Jack A. Smith : Climate Change Confab Brings Too Little Too Late

Climate change activists in Warsaw, Friday, November 22, 2013, portray, from right, French President Francois Hollande, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, President Obama, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Photo by Czarek Sokolowski, / AP.

Climate Change meeting in
Warsaw brings too little too late


Given the number of drastic reports about climate change... the accomplishments at COP19 are useful but hugely disproportionate to what is needed.

By Jack A. Smith / The Rag Blog / December 23, 2013

The sharply increasing scientific indicators of impending disastrous global climate change have failed to motivate the principal developed countries, led by the U.S., to accelerate the lackluster pace of their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This was the principal conclusion of several key environmental groups attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC) November 11-23 in Warsaw, Poland. The meeting lasted a day and a half longer than scheduled to resolve a dispute about new greenhouse emission targets. About 10,000 people attended the 19th annual meeting of the so-called Conference of Parties (COP19) that drew nearly all the UN’s 193 member states.

About 800 attendees associated with environmental groups walked out of the conference November 21, protesting the lack of progress. In a joint statement on the day of the walkout, the World Wildlife Federation, OxFam, Friends of the Earth, Action Aid, and the International Trade Union Federation declared:

Organizations and movements representing people from every corner of the Earth have decided that the best use of our time is to voluntarily withdraw from the Warsaw climate talks. The conference, which should have been an important step in the just transition to a sustainable future, is on track to deliver virtually nothing.

According to Professor Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics and a leading British expert on climate change: “The actions that have been agreed are simply inadequate when compared with the scale and urgency of the risks that the world faces from rising levels of greenhouse gases.”

There were also street protests and marches in Warsaw composed largely of younger conference attendees and local youth. One slogan, referring to climate disasters, was “The Philippines, Pakistan, New Orleans: Change the System, not the climate.”

On November 18, delegates from 133 developing countries -- under the umbrella of the G77 group plus China -- walked out temporarily “because we do not see a clear-cut commitment by developed countries to reach an agreement” to financially help poor countries suffering the effects of climate change for which they are not responsible. The U.S., for instance, was reluctant to help developing countries adapt to sea level rise, droughts, powerful storms and other adverse impacts, even though it is historically the greatest emitter of greenhouse gases.

By the end of the conference, perhaps encouraged by the walkout, the world body agreed to set up a “Loss and Damage” process for “the most vulnerable countries” experiencing losses from global warming. The details remain vague.

A distressing aspect of the conference came when four major developed countries took actions in contradiction to fighting global warming.

• Japan -- the fifth largest carbon polluter -- announced it was breaking its pledge to reduce greenhouse gases by 25% of 1990 levels by the year 2020, blaming the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.
• Canada and Australia recently declared they would not support the Green Climate Fund -- the UNCCC program to transfer money from the developed to the developing countries to assist them in dealing with climate change.
• Conference host Poland, a major coal producer, worked with the World Coal Association to simultaneously host the International Coal and Climate Summit in Warsaw. (Greenpeace and others protested outside the coal meeting.)

COP19 was permeated with corporate lobbyists from “fossil fuels, big business groups, carbon market and financial players, agribusiness and agrofuels, as well as some of the big polluting industries,” according to the oppositional “COP19 Guide to Corporate Lobbying.” Corporations appeared at previous COP meetings but, witnesses say, never in such large number.

Obviously, one of the most important issues confronting the world community is reducing greenhouse carbon emissions to impede global warming. This is a perennial UNCCC goal but hardly sufficient so far to prevent substantial increases in carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere, now exceeding 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in at least 3 million years since the Pliocene era.

Greenhouse reductions hark back to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which obligated developed countries to specific -- and in the main incongruously low -- emissions reduction targets while developing countries were encouraged to reduce emissions without a binding requirement.

Since 1997, despite Kyoto, emissions have increased substantially. According to a new report from research teams coordinated by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, “The gap between where emissions are and where emissions would need to be in order to keep climate targets within reach is getting bigger and bigger.”

Kyoto, which the U.S. refused to join because of its so-called “bias” toward developing countries, has in effect been extended from 2013 to 2020 when new emissions targets will go into effect. Unless these new targets are far greater than the old, CO2 ppm will jump much higher.

At issue during COP19 was a proposal by the EU, U.S., and a number of developed countries to eliminate Kyoto’s nonbinding reductions for developing countries. Under this plan, each and all countries would set specific targets over next year. These targets would then be inspected by the other countries to assure they are adequate for the mission at hand. The final targets would be published in early 2015 and presumably approved by that year’s COP, and implemented in five years.

An intense 36-hour struggle between a group of developing countries and most developed countries over this proposal went into an extra session lasting throughout Nov. 22 and into the early hours of the 23rd. Opposing removal of the distinction between developed and developing countries was a group called the “Like-Minded Developing Countries on Climate Change” (LMDC), including such countries as China, India, Venezuela, Bolivia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Thailand.

According to an account in the mass circulation Indian newspaper The Hindu:

India, China and other countries in the LMDC group take the position that the new climate agreement must not force developing countries to review their volunteered emission reduction targets. Setting themselves up in a direct confrontation with the developed countries, the LMDC opposes doing away with the current differentiation between developing and developed countries when it came to taking responsibility for climate action.

In other words, the developing countries will do what they can to reduce emissions, but the principal task by far belongs to the developed countries. They argue that developed industrial countries have been spewing fossil fuel-created greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for 100 to 200 years or more, and most of these pollutants have yet to dissipate. The carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere could warm the planet for hundreds of years.

The richer countries reject this argument, pointing to the increasing industrialization taking place in the developing world. Writing in the Guardian November 25, Graham Readfearn points out: “Rich countries are desperate to avoid taking the blame for the impacts of climate change.... The developed countries won't let any statements slip into any UN climate document that could be used against them in the future” in terms of financing mitigation, adaptation, and compensation costs.

Most developing countries are very poor and have contributed miniscule emissions, but a few of them -- China, India, and Brazil, among others -- have become major industrialized powers in relatively recent years. China, now the largest annual contributor to global warming, has been seriously industrialized for less than 30 years and also functions as a global factory for many nations, including the U.S.

These recently industrializing developing states, most of which are former exploited colonies of the rich countries, argue that the developed states became major powers based on burning fossil fuels and thus have the major responsibility to take the lead in reducing emissions.

China points out that while it has recently displaced the U.S. as leading producer of Greenhouse gas emissions, its population is three times greater. On a per capita basis, Beijing notes, the average American in 2011 produced 17.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide; the average Chinese, just 6.5 tons. (A metric ton is 205 pounds heavier than a 2,000 pound ton.) The U.S. rejects these arguments.

Climate activists in downtown Warsaw, Poland, Saturday, November 16, 2013. Photo from AP.

The developed-developing conflict over emissions was finally resolved when China and India withdrew demands for including Kyoto’s exception for developing countries, in return for which “commitments” to a specific target were changed to “contributions.” Clearly this is a vague stopgap measure that will eventually change. The important matter is the total of emissions reductions to be agreed upon in 2015.

The U.S., as the most influential developed country, has taken hardly any action at all to significantly reduce CO2 emissions when it was the number one emitter of carbon in the atmosphere or now when it is number two, tut-tutting about China’s smokestacks while President Obama boasts about expanding drilling for oil and fracking for gas.

Ironically, though China is a mass polluter today it is investing far more heavily than the U.S. in renewable resources such as solar and wind energy. This may eventually pay off, but not before an unacceptable level of CO2 continues.


