Category: Book reviews

The Carbon Challenge

The Carbon Challenge: New Zealand's Emissions Trading Scheme

Empty rhetoric.  That’s the verdict on the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS ) from Geoff Bertram of the Institute of Policy Studies and Simon Terry, Executive Director of the Sustainability Council, in their searching book The Carbon Challenge: New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme.

They present a picture of governmental processes captured by powerful groups pursuing their own interests at the expense of the rest of the community. Large industry and agriculture have won for themselves exemptions and delays of such an order as to make significant emissions reduction impossible in the first commitment period (CP1) of the Kyoto Protocol. At the same time the costs have been loaded disproportionately on to households and small industry. Those responsible for 30% of emissions will carry 90% of the cost. Agriculture with 49% of emissions will pay 3% of the costs.

The authors don’t accept the claim of the agricultural sector that there are few options open to them to reduce emissions. In fact they claim agriculture offers by far the biggest set of low-cost abatement opportunities. There are a number of options that are not only commercially available but profitable to undertake. They instance means for reducing nitrous oxide emissions – nitrification inhibitors, stand-off pads, new grasses, supplementary maize feed, improved soil drainage.  Selective breeding offers the possibility in due course of some reduction of methane as does the supplementary feeding of various plant matter. The processing of casual effluent from milking sheds through bio-digesters cuts both carbon dioxide and methane. Improved carbon storage in soils through pasture management appears possible as does sequestration through biochar burial. Meanwhile agriculture’s exemption from the ETS bolsters higher land prices. Nice for landowners, but subsidised by the community at large.

In the longer run the ETS exemption is against farmers’ own best interests. It is shielding them from likely winds of change in world markets. The authors instance large companies in other countries seeking low-emissions milk, as Cadbury is doing in the UK,  and point to the likelihood that New Zealand will surrender first-mover advantage to such countries if we continue with our present dogged denial.

There is self-defeat for large industry, also, in the favoured position they have gained for themselves. The ETS opens the possibility of production subsidies for high-emission industries by focusing on the intensity rather than the overall quantity of emissions. It is likely, for example, that Solid Energy would be entitled to subsidies for the manufacture of urea from South Island lignite, even though it would be the country’s biggest single industrial emitter of greenhouse gases after the Huntly power station. By this provision New Zealand could provide a welcoming environment for industries relocating from other Annex I countries, via ‘carbon leakage’ from those economies. Such production subsidies will invite tariff retaliation from other countries and could shut New Zealand exports out of key markets.

New Zealand will emerge from CP1 with a level of emissions considerably higher than the 1990 benchmark to which we are expected to have returned. The role of forestry as a carbon sink to offset the country’s emissions is the subject of close investigation in the book, which warns of the reckoning which must be faced when the trees are cut down. Potentially enormous costs could be faced by the next generation when the final accounting is made. Indeed, the costs may be so high as to raise questions about the country’s ability to meet them. This prospect may see other nations disallowing the plantation forest offsetting practice in successor arrangements after CP1. Permanent forests are a different matter, and the authors see these as a real key to balancing the country’s future carbon budgets. They lament the uncertainties and potential retrospective taxation the forestry sector faces by comparison with the government response to demands from large industrial operations.

The book’s discussion of forestry, as of many other aspects of the ETS, is complex and demanding for the general reader. But the ETS itself is highly complex and often difficult to follow. I can well understand the authors’ claim that it’s a reasonable guess that no more than a handful of MPs understood the detail of what they were voting on in 2008 and 2009. I often found myself struggling to get a proper hold on the ramifications of the various processes the book explores, even though the authors have been exemplary in the patience and thoroughness of their explanations.

It is the exhaustive care they bring to their task which makes the reader respectful of the summary statements which emerge from time to time in the course of their discussion, such as this one:

“The ETS has not been designed to promote economically efficient abatement.  It has been designed firstly to protect and promote the position of vested interests that are unwilling to shoulder asset write-downs required to recognise a price on carbon, and secondly to transfer the costs of this to future generations.”

