When last we left our intrepid heroes, the great Northwest had woken up to find itself cast in the wrong movie, sort of like Owen Wilson playing Richard Nixon (see Part 1). If we’re disoriented, it’s no wonder – what, with all the crap flying around trying to convince us that turning Cascadia into a conveyor belt for coal is the best idea since Boeing. So let’s cut some of it.

Coal export from the Northwest would increase coal consumption and carbon emissions, not just displace other coal. The coal trains won’t “come anyway” and continue on to terminals in B.C. if the Cherry Point project isn’t built. Examining the climate impacts of coal export will not threaten airplane manufacturing or wheat exports, for Pete’s sake. (In part 4 of this post, we’ll further deconstruct the most popular rationalizations for coal export.)

But as analytically weak as these arguments are, the coal industry wins just by having them. They serve the essential purpose of diverting our attention from the first, most fundamental reason why we should reject coal export: It’s wrong.

Even if you could demonstrate that it would have zero effect on net coal consumption (and again, you can’t), coal export is materially participating in and profiting from an enterprise that sows death and destruction around the world. Many lives were lost, and millions disrupted, by Superstorm Sandy. Most of the counties in America were declared disaster areas last year due to drought. In January, parents in Australia sheltered their children from “tornadoes of fire” by putting them in the ocean. This is what climate disruption looks like. And coal causes it.

If we keep pouring capital investment into fossil fuel infrastructure for just a few more years, we will be locked into emission trajectories that make catastrophic disruption inevitable. Arguments to the effect of “if we don’t do it, someone else will” just don’t hold moral water when “it” leads to unimaginably grave human consequences. It’s not right, no matter what anyone else does.

So far, the discussion of coal export has mostly occurred outside this moral context. But closing our eyes to the consequences doesn’t make them go away. On the contrary, ethical evasion is the essential host condition in which injustices metastasize into historic moral crimes.

“We are not responsible.”

The whole edifice constructed for the express purpose of blocking climate action is built on this single, unconscionable stance. With each new definitive finding of culpability, fossil fuel interests devise a new dodge. The bottom line is always the same: It ain’t me, babe.

First, it wasn’t happening. Then it was happening but it wasn’t human-caused. (Damn those sun spots.) Then it was human-caused but there’s nothing we can do because China and India’s emissions will swamp us anyway. And now we might as well shovel their coal because otherwise they’ll just burn someone else’s. If we don’t ship it, the trains will just “pass us by” and offload elsewhere. If we consider climate impacts now, where do we draw the line? Resistance is futile. Responsibility is no one’s.

So coal export proponents are part of a rich tradition of moral circumvention, offering a familiar litany of shirks and jives to deflect responsibility for climate consequences. Without relieving them of their accountability for this mess, you can understand how coal export enablers would default to a position of climate adolescence. Their failure to accept responsibility for climate disruption is, after all, the prevailing condition of American society. Denial is an ecosystem. When the President of the United States says in the same speech that we owe it to our kids to tackle climate disruption and we need an “all of the above” energy strategy, it’s hard to know which end is up.

But now, here, we have to deal with it. Morally and mathematically, the gig is up. If we aim to make it better, there’s just no more room for big capital investments that make it irretrievably worse. Going forward with coal export amounts to looking our kids in the eye and saying “we are resigned to a future of unrelenting climate disasters for you, so it’s okay to make a few bucks now by facilitating that future.” (Here is how they might respond.) That may not be anyone’s intent. But it would be the result.

How can we draw this moral line against coal export (or anywhere), when we exacerbate climate disruption every time we drive a car or eat an imported banana? By invoking the Keystone Principle: As we begin the long, slow journey to climate solutions, we must immediately cease making large, long-term capital investments in new fossil fuel infrastructure that “lock in” dangerous emission levels.

It will take decades to decarbonize our transportation and energy systems. We can do it over time, patiently and incrementally, building stronger economies and healthier communities as we go. But we cannot make big new capital investments now that irrevocably commit us to catastrophic climate failure. Driving to the store or eating a banana is not such an investment. Coal export is.

The big President’s Day rally on the National Mall is more than a Keystone pipeline protest. It’s a statement of principle for climate action.

After a year of unprecedented destruction due to weather extremes, the climate fight is no longer just about impacts in the future. It’s about physical and moral consequences, now. And Keystone isn’t simply a pipeline in the sand for the swelling national climate movement. It’s a moral referendum on our willingness to do the simplest thing we must do to avert catastrophic climate disruption: Stop making it worse.

