In a penetrating lecture Wednesday, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, explained that “religious communities are ‘failing profoundly in what is expected of us‘ in energizing a response to climate change in society.” The Archbishop told his audience at York Minster that “we are near a tipping point” of global warming “and that the church, and other religious communities, are not doing their part to lead the world against it.” He fiercely defined an “unintelligent and ungodly relation with the environment“:

It is impatient: it seeks returns on labour that are prompt and low-cost, without consideration of long-term effects. It avoids or denies the basic truth that the environment as a material system is finite and cannot indefinitely regenerate itself in ways that will simply fulfil human needs or wants.

Warning there “is no guarantee that the world we live in will ‘tolerate’ us indefinitely if we prove ourselves unable to live within its constraints,” the Archbishop eviscerated the false claims of right-wing evangelical campaigns like We Get It, launched by James Dobson, Jim Inhofe, and other conservative climate deniers:

We Get It: “The science is not settled on global warming.”

The Archbishop: “I don’t intend to discuss in detail the rhetoric of those who deny the reality of climate change, except to say that rhetoric (as King Canute demonstrated) does not turn back rising waters. If you live in Bangladesh or Tuvalu, scepticism about global warming is precisely the opposite of reasonable: ‘negotiating’ this environment means recognising the fact of rising sea levels; and understanding what is happening necessarily involves recognising how rising temperatures affect sea levels.”

We Get It: “A recent Barna study of evangelicals found that only 33% consider global warming to be a major challenge.”

The Archbishop: “As is true in various ways throughout the whole created order, humanity and its material context are made so that they may find fulfilment in their relationship. Without each other they are not themselves. And the deliberate human refusal of this shared vocation with and within the material order of things is thus an act of rebellion against the creator.”

We Get It: “Efforts to cut greenhouse gases hurt the poor.”

The Archbishop: “The world is less than it might be so long as human beings are less than they might be, since the capacity of human beings to shape the material environment into a sign of justice and generosity is blocked by human selfishness. In the doomsday scenarios we are so often invited to contemplate, the ultimate tragedy is that a material world capable of being a manifestation in human hands of divine love is left to itself, as humanity is gradually choked, drowned or starved by its own stupidity.”

The Archbishop’s full lecture, with audio, is available here.

In this post I will lay out “the solution” to global warming.

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On Hardball yesterday, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) worried that a cap and trade system to prevent catastrophic global warming and drive green economic development might “suck money” and jobs away from coal-intensive states:

Cap and trade, you’ll probably need 60 votes because it affects so many states economically that if you don’t do it in the right kind of way, you’re taking money from carbon intensive states like Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and redistributing it to California, New York. That’s just a very hard sell to our people at a time when they’re hurting. And you also run the risk of taking jobs away and not solving global warming.

Watch it:

Sen. Bayh appears to be listening too much to global warming deniers like Rep. Joe Barton, who argued last week that “if you’re trying to cap carbon, which is one of the most ubiquitous elements in the world, it’s going to put a price on it and the price is going to go up while the jobs are going to go down.” Barton warned that “the cost of energy already has a bearing on whether we manufacture or create in the United States or in China or Mexico or Brazil.”

On March 9, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal claimed that cap and trade “takes from Miami, Ohio, and gives to Miami, Florida“:

But the greatest inequities are geographic and would be imposed on the parts of the U.S. that rely most on manufacturing or fossil fuels — particularly coal, which generates most power in the Midwest, Southern and Plains states. It’s no coincidence that the liberals most invested in cap and trade — Barbara Boxer, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey — come from California or the Northeast.

It’s certainly Sen. Bayh’s prerogative to think that the most important questions to ask about cap and trade legislation are those promoted by fossil-fueled right-wing global warming deniers, even though their policies have led to the decimation of manufacturing jobs in “Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.” Bayh’s agenda should instead include asking questions like these:

– If we don’t act, will it be China, India, or Germany that will develop next-generation technologies and the economic prosperity that comes with them?