However there are countervailing forces at work against the formidable clout wielded by agricultural and other major emitter lobbies. The authors nominate three domestic factors which could upset the current political equilibrium. One is the possibility that the lack of trust in the forestry regulatory regime may deter new planting in general and permanent afforestation in particular; this would increase pressure for reform of the ETS.  The second is that sections of the population and the economy will become more concerned about climate change and the lack of any effective action at home to reduce emissions. The third is that the recognition of the size of the carbon debt we are passing to future generations by using forest credits to cover excess emissions may become a moral issue.

They also point to international factors which will put our ETS under pressure. One is the pressure we will come under if international emissions targets move towards being set more on a per capita basis. It would be very risky for us to go forward with gross emissions far above any we could hope to defend in a global commons debate.  Another is the possibility mentioned above of changes to the rules relating to forestry in a CP2 period. A third is the risk of border taxes and other adjustments we could well face from other governments and from private-sector firms if our climate change policy is shown to be incapable of matching the climate change objectives it espouses.

In the ETS we have shied away from the present costs involved in serious action to reduce emissions. But in doing so we have laid up for ourselves the far greater costs which will be the result of doing nothing now. That is the basic warning of the book. New Zealand is part of the developed world and will not be able to escape its fair share of responsibilities as we appear set on trying to do.

Climate Conflict

Climate Conflict: How Global Warming Threatens Security and What to Do About it (Adelphi Series)

How long can these people go on talking about the future as if climate change isn’t going to be part of it, let alone a determining factor?“  That is a question I often enough exasperatedly mutter to myself when listening to politicians or a variety of policy experts discussing the shape of the future with never a mention of the impacts of climate change.

Behind the scenes it may not be as bad as it looks. Gwynne Dyer wrote his book Climate Wars partly because he discovered that climate-change scenarios were playing a large and increasing role in military planning processes.  Chatham House associate fellow Cleo Paskal discussed the need for forward planning for the geopolitical impacts of climate change in her recent book Global Warring. Now the International Institute for Strategic Studies has produced a book by research fellow Jeffrey Mazo, Climate Conflict: How global warming threatens security and what to do about it. I notice incidentally that in his acknowledgements he thanks Cleo Paskal for discussions on climate and security.

He also thanks climatologist Michael Mann for comments on his first chapter. It included an up-to-date summary of the science, depending on the IPCC AR4 reports but also acknowledging that, if anything, their projections underestimated the amount, rate and impact of anthropogenic climate change. Although the book is largely directed to the likely impacts of climate change in the medium term, Mazo has no doubt that, without early and severe reductions in emissions, climate change will be disastrous for the global community in the second half of this century. Such a recognition strikes me as a necessary basis for serious engagement with policy questions.

However, although he hopes effective mitigation policies will be undertaken quickly, it is on the unavoidable effects in the next two to four decades that Mazo’s discussion centres.  In particular he focuses on state failure and internal conflict.

A brief historical survey looks at how climate has been implicated in the collapse of many previous cultures. It’s a complex matter isolating the relative effects of climate change from other stresses undergone by societies in danger of collapse, but he detects it as a common contributing factor in many cases. He includes interesting reflections on the way in which adaptation can be part of the cultural toolkit of societies which value mobility and flexibility. On the other hand some cultural values can work to make societies reluctant to abandon unsustainable lifestyles and prevail against rationality. He also notes that increased complexity in societies means increased fragility when systems finally fail, as in Easter Island and the Mayans, among others. In our own time the wealthier industrial nations are much more resilient to climate shocks than less developed countries, but he posits that if they do reach the breaking point the collapse will be further and faster.

Darfur provides the first modern climate-change conflict. Mazo examines this proposition carefully, paying attention to the variety of analyses that have been offered. He does not think it can be said that the conflict was caused by climate change, if ‘cause’ is meant as both a necessary and sufficient condition. His approach is rather to ask whether climate change has acted as an exacerbating factor or threat multiplier. Following through the various threads contributing to the conflict, many of them environmental, but also economic and governmental, he concludes that if one doesn’t take  a simplistic, reductionist view of causality it becomes apparent that anthropogenic climate change is a critical factor underlying the violence in Darfur.

