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Lessons from cognitive dissonance theory for U.S. environmentalists

If we accept the worst, or precautionary assessment, then U.S. environmentalists have perhaps a year to avert cataclysm, and nothing we are doing now will work. We are dealing with this terrible situation in a very ordinary and human way: by denying it.

Our denial comes in a variety of forms: we believe that President Obama can and will solve the problem; we ignore Jim Hansen's assessment and timeline; we concentrate on our jobs and organization agendas and pass over the big picture; we focus on the molehill of climate policy rather than tackle the mountain of climate politics; we assess our efforts by looking back on how far we have come and do not measure the distance still to be traveled; we scrupulously avoid criticizing each other, lacking conviction in our own courses of action and not wishing to invite criticism in turn; and we are irrationally committed to antique approaches that are self-evidently inadequate.

In our hearts we know that what we are doing is futile, but we do not know what else we should or could be doing. The constraints within which we work feel so intractable and out of human scale that we cannot imagine how to break them. Despite our best efforts, Americans just don't seem to get it or they don't care, and we are at a loss to explain this. Unable to influence our own nation, we are further dismayed by the far vaster challenge of altering the trajectory of China, India, Brazil, and the rest of the world.

Nothing we now confront should be a surprise. We have known for more than thirty years that the world was bound to reach this state (with twenty years specific warning on climate). The purpose of environmentalism was to alter the self-destructive parabola of growth by introducing new values and sensibilities, which, as has been clear for some time, we have manifestly failed to do.

We are the ones who warned the world what was to come and we are the custodians of the only true solution, yet our current best ideas amount to no more than fiddling with the dials of corporate capitalism (cap-and-trade) and gussying up environmental policy as one item on the domestic progressive agenda (green jobs).

We do not seem capable of taking even the most elementary steps to extricate ourselves from the trap in which we find ourselves. Why, for example, have we never convened a general conference of environmental leadership to consider what to do, or formed an association bigger than the sum of our parts? Why do we not spend some of the billions in our control to experiment with new approaches and campaigning (or support those already doing so)? Why is there no internal debate or discussion other than a quarrelsome wrangling over the minutia of policy?

Alice Waters' move into the political sphere is hitting some bumps

I'm hesitant to step in the middle of any debate over Alice Waters' contributions to food policy. But suffice it to say that, as she moves more and more aggressively into politics, she is taking some hits. Ezra Klein sums up the Alice Waters paradox this way:

Good food -- the sort Waters features at her restaurant -- is considered a luxury of the rich rather than a social justice issue. As Waters frequently argues, no one is worse served by our current food policy than a low-income family using food stamps to purchase rotted produce at the marked-up convenience store. Her vision is classically populist: It democratizes the concrete advantages -- health, pleasure, nutrition -- that our current food system gives mainly to the wealthy. But her language is suffused with the values and the symbols of, well, the sort of people who already eat at Waters' restaurant. Thus, in promoting an agenda that benefits poor people with little access to fresh food, Waters tends to communicate mainly with rich people interested in fine dining.

She's been fighting the elitist tag for some time -- as well as a reputation for being a bit, well, overbearing. According to a recent article in Gourmet, she overwhelmed even former President Clinton years ago with her passion over a White House vegetable garden. After receiving a letter from the Clintons suggesting that a front-lawn vegetable garden wasn't in keeping with the formal landscaping of the White House, Waters couldn't restrain herself:

[S]he fired off another letter. Apologizing for "being so insistent," she begged to differ, reminding him that "L'Enfant's original plan for the capital city was inspired by the layout of Versailles, and at Versailles the royal kitchen garden is itself a national monument: historically accurate, productive, and breathtakingly beautiful throughout the year."

It was the end of their correspondence.

Ouch. And the Obamas, while unfailingly polite in person, have so far resisted Waters' attempts to be pulled into their circle of informal advisors. Having nothing to do with Waters, it's well-known that hobnobbing with aesthetes can be dangerous to your electoral prospects and the fact remains that Waters is, at heart, just that.

Join new climate-action Facebook application, win rewards

If you haven't already heard, Grist is tickled to be the editorial sponsor of Hot Dish, a climate change news-'n'-activism Facebook app that has all the cool kids talking. It's the brainchild of online social media and news aggregator NewsCloud, made possible by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. (Yours truly even had a hand in it.) Hot Dish is where online news meets real-world action to fight climate change.

Grist helps drive the conversation around the day's top climate change news, and Hot Dish enables users to share it with each other within the comfy confines of Facebook. But wait -- there's more! Users can join the Action Team to complete challenges and earn points by, say, writing to a congressperson, setting up composting, or volunteering with an environmental group.

Low permit prices undermine infrastructure transformation

Back when I worked developing large software systems, every now and then we ran into a bug that management decided was too much trouble to fix -- "It's not a bug. It's a feature!" This is the approach that Kevin Drum seems to be taking when it comes to volatility in cap-and-trade programs.

The short version of the volatility problem is that with a trading system, permit prices vary not only in response to how many permits are issued, but also in response to general economic conditions. As a result permit prices bounce up and down a lot. Kevin, like a number of cap-and-trade supporters argues that this volatility is a good thing, because permit prices drop during bad times when people don't have money to invest, and they rise during times when they do. In short they argue that counter-cyclicality makes volatility positive rather than negative. But, just as in the software industry, I'm afraid it is still a bug, not a feature.

