The Debate is Over  

WorldChanging's Alex Steffen notes that Bush's grudging admission that he is a dickhead (and global warming is due to human activity) means the debate is over. Someone please tell the CEI...

This is the way the debate ends: not with a bang but a press availability. President Bush today in a backhand way admitted that climate change is here, but said we shouldn't get caught up in discussion about what is causing it and instead focus on solutions:

"And in my judgment we need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and at the same time protect the environment."

We're all about solutions, of course, but this is no time to ignore science, because, as this Op-Ed notes, scientists are saying that none of the solutions we're yet considering are even vaguely on a par with the magnitude of the threat we face:

Here's the truly inconvenient truth: Scientists have long been warning that the world must cut back on greenhouse-gas emissions by as much as 70 percent, as soon as possible, if we're to have a fighting chance of stabilizing the climate. Yet even with full participation by the United States, the controversial Kyoto Protocol — the only global plan in the works — would hardly begin to do that. Its goal is to reduce emissions by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. And so far, the best plan offered by American politicians — the Climate Stewardship act sponsored by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman — has an even more modest goal: it aims to cut emissions in the United States merely to 2000 levels by 2010. And the Senate has rejected it twice.

Last June, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California became one of the few elected politicians with the courage to talk about climate change in the language it requires by promoting a plan to reduce his state's greenhouse-gas emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050. But Mr. Schwarzenegger has since warned of the need to move slowly so as not to "scare the business community."

While the California governor backpedals, a team of scientists, economists and business executives have put forward a potentially revolutionary plan. Outlined by Ross Gelbspan, a former Boston Globe reporter and editor, in his book "Boiling Point," the so-called Clean Energy Transition [an update of the World Energy Modernization Plan we discussed back in 2004 - ed.] would start by turning over an estimated $25 billion in annual federal government payments now supporting the fossil-fuel industry to a new fund for renewable energy investments. It would also create a $300 billion clean-energy fund for developing countries through a tax on international currency transactions, while calling on industry to get in line with a progressive fossil-fuel efficiency standard, forcing greenhouse-gas emitters to immediately work on conservation. ... If megaproposals like the Clean Energy Transition, which would get the ball rolling on a global level, still strike us as romantic and implausible, it's only because our politicians, including the well-intentioned Mr. Gore, and smart, well-financed groups like Environmental Defense have denied us the leadership we need to achieve global warming solutions on par with the problem.

Indeed, it is precisely because the climate crisis is so profound that we need to encourage the American debate on the subject to move on, finally and for good, and start to focusing on how to build a bright green future as quickly as possible. The science, after all, is pretty unequivocal at this point. Indeed, essentially the last remaining credible skeptic, Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer announced this month that, despite his dislike for environmental groups

[D]ata trump politics, and a convergence of evidence from numerous sources has led me to make a cognitive switch on the subject of anthropogenic climate change. ... Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.

In other words, the debate it over. It's just over. Climate change is here, it's scarier than we thought, we're causing it, and (especially in combination with other large-scale environmental and social problems) it's going to demand radical innovation and major reforms.

...

Over the last few months, we here at Worldchanging and our allies at related sites across the blogosphere have seen a noticable uptick in comments and trackbacks from climate denialists. Some folks I've talked speculate that this is an organized effort to try to inject one final round of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt into the debate in advance of what is likely to be a summer where climate dominates the news. I don't know that that's true. What I do know is that having this debate online is no longer helpful: many of the folks making these comments seem most interested not in learning more about the science, but rather in spreading propaganda and disrupting conversation about how to take action. Climate "skeptics" have become a new brand of troll.

But how do you deal with climate denialists? This has been a subject of great debate here at WC Planetary HQ this last week.

Ignoring them (which is the usual practice for dealing with those who would disrupt an online conversation) will in this case leave unaswered what are essentially lies (often lies whose funding trails we can trace back to Big Oil). And we all know that a lie, unaswered, is often taken for the truth. That seems contrary to the mission we're all pursuing, of putting forward better answers.