Specifically and categorically, we must cease making large, long-term capital investments in new fossil fuel infrastructure that “locks in” dangerous emission levels for many decades. Keystone is a both a conspicuous example of that kind of investment and a powerful symbol for the whole damned category.

It’s true that stopping a single pipeline — even one as huge and odious as Keystone — will not literally “solve” climate disruption. No single action will do that, any more than refusing to sit on the back of a single bus literally ended segregation. The question — for Keystone protestors as it was for Rosa Parks — is whether the action captures and communicates a principle powerful enough to inspire and sustain an irresistible movement for sweeping social change.

Stopping Keystone nails the core principle for climate responsibility, by preventing investments that make climate disruption irrevocably worse. Again, it’s not just that burning tar-sands oil produces a lot of emissions; it’s that long-term capital investments like Keystone (and coal plants, and coal export facilities) “lock in” those dangerous emissions for decades and make catastrophic climate disruption inevitable.

Now, if you are a fossil fuel company, “locking in dangerous emissions” means locking in profits. It is your business strategy, precisely. For the rest of us, it’s a one-way, non-refundable ticket to centuries of hell and high water. We must not buy that ticket.

This is the Keystone Principle. It emerges from multiple lines of scientific and economic research, most notably the International Energy Agency’s 2012 World Energy Outlook, which starkly warned that the chance to avert catastrophic climate disruption would be “lost forever” without an immediate shift away from fossil fuel infrastructure investment.

But it doesn’t take a supercomputer to confirm that the Keystone Principle is basic common sense. It’s step one for getting out of a hole: Stop digging. A comprehensive strategy for global climate solutions called “Design to Win” put the point succinctly: “First, don’t lose.” The choice is clear and binary: Do it and we’re toast. So don’t.

In contrast, the many things we must do to advance positive climate solutions — clean energy, more efficient cars and buildings, better transportation choices — are full of grey areas. Implementing them is inherently slow, incremental, and subject to tradeoffs based on economic and other factors. Should new fuel economy standards make cars 80 percent more efficient or 90 percent? Over what period of time? The answers are judgment calls, not moral absolutes. But when it comes to stopping Keystone and other fossil fuel infrastructure investments, the choice is stark, clear.

“Climate solutions” are millions of Yeses and many shades of green, over a long period of time. But they also require a few bright red Nos, right now. These Nos are, you might say, the “keystone” for responding to the climate crisis, as in “something on which associated things [like, say, all efforts to avert catastrophic climate disruption] depend.” No amount of clean energy investment will stave off disaster unless we stop feeding the fossil fuel beast with capital now.

Most importantly, as we enter the era of climate consequences, the Keystone Principle has moral power. Many lives were lost, and millions disrupted, by superstorm Sandy. Most of the counties in America were declared disaster areas last year due to drought. Last month, parents in Australia sheltered their children from “tornadoes of fire” by putting them in the ocean. This is what climate disruption looks like.

Now that the faces of the victims are regular features of the daily news, what will we say to them? And what will we say to our children — the prospective victims of still-preventable disasters? Defying the Keystone Principle is like saying “Sorry, you’re out of luck. We will use our laws, our time, and our money to make it irretrievably worse.”

President Obama has begun to carefully edge away from the moral bankruptcy of this position. As he said in his inaugural address: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”

But no one will believe him, or us, until we stop making it worse. That’s what Keystone is about. It’s not just a pipeline. It’s a principle.

In a memorable TV ad saluting the hard work of Olympic athletes, swimmer Ryan Lochte reveals how he made it to the Games in London:  “I swam here.”

That would be one way to avoid the modest cost of carbon pollution permits required for aviation under the EU’s Emission Trading System.

Senator John Thune has a less strenuous approach:  ban U.S. airlines from participating in the system. His European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act (S. 1956), passed by the Senate Commerce Committee yesterday, would authorize the Secretary of Transportation to do just that.

Now, it’s one thing to stand on the sidelines of the global campaign for climate solutions with your arms folded, as our federal government has mostly done for the last 15 years.  It’s another thing to throw tomatoes at the players.  That’s pretty much what S. 1956 is about.

