Collide-a-scape

The Guardian has published an essay titled, “Once men abused slaves, now men abuse fossil fuels.” The author, Jean-François Mouhot, is a historian. The parallels between fossil fuels and slaves occurred to him in the mid-2000s, he recounts:

I was reading a book on climate change which noted how today’s machinery – almost exclusively powered by fossil fuels like coal and oil – does the same work that used to be done by slaves and servants. “Energy slaves” now do our laundry, cook our food, transport us, entertain us, and do most of the hard work needed for our survival.

Intriguing similarities between slavery and our current dependence on fossil-fuel-powered machines struck me: both perform roughly the same functions in society (doing the hard and dirty work that no one wants to do), both were considered for a long time to be acceptable by the majority and both came to be increasingly challenged as the harm they caused became more visible.

This is quite a comparison, one the author has sketched out in more detail in this paper.

In fairness, Mouhot also says:

Obviously, there are differences between the use of slaves and of fossil fuels. Fundamentally, slavery is a crime against humanity. Fossil fuel use is not a moral evil, but burning coal or oil contributes to global warming, already causing widespread harm: it now directly or indirectly kills 150,000 people per year according to a 2004 World Health Organisation study.

Leaving aside the dubious statistic he plucked from an 8-year old WHO report, Mouhot’s analogy to this point strikes me as forced. Eventually his line of reasoning becomes clear:

Unlike the harm caused by slavery, the harm in the use of fossil fuels is of course indirect, long range, even unintended. It seems at first glance to be a fundamentally different kind of harm, and the unintended consequences of ongoing use of fossil fuels have only recently become understood. Initially, their use was seen as positive and progressive. But now that we know the consequences, and continue, globally, to increase emission levels, how can we still consider these consequences “unintended”?

And here’s the argument that he (and others) have been advancing in recent years:

It should thus come as no surprise that there is so much resistance to climate science. Our societies, like slave-owning societies, have a vested interest in ignoring the scientific consensus. Pointing out the similarities between slavery and the use of fossil fuels can help us engage with the issue in a new way, and convince us to act, as no one envisages comfortably being compared with a slave-owner.

Furthermore, because of the striking similarities between the use of slaves and of fossil fuels, policymakers can find inspiration from the campaigns to abolish slavery and use them to tackle global warming. For example, the history of the abolition of slavery, in the UK at least, suggests that an incremental approach and the development of compromises worked better at moving the cause forward than hardline stances.

As I mentioned, the equivalence with abolition has been made before. I discussed it here two years ago.

I think there is an ethical case to make with climate change. (I don’t believe it will carry the day.) I just don’t find the slavery/abolition argument to be convincing or even helpful in that regard. Personally, I think the best chance for progress lies with some kind of vision and blueprint for sustainability that is workable. It also has to catch fire in the public mind and appeal to a broad constituency.

A tall order? For sure. But in case you haven’t noticed, staving off climate doom doesn’t seem to be a winning narrative.

Remember the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)? To some, it justified the arms race between the U.S. and the old USSR. As Wikipedia explains:

The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) assumes that each side has enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the other side; and that either side, if attacked for any reason by the other, would retaliate without fail with equal or greater force. The expected result is an immediate irreversible escalation of hostilities resulting in both combatants’ mutual, total and assured destruction.

Fortunately, no nuclear-armed country has tested this doctrine by preemptively launching nuclear weapons against a nuclear-armed foe.

The warring sides in the climate debate, however, are locked in a hostile embrace that threatens to destroy them both. There is one  difference to this war, though, in that it is not a conventional clash of superpowers, but more an asymmetrical conflict. Think of it like the war in Afghanistan, where climate scientists and campaigners are the U.S. military presence and Marc Morano and his like-minded band of ideologues are the Taliban.

Technically, the U.S. is waging a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, trying to win over the populace with a hearts & minds campaign while also taking out the hostiles. For various reasons, it’s become a rather futile effort that military analysts can explain better than me.

But here are some of the parallels with the climate war. The Taliban, like Morano, are fiercely puritanical. They are not averse to cleansing their own side. Morano has shown that in the Republican Presidential race, where he’s gone after GOP candidates who once were in favor of taking action on climate change. Not coincidentally, global warming has become a litmus test for Republicans in this election year.

The Taliban, like Morano, are excellent provocateurs. They don’t have the manpower to go toe to toe, but they have successfully goaded the U.S. into committing what some experts have called ”own goals.” So it is with the climate movement, whose public spokespersons tend to  fan the flames that perpetuate the fighting.

