Jeff Masters gets at something in his great piece on the "climategate" e-maelstrom that most press coverage leaves out: this isn't our first time around the track. The Manufactured Doubt industry has been around for decades, working to thwart regulatory constraints on large corporations that make dangerous products. Not only are all the same techniques being used in the same way on climate change, in many cases they're being used by the same people and institutions that fought against tobacco, CFC, asbestos, and auto safety regulations.

In every case they have been discredited, their science exposed as fraudulent, their economic doomsaying given lie by subsequent innovation and growth. In every case, documents later show that the truth about the products' dangers was known but deliberately concealed and the effort to deceive was intentional and well-funded.

It's an industry that uses dishonesty to defend corporations. Plain and simple. Everyone ought to know that by now and it ought to frame media coverage of these dreary "skeptic" controversies. Yet the press seems to think that every new claim or contrived controversy from the industry deserves to be met with the same furrowed brow, the same quote and counter-quote presentation of "sides," the same chin-scratching atmospherics of doubt. It's always the world's scientists and scientific institutions being asked to defend their integrity, not the professional dissemblers and character assassins.

I haven't read the emails. I'll leave it to others to determine whether a few scientists or a few papers deserve a newly critical eye. As Masters says:

Even if every bit of mud slung at these scientists were true, the body of scientific work supporting the theory of human-caused climate change--which spans hundreds of thousands of scientific papers written by tens of thousands of scientists in dozens of different scientific disciplines--is too vast to be budged by the flaws in the works of the three or four scientists being subject to the fiercest attacks.

Whatever may be on trial in this latest dismal theater piece, it isn't the validity of the basic conclusions of climate science. Media coverage of this spectacle is a failure if readers do not come away understanding two facts:

The rest is sound and fury.

------

UPDATE: A fantastic interview on Washington Post with science historian Spencer Weart reaffirms what I was saying above, particularly this bit:

The theft and use of the emails does reveal something interesting about the social context. It's a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science: Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we've never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance.

Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers. In blogs, talk radio and other new media, we are told that the warnings about future global warming issued by the national science academies, scientific societies, and governments of all the leading nations are not only mistaken, but based on a hoax, indeed a conspiracy that must involve thousands of respected researchers. Extraordinary and, frankly, weird. Climate scientists are naturally upset, exasperated, and sometimes goaded into intemperate responses... but that was already easy to see in their blogs and other writings.

Related Links:

Lomborg v. Monbiot: liveblogging the Munk debate on climate change

For McCain, it’s really all about the fake snow

What to make of the new climate poll

Freeman Dyson is a noted physicist who's argued -- utterly implausibly -- that carbon eating trees will save us and we shouldn't worry about the whole climate change thing. For this, he's been profiled in The New York Times and now dubbed a Brave Thinker by the Atlantic. But is he really that brave?

Said friend Oliver Sacks of Dyson, "He feels it's important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive, and he's done that all his life." For whatever reason, Dyson decided enviros were the latest orthodoxy to need a thumb in the eye.

It's a pretty common sentiment. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner are the latest to do it, in their new book Superfreakonomics. Their chapter on climate change sits awkwardly with the rest of their work; the original Freakonomics was based on Levitt's academic work, real data and models the authors used to make ostentatiously counterintuitive points about perverse economic incentives. But Levitt did no original work on climate. The chapter's not about economic incentives. There's no evidence of deep or sustained engagement with the literature or previous research on the subject. The authors just high-stepped in, cast a cursory glance around, and started condescending to the people involved in it (and stepping on rakes).

Why? What leads people to think that entire areas of climate science and policy, the subject of close study by thousands of very smart people all over the globe every day, can be overturned with facile points of logic and Silver Bullets Nobody's Thought Of?

Well, it ain't bravery.

The fact is, anybody who takes a poke at the Dirty F*ckin' Hippies -- anybody, for any reason -- can get attention and access to media. There's an enormous infrastructure on the right to elevate any anti-DFH voice, including random economists, physicists, meteorologists, talk show hosts, computer programmers, whatever. You don't need any particular credentials. You don't even have to believe what the right does; as long as you confuse the issue, they'll amplify your voice. (Indeed, they're embracing Superfreakonomics.)

Add to that the fact that mainstream media outlets seek one thing above all else, and that's the unexpected, the contrarian. When it comes to climate change, that generally means taking a poke at greens (or better yet, at Al Gore). It's even better if you're a purported green bashing other greens. That's the kind of media crack Nordhaus & Shellenberger dealt on their way to fame and funding. Bash the greens, no matter your qualifications or the merits of your arguments, and you will find yourself on television and in opinion sections from the New York Times to Washington Post to Wired.

Helpfully, when you offer facile dismissals of science and policy to which people have devoted their lives -- "We could end this debate and be done with it," sighs Leavitt, "and move on to problems that are harder to solve." -- they get angry, and they express that anger. Then you get to be the Brave, Persecuted Freethinker battling the Quasi-Religious Orthodoxy, and the press loves you all the more. Why else would anyone know Roger Pielke Jr.'s name? Lomborg rode that train, along with Shellenberger/Nordhaus and Dyson. In a smaller, grubbier way, even a flack like Patrick Moore ("co-founder of Greenpeace"!) has made it work for him. It's no wonder Levitt/Dubner thought they could do the same thing, and you can sense their hesitation now that it's not working so well. Though it did work like a charm on the normally sharp Jon Stewart, who offered Levitt this pathetically fawning interview:

On the other hand, simply repeat the broad global consensus -- climate change is an urgent problem that warrants coordinated action to reduce GHG emissions -- and you get nowhere. Boooring. (I can't tell you how many back-and-forths I've had with media outlets where I try to explain that the thing most people think is right actually is right, and they say, maybe so, but that's not going to titillate our readers.)

I could start doing this crap tomorrow: Have a revelation that greens are emotional, irrational, in the grips of a cultish faith (a "secular religion"!). Realize that they're doing everything wrong, from their message to their recommended policies. Discover that the real solution is ... I don't know, thorium reactors, and everything else is needless hype and meddling. I could be denounced by greens and wear their opprobrium as a badge to gain entry into cable news and op-ed pages.

I would get the egoistic thrill of subversion. I'd get a hearty band of supporters on the right and thrillingly dastardly enemies on the left. I could parlay the conflict into national attention and infamy. If I was a retired physicist in my twilight years, it might even be a real kick in the pants to be back in the fray again.

Yeah, I could do all that. It would be many things, but "brave" isn't among them.

Related Links:

On ‘climategate’

SuperFreak Dubner embraces ClimateGate conspiracy theories

Best. Review. Ever.

Today the Wall Street Journal editorial board published a typically dismissive editorial defending the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from the companies that have quit or criticized it over its position on climate change.

The Chamber, to recap, opposes the clean energy bill in Congress and recently called for a “Scopes Monkey Trial” questioning the scientific reality of climate change. The 97-year-old business lobby has faced a wave of defections, from large utilities such as Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Exelon and well-known members such as Nike (which quit the Chamber’s board but retained its membership) and Apple.

The WSJ editorial board waved its hand at the moves: “Apple and Nike are putting green political correctness above the long-term interests of their own shareholders.”

It also buys wholesale the Chamber’s claim that it really wants to help on climate change, it just doesn’t happen to approve of the bill currently in Congress, or last year’s Lieberman-Warner climate bill, or the plan the Environmental Protection Agency is pursuing.

Bizarrely, the WSJ editorial board also attacks Al Gore for promoting clean energy while investing his own money in renewable energy technologies, as if it were hypocritical to invest in a cause one believes in. It complains that cleantech could make Gore “richer than he already is,” as if his wealth discredits him.

No big news here—the editorial board has long made it clear it doesn’t believe in climate change and opposes any energy plan that attempts to address it. But I learned about the most recent editorial from a takedown by the WSJ’s own Keith Johnson, the lead reporter at the paper’s Energy Capital blog.

Writes Johnson:

Johnson (understandably) declined my request to talk about his criticism and the internal politics involved in posting it. Like the Washington Post, the WSJ puts out some solid journalism on climate and energy issues, combined with utterly misleading pieces from its opinion page. As with the Post reporters who called out Post columnist George Will for lying about climate science last spring, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Journal editorialists find themselves challenged by their own news staff.

Related Links:

Annie Leonard misses the mark in her new video, “The Story of Cap-and-Trade”

E.U. pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

On ‘climategate’

I have to admit — sometimes Joe Romm ruins my mornings. As the author of Climate Progress, one of the most influential global-warming blogs on the Internet, few debates on energy or the environment get past his ravenous attention, and he takes particular pleasure in targeting mainstream journalists who’ve written something he deems stupid. That’s been me occasionally -- like the time Romm took me to task for referencing an analysis on energy research and development he found wanting. At least I’m in good company: writers from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have all been the subject of Romm posts.

I don’t know what’s more suprising. That Time named me one of its “Heroes of the Environment 2009” -- I certainly don’t see myself as a hero.  Or that they gave the assignment to Bryan Walsh, given my earlier critique of one of his pieces -- and he still wrote such a generous profile, which continues:

But here’s the thing -- more often than not Romm’s right. A physics Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Romm, 49, clearly has brains to spare. He combines that intellect with a strong sense of moral outrage. He also possesses a Jon Stewart-like quality for pointing out the absurdity of his opponents.

Unlike many climate bloggers, Romm comes at global warming not from an environmental background but from a national-security one. After graduating from MIT, he worked at the Rockefeller Foundation. His job in the twilight of the Cold War was to identify the world’s new big problems -- and as he talked to experts across the ideological spectrum, he found them: energy and climate change. “These were the sleeper issues that were really going to dominate the coming decades,” says Romm.

