Gut check

From Ezra’s column:

The visceral reaction against anyone questioning our God-given right to bathe in bacon has been enough to scare many in the environmental movement away from this issue. The National Resources Defense Council has a long page of suggestions for how you, too, can “fight global warming.” As you’d expect, “Drive Less” is in bold letters. There’s also an endorsement for “high-mileage cars such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids.” They advise that you weatherize your home, upgrade to more efficient appliances and even buy carbon offsets. The word “meat” is nowhere to be found.

That’s not an oversight. Telling people to give up burgers doesn’t poll well. Ben Adler, an urban policy writer, explored that in a December 2008 article for the American Prospect. He called environmental groups and asked them for their policy on meat consumption. “The Sierra Club isn’t opposed to eating meat,” was the clipped reply from a Sierra Club spokesman. “So that’s sort of the long and short of it.” And without pressure to address the costs of meat, politicians predictably are whiffing on the issue. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, for instance, does nothing to address the emissions from livestock.

The pity of it is that compared with cars or appliances or heating your house, eating pasta on a night when you’d otherwise have made fajitas is easy. It doesn’t require a long commute on the bus or the disposable income to trade up to a Prius. It doesn’t mean you have to scrounge for change to buy a carbon offset. In fact, it saves money. It’s healthful. And it can be done immediately. A Montanan who drives 40 miles to work might not have the option to take public transportation. But he or she can probably pull off a veggie stew. A cash-strapped family might not be able buy a new dishwasher. But it might be able to replace meatballs with mac-and-cheese. That is the whole point behind the cheery PB&J Campaign, which reminds that “you can fight global warming by having a PB&J for lunch.” Given that PB&J is delicious, it’s not the world’s most onerous commitment.

Warming reducing cloud cover

Well, this isn’t good:

In a study published in the July 24 issue of Science, researchers Amy Clement and Robert Burgman from the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and Joel Norris from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego begin to unravel this mystery. Using observational data collected over the last 50 years and complex climate models, the team has established that low-level stratiform clouds appear to dissipate as the ocean warms, indicating that changes in these clouds may enhance the warming of the planet.

Putting his money where his mouth is

Nate Silver issues a challenge to global climate change skeptics:

The rules of the challenge are as follows:

1. For each day that the high temperature in your hometown is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit above average, as listed by Weather Underground, you owe me $25. For each day that it is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit below average, I owe you $25.
2. The challenge proceeds in monthly intervals, with the first month being August. At the end of each month, we’ll tally up the winning and losing days and the loser writes the winner a check for the balance.
3. The challenge automatically rolls over to the next month until/unless: (i) one party informs the other by the 20th of the previous month that he would like to discontinue the challenge (that is, if you want to discontinue the challenge for September, you’d have to tell me this by August 20th), or (ii) the losing party has failed to pay the winning party in a timely fashion, in which case the challenge may be canceled at the sole discretion of the winning party.

Any takers?

Past the point of no return?

This is probably accurate:

In fact, there is a perfectly good reason developing countries are unwilling to act on climate change: What they are being asked to do is more awful than climate change’s implications–even if one accepts all the alarmist predictions.

Consider what would be necessary to slash global greenhouse-gas emissions just 50% below 2000 levels by 2050–a far less aggressive goal than what the enviros say is necessary to avert climate catastrophe. According to U.S. Chamber of Commerce calculations, even if the West reduced its emissions by 80% below 2000 levels, developing countries would still have to return their emissions to 2000 levels to meet the 50% target. However, Indians currently consume roughly 15 times less energy per capita than Americans–and Chinese consume seven times less. Asking them, along with the rest of the developing world, to go back to 2000 emission levels with a 2050 population would mean putting them on a very drastic energy diet.

The human toll of this is unfathomable: It would require these countries to abandon plans to ever conquer poverty, of course. But beyond that it would require a major scaling back of living standards under which their middle classes–for whom three square meals, cars and air-conditioning are only now beginning to come within reach–would have to go back to subsistence living, and the hundreds of millions who are at subsistence would have to accept starvation.

I think I may agree with this point: we are too far down the slippery-slope of climate-change for curbing consumption to be enough to effectively combat the changes. We might be past the point of no-return here.

