Climate Deniers Versus Reality, Once Again

In a major speech yesterday, President Barack Obama laid out a plan for dealing with climate change. It's not a perfect plan--it gives too much away to "clean coal," which doesn't exist, and to fracking, which causes more problems than it solves--but it's a start. It's good to see the president finally delivering on the promises he made throughout his first and second election campaigns.

When I posted on Facebook praising the president's speech, I received the anticipated response from a climate denier. With roughly 250 friends, I was bound to have a denier or two among them.

We're rapidly reaching the point where the voices of climate deniers, for all their sound and fury, are being drowned out by common sense. Within a decade, I anticipate, climate deniers will be seen pretty much the way people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are seen: as odd, sad, strange people who, for whatever reasons, refuse to live in the reality the rest of us live in.

Because you know, it is strange.  A recent study demonstrates that over 97% of climatologists--those are the experts who study climate--agree with the consensus on anthropogenic global warming. That's a significant percentage of experts. The proportion of experts who disagree, the study concludes, is "vanishingly small."

When I pointed this out to my climate denier friend, he objected that science isn't based on opinion polls. And I agree. But expert consensus is not the same as an opinion poll.

Experts are those who know a subject best. Opinion polls involve random samples of people who probably know very little about the subject under debate.

We base many of our decisions on expert consensus. When more than 97 percent of cardiologists tell us we have a heart problem, most of us decide to get heart surgery. When more than 97 percent of plumbers tell us we have a plumbing problem, most of us decide to get the pipes fixed. When more than 97 percent of ex-girlfriends tell us we have a bad breath problem, most of us decide to invest in some Tic Tacs.

Opinion, as I tell my students, isn't the same as informed opinion. And informed opinion isn't the same as expert opinion.

We're all entitled to our opinions. But only if we're informed--or better yet, experts--are we entitled to have our opinions count.

Krancer Causes Cancer

In today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I read that there are "45 current or former [Pennsylvania] state officials who have links to the energy industry and gas drilling and fracking regulation, including 28 who have left to take industry jobs."

These officials include our current and past three governors, as well as a bunch of other yahoos.  But my favorite has got to be Michael Krancer.

He's Pennsylvania's current secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection.  You know, the department that, like, is supposed to protect the environment.

But Krancer's ties to oil and gas interests run deep.  He was general counsel for a natural gas utility, Exelon, as well as a litigator for an industry lobbying group.  Not surprisingly, his principal activities as secretary have been to craft industry-friendly provisions, to fight citizen attempts to slow or halt the pace of shale gas development, and to make regulation of the industry as minimal and cumbersome as possible.

And then there's his position on global warming, as quoted here: "There is no uniformity within the scientific community on how much the warming is occurring.  And there’s no agreement about how much is attributable to the human part of it and how much is attributable to other factors.”

This is, of course, nonsense.  There's almost complete uniformity within the scientific community on both of these issues.  To those who want to deny the reality of anthropogenic global warming, such uniformity means there's some vast scientific conspiracy to quash dissent and amass lucrative research grants.  This, of course, makes no sense either, inasmuch as the real money lies in working for the oil and gas interests that deny global warming.  But global warming skeptics are a very stupid bunch of people, and they'll say just about anything to try to wiggle out of the facts.

I wrote a letter recently to Krancer, asking him to stop being such a stupid idiot and admit that the science says exactly what it says: that human beings are the main drivers of global warming, and that if we don't take immediate steps to curb it, we may well be living in an unlivable world by the end of the century.  Considering the severity of the issue, I was actually pretty polite; I did not, for example, use the words "stupid idiot."  I got a polite reply from his PR stupid idiot thanking me for my letter.

But since it seems to be Krancer's prerogative to say stupid, untrue things, I thought I'd exercise my own right to do the same.  So for the record: Michael Krancer causes cancer.

Though I'll admit there's not complete scientific consensus on that.

35,000.org

As you know if you're following my Twitter feed @JoshuaDBellin (and if you're not, why the heck aren't you?), I was in DC yesterday for 350.org's ClimateForward Rally.  The stated purpose of the rally was to convince President Obama to put the kibosh on the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline, or at least the part of it that's planned to pass through U.S. territory (which, as I understand it, would put the kibosh on the whole deal).  The broader purpose of the rally was to draw together the disparate elements of the climate change movement--people fighting fracking, mountaintop coal removal, the petroleum lobby, and a host of other issues--and thus to forge a single, coherent force capable of halting the juggernaut that is our nation's and our world's fossil-fuel addiction.

