Cognitive Dissonance

this ain’t. Willful ignorance, maybe. What momentum climate denialism ever had might be fading a bit; after much froth, Cap’n Trade (a new breakfast cereal?) might become just another unremarkable regulatory mechanism. Whatever – I’m not trying to be hopeful here, I’m just sayin’: the whole stupid idea that just because some major companies or investors are going to profit from efforts to reduce carbons emissions and therefore dial back trends that indicate global warming does not itself mean that global warming is a hoax. This is not, what do you call it, a valid deductive argument. It’s actually quite asinine – correlation does not indicate cause and effect, even and especially when proffered dishonestly arbitrarily carelessly. Watch.

People profit from scams.

People will profit from global warming.

(Therefore) global warming is a scam.

See? No work-y. One of the premises is true only under certain conditions. Something’s missing. Something that brings to mind… colorful language, let’s say.

People: for practice, take some contradictory ideas and hold them in your head. No, you don’t have to hold your breath. Just wait. Did anything happen? No! You’ve just become slightly more intellectually dynamic. Don’t worry, your friends shouldn’t immediately notice.

Seriously though, why are so many people so pisspants about reducing carbon emissions? You live within an alphabet soup of corporate logos and events, products and services, and now you’re worried about someone controlling what you can do? This is a much more interesting question. But wondering why companies are going to profit from whatever we do about anything (erectile disfunction, anyone?), much less attaching conspiracy theories to it, less so. Companies, especially big ones with a lots of influence, are always going to profit. That’s how everything is set up. So the idea that this very arrangement invalidates the reality that some seriously grave effects are following our path into the present age is itself an arbitrary take on things. Which we might, again, refer to as the Sinclair effect.

The Foreign(ness of) Aid

From LG&M, Americans still in a rage about issues of which we are greatly uninformed. Which is different from uniformed, though there is probably an appropriate  jumper or pants suit:

The weekend before President Clinton’s State of the Union Address, the Wall Street Journal assembled a focus group of middle-class white males to plumb the depth of their proverbial anger. These guys are mad as hell. They’re mad at welfare, they’re mad at special-interest lobbyists. “But perhaps the subject that produces the most agreement among the group,” the Journal reports, is the view that Washington should stop sending money abroad and instead zero in on the domestic front.

“a poll released last week[1995, ed.] by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland which stated that 75% of Americans believes that the US spends “too much” on foreign aid, and 64% want foreign aid spending cut. Apparently a cavalier 11% of Americans think it’s fine to spend “too much” on foreign aid. Respondents were also asked, though, how big a share of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. The median answer was 15%; the average answer was 18% the correct answer is less than 1%. A question about how much would be “too little” produced a median answer of 3%–more than three times the current level of foreign aid spending.

Wisely transferring money from rich people or countries to poorer people or countries is one of the keystones to good public policy. To the extent we care about it, it’s one of the ways we construct an equitable society and definitely one of the ways we do things like secure the peace (Marshall Plan), bribe the enemy (Iraq) and otherwise incentivize behavior on the part of our strategic partners (examples too numerous to list). This goes doubly for trying to effect lower CO2 emissions around the globe. But we only need to look to the above to see how far the rock will fly.

And while we also spend money in a multitude of horrific ways around the globe, the idea of climate debt was a subject of some contention at COP15. Grist hits a good tee shot on the subject.

The climate pollution already in the atmosphere has “locked in” a certain degree of climate change. Since rich nations produced the bulk of historical pollution, they bear the bulk of the responsibility for the damages that result. Those damages will fall disproportionately on the world’s poorest countries, which bear the least responsibility. Given the situation, rich countries are obliged to help poor countries pay to adapt to climate change and mitigate its effects.

How we get on the green from there, well… it’s an open question as to whether the debt model is the right one. But how ever we come to frame climate justice – and it’s going to be Orwellian orchid sex if there’s ever been any – it must result in the further collapse of the detachment and separation model featuring the highly useful us/them split, of which climate change is the biggest harbinger of all time. It’s why we hate it – odorless, borderless and raceless.

What’s the Alternative?

When you’re not very bright, and prone to dishonesty, I guess it’s only right that you would worry so much about being duped.

Who’s the sucker, right?

