic Places. As I’ve said before, climate activists who support renewable energy are going to find themselves increasingly at odds with preservationists, wildlife advocates, and green NIMBYists.

A commenter at the National Parks Traveler blog aptly sums up the emerging dynamic:

We want clean energy. We want wind farms.

Build them in the California desert and disturb the turtles?? Build them in the bay and destroy our visual??

How dare you!!

Build these wind farms – yes; but never, never, never, never, never in MY backyard.

As with wildfires, floods, and drought, connecting the dots between anthropogenic climate change and human migration is difficult. So I admire a story that explores the likely prospect of climate-driven refugees through the lens of recent environmental disasters. Joanna Kakissis pulls it off in this superb NYT story.

I got to know Joanna last year, when both of us were Fellows at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism. She’s a talented reporter. When I heard she was going to Bangladesh, I knew a story on “climate refugees” would be a tough nut to crack. But I think she sets the right tone near the beginning of her Times piece, with this:

Natural calamities have plagued humanity for generations. But with the prospect of worsening climate conditions over the next few decades, experts on migration say tens of millions more people in the developing world could be on the move because of disasters.

I was going to expound more on the article’s premise, but Brad Plumer captures my take with this excellent post. He writes,

In the past, many analysts argued that climate-driven migration would lead to tens of millions of “climate refugees” pouring into wealthy countries. Droughts in North Africa, say, would push people into Europe. (This explains why some European anti-immigration groups have adopted green rhetoric.) But more recent research suggests that most of the migration will take place within developing countries—from rural areas to cities. And the main worry here is that these cities are already swelling exponentially, and their infrastructure can barely keep up, which is why many “megacities” sport massive slums.

As he then correctly notes,

the tricky part is tying these trends to climate change. After all, severe storms and droughts are nothing new. Nor is internal migration. People in developing countries have been flocking to cities for a long time, whether it’s to seek out work or because the rainfall’s dried up or because the soil’s eroded away. We can say that global warming will exacerbate these pressures and greatly increase the pace of migration, but it’s hard to attribute any single event—or single migrant—to man-made climate change.

Joanna’s story opens a necessary window on the human dimension of “environmental refugees”; Brad’s post is a really smart analysis on the complexity of the issue, especially when it’s narrowly defined as a climate change problem.

I love it. The blogger who goes on endlessly in blog posts inveighs against tweeting:

Journalists simply shouldn’t be twittering on science or other subjects that require more than 140 characters to discuss intelligently, which is pretty much every topic.

It makes total sense: it often takes Romm thousands of words to make the same point that others can distill in two sentences. If I was him, I’d feel threatened by Twitter too.