Whether the rally achieved either purpose is anyone's guess.  President Obama didn't make an appearance (he was reportedly golfing with Tiger Woods), and whether he'll show the political strength and foresightedness to live up to his recent rhetoric on climate change remains to be seen.  (The fact that he held that rhetoric in abeyance during the election season, bringing it out only when victory was assured, suggests that he knows how unpopular it remains among a sizable portion of his constituents.)  Van Jones, one of the day's speakers, opined that no matter what else the president does during the next four years, all his achievements will come to naught if he fails to act decisively on the world's climate.  I'm inclined to agree, but I'm not sure the president will.

Regarding the climate movement writ large, 350.org creator Bill McKibben announced at the rally that February 17, 2013 was the day the movement finally came together and found its voice.  That may be.  By some estimates, there were as many as 50,000 people marching, chanting, dancing in the streets, and sign-holding (my favorite banner read "We Must Rise Faster Than the Seas"), though 35,000 is probably closer to the actual mark.  That's a lot of people, and we sure did look united.  On the bus ride home, though, I eavesdropped on a rather contentious debate about the merits of solar versus nuclear--a very old debate, and one that's likely to get us nowhere.  I've been in this fight for over a decade now, and every time there's a big rally, someone says our time has finally come--yet obviously, measured in terms of tangible changes in policy or popular conviction, it hasn't.  To expect 35,000 people--or 35 million, which is what the movement will need if it really wants to attract attention--to stand united on any issue seems like a lot to ask.

Still, for the moment, the day belongs to us.

Connecting the Dots

Global warming warrior Bill McKibben has a good piece out on his 350.org website about the relationships among all the bizarre weather events we've had in recent months (tornadoes, floods, droughts, blizzards, etc.). I think it's vitally important for us to realize, as McKibben's essay makes clear, that global warming is not only REAL, it's HERE--right now. I hear too many people saying, "oh, IF global warming happens, then we'll do something about it." These people have failed to do what McKibben does: to draw connections among the surface manifestations (that is, the weather) and trace them to their underlying cause (that is, a warmer climate). It's hard to think systemically; I always tell my students that when they prefer to look at isolated cases out of context. But it's what we need to do, right now, if we are ever to get a handle on this global-systemic problem.

Going Local

Yesterday was an environmentally friendly day for me. In the morning, my kids and I helped the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association plant trees; in the afternoon, I switched electricity generators to Viridian Energy, which will supply 100% of my electricity through wind power; and in the evening, I attended a lecture on sustainable agriculture by Anna Lappe, whose new book connects our eating choices to the climate crisis. And, having read recently that the majority of car trips we make are fewer than two miles, I decided to walk the mile and a half to the lecture and back. So there was lots of good stuff, environment-wise.

There was also one depressing moment, when I read the following passage in Michael Shuman's book Going Local:

"Governments will be increasingly inclined to put a tax on oil, as well as on other fossil fuels, to account for the environmental effects of burning them. There is a virtual consensus among scientists today . . . that human progress is warming the planet. . . . By the time the multi-trillion-dollar costs of global warming are clear enough to affect the market price of fossil fuels, it will be too late to prevent it. But political pressures will surely mount on governments to place taxes on these fuels, per unit of pollution (a carbon tax) or per unit of energy (a BTU tax), that will raise their prices and reduce releases of carbon into the atmosphere."

Shuman, writing in 1998, is certain that governments will come to their senses, tax carbon, and thereby level the playing field for the development of renewables. But here we are in 2011, and guess what? We haven't taxed carbon (partly because the scientific consensus Shuman applauds has been attacked relentlessly by climate change deniers); we're investing heavily (in both dollars and infrastructure) in the latest fossil fuel to come down the pike, natural gas; the market in renewables is stagnant; the price of oil is way up, but mostly because of unrest in the Middle East, not because of the environmental costs of burning it; global emissions continue to grow day by day; and the planet's climate is becoming increasingly unpredictable, chaotic, and punishing. At the national and international level, we've utterly failed as a species to take the necessary steps to protect our planet and ourselves.

Which is why, for the foreseeable future, I'm "going local," as the title of Shuman's book recommends. I'll plant trees in my own neighborhood, power my own house with wind energy, walk instead of drive, support local groups like the Nine Mile Run association, and otherwise focus on what I can do in my own community. I'll act locally, and think--or at least dream--of a time the global community will come around.

The Greediest Generation

Journalist Tom Brokaw famously dubbed the generation that came of age during the Depression and World War II "The Greatest Generation." This was a group of people with the wisdom to face these two global evils, the courage to confront them, and the selflessness to accept the sacrifices meeting them entailed.