The EU wisely decided to include aviation – one of the fastest growing carbon emission sources – in its ETS.  The system limits dangerous carbon pollution and requires large emitters to have permits for the amount they produce.  The number of permits declines over time – as carbon emissions must.  Air travel is conspicuous carbon consumption; exempting it would be a bit like allowing Ferraris to ignore speed limits.

The cost of these permits would amount to about $6 for a round-trip flight from Washington D.C. to Copenhagen.  The ticket for that same flight on United this last April would have included a “fuel surcharge” of $496, according to testimony submitted by Annie Petsonk of the Environmental Defense Fund in answer to questions posed by Senator Maria Cantwell.    (Annie’s testimony is here.)

Since the emission limits incentivize cost-effective efficiency improvements in aviation, they reduce the risk of these large fuel surcharges.  But increasing Americans’ exposure to the growing costs of oil dependence is apparently not too high a price to pay for the Senate to flip the bird at Europe’s climate policy.  This is particularly ironic/obnoxious, since the premier U.S. commercial airplane manufacturer, Boeing, is committed to leading the industry in efficient aviation technology and lower carbon fuels.

Senators Kerry and Boxer salvaged a little something out of this exercise in international nose-thumbing, adding an amendment that would require U.S. negotiators to achieve a global approach to reducing airline emissions through the International Civil Aviation Organization.

As Senator Kerry put it, S. 1956 amounts to “authorizing through legislation the ability for U.S. companies to break the law of another country.”  Not content to make America an international scofflaw and climate heckler, the bill would direct the Secretary of Transportation to hold U.S. airlines harmless for any penalties associated with their non-compliance.  The airlines, of course, wouldn’t have it any other way.  That could put U.S. taxpayers on the hook for about $22 billion by 2020, according to EDF.   (You’d think that for that kind of money, someone would have offered an amendment requiring the airlines to offer some decent food and a little legroom.)

So rather than pay $6 for emission permits on a round-trip flight to Europe – under a program that would promote efficiency and reduce fuel costs – U.S. taxpayers would just pay airline companies’ fines for failure to comply.

Hey, at least that would spread the costs more equally, right?  This way, even if you swim to London, or just stay home and watch the Olympics on TV, you’ll still have to pay.

First, for the record:  Jimmy Carter is a great man, a courageous humanitarian, and a vastly underappreciated former President.  It’s not his fault.  But one of the founding myths of the modern energy efficiency “movement”, if we can call it that, is that his “moral equivalent of war” speech and his fireside chats on energy were a huge cultural setback for conservation.

By framing energy conservation as a moral proposition (goes the myth) he made it somehow trivial, sentimental, insubstantial.  In order to elevate energy efficiency to its proper place as a big manly energy alternative, we must think of it not as a lecture, not as a lifestyle admonition, but as an energy resource — just like a power plant.   We must never, ever call it “conservation,” because that smacks of moralism; we must call it “efficiency” in order to underscore its practical, effective, hard-nosed utility as an energy option.

I wish to explode this myth.

The problem wasn’t that Jimmy Carter framed conservation as a moral issue.  It IS a moral issue (AND a our largest, cheapest, most important energy resource). The problem, in a nutshell, was The Sweater.

To observe that The Sweater was profoundly unattractive is to dwell on the obvious.  But the issue goes well beyond the butt-ugliness.  The problem was that The Sweater, and its wearer, came to symbolize national impotence, and the weakness rubbed off on energy conservation.  Look at that damned cardigan; a bald eagle wouldn’t be caught dead in that thing!  It’s fuzzy and pathetic and yella!

Once again, Jimmy Carter is a great man and it wasn’t his fault, but his Presidency occupies a place of doubt and deprecation in an American myth that celebrates exceptionalism and virility.  That he was followed by the strapping, ruddy, anti-ambivalent  Ronald Reagan was no accident.  “Morning in America” was the light at the end of the dark tunnel of national tentativeness for which the Carter era is (inaccurately) remembered.  The cardigan became a pathetic symbol of that, and the “malaise” oozed out all over energy conservation.

Which is why, inspired by a great upwelling of national pride, or something, I googled up these images.  I think you will agree that they illustrate a keen grasp of marketing on my part.

(Important preliminary research finding:  Penelope Cruz apparently does not wear sweaters.)

It may take another blog post to get to it, but there is actually a point to all this.  And it’s not just that we need to make energy efficiency sexier.

