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Talking point: Fossil fuel morality

Arguments over energy tend to get technical, quickly: EROI, dollars per kilowatt, reserve estimates, capital costs, carbon lifecycles, ad infinitum.

Take a step back.

The argument against cutting fossil-fuel use is that it will cost too much. The economy couldn't take it. It's too hard.

It brings to mind something I read in Jeff Goodell's Big Coal -- a quote from an interview with author Ian Frazier, about Lincoln and slavery:

The arguments against slavery were always bumping up against this: "But it's an institution that's been around forever! What would happen if we got rid of it? How would you pay the people who lost their slaves, their valuable property? How would we harvest? It's not practical. What would we do?"

Lincoln's great moment was saying, "I don't care if it's destructive. Slavery is wrong."

You start with, "Is it right or wrong?" Then you act on that judgment. You don't say, "I'm not going to say it's wrong because it would be too impractical to undo."

Enriching despotic regimes, ravaging our landscapes, sickening the most vulnerable among us, and destabilizing our atmosphere are wrong.

So we should stop.

Period.

Do monopolies undermine the environment?

For many skeptics of the environmental benefits of market economies, the fear of monopoly control over natural resources is one of their greatest concerns. The reality is actually much more complicated; here's why.

Drill now, save never

The NYT has an editorial today critiquing the "Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act" the Senate is set to debate today.

The bill's stated purpose is to reduce fuel prices. But while the gulf may hold enough natural gas to affect the price of that commodity, the same cannot be said of oil. No matter where it looks, a country that consumes one-quarter of the world's oil supply while holding only 3 percent of the reserves will never be able to drill its way to lower oil prices, much less oil independence.

There's some opposition within the Senate:

Vicious circle

Records are falling all around in California.

A heat wave has been setting record temperatures. And then on Monday, California set a record for all-time peak electricity usage. From the NYT:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered state agencies to reduce electricity consumption by 25 percent, acting on a prediction from the state's power grid managers that demand would peak at 52,000 megawatts, a mark they had not expected to reach until 2011. Demand peaked at 50,270 megawatts at 2:44 p.m. Pacific time, breaking the record of 49,036 megawatts set last Friday.

More heat = more electricity usage.
More electricity usage = more carbon emissions.
More carbon emissions = ... you get the idea.

Maybe I’m Amazoned at the Way I Really Need You

Drought could turn Amazon into desert, researchers warn The Amazon rainforest — soon to be called The Artist Formerly Known as the Amazon Rainforest, and then just some weird little symbol — appears to be undergoing a second year of drought, and that has researchers seriously alarmed. Starting in 2002, scientists at the Woods Hole […]

Reps Gone Wild

House approves new wilderness areas in California, Oregon, and Idaho The U.S. House yesterday unanimously approved bills that would create over 1,000 square miles of new wilderness areas and protect 47 miles of rivers in California, Oregon, and Idaho. A bill to ban drilling in New Mexico’s Valle Vidal also passed. All of the bills […]

I’m goin’ back to Noonan, Noonan, Noonan

I am drawn, like a dazed witness to a bloody car wreck, back to Peggy Noonan's column in the Wall Street Journal last week. If you haven't read it, you really, really should. It is a marvel.

(As an aside: Noonan is a fixture of the Romantic wing of the conservative movement. She feels conservatism deeply. How deeply? She once said, "Bush the Younger would breastfeed the military if he could." She said the great truth of 9/11 "is not only that God is back, but that men are back. A certain style of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country ..." That's how deeply she feels conservatism.)

Noonan's short snippet on global warming contains a superabundance of dimwittery. There is dimwittery in every paragraph, every line, virtually every word. The syllables, the phonemes ... there is cluelessness at the molecular level.

Let us begin.

She laments ...

... how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? If it is real, is it necessarily dangerous? What exactly are the dangers?

Peggy, welcome to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an extensively peer-reviewed report from hundreds of scientists in over 120 nations. When you're done browsing there, please visit the National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. EPA ... oops, Bush got to that one.

Is it possible that Peggy's simply not aware of the IPCC, probably the most cited scientific body in the history of scientific bodies? That she lives in an ideological world so hermetically sealed she never stumbled across so much as a mention of any of the major scientific reports on global warming? If that is the case, the WSJ seems almost cruel for broadcasting her cry for help. Were she capable of embarrassment ...

Then, as so often, Noonan veers from plaintive to addlepated:

The hurricane problem

A group of 10 scientists who've disagreed with one another in the past about the influence of climate change on hurricanes has come out with a collective statement saying that the media is obsessing over the climate debate at the expense of the more immediate truth, about which there is widespread consensus: vulnerable places are being overdeveloped, and the U.S. government is subsidizing it.

We are optimistic that continued research will eventually resolve much of the current controversy over the effect of climate change on hurricanes. But the more urgent problem of our lemming-like march to the sea requires immediate and sustained attention. We call upon leaders of government and industry to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of building practices, and insurance, land use, and disaster relief policies that currently serve to promote an ever-increasing vulnerability to hurricanes.

Needed to be said.

Some quasi-philosophical blather

I can't bear to get back into the news just yet, so let's discuss this a little bit.

Are human beings part of the environment? You can answer in two ways.

If you say no, they're not, then you're stuck with the pernicious dichotomy between humans and nature that has bedeviled Western intellectual history and led to the illusion that we can dominate or control nature. Humans are rational creatures, in touch with some sort of Platonic realm beyond the grubby, irrational, violent chaos of nature -- that kind of thinking. Much of environmentalism has been devoted to trying to knock down that false dichotomy.

But if you say the environment does include human beings, then you're left with nothing that the environment doesn't include. "The environment" is thereby synonymous with "everything." But then the term is useless. Saying something is good for the environment becomes tantamount to saying it's good for everything. And that doesn't make any sense.

What can we learn from all this?

Back

Well, I'm back from the pony show. It went well.

Now I return to find a) so much stuff has happened that I couldn't possibly begin to blog about it all, and b) nobody outside the environmental community noticed, or likely cares about, any of said stuff. Sigh.

Anyway, I'm back in the saddle and will try to post on a few things that happened in my absence shortly. I know you're all relieved.