The question has been raised — why spend time “debunking” S&N when they seem to be well-meaning folks struggling for a genuine solution to global warming, unlike, say, Bj¸rn Lomborg? Aside from the fact that they are adding great confusion and misinformation to a critical debate, the answer is simple — they aren’t well-meaning.

S&N spend far more time attacking the environmental community (and Al Gore and even Rachel Carson) than they do proposing a viable solution. Worse, they don’t even attack the real environmental community — they spend their time creating a strawman that is mostly a right-wing stereotype of environmentalists.

S&N’s core argument is that environmentalists only preach doom and gloom and sacrifice, and that solving global warming …

… will require a more optimistic narrative from the environmental community. Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, like Silent Spring, was considered powerful because it marshaled the facts into an effective (read: apocalyptic) story…..

In promoting the inconvenient truth that humans must limit their consumption and sacrifice their way of life to prevent the world from ending, environmentalists are not only promoting a solution that won’t work, they’ve discouraged Americans from seeing the big solutions at all. For Americans to be future-oriented, generous, and expansive in their thinking, they must feel secure, wealthy, and strong.

Gore has never promoted such an inconvenient truth — they should read his book or listen to his speeches — and indeed I don’t know any major environmentalist or environmental group who has promoted such a message. Just spend some time on the climate websites for NRDC, Environmental Defense, Sierra Club, and Greenpeace. They all support (most of) the same big solutions S&N do, they just don’t think you get those solutions the way S&N does (i.e. a massive government spending program).

So why do S&N, who appear to care about the climate, attack the mainstream environmental community in such a vicious and distorted fashion? Who knows? Watthead points out, “it may be a great way to get attention for your articles and books, but it’s not a great way to build alliances with the kind of folks who you should be building alliances with.”

I would go further. It is particularly destructive for one’s supposed allies to repeat myths that Frank Luntz and Rush Limbaugh and President Bush want people to believe about environmentalists. The Deniers and Delayers want people to believe that environmentalists are backing climate change to achieve a hidden agenda of government limits on their consumption. They can’t win on the merits of the science, but they can scare people into inaction. S&N play right into their hands, reinforcing tired old stereotypes:

Read more

Even tougher warming curbs may be needed – Reuters. “People are actually questioning if the 2°C benchmark that has been set is safe enough,” Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told a Reuters Environment Summit. Let’s hope it is — since we will have a devil of time just stopping at2°C.

A Swiftly Melting Planet — N. Y. Times. A good op-ed on feedbacks by Thomas Homer-Dixon.

Climate change as much a concern as terrorism: survey – ABCNews (Australia). Some 76 per cent of Australians “believe global warming is now equal to or more serious a threat than Islamic fundamentalism.”

Australia may adopt Kyoto on Bali eve - carbonpositive. That would leave us all alone among developed countries. Sad.

Dell says it will be carbon neutral in 2008 – msnbc. Dane Parker, the director of Dell’s global environmental health and safety programs, said, “Our priority is to minimize total (energy) consumption,” but he “acknowledged that buying offsets from other entities that have made extra cuts in their carbon production will be Dell’s main route to carbon neutrality in the short term.” And they’ll be buying trees. Better than nothing, I suppose.

Too many clean energy books are being published for me to keep track of. Fortunately the excellent web site, calcars.org, has reviews of them all, including these four new books touting plug in hybrids (with one-line summary reviews):

• Apollo’s Fire by Rep. Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks (who occasionally blog here): “Apollo’s Fire’s real life stories and optimistic strategies can unify our nation through innovation and public investment to reach prosperity in a sustainable world.”
• Zoom by Vijay Vaitheeswaran: “Zoom‘s very readable narrative takes the reader from an analysis of why the petroleum age is ending to a picture of all the entrepreneurs, environmentalists and engineers who are bringing future cars to market now — spurred in part by an unprecedented grassroots movement for plug-in hybrids.” [Glad to sees this one time hydrogen car enthusiast I once debated embrace plug ins.]
• Winning Our Energy Independence by S. David Freeman: “David Freeman’s Winning our Energy Indepence brings four decades of experience to a fearless direct call to abandon the ‘three poisons of coal, nuclear and oil,’ and an inspiring vision of how to replace them with renewable energy sources powering plug-in cars.” [Glad to sees this one time hydrogen car enthusiast I once debated embrace plug ins, too!]
  
• Freedom From Oil by David Sandalow: “What could be better than this complete and practical roadmap for the next President on plug-in hybrids and everything else we need to achieve Freedom from Oil?”

Enjoy!

Between travels and prior to speaking before the UN in September, Lo Sze Ping, the Campaign and Communications Director for Greenpeace China, stopped in for a briefing with a handful of folks at the Center for American Progress. His message to us, as it will be to the UN, was that China IS taking steps to combat global warming, debunking the U.S.’s “China excuse.”

I’m not sure how strongly his argument stands [I for one am skeptical -- JR], but having opened the can of worms that is China, several questions emerge. How heavily should the U.S.’s decision to act rely on China? And what would constitute action from China? Finally, my background in comparative politics is useful because China’s domestic landscape could factor heavily into the answers.

Lo explained that unlike the U.S., China’s national leadership is undoubtedly stronger than local leadership on global warming and renewable energy. As evidence, look at China’s National Climate Change Action Plan to rely on 15% renewable energy sources by 2020.

Provincial leaders, on the other hand, are especially GDP-minded. (Thomas Friedman, in a recent series from Beijing, discussed China’s obsession with economic growth as a source of stability, tagged “GDP-ism.”) Meanwhile, the national leadership is held responsible for China’s pollution and therefore has more political incentive to deal with global warming. Contrast this to the U.S., where local leadership prevails.

For its national action plan, China will rely heavily on wind and solar power, the root of Greenpeace China’s argument that China has begun to act. A recent report by WWF, the Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association, and Greenpeace backs Lo’s claim. Yet, news coverage of the report is both complimentary and critical:

The report predicts that solar power prices will match conventional power prices by 2030, when installed capacity could be up to 100 GW with strong government support — or one-sixth of the country’s total generating ability at present. But without support through the years when it cannot compete on price alone, solar will be just one-tenth that potential level, a still impressive 10 GW but far from enough to make a dent in China’s energy-related pollution problems or to contribute to its energy security.

Clearly, scale is a central issue as China grows exponentially (as the above excerpt implies). A second issue raised in CAP’s meeting with Lo is the value of potential capability and targets versus implementation, and if both serve as a sufficient negotiating tool. The conversation evolved into a question of if and how to constructively involve China in international negotiations (for example, if based on Greenpeace’s action argument).

Peter Ogden, CAP senior analyst and author of the Washington Post article “Back in the Black: Profiting on a Green China,” carried the question of how to make China be seen as a negotiating partner to draw all sides into more productive international and/or bi-lateral discussions.

Asking what it takes to see China as a meaningful participant in negotiations brings us back to the question of how heavily the U.S. should depend on Chinese action before staking out its own policy.

Unfortunately, neither are questions that are likely to see any progress this week. China ratified Kyoto and has thus cooperated (to an extent) in international, UN negotiations on climate change. (China’s progress on actual emissions is, so far, non-existent.) Meanwhile the U.S. stages an obstructionist summit on voluntary reductions for the world’s worst climate offenders.

While Thomas Friedman struggles with the color of Chinese policy on the environment, the U.S. remains a solid, steady, dirty black — the color of Dick Cheney, Big Oil, ignorance and oblivion.