The debate over what to do about global warming has begun.

The NRDC's David Hawkins responds.

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, responds.

A young climate activist responds.

The Global Interdependence Initiative responds.

We'll be weighing in again soon.

Today at Grist, we respond to reviews of Break Through by Carl Pope, Bill McKibben, and others here.

All too often current events provide a canvas to project our political anxieties. Consider the recent spate of China-bashing resulting from contaminated pet food, toxic tooth paste and leaded children's toys. Early reports characterized China as "a marketplace teeming with unlicensed operations and entrepreneurs willing to cut corners to make a bigger profit." From Pinots to Firestone 500s corner cutting is hardly a uniquely Chinese phenomenon - its synonymous with capitalism.

Continue reading "Abstract Art" »

Bloomberg Story on New American Environics Poll

Public Leery of Climate Change Remedies If Energy Costs Rise

By Jim Efstathiou Jr.

Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Most Americans see global warming as a problem policy makers should immediately address, unless it increases their energy bills.

Continue reading "Public Leery of Climate Change Remedies If Energy Costs Rise" »

A great review of Break Through at the Boston Phoenix.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger's philosophy requires big thinking: Internet-scale government investment in clean-energy technologies (which will create a new clean-energy economy), adaptation to and preparation for unavoidable climate changes, and a "new social contract" that protects individual autonomy while recognizing the relationship between politics and social fulfillment.

Today Reuters did a very good piece about the failure of carbon prices to affect action on global warming. Coming out of Reuters' London Bureau:

LONDON (Reuters) - The battle to beat climate change has come down to one weapon -- the price of carbon. And analysts say it is not working.

Much lip service has been paid to cutting climate warming carbon emissions through measures such as improved energy efficiency, technological innovation, reduced demand, higher standards and carbon output restrictions.

But in most cases the vital incentive is supposed to be provided by achieving a high price for carbon, from which all else would follow. Neither has happened and time is running out.

Surrealism is no stranger to politics. In a recent posting , Ted describes how a non-descript stand of oak trees in Berkeley has metamorphosed into an "ecological wonder." Equally as intriguing is how efforts by the University of California to ensure tranquility at a football game, by separating this ecological wonder from 70,000 fans with a fence, became the moral equivalent of Bloody Thursday .

Continue reading "Rear View Politics" »

Bill Chaloupka, professor of Political Science at Colorado State University, has an insightful essay in Jon Isham and Sissel Waage's new book, Ignition. In it he argues that environmentalists must understand the ways in which their moralizing about capital-N Nature contributed to the anti-environmentalist backlash in the west.

Continue reading "How Scientism Enervated Environmentalism" »

Tom Friedman has been writing a bristling column on energy issues and global warming for years. Lately he's been wrestling with the challenge of what to do about skyrocketing global energy demand. On the one hand, rising energy consumption is good, since it is strongly correlated with longer lives, a higher standard of living, and better health. On the other hand, increasing energy consumption is a prime cause of global warming

He arrives at conclusions very similar to ours:

Continue reading "Tom Friedman Cuts to the Chase on Global Warming" »

I'm trying to decide who I'm supporting for President, and frankly, I'm not getting there. Along the way, I'm hearing lots of bad reasons for not supporting one candidate or another. I understand how this works. Most of us make a decision, based on some jumble of reasons or emotions, and then go looking for ways to prop it up.

And that's fine with me. If you have a horse in this race, go ride it. But I just want to be that little voice out here on the sidelines urging you to stay a little flexible. After all, your candidate just might fall by the wayside. That happens, right? And people of good will eventually will need all the help they can get for this campaign to turn out well.

So, in the interest of increasing the level of cognitive dissonance among readers of this fine web-based establishment, let me suggest several reasons you shouldn't broadcast too fervently in buttressing your own choice for President. I'll start with Barack Obama. Next time, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

Continue reading "One Reason not to dis Barack Obama" »

The first excerpt from Break Through, in this week's New Republic, just went live. The article, "Second Life," focuses on global warming and energy policy, even though the book goes much broader than that. We write:

In terms of birthing a new energy economy, regulation is important -- it's just not the most important thing. The highest objective of anyone concerned about global warming must be to bring down the real price of clean energy below the price of dirty energy as quickly as possible--most importantly, in places like China. And, for that to happen, we'll need a new paradigm centered on technological innovation and economic opportunity, not on nature preservation and ecological limits.

Click here to download a PDF version of the article.

Seems like the New Republic's cover art recently got a hell of a lot more exciting. This is the cover for the September 24, 2007 issue. A screaming monkey really does seem like the right image to go with the magazine's special environment issue...

The Wall Street Journal's September 12, 2007 story on "cap and trade" vs carbon tax includes a graphic analyzing the cost to Americans of different income levels of a tax on carbon, or an emissions cut of 15 percent. In typical neoclassical (read: market fundamentalist) economic fashion, the Journal only calculates the costs and not the benefits of accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy. I haven't checked these numbers, which come from CBO and American Enterprise, to see if they're right, but here they are:

Continue reading "Energy Price Anxiety" »

President Bush's science adviser, John Marburger, was interviewed today on the BBC (audio). Here is the quote that will get the most attention, undoubtedly (my own transcription):

The climate is in fact sensitive to CO2 emissions. As they increase, the anthropogenic contribution to global warming and climate change will simply progress. The CO2 just accumulates in the atmosphere, there is no end point. It just gets hotter and hotter. At some point the planet becomes unlivable.

His comments that followed had much nuance and focused on the imprecision of targets and timetables and how science cannot tell us how much time to act or what endpoint to choose. He concludes with a call for technological innovation.

His comments prior to the quote above emphasized acceptance of the IPCC consensus, which is interesting because the IPCC doesn't say anything that I am aware of about making the Earth unlivable.