By those standards, I guess you'd have to call the present generation of so-called grown-ups in this country "The Greediest Generation."

I was reminded of this when I read that all but one of the Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to deny the reality of global warming, regardless of cause. Yep, they actually voted--nary a climatologist in the bunch--to deny that global warming exists.

The hubris of such a vote is nearly unfathomable. It's as if they'd voted to deny that the earth revolves around the sun.

Beyond this, such a vote is strikingly stupid.

To put it in perspective, let's imagine these clowns had been in the House during our grandparents' time. They decide to take a vote on the reality of the Depression. Sure, lots of folks are out of work, the banks are bankrupt, the breadlines are growing, the breadbasket is blowing away in a cloud of dust, but is the Depression really real?

Nope, we don't think so.

And what about those politically-motivated rumors of war over in distant Europe? They say some guy named Hitler invaded Poland; that he's currently bombing England and France; that his tanks are in North Africa; that he's moving on Stalingrad? Let's take a vote on it.

No, there's no war.

We can deny all we want. We can even legitimize our denial through the political process.

But we can't change the nature of reality. It'll always be there, silent and irresistible, to show us when we're wrong.

Burn, Baby, Burn

Sorry for the blaze of environmentally-themed posts in recent days--I promise I'll have something entirely new soon--but I was so incensed by the House vote yesterday, I just had to fire off this cartoon. And yes, as you can see, all the incendiary language is intentional.

A Tolerable Planet

Recently, I reported on attempts to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gases. Today, I am sad to report House Republicans have had their way: in their spending bill, the House not only slashed EPA funding but tucked in an amendment to prohibit EPA regulation of heat-trapping gases. The reason, of course, is that they claim such regulations would hurt the economy.

The last time I talked about this issue, I tried to see it from the side of your average American, someone who's afraid of losing her or his job (or who has already lost it) and who honestly believes regulating CO2 and methane will hurt their chances of a decent life. That person, I suggested, was someone with whom one can sympathize.

But the Republican leadership and representatives aren't supposed to be your average Americans. Politicians are supposed to be forward-thinking, insightful people who understand the implications of their actions. They're supposed to think about the damn future, not just about the next election cycle.

Sadly, American politics are in ideological freefall, with neither party able to govern effectively. All they can do is piss off the electorate enough that the vote swings toward the other party two or four years later.

We are living in a climate-altered world. That's fact, not ideology. If the world's climate gets much worse, we may not be living at all. I can appreciate the difficulty of the average citizen in accepting that reality. But I can't accept elected officials' ideological purblindness to the actual world in which they and their constituents live.

Thoreau wrote in his journal: "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" That was in the 1850s. He was thinking of the future. If he were here today, he'd surely be shocked and saddened to see so many of the nation's supposed leaders living in the past.

Passing Gas

Here's my latest pictorial comment on newly inaugurated Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett and the natural gas industry he supports. If you're a Pennsylvanian (or New Yorker, or West Virginian, or Ohioan, or Texan, or just plain American) concerned about this issue, watch Josh Fox's film Gasland, check out the Marcellus Protest website or the blog "Fracked Again," and get involved!

The Third Option

I got a call a couple days ago from some lobbyist group trying to convince me that the EPA shouldn't be allowed to regulate greenhouse gases. Their reasoning? You guessed it: doing so would "hurt the economy." My response: "perhaps, but it would help the planet." Clearly, we had little to talk about, so we hung up.

It boggles the mind, this weighing of profit over planet. Taking the long view of things, it's impossible to conclude that those who favor the former over the latter are certifiably insane.

And yet, the thing is, they're not insane. They're behaving, in fact, in perfectly sane, indeed eminently rational ways. According to rational choice theory, most of us, when given an either-or choice, will choose the one that is most rational for our immediate circumstances. If the choice is between having a job today and having a planet 100 years from now, it's rational to choose the former over the latter. And so most people do.

This reminds me of discussions we've had in one of my classes this semester. Why, we've wondered, did northeastern woodlands Native peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over-hunt and over-trap fur-bearing animals? Couldn't they see that they were depleting the very resources on which they relied? Weren't they--according to the popular stereotype--environmentally conscious enough to want to preserve for the seventh or seven hundredth generation the land's bounty?

Perhaps they were. But they were also enmeshed in a colonial economy wherein just about the only valuable commodity they could sell or trade was furs. Their populations were decimated, their forests were falling, their lands were diminishing, their languages and cultures were threatened--and they still had to feed their families. Given the choice to do so over the choice to preserve hypothetical future beaver and deer, they rationally chose the former.

