I'm interested in the "cognitive dissonance" that occurred, or maybe didn't occur, at that conference.  One of the things that has been driving me crazy has been the juxtaposition of "the world is going to end" and "change your lightbulbs". It always seemed to me that that was a great way to deflate any emotions -- even anger.  On the other hand, we keep getting this mantra of "If we start everyone out with small things they will get to the big things".  So were the participants aware of this contradiction?

I hate to say it, and I hope I'm not being sectarian, but Gelbspan seems to be a good example of the problem you're talking about.  Last I looked, he was proud of the fact that he had consulted with lots of economists and world leaders and came up with a plan of bringing down carbon by so-many-percent per year ( JMG, I don't mean to criticize what you're doing).  Why isn't he calling for World War II type action, globally? (and by the way, that was an great metaphor, that helping China would be like helping an ally during war, and doing nothing is like appeasement).

I think you're calling for a mass movement (strangely enough, I think Gore was calling for a global movement in his last TED speech, although I don't know what he meant by that).  But here's the thing -- I don't see a mass movement happening until global warming is linked integrally with other struggles -- and I think that the key issue is economics, because that links to all of the progressive communities, such as African-American, Latino, women, unions, etc.  So the idea of transforming the economy into something sustainable, that yields, not just millions of good jobs, but an entire economy that yields good jobs, becomes imperative, in order to bring millions of people in as a mass base.

Is your solution a World-War-II type transformation, complete with most (or a significant amount) of the Federal budget devoted to an economic/environmental transformation?  That sounds reasonable to me, just asking.

So I'll stop right there for now, great essay.

Here's my 2 cents:

In each of the great mobilizations of the american people, they had something to work FOR. They had a goal and a purpose and it was an idea that they could rally around.

Environmentalists have often been accused of being utopian and to a certain degree I think that the label is deserved. Scientists are very good at telling people What's Wrong, but as of yet have not been great at the Now What.

If we are going to save ourselves and our planet then we need a principled discussion of Now What. I agree with Mr. Ward that we have gotten bogged down with short term goals and tiny victories. We need a well thought out vision of what an Eco-Society would look, smell, and feel like. How would we make decisions about what is good or bad? What guidelines would we use for choosing leaders, businesses, homes, etc?

We need this kind of vision more than we need the sad wrangling of politicians trying to get us to shut up already. :)

In each of the great mobilizations of the american people, they had something to work FOR. They had a goal and a purpose and it was an idea that they could rally around.

The great mobilizations were also knee-jerk reactions to emotional events.

The CCC and the NRA (the National Reform Act- not the gun-totin' hillbilly association) was founded in response to the stock market crash.

America didn't enter WW2 until after Pearl Harbor.

America didn't care much 'bout terrorism or Afghanistan until after the New York terrorist attacks.

America didn't see communist Russia as much of threat until they started testing atomic weapons.

With global climate change, it's a bit different beacuse there's not a singular, defining, spectacular, explosive event which can be instantly concrete-linked to it.  It happens quickly, but not instantly, and it doesn't include any big explosions or great balls of fire from a giant airplane labeled "global warming".

If it did, then they'd be much more passionate 'bout it.

Beautifully put.

grist.org

"Where is the gathering of Green Group leadership to plan strategy?"

In Washington DC, with the focus on electing Democrats, after which what those Democrats are willing to do will be defined as sufficient progress.

they just haven't been played that way.

Look at the outpouring of support in the days & weeks following September 11th: blood banks were overflowing, volunteer lines were jammed, most everyone I knew was desperate to do something, anything to help.  

What if we'd had a President at the time that told Americans that the attacks were directly related to our Middle East foreign policy, and that our Middle East foreign policy was directly related to our dependence on oil?  What if, instead of the War on Terror, we declared War on Oil?  What if, instead of slapping magnetic flag decals on our SUVs to show our patriotism, our President told us that the most patriotic thing we could do was not drive? What if, instead of launching a war against Iraq, we had invested those billions on dollars into our War on Oil and funneled that money into renewable energy, efficiency standards and transit infrastructure? What if, when millions upon millions of Americans asked "what can we do to help?" our President said "Bike to work. Insulate your home. Buy a hybrid. Plant a garden. Buy organic.  Let's do everything in our power to stop funneling money, through our oil consumption, to these terrorist groups."

