Brian F. Keane, renewable-energy marketer, answers questions

Brian Keane. What’s your job title? I’m president of SmartPower. What does your organization do? SmartPower is a national nonprofit...

Global warming is not a scientific story

I'm a little late getting to this, but everyone should read Paul D. Thacker's interview with New York Times climate journalist Andy Revkin. There's one point in particular I want to comment on:

Has there been anything in your coverage that you think you've missed?

AR: Well ... I think there are ways I could have pushed to get the coverage outside the science section. There were some pretty great pieces on things like the Greenland puzzle and the whole abruptness issue, but those were always Science Times pieces and I guess that is a ghetto, ultimately. A bunch of readers won't get to see it.

This has been a failing not only of climate journalists, but of environmentalists and politicians as well.

Global warming is not a scientific story.

It's a spiritual story, about our relationship to the earth. It's a moral story, about our obligations to our descendents. It's a cultural story, about our consumerism and excess. It's a political story, about wealthy industries holding our democracy hostage. It's an economic story, about the transition to a kind of wealth that does not require waste. It's a sociological and psychological story, about the difficulty of mobilizing vast change in response to long-term challenges. And it's a personal story, about the ways we as individuals can contribute.

Science is not the story, it's the substrate. Science merely establishes that there is a story.

All of us -- climate journalists, environmental advocates, and everyone else -- need to start telling all of these stories, the whole dizzying, overwhelming, galvanizing array of them.

Ethanol dreams and ethanol realities

Christopher Cook has a piece in the American Prospect identifying my central concern about the ethanol boom.

To wit, here are the sustainability advocates:

An array of ideas are afloat to encourage a more sustainable biofuels expansion: a diversified renewable energy policy that, rather than expanding corn crops, promotes more wind power and cellulosic energy from switchgrass and crop residues (which may favor localized, small-scale production); a federal version of Minnesota's model, creating targeted incentives for farmer co-ops; and increased research spending by the USDA and Department of Energy to develop smaller-scale biofuels processing plants.

Sounds great, huh?

Here's the reality:

Chop Revenuey

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Environmentalism is dead? Long live environmentalism.

Thanks to David Roberts for highlighting an article in the current Washington Monthly, "The Emerging Environmental Majority" (by yours truly).

Here's the quick version: Each time in American history that environmental concerns rose to the top of the national agenda, support for ambitious government action came from a broad array of groups responding to an impending sense of crisis.

Having spoken to activists, historians, and politicians of the 1960s and 1970s, I believe there are parallels between today's mounting public concern over global warming and the prelude to our nation's last great era of environmental reform. In the decade before "Earth Day," city-based citizen groups across America worked to control pollution, union chapters focused on mining safety, sportsmen's groups worried about watersheds, and women's organizations highlighted the connection between pollutants and fetal health. These groups had diverse focuses, but the broad chorus for reform made green concerns impossible to ignore. In the early 1970s, Washington produced the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act, among other landmark laws.

Today public concern about global warming is approaching another tipping point. Climate-change campaigns are taking root among a widening spectrum of groups, from environmentalists to evangelicals, hunters to insurance companies, farmers to politicians. For ambitious measures to pass muster in Washington, global warming has to be seen, not as an issue for partisans, but as an issue affecting everyone.

Now, my original point was that David is one smart cookie (don't you agree?), and he raises some pertinent questions that I take a whirl at answering below.

Climate science, say hello to Decision Science

Recently, the issue of how to frame the global-warming debate has come up repeatedly. David sums it up here.

It's gotten me thinking about the confluence between climate science and decision science. Communicating about global warming can not be reduced to a simple up or down vote on the use of doom and gloom, or a tradeoff between bad science and a complete value change. In the end, how, when, and most importantly, why people start to seriously address global warming will be 1/10th about the climate science and 9/10ths about good ol' wacky human decision making.

Campuses across the country turn to renewable energy

"Leadership in sustainability could give [University of Florida] the edge it needs to be a Top 10 public university." That's the beginning of an article from UF's student paper The Alligator. Now read it again. (Just do it. Work with me, people!) Do you understand what that means? Let me spell it out for you: Sustainability = Mad Props. Really. That's what it says.

And apparently it's a growing trend; colleges are seeing green cred as an important factor in attracting students and getting high rankings from Those People Who Decide Which Colleges Are the Best and Which Ones Suck. And one way many schools are going for the green is by powering up renewable energy on their campuses. (Ha! "Powering up" ... you love it!)

Schools ranging in size from community colleges to major Ivy Leagues are moving toward renewable energy use (and gaining loads of green cred in the process):

• Napa Valley College has installed Northern California's largest solar array to provide 40 percent of its power.
• The Massachusetts Maritime Academy is erecting a wind turbine in hopes of cutting electric bills in half.
• Yale plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent below 1990 levels (hello, DIY Kyoto!) by investing in energy conservation and alternative energy sources.

And these schools certainly are not alone.

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