“The Arab awakening was driven not only by political and economic stresses, but, less visibly, by environmental, population and climate stresses as well. If we focus only on the former and not the latter, we will never be able to help stabilize these societies.”

NOAA concluded in 2011 that “human-caused climate change [is now] a major factor in more frequent Mediterranean droughts.” Reds and oranges highlight lands around the Mediterranean that experienced significantly drier winters during 1971-2010 than the comparison period of 1902-2010.  [Click to enlarge.]

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has a terrific column on how climate change has already begun to impact the Middle East — and how it is only going to get much worse if we don’t act soon.

Friedman is one of the few journalists and columnists to win 3 Pulitzers, his first for coverage of the war in Lebanon, then for his coverage of Israel, and finally for commentary on global terrorism. His bestseller From Beirut to Jerusalem won the 1989 U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction.

He opens today’s column, “The Other Arab Spring,” with some telling details:

ISN’T it interesting that the Arab awakening began in Tunisia with a fruit vendor who was harassed by police for not having a permit to sell food — just at the moment when world food prices hit record highs? And that it began in Syria with farmers in the southern village of Dara’a, who were demanding the right to buy and sell land near the border, without having to get permission from corrupt security officials? And that it was spurred on in Yemen — the first country in the world expected to run out of water — by a list of grievances against an incompetent government, among the biggest of which was that top officials were digging water wells in their own backyards at a time when the government was supposed to be preventing such water wildcatting? As Abdelsalam Razzaz, the minister of water in Yemen’s new government, told Reuters last week: “The officials themselves have traditionally been the most aggressive well diggers. Nearly every minister had a well dug in his house.”

Then he goes on to excerpt an important analysis from the Center for Climate and Security (which I reposted here):

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JR: Since Brad Johnson is leaving ThinkProgress, here’s another timely column of his.

The lessons of the Hebrew prophets can teach humanity how to respond to the catastrophe of global warming with strength and resilience. As we near Passover and Easter Sunday, it is a good time to reflect on their example.

The threat of global warming is almost unimaginable — sea level rise of metersswamping the world’s great cities, the desertification of lands populated by billions, the extinction of thousands of species, the death of the oceans, the destruction of ice caps, droughts, floods, fires, and storms of Biblical proportions. Unchecked, global warming could actually make regions of the planet literally uninhabitable to humans — so hot a person would drop dead in minutes.

The cause of this growing calamity — with terrible devastation already and much more to come — is humanity itself, with the unchecked burning of the fossil fuels that power civilization, despite the increasingly desperate warnings of scientific observers.

Yet people are told that we can fight global warming easily. Anointed leaders retreat into denialor simply avoid the subject. Many who grasp the terrible stakes righteously batter the “failure” of imperfect, “ineffective” governmental efforts to tackle climate pollution.

In Pillar of Fire, the second of his three-part biography of Martin Luther King, Taylor Branch describes how the civil rights movement in 1963 faced a similar crisis of faith in trying to figure out how to fight entrenched, institutionalized, racism and segregation in what seemed at the time to be impossible odds and repeated failure.

At the January 1963 Chicago Conference on Religion and Race, one thousand delegates of assembled clergy from the various branches of the Judeo-Christian faith grappled with that question, which sent them careening from Pollyannish optimism to biting despair. As Branch relates, King found a fellow voice in Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the Hasidic scholar who escaped the Nazis and then fought the wave of atheistic nihilism that followed the Holocaust. King and Heschel found guidance in the “ideal of the Hebrew prophets” who faced destruction not merely with virtue but also the “remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression”:

What brought King and Heschel together was a prescription for the dilemma that plagued the Chicago conference. Most of the delegates searched for ways to overcome a stubborn avoidance of race in religious discourse. To break such a barrier, nearly all the theologians felt the need for a calming approach that labeled racial prejudice a feeble anachronism, a holdover of premodern irrationality, but this very impulse to soothe and minimize opened them to charges of false engagement from realists such as Stringfellow and Campbell. Yet, the realists’ tinge of fatalism reminded Heschel of a ghostly legacy from the Jewish past — the defiant urge to abandon hope of any divine presence in the face of inexplicable calamity . . .