Nor do we feel comfortable deleting these comments: though many of them are clearly made in order simply to disrupt rather than add in any way to the conversation, and they are (as Joi Ito argues) a form of spam, and thus fair game for deletion, we feel that simply deleting them is a bad precedent, and that on principle the answer to bad speech is better speech.

So ignoring and banning are both bad ideas: where does that leave us? We think it leaves us with the responsibility to answer these comments with better information.

Well - that was one reason why RealClimate was set up - but admittedly its way too technical for the average person (and that includes me for a lot of their posts). Another alternative is Coby Beck's excellent FAQ for responding to global warming deniers, which is a bit more down to earth - though Alex thinks it doesn't quite fit the bill.

Continuing the nuclear theme from recent days, Crikey's Christian Kerr (normally a rabid anti-greenie) takes a look at the politics of nuclear power and wonders if the Rodent may have given himself a wedgie (echoing some of my comments recently).

Nuclear wedges and hot seats

It doesn't really matter what Martin Ferguson, Anthony Albanese, Bill Shorten, Mike Rann, Peter Beattie, Alan Carpenter or any other Labor figure with an opinion on uranium mining or processing – let alone nuclear energy – might think. Some backbenchers already have the perfect response to the Prime Minister's nuclear wedge.

Yes, Labor is divided on the issue. Yes, the three mines policy is and always has been an idiotic compromise. But the backbenchers interjecting “Where's the reactor going to be? Where's the reactor going to be?” as Acting PM Peter Costello took the first dixer of the day on the subject have got a very good point.

How many years has the debate over the location of a low level nuclear repository been going on? Imagine what the reactor row will be like. It's a good question. Which electorate will the reactor be in? Which electorate will its waste be stored in? Which electorates will it be transported through?

That's the where. But there's also the when. “It's not a credible response to global warming, because it's going to take too long to come into effect,” Dr Richard Corkish from the University of New South Wales said on the 7:30 Report last night. “By the time you start building power stations – even soon – it's a long time into the future before they're actually constructed.”

It's nice to see a nuclear debate which features science instead of superstition and scaremongering – but will it last if the wedge doesn't work? Kim Beazley even speculated in the Opposition Party Room meeting this morning that this is one issue the Government might wedge itself over.

The Independent also has an article on "Going nuclear".

A new generation of reactors is suddenly likely. But at what cost? And what will happen to the waste?

In a pool of cold water in west Cumbria sit hundreds of metal flasks, silently oozing heat. Each contains enriched uranium removed from the reactors of nuclear power stations after use. It remains highly radioactive. Exposure to the contents of one flask would be followed quickly by death.

There are 2,000 cubic metres of high-radiation nuclear waste in Britain, some kept in cooling pools near reactors but most stored at Sellafield. A terrorist attack here would be a disaster to dwarf the meltdown at Chernobyl two decades ago, says the campaign group Greenpeace. Two million people could die.

Some people say this deadly waste should be fired into space. Others say bury it deep underground and wait tens of thousands of years for its radioactive strength to decay. But the people who matter, the ones who stop it from leaking and killing people, are waiting for the Government to tell them what to do.

Or they were, before the rules changed. The Prime Minister surprised the nuclear industry last week by saying that its form of energy - underfunded for years, feared by many - was "back on the agenda with a vengeance". Suddenly it is assumed that a new generation of reactors will be built to replace the existing ones that are being prepared for shutdown. There now seems no need to wait for the energy review due to be published in July. Nuclear enthusiasts are glowing with pleasure.

But more power means more waste. Even if none of the expected 10 new power stations is built, this country will still produce enough highly radioactive nuclear waste to fill 14 Olympic swimming pools.

"For 50 years the UK has been creating radioactive waste without any clear idea of what to do with it," says Professor Gordon MacKerron, chair of the expert Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, which will also report in July. "Whether we like it or not, waste exists and we have to deal with it."

Only now the problem is even more pressing. Mr Blair can hardly declare a new nuclear dawn without saying where the waste will go. Investors - along with many of his own MPs and even ministers - wait to be convinced.

Tom Paine has an article on "Energy Futures" by K.C. Golden.

