The Sound of a Tree Not Falling

Social Eco progress continues in Latin America, while the rest of the world fixates on reality t.v. shows and/or burns.

In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies – and, for today, they have won.

Human beings need to make far more decisions like this: to leave fossil fuels in the ground, and to leave rainforests standing. In microcosm, this rumble in the jungle is the fight we all face now. Will we allow a small number of rich people to make a short-term profit from seizing and burning resources, at the expense of our collective ability to survive?

If this sounds like hyperbole, listen to Professor Jim Hansen, the world’s leading climatologist, whose predictions have consistently turned out to be correct. He says: “Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know. We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with a sea level 75 metres higher. Coastal disasters would occur continually. The only uncertainty is the time it would take for complete ice sheet disintegration.”

via.

Keep ’em Coming

In the same way that having Insurance company executives testify on camera before Congress about what their companies do is be the best way to guarantee passage of universal health coverage, Republican opposition to climate legislation written by the coal lobby will likely be its best friend, as well.

House Republicans are circulating a PowerPoint document that purports to show the regional breakdown of costs for energy consumers under the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill (ACES). The header: “Most States Lose Under the Pending Climate Bill.”

The catch? It appears to have been authored by the coal giant Peabody Energy. [Note: It was actually authored by the National Mining Assocation; see updates below.]

The document was discussed on a conference call held by the “Rural America Solutions Group” within the GOP caucus on Thursday, hosted by group co-chairs Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), Sam Graves (R-Mo.), and Doc Hastings (R-Wash.). According to a press release, the call was meant to “highlight how the Democrats’ National Energy Tax will make it more expensive for rural Americans to fertilize the crops, put fuel in the tractor and food on the table.”

It isn’t that this is anything more than run-of-the-mill skulduggery, which it is, by and large. The interesting point about it is just how out-to-lunch this approach is to governing, in terms of using government to enact solutions to massive problems that require a centralized organization. Like a government. Industry shills and bought-and-paid for politicos are our connection to the Gilded Age proper. If you’re a romantic and wonder what it was like, this is what is was like.

Its excesses and corruption were its undoing and eventually led to reforms. Our excesses being a little more poisonous in terms of waste and emissions, and our corruptions enlarged to include the intellectual, our undoing is likely to be far more jarring than a matter of a few reforms.

So it is enlightening, in its way, to have chief polluters and fiscal looters advocate and agitate for the policies that have enshrined their advantageous positions. They’re as likely as any of us to be perfectly frank about their successes and points of view. Not always truthful, but you’d be amazed.

These strategies keep our refusals to change right in front of us, which is where they need to be. The longer we/they keep people right out in front spouting nonsense about the how costs of staying healthy or using less energy are too great to bear, the more effective measures to protect health and save energy can be.

The Big Picture

That’s the name for a ‘news stories in photographs’ feature on the Boston Globe site and it’s really excellent.

Words can be hurtful and leave permanent scars, but images are even more powerful. They can help explain conditions and situations by harkening back to the essential and human in us. Maybe images can even be helpful to people like the chairman of the House Agriculture committee, who holds great sway over measures that will combat climate change, even though he does not understand what it is.

… has been blocking the passage of comprehensive climate legislation, dismissed a White House report on the damaging effect of global warming on U.S. agriculture. Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the chief of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association and one of the top scientists in the Obama administration, called the climate impacts report released yesterday a “clarion call for action” for a problem that “is happening now, and in our own backyards.” However, the Wall Street Journal reports that Peterson, “when asked by reporters Tuesday about the report’s findings, said they run counter to what many in his region are experiencing“:

We’ve just had the biggest floods and coldest winters we’ve ever had. They’re saying to us [that climate change is] going to be a big problem because it’s going to be warmer than it usually is; my farmers are going to say that’s a good thing since they’ll be able to grow more corn.

If you’re in a position of influence and don’t know what you’re talking about, on what basis do you continue talking?

  1. the soothing sounds of one’s own voice
  2. The shill/hack continuum
  3. ?