Given the number of drastic reports about climate change from the scientific community in the last several months, the accomplishments at COP19 are useful but hugely disproportionate to what is needed. In addition to the agreement on contributions to lower greenhouse emissions this also happened: The countries agreed on a multi-billion dollar program to combat global deforestation. The Loss and Damage project was passed, and developed states were urged to increase levels of aid to poorer countries. A plan was hammered out to monitor emissions reductions.

A few of those recent drastic reports include these facts:

• Greenhouse gas emissions are set to be 8-12 billion tons higher in 2020 than the level needed to keep global warming below 3.6 Fahrenheit, the UN Environment Program said. (Above 3.6 F, the world’s people will begin to experience extreme effects)...
• According to the American Meteorological Society, there is a 90% probability that global temperatures will rise 6.3 to 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit in less than 100 years...
• According to the Associated Press, a leaked report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change means that “Many of the ills of the modern world -- starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war and disease -- are likely to worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change”...
• The U.S. is likely to become the world’s top producer of crude oil and natural gas by the end of 2013 due to increased oil drilling and fracking for gas...
• The U.S. is pumping 50% more methane into the atmosphere than the government has estimated, reports Science News...
• In a new study, the team of researchers reports a global loss of 888,000 square miles of forest between 2000 and 2012 and a gain of only 309,000 square miles of new forest.

Summing up the Warsaw conference, an observer for Christian Aid, Mohamed Adow, declares:

In agreeing to establish a loss and damage mechanism, countries have accepted the reality that the world is already dealing with the extensive damage caused by climate impacts, and requires a formal process to assess and deal with it, but they seem unwilling to take concrete actions to reduce the severity of these impacts.

“We did not achieve a meaningful outcome,” said Naderev Sano, the head of the Philippines delegation who had been fasting throughout the meeting in solidarity with the victims of Typhoon Haiyan.

Samantha Smith, representing the World Wildlife Fund at COP19 declared:

Negotiators in Warsaw should have used this meeting to take a big and critical step towards global, just action on climate change. That didn't happen. This has placed the negotiations towards a global agreement [on emissions] at risk.

The next major UNCCC conference, COP20, will take place in Lima, Peru, in December 2014. The extremely important 2015 meeting, when the countries will decide on new emissions targets, will be in Paris.

There is positive news as well as the negative.

• A majority of the American people now seek to limit global warming, according to a recent report from Grist Environmental News. Stanford University Professor Jon Krosnick led an analysis of more than a decade’s worth of poll results for 46 states. The results show that the majority of residents of all of those states, whether red or blue, are united in their worries about the climate. At least three-quarters of residents are aware that the climate is changing. Two-thirds want the government to limit greenhouse gas emissions from businesses. At least 62% want regulations that cut carbon pollution from power plants. At least half want the U.S. to take action to fight climate change, even if other countries do not.


• The walkout by environmental NGOs is highly significant. They are clearly “mad as hell” and presumably are “not going to take this anymore!" to evoke the famous line from the film Network. Their unprecedented action in Warsaw undoubtedly reflects the views of millions of people back in the United States who have been following the scientific reports and want Washington to finally take dramatic action.


• At issue is mobilizing these people to take action in concert with others to force the political system to put climate sanity and ecological sustainability on the immediate national agenda. Two things are required: 1. A mass education program is called for because the broader and deeper implications of reforms must be understood and acted upon. 2. Unity in action is necessary to bring together many constituencies to fight for climate sanity and justice with a view toward protecting future generations from the excesses of the industrial era.


• There are up to a score of major environmental organizations in the U.S. Some, like Greenpeace and 350.org are willing to offer civil disobedience; some are important education and pressure groups; and some -- far fewer -- are too cautious and compromising, such as those advocating for nuclear power or natural gas. There must be many hundreds and more small and medium size environmental groups throughout our country, with anywhere from five to 50 or even 100 local followers. And then there are the numerous progressive and left organizations that basically agree with the environmental cause. None have to give up their individual identities, but they can come together around specific global warming and ecological issues and fight the power of the 1% to 5% who essentially rule America.


• The actions of the developing societies at COP19 were important, too, particularly their brief walkout. The majority of these countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are not only vulnerable to the consequences of climate change but rarely possess the economic wherewithal to adequately survive. They will struggle for their demands in future global conferences.


• Despite the foot-dragging of many developed countries, all of them contain environmental and progressive/left organizations. They, too, are “mad as hell” and will grow stronger.


• Time may not be on sanity’s side, but as the CO2 ppm rises and the hopes for significant reductions in greenhouse gases fall in the next few years, conditions will be ripe for a global climate justice uprising.

At this point it seems that only a mass mobilization of the U.S. and world’s peoples will be able to provide the strength to stand up to the fossil fuel interests, the corporations, big business, banks, financiers, and the weak or corrupt politicians who impede the way to build an equal and ecologically sustainable society including rational conservation of resources and reduction of excess consumption.

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian -- for decades the nation's preeminent leftist newsweekly -- that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter. Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Bruce Melton on Global Warming and Climate Change Denial

Environmental activist Bruce Melton at the studios of KOOP radio in Austin, Texas, September 20, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Environmental researcher and
climate change activist Bruce Melton

Austin environmentalist and Rag Blog contributor talks about global warming, climate change denial, and Austin's 'Dry Lake Blues.'

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / October 2, 2013

Environmental researcher and climate change activist Bruce Melton was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 20, 2013.

Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download the podcast of our September 20 interview with Bruce Melton here:


Melton, an Austin-based civil engineer and a student of climate science, discussed global warming, climate change denial, the Texas drought, and Austin's "Dry Lake Blues" on Rag Radio.

Bruce Melton is an environmental researcher and activist, a green builder, an environmental filmmaker, an author, and front man for the band, Climate Change. Bruce is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and Truthout on issues of climate change and global warming. He is the author of Climate Discovery Chronicles and his new book is Dry Lake Blues. He blogs at ClimateDiscovery.com .

Bruce Melton was one of eight Austinites named as a "Hero of Climate Change" by Good Life Magazine. He has been translating and interpreting scholarly science publications for two decades. His Climate Change Now initiative has applied for nonprofit 501(c)(3) status. This is his fourth time to appear on Rag Radio. The Rag Blog's Roger Baker also participated in the discussion.

Listen to the podcasts of Bruce Melton's earlier appearances on Rag Radio and read Bruce's articles at The Rag Blog.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is now also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, October 4, 2013: Novelist Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross, set in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Friday, October 11, 2013: Medical and Cultural Anthropologist Seth Holmes, author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States.

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Bruce Melton : Kick the Climate Deniers off the Island

The Greenwood Acres fishing pier on Lake Buchanan, west of Burnet, Texas. Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.

The climate science is certain:
Time to kick the deniers off the island

In just eight years, permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest (including Austin) will be comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years.

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / August 15, 2013

AUSTIN, Texas -- The science is certain, but the deniers are just as certain that their pseudo science is certain. Getting the last few deniers to agree with 97 percent of climate scientists though -- is that a good use of resources? We have the vast majority of the public on our side -- isn't that enough votes?

We can kick the deniers off the island. This is not a mean-spirited thing -- far from it. It's about the optimal path for resource-deprived situations.

