A few years back, Robert Redford narrated a documentary, Fighting Goliath, that told the epic Texas tale of how a coalition of ranchers, environmentalists, and others banded together in the mid-2000s against a giant power company’s plans to build 11 coal plants that would have belched pollution across the state. The film includes scenes of billowing smoke, militant big-city Texas mayors, and protesters carrying signs crying, “No more coal.” One farmer tells an interviewer, “’Til this thing came about, I always looked the other way when I saw an environmentalist.”

When the dust settled, only three plants were approved, and the rest were killed in a buyout of the power company, despite an effort by Gov. Rick Perry (R) to fast-track the scheme.

Today in West Texas, the simple heroism of that tale has been replaced by a far more complex story of trade-offs, pragmatism, and scientific uncertainties about a project slated for what Odessa city officials call “the clean energy capital of the world.” At the heart of it all is one of the very first full-scale tests of that still hazy concept, “clean coal.”

Lying in Penwell, Texas, 15 miles west of Odessa, the $2.5 billion Texas Clean Energy Project would carry out the vision of many scientists and technocrats of turning coal into clean-burning synthetic gas and capturing carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, where it would contribute to global warming. The plant, which enjoys nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in federal aid, would create 1,500 construction jobs over three years, 200 permanent jobs, and make 750,000 tons a year of urea for use on as fertilizer on cropland.

The project’s manager and its most visible spokesperson is former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller, who not coincidentally was the rock star of the anti-power plant effort. Speaking recently to members of the Society of Environmental Journalists, Miller recounted that at the end of that struggle, “I left office, and I was asked, ‘Why don’t you go all around the country to fight coal plants?’ I said, ‘It’s not easy to stop them.’”

“I really want to raise the bar forever,” she said, “so nobody can build a dirty coal plant anymore.”

The devil, however, is in the details.

The plant would transform 2 million tons of coal into synthetic gases each year, then burn the gas to produce electricity. In the process, it promises to capture 90 percent of the greenhouse gases, or 2.5 million tons per year, that the plant produces. The total amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere would be less than 10 percent of a conventional coal plant with similar energy output, and less than 25 percent of a high-efficiency natural gas-powered power plant. It will also be capable of capturing 99 percent of sulfur dioxide, 90 percent of nitrogen oxide, and 99 percent of mercury.

Based on that simple accounting, the plant would be a marked improvement over a traditional coal plant. In fact, the U.S. Department of Energy calls this project “the cleanest coal-fueled power plant in the world.” The department has approved $450 million in federal grants for this project, and the Internal Revenue Service has funneled another $313 million to the project in investment tax credits.

But there’s much more to the story. First, the coal would be imported from strip mines in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin — a trip of 1,000 miles via diesel-powered train. Once the CO2 is removed from that coal, it will be piped in a liquid state to oil companies that will use it to boost production in one of the world’s petroleum hotspots: the 100,000-square-mile Permian Basin.

That’s right. This “clean coal” plant will increase the production of another fossil fuel — oil that could easily, when burned, create more CO2 than the coal plant saved in the first place.

The question of whether this project ultimately will produce more greenhouse gases than it saves went unstudied in the federal environmental impact statement that led to the $450 million grant. But an MIT study of a similar project already in operation in southern Saskatchewan doesn’t inspire hope, at least not in the short term. The Weyburn project by 2010 had injected a net 18 million tons of carbon dioxide into the ground to aid in oil extraction. That will enable the recovery of 130 million barrels of oil over 25 years, according to the study — and burning that oil in turn will generate 45 million tons of CO2. That’s a net increase of 27 million tons of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere.

In 2009, scientists at the Carnegie Mellon Institute did a major study of this type of project. (In official parlance, extracting CO2 and pumping it into the ground is called “carbon capture and storage,” and using it to pump oil is called “enhanced oil recovery.”) They found that these projects can have a net carbon benefit, but only if their “clean” power output creates enough of a carbon savings when displacing a dirtier plant to make up for the burning of the oil extracted with the CO2.

Even Susan Hovorka, a research scientist for the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, which gets one-third of its budget from industries including oil, says the Texas clean energy plant won’t benefit the atmosphere from a carbon standpoint. She called the Carnegie Mellon study “a good study, a legitimate study,” one that should cause concern among environmentalists.

There are two things worth mentioning about this. First, squeezing more oil out of existing fields is preferable to developing new fields in places like Alaska — or so says Laura Miller, who won at least the tacit endorsement for the Texas project from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund.