It’s that the clean energy transition must be enormous and robust.  And it must be accelerated in an era when large public institutions are increasingly prevented from doing much of anything, let alone enormous, robust things.

We can’t give up on large institutions – we must redemocratize them.  But we also need to drive the clean energy revolution up from the bottom.  Powered by distributed technology, connected by interactive media, and affirmed by new cultural norms and rewards (including but not limited to sex; but hey, might as well start with sex), the clean energy revolution is gaining inexorable momentum, even though it remains formally undeclared.  And we have to lean into that cultural transition, not run away from it.

Moral imperatives and psychosocial rewards CAN go together….just not in a yellow cardigan.

We’ll shoot to get more GRIP on that down the road.

(Really, it’s about both, but we’ll get to that later.  See footnote if you can’t wait.)

Why don’t Americans accept the climate challenge as a moral imperative?  University of Oregon researchers Ezra Markowitz and Azim Shariff tackle the question in Nature Climate Change.  Markowitz blogs their conclusions here.

Their analysis draws insights from broader research on “the moral judgement system – the set of cognitive, emotional, social, and motivational mechanisms responsible for producing our perceptions of right and wrong.”  They describe why our moral discriminators have a hard time grokking climate disruption, and offer potential strategies for activating moral intuition.  It’s interesting stuff, worth a look.  Their blog post is a good summary; I’ll just poke at couple of themes that seem to need poking.

The Guilt Trip -  Climate disruption is like my (dear) Jewish mother; it makes people (and especially Americans, say the authors), feel guilty.  From the Nature Climate Change paper:  “To allay negative recriminations, individuals often engage in biased cognitive processes to minimize perceptions of their own complicity.”  From my adolescence:  “I can’t hear you Mom!”

This makes sense (we are guilty!), but it downplays the importance of efficacy in the development of moral responsibility.  Bob Doppelt makes the case that motivating big changes in human behavior requires dissonance, efficacy, and benefits.  Lack of efficacy often seems like the bottleneck when it comes to moral engagement on climate.  The strategies within any actor’s scope of effectiveness are not scaled to the problem.  No use accepting guilt, let alone responsibility, if you can’t do anything about it.  “May I be granted serenity…,” etc.  Moral intuition finds no traction where there is no efficacy.  (This is why we do what we do at Climate Solutions.)

The Co-benefit Conundrum -  This cartoon is a staple of climate advocacy:

To build support for climate solutions, we focus on “co-benefits” – often going so far as to shun discussion of climate altogether (which, as I’ve harangued, is a big strategic mistake.)  There’s no denying the effectiveness of this approach in building bridges to new constituencies for action.  Air quality, economic opportunity, and transportation choices are intuitively positive, accessible, tractable.  Stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of GHGs is not, not, not.

But the focus on co-benefits can have a perverse effect on moral intuition – like saying “Do this because it will feel good.”  The pitch allows us to infer that we don’t need to do it unless it feels good.  Or if some other thing feels better, we can just do that instead.  It’s morally disengaging.

In a classic of motivational speech, Winston Churchill said, as he was rallying the Brits to war with Germany, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” It is the stark and pointed absence of co-benefits that underscores the necessity for action and makes the rap so powerful.

Hmmm.  Big climate advocacy problem:  Either we  a) keep pumping co-benefits, even at the expense of suppressing moral intuition, because it’s an effective way to build a broader political constituency for climate solutions, or b) downplay co-benefits and just bum folks all the way out, to make the moral imperative as naked and absolute as it must be to drive climate action at scale (the Churchill approach).

Both these options suck.  I’m no Churchill, and climate disruption seems to lack the fear-focusing power (though certainly not the destructive potential) of the Third Reich.  So I’ll keep selling co-benefits, while taking every opportunity to press the case that climate action is a moral imperative, not an amenity.  But I won’t try to reconcile this tension with handwaving about “balance” between moral urgency and marketing co-benefits, at least not today.  For now, let’s just leave it hanging out there as the conundrum it is.

When the political class focuses on the perils of fossil fuel dependence, they almost always use the word “foreign” before “oil”.  This is redundant.  Oil is inherently foreign.  All of it.

Oil is foreign to democracy.  In an election cycle flooded by unrestricted political money, oil money stands out as the biggest gusher.  The Supreme Court struck down Montana’s law limiting corporate spending on campaigns yesterday, so the blowout of oil’s influence will remain uncapped for the foreseeable future.   In America and around the world, oil and freedom do not mix.  Because it concentrates wealth, facilitates abuse of power, breeds dependence, and crushes democracy, oil is fundamentally foreign to the American creed.