The denier crowd is no longer a viable voting block. We need to be focusing on the rest of us. Very few understand the extreme nature of the most recent findings in climate science and the relative ease with which our climate pollution problem can be solved. Environmentally aware voices today advocate for Kyoto Era policies. But Kyoto Era policies were created in the early 1990s.

The psychology of denial is a tricky thing to overcome. It's not about what we think it is about. It's not about "their science" being as good as ours in their eyes. It’s deeper than that and involves social upbringing, false intuition, authority figures, geography, gender, and religion. Because "believers" control the voting block it no longer matters why deniers disbelieve. We no longer need to change their minds.

Because of the dwindling number of deniers, their opinions are no longer relevant. The only thing that has a chance of changing their minds is time or personal experience -- so says the global warming psychology literature. We can influence neither of those, so why waste valuable time and resources? In just eight years, permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest (including Austin) will be comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years. (1)

This megadrought has now begun. In Austin we are suffering from a devastating long-term drought, but only four of the last eight years in Austin have seen significantly below normal rainfall (less than 0.5 inches below average). In the Highland Lakes watershed at San Angelo, where the water comes from to fill our lakes that are at 36 percent of capacity, only three of the last eight years saw significantly below normal rainfall. Yet inflows to the lakes have fallen below the 1950s Drought of Record levels four times in the last eight years. How can this be?

A longer growing season soaks up more soil moisture and leaves less for the springs to create inflows into the lakes. More numerous bigger rainfall events and fewer smaller rainfall events happening already mean that dry periods are longer. When it does rain, more soaks in and less runs off.

Winters are warm enough now that many species do not go dormant any longer (in Central Texas). They keep using groundwater through the winter and leave less to create inflows into the lakes. Evaporation is disproportional to warmth. A little warmth equals a lot more evaporation; more evaporation creates a drier atmosphere allowing it to get warmer creating a feedback loop.

Inflows to the Highland Lakes during the drought of record were 14 percent more than what we have seen today. They were more during the Drought of Record.

• 1947 to 1956: 10,333,493 acre feet
• 2003 to 2112: 9,070,919 acre feet

(This does not include the drought buster year of 1957 with 4.4 million acre feet of inflow.)

Plus, during the Drought of Record, LCRA was releasing 460,000 acre feet of water annually above what they release today because of hydroelectric generation. If hydroelectric releases similar to LCRA’s hydroelectric generation era were made today, in 2011 lake levels would have been far lower than they were in the 1950s and today the lakes would be completely dry. LCRA quit making hydroelectric releases in the late 1970s and early 80s as coal- and natural gas-fired power plants came on line.

But the biggest surprise is that rainfall in Austin is 7 percent more than it was in 1990. Yet, inflows to the lakes are far, far below the average of the previous 50 years. Drought can be perpetuated even with greater rainfall.

Climate scientists have been telling us these things will happen for decades, and now they are happening. It shouldn't be counterintuitive, but the denier and delayer crowd has effectively killed discussion about anything except whether or not global warming exists from a high school greenhouse effect point of view.

We need to be focusing on the level of "belief" of the "believers." It's a business decision. We can fire the deniers. It might not be the "right" thing to do, but we do not have time to be so kind. As a bonus however, we can preserve our relationships with deniers by ignoring the topic like they do. It's ok, we have enough votes.

The amount of resources needed to convince the denier and delayer gang is disproportionally large compared to the fine-tuning of the message that needs to be delivered to "believers." Time is short. We are likely too far gone to forego major tipping points like the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, desertification of the interior of continents, and a 50 GT methane outburst from clathrates. Now we need to prevent our climate from crossing even more severe thresholds.

Solution requirements are much larger today than in the Kyoto Era. We were supposed to have reduced our emissions to 1987 levels by 2012 to prevent dangerous climate change. Instead we have increased emissions by 57 percent. Since 1987 we have emitted 81 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted from the beginning of mankind's emissions until 1987.

Greater than 100 percent emissions reductions are now needed to prevent "extremely dangerous climate change." (2) Spending all of our time trying to convince a few deniers that climate change is real is not a good use of limited time or resources.

The public needs to know the ease with which we can "treat" climate pollution. The 2 percent global gross domestic product cost of dealing with climate pollution advocated by most economists over the last decade is the same as we spend on advertising every year; or the annual U.S. military budget not counting wars; or the yearly costs of the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act; or the costs of normal weather losses every year in the U.S. alone not counting climate enhanced events. It is one quarter the annual cost of health care in the U.S. averaged from 2000 to 2009 -- before Obamacare went into effect.

But the latest research leaves the science of the mid-2000s in its dust. The Stanford/Cornell Plan for a fossil fuel-free New York State suggests that New York build a new alternative energy infrastructure at a cost of a bit more than $500 billion by 2030. Beginning in 2030, the savings and profits -- above a fossil fuel economy in New York State -- are $114 billion per year. This pays off the investment in less than five years. Savings and profits then only increase with time relative to the ever-increasing costs of a fossil fuel infrastructure.(3)

[Bruce Melton, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, as well as more climate change writing, climate science outreach, and critical environmental issue documentary films can be found on his website and at climatediscovery.com. Melton’s Climate Change Now Initiative has applied for nonprofit 501(c)(3) status. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]

References:

(1) In just eight years, permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest will be comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years -- Evaluation of work from NOAA and Columbia Earth Institute (Seager 2012) for Truthout.org. Melton, Worst Drought in 1,000 Years Could Begin in Eight Years, Truthout.org, Feb. 21, 2013.
 http://truth-out.org/news/item/14655-worse-drought-in-1000-years-could-begin-in-eight-years
Seager et al., Projections of declining surface water availability for the southwestern United States, Nature Climate Change, December 2012, page 5, last paragraph.
Abstract: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1787.html
NOAA: 
 http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/glodech/research11%20SW%20water%20surface.html
Earth Institute press release: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/12/23/smaller-colorado-river-projected-for-coming-decades-study-says/
 
(2) Extremely dangerous climate change, two degrees C: 550, 450, 350 and 300 ppm CO2 -- Morrigan, Target Atmospheric GHG Concentrations Why Humanity Should Aim for 350 ppm CO2e, University of California Santa Barbara, 2010.
http://www.global.ucsb.edu/climateproject/papers/
Ramanthan, On avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system: Formidable challenges ahead, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, 2008.
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14245.full.pdf+html
Hansen et al., Target Atmospheric CO2, Where Should Humanity Aim, Open Atmospheric Science Journal, NASA, November 2008.  
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Hansen_etal.html
IPCC 2007, Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,, B. Metz, O.R. Davidson, P.R. Bosch, R. Dave, L.A. Meyer (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, Chapter 13, Policies, Instruments and Co-operative Arrangements.
IPCC 2001, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Third Assessment Report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Technical Summary.  
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/
 
(3)A Fossil Fuel Free New York State -- Melton, A Fossil Fuel Free New York State by 2050: An in-depth look at Stanford and Cornell's 100 percent alternative energy road map for New York state, Truthout.org, May 26, 2013.  
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16540-a-fossil-fuel-free-new-york-state-by-2050
Jacobson et al., Examining the feasibility of converting New York State's all-purpose energy infrastructure to one using wind, water, and sunlight, Energy Policy 57 (2013) 585-601.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/NewYorkWWSEnPolicy.pdf

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Robert Jensen : The Craziest Person in the Room

The craziest person in the room:
Reflections on how a mediocre
white guy can try to be useful

It’s the job of people with critical sensibilities -- those who consistently speak out for justice and sustainability, even when it’s difficult -- not to back away just because the world has grown more ominous.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / June 18, 2013

[This is an edited version of a talk given at the annual National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE) in New Orleans on June 1, 2013.]