NRDC cites an oil and gas industry consulting firm’s study saying that injecting CO2 into “stranded” oil fields — what’s left after the fields are exhausted through conventional techniques — could recover up to 61 billion barrels of oil nationally using current technologies, or more than 10 times the U.S. annual production. New technologies could up that number to 137 billion barrels, according to the study [PDF].

Second, the plant itself will emit substantially less CO2 than a traditional coal-fired plant. But here, too, there’s a hitch. While the plant will sell half of its power to San Antonio (to replace power generated by a traditional coal plant slated to close in 2018), the other half will go to power the clean coal plant itself and the desalination plant that produces its water; to manufacture and distribute urea, sulfuric acid, and other commercial products that the plant will sell; and to pipe the captured CO2 to the oil fields.

Let’s run through this again: We’re burning fuel to haul strip-mined coal cross-country, then using that coal to generate electricity and liquid CO2 that will be used to pump more oil out of the ground to produce … more fuel?

“You’re simply using CO2 to get more CO2,” says Kyle Ash, a D.C.-based legislative lobbyist with Greenpeace.

Greenpeace opposes carbon capture and storage on economic as well as environmental grounds, and denounces enhanced oil recovery as “a scam.” The group cites a long list of cancellations of similar projects in Europe over the past 18 months due to economics and local opposition.

The leader of a local eco-coalition that decided not to fight the Texas project makes it clear that it was an agonizing choice.

Tom “Smitty” Smith, an Austin lobbyist of 25 years for Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen, marched arm in arm with Miller to fight the dirty coal plants. Smith said Public Citizen’s unequivocal view remains that there’s no such thing as clean coal, due to the environmental costs of mining coal and shipping it to even a clean power plant. Ultimately, however, the group decided there was little chance to stop the project in oil-rich Texas and that it was still better than a dirty coal or a natural gas plant.

“It was a decision we struggled over for months,” Smith says. “This is one that wakes you up at night.”

Miller defends the project. “It’s high time we start capturing the CO2 instead of emitting it,” she says. “Because of the international reluctance to do cap-and-trade or put a price on carbon, the only way to do that is if the projects can somehow be affordable. The only way to do that in the near future is enhanced oil recovery — you have to get revenue from CO2, not just bury it.”

And in the oil fields, CO2 will be an improvement over the alternative, she says. If “something soft” like CO2 isn’t used to get at the oil, something “more violent and more water-intensive” such as fracking will be used instead.

Hovorka adds that the plant will push clean coal technology forward, making future plants more affordable and less dependent on oil-drilling schemes to survive. “It’s the first step and hardest step to get the capture going,” Hovorka says. “It gets us halfway — and that’s not something to be disdained.”

All the needed permits are in, and in addition to the $763 million in federal backing, the Texas Clean Energy Project has $1 billion in investments from state-run Chinese companies. Assuming the remaining financing rolls in on time, the Summit Power Group of Dallas hopes to start construction next year and open by 2016 or 2017.

During online surveys, researchers switched up their language, referring to the fees as “taxes” for some, and “carbon offsets” for others. Broken down along party lines, the results showed that Democrats were almost equally likely to support the fees regardless of labeling. But independents’ support was roughly 60 percent stronger for an offset than for a tax. And Republicans were almost five times more likely to favor the fee if it was called an offset.

This is but one example, researchers say, of how framing is key when it comes to convincing people that climate change is an important issue, and why a better-framed and more pragmatic message would do the climate movement a lot of good. It’s not the first time people have pointed to a lack of marketing savvy among those pushing progressive causes, but with the public’s belief in climate change on the decline even while the risks increase, it is worth another look.

Those pushing back against climate change are up against a long list of obstacles that have made their issue far less popular in polls than even three years ago, including the recession, the rise of the Tea Party, the sharp decline in mainstream media coverage of climate change, and the outpouring of campaign contributions and ads from the fossil fuel industry. But climate activists have also just been “outmessaged” by their adversaries, who, for all their manipulation and dishonesty, understand better what resonates with the American public, says Kenneth Broad, director of the University of Miami’s Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy.

For those fighting climate change, Broad has this advice: “Know thy audience.”

Broad, who also co-directs the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, was one of three scholars of human behavior who laid out research findings on climate change as a cultural issue at a Society of Environmental Journalists conference this fall.

One of Broad’s fellow panelists, University of Indiana researcher Shahzeen Attari, laid out the task of reaching the public like a marketing specialist would. You need to frame issues in ways that individuals can relate to, she said. Multiple frames help, she added, such as “saving energy is a double dividend. It’s good for the environment and it’s good for you and your own budget.”