The same holds true in contemporary Native Nations. Some of my students were troubled, given the prevailing stereotypes, to hear of the presence of extractive, and highly destructive, industries on Indian reservations. How could Indian peoples damage the lands of their ancestors? Well, Indian peoples live, by and large, on the submarginal lands to which they've been relocated; poverty in their communities is endemic; opportunities for education or advancement are practically non-existent; and when the coal company comes knocking, the rational choice is to open the door and let them in.

All of this simply goes to show that to make a truly rational choice, one that empowers communities while at the same time embracing planetary health, we need a third option. And that third option can only come from systemic change; individual communities generally don't have it at their disposal or within their means.

Which is exactly why we need the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. That, in conjunction with programs that help individuals pay the bills and that promote renewable energy and green jobs, would be a step toward that third option.

The Politics of Climate Denial

Following on the heels of my "Warming in a Winter Wonderland" post of a couple weeks back, my fellow blogger at "Fracked Again" has posted a great video from the Rachel Maddow show connecting winter snowstorms to climate denial to the new Republican House leadership to the oil-funded organization Americans for Prosperity to . . . well, you get the picture. Thanks to the aforementioned blogger for this video, and watch it if you don't mind weeping profusely over the future of our planet and our species.

Warming in a Winter Wonderland

It never fails. The first spell of bad winter comes along (we’ve currently got four inches of snow and temps in the teens here in Pittsburgh), and questions start to arise about the validity of global warming. Last year, when two feet got dumped on us in a single night, the naysayers, conservative talk-show hosts, and industry lobbyists had a field day. How, they asked--and expected only one answer--can the planet be warming when it’s so gosh-darned cold outside?

Never mind that there’s nothing in the science of global warming that says anything about cold days vanishing from the globe. Never mind that increased precipitation is one of the expected results of warmer air, which holds more moisture than its colder cousin. The real problem is that most people get all confused--and the skeptics thrive on seeding such confusion--about the difference between weather and climate. The former, since we live with it on a moment-by-moment, day-by-day basis, might seem like the thing to focus our attention on. But it’s not.

Weather--the atmospheric conditions in any given place at any given time--is, as we all know, wildly variable. The proverbial butterfly’s wings can change it, and meteorologists struggle to predict it as little as twenty-four hours in advance. It would be foolhardy to attempt a weather forecast of more than a few days--to predict, say, the weather in Pittsburgh a year from now. Chances are you’d be off by as much as 30 or 40 degrees in either direction--to say nothing of clouds, precipitation, wind, and all the rest.

Climate is different. As the composite of weather averaged over space and time, climate is remarkably stable, and can be forecast with considerable confidence years, even centuries, in advance. In the case of global climate, human beings have enjoyed roughly the same one for thousands of years. The last time the planet’s climate looked significantly different, Cro-Magnons were hunting mastodons and a mile of ice flattened Manhattan. The time before that, when the planet was appreciably warmer, tyrannosaurs roamed North America and crocodiles cruised the poles. The stability and predictability of our present climate is what enabled human civilization to become what it is today.

And that’s the ultimate irony: for the past two centuries, human civilization has tampered with the very climate that, for the past two millennia, made human civilization possible. The planet is warming--and more rapidly than ever before. (Indeed, even with its unseasonably cold December, 2009 is tied for second hottest year on record, and at the end of the day the past winter, on average, was warmer than the one that preceded it.) We’ve made great, and undeniable, advances as a species: advances in technology, in medicine, in science, in human rights, in art. Since the dawn of the Hydrocarbon Era, we’ve made those advances with ever accelerating ease. But in so doing, we’ve degraded the planetary climate (not to mention the planetary soils, waters, and affiliated organisms) perhaps beyond recall.

We have a couple choices here. We can acknowledge the reality of climate change, and respond appropriately. Or we can deny that dire reality and continue to dig ourselves deeper into a hole.

If we choose the first option, our choosing can’t be like the weather, which changes every day. It has to be like the climate, which steadies us and survives deep into the future.

Making a Killing

Let's imagine you could kill people and make a profit from it. Not only were there no negative consequences to killing people, there was an economic incentive. Would you do it?

Maybe, maybe not. You're a moral person; you read your Bible; you know that killing is wrong. For most of us, the moral disincentive to kill would outweigh the economic incentive to kill. Even in the absence of materially negative consequences--jail time, our own potential execution--the negative effect on our consiences would be sufficient to prevent most of us from killing.