But this is what many people might have a hard time with, those who want to assume the best of intentions on the part of others and therefore hold out a benefit of the doubt for them like it’s the last baby carrot at the Appleby’s salad bar thing they assume is done for them. The question of honesty and intentions here is acute – for all the denial about the climate changing, what do it’s proponents suggest we do instead of trying to drastically reduce our reliance on carbon-based energy and hence, carbon emissions? Nothing? All of the scientists are lying so we can and should just keep on burning sh*t and kicking ass?

Al Gore went to Slate and refused to nibble delicately on the petit fours:

And again, we’re putting 90 million tons of it into the air today and we’ll put a little more of that up there tomorrow. The physical relationship between CO2 molecules and the atmosphere and the trapping of heat is as well-established as gravity, for God’s sakes. It’s not some mystery. One hundred and fifty years ago this year, John Tyndall discovered CO2traps heat, and that was the same year the first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania. The oil industry has outpaced the building of a public consensus of the implications of climate science.

But the basic facts are incontrovertible. What do they think happens when we put 90 million tons up there every day? Is there some magic wand they can wave on it and presto!—physics is overturned and carbon dioxide doesn’t trap heat anymore? And when we see all these things happening on the Earth itself, what in the hell do they think is causing it? The scientists have long held that the evidence in their considered word is “unequivocal,” which has been endorsed by every national academy of science in every major country in the entire world.

If the people that believed the moon landing was staged on a movie lot had access to unlimited money from large carbon polluters or some other special interest who wanted to confuse people into thinking that the moon landing didn’t take place, I’m sure we’d have a robust debate about it right now.

Word. Gore quote via Benen.

Indian Initiative

I got the paper paper on Friday, for the first time in a long time. Are we going to explain to our grandkids someday how we used to peruse the newspaper for stories we weren’t even looking for? Anyway, so disposed, I came across this article on how India plans to limit its carbon emissions.

The Indian initiative, presented in Parliament by the country’s top environmental official, means that India has now joined the United States, China, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa in making a domestic emissions pledge before the Copenhagen talks. Like China, its approach is focused on improving energy efficiency rather than accepting mandatory limits on emissions.

India is a critical player in the climate change talks, if one in a complicated position. With 1.2 billion people, it is the world’s second most populous country, having both high rates of poverty and high rates of economic growth. Its population means it has a much lower per-capita emissions rate than that of the industrialized world, yet it has high levels of total emissions. It ranks fifth globally in overall emissions and is projected to rank higher as its economy grows.

Emphasis mine. So what does this mean? Per capita, Indians emit much less CO2 than Americans, though India has higher emissions than America. Who should come into compliance with common standards? We want to limit their countrywide emissions – does that mean they should want to limit our individual emissions? Which are more difficult? How do you establish equitable standards where they won’t have to have higher emissions just to get to our [ostensibly] lowered levels?

Or do we just keep what have and they lower theirs further? Are our emissions more important that theirs? Don’t answer that.

Shocker

A new poll indicates that growing numbers of Republicans don’t believe global climate change is real.

The quality of anecdotes, alas, is also showing steady declines:

Lisa Woolcott, another Republican poll respondent, said she doesn’t think that burning fossil fuels is “causing all the global warming,” adding: “We can’t control what happens in the atmosphere.” But Woolcott, a physician’s assistant who lives in Kansas City, Kan., said she supports the idea of a bill that would cap the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions and doesn’t think the United States should predicate its actions on what other nations do. “We need to do what’s best for us,” she said. “I don’t think we should back down.”

No, I don’t know, either.

But it brings up a pretty fair point about public opinion, as a detector of trends in attitudes as the basis for policy. Attention to global warming has much to do with pending legislation, of course, the opposition to which itself mirrors hardening opposition to Obama. But reliance on governing by public opinion would vary by the same factors – the ebb and flow of legislative priorities, the relative popularity of leading politicians. What won’t change is our relationship to growing problems, that are in-progress, tied to our behavior and representative of the need for broad changes in the disposition of society. Public opinion and good policy are not two great tastes that go great together; they may coincide; they may switch off being in the lead from time to time. But while public opinion shouldn’t be ignored, developing good policy must not be. How we do elevate policy considerations without basing them on public opinion or giving short-shrift to both?

You can always never force people to be informed and have opinions on non-local phenomena.

