We are what we think. With our thoughts we create the world. — Buddha

OK, first, let me hasten to say that I find myself, as most any physical scientist would, irritated by the ancient quote above.

I expect a modern person to know, though the Buddha may or may not have known, that the logic of the physical universe is so intricate and so precise that mere human thoughts are grotesquely insufficient to create it, that some objective reality must exist.

What You Think About Determines What You Think

There is another sense, though, in which it is precisely true that we create the world with our thoughts. We live in a world both of artifice and of nature. Our environment shapes our minds and our minds shape our environment. What we are thinking about matters.

Consider the matter of Iran, for instance.

By now everybody’s talking about Iran, but early last week there was immense frustration directed at the major media in a small niche community, for ignoring the story entirely. That niche community was Twitter users.

It was an unusual week among Twitterphiles. We were experiencing the world much as one did when the Berlin Wall was coming down, with a sense that noble events of great and auspicious consequence were happening in the world, that one should at the least fervently wish for the success and safety of those of pure heart, and that little else could possibly have comparable relevance, not even climate change or health care or the economic, um, thing.

But if you were not the sort of person to use Twitter to get news, you might have barely registered that something was going on in Iran. You may have had a mild interest in the events but you are still a bit confused about who possibly stole what from whom, and what Twitter could possibly have to do with it.

This fact in itself is an interesting part of the story. Not only was Twitter an important player, your level of interest in Twitter was at one point a strong predictor of your level of interest in the outcome of the whole crisis in Iran!

Isn’t that strange?

Perhaps not. The ideas that fill our minds are the ideas we are exposed to every day. One reason we were upset was because we saw events of immense importance taking place, and a press that was treating it as a non-story. Recall the substantially similar events in the Republic of Georgia six years earlier. There was some news coverage, but it didn’t take over our consciousness, because none of us were watching media where the story was pervasive.

What we think about is determined by what we experience, and what we experience is determined by what we think about. As a result, we live side-by-side in different worlds.

Idea Clusters

Comparisons of how different groups, be they professional or ethnic, construe related ideas are usually revealing. Trouble and misunderstanding often arises when the habits of mind of different communities of interest are brought to bear on the same subject.

These ideological clusters emerge from habits of mind. The habits of mind emerge from language, and from the accessibility of concepts. Russians, who have no word for blue, but rather two separate words for light blue and for dark blue, apparently are quicker to distinguish light blue from dark blue objects than speakers of other languages. And then there is the infamous precision of Inuit with regard to snow and ice, which may or may not be apocryphal, but I suspect there is something to it. Have you ever listened to a conversation about snow among skiers?

It can be stunning how differently different subcultures address related ideas. Economists vs energy providers, reporters vs bloggers, cat lovers vs bird lovers, industrialists versus environmentalists, ecologists versus climate physicists, scientists vs politicians, journalists vs entertainers, engineers vs economists. The consequences of differing vocabularies and habits of thought are everywhere and are increasing as the world becomes more crowded, complex and interdependent.

Economists’ faith in eternal growth as opposed to the environmentalist’s fear of imminent doom is a case in point. It leads me and a few stalwart others to a synthesis position: an intent to find patterns of thought and action that avoid the doom associated with compulsive growth, and instead create a reasonable steady state economy. This is the idea cluster that I’m trying to participate in building.

An idea cluster (or maybe let’s call it a “meme complex”… ideas?) is much bigger than a meme. It is sometimes identical to an ideology, but it isn’t always that. It is a cultural predisposition to notice certain things and think about them in certain ways.

Where Idea Clusters Come From

To see where we’re going it often helps to consider where we’ve been.

In the past century, the century of mass media, it was the media that mostly provided the language, the Lego blocks, the molecules of thought for most people. Tiny little cultural clusters coalesced under the pressure of very powerful aggregators and distributors of information, not just through news but even through entertainment.

In America, the news media developed a set of scruples that reporting and commentary functions should be kept very distinct. The reporting people in particular were taught this as a bedrock ethical principle, and continue to defend it fiercely. A news medium is an economic entity, but its success depends on public trust, so the thinking went. Thus the reporter should be scrupulously “neutral”. Because the ownership wanted an outlet for its own ideas, the “editorial” sandbox was set up for them.

