Direct Line Between Weakness Of Climate Bill And Weak Public Reaction

The Senate version of the climate and energy bill has been delayed until September, which means a few more months of debates over whether it's worth it to pass at all. The Waxman-Markey climate bill included so many compromises and hedges and backdowns that many, including the respected Dr. James Hansen, find it unworthy of passage.

With a workable climate bill in his pocket, President Obama might have been able to begin building that global consensus in Italy. Instead, it looks as if the delegates from other nations may have done what 219 U.S. House members who voted up Waxman-Markey last month did not: critically read the 1,400-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 and deduce that it's no more fit to rescue our climate than a V-2 rocket was to land a man on the moon.

I share that conclusion, and have explained why to members of Congress before and will again at a Capitol Hill briefing on July 13. Science has exposed the climate threat and revealed this inconvenient truth: If we burn even half of Earth's remaining fossil fuels we will destroy the planet as humanity knows it. The added emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will set our Earth irreversibly onto a course toward an ice-free state, a course that will initiate a chain reaction of irreversible and catastrophic climate changes.

Some, like Joseph Romm, disagree violently with this.

Hansen claims "For all its 'green' aura, Waxman-Markey locks in fossil fuel business-as-usual and garlands it with a Ponzi-like 'cap-and-trade' scheme." Not so. I have previously explained why W-M takes us sharply off of the BAU emissions path over the next decade, probably reducing coal use more than 25% by 2020 (see "Game changer, Part 2: Why unconventional natural gas makes the 2020 Waxman-Markey target so damn easy and cheap to meet"). And then it requires a 42% emissions reduction by 2030 and an 83% reduction by 2050, which will drive a massive energy transition over the next few decades.

The global economy is indeed a Ponzi scheme, but this is the first piece of legislation by any major country that makes a serious effort to end that Ponzi scheme.

You can read both of these efforts and draw your own conclusions. I would simply say that the environmental community, including people like Hansen, have generally failed to create the urgency necessary to pass the kind of bill he would prefer. All you have to do is look at this recent poll, showing that less than half of all Americans believe that climate change is the result of human activity. This may not even be the fault of Hansen and climate activists - this problem is uniquely ill-suited for the American political system to solve. It's long-term and not entirely tangible. It forces parochial lawmakers to act in the global interest. But the facts are that under the current structure, a straight-up carbon tax cannot pass, and anyway would be completely flawed with numerous loopholes, because it would have to run the exact same gauntlet that the Waxman-Markey bill has. It's dishonest to glorify all the positives of a bill that hasn't been through that ringer, and demonize the negatives of one that has.

Many climate activists have been valiant - Greenpeace draping a banner on Mount Rushmore is fantastic - but they have not broken through in the popular imagination. We have not seen the kind of pressure necessary, and furthermore the mainline enviro groups have been happy to pass whatever they can pass, and signaled that so early in the debate that they nullified any effect they could have on lawmakers, and disappointed progressives who could mount energy on that score. As a result you get politicians happy to take duplicitous stances like this:

I sent several emails to Rep. Glenn Nye urging his support for the ACES climate change bill and more emails expressing my disappointment after he voted against it.

I received two different emails from him in response:

In one email, Nye said I will be pleased to know the bill passed, praising it as "a comprehensive approach that charts a new course toward a clean energy economy" and "will create jobs, help end our dangerous dependence on foreign oil, and combat global warming" (without ever mentioning that he voted against it).

In the other email, Nye said I will be pleased to know that he voted against it "because we do not need another tax on American families during this time of economic hardship."

Oops! Nye can't have it both ways. Thelma Drake was consistently wrong, but at least she was consistent.

The environmental community simply must find other ways to intensify the debate. Otherwise, our political system will not produce what's necessary.

Global Warnings And Cultural Shifts

James Hansen delivered his first warning about global warming to Congress on June 23, 1988. Twenty years later he returned, and his message is far more dire.

Again a wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known by policymakers and the public. Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic. Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 percent.

The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next president and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.

Otherwise it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse-gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control.

Hansen called for CEOs of fossil fuel companies to be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity. They have blocked any attempt to transition into a clean energy future, have funded organizations designed to lie about the reasons for global warming, and generally protected their share of the energy market through disinformation and intimidation. If their work results in mass deaths and an unsustainable planet, I have to say he has a point.