“You also need to use frames that are very visible to your audience,” Attari said. “Time magazine had a cover story showing a polar bear about to drown. The problem is, when was the last time you saw the polar bear in its natural environment?”

Asked for examples of successful social campaigns that could offer lessons for climate activists, Broad offered up the fight 20 years ago to ban chlorofluorocarbons, which were linked to the destruction of the ozone layer. “People associated that with skin cancer and got worried about kids. There was an outpouring of concerns from mothers,” he said. “Climate change hasn’t been framed as a health issue. But disease vectors related to mosquitoes are coming closer. We’re going to have malaria in South Florida.”

Scary stuff — but even scaring the daylights out of people with local threats has its limits, said the third panelist, psychologist-turned-economist Michel Handgraaf, an associate professor of economics at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Recent research in psychology shows that fear is not a great tactic because many people don’t like to be scared and end up simply ignoring your warning, Handgraaf said. He advocated the “efficacy” approach: convincing people that something can be done to remedy the situation.

Handgraaf framed the climate change dilemma through the story of peoples’ contrasting responses to the 2004 South Asia tsunami, and Africa’s ongoing hunger problems. “People aren’t giving money to Africa like to the tsunami victims, and the main reason, I think, is that the tsunami is something we can do something about. We give them money, and they can rebuild. They are OK again,” Handgraaf said. “Hunger problems in Africa are like a bottomless pit. You keep throwing money at it and it just doesn’t work.”

The next challenge: getting real about what actually can be done to ameliorate global warming. Last year, Attari and three other researchers conducted a study showing that when 525 people were asked to name the best way to save energy, the single biggest group, about 20 percent, responded, “Turn off the lights.” Studies show that this is flat wrong — people can save a lot more energy by installing energy-saving light bulbs and appliances, driving more fuel-efficient cars, and using solar and other green energy to heat and cool buildings.

But a separate 2011 survey by Yale researcher Anthony Leiserowitz and some colleagues offers hope for climate change advocates. As long as climate change was not mentioned in the questions, respondents showed wide, bipartisan support for measures that many experts say could lead to significant reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Majorities of Democrats, Republicans, independents, and even Tea Party members, for instance, supported more money for research into renewable energy sources, and tax rebates for people who buy energy efficient vehicles and solar panels. Majorities of all but Tea Party members supported requiring utilities to produce at least 20 percent of their electricity from renewable energy, even if household electric bills rose $100 a year.

Leiserowitz’s surveys also found strong bipartisan support for attacking global warming on local fronts — again with measures that weren’t called global warming fixes. They include requiring new homes to be more energy-efficient, building more bike paths, and increasing transit service. Independent voters also joined Democrats in supporting changing zoning rules to promote energy-efficient apartment buildings, mixed-use neighborhoods to encourage walking, and decreasing urban sprawl. Majorities of Democrats, independents, and Republicans also said it’s important to protect local water supplies, sewer systems, public health, agriculture, forests, wildlife, and coastlines from global warming.

Put all this together, and a major national effort, with simple clear messages, repeated often, by a variety of trusted sources, could not only restore public opinion on climate change to 2008 levels, but beyond, Leiserowitz said.

Leiserowitz acknowledged that progress on climate change rests on a whole host of factors, including the economy, the political makeup of Congress, the presidential election, and media coverage of the issue. But without better communication, he said, “we’re pretty much guaranteed that nothing will happen — or rather, that things will get worse.”

This is the second of two posts about Americans’ attitudes toward climate change. Read part 1 here.

The New York Times ran a story in October headlined, “Where did global warming go?” that cited polls suggesting that Americans had lost interest in climate change, or just didn’t believe in it. Climate activists have blamed the declines in some surveys on flawed questions. But polls by Gallup and PEW have shown similar recent declines. And one of the leading thinkers on the matter, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, says the numbers are not just an aberration.

In the fall of 2008, Leiserowitz conducted a poll gauging Americans’ thoughts on the matter. Seventy-one percent of respondents said they believed global warming was happening, while 57 percent said humans were causing it. Fast forward two years, and only 57 percent of respondents to Leiserowitz’s poll believed global warming was real, while just 47 percent blamed humans.

There was no smoke and mirrors. Leiserowitz asked the same, straightforward questions both times: Do you believe global warming is happening? Do you think it is caused by humans, by natural environmental changes, or something else?