So the raw materials for thought, the mindsets, the idea clusters, become 1) the world of commerce, trade, profit, wealth, “free enterprise” to give it its triumphal name 2) the world of strife, controversy, secrets kept and secrets breached, objectives baldly stated and objectives obscured, speech honest and speech mendacious, in other words the gritty world of “muckraking”. Even the opposition to these ideas was framed in the same terms: “the workers control the means of production”, “power to the people” “el pueblo unido jamas sera vencido” etc.

For a long time, this model served well enough. When there is a local question, say a road bond or new convention center, the tension between fiscal conservatism and boosterism is very well suited for this constellation: there is a horse race of two ideas, both resonate with the values of the community, no special expertise is required to understand the issues, and eventually, one side or the other will win. (Then, if the project is approved it will be executed well, indifferently or badly, again stories which the traditional media are well suited to examine.)

In the past, even national questions were somewhat more disjoint than they are now. Everything wasn’t deeply enmeshed in everything else, specifically because the American landscape wasn’t very crowded. So for the most part, even national issues had a local, parochial flavor; a public dance of debate, a backstage drama of arm twisting and intrigue, and on the whole, an increasingly homogeneous national character that matched circumstances well enough.

Thus emerges our habitual mental model: “there are two sides to every story”. Everybody bends the truth in their direction. The public interest is the sum of every individual’s self interest. Some people are especially influential because they control large institutions or large pots of money. Decisions are based on cultural affinities, alliances, and exchanges of political capital.

But the questions we face now are very different. Try to map this habit of mind onto questions of managing the earth as a tightly coupled and disrupted system and what do you get?

There’s an nerdy joke among scientists, that a mathematician who knows what to do when confronted with a burning building will set non-burning buildings alight, thereby reducing it to the previous problem. When there is only one side to a story, the press will manufacture another.

The press has a natural cultural affinity for politics, especially the brawling, sometimes cynical and always entertaining world of local and state politics. The vocabularies and intellectual maps of the press and the politicans are closely entwined. Propositions have winners and losers, advocates and opponents. Eventually they are either enacted or defeated. Is that how we have managed to find ourselves in a world with people who are willing to be called “anti-environmentalists”? With our “friends” at Climate Depot, whose response to existential uncertainty on a planetary scale is mockery with a side order of cherry-picking?

I think so. This “opposition” is partly political opportunism of course, and it’s partly entertainment for a certain sarcastic and defensive state of mind, but ultimately it is a creation of the media, which given an issue of importance goes off in search of an opposition. And so we have reached a pretty pass. We’ve managed to create a constituency which stands in opposition to the persistence of a viable planet.

We are thinking about our circumstances as if we were in opposition to each other, but it is in the interest of everyone on a ship at sea, be they communist or jihadist, butcher or vegan, that the ship not sink. Why are the words we use to think about our collective future so adversarial?

They didn’t start out that way. If the issues came from the deliberations of scientists and academics, the discussions would remain polite, truth-seeking and unpolarized.

The polarization may not originally come from the press, but it is maintained by their conceptual maps, idea clusters, meme complexes. Polarization is embedded in their model of human activity as economic activity, of politics as contention. As a result, the words and ideas and conceptual maps that the public draws upon date from the industrial revolution: workers against capitalists, rich against poor, centralization of decisions versus distributed decision making, nation vs nation, lifestyle vs, lifestyle, sect vs. sect. Of course these problems have not gone away; of course they only make our new problems that much harder.

But our new problems do not look like that. And what we need is a new cognitive map.

A Better Word for Doom?

All of this is by way of addressing one of my perennial questions, which Andy Revkin again raised recently in a Dot Earth column:

If the science pointing to a rising risk of dangerous human interference with climate is settled, the thinking goes, then why aren’t people and the world’s nations galvanized?

People are casting about for the right words to describe our moral and existential quandary, words that will galvanize “action”.

