Climate, Cancer and Changing Minds  

Another short post - then I'm off the air for a few days.

Jamais has a post on lessons to be learned from the cigarette smoking causes lung cancer experience, and how the process of getting action on global warming can be sped up using similar techniques. What price Exxon when oil and coal companies start getting sued for climate damage ?

It's not hard to find thoughtful observers lamenting the difficulty of getting people to understand what's happening to the climate when the cause-and-effect relationships are complex and slow-moving, and when scientists are so cautious. You'll find few if any reputable scientists who will say that global warming caused Hurricane Katrina last year. Carbon industry lobbyists and their dupes pounce on that scientific caution about a given example as a sign that the broader connection between global warming and weather disasters is uncertain.

But it wasn't too long ago that cigarette lobbyists and the psuedo-skeptic crowd made the same kinds of claims about smoking and cancer. For awhile, that worked, and it wasn't hard to find politicians and citizens willing to accept the industry's perspective. But as the public grew more comfortable with the idea of a complex, long-term result from current behavior, and the evidence grew for the big-picture smoking-cancer connection -- even while the cause-and-effect for a given example could be no more certain -- the culture (in the US) shifted, and the cigarette industry lobbyists stopped trying to undermine the science and started trying to hold off lawsuits.

The public response to global warming isn't quite at that point yet, but we're moving in that direction. The carbon industry voices trying to plant doubt about climate science are dying down, replaced by voices arguing, in effect, that global warming's not that big of a deal, can be adapted to more readily than stopped, and that we should, in effect, just lie back and enjoy it. They are still fighting any suggestion that weather disasters are linked to global warming, however, as they need to hold that line as long as possible. Once it falls -- once the public becomes willing to accept that global warming can cause weather disasters, even if any single disaster can't be definitively traced to atmospheric carbon overload -- the gates are open to lawsuits and economic ruin for the companies that enabled the environmental ruin.

"About My Planet" points to an article in Harvard Magazine on "Fueling Our Future".

Climate warming is accelerating as energy use soars. Nuclear power won’t close the gap. We need to learn to live with coal. Here’s one elaborate engineering solution.

Our demand for energy, on which we depend for health and prosperity, rises all the time: oil and natural gas to heat our homes; electricity for lights, refrigeration, computers, and televisions; gasoline and diesel for our cars and trucks. Fossil fuels provide 80 percent of the energy that powers civilization. The more fuel we burn, the more heat-trapping greenhouse gases we produce, principally carbon dioxide (CO2). We know the carbon is coming from fossil-fuel combustion because, as Iain Conn, executive director of British Petroleum, said in a recent visit to Harvard, isotopic fingerprinting of the carbon tells us so. The consequent global warming is already linked to a pattern of record floods, droughts, heat, and other extreme weather events around the globe, and is expected to lead to extinctions of some plants and animals. But such news from the natural world has done little to galvanize political will. Even forecasts of disastrous effects for the human sphere—severe drought in parts of Africa and Europe in the next century, and rising sea levels worldwide that will someday drown major cities—have thus far failed to mobilize public action in the United States. The time to act is running short.

Exxon may be but a future carcass for trial lawyers to feast on, but they are still going to suck plenty of money out of all of us in the meantime - even if the likes of BHP have to go and find oil and gas for them - one more big LNG development appears to be on the way in WA. Hopefully the rapidly enriching locals don't die of thirst after the party is over.

BHP Billiton's plans to build a liquefied natural gas terminal in California got a boost yesterday when Exxon Mobil indicated the $4 billion Scarborough gas joint venture looked more likely to proceed. BHP and Exxon each have a half share in the West Australian gasfield but Exxon is the operator.

In late 2004 Exxon said Scarborough was unlikely to be developed soon because it was far from shore and there was uncertainty about its size. In contrast, BHP has always had faith in the project and plans to ship liquefied natural gas from Scarborough to its proposed $US800 million LNG terminal off California.

Despite the joint venture arrangement, BHP funded three successful appraisal wells and a 3D seismic survey by itself last year in a bid to demonstrate the project was commercially viable.

