Department: The Edge

Game Over for Climate? Let's Hope for Extra Innings

George Black — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:38:09 +0000

James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the grand old man of the debate on global warming, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times last week that attracted a good bit of chatter. Its title was “Game Over for Climate,” an allusion to the consequences of Canada continuing to exploit its filthy tar sands and the United States doing nothing to stop it. Everything Hansen says or writes merits respect, but what struck me most about this piece was the absolute, unmitigated bleakness of his vision of the future. Pretty much every dark prophecy you can imagine -- unlivable temperatures, disintegration of the ice sheets, mass species extinction, human civilization at risk, etc. -- was wrapped up here into a mere 942 words (I counted).

Word for word, I couldn’t quibble with anything he said, and all of it, as far as I know, is backed up by the peer-reviewed work of 97 percent of climate scientists (that’s the figure journalists have taken to using recently, even though many of them continue to report on “both sides” under the questionable doctrine of equal time). Nor do I question for a moment that the tar sands, and particularly the Keystone XL pipeline, is a fight of historic importance.

The question, however, is how to bring more warm (and influential) bodies to that fight, and to the climate wars in general. Because right now, despite the truly heroic work of Bill McKibben and others, there just aren’t enough of them. And that’s why I wished that Hansen had left his op-ed in his drafts folder. The truth is that by the time I got to the end of it, I felt like the only thing to do was switch off all the lights and head for the nearest ledge. And I’m not one of those in need of conversion.

However, on the same day that I read Hansen’s jeremiad, I also read -- belatedly, I admit, because it was first published six weeks ago -- an article that gave me real hope. And the really interesting thing is that the author is a Republican, a Christian, the father of a Navy fighter pilot, a fiscal conservative, an opponent of big government and excessive regulation, and an unapologetic fan of Bill O’Reilly and John McCain. Perhaps most important, he’s also a meteorologist. His name is Paul Douglas.

Douglas directs a lot of well-deserved zingers at his obscurantist fellow Republicans and their “scientific superstitions and political fairy tales.” But the core of his argument is drawn from his 36 years as a radio and TV weatherman. The zany weather has become a staple of water-cooler conversation in the past year, of course, and it has the potential to become a game-changer in the climate debate. We know that public opinion is shifting, as it becomes harder and harder to deny the connection between climate change and extreme weather. In a widely publicized April 18 Knowledge Networks poll [pdf], 72 percent of respondents said that they “strongly agreed” or “somewhat agreed” that global warming was a factor in the freakishness of this past winter.

This is a remarkable shift, and I’m pretty sure that people are in motion not because they’re reading the latest report on the subject from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or because they’re galvanized by Hansen’s apocalyptic visions of future dust bowls and the collapse of agriculture in California’s Central Valley. It’s not because of what they’re abstractly fearing, but because of what they’re actually experiencing. That’s what changes people’s minds.

Douglas’s article excited me for several reasons. First, because he’s a weatherman, and even if he gets the forecast wrong sometimes, that guy standing in front of the big map on TV enjoys a high level of public trust and has a lot of influence in people’s everyday lives and decisions. More than that, a recent survey by a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin found that 93 percent of TV stations that employ a weathercaster do not have a dedicated science reporter. The house meteorologist makes an excellent proxy.

Second, because his argument focuses on tangible present-day realities and not on terrifying future scenarios -- 129,404 weather records in one year; 6,895 in one week in March alone, with some towns experiencing temperatures from 30 to 45 degrees above the seasonal average.

Third, because he understands and uses the language that will be most effective in conveying his message. Above all, he knows the value of homespun metaphor in demystifying complex questions such as the exact linkages between climate and specific weather events. Was Hurricane Katrina the direct result of global warming? Or that scorching weekend that brought out the June bugs in your garden six weeks ahead of schedule? No one can say. But Douglas picks up on a comparison that a smart climate scientist made a few months ago -- that global warming is to weather as steroids are to baseball. “You can’t prove that any one of Barry Bonds’s 762 home runs was sparked by (alleged) steroid use,” Douglas writes. “But it did increase his 'base state,' raising the overall odds of hitting a home run.”

Bring it home, make it personal. That’s the lesson of all politics, in a sense, and it’s why the weather has the potential to make this a whole new ballgame, so to speak. We see the principle at work every time public opinion shifts on a vital issue, gay marriage being a quintessential example. Why has there been such a dramatic shift in public attitudes (bans in 30 states notwithstanding)? Because for tens of millions of people, it’s finally become personal. If it’s your daughter who can’t marry her sweetheart, or your neighbor who isn’t allowed into the hospital room to be with his dying life-partner, the issue is no longer remote or abstract. It’s a visceral part of your everyday reality. And you trust not only the message but the messenger.

So it is -- or should be -- with climate. The minds we need now won’t be changed by an IPCC report or an op-ed by Jim Hansen. But if your alfalfa crop shrivels and dies from the drought, or the insurer won’t go on covering the risk to your beach house, or, God forbid, your kids are killed when a hurricane blows down your trailer park -- well, that’s personal. And if the underlying logic of it is explained by someone you trust? Imagine meteorologists from all over the country, in every small media market, all banding together to sing the same tune. Perhaps, to paraphrase the old Dylan song, we really do need the weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

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Warning: Nature Shows Not Suitable for Nature Lovers

George Black — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 19:25:17 +0000

By George Black

I went to a bar with a friend the other night, one of those old-fashioned street-corner Irish dives that you still find in New York, specializing in draft Guinness and raucous conversation. In the men’s room, there was a poster depicting two over-muscled characters in imposing body armor. It was advertising something called Knights of Mayhem (the title was in Gothic script) which I assumed was just another new computer-generated action movie in the tradition of Wrath of the Titans. Then I looked at the small print: a National Geographic Channel production.

National Geographic? The folks who bring us the wonders of the Serengeti and the amazing world of big cats? I was intrigued enough to go online to see what other shows the channel was offering these days. Don’t get me wrong: National Geographic, like public television, still makes gorgeous documentaries, such as the highly acclaimed Great Migrations. But its current listings also include things like Beast Hunter, Python Hunters, Shark Men, Swamp Men, and Stormageddon.

This isn’t an isolated development, it turns out. Much the same thing is happening with programming on nature, environment, and wilderness topics across the cable TV spectrum, no matter how distinguished or how sleazy the pedigree of the particular broadcaster. The Discovery Channel, which began life as a bona fide competitor to PBS in the field of serious docs, spends a lot of its time now hanging out with hunky men with three-day stubble as they master the world’s toughest natural environments. The World’s Toughest Trucker hurtles across the waterless Australian Outback and slithers around ice-bound precipices in the Himalayas. In The Deadliest Catch, Alaska fishermen do constant nailbiting battle with the Perfect Storm, which seems to occur up there on a weekly basis. There’s Man vs. Wild, Out in the Wild, Hogs Gone Wild… in fact the word wild crops up in the title of five different shows. Clearly it market-tests well.

Animal Planet, meanwhile, which was launched as a documentary project with the BBC as a partner, now serves up Gator Boys, Call of the Wildman, and Skunk Whisperer, in addition to Animal Planet Extreme and My Extreme Animal Phobia. (The word extreme should probably be stricken from Webster’s at this point, having become such an advertising cliché that we now have to contend with newer variants such as extreem, extreeme, and xtreme. Perhaps Xtreme Power Stick deodorant is what all those tough truckers use.)

Not to say all this man-conquers-nature stuff is exactly new. Theologians may continue to debate the exact meaning of the original Hebrew, but the entrenched view (certainly in the Republican Party) is still that the King James version of Genesis, I:28, which urges us to "have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth," should be taken literally.

There’s always been a good bit of shock and awe along the way, of course. Violent struggle -- human versus the elements, human against animal, predator and prey -- is an intrinsic part of the drama.

In pop culture, the forms have changed over time. Men have always grappled with hostile creatures and boasted about their size. The celebrated explorer-writer-radio show host of the 1920s and 1930s, F. A. Mitchell-Hedges, who may have been the inspiration for the character of Indiana Jones, wrote a bestseller with one of my all-time favorite titles: Battles with Giant Fish. Now we have Python Hunters and Shark Men. (Men being the operative word: note the absence of gator girls and swamp women in my informal survey.)

We have also always loved the vicarious thrill of observing nature in all its redness of tooth and claw. When I was a kid in Britain, one of the most celebrated TV nature shows featured a Belgian scientist called Armand Denis and his blonde British wife Michaela, who looked a bit like Grace Kelly. Off we would all go on safari, and when we got there the heavily accented and much-parodied Armand would sit for hours in a baobab tree with his telephoto lenses until the magic moment when he could say, Und heer vee see a leopard engaged in a laife-or-deass shtruggle viss a helpless wildebeest.

But something fundamental has changed: we’ve kept the thrills but we’re losing the story. I don’t want to idealize those old books and TV and radio shows, because they carried cultural baggage that would make us cringe today. When Mitchell-Hedges traipsed off to do battle with the sharks of Central America, for instance, he would also deliver pep talks about the need for military dictators to keep the rowdy locals in line. When we went on safari with Armand and Michaela, it was usually in the company of faithful native bearers and their titillatingly bare-breasted wives. Even so, these travelers knew that their job was to tell us a story, one with context, history, a narrative arc. And the Belgian-British couple actually spoke passable Swahili.

I’m not saying the great environmental documentary is dead -- we will no doubt get more things like David Attenborough’s incomparable Planet Earth; the independently produced Koyaanisqatsi (a Hopi word meaning "life out of balance"), with its Philip Glass score; or the French-made Microcosmos, the extraordinary close-up study of the everyday lives of insects. But in places like Animal Planet, the barbarians are definitely storming the gates. When that channel announced its makeover in 2008, the logic was pretty overt: it said it wanted "an image with more bite … to tap into humans’ basic instincts." As one astute commentator on cable TV remarked at the time, "Think of it as swapping a drab narrator saying that a lion is about to kill its prey for the blood-curdling scream of the doomed creature as it meets its demise." Don’t expect any more Attenboroughs on that channel.

I’ll continue to hope that the better angels at National Geographic hold the line. Otherwise what we’ll be left with is the environmental equivalent of the baseball highlight reel: none of the longueurs, subtle tactical maneuvers, and intimate dramas of the three-hour game, just a pulse-pounding music track and an endless succession of diving catches, strikeouts, and home runs. Think of it as nature porn.

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The (Deposed) Island President: Q&A with Mohammed Nasheed

George Black — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:03:37 +0000

By George Black

For a man who was tossed out of office by a police and military revolt less than two months ago, former President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives seems positively ebullient, determined to dramatize the dangers of climate change just as passionately as a citizen activist as he did as a head of state.

First a quick recap: Nasheed’s country is an idyllic archipelago of more than a thousand islands off the southwestern coast of India, surrounded by pristine beaches and turquoise waters, with a population of a little more than 300,000, most of them Sunni Muslims. The highest elevation in the Maldives is about eight feet above sea level. Because of climate change, it may be literally be the first nation in the world to go under the waves.

For 30 years the country was ruled by an ostensibly “elected” strongman, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. For the second half of Gayoom’s rule, Nasheed was like a democratic dog snapping at his ankles, an outspoken human rights advocate who was jailed several times, spent 14 months incommunicado on the tiny prison island of Gamaadhoo, and was adopted by Amnesty International as a Prisoner of Conscience. Then, astonishingly, he defeated Gayoom in 2008 in the country’s first-ever multiparty election. Within a matter of weeks, he had declared his goal of making the Maldives the world’s first carbon-neutral nation, eliminating its heavy dependency on imported diesel, on which it relies for most of its energy (as well as for its drinking water, via desalination). By the end of 2009, it’s fair to say that Nasheed had become the most celebrated of all national leaders on climate change, particularly through his role in the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).

A new documentary about Nasheed, The Island President, premieres today in New York City. Much of it is devoted to a rare behind-the-scenes look at the horse-trading over an elusive agreement at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009. Variety calls the movie “inspiring” and the Hollywood reviews and gossip site Awardsdaily.com says it is “beautifully shot, heartbreakingly real,” adding that it “plays more like a thriller and less like a doomsday warning.” All the early reviews agree on one thing -- that this is a man of extraordinary charisma. That’s the first thing that strikes you when you meet him, as I did today, a few hours before the movie opened -- that, his youthfulness (he’s in his mid-forties, but could easily pass for thirty), and his impatience with the compromised language of conventional diplomacy.

People say that a big part of your appeal is that you don’t play by the normal diplomatic rules.

Well, what have the rules of diplomacy done for the specific situation we face? Last month there was a coup in the Maldives. But the United States and India were unable to understand what was happening. What’s to understand? The coup was live on TV! The problem with normal diplomacy is that it just wants to maintain the status quo.

I’m guessing you see a parallel there to the rules of diplomacy as they were practiced in Copenhagen.

People don’t want to move away from what’s comfortable. They like things the way they are. They come to the talks, they go home to their beautiful wife and their kids. They have no passion. You can’t express your concerns openly in the normal language of diplomacy. You lose sight of the bigger picture, so you develop short-sighted solutions. Your diplomacy is played out according to the text messages you’re getting from certain industries.

[extended_sidebar]

A lot of people saw Copenhagen as a failure, a kind of negative watershed.

I didn’t see it that way. There were a number of very good decisions taken there. We got an agreement, the Copenhagen Accord. And when you have an agreement, you move on to the details. The COP 17 meeting in Durban in December was about solidifying what we did in Copenhagen. Even so, all these meetings are so long-winded and silly.

Which means there are built-in limits to what you can accomplish?

Yes, of course, even if you reach an agreement, it can be so diluted that it isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. People always look for the lowest common denominator. But I like to say that you can’t cut a deal with Mother Nature; you can’t negotiate with the laws of physics. So when you think about it, I suppose the idea of negotiating a climate treaty is kind of silly.

Assuming you accept the science, of course, which a lot of people in this country don’t.

Well, it’s not like that in Asia. Take India, which is our neighbor. India too makes arguments about climate that are silly -- like saying to the developed countries, you did it, you’ve brought us to the brink, now we’re going to do it. But they don’t question the science. Asian politicians tend to regard science as something very sacred. You spend your life educating yourself about such things. No one ridicules the science. We find that idea quite strange.

Does that mean you have a good working relationship with India?

Yes, and we’re getting to a closer alignment. India may not be able to agree on limiting its CO₂ emissions, but it’s taken some very good measures on renewables. As we continue the conversation, I think we’ll find India aligning more closely with the Europeans than with other big emerging nations like China and Brazil.

What happens to the Alliance of Small Island States now that you’re gone?

Obviously I don’t want to name individuals, but there are some very good people in the smaller countries, so I hope someone will take up the mantle. Of course, whoever that is, it’s very difficult to speak up against the bigger powers. We have to find narratives that don’t irritate them. Which brings us back to that silliness we were talking about earlier.

Sometimes people can actually be more influential when they’re out of power. I’m thinking of Al Gore, for example. Do you think that might happen with you?

There’s a lot of work for me to do at home now. I still live in the Maldives, and fortunately, I feel safe because I have a lot of people around me for protection. The Maldives is special, because it captures people’s imagination. It’s the romance, the delicacy of the country. It’s paradise, and we’re going to lose it. Someone has to bring moral authority to saying these things, and it has to be a democrat. You can’t say these things about climate if you’re some bloody dictator.

But your predecessor, Gayoom, was talking to the UN about climate change decades ago.

Yes, but his words didn’t resonate. He had too many skeletons in his closet. If the new president [Mohammed Waheed Hassan] goes out and talks about climate change, the first question will be, when are you going to hold elections? You have to be democratic to be credible.

I sense there’s a kind of convergence going on everywhere right now -- you see it in the buildup to the Rio+20 meeting in June, for example -- between environmentalism, democracy, and social justice.

Look, to have the planet, to have people, you must have democracy. We’re a Muslim country, so I think about the Arab Spring. I’ve been telling people in places like Egypt and Tunisia that to have climate advocacy you must have human rights. All democratic movements are going to have a climate change track, and that will bring more fuel to any future deal we reach on climate.

How does that apply to the immediate problems you’re facing in the Maldives?

If we’re going to protect ourselves against sea-level rise we’re going to need all kinds of adaptation programs, for example consolidating our urban centers. For which of course you need money. We’d introduced a higher corporate tax, a goods and service tax, to pay for some of this, which of course is part of the reason why business turned against us. Now the new government is talking about reducing those taxes again, which will undermine our ability to respond to climate change. So you see, it’s all about democracy. We’re still stuck with this 19^th century idea of politics. For me, your new statesman is also going to have to be an activist.

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Dirty Industry, Dirty Fight

George Black — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 15:33:25 +0000

By George Black

Bad, bad week for Big Coal, epitomized by the announcements Wednesday that two big utilities, Midwestern Generation and GenOn Energy, are to close ten coal-fired power plants in the Northeast and the Midwest, including two within the Chicago city limits.

For Massey Energy and the giant company that owns it, Alpha Natural Resources, the news was even worse. The name Massey will probably ring a bell. It’s the colossus of the Central Appalachian coalfields, and in a dirty industry it has a particularly dirty reputation, both for its fondness for tearing off the tops of mountains and for its conduct below ground. Most of its active mines are in West Virginia, and that’s where the Upper Big Branch Mine is located, in the town of Montcoal.

Twenty-nine miners died in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch in April 2010, an event now firmly inscribed in the ledger of great industrial disasters, up there with New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, in which more than 100 garment workers burned, jumped, or fell to their deaths. (That of course was in the bad old days -- or good old days, depending on how you look at it -- when industry didn’t have to worry about pesky government regulations.)

But even Big Coal is subject to the law these days. Last week, U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin filed charges of criminal conspiracy against mine superintendent Gary May, alleging that he had "plotted with others known and unknown" to conceal lethal hazards at the Upper Big Branch. A former security chief at the mine, Hughie Elbert Stover, was sentenced Wednesday to a three-year jail term for lying to federal investigators and attempting to destroy company documents by tossing them into a trash compactor.

May is accused, among other things, of deliberately disabling a methane gas monitor and pumping fresh air into sections of the mine to provide a kind of Potemkin Village tour to visiting inspectors from the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration -- an agency to which the word toothless is frequently attached -- who were there to sample levels of airborne coal dust. What makes his prosecution especially interesting is that it may go much higher than May’s pay grade. Eighteen other company officials have already refused to cooperate with investigators, invoking their Fifth Amendment rights. They include Massey’s former CEO, Don Blankenship. (Salary at the time of his resignation in December 2010: $23.7 million. Most remembered quote: "What you have to accept in a capitalist society, generally, is that I always make the comparison it’s like a jungle, where a jungle is the survival of the fittest.")

Alpha bought Massey a year and a half ago, for $7.1 billion, making it the third biggest coal company in the nation, after Peabody Energy and Arch Coal. Coming right after the Upper Big Branch, it always felt like a bizarre piece of timing for an industry battered by image problems and struggling to turn a profit in a tight market. It seemed almost to invite a run of bad karma, and last week appeared to prove the point. Two days after the conspiracy charges were filed against Gary May, Alpha announced staggering fourth-quarter losses of $733.3 million, against revenues of just over $2 billion.

