(From the diaries -- Plutonium Page. One of the best global warming pieces I've read here at dKos.)A full page article in the Financial Times makes it painfully clear that the main obstacle to any action on global warming is Washington's active denial of the phenomenon, despite what is now overwhelming evidence:
The heat is on
The Bush administration, home of climate-change scepticism, has a history of blocking international agreements on the subject. And a recently leaked draft of the G8 communique on climate change failed to take a clear position on the science of global warming.
(...)
top administration advisers and officials freely admit to sceptical views. It is hard not to conclude that many of them arrive at their positions by considering politics first, science second. During recent visits to Washington, several Republicans have told me that limiting big cars and air conditioning is "communist" or "anti-American".
(...)
If there is to be effective international action on climate change, the argument - scientific and political - must be won in the US, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gas. Given the credence accorded to sceptics, from the Oval Office down, this will be a struggle.
We could regard sceptics as responsible people playing devil's advocate, or at worst as mere cranks, if some of them didn't hold influential positions in Washington. In public, the Bush administration says action is needed on climate change. Although the US is the only developed nation besides Australia that refuses to ratify the Kyoto protocol, the White House couches its opposition in terms of economic justice, not science. Kyoto is unfair, it is argued, because it imposes less stringent terms on developing countries.
But in private, some top administration advisers and officials freely admit to sceptical views. It is hard not to conclude that many of them arrive at their positions by considering politics first, science second. During recent visits to Washington, several Republicans have told me that limiting big cars and air conditioning is "communist" or "anti-American". They pick holes in the research that says Kyoto-type emissions limits will be necessary, and rely on rival arguments provided by a small band of scientists who cast doubt on the work of the majority of climatologists.
The article provides a summary of the scientific facts available, and clearly states that, for all intents and purposes, the scientific argument has been made:
In 2001, after 13 years of considering all the available research on global warming, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that the Earth had definitely grown warmer during the past half century - and it was our fault.
In the past nine months alone, three new reports have given considerable backing to the IPCC's position. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a four-year study involving more than 160 scientists from eight countries, found that Arctic sea-ice now covers an area up to 20 per cent smaller than in the 1960s, while snow cover in the region has shrunk by 10 per cent in the past 30 years. A geological survey of the Antarctic Peninsula found that 87 per cent of glaciers studied in the region had been retreating at an increasing rate over the past 50 years; and a study led by the California-based Scripps Institution of Oceanography found the warming of the world's oceans could only be explained by anthropogenic (man-made) climate change. As one of its authors said when news of the report broke: "The debate over whether there is a global-warming signal is over now, at least for rational people."
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There are always uncertainties to be exploited in science. Scientists, indeed, are professional sceptics, taught to question all hypotheses and received wisdom. (...) The science in this case is probably not going to get any clearer until some form of catastrophe has occurred. Yet in order to believe that the sceptics are correct, one must disbelieve the national science academies and the foremost climatologists of the developed world. One must believe that the most respected scientific journals are joined in a conspiracy to hide evidence proving the sceptics right.
There will always be scientists questioning some results, or some numbers, or some interpretations - because that's what scientists do, and that's how good science gets done. As the article says, barring a massive, obvious catastrophe, those that do not want to believe in global warming will always be able to cherry pick these critical voices (even if they are critical of very specific things) to claim that global warming is not real, or not important, or not a bad thing. Nothing will change that fact.
So the debate must move to the political ground.
And the core of the problem is that today's politics are run by two things: the now, and the money value. Let me explain:
- the now: we seem to care less and less about the future. Everything is about the satisfaction of our desires and our needs right now. The culture of consumerism, the short cycles in news and political life, the permanent quest for more, better, "new." So the future is heavily discounted, and the negative consequences of our acts today are not properly accounted for. Global warning is only the biggest and seemingly farthest away of all the invisible problems we are building up today. The Bush administration seems to have accelerated this trend, with its massive debt build up, its refusal of regulations, its "repression-not-prevention" foreign and crime policies, etc... It's me, me, me, NOW;
- the money value: we are caught in a time where we are trying to put a monetary value on everything and, conversely, where we are ignoring the value of things that cannot have a price tag. So we are ignoring externalities (the hidden, collective costs of individual actions, such as pollution and traffic jams resulting from the use of our cars), or we are actively hiding them. Free time, social goods, communities are concepts that are being increasingly discounted, not being measurable. If it does not appear in the (quarterly) bottom line, it does not exist.