– How fast and strong must cap and trade legislation be to minimize the damages of global warming-fueled floods, heatwaves, disease, droughts, and hurricanes?

– How can we design legislation to prevent job losses from wildly veering coal and oil prices?

– How can we ensure that climate legislation builds new industries in renewable energy and energy efficiency for manufacturing-heavy states like mine?

– What must we do to mitigate the looming national security crises of unprecedented droughts, sea level rise, floods, and typhoons in developing countries even as fossil fuels grow scarcer and more expensive?

– How many jobs will be lost if our planet is no longer habitable in a few generations?

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In the future, your drinking water is going to be recycled from your toilet — believe it.

As the population grows and global warming drives desertification and the loss of the inland glaciers (see here), fresh water will become increasingly in short supply. As the AFP reported recently:

Surging population growth, climate change, reckless irrigation and chronic waste are placing the world’s water supplies at threat, a landmark UN report….

The global population is growing by 80 million people a year, 90 per cent of it in poorer countries. Demand for water is growing by 64 billion cubic metres per year, roughly equivalent to Egypt’s annual water demand today.

In the past 50 years, EXTRACTION from rivers, lakes and aquifers has tripled to help meet population growth and demands for water-intensive food such as rice, cotton, dairy and meat products. Agriculture accounts for 70 per cent of the withdrawals, a figure that reaches more than 90 per cent in some developing countries.

ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION from water pollution and excessive extraction now costs many billions of dollars. Damage in the Middle East and North Africa, the world’s most water-stressed region, amounts to some $US9 billion ($A13.84 billion) a year, or between 2.1-7.4 per cent of GDP.

Yes, desalination will become much more widely used, but it is very energy intensive, creates its own environmental problems, and can’t easily be used everywhere (see “How dry I am: Droughts and desalination, another amplifying feedback” and below)

And that brings us to toilet to tap. Reuters has a good article on the subject I excerpt below:

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In case anyone is wondering whether the news industry is doomed, a few data points:

— The New York Times Magazine is publishing an 8,000-word cover article on climate denier Freeman Dyson written by Nicholas Dawidoff, a baseball writer.

– The New Yorker’s lead ‘Talk of the Town’ piece on the economy and global warming is written by David Owen, a golf journalist.

– The Wall Street Journal’s “deputy Taste editor,” Naomi Schaeffer Riley, criticizes a groundbreaking Redefining Progress report on the demographics of environmental and economic inequality as “oddly conspiratorial” and “condescension.”

Environmental economist Jim Barrett, chairman of Redefining Progress, tells the Wonk Room:

Good grief. Let’s all start writing blog posts about what a crappy golf course Pebble Beach is, how steroids are good for baseball, and why white shoes are just fine after labor day. Don’t feel constrained by your lack of knowledge of the facts. No one else seems to.

Perhaps these papers are hoping to follow in the footsteps of the Atlantic and Newsweek, who publish football pundit Gregg Easterbrook as an energy expert. Their choice of assigning clearly uninformed culture writers to deal with complex scientific issues and economic policy is unfortunate, since so many qualified science and economic journalists — from Chris Mooney to Elizabeth Kolbert, Jeff Fleck to Kate Sheppard, Ken Ward, Jr. to Keith Johnson — are out there.

Traditional science journalism is certainly dying (see “CNN fires staff covering science and environment, hires psychic to cover climate change” and “NBC nixes TV’s only global climate change show during ‘Green Week’.” and below). This is part of an overall trend in the death of serious reporting and major newspapers.

I have mixed feelings, since, on the one hand, both of my parents were award-winning journalists/editors, but, on the other hand, the state of science journalism and climate reporting today in the traditional media just ain’t good — as I have blogged on many times (see CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story — never mention climate change and “NYT’s Revkin seems shocked by media’s own failure to explain climate threat” and links below).