Alpha CEO Kevin Crutchfield accounted for these losses, and announced major cutbacks in the company’s Appalachian mining operations, in a conference call that was full of good things for the connoisseur of black humor. (Opening words: "Alpha continued to demonstrate excellent safety performance since our last earnings call.") Crutchfield followed that with a sober summary of the reasons for the company’s miserable balance sheet: regulatory uncertainty, environmental opposition to new coal-fired power plants, higher production costs for Appalachian coal, fierce competition from natural gas, and the weather. (One byproduct of global warming and weird weather is that people burn less coal in a mild winter like this one. Truly, every cloud has a silver lining.)

But hold the celebrations, and remember that when you have a boxer on the ropes, that’s exactly when you should expect a sucker punch to the kidneys. For the coal industry, that sucker punch has always been jobs. That’s the deal that Massey offered Appalachia for almost a century. Damn black lung, damn the methane, damn the mountaintops; we’re bringing you jobs. Now, Big Coal is again trying to bludgeon its opponents with the same argument -- although this time in a different venue.

Over the past couple of years, the coal industry has become convinced that it has an ace in the hole: the surging Asian market, with its promise of sustained long-term demand. That’s why the big coal companies are hell-bent on building coal export facilities on the Columbia River and the coast of Washington State. And that’s where, from the environmental point of view, this week also brought some bad news.

One of the prime sites for a shipping terminal is in Longview, Washington, where Millennium Bulk Terminals, a subsidiary of the Australian company Ambre Energy, was denied a permit last year after it was found to have lied about the amount of coal it intended to ship from the port -- as much as 60 million tons a year. But as I predicted then, they have not given up. In fact, a day after Gary May’s arraignment and a day before Alpha’s announcement of its fourth-quarter losses, Millennium was back, filing new permit requests for a Longview terminal with local, state, and federal regulators. Worse, at the end of January, despite heavy local opposition, the Port of St. Helens, 30 miles north of Portland, approved requests from Ambre for two new coal export facilities.

This fight is far from settled. These are local permits, and they will all need state and federal approval. But the jobs argument is potent. The numbers in Oregon and Washington are modest -- each terminal will create scores of jobs, not hundreds, and many of them will be temporary construction jobs. But these are depressed communities, and, as we know, we’re talking here about the political third rail in this frail economy.

In announcing Alpha’s losses last week, CEO Kevin Crutchfield said, "By now the headwinds facing U.S. coal producers are well known to most everyone." To those who are tempted to think that this means the battle is won, I have only one piece of advice: remember that this will be a long and dirty fight, and keep those winds blowing.

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Heads Above Water

George Black — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:47:18 +0000

By George Black

Great piece on Fox News the other day. No, really.

It was a two-minute story on Fox’s Colorado affiliate (which is about as close as we get to serious documentaries on a major network these days), about the storm that had just dumped an unseasonable 16 inches of snow on Denver, the heaviest February storm in exactly 100 years. The headline -- "Scientists Research Link Between Extreme Weather and Climate Change" -- had me braced for the usual Fox fare. So did the opening lines from the reporter, Dave Young: "There’s a lot of people who have a hard time buying into the whole global warming thing, especially when they have two feet of snow still sitting in their front yard in early February." But what followed was a pleasant surprise.

The focus of the piece was the University of Colorado, where, Young said, "some of the most important work on climate change" is being done. He started with meteorologist Bob Henson of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, who laid out clearly how a warming atmosphere holds more water vapor and therefore leads to heavier storms. Next up was John Wahr, one of a team of physicists that has spent eight years measuring the loss of ice sheets in the Arctic. The scientists have "found them melting at an alarming rate," Young reported, showing us some satellite maps for greater dramatic effect. Since the study began, four billion tons of water have sluiced into the oceans, enough to cover the entire United States to the depth of one and a half feet and raise global sea levels by roughly half an inch. "Everyone should be worried about this," said Wahr in conclusion.

Now, half an inch may not sound like much if you live in Denver, a mile above sea level and a thousand miles from the ocean. But what I found so interesting about the Fox report was that it shared the headlines that same day with the violent removal of Mohamed Nasheed, the democratically elected president of the Maldives, one of the world epicenters of climate change and extreme weather. The country is an archipelago of 1,192 islands off the southwestern tip of India. A hundred and ninety three of these are inhabited. The total population is 300,000, most of them Sunni Muslims. The highest point in the Maldives is just eight feet above sea level, and the average is closer to four feet, so half an inch is a very big deal, bringing a growing threat of flooding, storm surges, coastal erosion, salination of freshwater supplies, and extreme weather events that will make the Denver snowstorm seem tame. During the 2004 Asian tsunami, the entire country was briefly submerged.

The military and police rebellion against Nasheed was prompted by his attacks on corruption, his purported departure from the principles of conservative Islam, and his arrest of the chief judge of the Maldives criminal court, an alleged crony of the country’s former dictator, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. The new government is stacked with supporters of Gayoom, who was in power for 30 years and was regularly "re-elected" with more than 90 percent of the vote, until Nasheed finally prevailed in a free and fair election in 2008.

Under Gayoom, Nasheed had been famous as a human rights activist. He was jailed repeatedly, and after being subjected to torture and 18 months of solitary confinement, he was adopted by Amnesty International as a Prisoner of Conscience. But after his election, his name became synonymous with action on climate change and a flair for publicity. On one celebrated occasion, to dramatize the problem, he held a cabinet meeting underwater, with the members outfitted in SCUBA gear. The story of Nasheed’s activism is told more fully in a new documentary, The Island President, which was supported in part by the Sundance Institute and the Ford Foundation and is due to open next month in New York. (I learned that from Fox News, too, by the way.)

As developing countries go, the Maldives is not one of the poorest, thanks to high-end tourism, which accounts for 60 percent of foreign exchange earnings. It’s not the kind of tourism that immediately seems to jibe with a leader of Nasheed’s political inclinations, with the likes of Madonna shelling out thousands of dollars a night for hotel rooms in paradise and 2-bedroom beachfront apartments starting at $3 million. But even these excesses have brought the Maldives some surprising environmental benefits. Two years ago, Nasheed announced that the entire nation would become a shark sanctuary. Not only did this lend momentum to the growing international movement to ban shark fishing, it was also a great example of "ecosystem services," the assignment of economic value to the health of the natural environment. According to Australian researchers, a single gray reef shark is worth $3,300 to the Maldivian tourist industry, against the one-time value of $32 that a fisherman would get from catching the shark, cutting off its fin, and selling it to make soup in a Chinese restaurant.

Nasheed steadily built the reputation of the Maldives as a global leader on climate change, together with other tiny island nations such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands, all of which may eventually go the way of Atlantis. All of them belong to AOSIS, the Alliance of Small Island States, and while they may sound like small fry on the world stage -- the four nations together have only about half a million people -- the 39-member AOSIS, which now includes bigger countries like Jamaica, Singapore, and the Dominican Republic, has become a significant voice for the developing world in the international climate debate. Most recently it has called for a "global insurance fund" that would help the most vulnerable nations cope with the worst effects of climate change.

I’ve rarely heard the problem laid out so plainly as it was in an interview with the president of the Maldives in 2008, just after the publication of his book, Paradise Drowning. "Civilization is under serious threat from the continued degradation of the environment and the resulting effects of global warming, climate change, and the rising sea levels. [We] are in the frontline of danger from the rising seas." Except here’s the kicker: it wasn’t Nasheed who said this, but the strongman, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, just before he was turned out of office. Gayoom had been issuing similar warnings about global warming at the UN since the late 1970s.

Truly, we live in interesting times. Fox reporters and a dictator with a taste for conservative Islam both seem to have got the message on global warming. Whatever next: the Republican Party?

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George Black — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:16:15 +0000

By George Black

Listening to President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, I found myself thinking about black carbon -- even though he never once used the phrase. Until recently, in fact, I doubt that many people had even heard of it. Black carbon? Maybe it’s the stuff that’s left over on the barbecue after you’ve finished grilling the hot dogs?

But the reduction of black carbon emissions has suddenly moved to the center of the climate debate -- and the beauty of it is that it’s unnecessary to utter the word climate at all, because getting rid of black carbon brings so many other benefits. Even the egregious John Tierney, who can never resist a swipe at the advocates of a global carbon treaty, has come on board. In his regular column last week in the New York Times, Tierney was one of the many commentators to draw attention to an article about black carbon emissions by two dozen distinguished scientists from around the world in the January 13 issue of Science magazine.

So what is black carbon? The easy shorthand is that it’s soot, and in the developing world it’s largely the product of burning wood, animal dung, or crop residues in primitive cookstoves. It isn’t a greenhouse gas; it comes in the form of countless billions of tiny, dark particles that absorb sunlight -- and that means that the net effect on atmospheric temperatures is much the same. By depositing dark soot on white snow and ice and increasing their absorption of sunlight, black carbon accounts for a substantial amount of the melting of glaciers and ice sheets from the Arctic to the Himalayas. In fact, it accounts for about 18 percent of all global warming emissions, second only to carbon dioxide.

The nastiest thing about this newcomer to the climate debate is that its effects are not limited to the warming of the atmosphere. Visit a poor household in South Asia or Africa, and you’ll see blackened kitchen walls and women choking over the smoke from their stoves. Go to the local clinic, and you’ll find children dying of preventable respiratory diseases. As the authors of the report in Science point out, getting rid of black carbon could save anything from 0.7 to 4.7 million lives a year. And that’s not all. The stoves that generate black carbon also generate ozone, a ground-level pollutant that causes billions of dollars in crop losses in the developing world.

The beauty of eliminating black carbon, then, is that it deals with multiple threats afflicting the developing world, from the long-term loss of water from disappearing glaciers to out-of-control child mortality to declining yields from agriculture. This is where Tierney has to get in his obligatory swipe: environmentalists don’t care about the huddled masses struggling to grow rice, because of their "lack of glamour." The plight of the poor, he says, "is less newsworthy than negotiating a global treaty on carbon at a United Nations conference."

Ah, those glamorous U.N. conferences on climate change! All those long, pre-dawn hours spent wrangling over every comma in resolutions taking note of this, and cognizant of that, and gravely concerned by the other, and calling for steps to facilitate the effective implementation of appropriate mechanisms to… whatever. Personally I’d rather have a root canal.

Tierney’s argument, aside from being spiteful, is based on totally false premises. First of all, why are we worried about climate change in the first place? Because we want the planet to remain habitable. In other words, we want people to have sufficient water, produce food in a sustainable way, and minimize the escalating threats to their health. Second, the decision to take action against black carbon emerged from the highest levels of the climate treaty crowd that Tierney so disdains. At the most recent U.N. climate conference, in Durban, South Africa, in December, the head of the United Nations Environment Programme, Achim Steiner, declared that black carbon would be the centerpiece of the agency’s "fast-action agenda" against climate change.

The most ambitious effort in the world to curtail black carbon emissions is in India, and it grew directly out of conversations between one of the world’s leading climate experts, Veerabhadran Ramanathan (who is also one of the authors of the article in Science), and Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It’s called Project Surya (the word surya means sunlight in Hindi), and it involves the replacement of traditional mud stoves with clean-burning stoves. (I went to see the project just a couple of days after meeting with Pachauri in New Delhi last November, and I’ll be writing more about it in the next issue of OnEarth magazine.)

Ramanathan’s reasons for launching Project Surya, and Pachauri’s enthusiasm for working with him, were twofold. One, Ramanathan is a world-class climate scientist who saw a way of sidestepping the obstacles to a global carbon treaty. (And because black carbon only remains in the atmosphere for a matter of days -- CO₂ lingers for more than 100 years -- getting rid of it brings almost instant results. Two, he’d been haunted since childhood by the image of his grandmother coughing and wheezing over the dung stove in the smoke-blackened kitchen of the family home in South India. Slowing climate change and protecting public health were inseparable goals for him, in other words.

While the president never used the words black carbon on Tuesday night, two things brought it to mind: first, his acknowledgment that, "The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change," and second, the moment when the camera panned briefly across the grim visage of Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the most obdurate of all climate deniers. The beauty of eliminating black carbon is that it can bring a smile even to Inhofe’s face. Because it’s a local matter, and has such obvious humanitarian benefits, it avoids the political third rail of a carbon treaty at the U.N. and legislation in Washington. Surprising as it may seem, Inhofe was one of the co-sponsors of a bipartisan bill in 2009 (on Earth Day, no less!) directing the EPA to study the impact of black carbon emissions on public health and global warming.

So does it matter what words we use? Public health or climate change? Cynics or purists will probably say it does: that talking about dying babies in Asia and Africa is a weasely cop-out, an act of political surrender, an evasion of our responsibility to educate the public about the coming apocalypse. But surely it’s the results that count, and we need to buy as much time as we can to bear down on the ultimate problem of rallying the public, and the world, once and for all against CO₂. Attacking black carbon does that. Public health, climate change: to me, the rose, by either name, smells just as sweet.

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Talking with IPCC Chairman Pachauri about U.S. Climate Action

Climate Change Threatens Health

Cutting Black Carbon -- and Slowing Climate Change -- With Cleaner Cookstoves and Cleaner Diesel

My Top Greenreads of 2011: Good News, Bad News, and a Little Soul-Searching

George Black — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:19:53 +0000

By George Black

In thinking about the best environmental reporting I've read this year, some excellent pieces came to mind on all sorts of topics: food, animals, wilderness, local politics, arcane areas of science. But I'm going to leave those aside, because this was no ordinary year. For environmentalists, 2011 was marked by deep soul-searching and seismic political shifts. So in choosing the most important articles of the year, I'm going to limit myself to those that shed the brightest light on some of the monumental questions we're now facing.

First, has the time come to stop talking about the menace of global warming and how to halt it? We've been hearing this argument a lot lately: climate legislation has drowned in the know-nothing swamp of congressional politics; the search for a global treaty on carbon emissions shuffles along painfully like an arthritic with a walking frame, with no end in sight; the whole topic is just too depressing -- and it may be too late now to do anything about it anyway.

Second, if we do make this shift, where should we devote our energies instead? Reshape the environmental movement by building on campaigns against fossil fuels like the successful (fingers crossed) fight against the Keystone XL pipeline? Use unthreatening language to appeal to heartland audiences that environmentalists have shied away from in the past? Stop thinking about laws and treaties and search instead for the visionary ideas that may yet have the potential to transform the world?

I'll start with the last of these questions. If you're looking for a really big idea, how about building a wall of trees across Africa? That's the subject of Burkhard Bilger's "The Great Oasis: Can a Wall of Trees Stop the Sahara from Spreading?" (New Yorker, December 19 and 26). Full disclosure here: Bilger is my brother-in-law. But that doesn't prevent him from also being a terrific writer, who can turn his hand to just about any topic you can name (high-altitude sky divers, artificial sweeteners, tugboat captains, nuns who make cheese...) He doesn't write about environmental topics as often as I'd like, but when he does they're a typically deft mix of portraiture, fine-grained detail, and intellectual inquiry. By coincidence, just a few weeks before Bilger's piece came out, the consistently excellent Mark Hertsgaard went after the same topic, from a completely different angle, in "A Great Green Wall for Africa" (The Nation, November 21). Read these two as a pair.

If a 3,000-mile wall of trees is a really good big idea, then nuclear power -- still promoted by some people as the magic bullet against climate change -- is a really, really bad one. If the Fukushima disaster didn't convince you of this, pick up the Fall 2011 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, which is devoted to the former Soviet Union. Read about the children of Chernobyl in "The Resurrection," by Maria P. Vassileva, with striking photographs (and an online video) by Maisie Crow, and then turn to the pieces on plutonium smuggling and the legacy of Soviet nuclear tests in Semipalatinsk, and you'll get the picture.

Now back to that first question: should we still be talking about global warming? Grist's David Roberts takes this on in a provocative recent series of blogs entitled "'Brutal Logic' and Climate Communications" (Grist, December 5, 8, and 16). You're unlikely to agree with every word of this (comparing Andy Revkin of the New York Times dot.earth to the Greenpeace climate apostate Bjorn Lomborg seems a bit much). But it's hard to take issue with Roberts's basic premise: that climate science is now pointing in such apocalyptic directions that we duck the conversation at our peril.

My other quibble is that Roberts seems to disdain any "solutions" (no matter how achievable they may be) that fall short of the radical reductions in CO₂ emissions that we will ultimately need (no matter how politically implausible those now appear). But maybe it's time to shift the focus away from CO₂, as The Economist does in a fascinating article called "Climate Change in Black and White" (February 17, 2011). This looks instead at two other climate "forcings" -- black carbon and ozone -- where we may be able to achieve rapid, radical reductions without the need for international treaties, and in the process buy ourselves some time to bear down on the ultimate problem of CO₂. (I'll be writing about black carbon emissions in India in the spring 2012 issue of OnEarth.)

Those of us who live in the carbon-addicted West have very little moral right to castigate India and China for the strategies they've adopted to raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. At the same time, there's no doubt that the future of the planet rests heavily on the choices those two countries make about energy and the environment.

While India remains the biggest underreported environmental story of our time (editors: please note), China fares a bit better. Orville Schell has been the doyen of China observers for 30 years now, and his latest piece, "How Walmart is Changing China," in the December 2011 issue of The Atlantic, is as good as anything he's written. Beyond his unparalleled knowledge of the country and the suppleness of his prose, Schell forces us to confront a central question: if our goal really is to save the planet, how fussy can we afford to be about who gets us there? The party of Mao and the empire of smiling Sam Walton (Schell finds interesting parallels between the two Great Leaders) might not be our preferred choice of allies, but their joint efforts can be game-changers.

As a companion piece to Schell's, it's well worth reading Bill McKibben's "Can China Go Green?" in the June 2011 issue of National Geographic. McKibben has been an outstanding writer since he arrived at the New Yorker fresh out of college 30 years ago. Since then, he's become equally well-known as an activist, and in 2011, through his leadership of the campaign against Keystone XL, he became a truly transformational figure in the modern environmental movement. The amazing thing is that he still also finds time to write. Like Schell, he uses a sharp eye for local detail to illuminate the biggest of questions: in this case, "how fast China [can] wean itself off coal and tap the sun and wind."

McKibben's answer, unfortunately, is not optimistic -- but as I said at the outset, we duck such questions at our peril.

Find the top Greenreads from other OnEarth contributors here, and share your own on Twitter and Tumblr with the hashtag #greenreads.

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Renewable Energy's Ugly Duckling

George Black — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:45:37 +0000

By George Black

Could the fate of the planet be shaped by rice husks, eucalyptus twigs, and cow dung? Serious question. Power from the sun, which I wrote about in my last column, is the sexy poster child of renewable energy. Power from the soil -- biomass -- is the ugly duckling. For more than 700 million people in South Asia, daily survival still depends on burning biomass, and the idea that these people will continue to power their lives with firewood and agricultural waste carries a persistent stigma: it's a symbol of the past, not the future; it's a health hazard and a poverty trap; it's crude, dirty, and downright distasteful.

In fact, burning biomass cleanly may be vital to the future of the developing world, and the ability of these hundreds of millions to escape from poverty. The understandable instinct of governments is to think as Americans did in the 1930s, when FDR created the Tennessee Valley Authority: that such a monumental challenge demands monumental solutions, grand schemes that will add hundreds of gigawatts to a nationwide spider's web of power plants, towers, and transmission lines. But the alternative is to think small, to start from how people actually live, and what they most urgently aspire to: to build up from the ground, rather than down from the grid.