Revkin points out an article on Seed where several very appropriate people (myself oddly excluded, hrmph) take up the topic with varying degrees of success. I am most sympathetic to Ann Kinzig’s approach. She concludes “If we accept that language is never neutral, why not adopt the terms that resonate with a broader swath of the public?” And indeed, I think language is never neutral, despite the protestations of people inculcated in journalistic culture. But what language should we use?

In the Seed article, Matt Nisbet, whose article with Chris Mooney is often credited (somewhat to my personal irritation since I’ve been going on about this stuff for fifteen years) with starting the conversation about how these ideas are communicated, starts off on the right foot but then stumbles into a rather feeble pair of examples:

The point is not to “sell” the public on climate change, but rather to use research on framing to create communication contexts that move beyond polarization, promote discussion, generate partnerships and connections, and that accurately convey the objective urgency of the problem. If the public feels like they are being marketed to, it will only continue to fuel additional polarization and perceptual gridlock. In shifting the frame on climate change, the goals should not be to persuade, but rather to start conversations with the public that recognize, respect, and incorporate differences in knowledge, values, perspectives, and goals.

In one prominent example of re-framing the debate, strategists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger have led the way by advocating that climate change should not be defined as a pollution problem that requires additional regulation but as an energy problem that provides an opportunity for growing the economy and creating jobs around clean technology. This reframing moves the debate beyond a narrow constituency of environmental advocates and opens the doors for a broader climate movement that includes labor, business leaders, and the investor class. The frame was a major emphasis by both presidential candidates in the past election, is emphasized in Al Gore’s “Repower America” television ads, and continues to be a dominant focus of the Obama administration.

A second framing strategy to move beyond perceptual gridlock is offered by scientists such as E. O. Wilson and Evangelical leaders such as Richard Cizik who frame environmental stewardship in terms of morality and ethics, engaging an Evangelical audience who might not otherwise pay attention to appeals on climate change. This frame is more than just a talking point or a rebranding of the issue: When scientists and religious leaders join together around shared values to work on a common problem, it builds bonds of trust that enables long-term collaboration and that breaks down prejudices.

Sorry, a shallow appeal to the fading paradigm of personal greed as one example, and a scolding from an evangelist on the other? Out of the frying pan and into two fires? What sort of help is that? Does that help you? It doesn’t help me, and it apparently doesn’t help Revkin who ends on a note of futility:

So what’s your view? Is the climate challenge one of communication style, of inadequate energy choices, of the hard-wired aspects of human nature?

My sense is there’s a big dose of the latter in this arena. Humans remain mainly focused on the here and now, and the worst outcomes in a warming world remain someday or somewhere. There’s still scant evidence we’re able to invest against inevitable shocks even when the danger is clear and local …

Stop the Presses!

Stop the presses, Andy. You missed the point. Of course you missed the point, or pretended to, because the problem is you.

No, not you, Revkin, personally. Revkin, (despite my constant harping about you) you are among the best of a bad lot, trying to bring a journalistic sensibility to a set of problems that do not map onto the intellectual style of the journalist. The point is that that style is serving us badly.

If f the science pointing to a rising risk of dangerous human interference with climate is settled, then why isn’t the press galvanized? Why do the stories run on page 13?

What we need is not a noun phrase, a new name for doom. The qeustion of “global this” or “climate that” is not going to help. We need a noun phrase embedded in a new way of thinking, an approach to planetary maturity on a suddenly depleted world. You can call it Mrs. Renfro’s Corn Relish for all I care; it’s the context that matters.

The Sustainability Mindset

Sustainability on a crowded and finite world is a fundamental challenge to every culture and ideology that ever emerged on the growing and open world. Humans are vastly adaptable, but the cultural matrices in which we find ourselves are not. The buildings of Rome are mostly not new, but they are much newer than the routes that the streets take through them. The main street through Bastrop TX carries little sign of the Spanish empire but is still called El Camino Real.

Most of us don’t have a sustainability mindset.