Maybe someone can draw me a picture.

Cognitive Dissidents

Foreign fighters among the Taliban with Birmingham (U.K.) accents? NASA planning massive space explosions in search of water on the moon? Unrelated incidents to be sure, but what, exactly, is going on?

These sort of bizarre happenings in parallel occur all the time, of course, and they have become a part of living in our present day – as curious as horseless carriages must have once seemed. Unpacking them at all, they may become even more Byzantine as curiosities. The Aston Villa tattoos on the recently-killed Taliban fighter are as crazy/easy to explain as would have been the case had their accents been from Birmingham, Alabama. Okay, maybe not. That would have been crazy. But no more so than scientists preparing to fly a rocket booster into the moon in order to trigger a six-mile-high explosion.

The four-month mission of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which will be directed from NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, is to discover whether water is frozen in the perpetual darkness of craters near the moon’s south pole. As a potential source of oxygen for life support and hydrogen for rocket fuel, that water would be a tremendous boost to NASA’s plans to restart human exploration of the moon.

It is in this climate, where we have become nearly unable to differentiate the fabulous from the actual, where the words ‘incredible’ and ‘amazing’ have been displaced of their original meanings, where extraordinary measures of all sorts limbo beneath the radar, causing not the slightest flinch. Maybe it’s always been like this; or perhaps the volume of information bombardment itself is causing the greatest psychological displacement, such that we begin to allow for the unallowable. How else to explain this:

Using iron “seeding” to set off massive plankton growth in the ocean to slow climate change; creating artificial volcanic eruptions to release cooling sulfur into the atmosphere; increasing the solar reflectivity of clouds by adding sea-salt particles; building a giant space mirror to stop ice from melting in Greenland. These may sound like concepts straight out of a George Lucas film, but they are real ideas being proposed by scientists as part of the “geoengineering” movement — a school of thought based upon the idea that humans can engineer ourselves out of global warming on a massive scale.

How many people listened to this report on NPR driving home on Tuesday, looked around at the traffic and nodded their heads? Did they say to themselves, ‘that sounds like a good idea,’ or “I’m glad people are thinking about this’? Even the report hedged itself with a kind of reality check.

And experiments could create disasters. Alan Robock of Rutgers University cataloged a long list of risks. Particles in the stratosphere that block sunlight could also damage the ozone layer, which protects us from harsh ultraviolet light. Or altering the stratosphere could reduce precipitation in Asia, where it waters the crops that feed 2 billion people.

Should we be outraged* by these kinds of suggestions? We seem to be caught in an information spiral, where we’ve down-graded the importance of expertise in favor of a balance between opposing viewpoints. We lend credence to both and preserve the power to play Solomon, though we are greatly ill-educated and prone to believing in both our better impulses and the existence of an easy way out. Sitting in that car in traffic, we may need to first begin to agitate among ourselves, to regain control of what’s happening inside the car, first. Why shouldn’t we be able to counter the effects of climate change without driving less, wasting less, living differently? Do we even know?

* this can be a rather complex proposition in itself, e.g., toward what would the outrage be directed?

Climate Change as Metaphor

Overlapping metaphor, that is. This op-ed by the president of Emory University puts a bit of point onto the identifier as a term for what’s happening in the university. Though we can take it plenty further, it’s not a bad place to start.

Historically, watershed moments such as this have pushed universities to restructure everything from basic research to how and where our undergraduates live. This time, rather than being reactive, we should pause to ask careful questions about how best to move toward a transformation of our own choosing.

This time, our investment should include commitments that will return us to the transporting promise of the liberal arts — freeing all of us, teachers and learners alike, from the limitations of our self-centered perspectives; enabling us to understand the world from others’ viewpoints; and empowering us to be agents of societal change. We must affirm that education is as much about insight as it is about gaining information or job training; it is about the duty to listen as well as the responsibility to speak out, about the pursuit of wisdom as well as knowledge. We should understand that the study and practice of ethics must find a home in our graduate schools of business and medicine just as it does in our liberal arts colleges.

