The unfortunate fact is that in order to have any impact at all on climate change (or fuel and food security, or clean water and air, just pop in the words that work best for you), we need to reduce emissions, not just keep them from increasing. To get the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere from its current 387 parts per million to the 350 parts per million that many environmental activists and scientists have been promoting (thanks in large part to Bill McKibben’s 350 campaign) as the highest it can go without causing seriously erratic climate conditions, requires dramatic action to reduce the amount of carbon being emitted.

Many believe that it’s impossible to get down to 350 ppm, no matter what we do. “Three-fifty is so impossible to achieve that to make it the goal risks the reaction that if we are already over the cliff, then let’s just enjoy the ride until it’s over,” John M. Reilly, an economist at M.I.T., told the New York Times earlier this year. “The message needs to be that there are risks at the current level, and those risks increase the further we push the system,” he said.

Nasa scientist and climate expert Dr. James Hansen, in a paper that lays out the case for the 350ppm target, counters that it’s possible to meet the target, it just requires a big shift in thinking. “The 350ppm target is achievable by phasing out coal use except where CO₂ is captured, and adopting agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon,” he wrote.

Whether you agree with Hansen and McKibben or Reilly and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it’s clear that just keeping increases in CO2 emissions static or low is not enough. Moreover, while it’s important to occasionally realize that we have managed to accomplish something, celebrating half-steps and marginal progress and clouding the issue with debates over what sounds to most people like scientific jargon is only serving to push the environment further down on the average Joe’s priority list. To wit, a Gallup poll released earlier this week revealed that Americans are less concerned about pollution, global warming, deforestation, and animal and plant extinction than at any point in the past 20 years.

One of the reasons, according to Mother Jones’ Blue Marble blog, could be that “the public is more content with environmental progress than before, so they have less to gripe about.” MoJo attributes that contentedness to the fact that Obama is a more eco-friendly President. I would add that the fact that we’re hearing about environmental issues all the time probably gives people the sense that things are being taken care of. Then when they see something like, say, a chart that shows that CO2 emissions haven’t changed all that much in the last 10 years they think, “alright, maybe we’ve got this thing beat.”

And given the fact that we only recently got people back on the environmental bandwagon, and still haven’t actually done that much, congratulating ourselves now and taking a little break on the environmental front is incredibly dangerous.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/earthmatters/2010/03/19/sometimes-pessimism-is-just-realism-or-why-compostable-chip-bags-and-static-co2-emissions-wont-save-the-world/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/earthmatters/2010/03/11/legalese-a-new-way-to-fight-climate-change/ http://thefastertimes.com/earthmatters/2010/03/11/legalese-a-new-way-to-fight-climate-change/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:47:33 +0000 Amy Westervelt http://thefastertimes.com/earthmatters/?p=567 Back in 2006 there were a couple of landmark cases in Rhode Island and California that didn’t seem all that important at the time. The cases revolved around lead paint and whether manufacturers were still responsible for the effects of their product, and the costs associated with those effects, after the statute of limitations had run out on product liability claims. Both judges ruled that they were, and invoked public nuisance law in their rulings. The parameters of product liability, a part of tort law, force plaintiffs to prove the guilt of the defendant; prove the extent and uniqueness of their suffering; prove harm was caused by a faulty product (not misuse of the product) — and do it all within a certain time frame. But public nuisance law, as applied to products, relaxes the parameters and nixes the time limits.

At the time of the lead paint cases, some corporate lawyers worried about the implications of the rulings for their clients, while activists hoped the cases could be a jumping-off point for public nuisance lawsuits against known polluters, gun manufacturers and other corporate baddies.

But despite all the worry and hype, nothing much happened immediately following those rulings. Then, in late 2008, Kivalina, an Inupiat Eskimo village, proved all those corporate worry-warts right. The small barrier island Kivalina sits on is eroding, a fact that will eventually require the mass-evacuation of the entire village. And Kivalina villagers are suing the dozen or so oil companies they believe are responsible, citing the companies’ practices, and the climate change that results, as a “public nuisance.” An Oakland court dismissed the case, but the people of Kivalina and their lawyers are appealing and it’s starting to look like they may get somewhere.

Meanwhile, a case that actually pre-dated the 2006 lead paint cases, and which trial watchers at the time believed would be almost immediately affected by those rulings, is just now getting its day in court. Back in 2005, Hurricane Katrina victims brought a class-action lawsuit against the country’s main greenhouse gas emitters, including Shell, ExxonMobil, BP and Chevron, as well as Honeywell and American Electric. The plaintiffs claimed that these companies had a duty to “avoid unreasonably endangering the environment, public health, public and private property.”

Like the Kivalina case, the Katrina case was dismissed by a lower court. Then last October a three-judge federal appeals court allowed the case to move forward. In February, the same court decided to re-examine the case with nine justices. “The plaintiffs allege that the defendants’ operation of energy, fossil fuels, and chemical industries in the United States caused the emission of greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming,” the lawsuit reads. The increase in global surface and air temperatures “in turn caused a rise in sea levels and added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina, which combined to destroy the plaintiffs’ private property, as well as public property useful to them.”

There’s a pretty good likelihood that one or the other of these cases will end up before the Supreme Court, a fact that has big polluters pooping their pants. The Kivalina case is particularly worrisome because in addition to public nuisance, it claims that the defendants in the case (Big Oil) knew the consequences of their practices and deliberately covered it up. If the case were to make it all the way to the Supreme Court and any embarrassing emails or, say, whistleblowers were to suddenly appear, the impact could be drastic for the whole industry, and for the environment.

Which leaves me with one big question: Who will play the whistleblower in the climate change version of the Insider? I’m thinking it’s gotta be DiCaprio.

Evidence of that truth was on display last night during the 82nd Annual Academy Awards, when Ric O’Barry - protagonist of the film, The Cove, which took home the trophy for Best Documentary–tried to use his 15 seconds of screen time to jolt new energy into the campaign to halt the dolphin capture and slaughter in Taiji, Japan.

As soon as he got on stage, co-director Fisher Stevens rattled off the obligatory Thank-Yous then included, “My hero, Ric O’Barry, who is not only a hero to this species but to all species.” That’s when O’Barry unfurled a small, plain, black-and-white banner reading, “Text DOLPHIN to 44144.”

