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Terror: Good or bad?

I believe the attacks in London today are horrific -- for the loss of life, obviously, but also because they distract attention from global warming and poverty in Africa, which are, in my humble opinion, much worse problems in the grand scheme of things.

A Fox News anchor agrees with me that the focus has shifted, but thinks, for that very reason, that the attacks are a good thing.

G8 climate fast

A group of activists is parked outside the White House, in the midst of a three-day fast meant to urge President Bush to join the rest of the G8 countries in committing to efforts to battle global warming. You can read more about the fast, and find out how to get involved, here.

We asked Billy Parish, coordinator of Energy Action, and Monica Brown, organizer for the Road to Detroit, to send us word of how it's going. Their dispatch is below.

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While President Bush is in Scotland stalling yet another international agreement on global warming, dozens of us from all over the country have gathered directly across from the White House to partake in a three-day fast to stop the madness. Our crowd of youth, environmental, and religious leaders is stranded on a small solar-powered platform along with any and all baggage, chairs, and banners, lest we provoke the fury of metro police, the SWAT team, or national park enthusiasts.

While doing backbends to comply with D.C. demonstration regulations -- keeping tents away from the "drip-line" of nearby saplings and chopping off the ".orgs" from all our signs -- we also happen to be giving up food in an effort to prevent the starvation and death of millions: the inevitable result of droughts and floods caused by global warming.

Studying eco-design

Looking to study eco-friendly design? Treehugger has a list of place where you can do it.

Attention all muggles

Planning on buying the new Harry Potter book? Buy Canadian.

A park for Ground Zero

Andy's post last week touched on the latest designs for the "Freedom Tower" at the site of the World Trade Center in New York City. I thought today I'd follow up from my perspective as a green-minded local. The terrible news of the bombings in London is an upsetting backdrop, but it reinforces my belief that we need to meet this kind of violence with positive visions for the future and the social and political will to realize them.

Right now, the process and designs for the new World Trade Center don't cut it.

The rebuilding effort long ago devolved into being more about the agendas of a few elites than what's best for the life and health (physical, economic, and emotional) of the city. It looks to the past -- the hokey insistence on a height of 1,776 feet, re-creation of office space the city almost definitely doesn't need (and would you want to work on the upper floors of a rebuilt WTC?), and the loss of clean energy generation on the site, even as the daily news is full of changing economics, peak oil, global warming, and war in the Middle East.

The "Freedom Tower" as originally designed by Daniel Liebeskind was an airy, glass-walled structure that combined transparency with scale, encapsulating the endurance and openness of America's democratic society. In succeeding iterations, the tower has become a military fortress, unconnected to life at a human scale in a civilian environment. I don't suppose I need to hammer home the symbolism of that. (It's also James Howard Kunstler's July 2005 Eyesore of the Month.) Check out this entry on Curbed (a New York real estate blog -- yes, we have real estate blogs here) to get an idea of how suffocating the "almost impermeable and impregnable 200-foot base" will be in real life.

More on London and the G8

Aargh. For the first time in five godforsaken years, issues of large-scale humanitarianism were topping the headlines, instead of war, anger, and intolerance. A genuine effort was underway to coordinate the world's largest and most powerful governments around two vital issues of our time: lifting Africa out of poverty and addressing global warming.

And now this. More violence, which will beget, as it always does, violence, anger, and territorialism in response.

We were struggling to find the higher angels of our nature, and now we're back to the reptile brain.

So goddamn frustrating.

As is becoming standard, Wikipedia is the place to keep up with developing news and links around the London tragedy. For coverage of how the Gleneagles participants are struggling to stay focused on the tasks at hand, check out Sciencegate, which has already become indispensable.

And for a reminder of how vital the G8 agenda remains, check out the SciDevNet feature on the connection between global warming and African misery.

Explosions in London linked to G8

A series of explosions during rush hour this morning in Central London at underground tube stations and on double-decker buses has claimed the lives of several commuters and injured more than 100. The city's transport system is now completely shut down as rescue teams and investigators clear the scene.

Although it's not yet known who is responsible for the explosions, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has called the incident a terrorist attack and suggested it was aimed at disrupting the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, this week.

"It is particularly barbaric that this has happened on a day when people are meeting to try to help the problems of poverty in Africa, and the long term problems of climate change and the environment," Blair said. "Just as it is reasonably clear that this is a terrorist attack, or a series of terrorist attacks, it is also reasonably clear that it is designed and aimed to coincide with the opening of the G8."

Blair has returned to London to deal with the incident, but said in a statement from Gleneagles at 1 p.m. BST: "We will not allow violence to change our societies or our values nor will we allow it to stop the work of this summit. We will continue our deliberations in the interest of a better world."