The fallout from this comment will no doubt be interesting.

Haven't had to a chance to pick up Bjorn Lomborg's new book but have recently seen two interesting reviews.

Over at Salon, our friend Eban Goodstein attacks Lomborg for "cherry picking" both the science and the economics to bolster his view that the likely impacts of global warming do not justify the economic impacts that global carbon regulations would impose. Chris Anderson, on his Long Tail blog, is, by contrast, more willing to accept much of Lomborg's argument, but takes issue with his solution, preferring a higher price for carbon and lower public investment in clean energy technology.

Continue reading "What Lomborg Gets Right" »

Cap and trade and carbon taxes are both incremental, based on gradual emissions reductions and gradual increases in the price of carbon.

But technology innovation is not gradual. It is nonlinear and disruptive. It is nonlinear in the sense that classic technology adoption follows an "S-curve".

For a long time, only a small percentage of consumers -- say 5 percent -- use a new technology (e.g., car/cell phone use between 1980 - 1995). Then, suddenly, within just a few years, say between 1995 to 2000, a huge number (~ 50 percent) of consumers get cell phones.

The same will be the case with clean energy technologies like solar. In the case of solar, the S-curve will be even more dramatic. A small number of consumers, ~.001 percent of electricity users -- use solar (the 55 years between ~1975 and 2030), and then suddenly -- if we buy down the price -- solar will become cheap enough to get picked up in exponential quantities. The Moore's law of energy over the last 30 years is that solar price falls 20 percent for every doubling of capacity. It is an amazingly predictive algorithm.

Continue reading "Making Solar as Cheap as Coal in China" »

My neighbor recently had the unfortunate experience of being jettisoned from his bicycle into the back of a car. The incident resulted in a painful blow to the neck followed by a Good Samaritan rushing to his aid with an offer of herbs which she "takes all the time for pain." With the explosion of homeopathy, the slightest sniffle or cough can result in an offer of a specialized supplement followed by an herbalist's statement that it is "natural."

Continue reading "Toxic by Nature" »

Really hard to imagine a more brilliant pairing than quotes from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche with the banality of "Family Circus." But there you go.

On the sixth anniversary of 9/11, it's worth spending some time thinking about how the war on terrorism has, and continues, to change the way Americans think about politics. I watched part of MSNBC's coverage this morning - they replayed the tape of their actual coverage from 9/11 and it was remarkably chilling. On 9/11, I was working for Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, waiting for a meeting to start in the third floor of the Capitol and watching the coverage of the attacks in New York. I remember seeing "smoke reported at the Pentagon" on the CNN crawl, and I casually walked over to a window overlooking the national mall and saw a huge plume of deep black smoke rising from the Pentagon. Watching the images today, listening to the rumors about car bombs at the State Department, and seeing the towers burn knowing that they were to collapse brought up many of the same emotions I felt watching the coverage six years ago, after evacuating the Capitol, and regrouping at a small office a few blocks away.

Continue reading "9/11, Fear and Rational Thought" »

Gregg Easterbrook reviewed Break Through in the new, very good progressive policy journal Democracy. It's a great review from a very good reporter.

In Break Through, an urgent, engaging work, Nordhaus and Shellenberger sail through the fog of instant-doomsday pessimism to show that environmental reforms succeed, are affordable, help the economy, and tangibly improve people's lives...

While others deny the climate change threat or squabble over whose ox should be gored, Nordhaus and Shellenberger are right to look to human ingenuity for the big breakthroughs that will make the impossible possible.

Continue reading "Break Through's Concrete Ideas" »

Ah, existentialist sports humor, there's nothing quite like it.

New York Times Op-Ed Contributor

"Monday Night Existentialism"

By TEDDY WAYNE
Published: September 8, 2007

LAST year, "Monday Night Football" switched from ABC to ESPN after 36 seasons, ending the broadcasting reign of John Madden and Al Michaels, who moved to Sunday evening. How have they been spending their Monday nights?

(Graphic of a clashing pen and scroll.)

FRENCH-ACCENTED VOICE-OVER "Are you ready for some existentialist theater?!"

Continue reading "Monday Night Existentialism" »

When I was 10 my soccer team played an end-of-the-season scrimmage, with the team's two coaches playing opposing goalies. I normally played center half-back, not forward, but somehow I ended up with the ball and began to drive toward the goal. The next thing I know I'm trying to slide past my 220+ pound coach for the shot, he falls on me, and people from across the park hear the bones in my lower leg snap.

Continue reading "Morphine as a human right" »

Inglehart's modernization theory predicts that nations undergo economic transformation from industrial to post-industrial societies. This transformation coincides with a cultural shift from material (standard-of-living) to post-material (quality-of-life) values. A rule of thumb based on the Eurobarometer values survey is that post-material countries tend to express pessimistic views of technology while material countries are optimistic. Concern over the impact of technology, like environmentalism, appears to be a decidedly post-material value.

Rusanen has highlighted one interesting exception to this rule, Finland, a post industrial society with very high support for applied biotechnology in both agriculture and industry.

Continue reading "The Nokia Effect" »

In June of this year, Environmental Defense and DuPont introduced the NANO Risk Framework to "evaluate and address the potential risks of nanoscale materials." Nanotechnology refers to applied science and technology whose unifying theme isthe control of materials on the molecular level and the fabrication of devices within that range.

What is striking about the framework and an earlier editorial published in the Wall Street Journal by Fred Krupp is the reliance on the eco-tragedy meta-narrative combined with the risk assessment sub-plot.

Continue reading "Risking it All" »

From the September 1, 2007, Cape Cod Times:

"A coal industry insider, Wattley has been a frequent commentator on energy issues and utilities in the national media. He has commented publicly on the Cape Wind project on several occasions."

Click here to read the whole story.