It’s not just Tea Partiers who doubt the severity — or existence — of the problem. In a third poll conducted this May, Leiserowitz and three other researchers found that only 36 percent of independent voters — the ones who swing most national elections — thought global warming should be a high or very high priority for the president and Congress. Only 43 percent of independents said they thought global warming is caused mostly by human activities, compared to 62 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans.

Why can’t Americans seem to get their heads around climate change? While the recession, the Tea Party, a lack of media coverage, and other forces have taken a bite out of public support for the issue recently, the problem has its roots in human nature, researchers say.

Columbia psychology professor Elke Weber was among the early researchers to look at why the seriousness of climate change was not getting through to the American public. She and her fellow scholars have pointed out that climate change is intrinsically challenging to understand: Its main causes are invisible, its impacts are distant and far off for most Americans, and its signals are often hard to detect.

Even those who understand the problem may have a hard time reacting to it, however. In her 2006 paper, “Why global warming does not scare us (yet),” published in the journal Climate Change, Weber wrote that fear is often the driving force causing people to try to extricate themselves from dangerous or risky situations. But statistics make lousy scare tactics. Peoples’ reactions to a risky situation often have little relationship to the statistical likelihood of the risk becoming reality or the magnitude of the catastrophe that could befall them.

People are much more likely to react to personal experience than to numbers, Weber wrote, and climate change hasn’t smacked Americans in their guts enough to prod them into action. If she is right, we’re the proverbial frog in a pot: As long as the water warms at rates that are not easily perceptible, we’ll be frog soup before we realize it’s too late.

Leiserowitz, in a previous job as a research scientist in Oregon, found in a 2005 study that many Americans are convinced that climate change is warming someone else’s pot altogether. In his national survey of 673 U.S. adults, published in the journal Risk Analysis, 68 percent of respondents were most concerned about global impacts such as declining living standards, water shortages, and damage to nature. They rated local impacts “as somewhat unlikely,” with only 13 percent most concerned about those. Of 24 categories of images associated with global warming, people responded most heavily to melting glaciers and polar ice.

In other words, he found that most people think “It’s the polar bear’s problem, not mine — and as long as it’s not my problem, I frankly have more pressing things to worry about.”

Kenneth Broad, director of the University of Miami’s Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy, and his fellow researchers have found that an increasing number of Floridians believe that global warming is happening now or will happen in the next decade — but that most of them think the problem will happen somewhere else.

“Miami is the only city in the developed world that is on the ‘top 10 most vulnerable’ list of cities for rising sea levels,” Broad said. “But Floridians still associate [climate change] with melting ice — It gets two or three degrees hotter here, big deal.”

In fact, two or three degrees would be a huge deal. Experts project sea levels in Florida will rise by three to five feet by 2100. With a two-foot rise, water would cover 28 percent of South Florida and wetlands would be lost as far from the coast as Homestead, about a 125-mile drive from Key West. Miami would become a barrier island.

Some (including Grist’s own climate hawk, David Roberts) say that in order to startle Americans out of their apathy about climate change, we need to ring the alarm bells even louder. Some scholars, however, warn that approach could backfire. In part 2 of this post, we’ll discuss how they think it could be done differently.

Flooding in Miami.Photo: kthread

Kipness says he never saw such flooding until a decade ago, but now sees it up to twice a day during the fall, when tides are especially high. He says he’s watched the undersides of $100,000 cars get rusted away by salt water.

This happens, many experts say, because of rising sea levels attributed to the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. We can expect to see more of the same across South Florida in the coming years, as a warming climate accelerates the faraway melting. Researchers are just now beginning to grapple with what this will mean for the inner workings of the city.

Miami is one of the world’s most vulnerable cities to rising sea levels from climate change, according to the international Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. Sea levels have risen nine to 12 inches here in the past century, and are expected to rise up to six more inches by 2030, 12 to 21 inches by 2060, and by three to five feet by 2100.

What will this look like? With a two-foot rise, water would cover 28 percent of South Florida and wetlands would be lost as far from the coast as Homestead, about a 125-mile drive from Key West. Miami would become a barrier island, Hal Wanless, chair of the University of Miami’s geology department, told members of the Society of Environmental Journalists, which held its annual conference here last week.

With a four-foot rise, 48 percent of the land in South Florida would be soaked, the Everglades would become an estuary, and two proposed nuclear plants at Turkey Point along the eastern coast would be underwater. At five feet of rise, storm surges would flow in all directions. At six feet, 56 percent of the land would be gone and 73 percent of what’s left would be less than two feet above sea level.