draw up a national grid proposal, with pretty maps, that plays to the distributed strengths of renewable energy. even if it's the european super-grid proposal traced onto a kids' wooden USA puzzle it would be better than "our target should be 20-60% in no less than 25 years, if practical." it's practical. the obstacles, as ralph nader recently put it, are "non-technical."

stop talking about climate as though it were separate from groundwater supplies, fisheries, credit shortages, falling wages, and anything else big going on now. this is all part of one big resource-management screwup and no part alone can be fixed without the others drawing it back into the red.

yes to jon rynn. the fact that this changes the economic picture for billions of people -- for the bad if we quit, for the good of we try -- shows that it's a real story worth telling. A WORLD-ROUND MOBILIZATION MEANS THERE WILL BE TONS OF WORK. some will work in bad faith and screw things up. that will take watching. some will work on whatever, not caring why. that's totally okay. you need to take a step back if you think of this as saving souls. the first business of any good religion is to help with the daily chores.

stop harshing on the lightbulb message -- we all know it's huge -- one of the biggest changes we can make. worthy of law, including practical disposal preparations. instead, go get mad at the "check your tire pressure" people. driving with a lighter, steadier foot, closer to the speed limit, would get most people 20-30% better gas mileage. part of being serious means we scrub out the tips that don't work and concentrate on the good ones. (i'd give a kidney if this otherwise wasted election eon could be used to teach people about embodied energy and the other core concepts of smartening up our equipment buys.)

start talking about complications of implementation. say, "okay, we're working on building our wind power, and that's good, but we're already outgrowing the grid we have and we may have some raw materials problems -- the answer to which is probably recycling more of our current deadweight, faster. let's figure out what we'll be tossing and see if deconstructing it gets us closer to our materials needs."

never show fear to a camera. tell people what will happen. a contraction of one industry, growth in others. tell them washington's job now is not to tell nature what to do or legislate science, it's to divide the work effectively, thoughtfully, attentively, and fairly. we can save our dirty industries from getting beat by the new and clean, or we can save our beloved planet. people know polluting businesses have been living on borrowed time and political favoritism. they just need to know they have a way out that isn't marked "bankruptcy."

for luck, because we need it, and that's actually an optimistic point of view.

work from a plan. if you don't like lester brown's numbers, say why. if they're okay, show them to people, talk about how they're practical, how they are economical and create wealth and opportunities while blowing the doors off the polluters' estimates of how fast we can afford to change.

get used to saying the word "trillion." it's a big number because there are a lot of us and together we make a big economy. but the money all shifts from other places. we can afford to be amazing.

Interesting post as always.

One slight correction. Jim Hansen's announcement that 350 is the new number has not been met with an entirely deafening silence. Those of us who ran the domestic StepItUp effort last year have now started a global campaign, 350.org, which will officially launch next month but has already organized actions in a dozen states and a dozen countries, and been widely discussed in major articles in the LA Times and Washington Post. If I was better at linking, I'd send you to the piece that originated last week at tomdispatch.com, and was carried widely around the blogosphere, including in Grist. In any event, you can check out the website at 350.org, and more to the point you can help join in the battle. Not easy to do, a global movement, but at least we're trying (and in 14 languages!).

Ken Ward is, as usual, perspicacious and brutally honest in his assessment, in particular his keen insight : that policy is preceded by power. Many activists talk about building that "broad consensus" that they assume will create this power. But so far few have proposed anything more than the usual interim short -term "coalition building", based on the assumption that all progressives in all movements think and evaluate the same and share the same objectives. This is a sad delusion, underscored by the internal conflicts within the Democratic Party, presumed home base for liberals and everyone who isn't a Republican.  What is overlooked is this simple fact: that even though the environment has not taken priority in voter's choices,  there are literally tens of millions of citizens who support, directly and indirectly, environmental causes and organizations, who cut across economic and class lines, and who are the most likely segment of society to be sympathetic to an uncompromising and militant approach to global warming. Instead of a scattershot approach - appealing to the general public or the elites - we should spend our time and money to recruit this base to an undiluted campaign against global warming. And this campaign would directly address the issue of power, through a demonstrably effective mechanism: the PAC. If every one of these 20 million voters gave $10, we would have $200 million dollars to run those candidates who pledge to support a tough  energy policy that includes ending coal, terminating all fossil and nuclear subsidies, imposing carbon taxes, and imposing mandatory efficiency standards across the economy, as well as stopping deforestation, expanding  affordable regional and national passenger rail, and even placing a Border Tax Adjustment on tax carbon-intensive imports. The PAC could both run candidates in key districts and selectively endorse incumbents who support this plan. Some wealthy benefactors might be persuaded to match the PAC-raised funds, thus doubling the intake. Focus should be on the U.S. Senate rather than the House of Representatives, because it would take far more effort to obtain a majority in the House than in the Senate, and getting a green senator onto Capitol Hill means six years of opportunity.  This kind of message to the supposed progressives in congress would be like a pail of cold water on the heads of those Democrats who take the liberal vote for granted by assuming liberals and independents have nowhere else to go. What a powerful statement....and what a giant step toward getting the power that is needed to radically change our energy policy.

