Climate Progress

Although NBC was given some stiff competition by Slate and the Washington Post, the judge’s choice for the worst Triage Earth Day week story was unanimous: Dateline NBC.

Sunday night millions of people were watching what seem to be a reasonable hour of television devoted to environmental issues, ending with a fascinating, if not terribly original, story about the melting of the Bolivian glaciers and its likely impact on that country. And then they got to this amazing exchange:

Pathetic!

Here is the transcript:

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Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.

I have a new piece in Salon, “Let’s dump ‘Earth’ Day.” It is supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious. Anyway, the subject of renaming Earth Day has been on my mind for a while, or at least since this post last Friday:

I don’t worry about the earth. I’m pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it. I’m very certain the earth doesn’t worry about us. I’m not alone. People got more riled up when scientists removed Pluto from the list of planets than they do when scientists warn that our greenhouse gas emissions are poised to turn the earth into a barely habitable planet.

The earth is certainly not important enough to qualify for an ABC debate question. Who wears an Earth lapel pin? Arguably, concern over the earth is elitist, something people can afford to spend their time on when every other need is met. But elitism is out these days. Only bitter environmentalists cling to Earth Day. We need a new way to make people care about the nasty things we’re doing with our cars and power plants. At the very least, we need a new name.
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[Sadly, this is only a runner up for the worst Earth Day climate story from the traditional media. I’ll post the winner on Earth Day. Hint: It’s NBC.]

No, hell has not frozen over. But Slate and its partner the Washington Post would have you believe otherwise.

This week, Slate is hosting some of the world’s most eminent environmental thinkers, leaders, and advocates, and inviting them to answer questions from our readers about what’s happening to our world and what we can do about it.

Yes, Slate then describes Gingrich, author of the recent book A Contract with the Earth, as a “conservative conservationist” who has now “devoted himself to a bipartisan ‘mainstream environmentalism.’ ” And the Post runs their interview with him saying he will “discuss finding a common commitment to environmental stewardship and bipartisan solutions for global warming and other critical problems.”

Seriously. And people ask me if the media coverage of the environment and global warming has gotten better. The traditional media has the attention span and historical memory of an erection.

Back in November, Salon ran an interview (here) with Gingrich, who famously co-authored and then worked to enact the anti-environmental Contract with America (CWA), in which he claimed

I don’t know of a single thing in the Contract that was bad for the environment.

As I noted at the time (here), CWA was a clever, stealthy attack on the environment as detailed by NRDC in a lengthy analysis (summarized here), by the Sierra Club, and by the National Wildlife Federation, which wrote at the time: “Taken as a whole, the House plan constitutes the broadest and deepest attack ever mounted against laws that protect public health, the environment, natural resources and wildlife.”

Regular readers of this blog know precisely what environmental non-strategy Luntz Bush Gingrich must embrace, and his Washington Post interview does not disappoint, from the very start:

Newt Gingrich: I want to start by saying that I believe we need an entrepreneurial, science and technology oriented approach to the environment, and that most Americans agree with that…. [A] majority of Democrats, independents, and Republicans all agree that entrepreneurs can do more than bureaucrats to solve environmental challenges.

If you are a new reader and that doesn’t sound familiar, try this:

We need to emphasize how voluntary innovation and experimentation are preferable to bureaucratic or international intervention and regulation.

That of course would be a direct quote from the Frank Luntz playbook on how to seem like you care about the climate when you don’t, the same playbook our President has used with such great success (see Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah.” and of course, “Bush/Nero climate speech: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, let’s fiddle until 2025.″

Sadly for Newt, he loves the wrong technology: “A very inexpensive hydrogen car would change the entire trajectory of environmental impact for China and India.” Not!

Needless to say, Gingrich does not favor either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system. He favors technology incentives. Now he tells us.

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Here is the problemmatic paragraph in Time’s otherwise solid issue on global warming:

If we took all the steps outlined here–a national cap-and-trade system with teeth, coupled with tougher energy-efficiency mandates and significant new public and private investment in green technologies–where would that get us? We’d be a little poorer–a sustained battle against climate change will hit our wallets hard, absorbing perhaps 2% to 3% of gdp a year for some time, according to energy expert Henry Lee at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, though unchecked warming could end global prosperity. But think of it as an investment: that money, if matched by action internationally, can reduce emissions radically over the next half-century, contain warming and lead us to a postcarbon world.

Not quite. The battle will not absorb perhaps 2% to 3% of GDP a year for some time. It will redirect 2% to 3% of GDP a year for some time. Big difference — one that I have no doubt will crop up over and over again in the debate in the coming months and years, which is why I am blogging on it.

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…. Sorry — I’m the last to know.

WHERE: National Teleconference
Phone: 800.651.2087
Pass code: 21443147

Why do I keep criticizing Roger Pielke when he keeps saying we agree? Because we don’t agree. This is not a semantic difference or a small difference among people who share core beliefs. It is a fundamental disagreement that goes to the heart of our exceedingly different views of how serious the threat is and about how best to address it.

First, in March 13, 2002 testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works committee (see here), Pielke talked about his work on adaptation:

An implication of this work is that policy related to societal impacts of climate has important and under-appreciated dimensions that are independent of energy policy. It would be a misinterpretation of this work to imply that it supports either business-as-usual energy policies, or is contrary to climate mitigation. It does suggest that if a policy goal is to reduce the future impacts of climate on society, then energy policies are insufficient, and perhaps largely irrelevant, to achieving that goal. Of course, this does not preclude other sensible reasons for energy policy action related to climate (such as ecological impacts) and energy policy action independent of climate change (such as national security, air pollution reduction and energy efficiency). It does suggest that reduction of human impacts related to weather and climate are not among those reasons, and arguments and advocacy to the contrary are not in concert with research in this area.

