Forbes and Doublethink

Forbes magazine is one of the institutions that are part of the effort to attack climate scientists and the work that they do. Along with their attacks on scientists, the magazine also disparages conservation, green energy, and just about anything else favored by the Sierra Club and Al Gore.

            So it is one of those weird doublethink moments when Forbes publishes a piece with the title Wind Farms Cause Global Warming! Going from the text to a subtext, here is what Forbes is saying in this headline: “Here is something we dislike causing something we don’t acknowledge.” What is peculiar as well is the credulity with which they announce the findings of a single study, not to mention that they get the science of the study wrong. The study found localized warming by as much as 0.72C around large wind harvesting complexes. The change is local, how that temperature change affects a larger area is unknown. In essence, the warming may only be local, not global.

            In defending the status quo for fossil fuel companies, Forbes, the Heartland Institute, and the other organizations like them chose an easy tack, to attack the scientists researching global warming. Everybody is human and everybody is flawed. Attacking anybody, even scientists doing very good work, is easy. As the science of climate change becomes more certain, however, expect to find more head spinning headlines and twists of pretzel logic from these folks.

Should Environmentalists Vote for Barack Obama?

This coming national election should environmentalists vote for Barack Obama? Obama’s campaign is counting on green voters to support him this time around, as they did in 2008.  The Obama campaign has, predictably, set up a website, Environmentalists for Obama, that touts the environmental work that the president has achieved. The President even makes an appearance on his own environmental behalf.

It is true that the administration has set forth extremely high gas mileage standards. By 2017 cars will need to have an average mileage of over 50 miles per gallon. Given the current state of technology this is doable, and the administration deserves credit for pushing for it.

            And yet there are so many areas in which the administration has fallen flat when it comes to protecting our air, water, and land. Regulations that were loosened during George W. Bush’s time on the White House that gave the mountaintop removal coal companies an almost completely lawless free ride in Appalachia have not been changed by the Obama administration. And as I noted in a previous blog, the Obama administration wants to ease the protections for endangered species.

            And now the administration is turning its back on the polar bear. Because the CO2 that comes out of our tailpipes and factories is melting the ice on which the polar bears live, their survival as a species has become quite dicey. No polar ice = no polar bears. But the administration has issued a new rule that exempts activities outside the range of the polar bear from any restrictions that may protect the bear, even though those activities have been shown to harm the habitat of the bears.

Polar bears in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Photo credit: Susanne Miller, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, April 17, 2012 

OK, I admit that there are lots of complications to this. Restricting greenhouse gasses and thus protecting the bears here in the United Sates may not have any bearing on what India, China, or Uruguay does. We could do a very fine job of protecting the polar bears, and because the rest of the world, or at least a portion of it, continues to pump CO2 into the atmosphere polar bears will go the way of the passenger pigeon.

            The oil and gas industries, which are most likely the forces behind the new rule, appeal to a type of environmental isolationism, saying that it “makes no sense to require someone building a bridge in Florida to compensate for threats to polar bears at the top of the globe.” I would be a little sympathetic to this outlook had these same voices made similar arguments to that someone in Florida when it came to supporting or fighting in a war in Iraq, which is at the other end of the globe, too.

            The Fish and Wildlife Agency may have a point that regulating CO2 to protect the bears could lead to a flood of lawsuits, but we don’t know that for certain. I admit that I don’t like to spend a whole bunch of time inside a courtroom. But what would you rather have, a full docket of lawsuits or melting ice sheets and drowning polar bears?

            So for environmentalists, what do we do at the polls this November? Barack Obama’s record on the environment is mediocre at best. But there doesn’t seem to be any push for the environment coming from Romney. As a matter of fact, the GOP, with Newt Gingrich calling for the elimination of the EPA and Romney walking back his earlier acknowledgement that we are warming the planet, seems to be actively hostile to the environment. Is that our choice? Mediocre or bad?

February 3, 1973 Richard Nixon signs the Endangered Species Act. If we only had presidential candidates like Nixon today.

Squeeze This, Mr. Whipple!

Eleven centimeters. That’s less than half an inch. That is the amount by which a British company that makes toilet paper is going to reduce the size of the cardboard tubing that holds its toilet paper. This is a very simple and small change, yet the effects are big. With this one small shrinking of packaging over 140 British tonnes (over 150 tons, US) of carbon will not go up into the atmosphere every year.

            That’s almost hard to believe. One company. And it is one company in Britain, not the largest country in the world. Maybe this serves as a reminder. It is those little acts—keeping our tires inflated, turning off the lights when we leave a room, using low-watt bulbs—that add up.

Keep Squeezing, Mr. Whipple!