But let's imagine that economically profitable, consequence-free killing had been the social norm for 200 years or more. Might the situation be different then? Might not many of us be socially conditioned to accept killing-for-profit as a positive good, or at least an inalienable right? Might not many of us ignore the Bible (or whatever religious or ethical text we currently subscribe to) in light of the powerful cultural message that killing for profit is a-okay? Indeed, might not the Bible itself have been rewritten--or never written at all--to sanction such killing?

To help answer these questions, let's consider a real-life analogy.

For the past 200 years or more, it's been socially sanctioned, wildlly profitable, relatively cheap, and (at least as most of us imagine it) absolutely risk-free to burn fossil fuels. And guess what? The vast majority of us burn fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow.

Maybe this is a bad analogy. Maybe gutting the earth, poisoning the soils and waters, devastating habitats and their inhabitants (both human and non-human), and pumping pollutants into the atmosphere isn't comparable to kiling other human beings.

But if you look at all the costs of fossil fuel extraction and consumption, they're pretty significant. The only problem is, these costs don't strike us as costs, because they're "externalized"--they're not built into the market price of the thing. Health care costs, loss of species and habitat costs, community degradation costs, planetery climate collapse costs aren't reflected in the price we pay at the pump, so we get to engage in incredibly risky, damaging behavior without (apparently) suffering any negative consequences for it. Quite the contrary, we benefit from it economically (some of us, such as BP executives, more than most, but all of us to a considerable degree). And as a result, most of us engage in this behavior--a lot--without a second thought.

All of which suggests not only that we're incredibly malleable beings, capable of being socially engineered for better or for worse, but that if we're really serious about getting a handle on our current bad behavior, we need to acknowledge it as such. Even if doing so might prevent us from making a killing.

The People's Summit, Day Two

The People's Summit ended today with another excellent round of presenters and a slew of frightening, but galvanizing, facts. Mayor Calvin Tillman of DISH, Texas (featured in Josh Fox's film Gasland) spoke, introducing us to a new nonprofit he's created to help low-income families and communities get their air and water tested. The lunchtime keynote speaker, EPA whistleblower Wes Wilson (also of Gasland fame), fired the crowd up with his homey aphorisms and grassroots passion. (His best line was a Winston Churchill quote: "You can always count on the American people to do the right thing--after they've exhausted all the other options.") And at the conference's close, Fox himself Skyped in from Australia, where he's doing location shooting for a Gasland sequel. I missed a morning session on new online tools to help people in the anti-fracking fight track the industry and connect with each other, but overall, I feel as if I'm bursting with new information and energy.

For me, the most enlightening presentation was given by Bob Howarth, a professor at Cornell who challenges the industry's claims that natural gas is cleaner than coal and oil. In particular, he demonstrated that when you take into account routine leaks of methane from the pipelines and storage tanks, as well as the carbon-intensive activities necessary to transport the fracking water and refine the gas, natural gas ends up being a greater contributor to global warming than either coal or oil. As a longtime follower and advocate of the fight against global warming, this was important news for me to hear--and it suggests that the two movements need to start communicating to a far greater extent than they've done thus far. The only sour note to all this was the speaker who followed Howarth, a former industry vice president now working for the UN who addressed a roomful of activists as if we were kindergartners while he explained to us why gas is much better for the planet than coal and oil. He even had the gall to ask Howarth--a Cornell professor, mind you--if his research had been peer-reviewed! If nothing else, his presence reminded us of what we're fighting against, and of the depths to which they'll sink to try to invalidate our movement.

I returned home to a nice surprise: an email from a fellow blogger, John, who'd noticed my blog and featured it in his own. For those who are following this issue, John's blog is essential reading, focused as it is specifically on fracking. You should definitely check it out!

The fight continues. And thanks to the summit, I think it's safe to say the movement is stronger, more unified, and more prepared to take on the challenge than ever before.

Frick, Frack

In the city of Frick, the people are taking a stand against Frack.

Today I attended a rally in downtown Pittsburgh to protest industry plans to drill tens of thousands of natural gas wells (through a process known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”) into the Marcellus Shale formation that lies beneath our fields, forests, and cities. A broad coalition of environmental and citizens’ groups has formed to push for a state moratorium on drilling until further research into its environmental impacts has been conducted, to call on lawmakers to impose a severance tax on the drilling companies to help mitigate environmental impacts, and--most radically--to declare the city of Pittsburgh off-limits to drillers, permanently. The latter ordinance is working its way through Pittsburgh City Council. If passed, it would be the first such ordinance nationwide.