Maybe we can think of it as coming in from the cold of merely satifying the conflicting human needs for vengeance, justice and profit, having one of these always lose out and, over time, becoming greatly accepting of this outcome. As unseemly as it might be to posit the spiritual aspects of living better at a more reasonable scale, what the hell else are we actually talking about?

Up to now, our chief insights have been on the order of ‘might making right’ and other laws of a self-fulfilling jungle, whelmed periodically only by ferocious demands for social justice and, as seems to be the case now, imminent resource scarcity. Call them cataclysmic corrections as we might, but these opportunities that crop up in our haste to otherwise prevail (upon nature, each other, time, space) are nothing more, and thankfully nothing less, than a ticket to our once and preternatural state – the only place where the things we actually want are actually within reach: a return to uncertainty.

I’m sure a lot of this is buried somewhere deep inside the Report to Greco. So, you can look it up.

Recycled Oil Rigs

So as the Obama administration delays a Bush faux-solution to expand torture drilling, the Interior department is focused on developing offshore wind power. Coincidental to this, researchers report that one “unexpected quirk” of climate change is that wind speed is picking up off the coast of England.

Based on information taken from Nasa satellite images, the research found that average annual wind speed in the southern part of the North Sea had increased from about 7.5 metres per second in 1990 to 8.5 metres in 2008. In contrast, wind speeds in the northern part of the North Sea, off the coast of Scotland, have remained constant during this period.

If these trends continue, in a decade the south could be windier all year round than northern areas and double the power generated by wind farms off the coast of East Anglia and Essex.

For those poised to make a buck, why not jump in where you can make three? Apparently the sites off the Nantucket Sound are attractive not only because of significant sustained winds, but the shallow waters keep installation costs down. A major cost of installing the turbines is the offshore foundations themselves, such that the British government just launched a £20 million competition to accelerate a 30% cut in costs for deep water foundations. But, wait – we just read that

Until now, developers have relied on wind-speed levels taken on oil and gas installations or have used meteorological masts planted offshore. The Met Office has only limited satellite data to track offshore wind speeds in the North Sea but is working with wind-farm developers to produce a comprehensive set of data of the last 30 years. A spokeswoman admitted it would take two years to develop.

Duncan Ayling, head of offshore renewables at the British Wind Energy Association, said: “There have been wind-speed measurements on oil and gas installations that give some localised historic data, but a lot of the rest of it is extrapolation. If this technology provides an accurate measurement, it would be very exciting. More wind equals more money for projects. It would enable wind-farm developers to more accurately forecast revenues and have more certainty about the expected return on their investment.”

Emphasis mine. Oil and gas installations that are…  already out there in the windy North Sea, in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of California and elsewhere. Many of these are abandoned or likely to be tapped out soon. What happens to them when the spigot from down below runs dry? Can’t they be topped with a wind turbine, gigantic and lovely? Doesn’t fix everything or end the discussion, though we stipulate that neither of these is the point; also, far superior to highly-stylized schools of thought centered around 1) doing the same things and expecting different results and 2) Let’s Do Nothing!

Plus reuse is PR gold so this fulfills the implicit double entendre requirement for what green means. Please make checks payable to the editor.

Recycled Oil Rigs

So as the Obama administration delays a Bush faux-solution to expand torture drilling, the Interior department is focused on developing offshore wind power. Coincidental to this, researchers report that one “unexpected quirk” of climate change is that wind speed is picking up off the coast of England.

Based on information taken from Nasa satellite images, the research found that average annual wind speed in the southern part of the North Sea had increased from about 7.5 metres per second in 1990 to 8.5 metres in 2008. In contrast, wind speeds in the northern part of the North Sea, off the coast of Scotland, have remained constant during this period.

If these trends continue, in a decade the south could be windier all year round than northern areas and double the power generated by wind farms off the coast of East Anglia and Essex.

