Collide-a-scape

It’s only a matter of time before “America’s fiercest climate change activist blogger” let’s one rip on this essay by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger.

Above all, Joe Romm will vehemently object to the essay’s central thesis–that energy policy should be divorced from climate science. Doing this would deprive Romm of his main arsenal, which he wields like a gladiator in a daily death battle with evil denier/delayer forces.

But amidst this intractable war, here’s the gauntlet that N & S throw down to climate advocates, particularly someone like Romm:

Efforts to use climate science to threaten an apocalyptic future should we fail to embrace green proposals, and to characterize present-day natural disasters as terrifying previews of an impending day of reckoning, have only served to undermine the credibility of both climate science and progressive energy policy.

No doubt Climategate and the recent run of bad press for the IPCC has played a big part. Still, I think the two authors overreach with this blanket assertion, made right out of the gate:

The 20-year effort by environmentalists to establish climate science as the primary basis for far-reaching action to decarbonize the global energy economy today lies in ruins.

That implies something more than what has occurred.  Sure, climate science has had a bad stretch of publicity since late last year. But it’s not as if the underlying science is in doubt.

Still, N & S use the recent controversies to argue:

Now is the time to free energy policy from climate science.

Shouldn’t we be careful not to throw out the baby with the proverbial bathwater? After all, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a legion of scientists offering advice on regulatory issues involving everything from ozone thresholds to water pollution. Sure, that has proven a combustible arrangement, but policymakers have to take their cue from something science-based, however imperfect it may be.

To be fair, N & S do believe there is a place for climate science at the table:

Climate science can still usefully inform us about the possible trajectories of the global climate and help us prepare for extreme weather and natural disasters, whether climate change ultimately results in their intensification or not. And understood in its proper role, as one of many reasons why we should decarbonize the global economy, climate science can even help contribute to the case for taking such action.

They also get points for addressing the uncertainty wild card, though I think their argument falls short:

For 20 years, greens and many scientists have overstated the certainty of climate disaster out of the belief that governments could not be motivated to act if they viewed the science as highly uncertain. And yet governments routinely take strong action in the face of highly uncertainty events. California requires strict building codes and has invested billions to protect against earthquakes even as earthquake science has shifted its focus from prediction to preparedness. Recently, the federal government mobilized impressively and effectively to prevent an avian flu epidemic whose severity was unknown.

The example of California fails to persuade, given the state’s history of earthquakes, which many residents have experienced. As for the Avian flu, well, the government did do its part, but that was to ward off an epidemic this year, something pretty immediate in people’s minds. In contrast, as   N & S admit earlier in their essay, the threat from climate change

is distant, abstract, and difficult to visualize.

In light of this, selling uncertainty is no slam dunk, and certainly not as doable as N & S make it out to be. But these are quibbles. As usual, the Breakthrough leaders offer a compelling alternative blueprint to ponder as we head into the next phase of the climate debate.

Over the weekend I attended a large wedding anniversary party in Florida. Lots of smart, successful people in attendance. At one of the tables I was sitting at, a few snow birds were complaining about the unusually cold winter. It sounded as if some pact had been breached. One retiree complained about having to keep moving back his tennis game on a recent morning, from 9am to noon. Imagine the horror.

Another guy then chimed in, sarcastically, “Must be that global warming thing.” They had a good laugh.

Yes, this is an isolated anecdote, but I believe the weather is how average Americans process the climate change debate.

Which brings me to Michael Tobis and his attempt to compare “science denialism” to an OCD disorder. Yeesh. First of all, he can’t limit his thesis to climate skeptics if he wants to make this argument. There are many, many people who believe the earth was created in seven days. Just as there are many who believe that autism is caused by vaccines. These are two solid cases of “science denialism.” Are these people suffering from an OCD-like disorder, too?

And what about the Floridians who get annoyed by a few weeks of unseasonably cold weather, which they are inclined to consider as proof that global warming is not a pressing matter. More evidence of an underlying behavioral disorder?

Actually, the one who seems in denial here is Tobis. For as long as I’ve been reading his blog (over a year), he’s blamed the media for not doing more to awaken the public to the reality of rising greenhouse gases and its consequences. Some have tried explaining to him that a majority of the American public already believes global warming is real.

The more salient issue–which Tobis continues to ignore–is that there is no sense of urgency, because most people don’t see any current consequences to existing climate change and they don’t have the capacity to internalize future consequences, the worst of which are projected to be decades down the road.  Must be a bad case of societal OCD, I guess.

The irony is that Tobis, in comparing the outright denial of climate change to a neurosis, remains blind to the obvious behavioral aspect of the larger problem– public apathy. The fact is: Humans are hardwired to act on immediate dangers and concerns, not those that 1) are unclear and 2) are slated to unfold in the distant future. I’m starting to wonder if Tobis is a denialist of some kind.