Paving Our Fate

Or cementing, if you like. An American Business Community that was way late on the short-sighted-ness of sprawl, commercial real estate and exotic financial instruments (but big on INNOVATION!) is now working to defeat healthcare reform legislation because it will… slow down the climate change legislation juggernaut. Synergy!

Corporate front groups and large business trade associations are funneling their resources into defeating health reform. Even though health reform will lower costs for small businesses and boost worker productivity economy-wide, it appears that corporate entities influenced by major polluters are hoping that the defeat of health care legislation will slow President Obama’s agenda and derail their true enemy: clean energy reform.

The West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, which is largely backed by the coal industry, candidly revealed this strategy in a letter released today to Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Robert Byrd (D-WV). The Chamber of Commerce demanded that the senators use “their clout and seniority” to obstruct the health reform debate until cap and trade legislation is taken off the table and the EPA is barred from regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. As Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette noted, Rockefeller has already rejected a similar proposal of blocking health reform unless the EPA stops reviewing mountaintop removal permits. The coal lobby has also pressured West Virginia state legislators to pass resolutions opposing clean energy reform.

I’m kind of even bored with my own impulses toward snark on this, and maybe that’s a good sign. It’s simply not amusing, the way in which major financial interests in this country align their loyalties with short term infringements on their power instead of taking a longer view toward sustainable, if lower, profitability. That is the trade-off they choose to see. But it’s not a trade. It’s a fail. They appear wiling to sacrifice both for neither, as though activating some kind of compass in their Solomonic wisdom survival pack. But you have to wonder, the survival of exactly what?

Plus, in what kind of country is the true enemy clean energy reform? Explain your answer.

The Climate Divide

Increasingly, [if you’ve got] green [it] means that you’ll probably get by, while others, because of geography or more likely a lack of resources, deal with the fallout from your resource over-consumption. From the dotearth blog:

the climate divide.” This is the reality that the world’s established industrial powers are already insulating themselves from climate risks by using wealth and technology accumulated through economic advancement built on burning fossil fuels, even as the world’s poorest countries, with little history of adding to the atmosphere’s greenhouse blanket, are most exposed to the climate hazards of today, let alone what will come through unabated global heating.

Like so many things, this situation is highly unjust. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be moved by a sense of social justice. Doing something about a situation you know doesn’t or won’t  effect you personally is the definition of conscience, and hundreds of millions of people live by its code. It’s the way poverty and racial inequality were finally addressed in this country – not simply because so many people got fed with living in poverty or being discriminated against. But also many other people were sufficiently appalled by both or either that they, too, decided that the collective we had lived through, seen and profited from this situation enough, and cast their lot with the cause of justice.

Of course, there were  many people still, not more but many, who felt that those who suffered might yet should suffer more, who were unmoved by the bigotry and oppression and who didn’t want to move too quickly against these or any other injustices. Not quite yet or maybe not at all. And they are still with us, and can be counted on to slow down the climate change debate by emphasizing what we will lose by addressing its root causes. But this is not the collective we, present or future. To unravel the ambivalence about global climate change from a general lack of conscience on other matters would be difficult. And maybe it’s just a coincidence. But it’s probably a greater divide, one we know well, one whose challenge has several times inspired us. And may well again.

Zwischenzug

A San Francisco couple challenges the Waxman-Markey climate change bill wending it’s way through congress. Yawn.

A San Francisco couple who are both lawyers for the EPA challenges the Waxman-Markey climate change bill wending it’s way through congress. Scandal.

Check out the video in question. After the scary music, they offer disclaimers about not representing the government or speaking for the president. And I can’t tell from a straight-up amateur video that these people are any more overzealous or weird than the editorial page editor of the Washington Post Kaplan Test Prep Daily. They work at the EPA, and have for many years. They have strong opinions about cap-and-trade – they think it won’t spur the urgent technological innovations and investments needed to usher in the mammoth energy transition necessary to drastically reduce carbon emissions.

At some level, I don’t care how amateurish their videos might be – which also means that at some level, I do.  But I’m sympathetic to the argument that the bill, which gives away emission permits, doesn’t do enough. The EPA has every right to make sure their employees aren’t misrepresenting official policy – precisely because what their employees say carries more weight. That being the case, I’m interested in what they think. Most of what we hear about the climate bill is how much passing it will damage the economy. You can imagine that a couple of climate change deniers who were EPA lawyers would be feted as dissidents and we, treated to a new round of cable cause celebre. Harnessing the power of n, where n is anything other than coal or petroleum, will necessarily revolutionize much what we see and do. How are we possibly going to accomplish it? Let’s argue about that for a while.