For those poised to make a buck, why not jump in where you can make three? Apparently the sites off the Nantucket Sound are attractive not only because of significant sustained winds, but the shallow waters keep installation costs down. A major cost of installing the turbines is the offshore foundations themselves, such that the British government just launched a £20 million competition to accelerate a 30% cut in costs for deep water foundations. But, wait – we just read that

Until now, developers have relied on wind-speed levels taken on oil and gas installations or have used meteorological masts planted offshore. The Met Office has only limited satellite data to track offshore wind speeds in the North Sea but is working with wind-farm developers to produce a comprehensive set of data of the last 30 years. A spokeswoman admitted it would take two years to develop.

Duncan Ayling, head of offshore renewables at the British Wind Energy Association, said: “There have been wind-speed measurements on oil and gas installations that give some localised historic data, but a lot of the rest of it is extrapolation. If this technology provides an accurate measurement, it would be very exciting. More wind equals more money for projects. It would enable wind-farm developers to more accurately forecast revenues and have more certainty about the expected return on their investment.”

Emphasis mine. Oil and gas installations that are…  already out there in the windy North Sea, in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of California and elsewhere. Many of these are abandoned or likely to be tapped out soon. What happens to them when the spigot from down below runs dry? Can’t they be topped with a wind turbine, gigantic and lovely? Doesn’t fix everything or end the discussion, though we stipulate that neither of these is the point; also, far superior to highly-stylized schools of thought centered around 1) doing the same things and expecting different results and 2) Let’s Do Nothing!

Plus reuse is PR gold so this fulfills the implicit double entendre requirement for what green means. Please make checks payable to the editor.

The Art of Decision Making

This is going to annoy or excite you, likely depending on your one-free-cup-of-misanthropy card and how many holes it’s punched with.

NYT magazine yesterday has a long piece contextualizing the disconnect between believing the planet is in imminent peril and the willingness to do anything about it. Academic research behind the science of decision-making is explored in depth; I don’t believe any animals were permanently harmed in the gathering of data points for this article, but toward the end there was some heinous screeching. Maybe that was me:

Over the past few years, it has become fashionable to describe this kind of focused communication as having the proper frame. In our haste to mix jargon into everyday conversation, frames have sometimes been confused with nudges, a term made popular in a recent book, “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness,” written by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein when they were academics at the University of Chicago. (Sunstein later moved to Harvard Law School and has since been nominated as the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.) Frames and nudges are not precisely the same; frames are just one way to nudge people by using sophisticated messages, mined from decision-science research, that resonate with particular audiences or that take advantage of our cognitive biases (like informing us that an urgent operation has an 80 percent survival rate). Nudges, more broadly, structure choices so that our natural cognitive shortcomings don’t make us err. Ideally, nudges direct us, gently, toward actions that are in our long-term interest, like an automated retirement savings plan that circumvents our typical inertia. Thaler and Sunstein explain in their book that nudges can take advantage of technology like home meters, which have been shown to reduce electricity usage by making constant feedback available. These appeal to our desire for short-term satisfaction and being rewarded for improvement. Or a nudge might be as simple as a sensor installed in our home by a utility that automatically turns off all unnecessary power once we leave for the day — a technology, in effect, that doesn’t even require us to use our brains. “I think the potential there is huge,” Thaler told me recently, when I asked him about environmental nudges. “And I think we can use a whole bag of tricks.”

Ouch. This is the con behind the con, something I’ve touched on many times, on which this site is more than nominally based. Having the subject laid bare academically could make you see that we’re still merely in the marketing phase of project self-preservation. We’re testing the waters – pondering survival, if you can call it that. Perhaps we could speed things up if we go ahead and ask whether life would be worth living without the ability to consume and waste vast amounts of resources, without the freedom of our corporate sponsors to find new ways to poison us and indebt us. As nothing quite solid has panned out yet, we’ll continue feeling around for just that perfect thing (‘nudge’) that will convince us to do something about what we know. The preference for a ‘Pearl Harbor’ climate incident to galvanize attention is noted. And stupid.