Oil is foreign to the atmosphere, air, and water. Burning oil releases about 85 billion pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere per day, all of which has been foreign to our climate for many millions of years.  The planet that existed when that carbon was aloft was a very different place, as foreign as, oh, Jurassic Park.  And some oil doesn’t get burned because it leaks out along the way, causing the waterways of home to turn toxic, hostile, and foreign (see Inside Climate’s blockbuster story on the underreported “Dilbit Disaster” in Michigan.)

Oil is foreign to economic security.  The U.S. has less than 5% of the world’s population, about 2% of proven conventional oil reserves, and consumes about 20% of the oil produced.  Prices are set on world markets and heavily influenced by oilogopolistic producers, regardless of where the oil comes from.  Those producers have us over a barrel as long as we need the stuff.

Oil is foreign to local economic vitality.  The overwhelming majority of Americans live in communities that are hemorrhaging economic resources in order to pay for oil.  Here in King County Washington, for example, our economy will lose north of $5 billion this year to fetch oil – roughly the size of the entire County budget.  A tiny handful of Americans live in communities where oil brings in more money than it sucks out.

Oil is foreign to the intergenerational contract.  Any economic value derived from expanded oil trafficking is confiscated from the many generations who will have to pay the exorbitant costs of living in an unstable climate.  They will not be amused.  Estimates of the economic value of unchecked climate change are enormous but fuzzy;  there is no satisfying way to monetize the intergenerational abuse.

Regardless of where they poke the holes, oil is not yours.  It’s not mine.  It’s ExxonMobil’s and OPEC’s and the Koch’s.  Wherever the next fix happens to come from, they will use it to extract record profits, destroy the climate, and maul our democracy.

Drill here, drill there, it doesn’t matter.  The whole damned business is foreign to our national interests, to our values, to our future.

The question looms large in light of recent and imminent federal leases to extract a bazillion tons of coal from public land in the Powder River Basin (PRB).  Critics of the practice note that Americans are being compensated for this public resource at well below its market value.

But if you don’t happen to be in the coal business, the market value of coal-to-burn pales in comparison to the vital functions of coal-in-the-ground (hereafter, “coal ITG”).

Undisturbed coal delivers enormous benefits, like long-term strategic resource security, and locking up mercury that otherwise floats around causing neurological disorders.  And the greatest value of coal ITG may be in the carbon it stores.  That carbon was once in the atmosphere, as a result of which the Earth was a sauna with much higher sea levels.

What’s it worth to continue living on Earth as it is, rather than in, say, Jurassic Park?  The value in the absence of large predatory reptiles alone is incalculable!

How might we estimate the value of coal ITG? Bona fide wonks should respond.  But I’m going to take a quick hack at it, because the Bureau of Land Management is leasing the coal now.  We need to assess whether the lease revenues fully compensate Americans for the lost value of the coal ITG.

Determining this value raises tricky questions about how a unit of coal might be kept in the ground, and whether doing so would actually keep the equivalent greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere (“leakage effects,” etc.) But let’s suspend those questions for a moment and assume that coal ITG is carbon that’s not warming the climate. Because, you know, physically, it is.

One way to think about what coal is worth in the ground would be to assess how much it costs us once it gets out and gets burned.  EPA did just that in its regulatory impact analysis for new greenhouse gas standards.  They estimate the social cost of carbon dioxide at $24 per ton in 2015, escalating to $45 per ton in 2050 (using a 3% discount rate.)  Let’s take the middle of that range, since these coal leases go out for decades, and use $35 per ton of CO2.  Figure a ton of PRB coal produces 1.8 tons of CO2, so the carbon storage value of a ton in the ground would be north of $60.

You can imagine other ways of assessing the value, for example, by looking at:

- Economic damages due to climate disruption, as the Stern Review did.  Divide the total damages by the amount of GHGs assumed to be released, and you can derive an associated value for coal ITG.  If you do it this way, you really ought to include the huge health costs of burning coal, as the Harvard School of Public Health did when they estimated external costs of burning coal for electricity in the U.S. at $175-523 billion a year.  We burn a billionish tons a year in the U.S.  Since PRB coal is relatively low in sulfur and ash, it’d be worth a little less than $175-523 per ton - in the ground - using this method.