Great set of responses. Seems to me, all whining in my posts aside, that we (Grist posters) are making some strides towards carving out a conversation on the fundamental challenges.
In no particular order:

re: Bill MicKibben's post. Definitely didn't mean to imply that there has been no response to Hansen. Bill's eloquent and dogged effort to draw attention to the 350 benchmark is the most visible and effective. But I think that Bill's organizing in Step it Up and 350 prove the point. Climate activists groping for some point of certainty in the welter of partial goals and small-scale solutions (nicely described by kmp) must look to new efforts like 350, because there is no clarity in major environmental organizations' and foundations' program.

re: John Ryan #1. Cognitive dissonance, as I understand it in reference to climate, has several overlapping meanings: 1. The state of anxiety felt by an individual confronted by evidence which conflicts with belief; thus, the uncomfortable feelings of participants in low carbon footprint workshops who who believe that personal action is important and will rank household recycling and purchase of a Prius high on a list of climate action activities, but are also fully aware that carbon emissions reductions through their own, and like-minded peoples' efforts are essentially meaningless; 2. Sub-conscious processes the mind employs to resolve such conflict, particularly screening out or downplaying information which conflicts with belief. This, I think, describes the state of most professional staff working on climate, who are fully aware of the latest science, but unconsciously screen out, or do not access that information as they go about their day-to-day work), and; 3. Taking action that is contrary to belief and/or conforming one's beliefs to fit with actions one is unwilling or unable to change. This, it seems to me, describes the condition of many knowledgeable people working in the private sector, particularly oil, gas and coal companies.

In my view, our greatest problem is #2., because it is the continuing ability of of environmental staff and leaders to suit up and keep plugging away at an ineffectual agenda that prevents us from rewriting the environmentalist climate story and refocusing our climate agenda, to offer activists in #1 a way out and put the folks in #3 under increasing strain. Cognitive dissonance, in other worlds, is our stumbling block and also our best tool.

That's the theory. What actually goes through an individual's mind is, of course, idiosyncratic, but I have listened to many people, from senior staff attorneys to my dentist, describe strikingly similar experiences of existential panic. These intense, mildly dissociative states seem to occur most frequently during commutes, on waking or attempting to fall asleep, and sometimes in breaks during the work day - lulls in the stream of orderly thought. The trigger may be a stray piece of information, an image, or (for a lot of people) a sudden burst of anxiety over the future of their kids or grandchildren. The feeling is difficult to describe - one friend said she felt as though her body was suddenly empty, an echoing hollow between her hips and shoulders. Most people also experience shortness of breath.
I think what's going on is that our fight-or-flight reflexes are kicking in at odd moments, and the problem with our climate agenda - at this very primal level - is that we neither address the feeling, nor offer an opportunity to fight or flee.

In the unfolding WWII analogy, our story speaks in the language of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, whose response to Hitler was...
... by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and goodwill,"

To break free of our own cognitive dissonance and energize our core, we must rally and fight (flight is not an option), as Winston Churchill did for Britain...
...we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

re: John Ryan #2. Neither Ross Gelbspan, nor Bill McKibben, nor any of several other outstanding efforts to draw a bright line and craft a functional solution - see, especially, David Merrill's work at StopGlobalWarming.org and Tom Athan ___ - should be compared to our major organizations and foundations. The difference in resources is gargantuan - a handful of hardworking people, with little or no funding, entirely reliant on volunteer action by individuals and coalitions versus $1 billion in assets dedicated to climate, memberships in the millions, and professional staff in the thousands. The fact that Ross's work is seen in the same terms as, say, the Pew Climate Center, demonstrates a huge disparity in cost-effectiveness, but the bottom line is that Ross and others similarly positioned have limited options if they want to advance a pragmatic solution. McKibben's campaigns aim to shift the balance of power, and in my opinion, the 350 effort will be more useful, because it advances Hansen's bright line, than Step it Up, which called for US domestic emissions reductions alone.