From the Darfur model the book moves to a wider range of countries where climate change has the potential to affect stability and contribute to state failure. Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Sahel region in particular, is where the greatest number of already fragile states are also among the most vulnerable to climate change. Many other less fragile African countries are highly vulnerable but better placed for adaptation measures. The prospect is for increased volatility as a result of climate change for the most fragile states, and increased risk for more stable ones. Mazo also nominates and discusses some countries outside Africa which are particularly vulnerable to climate change and the deleterious effects it might have on the stability of the state, among them North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He notes the efforts Bangladesh has already made to reduce its vulnerability through a policy of deliberate protection of coastal mangrove forests, bucking the global trend of deforestation. Selected for closer attention are two less fragile states which have emerged from instability in recent years but are likely to be challenged again by climate change effects.  Colombia faces a high probability of the disappearance of its glaciers by 2035. Projected temperature increases and changes in precipitation could disrupt water and power supplies to large segments of the population, reversing the country’s progress and making a return to violence more likely. Indonesia’s food security is at risk, with agricultural production under threat from likely increased flooding and drought. If the country remains relatively stable it should, with support, be able to adapt to climate change over the medium term. But other stresses within the nation may be heightened by the effects of climate change and lead to a reversal of Indonesia’s progress.

Climate change presents policymakers in the developed world with two different questions. One is how to respond  to acute crises with new or increased military or humanitarian interventions. The other is how to prevent chronic problems caused or exacerbated by climate change through adaptation funds and other forms of aid or support.

The strategic implications are difficult to assess. Climate change is a threat multiplier, but not necessarily more so than the other causes or contributors to instability. However Mazo is clear that it is a new variable which must be taken into account in strategic assessments. And it is a very significant variable – strongly directional, accelerating and  irreversible on the time scales that current planning deals with. Among the points he discusses is the likely part to be played by militaries, not in fighting but in responding to humanitarian crises. He observes that militaries are often the only institutions with the capacity to deploy rapidly in such responses and sees them facing increased demands as such crises intensify and multiply with the increase in frequency and severity of extreme weather events, aggravated by sea level rise. He warns that cutbacks in this role will not only increase humanitarian problems but also result in a loss of prestige and soft power and even a negative reaction to a perceived uncaring West.

The book issues no clarion calls. But there’s no mistaking the underlying message of its careful and seemingly rather abstract low-key discussion. In effect it says to policymakers “You must take climate change seriously and integrate it fully into your understanding of what is happening in the world and into your planning to address global problems.”  About time too, one might add.

[Buy via Fishpond (NZ), Amazon.com (US), Book Depository (UK) and help cover Hot Topic’s costs.]

Climate Capitalism

Climate Capitalism: Global Warming and the Transformation of the Global Economy

Climate change science is clear and undeniable in its general thrust.  Climate change politics by contrast are murky and uncertain.  Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson have spent nearly two decades researching and writing about the politics, and their new book Climate Capitalism: Global Warming and the Transformation of the Global Economy reflects all the uncertainties and ambiguities.

They well understand the suspicions and anxieties felt in relation to the capitalist economy by many who take seriously the threat of climate change. The economy’s growth has been fed by increasing CO2 emissions and many of its actors seem heedless of the need to change that dependence. The early business response to climate change was automatic denial. More than that, positive attempts were made to discredit the scientific base on which the case for action was made and to give the impression of widespread public opposition to action. Some companies are still stuck in those responses and in some sectors of the economy they seem likely to remain vociferously opposed to the economic transformation required.