- Carbon markets:  If CO2 allowances were traded in a market that limited total emissions to levels consistent with responsible climate stabilization, how much would they go for?  Synapse did an analysis that came up with a mid-range $26 per ton of CO2.  Again, a ton of PRB coal produces 1.8 tons of CO2 when burned, so this gives us a carbon storage value of coal ITG of $46.80.  (This is conservative, since assumed carbon caps are too high to prevent catastrophic climate disruption.)

- Sequestration costs:  What if we can’t help ourselves — what if we just have to burn that coal and release the CO2?  What would it cost to put it back, permanently and reliably?  A Belfer Center study estimated the cost of first generation carbon capture and storage technology at $120-$180 per ton of CO2 avoided.  Again, multiply by 1.8 to get the value per ton of PRB coal ITG.

I’m obviously only scratching the surface with a cooked noodle here; we can wonk around with this all day (and I do hope better wonks will).  But quickly, before BLM squanders more of our coal ITG, let’s just use the official social cost of CO2 ($35 ton, cited above and here) as our proxy, and multiply by 1.8 for PRB coal:  So, say the coal ITG is worth more than $60 per ton in carbon storage alone.

Now… Where does BLM get OFF selling that $60 a ton public coal ITG for $1.11 a ton (the price of the most recent federal lease)? Their primary justification appears to be that it helps Americans get cheap electricity.  But the external costs cited in the Harvard School of Public Health study at least double the cost of coal-fired electricity.  And this false excuse completely falls apart when the coal is being used for export.

Is there any legal and/or political way for Americans to prevent this looting of our minerals, this pillaging of our climate stability, this fracking of our future?   Can we hold the BLM accountable for fiduciary mismanagement of public resources?

Can we lay claim to the value of coal ITG, even if we have to buy our own damned coal back from the BLM so we can leave it in the ground? 

It’d be a steal at ten times the going price.

In the pie-throwing contest that passes for energy dialogue in our political culture, Solyndra gets the ink, while the biggest story by far goes unreported.   Keystone dominates the headlines, while new fuel economy standards languish in obscurity — even though they’ll save far more oil than Keystone will deliver and create more jobs, at a fraction of the cost.  Clean energy naysayers offer a rhetorical choice between a “Keystone economy vs. a Solyndra economy“, when the actual economy is running more and more on the energy we save through better codes, standards, and efficiency programs.

Here in the Northwest, for example, we have saved over 4600 average megawatts of electricity since 1980.  That’s more than enough to continuously power 4 cities the size of Seattle – and the Northwest only has one city the size of Seattle!  If we let the east side of the region have all the good stuff, these energy savings could power the entire states of Idaho and Montana.  But we would never do that, of course, because that would make Seattle and Portland dramatically poorer; that conserved energy, harvested from the whole region, is a gold mine, saving consumers about $2.5 billion-with-a-b annually on our power bills.

This is by far the biggest energy story in the Northwest over the last 30 years.  The saved energy has met more than half of the growth in demand, at a fraction of the cost of the power we would have otherwise bought.  It has extended the value of our regional hydropower system, squeezing more work – more cold beer, more hot showers, more data crunching – out of every drop of water in the system.

But there’s plenty more squeezing to do.  The Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s Sixth Plan lays out a cost effective strategy for meeting the vast majority of new energy needs with efficiency over the next 20 years.  Oregon’s new draft 10 year energy strategy aims to go all the way – meeting all load growth by wasting less of the energy we’ve got.

And even that’s not the limit.  We’ve got coal plants to replace too, and huge power plants of wasted energy – squandered Grand Coulees, Dalles that dribble away – in our existing building stock.  Thousands of megawatts of available, cheap energy savings. Thousands of jobs for the people who harvest them…  A robust, irresistible, smoking hot energy future, powered by renewables and juiced by efficiency.

David Roberts here at Grist and Stephen Lacey at Climate Progress kicked off a good discussion last week about the roles of “yes” and “no” in climate work. This would-be schism dominates Climate Solutions’ strategy sessions, so I must weigh in.

Climate Solutions is a “yes” outfit. Roberts nailed our MO: We’re all about “forging of opportunistic coalitions.” We accept “compromise, tedium, and endless setbacks.” Roberts says “it’s just more fun to rage against The Man,” but we’re actually to the point where we revel in “the boring of hard boards.” Our mission statement even makes it sound romantic, adventurous: “ … galvanizing leadership, growing investment, and bridging divides”!