To the extent that emissions pricing accomplishes anything it drives investment in emission reducing infrastructure. But when emission prices drop too low, firms project long-term prices to be low as well. Managers get a lot more points for increasing or preserving market share than they do for managing environmental risks. Top bosses don't want to hear that emissions costs are going to rise, and the company needs to invest in reductions to comply with a cap-and-trade system. They want to hear that they can concentrate on their core business and buy low-cost permits from all the other firms reducing emissions. There is always a sound business case to be made for the other guy to reduce his pollution.

Glacier National Park to go glacier-free a decade early

[I welcome your ideas for a new name for the park. See the pictures of Grinnell Glacier circa 1940 and 2004.]

National Geographic News reports the oft-repeated statistic that the glaciers at Montana's Glacier National Park will disappear by the year 2030 is being revised:

But Daniel Fagre, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist who works at Glacier, says the park's namesakes will be gone about ten years ahead of schedule, endangering the region's plants and animals.

The 2030 date, he said, was based on a 2003 USGS study, along with 1992 temperature predictions by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"Temperature rise in our area was twice as great as what we put into the [1992] model," Fagre said. "What we've been saying now is 2020."

Yet another climate impact occurring faster than the models had projected.

As noted in my November post Himalayan glaciers "decapitated," glaciers all over the world are melting faster than previously expected, such as the Naimona'nyi Glacier in the Himalaya (Tibet):

If Naimona'nyi is characteristic of other glaciers in the region, alpine glacier meltwater surpluses are likely to shrink much faster than currently predicted with substantial consequences for approximately half a billion people.

Significantly, the U.K.'s Guardian reports, "China plans 59 reservoirs to collect meltwater from its shrinking glaciers" (see here). The article warns, however, "It is unclear, however, how long the water can be stored without replenishment."

For more on what is happening around the world, see "World's Glaciers Shrink for 18th Year" here and "AGU 2008: Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003" here. For some amazing pictures, see here.

The Glacier National Park story notes:

Obama’s budget would cut subsidies to oil companies and change transport funding

With all the buzz last week about the climate plan and green spending incorporated into President Obama’s proposed budget, we almost missed a few other environmental aspects. The budget also kills funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, as David noted, and it cuts subsidies for Big Oil and changes how transportation funds are […]

Duke University's study on the intersection of green jobs and rust belt manufacturing

Check out this report [PDF] from Duke University, completed in conjunction with Environmental Defense Fund and a coalition of labor unions. It is on the economic benefits of energy recycling. This is Chapter 7 of an on-going series on Manufacturing Climate Solutions that is focused specifically on those green technologies that can benefit the U.S. manufacturing sector.

Green jobs, to be sure, but not in the Van Jones sense where the green pulls the job, but in the sense that businesses who seek to be green can boost their profitability and protect existing jobs.

To be sure, there's a fair amount in here about our company, but I think the conclusions are generalizable, as is the political benefit to be gained from "strange bedfellows" of environmentalists and rust belt industries (and their employees). Worth the time to read.

Sweden’s ozone layer thickest in decades: institute

STOCKHOLM — The ozone layer over Sweden was thicker in February than it has been in decades, the Swedish meteorological institute SMHI said on Tuesday. Measurements taken at SMHI’s station in Norrkoeping, just south of Stockholm, showed the ozone layer was at its thickest in February since recordings there began in 1988, with a measurement […]

The NYT asks: are we shaming our politicians about their lifestyles enough?

Eager to find new ways to trivialize the warming of the planet, the New York Times has been reporting on the carbon footprint of individual politicians and legislatures.

They are abetted in this effort by Terra Eco, a French environmental magazine that has calculated British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's footprint to be -- quelle horreur! -- 8,400 tons of CO2 per year. By my calcs, that's about 0.0001 percent of America's carbon footprint, so as soon as Brown buys a bicycle, we should have the climate problem pretty well licked.

In the meantime, I applaud Terra Eco's work on this important issue, and look forward to their upcoming report on the size of Al Gore's swimming pool.

He is not 'guilty of inaccuracies and overstatements' and is owed a correction by the NYT

I will examine here the February 24 New York Times article by Andy Revkin to show that Al Gore is not "guilty of inaccuracies and overstatements," as he was accused.

Part 1 detailed how Roger Pielke, Jr. started all this by repeatedly misstating what Gore had said in his AAAS talk (video here). These indefensible charges would have died on the gossip grapevine of the blogosphere, had they not been picked up by Revkin.

I have written multiple emails to Andy in an effort to get him to clear Gore's name in print, and he refuses. If he won't, I feel that someone must for the record and the search engines. If I could clear Gore's name without criticizing Andy, I would. But I can't.

My reason for writing this post is simple. Having your reputation stained in print in the New York Times is a very big deal for anyone because:

• That story is reprinted and excerpted around the planet. It lives on forever.
• The NYT is the "paper of record," and thus considered highly credible (though it shouldn't be).

Let's look at exactly what Revkin wrote in "In Debate on Climate Change, Exaggeration Is a Common Pitfall" (see here, original links, emphasis added):

In the effort to shape the public's views on global climate change, hyperbole is an ever-present temptation on all sides of the debate ...

Mr. Gore, addressing a hall filled with scientists in Chicago, showed a slide that illustrated a sharp spike in fires, floods and other calamities around the world and warned the audience that global warming "is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented."

...

Both men, experts said afterward, were guilty of inaccuracies and overstatements.

Mr. Gore removed the slide from his presentation after the Belgian research group that assembled the disaster data said he had misrepresented what was driving the upward trend. The group said a host of factors contributed to the trend, with climate change possibly being one of them. A spokeswoman for Mr. Gore said he planned to switch to using data on disasters compiled by insurance companies.

Do you see what Revkin did here?