It’s the never-ending war on drugs, of course. Steve Chapman at Reason has a nice take:

By now, it should be clear that using force to wipe out the drug trade is a task on the order of bailing out the Atlantic Ocean with a teaspoon. Law enforcement can interdict shipments and imprison dealers, but the success is invariably short-lived.

Each seized cargo is an opportunity for another seller to fill the gap. Each arrested trafficker is an invitation for a competitor to grab his business. The more vigorous and successful the law enforcement campaign, the higher the prices drug suppliers can command—and the more people will be enticed to enter the market. It’s a self-defeating process.

All this would be academic if Americans (and Mexicans) would simply lose their taste for illicit drugs. But we might as well hope the Sahara Desert will run out of sand.

There has always been a demand for mind-altering substances, and there always will be. That’s why, despite all the resources the U.S. government has expended on locking up sellers and their customers, drug use is higher today than it was two decades ago.

As I noted in this review of Cleo Paskal’s new book, “the northwest passage looms large in geopolitics.”

Paskal argues that the the U.S. and European Union are allowing short term economic interests in the Arctic to threaten their long-term security interests. It’s one of the more provocative assertions she makes in Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map.

 On that note,  an article in Foreign Affairs last March was titled:  

The Great Game Moves North:  As the Arctic Melts, countries vie for control

The author, Scott Borgerson, wrote:

The next few years will be critical in determining whether the region’s long-term future will be one of international harmony and the rule of law, or a Hobbesian free-for-all.

So I found it curious when, in a recent post at The New Security Beat, Geoff Dabelko wrote:

Remarks at a recent spate of Arctic climate and security discussions suggest officials in Washington view the geopolitical and trade issues more as “challenges” than “crises.”

That seems fair enough. But depending on how those issues are handled, might the challenges soon become  crises?

I’m not sure how much you can read into one particular comment thread. But there has been a discernible anti-immigration zealotry expressed by Grist readers over the last week, in response to this post.

On the thread, Randy Cunningham pleaded with his fellow greens to be more compassionate. He finally gave up, despairing:

Most of the comments posted on this article have depressed the hell out of me. I love the environmental movement, and what I have been hearing here reminds me of when I used to hear my beloved grandparents use the N word. It embarrassed me. This conversation embarrasses me. It is a parade of our dirty laundry. If I were introducing someone to our movement, this is the last place I would want them to look. It feels mean. It feels selfish. It feels xeonphobic. It feels frankly racist. I want to take a shower after reading the latest entries.

This underlying sentiment of many population ideologues–what I call “green bigotry”– is what I discussed here in reference to the Grist post. I’m guessing it’s a hold-over from the Abbey-Brower-Foreman wing of the environmental movement, and that the hardcore sentiments on population are felt strongest by greens who came of age in the 70s and 80s.

Steve Bloom, a a long-time activist with the Sierra Club, who is also a frequent blog commenter (and a frequent critic of mine), tries to downplay this prevailing enviro mindset, in a comment at my site:

Grist threads in general have been infested by wingnuts for some years now, so I don’t think there’s much special going on with this one.

In other words, nothing to see here, just a bunch of crazies foaming at the mouth. If only that were the case.

Now this is an interesting new job for the right kind of journalist. The idea behind it is expounded on here at Nieman Journalism Lab.

I’ll be curious to see what news the Sense-Making Project will be tracking. Seems like you could do this sort of thing for many kinds of stories that receive sustained coverage, from the recent health care reform debate to climate science.

What’s intriguing is that the tracker will be part of the conversation s/he is curating. Here’s Poynter Institute’s Kelly McBride, explaining:

The whole idea of the project is, ‘What if you had someone whose only job it was, every day, to be looking at information? And this person gets the new world and the old world, and isn’t writing to an audience of professional journalists, and is writing to Joe Citizen, saying, ‘Hey, this is kind of interesting.

One of the problems I can see arising are questions of bias. So for example, let’s say this “curator” is advising Joe Citizen to check out the latest climate science controversy. Will the curator be assessing the sources that are driving the story’s meme, or just making the connections?  McBride says both:

What we’ve found is that when you start taking a single piece of information, you can actually look at the history — where it came from, who linked to what, who transformed it, and how it got to you. And then you can look at how it went out from there.

She tells Nieman that the curator’s analysis might require “diagnosing language,” or “asking about the motivation of the person who delivered the information.”

That’s going to require a lot from the person doing the diagnosis. For instance, it sounds like a generalist–perhaps somebody with little science journalism background–will potentially be tasked with recognizing not just the swirling cross-currents of the latest climate story bouncing around the web, but also the motivations of those who are advancing it.

If this pilot project is successful, I can envision it being expanded to include a host of topics curated by individual journalists whose background matches the subject matter.

I have a guest post up at Nature’s Climate Feedback, titled “Are climate scientists ignoring the lessons of climategate?”