Now before I go any further, let me state outright that I am not equating Marc Morano’s tactics with those of the Taliban. The latter is comprised of a brutal, extremist culture that terrorizes its own people in horrific ways. Morano merely uses excessive rhetoric and hyperbolic language to advance his aims. He runs an operation that has a political aim: To delegitimize climate science. To do that, he and his allies engage in a propaganda war that goads his opponents and smears the reputations of individuals prominently associated with the climate change cause.

His tactics, while ugly, can in no way whatsoever be compared to the actions of the Taliban. I’m merely saying that he is an insurgent who (with like-minded allies) has successfully forced the other side into a defensive crouch. The climate concerned community is fighting a battle on on his terms.

Morano-inspired fighters, like the Taliban, have also convinced themselves (or pretend to) that they are winning the war against their foes. In today’s NYT, there is a front page story that begins:

More Taliban insurgents are being killed or captured than ever before, yet when the captives are interrogated by the American military, they remain convinced that they are winning the war.

Similarly, Morano and his allies regularly charge that “the case for global warming has collapsed.”  In an interview last year, Morano said, “A to Z, the movement has collapsed.” This talking point, which has no basis in reality, is endlessly repeated. I honestly don’t think Morano believes it, but as he is a long-time political operator, he also knows that perception sometimes overtakes reality.

So where does this leave the climate community? Well, like the U.S. military’s rethinking of its strategy in Afghanistan, the climate-concerned community has to reassess how it can best achieve its aims. If it wants to win hearts & minds (broaden public understanding and support for its cause), then it should probably settle in for the long haul and rethink its communication strategy. But if the climate community prefers to expend most of its energy trying to defeat its most committed enemies, then it likely will stay on the current path of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Somehow, I think that would suit Morano just fine. For he will have achieved his goal and then move on to his next battle.

This is brilliant:

BREAKING NEWS IN THE CLIMATE DEBATE!!!

By R.U. Kiddingme.
Unassociated Press

15 minutes ago

“Realists” use analogy of scientists to dentists” while “Skeptics” use analogy of scientists to Lysenko (and Inquisitors)”

Voicing “concern” today, “skeptics” all over the blogosphere weighed-in write blog comments objecting to an analogy used in a WSJ op-ed comparing scientists to dentists. This comes after much ado over the past few days, when “realists” all over the blogosphere weighed-in to write blog comments objecting to an analogy used in a WSJ op-ed comparing scientists to Lysenko.

In other news, nothing ever changes.

At the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, Michael Svoboda has an excellent deep dive analysis on climate change media coverage. Specifically, he examines the findings behind recent reports that show a decline in climate-related stories the past two years. The decline is real, but also more nuanced than many probably realize.

When issues becomes hotly politicized, such as GMO’s (“Frankenfood“), health care (“death panels“), and yes, climate science (“hoax“), the extremes dominate the public dialogue. When this happens, it is virtually impossible to have a grown-up conversation about these issues in the public sphere.

The press, following the scent of controversy and conflict, ends up in a funhouse, where it has to distinguish between various shades of distortion. Reporters on the climate change beat not only navigate this funhouse but also follow the science and translate its meaning. But that, too, is often turned into sensationalist gruel or something unrecognizable to scientists. Either way, the public is not served well. A 2009 Popular Mechanics article, examining media reaction to five climate studies, observed:

A leading climate scientist argues that overbroad claims by some researchers–coupled with overblown reporting in the media–can undermine the public’s understanding of climate issues. Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate modeler, author and PM [Popular Mechanics] editorial advisor, concurs with the consensusview that the planet’s temperature is rising due largely to human activity. But, he says, many news stories prematurely attribute local or regional phenomena to climate change. This can lead to the dissemination of vague, out-of-context or flat-wrong information to the public.

“People think that if there’s a trend, it has to be connected to this bigger trend,” he says. “You often get this kind of jumping the gun.” Sometimes researchers are citing a potential connection to global warming to get noticed, he says, and sometimes journalists are focusing on that connection to make the story more compelling. “There’s a bit of a backlash amid people who have a brain,” says Schmidt. “It’s akin to [the media's reporting on] medical studies. It adds to people’s confusion.”

