environment Politics: idiots scientific literacy
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Month 12, Day 20: Don’t Be Silly! They Couldn’t Hit An Elephant At This Dist—!
If only this had started happening, I dunno, maybe twenty or thirty years ago:
The United States’ top climate negotiator is calling on scientists and policymakers to orchestrate an “educational effort” to change the public’s perception about climate change.
Todd Stern, the country’s special envoy on climate change, pointed to a gap between what science says about the changing climate and what American’s believe.
“There is a gap and I think there is an educational effort that really needs to be made,” he said in a pre-taped interview with the energy and environment news program energyNow! that aired Sunday. Asked who should lead the education effort, Stern pointed to both scientists and policymakers.
Better late than never, I suppose.
Dear Mr. Stern,
Your call for a widespread educational effort to inform American citizens about the realities of climate change is absolutely correct. The news media have been at best irresponsible and at worst criminally negligent, at a time when we need accurate information more than ever. The opposition to the very notion of global heating in the Republican party has now reached a point where it is essentially an article of faith — a religious conviction, if you will. These two factors have combined in a deadly synergy that virtually guarantees a systemic failure to act in the face of the gravest threat humanity has confronted in millennia.
Ordinary citizens have little recourse in the face of such egregious misconduct in the corridors of power, and very few of us have the time or inclination to educate ourselves about the dimensions of the problem. Those who do will write letters and make telephone calls, and invariably we’ll be ignored by those who are beholden to the world’s largest polluters and the mountains of cash they manipulate.
If we are to forestall a tragic outcome for our species and for our planet, we need the strong and unambiguous voices of people who are prepared to speak with authority on the issues of climate, attacking attack the systemic propagation of ignorance everywhere. Your position as the chief climate negotiator for the United States gives you that authority. I urge you to organize a Climate Misinformation Task Force that will take on the ignorance engendered by the media and enabled by our dysfunctional political system.
This is a debate our species cannot afford to lose. If the ignorant and avaricious have the final say in the climate debate, that could be the last words of our civilization or our species.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Cancun media irresponsibility scientific literacy
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Month 12, Day 19: Only Two Things Are Infinite…
The York County, Maine, Journal Tribune (York County’s only daily newspaper) runs an editorial citing “modest progress” at Cancun. Hard to argue with that. I used it as the opportunity to call out our media and political establishments for their anti-reality programming.
With all due respect to an excellent editorial summary, I would submit that the biggest challenge to managing climate change may not be reining in the greenhouse emissions of China and the U.S. It’s true that China’s is the largest share of worldwide CO2 output; it’s equally true that the dubious honor of the most emissions per capita belongs to the United States. And while humanity has never faced a planetary threat greater than atmospheric carbon dioxide, getting it under control will be easier than making our politicians grasp the enormity of the problem. Denial of science and scientific expertise is now an article of faith for conservatives, and a simple economic decision for the fossil fuel industries which bankroll them. As long as our media keep playing the game of false equivalence, in which the opinion of an expert climatologist is “balanced” by a corporate shill from a conservative think tank, we’re never going to make any real progress on climate change. Meanwhile, of course, the clock is ticking, and the world is getting ever hotter.
Warren Senders
environment India: Cancun polluting industries
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Month 12, Day 18: Homeopathic Solutions for Climate Change?
Sunita Narain, the Director of India’s Centre for Science and Environment, is less than thrilled about the Cancun accord.
The first agenda before Cancun was to decide on how much the industrialized countries – primarily responsible for this global problem – would cut. The target discussed at the Bali conference in 2007 was a reduction of 40% over 1990 levels by 2020. So, tough decisions were needed at Cancun.
The Cancun deal has been struck by letting these countries off the hook. There are no targets. Instead, it has been agreed that now these countries will take action based on what they “pledge” to do. Take the US. If the target was being set (as was decided in Bali) on the basis of its contribution to the stock of gases already in the atmosphere, then it would have to reduce 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. Now, US has “pledged” that it will reduce zero percentage points in the same period. Cancun legitimizes its right to pollute. It is no wonder that it worked hard to stitch the deal. It is no wonder that western media and leaders are ecstatic about the breakthrough. It is their victory.
What Cancun has done is to shift the burden of the transition to the developing countries. If the combined pledges of the developed world are compared to those of the developing (including India’s commitment to reduce energy intensity by 20% by 2020) then the sell-out character of the deal becomes clear. The industrialized countries, who till now were being asked to take on the burden, will end up cutting less emissions than the developing world. They cut roughly 0.8-1.8 billion tonnes, against developing country pledges of 2.8 billion tonnes.
She has a point.