The signs of a new, brighter energy future are everywhere.

Wind and solar power are the fastest growing electricity sources. NASDAQ just launched a clean energy index. Leading venture capitalists are making big bets on low-carbon energy sources. Auto dealers are carrying more hybrid and flex-fuel vehicles. Forward-looking communities are planning a future around people instead of cars. Farmers, entrepreneurs, investors—they’re all planting seeds for a cleaner, more secure energy future.

But they’re going too slow. Promising solutions are emerging, but our addiction to fossil fuels is getting worse and it’s killing us. War, climate disruption and economic insecurity are among its symptoms.

Now that we can see real pictures of the post-fossil fuel future—since it seems so tantalizingly possible—what can we do to accelerate it?

We can start by squaring up to a simple truth, fossil fuels are very costly. We pay some of the tab at the pump and in our utility bills. But we pay much more in the form of chronic national insecurity due to dependence on oil. We pay in the form of climate disruption—more intense storms, water shortages, ocean sterilization. We pay through the nose, through our lungs and through our declining standing in the world.

The price of oil may cycle down again—after all, suppliers don’t want to price us out of our addiction. “Peak oil ” may be more like a long ridge, with lots of price volatility to keep us guessing. The people who have the most control of oil prices also have the greatest incentive to discourage investment in alternatives—so don’t expect a smooth ride up the price curve. But when the price drops, it’s lying.

No matter how energy prices spike or plunge, fossil fuels are exorbitantly expensive. Their impact on our climate alone is an epic heist of the planet’s wealth—a hocking of our worldly treasure for a few decades’ fix. The geopolitical costs of fossil fuel addiction are literally bleeding us. Whatever is driving oil prices—greed, economics, supply disruption, all of the above—the rising price at the pump is finally communicating some fraction of the truth: fossil fuels are a colossal rip-off.

Steve at Deconsumption has an interesting little snippet about his "water index".

speaking of indexes, I thought it might be a good time to check back in with the price of water--or rather a rough proxy for it in the demand for shares of companies in the newly emerging "Water Industry". How newly emerging? Well the most comprehensive index is called the Palisades Water Index, which was inaugurated on the Amex. just over 2 years ago. Check out the PR statement:

"The Palisades Water Index is the premier vehicle developed for investors to capture the potential associated with the substantial increase in the economic value of water. We believe that this value will inevitably be unlocked as the global population adjusts to the linkages between human health, economic development and resource sustainability."

Is that last statement a chilling double entendre or what?

The BBC reports that the wall of China's Three Gorges dam has been completed - in some ways an environmental travesty, but in others a blessing - it would take a lot of coal fired power stations to generate the same amount of energy.

China has completed construction of the main wall of the Three Gorges Dam - the world's largest hydro-electric project. The controversial dam in central Hubei province will not be fully operational until 2009, once all its generators are installed.

China says it will provide electricity for its booming economy and help control flooding on the Yangtze River. Critics say over a million people were moved from the area, and the reservoir behind the dam is already polluted.

On Saturday, builders poured the last amount of concrete to complete the construction of the 185m (607ft) high, 2,309m (1.4 mile) long wall. A senior Chinese official said the event marked a "landmark progress" in the dam's construction, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported. "However, tasks such as building of power houses of the dam, the ship lock and shiplift are still formidable," said Pu Haiqing, deputy director of the dam's construction committee.

When its 26 turbines become operational in 2009, the dam will have a capacity of more than 18,000 megawatts.

Already the world's second-largest consumer of oil, China says it needs alternative energy sources to combat widespread power shortages and keep its booming economy powering along.

The BBC also reports that another big hurricane season is predicted for this year by the NOAA.

This year's Atlantic hurricane season will be "above normal", according to the US climate agency.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) predicts there will be 13-16 named storms, four of which will be "major storms".

But it says 2006 will be less active than last year's record-breaking season which saw Hurricane Katrina cause widespread devastation.

The US hurricane season starts on 1 June and lasts until 30 November.

