Tuesday, 25 Jan 2005

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

A crisp, cold, blue-sky New England day, fresh snow on the ground, and everything right with the world.

Except that last night, as I was preparing to attend a three-day conference on climate change here in Middlebury, Vt., yet another disturbing report on global warming drifted across the net. This one comes from the International Climate Change Taskforce, co-chaired by Stephen Byers, a Tony Blair confidant from the U.K., and Olympia Snowe, the Republican senator from Maine. In one sense, it’s nothing new: yet another document from moderate world leaders calling for urgent action and imploring the U.S. to join with the rest of the developed world to get something done. File it with similar reports from the National Academy of Sciences, the Nobel laureates, all the rest. This one’s designed, apparently, to function as Blair’s talking points for the coming year, during which he will serve as head of both the G8 and the E.U., and has promised to make climate change a top priority.

In another sense, though, the report is actually quite startling. It posits a new number as the climate crisis point: 400 parts per million atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. That concentration, the report says, has a better-than-even chance of eventually producing temperature increases of 2 degrees centigrade — enough to trigger widespread drought, crop failure, and rising sea levels. That 400 ppm number is very low; previously, most crisis scenarios focused on 550 ppm, which would represent a doubling of pre-Industrial Revolution carbon concentrations. It’s as if the American Medical Association suddenly announced that you needed your cholesterol down below 100 or your heart was going to go. This is especially bad news given that the earth’s CO2 levels are already north of 375 ppm and increasing by two parts annually. Clearly we are heading straight past the 400 level. Recognizing that, the report’s authors call on us to limit the amount of time the planet spends above the 400 mark, and to get back below it well before century’s end. Which essentially means: change everything, right away.

None of which will be easy (an understatement underscored by another report that came in overnight, this one showing that China’s economy grew 9.5 percent last year, its fastest increase in eight years). But it does provide a stirring background for the “What Works?” conference that kicked off today at Middlebury College, a semi-closed session designed to figure out why the United States has lagged behind the rest of the planet when it comes to global warming, and how we might catch up.

It’s a conversation that clearly needs to happen. Since climate change emerged as an issue in the late 1980s, the U.S. environmental movement has floundered in its efforts to make progress. No legislation of any consequence has come close to passing the House or Senate; none of the three presidents in that period have really put their muscle behind any action; and the current administration has about as much interest in the issue as that of, say, Warren Harding. In short, pretty much a total rout, especially in contrast to Western Europe and Japan, where the progress, while modest and halting, has been real.

Conference co-organizers Jon Isham, a Middlebury economist, and Sissel Waage, a former Natural Step analyst, have assembled an interesting cast of characters, concentrating less on the big environmental groups and their funders than on trenchant critics and people with local success stories to tell.

Tomorrow morning, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus will host one of the first face-to-face discussions of their ubiquitously emailed paper “The Death of Environmentalism.” Billy Parish, head of the Climate Campaign, will present plans for a large-scale program of civil disobedience. Blue Vinyl producers Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold will show rushes from their in-progress film Melting Planet. And John Passacantando, who ran the most dynamic atmosphere advocacy group, Ozone Action, before taking over the reins at Greenpeace USA, will moderate a Thursday morning discussion about the climate crisis. Groups working with supermarkets to cut energy use, leaders of programs training citizens to give speeches on climate change, even Middlebury students who have handed out thousands of compact fluorescent bulbs to Vermont homeowners will try to identify the rhetoric, the metaphors, the leverage points that might finally spur us into action. “We want to reflect on and appreciate the power of networks,” says Isham. “Also the power of strategic thinking. And maybe most importantly, the power of a having a positive vision.”

In that case, it might be best not to pick up today’s edition of The New York Times and read the article datelined “Over the Abbott Ice Shelf, Antarctica.” The one in which scientists describe the relentless thinning of huge glaciers, the disintegration or retreat of “ice shelves the size of American states.” In some parts of the Antarctic, according to a British survey, “large growths of grass are appearing in places that until recently were hidden under a frozen cloak.”

In the end, it doesn’t matter what anecdote you choose, what precise parts-per-million figure you pick as the threshold of peril. Here’s what we know: The U.S. has wasted the 15 years since climate change emerged as a real problem. Its environmentalists have failed to make measurable progress on the greatest environmental challenge anyone’s ever faced. So we better come up with something new.

Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Whatcha Gonna Do?

Wednesday, 26 Jan 2005

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

The bad boys of American environmentalism made their case this morning, and they made it well. By the time Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus had finished presenting the data that led to their famous “Death of Environmentalism” paper, most of the large crowd gathered for the “What Works?” conference here in Vermont were convinced that they had seen where the future lay for the climate-change movement — or at the very least, where it didn’t.

Dressed in fashionable black and toting their laptops, the pair looked like what they are: one pollster, one PR guy. They didn’t fit the cultural profile (hiking boots, ratty sweater) of Vermont environmentalists, and they’d pissed off a good many in the crowd with their paper’s no-holds-barred attack on the big enviro groups. But when they plugged in their PowerPoint, they had the goods. In fact, the data they presented were even more striking than the argument they’d made in their paper.

The statistics came from a data set on North American values collected by a Canadian polling firm over the last decade — and what they showed was that, quite simply, this country is deeply conservative and getting more so. The battle of values has been won, at least for the moment, and not by us. For instance, what percentage of Americans do you suppose would agree with the following statement: “The father of the family must be a master in his own house”?