As an American citizen, I heartily concur with Sunita Narain’s assessment of the Cancun agreement. The inability of the world’s biggest polluters to take responsibility for the disaster they have fostered is a moral outrage, an ecological nightmare, and an economic travesty. What does it say about our system of values that wealth is so strongly correlated with pollution and environmental destruction? Of course, there are reasons for optimism in the fact that an agreement of any sort was reached at all; the current accord is assuredly better than the contentious travesty that was last year’s Copenhagen summit. But it’s hard not to feel that we’ve slapped a tiny bandage on a huge wound; when humanity confronts a threat that may well destroy the lives of billions, we need robust, concerted and immediate action to end our dependence on fossil fuels if our species and our civilization are to survive.
Warren Senders
environment: Arctic ice melt scientific consensus
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Month 12, Day 17: The Idea Of North
This is a first for me; I have never written a letter to Nunatsiaq Online before. They ran an article about a conference in Ottowa where a whole bunch of Arctic climate specialists got up and said, more or less, “AAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!”
Nunatsiaq is pretty far North:
A is me. B is Iqaluit, Nunatsiaq. Google:
We could not calculate directions between 300 High St, Medford, MA 02155 and Iqaluit, NU X0A 0H0, Canada.
I asked Travelocity to find me fares between Boston and Iqaluit:
We apologize. Your last request could not be processed. Thank you for your patience.
While Jakarta & Sydney are certainly more distant, this is definitely the remotest place I’ve written to:
The thing to keep in mind when reading about climatologists’ reactions to changes in Arctic temperatures and weather conditions is that scientific terminology was developed specifically to minimize emotional responses. While the popular conception of scientists is based on this style of communication, it’s a mistake to think that these experts don’t care deeply about what they study. The participants in the Ottowa conference obviously love the Arctic, and their use of words like “unusual” and “dramatic” when discussing current conditions should set our alarm bells ringing. Those are strong words for scientists, the sort an epidemiologist might employ to describe an outbreak of bubonic plague; the sort a zoologist might utter when faced with a living, breathing Sasquatch. If Arctic specialists are sounding perturbed, it means the evidence of catastrophic system failure is overwhelming. We (all of us, everywhere on the planet) ignore their observations at our peril.
Warren Senders
environment: Cancun media irresponsibility
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Month 12, Day 16: Hearin’ It Through The Grapevine…
An editorial in the Guelph Mercury gives a qualified approval to Cancun’s results, while reminding us that the bulk of the work is ours to carry out.
Amelia Meister correctly notes that the Cancun agreements, while a tentative step in the right direction, leave much of the heavy lifting unaccounted for. This means that the world’s people will have to lead; our leaders are almost without exception too busy following the scents of money and power to be relied upon for responsibility on behalf of the planet. Meister’s suggestions for individual action are well-formulated, but she omits the most important one of all for those who are concerned about our global future: all of us must talk to other people. Because many of the world’s media networks have deep financial interests in spreading disinformation, staying genuinely and reliably informed about climate change is extremely tricky. It is up to us to move the conversation about climate change out of corporate control, and to help one another understand this complex and challenging subject. In the face of the gravest threat humanity has ever confronted, ignorance attains profound moral dimensions, along with human and environmental costs we cannot afford.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes climate zombies idiots
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Month 12, Day 15: Betcha Didn’t See THAT One Coming!
The Times reports on a new study released by the National Academy of Sciences that predicts a world of hurt for the Southwest.
As scientists attempt to warn residents of the American southwest that potentially catastrophic droughts are all but inevitable in the coming decades, the area’s politicians are locked in an ideological trap that makes it impossible for them to respond sensibly. Since the rise of the Tea Party movement, inflexible denial of the very possibility of climate change is now the only position open to Republican legislators who wish to avoid primary opposition. Interestingly, this isn’t the first time they’ve refused to admit the relevance of warnings from other sectors of society. If I recall correctly, “nobody” anticipated the breach of the levees in New Orleans, the absence of Iraqi WMDs, the collapse of the housing market, or, for that matter, that Osama Bin Laden might attempt a terror attack in the United States. The word “nobody” seems to be a sort of conservative shorthand for “people who understand the problem.”
Warren Senders
environment: Cancun optimism
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Month 12, Day 14: Rah, Rah, Bah, Bah!
The Toronto Globe and Mail runs a fairly routine piece of cheerleading for the results of the Cancun conference.
But you know me — ever the contrarian, I have to point out that there’s a lot that the agreement hasn’t dealt with. Grumble, grumble, grumble; what a grouch.
While the Cancun accord offers reasons for hope at a time when the planetary warning signs are pointing ever more unequivocally towards irrevocable climate chaos, we should not be lulled into complacency by the diplomatic tour de force represented by a 193-nation agreement; the devil is, as always, in the details. The international community has never before faced a situation where smaller nations actually face physical disappearance due to larger countries’ long-term irresponsibility. The developed world needs to overcome the political and societal inertia that has prevented significant reductions in greenhouse emissions in the past, and must also recognize that the costs of immediate action on climate change are dramatically smaller than those of inaction. Finally, our news media should acknowledge that the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming is essentially unanimous; reporting which suggests or implies that there is equal evidence for both sides of the issue is irresponsible.