The 1990s were spent working for the Clinton Administration in Washington, where for several years he was an acting assistant secretary at the Department of Energy, an experience that put him well ahead of the curve on green power. But it wasn’t until Romm’s brother lost his house in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina that climate change became personal. Romm began an in-depth research project to determine whether his brother should rebuild there. The result was the 2006 global-warming book Hell and High Water, which displayed a trademark urgency that bordered on hectoring. “The consequences of doing nothing were far more than what people realized,” he says.

It’s become Romm’s mission to make people realize that -- and his Climate Progress blog is the perfect vehicle for this son of a newspaper editor. What began as a once-a-day side job has become full time, with Romm scouring the Internet for climate studies and filtering them through his own firmly fixed values: that global warming is a potential human catastrophe, but that it can be fixed with today’s green technology, applied relentlessly. It’s “excellent and indispensable,” as New York Times columnist -- and new green champion -- Thomas Friedman likes to say.

It’s also much needed therapy for a writer who spends his time worrying about the fate of the world. “I used to be very frustrated,” he says. “But the blog keeps my blood pressure down.”

Indeed, it does (see “Why I blog").

Walsh is a good reporter, as evidenced by his 2008 cover story, “How to Win the War on Global Warming,” which I thought was first rate.

[Note: If anyone has come here because of the Time story, be sure to read "An Introduction to Climate Progress."]

Time sent a great photographer, Jordan Hollender, who took a lot of photos.  I might try to post some of the others. I’m a little surprised this is the one they used but I certainly do sometimes blog with my daughter on my lap. And she certainly is a great motivation for me to fight to preserve a livable climate for the next generation.

One final comment on the subject of heroes. When your father is a newspaper editor and your mother is also a journalist and your older brother collects comic books, it’s hard not to see journalists as heroes.

Clark Kent, of course, was (is?) a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper.  Peter Parker was a newspaper photographer.  Journalists were secret heroes. With Woodward and Bernstein and All The President’s Men, real journalists themselves became movie heroes to my generation. But now, a great many journalists have become part of the establishment, like Woodward himself, defenders of the status quo, like David Broder, stenographer of those centrists who are fatally uninformed about global warming.

Certainly I have the greatest respect for Time magazine, which continues to do the best science-based global warming coverage of any major national magazine (see “Time: How climate change is causing a new age of extinction“). So this means a lot coming from them, though it is ironic that I am being recognized in part for taking on the media itself, for being in some sense an anti-journalist, like Jon Stewart.

Let me end with Time’s framing of this issue:

From saving wild mountain rivers in China to measuring the Arctic’s icy expanse, from protecting the lush forests of Africa to conducting a feisty online debate, our green heroes are informed by this simple notion: We can all make a difference….

It’s easy to think that all the hard decisions are in the hands of our leaders alone. Not true. As the men and women in the following pages prove, we can all make a difference. Pen Hadow, leader of a daring survey across the Arctic to measure the thickness of sea ice, puts it this way: “Turning off a standby light once won’t make a difference. Do it for the rest of your life and that amounts to something. And if everybody’s doing something, then we’re moving in the right direction.” We hope our environmental heroes provide both inspiration and action. Like financial pundits, most of them embrace the idea that a crisis also presents opportunity. They are heroes because they set out to discover what that opportunity might be.

We can all make a difference. Indeed, we must.

Related Links:

On ‘climategate’

Time: “The science of climate change grows more dire.”

Is Freeman Dyson really “brave”?

What do they know that we don't?A scoop in The New York Times doesn’t surprise me. A scoop from nine months into the future does. This morning the Times Environment page featured a ClimateWire story dated May 15, 2010.

“Senators Spend Recess Fine-Tuning Messages on Cap and Trade” finds Senate Democrats still hand-wringing over the proper messaging of a climate bill. It finds Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) still confounded about how to line up his 59-vote majority behind a bill.

From the Times crystal ball:

OK, the actual story lists the date as Aug. 28, 2009. Probably safe to say the 2010 date is an error.

Bonus Good News from South Dakota--The story reports on Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.):

Related Links:

E.U. pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

On ‘climategate’

We are what we think. With our thoughts we create the world. -- Buddha

OK, first, let me hasten to say that I find myself, as most any physical scientist would, irritated by the ancient quote above.

I expect a modern person to know, though the Buddha may or may not have known, that the logic of the physical universe is so intricate and so precise that mere human thoughts are grotesquely insufficient to create it, that some objective reality must exist.

What You Think About Determines What You Think

There is another sense, though, in which it is precisely true that we create the world with our thoughts. We live in a world both of artifice and of nature. Our environment shapes our minds and our minds shape our environment. What we are thinking about matters.

Consider the matter of Iran, for instance.

By now everybody's talking about Iran, but early last week there was immense frustration directed at the major media in a small niche community, for ignoring the story entirely. That niche community was Twitter users.

It was an unusual week among Twitterphiles. We were experiencing the world much as one did when the Berlin Wall was coming down, with a sense that noble events of great and auspicious consequence were happening in the world, that one should at the least fervently wish for the success and safety of those of pure heart, and that little else could possibly have comparable relevance, not even climate change or health care or the economic, um, thing.

But if you were not the sort of person to use Twitter to get news, you might have barely registered that something was going on in Iran. You may have had a mild interest in the events but you are still a bit confused about who possibly stole what from whom, and what Twitter could possibly have to do with it.

This fact in itself is an interesting part of the story. Not only was Twitter an important player, your level of interest in Twitter was at one point a strong predictor of your level of interest in the outcome of the whole crisis in Iran!

Isn't that strange?

Perhaps not. The ideas that fill our minds are the ideas we are exposed to every day. One reason we were upset was because we saw events of immense importance taking place, and a press that was treating it as a non-story. Recall the substantially similar events in the Republic of Georgia six years earlier. There was some news coverage, but it didn't take over our consciousness, because none of us were watching media where the story was pervasive.

What we think about is determined by what we experience, and what we experience is determined by what we think about. As a result, we live side-by-side in different worlds.

Idea Clusters

Comparisons of how different groups, be they professional or ethnic, construe related ideas are usually revealing. Trouble and misunderstanding often arises when the habits of mind of different communities of interest are brought to bear on the same subject.

These ideological clusters emerge from habits of mind. The habits of mind emerge from language, and from the accessibility of concepts. Russians, who have no word for blue, but rather two separate words for light blue and for dark blue, apparently are quicker to distinguish light blue from dark blue objects than speakers of other languages. And then there is the infamous precision of Inuit with regard to snow and ice, which may or may not be apocryphal, but I suspect there is something to it. Have you ever listened to a conversation about snow among skiers?

It can be stunning how differently different subcultures address related ideas. Economists vs energy providers, reporters vs bloggers, cat lovers vs bird lovers, industrialists versus environmentalists, ecologists versus climate physicists, scientists vs politicians, journalists vs entertainers, engineers vs economists. The consequences of differing vocabularies and habits of thought are everywhere and are increasing as the world becomes more crowded, complex and interdependent.

Economists' faith in eternal growth as opposed to the environmentalist's fear of imminent doom is a case in point. It leads me and a few stalwart others to a synthesis position: an intent to find patterns of thought and action that avoid the doom associated with compulsive growth, and instead create a reasonable steady state economy. This is the idea cluster that I'm trying to participate in building.

An idea cluster (or maybe let's call it a "meme complex"... ideas?) is much bigger than a meme. It is sometimes identical to an ideology, but it isn't always that. It is a cultural predisposition to notice certain things and think about them in certain ways.

Where Idea Clusters Come From

To see where we're going it often helps to consider where we've been.

In the past century, the century of mass media, it was the media that mostly provided the language, the Lego blocks, the molecules of thought for most people. Tiny little cultural clusters coalesced under the pressure of very powerful aggregators and distributors of information, not just through news but even through entertainment.

In America, the news media developed a set of scruples that reporting and commentary functions should be kept very distinct. The reporting people in particular were taught this as a bedrock ethical principle, and continue to defend it fiercely. A news medium is an economic entity, but its success depends on public trust, so the thinking went. Thus the reporter should be scrupulously "neutral". Because the ownership wanted an outlet for its own ideas, the "editorial" sandbox was set up for them.

So the raw materials for thought, the mindsets, the idea clusters, become 1) the world of commerce, trade, profit, wealth, "free enterprise" to give it its triumphal name 2) the world of strife, controversy, secrets kept and secrets breached, objectives baldly stated and objectives obscured, speech honest and speech mendacious, in other words the gritty world of "muckraking". Even the opposition to these ideas was framed in the same terms: "the workers control the means of production", "power to the people" "el pueblo unido jamas sera vencido" etc.

For a long time, this model served well enough. When there is a local question, say a road bond or new convention center, the tension between fiscal conservatism and boosterism is very well suited for this constellation: there is a horse race of two ideas, both resonate with the values of the community, no special expertise is required to understand the issues, and eventually, one side or the other will win. (Then, if the project is approved it will be executed well, indifferently or badly, again stories which the traditional media are well suited to examine.)

In the past, even national questions were somewhat more disjoint than they are now. Everything wasn't deeply enmeshed in everything else, specifically because the American landscape wasn't very crowded. So for the most part, even national issues had a local, parochial flavor; a public dance of debate, a backstage drama of arm twisting and intrigue, and on the whole, an increasingly homogeneous national character that matched circumstances well enough.

Thus emerges our habitual mental model: "there are two sides to every story". Everybody bends the truth in their direction. The public interest is the sum of every individual's self interest. Some people are especially influential because they control large institutions or large pots of money. Decisions are based on cultural affinities, alliances, and exchanges of political capital.

But the questions we face now are very different. Try to map this habit of mind onto questions of managing the earth as a tightly coupled and disrupted system and what do you get?

There's an nerdy joke among scientists, that a mathematician who knows what to do when confronted with a burning building will set non-burning buildings alight, thereby reducing it to the previous problem. When there is only one side to a story, the press will manufacture another.