1992: 42 percent of Americans agreed
1996: 44 percent
2000: 49 percent
2004: 52 percent

Across 105 different values — everything from “concern for appearance” and “joy of consumption” to “acceptance of violence” and “xenophobia” — they found that over the past decade, an already generally conservative country has been making a beeline in the direction of status and security. A decade ago, 30 percent of Americans thought men were naturally superior; now the number is 40 percent. No matter what you ask, be it whether “to relieve tension a little violence is OK,” or “it’s important that people admire things I own,” the numbers show a nation almost inconceivable to your average card-carrying Sierra Clubber. A decade ago, 17 percent of Americans thought that pollution was necessary to preserve jobs; now the number is 29 percent. In 1992, 66 percent of Americans said they “discussed local problems with people in my community,” a number that has since dropped to 39 percent.

In other words, the sweet notion that we still live in a world where most people more or less agree with a worldview congenial to environmentalism — and particularly to the difficult changes required to deal with global warming — is simply wrong. Dorothy, we’re not in 1978 anymore. Or, as Nordhaus and Shellenberger put it, there’s been a “Fundamental Political Realignment.”

In the face of that alignment, they insist, it’s pretty pointless to keep doing what you’ve been doing. Instead, the answer is to look at the core values that progressives share, and then, more importantly, at what they label “bridge values,” areas of agreement that “both our people and the people we need to reach could potentially share.” They were less specific about what those might be, though they returned several times to their advocacy of the Apollo Project, the effort to address global warming not by talking about carbon but by talking about jobs and communities. Even so, they were unwilling to wax very optimistic. “I’m not convinced it’s a likely outcome that we’ll take back the government any time soon,” said Nordhaus. Realigning politics, realistically, might take 20 years.

It’s true that, as in their paper, the pair constructed a few straw men: The Sierra Club chapter in Boulder, Colo., can’t really be obsessed over the question of whether or not dogs should share hiking trails with people. (Can it?) But whenever they returned to the sheer weight of data on how Americans see the world, one could sense the audience, almost against its will, agreeing. “One of the things we’ve noticed is that a Darwinistic economy seems to beget Darwinistic values,” said Shellenberger. “There’s a drift toward sexism, ecological fatalism, patriarchy.” Well, yes — if we’re honest, that seems to describe the America we live in right now.

“We’re asking you to join us in the deconstruction of environmentalism, not out of a sense of nihilism,” said Nordhaus, “but so that we can come together to reconstruct an alternative vision.”

There’s something almost exhilarating in knowing how bad a situation really is. Spared the false hope that maybe things will get better on their own, at least you have permission to think expansively about what to do differently.

Where Do We Go, Where Do We Go Now?

Thursday, 27 Jan 2005

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

Here’s the different thing about this conference. Although participants spanned the generations, it was organized in large measure by 20 students here at Middlebury College. Some were already seasoned activists (or as seasoned as one can be at 21); more were new to the issue. But few had spent time in D.C., and none had been deeply imprinted with any one way of doing things. And so, when the gathering turned, as gatherings do, to What Do We Do Next, a fascinating array of projects and voices emerged.

For instance, one group had put together a project designed to flip Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.) in favor of the McCain-Lieberman climate legislation. The group knew where he went to church and who his priest was; they had the list of his campaign contributors, and were strategizing about which ones might be willing to put a little pressure on.

Another set was working with Ben & Jerry’s on marketing and packaging their newest flavor, “Fossil Fool,” projected to replace (you read it here first) “One Sweet Whirled” as a way to raise awareness about global warming.

A third group was busy fine-tuning its Flat Earth Award website so that it would be ready for the afternoon launch of a new annual prize. If you click through, you can vote for Michael Crichton, Rush Limbaugh, or S. Fred Singer as this year’s recipient of the prize for best twisting of the scientific consensus on climate change.

And a fourth group — just as well-scrubbed, well-organized, and polite — was busy laying the groundwork for a possible summertime siege of Ford Motor Co. headquarters in Detroit, a large-scale peaceful protest designed to highlight the fact that though it talks the talk, Ford doesn’t drive it; its vehicles, in fact, have the lowest average mileage of the Big Three U.S. automakers. (In keeping with the generational dictum that if it doesn’t have a website, it doesn’t exist, those interested in this trek to Motown can check out EnergyAction.net.)

The point seems to be — we’re at a loss. No one knows for sure what’s going to work next. The “Death of Environmentalism” survey data I wrote about yesterday makes it clear that “more of the same” is probably not a very wise strategy. And so there’s a casting-about, an attempt to probe what might break us out of the box canyon into which we’ve wandered. John Passacantando, the gregarious CEO of Greenpeace USA, summed it up in a rousing speech this morning: “We need to take in all the data we can, and all the strategizing and theorizing. And then you need to throw it all out, and just try stuff.” (Greenpeace, by the way, has decided to soften its tactics for the moment; this year’s biggest project will be a kayak exploration of the North Pole designed to show just how fast the melt there is proceeding.)

From a certain point of view, all that’s disheartening — like, we have no idea where to go. But oddly, the mood around this gathering seems almost giddily hopeful. If you have no idea where to go you just might stumble down the right road. Historical parallels abounded: Billy Parish, the quietly charismatic leader of the nationwide campus movement Energy Action, was quoting Martin Luther King Jr.: “the more I learn about all this, the more frustrated I get, and the more I want to lay my body on the line.” But it was also clear that the younger activists were not prisoners of past strategy. Many were quick to point out that their generation was not going to respond to a negative message.

For a long time, much environmentalism has appealed primarily to reason. But at least in the case of global warming, reason has proved insufficient. I can explain to you why an SUV is illogical, but you weren’t buying it for logical reasons in the first place; the world is more complicated than that. What everyone gathered for this conference has in common are a nightmare about a world too hot, and a dream about a world cooler in many ways (though perhaps not quite as cold as the 20-below temperatures that greeted early arrivals this morning). How to share those dreams in a way that they’ll get into other people’s heads and hearts — that’s the task ahead.