Those few that think they do, mostly don’t. The green movement have a Luddite view, a romantic view perhaps workable on a planet with a tenth of its present population. They are, I think, good people with much to teach us, but they aren’t really facing up to the scale of the problem any more than most other people are, and their culture is actively suspicious of quantitative thinking. So much as I love greenies, as much as I hope the agrarian ideal eventually pans out, this isn’t the time for it. We have big, collective problems to solve and we need a big, collective way of thinking about it. And not even a Woody Guthrie-esque “one big union” is big enough. Big government, big business, these are part of the solution.

The press isn’t giving us the vocabulary to think about our circumstances.

Where the media are bored by a topic, the public is implicitly informed that the topic is unimportant. My experience of understanding that events unfolding in Iran were important before the press caught on was sadly familiar to me.

Just as early last week, when non-Twitterphiles were not thinking about Iran, most people aren’t thinking about a way out of our quandary. People may think there is no quandary, or they may think there is no way out, or they may think that some other “They” have everything under control. What they don’t think about is which approaches they would tolerate, what the menu of scenarios, getting uglier by the month, looks like. There’s little awareness of the nature of the choices we face, and hence little support for people in the position to make the decisions/

The media are, in fact, bored. Sustainability, for the most part, doesn’t map onto what excites them. Read my lips Andy Revkin.

There is no proper word for doom when that word only appears on page thirteen.

Even running the same old stuff on page 1 won’t do. The entire way we organize ourselves, not just our cultures and our subcultures, but everybody else’s too, have to change in ways that lack any precedent. And they will change, too. There is no maybe about that. The only maybe is how much suffering we will have to endure before our thoughts adequately conform, to the world we actually end up with. All of which depends, as Buddha says, on our thoughts.

Exhortation

I only know what to do in the broadest sense. We need to start thinking about the things we need to think about. All of us, not just a few wonks and nerds.

The new nominee to be head of research and development at EPA, Dr. Paul Anastas, puts it this way: “It’s not enough to simply care about the environment, you need to learn about the environment and understand it deeply.” I think this is precisely what I am saying. We need to develop a vocabulary of understanding; habits of mind that are planetary in scale and scope. We need to think globally.

We don’t need a friendlier name for doom. We need a 24 hour doom channel. God knows it’s not boring once you actually get the picture.

It’s the future. The press, or whatever replaces it, needs to read more like science fiction. Let’s talk about scenarios, about what problems nature will present us with, and about coalitions, how we will address them. Let’s talk about social organizing tools. Let’s look backward from 2400 AD and describe how we overcame the nation-state, the porliferation of mutually hostile religions and ideologies, and the ethic of greed. Let’s think about how to extract unity from hostility and fear. Let’s try to understand why surplus feels like poverty.

Let’s not wait for “Them” to rescue us. There is only us. And whatever ends up serving the purposes of the “front page”, let’s put the “stuff that matters” on it, and not just “what’s fit to print”.

—–

(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Republication in whole with attribution to “Michael Tobis, Austin TX” is encouraged.)

Are its roots in the huge resource gap between the relatively rich and the very poor? If that’s true, it has broad implications.

Here’s one way of looking at it, from the Omaha World-Herald:

The list of likely damages from global warming is long and includes those from rising sea levels, more intense hurricanes, species loss, a wider reach of malaria, reductions in water supplies, and increased urban pollution. Perhaps the biggest likely risk, however, is to world agriculture.

Higher temperatures speed plants through their development and leave less time for grain filling. Evaporation and loss of water through plant leaves rises more rapidly with temperatures than the increase in rainfall expected from global warming, causing a loss of moisture. Incidence of severe drought, like that in the American Dust Bowl in the 1930s or Australia in recent years, would likely increase.

There’s another way this can be played, though, from The New York Sun:

The campaign against climate change could be set back by the global food crisis, as foreign populations turn against measures to use foodstuffs as substitutes for fossil fuels.

With prices for rice, wheat, and corn soaring, food-related unrest has broken out in places such as Haiti, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. Several countries have blocked the export of grain. There is even talk that governments could fall if they cannot bring food costs down.

