Brennan Cavanaugh

The magnetic lure of Occupy Wall Street is irresistible, and I went down for the first time this weekend to see it for myself. The first thing that struck me is the way in which environmental themes have crept into these protests since they began three weeks ago. People are connecting the dots.

Near the Cortland Street subway station, two young women were handing out free copies of the second issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal. Smack in the middle of the front page photo was a Friends of the Earth banner. After that, I began to count the signs. I especially liked the one that said "The Earth is Not Your Ashtray." But the single most frequent theme was "Ban Hydrofracking" (mixed in with a few less polite ones that said "F*** Fracking"). The second most prominent demand was for a nuclear-free, low-carbon future. A group of people walked around in white radiation suits stenciled on the back with a demand to shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant, 40 miles up the Hudson River from where we were standing.

The second thing that struck me is that, with the exception of the radiation suits, most of the people crammed into Zuccotti Square (formerly known as Liberty Plaza) were in shirtsleeves, T-shirts, or tank tops. The reason being that it was pushing 85 degrees, close to the all-time record for New York in the second week of October. As we watch these protests evolve and grow, one big question is how long they will last. Which will catch up with them first: an eviction notice from the park’s private owners, enforced by police action? Loss of momentum and motivation (I don’t think so)? Sanitation? Or plummeting temperatures? -- which leads inevitably to the question of what kind of winter we will have. Will it continue abnormally warm, or will it be a continuation of the last two winters, the two coldest back-to-back seasons in a quarter-century? (That question, by the way, explains why I prefer the term "climate disruption" to "global warming," for the benefit of those who still find it incongruous that a warming planet can actually leave us shivering at certain times of the year.)

The European Union (which had an even worse time of it last winter than we did) came out last week with its annual report on greenhouse gas emissions in its 27 member states. Those emissions climbed by 2.4 percent in 2010, the biggest annual jump in 20 years. Part of this was to be expected, given the recession-driven decline in economic activity in 2009 and partial rebound in 2010. But the largest reason for the increase was brutal winter temperatures, which led to a greater demand for heating in households, stores, and offices. The fiercer the cold, the higher the emissions, with increases in the worst-affected Nordic and Baltic countries such as Finland and Estonia rising by as much as 20 percent. The only comfort was that the numbers would have been even worse without the steady growth in Europe of renewable energy generation and its reduced reliance on coal in favor of natural gas.

The really big surprise, however, came in an E.U. public opinion survey conducted in June, again in all 27 member countries. Top finding: even as a double-dip recession looms, Europeans consider climate change a more serious problem than the global economic crisis, which makes nonsense of the conventional wisdom that people have stopped caring about global warming because the grievous state of the economy has swept all other concerns aside.

Conventional wisdom in the United States, that is. Texas, in a sense, is our Estonia -- except that the problem has been both extreme wintertime cold and extreme summertime heat (repeat after me: climate disruption). That has made the carbon outcome even worse, with people sprawled out under their air conditioners as well as huddled by their firesides. Paint Creek, the now-celebrated home of Texas Governor Rick Perry, had 84 100-degree days this summer; the record, however, seems to be held by Brownwood, just south of Abilene, which suffered through an incredible 109 100-degree days. Crank up the A/C.

The predictable result was a severe strain on the Texas transmission grid, 75 percent of which is served by the largest power operator in the state, ERCOT. In early August, ERCOT declared a power emergency when demand reached an unprecedented 68,000 megawatts. To put that figure in perspective, that’s the combined output of 100 average-size coal-fired power plants.

Now here’s what is truly perverse. Texas has more coal-fired plants than any other state (and many of the dirtiest ones); it is the country’s highest emitter of greenhouse gases; and it is the only state whose attorney general has resolved to defy new EPA rules to control CO2 emissions from power plants.  And one of the state’s (and ERCOT’s) principal arguments for opposing these federal regulations? That they will reduce the output of coal-fired power, which Texas needs urgently to deal with extreme weather conditions, which are caused at least in part by greenhouse gas emissions, which come most notoriously from coal-fired power plants. We hear a lot about climate-induced feedback loops in the physical world: how the melting of Arctic ice, for example, reduces the reflective power of the earth’s surface, which leads to the absorption of more heat by the darker water of the oceans, which leads to faster melting. Texas is a dramatic example of the human feedback loops that climate disruption also produces.

If an early cold snap drives the protesters away from Zuccotti Square, there will no doubt be loud cheers in Washington, D.C., many of them from the same types who like to build igloos outside the Capitol during snowstorms to deride global warming as a hoax. These are the same people who tell us incessantly about American exceptionalism. To be honest, they should have nothing to worry about: they are exceptional -- exceptionally out of step with the rest of the world, as well as with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, whose connecting of the dots looks smarter by the minute.