Category: environment and ecology

10:10NZ campaign launches

New Zealand now has its very own Ten-Ten campaign, part of a global effort to promote personal commitments to emissions reductions. Based on the hugely successful 10:10 campaign launched in the UK last year by New Zealander Lizzie Gillett (producer of The Age Of Stupid), the NZ campaign aims to get as many people as possible to commit to making a 10% reduction in their carbon emissions over one year, starting this year. Here’s Gillett on the scheme’s impact in the UK (from the press release):

In the UK, the 10:10 campaign aims to cut carbon emissions by 10% during 2010. It has amassed huge cross-societal support including Adidas, Microsoft, Tottenham Hotspur Football club, 55,000 individuals, 1,500 schools, and a third of local councils (representing 25 million people), all the cabinet and the Prime Minister.

I suspect the chances of getting John Key to sign up are slim, but if enough people demonstrate a willingness to make cuts it should show our politicians that this is not an issue that can be ignored or where action can be delayed. Cutting your personal emissions by 10% in a year is an easily achievable target for most people, as 10:10NZ spokesman Rhys Taylor explains:

It’s an easy figure to handle – for example 10% represents one of 10 weekday commuter journeys, either to or from work, switched from driving a car to walking or cycling. Walk or cycle both there and back one day in five to knock an easy 20% off fuel demand for that week’s commuting. If a bus traveller or car-sharer, your journey still requires fuel consumption, but significantly less per person than driving alone. Car sharing or using a bus to go both in and back on one day in five would achieve the passenger’s 10% drop in commuting fuel. That’s not hard to do, is it?

There’s more information on how to make cuts at the 10:10NZ site, including links to the interesting Project Litefoot. The campaign is currently focused on personal and household commitments, but there is also plenty of scope for businesses to join. And there’s the obligatory Facebook page.

Hot Topic is happy to endorse and support 10:10NZ: more news as the campaign develops.

Beatin’ the heat

It was a happy experience to open the Waikato Times last week and see across from the editorial page the profile of scientist Jim Salinger under the headline Salinger doesn’t feel critics’ heat.  The articlewas based on an interview with Salinger, who was visiting Hamilton to speak to Forest and Bird’s AGM about research on climate change since the 2007 IPCC report.

It opened with the recognition that in recent months Salinger has had to stave off repeated criticism of his work by the likes of Rodney Hide and the Climate Science Coalition.  Even his decades-old PhD thesis has come under fire.

Salinger explains that when he did his thesis he simply wanted to work out what was happening with New Zealand climate.

“In those days we weren’t considering the greenhouse effect, and I thought ‘this is an interesting topic, see if New Zealand’s climate has changed’.”

He discovered the climate was warming slowly, and he’s confident that if Niwa rechecks his work using modern techniques they’ll come up with the same conclusions.

About the attacks, he chuckles slightly and says:

“Science is about facts, not beliefs. I like to look at the facts and see what they say – if people want to attack me as a person, that has nothing to do with my science. It doesn’t worry me.

“…This whole group are trying to accuse me, and my overseas scientific colleagues, of fraud.

“Well, there is going to have to be a hell of a lot of people involved in this “fraud’…They’re trying to say the International Panel on Climate Change is a fraudulent activity, and in fact it’s a very thorough process.”

The theft of the UEA emails he sees as a deliberate attempt to discredit the scientists and the science. After outlining the basics of the evidence of warming, and along the way defending the peer-review system, he summarises that his concern is whether the planet will be fit for survival by humans as a species.

I reflected when reading the article that it is sad that the mainstream science Salinger represents should have to be presented to Waikato Times readers as a response to the ignorant and despicable attacks mounted on New Zealand climate scientists by the ACT party and the Climate Science Coalition.  The interviewing journalist Jeff Neems did a good job of ensuring that the science showed through clearly, but as a society we are apparently not yet ready to regard it as news enough in itself that leading scientists are greatly alarmed at what they are discovering about the effect of greenhouse gases on the climate. Had the Times not recently reported the attacks of Hide and company I imagine it is likely that Salinger would have slipped in and out of Hamilton virtually unnoticed except by those attending the Forest and Bird AGM.

I don’t mean to attack the Waikato Times particularly.  It has a better record in these matters than many New Zealand papers. But the press as a whole should have been doing much more than it has in focusing public attention on the seriousness of the issue. The science Jim Salinger represents shouldn’t have to depend on the campaigning of Greenpeace to get media attention. He and others who work in the climate science field should be reported regularly and seriously. His wondering whether the planet will remain fit for human survival is not idle. It’s a serious science-based concern and the public should know that many leading scientists have such a level of concern. Hide and his companions strike at the foundations of intellectual regard on which the functioning of society depends. Our newspapers should be strengthening those foundations.