In an ideal world, Real Climate (where Schmidt is a contributor) would have been a neutral arbiter of the science. Or at least be perceived as one by all sides. Of course, what website, magazine, or institution is perceived by all sides as unbiased?

The problem isn’t that we don’t live in an ideal world but that the civic space we inhabit has become so polluted with personal animosity, vitriol, and disrespect. The climate arena is merely an extension of this depraved landscape, where arguments are made by hyperbole and ad hominem. Opposing sides try to tear the other down, by casting aspersions on individual reputations and motives. In the climate debate, few can claim to be innocent, even those who would have liked nothing better than to stick to science or policy. Indeed, as I wrote here,

many prefer a smashmouth style of fighting. That means every provocation is taken up, every quote is potential fodder, every action is open to being exploited for partisan advantage.

This corrosive dynamic is by now well established.

So who should suddenly step into this lion’s den? A climate modeler–Tamsin Edwards– from the University of Bristol, who has just started a blog with a devilish name:

All Models Are Wrong

The title is pure genius, because just below it appears this subhead:

..but some are useful. A grown-up discussion about how to quantify uncertainties in modelling climate change and its impacts, past and future.

A grown-up discussion about climate science. What a quaint idea.

Before launching her blog, Edwards got some pushback on her chosen name, with one well-known scientist insistent that it would be deliberately misinterpreted and misused by opponents of climate science. She discusses this in her inaugral post:

I was surprised that a senior academic tried to persuade me, fairly forcefully, not to use the name.

Ah, innocence.

As Tina Turner in Mad Max 3 said, Welcome to the Thunderdome!

That’s the headline of my latest post at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media. I discuss the slide and why it soon may be reversed.

So it looks like the climate debate is degenerating to new lows. Make no mistake: This is a win for the Marc Moranos. Of course, some on the other side seem to relish getting into the mud with him. Perhaps they don’t realize that that is what he wants to happen.

Oh well, the “street fight” is definitely on, as I discuss here at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media.

I know everyone has been waiting on pins and needles about the future of this blog. The suspense has been killing me, too. Well, I have good news and bad news.

Let’s start with the latter. Your combined generosity has enabled me to buy some new socks, take my kids to a matinee movie and fill up the family car’s gas tank. The upshot: unless some amazing ad revenue model materializes, or George Soros and the Koch brothers team up to throw money at me, this is a dead blog walking.

Oh, quit your bawling. We’ve had a good run. You’ll be fine. Maybe some old friends will even start talking to me again.

The good news is I won’t totally go away. In fact, I still write a once a week thingamajob at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, which appears every Tuesday or wed. You can check Colide-a-Scape on those days for the blurb and link. Also, it’s not like I’m going to stop reading, reporting and writing about the subjects that have been a mainstay of this blog. So when my work appears elsewhere, I’ll flog it here.

Lastly, while I explore a few life support options for this blog, I’m going to post a round-up once or twice a week of links that catch my eye. That starts today, just below.

*******

Climate Change

Global warming “has joined abortion and gay marriage as a culture war controversy,” writes conservative WaPo columnist Michael Gerson, as if this were a fresh insight. There’s enough fodder in his piece to piss off all sides and reinforce the theme of Gerson’s column.

On a similar note,  Judith Curry finds that “the extreme polarization of the public debate on climate change seems very difficult to change.” Hmm, ya think? Curry says she is trying to build a “community for floaters, and diminish the basis for inflexibles and liars.” What is a floater? Someone who floats away from being inflexible and deceitful or between those two types? In any case, she seems to have realized that her blog, Climate Etc., “is fighting an uphill battle.”

The National Center for Science Education announces the launch of a new initiative “aimed at defending the teaching of climate change.”  This one will be interesting to watch. The Center made a name for itself by defending the teaching of evolution. See this LA Times story for more background.

Meanwhile, in the Guardian, University of Colorado media scholar Max Boycoff says that, beyond all this culture war stuff,

the “climate problem” suffers from a more powerful and enduring force: economic stagnation.

On the wonky front, a scholar considers the pros and cons of climate change being taken up the UN security council.

Anthropologist John Hawks tweeted that he was

Trying to figure out why climate change brings the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than the Cuban Missile Crisis.

A new study in Science offers a short-term solution that would address global warming while also improving public health and food security. The ever provocative John Tierney, in the NYT, writes:

This proposal comes from an international team of researchers — in climate modeling, atmospheric chemistry, economics, agriculture and public health — who started off with a question that borders on heresy in some green circles: Could something be done about global warming besides forcing everyone around the world to use less fossil fuel?