“I don’t think anybody knows precisely how much ethanol contributes to the run-up in food prices, but the contribution is clearly substantial,” a professor of applied economics and law at the University of Minnesota, C. Ford Runge, said. A study by a Washington think tank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, indicated that between a quarter and a third of the recent hike in commodities prices is attributable to biofuels.

…

“It takes around 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol,” Mr. Senauer, also an applied economics professor at Minnesota, said. “It’s not going to be a very good diet but that’s roughly enough to keep an adult person alive for a year.”

In fact, there is plenty of agricultural productivity to feed everyone, and in principle a considerable amount left over for biofuels.

What’s going on? It isn’t that there isn’t enough food. It’s that the ability to fill up a gas tank with gasoline is, in the “wisdom” of the marketplace, the highest value use of the food crop.

Admittedly, what we’re seeing now is a consequence of some distorted subsidies, but consider this. If the price of liquid fuel goes up further because of reduced supply and inflexible demand, then even if the subsidy goes away, it might well become more lucrative to produce biofuel for rich people than to provide food for poor people.

Indeed, something like this is already going on. Most of the land in production in the U.S. goes to produce animal feed, which produces a small fraction as many calories in a luxury crop (meat) as the same land would in producing directly for human consumption. While cereal crops worldwide set new records, some people have been going hungry even before this year’s price rises.

How is this possible? Is the demand for one luxury meat meal really bigger than the demand for ten subsistence grain meals? This is true only if the wealthy person’s desires are valued more than the poor person’s desires. A starving Haitian’s desire for a scrap of bread exceeds your desire for your favorite meal by a considerable amount, but his ability to pay is constrained by your desire for steak.

When our economic system evolved, the number of very wealthy people was small. For most of the population, there was a market for their labor, which they could exchange for goods. The demands of the wealthy for luxuries didn’t compete directly with the demands of the general population for basics. The world was essentially infinite; people bought labor and not resources.

The worker, free to sell his or her services to the highest bidder (at least in principle), was at least relatively liberated compared to his feudal ancestor.

Two things have changed. The number of relatively wealthy people has burgeoned, and the competition for raw materials has become important. The arrangement that fueled the successes of the industrial economy breaks down.

There is less opportunity to exchange labor for goods even in the wealthy countries, as the labor gets outsourced to foreigners and machines. With globalization, your currency gets weighed against my currency, and your labor competes against the labor of even more desperate people. At the same time, rich and poor now compete for the same raw materials.

In these circumstances, meat for one is “worth more than” gruel for ten, and a rational farmer will target the former rather than the latter.

The problem gets worse, the larger the ratio of the wealth of the wealthiest to the wealth of the poorest. In a recent NPR article about gasoline hitting $4/gal in the Bay Area, one fellow said, “It won’t affect me in the least. I am sure it is difficult for some people, but it has no impact on me whatsoever.” I have heard similar comments from a Texan who sells very large luxury vehicles.

I’m not sure how to address this. I used to believe that a carbon tax was our best bet, but I’ve come to doubt that it will work. In an age of a huge wealthy demographic, such measures become extremely regressive long before they bite the major consumers. Note that gasoline prices had to triple in the U.S. before the consumption curve showed even a tiny dent.

A rise in price of essential commodities concentrates wealth and, in turn, exacerbates excess.

Thinking about the fact that world cereal production set records last year, I’m convinced that the problem is in the incentive system, though, not in the production of biofuels or (leaving aside other issues) even in the demand for meat. When very rich and very poor people compete for the same resources, you have a problem that can’t be fixed with pricing.

We have excess food production capacity, and some of it could go into meat or into biofuels. The problem is that this makes it harder for poor people to get grain. I genuinely hate to say this, but I see no way around it. Unless wealth becomes much more evenly distributed, we need a way of separating out the necessities from the luxuries that isn’t purely market driven.

I guess the simplest thing on the food front is to tie food aid directly to prices of the foods that food aid supports, and to fund it through taxes of the competing commodities.

What to do about discouraging carbon use is less clear to me. The recent events regarding food versus biofuels has me thinking that, unfortunately, putting a price on carbon is not going to work out very well without some other, more complex and more difficult measures to discourage excessive consumption by the relatively wealthy individuals and societies.