I recognize that the title for this presentation -- “The Craziest Person in the Room: Reflections on How a Mediocre White Guy Can Try to Be Useful” -- is not particularly elegant or enticing, maybe not very clear or even coherent. So, let me begin by explaining what I mean by some of these terms.

First, the “white guy”: For some years now, I’ve begun talks on injustice and inequality by acknowledging my status: White, male, educated, comfortably middle class, and born in the United States -- in short, a privileged citizen of a predatory imperial nation-state within a pathological capitalist economic system. Borrowing a line from a friend with the same profile, I observe that, “If I had been born good-looking, I would have had it all.”

That approach communicates to people in this room who don’t occupy these categories that I recognize my unearned privilege and the unjust systems and structures of power from which that privilege flows. (It also indicates that I am not afraid to look in a mirror.)

But today I won’t offer much more of that reflexive white liberal/progressive/radical genuflecting, which while appropriate in many situations increasingly feels to me like a highly choreographed dance that happens in what we might call “social-justice spaces.” In rooms such as this, such a performance feels like that -- just a performance.

So, yes, there are some things I don’t know and can’t know because I’m a white guy, and that demands real humility, a recognition that people on the other end of those hierarchies have different, and typically deeper, insights than mine. But after 25 years of work to understand the world in which I live, there are some things I am confident that I do know and that are more vitally important than ever.

This confidence flows from an awareness that I am mediocre.

About “mediocre”: Don’t worry, I don’t have a self-esteem problem. I am a tenured full professor at a major state research university, a job that I work hard at with some success. This is not false modesty; I believe I’m an above-average teacher who is particularly good at expressing serious ideas in plain language.

I describe myself as mediocre because I think that, whatever skills I have developed, I’m pretty ordinary and I think that most of us ordinary people are pretty mediocre -- good enough to get by, but nothing special. If we put some effort into our work and catch a few breaks (and I’ve had more than my share of lucky breaks), we’ll do OK. Too many bad breaks, and things fall apart quickly. I think this is an honest, and healthy, way to understand ourselves.

So, for me, “coming out” as mediocre is a way of reminding myself of my limits, to help me use whatever abilities I do have as effectively as possible. I’ve spent a quarter-century in academic and political life, during which time I’ve met some really smart people, and I can tell the difference between them and me. I have never broken new theoretical ground in any field, and I never will. I probably have never had a truly original idea. I’m a competent, hard-working second-tier intellectual and organizer.

As a result, I’ve focused on trying to get clear about basic issues: Why is it so difficult for U.S. society to transcend the white-supremacist ideas of its founding, even decades after the end of the country’s formal apartheid system? Why do patriarchal ideas dominate everywhere, even in the face of the compelling arguments of feminists?

Why do we continue to describe the United States as a democratic society when most ordinary people feel shut out of politics and the country operates on the world stage as a rogue state outside of international law? Why do we celebrate capitalism when it produces a world of unspeakable deprivation alongside indefensible affluence?

And why, in the face of multiple cascading ecological crises, do we collectively pretend that prosperity is just around the corner when what seems more likely to be around the corner is the cliff that we are about to go over?

Those are some really heavy questions, but people don’t have to pretend to be something special to deal with these challenges. We can be ordinary, average -- mediocre, in the sense I mean it -- and still do useful things to confront all this. Instead of trying to prove how special and smart we are, it’s fine to dig in and do the ordinary work of the world.

But people like me -- those of us with identities that come with all that unearned privilege -- do have one opportunity to do at least one thing that can be special: We don’t have to pretend to be the smartest, but we can strive to be the craziest person in the room.

Third, and final, clarification, about “crazy”: In this context, I mean crazy not in a pejorative but in an aspirational sense. I want to be as crazy as I can, in the sense of being unafraid of the radical implications of the radical analysis necessary to understand the world.

When such analysis is honest, the implications are challenging, even frightening. It is helpful to be a bit crazy, in this sense, to help us accept the responsibility of pushing as far and as hard as is possible and productive, in every space.

I take that to be my job, to leverage that unearned privilege to create as much space as possible for the most radical analysis possible, precisely because in some settings I am taken more seriously than those without that status.

If it’s true that white people tend to take me more seriously than a non-white person when talking about race, then I should be pushing those white folk. If I can get away with talking not just about the need for diversity but also about the enduring reality of racism -- and in the process, explain why the United States remains a white-supremacist society -- then I should talk “crazy” in that way, to make sure that analysis is part of the conversation, and to make it easier for non-white people to push in whatever direction they choose.

Once I’ve used the term “white supremacy,” it’s on the table for others who might be dismissed as “angry” if they had introduced it into the conversation.

If it’s true that men tend to take me more seriously than a woman when talking about gender, then I should be pushing the envelope. If I can get away with talking not just about the importance of respecting women but also about the enduring reality of sexism, then I should talk “crazy” about how rape is not deviant but normalized in a patriarchal culture, about how the buying and selling of women’s bodies for the sexual pleasure of men in prostitution, pornography, and stripping is a predictable consequence of the eroticizing of domination and subordination.

I should talk about the violent reality of imperialism, not just questioning the wisdom of a particular war but critiquing the sick structure of U.S. militarism. I should talk not just about the destructive nature of the worst corporations but also about the fundamental depravity of capitalism itself.

As someone with status and protection, I should always be thinking: What is the most radical formulation of the relevant analysis that will be effective in a particular time and place? Then I should probably take a chance and push it a half-step past that. I should do all this without resorting to jargon, either from the diversity world or the dogmatic left. I should say it as clearly as possible, even when that clarity makes people -- including me -- uncomfortable.

Outside of overtly reactionary political spaces, most people’s philosophical and theological systems are rooted in basic concepts of fairness, equality, and the inherent dignity of all people.

This isn’t always as difficult or risky as it seems. Outside of overtly reactionary political spaces, most people’s philosophical and theological systems are rooted in basic concepts of fairness, equality, and the inherent dignity of all people. Most of us endorse values that -- if we took them seriously -- should lead to an ethics and politics that reject the violence, exploitation, and oppression that defines the modern world.

If only a small percentage of people in any given society are truly sociopaths -- incapable of empathy, those who for some reason enjoy cruel and oppressive behavior -- then a radical analysis should make sense to lots of people.

But it is not, of course, that easy, because of the rewards available to us when we are willing to subordinate our stated principles in service of oppressive systems. I think that process works something like this:

• The systems and structures in which we live are hierarchical.
• Hierarchical systems and structures deliver to those in the dominant class certain privileges, pleasures, and material benefits, and some limited number of people in subordinated classes will be allowed access to most of those same rewards.
• People are typically hesitant to give up privileges, pleasures, and benefits that make us feel good.
• But, those benefits clearly come at the expense of the vast majority of those in the subordinated classes.
• Given the widespread acceptance of basic notions of equality and human rights, the existence of hierarchy has to be justified in some way other than crass self-interest.
• One of the most persuasive arguments for systems of domination and subordination is that they are “natural” and therefore inevitable, immutable. There’s no point getting all worked up about this -- t’s just the way things are.

If this analysis is accurate, that’s actually good news. I would rather believe that people take pains to rationalize a situation they understand to be morally problematic than to celebrate injustice. When people know they have to rationalize, it means they at least understand the problems of the systems, even if they won’t confront them.