That was enough to get the Oscar censors’ attention. Before the other co-director, Louie Psihoyos, could get a word in, the camera cut to the audience and then the orchestra started in on its “exit-the-stage-now” theme.

But the Oscar producers’ shoddy treatment of O’Barry and company only succeeded in getting even more attention to the cause to protect Japan dolphins. This morning’s LA Times gave O’Barry a thumbs up, and the Seattle Post Intelligencer also offered a nod, as did all sorts of bloggers.

“I didn’t know until this morning that holding up the sign was the right thing to do,” O’Barry told me this morning as he prepped for an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper that will take place later today. “People are taking action because of it. But the Academy doesn’t like that. And I thought I was screwing up Louie’s speech when they turned on the exit music.”

Psihoyos got a chance to get say his piece backstage, telling reporters that, “The biggest thing will be when dolphins are no longer slaughtered for meat,” and  “If people take action, [they] can solve this problem.” As of this morning, about 40,000 people have sent the “dolphin” texts, which connects them to an online petition sponsored by Care2.

Far more important, though, is that the Oscar award will open the way for a widespread theatrical release for The Cove in Japan. As O’Barry wrote in an email to supporters at 2 am this morning:

“Japan has 126 million people; only 600 have seen The Cove so far. Those who saw it were shocked and dismayed that this slaughter was happening in their country. We need to enlist their help and the help of millions of their fellow citizens to stop the Japanese government from issuing 23,000 permits annually to slaughter dolphins.”

As I came to learn when I traveled to Japan with O’Barry last September to write a profile of him for Earth Island  Journal, the only way the dolphin slaughter will stop is if  Japanese citizens come to oppose it. The movie will have to be a key part of generating that opposition, since many Japanese are unaware of the annual hunt. “It’s really all about Japan for us,” O’Barry said to me this morning. “It guarantees there is interest in seeing this, even if the government doesn’t want people to see it. People will see it now.”

He said, “If another documentary had won, we would have gotten bumped. It’s a major breakthrough in the campaign. It guarantees a theatrical release in Japan. The distributor was struggling. But a movie that has won the Academy Awards will get into theaters.”

O’Barry said he was extremely nervous as he and the filmmakers walked on stage, but he knew that he had to unfurl his banner message:  “I had butterflies in my stomach. I wanted to throw up on my shoes. But I knew that one billion people were watching, and I had to do it.”

O’Barry is no stranger to the movie-making business, having spent years as a stuntman and animal trainer on the Flipper series and number of other television shows and films. Still, he said that being at the Oscars made him feel a bit like an odd fish. “I felt different than everyone else in the room,” he said, recalling his emotions in the moments before the award was announced. “I’m not in the industry. I am out of time and out of place. I don’t belong there at all. I am thinking what this will mean to the campaign if The Cove is mentioned.”

O’Barry said that it was great that James Cameron shook his hand as he walked down the aisle, and that backstage George Clooney told Psihoyos that it was lame he didn’t get a chance to talk. Oh, and that “the guy” who gave them the Oscar trophies was very encouraging and complimentary and said he had seen The Cove twice. O’Barry might not have recognized him, but “the guy” was, well, Matt Damon.

To learn more about the effort to halt the dolphin killing in Japan, visit: www.savejapandolphins.org.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/earthmatters/2010/03/08/the-coves-ric-obarry-recaps-his-oscar-moment/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/earthmatters/2010/03/04/is-cap-and-dividend-the-answer-to-all-this-carbon-business/ http://thefastertimes.com/earthmatters/2010/03/04/is-cap-and-dividend-the-answer-to-all-this-carbon-business/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:29:19 +0000 Jason Mark http://thefastertimes.com/earthmatters/?p=540 This post appears courtesy The EnvironmentaList.

If you were searching for a parable about the dangers of tactical absolutism (you know, my-way-or-the-highway type thinking), the rise and fall of cap-and-trade legislation would be a good place to start.

In the months leading up to the passage of the Waxman-Markey climate bill in the House last summer, many influential enviros were in a  don’t-rock-the-boat mood. Privately, most greens agreed that the legislation was deeply flawed, especially its giveaway of 85 percent of polluter permits and its cave-in to agribusiness interests. But the conventional wisdom among green mandarins was that any discussion of other options was politically naïve, quixotic even. The cap and trade defenders were often so convinced of their own sophistication that they descended to condescension. At Climate Progress, Joe Romm upbraided NASA Scientist James Hansen for backing a carbon tax: “Your opposition to Waxman-Markey is ill-conceived and unhelpful,” a headline there blared. “There isn’t going to be a carbon tax nor should there be. Get over it and move on.” Grist.org columnist David-shut-yer-piehole-Roberts was nearly hysterical in his defense of cap-and-trade, trashing a Thomas Friedman column in support of a carbon tax and concluding that “It’s Friedman who doesn’t seem to ‘get’ cap-and-trade.”

After Waxman-Markey passed, all eyes turned to the Senate and, to their credit, critics of cap-and-trade kept up their debunking in an effort to influence legislation in the upper chamber. At the same time, cap-and-trade defenders continued to proclaim that other options had no legislative chance sand so should stay out of the discussion. When the Story of Stuff’s Annie Leonard had the temerity to question cap-and-trade’s logic, Roberts slammed her for her “Romanticism.” He wrote: “This is the worst feature of the C&T bashers (and carbon tax advocates): their utter political naivete.” Environmental Defense Fund, which has staked its reputation on cap-and-trade success, hastily put together a rip off video, “The Facts of Cap and Trade.” The video tries to impress viewers with its seriousness by highlighting the fact that the presentation comes “From an Economist.”

As the debate continues ad naseum, a funny thing has happened: An alternative solution called cap-and-dividend is gaining ground and could  supplant the much heralded (and equally hated) cap-and-trade proposal. Under cap-and-dividend, producers and importers of fossil fuels will have to buy polluter permits that will be auctioned off by the government. Some of that money will go toward making investments in clean energy. But the rest will be returned to Americans in the form of a rebate — about $1,000 a year for a family of four. Everyone except for the wealthiest 20 percent of us would get some kind of rebate. By raising energy prices, the system would discourage people from being fossil fuel hogs, and would over time reduce emissions.