To avoid calamity, I believe we will need a technological revolution (coming in the form of a multi-front effort to increase carbon-free energy production, geo-engineering global cooling efforts, &c.).

But what we can do with consumption-curbing efforts is buy ourselves more time. If we can slow the pace of warming, we increase the chances of finding technological resources to help our efforts.

Her conclusion, which essentially amounts to sitting on our hands, is utterly backwards and false:

So what should climate warriors do? Right now the only certain way to save lives is by calling off this misguided war on climate change. If and when climate change promises to claim more casualties than poverty and starvation, the world will begin heeding their calls. If, however, these climate-change casualties don’t materialize, there would have been no need to act in the first place. Either way, the world has far more immediate and scarier problems than climate change to address right now.

We cannot abandon pushes to slow/stop climate change. That is suicide. To say we have to stop all efforts on this huge issue because there are other huge issues going on in the world simultaneously, is both misguided and cowardly. We can rub our stomach and pat our head at the same time–and in this case, we need to.

The real issue here is a failure to acknowledge that, going forward, our economy and our environmental policies and outlook are going to be intertwined. For example, examining the real cost of burning carbon on society as a whole. One of the ways to address this problem is to tie the real cost of carbon to the way it is priced in the market place.

The issues of poverty, food production/dispersion, and the environment are more intertwined than Dalmia acknowledges. And a failure to acknowledge this, and to address it as a three-headed but singular problem (there are actually more heads on this hydra than that–foreign policy, for example), is to failure to form the comprehensive, cohesive strategy necessary to take a crack at these globally-scaled issues.

(Danke: Patrick Appel)

“We are as Gods, and have to get good at it.”

Texas is the “10 billion hampsters in 10 billion running wheels” of wind power

…doesn’t quite have the right ring to it, eh? Green Inc. is looking for a new metaphor.

GDP vs. actual value

Why GDP is not the end-all be-all of how we should value the world and its resources:

There will be no snow left on Kilimanjaro within a few years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is zero. There will be no year-round snow left in the Himalayas in 100 years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is tiny. There will be no Everglades in 100 years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is marginal. There will be no Venice in 100 years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is tiny. There will be no New Orleans in 100 years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is extremely small.

There are two issues here. First, GDP measures income, not wealth. If your house burns down, it will most likely not change your income. Does that mean you should spend nothing to protect your house from burning down? Second, GDP only measures things that can be measured in money. But the worth of many precious things cannot be measured in money: Yellowstone National Park, the independence of one’s country from foreign rule, the existence of elephants and polar bears, clean air, the ruins of the city of Ur, the fact that humans have traveled to the moon, etc.

(Danke: Patrick Appel)

Keeping egos in check

ReTweet: “Broken America”

An exercise in cynicism by Sullivan and one of his readers:

A reader writes:

Sorry, but I don’t understand why anyone would be excited about the Waxman bill. I imagine it’s well-intentioned. But this is a country that can’t even raise the gas tax from 18.4 cents to 30 cents. This is a country with a Nobel laureate who heads the Energy Department, who announces that global warming could be reduced by simply painting more roofs (and other surfaces) white, and of course we all know that we’ll never actually do this. This is a country with terribly unbalanced finances, and we all know that of course no one will raise the retirement age for social security, not even by 6 months, to take effect next year. This is a country that, fully-aware that there is a glut of cars in the world, subsidizes… GM and Chrysler. So why on earth would anyone think that this country can do anything to affect global warming?

Apologies for the cynicism, but when there are so many “softball solutions” that seem to have no prospect of actually happening, it’s hard to care about an ambitious bill about climate change.

I have to say I agree. I know the system mitigates against swift change – and that’s its beauty – but it also seems to be resistant to any change that might benefit the public interest if it can be prevented by massively powerful private interests or ideological campaigns based in cynicism and the pursuit of power.

Watching how this government can do nothing to reform health care, nothing to end the wars and occupations that drain the coffers, nothing to tackle entitlements even as the country teeters toward complete insolvency, nothing to reform a broken immigration system … even after a president is elected with a clear mandate and a Congressional majority in both Houses: well, we know why America is fucked, don’t we?

I gotta say that I’m too young to be this cynical… but theirs is an informed cynicism based on a history of failures. But what it doesn’t take into account is America’s history of successes in certain areas as well.