The whole point of regulation (good regulation anyway) is to make externalities appear as a cost for those that cause it, in the hope that it will make them change their behavior in the "visible spectrum" of the economy. With the Bush administration actively fighting regulations of any kind on business, this is only getting worse: oil has a monetary value, but the pristineness of the area it was taken from does not, and the concept of depletion does not either.
A focus on the future could help take externalities into account: after all, if you know that 1 dollar spent on reducing pollution today will save you 10$ in health costs in a few years, it is a good investment. But investments make sense only if you have a way to value properly future revenue streams, and as the point above was making, this is becoming harder.
Global Warming (like the REACH directive about the proper impact studies required for all chemical and industrial products currently being negotiated in Brussels) is the perfect symbol of these trends. Its consequences are still apparently far enough away (and will affect other people before anyway), and preventing them would force us to change our current behaviors (our use of energy, some industrial patterns) which is not acceptable.
But at least Europe is trying somewhat. Everybody agrees that Kyoto is too little, too late, but at least it's a step in the right direction, it helps to build some tools that can be expanded (like carbon trading - which, by providing a monetary value to an important externality, is a nice jiu-jistu move). Similarly, the REACH directive is an important step in making industry more responsible for the thousands of products they have introduced in our households. The very real push for renewable energy is also a significant step in the right direction.
But the USA, under the Bush administration but already before (remember that the Senante voted 95-0 against Kyoto under Clinton) is not moving in that direction. Why?
Could it be that Americans don't really want to? I know that readers here are certainly not my target (I am always amazed by the number of people on the lefty blogs that already drive Priuses, for instance), but the question stands, and has been made sufficiently clear by Cheney and others "the American way of life is not negotiable".
Well, that's true, it's not sustainable, and reality will certainly not negotiate when the wall is hit...
So what do you do to change that mindset, between the twin dangers of doomsaying (the nastier scenarios are discounted as scaremongering and unserious) and complacency (rhe problems are real but manageable, and American ingenuity will help us manage) which both encourage all to do nothing?
I think that short term scaremongering is useless, but that long term scaremongering ("Los Angeles will be flooded by 2100 from rising sea levels") has its uses, because it brings attention to the topic in a non threatening way (we won't be around to see it).
The corollary is that we need to get "American ingenuity" to act in the short term, and that means that there must be incentives to do so. The European regulations are a pretty good way to do it, and you can do something there:
- support REACH, support the Kyoto treaty and associated negotiations on carbon trading - there must be grassroots support and awareness for these schemes in the USA as in all European countries;
- raise awareness of the same in your company or with people that you know work in multinational companies. Push carbon-trading as a potential source of profit (you can point them to GE's current massive press campaign to promote its environmentally-friendly strategy); put forward that being a first mover in adapting new tougher regulation can be (and indeed is eventually) a competitive advantage ; point out that a "level-playing field", i.e. consistent regulation for all international players is the fairest solution.
- and act, at your individual level, in sustainable ways as much as you can. Limit your driving. Buy less stuff. Buy local foodstuffs. Switch off lights and the like. Don't use AC as much; and encourage people around you to do the same.
But above all, people everywhere need to be made aware of the increasingly high monetary costs today of not doing anything:
- higher gasoline prices are a reflection of increasing scarcity. Talk to people around you about "peak oil", about the "terrorist tax" that they are currently paying to Middle Eastern regimes (yep, I know it somewhat panders on underlying racism, but it's understandable and effective). We know about it, but few people have actually heard of these things yet in the non-blog-obsessed world;
- the Fed is rising rates again. Money is getting more expensive. That's because of the current debt binge. Immediate consumption is about to get a lot more expensive - get people to worry about their debts;
- healthcare costs are rising uncontrollably. Smart regulation today increases our chances to avoid nasty diseases (which could bankrupt you) in the near future;
- sustainable development requires smart, well-paid and hard to offshore jobs: local foodstuffs, decentralised (i.e. also local) energy sources; smart design, and tough local and global enforcement.
We need to fight the cynical and selfish crowd in Washington with all our forces, because they are killing us slowly (or not so slowly in Iraq). This requires grassroots efforts by all of us to improve consciousness of the issue and get people to think of the consequences beyond their next paycheck.