Smokestack lightning

Icelightening.jpg

Not much to do with climate, I’m afraid, given that the Eyjafjallajökull eruption seems to have slowed down for the moment, but this spectacular picture from Marco Fulle at Stromboli Online shows that there’s still a lot going on up there. One of a series of night shots, it shows lightning flashing through the lava and ash erupting from the vents at the top of the volcano. There are other wonderful images to be found at Stromboli Online — Jeff Masters uses one in his latest roundup of ash movements. For the view from space, take a look at this picture from NASA’s Earth Observatory. Normal climate service will resume shortly…

[Howlin’ Wolf]

Eco-pragmatists need stiffer spines

Forty years ago Denis Hayes was US national coordinator for the first Earth Day.  This year he is international chair for the 22 April event. He has a notable record as an environmental activist and early proponent of solar power. But he’s chafing under the blandness that he detects threatening environmental movements in the US. In an articlerecently published in Yale Environment 360 he both supports Earth Day and warns of its limitations. In particular he’s concerned that American environmentalist groups are being inveigled into political compromises on climate change which impair any prospect of adequate legislation in the US.

He recalls the origins of Earth Day:

“Earth Day 1970, for which I served as national coordinator, was huge. Twenty million Americans took part. Millions of Americans who didn’t know what “the environment” was in 1969 discovered in 1970 that they were environmentalists.

“Moreover, Earth Day was bipartisan.”

 

For a time results followed:

“Over the next three years, Congress passed the most far-reaching cluster of legislation since the New Deal — the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and myriad other laws that have fundamentally changed the nation. Trillions of dollars have been spent differently than they would have but for this new regulatory framework.”

Understandably, he says, the environmental movement drew the lesson that it should try to grow as large as possible and be bipartisan.  But times have changed. Reagan assembled the most anti-environment cabinet in history. Bipartisanship isn’t working in today’s scene.

“…the Republican leadership is now so robustly anti-environmental that the League of Conservation Voters uses affirmative action in evaluating its scorecards. A Democrat with a 60 percent voting record is seen as awful, while a Republican with 60 percent is seen as exceptional.”

Striving for bipartisan support in such a context produces legislation that is at best inadequate and at worst designed to fail. Earth Day itself, which is a mainstream phenomenon,  must continue to be as embracing as possible, with a broad common denominator. But the environmental movement mustn’t rely on this approach to effectively address climate change.

“… to succeed against the wealthy, powerful forces arrayed against it on issues like climate disruption, ocean acidification, and a global epidemic of extinction, the environmental movement also needs a large block of people who will fight for a sustainable future valiantly and without compromise.”

It’s no good relying on Congress to do the right thing.

“Although Congress has some brilliant, courageous individual members, as an institution it is dumb and cowardly. The only way that Congress will act intelligently and boldly on this issue is if we give it no choice.”

The current Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill now making the rounds in the Senate gets weaker at every draft.

“Every draft does a poorer job of putting a reasonable price on carbon. Every draft is larded with more taxpayers dollars for socialized, centralized nuclear power and for ‘clean coal.’ Every draft carries more sweeteners for the utility industry, the automobile industry, the coal and oil industries, and the industrial farmers and foresters”

The eco-pragmatist view is that this is the price that must be paid to get any climate bill at all. Hayes laments that this pragmatic view has been broadly, if reluctantly, embraced by most of the large, mainstream national environmental groups working on climate as well as by the Obama Administration.

It’s time for sterner stuff. Instead of weakening the bill, we need to change the politics.

“Politicians who try to ignore climate disruption — and that’s a whole lot of them — need to start losing their jobs next November.”

There was a sharp edge to the first Earth Day in the US. Hayes notes that the organizers jumped into the subsequent Congressional elections, seeking to defeat a “Dirty Dozen” of incumbent Congressmen. The targets were selected because they had abysmal environmental records, but also because they were in tight races and were from districts with a major environmental issue that voters cared about. Seven Congressmen were taken out that election.  Hayes considers that was a useful shock for legislators and helped the 1970 Clean Air Act pass the Senate unanimously.

He wants to see environmental groups put aside support for further compromise and concentrate instead on creating an intense environmental voting bloc that will subordinate all other issues to climate. That block needs to construct a successful campaign to return some Congressional villains to private life—perhaps even a couple of dozen.

“We must make it crystal clear to politicians everywhere that we are serious. This issue to too vital and too urgent to do any less.”

Hayes claims, incidentally, that the Cantwell-Collins bill in the senate is acknowledged by most experts as the best climate legislation that has yet been proposed. It’s the only option under consideration that would make a significant dent in emissions in the near term. It has a cap but no trade. Carbon permits are auctioned and the proceeds returned to the public on a pro rata basis. It sounds like what James Hansen is so strongly advocating.

I admit to having difficulty following the labyrinthine processes of American politics, but Hayes seems to be grappling with an underlying issue which is not confined to the US. Is something better than nothing in legislation to tackle climate change?  Do we settle for less and hope it might grow into more with time?  Or do we say we haven’t got that time, that nothing less than adequate, and soon, will do?