However the authors see no likelihood of the abandonment of capitalism or its dependence on growth. For them the question has to be how capitalism can be configured to grow while gradually replacing coal, gas and oil. It’s a very difficult task but not a hopeless one. They point to those within the world of business and finance who have come to realise that the science will not be gainsaid and that the costs of action would not be disastrous.  In a variety of ways those firms have begun to discern economic opportunities in a low-carbon economy. For sunrise industries, the nuclear industry and biotechnology companies the advantages are clear. For others reputation management and corporate social responsibility are to be considered. Overall there is a tendency to see failure to anticipate likely possibilities as a business risk — risk to reputation, risks of legal liabilities, risks of losing out on new market opportunities. It remains a mixed picture, but there is a policy momentum likely to keep the issue relatively high on the executive agenda.

Whether we like it or not, neoliberal capitalism has already shaped the character of our response to climate change. That is why emissions trading has become the preferred policy approach, ahead of environmental taxation measures. The authors comment that emissions trading became almost unstoppable once the dominant financial actors realised its potential as a new market, with its derivatives, options, swaps, insurance, and so on, and thus as a profitable enterprise.

The power of investors is to some extent being felt in driving an orientation to face climate change issues.  One example is the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), effectively a consortium of investors who write annually to corporations listed on stock exchanges asking them to report on matters relating to CO2 emissions and their perception of risks from climate change. The uptake has been impressive and by 2008 the CDP was backed by $57 trillion worth of assets from over 3000 financial institutions. Investment growth in renewable energy has been considerable in recent years. The book recognises that, given the neoliberal context we live in, mobilising the money of large institutional investors like insurance companies and investment funds will be crucial to the transformation to a low-carbon economy.

The authors lead the reader patiently through the apparently bewildering variety of mechanisms by which the demands for a flexible carbon market are addressed. Of particular interest is their examination of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism and its emission credits whereby purchasers in the North can enable projects in the South. It has proved far more popular than expected, though in practice the book acknowledges that it has not yet delivered the benefits that many hoped for and expected, and critics continue to see it as a fraudulent mechanism that lets rich countries off the hook.

As the explanations proceed it becomes very clear that market governance is the key to whether a market-based approach to climate change will succeed in reducing emissions. The book tackles this squarely. A market requires more than a minimum of creating property rights and enforcing contracts. It needs rules by which trading can occur, elaborate accounting systems to measure emissions and make companies report on them, and complex methodologies to estimate whether a project has reduced emissions. The authors distinguish three basic sorts of governance. First, by quantity. Here rules are set which establish overall limits for carbon emissions, allocate them among different players, and enforce those limits. Second, by price. In emissions trading schemes so long as the targets produce scarcity a price is created for carbon emissions permits which exerts a governing effect on behaviour. Price can also be affected directly, through carbon taxes. Some governments have instituted such taxes and the authors consider they should remain a possibility if necessary. The third type of governance is by disclosure, where business and other actors are required to report on their emissions profile.

How good is all this governance at present?  Not very, is the impression given. Targets set are often too weak. The flexibility allowed in meeting commitments means that carbon offsets are not sufficiently rigorous. The voluntary market is particularly prone to such problems. Can we learn and improve?  The authors think the EU has made considerable improvements to its emissions trading scheme as time has progressed, tightening its allocations and data collection methods. The voluntary carbon market has also considerably strengthened its certification schemes.

In the very uncertain future for climate capitalism the authors have a preference for what they call climate Keynesianism, where strong governance directs the markets more closely towards the goal of decarbonisation and integrates them globally, including a green Marshall Plan-type global scheme. Their filling out of this vision is central to the positive view they have tried to achieve of the potential of a capitalist economy to successfully meet the climate challenge.

The book is sympathetic to those whose interest in climate change is driven not by the potential to make money but by the gravity the issue poses.  But, say the authors, we have to understand how capitalism works if we’re going to have any chance of success in dealing with the threat in a humane way. It’s not easy, and it’s urgent. However there have been significant transformations of capitalist economies in the past. They instance the Bretton Woods system after the second world war which in a short space of time created a new global deal that produced an unprecedented period of smooth, rapid economic growth. On the technology side their analogy is the development of the railways in the mid-nineteenth century, a messy affair involving a number of entrepreneurial engineers acting competitively, and one which had far-reaching effects on daily life.  They urge novel and probably uneasy alliances – environmentalists and venture capitalists for example – as we assemble the necessary coalitions to rewrite the rules of the global economy.