What an irony: In Afghanistan, the U.S. military, in order to achieve a larger strategic victory in Marja, the former Taliban stronghold, is ignoring the vast opium fields in their midst. As this NYT story from yesterday reports:

“Marja is a special case right now,” said Cmdr. Jeffrey Eggers, a member of the general’s Strategic Advisory Group, his top advisory body. “We don’t trample the livelihood of those we’re trying to win over.

Now Mexico is a whole other kettle of drugs, so winning over the vicious cartels there is not an option. But it appears that ordinary Mexican citizens are turning against its government’s ineffectual war on the cartels. Meanwhile, the U.S., like a junkie’s enabler, is just helping to extend the misery and collateral damage. Is there an exit strategy for this war? As Blake Hounshell recently wrote in Foreign Policy:

If you ask me, it all seems like doubling down on a failed strategy — a typical example of trying to solve a social and political problem through military and technical means.

I think his qualifier was too generous. It’s pretty obvious the U.S. is sticking with the tip of the spear.

So why is that the U.S., when faced with failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, can pivot to a new war strategy, but not do the same with the endless drug war on its own turf and across its southern border?

There’s a good post up at Grist on the latent anti-immigrant sentiment within the larger environmental community. Anyone who is familiar with the green bigotry on this issue has probably bumped up against what the writer describes here:

So after I began working in the environmental community, I was disturbed to find that when friends and respected colleagues talked about immigration and the environment, it was often (albeit unintentionally) from an anti-immigrant perspective.

Most of those in green circles who know better prefer not to talk about this so openly; it’s uncomfortable, like the racist relative at Thanksgiving that the family tries to ignore. Of course, when the racist isn’t publicly called out by embarrassed family members, they are tacitly enabling his behavior.

Worse yet is the less overt racist attitude that underlies cultural attitudes towards people of color and illegal immigrants, which many try to gloss over.  (I just think my son should marry his own kind, and a common refrain heard with respect to illegal immigrants: I believe in the law.) So we have lots of environmentalists who have been hoodwinked (or are just winking at) what the Grist writer correctly calls the

large anti-immigrant organizations “greenwashing” –using environmental messaging to cloak anti-immigrant sentiments. Publicly, the mainstream environmental community has largely remained silent on immigration issues (with the exception of a couple of contentious debates in 2004 and 2005 that sprang up around Sierra Club board elections). In this silence, anti-immigrant groups have co-opted the green messaging and started gaining public support from those who generally ascribe to environmental values. These groups suggest that limiting immigration would be a good way to slow the population growth of the U.S. — and without any prominent environmental voices countering them, they’ve had plenty of room to make the case that immigration is a main driver of environmental degradation.

What I wonder: do prominent environmental voices stay silent because they too are anti-immigrant, or is that they just don’t want to offend or take on a substantial segment of their base?

Last week, there was a horrifying story out of Nigeria, in which

the attackers set upon the villagers with machetes, killing women and children in their homes and ensnaring the men who tried to flee in fishnets and animal traps, then massacring them, according to a Nigerian rights group whose investigators went to the area. Some homes were set on fire.

It was the latest, tragic episode of an ongoing vendetta between Muslims and Christians in Jos, Nigeria. Today, a NYT op-ed by a Nigerian journalist puts this incident in a larger perspective. The picture that unfolds in the op-ed crystallizes–at least to me–the kind of complexity that must bedevil environmental security scholars. For example, here’s the writer, exhibiting a weary, almost anesthesticized view of the normalized disorder in Nigeria:

But even if we decided to make more of a big deal out of our calamities, Jos, terrible as what happened there was, would have to patiently wait its turn. While ethno-religious violence takes place in Jos, people in Ebonyi State, who speak the same language and share the same religion, are massacring one another over natural resources. Disgruntled militants in the Niger Delta are threatening to cripple the economy by vandalizing more petroleum pipelines. Politicians are assassinated regularly in the western states; the elderly fathers and mothers of prosperous children are kidnapped and held for ransom in the east. And we know it’s just a matter of time before riots between Muslims and Christians break out again up north.

That’s a hell of knot for anyone to untie, especially environmental security experts, who examine the linkages between conflict and natural resources, among other socio/political factors. So I’m wondering if someone like Geoff Dabelko at the Woodrow Wilson Center, or anyone from the Center for for a New American Security (they have a program called Natural Security), could provide a a big-picture, environmental security perspective of Nigeria. Is there one overriding resource issue that runs through all the country’s aforementioned crisises? I’m not even sure what natural resources the people in Ebonyi State are killing each other over. You can start by explaining that one, then perhaps help me make sense of the whole, if that’s possible.

I guess what I getting at here is that Nigeria–judging by that snapshot above–is obviously beset by a number of seemingly unrelated “calamities.” Still, separate natural resource conflicts appear to be a common denominator.  So if you’re an environmental security expert, do you approach these cases individually, or is there one meta issue that must be tackled above all, before all the crisises metastasize beyond repair?