AlterNet has an article on "The great iraq oil grab" (which seems to have been a titanic failure thus far - but I guess the greatest prize of all is a powerful magnet).

There's a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Pentagon planners wanted to name the invasion of Iraq, "Operation Iraqi Liberation." Only when someone realized that the acronym -- O.I.L. -- might raise some uncomfortable questions, was "Operation Iraqi Freedom" born.

Supporters of the Iraq war airily dismiss chants of "no blood for oil" as a manifestation of the antiwar crowd's naïveté. They point out that Iraq's government still controls its oil and argue that we could have simply bought it on the open market.

Both of those claims are true on their face, but bringing Iraq's vast oil wealth under the control of foreign multinationals -- with U.S. firms the best positioned to develop it -- was always central to U.S. plans for Iraq. That Iraq's oil will continue to be "owned" by the "Iraqi people" is what differentiates classical 19th-century colonialism practiced by British officers in pith helmets from the neocolonialism the United States perfected in the second half of the 20th century. The newer brand can be summed up like this: We'll respect your sovereignty and abide by your domestic laws -- as long as we can help you write those laws to guarantee our firms' profits.

That's the central tenet of corporate globalization. Trade deals like NAFTA -- and the agreements implemented by the WTO -- are designed to "harmonize" countries' domestic laws regulating everything from capital flow to food safety to the environment in order to make them friendly to international investment. In Iraq, that philosophy was taken to an extreme, at gunpoint and with disastrous consequences.

Oil -- the engine that drives Iraq's potentially rich economy -- was the prize that made it worth a full-scale commitment of American armed forces.

...

Saying that Iraq's vast oil reserves -- projected by some analysts to be the largest in the world, greater than Saudi Arabia's -- was the sole motivation for the U.S. invasion of Iraq simplifies a complex issue. Opening Iraq's economy has the potential to reward the Bush administration's corporate allies with enormous windfalls as the country rebuilds after 25 years of war. Iraq has a well-educated work force and is well-positioned on global trade routes. Oil is the cherry on the sundae.

That's why Iraq's new oil laws have to be viewed in a larger context. Gaining control of the bulk of Iraq's oil was a key part of a broader economic invasion of the country, launched by an administration dominated by ideologues who view the agenda of corporate globalization as a vital part of the United States' national, as well as economic, security.

Grist has a post on "going with the flow" - harnessing hydrokinetic energy in New York.

Avoiding the bickering over wind power and biofuels, a Virginia-based company is seeking clean energy in the watery deep. Within a few weeks, Verdant Power will submerge turbines in New York's East River to draw energy from the tides. The first phase of the project will run for 18 months, with six turbines supplying energy to a nearby supermarket and parking garage; if this test run is successful, up to 300 improved turbines will be installed in 2010, enough to power 8,000 homes. This hydrokinetic or "in-stream" energy is an eco-friendly alternative to hydropower, wherein water is dammed and released. With watermills, "[f]ish and marine mammals can easily swim around," says one researcher. During the test run, the turbines will be closely monitored to make sure our fishy friends are not harmed. Says Dean Corren of Verdant, "There's no such thing as a 100 percent clean source of energy, but this is as close as you can get."

Transition Culture has a post on "urban wind farms" - an integral part of the non-nuclear future.

As I was washing up this evening and listening to the news on Radio 4, a story caught my ear that sounded too good to be true. After endless stories of wind projects being turned down across the country and all the ‘blot on the landscape’ nonsense about wind turbines, did I actually hear that urban wind farms could be the thing of the near future? In a very timely follow up to yesterday’s post about community renewables projects, the BBC gave a taste of things to come in the field of urban wind projects.

In Dundee, the tyre factory there has put up the first of three 400 ft. turbines for which they have planning permission. They argue that their fuel bills have doubled in the last year, and that securing their energy supply will make all the difference as to whether they survive or not. They have marketed the development with the slogan “making tyres from fresh air”. Well yes I thought, that and all the oil byproducts as well.

