The other day I highlighted a new piece from Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, which was critical of No Impact Man and other "stunts" in hyper-green living. Mainly I used it as an excuse to point to my old piece on the civic sphere, which, ahem, you should read.

I should have made it clear in the post that I have not read the No Impact Man book (or the other books mentioned in Kolbert's piece), so I'm not really qualified to comment on whether her criticisms are fair.

Not surprisingly, Colin Beavan -- No Impact Man himself -- doesn't think so! Kolbert's main charge is that personal lifestyle changes like his, no matter how committed or extreme, tend to obscure the fact that the big changes needed are collective -- social and political. One person changing doesn't amount to much.

Beavan wrote me to protest that a) he agrees with Kolbert's point entirely, b) his book actually contains a whole section toward the end about volunteering for NGOs and going to lobby Congress, and c) he has consistently used his platform to push for social action. One of Beavan's supporters also mounts a convincing defense in this post. It does seem that, whatever you could say about the other books in Kolbert's review, she did seem to squeeze Beavan into a box to make a point, a box in which he doesn't really belong.

You could argue, I guess, that whatever Beavan's intentions, and whatever he may have said in his book or blog, it was inevitable that the stunt -- going without toilet paper, etc. -- became the focus. The net cultural effect, even if unintended and explicitly disavowed, was roughly what Kolbert charged. Then again, you could just as easily counter that it's hard to get people involved in social change, period, and that you have to do whatever you can to get people's attention to begin with; that's what the stunt was, something flashy to draw people in and get them thinking. Not like other methods of pulling people into social change are working!

I certainly don't know the answer; if I knew how to make change, I wouldn't be a misanthropic shut-in blogger. I will say, though, that it's extremely easy to second guess other people's choices, much easier than taking action yourself. Whatever you might think of No Impact Man, Beavan has put skin in the game -- real, intense, sustained effort -- and that's a hell of a lot more than most people do. So props.

A final point: if people are going to do these kind of personal-behavior performance pieces, it's important that they convey accurate information about the impact of personal behaviors. That is information the public desperate needs. McKinsey found, in a 2008 survey of consumers:

Our study shows that more than one-third of the consumers who want to help mitigate climate change don't really know how. The top three ways for them to reduce their own emissions are to drive more fuel-efficient cars, improve the insulation of their homes, and eat less beef. Yet when we asked the consumers in our study to name the top three, they fingered recycling, energy-efficient appliances, and driving less. Few consumers knew how eco-friendly it is to shun beef.

Peoples is confused.McKinsey and Co.

As you can see, the American people are deeply confused about how to reduce their impact, even if they wanted to. I cringe every time I see someone on TV going on about unplugging power strips -- the most time-consuming, irksome, low-impact change a person can make. If you want to reduce your impact, replace your car with a Prius or take public transit, insulate your home, and eliminate beef from your diet. Do that and you can relax about, say, toilet paper.

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Elizabeth Kolbert's latest essay for The New Yorker is another triumph, a perfectly pitched marriage of style and substance.

It's about Colin Beavan's blog-turned-book-turned-movie No Impact Man, Vanessa Farquharson's Sleeping Naked Is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days, and other recent experiments in (well-to-do, white, urban) asceticism. Kolbert's dry wit is underappreciated. You gotta love this paragraph:

Farquharson's "green-ovations" range from the significant ("sell my car") to the useful ("turn down my thermostat," "fix things rather than replace them") to the downright ditzy ("go to eco-friendly spas," "shop at green malls," "use a natural lubricant instead of K-Y"). The day after she resolves to "use no more toothpicks," Farquharson is shown a house that's for sale not far from her apartment in Toronto. It's newly renovated, with three stories, and, in terms of Farquharson's ecological footprint, represents an awful lot of toothpicks. She immediately buys it. ("I must have this house," she writes.) Meanwhile, even though flying is pretty much the most carbon-intensive activity possible, Farquharson is constantly taking to the air. At one point, she flies to Banff for a writers' workshop. At another, she flies to Portland, Oregon, to undertake, of all things, a sustainability-oriented bike trip. (During the trip, she sleeps with one of the trip's leaders, and so a few weeks later he flies to Toronto to stay with her.) She flies to Tel Aviv to visit another guy she will eventually sleep with. Finally, she flies to New York, where she seeks out Beavan, because, as she puts it, there's "no way" she is going to go all the way to Manhattan "without confronting my competi— . . . I mean, meeting my fellow green blogger." They rendezvous, at Beavan's suggestion, at the Grey Dog's Coffee, on University Place, which, Farquharson sniffs, doesn't seem "especially green in any way." Naturally, the talk turns to shit.