The press has a natural cultural affinity for politics, especially the brawling, sometimes cynical and always entertaining world of local and state politics. The vocabularies and intellectual maps of the press and the politicans are closely entwined. Propositions have winners and losers, advocates and opponents. Eventually they are either enacted or defeated. Is that how we have managed to find ourselves in a world with people who are willing to be called "anti-environmentalists"? With our "friends" at Climate Depot, whose response to existential uncertainty on a planetary scale is mockery with a side order of cherry-picking?

I think so. This "opposition" is partly political opportunism of course, and it's partly entertainment for a certain sarcastic and defensive state of mind, but ultimately it is a creation of the media, which given an issue of importance goes off in search of an opposition. And so we have reached a pretty pass. We've managed to create a constituency which stands in opposition to the persistence of a viable planet.

We are thinking about our circumstances as if we were in opposition to each other, but it is in the interest of everyone on a ship at sea, be they communist or jihadist, butcher or vegan, that the ship not sink. Why are the words we use to think about our collective future so adversarial?

They didn't start out that way. If the issues came from the deliberations of scientists and academics, the discussions would remain polite, truth-seeking and unpolarized.

The polarization may not originally come from the press, but it is maintained by their conceptual maps, idea clusters, meme complexes. Polarization is embedded in their model of human activity as economic activity, of politics as contention. As a result, the words and ideas and conceptual maps that the public draws upon date from the industrial revolution: workers against capitalists, rich against poor, centralization of decisions versus distributed decision making, nation vs nation, lifestyle vs, lifestyle, sect vs. sect. Of course these problems have not gone away; of course they only make our new problems that much harder.

But our new problems do not look like that. And what we need is a new cognitive map.

A Better Word for Doom?

All of this is by way of addressing one of my perennial questions, which Andy Revkin again raised recently in a Dot Earth column:

If the science pointing to a rising risk of dangerous human interference with climate is settled, the thinking goes, then why aren’t people and the world’s nations galvanized?

People are casting about for the right words to describe our moral and existential quandary, words that will galvanize "action".

Revkin points out an article on Seed where several very appropriate people (myself oddly excluded, hrmph) take up the topic with varying degrees of success. I am most sympathetic to Ann Kinzig's approach. She concludes "If we accept that language is never neutral, why not adopt the terms that resonate with a broader swath of the public?" And indeed, I think language is never neutral, despite the protestations of people inculcated in journalistic culture. But what language should we use?

In the Seed article, Matt Nisbet, whose article with Chris Mooney is often credited (somewhat to my personal irritation since I've been going on about this stuff for fifteen years) with starting the conversation about how these ideas are communicated, starts off on the right foot but then stumbles into a rather feeble pair of examples:

The point is not to “sell” the public on climate change, but rather to use research on framing to create communication contexts that move beyond polarization, promote discussion, generate partnerships and connections, and that accurately convey the objective urgency of the problem. If the public feels like they are being marketed to, it will only continue to fuel additional polarization and perceptual gridlock. In shifting the frame on climate change, the goals should not be to persuade, but rather to start conversations with the public that recognize, respect, and incorporate differences in knowledge, values, perspectives, and goals.

In one prominent example of re-framing the debate, strategists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger have led the way by advocating that climate change should not be defined as a pollution problem that requires additional regulation but as an energy problem that provides an opportunity for growing the economy and creating jobs around clean technology. This reframing moves the debate beyond a narrow constituency of environmental advocates and opens the doors for a broader climate movement that includes labor, business leaders, and the investor class. The frame was a major emphasis by both presidential candidates in the past election, is emphasized in Al Gore’s “Repower America” television ads, and continues to be a dominant focus of the Obama administration.

A second framing strategy to move beyond perceptual gridlock is offered by scientists such as E. O. Wilson and Evangelical leaders such as Richard Cizik who frame environmental stewardship in terms of morality and ethics, engaging an Evangelical audience who might not otherwise pay attention to appeals on climate change. This frame is more than just a talking point or a rebranding of the issue: When scientists and religious leaders join together around shared values to work on a common problem, it builds bonds of trust that enables long-term collaboration and that breaks down prejudices.

Sorry, a shallow appeal to the fading paradigm of personal greed as one example, and a scolding from an evangelist on the other? Out of the frying pan and into two fires? What sort of help is that? Does that help you? It doesn't help me, and it apparently doesn't help Revkin who ends on a note of futility:

So what’s your view? Is the climate challenge one of communication style, of inadequate energy choices, of the hard-wired aspects of human nature?

My sense is there’s a big dose of the latter in this arena. Humans remain mainly focused on the here and now, and the worst outcomes in a warming world remain someday or somewhere. There’s still scant evidence we’re able to invest against inevitable shocks even when the danger is clear and local ...

Stop the Presses!

Stop the presses, Andy. You missed the point. Of course you missed the point, or pretended to, because the problem is you.

No, not you, Revkin, personally. Revkin, (despite my constant harping about you) you are among the best of a bad lot, trying to bring a journalistic sensibility to a set of problems that do not map onto the intellectual style of the journalist. The point is that that style is serving us badly.

If f the science pointing to a rising risk of dangerous human interference with climate is settled, then why isn't the press galvanized? Why do the stories run on page 13?

What we need is not a noun phrase, a new name for doom. The qeustion of "global this" or "climate that" is not going to help. We need a noun phrase embedded in a new way of thinking, an approach to planetary maturity on a suddenly depleted world. You can call it Mrs. Renfro's Corn Relish for all I care; it's the context that matters.

The Sustainability Mindset

Sustainability on a crowded and finite world is a fundamental challenge to every culture and ideology that ever emerged on the growing and open world. Humans are vastly adaptable, but the cultural matrices in which we find ourselves are not. The buildings of Rome are mostly not new, but they are much newer than the routes that the streets take through them. The main street through Bastrop TX carries little sign of the Spanish empire but is still called El Camino Real.

Most of us don't have a sustainability mindset.

Those few that think they do, mostly don't. The green movement have a Luddite view, a romantic view perhaps workable on a planet with a tenth of its present population. They are, I think, good people with much to teach us, but they aren't really facing up to the scale of the problem any more than most other people are, and their culture is actively suspicious of quantitative thinking. So much as I love greenies, as much as I hope the agrarian ideal eventually pans out, this isn't the time for it. We have big, collective problems to solve and we need a big, collective way of thinking about it. And not even a Woody Guthrie-esque "one big union" is big enough. Big government, big business, these are part of the solution.

The press isn't giving us the vocabulary to think about our circumstances.

Where the media are bored by a topic, the public is implicitly informed that the topic is unimportant. My experience of understanding that events unfolding in Iran were important before the press caught on was sadly familiar to me.

Just as early last week, when non-Twitterphiles were not thinking about Iran, most people aren't thinking about a way out of our quandary. People may think there is no quandary, or they may think there is no way out, or they may think that some other "They" have everything under control. What they don't think about is which approaches they would tolerate, what the menu of scenarios, getting uglier by the month, looks like. There's little awareness of the nature of the choices we face, and hence little support for people in the position to make the decisions/

The media are, in fact, bored. Sustainability, for the most part, doesn't map onto what excites them. Read my lips Andy Revkin.

There is no proper word for doom when that word only appears on page thirteen.

Even running the same old stuff on page 1 won't do. The entire way we organize ourselves, not just our cultures and our subcultures, but everybody else's too, have to change in ways that lack any precedent. And they will change, too. There is no maybe about that. The only maybe is how much suffering we will have to endure before our thoughts adequately conform, to the world we actually end up with. All of which depends, as Buddha says, on our thoughts.

Exhortation

I only know what to do in the broadest sense. We need to start thinking about the things we need to think about. All of us, not just a few wonks and nerds.

The new nominee to be head of research and development at EPA, Dr. Paul Anastas, puts it this way: "It's not enough to simply care about the environment, you need to learn about the environment and understand it deeply." I think this is precisely what I am saying. We need to develop a vocabulary of understanding; habits of mind that are planetary in scale and scope. We need to think globally.

We don't need a friendlier name for doom. We need a 24 hour doom channel. God knows it's not boring once you actually get the picture.

It's the future. The press, or whatever replaces it, needs to read more like science fiction. Let's talk about scenarios, about what problems nature will present us with, and about coalitions, how we will address them. Let's talk about social organizing tools. Let's look backward from 2400 AD and describe how we overcame the nation-state, the porliferation of mutually hostile religions and ideologies, and the ethic of greed. Let's think about how to extract unity from hostility and fear. Let's try to understand why surplus feels like poverty.

Let's not wait for "Them" to rescue us. There is only us. And whatever ends up serving the purposes of the "front page", let's put the "stuff that matters" on it, and not just "what's fit to print".

-----

(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Republication in whole with attribution to "Michael Tobis, Austin TX" is encouraged.)

Related Links:

On ‘climategate’

Disappearing slave history

Europe places outcome of Copenhagen squarely on Obama

President Obama gave a strong endorsement of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) at a White House press conference today, calling it “historic legislation that will transform the way we produce and use energy in America.”

The White House press corps didn’t seem to notice, asking not a single question about the bill, its reach into the American economy, or about energy and climate in general. Instead, reporters asked questions about the timing of his statements on Iran’s election and about his personal smoking habits. For real.

“How many cigarettes a day do you now smoke?” Margaret Talev of McClatchy Newspapers asked him. “Do you smoke alone or in the presence of other people? And do you believe the new law would help you to quit? If so, why?”

The energy bill, as Grist’s Kate Sheppard reports, could receive a vote in the House as soon as this Friday. The extent Obama is willing to lean on lawmakers to pass the bill has been a key question in determining whether the bill will pass, and in how strong a form. But it hasn’t become a “real” story for the White House press corps, apparently.

Not to diminish the importance of health care and what’s happening in Iran, but ... Obama’s smoking habits? C’mon, now.

Here are the president’s full remarks on energy, from his opening statement:

If you’re still curious, here’s Obama’s response to the smoking question.