His research says that reducing future human impacts related to weather and climate are not among the reasons for energy policy action, and that such policies are perhaps largely irrelevant to reducing those impacts — though, in fairness, he isn’t opposed to a different energy policy, just not one whose primary justification is reducing climate impacts on human.

I simply could not disagree more, as I have explained at length here where I discuss “LIVING/SUFFERING IN A 1000 PPM WORLD.” I believe the reverse is true — if we don’t have an aggressive energy policy then adaptation policies will be grossly insufficient to prevent billions of people from suffering untold — but preventable — misery. Yes, Pielke is now on record saying he would like to see 450 ppm. I believe such a sentiment is utterly odds with his testimony above. Achieving 450 ppm would take an enormous amount of effort — indeed, avoiding 800 ppm would takes a lot of effort, too — and it is certainly only possible if the public and policymakers realize that failing to do so will have catastrophic impacts that render the word adaptation meaningless.

Anyone who argues we shouldn’t embrace energy policy primarily to reduce or avoid climate impacts — anyone who argues that energy policy is perhaps largely irrelevant to reducing those impacts — is, in my mind, undercutting the primary reason for going to all the trouble of adopting the necessary policies.

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Traditional photovoltaic (PV) is typically installed on rooftops and competes with retail electricity. Over 40% of the cost of a system can be in the installation, which must be customized to every rooftop. So technologies that dramatically lower PV cost end up having a less dramatic impact on total residential system cost. So it is natural that the next generation technologies, such as thin films of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) printed as ink on conductive substrates need to look at non-rooftop applications, where the installation of a large solar farm is fairly turnkey.

Nanosolar, a thin-film PV startup, has just announced their vision in their blog and newsletter. They see the best fit for solar being municipal solar plants of 2-10MW in size and suggest such plants can be done in 12 months, providing a significant advantage over coal or nuclear. Martin Roscheisen, Nanosolar’s CEO, writes

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Two pros give you the inside scoop Monday, April 21 at 11:30am.

Energy, global warming, and environmental protection will be major issues during the 2008 election campaign. Recent polls determined that voters believe that energy is the third most important issue after the economy and the Iraq war. The public’s desire to know about the presidential candidates’ records and positions is higher this year than ever before.

On the eve of Earth Day, please join two experts in the field of energy and environmental policy and politics. They will provide information about the records and policies of the three remaining major party candidates. They will also highlight key energy and environmental issues.

HOW TO LISTEN IN: Phone: 888-387-8686, Passcode: 5869246

WHO: Gene Karpinski, President, League of Conservation Voters, and Daniel J. Weiss, Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy, Center for American Progress Action Fund

When I see a Nicholas Kristof piece in the NYT on global warming, I expect to learn something. Alas, not today. The online version of his article, “Our Favorite Planet,” has the blurb

None of the presidential candidates focus adequately on climate change, for this will be one of humanity’s great tests in the coming decades — and so far we’re failing.

Well, actually two of them do, as I explained in “Could a President Obama or Clinton stop global warming?” As we’ll see, this time Kristof couldn’t be bothered to check out the facts about “one of humanity’s great tests.” Near the end he says:

So the next president should start a $20 billion-a-year program (financed by a pullout from Iraq) to develop new energy technologies, backed by a carbon tax and cap-and-trade system.

No, no, a hundred times no. First off, why on God’s green earth would you have both a carbon tax and cap-and-trade system? One of the main reasons to do something as complicated as an economy-wide cap-and-trade system is that the simple approach, a tax, is a political nonstarter in this country. If you could get a tax, why would you add all the complexity of a cap-and-trade system? Pick one and stick with it. Please.

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One of my most tedious jobs here at Climate Progress is to read all the crap major articles published on global warming, and sort the wheat from the chaff. That was once the job of real journalists at places like, say, the New York Times. Simply providing, say, a long list of things that could conceivably reduce carbon emissions, without actually discriminating the ponies from the crap lemons, is, in fact, one of the MSM’s main critique of the Internet. [Cue laugh-track.]

Given that this is Earth-day week, where newspaper editors around the country say to their best writers (who, of course typically know very little about energy or the environment), “Give me 800 words on that global warming thing — oh, and try to find a new spin, something not so … Al Gore.” End result, lots and lots of drivel.

Case in point, “The Green Issue” of the New York Times Magazine today, titled, appropriately enough in the print edition, “The low-carbon catalog.” You can skip the whole thing (and I’m not going to provide any more links for it, since I don’t want to encourage you to waste your time). I mean, really, catalogs don’t tell you what the good stuff is — they just throw everything at you. Kind of like this issue.

For instance, on the same page is the pebble-bed nuclear reactor, which could conceivably deliver hundreds of gigawatts of zero carbon power, and Blackle Search engine, which probably accomplishes nothing whatsoever, especially if you own a flat-panel monitor like, uhh, most people who read the NYT.

As an aside, in the online edition, the subhead reads, “Some Bold Steps to Make Your Carbon Footprint Smaller,” and in the print edition, the subhead reads “any number of ways to reduce your footprint. PLUS: A defense of small, individual eco-actions.” So you probably think, given the NYT’s reputation for clarity, that this issue is going to focus on measures you yourself can take to reduce your carbon footprint, possibly small, possibly bold.

Now I knew the readership of the NYT mag was upscale, but a pebble-bed nuke is not even Tiger Woods territory. We’re talking Gates or Buffet.

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