Gristmill

A volunteer army takes on oceans of trash

This photo of a trash-covered beach in the Philippines was taken during the 2008 cleanup. Photo: Tamara Thoreson Pierce On a single day last September, some 390,000 volunteers collected 6.8 million pounds of garbage from coastal locations and waterways throughout the world, providing a stark and detailed snapshot of the trash polluting the world’s oceans. […]

U.K. Independent and Debategraph collaborate on visual climate policy … doohickey

This is a pretty cool widget:

It's a collaboration between the U.K. Independent and the folks at Debategraph.

It's all open, like a wiki, so if you feel so moved you can add to it or link elements or whatnot. (There's a lot of BS in it at the moment.) Play around!

As EPA moves on greenhouse gases, pressure builds on Congress to pass a climate bill

The Environmental Protection Agency is rapidly laying the groundwork for regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions, upping the pressure on Congress to pass a climate bill and beat the Obama administration to the punch. On Tuesday, the agency unveiled a plan that would require some 13,000 major polluters to report their emissions, creating the first comprehensive national […]

MIT's uber-hypocritical anti-scientific scientist went from denial to defamation

As an alum, I was happily surprised when a few weeks ago a senior MIT professor directed me to major study by a dozen leading experts associated with their Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change that made clear MIT had joined the climate realists.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has just doubled its previous (2003) projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C. Their median projection for the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in 2095 is a jaw-dropping 866 ppm. Human civilization as we know it could not survive such warming, such concentrations (see likely impacts here).

But there is one MIT professor who has remained blind to the remarkable strengthening of our understanding of climate science in the past 2 years -- Richard Lindzen. A general debunking of Lindzen's popular disinformation tracts can be found on RealClimate here.

At the Heartland conference of climate-change deniers that began Sunday in New York, however, Lindzen went from denial to defamation as he smeared the reputation of one of the greatest living climate scientists, Wallace Broecker.

Before discussing that indefensible and hypocritical smear, it is worth noting that the Heartland conference is so extreme that even "moderate" deniers, like John Christy won't go, as Andy Revkin reports:

John R. Christy ... said he had skipped both Heartland conferences to avoid the potential for "guilt by association."

Now when a guy who has been as wrong for as long as Christy has (see here) is afraid his reputation will be harmed by attending your conference, you are way, way out there!

And indeed, Lindzen chose to abandon what little is left of his professional reputation, as the astonishing report on the conference from Examiner.com makes clear:

The last American jaguar doesn’t have to be the last

Photo: Arizona Department of Game and Fish This piece was submitted by Kieran Suckling, executive director and co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity. The last known jaguar in the United States was killed Monday in what is increasingly looking like a bungled attempt to opportunistically radio-collar one of North America’s most endangered species. The […]

An argument for separating climate action and economic stimulus — sometimes

The January 12, 2009 issue of The New Yorker includes a well-written and in some ways inspiring article by Elizabeth Kolbert, profiling Van Jones, founder and president of Green for All. In the article, "Greening the Ghetto: Can a Remedy Serve for Both Global Warming and Poverty," Kolbert includes the following passage:

When I presented Jones's arguments to Robert Stavins, a professor of business and government at Harvard who studies the economics of environmental regulation, he offered the following analogy: "Let's say I want to have a dinner party. It's important that I cook dinner, and I'd also like to take a shower before the guests arrive. You might think, Well, it would be really efficient for me to cook dinner in the shower. But it turns out that if I try that I'm not going to get very clean and it's not going to be a very good dinner. And that is an illustration of the fact that it is not always best to try to address two challenges with what in the policy world we call a single policy instrument."

That brief quote generated a considerable amount of commentary in the blogosphere, much of it negative, and some of it downright hostile. This surprised me, because I didn't consider the proposition to be controversial, and I had chosen my words carefully, simply stating that "it is not always best to try to address two challenges with ... a single policy instrument." Two activities -- each with a sensible purpose -- can be very effective if done separately, but sometimes combining them means that one does a poor job with one, the other, or even both.

In the policy world, such dual-purpose policy instruments are sometimes a good, even great idea (gas taxes are an example), but other times, they are not. Whether trying to kill two birds with one stone makes sense depends upon the proximity of the birds, the weapon being used, and the accuracy of the stone-thrower. In the real world of important policy challenges -- such as environmental degradation and economic recession -- these are empirical questions and need to be examined case by case, which was my point in the brief quote. Since my further explanation of this point in the green jobs context (in an interview that lasted 30 to 60 minutes -- I don't recall) did not find its way into Ms. Kolbert's article (no fault of hers -- she had plenty of sources, plenty of material, and limited space), let me provide that explanation here.

Are we all Bernie Madoffs, and what comes next?

Yes, homo "sapiens" sapiens have constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes, whereby current generations have figured out how to live off the wealth of future generations. Yes, we are all in essence Madoffs (many wittingly, most not) or at least his most credulous clients. What comes next will be the subject of a multipart series.

I had been planning to write something on this for a while when NYT columnist Tom Friedman interviewed me for "The Inflection Is Near?" which appears in Saturday's New York Times:

"We created a way of raising standards of living that we can't possibly pass on to our children," said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks -- water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land -- and not by generating renewable flows.

"You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior," added Romm. "But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, 'This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...' Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy."

A few years ago I thought that aggressive action by governments around the world to push clean energy could spare the public dramatic lifestyle changes in the coming decades, but I have been convinced otherwise by

• the failure of U.S. leadership [thank you George W. Bush and the conservative movement stagnation]
• the remarkable shift in our understanding of climate science in the past two years
• China's decision to join the Ponzi scheme full throttle and emulate our rapaciousness (see here and here), and
• a recent, brilliant talk I heard (a teaser for a future post).

The adults, in short, are not standing up. Sadly, most haven't even taken the time to understand that they should.

And so every generation that comes after the Baby Boomers are poised to experience the dramatic changes in lifestyle that inevitably follow the collapse of any Ponzi scheme.

This global Ponzi scheme is not just a metaphor (see here), but for me a central organizing narrative of how to think about the fix we have put ourselves in.

What exactly is a Ponzi scheme? Wikipedia has a good entry:

A love of delicious farm votes beef crosses ideological boundaries

In December, ranchers fell into a panic over a nonexistent EPA proposal to tax methane emissions from cows. By February, panic was replaced by giggling: how could they every have worried over something so crazy as a "cow tax"? And now, to demonstrate how badly misplaced their fears were, a Democratic and Republican Senator have joined together to enshrine in law the sacred principle that American cows shall never be taxed. Smell the bipartisanship.

Including cattle in a cap-and-trade system is, of course, a fine idea. From an environmental perspective, cattle are a major source of a wide range of ills: methane emissions, land use changes, nitrous oxide emissions, ammonia emissions, etc. If you tally up the negative impacts of beef on human health and productivity, the societal cost of cows climbs even higher.

From an economic efficiency perspective, it generally doesn't make sense to exclude sectors from a carbon cap. We want emissions reductions to come from the fastest, lowest-cost sources available, and it's hard to imagine anything cheaper or lower-cost than reduced beef consumption. It takes decades to shut down a coal plant. It takes no time at all to not eat a strip steak. Moreover, energy is a primary input to just about every sector of the economy. The same can hardly be said for tender, delicious short ribs.

TVA: making Bozo look good

"Last week, I called TVA a bunch of arrogant Bozos. I guess I should have said arrogant clowns."

-- Sen. Tim Burchett, at a Congressional hearing on the Tenn. coal ash spill, explaining that he meant no offense to Bozo the Clown