Here’s the thing, though: With no meaningful climate policy commitment — no binding emission limits, no carbon pricing, not even a clean energy standard — the awesome work of building a clean energy economy is proceeding in parallel to the unfolding disaster of climate disruption, rather preventing it. We can say “yes” ’til we’re blue in the face, but we can’t call it “climate solutions” unless we stop the beast.

A local example: Here in Seattle, we made a commitment in 2000 to power our community with zero net carbon emissions. We sold our share of a big coal plant (which is now on its way to retirement). We let our gas combustion turbine contract expire. We doubled down on efficiency. We made the anchor investment in the region’s first big wind project. For the little remnant of emissions we couldn’t eliminate (utility maintenance vehicles, spot market purchases, etc.), we bought high-quality offsets. Saying “no” to carbon in our power supply was a launching pad for saying “yes” to a clean energy economy.

By selling our share in that coal plant, we scrubbed about 400,000 tons of coal a year out of our energy footprint. Sweet. But if the current coal export proposals in the Northwest are fully developed, we would ship over 400,000 tons of coal a day through our communities to be burned in Asia (a third of it right through the middle of our iconic Olympic Sculpture Park on Seattle’s waterfront). Our clean energy economy, as my colleague Ross Macfarlane colorfully says, would be but “a hood ornament on the Hummer of fossil fuel addiction.” Our brave local “yes” would be a joke.

The point here is not just that the bad stuff will overwhelm us if we fail to stop it (though that point alone is plenty to justify “no”). It’s that unchecked expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure undermines the credibility of solutions. “Yes” to climate solutions without “no” to these “game-ending” investments comes off as silly, sentimental, tokenistic.

We work with a lot of state and local elected officials who take on climate commitments. Almost invariably, skeptical reporters ask them something to the effect of, “C’mon, what difference will it make? Our emissions are a miniscule fraction of the problem. We could reduce our carbon footprint to zero and we’ll still have the same climate impacts. Isn’t this local action just symbolic?”

A good answer goes something like, “We’re not fighting climate change alone. Our city is joining with umpty-ump other communities, nations, and businesses around the world to deliver solutions. We’re doing our part and pressing our national leaders for stronger action. We’re proving up solutions that can work everywhere. And we’re making this a better place to live and work by [fill in co-benefits here].”

This is a beautiful story, and we’ve done much to make it true. But nobody is going to hear it over the din of coal trains rumbling through town all day. If we take all the coal we don’t burn, and a couple of orders of magnitude more, and ship it through our communities to promote global fossil fuel dependence, how can we say with a straight face that we’re serious about solutions? Yes is bunk without no.

Yes also feeds no. It’s like an immune-system booster — building resilience and increasing our capacity to resist fossil fuel development. In Bellingham, Wash., for example, the largest and most powerful business association is not the chamber of commerce but Sustainable Connections. This community has such a strong investment in “yes” that the idea of becoming a coal export hub seems like an alien invasion. In a terrific NPR story, Julie Trimingham of Coal Train Facts says movingly: “It’s almost inconceivable that there would be a plan afoot to change this part of the world to a coal export facility. It seems ironic or cruel, or misguided at best.”

Even in Longview, Wash., an industrial port community targeted for coal export, “yes” holds a powerful allure. The vision statement in “Turning Point” [PDF], its local economic development strategic plan, says the community “will transition from a natural resource dependent economy, embrace higher value projects, and raise its profile within a broader regional market.” The coal export battle there will test the resolve and hope in that community for the “yes” they’ve imagined. If they believe in it, they’ll say no to coal export, which is roughly the exact opposite of their vision statement.

Yes and no are interdependent, but they are not symmetrical with respect to the pace and scale of the climate challenge. The climate “game” must be won over the long haul. The winning strategy is a zillion yeses, driving an inherently slow transition. But the game can be lost very quickly — Jim Hansen’s point in “Game Over for the Climate,” and the bright bottom line in the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook. Yes is a patient, incremental thing. But the no we need to muster on tar sands and coal export is immediate and uncompromising.