As for what is being proposed, Tierney summarizes:

researchers determined the 14 most effective measures for reducing climate change, like encouraging a switch to cleaner diesel engines and cookstoves, building more efficient kilns and coke ovens, capturing methane at landfills and oil wells, and reducing methane emissions from rice paddies by draining them more often.

Barrie Pittock at The Conservation explains why a better framework for the climate debate would be risk-based:

Policy is value-laden, while science can only tease out the possibilities and probabilities. Some have now agreed we need to avoid a global average warming of more than 2°C. But this “limit” is uncertain and value-laden. What is “dangerous” to someone living near the coast in Vanuatu may be quite different from what someone in Russia or inland Australia might consider dangerous. Many of us think a 2°C limit may not be strict enough to avoid a dangerous degree of climate change. But that is a value judegment made under uncertainty.

Only time will tell what is an acceptable risk and to whom.

At the local level in Florida, comprehensive planning for climate change is underway. Michael Lemonick at Yale Environment 360 has the details. Shocker alert: Republicans and Democrats in the Sunshine state are working together on these regional climate initiatives.

Energy

The oil & gas industry must have perceived some tipping point over fracking, since a new law (in Texas, of all places) is about go into effect, forcing drillers to “disclose many of the chemicals that they inject into the Earth,” writes Steve leVine over at Foreign Policy.

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria looks at some “striking numbers” that convince him why oil prices will remain high for the foreseeable future.

India has a worsening energy crisis, resulting from years of “policy gridlock,” according to The Times of India, which reports:

Archaeology

A NYT story discusses recent discoveries that potentially upend  the “conventional understanding of the world’s largest tropical rain forest.”

One of the unfortunate consequences of the hyperbolic, circumscribed climate change discourse (It’s all hoax, No it’s not!) is that we don’t pay enough attention to the climate change that did happen in prehistory, specifically the mega-droughts that combined with other factors to cripple ancient empires.

These are complicated stories that are still being puzzled out by scientists, as I discuss in this longish piece at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media. But I think these stories and the evidence of prehistoric drought are becoming clear enough for us to draw lessons from. Have a read and let me know over there what you think.

UPDATE: Via John Fleck, I see there’s an important new study on medieval megadroughts that adds to a robust body of literature.

So while American politicians and environmentalists slug it out over a proposed pipeline, China is stocking its rainy day shale and oil sands fund. Let’s start with the recent news out of Canada:

China will take over full ownership over a Canadian oil sands project for the first time after Athabasca Oil Sands Corp announced Tuesday it sold the remaining 40 percent of the MacKay River oil sands development to PetroChina for US $673 million.

The deal continues a trend that has seen China’s state-owned oil companies invest billions of dollars in exploration or production ventures in Canada, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.

Elsewhere is another way of saying the United States, as this other bit of news suggests:

Showing that it isn’t worried about the upswell of angst over hydraulic fracking technology, the Chinese government, through state-controlled Sinopec, today struck a deal with Devon Energy to buy into five prospective new exploration areas in the U.S.

The deal, which includes $900 million in cash upfront and a promise of $1.6 billion in the years ahead to cover drilling and development, gives the Chinese a 33% stake in five of Devon’s fields, and a front row seat to what is effectively the second wave of development of U.S. shale assets. The areas in question include the Tuscaloosa in Louisiana, the Niobrara in Colorado, the Mississippian in Devon’s home state of Oklahoma, the Utica in Ohio and the Michigan basin.

The second wave? Does that mean it washes over us irrespective of the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline? Has anybody told environmentalists this? And what about climate activists? Who worries you more at this point: Mitt Romney or China? Oh, Never mind.

Back to that second wave, and how it’s being funded from Chinese cash, see this 2011 must-read from Jonathan Thompson. He writes that, over the last decade,

China has emerged as one of our biggest customers; U.S. exports to China have increased 460 percent since 2000. Compared to British, Canadian or Australian multinational corporations, Asian companies still have a minuscule investment in Western resources. But over the last year, as much of Asia scrambles out of the global recession unscathed and the U.S. continues to wallow, Chinese, Indian and even former Soviet-bloc companies have bought into American oil and gas fields, molybdenum mines and more.

The story of fossil fuels as a much sought after global commodity is the big climate story that climate-concerned activists and bloggers willfully ignore.