Pie in the sky? Not exactly. Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, is pushing a cap-and-dividend bill. She even has a Republican co-sponsor, Susan Collins of Maine. What gives the Cantwell-Collins bill a chance of success is its simplicity: A mere 40 pages long, the CLEAR Act boasts the virtue of brevity; it’s a fraction of the length of the Waxman-Markey bill. And the measure is picking up media endorsements. The Economist recently wrote: “Of all the bills that would put a price on carbon, cap-and-dividend seems the most promising. … The most attractive thing about the bill is that it’s honest.” The Washington Post gave the Cantwell-Collins proposal a nod, writing last week in an editorial that “there is a chance that the failure of the House’s bill in the Senate and the search for a Plan B will yet produce better legislation.”

So, with cap-and-trade on the ropes and a sensible alternative, cap-and-dividend, gaining momentum, I’m wondering if the chorus will change its tune. Will EDF, for example, be willing to ditch their pet project and support another carbon-reduction mechanism? Will the green bloggers lend their support to a different tactic?
I think it’s only fair to ask: Who’s being politically naïve now?

By Tom Athanasiou, director of Eco Equity and a member of the Greenhouse Development Rights authors group. This piece originally appeared in

First, a confession: This is not another enumeration of confident judgments. I will not tell you that Copenhagen was an unmitigated failure. Or that this failure was Obama’s fault. Or that, as is the new fashion, China was the ugliest of them all. I will not say that the South’s negotiators made impossible demands. Or argue that the United Nations’ process is unwieldy and obsolete. I will not claim that only domestic US action really matters. Nor will I talk of a “North-South impasse” or a “US-China polluters pact,” two popular formulations that misleadingly imply an equal division of blame.

I will say this: Almost two decades after I started working on climate change, I was happily astounded to witness the crystallization, on the streets of Copenhagen, of a grassroots movement that was both energetic and sophisticated, and to see global civil society groups working in solidarity with the leaders of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable nations to press a collective agenda. And I can tell you something else: Our chances of preventing climate catastrophe rests in large part on the ability of this new alliance to communicate to the world’s richest and most powerful peoples that the emissions emergency is, above all things, a crisis of justice.

As everyone knows, the Copenhagen talks failed to catapult us into the ambitious global mobilization we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But this was never going to happen anyway. What did happen, as the veteran Bangladeshi policy activist Saleemul Huq put it, was “a shaking of the traditional pieces of the global geo-political puzzle and their landing in a new and unfamiliar configuration.” In this sense, the question of success and failure is moot. The real question is whether the new configuration offers us fresh ways forward.

This question cannot be answered by the usual logic of environmental campaigning. Now is a time for reflection – not for pushing forward one more meeting, one more demonstration, one more demand. Of course we need action, and we need it fast. But we also need strategy, because Huq’s “unfamiliar configurations” are going to settle in the midst of another big year that will culminate with another major December climate showdown, this time in Mexico City. If 2010 is major, 2011 and 2012 promise (or threaten) to be just as important, as do the other years in the brief time ahead – the post-Copenhagen era in which we must begin to act.

The Copenhagen summit marked a pivot in world history, a defining moment – if not a decisive one. The climate negotiations saw the debut of a new geopolitics. In it, China looms large, the United States appears weakened (though still with the ability to do great harm or good), Brazil and India are rising, the European Union looks progressive but ineffectual, and a chorus of smaller states have been emboldened to defend their interests in the face of an existential crisis. As for that “second superpower” – world public opinion – it is, frankly, divided against itself. Seen in this way, the end of 2009 may well mark the real beginning of the twenty-first century, in the sense that 1914 and the start of World War I are commonly taken to mark the real beginning of the twentieth. The hope must be that our new century won’t be as hot and brutal as the last one was cold and bloody.

Copenhagen was about far more than the climate talks. To make sense of it, look at it as a milestone in a process that’s still unfolding. The negotiations did not just occur in the official meeting halls of the Bella Center. They took the form of countless debates that happened in the NGO “Convergence Center” on Copenhagen’s Nørrebro, on countless internet comment boards, in civic spaces around the world. The critical debates of Copenhagen spanned the entire globe and a huge swath of opinion. Justice and science, realism and necessity, capitalism and democracy, the cost of affluence and the rights of the poor – it was all in play, encoded in the chants and banners of the estimated 100,000 people who clogged Tivoli Square on December 12 demanding meaningful action. And – most importantly – these debates were a key background to the blow-by-blow negotiations occurring among nation-states.

This surely is one of the core achievements of Copenhagen. Were it not for the “street heat,” even the provisional possibilities of the new situation would not be ours. The massive demonstrations outside the summit halls, the activist flash mobs within the conference, the demonstrations, and constant in-your-face pressure – this and much more had an effect not just on the tone of the negotiations, but on the substance as well. Even after civil society groups were ejected from the Bella Center, their demands echoed in the formal negotiating rooms. The green movement showed itself to be far clearer on the logic of climate justice than it was even a year ago. The ubiquitous placards calling for an accord that would be “fair, ambitious, and binding” were the right ones. The demonstrators showed smartness and savvy wrapped in a sense of urgency.

The point is that, as a focus for public education and movement building, Copenhagen was an incalculable success. Everyone – from Barack Obama to Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chair of the South’s G77 negotiating bloc, to you and me – knows a hell of a lot more about climate change and its politics than we did a year ago.

Not that we didn’t already know that we face a planetary emergency. This has been obvious for years. The difference now is that – thanks to the global campaign 350.org, and Mohamed Nasheed, the President of the Maldives, and a whole lot of terrified scientists – we know that we know it. And we know it in an altogether appalling manner. We know, at least in outline, what will happen in Africa, though we may wish we didn’t. And Tibet. And the Australian grain belt, and Florida, and the southern oceans, and of course Greenland. We’ve talked about the bogs, the permafrost, and the risks to forests. We’ve heard, finally, about the threats to people: We know how they will suffer, how they will die.

Copenhagen did not deliver the stringent targets and commitments needed to support the fair and ambitious climate accord the protest banners demanded. But this, fortunately, isn’t the end of the story. We can also ask if Copenhagen was a failure when compared not to what is necessary, but rather to what was possible. We can explore whether (this is a key twist) it opened new possibilities, or at least prevented new possibilities from being foreclosed.

