Tag: USA

McKibben’s long and winding road

“We will keep fighting” vowed Bill McKibben at the end of his book Eaarth. Today in an article on Yale Environment 360 he gives a promising account of what that might involve. He writes from a road trip to Washington, D.C., towing a solar hot water heating panel from the roof of the Carter White House. Jimmy Carter put it there in 1979, declaring it would still be heating water in 2000. It wasn’t, because Ronald Reagan promptly took the panels down, an action symbolic, McKibben comments, “of our decision to turn away from the idea of limits.”

The panels were salvaged by Unity College in Maine and put up on the cafeteria, where they continued to produce hot water for the next three decades. McKibben and his associates are headed for the White House with one of the Maine panels, and with a promise from the U.S. company Sungevity that it will supply all the brand-new panels the president could ever want – as long as he puts them up on his roof where everyone can see them.

Continue reading “McKibben’s long and winding road”

Obama’s failed climate strategy

Obama must take a different tack, says economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, writing in the Guardian. The President has been pursuing a failed strategy of negotiating with senators and key industries to try to forge an agreement, making no headway in the back rooms of the White House and Congress. What he should have done, and still should do, is to present a coherent plan to the American people.

“He should propose a sound strategy over the next 20 years for reducing America’s dependence on fossil fuels, converting to electric vehicles, and expanding non-carbon energy sources such as solar and wind power. He could then present an estimated price tag for phasing in these changes over time, and demonstrate that the costs would be modest compared to the enormous benefits.”

The candidate of change has not presented real plans of action for change. Sachs charges that the administration is in the paralysing grip of special-interest groups. He’s not sure whether this is an intended outcome to secure large campaign donations or just the result of poor decision-making, or maybe a bit of both.

Sachs has several things to say leading up to his urging a presidential plan. He opens with a blunt statement. “All signs suggest that the planet is still hurtling headlong toward climatic disaster.” Yet we still fail to act.

He identifies three major challenges which make action difficult.  First, energy and agriculture (including deforestation to create new farmland) are the two principal sources of emissions, and they are two economic sectors which stand at the centre of the global economy and involve the whole world’s population. It’s no small matter to change those systems.

The second challenge is the complexity of the science, involving many thousands of scientists in all parts of the world. Uncertainties attend the precise magnitude, timing, and dangers of climate change. The general public has difficulty grappling with this complexity and uncertainty, especially as changes occur over a timetable of decades and centuries rather than months and years, and are intermixed with natural variations.

The third problem arises from a combination of the economic implications and the uncertainties of the science. It is the “brutal, destructive campaign” against climate science by powerful vested interests and ideologues, aimed at creating an atmosphere of ignorance and confusion. Major oil companies and other corporates have financed disreputable PR campaigns, exaggerating the uncertainties and absurdly charging that climate scientists are engaged in some kind of conspiracy to frighten the public.

Sachs attacks the Wall Street Journal’s aggressive editorial campaign against climate science, which has been running for decades:

“The individuals involved in this campaign are not only scientifically uninformed, but show absolutely no interest in becoming better informed. They have turned down repeated offers by climate scientists to meet and conduct serious discussions about the issues.”

There is a fourth over-arching problem — the unwillingness or inability of US politicians to formulate a sensible climate-change policy, despite America’s central role in global emissions. When Obama was elected he clearly wanted to move forward on this issue, but will not be able to do so on the path so far chosen.

Sachs’ comment seemed to me to say all the important things with clarity and precision. And he’s in no doubt about what is at stake. We are courting disaster.

“Nature doesn’t care about our political machinations. And nature is telling us that our current economic model is dangerous and self-defeating. Unless we find some real global leadership in the next few years, we will learn that lesson in the hardest ways possible.”

Sachs is no intellectual lightweight. His books The End of Poverty and Common Wealth have been widely read.  He has twice been named as one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2004 and 2005. The clear perception he displays of the central issues of climate change for the US must surely represent a substantial body of educated American opinion. Alas, not yet substantial enough. For the present the babble of denial and delay prevails.

The Climate War

The climate change rhetoric when Obama came to power was exciting. It sounded as if he would lead from the front and the US would soon have a federal cap-and-trade system. “Delay is not longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”  Certainly we have seen an end to denial from the White House. But we are still waiting for an end to delay, and increasingly it looks as if we’ll be waiting for a long time. Why?

