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, Bjorn 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 that has promoted such a message. Just spend some time on the climate websites for NRDC, Environmental Defense, the 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 do (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 hyping 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:
Nor should we want to dramatically curtail energy consumption. Increasing energy use is the primary cause of global warming, but it is also a primary cause of rising prosperity, longer life spans, better medical treatment, and greater personal and political freedom. Environmentalists can rail against consumption and counsel sacrifice all they want but neither poor countries like China nor rich countries like the United States are going to dramatically reduce their emissions if doing so slows economic growth.
Apparently S&N have never heard of energy efficiency (which decouples economic growth from energy consumption), never been told what California has accomplished, and never met any of the environmentalists I talk to every day.
Even as we are seeing a groundswell of support for cap-and-trade programs at a national and state level, S&N insist the strategy just won't work:
The only way to double global energy consumption while cutting global warming emissions in half is by developing new sources of clean energy. Thus, the problem with the proposals currently being discussed in Congress: They will, for the foreseeable future, direct private investment toward the least expensive emissions reductions (such as burning methane from landfills, purchasing forest land for carbon sequestration, or retrofitting power plants and buildings so they operate more efficiently) rather than toward breakthrough technologies (like low-cost solar energy, and carbon capture and storage), which are too expensive to become widely adopted today but vital for creating a new energy economy and thus drastically reducing emissions. Cap-and-trade schemes, for example, would achieve some inexpensive reductions but wouldn't drive investment into long-term R&D because those investments would not immediately reduce emissions.
No, no, no, and no. Again, their obsession with breakthrough supply-side technologies is not grounded in historical reality, as I have argued. They seem painfully unaware of energy efficiency. They are very wrong that carbon capture and storage requires breakthrough technology -- it can be done today but it isn't being done because carbon has no price -- so their argument is dangerously backwards.
Of course a price for carbon would drive R&D -- a price for other pollutants drove R&D for their replacements -- and in fact, just the now-inevitable prospect of a carbon price is already driving a big surge in venture capital funding for clean energy. But again, S&N are obsessed with investment into "long-term" R&D. Guys, hello, we sat on our hands for three decades doing nothing about the climate problem (except R&D) -- the long-term is now!
If we needed long-term R&D to avoid catastrophic global warming -- the very argument that Bush and Lomborg use to advocate delay -- we would be in big trouble since we appear at real risk of triggering dangerous carbon-cycle tipping points. Fortunately, we don't. What we need to do is massively deploy all the low-carbon technology that exists today or is already in the pipeline. And that is best done through the kind of carbon pricing and intelligent government regulations that S&N criticize.
Just as bad as their strawman argument is the fact that they pass off political naivete as political savvy, accusing environmentalists of pursuing politically impractical approaches, when that is what they themselves are doing -- as I will discuss in Part V.
Want to read more debunking of S&N? Here are Part I, Part II, and Part III.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Comments
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Jon Rynn Posted 7:29 am
06 Oct 2007
Launch a massive performance-based efficiency program for homes, commercial buildings, and new construction.
Launch a massive effort to boost the efficiency of heavy industry and expand the use of cogeneration (combined heat and power).
Capture CO2 from 800 new large coal plants and store it underground.
Build it 1 million large wind turbines (or the equivalent in renewables such as solar power).
Build 700 new large nuclear plants while shutting down no old ones.
Every car and SUV achieves an average fuel economy of 60 miles per gallon.
Every car can run on electricity for short distance before reverting to biofuels.
We stop all tropical deforestation, while doubling the rate of new tree planting.
Now, I certainly disagree with several of those points (and would add many more), but the point I want to bring up is this: at the very least, points 1,2 and 4 look to me like they require public investment; maybe 8 as well; and even though I disagree with 3 and 5, they look like they need public investment as well. Which means that of his 8 points, only 2 look like they are amenable to regulation!
So I'll repose Joe's question: Why bother criticizing S&N, when we should just get on with the task of figuring out what are good uses of public investment?
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amphibious Posted 8:58 pm
06 Oct 2007
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:48 am
07 Oct 2007
Romm: Regulation of the market is necessary and sufficient to mitigate global warming
S&N: Regulation of the market is necessary but not sufficient; public investment, mostly in R&D, would make the program sufficient.
So, if a policy was implemented that was based on regulation (hopefully it would lean toward something like state renewable electricity standards), and it included many billions for public investment -- then it seems to me that Romm and N&S would all support it.
However, I don't see how global warming is going to be mitigated without a massive program of public construction of mass transit, at the least. Mass transit is necessary, although not sufficient by itself, because a global vehicle fleet approaching 1 billion will fry the planet.
If you want intellectual cover for this, Mr. Market himself, Thomas Friedman, in today's NY Times, approvingly talks of taxes to "rebuild bridges or schools or high-speed rail or our lagging broadband networks"
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Sam Wells Posted 2:01 am
07 Oct 2007
Onward through the fog
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:07 am
07 Oct 2007
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Sam Wells Posted 2:38 am
07 Oct 2007
Onward through the fog
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Sam Wells Posted 4:22 am
07 Oct 2007
Onward through the fog
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mkayser Posted 7:29 am
07 Oct 2007
What is the precise suite of policies you want enacted;
How much will each policy reduce CO2;
What are your calculations and assumptions.
Talking any more at a high level is useless. Clearly you are operating from different assumptions.