Clearly there were successes in Copenhagen. The emergence of a semi-organized bloc of “Most Vulnerable Countries” (the acronym is MVCs) is news that will stay news, and not just because of the tension between the MVCs and “emerging economies” like China and India. The larger issue is that the MVCs have come to know themselves as frontline states, and in so doing have irrevocably transformed the global politics of climate crisis. It goes without saying that, in the coming battles, the most vulnerable will reserve much of their ire for the wealthy countries of the North.

Witness the open letter that South African Archbishop and Nobel Prize Winner Desmond Tutu sent on December 15, after a walkout by the unified African bloc led to a sudden halt in the official negotiations. The Africans aimed to pressure the wealthy countries into honoring their obligations to accept stringent new reduction targets, and Tutu wished to make the stakes quite clear. His letter was blunt: “If temperatures are not kept down then Africa faces a range of devastating threats such as crop yield reductions in places of as much as 50 percent in some countries by 2020.… A global goal of about two degrees C is to condemn Africa to incineration and no modern development.”

On that same note, the effectiveness of the 350 campaign is another Copenhagen achievement. By the end of the two-week melee-cum-jamboree, 112 countries had endorsed the demand to stabilize carbon dioxide levels at 350 parts per million (it’s now at 387 ppm, and rising.) The 350 ppm target, which once seemed so obscure, had by the end of the talks become an expression of plain speech. And, at least among the activists, it had almost entirely supplanted the 2°C temperature target as the measure of climate stabilization. This happened thanks to the determined efforts of thousands of citizen-activists across the globe who had made the number the cornerstone of their campaigns.

As a goal, 350 ppm is hard to explain without recourse to charts and other technical idioms. Suffice it to say that in Copenhagen 350 emerged as the alternative to reduction targets that would condemn low-lying and island states and other “most vulnerable” areas to near-certain apocalypse. The “official” target, as agreed by the G8 and many others, is commonly expressed in terms of a global emissions reduction to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, a target that is often said, especially by politicians, to be “2°C compliant.” But that’s stretching the arithmetic. More precisely, the G8 supports a slack and politically expedient emissions pathway that the vulnerable countries and their allies are determined to cast aside. The vulnerable nations didn’t settle for a “more honest” 2°C target, but instead counterattacked with the slogan “1.5 to Survive.” This was a call for a 350 ppm target, which has perhaps a 50-50 chance of holding the warming below 1.5°C, and something like an 85 percent chance of keeping it below 2°C.

The Copenhagen Accord (.pdf, ~150k), of course, did not open the road to 350. What it does is provide a process by which governments can step forward to publish reduction pledges. This will be a very big deal, but evaluating these pledges will be complicated. What, after all, should a national emissions pledge be compared to? A projection of business-as-usual emissions? If so, which one? A measure of per-capita “emissions rights?” If so, what to do about the fact that the “atmospheric space” is already exhausted? Should historical responsibility come into play? If so, starting when? How should the obligations of rich countries be compared to those of poor? And what about the rich people within poor countries? Or for that matter the poor people within rich ones?

These questions are not easy. They are further confused by the matter of domestic vs. international obligation. Should the United States – which tops the charts in measures of capacity, responsibility, and per-capita emissions – be able to do its fair share within its own borders? Or does it have obligations to more vulnerable countries around the world?

Then there’s the problem of loopholes. These are critical, because the United States and other wealthy countries have built plenty of them into their emissions reductions projections. The critical loopholes are surplus allowed emissions (so-called “hot air” from the collapse of the Soviet economy in 1990), forestry and agricultural credits (calculated from bogus baselines), and of course “non-additional offsets” (which represent reductions that would have happened anyway). If they’re allowed to stand, then the wealthy countries will have to do almost nothing at all.

The bottom line is that the fundamental impasse over North-South “burden sharing” – who does what, when, and where, and, most importantly, who pays – is still unresolved. The crux of the problem is that we in the wealthy world are simply not carrying our own weight. Consider just a simple comparison between the United States and China. Since 1850, the United States has emitted some 350 gigatons of CO₂, according to the US Department of Energy; during that same time, China has emitted about 125 gigatons. Now take the two countries’ pledged emissions reductions by 2020. China is promising to cut 2.5 gigatons of CO₂, , or a 40 percent improvement in energy intensity; the United States, for its part, has committed to cutting only 1.25 gigatons. In short, our historical responsibility for climate change is greater, yet the Chinese are the ones undertaking the larger obligation.

Since the summit didn’t succeed, the inevitable question becomes, “Why not?” One possible answer is that, as the street protesters had it, we need “system change not climate change”: Our governments, in thrall to corporate interests, are incapable of organizing a decisive response to the climate crisis. Another explanation is that the United States was willing to undermine a multilateral agreement with the cynical goal of avoiding real emissions commitments while, if possible, looking good. A third possibility is that the Obama administration, desperate to break Senate Republicans’ hold on climate policy, was willing to take any deal, no matter how weak, as a way to “unlock” the Congressional stalemate. Jamie Henn of 350.org captured this point of view when he quipped to me, “This isn’t a negotiation; it’s a hostage crisis.”

Alternatively, Copenhagen’s failure may have been China’s fault. This explanation, alas, has become quite popular. It demands discussion, beginning with a widely read, and rather fantastically misleading article titled “How Do I Know China Wrecked the Copenhagen Deal? I Was in the Room,” by Mark Lynas, a reporter-activist who was part of the Maldives’ negotiating team. Here’s Lynas’ key paragraph:

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China’s representative who insisted that industrialized country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. “Why can’t we even mention our own targets?” demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil’s representative too pointed out the illogicality of China’s position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord’s lack of ambition.

It’s easy to see why Lynas’s fly-on-the-wall account is so compelling, particularly to Westerners primed to see China as an implacable mercantilist threat to their preferred style of capitalism. Certainly Lynas’s conclusions are much in line with the North’s strategy of hiding behind the emerging economies. But caution is in order here. It’s important to go to the core of China’s inflexibility, which, as Lynas subsequently put it, is that “Copenhagen has opened up a chasm between sustainability and equity.” How so? Because, although “NGOs that ideologically support equity defend the right of developing countries to increase their emissions for two to three more decades at least,” in fact, “there is no room for expansion by anyone.”