There's plenty of fun to be had at the expense of these wannabe Thoreaus, but Kolbert does have a point to make. The problem here is that "lifestyle changes" are conceived of as strictly bounded by the individual's private sphere. Says Kolbert:

The real work of “saving the world” goes way beyond the sorts of action that “No Impact Man” is all about.

What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: “Impact Man.”

To put a slightly more fine point on this, I've long lamented that America seems to have devolved into two spheres, the private, which now contains almost everything of meaning to individuals, and the public, which is "government doing its thing somewhere far away."

What's missing is the middle sphere, the civic sphere, in which people do things collectively outside the state (via churches, neighborhood groups, voluntary associations, etc.). Pushing his quest into that sphere would have been much more brave of Beavan; he has less control over it, and progress is much slower and more frustrating, but it would much better illustrate what we'll all need to do if we want reduce our collective impact.

Anyway, I once wrote a post about this: "10 things we can do: rebuilding civil society." Give it a read, it's nice companion piece to Kolbert's.

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You never get a second chance to make No Impact—oh wait, yes you do

Elizabeth Kolbert.

Over the past year, a perfect storm of scientific studies, dire weather events, and media coverage lifted global warming onto the mainstream national agenda. No writing had more impact than a series of closely observed pieces in The New Yorker by journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, which have now been collected and expanded into a book: Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. (Read a review of the book.)

While most writing on climate change has relied on dry data and statistics, Kolbert's is vivid, technicolor reportage. She went on expeditions with some of the world's top climate scientists to Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska to witness the ongoing devastation firsthand. And she ventured to Washington, D.C. -- one place that's not changing quickly.

Though her writing is never hectoring or overtly ideological, what she found left her deeply alarmed. The book ends with these chilling words: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing."

I met with Kolbert just before she gave a presentation on climate change to several hundred people at Seattle's Town Hall. She professed an aversion to public speaking, and with her wiry, nervous energy, she did seem more suited to on-the-ground reporting. But as we talked, it was easy to see the passion and concern that has pushed this New York City journalist into the unlikely role of global-warming evangelist.

Tell me about your experiences with the scientific community. Why has the one group of people that's really taken climate change to heart not been able to break through the public's apathy?

The norms of science are such that they work against communicating alarm to the public. If you read [scientific] papers on global warming, or generally just talk to these guys, they will tell you, for instance, that discharge of ice into the Atlantic has doubled; but they will never say what the implications of this are -- why this is, you know, horrifyingly dangerous. Scientists speak a certain language, they tend to speak mainly to each other, and the norms are such that you're never supposed to go beyond the data. Their attitude is that the data speaks for itself.

Field Notes From a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert, Bloomsbury, 192 pgs., 2006.Unfortunately, most people don't find those data very compelling. They don't know what the implications are. So you have one community speaking to itself and getting increasingly alarmed, and the rest of the world saying, well, the scientists haven't really figured it out yet.

And I would add that the norms of journalism also work against communicating this. So when you add those two together, you're in deep doo-doo.

Complaints about the "he-said, she-said" school of climate journalism are common. As someone who's seen the inside of The New York Times and The New Yorker, can you explain where it comes from? Surely reporters hear this constant litany of complaints about it. What enforces it?

On one hand there is a very, very clever campaign to turn this into a political issue, as opposed to a purely scientific issue. And I suppose there were once enough halfway credible people making the case against warming that journalists felt they had to go to them.