To its credit -- and despite its general tendency to think in gigawatts -- India has a proud record on biomass. The only country in the world with a Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, it has been looking to unromantic things like firewood and animal waste for almost 30 years now. Just two weeks ago, the ministry announced that India's next five-year plan (yes, it still has that relic of socialism, despite the overall liberalization of its economy) will include a National Biomass Mission, parallel in ambition to its National Solar Mission. And if you're still worried about the pre-modern image of biomass, look no farther than Germany, which has done more to reduce its carbon emissions in the past 20 years than any other developed nation, in part because it now covers 7 percent of its energy needs with biomass (a figure that may rise to 15 percent by the end of this decade).

***

Biomass is a word that's often thrown around loosely to cover a number of different things: the burning of plant matter to create energy, either through a gasifier or to drive a steam turbine; its transformation, through a chemical process, into biofuels; and the production of biogas (mainly methane), usually at the household or neighborhood level, by breaking down organic matter in an oxygen-free environment. It's impossible, in India, to leave biogas out of the energy equation. But what interested me most in coming to Bangalore was to find out what the best brains in India's high-tech capital were doing to bring gasifier technology to the village level, and how this effort might help to solve the country's crippling energy problems.

The people I visited in Bangalore are based there for a logical reason: the presence of the Indian Institute of Science, whose Combustion, Gasification, and Propulsion Laboratory is doing some of the world's most advanced R&D in biomass technology. But there were also some surprises in my conversations with the heads of two of the country's most ambitious biomass initiatives. One of them, DESI Power, can't wait to leave Bangalore and move its operations to Bihar, the dirt-poor northern state where the company's founders grew up. The other, the Biomass Energy for Rural India Society (BERI), is rooted not in the high tech sector but in the Indian Forest Service. And the models they espouse are quite different, one tailored to villages that have no access to the power grid, and the other to villages that do.

Well, make that nominal access. Shortly before arriving in Bangalore, I'd visited a village that was listed in government records as having a grid connection. An impressive line of electricity poles marched along the narrow main street. A farmer took me into his home and showed me the meter mounted on his wall. The only problem was that there no wires, and the meter was festooned with cobwebs. Government workers came here a few years ago, put up the poles, installed the meters, and never returned. But no matter: check it off the list; add it to the official stats. Another electrified village.

In tens of thousands of other villages, the ones that do have wires, the current may flow for only a few hours each day. When the grid can't cope with demand, the available power goes to the cities and factories. The villages are disconnected. Maybe you'll get a spurt of power in the morning; maybe it will come in the middle of the night. Maybe they'll tell you those hours in advance; maybe they won't.

DESI Power's dream, said the company's CEO, Ashok Das, is to build standalone, off-grid plants in 1,000 villages in Bihar. These will be tiny, producing less than 100 kilowatts on average, but that's enough to make a small village self-sufficient in energy. Solar lighting programs, like those I wrote about in my last column, had more limited potential, Das said, especially in more remote areas that had zero access to the grid. "Solar is best for light," he said, "but biomass is best for power." Without 24/7 power to run grain mills, irrigation pumps, and cottage industries, you would never open a meaningful path to prosperity. These activities would generate new income, and part of that would be used to pay for the electricity. DESI Power had already demonstrated the soundness of this business model in three villages in Bihar; there was no reason, Das said, to think that it couldn't be replicated all over the state, indeed all over India.

The BERI model is quite different; in fact it's unique, in that it's aimed at villages that have a nominal grid connection, and it will involve somewhat larger power plants, up to about one to two megawatts. The pilot project, which is centered on the village of Kabbigere, two hours north of Bangalore, is designed to generate enough power to meet the needs of a cluster of five communities during periods when the grid supply is shut down. The idea is that the state power company, BESCOM, will pay a reasonable amount for this "tail-end support."

BERI is the brainchild of G. S. Prabhu, a boisterous, at times abrasive 33-year veteran of the Indian Forest Service with a fondness for speaking in aphorisms. Biomass, he told me, is "power for all seasons and all reasons." He checked off a list of its built-in advantages. "The driving factors are climate change, the exhaustion of fossil fuels, and energy security," he said. "Any energy source has to deal with its own fuel needs. If it's a coal plant, you have to lock up coal supplies. Ditto uranium for nuclear. You can't set up a winery without grapes." Biomass was the obvious answer, he said. If you were smart about which trees you planted and where you planted them, there were no limits to the amount of fuel you could produce. If it could work in Kabbigere, it could work anywhere.

With the right technology, and with the "energy forests" acting as a carbon sink, biomass will generate zero CO₂ emissions, he continued. It will also produce energy at less than half the cost of wind and a third that of solar. And if it's produced close to the villages that use it, almost nothing is lost during transmission and distribution. The Indian grid is infamous for losing up to a third of its output before it reaches the consumer, and electricity becomes more and more expensive the farther you are from the main power lines. So a poverty-stricken villager in rural Karnataka can pay many times more for a light that flickers on and off for four hours a day than a software executive in Bangalore pays for all his household electricity needs.

Reality is a bit more complicated than a tabletop model, of course, and Prabhu acknowledged that BERI had to overcome all sorts of practical obstacles to prove that its ideas would work. Local people had to develop the necessary skills, although he said tree-planting "isn't rocket science" and a smart kid could learn enough with six months of training to handle most day-to-day operations and maintenance at the plant. You had to get buy-in from the elected local government, the gram panchayat, and in Kabbigere those conversations had been thorny. You also needed to resolve land ownership issues, which are complicated in India, and above all, Prabhu said, "you don't want to displace food crops so that you empty the poor man's stomach and fill the rich man's."

***

It was a hot, dusty afternoon when we reached Kabbigere. There's nothing romantic about a biomass plant. Two women in saris were squatting outside in the blazing sun under a sign that said "Green Power," hacking up eucalyptus branches into three-inch chunks with short-handled sickles of the sort people use to harvest rice. Inside the plant, men were winching up bucketfuls of wood to feed the gasifier, which looked a bit like the smokestack on a 19th century railroad engine. The machinery clanked and groaned and hissed. The building smelled of sawdust and woodsmoke. The walls were scuffed, the concrete floor was cracked, there were puddles of standing water, boxes of discarded parts caked in grease, and a labyrinth of ducts, gantries, and catwalks that put me in mind of the movie Brazil.

Kabbigere could generate 500 kilowatts, I was told by the young plant engineer, Harsha Naik -- enough to provide backup for the grid for three hours a day. When two smaller nearby plants came online, pushing the total output up to one megawatt, this would rise to six hours. Two megawatts would make electricity available around the clock.

But there was much more to the package than I'd realized from talking to G. S. Prabhu. People struggle for subsistence in this part of Karnataka, the engineer explained. The land is arid where much of the state is lush and fertile, and BERI's goal was to meet the full range of people's basic energy needs.

We drove out through the plant's 10,000-acre energy forest to one of the villages that would benefit. There were backyard biogas digesters, two-burner gas stoves, solar lanterns -- all courtesy of BERI. Out in the fields, we encountered a couple of farmers at work by a borewell and an electric irrigation pump -- also installed by BERI. The older man said he used to leave the village seeking casual labor during the eight months of the dry season; now, with irrigation, he could produce year-round crops of chilis, vegetables, coconuts, and bananas. His neighbor plucked a small white blossom, a variety of jasmine, and held it to my nose so that I could smell the delicate scent. Raising flowers for the market in the nearest town had changed his life, he said, bringing in more than 10,000 rupees a month -- $200 -- an unheard-of sum.

I asked the young engineer whether Prabhu had been serious when he told me that the Kabbigere model could be replicated in every one of the 33,000 villages in Karnataka. He looked at me earnestly, and said, "Oh yes. We're planning 20 years ahead. The technology is still developing, but this has to be one of our energy options when fossil fuels are exhausted."

***

The question is, how does India get from here to there? All the clean energy projects I'd seen around Bangalore, whether solar or biomass, depended on financial angels in their early stages, to prove that their ideas were viable and could be replicated at a larger scale. SELCO, whose work I described in my last column, had relied on European donors to persuade local banks to underwrite solar loans. Half the budget for the Kabbigere project comes from the United Nations Development Program. DESI Power relied on the support of the Rockefeller Foundation.

At some point the training wheels will have to come off, but realizing the full potential of these initiatives to meet India's need for clean energy will require government subsidies, soft loans, venture capital, carbon credit financing, an equitable tariff structure, investment in ongoing R&D. And those things will happen only with a radical change in the mindset of government and the private sector, which have the necessary skills, resources, and good intentions, but may be wedded to the wrong assumptions.

The International Energy Agency says that if the world is to achieve universal access to energy by 2030, 70 percent of all investments should go to off-grid projects. The figure for India's National Solar Mission? Less than 10 percent. That think-big approach has been ingrained in the psyche of Indian governments ever since independence. As the Sierra Club's Justin Guay recently wrote in his excellent blog, the grid is unlikely ever to keep place with India's needs: while it has expanded by 60 percent in the past decade, access to energy has grown by just 10 percent. Maybe the National Biomass Mission will be different. We'll see.

The private sector, meanwhile, has an equally long way to go. At Davos last year, SELCO's Harish Hande was asked to chair a panel of 30 leading CEOs interested in clean energy. "Extremely smart people," he wrote in his blog, "but so removed from reality."

"Big solar arrays are so hyped because of big corporate lobbies who see huge profits," said Ashok Das of DESI Power. "But who speaks up for biomass?"

If India faces up to questions like these, the ugly duckling of renewable energy may turn into a swan, and the country's future may be both clean, prosperous, and equitable. If it doesn't, we may just see a lot more glitz and glitter in places like Bangalore -- more and more of it powered, no doubt, by solar energy from the grid.

Into the Wild Green Yonder
VIDEO: Algae As Fuel
Awesome Eclipse Video, Great Pacific Garbage Fibs, Mining Mongolia

Top Down or Bottom Up?

George Black — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:00:22 +0000

By George Black

It was New York Times columnist Tom Friedman who made Bangalore famous. This city of seven million is the Silicon Valley of India, its technology parks and outsourcing services the driving force behind the country's remarkable recent boom. For Friedman, Bangalore was the key to understanding the new global economy, and he came up with a snappy catchphrase to describe it, which in turn became the title of a best-selling book: The World is Flat. In this flat new world, India's "knowledge economy" would rescue millions from rural poverty and usher them into a world of eight percent growth rates and abundant clean energy.

I came to Bangalore last month in search of this new energy economy, whose success or failure will be critical in determining the fate of the planet. But what I found was very different from what Friedman had in mind. In many ways it was more exciting; but it was also much more challenging. There's no doubting India's sincerity about shifting, over time, to a low-carbon future, but the vision of that future that I found in Bangalore will demand a radical change in the mindset of the government and of those who have done most to create Friedman's Flat World.

Arriving here, as I did, from the teeming chaos of Uttar Pradesh, one of India's most impoverished states, is an extreme form of culture shock. From the gleaming airport, my cab whisked me into the city along a divided highway (soon to be an expressway), flanked by tall concrete pillars (soon to be the metro to the airport). There was hardly a rickshaw or a sari in sight. Instead there were giant billboards advertising financial services, skiing vacations in Switzerland, and luxury prestige residences with golf course views. Were we really in India?

***

My illusions about the Flat World lasted about 12 hours -- until the next morning, to be precise, when I sat down to talk to Ananth Aravamudan.

On the face of it, Aravamudan's involvement in renewable energy is the embodiment of Friedman's ideal. A native of the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, he has lived in Bangalore for 20 years. His first job in the software business was with WIPRO, which provides information technology services for 150 Fortune 500 companies. In 1999 he left WIPRO to become one of the founders of MindTree, which has since become an important IT and outsourcing company in its own right. But in 2009, he told me, he decided he wanted to do "something more meaningful," and joined SELCO, the Solar Electric Light Company, becoming the senior technical manager for its newly established research lab. Since its foundation in 1995, SELCO has illuminated some 140,000 households -- about 700,000 people -- almost all of them in the state of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital. Those numbers make SELCO one of the world's leading providers of solar photovoltaic panels.

I found that Aravamudan was deeply skeptical about both the Bangalore boom and its relevance to India's most pressing energy needs. The boom is actually a bubble, he said, based on offering the world's cheapest software development services to the world market -- "but this won't remain true for very long, as other newcomer nations will price their services more aggressively. Also, the growth of Bangalore and the IT sector has only benefited a small percentage of people, while alienating a whole lot of others." It was true that most of SELCO's technical experts were graduates of the Bangalore high-tech sector, but they were isolated outriders. "Almost no one here is looking at the problems right under their noses," he said -- the most urgent of these being to find ways of providing affordable, clean energy to the 400 million Indians who, without it, will never be able to enter the economic mainstream. The problem with a Flat World, you might say, is that a lot of people fall off the edge.

SELCO's success has made its founder and managing director, Harish Hande, something of an international celebrity. Last year he was one of a dozen entrepreneurs chosen to meet with President Obama during his visit to India, as well as an invitee to the annual meeting of movers and shakers at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But Hande has used these elite platforms shrewdly to advance the vision of social equity that brought him into the renewable energy business in the first place. You might expect someone who has devoted his life to solar energy to praise the Indian government's ambitious National Solar Mission, which aims to generate 22,000 megawatts of clean power in the next decade, the equivalent of more than 60 average-size coal-fired power plants. But the most Hande would say, in a World Economic Forum blog, was to damn the initiative with faint praise as "extremely well-intentioned."

The main problem, he wrote, was that more than nine out of every ten solar megawatts would be used to feed the central power grid, which could never expand fast enough to meet the country's rising hunger for energy. The government continued to believe that size is everything, whether that took the form of coal-fired power plants, nuclear reactors, massive hydropower schemes, or the huge thermal solar arrays that it now dreams of building in the scorching deserts of India's northwestern states. There's nothing wrong with these solar arrays per se, of course, especially if they lessen India's reliance on fossil fuels. The problem, Hande said, was that the government was ignoring the wisdom that had been acquired over the past two decades about the potential for solar power in places the grid can never reach. "For those of us who have day in and day out worked hard to create sustainable businesses in the rural areas," he wrote, "the solar mission feels like a hangman's noose."

The fact that SELCO is a business is important to keep in mind. "We use the word company very consciously," Aravamudan told me. "We're not an NGO." The SELCO model is based on the belief that providing clean energy to those who most need it requires a sound and sustainable business model, even if the company's major shareholders are foundations and private equity funds that are more interested in social impact than the magnitude of profits.

The entry-level package offered by SELCO consists of a single 25-watt solar panel and four lights -- two LEDs and two CFL bulbs -- for which it charges 7,500 rupees, about $150. That may not sound much, but in rural India it's a small fortune. So SELCO set out to debunk a couple of tenacious myths: that the rural poor couldn't afford renewable energy, and that a social enterprise couldn't be commercially viable. The genius of its approach was not to lower prices (which would have meant a corresponding drop in quality), but to work out a financing model that would make high-quality technology affordable.

The biggest obstacle for potential buyers, who could usually offer no collateral, was scraping together the cash for the down payment on a bank loan (Indian banking regulations require "margin money" of 15 percent or more). The idea of a "solar loan" was unknown when SELCO started, but over time the company found creative ways of helping buyers with their initial payments, enlisting a persuasive network of supporters that included international organizations such as the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership, based in Vienna, as well as local farmers' cooperatives, microfinance institutions, even local branches of the Rotary Club. The result: 90 percent of SELCO's customers repay their loans on time, and the reluctance of local banks has largely evaporated.

Which is not to say that SELCO's path has always been easy. The company didn't turn a profit until 2001, and six years later the surging global demand for photovoltaics -- spurred in large part by Germany's introduction of lavish subsidies for solar power -- almost put it out of business. Supply couldn't keep up with demand, and prices rose by almost 50 percent, imperiling SELCO's core commitment to affordability. The World Bank's International Finance Corporation helped SELCO over the hump, but the company also decided that its future depended on more than selling off-the-shelf solar panels and lighting systems. It needed to diversify, to develop a range of new, affordable renewable technologies. So SELCO set up an R&D lab, financing it through a new not-for-profit rather than drawing the working capital from the company, which was operating on razor-thin profit margins. "That gave us the the freedom to explore projects that aren't necessarily commercially viable yet," Aravamudan said.

***

The lab is based 200 miles west of Bangalore, in the small town of Ujire, which is nestled in the Western Ghats, a range of misty, forested mountains dense with coconut and areca palms, coffee and rubber plantations, and scented groves of cardamom, cloves, and peppercorns. At intervals we passed through small towns with soaring, technicolor-painted temples, and crossed bridges over rushing streams. There was some potential for small-scale hydropower in this part of India, Aravamudan said, and for energy from the winds that blow off the Arabian Sea. But rivers are seasonal, and winds are fickle, and together they could barely make a dent in Karnataka's perpetual energy crisis. Most of the power in the state comes from the giant Raichur coal-fired power plant, he told me, but India cannot dig or import coal quickly enough to keep the turbines spinning. Even booming Bangalore has to endure rolling blackouts.

The SELCO lab is run by Anand Narayan, a chemical engineer whose career path has been, to put it mildly, unorthodox: back and forth to the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he got his PhD, bracketing a spell at the elite Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and another as a disciple of the Japanese writer Masanobu Fukuoka, whose book One Straw Revolution promotes a Zen vision of "natural farming." However, Narayan told me drily, "I found that my intellectual interest in farming wasn't matched by my enthusiasm for the actual work." So back he went back to Colorado, where he worked for seven years at a cell phone startup in Denver, before finally returning to Karnataka to take charge of the new lab.

The set-up in Ujire is as idiosyncratic as Narayan's career path, and as smartly conceived as SELCO's business model. The lab occupies a large, airy space in the SDM Institute of Technology -- SDM standing for Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara, a renowned Hindu temple and pilgrimage site in the nearby town of Dharmasthala. Through donations from pilgrims, the Dharmasthala Trust has become a financial and political powerhouse in Karnataka, opening more than a dozen of these technology institutes around the state.

The lab had something of the mad inventor's workshop, large concepts executed not only with PV panels and circuit boards but with hammer, nails, and screwdriver. Narayan's desk was littered with half a dozen different models of solar lamps and lanterns. On the floor nearby was a selection of improved cookstoves, designed to burn firewood and cow dung more efficiently and with lower carbon emissions. SELCO had experimented with solar-powered electric fences, Narayan said, to keep animals from trampling crops and vegetable gardens, but they were too expensive for most people, costing 10,000 rupees -- $200 -- to fence in an acre of land. Scattered around the lab were solar dehydrators for preserving fruits and vegetables and machines to dehusk and grind grains. At one end of the room, an intern from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland was scratching his head over a miniature wind turbine, painted bright yellow, which sat on the floor like some oversize spider from the imagination of Dr. Seuss.

"Maybe we're doing too much," Narayan said with a grin. "But we'll try all sorts of things to see what works." Nine out of ten experiments would probably come to nothing, but the devices that made it through the testing process would use renewable energy in a way that was customized to local needs, and nothing would go to market until SELCO was satisfied that it was supported by a cast-iron business plan.

A few miles away in Dharmasthala, SELCO's newly opened "energy center" was gearing up to greet the floods of pilgrims -- 100,000 were expected -- who would be arriving the next day for the Laksha Deepotswava, the Festival of Lights. Energy center sounds grandiose, but it was actually a modest affair: a converted 20-foot shipping container with a dozen PV panels on the roof and shelves of solar lanterns for rent beneath a smiling portrait of the temple administrator. Eighteen people had stopped by already today to charge their cell phones, and the solar-powered water purifier had dispensed more than 1,500 gallons of clean drinking water to thirsty pilgrims. The festival would bring a steady stream of customers and give SELCO a huge captive audience for its products and services. The plan now is to replicate the center at other pilgrimage sites around the country.