Those Who Disparage Climate Scientists Can Take a Vacation

I sometimes wonder why there is an industry that disparages the scientists who investigate climate change and the work that they do. If the Heartland Institute, Forbes Magazine, Fox News, and other organizations like them stopped their attacks on climate scientists, would it make any difference? Would there be serious discussion and action to reduce our carbon emissions?
             One of the latest opinion pieces from the Forbes is tediously silly. Because R.A. Pielke, a meteorologist with a skeptical yet nuanced view of the current understanding of climate change, criticized on his blog what appears to be a stupid statement in a scientific paper on climate, the Heartland Institute’s James Taylor insists that this is proof that the whole endeavor to understand how our use of fossil fuels is warming our planet is nothing but a house of cards. By his way of thinking, one corrupt judge is proof that the entire judiciary is morally bankrupt, and one bad teacher demonstrates the hollowness of our educational system.
             Obviously this cramped and weak reasoning is enough for the true believers who still disbelieve that the world was warming, even when they are presented with the most convincing evidence. And manufacturing doubt sways a few additional folks as well.
             But if the Heartland Institute stopped its attacks, if Forbes magazine stopped publishing dubious op-eds on climate scientists, if Fox News started reporting facts instead of opinion, would it make any difference?
            Mitt Romney, who only two years ago acknowledged the human thumbprint of global warming in his book, No Apology, has adopted a line acceptable to the GOP to become their nominee. Speaking at a recent closed-door fundraiser, he said, “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO₂ emissions is not the right course for us.” This line rings with doppelganger-like similarity to George W. Bush’s climate change mantra that more research needed to be done before we took any action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

But with Barack Obama, who, like Romney, has also acknowledged that humans are causing climate change, we have a president who is running for reelection and is in the meanwhile saying nothing about global warming. On his recent energy tour—in which he talked about his “all of the above” energy strategy, which includes a reliance on fossil fuels—not once did he mention climate change, greenhouse gasses, or global warming.

             So there you have the two candidates’ stances on global warming: a policy of glib doubt or silence. The Heartland Institute could probably lay off its staff that attacks climate scientists, and Forbes could probably take the space in its magazine devoted to global warming and use it for something else, because right now, no matter who you vote for, it looks like Heartland, Forbes, Fox, and all the big business that they speak for will get their way: Nothing is going to change except the climate.

How Can We Allow Mountaintop Removal?

One thing that has stymied me is mountaintop removal. In a country that is supposed to be among the best in the world when it comes to environmental regulations—NEPA, the Clean Water Act, state and federal historical preservation laws, etc.—it is difficult to believe that there are no legal repercussions to a coal company blasting the top off of a mountain and sending the resulting rock and dirt into surrounding valleys and pristine streams. That these companies could do this once or twice is hard to believe. That they have flattened hundreds of mountains and destroyed hundreds of miles of streams in Appalachia astounds the imagination.

Just One of the Hundreds Moutaintop Removal Mines in Appalachia

We, as a society,  decided that acidic rainfalls caused by the emissions of power plants could no longer destroy the lakes and streams of New England and other parts of the East. We decided that thick smog could no longer choke the residents of our larger cities. We decided that we were no longer going to have rivers that had so much pollution in them and trash floating on them that they caught on fire.

How is it that we let the destruction of the coal-rich Appalachian Mountains to be left out of our concerns for our health and our environment? It is as though a big EXEMPT were stamped on the remote eastern mountains of our country, letting the coal companies write their own rules when it comes to extracting as much coal as they can for as cheaply as they can.

Deepwater Horizon Two Years Later

Two years ago this month the Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded and killed eleven men working on the rig. The ensuing oil spill dumped about 200 million gallons of oil into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, as estimated by a team of government scientists.

            It is no surprise that some of the latest news gives us some idea of the damage to the environment that lingers in the gulf and will probably continue for some time. Lots of dolphins are showing health problems from the oil, and corals that are usually unaffected by similar spills are showing signs of degradation.

            What is also unsurprising, at least when one’s cynicism is fully functioning, is that so little reform has been performed in the wake of this disaster. Now, don’t get me wrong. Government and industry have made some efforts. But a governmental commission formed to look into the Deepwater disaster issued 15 policy and regulation recommendations over a year ago that are crafted to avoid a similar and subsequent disaster, and no meaningful action has been accomplished on these recommendations. The commission recently reunited because of their concerns over this lack of progress. William Reilly, one of the co-chairs of the commission said, “The commissioners have become increasingly concerned that efforts to implement the recommendations are ebbing in spite of all that still needs to be done.”

            The Senate, with bipartisan support passed a key provision of the commission’s recommendations, that monies from BP’s fines for the disaster be directed toward ecosystem restoration. Known as the RESTORE act, the Senate passed the bill as part of a spending bill, but the House, just last week, stripped the RESTORE act from their stopgap spending bill.

            After the Exxon Valdez despoiled hundreds of miles of Alaska coastline in 1989, Congress passed legislation requiring double hulls on tankers. Later efforts by Newt Gingrich and his contract with America failed to repeal this legislation. The law stands, and currently almost all tankers in American waters are double hulled.

            I hope I’m wrong, but I’m afraid that in the last 20 years our abilities to confront our problems have been seriously blunted. The Deepwater commission can reunite, make a firm stand for reform, and no doubt there may be some speeches and a few bills introduced into Congress, but somewhere, somehow the legislation will be shelved or the needed monies will be held back, and we can wait for the next disaster.