This, alas, is almost true. The central fact of our carbon-constrained future is that China – along with India and South Africa, Brazil and Mexico, and indeed the entire “emerging” world – stands at the edge of an impossible future. These countries are expected to constrain their carbon emissions while at the same time (here’s the punch line) pulling hundreds of millions of their citizens out of poverty. Yet the only model of modern prosperity that they have to work with is one based on huge per-capita emissions. No wonder they balk at demands from the North.

In order to halt catastrophic climate change, the major emitters must act decisively. All of them, at once. But this will only be fair, and indeed it can only happen, if the wealthiest among us pay for most of the action. That, however, is politically impossible (see: US Senate). And it’s impossible, in part, because the debate about “fair burden sharing” that has raged among climate negotiators during the last few years has not reached the public consciousness. We do not know our duties. The Northern climate movement has quite failed to explain the structure of the global problem to its home constituencies. The term “climate justice” might be well understood by green NGO-istas and, say, Bolivian president Evo Morales, but that doesn’t mean that most people get it.

What exactly is this “global problem”? First, that we’ve reached the limits to growth, and done so in a world that’s bitterly divided between haves and have-nots. Second, that despite decades of warning, the wealthy nations have neglected to demonstrate that low-carbon development is possible. Third, that the industrialized countries have stonewalled, rejecting the demand for meaningful reduction commitments. And finally, that China – which, despite its faults, has lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty – has emerged as the chief voice of a bloc that refuses to choose between developmental justice and climate stabilization.

The situation is easy enough to visualize. Consider the “G8 style” emissions pathway that provoked China’s backroom confrontation with the North. The details of this pathway are that: 1) global emissions peak soon (about 2020) and decline by 2050 to 50 percent below 1990 levels; and 2) Northern emissions simultaneously decline to at least 80 percent below 1990 levels. Now ask yourself – why might China’s rejection of such an offer be reasonable? The answer lies in arithmetic: The remaining global emissions budget is so small that, despite a relatively ambitious program of Northern emission reductions, Southern emissions must still peak soon after global emissions, and then drop almost as rapidly. Further, they must do so while the people of the South are still struggling to escape poverty, and more generally to invent new, dignified, and sustainable models of life. The climate crisis is, in other words, a crisis of development.

I want to be very clear here: The problem is not that poverty alleviation or sustainable development are impossible in a carbon-constrained world. The problem is that they have not been pioneered, that the only proven routes up from poverty still involve an expanded use of energy and seemingly inevitable increase in fossil-fuel use. Which is why it’s almost impossible for the South to imagine an equitable future in which its emissions precipitously decline. The South is concerned that an inequitable climate regime will force a choice between developmental justice and climate protection. And justly so.

This brings us back to China, which despite its wealthy enclaves is a deeply impoverished country. The targets that the Chinese insisted on expunging from the Copenhagen Accord have developmental implications. The South in general has made it quite clear that it will not allow itself to be trapped into sacrificing development for climate protection. More specifically, the Chinese have repeatedly insisted that the North accept an aggregate reduction target that is at the “upper end” of the 25 percent to 40 percent range (from the 1990 baseline) by 2020. Yet the North was attempting to enshrine a global emissions reduction pathway without making any such short-term commitment. Given the North’s refusal to accept stringent targets, what (other than explaining themselves coherently) should the Chinese have done differently? The answer is not obvious.

The wheel is still in spin. As Copenhagen passes into history, the politics of climate obligation may well shift in significant ways. For one thing, although the rich countries may have succeeded in sidelining the Kyoto Protocol (we don’t know yet) they did not manage to remove the presumption that it’s still their move. Nor, despite Copenhagen’s adoption of a pledge-based system, was the momentum of the UN negotiations broken. Copenhagen reaffirmed the need to devise a formal global accord that’s fair, stringent, and capacious enough to contain both the United States and China – while stabilizing Earth’s climate system.

To get there will require admitting a few difficult truths. Like the fact that the United States did a great deal to poison the Copenhagen waters and that, going forward, it may do even more. And that there will be no breakthrough until the wealthy countries pursue stringent domestic reductions, and help to underwrite the larger transition as well. The fact that the South’s biggest emitters have, to a small extent, stepped outside the G77’s overall ranks does nothing to change this underlying reality. The new game is one in which the players as well as the rules belong to a still-emerging world. China’s end-game posture makes this clear enough.

The toughest admission will be that of national obligation, of duty. If we in civil society are to do better than our putative leaders, we must escape the “dysfunctional system” frame that spreads the blame around so thinly. More precisely, we’re going to have to actually work out a coherent way of assigning responsibility for the fundamental deadlock in the international climate negotiations. This gives us a clear mandate: We must fight for a framework within which all countries, but first of all the wealthy ones, make the commitments demanded by the science, by their own record of emissions, and by their fiscal capacity to act. If we’re to assign responsibility, we must also assume it.

Copenhagen, for all its disappointments, marked a turn. The need for an emergency mobilization is obvious, and with it a set of challenges that can no longer be denied. These will get clearer in the years ahead, but the essential situation is before us: With the atmosphere’s ability to absorb carbon critically limited, we face the greatest resource-sharing problem of all time. For all its complexity, the core of this problem can be stated simply enough: What kind of a climate transition would be fair enough to actually work?

The climate problem is and remains a justice problem. It’s more than this, of course, but justice is nonetheless the key. If we fail to solve it in time, it will be in large part because we refused to see it as such.

It all boils down to what venture capitalist and Silicon Valley golden boy Vinod Khosla calls “being technology-neutral”: essentially, if you are too financially or emotionally invested in any one solution, you may lose out on other, possibly better, solutions. Whereas the UK government is the primary funder of research in that country, in the United States, corporations are responsible for about 65% of university research. And while there are issues connected to both government- and corporate-funded research, it seems as though the UK’s model is geared more toward finding appropriate solutions, while the corporate investors and venture capitalists responsible for funding innovation tend to focus on the solutions that will deliver the most profit, not necessarily the most energy savings or emissions reductions.