So, our task is to take seriously that claim: Is this domination/subordination dynamic natural? Yes and no. Everything humans do is “natural,” in the tautological sense that since we do it, human nature obviously includes those particular characteristics. In that sense, a pacifist intentional community based on the collective good and a slave society based on exploitation are both natural.

We all know from our own experience that our individual nature includes varied capacities; we are capable of greedy, self-interested behavior, and we also can act out of solidarity and compassion. We make choices -- sometimes consciously, though more often without much deliberation -- within systems that encourage some aspects of our nature and suppress other parts.

Maybe there is a pecking order to these various aspects of human beings -- a ranking of the relative strength of these various parts of our nature -- but if that is the case, we know virtually nothing about it, and aren’t likely to know anytime soon, given the limits of our ability to understand our own psychology.

What we do understand is that the aspect of our nature that emerges as primary depends on the nature of the systems in which we live. Our focus should be on collective decisions we make about social structure, which is why it’s crucial to never let out of our sights the systems that do so much damage: white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism.

There are serious implications to that statement. For example, I do not think that meaningful social justice is possible within capitalism. My employer, the University of Texas at Austin, doesn’t agree. In fact, some units of the university -- most notably the departments of business, advertising, and economics -- are dedicated to entrenching capitalism. That means I will always be in a state of tension with my employer, if I’m true to my own stated beliefs.

Education and organizing efforts that stray too far from this focus will never be able to do more than smooth the rough edges off of systems that will continue to produce violence, exploitation, and oppression -- because that’s what those systems are designed to do.

If we are serious about resisting injustice, that list of systems we must challenge is daunting enough. But it is incomplete, and perhaps irrelevant, if we don’t confront what in some ways is the ultimate hierarchy, the central domination/subordination dynamic: the human belief in our right to control the planet.

Let me put this in plain terms: We live in a dead world. Not a world that is dying, but a world that is dead -- beyond repair, beyond reclamation, perhaps beyond redemption.

Let me put this in plain terms: We live in a dead world. Not a world that is dying, but a world that is dead -- beyond repair, beyond reclamation, perhaps beyond redemption. The modern industrial high-energy/high-technology world is dead. I do not know how long life-as-we-know-it in the First World can continue, but the future of our so-called “lifestyle” likely will be measured in decades not centuries.

Whatever the time frame for collapse, the contraction has begun. I was born in 1958 and grew up in a world that promised endless expansion of everything -- of energy and material goods, of democracy and freedom. That bounty was never equitably distributed, of course, and those promises were mostly rhetorical cover for power. The good old days were never as good as we imagined, and they are now gone for good.

If that seems crazy, let me try again: The central illusion of the industrial world’s extractive economy -- propped up by a technological fundamentalism that is as irrational as all fundamentalisms -- is that we can maintain indefinitely a large-scale human presence on the earth at something like current First-World levels of consumption.

The task for those with critical sensibilities is not just to resist oppressive social arrangements, but to speak a simple truth that almost no one wants to acknowledge: This high-energy/high-technology life of affluent societies is a dead end. We can’t predict with precision how resource competition and ecological degradation will play out in the coming decades, but it is ecocidal to treat the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump. We cannot know for sure what time the party will end, but the party’s over.

Does that still sound crazy? Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live -- groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of dead zones in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species, and reduction of biodiversity -- and ask a simple question: Where are we heading?

Remember also that we live in an oil-based world that is rapidly depleting the cheap and easily accessible oil, which means we face a major reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds daily life. Meanwhile, the desperation to avoid that reconfiguration has brought us to the era of “extreme energy,” using more dangerous and destructive technologies (hydrofracturing, deep-water drilling, mountaintop coal removal, tar sands extraction). Instead of gently putting our foot on the brakes and powering down, we are slamming into overdrive.

And there is the undeniable trajectory of global warming/global weirding, climate change/climate disruption -- the end of a stable planet.

Scientists these days are talking about tipping points (June 7, 2012, issue of Nature) and planetary boundaries (September 23, 2009, issue of Nature), about how human activity is pushing Earth beyond its limits. Recently 22 top scientists warned that humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale critical transition “with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience,” which means that “the biological resources we take for granted at present may be subject to rapid and unpredictable transformations within a few human generations.” (Anthony Barnosky, et al, “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere,” (Nature, June 7, 2012.)

That conclusion is the product of science and common sense, not supernatural beliefs or conspiracy theories. The political/social implications are clear: There are no solutions to our problems if we insist on maintaining the high-energy/high-technology existence lived in much of the industrialized world (and desired by many currently excluded from it).

Many tough-minded folk who are willing to challenge other oppressive systems hold on tightly to this lifestyle. The critic Fredric Jameson wrote that, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” but that’s only part of the problem -- for some, it may be easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of air conditioning.

I’m not moving into rapture talk, but we do live in end-times, of a sort. Not the end of the world -- the planet will carry on with or without us -- but the end of the human systems that structure our politics, economics, and social life.

All this matters for anyone concerned not only about the larger living world but also the state of the human family. Ecological sustainability and social justice are not separate projects. One obvious reason is that ecological crises do not affect everyone equally -- as those in the environmental justice movement say, the poor and oppressed of the planet tend to be hit “first and worst, hardest and longest” by ecological degradation.

These ecological realities also affect the landscape on which we organize, and progressive and radical movements on the whole have not spent enough time thinking about this.

First, let me be clear, even though there is no guarantee we can change the disastrous course of contemporary society, we should affirm the value of our work for justice and sustainability. We take on projects that we realize may fail because it’s the right thing to do, and by doing so we create new possibilities for ourselves and the world. Just as we all know that someday we will die and yet still get out of bed every day, an honest account of planetary reality need not paralyze us.

Then let’s abandon worn-out clichés such as, “The American people will do the right thing if they know the truth,” or “Past social movements prove the impossible can happen.” There is no evidence that awareness of injustice will automatically lead U.S. citizens, or anyone else, to correct it. When people believe injustice is necessary to maintain their material comfort, some accept those conditions without complaint.

Social movements around race, gender, and sexuality have been successful in changing oppressive laws and practices, and to a lesser degree in shifting deeply held beliefs. But the movements we most often celebrate, such as the post-World War II civil rights struggle, operated in a culture that assumed continuing economic expansion.

We now live in a time of permanent contraction -- there will be less, not more, of everything. Pressuring a dominant group to surrender some privileges when there is an expectation of endless bounty is a very different project than when there is intensified competition for increasingly scarce resources. That doesn’t mean nothing can be done to advance justice and sustainability, only that we should not be glib about the inevitability of it.

Never in human history have potential catastrophes been so global; never have social and ecological crises of this scale threatened at the same time; never have we had so much information about the threats we must come to terms with.

If all this seems like more than one can bear, it’s because it is. We are facing new, more expansive challenges. Never in human history have potential catastrophes been so global; never have social and ecological crises of this scale threatened at the same time; never have we had so much information about the threats we must come to terms with.

It’s easy to cover up our inability to face this by projecting it onto others. When someone tells me “I agree with your assessment, but people can’t handle it,” I assume what that person really means is, “I can’t handle it.” But handling it is, in the end, the only sensible choice. To handle it is to be a moral agent, responsible for oneself and one’s place in a community.

Mainstream politicians will continue to protect existing systems of power, corporate executives will continue to maximize profit without concern, and the majority of people will continue to avoid these questions. It’s the job of people with critical sensibilities -- those who consistently speak out for justice and sustainability, even when it’s difficult -- not to back away just because the world has grown more ominous.

