Climate politics – Page 151

Misuse of political office: science under attack

A couple of months ago I posted on Michael Mann’s fight back against the denialist attacks he is constantly subjected to. Now there’s a new kind of attack. The Attorney General of Virginia, one Ken Cuccinelli, has made a Civil Investigative Demand to the University of Virginia for a long list of documents relating to the grant-funded research of Michael Mann while he was working at the University from 1999 to 2005. Among the materials requested by May 27 were email correspondence with a long list of other climate scientists, including several who, like Mann, were prominent figures in Climategate. The Attorney General’s demand is made on the grounds that he is investigating possible violations by Mann against the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act when he sought funding for a number of research projects.

Cuccinelli is a climate change denier who describes the science as “unreliable, unverifiable and doctored”. He is currently suing the Environment Protection Agency over its efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

His justification of his action against Mann to the Washington Post this week was: “In light of the Climategate e-mails, there does seem to at least be an argument to be made that a course was undertaken by some of the individuals involved, including potentially Michael Mann, where they were steering a course to reach a conclusion. Our act, frankly, just requires honesty.”

In addition to Mann’s email correspondence with other scientists, Cuccinelli asks for material which suggests he intends a scientific investigation of Mann’s work. It includes “any and all computer algorithms, programs, source code, or the like created or edited by … Mann” from 1999 to the present, and “any data, information or databases, structured or unstructured information, source code and formulas that may be stored in any format or media type…” Such investigation is obviously well beyond the expertise of a law enforcement office and one wonders who Cuccinelli has in mind to do it. Fred Singer perhaps? Singer has already welcomed Cuccinelli’s move:

“There is a good chance that Virginia’s Attorney-General Ken Cuccinelli will come up with the “smoking gun” — where other so-called investigations have only produced one whitewash after another.

“We know from the leaked e-mails of Climategate that Prof. Michael Mann was involved in the international conspiracy to ‘hide the decline’ [in global temperatures], using what chief conspirator Dr. Phil Jones refers to as ‘Mike [Mann]’s trick.’ Now at last we may find out just how this was done.”

It’s worth noting that not all deniers welcome what Cuccinelli has done. Steve McIntyre calls it “a repugnant piece of over-zealousness by the Virginia Attorney General, that I condemn.”

Mann went from Virginia to Penn State University in 2005. He says: “It seems clearly to me that it’s an attempt to intimidate and to silence me and to make an example of me for other scientists who might speak out on the science of climate change.”

Rachel Levinson, senior counsel with the American Association of University Professors, said Cuccinelli’s request had “echoes of McCarthyism.”

“It would be incredibly chilling to anyone else practicing in either the same area or in any politically sensitive area.”

The faculty of the University of Virginia has made a strong statement, which includes the following:

“Dr. Mann is an internationally respected and highly cited climate scientist. The funding he received for his research resulted from impartial, stringent peer review by respected independent scientists under the auspices of national scientific research organizations. His research findings, including many of those involved in this investigation, have been reported in leading scientific journals, which are themselves subject to additional exacting review by the scientific community prior to publication…

“We maintain that peer review by the scientific community is the appropriate means by which to identify error in the generation, presentation and interpretation of scientific data. The Attorney General’s use of his power to issue a CID under the provisions of Virginia’s FATA is an inappropriate way to engage with the process of scientific inquiry. His action and the potential threat of legal prosecution of scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer-review standards send a chilling message to scientists engaged in basic research involving Earth’s climate and indeed to scholars in any discipline. Such actions directly threaten academic freedom and, thus, our ability to generate the knowledge upon which informed public policy relies.”

In a subsequent television interview Cuccinelli, who has been in his elected office only three months, drew back from the implication that he was making a scientific enquiry:

Warren: “What gives your office the authority to interpret what is scientific data?”
Cuccinelli: “That’s a worthwhile question. We aren’t targeting scientific conclusions. That’s not the issue. It’s the expenditure of taxpayer dollars.”
Warren: “Do you believe that manmade gases are actually warming the climate?”
Cuccinelli: “I think the jury is still out.” He went on to say, “I don’t think the evidence at this moment as it’s been presented would lead one to man-caused conclusion in that respect.”
Warren: “If you don’t believe manmade gases are warming the earth, how can we trust what your office finds? In other words, politics could be at play here?”
Cuccinelli: “There are some people who will never believe anything we do. But, for people who know me, I’m capable of being extremely objective.”

That objective capability he claims is hardly demonstrated in the demand he has made of the University of Virginia. The University at least initially believes it is obliged to accede to the demand, but the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Association of University Professors have sent a joint letter to the Rector urging him to use every legal avenue to resist providing the information and offering their assistance if wanted.

It is too soon to sense how this will play out. Probably the action of Cuccinelli should come as no surprise given the fevered pitch and irrationality of American denialism. But attacks by politicians on established science and scientists are always unnerving. Even Rodney Hide’s foolish statements in the New Zealand parliament carried a touch of menace with them. American academics and scientists will need to be united and firm in their defence of scientific independence. There is plenty of evidence that they will be, some of it referred to above, and more seen in an open letter from prominent members of the National Academy of Sciences published in the Guardian today. It probably predates the Cuccinelli affair, but the principle clearly applies.