Anyway, residents interviewed voiced opinions that ranged from thinking they were beautiful, to the usual stuff about house prices (are there any studies that actually show that living near a wind turbine lowers the value of your house?) to one woman who said they were “absolutely hideous”. Unlike watching Bangladesh sink beneath the waves I suppose, which presumably would be comparatively attractive.

...

One of the things that always struck me as a difference between living in Ireland and living in England is that in Ireland when people meet and tell each other where they are from they usually reply “ah, a fine place”, or “it’s beautiful round there”. In England, so many places are horrible, that surely the argument about ‘landscape despoilation’ usually levelled at wind projects is somewhat redundant. A nice wind farm in the middle of Slough could hardly be said to be distracting from its scenic splendour.

Will the anti-wind lobby have to come up with a whole new lot of objections specific to urban wind farms? The stuff about migratory bird routes and visual impact no longer being able to stick they’ll have to be a bit more inventive. As I have argued many times before, we need renewables, be they wind, PV, heat pumps, whatever, anywhere and everywhere, be it the Welsh Hills or the Manchester City football ground. As the Castlemilk project will hopefully prove, a wind turbine, wherever it is, looks far better when you know that you and/or your community is making money every time it goes around.

Ray McGovern has an article at Tom Paine called "bowing to the police state".

Is Congress aiding and abetting the creation of a police state? Recently, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., helped to give the CIA and NSA unprecedented police powers. By inserting a provision in the FY07 Intelligence Authorization Act, Hoekstra has undermined the existing statutory limits on involvement in domestic law enforcement. This comes after revelations in January of direct NSA involvement with the Baltimore police in order to "protect" the NSA Headquarters from Quaker protesters.

Add to this, the disquieting news that the White House has been barraging the CIA with totally improper questions about the political affiliation of some of its senior intelligence officers, the ever widening use of polygraph examinations, and the FBI’s admission that it acquires phone records of broadcast and print media to investigate leaks at the CIA. I, for one, am reminded of my service in the police state of the U.S.S.R., where there were no First or Fourth Amendments.

Like the proverbial frog in slowly boiling water, we have become inured to what goes on in the name of national security. Recent disclosures about increased government surveillance and illegal activities would be shocking, were it not for the prevailing outrage-fatigue brought on by a long train of abuses. But the heads of the civilian, democratically elected institutions that are supposed to be our bulwark against an encroaching police state, the ones who stand to lose their own power as well as their rights and the rights of all citizens, aren’t interested in reining in the power of the intelligence establishment. To the contrary, Rep. Hoekstra and his counterpart at the Senate, Pat Roberts, R.-Kan., are running the risk of whiplash as they pivot to look the other way.

James Bamford, one of the best observers of the inner workings of U.S. intelligence, warned recently that Congress has lost control of the intelligence community. “You can’t get any oversight or checks and balances,” he said. “Congress is protecting the White House, and the White House can do whatever it wants.”

And to close, here's a blast from the past - Salon interviewing Hunter S Thompson.

He calls himself "an elderly dope fiend living out in the wilderness," but Hunter S. Thompson will also be found this week on the New York Times bestseller list with a new memoir, "Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century."

Listening to his ragged voice, there is some sense that Thompson, now 65, has reined in his outlaw ways, gotten a little softer, perhaps a little more gracious now that he's reached retirement age. "I've found you can deal with the system a lot easier if you use their rules," he says. "I talk to a lot of lawyers."

But do not be deceived. In "Kingdom of Fear" and in a telephone interview with Salon from his compound in Aspen, Colo., Thompson did what he's always done: speak the truth about American society as he sees it, without worrying much about decorum. "Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads?" he writes, referring to the people currently occupying the White House. "They are the racists and hate mongers among us -- they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis."

That's his enduring attitude in this new age of darkness: a lot more loathing than fear.

The godfather of gonzo believes America has suffered a "nationwide nervous breakdown" since 9/11, and as a result is compromising civil liberties for what he calls "the illusion of security." The compromise, he says, is "a disaster of unthinkable proportions" and "part of the downward spiral of dumbness" he believes is plaguing the country.

While the country's spinning out of control, Thompson says his own lifestyle has been a model of consistency. He still does whatever the hell he wants.