Warren Senders
environment: Cancun capitalism
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Month 12, Day 13: Not Bad News
The Cancun climate conference ended on a friendly note, with mild intimations of progress all around. Lots of handshakes and polite applause, with only a few dissenting notes.
Yvo de Boer, who stepped down this year after four years as executive secretary of the United Nations climate office, said that the success of this year’s conference was in large measure attributable to the modesty of its goals.
“This process has never been characterized by leaps and bounds,” he said in an interview. “It has been characterized by small steps. And I’d rather see this small step here in Cancún than the international community tripping over itself in an effort to make a large leap.”
In all, the success of the Cancún talks was a shot in the arm for a process that some had likened to a zombie, stumbling aimlessly but refusing to die.
Is it just me, or is that last paragraph a desperate journalistic attempt to reconfigure the “climate zombie” meme?
It’s vaguely reassuring that the Cancun conference did not end with walkouts and public squabbles on the issues surrounding climate change. When representatives of the world’s countries gather to discuss the gravest existential threat our species has ever faced, and conclude with a modest agreement that further progress needs to be made, that’s good news. That is to say, it’s good news if you think about the alternative: contentious squabbling over trivialities as a means of ignoring the looming, slow-motion disaster that imperils us all. As Michael Levi notes, the most significant work will likely take place in areas that are not addressed by the U.N.’s decisions, which means individuals and communities at the smallest levels of scale, and multinational corporations at the largest. The question emerges: can transnational corporate entities acquire enlightened self-interest quickly enough to make a difference to the planetary systems upon which their customers’ survival depends?
Warren Senders
environment: Barack Obama
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Month 12, Day 12: Grouchy Edition
Sunday POTUS, written in a bleak mood. What the hell happened to the guy we elected?
Dear President Obama —
I was one of your fervent supporters in 2008, in part because it seemed obvious to me that a man of your intellectual depth would understand that the long-term threat to our planetary environment posed by global warming would be the central issue for our survival as a nation, as a civilization, and as a species.
Now, after two years of your administration, I’m not so sure. I first ascribed the failure to reach a genuine agreement at Copenhagen to incompetence and intransigence; now it seems at least plausible that my own government colluded with that of China to ensure that no meaningful emissions control agreement would be reached. This is beyond disappointing; this is outrageous.
Now comes the news that your administration’s E.P.A. is reversing its commitment to new environmental regulations, saying it needs “more time to analyze” the effects of proposed rules on pollution. Forgive me for not taking this at face value; if it looks like a capitulation, walks like a capitulation and quacks like a capitulation, I say it’s a capitulation.
And what a capitulation it is! The past several years have offered ample evidence that the world’s fossil fuel industry is a hotbed of mendacity, cupidity, sociopathy and idiocy. From environmental destruction to the subornation of scientists, Big Oil has demonstrated that it can only be trusted to act in its own interests, and that those interests are emphatically not aligned with the people of this country and this planet.
These companies should be nationalized; their assets redistributed and their leaders jailed.
I voted for you because I had hoped for justice and environmental policy that would be based on science. Now, as I watch the criminals who destroyed so much reap the rewards of their corruption, I have abandoned hope for justice — and as I watch your administration’s E.P.A. kowtow to some of the world’s worst environmental criminals, I must abandon hope for science-based policy as well.
Please tell me: what (if anything) can I hope for in the months and years to come?
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama corporatism idiots
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Month 12, Day 11: It’ll Feel Better When It Stops Hurting. But When Will It Stop Hurting?
Well, this sucks:
The Obama administration is retreating on long-delayed environmental regulations — new rules governing smog and toxic emissions from industrial boilers — as it adjusts to a changed political dynamic in Washington with a more muscular Republican opposition.
The move to delay the rules, announced this week by the Environmental Protection Agency, will leave in place policies set by President George W. Bush. President Obama ran for office promising tougher standards, and the new rules were set to take effect over the next several weeks.
Beating my head against a wall would feel better.
President Obama’s reversal on EPA policy is a shameful capitulation to some of the most environmentally irresponsible elements in the global economy. The big oil companies, unsatisfied with year after year of record-breaking profits, are anxious to undermine the only remaining authority with the capacity to regulate pollution — and the President, incomprehensibly, seems to believe that acceding to their agenda will be a positive step for this country and the world. When accelerating climate change is endangering the world’s agricultural systems, when increased acidity is jeopardizing the ability of our oceans to sustain life, when the scientific evidence for human causes of global warming is irrefutable — it is not the time to bow to the desires of the fossil fuel industry for an even more unconstrained regulatory environment. Fossil fuel is the crack cocaine of the American economy. Why should we reward the dealers?
Warren Senders