“We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular…

“Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence.

“…there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change.”

Prosperity without growth

I paused for a while wondering whether a review of a book on sustainable economics had a place in a website devoted to climate change. But only briefly. One can’t worry about climate change for long without considering the economies which have given rise to it and wondering how they will survive under the low-carbon regime which they must now adopt. Anyway carbon emissions figure frequently in the course of Tim Jackson’s book Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet. Published last year it was based on a report he wrote earlier in the year as Economics Commissioner of the Sustainable Development Commission, the UK Government’s independent watchdog. Increasingly climate change has imparted a new urgency to sustainability thinking. It sits as one of many issues, but it underlines the seriousness of the need to come to grips with the finitude of the planet.

The prosperity Jackson writes of is our ability to flourish as human beings. It transcends material concern. It has to do with such matters as physical and mental health, access to education, relationships and sense of community, meaningful employment and the ability to participate in the life of society. He argues that in the developed countries we can (and must) have such prosperity without the economic growth paradigm that currently rules our thinking.

Jackson recognises the difficulties of the situation we have landed ourselves with. On the one hand growth is unsustainable, at least in its current form. The burgeoning consumption of finite resources and the heavy costs being imposed on the environment are accompanied by profound disparities in social well-being. But on the other hand “de-growth’ is unstable, at least under present conditions. Declining consumer demand leads to rising unemployment, falling competitiveness and a spiral of recession. It adds up to a dilemma, but one which we must face and think through.

Some economists place hope in our being able to decouple economic growth from growth in physical inputs and environmental impacts. Capitalism’s propensity for efficiency figures strongly in these scenarios. Jackson doesn’t think either the historical evidence or the basic arithmetic of growth can support the decoupling notion. The deep emission and resource cuts needed can’t be achieved without confronting the structure of market economics.

He takes a closer look at this structure. The engine of growth is driven by the ability of the profit motive to stimulate newer, better or cheaper products and services through a continual process of innovation and ‘creative destruction’. This is matched by expanding consumer demand for these goods. A complex social logic drives this demand. Consumer goods have come to play a symbolic role in our lives. Somehow, beyond the simple material needs they meet, they can become vehicles for our dreams and aspirations, however much they fail in delivering. The economic structure thus combines with our nature to “lock us firmly into the iron cage of consumerism”.

What we need, claims Jackson, is a new ecological macro-economics. It will still include a strong requirement for economic stability, but it will add conditions that provide security for people’s livelihoods, ensure distributional equity, impose sustainable levels of resource throughput and protect natural capital. New variables need to be brought into play to complement and affect those already part of economic thinking. They will reflect the energy and resource dependency of the economy and the limits on carbon. They might also reflect the value of eco-system services or stocks of natural capital. Ecological investment will be important, and will mean revisiting the present concepts of profitability and productivity and harnessing them to longer term social goals. He urges the abandonment of the infatuation with increasing labour productivity in favour of high employment in low-carbon sectors.

We will need to be weaned from our dependence on consumerism, but he provides evidence that a less materialistic society will be a happier one and a more equal society a less anxious one. Greater attention to community and participation in the life of society will reduce the loneliness and unsocial behaviour which has undermined the well-being of the modern economy.

He argues that there is a clear case today for an increased role for government. We have already seen an acceptance of this in relation to the 2008 financial crisis. The principal role of government is to ensure that long-term public goods are not undermined by short-term private interests and to deliver social and environmental goods. This role has been diminished by the need in the growth economy to support the consumerism which keeps the economy afloat.

Jackson is leery of revolution, but he proposes steps through which to build change. They fall under three main categories. First, changing the limits. Here he writes of caps on resources and emission, considers the contraction and convergence model, discusses emissions trading schemes and ecological taxes and emphasises the need for support for ecological transition in developing countries.

The second category of steps for change is fixing the economic model. The ecological macro-economics discussed above will lower expectations for labour and capital productivity and account for the value of natural capital and ecosystem services. Ecological investment in jobs, assets and infrastructure will include retrofitting buildings, advancing renewable energy technologies, redesigning networks such as the electricity grid, building public transport infrastructure, maintaining and protecting ecosystems, developing public spaces. There will be increasing financial and fiscal prudence, including regulation of financial markets. A Tobin tax on international currency transfers may be considered. Banks will be required to hold higher asset reserves. National accounts will be revised to be more robust than the present rough and ready GDP.

The third category is changing the social climate. Working time may be reduced. Systemic inequality will be tackled. Better measurements of prosperity will be found. Social capital will be strengthened. The culture of consumerism will be carefully dismantled.

Utopia? No, he says firmly. A financial and ecological necessity.

In a final chapter he faces the question of whether this spells the end of capitalism. Certainly growth would be slowed – labour-intense activities mean slower productivity growth, and ecological investment means a lower and longer return on capital. There would also be a larger role for the public sector in taking some ownership stake in the longer-term less productive investments. But capitalist economies often have elements of public ownership. There is a wide spectrum of possibilities in a capitalist system. There’s no need to polarize the debate.

