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First they said global warming wasn't happening at all. When the evidence got too overwhelming, they said global warming was happening, but that human beings had nothing to do with it. But a growing body of evidence washed this position away too.
Now we've got the 3rd generation of deniers, as packaged in a new book, Cool It: A Skeptical Environmentalist Looks at Global Warming by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg.
I'm launching a new web site today that takes on Lomborg's arguments--Putting the Heat on Lomborg--and I'd love for you to come over, learn more about why Lomborg's book is such a threat to stopping climate change, and just put the website through its paces.
Lomborg admits that global warming is happening, and that humans have something to do with it, but that it will cost more than it's worth to stop climate change, and it might even be a good thing. Register and log in and leave a question, a comment, or a website you like that deals with climate change.
The lunacy that bothers me is not the stuff you find in Bedlam - people raging at the walls: that's what sane people do now; it's the new variety that comes from poverty of spirit: the popular, well-dressed, well-heeled and well-spoken lunacy that elects mad leaders to make mad wars upon the unfortunate and the dispossessed - the lunacy of the soul; of cold human hollowness, emotional flatness and numbness, moral emptiness; all surrounded with a gargantuan, manic and carefully disguised greed as a remedy for pain and the fear of death: the clever, well-adapted madness that the world rewards and to which the world aspires.
Michael Leunig in The Age, thanks to woz. (Leunig's day job is as an editorial cartoonist for The Age.)
Karen Bradley introduced this quote a couple of posts ago. I found this paragraph deeply
troubling, and want to give it another reading.
At first glance, I took it as a spectacularly good summary of the mess that western civilization, capitalism, and globalization have made of the planet. At the macro level, the signs are all bad: global warming is accelerating as we pour more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; we appear to be close to, if not past, global Peak Oil, after which energy prices will rise to heights we cannot imagine; and human activities are causing the 6th great extinction in the 4 billion year history of our planet.
“You can never do only one thing” —-attributed to ecologist Garret Hardin
“Hey students! Biofuels such as bioethanol and biodiesel can make a big difference in improving our environment, helping our economy, and reducing our dependence on foreign oil.” —-from "ABC’s of Biofuels," U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
Well guess what else, boys and girls.
In its ABC’s, the Department of Energy forgot about the XYZ’s. In our desperate rush to find substitutes for oil in order to keep the American Way of Life in Cars intact, we are rushing down a path that will wreak havoc on the lives of the world’s poor, and further accelerate the already catastrophically high rate of extinction for the rest of the species we share the planet with.
And just for a little ethanol?
[Photo credit of eggs frying on sidewalk: operapixels]
All the kids I know are asking if you can really do this...yes, you can, but it's disgusting. I give that answer alot these days.
[UPDATE: Harriet Miers blows off the subpoena. Conyers responds here. My response? Throw her ass in jail. Now. What's your response?]
Speaking of these days, you don't need me to tell you that it's summertime. The mercury is through the roof, and we're all seeking a little shelter. And while you seek that shelter, what are you talking about with your friends and neighbors? More important, what are you talking about with strangers? You know, the folks in line at the grocery store, or in my case, at the town pool.
I usually know what's on the minds of my close friends and neighbors, but I've found that what's on the minds of strangers usually provides the most insight as to what the country, as a whole, is talking about.
So here's what people are talking back about:
"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."
But polar bears can't talk. So it's up to us to talk about it for them. Because they're in trouble and they need our help.
One of the most visible side effects of global warming is that Arctic sea ice is melting away at ever-increasing rates.
Polar bears are completely dependent on Arctic sea ice to survive, but recent reports indicate that 80 percent of that ice could be gone in 20 years -- all of it by 2040.
Polar bears are already suffering the effects: birth rates are falling, fewer cubs are surviving, and more bears are drowning.
I have reverted to my first love, the environment, and am now working for a west-coast based nonprofit, the Post Carbon Institute, which focuses on finding solutions to the twinned problems of Peak Oil and global warming. Post Carbon hosts several major projects, including the Relocalization Network which ties together almost 150 local groups around the country who are working on the energy crisis at the community level. I have opened Post Carbon's Washington DC office, and report on what's happening here, from hearings on Capitol Hill to energy briefings at the Pentagon.
My very first publicly published writing was a letter to the editor about the fate of "Pokey the Whale," a small whale who made the unfortunate error of swimming up Virginia's James River and getting stuck on a sandbar. Government agencies delayed action, allowing some of Virginia's finest sportsmen to motor over with their high-powered rifles and shoot enough holes in Pokey that the whale bled to death.