My hope is that you'll see that less and less. I think the message is getting out there that this is not a two-sided issue. Naomi Oreskes did a paper looking at the scientific literature, and there just is no debate. I hope that phenomenon will taper off, but it hasn't ended. I read the papers like everyone else, and I still see quotes from these thoroughly discredited people, and I honestly don't understand it myself at this point.

Why do you think there's this immense disconnect between the information available and the level of public outrage?

I grappled with that question, and I still do. Eventually I came to think there are three major reasons.

One is catastrophe overload. The end of the world has been going to come several times, and we're all still here. So it's: "Wake me up when the real end of the world is coming."

The ice shelf crumbleth.

Photo: stock.xchng.

Then there's: "If this were really as bad as you say, I would feel it by now. There'd be water lapping at my first-floor windows." The problem is that the climate operates on a very long time lag, so if you wait until there's water lapping at your first-floor windows, you can be sure there's going to be water lapping at your second-floor windows. I don't think the message has gotten out: changes 30 or 40 years from now are already inevitable. There is warming in the pipeline already.

And then there is this question of what to do. People don't like to confront problems they don't have a clear answer to. And the answers here -- to the extent there are answers -- are very, very complicated. They're very hard. We know what causes people to be overweight, and we can't even stop that! And with global warming it's not as simple as "eat less, lose weight." It's "do a million things." As the mayor of Burlington, Vt., said to me, there's not one thing we have to do; there are hundreds and hundreds of things we have to do. And we have to do them on a global scale.

So that's pretty daunting to people. It's very much easier to pretend the problem doesn't exist.

Do you think a Kerry/Edwards administration would have done substantially different things?

The frightening thing is that we're in such a bad situation now, so many people in Congress have dug in their heels, I don't think anyone could say a Kerry/Edwards victory would have radically altered our path.

On the contrary, some people take a sort of "Nixon goes to China" attitude: if there's one person who could do something about this, it's George W. Bush.

What did you think of the energy section of the State of the Union speech -- the "oil addiction" phrase? Not exactly "Nixon goes to China," but perhaps "Nixon acknowledges China's existence."

"Nixon goes to Chinatown."

[Laughs.]

I thought they were nothing. It's nice to say we're addicted to foreign oil -- and we are -- but oil's only part of the problem. We're addicted to coal, too.

It's one thing to point out the problem, but it's a totally different one to find a solution. People were looking for it; he could have easily done it. He could have said, "We need to conserve, and we need to find new carbon-free sources of energy, and here's 20 or 30 billion dollars to start doing it." He didn't do that. Since he didn't put any money behind it, I don't think anyone can take it terribly seriously. That's how Washington works: No money, no commitment.

Do you think hard carbon-emission limits are inevitable? Are they the only real sign we're taking it seriously?

I do think they're inevitable. George Bush, in his heart of hearts, probably thinks they're inevitable. Christie Whitman told me they're inevitable. Everybody knows they're inevitable. The only question is how much damage we do between now and then. Unfortunately, the answer could be a tremendous amount.

Is that the only sign of commitment? Yes. Reducing "greenhouse-gas intensity," which is what we're doing now ... you know, the atmosphere doesn't care about greenhouse-gas intensity. It only cares about aggregate emissions.

There's some feeling on the right that the left is using global warming to achieve ulterior ends: slowing economic progress, redistributing wealth, etc.

You do find people who say the whole thing is a big lefty plot to destroy our way of life. I don't know how you respond to that.

It's very striking: When I went to Europe, I talked to the Dutch minister for the environment. In this country he would have been considered far left. He was a member of the Center Right party. His views were: obviously the industrialized world is going to have to cut its carbon emissions way, way down. The developing world is going to be using a lot more carbon, and how could we say they can't? After all, our own wealth is based on that.

You thought you were talking to a member of Greenpeace, but you were talking to a member of the Center Right ruling party in the Netherlands.

The politics are just so different over there. We have a level of political discourse here that's considered by a lot of the world to be just ... wacky.

Hard to argue with that. Do you think international pressure is having any effect on this government? Or that it might be having the opposite of the intended effect?

I think it's having no effect. The one moment you thought they might have to throw a little bone was the G8 last year, where Tony Blair, who had risked so much for this crew, was asking them to do something. And they did nothing.