That this perfectly childish scenario is somehow normal, because we have a non-trivial percentage of our citizens and leaders who believe that a warming planet won’t be their problem and so shouldn’t merit their worry, is merely accepted as one among a workable array of factors and an insult to children everywhere. The contrived pull and yaw of doing/not doing anything can continue indefinitely.

So in terms of policy, it may not be the actual tax mechanism that some people object to; it’s the way a “trivial semantic difference,” as Hardisty put it, can lead a group to muster powerful negative associations before they have a chance to consider any benefits. Baruch Fischhoff, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a kind of elder statesman among decision scientists, told me he’s fairly convinced a carbon tax could be made superior to cap and trade in terms of human palatability. “I think there’s an attractive version of the carbon tax if somebody thought about its design,” Fischhoff told me, adding that it’s a fundamental principle of decision research that if you’re going to get people to pay a cost, it’s better to do it in a simple manner (like a tax) than a complex one (like in cap and trade). Fischoff sketched out for me a possible research endeavor — the careful design of a tax instrument and the sophisticated collection of behavioral responses to it — that he thought would be necessary for a tax proposal to gather support. “But I don’t think the politicians are that informed about the realm of the possible,” he added. “Opinion polls are not all that one needs.”

Careful we don’t do anything to confuse or depress or worry people into changing the way we live. You wouldn’t want to cause a stampeed among so fragile a population… better to slip it in a like a suggestive value menu item.

I know there’s a chicken-and-egg quality to the way we follow leaders who think so little of us, but it’s not a closed loop. As this useful article makes implicit, there are plenty of ways of  breaking the spell, even if we must get psychological about it. We would proably relax if we could be sure that the next steps would merely be dangerous. And interesting.

45°

Along with being the Trig functions for Theta, 45 degrees is also the number being thrown around for expected sustained temperatures in Australia, which many say is already experiencing the predicted effects of global warming. Massive wildfires, drought, flooding in the northern tropical areas – it’s not pretty.

Climate scientists say Australia — beset by prolonged drought and deadly bush fires in the south, monsoon flooding and mosquito-borne fevers in the north, widespread wildlife decline, economic collapse in agriculture and killer heat waves — epitomizes the “accelerated climate crisis” that global warming models have forecast.

With few skeptics among them, Australians appear to be coming to an awakening: Adapt to a rapidly shifting climate, and soon. Scientists here warn that the experience of this island continent is an early cautionary tale for the rest of the world.

A royal commission has  been convened to determine whether, in fact, global warming contributed to the deaths of 173 people in the nation’s worst wildfires ever and the 200 who died from heat the week before. Farmers are being pushed to the verge of suicide and beyond. Rainfall is down by 70 % in many areas. The commission’s report is due in August.

But in a country that gets 80% of its energy from burning coal, what can the report say?

Scientists are frustrated that such dramatic anecdotal and empirical evidence hasn’t sparked equally dramatic action from Australia’s government. They suspect the inaction can be partly explained by examining the nation’s relationship with coal. Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and relies on it for 80% of its electricity. That helps make Australia and its 21 million people the world’s highest per-capita producers of greenhouse gases in the industrialized world.

Climate change researcher Cocklin, who is deputy vice chancellor at James Cook University, said the power of the coal companies and the massive receipts they bring in render the industry politically untouchable.

“The nature of our energy profile is one where coal features significantly,” he said. “There’s no denying it’s a massive problem. I don’t think in the public-political arena it is being challenged with the tenacity that you would want. No Labor [Party] government is going to challenge that.”

So, the prime minister pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5% by 2020 (wouldn’t want to rush things). And I think we can relate. Australia is not just a case in point of what global warming will look like, but also an example of vast government inaction in the face of damning consequences. See one, see the other. Pleasant loud speaker voice: In the name of not kinking solid revenue streams, will everyone please step two miles in toward the middle of the country?

Do we actually think that’s going to work? If we don’t – what actually is the plan?