ENVIRONMENT NOVEMBER 4, 2012
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In our house, an hour north of New York City, we mark the seasons with extreme weather: the spring thunderstorm that felled our century-old maple; the summer hurricane that knocked out our power and flooded our basement; the Halloween blizzard that collapsed our fence; the summer heat wave that killed our sweet corn crop; and the fall "superstorm" that tore away part of our back porch and—infinitely more painful than any of this—took the lives of two young boys in our town. All of this in the past 18 months.
Sandy was one of the most destructive storms in American history. The best science tells us that global warming fed her fury. It helped heat the Atlantic waters, increasing her energy. It loaded the atmosphere with additional moisture, boosting her rainfall. And it raised the sea level in New York Harbor, adding to her record storm surge. Climate change makes hurricanes badder and bigger as surely as doping made Lance Armstrong ride farther and faster.
So will Sandy put an end to our political leaders' silence on climate change?
I thought we had already answered that question. In 2006, an even deadlier storm, Katrina, helped shift the conversation from science to politics, from whether anthropogenic global warming was real to what we were going to do about it. In response, I decided to devote three years to a book about climate politics. When I began work on The Climate War, in early 2007, I thought I would be telling the story of how we finally started to get serious about reducing emissions, by passing a mandatory, declining carbon cap. I ended up telling the story of how we failed.
There were plenty of culprits: the financial crisis and the Great Recession; a president who promised to drive climate legislation but chose other priorities; a news media that mostly missed the biggest story of the era; a fossil fuel industry that spent (and continues to spend) hundreds of millions of dollars a year on politicians, lobbyists, and misleading ads; and finally, elected officials from both parties who concluded that silence was better politics than solutions.
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The only entity with the moral authority to call the politicians to their duty—the American public—was also disengaged from the fight. Environmentalists had limited success getting broader communities involved, in part because the problem seemed so much more distant and abstract than the economic troubles that were keeping people up at night. The relatively small portion of the population that pays attention to policy debates never grasped the stakes of this one. The argument was distorted by post-crash economic anxiety and the rise of the Tea Party. As a result, “cap and trade” became "cap and tax" and the issue was framed as being about the imposition of new costs, rather than about the larger costs that would come from doing nothing.
The climate campaign of 2009-10 was reduced to a top-down strategy—the attempt to pick off enough Republicans to jam the bill through. With the White House and both houses of Congress in (narrow) Democratic hands, it was worth a shot. But energy votes turn on geology as much as ideology. In extraction states, Democrats and Republics alike were uneasy about the climate bill. Every landmark piece of environmental legislation in U.S. history has passed with overwhelming bipartisan majorities, and the climate bill failed to become an exception to that rule. It squeaked through the House but was dead on arrival in the Senate. And with that, climate change vanished. Most news outlets basically stopped covering it. This year, for the first time since 1988, it wasn't mentioned in any of the presidential or vice-presidential debates.
A year after the climate bill died, I decided to get off the sidelines. I took a job at Environmental Defense Fund and—along with many others—started thinking about how to restart the discussion. I traveled in the Midwest, meeting with people who don't trust environmentalists; they thought coastal elites had been trying to cram something vile down their throats. To be successful, the next climate campaign will have to be more bipartisan, more inclusive, and more bottom-up, with people from both sides of the aisle competing to provide the best ideas. But let's be honest—it has been hard to see how that would happen as long as one of the two national parties declines to recognize the problem or participate in the debate.
But now there’s Sandy, and suddenly Chris Christie was standing with President Obama on the wrecked shore, because the New Jersey Governor had "bigger fish to fry" than the election. After a year of extreme heat, drought, floods, and storms that were almost never explicitly connected to climate change, at least not in the media or by politicians, that silence is beginning to crumble.
Bill Clinton made the first noise. On Tuesday, the former president said: "All up and down the East Coast, there are mayors, many of them Republicans, who are being told: 'You've got to move these houses back away from the ocean. You've got to lift them up. Climate change is going to raise the water levels on a permanent basis. If you want your town insured, you have to do this." That evening on the NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams offered a tentative linkage of his own: "People are raising global warming already."Soon New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and newspapers across the country were asking what our coastal cities need to do to prepare for rising seas and wilder storms, and how much will it cost.