Eric Pooley’s book The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth sheds a good deal of light on why it is that America, in spite of all the scientific evidence that demonstrates the threatening reality of climate change, is still unable, and often unwilling, to mobilise itself to address the danger.
The author is an accomplished journalist who has spent hundreds of hours over the past three years interviewing some of the players in America’s painfully slow progress towards climate change legislation.  The result is an illuminating story of battles in an ongoing war which is far from conclusion. It’s told painstakingly but with a narrative verve that carries the reader along irresistibly through its mass of detailed accounts. It’s compelling reading, from which I’ll mention just a few examples.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is the climate change group to which Pooley devotes most of his attention. A large organisation which has been at work for over 40 years, the EDF has long argued for a cap and trade system to tackle CO2 emissions. Its president, Fred Krupp, is focused on partnership with business to bring about political action on climate change and was influential in the formation of the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) in 2007, initially a group of ten companies and four environmental groups. Among them was Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy. In typically detailed fashion Pooley recreates the drama of meetings at which were hammered out the conditions on which Rogers felt he could join the Call for Action USCAP planned to issue. It hinged on whether allowance was made for initial free distribution of allowances to utilities like Duke, a sticking point for Rogers.

USCAP may have been looked at askance by many Green groups, but Roger’s involvement didn’t go down well with his colleagues at the Edison Electric Institute either. He was chairman at the time and several CEOs called for him to step down. At the Heartland Institute denier’s convention in 2008 Steven Milloy bitterly expressed his dismay that CEOs would endorse a mandatory cap. “What do you do when the people who represent business and free enterprise have switched sides on you?”

As the Waxman-Hartley bill was developing, the question of emission allowances being free or auctioned remained vexed. Krupp was willing to give way to the companies, maintaining that it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was how many allowances were distributed in a given year and how quickly the number was ratcheted down. The declining cap would see to it that coal use declined.

After his close coverage of the tortuous development of the bill, Pooley concludes:

“Of course Waxman-Markey was full of flaws, compromises, and reluctant nods to political reality.  But the bill got right a lot more than it got wrong.  By giving carbon allowances to electric distribution companies and requiring them to pass the value on to customers, it used the cap and trade mechanism to address to genuine cost imbalances between regions of the US – making the system fairer and helping the very heartland people who most wanted to see the whole thing wither and die.”

Pooley recognises that the intransigence of the Republicans meant that the bill reflected negotiations only between the left and right wings of the Democratic party, not between the left and right wings of America. “Like a wounded animal, the GOP’s only reflex was to lash out. Anything Obama was for, they would be against.”  It’s a sad commentary on a party which has too often allowed itself to be informed on global warming by the organised denial movement which Pooley also takes into his purview.

Al Gore features frequently in the book. His Alliance for Climate Protection organization aimed to spend $100 million a year for three years on advertising campaigns. In July 2008 his Repower America speech challenged the nation to commit to clean energy within ten years. After the elections he sought to orchestrate a large, loud chorus of voices calling on the president-elect and the new Congress to go big and go quickly on the energy front. Some wanted an energy bill first and to leave cap-and-trade for later. Gore disagreed. “If we’re going to have a fight on climate, let’s have a big fight.”

James Hansen enters the picture from time to time.  He met with Rogers over a meal. Pooley records each man’s feeling as they left the restaurant. Rogers felt positive: I’m not a confrontational guy, and neither is he. Hansen felt disappointed: This man has a reputation for being green, but he doesn’t really know what it means. His priority is making money.

Pooley records at best mixed messages from the White House. On a good day Larry Summers told USCAP leaders that the stimulus bill needed to be complemented with a cap-and-trade mechanism. “It’s like two blades of a scissors…We need both of them.”  But when it came to the Waxman-Markey bill, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser David Axelrod wanted to stick to the clean energy message and leave climate policy to Waxman. Pooley tells of the committed greens in the White House being defeated time and again by those in the political and economic teams who consider voters don’t care about climate action enough for the president to fight for it. The president who we expected to lead on the issue remains strangely constrained.