As a professional blogger, I certainly don’t have the reach of the traditional media with my 10,000 visits and 50,000 page views each day — but I and many others provide what I believe is a far superior picture of the harsh reality of climate science than the soft-pedaling scribes of the MSM. Indeed, if homo “sapiens” sapiens fail to act in time to avert the worst global warming impacts: Hell and High Water, then science journalism will certainly deserve some of the blame for having delivered such a muddied message.

I’d be interested in your answers to the two headline questions. But first, science journalist and science blogger Chris Mooney has some thoughts of his own in a post first published by Science Progress.

Amid all the layoffs in the traditional science journalism field, which I’ve been writing about here for some time, the focus of chatter has quite naturally shifted to an inevitable question: Do science blogs serve as any real replacement?

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The conservative movement stagnation has never had a serious strategy for responding to major global environmental problems (see “Hill conservatives reject all 3 climate strategies“). Two decades ago, Secretary of the Interior, Donald P. Hodel proposed a “personal protection plan,” at a meeting of President Reagan’s Council on Domestic Policy, suggesting that “hats, sunglasses and sun screens could be effective alternatives to an international treaty as a way of protecting people from the ultraviolet radiation reaching the earth because of depletion of the ozone layer.” Guest blogger Satyam Khanna has news on a modern-day Hodel in a post first published by Think Progress. I add comments on the GOP’s “expert” witness, The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (aka TVMOB) at the end.

In a hearing Wednesday on adapting to climate change, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) denied the consensus on man-made climate change, saying it is “natural.” His solution to the warming planet? Just get some “shade”:

BARTON: I believe that Earth’s climate is changing, but I think it’s changing for natural variation reasons. And I think man-kind has been adopting, or adapting, to climate as long as man has walked the Earth. When it rains we find shelter. When it’s hot, we get shade. When it’s cold, we find a warm place to stay. Adaptation is the practical, affordable, utterly natural reflex response to nature when the planet is heating or cooling, as it always is.

“Nature doesn’t seem to adjust to people as much as people adjust to nature,” he added. “Adaptation to shifts in temperature is not that difficult.” Watch it:

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Turns out that media reports of the death of the clean tech industry have been exaggerated (see “Global recession? Must be time for the media’s alternative-energy backlash“).

A recent Greenwire story (subs. req’d, excerpted below), “Stimulus seen sowing seeds for industry’s revival,” notes:

There are signs that the federal stimulus might be pumping a little life into the alternative-energy industry.

Financiers and law firms specializing in renewable energy say they see growing interest in reviving moribund projects and breaking ground on new deals. And while big banks that have braced the industry’s backbone are still on the fence, some hedge funds and private equity and venture capital firms are cautiously looking to take advantage of stimulus provisions that temporarily eliminate the need for tax equity financing, which has long been a mainstay for renewable energy projects.

“Whether it’s the stimulus package or the return of the banks, there is early evidence of a growing appetite for the types of small- to medium-sized projects that they sponsor,” said Tucker Twitmyer, managing partner at the venture capital firm EnerTech Capital.

The first thing to be said is that given how well much of the clean tech industry has been doing, the word “revival” is relative (see “U.S. wind energy grows by record 8,300 MW in 2008“).

Second, to believe the cleantech industry was going to suffer for long required believing that President Obama was not going to keep his many campaign commitments to boost funding and incentives for the industry (see “Progressives, Obama keep promise to jumpstart clean energy, economy“).

Third, the massive infusion of cleantech VC funding in 2008 always meant that many clean tech firms would have a great deal of money to survive if not thrive this year. I had previously noted among my “Top 10 things to be thankful for in 2008″ that “Despite market downturn, cleantech venture investment hits record $2.6B in 3rd quarter.” Well, this year, the Cleantech group reported, “Clean technology venture investment reaches record $8.4 billion in 2008 despite credit crisis and broadening recession,” with these remarkable details:

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