re: John Ryan #3. Gore's thinking remains an enigma. On the one hand, as John notes, he does speak in terms of a movement and has called for direction action, but when it comes to spending money, he invests in "We" commercials which are almost the antithesis. Movements and protest are launched by small groups of deeply committed people who crystallize a moral question and polarize options between black and white.
This forces the majority, who will otherwise be perfectly content with shades of grey, to make a choice.

I keep turning to the example of slavery in the early half of the `19th century as the best example of how an issue that is accommodated within pluralistic politics can be pole-vaulted to the defining question before the nation. Northern abolitionist groups of the era, like environmentalists now, were large, well financed and able to move limited-aim bills in Congress. They were also committed to incremental change, split into many competing organizations, and spent a good deal of time and energy debating alternative policies - slaves should be returned o Africa, freed, but not made citizens, given their own territory/reservation, and so on. John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry failed raise a slave rebellion, but Brown's moral absolutism, brilliantly publicized by Emerson and Thoreau, put both Southern slavers and Northern abolitionists on the road to emancipation and rebellion.

re: John Ryan #4. Sure, I don't see how we avert catastrophe otherwise, and I have an optimistic view of America and Americans, that in clutch, we will do the right and pragmatic thing. The fact that we are not now willing to come to grips with the crisis is consistent with how Americans have always acted, but our nation as a unique ability to shift gears very quickly, and will do so again on climate. Don't get me wrong, this is not an argument to sit on our hands and wait for some future political crisis. But it does argue that our present focus on convincing the majority that we have a problem, while being careful not to scare them too much, is misguided. Rather, we should be focusing on building the base of flat-out committed climate activists, heightening conflict, and polarizing climate between two mutually exclusive visions.

re:kmp. I agree completely. I thought the most dispiriting aspect of the debate over Cape Wind was the fact that all arguments, pro and con, were in the abstract. The bottom line question - is Nantucket Sound so unique an environmental and aesthetic treasure that it trumps climate action? - can only be answered if we have some idea, even a guesstimate, of how much wind power we must generate and where, to meet this objective, Nantucket Sound falls on the list of sites.

re: lifestyle. I'm not convinced that Americans must make significant changes in lifestyle - at least to reduce fossil fuel use, we may well be forced to make major changes to deal with climate change impacts. It's all a matter of scale and power. If the US government, acting with the same alacrity and pragmatism of post-Pearl Harbor, simply mandated 60 mpg vehicles, phase-down of fossil fuel electricity generation, and required solar retrofits for building heating, we would be in striking distance of self-sufficiency, without any cultural change of significance.

The idea that environmentalism is only about setting limits and our image as crabby meddlers, intent on making life less fun, is not one we should accept or perpetuate. Somewhere along the line we stopped thinking and talking about environmentalism in terms of freedom from want, intelligent design, and simple-but-elegant solutions. Remember Amory Lovins describing nuclear power as "cutting butter with a chainsaw"?

Shellenberger and Nordhaus are half right in arguing that we must celebrate the vision of sustainability. After all, the rest of the world is fighting to become what we are. They are naive, I think, in arguing that emphasizing the positive alone is sufficient.

8. re: Tasermons Partner. I don't think we should discount the possibility of one galvanizing climate impact or a sequence. Part of our problem is that in describing climate change as a host of impacts without differentiation, we make is difficult to grasp the problem as something we can fix. But there is one big problem - the ice shelves and sea level rise - that will be "spectacular."

It already is, but we're not doing much to draw attention to it. The breakup of the Wilkins ice shelf in March of this year, 30 years earlier than the leading expert predicted, is very sobering and ought to have been banner line news in our communications.

9. re: Anna, Lorna,  hapa, Handley on what do we do? Good suggestions all. I feel that the key issue here, though, is how our organizations and the foundations which support us, define the agenda. I don't see that there is time to construct an alternative. This is nettlesome, in that there is little to offer frustrated activists, and at the same time relatively straightforward. It is our institution and if we cannot imagine reworking our own approach, why should we hold out any hope of changing America?