Related Links:

E.U. pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

I haven't read The Atlantic much lately, but I picked up the latest issue at the airport and it is superb. Three pieces are worth particular note.

First, Joshua Green has a piece on "The Coming Green Economy" that is as good as anything I've ever read in popular media about the contours of the green energy space over the last 30 years. It avoids many of the dumber canards passing as conventional wisdom these days, but is appropriately skeptical. Really top-notch.

Then there's a piece by Graeme Wood that I fully expected to hate: "Re-Engineering the Earth," about geoengineering. Articles in the popular press on this subject tend to be far too credulous and breathless about the awesomely laser-tastic future techno-zappery that's going to save us. Wood actually does a decent job of presenting both the hopes and the many, many dangers.

And finally, not exactly green, but well worth checking out, is Jamais Cascio's "Get Smarter," about how technology is enabling us to enhance, extend, and network our natural intelligence. Climate change is never mentioned, but if you want a little hope about our ability to deal with something this huge, Cascio's article is the place to find it.

Related Links:

Why buying cheap energy certificates worsens climate change

On ‘climategate’

Is there a tradeoff between economics and the environment?

Big media struggles with how - or even whether - to explain to the public that the increase in extreme weather we are seeing is precisely what scientists have been predicting would occur because of human-caused climate change (see, for instance, "CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave "Hell (and High Water) on Earth" story - never mention climate change").

But the AP and the Washington Times has explained quite well (here) the likely source of Brazil's double punch - brutal drought followed by brutal flooding, Hell and High Water:

Across the Amazon basin, river dwellers are adding new floors to their stilt houses, trying to stay above rising floodwaters that have killed 48 people and left 405,000 homeless.

Flooding is common in the world's largest remaining tropical wilderness, but this year the waters rose higher and stayed longer than they have in decades, leaving some fruit trees entirely submerged.

The surprise isn't just the record flooding, it's that the flooding followed record droughts:

Only four years ago, the same communities suffered an unprecedented drought that ruined crops and left mounds of river fish flapping and rotting in the mud.

Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency.

The BBC also got the story right last month, "Experts say global warming may be behind the wild climate swings that have brought periods of unprecedented droughts and flooding to the Amazon in recent years."

Interestingly, the same exact swings in extreme weather hit Louisiana in 2005, as I wrote in my book Hell and High Water:

While the U.S. suffered a record-smashing hurricane season that deluged southern Louisiana with rain in the summer of 2005, "the eight months since October 1, 2005 have been the driest in 111 years of record-keeping" in southern Louisiana, the U.S. National Climatic Data Center reported in July 2006.

What makes the AP and the Washington Times story on Brazil so unusual is not only that the Times is a right-wing newspaper, but that the story continues with an extended discussion of the climate issue:

It's "the $1 million question," said Carlos Nobre, a climatologist with Brazil's National Institute for Space Research.

While a definitive answer will take years of careful study, climatologists say the world should expect more extreme weather in the years ahead. Already, what happens in the Amazon could be affecting rainfall elsewhere, from Brazil's agricultural heartland to the U.S. grain belt, as rising ocean temperatures and rainforest destruction cause shifts in global climate patterns.

"It's important to note that it's likely that these types of record-breaking climate events will become more and more frequent in the near future," Mr. Nobre said. "So we all have to brace for more extreme climate in the near future: It's not for the next generation"...

"Something is telling us to be more careful with the planet. Changes are happening around the world, and we're seeing them as well in Brazil," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said this month on his radio program....

"I think we should be preparing for this to become more the norm, and there's a need to look at what the future Amazon will look like," said Daniel Nepstad, a tropical forest ecologist and chief program officer for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's environmental conservation program.

Of course, no story would be complete without some "balance," some reply to the climate scientists:

"We are used to floods and droughts and know how to coexist with them, but we are not used to them happening so swiftly and lasting so long and causing so much damage," said schoolteacher Gleicimeire Freire, who distributes aid with the Roman Catholic Church. "This is what is scaring us."

In southern Rio Grande do Sul state, bordering Argentina and Uruguay, many farmers say the driest weather in 80 years has withered their corn and alfalfa. Winter grass for cattle couldn't be planted, and milk production has suffered, said Darcisio Perondo, a congressman who represents the state.

"In some villages there wasn't enough water for people to drink, and in some towns they had to get water from the large rivers and tote it by truck for the cattle," Mr. Perondo said.

He called the situation a calamity, but isn't sure whether global warming is to blame.

"Anyone who reads the Bible knows that floods and droughts are cyclical," he said. "I just don't know if global warming is causing this."

Still, this is an excellent story overall. Kudos to the AP and the Washington Times for informing the public as to what we face on our business as usual emissions path.

Related Links:

On ‘climategate’

A scientific hack job that won’t cripple climate talks

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

The five stages of grief describes "a process by which people allegedly deal with grief and tragedy, especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness or catastrophic loss," as Wikipedia puts it:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

l have been meaning to blog on this since I heard a very brilliant physicist, Saul Griffiths, use this piece of pop psychology to describe climate science activists (CSAs), and I realized that he had it backwards.

And the timing could not be better what with the staggering number of comments over the weekend from the WattsUpWithThat crowd. I let the overwhelming majority of those comments through because every several months progressives and CSAs should see what anti-climate-science talking points are making the rounds. [For the last go round, see "The deniers are winning, especially with the GOP" with 537 comments.]

But first, let me explain why I am still using the word "denier" here, although many deniers don't like the implication - which I am certainly not making - that they are anything like Holocaust deniers. I have blogged many times on the quest for a better term (for a long discussion see Media enable denier spin 3: PLEASE stop calling them "skeptics").

I suspect future generations will call them "climate destroyers" or worse - since if we actually (continue to) listen to them, that pretty much ensures warming of 5°C or more this century, 850 to 1000 ppm concentrations, and centuries of what had been purely preventable misery (for the recent scientific literature and analysis of the multiple catastrophic consequences humanity faces on the business-as-usual emissions path, see "An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water"). But what should we call these people in the meantime, while we still have time to ignore them and save the climate?

As an important aside, I very much draw a distinction between the deniers - the professionals (like Watts, Morano, and Will) who spread disinformation for a living and/or full-time - and the much larger number of people who have been misled by them into repeating their disinformation. It's much harder to know what term to use for the misled than it is for the misleaders. Let's call them delayers, for now, since that is their primary impact.

Let's first note that neither the deniers nor the delayers are skeptics, the term they (and the media) like to use.

THEY AREN'T SKEPTICAL - THEIR MINDS ARE MADE UP

The traditional or mainstream media still call them "skeptics," as in this NYT headline. As long as they do so they trivialize the problem and render the word "skeptic" devoid of meaning.

All scientists are skeptics. Hence the motto of the Royal Society of London, one of the world's oldest scientific academies (founded in 1660), Nullius in verba: "Take nobody's word." Indeed, as Wikipedia explains in its entry on "Skepticism":

A scientific (or empirical) skeptic is one who questions the reliability of certain kinds of claims by subjecting them to a systematic investigation. The scientific method details the specific process by which this investigation of reality is conducted. Considering the rigor of the scientific method, science itself may simply be thought of as an organized form of skepticism. This does not mean that the scientific skeptic is necessarily a scientist who conducts live experiments (though this may be the case), but that the skeptic generally accepts claims that are in his/her view likely to be true based on testable hypotheses and critical thinking.

Skeptics can be convinced by the facts, but not the deniers and delayers. Skeptics (and real scientists) do not continue repeating arguments that have been discredited. Deniers and delayers do.

What are these long debunked arguments and talking points that deniers keep pushing? You can find a constantly updated list - with debunking - at the excellent website Skeptical Science. Many science blogs, including CP and RealClimate, take them on regularly as a quick search would reveal.

As an aside, while I have temporarily relaxed my comments policy this weekend, CP in general does not allow people to post long-debunked denier talking points as I have said many times. Why? Either I have to waste time debunking them for the umpteenth time (and deniers are never satisfied with a couple of sentences and a link) - thus allowing deniers to achieve one of their goals which is to waste everyone else's time - or I ignore it, in which case a first-time visitor stumbling over a post might think that the disinformation had some validity because it wasn't debunked. That is a no-win situation that even Capt. Kirk or Mr. Spock in the latest Star Trek movie - which, by the way, is quite terrific (saw it last night finally) - would have trouble dealing with.

As I explained in my post, "Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS)," you can generally tell a denier or delayer by repeated use of the following phrases, which are connected to the long-debunked talking points:

Individually, some of these words and phrases are quite useful and indeed are commonly used by both scientists and non-scientists who are not anti-science. But when used by people claiming to be "skeptics" - especially in combination with the name "Al Gore" - you know you have a denier on your hands.

My personal experience is that no amount of scientific evidence can convince the well-known "skeptics." I have debated Lomborg and he is very well versed in the science - he just chooses not to believe most of it. Indeed, if the overwhelming evidence of the last five years - if the analyses and warnings from a growing number of uncharacteristically blunt scientists - doesn't convince someone of the dire nature of the situation, then they simply aren't open to scientific reasoning, the basis of true skepticism.

The media - and everyone else - should stop using the term. It makes a mockery of the English language, it is an insult to real scientific skeptics, and it feeds the overall disinformation effort that makes humanity's self-destruction more likely.

The deniers and delayers, as CP uses the terms, are those who aggressively embrace one or both parts of a two-fold strategy. First, they deny the strong and growing scientific understanding that the climate change we are witnessing is primarily human-caused, that the human component of the climate forcing will increasingly dominate the climate system, and that we face multiple catastrophic impacts if we don't reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends sharply and soon. Second, they work to delay this country from taking any serious action beyond perhaps investing in new technology (although even that is mostly lip service since the overwhelming majority of deniers and delayers are conservatives and libertarians who oppose all serious efforts to accelerate the development and deployment of low carbon technologies).

