Climate Progress

For some Christians, teaching the science of climate change contradicts religious beliefs, but a growing group of evangelical environmentalists has been working to change that view.

For a few years, Richard Cizik, the Vice President for Governmental Affairs with the National Association of Evangelicals, has spoken out as passionately in favor of addressing climate change as he has against abortion, gay marriages or embryonic stem-cell research. You can read an interview with him at Grist and hear one from NPR.

Despite his being isolated by several other religious leaders, Cizik is not alone. The New York Times has also featured Jim Ball, a Virginia minister who relies heavily on the Bible for his guidance in going green. He explains,

“Colossians, chapter 1, verses 15 to 20 is the touchstone text for me,” he said. ” ‘All things have been created by Him and for Him. All things have been reconciled by His blood on the cross.’ The Apostle Paul tells us we are called to be ministers of reconciliation, and that means caring for all things.”

Both men advocate what is widely-called ‘creation care’, which includes preserving the landscape and the livelihoods we have been given. And both men wisely see how climate change poses a direct risk to creation.

Recently there has been more good news. The NAE has backed Cizik’s creation care agenda, reaffirming that “environmental protection … is an important moral issue.” We will need as many voices as possible speaking out on climate change if we are to avoid the worst.

Is there anyone in the global warming debate less well-informed on the subject than Gregg Easterbrook? He has a mistake-filled article in the latest issue of the Atlantic (subs. req’d) and a mistake-filled interview on line.

Consider this whopper from the interview:

In the current federal budget there’s almost five billion dollars for energy conservation research–I wish there was zero in the current federal budget. Progress would be faster.

Wrong by a factor of more than 10. I ran the energy conservation office. The entire research budget is well under $500 million — and much of that is hydrogen research that is probably pointless and in any case not real conservation. Easterbrook is completely unaware of the $30 billion in savings the energy conservation program has been documented to provide Americans by the National Academy of Sciences.

Or consider this whopper from the second sentence in the article:

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“The violence in Darfur is usually attributed to ethnic hatred. But global warming may be primarily to blame,” concludes the Atlantic Monthly (subs. req’d).

The article is worth quoting at length for two reasons. First, the world needs to understand its moral obligation in Darfur if human emissions of greenhouse gases were a major contributing cause to the crisis. Second, the article almost single-handedly contradicts an absurd article that appears in the same issue by Gregg Easterbrook suggesting that global warming might have as many winners as losers (which I will discuss in a later post). Here are the key parts of the Darfur article:

Why did Darfur’s lands fail? For much of the 1980s and ’90s, environmental degradation in Darfur and other parts of the Sahel (the semi-arid region just south of the Sahara) was blamed on the inhabitants. Dramatic declines in rainfall were attributed to mistreatment of the region’s vegetation. Imprudent land use, it was argued, exposed more rock and sand, which absorb less sunlight than plants, instead reflecting it back toward space. This cooled the air near the surface, drawing clouds downward and reducing the chance of rain. “Africans were said to be doing it to themselves,” says Isaac Held, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But by the time of the Darfur conflict four years ago, scientists had identified another cause. Climate scientists fed historical sea-surface temperatures into a variety of computer models of atmospheric change. Given the particular pattern of ocean-temperature changes worldwide, the models strongly predicted a disruption in African monsoons. “This was not caused by people cutting trees or overgrazing,” says Columbia University’s Alessandra Giannini, who led one of the analyses. The roots of the drying of Darfur, she and her colleagues had found, lay in changes to the global climate.

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For a detailed debunking of one of the last refuges of the global warming denyers, check out realclimate.org.

And more dynamic debunking of the disinformation deluge of the dastardly denyers can be found here.

Alaskans may be more familiar with the up-close devastation caused by our warming globe than anyone in the Western Hemisphere.

Entire coastal villages have been forced to relocate inland, polar bears have drowned in Alaskan waters, and the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service has formally decided to silence its employees regarding such events.

That recently came to light thanks to a memorandum leaked by Deborah Williams, with a reputable career in government and the Department of the Interior, non-profits and wildlife leading to her current position as President of Alaska Conservation Solutions.

The censorship is especially inopportune just weeks after proud announcements of the International Polar Year, which is set to study in-depth the impact of global warming in the North and South poles (reg. req’d). Scientists from 60 countries, supposedly supported by our own presidential science adviser John H. Marburger III, are driven by the burden of questions that outnumber answers.