Facing this doesn’t demand that we separate from mainstream society or give up ongoing projects that seek a more just world within existing systems. I am a professor at a university that does not share my values or analysis, yet I continue to teach.

In my community, I am part of a group that helps people create worker-cooperatives that will operate within a capitalist system that I believe to be a dead end. I belong to a congregation that struggles to radicalize Christianity while remaining part of a cautious, often cowardly, denomination. We do what we can, where we can, based on our best assessment of what will move us forward.

That may not be compelling to everyone. So, just in case I have dug myself in a hole with some people, I’ll deploy a strategy well known to white people talking about social justice: When you get in trouble, quote an icon from the civil-rights movement. In this case, I’ll choose James Baldwin, from a 1962 essay about the struggles of artists to help a society, such as white-supremacist America, face the depth of its pathology.

On this question of dealing honestly with hard truths, Baldwin reminds us, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” In that essay, titled “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” Baldwin suggested that a great writer attempts “to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more.” (James Baldwin, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” in Randall Kenan, ed., The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings [New York: Pantheon, 2010], pp. 28-34.)

He was speaking about the struggle for justice within the human family, but if we extend that spirit to the state of the larger living world, the necessary formulation today would be “to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then all the rest of the truth, whether we can bear it or not.”

By avoiding the stark reality of our moment in history we don’t make ourselves safe. All we do is undermine the potential of struggles for justice and sustainability and guarantee the end of the human evolutionary experiment will be ugly beyond our imagination. We must remember, as Baldwin said, “that life is the only touchstone and that life is dangerous, and that without the joyful acceptance of this danger, there can never be any safety for anyone, ever, anywhere.”

This article was also published at Racism Review.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His latest books are Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue and We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Kristin Moe : Polluted Houston Neighborhood Draws the Line at Tar Sands

Children from the Manchester neighborhood in Houston with oil refinery smokestack in the background. Photo by Tar Sands Blockade. Photo by Tar Sands Blockade / YES! Magazine.

Houston's most polluted neighborhood
draws the line at Alberta Tar Sands

East Texas is the belly of the beast: the heart of America’s oil country and the seat of power for the fossil fuels industry.

By Kristin Moe / YES! Magazine / May 2, 2013

HOUSTON -- If the Keystone XL pipeline is approved, 90 percent of the tar sands crude that flows through it will be processed near an embattled Houston neighborhood called Manchester. Residents are joining up to demand a healthier future.

The playground in Manchester, a neighborhood on Houston’s east side, is empty much of the time. Children who play for too long here often start to cough. They go back inside, leaving an empty swing set in the shadow of a nearby oil refinery.

Yudith Nieto, 24, has lived in Manchester since her family came from Mexico when she was a small child. While it’s OK to visit the playground, she says, it’s not OK to bring her camera. On several occasions, security guards from the Valero refinery next door have appeared and asked her to leave, claiming that taking pictures in the park was “illegal.” They’ve even brought in Houston police as reinforcements.

Valero, one of the major oil companies operating in this industrial part of Houston, keeps its security busy: Nieto says that they have harassed documentary filmmakers and journalists. And when college students participating in an “alternative spring break” program came to the park to talk to her about the neighborhood’s problems, a guard drove up in an unmarked vehicle and took video of the meeting on his cellphone.

“I'm not afraid of the attention I'm getting from these people,” Nieto says, “because we want people to know that we're aware.”

Manchester, one of Houston’s oldest neighborhoods, is surrounded by industry on all sides: a Rhodia chemical plant; a car-crushing facility; a water treatment plant; a train yard for hazardous cargo; a Goodyear synthetic rubber plant; oil refineries belonging to Lyondell Basell, Valero, and Texas Petro-Chemicals; as well as one of the busiest highways in the city.

Industrial development continues uninterrupted down the Houston Ship Channel for another 50 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. The refineries around Houston have been called the “keystone to Keystone” because they’re expected to process 90 percent of tar sands crude from Alberta if the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is completed.

It’s one of the most polluted neighborhoods in the U.S., one where smokestacks grace every backyard view. But it’s taking on a new significance as the terminus of Keystone because the pipeline is at the center of the highest-stakes environmental battle in recent years. As international pressure builds, residents are beginning to organize, educate themselves, and speak out for the health of their families.

For them, the struggle over Keystone is not a political game. It’s not even about climate change, at least not exclusively. The effects of the pipeline will be right next door.


A grassroots movement begins to grow

Manchester is in some ways typical of low-income urban neighborhoods: it’s almost entirely Latino and African American, with a large number of undocumented immigrants. A full third of residents live below the poverty line. Drugs, unemployment, and gangs are a problem. And there’s a strange smell in the air: sometimes sweet, sometimes sulfurous, often reeking of diesel.

The most striking thing is that people here always seem to be sick. They have chronic headaches, nosebleeds, sore throats, and red sores on their skin that take months to heal.

Playground with Valero refinery
in background.

It took a groundbreaking study by the Houston Chronicle in 2005 to reveal for the first time the extent of the air pollution here. It identified five human carcinogens (a 2010 EPA study identified eight), including enough benzene that one scientist told the Chronicle that living in Manchester was “like sitting in traffic 24/7.” Toxin levels “were high enough that they would trigger a full-scale federal investigation if these communities were hazardous waste sites,” the Chronicle wrote.

Given this, it’s easy to understand why there are so many chronic respiratory problems. But the health risks go beyond asthma: for children living within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel, chances of contracting acute lymphocytic leukemia are 56 percent higher than for children only 10 miles away. “Children are being bombarded with toxins every day of their lives,” Nieto says.

Nieto, like many others in Manchester, grew up with asthma. Now an after-school teacher at Southwest Elementary, she spends her spare time working to organize this community, which has long been paralyzed by poverty, language barriers, and lack of access to information about exactly what is making them sick.

But the business of grassroots organizing is a slow one. It’s family to family, house to house. Many residents have reasons to resist taking action. They’re preoccupied with earning a living, fearful of authorities -- often because of their legal status -- and hesitant to accept just how bad their air might be.

Most people, Nieto says, just want to get out of Manchester. But they can’t afford rents anywhere else, and it’s impossible to sell. After all, who would buy a house with an oil refinery in the backyard?

So far, government representatives have been unwilling to act on behalf of residents who live along the Ship Channel. Juan Parras, a community organizer who founded Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, or TEJAS, says that a major goal is simply holding public officials accountable and enforcing the laws already in place under the Clean Air Act.

But in a state where oil is king, he says, “our elected officials are more responsive to industry than they are to community needs.” Fossil-fuel companies -- and the politicians whose campaigns they fund -- stand to profit enormously from projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, Parras says. “They have our elected officials in their back pockets.”


Where grassroots meets DIY

But residents of Manchester are finding ways to take action that don’t depend on those representatives. Alongside two organizers from the group Tar Sands Blockade, Nieto, her partner Emmanuel, and a few other young people have set up a “free store” with regular hours.

It’s an outdoor community space based in a neighbor’s yard, a tent and some tables crammed with information and arts-and-crafts materials for children. The store offers free donated clothes, food, information on air pollution, meetings of local government officials, and trainings in skills like talking to the media and filing pollution complaints with the city.