Such is the road to ruin. Those who advance such a view, including Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat, deserve a strong label. No doubt many delayers (and even a few deniers) are sincere in their beliefs, but many are not. Sincere or insincere, they spread misinformation or disinformation that threatens the well-being of the next fifty generations of Americans, indeed of all humans. Deniers like Watts are also not content merely to dispute the work of climate scientists--they are actively engaged in smearing the reputation of those scientists. Such folks deserve the very strongest of labels.

That said, the term "delayer" is more accurate, I think, since so many deniers now realize how untenable their position is. As result many don't fully deny that the climate is changing and that humans are contributing, they just say the whole thing is very overblown and who knows what the perfect climate is and the actual climate sensitivity is an order of magnitude smaller than all the science (including the paleoclimate science) says, so let's just wait and see ... blah, blah, blah. So I will still try to use the term delayer here, mostly for the misled.

But "delayer" never caught on, or any of the other narrower terms, like "disinformer," that I sometimes use at CP for the people who make it their full-time job to spread disinformation. So if for no reason than for clarity's sake - as well as for the sake of people doing web searches - we seem to be stuck with denier for general usage.

I understand that some of the deniers take offense at the apparent implication that they are like Holocaust deniers. I am not trying to make that connection - since climate science deniers are nothing like Holocaust deniers. Holocaust deniers are denying an established fact from the past. If the media or politicians or the public took them at all seriously, I suppose it might increase the chances of a future Holocaust. But, in fact, they are very marginalized, and are inevitably attacked and criticized widely whenever they try to spread their disinformation, so they have no significant impact on society.

The climate science deniers, however, are very different and far more worrisome. They are not marginalized, but rather very well-funded and treated quite seriously by the status quo media. They are trying to persuade people not to take action on a problem that has not yet become catastrophic, but which will certainly do so if we listen to them and delay acting much longer.

THIS IS ABOUT DENIAL

And fundamentally this is about denial - denial of climate science. The clearest evidence is that a great many climate science deniers accept the science of evolution, such as Charles Krauthammer - who wrote in ""Phony Theory, False Conflict," that "Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge - in this case, evolution - they are to be filled by God." And yet he is a hard-core climate science denier (see, for instance, Krauthammer's strange denier talk points, Part 1: Newton's laws were "overthrown"). Similarly, another hard core climate science denier, George Will, also believes in evolution - he actually called it "a fact."

But that raises the obvious question. Why do so many apparently intelligent conservatives and libertarians - ones who accept the science of evolution, ones who take medicines prescribed by doctors based on the scientific method, ones who rely on science and technology every day, indeed, every minute - why do they deny climate science?

My book discusses this general question at length, and offers the answer (see here):

The answer is that ideology trumps rationality. Most conservatives cannot abide the solution to global warming-strong government regulations and a government-led effort to accelerate clean energy technologies into the market. According to the late Jude Wanniski, Elizabeth Kolbert's New Yorker articles [on global warming], did nothing more "than write a long editorial on behalf of government intervention to stamp out carbon dioxide." His villain is not global warming, but is the threat to Americans from government itself.

George Will's review of Michael Crichton's State of Fear says: "Crichton's subject is today's fear that global warming will cause catastrophic climate change, a belief now so conventional that it seems to require no supporting data.... Various factions have interests-monetary, political, even emotional-in cultivating fears. The fears invariably seem to require more government subservience to environmentalists and more government supervision of our lives."

As the NYT's Andy Revkin explained about the recent skeptic denier conference in New York,

"The one thing all the attendees seem to share is a deep dislike for mandatory restrictions on greenhouse gases."

What unites these people is their desire to delay or stop action to cut GHGs, not any one particular view on the climate.

It is nearly impossible to win an argument with a conservative or libertarian who hates government-led action. Yes, you can try to point out all the great things the government has done (the Internet, anyone?) and try to point out that they invariably support government-led action for military security, and, of course, government subsidies and regulations to promote energy security, at least as it applies to oil industry and nuclear energy pork.

I have a different argument - if you hate government intrusion into people's lives, you'd better stop catastrophic global warming, because nothing drives a country more towards activist government than scarcity and depravation. The catastrophic impacts the country faces on our current emissions path by 2100 - 10 to 15° F warming over much of the inland U.S., 4 to 6 feet of sea level rise, and 1 to 2 inches a year after that, a Dust Bowl over much of the area from Kansas and Oklahoma to California, and hot, acidic ocean deadzones - will lead to far more government intervention in the lives of Americans than preventing those catastrophes ever would.

But most conservatives and libertarians can't hear that argument. Again, they can't stand the cure - a government led effort to sharply sharply increase the use of clean energy and sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions - so they deny the diagnosis.

And so, for better or worse, the word "deniers" stays with us. As I've said, I will try to reserve that term for the professional disinformers and their work. And I'll try to remember to use the term delayers for those who have been misled.

THE FIVE STAGES IN REVERSE

And now let me end with what I promised - the five stages of grief in reverse.

Climate science activists begin with accepting the science. What else can one do? Science is the reason so many of us survived childbirth and childhood, science has fed the world, science is the reason computers and the blogosphere exist at all. And yes, science gave us our fossil-fueled wealth. I'm a scientist by training, but I just don't see anyone can pick and choose what science you're going to believe and what not. The scientific method may not be always be perfect in single studies - since it is used by imperfect humans - but it is the best thing we have for objectively determining what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen. It is testable and self-correcting, unlike all other approaches.

Once CSAs accept the science, many quite naturally get depressed - see "Dealing with climate trauma and global warming burnout." The situation is beyond dire, and we aren't doing bloody much about it, in large part because of the successful efforts of the deniers and delayers. Climate science offers a very grim prognosis if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path.

After depression, comes a serious effort at bargaining: CSAs try to figure out what they can do to stop the catastrophe. Taking actions and making bargains at a personal level and a political level - depending on their level of activism.

Then comes anger. Once you've been at this for a while, you get very very frustrated by how little is happening - by the status quo media, the many anti-science politicians, and especially the deniers, the professional disinformers.

Finally, you end up in a kind of denial. It just becomes impossible to believe that the human race is going to be so stupid. Indeed, my rational side finds it hard to believe that we're going to avoid catastrophic global warming, as any regular CP reader knows. But my heart, in denial, is certain that we will - see "How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution (updated)." The great New Yorker write Elizabeth Kolbert perhaps best summed up this form of denial. Her three-part series, "The Climate of Man," which became the terrific book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, famously ends:

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.

It is impossible to believe. I myself can't believe it.

Related Links:

Lomborg v. Monbiot: liveblogging the Munk debate on climate change

On ‘climategate’

Climate deniers, hold your fire!

The Climate Post is a weekly roundup of climate news, produced by the The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.

-----

The U.S. Congress fast-tracks climate legislation, international negotiators hash through the first “negotiating text” for year-end global talks in Germany, and big businesses start counting their carbon. The pile of climate stories this week climbed faster than predicted New England sea levels.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act -- aka Waxman-Markey, aka ACES, aka H.R. 2454 -- may reach the House floor by the July 4th recess, if Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s new legislative push proceeds as she intends. She has charged the eight committees evaluating the legislation to complete their work by June 19, which may be a particular challenge for Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who have the most work to do on it. Chairman Peterson has said the bill deserves a close look to make sure the farm community is treated equitably.

Events on the Hill will shape the world’s reactions to White House policy at the COP15 climate change conference in December. In preparation, negotiators this week and next descend on Bonn, Germany, where nations have their first opportunity to react to the United Nations’ negotiating text, released last month. Diplomacy efforts continue to step up, in Bonn and elsewhere, with U.S. special envoy on climate change Todd Stern visiting Beijing next week.

“How green is Obama, really?” asks Silicon India, in the headline to this short Indo-Asian News Service piece. It’s a sign of the times that international wire services are covering the U.S. Congress. But their readers will miss the magnitude of Congress’ task by offering as straight reporting judgments such as this: “[A] reluctant U.S. Congress is resisting even moderate cap-and-trade goals.” From inside-the-beltway, objectively speaking, things are moving quite rapidly for such a complex endeavor, however its goals are characterized.

With the climate bill out of its key committee, several newspapers stepped back recently and offered short explainers on a “cap-and-trade” climate system (the Wall Street Journal, McClatchy newspapers, the Financial Times). The Washington Post offered a fine effort that contains an interesting example of how space limitations in the news-article format can further muddle an already complex subject. Take this passage, about the potential per capita costs of the climate bill:

The EPA thinks it will fall between $98 and $140 per year, causing barely a stutter in the U.S. economy as a whole.

The Union of Concerned Scientists thinks the system will actually make money for families, since more efficient technologies will save on energy costs. But the conservative Heritage Foundation thinks it will cost big: $4,300 per family in a few decades.

This quick triptych suggests that three organizations looked at the same legislation in the same way and deduced a range of outcomes when in fact they were responding to varied legislative scenarios. The risk in presenting the material this way is that they have actually conducted different studies, with different initial assumptions, and that juxtaposing them so quickly adds distortion to simplicity. A broad Economist narrative of the U.S. climate debate cites only a Congressional Budget Office estimate, and glibly concludes, “If politicians pretend they can save the planet at no cost, they risk a backlash when people realize they were fibbing.”

Reduced carbonation?: Finding your carbon and reducing it is becoming the next big quest for big business. The Economist article, “A Green Revolution,” appears in a large section about rebuilding American business, a topic that won’t go away any time soon. The U.N. observes that in 2008, for the first time ever, clean tech drew more investment than fossil-fuel power generation globally. Nearly 6 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from 417 large companies -- a percentage that many firms are trying to reduce their contributions to, BusinessWeek reports in a special package about carbon accounting. Coca-Cola officials assumed the company’s biggest contributions came from its truck fleet. But that’s before they discovered greenhouse-gas-rich refrigerants and electricity-hungry vending machines are responsible for five times more than its transport: 15 million metric tons of CO2 a year. “If we had never put pencil to paper and done the calculations, we might not have understood it ourselves -- or believed it,” one official said.