In a brief article on DeSmog by Emily Murgatroyd, a Cato Institute type, Jerry Taylor, is quoted as saying

Scientists are in no position to intelligently guide public policy on climate change. Scientists can lay out scenarios, but it is up to economists to weigh the costs and benefits and many of them say the costs of cutting emissions are higher than the benefits.

Can we consider this claim, or is it somehow protected by a taboo? Is one a Marxist or even a Stalinist for pointing out that economists are not, themselves, necessarily right about everything?

Economists, meanwhile, claim to have the key to rationality. Their claim is based in their own definition of their field, which is about "how people collectively make decisions", but they proceed very quickly from there to the marketplace via a number of dubious assumptions.

The marketplace is real enough, and the fact that it affects the decisions we make is inescapable, but that doesn’t prove a claim that economics is uniquely placed to resolve our differences.

A claim in more desperate need of challenging I cannot imagine — yet on it goes, essentially unchallenged in circles of power.

A crucial problem is the idea that the purpose of our society is to maximize "growth."

Is infinite growth of some meaningful quantity possible in a finite space? No scientist is inclined to think so, but economists habitually make this claim without bothering to defend it with anything but, "I’m, an economist and I say so", or perhaps more thoughtfully, "hey, it’s worked until now".

Such ideas were good approximations in the past. Once the finite nature of our world comes into play they become very bad approximations. You know, the gods of Easter Island smiled on its people "until now" for a long time, until they didn’t. The presumption of growth is so pervasive that great swaths of economic theory simply fail to make any sense if a negative growth rate occurs. What, for instance, does a negative discount rate portend?

Perhaps it’s because much of the theory breaks down under economic decline that the presumption of growth pervades everything economists do. Even the Stern report, which is based on enough understanding of our circumstances to see that unconstrained carbon emissions are to be avoided, has to torture economics a bit to come up with the result. More striking, though, Stern speaks of the consequences of failure in terms of "slowed growth" and not of actual, you know, catastrophe.

Well, the cockroaches and jellyfish won’t consider it a period of absolute decline, I guess …

The whole growth thing becomes a toxic addiction. The only path to a soft landing is down; we in the overheated economies need to learn not just to cope with decline but to celebrate it. We need not just an ideology but a formal theory that can not only cope with reduced per capita impact but can target it.

Decline isn’t bad news in an airplane. Decline is about reaching your destination. Perhaps there is some level of economic activity beyond which life gets worse? Perhaps in some countries we have already passed that point? Could the time where we’d all be better off with a gradual decline have arrived? How much attention should we pay to the folks who say we should keep climbing, that there’s no way we can run out of fuel, that we’ll think of something?

I think the soft landing is still within our grasp. The longer we treat the people who call themselves economists as a priesthood above criticism rather than as a human subculture with serious dysfunctions, the bumpier the best landing we can achieve gets. Climate change is just a symptom, though an increasingly salient one. I suggest that the core problem lies in our collective failure to consider what human decency means and to use that understanding to manage what money means. We don’t have to listen to people who get that backwards.

I have no objection to that approach and am pleased to be somewhat distantly associated with it. That said, I did not leave the event with great enthusiasm for Sundalow’s book. It was worthwhile in that it drew for me a sharp distinction between can-do optimism and unrealistic, delusional optimism.

I think a train wreck of development, energy, food, environment, and warfare, all driven by a hugely overpopulated planet, is going to be very hard to avoid. I think we can avoid it, and even when I am pessimistic I whistle a happy tune and act as if we can avoid it — because without optimism there is no hope. Optimism is a moral imperative. That said, it needs to be reality-based optimism. Sometimes the things we want to work aren’t the things that are going to work.

I won’t bother describing the peculiar literary device in Sundalow’s book. Here’s some PR, with some impressive blurbs: Bill Clinton, Richard Lugar, Wesley Clark. Here’s a favorable review with an audio link. Alas, they are all badly wrong. The species of wrongness exhibited here is a form of middle-of-the-road lawyers’ science, in which physical reality is forced to take a back seat to some convenient, pseudoreasonable political posturing.