The answer is, a lot. Sea gates to protect New York Harbor from storm surges could cost $10 billion. (London already has them.) But doing nothing would be far more expensive. Sandy's price tag is estimated at $50 billion. Last year, some $26 billion was paid out in insurance damages for thunderstorms alone. Drought-induced crop failures have sent commodities prices soaring. And the German reinsurance company Munich Re released a report last month that found the rate of extreme weather events rising globally, but “nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.” From 1980 through 2011, weather disasters caused losses totaling $1.06 trillion. Compare that that to the cost of tackling the problem. The best nonpartisan academic analyses of the carbon cap estimate that by 2030 it would shave just 0.58 percent, or $133 billion, from the U.S. G.D.P.
For the first time, the climate debate, once focused on the cost of action, is taking into account the cost of inaction. As Bloomberg Businessweek said on the cover of this week’s issue, "It’s Global Warming, Stupid." Then the magazine's owner endorsed Obama, saying Sandy "should be enough to compel all elected leaders to take immediate action" on climate change. That's a sentiment I've been hearing from people I hadn't expected to feel that way. Early this year in southern Indiana, I met a utility lineman who spends his days outside. He was a conservative man, but weird weather had grabbed his attention. "It isn't like it used to be," he told me. "It's hotter and the storms are much scarier —we all know that." The polls bear him out. According to the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, a majority of Americans now believes global warming has intensified the record-setting extreme weather events of the past two years.
It would be easy to overstate the significance of this moment. Sandy might mark the beginning of an important shift in the political dynamic—but that will only happen if the conversation that started this week is given steady attention, not one brief spasm after a horrendous storm. A great many people have been hiding from this issue for the last couple of years—elected officials, civic and business leaders, journalists, folks who were just tired of arguing about it. It's time for them to speak up.
If the Indiana lineman and so many others like him keep talking the way they have, if local officials and grassroots activists and faith leaders and business people and first responders and insurance agents all join in, politicians from both parties will conclude that it is to their political advantage to talk about climate change as well. If we demand it, our leaders will have to follow.
Pooley, a former managing editor of Fortune and chief political correspondent for Time, is senior vice president at Environmental Defense Fund and the author of The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth.
16 comments
But yet, at a Romney rally, a man holding up a sign about climate change was heckled and the crowd started chanting "USA! USA!," as though discussing climate change is unpatriotic. Meanwhile Romney had on his long-suffering Jesus look, with the smirk. I am gonna scream.
- Sophia
November 4, 2012 at 4:17pm
Mayor Marathon lost all credibility the day after he endorsed Obama. Bloomberg has had eleven years to push for the $10BIL "sea gates to protect New York Harbor from storm surges", an idea which has been talked about for more than ten years. He wasted all of his political capital on cigarette smoking, transfats, sugary sodas, and re-inventing NYC schools, including shutting down successful vo-tech programs because he thinks everyone should go to college. Just like former Governor Pataki had twelve years in Albany to deal with New York's mountains of debt, and unsustainable Medicaid. Pataki's big idea was to privatize NY Blue Cross/Blue Shield in order to partly offset a one year budget deficit. Rather ironic that Gov. Romney, during his tenure in Massachusetts, scheduled the closure of so many coal-fired electricity generation plants in Massachusetts to insure an electricity shortage in 2013. Seems most of the alternative energy projects that were going to replace the coal have mostly failed to get past the objections of environmentalists.
- K2K
November 4, 2012 at 4:40pm
Timely & beautifully put. When the conversation does restart, I hope we on the left abandon our tone of blame, which turns off otherwise obvious allies in the fight to mitigate climate change -- nominally centrist folks like the linesman, as well as family farmers, outdoors-people & suburbanites, all of whom see their world changing but don't know what to do about it. For the scale of the problem vastly overwhelms Prius-vs-F150 pettiness, and solving it requires all hands on deck. As was the case in late 1941, unfortunately, the time for half-measures has past, so, as a nation, we're either all in -- or out.