Interestingly, oil prices -- which reached $62 per barrel yesterday for the first time -- have plunged following news of the explosions.

PIPA poll: The impotence of mere belief

A big new poll from the Program on International Policy Attitudes shows widespread public belief in the phenomenon of global warming and broad support for action to fight it, even if that action hurts the economy (via Mooney on Scienceg8.)

I'll put some excerpts from the poll summary below the fold, but first a few caveats.

• Heed the wise words of Roger Pielke Jr., who points out that majorities have believed in global warming for years:
  

  ...the battle over public opinion about the existence of global warming has been won. Efforts made trying to convince the public that global warming is "real" are pretty much wasted on the convinced. The public overwhelmingly believes global warming to be real and consequential.

• Politically informed people tend to project their habits on others. The fact the the public says it believes in global warming, or that it supports a cap-and-trade system, doesn't mean that people have individually sat down, surveyed the science, assessed the policy possibilities, and come to considered conclusions. People more or less parrot conventional wisdom.
• Because they are parroting conventional wisdom, it doesn't matter much to them, and they don't follow it very closely. Polls are always finding widespread support for progressive policies, but conservatives keep winning elections because elections aren't fought over policies.
• One hesitates to sound cynical, but nevertheless: Never underestimate the ignorance of the American public. As you will read below the fold, almost half the respondents believe that Bush supports Kyoto. People just by and large know very little about what politicians support, and even less about what politicians are actually doing. Talk about global warming floats about the media and culture, and Average Joe and Jane assume that somebody somewhere is doing something about it.

What greens should get from this poll is not a thrill of hope that the tipping point has finally arrived. It was always a pipe dream that some magical study would come along to finally-once-and-for-all prove that global warming exists, and voi la, the world would change.

The public is already convinced, and has been for some time. What we need now are local activism, fresh stories to tell, innovative policies, dramatic representations, success stories, unflagging political engagement ... all that stuff. It's still going to be a long, hard slog to get where we need to go. But if nothing else, this poll shows that the raw materials are there to work with.

Now, some excerpts:

Jammin’ on traffic

From Gordon Price's most recent Price Tags newsletter -- a computer simulation of traffic congestion that will run on any java-enabled web browser.

It's mesmerizing to watch "phantom" traffic jams form -- temporary slowdowns in traffic caused just by congestion, without any obstacle in the road.

And the especially nifty thing (or big time-waster) for me is that you can tweak the settings -- traffic volume, driver politeness, road setup -- to see what kinds of things lead to more congestion. For example, traffic that flows along smoothly when the speed limit is set at 80 km per hour (about 50 miles per hour) might completely jam up when the speed limit is bumped to 100 kph (or 60 miles per hour). And the same road can jam up when speed limits are decreased to 40 km per hour. This may seem either counterintuitive or completely obvious, depending on your perspective. In both cases, though, it's pretty easy to identify with the little dots stuck in traffic -- the congestion patterns are all too familiar.

As drivers, we tend to think that we exercise conscious control over what happens on the road-- which makes it easy to blame other drivers' "mistakes" when traffic slows down for no apparent reason, as in a "phantom" traffic jam. So it's instructive to see that little computer rectangles following simple rules show the exact same kinds of complex traffic patterns that humans create. Which is a reminder, perhaps, that the rules of the road can have more of an effect on real-world outcomes (traffic or otherwise) than our conscious choices -- which really is something to chew on while you're stuck in traffic.

Portland and vanity

Re: the previous post, another quote from the Portland guy caught my eye:

Mr. Sten added that Portland's officials were able to curb carbon emissions only because the steps they took were intrinsically popular and cheap, serving other purposes like reducing traffic congestion or saving on electrical costs. "I haven't seen that much willingness even among our environmentalists," he said, "to do huge masochistic things to save the planet."

Two things to note here, related to my post on hypocrisy from yesterday:

• Sten hasn't seen much "willingness even among environmentalists to do masochistic things to save the planet." Me neither. There are people who will sacrifice amenities and conveniences to live a life of environmental virtue, but they are now, and will always be, in the small minority. Welcome to homo sapiens.
• But that's okay. The people of Portland are leading lives of increasing environmental virtue just by living in Portland. Thanks to some savvy organizing and good government, Portland has made structural changes -- new traffic lights, more transit routes, more bike trails, etc. -- that make extraordinary individual sacrifice unnecessary. They are making environmental virtue the path of least resistance.

What's the lesson?

Get involved in your community. Organize. Write letters to the editor. Run for city council. Join a campaign. Inform others. Get informed. Vote.

Change the structure of our collective life. All else is vanity.