Again, it was hard not to be impressed by the company's ingenuity. There are scores of clean energy initiatives in India, and while SELCO may be the best known, most share the same core philosophy: think from the ground up rather than from the grid down. Solar power may indeed be a key to India's future, but not perhaps as the government imagines. The solutions may come from humbler places, like here among the pilgrims in Dharmasthala, where glittering solar arrays in the deserts of Rajasthan and the Flat World of Bangalore feel like visions from an alternate and more distant reality.

Next: Biomass, the ugly duckling of renewable energy

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How Cool is That?
VIDEO: Algae As Fuel

India's Climate Change Ground Zero

George Black — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 19:17:10 +0000

By George Black

In India, extreme weather basically means the annual monsoon, and this season’s rains, which ended a few weeks ago, were a constant topic of conversation during the five days I’ve just spent traveling around the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh. U.P., as people call it here, is one of the poorest states in the nation, as well as the largest (with 200 million people, it has more people than Brazil -- but squashed into 94,000 square miles, just 3 percent of the land area).

A new IPCC report on extreme weather events and climate change, published today, reflects the almost unanimous view of scientists that we face a future of hotter temperatures, stronger storms, heavier rainfall, and worse droughts. (See my interview with IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri.) No single event can be predicted with certainty, and it’s especially difficult to draw hard and fast conclusions about the South Asian monsoon. Climate modelers find the monsoon a notoriously difficult challenge, since its onset, length, and intensity depend on so many factors: ocean surface temperatures, winds, the interaction between land and ocean conditions, snow cover in the Himalayas, the influence of the so-called El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and so on.

In any given year, the impact of the monsoon can also vary a lot from place to place, and much of the evidence is necessarily anecdotal. In some areas of U.P., people told me, this year’s rains had been about average. In others, they had gone on much longer than usual. In others, the rainfall had been uncommonly heavy, while the previous year’s monsoon had been brutally dry. These variations are pretty typical. But on the broader picture there was little dispute. "There’s no doubt that the summer season has become longer and hotter," I was told by an agricultural expert in the town of Allahabad. "It used to be six months; now it’s eight, eight-and-a-half. And the winters are colder. Last year it went down to 5 degrees Celsius (41 Fahrenheit), which is unheard of."

Farmers in U.P. live or die by their crops of rice and wheat -- which means they live or die by the weather. In the village of Kanethi, women in bright saris were out in the fields threshing a late-planted variety of rice. In a nearby assembly hall, one farmer complained that he had lost 10 percent of his crop this year to a disease that blackens the grains and makes them bitter. Another said his paddy leaves had turned yellow, and he was only just able to save his crops with a timely barrage of pesticides. Another said that the blight that hit his fields was worse than he had ever experienced. When he put the blame on climate change, everyone in the room nodded vigorously in agreement.

The most wrenching post-monsoon stories came in the district of Gorakhpur, a grimy, chaotic town about 130 miles north of the Ganges and the spiritual center of Varanasi. I had been warned to think twice about visiting the area, because an epidemic of encephalitis had been raging since mid-July. It’s a particularly hideous disease -- Indians call it "brain fever" -- and it mainly affects small children from the "scheduled castes," the poorest of the poor. Gorakhpur is regularly afflicted; in fact, it was here that Japanese encephalitis, the mosquito-borne variant of the disease, was first documented in the 1970s. The more standing water, the more mosquitoes, the more encephalitis. There were pockets of very severe flooding around Gorakhpur, and five weeks after the rains ended, there were still large areas of inundated land -- and the dying continued.

One of the most important parts of the new IPCC report on extreme weather is its analysis of how governments can respond to the human consequences of events like an abnormally heavy monsoon. Do they have enough information to make accurate predictions? Are they doing enough to educate people about ways of adapting to changing conditions? Do they have the material resources and institutional competence they need? Above all, perhaps, do they have the necessary political will?

In Gorakhpur, it seemed, the answer was "none of the above." On a traffic island in the center of town, under a statue of Gandhi holding an umbrella, I met a local NGO leader named Jatashanker, who was leading a week-long sitdown protest at the government’s inaction in the face of the encephalitis epidemic. No one really knows how many have died this year, he told me. The official number is over 500, but most of the reporting comes from the central hospital in Gorakhpur. Out in the remote villages, who could say?

The government had said that all the local community health centers were stocked with vaccines and could handle the situation, but that was laughable. Jatashanker pulled out his iPhone, incongruous amid the chaos of rickshaws, motorbikes, and wandering water buffalo, and showed me a photograph of four infants sharing a single bed in the Gorakhpur hospital. Had they all died? I asked. He didn’t know. But if they survived, they would have permanent brain damage.

I asked Jatashanker what he thought the government should do. Three things, he said: declare a national disaster, build a new 400-bed hospital to deal with future outbreaks, and fund a scientific research center to learn more about the dreaded disease and how its severity related to the rains. I assume the doctors must be helping you press your case, I said. "Gorakhpur doctors are a very careless body," he said wearily. "They just say, we have no powers, we can’t make any recommendations."

You hear this kind of complaint a lot in U.P. Even by India’s dismal standards, the state government is notoriously slothful and corrupt, and the medical profession is deeply implicated in the rampant graft. Just two days ago, the local press carried fresh news of the investigation into the recent murders of three senior government health officials in the state capital, Lucknow. Were they personally involved in the corruption? Was one of them about to name names? In U.P., these things are hard to know.

On the afternoon of my visit to Jatashanker’s protest, I went out to Jungle Deerdhan Singh, a village near Gorakhpur, where a four-year-old had succumbed to encephalitis in September. Could his death be ascribed to climate change? Could the bitter grains of rice in Kanethi? As the new IPCC report says, it’s impossible to link any single weather event or its consequences to climate change. But the pattern is clear: in our warming future, more children will die, more rice grains will turn bitter, and the places worst afflicted will need something better than the government of Uttar Pradesh to protect them.

In Each Shell a Story
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Talking with IPCC Chairman Pachauri about U.S. Climate Action

Climate Change Threatens Health

New Study Links Climate Change to Higher Medical Costs

As IPCC Links Extreme Weather to Climate, Its Controversial Chief Braces for Storms of Denial

George Black — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:47:12 +0000

By George Black

A major new report is due out tomorrow from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that will link an increase in extreme weather events and disasters to global warming. A few days before its release, I had the chance to sit down with Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC -- the man the climate skeptics love to hate.

The report is, to put it mildly, well-timed, after this year’s freakish sequence of extreme weather events, from the unprecedented heatwave and drought in Texas to the horrendous floods in Bangkok, which have left 562 dead at the last count. Pachauri said he was quite ready to face a fresh onslaught from deniers and skeptics -- particularly the inevitable scoffing that there was no proof that any of these incidents could be laid at the door of climate change.

It would probably be much like 2009 and early 2010, he said, when the skeptics threw a series of hand grenades at the IPCC -- unfortunately to great political effect. They focused mainly on a slip-up in the IPCC’s usually meticulous review process in its fourth periodic assessment report, issued in 2007, the subject being the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers. The report included an estimate that "if the present rate [of melting] continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high (IPCC-speak for 90 percent-plus likely) if the earth keeps warming at the current rate." This prediction came from a 1999 magazine interview with India's leading glaciologist, Syad Iqbal Hasnain, not an article in a peer-reviewed journal.

So, yes, a small lapse, and within 24 hours the IPCC had acknowledged it. But how significant was the error? It happened that I had interviewed Hasnain in New Delhi in 2009; he told me that he had slightly modified his projections on the basis of new data compiled over the intervening decade. What he said now was, "If the current trends continue, within 30 to 40 years most of the glaciers will melt out." It was hard to be more precise, he said, because so much of the affected region in India, Pakistan, and Tibet is off-limits to researchers for national security reasons. So most of the glaciers are very likely to be gone by 2040 to 2050, rather than all the glaciers are very likely to be gone by 2035.

If I were one of the 1.5 billion Asians whose future survival depends on meltwater from the Himalayas, I’m not sure I’d grasp the fine distinction.

The second assault was on the integrity of Pachauri himself, accusing him of a conflict of interest as a paid consultant for the likes of Deutsche Bank -- which may be the single most enlightened financial institution in the world on the subject of climate change. Pachauri's fees, in fact, went straight to renewable energy projects, such as the provision of solar lanterns and fuel-efficient cookstoves to villages that lack electricity, run by the New Delhi-based not-for-profit organization he also heads -- the Energy and Resource Institute (TERI).

It had obviously been a harrowing experience, one of Pachauri’s senior associates told me, but he never lost his Olympian calm or his warm collegiality, turning out every weekend as usual -- at the age of 70 -- to play for TERI’s redoubtable cricket team.

Indeed, as we sat in his office in the Indian capital last week, Pachauri remained as charismatic a presence as one can imagine, the broad band of white in the center of his dark gray beard as distinctive as Susan Sontag’s white streak. I’ve rarely seen someone project such equanimity in the face of all-out assault.

In the long run, Pachauri told me, the whole "Himalayagate" affair had only strengthened the IPCC. "The processes we follow are our biggest strength," he told me. "We took the initiative with the U.N. Secretary General to review those processes, and it was gratifying that the independent review found our work solid and robust. But look, we’ve been around for 23 years now. You change with the times. There’s always room for refinement. We know we’re under constant intense scrutiny, and we change with the times -- which I think is to our credit." The new report on extreme weather, he added, would be a good illustration of that process of constant refinement.

Of course, he said, it’s in the nature of extreme weather that no single event, no single incident, can be linked directly to global warming. Recall the controversy over Hurricane Katrina. Pachauri wasn’t able to comment on the specifics of the report pre-publication, but his underlying message was clear. "As we said in the 2007 assessment report," he told me, "floods, droughts, and heatwaves will all increase. We abide by that, and we hope the world accepts it. We can never link a specific event, but the aggregate analysis is totally sound."

Most of the world will accept it. Those who won’t, won’t, he said. "Some find us inconvenient. We will always be opposed by vested interests, and if people still want to attack us, there’s nothing we can do about it." With that, he apologized for not being able to continue the conversation: he had to join an important conference call with the vice-chairs of the IPCC -- no doubt, his press officer said, to review some last-minute questions about the upcoming report. Pachauri rose to shake hands in farewell, Olympian calm intact.

Coming tomorrow: A first-hand report from one of the places suffering the worst from extreme weather.

In Each Shell a Story
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Consequences of Global Warming

Talking with IPCC Chairman Pachauri about U.S. Climate Action

Two Faces of Old King Coal

George Black — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:42:58 +0000

By George Black

Since my cover story in the fall issue of OnEarth on plans to export American coal to Asia, a number of interesting things have plopped into my mailbox. A photographer sent me a book; a friend sent me a song. Let’s start with the song, which is one of the most deliciously cringe-making pieces of historical ephemera I’ve seen in a while.

It comes from the time warp of 1976, a dark and anxious time bracketed by the twin oil shocks of that decade. It’s a piece of sheet music for one of the numbers from a "musical multi-media salute to coal and America’s 200^th birthday." On the cover is an eagle with the stars and stripes emblazoned on its breast and a large black lump of coal clutched in its talons. The title of the song is "I Am Coal: I Am America," and it was apparently belted out by one Mickey Heller, playing Uncle Sam, with harmony from The Coal Kids (a five-person chorus that included Dale Hensley -- the same Dale Hensley, if I’m not mistaken, who recently starred on Broadway in the revival of La Cage Aux Folles). I’m not making this up.

The stringent laws of copyright prevent us from quoting more than a brief snatch of the lyrics. But you’ll probably get the flavor from lines telling us that coal will "light the forge of freedom" and "do wond’rous miracles for old and young." Not to mention that it is the "source of America’s future power and energy plans." (The lyricist, Neal Love, to put it charitably, doesn’t always follow the strict laws of rhyme and scansion that your English teacher taught you.)

As for the book, it’s called Colstrip, Montana, and it was sent to me by the man who created it, the photographer David T. Hanson. Hanson lives in Iowa these days, but he was born near Colstrip, a town of about 2,500 people, which makes it the biggest population center in Rosebud County, in the eastern part of the state. George Armstrong Custer camped near here on his way to the Little Bighorn; the Northern Cheyenne Reservation is 20 miles away. This is wild, wide-open land, in other words -- or at least it was.

However, modern Colstrip is best known for its two open-pit coal mines and a 2,100-megawatt coal-fired power plant -- the second-biggest such plant west of the Mississippi. The first of its four units was opened in 1975, and the second in 1976. Colstrip, in other words, is a child of the time that gave us "I Am Coal: I Am America."

Yet Hanson’s book shows us a different legacy of the 1970s. Some things have changed for the better since those far-off days of oil shocks, leisure suits, and orange shag carpeting. Photographers (as well as writers such as OnEarth contributing editor Rick Bass, who has an eloquent essay in Colstrip, Montana) have changed the way we see things like coal. Hanson’s book is a collection of 82 images of the Colstrip plant, the mines, and the town: luridly colored geometries of spoil piles, railroad tracks, and evaporation ponds; giant draglines scooping out bucketfuls of black dirt; bleak, snow-covered fields with smokestacks belching gray muck into a wintry sky; monotonous rows of trailer homes and power lines. At first blush, you might say that while these images are brilliant, you’ve seen a lot like them before. But in a way, that’s the point. These photographs were made in the early 1980s, even though they were collected in book form only about a year ago.

Hanson was an important figure in the new American landscape photography that emerged in the 1970s, creating formally striking images (in color, previously favored mainly for advertising) that focused on the interplay between the land and human activity. These were cultural landscapes, not the wild, natural kind. (For contemporary echoes of his Colstrip work, see Mitch Epstein’s superb 2009 book, American Power.) Hanson was also one of the first to take to the sky -- others would include David Maisel, J. Henry Fair, and the Canadian Edward Burtynsky -- in search of a new perspective on the ways in which the American landscape had been impacted by mines, dams, power plants, and the other infrastructure that supports our modern, energy-hungry economy.

So if you want to think about what coal does to the land, take a look at Colstrip, Montana. Alternatively, you can always go to YouTube and watch the present-day equivalent of that 1976 "multi-media salute," produced by the likes of America’s Power, whose videos are an exercise in plus ca change, with the same glowing promises of cheap, abundant energy and new jobs, and now also, thanks to the wonders of technology, coal that will burn clean. If those videos inspire you, by all means go ahead and compose a new patriotic song of your own. Something like this, maybe:

My coal mine ‘tis of thee,
Clean and pollution-free,
Let good times roll.

Strip-mine or underground,
It’s the best fuel we’ve found –
No smarter deal around
Than Old King Coal.

My power plant ‘tis of thee,
Energy security!
Our noble goal.

We’ll sell to India,
Trash West Virginia,
Make fuel bills skinnier,
Praise Old King Coal.

Myself, I think I’ll stick to David Hanson’s photographs of Colstrip, Montana.

Can you top George's "tribute" to coal? Try in the comments below.

On This Earth, a Shadow Falls
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Coal in a Changing Climate

Renewable Energy in Montana

Can Industry Get Any More Cynical Than Coal Carolers?

Credit: David T. Hanson

Caption: Strip mine and railroad tipple along Armell’s Creek, 1984.

Credit: David T. Hanson

Caption: Power plant, waste ponds, and residential areas, 1984.

Credit: David T. Hanson

Caption: Coal storage area and railroad tipple, 1984.

Credit: David T. Hanson

Caption: Waste ponds and evaporation ponds, 1984.

Credit: David T. Hanson

Caption: View from State Highway 39: Cottonwood Drive and power plant, 1985.

Next Up: Occupy Texas?

George Black — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:18:26 +0000

By George Black

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.

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Texas Drought Does Not Seem to be Affecting Oil and Gas Industry

Ask an Aggie: Climate Change is Real

George Black — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:59:36 +0000

By George Black

For the tens of millions of Americans who are determined to "take their country back" (from what or whom exactly is still a mystery to me), there’s no climate debate. The jury is in. Global warming is a hoax, the product of a conspiracy so immense that it dwarfs anything Senator Joe McCarthy dreamed up when he was sniffing out Chinese communists in the State Department.

The command posts of this conspiracy are well known by now: the leftist radicals at the United Nations; the University of East "Climategate" Anglia; and pointy-headed, elitist institutions like Princeton and Yale, Stanford and Berkeley. By contrast to these bicoastal cosmopolitans, we’ve been hearing a lot recently about the homespun heartland virtues of schools like Texas A&M, where we’re told that a talent for yelling loudly at football games is just as important as good grades -- and is held to be no impediment to the pursuit of high office.

But hold on; there’s a problem with this scenario. It turns out that Texas A&M is in fact one of the nerve centers of the great climate conspiracy, together with other football-mad southern and Midwestern schools like the universities of Alabama, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, all of which are doing groundbreaking research on global warming.

The School of Atmospheric Science at Texas A&M boast some of the finest minds in the field. There’s department head Ken Bowman, for example, who tests and validates climate models, particularly their simulation of precipitation; there’s Andrew Dessler, who specializes in the role of clouds and water vapor in climate change; there’s Gerald North, who works on paleoclimate records from ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica; and many more. (North and Bowman also tell me they enjoy watching Aggies football games.)

Not only are these people brilliant; they’re outspoken. The school’s homepage greets the visitor with the following message, signed by all 23 faculty members after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its fourth periodic assessment report in 2007:

It is virtually certain that the climate is warming, and that it has warmed by about 0.7 deg. C over the last 100 years.
It is very likely that humans are responsible for most of the recent warming.
If we do nothing to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases, future warming will likely be at least two degrees Celsius over the next century.
Such a climate change brings with it a risk of serious adverse impacts on our environment and society.

These guys were clearly out to make a point. It’s unprecedented for an academic institution to come out with this kind of in-your-face language on its homepage. I checked a very useful website that gives a compendium of institutions that back the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. I counted well over 100 entries: national academies of science from 21 countries (starting with the United States, China, Russia, and Britain); the G8; the Pentagon and a slew of other U.S. government agencies; peer-reviewed journals; corporate and financial leaders from the likes of Wal-Mart, General Electric, DuPont, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs; the Conference of Catholic Bishops; the National Association of Evangelicals… In the entire list, there was just one statement from university faculty: Texas A&M.

I asked Bowman and North why they had taken such an extraordinary step. Bowman e-mailed back, "As employees of a public university, we believe that it is our responsibility to provide the best scientific information and advice to policymakers and the public, particularly on issues of such social, political, and economic importance. Our statement on climate change makes clear that there is sound, well-tested science that supports predictions of potentially serious changes in the climate of Texas, the U.S., and the world."

Texas, it should be noted in passing, is currently in the throes of the worst one-year drought in its history, accompanied by record temperatures, with every single county in the state suffering from the highest levels of drought on the scale -- D3 (extreme) or D4 (exceptional). That’s official: the numbers come from the Texas state climatologist, Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon, who was appointed to the position by former governor George W. Bush.

It turns out that there’s no daylight between Nielsen-Gammon’s views and those of Bowman and North. Last year, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced that the state would defy the Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling, in response to a Supreme Court decision, that carbon dioxide should be regulated as an air pollutant. The reason, Abbott said, was that the EPA had relied on findings by the "scandal-plagued" IPCC. He added for good measure that, "We’re not focused on, nor need we be focused on, needing to prove anything from [sic] a scientific basis ourselves." Nielsen-Gammon retorted that the IPCC’s 2007 report is "probably as good as it gets in terms of a comprehensive analysis done by scientists," and that "anthropogenic increases of greenhouse gas concentrations clearly present a danger to the public welfare."