So my interest in environmental issues goes way back, with stops along the way at the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance, my co-authored book Nukespeak: Nuclear Language, Myths, and Mindset (Sierra Club Books, 1982), my attraction to John Kerry as a Senate candidate because of his great work on acid rain as Lieutenant Governor, the Worldwatch Institute and Friends of the Earth.
Below is the beginning of my most recent article for Post Carbon. The charismatic mega fauna will get you every time.
Are polar bears going to save the planet from global warming?
Today was an energy trifecta in the U.S. Senate: you could see Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman testifying on the energy sections of the President’s new budget, find out about the Bush administration’s political manipulations of climate science, or talk about global warming and wildlife.
Charismatic mega fauna (CM) fan that I am, I headed for the wildlife hearings, held by the (who makes up these names?) Private Sector and Consumer Solutions to Global Warming and Wildlife Protection subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, chaired by Senator Joe Lieberman. Plus there was the distinct possibility that Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), best known for his “Global warming is a hoax” line, would be there.
(DCP co-founder Richard Bell's new job is Communications Director of the Post Carbon Institute. He has been quite busy attending press conferences and hearings on climate change these past few weeks because the 110th Congress seems to be attending to the issue. He wrote the following report for Global Public Media, Post Carbon's online broadcasting arm.)
Washington, DC -- At an all-day Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee conference on “renewable biofuels,” witnesses from three of America’s premier energy research institutions cast grave doubt on the feasibility of reaching President Bush’s State of the Union goal of manufacturing 35 billion gallons a year of alternative fuels by 2017. The witnesses agreed that DOE’s spending on alternative fuels was far, far below what was necessary to meet the president’s goal, much less the more critical goals of increasing the country’s energy security while decreasing carbon emissions.
Bush’s State of the Union announcement was a major boost for the alternative fuels industry. But if the president has thrown out a number that is not supported by the best researchers in the field, the resulting loss of credibility could undercut investor confidence in the industry.
Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), the most senior Republican on the committee and its previous chairman, brought this damaging testimony to light in the last session of an all-day, all-biofuels marathon with some 33 witnesses in six panels. During their respective testimonies, several witnesses on the final panel hinted that we could not manufacture enough alternative fuels to meet the president’s goal without an unprecedented shift in federal priorities.
Looking at the witnesses before him, Domenici plaintively asked why would Bush have used the 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels goal for 2017 “when you’re telling us you don’t know how to do it.”
Before the panelists could answer, Senator Bingaman (D-NM), chair of the committee, suggested that the committee ask the Department of Energy, which was presumably the source of the president’s goal. If there were DOE representatives in the room, they kept quiet.
Despite the best efforts of Al Gore and millions of concerned citizens, the editors at the Washington Post are still oblivious to the threat of global warming.
It's not enough for the paper to run stories about new reports on disappearing glaciers, melting permafrost, and the like. We need editors and reporters who understand how the threat of global warming permeates their work, who don't let an opportunity go by to help readers make the connections between the mundane and unremarkable aspects of our lives and their accelerating threat of global climate change.
Take today's frontpage story ("The Superhighway to Everywhere") on the eve of the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s signing of the law creating the federal Interstate Highway System. There is the parade of statistics (47,000 miles of highway, 55,000 bridges, etc.), some sociological observations about fast food restaurants and Wal-Mart, rush-hour congestion, and air pollution.
But nowhere in this paean to highways and cars does reporter T.R.Reid mention global warming. Cars and trucks contribute 25% of all U.S. CO2 emissions. And with about 5%of the world's population, the U.S. produces roughly 25% of the world's greenhouse gases.
No one involved in writing or editing T.R.Reid's story thought to even mention the role of the Interstate Highway System in accelerating the production of greenhouse gases. Here we have what is often hailed as "the largest engineering project in history," a project that undergirds a suburbanized system of land development that requires burning ever-larger quantities of fossil fuels, and there is not a word about global warming.
With this kind of silent stupidity from one of the country's leading newspapers about one of the greatest threats to world civilization, it's hard to avoid the feeling that we are unlikely to save our world from the violence of unchecked global warming.
How about the Post send its entire remaining (they just gave "early retirement" to a huge bunch of reporters) editorial staff to a remedial course in how to incorporate the impact of global warming into as many stories as they possibly can?