The good news is that we have moved culturally toward a mindset of renewable energy and against carbon-producing industries. If you told me that rural Virginians would protest a coal-fired power plant three years ago, I wouldn't have believed you.

If it were possible to build a coal-fueled power plant in Virginia without controversy, it would happen here. In the state's Appalachian southwest, there is coal in the hills, coal in the rail cars, and coal in family histories that stretch back to picks and shovels.

Apparently, it's not possible.

"I am opposed to this plant," Wise County resident Jaculyn Hanrahan told the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board on Tuesday. "Because I am opposed to respiratory illness, smog, neurotoxins and acid rain."

The environmental injustice of carbon-producing energy is starting to reach people's understanding. Recent public health studies in poor areas like Appalachia showed the return of all sorts of exotic diseases that had been eradicated from North America for decades, like tapeworms and dengue fever. We know that areas in poverty typically have more pollution in the air, a result of having little political power to stop polluting industries from moving into their backyards. But as you can see in Wise County, they're starting to fight back, and coal is starting to become a dirty word. Forcing a technological shift out of necessity in heavy industry is one of our only hopes to provide a sustainable future for the next generation.

Breaking!!!! NASA Temperature Reading Infinitesimally Different!1!!! Must Credit D-Day!!1!!!

Wingnuts have got themselves in a good lather over a .03 degree change in the US temperature reading for 1998. Not the entire globe, but just the United States. This somehow proves that global warming isn't real. For a time there was a major wingnut attempt to look for other reasons for recent temperature increases (like sunspot activity), a tacit acknowledgement that the Earth is indeed getting hotter. Now they've swung back to denying its existence altogether, with "facts" that are the thinnest of gruel:

But how big an error was it? Well, 1998 went from being listed as 0.01 degrees warmer than 1934 to being listed as 0.02 degrees cooler. That means 1934 is back to being the "official" hottest U.S. year on record, although it's still a statistical tie. Some of the other U.S. years in this decade were also downgraded slightly. This all had virtually no bearing on the global temperature record, in which 2005 still appears to be the hottest year on record, and Al Gore's claim that nine of the ten warmest years in history have occurred since 1995 is still operative. Check out RealClimate for some graphs.

Nothing's really changed. But there are a few things to note here. One, I'm not sure what the "fraud" is. Conservatives keep claiming that (James) Hansen is being secretive about his "algorithms," although the methods for NASA's analysis are all laid out in painstaking detail here. Two, it's interesting that Hansen himself--the man who apparently needs to be "frog-marched out of his office"--doesn't seem to have ever claimed that 1998 was unequivocally the hottest U.S. year ever.

You're of course assuming that the right-wing blogosphere is interested in facts instead of just having something to whine about. This is illustrative of what Matt Yglesias has called the Hack Gap, the willingness for wingnuts to obsess over completely meaningless bits of information and to turn them into quelle scandal! while the progressive blogosphere doesn't usually get so wrapped up in such minutiae. The problem is that these kind of scandals are ready-made for the traditional media, who can just say "bloggers are on fire about X" and invite some maniac to yell about it for a while and provide instant drama without having to do a lot of work. This is why they jumped on "Macaca," because it was easy, but those of us on the left just don't sustain outrage over things that are meaningless with the same fervor (I would argue that Macaca wasn't meaningless because it spoke to a candidate's real views. Point-zero-three changes in temperature, um, are meaningless.)

The nature of two-party democracy is that elections are decided by the small minority of the public too confused or too ill-informed to realize that there are persistent, substantial differences between the two federal political parties. As a result, the issues (or, more likely, pseudo-issues) that are most important in deciding elections tend to be the issues that are least important in substantive terms.

As a writer, though, I'd rather spend my time writing about things that I think are important or at least interesting. Harping away on haircuts, Bykofsky's appalling column, the way George W. Bush lied to the American public about what kind of cheese he likes on his cheesesteak (really!), etc. doesn't seem like an appealing way to spend my time. But the fact that the right has an army of people willing to pretend that this sort of thing is the most important thing in the world is a massive, massive impediment to having sensible policies about national security, taxes, health care, global warming, etc.

Indeed.