I asked Bowman and North what kind of relationship the Texas A&M faculty had with the state climatologist. They explained politely that this was kind of a stupid question. In addition to his official duties, Nielsen-Gammon is also a professor of meteorology at the school. "He’s probably the best state climatologist in the nation," North told me. He recommended that I take a look at Nielsen-Gammon’s blog, which is called "Climate Abyss" -- a title that doesn’t leave much to the imagination.

So where does all this lead us? To hope, I guess, that Texas politicians don’t carry through on their threat to have the state secede from the Union. We need their climate scientists too much.

Game Over for Climate? Let's Hope for Extra Innings
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House Republicans Pretend Global Warming Doesn't Exist

Climate Change: Drought Threatens Water and Food Security

Climate Change Denial from the Book of Hesitations

In Praise of Pronghorn

George Black — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:36:54 +0000

By George Black

One of the privileges of my work is that it often takes me to the wildest portion of our country, the Rocky Mountain West. Even if it’s to report a story on natural gas rigs or coal mines, and the foreground view is ugly, wild creatures are always present in one’s peripheral vision. Like anyone else, I have my personal hierarchy. There are wolf lovers, grizzly lovers, elk fanatics (even, or perhaps especially, among those who shoot them for recreation). For me, it’s the pronghorn, Antilocapra americana, although it took me a few years before I understood the full range of reasons for the feelings they provoke.

My first encounter with the wild quadrupeds of the West was with a mule deer. I was mightily unimpressed. The outsize, floppy ears that give the animal its name definitely place it in the category of ugly-cute, and an easterner accustomed to flattened heaps of deerburger on the roads has a hard time seeing any deer as exotic.

Next came bighorn sheep. If I needed any proof of their weirdness, it came in a jaw-dropping set of photographs that a friend in Wyoming sent me. These showed a dozen bighorns clambering around on the almost-sheer face of the Buffalo Bill dam on the Shoshone River, which looks a bit like the one Harrison Ford jumped off in The Fugitive. But then I met my first flock close-up. They had only one set of horns between them, and even those were stumpy and unimpressive. So were they exotic or banal? I was confused.

Elk provoked a similar reaction. The first one I ever saw was in Yellowstone, a magnificent bull with a 14-point rack that looked like an outsize candelabra. Later I heard for the first time the other-worldly screech of a bugling male during the fall rut. But then I checked into a motel in the town of Gardiner, at the north entrance to the park, and found a large group of elk lazing around on the lawn and nibbling at the bushes. So more mixed feelings there, and that goes for buffalo, too.

Admittedly, I still feel a frisson when I see the huge herd spread out around the cottonwoods in Yellowstone’s beautiful Lamar Valley. But ten minutes later I’m stuck in a traffic jam as the tourists spot their first Bison bison and begin clicking away on their cell phone cameras. My fingers start drumming on the steering wheel. Get moving; don’t you realize you’re going to see a zillion of them?

As for grizzlies, I have to make an embarrassing confession. I truly hope they thrive and prosper out there in the wild, but they scare the bejesus out of me. The first one I ever saw was a colossal humped male, hunkered down in the middle of the Lamar river, gnawing on the carcass of a bison, perhaps a casualty of the fights that break out among bulls during the summer mating season. Since then, not even bells and bear spray are enough to tempt me far from the beaten path.

But then came my first pronghorn. I had turned off I-90 between Billings and Bozeman one day, looking for a place called Hunter’s Hot Springs, an abandoned 19^th century spa that has a minor role in the book I’ve just finished on the history of Yellowstone. The hot springs weren’t much to look at, just a small stream that was warm to the touch, surrounded by open fields. When I turned around, a pronghorn buck was standing 20 yards away, motionless, staring at me. My first reaction was to its sheer beauty: the slender, curved, spiked horns themselves, the tan and white striping on the neck, the sleek musculature. We stared at each other for a few moments. Then I took a step forward; its nostrils quivered, and it bolted.

Never having seen antelope during my one trip to Africa, I was unprepared for the animal’s sheer speed and grace, and later, as I saw more and more pronghorn, I realized that this was the key to their magic. Bighorns, elk, bison, and bears all provoked feelings of ambivalence. Pronghorns felt pure. There was nothing even semi-domesticated about them. They’re not true antelope, although that is often what people call them. But they look like antelope, and evolution has equipped them with the same capacities. They are the fastest animals in the Western hemisphere, capable of reaching sustained speeds of 50 miles an hour or more, enough to outrun their historic predator, the American cheetah. But the cheetah are long gone from North America now, vanishing during the Pleistocene. The pronghorn remains, uncatchable.

Uncatchable, but not invulnerable, and that’s where we heavy-footed humans enter the picture. It’s hard not to be moved when you see a solitary pronghorn browsing next to the fences that surround the natural gas wells in Sublette County, Wyoming. The gas companies boast about this; they say it proves that their activities have no ill effects on wildlife. But the reality is that the fences and the drill pads are steadily turning the vast open spaces that pronghorn need to thrive into industrial subdivisions.

The last time I saw pronghorn was in June, in the coalfields of the Powder River Basin. There were three of them, a mother and two month-old fawns. She was nosing along the triple strand of barbed wire around one of the mines, trying to figure out a way through. I don’t think it’s anthropomorphic to say that she looked anxious, disoriented, confused. Our insatiable hunger for fossil fuels is penning in the pronghorn, compromising its wildness. And perhaps that’s what completes the spectrum of feelings, from awe to anger, that accounts for the specialness of pronghorn, at least for this one passionate admirer.

In Each Shell a Story
On This Earth, a Shadow Falls
The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature

Wildlife on the Brink: Yellowstone/Greater Rockies

Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: A Photo Essay

Help Protect the Path of the Pronghorn

Gulliver and the Lilliputians (Dirty Energy Edition)

George Black — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 21:06:36 +0000

By George Black

If you’re in the mood for some black humor, it’s always worth reading the editorial pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. Last month, for example, the Journal’s Americas columnist, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, lit into "environmental extremists" opposed to the construction of five massive hydroelectric dams in southern Patagonia. As O’Grady sees it, this is a real David-and-Goliath struggle: the salutary tale of an innocent corporation trying to do right by the poor ("U.S. Greens vs. Chile’s Poor" was the headline of the piece), outgunned by the dark forces of "enviro elites" with "loads of cash" from "wealthy jet setters."

When I think of David, people like the dam developers, HidroAysen, who are planning to spend $7 billion on their project and have employed Burson Marsteller to handle their PR, are not the first ones to come to mind. I tend to think more of people like the Council for the Defense of Patagonia, a coalition of more than a dozen small Chilean environmental groups who can’t even afford a permanent office staff. When I met with their leaders in Santiago in March, in the course of reporting a three-part series on the dams, they were desperately trying to scrape together a few thousand dollars to produce some educational leaflets about alternative sources of energy.

It can be depressing for environmentalists to contemplate numbers like these. But take heart. Even though she has her Davids and her Goliaths mixed up, O’Grady may actually be on to something: namely that the Davids -- or perhaps a better analogy would be the Lilliputians, tying down Gulliver with a thousand threads -- are in a stronger position than they might think. The reason for this is the character of the infrastructure that is now being built to feed our insatiable appetite for energy, in the United States just as much as in Chile.

The Chilean government has now signed off on HidroAysen’s assessment of the environmental impact of the dams, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the project will go ahead -- because next comes a separate review process for the 1,400-mile transmission line that will carry the electricity to the Chilean heartland. And that’s where energy projects like this become vulnerable. The power line may be 1,400 miles long, but it travels along a narrow clearcut strip that is only 250 feet wide. This strip will have to cross hundreds of pieces of private property. Each parcel of land is a lawsuit waiting to happen, and each legal challenge can be a piece of grit in HidroAysen’s machinery. Two more years and Chile will be into a new presidential election season and a changed political landscape, when things could look very different for the developers.

As I said, projects like this aren’t unique to Chile, and nor is their vulnerability to Lilliputian challenges. The Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry dirty bitumen from Canada across the Great Plains to Houston and Port Arthur Texas, would be 1,600 miles long -- and the width of a ditch. The railroad tracks that big companies like Peabody Energy and Arch Coal would like to use to carry their product from the Powder River Basin of Wyoming to new export facilities in the Pacific Northwest are two strips of steel, 1,400 miles long and about five feet wide.

These skinny spider webs of infrastructure, passing through small towns and private farms and ranches, are inherently vulnerable. They put me in mind of those old movies in which a small group of intrepid French resistance fighters blows up a few feet of railroad line and the entire supply operation of the Wehrmacht grinds to a halt. That’s not to suggest that the good people of Nebraska or Oregon or Patagonia are going to reach for the dynamite, but they do have a potential power that is disproportionate to their size. And what matters is who they are, not just what they can do. The people who are increasingly getting involved in these fights are not your usual suspects. They’re not big guns like the Sierra Club or NRDC. They are farmers and ranchers, homemakers and owners of small businesses. They have names like Landowners and Citizens for a Safe Community. Think of them as accidental environmentalists.

I’m not being a romantic here; these people have already shown that they can tie Gulliver down. Two members of Landowners and Citizens for a Safe Community whom I met recently in Longview, Washington, one of the proposed sites for a coal export terminal, told me that they’d first met five years ago, when each of them found that her property was in the path of a 200-mile-long, three-foot-wide pipeline that a Houston corporation, NorthernStar Natural Gas, was proposing to build, at a cost of $650 million, to carry liquified natural gas from the Middle East to a new storage terminal on the Columbia River.

Working with the Columbia Riverkeeper, a small environmental group based in Hood River, Oregon, local residents like these went after NorthernStar. There was a winemaker in the Willamette Valley, worried about his investments. There was the owner of the Cannery Pier Hotel in Astoria, Oregon, who feared for the tourist trade. There was a third-generation farmer who fretted that digging a trench for the pipeline would diminish the productivity of his land. In the end they won.

They won for many reasons: because they brought new players into the game; because they emphasized small, private, parochial issues and the preservation of property rights; and because they were patient and persistent. Eventually, after some obligatory fulminations about how these people were "still upset that the Industrial Revolution occurred," NorthernStar picked up its marbles and quit. The battle took six years. But if it can work here, it can work in Patagonia, it can work against coal trains, and it can work against Keystone XL. All the same ingredients are present.

So -- go, Lilliputians!

Foot Power, Rio Beckons, Congress to Navy: Screw National Security, Burn Oil
The Barnstormer
Awesome Eclipse Video, Great Pacific Garbage Fibs, Mining Mongolia

Proposed Dams Jeopardize Patagonia's Wild Rivers

Clean Energy is Path for Security, Not the Proposed Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline

Latin American BioGems

Why on Earth Do We Listen to Those Who Cry Wolf?

George Black — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 17:13:04 +0000

By George Black

Amid the white noise of cyberspace, here’s a new website that’s really worth looking at: www.crywolfproject.org. I’ll get to the particulars in a moment, but what I especially like about the project is that it helps cut through the confusion about why we appear to be losing ground in the fight for public concern about climate change. Or do I mean global warming? No, that’s too alarmist. Climate change, then. No, that’s just a euphemism. Well, let’s say climate disruption; that’s more accurate. But no one knows what the phrase means. On the other hand...

These arguments about semantics say a lot about the sticky spider’s web we’ve woven around ourselves in our debate about language, messaging, audiences, teachable moments, and so forth. Meanwhile, the skeptics and deniers coast along cheerfully on the back of what the Republican messaging guru Frank Luntz calls "the phrase that persuades." Think death panel. Or big government. Or pro-life. Or, in the case of climate change, It’s just a theory, cap-and-tax, Climategate.

I’m not saying that responding to this is easy, in large part because of our disgust with the idea of stooping to this crass and cynical phrasemaking. But the bottom line is that public opinion has changed, and we don’t quite know what to do about it.

The most complete summary of recent opinion polls I’ve seen was published in May by the Social Capital Project of the Resource Innovation Group (TRIG), based at Willamette University in Oregon. This reviewed 94 different polls and studies, with data gathered between 2008 and 2010. It shows a consistently negative trend on virtually every core question: Is it happening? Do scientists agree that it is happening? Is it caused by humans? Does it affect me personally? Should the government do anything about it?

The difficulty lies not in showing the trend but in deciphering the underlying reasons. Is it because one of our two major political parties is dominated by climate deniers, or because the president has been too passive on the subject? Because the problem is so big that we despair of fixing it, or because the problem is so abstract and remote that we don’t pay attention to it? Because Americans don’t trust scientists, or because we trust scientists so much that we’re confident they’ll find a solution? Because people are turned off by warnings of catastrophe, or because our warnings have not been sufficiently dramatic? Social scientists can cite data to support all of these propositions.

The more optimistic analysts, like Jon Krosnick of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, believe that the problem is only temporary, the product of passing circumstances. Krosnick cites the bitter winter of 2009, for instance, when Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma suggested that Al Gore should build an igloo outside the Capitol, coupled with the fact that people don’t understand the difference between climate and weather. But if that theory is correct, the pendulum will presumably swing back in response to this crazy summer of record heat, massive wildfires, and endless drought. Personally, I’m not holding my breath.

Of all the competing theories, the one that seems most persuasive to me is that people have a "finite pool of worry," and that this dismal season of economic distress and unemployment has driven all other anxieties to the margins. Which brings us back to the utility of the Cry Wolf Project.

Since 1984, the most influential of all our national polls, Gallup, has been posing an absolutely fallacious choice to its respondents: which do you think is more important, environmental protection or economic growth? In 2009, for the first time ever, a majority said economic growth. Opponents of federal action on the environment have thrived for decades on the Gallup fallacy, asserting that regulation will harm the economy. The Cry Wolf website is ingeniously designed to refute this. Its search engine allows you to choose from a menu of a dozen environmental issues, select a specific federal or state law from a list of about 140, and then, if you wish, add a further filter that isolates a particular rhetorical theme -- "bad for business," "job killer," "prices will rise," and so on.

There are hundreds of gems, with constant updates promised. (You can add your own.) Let’s just take three typical Cassandra predictions, spaced at 20-year intervals.

"This bill could prevent continued production of automobiles… [and] is a threat to the entire American economy and to every person." – Lee Iacocca, executive vice president of the Ford Motor Company, on the 1970 Clean Air Act.

"[There is] little doubt that a minimum of 200,000 jobs will be quickly lost" and that this number "could easily exceed one million jobs -- and even two million jobs." -- The U.S. Business Roundtable, on the 1990 amendments to the act.

"[It] is nothing more than a tax on electricity, a tax on our residents and on businesses with no discernible effect on our environment." – New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, 2011.

No one should have believed them then; so why believe them now?

In addition to the quote-finder, Cry Wolf’s blog posts dismember particular claims with hard empirical data. The latest one by project director Donald Cohen, for example, reviews the impact of the Clean Air Act. What actually happened was that a few thousand existing jobs were lost and a greater number of new ones were created. Cleaner gasoline did end up costing a few cents more at the pump, but consumers quickly got used to that as a fair trade-off for cleaner air. Electricity rates did not soar as predicted; in most states they declined, in some cases by as much as 64 percent.

The real beauty of this fact-based approach is that it can address people’s most deep-seated economic anxieties, not with the debatable opinions of behavioral psychologists and poll analysts but with actual data on jobs, costs, and savings -- not to mention tangible environmental and public health benefits. And who can be reached with the message that government environmental regulation actually works, and at an acceptable cost? True believers, fence-sitters, the sincerely confused, and those adversaries who are still open to reason. Pretty much everyone, in fact, but the hard-core "rejecters," as Frank Luntz calls them. ("Forget the rejecters," Luntz says, "because there’s nothing you can do to influence them.")

Cry Wolf can’t reach all these audiences directly, of course, and nor can full-time environmental advocates. But our highest elected officials can, all the way up to the president. So perhaps we should start by figuring out how to persuade them of the virtues of empirical data, clearly presented, and urge them in turn to convey it to those who need to hear the facts. Who knows, our current president might even discover that there is still such a thing as the bully pulpit. In fact, in refuting the endless scare tactics of the climate skeptics and opponents of environmental regulation, he might even borrow a line from that master of "the phrase that persuades," Ronald Reagan: There you go again.

In Each Shell a Story
Awesome Eclipse Video, Great Pacific Garbage Fibs, Mining Mongolia
Fracking Envy, Apple Dumps Coal, Australia Gets Hotter

Climate change denial from the Book of Hesitations

Consequences of Global Warming

Chamber of Denial

Montana’s Yellowstone River Oil Spill: The Shape of Things to Come?

George Black — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 16:36:20 +0000

By George Black

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to cross the Yellowstone River at Billings, Montana. It was raging café-au-lait. Small islands were all but submerged, bankside vegetation was awash, tree trunks were hurtling along on the flood. It looked like a disaster waiting to happen, and on the night of July 1 the disaster duly arrived, when the Yellowstone hit flood stage and an Exxon pipeline a few miles west of Billings, buried in concrete six feet deep, ruptured and spilled 42,000 gallons of oil into the river. The working theory, until engineers can get closer to the site, is that the flood scoured out the riverbed, laid bare the pipe, and exposed it to all manner of hurtling debris.

An event like this holds all kinds of lessons. First of all, this year’s floods in the northern Rockies have been epic. After a decade of declining snowpack, last winter brought record snowfalls followed by torrential spring rains. (The deniers are on to this one already: What do you mean, global warming? Look at all that snow.) Second, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which will carry oil from the Canadian tar sands, will also be buried in the bed of the Yellowstone. Third, the Exxon pipeline fully met federal safety regulations, proving yet again that said regulations don’t come close to what we need, especially in an era when thousand-year floods, once-in-a-lifetime tornados, and no-way-that-could-ever-happen tsunamis, seem to occur about twice a month.

But the Yellowstone spill made me think about something quite different, especially when I heard Governor Brian Schweitzer’s angry comment to Exxon that “we take our rivers very seriously here in Montana.” Well, yes, and, um… no. Just two days before my visit to Billings, I’d been driving around one of the most remote and undisturbed corners of a still largely undisturbed state, an area where Governor Schweitzer, a Democrat, recently leased 9,600 acres of state land in the remote Otter Creek valley to Arch Coal, the second biggest company in the business, allowing it to strip-mine 731,000 tons of coal.

Politicians in Montana have always been in love with the idea of digging fortunes out of the ground. Nineteenth-century Montana Territory was built on gold mines; the modern state was built on copper. For decades there has been talk of Montana as the "Saudi Arabia of coal," with reserves dwarfing those of neighboring Wyoming, which provides 40 percent of all American coal. The present governor has never met a form of coal he didn’t like: thermal coal, metallurgical coal, strip-mined coal, underground coal, coal gasification, coal-to-liquids, you name it. He likes to refer to coal mining as "deep farming," and most of the Otter Creek coal would be destined for what the industry see as its next great harvest: exports to Asia (about which I’ll be writing at greater length in the Fall 2011 issue of OnEarth).

Yet Schweitzer likes to portray himself not only as an environmentalist but as an embodiment of the old Montana, "the last best place." Look at his campaign materials, or the state’s free highway map, and there’s the governor with his lovely wife, Nancy, leaning against a split-rail fence with some horses. He’s usually wearing a cowboy hat and a bolo tie, with a folksy twinkle in his eye. The problem with this carefully cultivated image is that Otter Creek is the old Montana incarnate, and he’s proposing to tear it apart.