The rally was attended by none other than Josh Fox, rogue visionary behind the film Gasland. Fox whipped the crowd into a frenzy by citing the copious evidence (all of it denied by industry) of negative environmental and health consequences of drilling. He also showed his characteristic flair for the theatrical, calling up the Republican governor-elect of Pennsylvania on his cell phone and, while the crowd hooted approval, leaving a message with the man’s secretary. But the grandstanding had a serious purpose: as Fox represented it, the fight against fracking is the environmental battle of the day. Win this one, he told us, and we secure a greener, brighter future. Lose it, and we concede a future of runaway environmental and human degradation.

Now, all environmentalist prophets say these sorts of things. For Aldo Leopold, the issue was land. For Rachel Carson, it was pesticides. For Al Gore, it was global warming. Environmentalism thrives on these sorts of dire prognostications of utter collapse if that one issue, whatever it may be, is not addressed.

But this time around, I tend to agree with Fox. The natural gas industry stands in the way of healthy environments and communities not only in Pennsylvania, but nationwide (if not worldwide). This latest boondoggle by the fossil fuel industry represents an effort to keep our future locked into the same sorry path we’ve been walking since the time of the industrial revolution, a deal with the devil where we forfeit environmental and communal wellbeing for the luxury lifestyle offered by rapacious robber barons. The rush to drill is based on two deeply flawed propositions that, if exposed and rejected, may well set us on the road to recovery as a people and as a world:

1. Natural gas is a clean energy source. This is, quite simply, bullshit. While natural gas is marginally cleaner-burning than coal or oil, the process by which it’s extracted is brimming with environmental hazards: contaminated water, damaged soil, toxic air. Of the three, the threat to water is perhaps the most ominous: the amount of water required to drill one well is astronomical, and there’s precious little regulation concerning where that water comes from and where it goes after it’s been drenched in hazardous chemicals. As several speakers at today’s rally pointed out, if drilling is as safe as the industry claims, then why did they enlist Dick Cheney and his cronies in Congress to ensure that legislation would be passed exempting the fracking process from key provisions of the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Superfund law? To tout natural gas as a “clean” alternative to oil is akin to praising crack as a safer-burning form of cocaine.

2. Natural gas represents a “transition fuel” to a clean energy economy. Again, total bullshit. If you look at the history of the fossil fuel industry, you’ll find plenty of transitions--but only from one fossil fuel to a yet more cheap, abundant, energy-intensive, and environmentally destructive fossil fuel. From charcoal to coal to petroleum, the industry has tried them all, and they’re seeking newer and unhealthier sources of energy (tar sands and the like) even as we speak. There’s simply no incentive for the industry to do anything else, and anyone who thinks it will diversify out of the goodness of its heart or concern for its customers has been drinking its toxic Kool-Aid for way too long. (We all saw how well BP fulfilled its vow to move “beyond petroleum,” right?) Unless the rest of us make it inconvenient, unprofitable, and in fact illegal for these vampires to conduct their filthy business, the industry will continue to suck fossil fuels from the planet until it’s literally sucked dry. If we are to embrace a clean energy future, it has to start now, with heavy investment in renewables and disincentives for business as usual. This will hurt in the short term, but it will not hurt nearly as much in the long term as a continued dependence on fossil fuels.

So if you’re following this issue, keep your eyes on Pittsburgh. If my hometown can secure victory in this battle--if we can claim our land, our communities, and our health as inalienable rights no one can steal--then the collapse of the fossil fuel industry is within grasp, and a sustainable world within reach.

Drill in Pittsburgh? As they chanted at today's rally: "No fracking way!"

The Best Laid Plans

I'm spending the week with my family in Rockport, Massachusetts, a seaside village and artist's colony on Cape Ann north of Boston. The water, predictably, is scrotum-tighteningly cold. Meanwhile, just south of us, great white sharks are circling Cape Cod, closing beaches and scaring the bejeebers out of anyone old enough to remember Jaws (in other words, everyone). Apparently this has to do with the explosion of the gray seal population, for reasons unknown.

Nature is a strange place. Things happen without cause or warning. Patterns reshape themselves, predictions fail. You congratulate yourself when things turn out the way you expect them to, puzzle over the things that don't. It's probably safer to say that when things do turn out the way you expected, that's the real puzzle.