The free store starts to address some of the immediate, daily needs for things like clothing and healthy food, which might prevent residents from engaging politically. It seems tiny in comparison with the industrial behemoth that’s so close. But it represents a critical shift towards mutual aid and self-sufficiency, an alternative to the feelings of helplessness that have long been dominant here.

By creating a space where neighbors can come together to take control of their own needs, organizers hope they’ll pave the way for deeper empowerment.

After a small rally and march last year, two activists from the Gulf Coast locked themselves to trucks entering a Valero facility in Manchester and launched a 45-day hunger strike, demanding that Valero divest from the Keystone XL pipeline. For now, the people risking arrest in these actions remain outsiders -- U.S. citizens with greater access to resources and support. For many locals who struggle with supporting families under already difficult conditions, civil disobedience isn’t an option.

For Nieto, though, it’s about “building the support from people that I’ve known all my life.” Residents are mistrustful of even the most well-intentioned outsiders. That puts Nieto and the small handful of other young people from Manchester in a unique position to create change from the inside.


A critical position

The Alberta tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline have taken on a monumental significance for the North American environmental movement. It’s not just another pipeline; former NASA climate scientist James Hansen famously referred to it as “the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” In February, it was a rallying point for the largest demonstration on climate change in U.S. history. Over 60,000 people have already signed a pledge to engage in civil disobedience should the final leg of the pipeline be approved.

East Houston man pickets pipeline.

If that happens, almost all of the tar sands crude that flows through Keystone will be processed at refineries in East Houston. Activists from Tar Sands Blockade say that Valero has contract rights with TransCanada, which will allow them to purchase up to three-quarters of Keystone’s capacity. Tar sands crude oil is much more toxic than regular crude, and contains 11 times more sulfur and nickel, and five times more lead.

That puts neighborhoods like Manchester in a critical position not only to affect the future of the pipeline -- and by extension the fight against climate change -- but to raise environmental justice issues around race and class into the national conversation.

After decades in the shadow of the refineries, Ship Channel residents have the potential to play a major role in the debate. The political pressure around Keystone might be just big enough to catalyze both residents and public officials to change the composition of the air in East Houston and the carbon in our atmosphere.

What’s more, East Texas is the belly of the beast: the heart of America’s oil country and the seat of power for the fossil fuels industry. Juan Parras of TEJAS says he tells national environmental groups concerned about climate change to get involved in Manchester. “Because if you can fight them here,” he says, “and beat them to the punch, it’s going to have a huge impact on the rest of the nation.”

But Parras also worries that spotlighting Keystone will allow the media to forget the myriad other issues faced by residents of Manchester -- that even if the pipeline is stopped, public attention will move on, and local people will still be dealing with polluted air, cancer and asthma, and the poverty that makes it impossible to leave.

Yudith Nieto, through her activism, has started to travel. She has met organizers from places all along Keystone’s path, including indigenous people from the Alberta tar sands.

Meeting them only deepened her sense of shared destiny, she says, the sense that she and her neighbors are not alone. “It put everything else into perspective,” she says. “This has been going on for such a long time. I became an ally to those people, and they became allies to me.”

Keystone is a threat to the health of communities along its path, from the source in Alberta to the terminus in Texas. But it also presents a challenge, and an opportunity, for those communities to realize what they have in common and make their voices heard. What’s at stake is not only the air quality in East Houston, but the stability of the climate across the planet.

This article was originally published by YES! Magazine and distributed by Truthout under a Creative Commons License.

[Kristin Moe writes for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media project that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Kristin writes about climate, grassroots movements and social change. Follow her on Twitter @yo_Kmoe.]

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Bruce Melton : Calling all Earthlings

Alien beings emerge from “What Was Once Lake Buchanan” as the water level falls. Photos by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.

Calling all earthlings:
Climate change communications
may as well be from aliens

Relative to most of the 20th century, Austin’s January highs and lows were not 2.9 and 1.4 degrees above normal, but 9.9 and 10.4 degrees above normal!

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2013

AUSTIN -- Average temperatures have risen rapidly at the Austin reporting station since the turn of the century but the National Weather Service’s 30-year average “normal” temperatures show little of this change yet. Average April highs and lows have risen 3.5 and 5 degrees respectively. The average August temperature has risen 5 degrees and the average January high and low has risen 6 and 9 degrees respectively.

Because the National Weather Service’s 30-year averaging procedures mask this recent rapid warming, a valuable tool in climate change communications lies unused.

We Earthlings who are not climate scientists do not have the telepathic powers necessary to understand how our climate is truly changing. Someone must tell us directly. Local temperature change is a prime example. We've heard a lot of “warmer than normal” since about the turn of the century, but when the details get broken down, accuracy falls behind.

Climate change is so far different from what most of us think that a change in communication tactics must happen very soon; otherwise we will continue on this business as usual path of denial and delay until we have a global climate catastrophe that cripples the world’s economy.

The challenge is akin to that frog in a pot on the stove. This is a terribly cruel “cooked alive” analogy, but is it any more cruel than what we are doing to our future society because of delay on climate pollution action? As the analogy goes, the water in the pot gradually heats, the frog does not notice until it is too hot and he is dinner.

Climate change is insidious. The definition of insidious fits the process well. Insidious: proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects; working in a subtle or apparently innocuous way, but nevertheless deadly. It has snuck up on us because it only changes a little bit every year. It is already creating dangerous impacts to our society on a planetary scale, yet we as that society know very little of these impacts.

The way the weather is presented to us is one of the major reasons for our ignorance. There are many things that our media weather presenters could do that would help us Earthlings understand climate a truckload better than we do, but one stands atop the heap. Every 10 years the National Weather Service (NWS) refigures their “normal temperatures” that we hear on the weather report every day. They look back to the previous 30 years for these calculations. So every ten years, the averages change a little bit. In 2010, the averages were refigured for the period 1980 to 2010. In 2000 they were refigured for 1970 to 2000, etc.

This is fine and dandy when our climate is stable. Our climate has changed a lot lately and this technique masks the changes. The process is designed on purpose to mask relatively short term weather changes (less than 30 years) because traditional meteorology acknowledges that short term chaos in weather does not reflect “climate.”

But in our carbon-saturated 21st century new rules have arrived. Climate scientists warned us for decades that their models said an abrupt climate change would occur if we did not begin to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases. Instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we ignored this counsel and almost doubled our emissions. Not surprisingly, this abrupt change is now happening and 20th century meteorology is hiding the abrupt change in its 30-year temperature averages.


Urban heat island

Before I go further, let me address the urban heat island because the temperature records I am talking about could be influenced by the heat island. This is one of the biggest of the perceived controversies in the so-called debate, and rightly so. Anyone who has driven into or out of the city on a cool night has experienced the extra heat that is absorbed by concrete and buildings in urban areas.

Climate scientists (not meteorologists) correct for the heat island by looking at rural weather stations surrounding urban areas and applying a correction factor to the urban records. The corrected global average temperature change, what is presented to us by the media as the effects of climate change, are corrected for the urban heat island. But the everyday weather stats presented to us on teevee are not.

In the last several years climate scientists have even begun to use satellite images of night lights to help locate those truly rural weather stations that they use for their corrections. Time goes on. Science moves ahead. We get more accurate information as a result (most of the time).

NASA brings us night vision satellites for a deeper look at our planet. Climate scientists use these “nightlight” images to help correct for the urban heat island effect in their average global temperature records. Shown is a crop of the Texas coast. Houston, Corpus, Brownsville, San Antonio, and Austin are the largest masses of lights. New in the last several years however is an odd crescent of lights that run from southwest of San Antonio to the northeast. These lights are all oil rigs drilling the Eagle Ford Shale in the latest oil fracking boom. The white spots in the Gulf are oil platforms.