The New York Times, Reuters, and the Los Angeles Times also mark the launch of Hara, a new software start-up that helps companies, including Coca-Cola, track and reduce their emissions. Backed by the leading venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins (Al Gore sits on its board), Hara is the newest of several young companies offering large firms a step up from the spreadsheets that have marked many carbon-reduction efforts to date.

Did everyone get the memo? A recent Gartner survey of 575 companies found that 13.6 percent of the firms didn’t know whether they had carbon management systems in place.

Drops to drink?: Two days before President Barack Obama delivered his major address about Middle East peace in Egypt, a Canadian non-profit issued a report highlighting concerns that climate change could exacerbate security threats in the embattled region. Already, AFP reports, drought forced 160 Syrian villages to relocate to cities in 2007-8. “Climate change could hold serious implications for regional security,” the report’s authors write.

The world’s rivers may already bear the marks of climate change, according to a new study in Environmental Science and Technology. Scientists assembled streamflow data, taken as far downstream as possible, from 925 rivers on all continents except Antarctica. The authors compared the data to a climate model and concluded that direct human effects on rivers (ie, drawing water from them) is small when compared with climate change from 1948-2004. Water levels dropped anywhere from 3 to 14 percent in some major rivers flowing into the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The Mississippi and some other rivers saw increased flow, as the result of changing rain and snow patterns. Empirical studies such as this can add gravity to even unrelated calls of concern. Namibian Minister of Environment and Tourism Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah told a group in New York last month that warming means increased drought, desertification, and land degradation in her country.

Many unanswered questions ... except that one: The Calgary Herald offers the most outdated story of the week, a run through the ideas of a visiting Israeli chemist. The story itself is of less concern (time being what it is) than the lede, which reads:

As the world continues to grapple with the issue of climate change, one question remains unanswered: Is global warming the result of human behaviour or is it part of a heating and cooling cycle that has gone on for millennia?

And it’s the absence of an answer to this question that is going to continue to bedevil industry and government alike for the foreseeable future.

In fact, global warming is largely the result of human behavior. IPCC scientists have said that there are nine chances out of 10 that greenhouse gases have caused global warming observed in the past 50 years. And they elaborated on these causes in a full chapter (PDF here) of its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. But what these studies translate to for practical purposes is, yes, fossil-fuel powered industry and deforestation are the significant causes of global warming. “Industry and government alike” are “bedeviled by questions for the foreseeable future,” but these bedeviling questions instead concern, for example, the rate of ice melt in Greenland, how to transform the energy system, predicted drought in the American Southwest, and, as the article does indicate, if carbon capture and storage will work on a global scale. It’s just one sign of the complexity of climate change that the simplest question -- What’s going on?! -- still eludes many well-meaning people who are simply trying to explain it.

Related Links:

Will the Washington Post ever fact check a George Will column?

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

On ‘climategate’

Tonight at 9 pm on ABC, “Bob Woodruff explores what might be the worst case scenario for civilization.”

Hurray for the mainstream media exploring the worst-case scenario aka Hell and High Water! I am very interested in your thoughts on this show — before and after. One of the most commented on posts of this year was “How likely is it that Global Warming will destroy human civilization within the next century?”

You can see video excerpts and viewer submissions on what looks to be an excellent website:

Experts say over the next hundred years the “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion and climate change could converge with catastrophic results….

“If we continue on the business as usual trajectory, there will be a tipping point that we cannot avert,” says John P. Holdren, science advisor to President Obama. “We will indeed drive the car over the cliff“….

“A few hundred years down the line, they’ll look back and say the dark ages began with the twenty-first century,” says E. O. Wilson, an award-winning evolutionary biologist and professor at Harvard University.

Here’s more on the two scenarios the show lays out for humanity’s future:

Imagine a world in which cities are abandoned and our population has dropped by 90 percent. A world in which we have wreaked havoc on our delicate ecosystems and nature has begun to reclaim Earth. Once-bustling cities have fallen silent except for the rustle of the wind through the grass and trees that have cracked through the collapsing pavement. Humans have not walked these urban streets for years.

And some people say I’m an alarmist!

Does it seem like the stuff of science fiction? According to the world’s top scientists, it could very well be the legacy we leave our children and grandchildren. They say we are at a turning point, that the choices we make today will determine if the human race, as we know it, will survive.

Imagine our future as two doors. Door No. 1 is our current path, or as the scientists put it, business as usual. If we continue on this trajectory, experts say, over the next 100 years the “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion and climate change will converge with catastrophic results. In this scenario the combination of war, famine and disease has the potential to “decimate” the world in less than a hundred years.

Note to ABC: “Decimate” technically means kill every 10th person, but that has changed with popular usage. That said, the ABC scenario is much harsher than mine. Climate change killing every 10th person by 2100 — one billion people — would be a staggering outcome. I personally cannot even conceive of what losing 90% would mean.

“Earth 2100″ takes viewers through door No.1, with the help of a fictional character, Lucy. Born in the year 2009, Lucy guides us through the next century as it may well unfold, if we don’t take drastic measures. With the assistance of some of the world’s foremost scientific experts, she gives us a detailed decade-by-decade countdown to the collapse of society.

But it does not have to be. “Earth 2100″ will conclude by traveling through door No. 2. The clock resets to 2009, and using the same chronology and the same scientists, we leave the viewer with the inspiring story of an alternate future. The experts tell us what actions we must take to survive and describe the world we can create. In this version, Earth in 2100 will be one we would be proud to imagine.

It does not have to be!

UPDATE: This was certainly the best done worst-case scenario mainstream media has ever put in front of the American public. I have a bunch of little quibbles — no one’s going to be abandoning the American suburbs just because gasoline hits $5.50 a gallon, as the show depicts — see “Why I don’t agree with James Kunstler about peak oil and the “end of suburbia.“ Heck, Great Britain has had gasoline costs above seven dollars a gallon for many years and the life goes on. But ABC deserves a lot of kudos for laying out so many realistic threats that humanity faces on the business as usual path.

Related Links:

On ‘climategate’

A scientific hack job that won’t cripple climate talks

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

The New York Times has a great story about Chevron hiring a former CNN reporter to produce a "news" report to counter a 60 Minutes segment on the oil company's contamination of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador.

On May 3, 60 Minutes ran a story on the $27 billion lawsuit against Chevron for environmental damage, featuring footage of the rainforest and interviews with the Ecuadorean judge handling the case and a Chevron manager. Chevron hired Gene Randall, a former CNN correspondent, to tell its own version of the story, featuring the Chevron manager and five professors who are consultants to the oil company, but no plaintiffs involved in the case.

The two videos are below. First, the 60 Minutes segment, and second, the Chevron video, where you can see the "journalistic integrity" of Chevron and Randall in all its glory:

Related Links:

Annie Leonard misses the mark in her new video, “The Story of Cap-and-Trade”

Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations

On ‘climategate’

There's been lots of bashing of Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) here on Grist lately -- see Kate here, Brad here -- and with good reason. The guy has a good chance of being the next Republican House leader and he is, to put it bluntly, dumb as a box of hair. Guy like this, it's hard to know if he's lying, exactly, because you can never really tell whether he understands the situation well enough to distinguish lies from truth. But he certainly says lots of incorrect things.

Anyway, though, this post isn't mainly about Pence. It's about Republicans and climate change and how both the media and the Dems should be approaching the subject.

Pence put in an absolutely astonishing appearance on Hardball this weekend:

Before I say anything about this, I also want to dredge up this interview with House Minority Leader John Boehner from a couple weeks ago. Watch:

Now, there's been lots of discussion and ridicule of both these clips, but most of it has focused on the scientific illiteracy. And yes, it's amazing that after all this time, after all these hearings, neither of these Republican leaders seem to have the faintest understanding of what the problem is even supposed to be. A "carcinogen"? WTF?

But to me the more significant aspect is that Stephanopoulos and Matthews have finally done something that, astonishingly, virtually no mainstream journalists have, which is press Republicans on what their solution to climate change is.

The public largely understands that this is a problem; they largely accept the science. They get nervous when specific solutions are discussed, which is why Republicans want to spend all their time talking about the Dems' "national energy tax." But they do believe that this is a problem that needs to be addressed.

And on that terrain, Republicans are completely a mess -- a familiar mess, trapped between their increasingly loopy base and the American mainstream. Their base is full of flat-earthers that don't believe the scientific consensus. Limbaugh, Beck, and the rest will be outraged if a Republican leader acknowledges that it's a real problem. On the other hand, the public and the establishment accept that it's a problem and are in the midst of debating solutions. So Republicans have to offer something. That's where the coal- and nuke-heavy "all of the above" nonsense comes in.

But the position is unsustainable. It crumbles with just a little pressure, as you can see from the above videos. Republican leaders want to say, simultaneously, that climate change isn't caused by CO2 and that the public should trust Republicans to reduce emissions. It's incoherent and grossly dishonest.

It's a serious indictment of the media that more journalists haven't pushed on this. And I don't know why Dems aren't pushing it. The lever is effective and easily available, and it moves debate onto far more favorable territory.

All they have to do when faced with Republican opposition is ask: what's your solution? The only response available to Republicans is to deny the science and look like troglodytes or accept it and suffer at the hands of their base.

In short, Republicans have no answer. They can't solve a problem they don't believe exists.

Related Links:

Annie Leonard misses the mark in her new video, “The Story of Cap-and-Trade”

Lomborg v. Monbiot: liveblogging the Munk debate on climate change

On ‘climategate’

Andrew Revkin

New York Times reporter Andy Revkin has a blockbuster story showing that the Global Climate Coalition, the main industry group that spent much of the 1990s seeking to sow doubt in journalists' and politicians' minds about the reality of climate change, knew all along that it was real and dangerous:

The amazing thing about this story is not that industry deceived journalists about the threat of climate change, but that journalists are still buying industry deceptions to this day - just different ones.