Exxon spokesman Rob Young yesterday indicated the US oil group had become more optimistic about Scarborough thanks to BHP's efforts. "Our view has certainly been enhanced about the potential resource base," he said. "We are working on joint evaluation with them and looking to optimise development."

BHP would like to build an onshore LNG plant in the Pilbara to develop its share of the gas from Scarborough. The Pilbara LNG project is undergoing a pre-feasibility study but Exxon said it was looking at other options.

The Scarborough project is technically challenging because it is 280 kilometres offshore in water 900 metres deep. For comparison, the North-West Shelf is about 125 metres deep and the $11 billion Gorgon gas project is in about 200 metres of water.

Ross Gittins explains why rising petrol prices are a good thing (even if you don't take depletion into account) and politicians shouldn't give in to whingers who wants cuts in petrol taxes (and I'd go even further and say slug us all harder with carbon taxes too). I was happily surprised to read that Australian petrol consumption dropped 8% last year - hopefully we can repeat the performance this year.

With prices nudging $1.40 a litre in some cities and Costello warning that worries about the Iranian nuclear stand-off could push them up to $1.60, the motoring lobbies are looking for ways to ease the pain. The Royal Automobile Club of Victoria, for instance, wants Costello to remove the GST on fuel excise, saving about 3.4 cents a litre.

But, whichever way you look at it, cutting the tax on petrol would be the wrong way to go. For a start, there's the conventional economists' argument that the best response to higher prices is higher prices.

Huh? When you think about it, it's not as meaningless as it sounds. Prices rise when the demand for something is growing faster than its supply. Although part of the rise in oil prices is based on speculation about disruption in the Middle East, and so may not last long, the underlying increase in demand is coming from the rapid growth in the economies of China, India and other developing countries. This is likely to keep upward pressure on oil prices for many years.

But in a market system, a rise in the price of such a commodity prompts a change in behaviour. It increases supply by encouraging exploration for new sources, makes formerly uneconomic oilfields profitable and encourages the development of substitute fuels. At the same time, it reduces demand by encouraging consumers to use petrol more economically and search for cheaper substitutes. Put this reduction in demand together with the increase in supply and you see that a rise in prices should lead to a fall in prices.

So allowing retail petrol prices to move in response to market forces is the best way to minimise the long-term rise in prices likely to come from the developing world's increasing demand for oil.

There's evidence that motorists really are changing their behaviour in response to the higher prices of the past year or two. Despite the continuing growth in our economy, the quantity of petrol sold in Australia last year fell by 8 per cent.

I'll close with Billmon, contemplating a modern day armchair Colonel Kurtz's view of the way forward in Iraq. The horror, the horror...

Whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.

This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life -- absorbed as new history -- so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.

Shelby Steele
White Guilt and the Western Past
May 2, 2006

He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must necessarily appear to them in the nature of supernatural beings -- we approach them with the might as of a deity,' and so on, and so on. 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him . . . This was the unbounded power of eloquence -- of words -- of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'

Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
1899

Glenn Greenwald has been chewing over Shelby Steele's exceedingly bizarre op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, in which the conservative scholar declares that Uncle Sam is losing the war in Iraq not because of bad planning or a lack of troops or bad intelligence or a total failure to grasp the social realities of a deeply divided Middle Eastern country, but rather because of white guilt.

Yes, white guilt. America, it seems, has lost its warrior mojo because it is crippled -- haunted, tormented, curled up in agony in a fetal position on the floor -- by its historical legacy of racial oppression and injustice, or rather, by the left's determination to keep rubbing white Americans faces in that injustice.

...

This is, to say the least, a unique argument -- one in which standard counterinsurgency warfare tactics (not to mention our president's liberator fixation) are redefined and then dismissed as the geopolitical equivalent of the VISTA program. It's the neoconservative take on street crime displaced about 8,000 miles, with Iraqi insurgents filling in for black inner city youth.

I would suggest this is simply Steele's way of putting the war in a familiar context -- that of his pseudo-scientific social theories -- rather than any kind of coherent argument about U.S. policy in Iraq. As the saying goes: To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I suppose it was too much to expect Steele to restrict himself to jabbing his thumb in America's own racial sores, while leaving the quack theories about Iraq to his ideological comrades-not-in-arms at the American Enterprise Institute.