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theBike45 Posted 8:38 am
07 Oct 2007
plus the resurgeance of the only significant means we currently possess for producing carbon free electricity (nuclear - 32 new US plants, 304 new plants outside the US in the next 3 to 5 years) anyone is bothering to even discuss such outmoded and doomed technologies as photovoltaic, (non-dispatchable) wave and wind and carbon sequestration. Keep talking, but I won;t be listening anymore - your discussions have been rendered totally irrelevant. Sorry, you misinformed folks. The environmental game is over, along with its multiitude of nonensical theories, technologies and arguments. Conservation ala fat Al is likewise now just plain dumb.
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David Roberts Posted 10:07 am
07 Oct 2007
Promise?
grist.org
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Sam Wells Posted 11:01 am
07 Oct 2007
Onward through the fog
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Jon Rynn Posted 12:32 pm
07 Oct 2007
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sunflower Posted 1:02 pm
07 Oct 2007
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Sam Wells Posted 1:42 pm
07 Oct 2007
http://www.ocean.udel.edu/people/profile.aspx?jcorbett
Ship fuel is known as "heavy fuel oil" and varies between 2.7 and 1.5 percent sulfur. This is similar to what we in the US used to call "Bunker C." The stuff is so thick it has to be heated and run through a centrifuge before it can even be burned.
These fuels can be blended down or hydro-treated so as to achieve sulfur limits of 0.5 percent sufur and even lower. These grades of ship fuel are called marine distillate oil. Cleaner than that, you're talking marine gas oil, which is very similar to diesel, which is a true distillate. California has a regulation for ships to use marine gas oil when in port although a judge has recently issued a stay against any compliance - but many proactive companies are doing it.
By and far, the worldwide average for ship bunkers is 2.4 to 2.7 percent sulfur heavy fuel oil. About 95 percent of the large ship activity in the U.S. is from foreign ships using that stuff. Foreign ships are regulated by the International Maritime Organization, and legal challenges have prevented most U.S. laws unless the ship was "flagged" or registered here.
I hesitate to say that ship bunker fuel is "x" percent of worldwide stocks because it changes so much, for example doubling from initial studies to the more recent (and using the same data). Is it 14 percent or as much as 30, or are those estimates way inflated? Remember we're just talking liquid fuel oil here, not total energy.
All I can say is that there are about 30,000 large ships chugging around the world and each burns between 30 and 130 metric tons of fuel per day (at about 700 gallons per ton). Now that's some fuel, bubba.
Onward through the fog
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Colin Wright Posted 2:08 pm
07 Oct 2007
What I'm reading from you is, "don't worry, a price on carbon, the market, a few government regulations concerning efficiency will take care of things."
Then you lump your detractors in with the Limbaugh crowd. And wash your hands, thus absolving you from taking their arguments seriously. But the main arguments aren't about what constitutes an environmentalist these days or what constitues a breakthrough technology.
The main issue as I see it is, is cap and trade (and/or a carbon tax) going to work ? It hasn't in Europe so far. You don't address S&N's contention that:
The IPCC estimates that establishing a global carbon price of $184/ton -- a figure five times higher than what legislation in the Senate would set it at -- would still only result in a reduction of global carbon emissions by 20-38 percent by 2030
If it was an argument just between you and a few rogue social scientists. that would be one thing. But S&N marshall a whole assortment of esteemed figures:
Indeed, whether it's the recommendations presented by the IPCC, the Stern Review, Scientific American, or top energy innovation experts, investment is universally seen as a central element in overcoming ecological crisis. "Funding for energy research," Scientific American said in its lead editorial in a special issue dedicated to clean energy, "must be accorded the privileged status usually reserved for health care and defense."
That's why it's important that you address the full substance of N&S's critique. Your backgrond in energy policy obviously gives you deserved credibility. But many people regard the Clinton/Gore environmental policies with deep suspicion.
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Teryn Norris Posted 2:31 pm
07 Oct 2007
Really?
Q&A with Bill McKibben: Acceptable Energy Consumption
"Your article is a nice piece of diplomacy. However, from what I've seen of Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in The New Republic, they talk a double game: we have to give people a vast increase in energy consumption because they won't settle for anything else; and, they're right not to. So we have no choice but to somehow go from fifteen terawatts of consumption in 2007 to sixty in 2100. Maybe they're right about what's politically possible, but are they right about what's desirable? Is it, in your opinion, possible to have environmentally acceptable energy consumption at that level, considering what that energy is used for, and what it takes, under the most benign assumptions, to produce it? If not, shouldn't we at least not reinforce illusions while bowing to realities?"
--Willem Vanden Broek
Bill McKibben replies:
"My most recent book, Deep Economy (Times Books, 2007), tries to answer this question in great detail. Suffice it to say, it seems to me that we would be wise to start asking deeper questions about the economy than 'how can we make it larger'. Like, how can we make it more durable, and more satisfying. The answers to both, I think, point towards less energy use instead of more."
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/2007/10/questions-for-bill ...
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GreenEngineer Posted 4:50 pm
07 Oct 2007
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Sam Wells Posted 12:07 am
08 Oct 2007
Onward through the fog
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Jon Rynn Posted 12:53 am
08 Oct 2007
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Erik Hoffner Posted 1:17 am
09 Oct 2007
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/12/113159/502
Erik
The Orion Grassroots Network: 1,100+ grassroots groups working for conservation & more
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