A study currently underway by the UK Technology Strategy Board is a prime example. About 90 percent of UK buildings are over 100 years old. “We love our old buildings, but they consume an incredible amount of energy and we need to find ways to improve their performance while preserving the existing structure,” Richard Miller, Innovation Platform Leader for the Board told me.

To that end, his agency, which has 1 billion pounds of government funds to spend over the next three years funding projects that explore solutions to the country’s most pressing issues, is funding studies of 87 different technologies. The technologies are being tested in council homes(that’s “the projects” for us Yanks), because, according to Miller, the landlords of these developments are typically responsible for thousands of dwellings. “We wanted to start there because if they find a solution they like, they’ll deploy it across thousands of residences and deliver a meaningful benefit fairly quickly,” Miller said.

The Board is testing a wide range of technologies, from home energy monitoring systems to more invasive add-ons and retrofits to buildings. They are monitoring the performance of each study building and also surveying tenants to determine whether occupants are comfortable with the solutions they’ve been given. After two years, they’ll compile the results into a report and make it publicly available.

“That way, if you’re a council landlord for example, you can read the report and say okay that solution looks like one that would work well for my buildings and my tenants in this location,” Miller explained.

In the United States, on the other hand, venture capitalists have worked themselves into a frenzy over the last few years over all things “smart grid,” an umbrella term that essentially refers to technologies that allow utilities and customers to better understand and thus modify energy usage patterns. The excitement over smart grid applications and technologies has led to increased private funding in that space, which in turn helped to fuel more public interest, culminating in several billion dollars of stimulus package money being thrown at smart grid pilot projects throughout the country.

I’m not saying this technology isn’t worth looking into, or that the government is blindly following the venture community. Clearly Department of Energy Secretary Chu, who is a big fan of smart grid, is an extremely smart guy. The problem is more that with so much money and excitement now flowing around smart grid, there’s little incentive to explore other options. So, while the UK will have 87 solutions to choose from, we will have one. That doesn’t seem like the smartest strategy.

Corporations are corporations and they exist to make money, so no one’s saying they should suddenly take an altruistic approach to research and development investments. Ditto private investors. However, concern has been mounting over the past several years that the lack of state and federal funds for university research in the United States is putting us at a disadvantage in the race toward innovation. Which, funnily enough, could end up hurting those bottom lines in the end, too.

For those of you who haven’t heard, Plastiki is a boat made out of recycled bottles that billionaire Brit and self-proclaimed “eco-adventurer” (or “eco-warrior,” depending on which interview you’re reading) David de Rothschild plans to sail across the Pacific. The aim is to draw attention to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and de Rothschild has said he plans to include a few scientists in his crew who will conduct studies on how the litter is affecting the ocean. The New York Times has already pointed out that if the boat, which so far has only taken test runs between the San Francisco pier where it’s docked and the nearby seaside town of Sausalito, falls apart in the middle of the treacherous journey to Australia, it could dump thousands of bottles straight into the ocean. I would add to that the fact that even if the boat stays together, the PET bottles it’s made of will be leaching toxic chemicals throughout its journey. With a hull made of 12,000 used plastic bottles and a frame made of virgin (though recyclable) srPET, de Rothschild runs the risk of exacerbating the ocean pollution problem more than he helps to solve it.

Also, while de Rothschild has been great about saying that recycling is not the answer, by creating a boat out of used bottles and pushing the whole “second use” thing, his actions are furthering the idea that we can still use plastic for disposable items, just so long as we recycle it. C’mon folks, when has anything outside of Catholic confession ever really been that easy? Recycling plastic is not only extremely energy-intensive, it doesn’t actually cut down on the use of virgin plastics. The Berkeley Ecology Center, the organization that practically invented recycling, breaks it down on a list of seven misconceptions about plastic and plastic recycling:

Collecting plastic containers at curbside fosters the belief that, like aluminum and glass, the recovered material is converted into new containers. In fact, none of the recovered plastic containers from Berkeley are being made into containers again but into new secondary products such as textiles, parking lot bumpers, or plastic lumber – all unrecyclable products. This does not reduce the use of virgin materials in plastic packaging. “Recycled” in this case merely means “collected,” not reprocessed or converted into useful products.

What irritates me about the project almost as much as its unintended environmental drawbacks, though, is the fact that de Rothschild and the people constantly sucking up to him act as though this is the first time such a venture has been undertaken. In fact, it has been done several times (see here and here for the most recent examples). Awareness has been raised … how about doing something real about it and spending your considerable fortune on working with industry to reduce the use of packaging entirely, or funding research on a less toxic packaging option?

At least de Rothschild seems to be fairly well informed and is not pushing the “let’s clean up the Pacific Garbage Patch” agenda. The thing is, and people really don’t want to hear this: You can’t clean up the Pacific Garbage Patch. Ditto the newly found Atlantic Garbage Patch. They will stand forever as testaments to the harm humans have caused to the planet. But while that thought is pretty disheartening, the good news is that there’s a way to stop feeding the garbage patches: Just say no to disposable plastic packaging or items. I had a great conversation with Manuel Maqueda from the Plastic Pollution Coalition, of which de Rothschild’s group is a member, the other day and he put it really well: “It makes no sense to take a material that lasts forever and use it for something disposable.”

Duh. So simple! And yet so difficult. The point is, while it’s nice that the Plastiki expedition and others like it want to boost awareness of environmental issues, it would be even better if they were focusing on projects that could actually deliver something more than a ton of press. And while I’m at it, it sucks that HP and Kiehl’s are funding this instead of more worthy projects, but I guess they wouldn’t get nearly the same level of publicity.

A few months ago, I wrote about the declining Arctic sea ice and suggested that the whole area up there needs a caretaker. Seems that someone actually heard me. Some folks over at the US federal government, of all places, voted recently to close as-yet unexplored United States-owned Arctic Ocean waters to commercial fishing as a preventative measure against the uncertainty of melting sea ice and changing ecosystems. This might have been the first time the government signed something into action and just about no one objected.