Obama went to Copenhagen having failed to move a climate bill. Pooley credits him with an honest, even heroic, attempt there to break the deadlock by bringing the major developing nations to the climate table. His speech offered welcome straight talk on the science, though little on the necessary action to address it. But the possibility of a triumph at Copenhagen had already been ruled out by his decision at home not to mount an education campaign on climate science and clean energy jobs to counter the sceptics, and the failure to put a top-level aide in charge of the international climate issue.

Pooley ends with questions:

“Alexis de Tocqueville long ago said that in the US, events ‘can move from the impossible to the inevitable without ever stopping at the probable.’  Was that still true?  How bad did things need to get before the moment came?  Would the prospect of a clean energy economy, and the jobs it would bring, mobilize enough people to make a difference?  Or would some sort of monstrous, galvanic weather event – epic heat and drought, Katrina on steroids – be needed to shake America fully awake?”

They seem to me open questions.  After following through the labyrinthine processes the author describes by which anything happens, if it happens, in the American political system and recognising the blinkered self-interest and sometimes sheer malevolence that seems to motivate many of the players, I found it hard to credit that America is on the verge of significant progress.  But I took what comfort I could from Pooley’s final brief paragraph where he imagines that the campaigners refused to be paralysed by the questions posed, “splashed some cold water on their faces, ran their fingers through their hair, threw back their shoulders and marched toward the sound of the guns”.

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Conference in Bolivia: who pays the price of change?

“We are very worried because we have no water. Half the people of this community have already left. Those who remain are struggling with the lack of water.”

 

Those are the words of a villager in a small Bolivian village called Khapi which is suffering from the effects of retreating glaciers in the Andes.  A BBC news report explains how it is for the villagers. Over the past 10 or 15 years, changing weather patterns have led to irregular water flows – the streams become torrents or dwindle to just trickles. “Our crops are dry now, our animals are dying; we want to cry.”

There are only 40 families in the village, but they’re ready to take their case to international forums. One of their leaders is Alivio Aruquipa (pictured):

“For the past two decades, we, the people from the Andean regions have been suffering because of the greenhouse emissions from the developed countries. If they don’t stop our glaciers will disappear soon. We want those countries to compensate us for all the damage they have done to nature…

“We don’t know how to calculate the compensation because we are not professionals, we are simply farmers. But we would like assistance, and then to receive some money and, with that money, to build dykes to store the water, improve the water canals.”

Hot Topic carried a post last November on the necessity of adaptation in Bolivia, following an Oxfam report.  The BBC news item is another example of the increasing body of evidence which bears out predictions of likely impacts of climate change. It will be discounted by some as anecdotal but there comes a point where the sheer volume of converging stories means they deserve credence.

The call for compensation is a just one, and rightly part of the price we should pay to assist poorer people already suffering the effects of human-caused climate change. In some respects it is in lieu of the price we ought to have put on carbon some years back. It’s a call which the Bolivian government is pushing. They would like to see an international environmental court where compensation claims can be made.

Bolivia is right now hosting its own international conference on climate change, the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. It’s attended by a mixture of NGOs and government representatives, and in some respects it’s an attempt to recover the ground Bolivia considered was lost at Copenhagen when the Accord was put together by a small group of larger countries. Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s UN ambassador, who has been prominent in the organising of the conference says:

“The only way to get climate negotiations back on track, not just for Bolivia or other countries, but for all of life, biodiversity, our Mother Earth, is to put civil society back into the process. The only thing that can save mankind from a [climate] tragedy is the exercise of global democracy.”

Robert Eshelman describes the conference in the Huffington Post:

“…participants [include] Bill McKibben, NASA scientist Jim Hansen, Martin Khor, G77 + China negotiator Lumumba Di Aping, and Vandana Shiva. Throughout the conference, seventeen working groups will convene to discuss issues ranging from deforestation and climate migrants to the rights of indigenous peoples and developing technologies for poor and low-lying nations to adapt to the impacts of climate change.”

He sees divergence from the kind of path the US is wanting to follow:

“While the U.S. will use the Major Economies Forum and the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas to spotlight how small group and bilateral discussions among leading economies, rather than the 192-nation U.N. process, is the best way forward on climate negotiations, participants at the Bolivian conference argue that the conversation about, and the process for, developing strategies to address climate change needs to be expanded, not narrowed, bringing more voices into the debate around climate change.”

Hopefully this needn’t indicate stalemate, but both paths can be pursued. If they’re not there is real danger of the poorest nations suffering the injustice of neglect.

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?