In the course of developing its major themes the book is valuably informative on many of the details of carbon markets and trading. The reader who wants a better picture of complicated systems within reasonably brief compass will be rewarded.

[Buy at Fishpond (NZ), Amazon.com, Book Depository (UK)]

Agrofuels

Agrofuels: Big Profits, Ruined Lives and Ecological Destruction (Transnational Institute)

François Houtart, born in 1925, is a Belgian sociologist. He’s also been a catholic priest for sixty years. His orientation can be seen in the NGO he founded in 1976, CETRI, which aims to promote dialogue with third world social movements and to encourage resistance and action. He’s one of the most active members of the World Social Forum. The concerns these organisations represent are reflected in his book first published in French last year, now translated into English: Agrofuels: Big Profits, Ruined Lives and Ecological Destruction.

Houtart is far from unaware of the climate crisis, which he describes in fully adequate terms. He is also aware that the question of energy is not only central to the climate crisis but also faces the exhaustion of its nonrenewable sources within the century. But he argues clearly and strongly that agrofuels (biofuels) as at present produced are no solution to either the climate crisis or the energy crisis and are taking a terrible toll on the lives of those dispossessed by their advance in countries of the South.

Before examining the realities of rapid agrofuel development Houtart places it in the context of the neoliberal discourse on climate change.  Neoliberals began by denying or playing down climate change. Scepticism and political manoeuvring marked this stage, with attempts to delegitimize the scientific approach. However a second phase began to develop as the extent of the climate crisis became evident. Market-oriented solutions can be found. Optimism pervades this approach. The appropriate technological solutions can be employed and capital accumulation can continue. But in relation to agrofuels Houtart says hold on: new externalities have emerged and not been accounted for in the reckoning of profit from agrofuels.

His attention is largely on the so-called first generation agrofuels — ethanol from alcohol-producing plants and bio-diesel from plants yielding oil. He acknowledges the potential advantages of second generation agrofuels in that they don’t use food crops, require fewer fossil inputs, and aim at using the whole plant.

His survey of Brazil’s production of ethanol from sugar cane considers the ecological and social effects of its production and the type of economic model by which it is developed. Although sugar cane does not directly encroach on forest land, which doesn’t suit its growth, it displaces pastureland and soya cultivation, pushing them towards forested regions. Another displacement, that of population, is a consequence of the massive monoculture which requires land concentration. Big companies and foreign investment are required for the scale of the operation, which is clearly orientated towards exportation. The social consequences include a considerable elimination of labour, particularly that of peasants. For those who take employment in the sugar cane plantations the work is so hard and the pay so low as to be akin to a new form of slavery.

Palm oil plantations in Asia, mainly Malaysia and Indonesia, displace vast forests of trees containing carbon.  The driest areas are used first, but when plantations move to the marshy land of forests growing on peat bog the soil must be dried after the forests are cut, in the process releasing more carbon than that contained in the trees. Local populations suffer illegal misappropriations, unjustified debt, and harsh employment conditions.  In Latin America Colombia has a massive lead in the palm oil sector. The author includes at this point in his book a wrenching personal narrative of his own visit to Colombia, recounting brutal displacements of local peasants and massacres by the paramilitary. “It is difficult not to feel rage when you see such things.” He briefly participates in a protest operation to destroy palm trees, “the work of death” as one of the peasants describes them.

The author has kinder words for jatropha, though not when farmed as a large-scale monoculture. In many of its present forms of production it is aimed at satisfying local needs and has the merit of respecting biodiversity.