Environmental groups, commercial fishing groups, and the NY Times Editorial page all applauded this decision, which determined that the marine ecosystems off the north shores of Alaska are too poorly understood to open them to fishing exploration. Subsistence fishing by indigenous groups is exempt, as are fishermen operating within three miles of the coastline. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council effectively hung a big ‘SHUT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE’ sign on the rest of the ocean that falls within the United States’ Exclusive Economic Zone, up to 200 miles from the coastline. There’s a potential treasure chest of Arctic char, salmon, and cod down there, but it looks like we won’t be eating from it any time soon.

This move deals proactively, rather than re-actively, with a rapidly shifting climate that is demanding new ways of understanding environmental management all over the globe. The Arctic is one of the best places for long-term proactive planning since its surface is changing measurably by the day. A German trawler took the opportunity, for instance, to be the first to plow through broken floating ice and complete a maritime Arctic shipping passage this week between Europe and Asia, along the northern edge of Russia. This Northeast Passage, or Northern Sea Route (as opposed to the famed but as of yet un-traversed Northwest Passage between Europe and Asia), isn’t exactly smooth sailing, given the equally challenging gigantic icebergs and Russian permit-wielding bureaucrats. I suspect German ships won’t be the only ones making this summer trip over the coming years in the name of commerce though. The voyage from China to Europe via the Arctic is 3,000 miles shorter than via the Suez Canal. Marco Polo just rolled over in his grave.

So between the anxiety about newly opened fishing waters and uncharted shipping routes, how’s the Arctic sea ice looking these days? You’d think that with all of this political and economic activity we’d be seeing a completely ice-free summer. Au contraire.

Back in July, I mentioned that the projected minimum sea ice extent this year would be slightly above the historic low in 2007, when the polar ice cap shrunk to 4.1 million square kilometers. Not so. September is the month in which sea ice reaches a  yearly minimum, usually sometime in the next week or so, which is why many of us (ok, really just a handful) are currently watching the sea ice retreat by the hour. Last year, the ice mass retreated to its smallest size — 4.7 million sq km — during the week of September 12. If you have found yourself with little else to do these days, you might consider checking out the daily data being gathered by the National Snow and Ice Data Center charting the ice’s progress as many Arctic researchers are doing now. What will remain after this month’s big melt has finished is perennial sea ice, or the ice that usually sticks around year after year – the really thick stuff – and it’s estimated there will be 5 million sq km of it left at September’s end.

What do we have to thank for this generous remnant ice, which, while still much lower than the 30-year average of 6.7 million sq km, is not nearly as low as some feared? Over the last month, a low-pressure system swept in over the North Pole and has kept the direct sun at bay, preventing some melting. Low pressure also means the winds are blowing counter-clockwise up there, against the general direction of ice flow. This spreads the ice around a bit more, creating a larger extent, but it’s also creating more open-water areas that may increase the melting rate. Overall though, this is a smidgen of good news for a place usually dismissed as dismal. But perhaps not for Marco Polo’s descendants — looks like a Northwest Passage trading voyage will have to be postponed yet again since this September’s available route is still too treacherous for travel. At least the Canadians have another year to hammer up some ‘NO TRESPASSING’ signs.

Images from National Snow and Ice Data Center

**Author’s note: It was brought to my attention that the Northwest Passage has in fact been traversed over water, by icebreakers. It’s also been traversed, historically speaking, over ice, as Roald Amundsen first did in 1903. But as the melting sea ice has offered new opportunities to cross the Arctic Ocean over water, the Northeast Passage is proving to be more accessible to commerce ships, though they too still need to travel with icebreakers. We don’t yet know with what regularity commerce ships will be able to cross either passage, and do it without the assistance of icebreakers.

I pulled on my big sun hat and pulled out a well-worn copy of Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster for beach reading in Santa Monica this weekend. His chapter titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” kept me company as I watched the ash cloud to my east turn varying shades of gray and then cumulous white near its top, expanding and contracting as it dwarfed Los Angeles’ mountains and towers and palms. A stout man in cargo pants with his head down paced with a metal detector, stopping occasionally to dig with his sifter. Four bare-chested guys faced the late afternoon sun, away from the ash cloud, egging on their friend to approach a nearby woman: “Dude, you’ve got a red hat, she’s got a red hat, it’s the perfect line!”  Parents watched kids, kids watched the surf. Everyone was missing the lava lamp-like cloud show in the sky.

If Los Angeles burns, doesn’t anyone care?

Not really, it seems. Unless you’re fighting on the front lines, called upon to evacuate, or worse, to return to burned rubble, or you’re the state government realizing two-thirds of its firefighting budget went up in flames during this first week of fire season. During my first sweltering So-Cal fire season in 2007, when I knew no fall other than the one of foliage, apple cider, and wool fresh out of storage, I anxiously mentioned the fires to everyone I met. Most would just nod and appease me with “Yes terrible this year, eh?” The subtext was probably “You’re not from around here, are you?”

So this year, before the autumnal hot and dry Santa Ana winds have even begun, I’ve learned to do as the locals do. I glance wearily down the boulevards at the mushroom cloud, complain about the yellow-tinged air (totally had to keep the windows rolled up), and shrug. Or better yet, I pull up a beach chair for a nose-bleed view of the so-called Station fire still incinerating the city’s northeastern fringe.

Wildfires in Southern California are simultaneously apocalyptic and mundane. Mike Davis calls them “ordinary disasters,” meaning that, like earthquakes and mudslides, they are completely inevitable within this regional ecosystem yet are still crisis-inducing when they arrive.

Ecologically speaking, coastal Southern California is dominated by a Mediterranean climate  (mild winters and dry summers) and densely-growing native vegetation, collectively known as chaparral, that needs the occasional fire for seed dispersal. Fire suppression policies throughout much of this region have been in place for decades, largely on account of the fact that people don’t want intentional fires set in their backyards. How fire suppression affects the intensity and frequency of chaparral-based wildfires is still debated among ecologists. But it seems pretty certain that when vegetation grows for decades without the understory being burned by low-grade fires, this thick biomass will provide substantial fuel for an eventual spark. Smaller, more frequent fires also allow for varying biomass across a landscape so the vegetation becomes patchy, or mosaic, in its diversity. Without these small fires, the biomass can build up more uniformly across a large area (such as in the Angeles National Forest, which is on fire this week) so when a fire does emerge it spreads farther and faster than it would if the density of biomass was more varied.