A good friend of mine from high school, visiting with his family from their current home in Lexington, MA, reminded me that with the onset of global warming, a whole new puzzling logic enters the picture, a whole new future of unpredictability and randomness. We simply don't know what's going to happen in a climate-altered world, if in fact there is to be a climate-altered world. Nature, ever weird, will likely become weirder, but in what ways we can't really say.

Our conversation also turned to end-of-life issues (probably because, just before my trip, I got a call from the local cemetery offering me a free plot. I turned them down because, as I responded to their query, I don't plan to die). But truthfully, since death remains the one thing we can bank on, our conversation made me think about how I'd choose for my loved ones to dispose of my mortal remains. I've always disliked the idea of burial: too much wasted space. But cremation poses its own problems: too much carbon emitted. Hopefully, I won't have to make a decision any time soon.

But of course, the best laid plans....

Denying the (Climate) Holocaust

I was doing some research for a class I’m preparing on Holocaust literature, and I came across a review of Holocaust films on Netflix that read in part, “It’s time for new facts and real research into [the Holocaust], not the old propaganda.” I was struck by this statement for a number of reasons, not least because it so resembled the complaints you hear from climate change deniers. To many, it seems, the accumulation of fact and research, the growth of scientific consensus on the subject, cast doubt on its validity; where most people agree that a preponderance of fact increases the likelihood of something being true, the deniers argue, paradoxically, that the more agreement there is among scientists, the more likely it is that the science is nothing but lies. I still remember the example that was used in high school to introduce us to scientific method: the statement “copper always burns with a green flame” was based on countless observations of copper burning with a green flame. This doesn’t prove beyond doubt that copper will always burn with a green flame. But it does render suspect the statement, “copper does not burn with a green flame” or, worse, “those who claim that copper burns with a green flame are trying to hoodwink an unsuspecting public with shameless, self-serving propaganda.”

Now, we all know the Holocaust occurred. The evidence is irrefutable. But there are still those who refute it, not only neo-Nazis but average people who insist that no matter how much evidence we amass--indeed, in direct relation to the increase of evidence--the whole thing must be a fabrication. And, without suggesting that climate change deniers are identical to Holocaust deniers, I’d like to explore the mentality that produces such an unwonted break from logic. In what follows, I’m going to avoid the most common explanation: that we deny climate change because acting to avert it would entail such monumental disruption in our way of life. That’s a big part of it, certainly, but I think there are other, perhaps even more fundamental psychological motivations at play.

The first of such motivations to come to mind is that people don’t readily accept bad news; this is why, as has been amply documented, denial is one of the predominant responses to terminal illness, whether one’s own or that of a friend or family member. The Holocaust, like global warming, is bad news; it sickens most people to confront what occurred there (as it sickens most to confront the scenarios for a post-climate-change planet), and some resort to denial, I suspect, as a means of softening the blow. Who wants to admit that the human race is so awful? Who wants to be a member of a species capable of such atrocities? It’s far more congenial to one’s self-image to believe that really bad things, even those that were produced by others and that happened to others (much less those that are produced by ourselves and will happen to ourselves), didn’t really happen. If the Holocaust did occur, it means, hypothetically, that it could occur again, or even more personally, that the people you think you know, the people you love, even the person you are, might be led to participate in it. Far better to deny, and in so doing to restore one’s faith in the essential goodness of friends, family, and self.

Then there’s the distrust of authorities or, at its most extreme, anti-intellectualism that’s been such a prominent part of America’s collective mentality for so long (and that’s been exploited so successfully by certain political parties to score points and win elections). Looked at not from a cultural but from an individual perspective, this aspect of the denier’s mentality makes perfect sense. Who wants to feel stupid? Who wants to be put in the position of a three-year-old having grown-ups explain the nature of reality to you? But that’s precisely where climate science puts the vast majority of us (I include myself): it’s so damn complicated, no matter how many analogies they try to use (greenhouses, blankets, etc.), we find ourselves being preached to by smarty-pants eggheads who think they know so much more than the rest of us. That’s a real blow to the ego, and it’s preferable for many to conclude that the eggheads don’t really know more than we do, in fact that they know less, and that in reality they’re only trying to confuse us to gain publicity, grant money, fame, and power.

Finally--and this is the most subtle and, in some ways, least explicable factor--there simply seems to be an information threshold or saturation point in the human mind, beyond which fact turns to falsehood, truth to lie. We can observe this in everyday life when we begin to doubt the professions of love from our partner, or the sincerity of our boss or congressperson, or the validity of our most deeply held religious beliefs. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” Hamlet’s mother remarks of the drama her son has staged to expose his uncle’s (her current husband’s) treachery; leaving aside her obvious desire to reject this all-too-true representation of events, her distrust of the performer’s words, her assumption that when “too much” is said in one direction the opposite must actually be true (and what is said mere performance), is familiar to all of us. Tell a person about climate change once, or a hundred times, and she might believe you. Tell the same person a thousand times, and she might begin to doubt.