Ecological and social externalities are being ignored in the development of agrofuel monocultures. The model under which large-scale agrofuel production is presently pursued focuses on economic efficiency which means concentration of land ownership, heavy use of fertilisers and pesticides, exploitation of cheap labour, large companies capable of transcending national frontiers, and quick return of profit. The results include forced peasant migration (with 60 million estimated to be at risk of expulsion from their land to make way for agrofuel crops), the destruction of biodiversity and carbon sinks, water pollution, soil contamination, and other disastrous consequences which arise because the productive operations have excluded them as costs. “But one day, we are all going to suffer from the effects, including financiers.”

It’s not as if agrofuels produced in this way are a solution to the climate problem.  Nor can they be more than a marginal alleviation of the need for new forms of energy. They use a development model which owes its legitimacy to its own success.  Houtart sees this as the logic of capitalism which continues to consider as externalities everything that does not enter directly into the calculation of exchange value.

He proposes five conditions for accepting the production of agrofuels: respecting biodiversity; avoiding encroachment on forests, especially primary forests; respecting soils and underground water; promoting peasant agriculture; combating the monopoly of the multinationals. If these conditions were met, he considers the production of agrofuels would be automatically towards the needs of the local populations, which is a rejection of the capital logic of exchange value in favour of use value.

His final chapter takes a brief look at the various alternative ways of solving the climate and energy crises and proposes four principles for an alternative development model to that offered by the engagement of big business in agrofuel production: sustainable use of natural resources; priority given to use value rather than exchange value; a generalized democracy; multiculturalism and interculturalism. A society which respects those principles can readily engage with energy economy and new sources of energy that respect nature and social relations.

Houtart is obviously no friend to global capitalism in at least some of its modes.  But his case against the agrofuel developments, laid out with painstaking detail, is hardly ideological. The ecological consequences in the various locations are carefully described.  The human consequences in the places where the crops are grown are for the most part dispassionately explained, save for the one brief first-hand Colombian account he allows himself. One doesn’t need to have a particular view of neoliberal capitalism to see that these consequences are bad. The extensive agrofuel industry Houtart focuses on looks like a blind alley so far as climate change mitigation is concerned, looks positively inhumane in the exploitation of labour and the dispossession of peasants, and fails badly in its ecological effects.  Capital may be an important ingredient in the fight against climate change, but not along this path.

[Buy from Fishpond (NZ), Amazon.com, Book Depository (UK)]

Straight Up

“I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to face unpleasant facts.” So writes Joseph Romm of blogging, in his new book Straight Up, a themed selection from the thousands of posts on his widely respected blog ClimateProgress.org. It’s as direct, lively and unequivocal as its title suggests. Romm, an admirer of George Orwell, knows how to express himself with admirable clarity and to satisfy what he describes as “a great hunger out there for the bluntest possible talk”.

The “status quo media” receive a drubbing. Romm is critical of their giving the same credence to a handful of US scientists, most receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry, as they give to hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists. Senior political reporters are writing more and more pieces as the issue becomes political; most know little about global warming and haven’t bothered to educate themselves. They stick with the “horse-race perspective”, measuring only who is up and who is down. In one post he criticises even Andy Revkin of the New York Times for suggesting that catastrophe is a marginal possibility and that campaigners for carbon dioxide curbs are suppressing the uncertainty in their picture. Revkin, says Romm, should know that catastrophe is not at the edge of the debate. The Washington Post he accuses of publishing unmitigated tabloid nonsense on climate change.

On the science Romm considers that the IPCC 2007 summary report underestimated likely climate impacts by not giving sufficient weight to positive feedbacks that accelerate warming and by assuming there would be aggressive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The book includes a stunning post written in March 2009, where he reports on more recent scientific literature. Under five headings he relentlessly lists the evidence that points to catastrophic impacts this century under business-as-usual conditions — temperature rise of 5-7 degrees, sea level rise of 5 feet or more, dust-bowlification in the Southwest US, high loss of species on land and sea, and likely further unexpected impacts difficult to foresee. So we must stabilise at 450 ppm or below, or risk humanity’s self-destruction. The cost of action is maybe 0.12 percent of GDP per year or a little higher if we aim for 350 ppm. This is the reality that the scientific community and environmentalists and progressives need to start articulating cogently.