Sundalow thinks all of our problems will be magically resolved by plug-in hybrids. Somehow he manages to convince himself that this not only removes the need for oil (of course, with present driving patterns it doesn’t) but that somehow it will solve our electricity problems as well.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against instrumental solutions. If someone could find a way to cheaply stabilize carbon, I would not try to legislate my aesthetic. I’d just smile tolerantly and let the Republicans have their fun hauling their three-ton vehicles across the state to their NASCAR thing. (I’d still want a decent bike lane in town though.)

The trouble is, Sundalow keeps saying things that aren’t true. Like the part about electric cars being so much more “efficient” than gasoline cars that even a coal-powered electric car has less CO2 emissions than a gasoline powered car. He says this in the book and he said it at the podium. He obviously believes it. Clearly, Clinton, Lugar, and Clark are not unwilling to believe it. It sounds completely wrong to me. Consider that the electric car, all else equal, starts a factor of two behind. Then put transmission losses behind that. I just find the claim beyond the bounds of credibility.

Similarly, he has very positive things to say about corn-based ethanol. Well, that isn’t my thing, but everyone I respect who has anything to say about it thinks it is completely delusional. This is where matters got interesting in the seminar.

There were a couple of engineers in the audience (in their requisite plaid shirts) who were adamant that even the absurd slightly-better-than-break-even proposition that the corn ethanol people are pushing is completely overoptimistic. They claimed — in rather angry tones — that in the analysis they had seen, 92 percent of the energy in the ethanol that was required just for the distillation process is unaccounted for.

Now, I’m no chemist. I’m not exactly sure how to treat that number or that claim. The thing is that I would not do what Sundalow did about it. I would say “please give me your card after this talk, I would love to investigate that claim, I need to understand the implications.” What Sundalow did was pretty much shrug and move on.

This sort of optimism is exactly what makes me a pessimist. We need our policy class to have the competence to evaluate competing claims. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to be an expert on everything. It does mean that they need to know whom to trust, they need to ask the right questions, and they should not try to divert attention from inconvenient counterarguments as if they were arguing in a courtroom or a political debate. Foolish optimism is about the most dangerous sort of error. As Richard Feynman said, nature cannot be fooled.

I have nothing against plug-in hybrids. It’s a promising technology, and it may well help matters quite a bit in combination with new electricity sources and various other strategies. We need to move forward on lots of fronts to limit our problems and avoid the abyss. Declaring something to have magic powers, though, will not make it so. No matter how much ethanol we make, for instance, it appears we won’t be better off. Maybe the guys in plaid got it right: we are substantially worse off with every gallon.

I was a bit nervous about attending a Live Earth event. At 52, I thought I’d be at least twice the age of most of the people I’d encounter. I needn’t have worried.

I attended two Live Earth house parties in Austin, Texas, and saw nobody under 30 except the kids of one of the hosts. I looked for online pictures of other parties elsewhere and saw about the same thing: mostly folks in their 50s with some 40-somethings and 60-somethings in the mix.

Both events were wonderful. I met several excellent people, started a few balls rolling and jumped on a couple of bandwagons, to mix metaphors.

But there was no sign of any successful appeal to youth in what I saw, and the photoblogs of Live Earth house parties I have dug up so far have been pretty similar.

I am hoping this event nucleates some sort of global political movement. It’s not clear whether our problems can be solved even at the national level. Ultimately, the whole world needs to pull together to defeat the forces of sectarianism and fear. I had been left believing that many younger people agree.

Yet as far as I can tell, given the opportunity to make connections they didn’t show up, even though, I guess, they were the target of the extravaganza. Was it like that where you are?

If you’re under thirty, what did you think of the event? Did you participate in any of the house parties? If so, did you meet anyone worth meeting? If not, what kept you away?

The bad news is that we are in quite a pickle.

The good news about the bad news is that the national science academies of the G8 countries, along with those of Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, China, and India, have issued a unanimous and remarkably strong statement (PDF) about our global energy quandary.