To get to the Otter Creek coal tracts, I turned off state highway 212 at a derelict building with a weather-faded sign that said "Stockman’s Bar -- Your Choice of Drinks -- Dutch Lunches Served" and entered a maze of red-dirt back roads. For mile upon mile there was no sign that humans had ever touched this land. Sagebrush and ponderosa pine covered the gentle slopes, and the low hills fell away to undulating prairie, uninhabited even by cattle. At intervals I passed weirdly eroded sandstone bluffs and rockpiles worn into the shape of medieval castles and minarets. The only sound was birdsong.

Otter Creek itself is a placid, meandering stream that flows through a broad, green valley, bordered by the Custer National Forest and dotted with occasional ranches. Eventually it flows into the Tongue River, a major tributary of the Yellowstone. The new mines would disfigure the Tongue Valley, too, because the coal would be hauled to market on a new, 139-mile railroad along the river, connecting the mines to the main Burlington Northern Santa Fe line. On the next leg of their journey to Asia, the mile-and-a-half-long coal trains from Otter Creek would follow the banks of the Yellowstone on their way to the huge switching yard in Laurel, eight miles west of Billings. For those who like their stories to have a nice narrative shape, Laurel is where the Exxon oil spill occurred.

Montana’s coal dreams have repeatedly foundered in the past, and the same thing may happen with Governor Schweitzer’s. Yes, the state has massive reserves, but they have remained in the ground for a reason, or rather a couple of reasons. Most coal-fired power plants in this country can’t handle the Montana product, because it’s so high in sodium, which can clog conventional boilers. More important, Otter Creek is in a highly sensitive alluvial river valley, forcing a rigorous environmental review of Arch Coal’s plans. So the fight over Otter Creek is far from over, and Montana environmentalists intend to make it a very big fight indeed.

As I write this, five days after the spill, the U.S. Geological Survey stream gauge at Billings shows the Yellowstone running at 55,300 cubic feet per second -- close to the highest level on this date in the 80 years of modern record-keeping -- and still rising. Oil has now been detected as far downstream as the town of Hysham, 100 miles from Billings and more than halfway to the mouth of the Tongue. So be a little wary as you listen to Brian Schweitzer talking about how seriously he takes rivers. Rivers with iconic names and reputations perhaps, but not the equally lovely ones that are tucked away, out of sight and out of mind, and ready for some deep farming.

Foot Power, Rio Beckons, Congress to Navy: Screw National Security, Burn Oil
Awesome Eclipse Video, Great Pacific Garbage Fibs, Mining Mongolia
Western Icons

Yellowstone River Damaged by Exxon Pipeline Oil Spill

Yellowstone River oil spill shows dangers of even riskier Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline

Yellowstone/Greater Rockies

What Ever Happened to the Party of National Security?

George Black — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:09:52 +0000

By George Black

I don’t spend a lot of time listening to Rush Limbaugh. But driving through Wyoming recently, I chanced upon his distinctive cadences on my car radio. I couldn’t find a reliable signal for NPR, I don’t like Mötley Crüe, and I was getting tired of listening to the preacher on a Christian station who was giving listeners his interpretation of the stream of crazy weather events and disasters this spring -- raging wildfires in Arizona, floods on the Mississippi, epic tornados in the Southeast, record snowfall in the Rockies. The preacher told them not to be concerned. It was all foretold in the Good Book, and these were simply signs that the End Times were approaching.

I found Rush one notch up on the FM band and decided to swing into the parking lot of a nearby supermarket to listen to the nation’s pontificator-in-chief for a few minutes. It turned out he was sniffing out heresy in the Republican Party. Any Republican who failed to understand that global warming was a scientific hoax and a plot to find a pretext for strangling the U.S. economy was ipso facto unfit for high office. True believers should recite these articles of faith at every opportunity; past sinners should immediately recant; those who persisted in the error of the ways should be cast out of the one true church. Old Rush sounded like Pope Paul V as he handed Galileo over to the Inquisition.

So "climate change" is a fevered secular-socialist conspiracy to do in the American way of life. That raises an inconvenient question for Republicans: why then is the U.S. military one of its leading protagonists? Here I was in the most Republican state in the nation (Obama got 32.5 percent of the Wyoming vote in 2008), and traditionally that equates to being stridently loyal to all things military. The mud-spattered pickup parked next to me had a Marine Corps sticker and an American flag on the rear windshield. The supermarket had posted a sign that declared it to be a "Proud Supporter of the Wounded Warriors Project," and another that said, "Budweiser: Here’s to the Heroes."

There was, to put it mildly, a disconnect here: the military were heroes, Rush Limbaugh had papal authority, and global warming was a hoax. Yet the Department of Defense has been actively promoting that hoax since 2003, when a much-heralded report by two Pentagon consultants, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, warned that catastrophic climate change "would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately" and constituted a threat "greater than terrorism."

Since then the drumbeat has only grown stronger, to the point where the U.S. military has become more aggressive about combating climate change than any other part of the hated "Washington elite," right up there with the Environmental Protection Agency -- which many Republicans in Congress regard as the Employment Prevention Agency and would like to abolish.

I wondered if the driver of the pickup truck with the Semper Fi sticker knew that the Marines are using solar panels to power their forward operating bases in Afghanistan, that military bases in the United States are introducing building codes and energy efficiency measures even more stringent than California’s, or that the Navy is pioneering a new generation of biofuels that may one day radically cut the carbon emissions of our civilian airplane fleet. The Pentagon’s most recent Quadrennial Defense Review vows to cut the military’s greenhouse gas emissions by 34 percent between 2008 and 2020. Indeed, the Pentagon has become so environmentally conscious that it plans to buy 200 million rounds of a new, lead-free "green bullet" that will kill enemy soldiers without harming wildlife. (This is not a joke.)

Once upon a time -- in fact for most of its modern history -- the Republican Party liked to prove its conservative credentials by stressing unswerving allegiance to the military and its values. Now its leaders seem bent instead on establishing their bona fides by kow-towing to the most extreme know-nothing fringe of American politics. Whatever happened, I wondered, to the "Party of National Security"? These days it feels more like the Party of the End Times.

In Each Shell a Story
Awesome Eclipse Video, Great Pacific Garbage Fibs, Mining Mongolia
Fracking Envy, Apple Dumps Coal, Australia Gets Hotter

U.S. Military Says We Need Action on Climate Now or We Will "Pay Later"

Clean Energy and Climate Legislation

Major U.S. Businesses and Military Leaders Call for Climate Investments for National Security

The Greening of America, 2020

George Black — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:31:10 +0000

By George Black

Time for a confession: like many of us who care passionately about the environment, I’m a child of the Sixties. Or, to be more exact, of that rough decade (in more senses than one) that was bracketed by the release of Love Me Do by the Beatles in November 1962 and ended with the death of Jimi Hendrix in September 1970.

What a year that was… the first Earth Day, the passage of the Clean Air Act, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (by a Republican president!), the last use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. And all those books on the shelf! Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Mis-Education… R. D. Laing’s Politics of Experience… the two-year-old copy of the Whole Earth Catalog, the stitching already coming apart from overuse. And above all, perhaps, the eloquently titled bestseller The Greening of America, by Charles Reich, which was first published in the New Yorker in the very same month they were laying Jimi in the ground.

Forty years later, what we remember most about Reich -- to the extent we remember him at all -- is his call for the creation of a new "Consciousness III," a flaky, countercultural concept that involved a lot of time listening to the Grateful Dead and consuming large amounts of homegrown marijuana. But there was a lot more to Reich than that caricatured memory. He was a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and a distinguished Yale Law School professor (one of his students, ironically, was Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito).

Reich deplored the lack of strong federal action to protect the environment. But he went way beyond that. "Green" was a broader term for him than it is to us today, encompassing not just environmentalism but a seamless package of values that also included feminism, gay rights, racial equality, and an end to military conflict, rampant consumerism, and overweening corporate power. The society Reich envisioned would start with individual consciousness, but end up with a wholesale reformation of our cultural and political institutions.

A little more than forty years on, what has happened to Reich’s vision? And in 2020, when The Greening of America hits its half-century, where we will be? I can almost imagine some of the news stories we may be reading:

* Just days after Exxon-Mobil announce quarterly profits of $37 billion, two K Street lobbyists are convicted on charges of paying six-figure kickbacks to members of the Senate Energy Committee to approve substantial tax breaks to benefit Exxon’s advanced algae biofuels division. The judge sentences the pair to three months of community service, telling them that he is exercising leniency in recognition of their commitment to a clean energy future and the promotion of energy independence.

* A consortium of five megachurches holds its annual assembly in Houston. In addition to resolutions reiterating opposition to same-sex marriage and support for the carrying of concealed weapons during services, church leaders approve a plan to pave all church parking lots with permeable asphalt to recycle stormwater.

* Lawyers for OrganoBigbox confirm that the giant chain of suburban retailers and fast food outlets will press ahead with its $25 million lawsuit for copyright infringement of its federally registered trademark, I’m Lovin’ that Green Stuff ®, by Reich Community Farms of Humboldt County, California.

As to the prospects for Consciousness III, Reich told an interviewer last September, there wasn’t much to be optimistic about. "It’s viewed as something like a fantasy or a dream that people woke up from with a headache," he lamented.

While Reich’s ideas might not give me a headache, they did feel as obsolete as Richard Nixon. Yet my mental images of 2020 didn’t leave me feeling depressed; ambivalent was a better word, or accepting, perhaps because they felt quite plausible. After all, if we want to scale up the greening of America to the point where it permeates the cultural mainstream, it’s going to happen in ways we never suspected in those far-off days when we were listening, stoned, to Dark Star and Purple Haze. Consider that the Pentagon was seen as the devil incarnate in the days of Agent Orange; now it’s light years ahead of any other institution in developing clean energy alternatives.

A decade from now, we could well be saying the same about the likes of Exxon. And that will indeed be a revolution -- if not the kind of which we once dreamed.

Bad Idea Bikinis, Leather Leftovers, Unfrozen Planet
Car Roof Gardens, Classroom Climate Controversy, Behold the Chicken Matrix
Texas Twisters, Homes That Float, Beware of Bloodsuckers

For Some, the Climate Crisis Means Change or Perish

George Black — Thu, 12 May 2011 15:49:58 +0000

By George Black

When you write about climate change for a living, you have to accept that it comes with a serious occupational hazard. The facts you bring back tend to be depressing, and people don’t like to be depressed. They want uplifting news. A trip I took to Peru last summer for OnEarth was a classic example of the dilemma: grinding poverty, crippling water shortages, life-giving glaciers disappearing before your eyes… Where was the good news?

I brooded about this for months, to the point where I found a pretext to go back to Peru for a few days, mainly so I could spend a bit more time with a glaciologist I’d met there named César Portocarrero. What had really been nagging at me, to be honest, was the suspicion that the good news had been there all the time, hidden in plain sight. In Peru, as in many countries around the world, I’d seen people adapting creatively to climate change, because the daily evidence of their senses tells them that it is an inescapable reality. For many environmentalists, however, this has meant facing up to a deeply inconvenient truth, a threat to the mantra that nothing but the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions will do, and that adaptation is an admission of defeat.

Climate deniers and skeptics have always been quite happy to sneer at the idea that we should invest in adapting to global warming; after all, if it isn’t real, why bother adapting to its effects? Others, like the idiosyncratic Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado, say that adaptation should be taken out of the climate debate; it’s just another word for responding to poverty. What bothers me more is the hostility toward climate adaptation from some of the smartest environmental commentators around, such as Joe Romm , who calls it a "cruel euphemism" for suffering. People can only "adapt" to global warming, Romm says, in the sense that people in Darfur have "adapted" to war and genocide, or the victim of an avoidable heart attack "adapts" by having heart surgery that might kill him.

The antipathy of people like Romm was fueled by a string of economic analyses published in 2008, all of which showed that the cost of curbing greenhouse gas emissions was much lower than we had imagined. First came the British government’s Stern Review, which concluded that stabilizing CO2 emissions by 2050 would cost only about 1 percent of global GDP -- a "significant but manageable" amount (the world currently spends three times as much on risk insurance). The International Energy Agency produced similar numbers, and the McKinsey Global Institute went further: stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at 450 parts per million by 2030 would have a "net cost near zero."

I have no quarrel with those studies; they make a persuasive case, and I wouldn’t deny for a second that unless we radically curb emissions the game will ultimately be lost. The problem is not the "invest in mitigation" part; it’s the corollary: "…and therefore don’t invest in adaptation."

To someone whose daily life is defined by ice, water, soil, and weather -- for example, a peasant in Peru or Bangladesh -- this zero-sum argument about how governments should spend trillions of dollars feels like a remote and abstract parlor game. And the implied message that said peasant should continue to grind along in the same old way for another 20 or 40 years while we get emissions under control is where abstract starts looking a lot like callous.

On my return to Peru, I met up with César Portocarrero in Caraz, a small town high in the Andes. It’s a sleepy place with a lost-in-time quality, yet climate change is a palpable presence in everyday life. Thanks to the mayor -- an old friend and tennis buddy of César’s -- there are several large murals in the streets lamenting the disappearance of the glaciers of the surrounding Cordillera Blanca and urging everyone to play their part in protecting the environment.

We drove up into the mountains from Caraz to a place called Huauya, where villagers treated us to a lunch of roast guinea pig and vividly colored native potatoes (which, incidentally, are seriously at risk because of climate change). Leaders of several of the surrounding hamlets had assembled to meet us. After opening prayers in a mixture of Spanish and Quechua, César was invited to address the gathering. He remarked to the villagers that they knew better than any scientist how the climate was changing: the cold was colder, the heat was hotter, the rains were unpredictable, new pests were eating the crops, you could look up at the mountain and see rock where once there had been snow.

When the conversation was over, we went out into the fields and talked with the community leaders about how they might address the problem. By choosing which crops to plant and when to plant them, the villagers would build resilience. By eradicating harmful bugs (without the use of pesticides), they would reduce their vulnerability to changing temperatures. And by learning how to manage their diminishing water supply, they would increase their capacity to adapt.

Yes, I know, Huauya is just one small, remote village in the high Andes. But here were all the core elements of climate adaptation -- building resilience, reducing vulnerability, and increasing technical capacity. Adaptation is going on all around us; it will go on happening without us, but much better that it should happen with our support.

Scientists like César are a big part of the solution. He doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty; indeed he sees it as a moral obligation. Scientific research counts for very little unless it had a practical application.

A long chain of logic had led him to the village of Huauya. He is a glacial engineer by training, which brought him to the Cordillera Blanca, a region that has suffered from a biblical plague of natural disasters -- earthquakes, avalanches, mudslides, and floods. Climate change has greatly aggravated many of those risks as the glaciers melt. César’s particular skill is the building of retention dams and drainage tunnels to avert the threat of catastrophic outburst floods from glacial lakes. The village of Huauya lies right below the Laguna Parón, the largest such lake in the region, and the dam that holds back its waters is the crowning accomplishment of César’s career. Building it took him deep into the daily lives of the communities that were threatened; climate change stressed them further; learning to use the water and plant their crops more wisely became the stuff of survival.

All sorts of threads were woven together, in other words, in this visit to one small village in the Andes, with a scientist who came down from the ivory tower and the disciplines of climate science, engineering, risk management, and agronomy blending seamlessly together. You could not find anyone who cared more about mitigating carbon emissions than César Portocarrero, but neither could you find anyone more richly immersed in the daily realities of adapting to climate change.

Perhaps this false and energy-sapping debate over adaptation has finally run its course. I’ve been as sobered as anyone by the slow and stumbling progress toward a binding global climate treaty, but here too there is some good news. Last December, in the most recent round of UN climate talks, delegates from 193 countries adopted the Cancún Adaptation Framework, which confronts our inconvenient truth head-on: climate change is real, it is unavoidable, and we have to support those who are trying to confront it, marrying the adaptive skills that indigenous communities have honed over centuries with the best available science and technology. Ask anyone in Huauya to choose between mitigation and adaptation, and they’ll tell you quite clearly: it’s not either/or, stupid -- it’s both/and.

In Each Shell a Story
Awesome Eclipse Video, Great Pacific Garbage Fibs, Mining Mongolia
Fracking Envy, Apple Dumps Coal, Australia Gets Hotter

Will the American Machine Finally Turn Green?

George Black — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 21:05:16 +0000

By George Black

We’ve been here before, says Alexis Madrigal. Solar power, wind power, tidal energy, electric vehicles, biofuels made from algae -- all of them have shown promise in the past, and some, like tidal turbines and electric cars, first showed up for duty more than 100 years ago. But why did they never reach lift-off, and why should things be any different today? That’s the question posed by Madrigal, a senior editor at the Atlantic and author of a new book called Powering the Dream. His answer may jolt many environmentalists. It’s time to put away Walden and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, he says, at least until we have thought through how the seminal ideas in those books can merge with the realities of the present and the future.

All of the visionary technologies that we see as the key to our future have foundered because they could not be scaled up to the mass market. Sometimes that was because the technology itself didn’t advance rapidly enough; sometimes it was because government was fickle about providing financial incentives; sometimes it was because powerful vested interests strangled the new baby in the cradle. (That one has never gone away, of course.)

For various reasons, Madrigal thinks the stars may finally be aligning. Climate change is our generation’s version of the oil shocks of the 1970s, only on a much larger scale; for the first time since Jimmy Carter we have a president who is seriously committed to clean energy; venture capitalists and big corporations see huge future sources of profit and are ready to invest billions of dollars to get there (assuming that government support remains constant). And even since Madrigal finished writing, instability in the oil-producing centers of the Middle East has increased our sense of vulnerability at being so dependent on fossil fuels. If all these currents of history weave together in the right way, we may at last get to the point where clean energy is produced on such a scale that it becomes cheaper than coal: a formula that Google famously calls RE < C.

That all sounds fine and dandy, except for two phrases that may already have stopped some readers in their tracks: venture capitalists and big corporations. The symbolic figure who opens Madrigal’s book is John Doerr, a venture capitalist whose view of the world is simply expressed: "I’m a raging capitalist. My job is to make a lot of money." And the symbolic project that closes the book is the huge Ivanpah thermal solar array planned for the Mojave Desert (in which Google has just invested $168 million) -- in prime habitat for the desert tortoise, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Get used to it, says Madrigal. The world has changed profoundly. The adversary is no longer just your local factory dumping toxic effluent into the river (although of course there are still plenty of those). It’s carbon, and it’s global. The only realistic remedy is to produce renewable energy on a massive scale, and that can only be achieved by unleashing tremendous, game-changing economic forces. Heading into the woods with Thoreau is not an answer; at best, it may toss a piece of grit into the great cogs and gears of our profit-driven industrial machine. (Which was also true, incidentally, in the 1840s; spending a year in the cabin he built on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land didn’t stop the construction of a single mill or factory.)

That great machine is now ready to turn green, Madrigal says, in another episode of what he calls the "grand American narrative" -- which President Obama, for one, embraces with enthusiasm. "Science! Technology! Progress! Economic growth! Unlimited everything! What’s not to love?"

Well, for many traditional environmentalists, plenty. For them (or do I mean us?), unlimited growth is precisely the problem. The ways in which we have used energy -- the automobile, the suburb, the air-conditioner -- have not just changed the way we live. They have changed who we are, what makes us human. We can’t have it all, and we shouldn’t want to.