But as Glenn notes, there is a method to Steele's madness. His little dissertation isn't just a Hoover Institute seminar on criminal justice run amok. It's an ingenious, if muddled, attempt to push the old law-and-order buttons in order to justify a more directly genocidal approach to warfighting. Just as filling prisons with bad guys (or, if your Charles Bronson, gunning them down in the street) is still the conservative answer to crime, massive firepower is still the conservative way to win a guerrilla war. The only problem, according to Steele, is that our own bleeding hearts won't let us do it.

...

But it's no good arguing that massive and indiscriminate casualties -- inevitably, of civilians and combatants alike -- won't defeat a popular insurgency or uproot a terrorist network. That's the polite fiction, but the record tells us otherwise: Given a sufficient level of murderous efficiency, it is possible to do both, as the French proved in Algeria and the Guatemalan Army and its U.S. advisors demonstrated in the highlands of Guatemala.

Moral questions aside, the practical problem is that the preferred American instrument for inflicting state violence on a grand scale -- air power -- isn't very useful for this purpose. It's true the British had some success with air tactics (using both conventional bombs and poison gas) during the first Iraqi anti-colonial rebellion, in the '20s, but airplanes were new and had shock value back then. Subsequently, there hasn't been a single example of a country or a people surrendering simply because they were bombed back into Stone Age. And while modern "smart" bombs may be devastating against conventional targets, or even irregular infantry (as the Taliban learned) their ability to terrorize civilian populations into renouncing, and denouncing, the guerrillas in their midst is unproven. As for poison gas, well, that would be a bit much, wouldn't it, after all that fuss we made about Saddam gassing his own people?

No, for that kind of work you have to go in and look people in the eyes as you burn their houses and slaughter their livestock and rape their wives and torture their children. You have to make very visible examples out of "enemy" villages, and let everyone know you'll be around and watching. That takes ground forces, far more than we've got, even if our troops had the stomach for that kind of butchery on the necessary scale. It also takes first class local intelligence, and we don't have that either.

So, short of using WMDs on Anbar Province, or turning the Sunni quarters of Baghdad into modern-day versions of the Warsaw Ghetto, it's not clear what kind of "military professionalism" would make our home front field marshals feel happy about the war again. I mean, the real generals have tried massive search-and-destroy sweeps, mass arrests, "oil spot" pacification campaigns, surrounding entire cities with barbed wire fences, clearing others (Fallujah and Tel Afer) block by block, selective bombing, precision bombing, revenge bombing. We've had Marines go house to house killing everyone they find. We've dropped 500 pound bombs in crowded urban neighborhoods, we've shot people (lots of people) on sight for driving too close to military convoys.

You have to wonder how much ferocity the Shelby Steele's of the world would need to see before they'd accept that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have put their white guilt behind them.

...

But it's a dicey solution in this case, propaganda-wise, since it raises the obvious question of who is doing the hand tying (the French? Jesse Jackson? the ACLU?) It appears the answer, as articulated by Steele, is all of the above. The combined weight of all that anti-American, anti-imperialist, anti-Western thinking out there -- call it the Noam Chomsky effect -- has made it impossible for George W. Bush to get in touch with his inner Patton.

Well, it's a theory. I hope it's just that, and I give thanks (a small one, but better than none) that for once the Cheney administration is acting smarter than its own camp followers. Whatever hopes America has for escaping from the Iraq quagmire with something less than a total loss rest with Zalmay Khalilzad and his wheeling and dealing in the Baghdad political bazaar -- not with the amount of firepower that Centcom can bring to bear on a target.

But it still makes me nervous, because I'm not nearly as sure as Steele that we've put our historical xenophobia -- and our ability to rationalize the deaths of brown people who happen to get in our way -- behind us. In fact I'm pretty sure we haven't. Combine that with our modern taste for videogame violence, the more depersonalized the better, and our national refusal to admit that we could ever, ever be the bad guys, and our need for the oil, and its not too hard to imagine the war in the Middle East getting very ugly indeed, in ways that might give Mr. Kurtz a run for his money.