Or maybe the Post could simply order all of its employees to check out Tom Toles every day: his cartoon today features a dark cloud labeled ("Global Warming Plague Number One")with a bolt of lightening that has knocked over a tree on the White House, with a caption over the White House reading "...but the pharaoh's head remained hard."
(For more on cars and global warming, check out the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The world's oceans aren't the only thing that global warming is sending creeping up the shores of our lives. Scientists are reporting that as we pour more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we're going to be making the country's poison ivy plants very, very happy.
Not only will the carbon dioxide-drunk poison ivy plants grow faster and larger, they'll be pumping out a more poisonous form of that excellent chemical (urushiol--whoever named this stuff picked a suitably creepy name)that causes misery for 80% of human beings who get it on their skin.
Having spent a while in a hospital as a child after wandering through smoke coming from a field containing poison ivy (thank god I had my shorts on; the entire rest of my body broke out--and I was scarfing steroids faster than Barry Bonds), I'm not looking forward to this super-poison ivy.
The researchers used a Duke research forest dotted with pipes that allows them to pump out extra CO2. In the poison ivy experiment, they raised the level of CO2 to what it's expected to be in 2050 (about 200 million parts per million higher, for you wonks out there). And lo, and behold, super ivy!
So another part of the wonderful world of global warming snaps into place. Unintended consequence? I don't think so. Plants are our friends? Not in this case. No more walks in the woods for me--see you at the beach (as long as the damn jellyfish don't start getting off on more CO2 too!).
Editor's Note: Bumped to the top from this morning.
Patrick Kennedy is not the only one who needs a twelve-step program. Could our country be any more addicted than it is to oil?
At least, Patrick Kennedy has gotten past the first step of his program: 1. We admitted we were powerless over drugs; that our lives had become unmanageable.
Our country is still struggling to admit that it even has a problem, that there really might be some limit out there on how much oil we can consume. In Europe, people have long recognized that restraining consumption of gasoline was a good idea. Europeans pay high taxes on gasoline, which limits both consumption and environmental damage. But faced with rising prices in the U.S., prices well below those in Europe, Democrats AND Republicans have been promoting plans to decrease the price of gasoline and bring us back to the "good old days."
What is it about our cars that produces such an eroticized response? Take the Washington Post's car column today about a $90,000 car that will go zero-to-sixty in four seconds.
It {the car} ultimately will take from you more than it will give, but you become so addicted to what it offers that you can't resist. You are seduced, pulled in by the obnoxious roar of its engine...If you drive it with side windows raised, the entrapped cacophony of roaring engine, tympanic hardtop, and popping tailpipes will pummel your brains and pound your soul - va-va-vroom, boom, pop-pop!
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports today that Americans are heading out even beyond the exurbs. At the very time when the marketplace is doing what fundamentalist free marketeers say it should be doing, people are ignoring the market signal, adopting lifestyles that will make many of them even more dependent on oil.
If our country were a person, our friends would surely stage an intervention. Right now we are heading toward a very nasty crash with the geopolitical realities of oil production and consumption. U.S presidents since Richard Nixon have given lip service to preventing the coming collision. But the American people have blithely ignored these warnings, and no president has yet dared to take meaningful action.
Addicts are lucky to hit bottom before killing someone. But hitting bottom is usually a nasty wrenching experience. In dealing with our oil addiction, we still have time to act and avoid at least the worst effects of hitting our energy consumption bottom.
We could start by reclassifying SUVs and light trucks to require them to meet the same fuel efficiency standards as cars and we should immediately begin to raise those fuel efficiency standards.
At zoning boards and land use planning agencies, we should end the regulatory regime that allows or even encourages auto-centric development.
In our cities, we should be making aggressive improvements in the quality of public transit, and making it as safe as possible for people to use bicycles instead of cars.
This is not rocket science, and the list of additional improvements that we could make is a very long one. But in order to make the commitment to wean ourselves from our addiction to oil, we have to start by taking the first step: recognizing that our lives have become unmanageable.
(Dick Bell will be posting his thoughts on the environment and the current crises associated with it, under the category of The Hapless Toad. That title is taken from a case heard by now-Chief Justice John Roberts: In the case of the arroyo toad, for example, the developer argued that the species had no connection to any economic or interstate activity and had no commercial value, so its protection was unrelated to interstate commerce and thus unconstitutional.)
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