On the other hand, I think the inverse is true as well: The fact that the U.S. has been so absurd on this issue -- so criminally negligent -- has made the Europeans ... there are a lot of people who say if George Bush hadn't withdrawn from Kyoto, Kyoto never would have been ratified. The Europeans were content to shuffle along indefinitely, but when he actually pulled the plug and said, "We're not participating," they stepped up to the plate and said, "We're going to do it." So in a weird sort of way his recalcitrance has unified them, and now they're committed to that path.

On the flip side, do you think the bottom-up pressure that seems to be building is going to do the trick?

I do think it's having an effect. There are some bills supposed to surface in Congress, and there's a sense that some Republicans who had opposed them might sign on to them. They're very watered-down things, but there's some movement. I think it's a combination of having taken 10 or 15 minutes to actually look at the science, and hearing from constituents.

Some of the religious groups are in there now; some of the business groups are in there now -- really, business is ahead of the Congress at this point. People these guys trust, and rely on, and who have always been supportive, are telling them we've got to do something. There might be something percolating up.

What's your assessment of the state of the climate-contrarian industry?

It's in deep, deep trouble. Even companies like Exxon, who had been big contributors, don't want to be seen anymore financing these things. They're all running ads about reducing their carbon emissions. They don't want the money trail to be traced to some of these wackos anymore.

So you think overt, socially acceptable climate denial is dead?

It's been reduced to guys you can count on one hand.

One of your recent New Yorker pieces was about the evolution of contrarian arguments. What's the 2006 model?

If you read the Wall Street Journal editorial page, you know where things are headed.

The new argument is: yes, there's more CO2 in the atmosphere, maybe it's global warming maybe it's not, but it really doesn't matter, because all these problems -- drought, flooding, hunger, starvation -- are the same old problems of poverty and natural disaster. We should just address those directly; we shouldn't spend all this money trying to reduce carbon emissions, because we could just funnel the money directly to the latest flood victims.

That argument sounds good in the very, very short term perhaps, but [global warming] doesn't stop. You're going to have a perpetually changing climate. It's actually kind of surprising to me, given the close nexus between this administration and the defense community: this has the potential to be so geopolitically destabilizing, you would think some of those guys would latch onto it as the next source of real turmoil in the world.

Climate change is such a distant, abstract issue, so slow-moving, with such a time lag, it's hard even for people who have an intellectual grasp of it to feel it viscerally. Has it gotten to your gut yet?

It has. It takes over your life, and it's not a happy development.

You have kids, right?

I have kids. And I have a hard time imagining their futures. That is very painful.

But even for me, do I imagine absolute disaster for the world during the course of their lifetimes? I'm not sure I do. I hold out hope we will avert that.

It's a heavy number as a parent. And it's a heavy number for kids. Kids are increasingly aware of it; my kids certainly are. It hangs over them. Of course, when I was growing up the threat of nuclear war hung over us. I suppose it's been a while since kids have grown up in a carefree world.

There's a dilemma of sorts: scientists feel uncomfortable with advocacy, journalists feel uncomfortable with advocacy, and advocates are ignored. Environmental groups have been marginalized, stereotyped as Chicken Littles.

We are absolutely crying out for political leadership.

But look at John McCain, somebody who has been pretty upfront on this issue. You can't say he's really been listened to. Arnold Schwarzenegger is out there sounding the alarm.

So what do we need? I really don't know. We need someone in a position of national leadership, [Sen.] James Inhofe [R-Okla.] or somebody, to stand up and say, "I have seen the light, I am convinced we need to do something." As I say, George Bush could have been that person.

One often hears -- at least inside environmentalism -- that things won't change on global warming until there is a something like a spiritual change, recapturing the values of mutual care and so on. I can't decide whether that's more or less depressing than the lack of a technical solution.

[Laughs.] I completely agree.

One guy in the book who I admire, he's very smart and sober-minded -- Dave Hawkins at NRDC -- gets up every day and thinks he's going to convince the Chinese and the Americans not to emit CO2. And you have to admire that. Is he kidding himself? I don't know. But thank God someone is doing that.

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