Having finally lost the battle about the reality of climate change, these same industries and their backers in Congress have come up with a different deception: that bold action on climate change would somehow negatively affect the economy.

In fact, there's overwhelming evidence showing that climate change is causing hundreds of billions of dollars in drag on the U.S. and world economies as a result of drought, flood, sea level rise (Hurricane Katrina alone caused more than $100 billion in damage), and greater spending on hot-weather accoutrements like air conditioning. NRDC estimates the damage from just four impacts at $2,000 per family every single year.  And that number doesn't even consider, for example, the $167 billion annual health care costs attributable to regular old cancer-and-asthma inducing coal fired power plants.

Nevertheless, many journalists, including even many at The New York Times (here and here (h/t Joseph Romm) for instance) repeat as received truth industry lobbyists' latest myth that continuing to spew pollution is somehow good for the economy.

I'm sure the oil and coal industries have a memo somewhere that will come out in 15 years showing that, in fact, their economists knew the environmentalists were right all along: a clean energy economy will in fact boost GDP, create millions of new clean energy jobs, and save consumers money on their electricity bills.

But until that memo comes out, they're going to continue peddling totally concocted junk economics about dirty energy to reporters  - and impede the creation of the clean energy economy.

It's time for journalists to learn from experience that no matter what your instincts or how slick and knowing the industry flacks seem, they cannot be trusted. They can't be trusted when they say tobacco is safe, they can't be trusted when they deny the need for seat belts, they can't be trusted when they deny the dangers of climate change, and they most certainly can't be trusted when it comes to the new green economy. 

Related Links:

Annie Leonard misses the mark in her new video, “The Story of Cap-and-Trade”

Lomborg v. Monbiot: liveblogging the Munk debate on climate change

Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

It's Earth Week, so the MSM is trotting out its obligatory parade of environmental coverage. The New York Times Magazine's green issue is better than most. Check it out:

Happy reading.

Related Links:

On ‘climategate’

Is Freeman Dyson really “brave”?

WSJ reporter knocks own editorial page for Chamber defense

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

That is attributed to Dante, but applies best to the Washington establishment, especially one David Broder.

Part 1 looked at why the establishment media’s coverage of global warming is so fatally useless.  Newsweek’s Evan Thomas unintentionally provided the answer — the shocking, unstated truth about the media elite: They have “a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are.”

But Evan Thomas is a B-list establishment journalist compared to the dean of the DC press corp — David Broder.  In two recent columns, Broder has combined a scientifically uninformed position on climate with remarkably flawed political designed to support his position.  Let’s start with the absurdities in his most recent piece:  “Why the Center Still Holds“:

Once political independents, who like the idea of clean air, grasped that cap-and-trade would mean a big tax increase for them, Republican opposition was reinforced and Democratic support weakened to the point that the Obama plan may already be doomed this year.

Huh?  Cap-and-trade doesn’t mean a big tax increase (see “MIT Professor tells GOP to stop ‘misrepresenting’ his work and inflating the cost to families of cap-and-trade by a factor of 10“).   That would be a right wing talking point that they beat to death over and over again to sucker … well, it’s obvious who they are trying to sucker.  So much for Border being a “centrist” or an independent.

I guess it always bears repeating over and over again that the combination of aggressive investment in energy efficiency and the President’s plan to return most of the auction revenues to the public means the majority of the public is held harmless — and indeed can actually lower their combined energy and tax bill if they adopt energy efficiency with the help of their utility or the federal government’s low-income weatherization program (see “Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar“).

By focusing only on the cost of action, and ignoring entirely the cost of inaction, Broder is yet another poster child for the searing critique award-winning journalist Eric Pooley did for Harvard (see “The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress”).

Second, who the heck didn’t “grasp” a long time ago that cap-and-trade would raise the price of dirty energy?  And when did any Republicans ever support action — you can go back several years to McCain-Lieberman and find very little support. Republican opposition couldn’t possibly be “bolstered” given that they have been dead set against any action whatsoever for years (see “Anti-science conservatives must be stopped“).

I grant that Democrats have done a lousy job explaining that a cap-and-trade never belonged in the budget in the first place.  Again, climate legislation was never going to be easy, but in any case nothing that has happened recently suggests Democratic support is any weaker — or stronger — than it was two years ago.

And, of course, it doesn’t really bother me — and I don’t think it should bother most climate science advocates — if we don’t pass a bill this year since Obama can get a better climate bill in 2010.  And Obama certainly remains as committed as ever to a bill, something Broder conveniently omits (see Obama says his energy plan and cap-and-trade “will be authorized” even if it’s not in the budget “and I will sign it” — Washington Post confused).

The really sad thing about Broder is that in two columns on the subject, he never bothers even mentioning a single reason why action on energy and climate is needed.  In the “End of the Honeymoon,” he writes:

I think the shift began when Obama moved beyond the stimulus bill to his speech to the joint session of Congress and his budget message. For the first time, the full extent of his ambitions for 2009 became clear — not just stopping and reversing the steep slide in the economy but also launching highly controversial efforts in health care, energy and education.

Each of those issues has a history in Washington — a history marked by congressional gridlock and legislative frustration.

In Broder’s world of uninformed centrism, if an issue has a history of gridlock and legislative frustration, then it is “highly controversial” and any president who tries to address these absolutely crucial issues is reaching too far.

Again, note that he never bothers to engage the substance of the issue.  The media establishment doesn’t care about substance.  It only cares about the status quo.  To repeat what Thomas wrote:

By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking. The in crowd of any age can be deceived by self-confidence….

That would be David Broder.

Two final points.  Broder drags out seriously flawed political analysis to attack Obama as polarizing:

As for the voters, the Pew Research Center reported this month on a survey that showed the partisan gap in Obama’s job approval scores is the widest in contemporary history. He rated a thumbs-up from 88 percent of the Democrats and only 27 percent of the Republicans in the poll — a gap of 61 points.

At a comparable point in their first terms, the gaps for George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were only 51 and 45 points, respectively.

Uhh, even the Washington Post’s own political reporter, Dan Balz, explained a key reason for that change in statistics:

Another factor is that, in a shrinking Republican Party, conservatives hold more sway — and they are most likely to disapprove of a Democratic president’s performance. Exit polls show that 64 percent of Republicans who voted in November called themselves conservatives. That compares with 54 percent in 2000 and 49 percent in 1992.

So the main reason Obama appears to be more polarizing in terms of a 10-point bigger gap in relative favorability among Democrats vs. Republicans (compared to Bush) is that Republicans have gotten 10-points more conservative.

But that analysis would get in the way of Broder’s attack on Obama as someone who is polarizing because he attacks the status quo because he wants to avoid catastrophic global warming and deal with our unsustainable use of oil.

Or how about this from Broder’s first piece:

Congress has taken note of the way Obama backed down from his anti-earmark stance, a clear signal that he is leery of any showdown with the lawmakers. Despite his popularity, Obama is not an intimidating figure, and so he can expect to be tested time and again.

So let me see.  First, Broder attacks Obama for overreaching by trying to address “highly controversial” issues like energy, even though that is precisely what a president should use his popularity for.  Then Broder attacks Obama for not using his popularity for a “showdown” with lawmakers on the trivial earmark issue, which comprises about 2% of the budget.

Further note to Broder:  Even if Obama cut out all of the earmarks, it wouldn’t save a penny of taxpayer money since the earmarks just cordon off parts of the budget — Congress would still keep the spending.

But the bottom line is clear.  Broder thinks Obama should have burned up his popularity on a trivial process issue (earmarks), but that he should stay far away from the nation’s substantive problems like health care or energy, since that is only what polarizing politicians pursue.

The status quo approach of the David Broders of the the Washington establishment are the road to Hell and High Water.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Related Links:

Lomborg v. Monbiot: liveblogging the Munk debate on climate change

On ‘climategate’

What to make of the new climate poll

Despite its economic woes, The Los Angeles Times still employs some of the best environmental reporters in the business, including a personal favorite, Julie Cart, who always brings compassion (and great quotes) to her work. Her story about how climate change is devastating Australia ran this week on the front page and it's absolutely first rate.

"What Will Global Warming Look Like? Scientists Point to Australia" is the headline in the online edition, but although the story references the science, it hits home with quotes from ordinary folk -- farmers, suburbanites, shocked patriarchs -- talking about non-climactic matters such as depression, despair, and suicide. One stout farmer named Frank Eddy told her:

"Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It's devastation," he said, shaking his head. "I've got a neighbor in terrible trouble. Found him in the paddock, sitting in his [truck], crying his eyes out. Grown men -- big, strong grown men. We're holding on by the skin of our teeth. It's desperate times."

A result of climate change?

"You'd have to have your head in the bloody sand to think otherwise," Eddy said.

Without being heavy-handed about it, the story also brings up an irony about global warming still unknown to most Americans, and quite beyond the mental capacity of deniers. As Kevin Trenberth, a leading scientist for the National Center for Atmospheric Research puts it: "The wets will get wetter, and the dries will get drier." The story also mentions that Australia, a big coal user and exporter, and the highest per capita producer of greenhouse gases in the world, happens to be one of the first industrialized nations to be devastated by climate change.

But the U.S. has no right to be complacent. Although it has not reduced its coal consumption or exports, Australia is making changes ... as Keith Schneider pointed out recently for Yale's Environment 360 site.

Concerned that steadily rising temperatures in south Australia and the recent drought signal a permanent climate shift, a majority of the country’s states have taken the unprecedented step of agreeing to let the central government play the dominant role in managing local water resources. Growing fears of a lasting change in climate patterns has helped generate support for major public works projects to deal with water scarcity. Australia’s 2007 national election, which saw the Progressive Party come to power, was the first national election in the country’s history in which a scientific issue — climate change — played a decisive role.