- Wonderland
November 4, 2012 at 5:13pm
Last time I checked, Ryan Lizza's reporting for The New Yorker is the gold standard. So, maybe Sophia should be screaming at Harry Reid. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=all "As the World Burns: How the Senate and the White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change." by Ryan Lizza October 11, 2010 "...During the campaign, he often argued that climate change was an essential part of a national energy strategy. “Energy we have to deal with today,” Obama said in a debate with McCain. “Health care is priority No. 2.” After the election, Obama decided to work on both issues simultaneously. Representative Henry Waxman moved climate change through the House, while Max Baucus, of Montana, moved health care in the Senate. “The plan was to throw two things against the wall, and see which one looks more promising,” a senior Administration official said. ... But the Administration had grown wary of cutting the kind of deals that the senators needed to pass cap-and-trade. The long and brutal health-care fight had caused a rift in the White House over legislative strategy. One camp, led by Phil Schiliro, Obama’s top congressional liaison, was composed of former congressional aides who argued that Obama needed to insert himself in the legislative process if he was going to pass the ambitious agenda that he had campaigned on. The other group, led by David Axelrod, believed that being closely associated with the messiness of congressional horse-trading was destroying Obama’s reputation. ... Then, suddenly, there was a new problem: Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said that he wanted to pass immigration reform before the climate-change bill. It was a cynical ploy. Everyone in the Senate knew that there was no immigration bill. Reid was in a tough reëlection, and immigration activists, influential in his home state of Nevada, were pressuring him. Senior aides at the White House were shocked by Reid’s statement. “We were doing well until Reid gave a speech and said it was immigration first. News to us!” a senior Administration official said. “It was kind of like, ‘Whoa, what do we do now? Where did that come from?’ ” ... But on climate change Obama grew timid and gave up, leaving the dysfunctional Senate to figure out the issue on its own. As the Senate debate expired this summer, a longtime environmental lobbyist told me that he believed the “real tragedy” surrounding the issue was that Obama understood it profoundly. “I believe Barack Obama understands that fifty years from now no one’s going to know about health care,” the lobbyist said. “Economic historians will know that we had a recession at this time. Everybody is going to be thinking about whether Barack Obama was the James Buchanan of climate change.” "
- K2K
November 4, 2012 at 5:25pm
Why should I scream at Harry Reid? Is he a totally political animal? Yes. I have been angered by him in the past, he is all too close to both the ranching and the extraction industries. However: the ignoramuses on the Right, and the fossil fuel industry which supports them, are the real problem. You know it dear. Let's face it, all too many Americans think the planet is 6,000 years old. Romney actually laughed at Obama for talking about the level of the seas and mocked the green energy initiatives. And Bloomberg hasn't lost credibility. He has gained it in my eyes.
- Sophia
November 4, 2012 at 7:34pm
But that's ok. Go ahead and vote for the reactionary, Dark Ages party and their lying leaders. I just hope more of us vote for sanity, for women, for workers, for the planet, for the right to healthcare, for a dignified old age and for our sense of community - not just privileged white people, the uber religious and corporations - ie, let's pray that a majority vote for Obama and the Democrats. And also, that voter suppression efforts and other disgusting attempts to steal the election don't haunt us. That would really take the cake especially given the racist undertones of the political discourse this past few years. How can anybody defend this or endorse it?
