Articles by David Roberts

Damn he’s smart

The Rocky Mountain Institute's Amory Lovins appeared on PBS's Charlie Rose Show on Tuesday. He was, as usual, brilliant and absurdly quotable. The guy's a human pull-quote generator. Charlie Rose is kind of dippy though. Here's the full video:

What kind of rhetoric creates social change?

In the course of questioning James Lovelock's apocaphilia, Jon Lebkowsky says this:

A solution to the problem of global warming begins with a cautious, balanced, and rational approach, and getting there is as much about our psychological and social frameworks than our ability to analyze and predict.

The latter half of that statement seems obviously true. But why should we believe that, among our many "psychological and social frameworks," the "cautious, balanced, and rational approach" is the most important or the most effective one?

A good interview

Worldchanging has a great interview with Andy Revkin, science/environment report for The New York Times. Here he makes a point similar one Andrew recently made:

Ultimately, the choices that confront us are values choices. The question of avoiding dangerous climate change revolves around the word dangerous, and the word dangerous is fundamentally a values-laden word. It's not a scientifically delineated term. We've been in this bollix since 1990. The negotiations leading to the Framework Conventional on Climate Change never defined the word dangerous because no one wants to touch it. The politicians know that it's too dangerous for them to define it. They toss it off to the scientists and the scientists say, "that's not our decision. We just tell you how much warming is going to happen, how much sea level will rise, and you figure out what level is unacceptable." So it goes round and round, until society really gets a clearer sense of what this boils down to: a decision about what is our responsibility to the next generation and what is our responsibility to our neighbor.

And as a special bonus, here's some footage of Revkin singing his soon-to-be-Top-40 smash, "Liberate Carbon":

It’s also the road to ‘energy security’

A few times now John has made a point I have made in the past and now shall make again (how's that for a self-referential intro?). To wit:

"Energy security" is a lopsided way of framing our energy problem, and left un-balanced, will do more harm than good.

Why? Because the shortest, cheapest route to energy security (or "independence," if you like) is through coal, and coal is ... wait for it ... the enemy of the human race. This is not just true for China and the U.S.; Germany, Britain, and even France are planning a slew of new coal plants.

For more on this crucial point, see this fantastic post from Jerome a Paris.