Understanding the mentality of climate denial as I’ve tried to do here does not, perhaps, get us any closer to a solution. Polls show that in increasing numbers, Americans are denying the reality of climate change; their native capacity for doubt, enhanced by institutional provocateurs with considerable cash, clout, and interest, has undone much of what science managed to do in the past decade. And so we have no climate legislation, no international climate agreement, precious little money for alternative energies, and the chorus of “drill, baby, drill” continuing to mount despite the disaster in the Gulf. Far from overcoming denial, we have succeeded largely in augmenting it.

And should global holocaust actually ensue, I’m sure we will have people on the other side of that catastrophe insisting that it never happened.

Vikings Liking Warming

So I read today in National Geographic that many folks in Greenland are enthusiastic about global warming. Remember, the Vikings settled the place during a particularly warm period--and vanished when the climate cooled during the Little Ice Age of the 15th century. If the island heats up again and the ice sheet melts in whole or in part, that will enable a longer and more diverse growing season, prompt tourism, and--most importantly--open up frozen seas to offshore drilling. It could be a great boon for Greenland's economy.

Of course, if the Greenland ice sheet melts in its entirety, sea levels worldwide will rise by some 24 feet, inundating coastlines everywhere (including, presumably, Greenland's own). And when you start to equate offshore drilling with economic nirvana, you have to remember the minor detail of the BP oil spill, which has killed the fishing and tourism industries of the affected areas for the foreseeable future, not to mention introducing long-term clean-up and public health costs that will certainly be borne largely by the communities, not by BP. And, oh yeah, there's that pesky problem of destroying the planet we live on.

All of which proves that the people of Greenland, at least those who look to global warming for salvation, are no more or less insane than the rest of us. The Vikings failed when the climate unexpectedly and unpredictably shifted on them. These days, we can see it coming--and still we refuse to believe.

Of Oil and Water

The cataclysmic BP oil spill now spreading through the Gulf of Mexico signifies--if any further signifying were needed--why America's (and the world's) addiction to fossil fuels cannot be reconciled with any reasonable vision of a sustainable planet. Forget global warming for the moment; forget wars over oil; forget fine particulate pollution (in Pittsburgh, where I hail from, the good news is that we've moved up from the nation's worst air to the nation's third worst). Just look at the well belching hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude into the world's waters, and ask yourself: how long is it going to take before we realize that we're on a crash course with doomsday?

Then there's the recent coal mine explosion in West Virginia's Upper Big Branch mine that killed 29 workers. Coal, the cheapest and dirtiest fossil fuel around, is responsible, one way or another, for thousands of deaths every year: deaths from accidents, from air pollution, from contaminated waters. I heard recently that there's an investigation underway into corruption in the regulatory agencies that supposedly oversee coal mining. Seems as if mine inspectors are on the take. Seems as if while we're paying with our lives, they're just getting paid.

And then there's the ongoing dispute in Pennsylvania over the Marcellus shale, a natural gas-rich formation that underlies much of our state. The drilling companies rushing to take advantage of this lucrative sink of fossil fuels is refusing to pay a severance tax to help mitigate the environmental damages their activities will surely cause. If they're taxed, they say, they'll take their business elsewhere, depriving us of the thousands of (good?) jobs they'd otherwise bring. Every other state in the nation that authorizes deep well drilling imposes a severance tax, but the Pennsylvania legislature can't seem to bring itself to do the same. More fossil fuels, more deaths, more damage, more destruction, and no one to pay for it.

A quick definition of addiction: knowing you're killing yourself but refusing to stop. That pretty much sums up the state of the world as we continue to pump junk into our veins and waters.

Bliss Is Ignorance

A new environmental essay of mine , titled "Bliss Is Ignorance," just appeared in the zine The Earth Comes First. I'm starting to have some success getting my writing placed in environmentally themed journals (including Canary, Terrain.org, and The Fear of Monkeys). I've also floated an environmental memoir about my frog-catching days that I hope will be picked up sooner or later. These publications are especially gratifying to me because, as a lifetime environmentalist--one who's tried his hand at everything from hosting rallies to joining environmental groups to lobbying politicians--I've long felt that I can best effect change through the written word. Check 'em out and let me know what you think!