I thought the book was splendid. Jackson’s writing is lucid and well organised. He has a gift for the telling sentence. (It was not altogether surprising to discover that in addition to his academic life he is a professional playwright for BBC radio.) He is cautious and sensible, not pretending that the transition to low growth is a doddle. But he holds firmly to the conviction that it can be made and that the society which emerges will be better than the one we currently inhabit.

There’s nothing quite as sexy as fossil fuels

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Slightly off topic, but who can resist two of NZ’s sexiest women having a bit of fun with energy minister Gerry Brownlee, and his plans to mine national parks for more coal? Not me.

Leaked! – NZ talks at Heartland crankfest

BREAKING NEWS: A mole in the Heartland Institute has leaked details of presentations planned for the fourth “International Conference on Climate Change”, to be held in Chicago from May 16 – 18. Over the weekend a file containing a selection of emails between Heartland senior executives and their invited speakers was uploaded to a Russian server, and a link to the file posted in comments at Hot Topic (since removed, to protect the whistleblower). To give you a flavour of the explosive contents, here are extracts in which prominent New Zealand sceptics Bob Carter, Chris de Freitas and Bryan Leyland discuss the talks they plan to give.

Continue reading “Leaked! – NZ talks at Heartland crankfest”

Klein in Bolivia: global democracy is the way forward

Naomi Klein has been to Bolivia. She reports in the Guardian on the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earthheld this week.

The Copenhagen Accord speaks of keeping global warming to two degrees. In fact to date the emissions reductions pledged under the Accord put the world on the path to three degrees. But two degrees, Morales told the conference, “would mean the melting of the Andean and Himalayan glaciers.”

Klein points out that Bolivia is in the midst of a dramatic political transformation which has nationalised key industries and elevated the voices of indigenous peoples.

“But when it comes to Bolivia’s most pressing, existential crisis – the fact that its glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, threatening the water supply in two major cities – Bolivians are powerless to do anything to change their fate on their own.”

Only deep emission cuts in the industrialised world can avert the catastrophe facing countries like Bolivia and Tuvalu. That’s what the leaders of endangered nations argued for passionately at Copenhagen. “They were politely told the political will in the north just wasn’t there.”

They were also shut out of the closed door negotiations which led to the Accord. And when Bolivia and Ecuador refused to endorse the Accord the US government cut their climate aid by $3 million and $2.5 million respectively. “It’s not a freerider process,” was the explanation of US climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing. That strikes me as an extremely ironic statement given the disproportionate emissions of the US, a point which Klein makes in this way:

“Anyone wondering why activists from the global south reject the idea of ‘climate aid’ and are instead demanding repayment of ‘climate debts’ has their answer here.”

Klein goes so far as to say that the message in Pershing’s words was that if you are poor you don’t have the right to prioritise your own survival. This is the context for her characterisation of the conference as “a revolt against this experience of helplessness, an attempt to build a base of power behind the right to survive.”

There were four big ideas proposed for the conference by the Bolivian government:

“That nature should be granted rights that protect ecosystems from annihilation (a ‘universal declaration of Mother Earth rights’);

that those who violate those rights and other international environmental agreements should face legal consequences (a ‘climate justice tribunal’);

that poor countries should receive various forms of compensation for a crisis they are facing but had little role in creating (‘climate debt’);

and that there should be a mechanism for people around the world to express their views on these topics (‘world people’s referendum on climate change’).”

Seventeen civil society working groups worked for weeks online and for a week together to prepare recommendations. Klein describes the process as “fascinating but far from perfect”, and suggests that its most important contribution may be Bolivia’s enthusiastic commitment to participatory democracy.

She thinks this because of her concern that after the failure of Copenhagen the idea that democracy is at fault “went viral”. The UN process of votes to 192 countries is too cumbersome and solutions are better found in small groups. She sees James Lovelock’s recent statement as an example: “It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”

Klein won’t have a bar of this. It is the small groupings which have caused us to lose ground and weakened already inadequate existing agreements. She notes that Bolivia came to Copenhagen with a climate change policy drafted by social movements through a participatory process, resulting, in her view, in the most transformative and radical vision so far.

She sees the people’s conference as Bolivia trying to take what it has done at national level and globalise it, inviting the world to participate in drafting a joint climate agenda ahead of the next UN climate conference in Cancun. She quotes Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solón: “The only thing that can save mankind from a tragedy is the exercise of global democracy.”

Her conclusion:

“If he is right, the Bolivian process might save not just our warming planet, but our failing democracies as well. Not a bad deal at all.”

Whatever one makes of the various avenues being pursued (if that’s not too strong a word) in achieving emission reductions, there is a need for the voices of the most endangered nations to be heard. It seems likely that they will need to be raised to the level of loud and clear before a great deal of notice is taken of them. Bolivia recognises its vulnerability to glacier melt, and to various other threats which were identified in an Oxfam report last year discussed here on Hot Topic. It would be a failure of a government’s duty to its citizens to remain quiet. Their steps to mobilise global opinion should not be treated with indifference or contempt. And it is to be hoped that the US cutting off of funding will be reversed. It looked suspiciously like punishment, and undeserved at that.