Madrigal’s survey of our past failures to get renewable energy off the ground is endlessly provocative. Here’s one example: during the brief burst of enthusiasm for solar power in the 1970s, the cost of photovoltaics declined sharply. One reason was government support, but the other was that Exxon (or Esso, as it was still known in those days) invested heavily in the technology. Not because the corporation wanted to liberate us from petroleum, but because it saw solar as potentially profitable. Fast-forward to today: Exxon recently invested $600 million -- about four days’ worth of profits -- in a new company called Synthetic Genomics. Run by Craig Venter, who led the private effort to sequence the human genome, the purpose of the project is to research and develop the next generation of biofuels. I know, I know, Exxon is the devil incarnate. But what if the corporation, with all its cultural baggage -- K Street lobbyists, bought politicians, unlimited advertising budgets, and so on -- also becomes a poster child for our clean energy?

Madrigal is cautiously optimistic that we can square the circle, achieving a fusion of "old" and "new" environmentalism. The challenge is so urgent and overwhelming, he believes, that we will simply have to surrender some of our most cherished convictions. He’s a fan of the historian William Cronon, who says that the dichotomy between humans and the natural world has become an illusion; new energy technologies mean that large-scale industrial development can now occur without a heavy environmental footprint. Madrigal also pins a lot of hope on the fact that "many countercultural energy types grew up and became policy wonks," and thinks that if we try really hard we can inject at least some traditional environmental values into Wall Street and the corner office.

Do I share his optimism? I’m not sure. But in the end, I think my colleague Johanna Wald probably says it best when she tells Madrigal that for good or for ill, "We have to accept our responsibility that something we have advocated for decades is about to happen."

What’s the other new book that’s gotten George thinking recently? Find out in the previous edition of The Edge.

Into the Wild Green Yonder
In Each Shell a Story
How Cool is That?

Renewable Energy for America

Is a Sustainable Energy Future Already Emerging?

Grasping Green Car Technology

Worried About the Indian Ocean? You Should Be

George Black — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:01:49 +0000

By George Black

When people ask me to recommend a good book on the environment, I tend to shuffle my feet and mumble "I’m too busy to do much reading," or "Does Moby-Dick count?" The truth is that most of the review copies that turn up in my inbox are destined for the office giveaway pile. I weary of the relentless tsunami of 57 Things You Can Do to Save the Planet, which make me feel vaguely guilty that I’m only doing 16 of them. And while I’m sure that titles like My Year of Living Off the Grid in the Yurt at the Bottom of the Garden are worthy and admirable, they tend to bring out my inner Dick Cheney; they feel more like a sign of personal virtue, as the former vice president famously said about conservation, than a serious contribution to the pressing debates of our time.

However, I’m now prepared to recommend not one book but two (although you'll have to wait for my next column for the second one). Both have the great virtue of challenging some of our basic preconceptions about what it means to think like an environmentalist in the 21^st century. And the first of them isn’t directly about the environment at all.

Let me explain. The book in question is Monsoon, by Robert Kaplan, a hard-headed foreign policy expert who writes for the Atlantic. His subject is the Indian Ocean -- broadly defined as the waters that stretch from the Red Sea to Indonesia. His thesis is that this region will be to the 21^st century what Europe was to the 20^th: the principal theater of conflict among the world’s great and ascendant powers -- namely the United States, China, and India.

What does all this have to do with the environment? The answer is that the contest for supremacy is all about the control of fossil fuels, minerals, and other natural resources, and the infrastructure to import and export them -- which means things like oil and gas pipelines, deepwater ports, and big navies to protect critical shipping lanes. You can say much the same thing about many of the conflicts of the past, of course, and extractive industries have always wreaked havoc on the environment. But the 21^st century is different, because the stakes are so much higher, not only as a consequence of climate change but because of the unprecedented demand for energy from China and India.

One of the startling things about Monsoon is the list of countries that Kaplan sees as the likely flashpoints of this conflict. Looking at a map of the Greater Indian Ocean, most of us would probably think first of Iran, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia. But Kaplan is worried about more obscure places like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Baluchistan, and the Isthmus of Kra (can you put that one on a map? I couldn’t). To the degree he’s concerned about Afghanistan, it’s less because of Islamic fundamentalism than because of that country’s estimated $3 trillion in mineral reserves (which U.S. companies are slavering over) and its value as a pipeline route to transport natural gas from Central Asia (which India covets).

Elsewhere, Kaplan says, the United States and India are running to play catch-up with China. The Chinese think more strategically than the United States (all those five-year plans, much mocked in this age of unfettered markets, turn out to have their uses). So, for example, China is building deepwater ports at vast expense in Gwadar in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan and another -- this one combined with a liquefied gas facility -- at Hambantota in Sri Lanka. (Two more places I’d never heard of.) And it’s eyeing more megaports in Myanmar and Bangladesh to handle Myanmar’s largely untapped reserves of oil, uranium, coal, zinc, copper, and timber.

In addition to long-range planning, China’s other great advantage is that its rulers don’t much care who they do business with. (The same can be said of the United States, of course, which has never been shy about jumping into bed with nasty governments where critical resources are at stake. Think Saudi Arabia.) But the array of countries targeted by China -- and increasingly by India -- is a good illustration of the point. Bangladesh is a shambolic quasi-democracy with a largely moderate Muslim population. Pakistan has the façade of civilian rule with an all-powerful military and roiling currents of Islamist extremism. Myanmar is one of the world’s most repellent military dictatorships. It’s not that the Chinese necessarily favors dictatorships over democracies as a matter of principle, any more than the United States does; you have the sense that they would be equally happy to sign contracts for pipelines, mines, and forest clearcuts with the democratic icon of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, if she were suddenly swept to power. It’s just that morality plays little or no part in their cold-eyed investment decisions -- and for the United States, at least now and then, it does.

China represents the ultimate in pragmatism: money, growth, and the assertion of its standing as a world power determine everything. The same philosophy that has made it the world leader in solar power has also made it the world leader in the deforestation of Asia. And India, riven with anxiety about falling behind China in the race for natural resources, is headed down a similar path.

All that takes us to the most provocative implication of Kaplan’s argument: that morality in foreign policy may not only place the United States at a strategic disadvantage; it may actually be detrimental to the environment. In 2007, Kaplan notes, the U.S. suspended military aid to Sri Lanka because of the government’s atrocities against Tamil rebels. So in came the Chinese, laden with fighter aircraft, radar systems, and armored personnel carriers, and unencumbered by moral qualms, and in return they gained expansive rights to drill for natural gas and build coal-fired power plants. Similarly, Washington’s ostracism of Myanmar’s ruling military council, the ominously named SLORC, left the field wide-open for China to exploit the country’s natural resources with few if any environmental restrictions.

Aren’t the protection of the environment and the promotion of human rights part of an inseparable package of moral imperatives? Or can one set of our most cherished values conflict directly with another? I don’t know the answer, but I do urge you to read Monsoon, because we live in a time when facing up to intellectual challenges of this kind is necessary -- and probably inescapable.

Next time in The Edge: another book that challenges us to face up to the moral paradoxes of contemporary environmentalism. Clue: it’s not Moby-Dick.

Solar Skirmish, Bed Bugs Lose Bite, Save the Rainforest (from Bad Legislation)
Surf's Up, Hawaii!, Saudi Sun Power, Fuel-Efficient Ferrari?
Solar Slowdown, Pursuing the White Whale, Franken-Corn Rises

International Initiatives

Greening China

China Renews Its Commitment to Renewable Energy

Crazy for Energy? Obama, Nuclear Power, and Giant Dams in the Ring of Fire

George Black — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:12:39 +0000

By George Black

Third in a series. Read parts one and two.

Just a week ago, we all thought we knew what would happen when President Obama flew into Santiago today for his meetings with his Chilean counterpart, Sebastián Piñera. In the wake of the horrors of Fukushima, Chile and the United States would shunt their long-planned cooperation pact on nuclear energy onto the most discreet back burner they could find.

Well, it turns out we were wrong. U.S ambassador Alejandro Wolff and Chilean foreign minister Alfredo Moreno initialed the agreement last Friday. Piñera’s spin on this seems to be, what’s all the fuss about? These are only technical discussions, and nothing will actually be done to develop nuclear energy for years. Besides, Obama and I are signing agreements on all sorts of things -- let me tell you about our cool plan to bring more English teachers to Chile.

We’re all obsessed with things nuclear right now, which is understandable. But Piñera is right in a sense. Nuclear power in Chile is still more conceptual than real, and focusing on it to the exclusion of all else creates the risk that we will overlook other, more urgent problems. By which I don’t mean English teachers; I mean how far the two presidents will push the limits of what they consider to be "clean, safe energy."

The most pressing question of all, as I’ve been arguing for the past week, is the string of huge dams that a corporate consortium named HidroAysén is proposing to build in the remote south of Patagonia. Nuclear reactors may be a far-off prospect, but the Chilean government will rule on the dam proposal as early as April 15. The indications are that Piñera’s "all-the-above" view of energy development will prevail. Chile faces such a dire energy crisis, in other words, that it needs to build every power plant possible, environment be damned. Or dammed.

I wonder what Obama might think of the dam idea if he took a few days off after his visit to Santiago and took Michelle and the girls on a trip to the far south. Halfway to Patagonia, he would pass through the city of Concepción, which was devastated by an 8.8 magnitude earthquake a little over a year ago. Farther south, at the gateway to Patagonia, he would surely be stopped short by the stunning, snow-covered Osorno volcano, Chile’s answer to Mount Fuji. It’s one of the most active in South America, having erupted at least five times in the 19^th century though not since. You might say it’s overdue.

The president would be over the Liquiñe-Ofqui seismic fault now, which runs north-south for more than 600 miles. Soon the dirt road would take him past the flattened cone of Chaitén, which erupted in 2008, burying a nearby town of the same name in ash. Farther still, beyond the town of Coyhaique, which was rattled during my own visit to Patagonia earlier this month by a 5.4 magnitude tremor -- small potatoes by Chilean standards -- Obama would come upon the spectacular Río Ibáñez. He would marvel at the sight of a dead forest, stretching for miles along the valley floor, a casualty of the Hudson volcano, whose eruption in 1991 was one of the largest of the 20^th century.

I could go on, all the way to the mouth of the Río Baker, but I suspect you get the drift by now: this is a hell of a place to build five big dams and a 1,400-mile high-tension power line. And let’s not even talk about building nuclear plants in another of the world’s most seismically unstable countries.

Worse, volcanoes and earthquakes are not the only reason why HidroAysén’s plans are so reckless. There’s also the small matter of global warming, which brings the increased risk of glacial lake outburst floods, or GLOFs, from Patagonia’s vast Northern Ice Field. In the headwaters of the Río Colonia, one of the Baker’s main tributaries, is a lake called Cachet 2. There hadn’t been a GLOF at Cachet 2 since the 1960s, but since 2008 there have been seven (the most recent was two weeks ago). Each of them dumped about 50 billion gallons of icy water into the Colonia, and thence into a stretch of the Baker that lies smack in the middle of the two dams that HidroAysén plans to build on the river.

Don’t worry, says HidroAysén: our dams are designed to withstand floods twice as heavy as those caused by the recent GLOFs.

Worry, say the scientists who have studied Cachet 2; physical evidence suggests that past GLOFs may have discharged more than four times as much floodwater as those that have occurred in the past three years.

After tsunami-proof nuclear plants and leak-proof oil wells six miles deep in the Gulf of Mexico, does all this sound a little familiar?

The worst part of this story is not that an energy giant would disfigure one of the most beautiful places in the world; not that multibillion-dollar dams are dinosaurs that the rest of the world is tearing down faster than new ones are being built; and not that Hidroaysén (not to mention the investors who are supposed to pony up $7 billion for the project) is courting disastrous physical risks. It’s that the whole thing is totally unnecessary. Chile simply doesn’t need the additional 2,750 megawatts that the project would supply.

Chile’s problem is not that it lacks energy, but that it lacks a national energy policy. The massive privatization of the energy sector means that the development of new sources is driven not by any coherent plan but by the whims and profit motives of corporations with near-monopoly power. In his first year in office President Piñera has done nothing to change that. If examples are needed, look no further than his decision just last month to permit Eike Batista, the richest man in Brazil, to build six new coal-fired power plants -- another 2,100 MW -- on an environmentally sensitive stretch of the Chilean coast.

Piñera says that Chile will need to add another 14,000 MW to the capacity of its central grid by 2025, doubling its energy supply. But studies by Chilean and U.S. energy experts have argued that this claim is based on grossly inflated projections of future economic growth. More realistic estimates, coupled with a serious California-style energy efficiency program, could reduce the projected increase by half. (Piñera, unfortunately, has slashed the budget for Chile’s energy efficiency agency.)

The real silver bullet, however, is the country’s remarkable potential to develop genuinely renewable energy sources, not spuriously "green" ones like mega-dams. The Atacama desert, scene of last year’s emotional rescue of the 33 trapped miners, has limitless solar potential; astronomers flock to the Atacama because it has the clearest skies in the world. And in the greatest irony of all, the very things that make HidroAysén’s project so risky -- the volcanoes and seismic faults of the Pacific Ring of Fire -- also represent an untapped and virtually limitless source of geothermal energy.

To become competitive, of course, these energies of the future require the kind of start-up support and financial cushions against risk that only governments can provide. If corporate monopolies are allowed to dictate the rules of the energy market and meet the "need" with reckless projects like the dams on the Baker, they will remove the incentives for cleaner, safer, and more reliable renewable sources.

We’re at a historic crossroads right now, with one country after another making huge, far-reaching decisions about its energy future. Ever since the Pinochet dictatorship ended 20 years ago, Chile has prided itself -- with good reason -- on being a model for the developing world. President Piñera has a basic choice to make: he can make his reputation as a visionary leader, charting a path for the rest of the developing world, or he can be just one more laggard, doing things in the same old dirty, dangerous, and destructive way. And even if Obama doesn’t take that fantasy trip to Patagonia, as he takes out his pen to sign the nuclear agreement he might ask himself the same question.

Into the Wild Green Yonder
VIDEO: Algae As Fuel
Beastie Boy Activism, Tiny Lizard vs. Big Oil, Disturbing Gulf Photos

NRDC Experts on Obama's Trip to Chile

Proposed Dams Jeopardize Patagonia's Wild Rivers

Latin American BioGems

The Power of Power in Patagonia

George Black — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 19:30:07 +0000

By George Black

Second in a series. Read part one.

COYHAIQUE, CHILE -- It’s hard to believe that last week -- March 11, to be exact -- marked the 20^th anniversary of the departure from office of the late, unlamented General Augusto Pinochet, who presided over the darkest period in this country’s history. Yet there is a bitter irony to the story of Chile’s return to democracy. Pinochet may no longer be around to torture and murder his opponents, but the system he built lives on in other ways. Though his democratic successors have chipped away at the edges of his radical free-market experiment, economic power and political influence remain concentrated in a few private hands. And those hands are now poised to strangle one of the last untouched corners of the planet.

One of Pinochet’s most harmful legacies was the creation of a virtual private monopoly over two key sectors of the economy: water and energy. A law passed in 1981 gave corporations the right to buy, sell, and trade water like any other commodity -- and that meant primarily the right to harness the energy of the nation’s rivers by damming them. Expecting a corporation to own water rights without exploiting them is a little like expecting a farmer to leave his fields permanently fallow.

On the eve of Pinochet’s departure, a company called Endesa (then in Chilean hands, now Italian-controlled) was granted the right -- free of charge and in perpetuity -- to develop the most powerful rivers in Patagonia. It is now the majority partner in a consortium called HidroAysén, which plans to build five mega-dams on the pristine Baker and Pascua rivers, deep in the Patagonian wilderness.

As required by Chilean law, HidroAysén presented its original environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the project in November 2008. The 10,000-page submission was greeted with thousands of critical comments, which basically told the developers that while their document might be useful as a doorstop, it had little value as a serious piece of analysis of the likely environmental damage.

If the government now approves HidroAysén’s latest round of revisions -- which will be delivered on April 15 -- Endesa and its local partner, Colbún, which is owned by one of the richest families in Latin America, will control close to 90 percent of energy generation for Chile’s central electricity grid. As if that weren’t enough, HidroAysén has also applied for mining concessions along the path of the 1,400-mile transmission line that will carry the juice to the capital, Santiago. (Mining, thanks in part to soaring copper prices, is the main force driving Chile’s rampaging demand for energy.)

Also, by what one could politely call a quirk of Chilean law, the environmental impacts of the dams and the transmission line have to be assessed separately. The moment the dam assessment is approved by the government, HidroAysén starts pouring cement. But the power line study does not fall due until September. I think in the trade this is called creating a fait accompli.

For opponents of the dams, the great conundrum is how a plan that continues to sidestep all the basic criticisms that have been leveled at it, may still be given the green light. The answer is that it’s all about power. Public opinion polls show that a consistent majority of Chileans oppose large-scale energy development in Patagonia. But the task of actively opposing it falls to a collection of small and desperately underfunded local environmental and civic groups, who, together with some larger international organizations (including NRDC) have banded together in a loose coalition called the Council for the Defense of Patagonia.

Even with their limited resources, the opponents of the dams made some impressive early headway. They successfully dramatized the threat by publicizing photo-montages of gorgeous landscapes disfigured by power lines. They started the first serious debate about energy efficiency as an alternative to endless new power plants. And they put Patagonia -- a place that had been as remote to many Chileans as deep space -- squarely on the national political agenda.

HidroAysén responded with a publicity offensive of its own, as fierce and powerful in its way as the waters of the Río Baker. In came Burson Marsteller, the 800-pound gorilla of global public relations. The firm has long experience in this sort of fight. Its previous clients include Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, Philip Morris in its fight against tobacco regulation, and the designers of the Three Mile Island plant after the partial core meltdown in 1979.

The campaign started with scare tactics. TV commercials warned that Chile would grind to a standstill without more energy: a woman pressed an elevator button and power cut out to a hospital operating theater; another switched on her hairdrier, and the national soccer stadium went dark -- the equivalent for fútbol-crazed Chileans of a blackout during the Super Bowl. Recently, the approach has become more subtle. Literally the first billboard a visitor sees today on leaving Santiago’s international airport is an eco-friendly message from HidroAysén: A FAVOR DEL AGUA. Limpia. Renovable. Chilena. FOR WATER. Clean. Renewable. Chilean.

Our Rivers Are Much More Than Energy: An anti-dam billboard near Lago General Carrera on Chile's southern highway, the Carretera Austral.

(Photo by George Black)

Anti-dam billboards do show up along the Carretera Austral, the dirt road that runs north-south through Patagonia, planted in fields and forest clearings that presumably are cheaper to rent than an airport off-ramp. In Coyhaique, 1,100 miles from Santiago and the only town of any size in the region, local anti-dam activists invited me to attend a Saturday demonstration and concert. By a generous count there were 300 people at the rally, if I included the babies in strollers. Posters around the stage showed sinister men from Endesa with dark glasses, briefcases, and skinny ties. Two rappers chanted slogans denouncing the corporation as mentirosa, engañosa, ladrona -- lying, thieving cheats. The sense of an unequal battle is very strong down here.