“In other words, you wouldn’t want to live in it,” says Wanless, who co-chairs a science committee for the Miami-Dade County climate change task force.

But while those scenarios have been well studied, another has barely peeped onto the experts’ radar screen — the potential for large-scale gentrification of lower-income, minority areas on higher ground by affluent, coastal residents who would buy and fix up aging homes there, pushing existing residents out.

Gentrification is already spreading in Miami’s urban core with an increasing array of high-rise condo projects along Biscayne Boulevard north of downtown. As sea levels rise, development pressure is bound to push further, to the neighborhoods along the coastal ridge, standing 15 to 20 feet above sea level.

These ridge areas were settled as long ago as the 1920s and ’30s, when blacks came to the Overtown area. After much of the area was drained to allow for development, Asians, Cubans, and Haitians settled on the ridge land.

“It’s where they built the railroad — nobody wanted to live along the railroad,” says Kipness, the retired fishing captain. “It’s the last place to flood.”

In Little Haiti along Northeast 2nd Ave., starting a bit north of downtown, a large Haitian community has found a niche and opened stores with French and Creole names such as Jenin’s Grocery, Pinan Bauta restaurant, and Libreri Mapou bookstore. A sign offers “unlimited calls to Haiti” for $39.99 a month.

Gentrification is already reshaping this and other inland areas, says Hugh Gladwin, an associate sociology-anthropology professor at Miami’s Florida International University. “It’s creating pressure on neighborhoods that have houses on high ground.”

Gladwin, who doubles as director of Florida International’s Institute of Public Opinion, is one of the few people in the region to publicly raise this issue of sea-level-driven gentrification. “Somebody’s going to go there and it’s probably going to be somebody with money,” he says.

If tough decisions have to be made to relocate people from the coast, it will require higher densities in the urban core, said Nichole Hefty, climate change program coordinator for the Miami-Dade County government, at the Little Haiti Cultural Center. “How do you do that without immense human costs? What happens to a thriving community when you suddenly have to make these decisions?”

Gladwin predicts that if the Haitian-American community is driven from Little Haiti, they’ll just go somewhere else because a goodly number of them are “U.S. citizens, hardworking and smart. The worst problems are going to be for Hispanics, particularly Cubans, who came here more recently and who don’t speak English.”

Other cities have installed floodgates to protect from storm surges and rising tides, but Miami is not the Netherlands, where authorities can stick walls into the ground to hold back the sea, says Jayantha Obeysekera, chief modeler for the six-county South Florida Water Management District. “Our groundwater system consists of limestone — it’s very porous, it’s like Swiss cheese.”

To cope with the rising seawater that seeps in through the ground, and with flooding created by stormwater runoff, authorities have built 28 pump stations in the region. But the water district’s Obeysekera says pumps and other technological fixes won’t protect everyone from higher seas. “If the sea level rise is two or three feet, water would come around structures into low-lying areas — if you put as many pumps in as you want, it won’t protect you,” Obeysekera says.

Still, many in this city cling to the belief that technology can overcome the coming floods. Realtor Scott Diffender has lived in the Miami Beach area for nearly 20 years. He has watched high tide flooding increase and rust out more and more cars. But he doesn’t think he’ll have to leave.

“There’s billions of dollars of real estate there,” says Diffender, who runs a homeowners association on Belle Isle, a barrier island between Miami and Miami Beach. “I can’t believe they can’t protect it.”

Even if they could work, the fixes would be pricey. Pump stations and other technological fixes would cost $500 million to $1 billion over the next 70 to 100 years, raising monthly household utility bills by up to $100, according to a new report from scientists at Florida Atlantic University in Fort Lauderdale.

Still, another member of the county’s climate change task force offers a vision that is somewhat less apocalyptic than some of her colleagues’. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, dean of the University of Miami’s architecture school, agrees with Gladwin and others that some gentrification is a likely outcome of rising sea levels, but says that the local government could find ways to do “triage,” allowing some neighborhoods to go underwater, while saving others.

“We can make decisions on what to protect,” says Plater-Zyberk, who, along with her architect partner and husband Andres Duany, is one of the country’s leading thinkers on new urbanism and sustainability. “A shopping center in the lowlands is a box full of air, and we may not want to protect it. A downtown area in the lowlands, we may want to protect.”

And some areas will be able to adapt, Plater-Zyberk says, just as some parts of Venice have been able to adapt to that city’s rising canal water levels. “We are ahead of Detroit. We have the opportunity to manage change over time.”