Yet, while their roles and applications differ, yes and no aren’t competing philosophies or alternative psychographics. Our political culture drives us toward niches, pressuring us to identify as yes or no types. But if you want to be an effective climate advocate (or parent), you have to wield both. Yes and no are the interdependent and mutually reinforcing faces of responsible action.

The more successfully we say no to fossil fuels, the more we open space for the growth of the clean energy economy we envision. And as we open it, we need to fill it. We have a better idea than Peabody and ExxonMobil about what a good future is, and we have to keep delivering on it.

When we affirm and invest in our vision, we fortify our defense against the fossil fuel onslaught. The more “yes” we say and do, the more credibly we can fight fossil fuel development with the claim: “We can do better” — a core message in the coal export campaign.

Yes without no is lame. No one will believe in the power of our clean energy vision if we let the fossil fuel juggernaut mow us down and wreck the climate.

And no without yes is adolescence. The only way to prove we can do better is to … do better.

How to explain the Gingrich resurgence in South Carolina? He harnessed anger and showed strength.

In an editorial, The New York Times calls his appeal to anger “the lowest form of campaigning.”

I disagree. I think the lowest form of campaigning — the deadliest poison coursing through the American body politic — is cynicism.

Now, Newt is the most cynical candidate in the race. This guy has a distinct advantage over Mitt Romney, because he doesn’t have enough shame to feel uncomfortable when he’s lying. (At least Mitt squirms.)

But he didn’t win South Carolina with cynicism. He won it by spraying a righteous can of whup-ass all over CNN debate moderator John King.

And, stunningly, when Rick Santorum accused him of grandiosity, Newt gobbled it up. “This is a grandiose country of big people doing big things.” He crushed his opponents by appealing to, of all things, our bigness!

Never mind that “grandiose” means not big, but “pompous,” “overblown.” Newt’s point was that we as a nation have big things to do. And I take heart from the fact that people will vote for a guy who makes that point, in an era when the scale of our collective vision is spiraling down toward the drain in Grover Norquist’s infamous bathtub.

In the debate Thursday night and in the spin room afterwards, Santorum offered a trenchant political argument about why Gingrich’s “grandiosity” is a liability: Newt will make himself the issue. The Republicans are more likely to win, says Santorum, if they make Obama the issue (i.e, if they campaign against government, if they appeal to cynicism). This is a corollary of the modern political truism: Nobody likes negative campaigning, but it works. I suspect most seasoned political professionals would agree with this assessment.

But in offering this cogent political diagnosis, Santorum sounded more like a campaign strategist than a president. The voters, as it turned out, didn’t want shrewd political tactics from a guy who is squeamish about making himself the issue. They wanted the loud guy, the angry guy, the guy who wants to kick some serious butt and do big stuff.

Santorum’s social conservatism should have given him a distinct edge in South Carolina, yet Newt cleaned his clock as the “not-Mitt” favorite because he projected something of size and ambition and determination.

Look, I’m not here to celebrate the politics of anger. And I’m certainly not here to celebrate Newt. Newt is as cynical as they come. But he won the South Carolina primary by hiding that fact. He won by coming up large and mad. He won by tapping into voters’ hunger for boldness and ambition — even in this case if it’s only ambition to thrash Obama and government. He won big!

My point (finally! obliquely!) is this: I find hope in what South Carolina’s Republican voters just did, because there is no way to tackle global warming in a world of hopeless cynicism, a world of radically diminished expectations.

Many individual climate solutions are small. But the idea of “climate solutions” is void unless we can think big — as big as the problem — and believe that we can act collectively at the appropriate scale.

Anger is not inconsistent with that belief. That Newt Gingrich would harness anger at “the Establishment” to propel his campaign is, of course, the height of hypocrisy. And anger can certainly be used to block solutions at least as easily as it can be channeled to advance them.  But anger, unlike cynicism, is consistent with the scale and determination that we must bring to our civilization’s epic confrontation with the climate crisis.

Cynicism is the right hand of smallness and futility. It is the most potent weapon against climate solutions at scale. And our politics generally celebrates and reinforces it. But something different prevailed in South Carolina.

Notwithstanding the puniness of our politics, voters responded to Newt because they are still hungry for something big. Yes, Newt would surely manipulate that hunger for big bad things (like, say, Newt). But when the hunger dies, there is no hope for big good things, like, say, climate solutions.

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See also:

• Time to be angry, not cynical, about corporate money in politics
• Gingrich’s views on climate, EPA, and ‘green conservatism’