There’s a certain amount of cynicism that is healthy. And I think on the whole, Andrew is pretty positive and hopeful (“Know Hope” is a common meme in his writing). So taking this post out of context from his daily barrage of posts is a little unfair.

But, if you haven’t, take a look at this short TED talk about perspectives on time. I think it lays out a healthy time perspective that we should try to hold even in the context of a government that often fails more than it succeeds.

Sully, this one goes out to you:

On the current state of affairs: Left vs. Right

John Cole ponders:

Why is it that anyone who says “killing all the wildlife in this lake might be a bad idea” becomes a de facto granola eating DFH? Why is it not considered conservative to say “this could cost us a lot in the long run, not just monetarily, but in terms of other measures.” Surely there have to be people in agribusiness and property rights advocates who oppose this sort of thing, and they can’t be considered “teh left.” I also understand that there are folks on the fringes of the environmental left who would shut down all business, if they could. Clearly there is a need for balance.

I understand why it is now- ideological lines are rigid, and anything members of “teh left” oppose members of “teh right” support, and vice versa. If Obama and the Democrats came out in favor of puppy kisses and free ice cream, the NRO would have a hundred op-ed pieces declaring puppy kisses to be the vanguard of the incipient liberal fascism. But how did it get this way? Why is not wanting 4.5 tons of toxic shit dumped into your lake considered “liberal?” Does anyone have a book that might explain things? Is there a religious component or something that I do not understand?

Minicows and “minihumans”

Saletan has a fascinating story about how us and our livestock have grown too big for our britches:

We did manipulate cows’ genes for our purposes. We adapted them to our environment: plentiful land and feed. But then our environment changed. It became better suited to natural cows — or, more accurately, cows that were the product of human manipulation up to a century ago — than to the artificial cows of the last 50 years. So artifice unraveled itself. We went back to the original gene pool. Except that now, having becoming used to oversized 20th-century cows, we call the modern offspring of their ordinary-sized predecessors “minicows.” [...]

They fit the latest “trend in farm efficiency — the move to ranchettes, smaller operations run by families or small groups of workers,” Huffstutter writes. Today’s ecology and economics demand smaller livestock.

The same is true of people. We’re getting too fat for our planet. Many of us no longer fit old-fashioned toilets, ambulances, or coffins. Yet we’ve become so accustomed to our new size that only 15 percent of obese people now recognize themselves as obese. Fearing the economic consequences, governments around the world are groping for measures to restore us to our previous size. If they succeed, I wonder what we’ll call the thin people of tomorrow. Minihumans, anyone?

Expected.

“Oil Industry Blasts House Climate Bill”

Americans may not know what cap-and-trade is, but they want climate policy

77 percent of voters favor action to reduce global warming emissions.

(Danke: @mattyglesias)

Close to home…

"SR 20, North Cascades Highway - Washington Pass on Dec. 1, 2008" by Washington StateDept of Transportation

The Cascades are melting:

The new research used four different methods to examine decades-long records of water contained in Cascades snowpack in the central Puget Sound basin on April 1 of each year. Scientists used simple geometry to estimate temperature sensitivity of snowpack, made detailed analysis of seasonal snowpack and temperature data, used a hydrological model to examine the data, and analyzed daily temperature and precipitation measurements to estimate water content of snowpack on April 1.

“If you assume precipitation is the same every year and look at the effects of temperature alone, all the ways we examined the data converge at about a 20 percent decline in snowpack for each degree Celsius of temperature increase,” said Casola.

Is a carbon-tax a good tax for conservatives?

Matthew Yglesias thinks so:

It’s easy enough to understand why members of congress don’t want to go within a 100 miles of the words “carbon tax,” but I’m a bit surprised that you don’t see more interest in carbon taxes in jurisdictions that are already heavily dependent on consumption taxes for revenue. Nobody likes to say “tax” and regressive taxes—which a carbon tax would be—are in some ways especially dicey. But insofar as you’re already relying on a regressive value-added tax (VAT) to raise revenue, as most advanced democracies around the world are, it seems to me that swapping VAT revenue for carbon tax revenue should have green appeal without political toxicity. In principle, you could imagine the same thing at the state level for states that have high sales tax rates.

“Green” is a label not typically assocaited with American conservatives. Is this how they can change that?