But wildfires rarely get attention if they burn across uninhabited land; it’s only when neighborhoods are threatened that they are newsworthy stories of crisis and disaster. The trend of building cul-de-sac suburbs at the wildland-urban interface has increased around Los Angeles and San Diego over the past decades. After all, who wouldn’t want a luxurious home surrounded by forest in the mountain foothills? These medium density neighborhoods set among chaparral, neither truly urban nor wildland, are actually the most at-risk of being destroyed by wildfire: lots of opportunities for ignition and lots of remaining vegetation to burn.

A recent New York Times article qualitatively described the burning land in the northern LA suburbs as bigger than Brooklyn and Queens combined; over 200 square miles so far and still uncontained. This may be an accurate size comparison for East Coasters trying to grasp magnitude but I think juxtaposing this Station fire with a 200 square mile area stretching from Greenwich, CT to Scarsdale and White Plains, NY is a better description. It’s an imperfect juxtaposition but only because most of the burning land this week is sparsely populated, not dense suburban corridors (so far). But like many of the wildfires, past and future, to hit Los Angeles County, the neighborhoods in the fires’ path are not as racially and economically diverse as a Brooklyn and Queens comparison would suggest. They are rather predominantly white and middle to upper class.

This isn’t really coincidence, as Davis points out in Ecology of Fear, since state and federal policy have generally supported building wealthy suburban enclaves in areas abutting wildlands that, while beautiful, are costly to build in and to insure. Following a fire homeowners are often given federal disaster assistance and are encouraged to rebuild their houses, bigger and more remote, in these high-risk areas, a cycle that Malibu has seen many times. The cost of this “ordinary disaster” assistance is meanwhile spread among the rest of us taxpayers.

Having gotten over my Los Angeles autumnal anxiety, it now strikes me as funny that news sources are always rushing to find the “cause” of a large wildfire. Someone or something — an unsupervised pyrophilic child, ignorant campers, an illegal migrant, downed power lines — will be blamed for lighting a match to a tinder box of forest and poof, combusting hundreds of homes, thousands of acres. Pointed blame might be helpful for the lawsuits that inevitably follow such a big mess, but tracing the cause back to a single source ignores some larger dynamics at work when these fires become so unwieldy. Long-term projected climate trends are one dynamic, as Los Angeles is slated to receive less rainfall and longer, hotter summers over the coming years. The management of urban development is another crucial dynamic. Until real estate developers sit down with policy makers, and the whole discussion is mediated by forest and fire ecologists, these massive fires will continue to suck up millions from the state firefighting coffers and ruin homes and livelihoods. In the meantime, season tickets to one of the world’s most spectacular fire shows are still available. I, for one, am content to stay in the nose-bleeds.

Images from Daily Mail

This week’s Op-Ed in the New York Times titled “Peak Oil is a Waste of Energy” by energy consultant Michael Lynch was a virtual pandora’s box, judging from the number of comments left by readers. Any op-ed piece is self-evidently open for dispute, and dispute this one the New York Times’ readers did. I’m almost as fascinated by the smart, and largely negative, reactions to the piece as I am by Lynch’s anti-peak oil rhetoric itself.

Many scientists and social scientists take M. King Hubbert’s infamous bell-shaped “peak oil” curve as gospel on the planet’s finite oil reserves. And why not? If you trust that we are extracting oil at a faster rate than the earth produces it, then oil is a non-renewable resource. So it makes sense that at some point we, the oil drinkers, will hit rock-bottom and understandably, we want to know when that day will come.

The equation behind peak oil that Hubbert originally devised back in 1956 is deceivingly simple, though widely misunderstood. As Kenneth Deffeyes explains in his entirely readable Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak, Hubbert’s peak oil theory rests on the assumption that our ability to produce oil is linearly dependent on the fraction of oil remaining. In other words, the less oil that is left in the earth, the less we will be able to produce because what remains is harder to get at. What remains also ain’t cheap, though Hubbert never said much about prices.

What follows from this is Hubbert’s theory as an elegant equation. Without putting it in proper algebraic terms, Hubbert’s peak oil theory tells us that the peak of oil production occurs when half of a region’s oil has been recovered, and half remains. When a given geographical region’s—whether it’s the United States’, Saudi Arabia’s, or the world’s—cumulative oil production in relation to the fraction of oil remaining is plotted over time, beginning with any date on which the cumulative production of that region is known (e.g. in 1972 the US had produced a cumulative 100 billion barrels of oil), what emerges is a symmetrical bell-shaped curve. I happen to be extraordinarily bad at math, so I leave it at this: back in 1956, Hubbert predicted US oil production would start to decline in the 1970s. It did. When petroleum geologists apply his theory to global oil production, they come up with a year sometime…in our lifetime. The significance of this, however, is not that oil will disappear overnight or even seem less abundant. It’s that the real cost of oil will continue to increase.

As a skeptic of this proposition, Lynch calls attention to the fact that peak oil theory does a shoddy job of accounting for many other factors that influence global oil production, such as fluctuating demand, localized political disputes, and the discovery of new, however hard to reach, oil fields (see: current economic crisis, Nigeria, and 23,000 feet off the coast of Brazil for corresponding examples). He’s right, Hubbert never took any of those things into his calculations. Nor did Hubbert account for rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a near-direct result of oil production and yet we still know how that’s turned out.

But peak oil isn’t just a theory, it’s also a gimmick. We’re missing the point if we debate the validity of the former rather than the latter. Lynch sets out to debunk peak oil, the theory, to which you either agree with his refuting points or stick squarely to Hubbert (so long as you know what Hubbert actually proposed), and concludes by advocating for low oil prices. It remains to be seen how successful he was at debunking Hubbert’s theory; I’m not sure that he was. But regardless of the holes in Hubbert’s theory, peak oil, the gimmick, still serves to remind us that some day the oil will be gone, out of our reach, or most likely of all, extraordinarily expensive. Peak oil, as a way of understanding the real costs–political, economic, environmental–embedded in oil production regardless of the day’s market price per barrel, needs to live on. Perhaps the gimmick has gotten stale, or never had a good ad campaign behind it anyway. Maybe it’s time for a new marketing strategy. Just don’t change peak oil’s point.