These are trying times. We face momental challenges, whether in protecting democratic ideals, advocacy for those in need, or promoting responsible environmental and energy policies. We face entrenched political and corporate interests who can best be described as petty parsers of every word we utter. A petty parser finds some connotation or imprecision in our language that can be used to distract from entire message. Petty parsers live on red herrings.
One of the best examples of petty parsing I have seen recently happened to Dr. James Hansen in his testimony to the Iowa Utilities Commission against the building and continued use of coal-fired power plants.
Dr. Hansen is a well known climate scientist, now at Columbia University. In October, he testified before the Iowa Utilities Commission about coal-fired plants, even those relatively clean in terms of sulfur or mercury emissions. His entire testimony (pdf) can be found here.
Here is an except that brought out the pesky petty parsers.
“Coal will determine whether we continue to increase climate change or slow the human impact. Increased fossil fuel CO2 in the air today, compared to the pre-industrial atmosphere, is due 50% to coal, 35% to oil and 15% to gas. As oil resources peak, coal will determine future CO 2 levels. Recently, after giving a high school commencement talk in my hometown, Denison, Iowa, I drove from Denison to Dunlap, where my parents are buried. For most of 20 miles there were trains parked, engine to caboose, half of the cars being filled with coal. If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains – no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.”
His analogy between the coal cars and "boxcars headed to crematoria" got some knickers in a twist. Here is the indignant response from the CEO of the National Mining Association. Here is the pdf link.
I was deeply distressed to read accounts of your recent testimony to the Iowa Utilities Board in which you likened freight cars carrying Powder River Basin coal to the box cars that carried Europeans to their deaths in crematoria during World War II. The suggestion that coal utilization for electricity generation can be equated with systematic extermination of European Jewry is both repellant and preposterous.
Your advocacy on behalf of global warming is ill-served by an invidious comparison that manages not only to trivialize the suffering of millions but undermines your credibility as a rational observer of a complex phenomenon. Your suggestion that an additional coal-fired plant here in America could somehow constitute a tipping point in the build up of greenhouse gases, while China builds a new plant each week, defies common sense.
I believe you owe the hard working men and women of both the coal mining and railroad industries an apology and respectively request that you refrain from making such comments in the future.
Sincerely yours,
Kraig R. Naasz
President and CEO
National Mining Association
Hansen's analogy was not perfect. Dropping one clause would allow him to have made the point as effectively.
If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains for uncountable irreplaceable species.
Naasz uses that one clause to fabricate indignation, but uses it as a red herring to question Dr. Hensen's credentials as a scientist: "undermines your credibility as a rational observer of a complex phenomenon." For someone who used to head The Fertilizer Institute, Naasz is an expert at spreading crap and inorganic nitrites.
Here is part of an editorial written by Naasz and published in the bird-cage liner known as the The Washington Times (pdf warning).
America's coal reserves are the world's largest, containing more energy than all the oil in the Middle East and generating half of the nation's electricity. And while coal will never be mentioned in the same breath as our purple mountains' majesty or our amber waves of grain, America's enormous coal supply remains a strategic natural resource whose value in the digital age can be as great as it was in the industrial age.
It is ironic that in his determination to equate coal with patriotism, he finds it advantageous to quote a line from America the Beautiful. The coal industry is single-handedly responsible for destroying over 470 purple mountains' majesty through the despicable practice known as moutaintop removal mining. In case you missed the front page series by Devilstower or the many diaries on mountaintop removal mining, here is a primer:
The big lie being told by the coal industry is that coal can one day be burned cleanly and not contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. This is the same lie that has been told by industry for over 40 years. Most of the largest coal-fired plants in America are among the world's worst contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and there are no plans to decomission those plants in the foreseeable future. Some day we will be clean. Honest. Trust us.
The big omission by the coal industry is that no matter how clean it becomes to burn coal as an energy source, its extraction will always be an environmental disaster unless the practice of mountaintop removal is prohibited.
Here is Hansen's response to Naasz.
Dear Mr. Naasz:
Your letter of 30 October regarding my testimony to the Iowa Utilities Board* appears to illustrate that you do not wish to have the message about the grave future consequences of unrestrained growth in coal-fired power plants publicly stated. Yet you offer no evidence contradicting the scientific assessment in my testimony.
There is overwhelming consensus about growing human-made climate change, which poses a threat to humanity and many other species on our planet. Climatic zones have been shifting poleward for the past 30 years at a rate that is, as far as we know, unprecedented. This rapid change is caused by increasing human-made greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide (CO 2). If this movement continues or accelerates this century, it will become the predominant cause of extinction of species, many already threatened by other human-made stresses.
Fossil fuel contributions to the alarming rise of atmospheric CO2 are well quantified. Cumulative CO 2 emissions, which properly apportion responsibility for climate change, are coal (~50%), oil (~35%), and gas (~15%). Potential emissions from coal are even greater on the long term, given coal’s larger proven reserves. As my colleagues and I have shown, the only practical way to bring human-made climate change under control is by phasing out coal use except where the CO2 is captured and sequestered.
Any implication that jobs created via increased emphasis on energy efficiency, clean renewable energies, and advanced safer nuclear power are somehow inferior to jobs in coal mining defies common sense.
America yearns for its native clear skies, reversal of the growing rates of asthma and other respiratory problems, an end to mercury and other water pollution that poisons our children, and a halt to mountain top removal with its spoliation of our streams.
Passenger travel by rail has become intolerable in parts of our country, at a time when it is most needed, because of delays caused by priority given to coal trains. This and other subsidies wrangled from the people by fossil fuel special interests soil our democracy, which our founding fathers intended to operate for the people, not for the financial benefit of the few.
Fortunately, young people are becoming aware of inequities, as too many special interests seek profits and ignore deleterious impacts upon the planet that today’s children and grandchildren will inherit. I hope that you will hear more from the young generation, and I look forward to our policy makers appreciating and acting upon the concerns of young people.
Sincerely,
James Hansen
Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Adjunct Professor,
Columbia University Earth Institute
Dr. Hansen has considerable "credibility as a rational observer of a complex phenomenon" unlike the hired hack lobbyist looking to buy politicians.
Who is Naasz backing in the 2008 presidental campaign? Mitt Romney To quote Gomer Pyle, surprise, surprise, surprise.