- Sophia
November 4, 2012 at 7:37pm
The trouble is that even those like Eric Pooley and Bill McKibben who do wish to "talk about" climate change and its mitigation fail to acknowledge the colossal magnitude of the change in human behavior required to forestall dangerous climate change. Cap-and-trade is a nice, rational-sounding idea. It is also almost certain to be completely ineffectual. Look at the 2004 Science paper by Pacala and Socolow, "Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies." They proposed--8 years ago, keep in mind--that if the world immediately adopted 8 to 10 of their schemes, so-called "stabilization wedges", then atmospheric CO2 could be kept below the threshold value of 450ppm until, but not beyond, 2050. With every delay in implementation, the severity of the emissions cuts required would grow exponentially. And to get an idea of how massive an undertaking we're talking about, consider that one such "wedge" was cutting total global automobile usage to half of 2004 levels in perpetuity. In other words, if every man, woman and child on the planet immediately started driving half as many miles as he did currently, whether for business or pleasure, and maintained those restrictions forever, that would still only be 10% of the sacrifice required, not to halt global warming completely, but just to keep it within semi-acceptable bounds only until mid-century. And given that we've already lost eight years, the required sacrifices are even greater. I've come around to thinking that on a global, collective level, human economic behavior is not subject to rational choice, certainly not individual choice but not collective, political choice either. We humans can no more cut our fossil fuel consumption back to preindustrial levels--which is what would be required to make a real dent in climate change--than a supersaturated cloud can stop making rain. Fossil fuels will continue to be extracted and burned and the earth's climate will continue to warm and either A) the warming's adverse effects on human civilization will be limited and manageable and mankind will gradually transition to alternative energy technologies as fossil fuels grow scarcer and more expensive or else B) the warming's effects on human civilization will be extensive and unmanageable and civilization will end and Mother Nature will go on about her inscrutable course as if Homo sapiens's million years on the planet never happened. I reckon that anyone who is truly serious about saving humanity from itself should stop worrying about climate change and go whole hog into nuclear disarmament. A thermonuclear exchange remains the single greatest threat to mankind's continued existence.
- AaronW
November 4, 2012 at 8:21pm
fine comment AaronW. Sometimes I think Homo sapiens is an invasive species. However, having survived the Ice Age, perhaps there is a third scenario, where the survivors re-construct a civilization wherever the climate is accomodating to still-adaptable humans. The cataclysm in the film "Day after Tomorrow" sometimes seems like one real possibility as the Arctic and Greenland glacier melt finally does disturb the Atlantic Gulfstream. The satellite images of the SIZE of StormSandy reminded me of the images from that film. And, I did not delve into why a major cyclone hit India same time.
- K2K
November 4, 2012 at 8:48pm
This excellent piece raises two distinct issues, which it partially conflates. Climate change is undeniable. Where defensive measures are feasible (e.g., building sea gates to protect Manhattan from storm surges), they should be taken, for their cost is modest compared to that of doing nothing. The only question, assuming that human activity plays some part in climate change, is what can be done to prevent these hundred-year events from happening every other year. Is it possibly too late to do anything but "talk about climate change"? Taking a very optimistic, long-range view, talk about climate change may lead (not just here, of course, but also in China and India) to concrete measures that will reduce carbon emissions; this, in turn may slow the progress of global warming and perhaps reduce the frequency and severity of hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves and droughts. For all we know, ocean temperatures may cool in the moderate zones and the polar ice caps freeze back up. Just not in our own lifetimes.
- lfeinber@email.unc.edu
November 4, 2012 at 8:58pm
come on k2k, Democrats have been tepid on the issue (and where they aren't have been mercilessly attacked but Repubs. ie Solyndra) and Republicans have been reactionary neanderthals so you choose to criticize Democrats? Do you remotely believe that if Republicans got religion as to climate change Democrats would not whole heartedly do everything that could be done?