“It’s testing our people,” said John Williams, the former chief of Land and Water for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the country’s premier scientific agency. “These new conditions are forcing people to move out of industries. There are many people making decisions to change radically the nature of their business. There are some industries — rice growing, cotton production — that are just failing and falling away.”

The American Southwest has yet to face these same climatic facts.

In California, for example, no substantial changes have been made in state-wide water distribution in recent years. An excellent report at the end of 2008 put out by a blue ribbon task force commissioned by the Governor has been ignored, even though nearly everyone agrees the system is in crisis, and even though the state is facing a third year of drought.

Related Links:

On ‘climategate’

Obama takes on the anti-scientific delayers

Disappearing slave history

There's an old saying my granddad was fond of. "Dave," he'd say, rocking his chair, puffing his pipe, squinting into the distance, "don't be such an a**hole."

Wise words. On reflection, my post about Tom Friedman's column ended up unnecessarily heated and confrontational, even insulting. I stand by my take on the column, but Friedman is a sharp guy who's done yeoman's work legitimizing green issues (his book was great). He's pursuing goals we share. If he's doing so in a way that I find politically counterproductive in this case, he deserves to be addressed in a spirit of fraternity, not ... blogginess. (Not for the first time I rue the fact that 95 percent of my published work consists of hastily written first drafts.)

It's worth the time to explain, to Friedman and the wider world, why I and many others are so frustrated right now. Interestingly, reaction to my post was sharply split. From insiders -- Congressional aides, legislative liaisons, folks inside the process -- the reaction was "right on!" From readers and semi-engaged outside observers, the reaction was a bemused, "why so angry? He seems sensible to me." (One exception: Kevin Drum, who gets it.)

What explains this dissonance? Why are people immersed in this stuff so frustrated, to the point that a simple op-ed column makes them want to chew their own faces off? Why so angry?

The moment

To understand the anger it helps to imagine, for a moment, that you are Rep. Ed Markey.

During the Clinton administration your green ambitions were thwarted by a Republican Congress. Then came six long years of ignorance and inaction under unified Republican rule, even as the science of climate change grew ever more dire and urgent. Finally, in 2006, your party regained Congress. Energy and climate were top priorities of your new Speaker, and she put you in charge of a special committee designed to publicize expert testimony, shift public opinion, shift business and elite opinion, and educate other members. All the learning, research, and planning greens had done underground for over a decade surfaced, and an honest-to-god process of moving toward legislation began. At last!

Then in 2008, history happened. A transformational candidate was elected president. Your majority increased in Congress. After a bruising battle, fellow green and top-notch legislator Henry Waxman was put in charge of the Energy & Commerce Committee, and you were placed atop the subcommittee on energy. Together, the two of you felt out the new landscape, talked with various lawmakers and members of the business community about what they'd need in exchange for their support, talked with minority groups and social justice groups and green groups and talked and talked and talked. A delicate dance, on a complex problem, with multiple competing interest groups, inched slowly forward.

Finally, after years of stifling inaction, you construct what you think is the strongest possible bill that can garner enough support to pass. Along with your Congressional leadership, you realize that this is the moment: a popular president in his first year, weakened opposition, and unprecedented public awareness.

It could all go away. If the economy worsens, Dems could get booted out in the mid-terms. Obama could lose in 2012. Energy and climate could fade from public consciousness as short-term suffering increases. Climate science makes clear that the time for efficacious action is growing perilously short. A looming international meeting in Copenhagen represents what may be the last real chance to shift the global trajectory.

This is the moment. You may not have a moment like it again any time soon. So you go big, piling all your energy/climate ambitions in to One Big Bill. It's got historic changes in energy, energy efficiency, and the grid, not to mention the carbon cap and trade system that greens have been discussing for decades. You realize the cap-and-trade stuff is wonky and nobody outside DC understands or much cares about it, so you lead with the energy/jobs/economy stuff, which polls through the roof.

Finally. It's here. The real fight begins! Time for everyone to call their armies and start marching! This is what everyone's been waiting for! Right?

The Republicans

Nobody told Republicans that history happened. Despite all the talk about bipartisanship and cooperation from Obama, Congressional Republicans quickly made it clear that there would be no cooperation. No Republican votes for the White House agenda. Not even from Republicans in districts and states that Obama won by a hefty margin. It was going to be pure, uncut, implacable opposition. Even the hesitant steps some Republicans had taken toward sanity on climate (including John McCain) were erased, and House Republicans got back in the game of disputing the very existence of climate change. Republicans in both houses immediately attacked any effort to address climate as an economy-destroying tax.

The Democrats

Nobody told "moderate" Senate Democrats that history had happened. They immediately set themselves up as gatekeepers of Obama's agenda, trimming billions (and millions of jobs) out of the stimulus bill. They voted to foreclose the option of passing the energy/climate bill as part of budget reconciliation (which requires only a 51-vote majority, not the 60 required to overcome a Republican filibuster). They criticized the decision to package energy and climate together, jealous of their jurisdictional prerogatives. They talked incessantly about the dangers of reducing carbon emissions to taxpayers in their states, and said nothing about tax rebates, energy efficiency, or the danger of climate change.

Obama's team

Obama's great messaging on green stuff during the campaign went out the window as his administration turned its focus to the banking crisis. Energy Secretary Steven Chu was out telling reporters that fundamental technological breakthroughs would be required before climate could be solved, and that the administration was leery to push a carbon cap during a recession (which implicitly concedes that it's a blow to the economy, not the economic renewal Obama discussed on the trail). At the first hint of pushback from big business, Obama and science adviser John Holdren backed off on the administration's pledge to auction 100 percent of the pollution permits under a cap, a clear social and economic justice concession. Holdren talked about how the administration was taking the hail-mary pass of geoengineering seriously. Obama and his team tripped over themselves to talk about how hard climate policy is and how willing to compromise they are.

The public

Obama and the Dems ran on a crystal clear platform of three priorities: energy, health care, and Iraq. Energy was, as Obama repeated several times, the first priority. Green is all the hype everywhere. So you might think that the public would be engaged in this push.

But polls find public interest as low as ever, and opinion about climate and energy policy as inchoate and incoherent as ever. There are no rallies. There are no emails and letters and phone calls streaming into Congressional offices. There is no real social movement behind energy/climate action. There's nothing to push a recalcitrant member of Congress in the right direction.

The media and opinion leaders

This brings us, finally, to the group of people that has some ability to rally public action, to pressure Congress, to reinforce positive messages, and to educate a body politic that remains abysmally ignorant about both the problem and the range of possible solutions.

But even here, there's no support. Congressional Dems put forward a bill that is fronted by historic, job-creating, national security-enhancing action on energy, efficiency, and the national grid. What does the media do? Even the progressive media? Cover it as a "cap-and-trade bill." If you hadn't read the bill itself, you'd have trouble telling from the media coverage that there were other provisions in it.

Do green journalists and bloggers and activists focus on the economy-reviving aspects of the bill? No. Almost more than the mainstream media, they obsess over the wonkiest, least popular aspect: carbon pricing. Even there, it is to bash cap-and-trade -- a consensus policy position a decade in the making -- in favor of a carbon tax. A huge new tax! This new progressive love of the tax code is bolstered by a bizarre mythology wherein a tax is simpler, and more popular, and more authentic, and downright heroic. Progressives bash Congressional Dems as greedy sell-outs and cap-and-trade as some kind of Wall Street-driven monstrosity. They focus attention on other bills that have zero chance of passing. They advocate scrapping a carefully wrought compromise built over four years by some of Congress's savviest operators and replacing it with high taxes, on the premise that such a radical, disruptive strategy is better politics. Because everyone in America thinks like affluent, white, hyper-educated internet wonks, right?

In other words, when a serious climate bill is finally in play, its worst enemy turns out to be the left.

After decades of inaction, something is finally underway and nobody is fighting for it. Republicans are undermining it. Democrats are undermining it. Greens are undermining it. The public doesn't give a damn. Imagine you are Markey. Imagine how you're feeling.

Friedman

This, then, is the backdrop from which Friedman's column emerged. The only sensibly green opinion leader with the reach and influence to clear up some of these confusions, focus some of this diffuse energy, pull the message back to stronger ground ... does the exact, diametrical opposite: reinforces the worst messages, ignores the non-carbon parts of the bill, disses the people pushing the bill, and advocates for some other bill that has no chance of passing. It's all the worst tendencies and messages, distilled to their essence, at the worst possible moment.

I wish Friedman had reached out to me, or Joe Romm, or someone on Markey's staff. Any of us would be willing, nay, desperate to help.

Regardless, my tone was unnecessarily pissy. When the battle to pass energy/climate is joined in earnest, later this year, Friedman will fight on the side of the angels. And it's a good thing. They'll need all the help they can get.

Related Links:

Annie Leonard misses the mark in her new video, “The Story of Cap-and-Trade”

Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

Another Washington Post staffer has joined the pile-on against columnist George Will's climate-change denial. Fellow columnist Eugene Robinson lambasted Will on the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC Wednesday night, and also called out the editors who let him get away with it.

"What George Will did was cherry-pick a sentence in a report, you know, be very persnickety in the way he parsed his sentences, and end up making it sound as if the report had said the exact opposite of what it actually said," said Robinson. "He was persnickety enough that his editors, who also happen to be my editors, felt he didn’t quite cross the line. I thought he did."

Robinson joins two reporters at the Post who explicitly cited Will's factual errors earlier this week. And last week political cartoonist Tom Tooles also poked fun at Will.

Related Links:

Annie Leonard misses the mark in her new video, “The Story of Cap-and-Trade”

“Many , including us,  find deniers’ claims irresponsible.”

Will the Washington Post ever fact check a George Will column?