As proof that human beings could engage the most deadening crises without falling into either of the classic polar traps — nihilism or blandness — Heschel held up the ideal of the Hebrew prohpets. While facing, even welcoming, the destruction of themselves and their own people, the prophets remained suffused with redemptive purpose. Far from soaring off in to saccharine self-persuasion, however, they made biting symbols out of daily pains and predicaments. “Moralists of all ages have been eloquent in singing the praises of virtue,” wrote Heschel. “The distinction of the prophets was in their remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression…”

Man-made global warming is another “inexplicable calamity.” Blandness, sarcasm, and nihilism are tempting responses. But there is another path — that recognizes that suffering is inevitably found on the way to justice, that knowing sacrifice can lead to redemption. “God still has a way of wringing good out of evil,” King said in at the the funeral for the four girls killed in a Birmingham church bombing in 1963. “And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive.”

King continued with words that speak directly to the challenge we now face:

Now I say to you in conclusion, life is hard, at times as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and difficult moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of the river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of its summers and the piercing chill of its winters. And if one will hold on, he will discover that God walks with him, and that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.

We have poisoned the very seasons, and people from New Orleans to Karachi have paid for that profligacy. The path to hope and redemption will not be easy or painless, but it can be found.

by Randy Essex, via Rocky Mountain Institute

Our 2006 Prius topped 100,000 miles last weekend as we drove on Interstate 70 through Colorado’s Glenwood Canyon, prompting my wife and me to wonder how much money we’ve saved. The result, calculated conservatively, is an eye-popping $34,441—most of which comes from becoming a one-car family living in an urban core when we bought the Prius. That’s $10,000 beyond the sticker price of the car, so we could say we got a free car and paid for some nice vacations.

Here’s how it happened.

In March 2006, I started work at the Detroit Free Press, moving from Des Moines, Iowa. I had always lived inside the city whose name appeared on the newspaper where I worked, disdaining the idea of suburbs and sprawl. I had about a 15-minute drive to work in Des Moines—a local joke being that everything there was a 15-minute drive. I also was struck in my 18 years in Des Moines by the folly of sprawl, paving over farmland ever farther away from the core of a pleasant, safe city, creating unnecessary commutes, wasting time, money, land, and fuel.

In Detroit, Angye and I moved into a high-rise apartment downtown, less than a mile from my job. We were paying for two parking spaces and my car was sitting most of the time during the week because I walked to work or took the funky People Mover, an elevated train on a 3-mile loop.

We each had a Toyota Corolla and admired the technology and fuel economy of the Prius. “What if,” we asked after we had been in Detroit about a month, “we traded in both of our Corollas for a Prius?” About a week later, we felt like we were in a spaceship as we pulled our “super white” Prius onto Southfield Road. (This is not meant as a Toyota endorsement. It’s great to see many companies producing fuel-efficient cars these days and pushing new technologies.)

We had to make some adjustments—most having more to do with the oddities of living in Detroit, which lacks full-service grocery stores in the city limits and effective mass transit throughout the metro area—but never were inconvenienced. In fact, we walked home from baseball games, concerts, and festivals giddy that we weren’t sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

I typically did not have access to a car during the day, but never was deprived. My dentist, barber, bank, favorite restaurants, and most other routine stops were within walking distance or a 50-cent People Mover ride. We planned weekend shopping trips for groceries, hardware, clothing, and other needs—trips that we likely otherwise would have taken separately. Having only one car added to our togetherness and our feel for our neighborhood.

In November, we moved to Basalt, Colorado, so I could work at RMI. We live six miles from work, and I wondered how it would be with one car. The answer is that it’s no different. Now that it’s warm, I can bike or run to work, and the mass transit options in the rural Roaring Fork Valley actually are better than in metro Detroit.

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