The solution is clean energy, a strong focus of Romm’s blogging. For a number of years in the mid-1990s he worked in the Department of Energy on energy efficiency and renewable energy. He considers that the US has all the clean energy technology it needs to start reducing emissions aggressively and cost effectively now. Deployment is the key. Electricity efficiency is high on his list. He points to McKinsey’s estimate that one third of the US greenhouse gas reductions by 2030 could come from electricity efficiency and be achieved at negative marginal costs. California is a model: if all America adopted their energy efficiency policies the country would never have to build another polluting power plant. Concentrated solar power is the technology on which Romm places most hope, because it generates primary energy in the form of heat which can be stored 20 to 100 times more cheaply than electricity –and with far greater efficiency. If all the renewable technologies that are commercial or nearly commercial today are deployed they will be enough to see the US through to 2050. He emphasises the steadily declining cost curve, due to economies of scale and the manufacturing learning curve.

As peak oil approaches it’s crucial that we avoid the strategy preferred by most in the oil industry of ramping up unconventional oil. Oil from tar sands and shale will make global warming worse. Coal to diesel will be catastrophic. The way forward for vehicle transport is better fuel economy standards and a move to plug-in hybrids which he discusses in some detail.

Romm has two key questions for the US. Will they voluntarily give up fossil fuels before they are forced to do so after it is too late to stop the catastrophe? When they do give them up will they be a global leader in the new technologies, or will they have been overtaken by other countries, especially China?

Romm was an advocate of the “flawed” Waxman-Markey climate bill which finally made it through the House of Representatives in June 2009. How can his climate politics realism be reconciled with his climate science realism? He replies that the bill was the only game in town and its passing a staggering achievement. It didn’t do enough, but it began a process and established a framework that can be strengthened over time as the science warrants. His political realism is also on view in his optimistic take on the result of Copenhagen. High level negotiations by the senior leaders of the big emitters seems to him a more likely way forward than the consensus process of the UN.

In right-wing US circles politics and climate disinformation have become entangled. Romm sees the conservative think tanks, media pundits and politicians as driving the disinformation campaign. He observes that while they can stop the country from taking the necessary action to avert catastrophe, they can’t actually stop the climate from changing. And some of the congressional conservatives are pushing policies that will lead to unimaginable planetary horror. Why? A post on a Krauthammer article in the Washington Post finds the heart of US conservatives’ hatred of climate science in the fact that it requires action by government, which is the same as socialism (except when it comes to government action on behalf of the nuclear and fossil fuel industries).

Misinformation has had a field day in the US. In part this is due to the organised campaign and the repeated broadcast of its messages by conservative pundits and politicians like George Will and Rush Limbaugh and Sen. James Inhofe. The “balanced” presentation favoured by the media hasn’t helped. But there are messaging failures from progressives in general and scientists in particular. Romm strongly opposes the notion that the impacts of global warming should be downplayed in communication to the public. Doing that would amount to unilateral disarmament in the battle to have the public understand what will happen if we continue on the path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions. People need to know the truth.  However he considers that some of the simple rules of rhetoric need to be better used in getting the message across. He identifies three of them as simple language, frequent repetition, and skilful use of figures of speech, especially metaphor and irony. The posts discussing better techniques of communicating the science are well worth attention and clearly underly his own practice.

Romm’s industry as a blogger is phenomenal, as anyone who follows Climate Progress will know. The selection of posts that he has chosen for this book testify that quantity doesn’t rule out quality. They have translated well to the printed page. Many of them repay close reader attention and together they serve to highlight the major themes which guide his work. The urgency displayed in his 2007 book Hell and High Water is undiminished.

[Available from Fishpond (NZ), Amazon.com, Book Depository (UK)]