Two hundred miles farther south, in Cochrane, the small, remote settlement that would be the hub of the dam-building operation, Tatiana Aguilera, a member of the town council, acknowledged gloomily that opinion is split. The siren song of the dam-builders is potent: HidroAysén means progress, modernity, a microwave oven. There will be jobs, of course -- 5,000 of them, the dam-builders promise, though most will be temporary and few will go to locals, who lack the requisite skills. HidroAysén will also bring scholarships for local kids, digital connectivity, money for the soccer team. When you’re about to throw $7 billion at something (an estimated $3.2 billion for the dams and $3.8 billion for the transmission line), greasing the wheels like this comes out of petty cash.

Opponents of the dam say they spend a lot of time debating how to turn their relative weakness into strength. Is this a case of David and Goliath, where they search for the single well-placed stone? Or are they Lilliputians, trying to tie down Gulliver with a thousand strings of publicity, litigation, technical argument, street demonstrations, YouTube videos, whatever it takes to buy a little time?

The shred of good news is that all is not lost, at least not yet. A decision on the EIA may be imminent, but for all HidroAysén’s wealth and political clout, the most significant doubts and technical questions remain unanswered. For opponents of the project, there may still be a little time left for both Lilliputian strings and David’s slingshot. The dams will threaten endangered species and flood portions of an iconic national park. Both dams and transmission line must run a gauntlet of floods, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Look at the map and you’ll see that Patagonia lies at one end of the Ring of Fire, the lethal string of seismic fault lines that girdles the Pacific Ocean. At the other end, in case we need reminding, is Japan.

Coming Monday in The Edge: As President Obama visits Chile, we examine why it is too risky to build giant dams in the Ring of Fire -- and why Chile doesn’t need them anyway.

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Is Nothing Sacred When It Comes to Satisfying Our Endless Energy Binge?

George Black — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 19:52:41 +0000

By George Black

First in a series. Read parts two and three.

COCHRANE, CHILEAN PATAGONIA -- Normally I’m allergic to hyperbole. People who toss around overused (and more often than not inaccurate) words like unique and pristine, or describe everything from the Grand Canyon to a babbling brook in Connecticut as totally awesome, can be deeply annoying. But I will make an exception to this general rule in the case of the Río Baker, here in the remote south of Chile. I will go out on a limb, in fact, and say that this may be the most beautiful untamed river in the world. If you disagree, please send photographs to support your nominations.

There’s a belief, deeply rooted in the 19^th century and still passionately held by many environmentalists, that untouched wilderness like southern Patagonia is the true, authentic face of the world, and that encountering it teaches us who we are, what we should be, and how we have fallen from grace. Again, I tend to stop short of such a sweeping view of things. Philosophically, I see our coexistence with the land as necessarily a tough, pragmatic battle, in which we preserve what we can and make bitter compromises where we must. But even for the pragmatist, there are places like the Baker, where the utter wildness and beauty overwhelm all thoughts of compromise, where you want to build some environmental equivalent of the Great Wall of China and hang a sign that says “OFF LIMITS. FOREVER.”

Ironically, it’s the very wildness of the Baker (Chileans pronounce it Backer) that now places it at risk, for there is always someone who looks at this kind of raw power and says, what a waste, what a squandering of potential profits. In Chile, that someone is an energy consortium called HidroAysén. And forever, in the case of the Baker, may mean just another month or so -- the period in which the Chilean government is likely to give its seal of approval to a plan by HidroAysén to bury long stretches of the Baker and the nearby Pascua in cement and steel.

Arguing that the country faces a critical energy deficit between now and 2025, HidroAysén has been lobbying for the past five years, against bitter opposition, to build a string of five colossal dams on these two pristine rivers, producing a total of 2,750 megawatts of power. That’s bigger than the Hoover Dam and equivalent to more than a quarter of the total current capacity of Chile’s central electricity grid. In themselves, these five dams would be no more than ugly, useless slabs of masonry, stuck away in the middle of nowhere. But the even greater affront to the land is that carrying all those megawatts to Chile’s urban and industrial heartland will also mean building a 1,400-mile transmission line, a parade of 6,000 pylons, each as much as 262 feet tall, marching north to the capital, Santiago.

Think of this transmission line as a gigantic power strip. Once it is built, every other wild river in Patagonia can be plugged into it at will like a domestic appliance. And under a unique Chilean law, the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship, Endesa, the Spanish-owned majority partner in the HidroAysén consortium, owns the rights to develop most of those rivers, too. (Note: Click photos to read captions.)

When I first came to Patagonia five years ago, I described the fight over the Baker (which was then just beginning) as a "global parable." (See "Patagonia Under Seige," Fall 2006.) I believe that more than ever today, because the HidroAysén project poses some of the most fundamental questions of our time. Where do we draw the line in our insatiable demand for energy? If not in Patagonia, then where? Can we meet our needs in a rational and far-sighted way, or do we mortgage the future to the entrenched interests of powerful corporations like Endesa? At a moment in history when the whole world has to make fundamental choices about its long-term energy strategies, which path will Chile take? That’s more than a parochial question: Chile’s self-image is bound up with the belief that the country represents a model for the developing world, and on March 21 President Sebastián Piñera is scheduled to welcome Barack Obama to Santiago -- the principal item on their agenda being clean energy, no less.

I’ll try to answer each of those questions over the next few days, but for now let’s just stick to the Río Baker, and consider, with the help of a few admittedly amateur snapshots, what is at stake.

Some great rivers begin as tiny mountain rills. Not the Baker, which emerges full-blown from a lake, Lago Bertrand, and rushes southward, already hundreds of feet wide, in unearthly shades of turquoise and pale emerald. Stretches of fast, unbroken current give way to thunderous waterfalls as the river negotiates its path through dense forests, rocky chasms, and lower, drier hills that hint at the steppes of Argentine Patagonia, on the other side of the Continental Divide.

In this interval of arid land, the Río Chacabuco enters from the east, carrying its load of milky blue glacial silt. This is where the 660 MW Baker 1 will be built. Ten miles or so farther downstream is the chilly outpost settlement of Cochrane, the only town of any consequence for hundreds of miles. ("Consequence" meaning two and a half thousand people.) Cochrane is an end-of-the-road kind of place that still carries the aura of the pioneers who began to hack out a living in southern Patagonia a century or so ago. It is a small collection of grid pattern streets lined with homes that are rustic yet charmless, with walls of bare boards or unfinished cedar shingles and roofs of corrugated metal. Smoke from wood fires drifts from tin chimneys. Yet Cochrane would be the nerve center of the HidroAysén enterprise, the hub of a network of trucking routes, port facilities, storage depots, and temporary encampments for the 5,000 or so transient workers building the dams.

South of Cochrane, the washboard dirt road to the Pacific follows the river, past the site of the Baker 2 dam (360 MW), through an ever-lonelier land. On the 80-mile drive to Caleta Tortel, where the river meets the salt, I count fewer than a dozen vehicles traveling in the opposite direction. Most are pickups driven by local colonos who work a scattered handful of farms and ranches in the back country. One is the morning bus to Cochrane. A pair of Nordic-looking bikers in Spandex labor their way up a steep incline. A father and son in brown ponchos and the traditional Basque beret of southern Patagonia wheel their horses onto a dirt track leading off into the hills.

Along the way, the Baker picks up one tributary after another. By quirks of geology, soil, vegetation, and gradient, these contribute waters of staggering variety. There are rivers that are chocolate with mud, others that run as clear as gin, others that meander deep-green through forests of native ñirre, coïgue, and lenga. Many carry the runoff from glaciers, tinted every imaginable shade of green, blue, white, even yellow. By the time the Baker reaches its final, open floodplain, it is a surging brown flood a half-mile wide. Brian Reid, an American limnologist, tells me, "The Baker and undammed glacial rivers like it probably contribute 95 percent of the dissolved silica in the fjords of southern Chile. That’s essential for diatoms, the base of the food webs that drive ocean productivity." Dams put an end to all that.

Tiny Caleta Tortel is tucked into a misty fjord between the great (though rapidly melting) northern and southern Patagonian ice fields, the largest reserves of frozen water on the planet other than those in Greenland and at the poles. Tortel is one of the stranger human settlements. The road stops short of town. The 500 or so inhabitants are served only by a network of red-cedar walkways, which give the whole place the faint smell of a mothproof closet. Boats, more dead than alive, are strewn about on the foreshore among the reeds and fallen cedar limbs.

A few windows have stickers that say Patagonia Sin Represas -- "Patagonia Without Dams." Others have hopeful signs directed at the few tourists, offering boat rides to the Montt and Steffen glaciers, or to the Island of the Dead, a scrap of dry land in the estuary of the Baker that contains the graves of 120 men. They were employed by the Sociedad Explotadora del Baker, an early, failed attempt to colonize this region for cattle ranching. They died in 1906. The official version is that they succumbed to scurvy after a supply ship failed to arrive. But locals tell me darker rumors, that the men were poisoned en masse by their employers to save on wages. Even the limited human history of the Baker is wild and mysterious.

Looking down on the deep-green fjord from the highest point of Tortel’s cedar walkways, my mind turns again to the problem of hyperbole. Crimes against nature is another of those overused phrases that grate on me. But if there was ever a case that justified its use, it is the proposal to dam the Baker, surely a crime against nature on an epic scale.

Coming Thursday in The Edge: How giant corporations acquired power over Chile’s water and energy sectors and ran roughshod over local opposition and environmental concerns.

PHOTO CAPTIONS

1: In a swirl of glacial colors, the Río Manso meets the Río Ibáñez. The rights to develop the Ibáñez are also owned by Endesa. Return to story.

2: This channel connects Lago General Carrera, the largest lake in South America after Lake Titicaca, with Lago Bertrand, the source of the Baker. Return.

3: The Baker surges through a canyon close to the site of the proposed Baker 1 dam. Return.

4: The Río Chacabuco (entering the Baker from the right) runs through land owned by American millionaires Doug and Kris Tompkins, who hope to turn it into a national park. Return.

5: The valley of the Río Baker has long, desolate stretches framed by distant snowpeaks. Return.

6: Four miles of cedar walkways link the scattered houses of Caleta Tortel and climb into the surrounding hills. Return.

7: In Caleta Tortel, local boatmen offer trips to the Steffen Glacier, named for one of the earliest explorers of southern Patagonia. Return.

Photos by George Black.

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George Black — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 22:10:49 +0000

By George Black

In my unending (and thus far, I have to confess, largely fruitless) attempts to figure out why Americans aren’t more alarmed about climate change, one of the more intriguing ideas I’ve heard recently was put to me by a psychologist named Andrew Shatté.

Shatté, a professor at the University of Arizona, is best known for his work on resilience -- the ability of humans to deal with adversity. His thesis on climate change, in a nutshell, is that we are hardwired for extinction. He compares us to the Irish elk, which went extinct about 11,000 years ago. The male of that species evolved to grow big antlers -- I mean really gargantuan antlers, racks up to 12 feet wide, designed for the usual reasons of aggression, defense, and sexual display. Over time, the antlers got so big that the elk couldn’t consume enough calories to sustain their growth, so instead the antlers began to feed in auto-parasitic fashion on the calcium in the animals’ bones. If galloping osteoporosis didn’t kill them, they got their antlers impossibly tangled up in the overhead branches and starved to death.

So why are we like the Irish elk? The problem is the human brain, Shatté says. Our evolutionary development has not yet caught up with the change in our circumstances. More specifically, the problem is our brain’s fear triggers. Our instincts are still paleolithic; our fear reflexes respond to all the wrong things. They lie dormant in the face of climate change, no matter how ominously scientists predict its probable consequences. But we’re programmed to pump adrenalin at the sight of spiders, snakes, and other mortal threats slithering into our caves. We still run a mile from snakes, although they only kill about five or six Americans a year. The most recent annual figure for fatalities from lightning strikes is 58, but would you go anywhere near a golf course in a storm?

For the past year or so, where climate is concerned, our human fear triggers seem to have become even more anesthetized. Some of the reasons seem obvious. The global economic crisis has shunted many other fears into the background, and the climate deniers have done a scarily effective job with all their manufactured "scandals" about the integrity of science.

But wait a second: let’s not generalize about human fear reflexes. What we’re talking about mainly is American reflexes and American deniers. Concern about climate change has diminished almost everywhere in the past year, in inverse proportion to the gravity of the warnings from mainstream scientists. But alarm in the United States remains much lower than in any other developed country. You can argue about the reasons -- the enduring belief in American exceptionalism, a cultural distrust of scientists, Rush Limbaugh, whatever. Some people explain the gap by invoking the power of the fossil fuel industry. But in that case, why haven’t the climate skeptics set up shop in Norway, where the oil business accounts for half of the country’s export earnings?

Another common argument -- and this is implicit in what Shatté says -- is that we aren’t scared by climate change because the threat seems remote and abstract. Bangladeshis may worry about sea-level rise, and Peruvians may fret about melting glaciers, but for Americans, climate change is still something that is happening only in a galaxy far, far away.

I don’t really buy that. I spend a fair amount of time in the West, which is experiencing at least three spectacularly visible impacts of global warming: prolonged drought, raging forest fires, and the destruction of forests by the mountain pine beetle. Sit on your front porch in Wyoming or Idaho and you can almost see the trees dying in front of your eyes -- and then hold your breath to see if they will burst into flames come summer. The conundrum, though, is that these states are among the reddest in the country, the most likely to distrust the science on climate change and the most hostile to any government effort to reduce carbon emissions.

So what’s the problem with Americans? (A question that occupies a good amount of bar, pub, and water cooler time in Europe.) In a widely noted comment last October, Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, pointed out that while conservative political parties in other countries have small pockets of climate deniers, the United States is the only nation in the developed world where a major political party is almost uniformly hostile to the scientific consensus. There are still a good number of skeptics in the U.K., but none of the three major parties there questions that climate change is a huge problem that demands an urgent response. European conservative leaders like Nicolas Sarkozy in France and Angela Merkel in Germany feel the same way.

All of which brings me back to Andrew Shatté’s theory of evolution. Shatté is a remarkably eloquent guy (his recent TED talk on resilience is worth a look). But in the end I wasn’t convinced. If he’s right about evolution, why are Americans so much less fazed by climate change than the rest of the world? Isn’t evolution supposed to be a uniform process in a species? Or does it happen at different rates depending on your nationality or the accidents of birth? Were the elk in the peat bogs of Killarney more unconcerned about their plight than their cousins in Donegal? However, I suppose in the end debating theories about climate change and evolution depends a lot on whether you believe in evolution in the first place. But let’s not go there. After all, this is America.

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Clear and Present Danger

George Black — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 22:43:58 +0000

By George Black

Why on earth would one of the world’s leading climate scientists, Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University, publish an article about glaciers in an academic journal called The Behavior Analyst? Not only that, but an article that ends with this ringing appeal: "Our only hope is to change our behavior in ways that significantly slow the rate of global warming, thereby giving the engineers time to devise, develop, and deploy technological solutions where this is possible." The precondition for that change, Thompson goes on, is government regulation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Absent that, "our only options will be adaptation and suffering. And the longer we delay, the more unpleasant the adaptations and the greater the suffering will be."

So has Thompson abandoned the world of science for the world of politics? Having talked to him at length for my recent OnEarth cover story on Peru, I don’t believe he has. I think he’s just following the logical path of scientific inquiry. And in the process, he’s posing what may be the most urgent question now facing those who care about climate change. How do we communicate apocalyptic warnings from the scientific mainstream without alienating the general public -- since many environmentalists now fear, partly based on a highly debatable study from the University of California at Berkeley, that people are turned off by talk of doom? I’ll try to hazard an answer to that question.

First of all, Thompson’s article illustrates a dramatic shift in the consensus among mainstream scientists. That consensus has now moved through three distinct stages over the past 20 or 30 years: first, there is a significant rise in global temperatures; second, our burning of fossil fuels is largely responsible; and now, third, that the impact of warming is much worse, and happening much faster, than anyone imagined even a year ago.

"Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group," Thompson says in his article. "We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies." But 2010 brought an unprecedented amount of new, scary data on climate change, with one scientific institution after another concluding that the skies may indeed be falling. This has put Thompson on a rhetorical path that many other leading scientists are also treading. Take a conversation between the great biologist E. O. Wilson and Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker, published in the same issue of OnEarth as my story on Peru. For many years, Wilson says, he felt that, with "all the devotion I felt to the purity of science… my duty was to stay with science and just get the theory and facts right." Today, theory and fact have led him to warn that we are approaching catastrophic levels of mass species extinction because we act as a "Star Wars civilization," apparently bent on the destruction of entire planets. And, like Thompson, he says our only alternative is a radical change in behavior.

Let’s go back to that flood of new peer-reviewed data, with three examples that document the state of the world’s oceans. (We’ll leave aside a slew of similar studies on everything from massive drought and desertification to the rate of species extinction.)

First, a March report in Science, partly funded by the National Science Foundation—a sober-sided body if ever there was one—that with Arctic temperatures rising twice as fast as in any other part of the world, "methane is leaking [into the atmosphere] from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf at an alarming rate." This methane, a greenhouse gas whose 100-year impact will be 25 times more potent than that of carbon dioxide, has been locked up in seabed permafrost (except that the prefix "perma-" no longer applies; better to think of it from now on as "tempafrost").

Second, a July report in Nature, titled "Global Warming Blamed for 40% Decline in the Ocean’s Phytoplankton." Obscure stuff to most people, but phytoplankton are the foundation of the ocean food web and the source of half the oxygen produced by all plant life on the planet.

Third, a December study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicts a rise in sea level of as much as 1.9 meters (6.23 feet) by the end of the century. This is up to three times higher than the projections in the last periodic report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued in 2007, which did not take fully into account the impact of ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica.

And to cap this annus horribilis, of course, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Climatic Data Center published its annual findings on global climate: 2010 equaled 2005 as the warmest year ever recorded.

Of course, the climate deniers will continue to assert that science has been politicized, and that so-called scientists are really activists in disguise. We’re never going to persuade them otherwise. But those who remain on the fence and are vulnerable to the siren song of the skeptics -- and there are millions of them -- are a different matter. The importance of Thompson’s article, I think, is that it suggests a line of argument that can be very effective. Let me explain.

The essence of the scientific method is Aristotelian logic, combined with a stolid excess of caution. Collect data objectively; formulate and test hypotheses; share your data for peer review (Thompson has published close to 200 peer-reviewed papers); and constantly update your findings to reflect where the evidence takes you. If it takes you to fear of the apocalypse, well… that’s where it takes you. The next logical step in the progression -- assuming you have a shred of moral sense and don’t just say, gosh, that’s interesting -- is to suggest remedial action. If it can be shown that variable X (say, sea-level rise) is the consequence of variable Y (carbon emissions), ergo changing Y will change X.

We have no trouble accepting this logic with, say, medical researchers. If a microbiologist demonstrates how a cancer cell operates (and assuming that he or she considers cancer to be something that we have a social interest in eliminating), the next step is to develop pharmaceutical and other science-based remedies.

In the case of public health, society accepts this logic as axiomatic, which takes us back to the problem of how we communicate. For those whose eyes glaze over at talk of the apocalypse, here’s a balanced message: Warn of the clear and present danger (Thompson’s phrase, and not a bad one to use, incidentally: it worked pretty well during the Cold War). But at the same time stress that scientific and technological research promises to bring us realistic solutions. That promise, though, hinges on one condition (and this is Thompson’s crucial point) -- that government first take action to buy us the time we need to develop those solutions. And that isn’t politics; it’s just sound mainstream science.

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