- blackton
November 4, 2012 at 9:22pm
AaronW writes: "The trouble is that even those like Eric Pooley and Bill McKibben who do wish to "talk about" climate change and its mitigation fail to acknowledge the colossal magnitude of the change in human behavior required to forestall dangerous climate change. Cap-and-trade is a nice, rational-sounding idea. It is also almost certain to be completely ineffectual." Spot on wrt changes needed. Scientists say we need to get CO2 emissions down to the level they were in the 70's to slow and then reverse the current trends. They say if we don't, then a tipping point is reached and there is no turning back. Concurrently, we also have 3+ billion people coming on-line in India and China that wish to use power the way westerners use power. Today in the US and Europe, per-capita CO2 is around 15 metric tons/person. To meet these requirements (allow another 3B people to access to energy and return to 1970's levels) means that a typical westerner (US or EU) must reduce their output by 94%. That means you are allowed a per-person budget of 750 kg per year. That allows you to do one of 3 things: 1) Drive a Prius 4600 miles --OR-- 2) Ride in an airplane for 1500 miles --OR-- 3) Power a standard US home for a few months. This, of course, means the end of things like sitting at home surfing the internet. You cannot afford to do this if you seriously believe what the scientists are saying. I hate to tell the readers this, but without nuclear, this just won't happen. There is not a single person int he US willing to restrict his activities to such an extreme. The country pats itself on the back when we all turn out the lights for an hour once per year. What a freaking joke when you consider what is really needed. When those that are telling us this is an emergency start ACTING like it's an emergency, then perhaps I'll start believing them. Until then, I'll just assume it's a bunch of anti-growth types trying to slow growth using the same tactics they've used since the 60's: Fear.
- seattleeng
November 4, 2012 at 10:32pm
blackton: I quoted Ryan Lizza's account from The New Yorker. I do not remember ever being more angry than while reading that two years ago. You should read the entire account before you cast the obligatory stone solely at republicans. or not. I am totally bipartisan in my criticisms. I am still reeling from learning last night that Bain Capital is part-owner of The Weather Channel, matching donations made to The Red Cross through TWC, which broadcast an hour-long "Anatomy of SuperstormSandy" last night.
- K2K
November 5, 2012 at 6:03am
Some great comments here. It's true that the problem is now "colossal," as AaronW notes; much, much too big to be solved with, say, fancy lightbulbs. Most people don't realize the enormity of climate change, or how far gone we already are. But the left bears some responsibility for this, by castigating folks who don't, you know, recycle or buy organic -- thereby simultaneously alienating potential constituencies, and reinforcing their misunderstanding of the problem's scale. Because, at this point, our only hope for mitigation in the next decade is a Manhattan Project-style nationwide mobilization towards mega-solutions -- yes, geoengineering-- for, whatever its merits, green energy is simply not ready for prime time and, well, car-pooling is not going to cut it. Pondering an effort of this size & uncertainty is scary, and its understandable to wish the whole thing would just go away. But our response to the terrible enormity of WWII can actually be a hopeful example these 60 years later: Once the nation understood there was nothing to be done but work together, we knocked it out of the park.
- Wonderland
November 5, 2012 at 6:19am
To distinguish myself from Seattle, I think it is an emergency; I just don't think there's much we can do about it. Hang on tight, 'cause whe's gonna get rough! Let's just pray the old girl doesn't go down!
- AaronW
November 5, 2012 at 6:23am
AaronW: At the risk of being Debbie Downer, you're right: There *isn't* much we can do about it now. That's why we have to get started on ginning up a plan as soon as possible. Just as the Manhattan Project was conceived as something that might be helpful *in the future,* we have to start now on a 'Sandy Project,' because, hoo boy, we'd hate to have nothing lined up when the real fun starts a decade or so from now. Hang on, it's going to be a bumpy ride! :)
- Wonderland
November 5, 2012 at 8:48am
Wonderland, something is called the "tipping point" because it means you can't undo it. If we've hit the tipping point, then your strategy moves from preventing damage to minimizing damage. However, imagine if the west had focused on small, inherently safe and scalable reactors in the 80's. And those reactors could be dropped and/or built anyplace in the world and could cheaply and cleanly power developing nations as well as the US and EU. But instead, because of a bias again nuclear, and the dream of wind, the nuclear was rejected, the bet was made that alt energy would eventually be at scale in spite of countless engineers saying it wouldn't. When I say "A vote AGAINST nuclear is a vote FOR the status quo (oil)" this is exactly what I mean. The green movement created the problem we're in today. Ironically. They love to lame it on the soccer mom in Kansas that drives an SUV. But in fact, our situation today is directly due to those that pushed alt and actively rejected nuclear. The put politicians in an impossible position, and as a result politicians took the easy way out and kept oil.
- seattleeng
November 5, 2012 at 11:33am