Eco-Sikhs

Our government bails out sprawl and congress picks up two one more progressives (but two Dems) in overnight voting, but the news here is the role of religion in the climate change debate. Leaders of the world’s major religions have gathered at Windsor Castle to discuss ways in which the faiths can impact (in a positive way, more on that distinction in a minute) efforts to combat global climate change.

Much of the discourse over climate has been focused on gigatons of gases, megawatt hours of electricity, miles per gallon or details of diplomatic accords or legislation. But  Olav Kjorven, an assistant secretary general at the United Nations involved with the meeting, spent the last year visiting religious orders around the world to see what faiths could bring to the climate table. The answer, Mr. Kjorven told me, is a lot, and not simply in prayer.

Religions, he explained, run more than half the world’s schools, so tweaking a curriculum to include more on the environment can have a big impact. Their vast financial holdings provide leverage and capital for investments with environmental or social benefits. At the conference, which ends on Wednesday, many faiths will be  announcing long-term plans to make more of an impact in an arena that has not tended to be a top priority.

What was it Mom always used to say? Yes… but. Granted, there are religious people around the world who are taking the threat seriously.

Of our very own countrymen especially, however, these are the folks who are greatly uninterested in the impact of man upon the Earth, even as they/we subscribe to a divinely-inspired caretaker role. I get this whole ‘dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air…’ thing as it extends to super-sized mega churches surrounded by oceans of pavement amid seas of sprawl and entitled consumption of limited resources, but it leads to super-sized mega churches… . Anyway, I used to think the funniest thing was how the mega-churches labeled themselves that way. Now, not so much.

Churches may end up being the last refuge of climate change denial, or at least indifference. So much despoiling of the earth and its inhabitants has been committed beneath its aegis that it may be impossible to turn that around and begin to use it as a force to un-despoil. Conceding any of that would seemingly undermine too much. And imagine a sermon whereupon the minister looks up in the suspended Bose speakers and recessed lighting 100 feet overhead and asks his fellow congregants if they need all of that to effectively commune with God and whether the energy they put into what they’re wearing or how they arrived there has anything to do with the planetary crisis that has the liberals all in a tizzy. Me neither.

But how do they/we broach that subject? How do we connect the very trappings of our holy communion [obviously, not limited to religion] to the waste we’re laying?

Big Sky

A friend was telling me recently how, even as Montana enjoys a reputation as a sort of great outdoors Shangra la, in actuality it has been methodically raped for its resources without concern or recourse for the environmental damage that has followed. Significant portions of the state are highly polluted from coal and gold mining, which until ten years ago utilized cyanide in the process and of course resulted in incidents of cyanide-tainted ground water. Push back on environmental issues in Montana has traditionally come from land-owners, though often their interests are as tainted as the ground they seek to protect.

So there are all kinds of fictions about the Big Sky state floating around, plus they’ve given us the wit and wisdom of Max Baucus to add to the healthcare debate. Actually, his wisdom knows no bounds, as Baucus steps up to pontificate on how we should go about dithering on global warming, too. via Grist, it seems that the beetles eating Montana’s trees don’t care if Baucus believes the planet is warming or not. cue munching sound:

One part of the media focused on the real story that Montanans are increasingly concerned about:  Climate change is already hitting their state hard now and is poised to devastate it utterly.  American Public Media’s Marketplace has be done a terrific multipart series on climate change, which can be accessed here, along with a map of how different regions of the country are being affected now and how they are likely to be hit in the future.

The first piece “Climate change in our own backyards,” tells the amazing story of the warming-driven bark beetle infestation around Helena.  And yes, this is the same exact story that the NYT screwed up in July (see “Signs of global warming are everywhere, but if the New York Times can’t tell the story (twice!), how will the public hear it?“).

The article is complete with pretty pictures and ‘sustainability reporters’. But this is a good reminder to watch out for the dueling rationales that pop up for the millions of acres of dying trees across the mountain west. Climate change denial is one thing – some people just choose to rather not believe it. And skepticism has its privileges. But what happens when actual people begin experiencing things like this? Will it get more difficult to concoct gymnastic reasons that place the blame on immigrants, or does Occam get a seat on the city council?