To bring the heat island effect into perspective for the historic average temperature records that I want to discuss for the Austin Mabry station, we need to understand how the heat island has historically impacted the weather recording station in Austin. To do this is easy enough in a generalized way. Simplistically, all we have to do is compare the historic average temperature in Austin to population growth. If the urban heat island is impacting the weather station, the temperature should rise as does the population.

Average Temperature and Population for Austin Texas 1900 to 2012. All weather stations are different. Some respond more adversely to the urban heat island effect than others. Austin’s is one that does not show a lock-step similarity in the urbanization/heat island effect. If it did, it is quite likely that the local average temperature would have continued to rise in the late 1950s as Austin’s local population began to soar.

This is by no means a scientific evaluation, but it does shed light on the issue of the heat island, at least relative to the official temperature record for Austin. The red line shows our rapid population growth and the blue is the average annual temperature. I will not deny that the heat island effect is strong in Austin, but to say that the heat island effect is strong “at the weather station” in Austin is a different animal altogether.

Weather stations are set up by design to minimize the influence of the surrounding geography on the temperature measured at the weather station. It can be blisteringly hot in the middle of a giant asphalt parking lot but just a couple of hundred feet away in the middle of a grass covered ball field, or in a forested area for sure, the temperature can be much cooler.

The techniques used to assure that weather station thermometers record an accurate temperature have been refined for over 200 years. Some places still need to be adjusted though, so these techniques are being ever-more refined as is the case with the nightlight satellite imagery.

What the numbers are telling us about the average temperature for April (1948 through 2012) at the Austin Mabry Station are:

• The NWS 30-year average high and low April temperatures have warmed 2 and 2.5 degrees respectively since the 1980s, but
• The 10-year high and low April temperatures have warmed 3.5 and 5.5 degrees respectively.

The 2 to 2.5 degrees of warming in 30 years may just be normal climate fluctuations (probably not), but the 10-year changes are likely what climate scientists have been warning us would happen. This is the abrupt climate change that their models have been predicting for a generation. As we continue to use the 30-year averages without effectively communicating our current temperatures relative to the normal temps of the last century, our frog is being cooked without our realizing it.

The warnings have been that at some point the “lag” in climate change would catch up to greenhouse gas concentrations and we would begin to see a rapid rise in temperature. This “lag” is generally considered to be two to several or more decades. In other words, today’s temperatures are what they are because of greenhouse gas levels in our sky from the 1980s, not greenhouse gas levels in the sky today.

Since 1980, the carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere has increased from about 335 ppm to about 397 ppm. Between the mid-1800s and 1980 the CO2 concentration increased from about 280 ppm to 335 ppm. So we have doubled the amount of greenhouse gases in our sky since the 1980s.

Because of the climate lag, we have another 4 degrees F or more of warming already built into our climate -- even if we were to stop emitting all greenhouse gasses this instant. This “lag” is caused mainly by the cooling effect of the oceans. Who in Texas hasn’t enjoyed a wonderfully cool summer day at the beach when just a few dozen miles away it was a sizzling 100 degrees?


Flattening temperature myth

Let me address another huge myth now. This is the “Flattening Temperature Myth.” Some would have us believe that Earth stopped warming about the turn of the century, and if we look at the temperature record it looks like this is a valid statement -- but we must understand the context. This flattening is simply a product of the massive high temperature record set with the Super El Niño of 1998. Erase that 1998 Super El Niño record and global temperature has not “flattened” at all.

The thermometer record has experienced two major flattening trends: from the late 1800s (end of the Little Ice Age) to the 1920s and then from the 1940s to about 1980. The current flattening is a product of the great Super El Niño of 1998. If we remove the Super El Niño from the record, the flattening trend that remains is similar to many more “flat” periods in the thermometer record other than just the two mentioned.

Austin’s average temperature record does not have a giant high temperature spike in 1998 so this myth does not float in this boat. And for Austin’s record to be different from the global record is quite normal. Some places will warm more than others and some places (a very few) will even cool a bit, at least for a while.

Abrupt climate change is here, it has caught up with the lag, and from here on it’s toast or be toasted. The models have been quite accurate so far and they tell us that things continue to get worse even faster. It's the 10-year averages that are important now because climate changes like we are now undergoing -- abrupt climate changes -- happen far faster than 30-year time frames. It is time that we recognize this not only in the media, but in the science as well. Things change, we live, we learn and then apply that new knowledge to life. If we don’t, we is frog legs.

In the last 100,000 years, based on highly accurate temperature records from Greenland ice two miles deep, we have seen 23 abrupt climate changes where global temperature changed up to a dozen degrees F in as little as several decades or less. The ice shows the biggest of these changes, that happened when climate was being forced the fastest, happened (in Greenland at least) in several years or less. Remember two things now: warming over land is twice or more what it is over water and we are changing our carbon dioxide concentration 14,000 times faster than anytime normal in the climate record in the last 610,000 years.

So, because climate change impacts have skyrocketed since the turn of the century (Greenland melt, Arctic melt, Antarctic melt, increasing sea level rise, forest impacts, and here in Austin, record drought and wildfires) we need to be looking at non-traditional climate averages, not the 30-year averages of 20th century climate. This is no longer our old climate. It has changed and is rapidly changing further.

Greenwood acres Pier on Lake Buchanan.

The new normal

January’s averages are even more astounding. Climate scientists have been telling us their models show more warming in winter and more warming at night in winter. Since the 1980s, the 30-year NWS highs and lows at Austin Mabry have warmed 4 and 2.5 degrees respectively but the 10-year highs and lows have warmed 6 and 9 degrees! Do you remember hearing any of this on the nightly weather report?

When the weather person says the weather today should be exactly normal, there's a large inaccuracy in his or her statement. In January in Austin, the NWS normal low today is almost 10 degrees warmer than what it was in the 1980s! But J.Q. Citizen goes about his business thinking that the weather is as normal as normal is normal.

The NWS tells us that January’s (2013 average) high was 2.9 degrees above normal and the low was 1.4 degrees above normal. But this is the NWS 30-year average. Relative to most of the 20th century, Austin’s January highs and lows were not 2.9 and 1.4 degrees above normal, but 9.9 and 10.4 degrees above normal!

This is one of the simplest and likely most effective techniques to educate the public about climate change. Our media weather presenters simply need to talk about it. They need to talk about it all the time. This information is endlessly available to the meteorologists who give us the forecast every night, but ferretting out these statistics and reporting them is not something they are accustomed to doing.

Almost everything of importance in the weather is based on long-term averages. With abrupt climate change, these averages need to be seriously reconsidered. Our climate is no longer stable. Why should we be using statistics that are based on a stable climate?

Please try and talk with your local weather information source and tell them that it is their responsibility to inform the public of this kind of information. It’s time to kick the delayers off the island and get along with the solutions to climate pollution.

It’s OK to start talking about climate change. It’s important that we get this moving. The delayers are now among the minority. The number of people offended by actively discussing climate issues is diminishing rapidly. And besides, we the “believers” now have a majority of votes -- even in Texas.

[Bruce Melton, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, as well as more climate change writing, climate science outreach, and critical environmental issue documentary films can be found on his website and at climatediscovery.com. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]

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