The bad news about the good news about the bad news is that the press is almost totally silent about it, at least in English-speaking countries.

Among the crucial statements in this document (PDF):

• “Our present energy course is not sustainable."
• "Responding to this demand while minimizing further climate change will need all the determination and ingenuity we can muster."
• "The problem is not yet insoluble but becomes more difficult with each passing day."
• "G8 countries bear a special responsibility for the current high level of energy consumption and the associated climate change. Newly industrialized countries will share this responsibility in the future."

Let me be as polite as I can stand about this. Where in the @$#! is the press? A unanimous statement by what amounts to all the world’s scientists is not some transient breeze in the to and fro of politics. These are the facts, according to almost all the extremely smart people whom we ask to figure out what the facts are. Everywhere.

I have friends in the press, and I hate to be confrontational, but this is beyond inexcusable. Can we please draw people’s attention to this, at least a hundredth the attention directed at cheap Hollywood scandals?

I’d appreciate some bell clanging in the blogs about this. I am unhappily astonished by the deathly silence that has greeted this remarkable statement. Let’s fix it. Thanks in advance.

This seems on its face a good question. Economists like Bjorn Lomborg take this reductionist recipe, spice it with an unshakable confidence in future growth, and conclude that climate should be low on our list of priorities.

Lomborg’s arguments follow from his assumptions. If his conclusions are wrong as they appear, perhaps the logic is wrong, or the data, or the underlying premises. All of these are good places for skeptical inquiry, and may be fruitful, but there is yet another place to look. I suggest that Lomborg asks the wrong question.

Is greenhouse gas accumulation important than water security, food security, global health, or peace? Phrased that way, of course not. Climate is clearly in last place on such a list. It doesn’t require a team of Nobel laureates in economics to make the determination. The trouble is that these aren’t really separate questions at all!

If the 21st century goes badly, but not so badly that history comes to an end altogether, the disaster will be called a “war” or “anarchy” No matter which part of our portfolio as planet managers we neglect, failure will eventually come out as vicious, stupid, violent squabbles between mutually hostile groups.

Peace (or “free trade” as the economists insist on calling it) depends on food, water and health every bit as much as it depends on universal tolerance and a modicum of mutual respect. Roughly speaking, peace is a name for success and war is a name for failure.

War arises from two main causes: intolerant cultures and poverty. Poverty is almost always a factor.

Who is so poor that they become violently angry at people who are less poor than themselves? People who lack food, water, shelter, and medicine.

So, if we end up badly, the proximate cause will be resource contention; we will be fighting each other for food or water. We may think we are fighting over principle or religion, but in fact we will be fighting over table scraps.

There is some maximum population that the planet can support agriculturally. The limiting factor appears to be fresh water. In many places, water is obtained extractively rather than sustainably. Many argue that we already have exceeded our long-term carrying capacity. Some soil management practices are also extractive; depleting soils may also play a role in limiting population (see Joel Cohen’s magnificent book How Many People Can the Earth Support?).

Now consider what the impacts of climate change are on food and water security. As rainfall belts shift around, as the ocean circulation wobbles around from one year to another, annual climates will become unpredictable. Severe local events will increase as a consequence of te increased energy content of the wetter atmosphere, but subtropical dry belts will grow, and may show a marked wander from year to year. Pest ranges will broaden. Huge areas may become unsuitable for agriculture altogether. This appears to be happening even now in most of Australia. Meanwhile, coastal infrastructure will be under severe stress from sea-level rise.

None of this will be good for food, water, or medicine.

Climate change will not kill us before other problems do, but those other problems will have been greatly exacerbated by climate change. Investment in climate change is investment in food, water, health, and peace. That’s why the dichotomy that Lomborg proposes is nonsensical.

Interestingly, Lomborg is now further stacking the deck by limiting the question to five-year windows.

We don’t live in an economy; that’s an abstraction, a theory that is useful for some purposes and not others. We live on a planet, in fact, a biosphere, a unique collection of solids and liquids that miraculously has given birth to many amazing species, and most perplexingly, to ourselves. In the context of a billion year miracle we have no right to limit our thinking to five-year windows.