Here’s one more question: How can our scientists adequately contribute or even participate if government employees in Alaska are on orders to restrict discussion on climate change, sea ice, and polar bears? I must have missed that memo.

Well, both, of course.

Your love life has hidden overlap with global warming (tip- the former you want more hot and steamy, and there are better routes than cheating/offsetting each).

Treehugger.com has a series on greening your sex life, which Canadians have happily welcomed. And ClimateProgress isn’t one to object. With the same cultural reach that Marvin Gaye has to get it on, let’s hope Bill McKibben can step it up.

The following is the Introduction to a new Progressive Policy Institute report on Plug-in Hybrids (the “car of the future“) that I co-authored:

There is a growing consensus that America’s dependence on oil constitutes a triple threat to its national security, its economic vitality, and its environmental health. But agreement breaks down on the question of how, exactly, the country can best achieve dramatic, near-term reductions in oil consumption. We believe that the greatest potential for transformative change may lie in the emerging technology of plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles (PHEVs), which could become widely available in the United States in five to 10 years if government takes a few smart steps to help spur their commercialization.

Like conventional hybrid-electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids save fuel by using small internal combustion engines in combination with electric motors. But while conventional hybrids charge their batteries with kinetic energy and power generated by their own internal combustion engines, plug-in hybrids, as the name suggests, have cords that can be plugged into standard, 120-volt electrical outlets.

That design — constituting a partial merger of the transportation and electricity sectors — can produce dramatic reductions in gasoline consumption. Equipped with more powerful battery packs than conventional hybrids, plug-in hybrids can travel the first 20 miles or more on battery power alone, without ever firing up their internal combustion engines. That is farther than the average round-trip commute. After that, they can switch to a conventional hybrid-electric operating mode. In all-around driving, plug-ins could thus get between 80 m.p.g. and 160 m.p.g., compared to about 45 m.p.g. for today’s Toyota Prius. The gasoline savings could be even greater if plug-ins were designed to run on biofuels; they could travel 500 miles on a gallon of gasoline blended with five gallons of ethanol. (more…)

The cheese-eating surrender monkeys are now complaining that climate change, having worsened recurring drought over the last five years, is ruining the truffle harvest.

And to make matters worse, Chinese imitations are invading the French market and threatening a national delicacy. Beware, jobs lost to the drought are reappearing as truffle police, out to fight truffle fraud.

The failure of the Department of Energy to meet any of the 34 energy efficiency deadlines that date back to the 1990s will cost U.S. consumers more than $28 billion in extra energy costs by 2030. So far, the DoE has only successfully reached 11 of the 34 program goals, but none in a timely fashion.

That’s the bottom line in a study conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in cooperation with estimates by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The first day of March, Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass.) gave the opening remarks for the GAO’s analysis of efficiency standards for appliances. He called the findings “a blistering indictment of a culture of incompetence and delay” within the DOE programs.

His words ring true no matter how you cut the numbers: $28 billion lost in consumer savings, use of an additional estimated 2.1 quadrillion British thermal units (Btus) of natural gas and 1.2 quads of electricty. Oh, and 53 million tons of future carbon dioxide emissions - which is about 1 percent of total U.S. emissions in 2004.

Once again, we can cut emissions. We have chosen not to.

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.
–attributed to Dante

America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
–attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville

Global warming will change American life forever and end politics as we know it, probably within your lifetime. How might this play out?

In the best case, we immediately start changing how we use energy in order to preserve the health and well-being–the security–of the next fifty generations. The nation and the world embrace an aggressive multidecade, government-led effort to use existing and near-term clean-energy technologies.

The enabling strategy is energy efficiency–since that generates the savings that pays for the zero-carbon energy sources, like wind power and coal with carbon sequestration. Efficiency keeps the total cost low to consumers and businesses. For utilities, we need a California-style energy- efficiency effort nationwide. For cars and light trucks, we need serious federal standards for high-mileage hybrids that can be plugged into the electric grid. The goal of all these efforts: keeping global emissions at or below 29 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (8 billion tons of carbon) for the next several decades–and keeping concentrations well below 550 ppm (a doubling of preindustrial levels) this century.

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