Ken Ward ken[at]brightlines.org

your program looks very interesting, but is anybody putting more details into your various proposals?  

Ken, I think this is a great essay, and was suprised you mentioned Rising Tide for criticism here since I think (?) you'd find most people active in our (100% volunteer network) agree with virtually all of what you said - perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't believe we fit with any of your criticisms.

Were you were saying that our "program" [sic!] is too removed from "climate 24-7" because we believe that the environment can not be viewed in isolation of human oppression - especially when fossil fuel extraction and burning is involved?

It would suprise me to hear that conflicts with your argument, but it's all I can think of...

I just not sure what you were getting and and was genuinely curious.

thanks for the article...

www.RisingTideNorthAmerica.org

To be able to see signs of global warming linked to CO2 you need two things (1) accurate CO2 data and (2) accurate temperature data. There is accurate CO2 data but only since 1958 at Mauna Loa, as for temperature, well there are thousands of high quality rural weather stations throughout the world and especially in the US and the northern hemisphere that have long histories and NO UHI bias. These stations are totally uncontaminated and provide temperature data from a totally natural environment like Mauna Loa does for CO2.

What do warmers such as Hanson/Giss do, well, they use station pairs and compare data from a highly UHI contaminated urban city weather station with CLEAN data from a neighbouring RURAL station. They then Use some secret algorithm put all the data through a computer which then gives them the result in degrees C. The odd thing is that the result always shows a steep rising temperature trend when the neighbouring RURAL CLEAN data shows only a flat or a slightly rising temperature trend.

Would it not have been more logical to have discarded the contaminated data from the Urban stations and used only the clean data from the Rural sites. I believe the answer to this is that this method would not allow the easy fiddling of data.

The Hanson method,
Bad data + good data = very good data because it shows rising temperatures, this is called Hansonisation.

Good data from RURAL weather stations =  NO link between CO2 and temperature rise and we don`t want that do we.

I goofed. I had listed Rising Tide with other organizations, based on a stray reference to Green Jobs, but neglected to read through the wealth of material on their site. Though I do not think there is time for any effort that aims to challenge capitalism, racism and patriarchy along with climate, Rising Tide is certainly no product of the Climate Policy Paradigm! My apologies. Ken

Ken Ward ken[at]brightlines.org

I put returning the composition of the atmosphere back to the preindustrial, i.e. 280 ppm in the policy books of the Green Party of British Columbia about twenty years ago, got elected as a Speaker of that party when they had three Speakers instead of a Leader, and went out campaigning for a brief period as if the party took that policy seriously.  I quickly found out that the serious environmental campaigners were all working for other political parties as the Greens were regarded as not having a chance in hell to elect anyone.  I campaigned saying that these environmentalists were legitimizing politics that would kill the planet by allying themselves to political organizations that had no climate policy at all and quickly found out how isolated you could become if you took the position I had taken.  I was condemned throughout British Columbia as "insane" and "dangerous" because if people voted for the Green Party to indicate they supported our climate policy, they would be opposing all these other environmentalists who had sold out any chance of making climate debate a reality back then in order to get a few more parks established.   The Greens themselves couldn't understand why all these reputable people were condemning me and support for me in my position evaporated.  I resigned eventually.  

No scientist at that time was advocating that civilization stablize the composition of the atmosphere and remove some of the greenhouse gases it contained to restore it anywhere near the preindustrial, so all I had to back up my position was that I could state that I had met a few top flight climatologists and I knew they would support what I was saying even though they would not call for it themselves.  I eventually despaired of this getting anywhere and I've not done that much, until recently when I heard Hansen was saying 350 ppm.  

Now, finally, after twenty years, there are some scientists calling for action commensurate with the level of threat they've been describing all this time.  They've always been precise and unrestrained when describing what level of threat global warming represents:  in 1988 the Toronto Changing Atmosphere conference of 400 high level delegates had no trouble agreeing on describing the threat as one that could only be exceeded "by global nuclear war", whereas their call for action would be laughable today.  

So I would say that I found myself isolated and powerless in the past doing exactly what you are calling for now, but that there are new possibilities now that some scientists are on board in this way.  I never saw the point in saying anything other than the truth as I saw it.   The truth just might start working for people now.  

david lewis