our-blogs

Showing the flag

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:04:09 +0100

July 4th musings on symbols, patriotism and identity
Ken Ward
posted Grist
July 3, 2009

Sketches of ideas for the JP Green House exterior all include banners, signs and flags at our request. This reflects our plan to unearth the former corner store which used to be housed in the "Flatiron" triangular building. It’s also a means of advertising our demonstration project and a good fit with our civic purpose, to serve as a community center and climate campaigning “hub” for 350.org.

The kids will enjoy making their own banners as well – indeed their after camp project today is to design a poster for the JP Green House Kid’s $5 Lemonade Stand & Mini-Toboggan Run/Water Slide planned for the weekend. Andrée and I have cautioned that they may not see many takers at that price, but I forget that five dollars isn’t quite the grand sum it was when I was a kid.

As in this early sketch by neighborhood architects Bill MacIlroy and Nancy Shapiro, we plan to have a couple of flag poles above a storefront sign, with banners on each side and a neighborhood bulletin board.

But what flag or flags to fly?

JPGHflag.jpg

JP Green House exterior design concept showing US and Earth flags
Bill MacIlroy and Nancy Shapiro

Flag-flying, like bumper-stickers, is an expression of personality and identity, which also in the aggregate, helps define a community. The journey from Jamaica Plain to Roslindale (the JP Green House sits smack on the line between these two Boston neighborhoods) is marked by a decline in rainbow flags and Tibetan prayer banners and an upsurge of shamrocks and American flags.

It has always struck me that the liberal/progressive rejection of the American flag (traceable to anti-Vietnam era protests I assume) has had a subtle but none-the-less powerful impact on US politics. Refusal to show the flag is an eloquent expression of deep ambivalence toward America and a huge boon for conservatives and the Republican Party. It was move of genius for the Obama campaign to employ a logo that evokes the flag, yet subverts the formula by dropping stars and choosing slightly off-true colors.

At this moment in history, facing immediate crises and the looming weight of climate cataclysm, I think it’s time to reclaim our flag as a symbol of national bonds stronger then partisanship, as an affirmation of those parts of American character on which we must rely if we are to face the terrible danger before us, and as an expression of the true, lasting and revolutionary founding principles of the nation.

On this 4th of July, we will proudly fly the American flag at the JP Green House... right next to a bold banner proclaiming “$5 Lemonade.” What could be more American?

Love in a time of Cataclysm

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:11:20 +0100

The intro question for the first gathering of 350.org activists in Massachusetts last week was, “how do you feel, personally, about climate change?” Having worked on the agenda I should have been prepared, but it still stumped me.

When I spoke, it was a distillation of five years of hard thinking and writing; truthful, but packaged. We are offered, I said, a choice between deniel – the sort of blind optimism that Waxman-Markey cheerleaders purvey – or deep despair – the feeling one gets from most climate scientists. I prefer, I said, a resolute hope that comes only in accepting reality – the reason for my commitment to 350.org and Bill McKibben’s brand of honesty and humor. Having said this, I felt cheerful.

Two others sitting in our circle did a better job. Someone, I don’t remember who, said “I’m surprised that no one has said they’re angry,” and immediately I too became angry.

Fred Small, Senior Minister at First Church Cambridge/Unitarian Universalist, a folksinger of tremendous talent who had us on our feet singing with all heart his new song “350,” spoke next. Fred said that between despair and hope lies resolve, but to live life well and with resolution, one must be both present and unattached, accepting that “I cannot solve this.” This struck me powerfully, and right away I felt calm and purposeful.

That’s how it goes. I careen from enervating despair – kicked off by anything from reading National Geographic to watching my son and his friends toss a ball around – to chipper optimism – when I learn that the Massachusetts Council of Churches is joining our 350.org campaign or one of my posts generates a flurry of responses – to black anger – when I see Sierra Club shilling for Waxman-Markey, or hear that my good friend David Merrill must shut down globalwarming.org, the only organization to campaign for reversing Bush’s rejection of Kyoto, for lack of funding. I do not have Fred’s balance, probably because I think can and must solve it.

The idea of the JP Green House, the building itself and Andrée are inseparable and came to me in reverse order. When I met Andrée I was living in a two room apartment in Jamaica Plain writing all day, every day, about climate. I stopped only to pick up my then–7 year old, Eli from school and started immediately after I dropped him off. The “bright lines” project I was pursuing aimed to create free space for senior US environmentalists to consider the stark realities of climate change and devise new strategies outside the boundaries of job description and organizational imperatives. With the clock ticking, and Jim Hansen moving the hands ahead, every minute seemed precious.

Andrée took guitar lessons with Ginger downstairs and every once in awhile I’d be invited down to sit in, and in those fleeting moments of three part-harmony, guitar, banjo and mandolin, I remembered what living is all about.

When it came time to move last year, we decided to buy a house together, letting our three boys (Eli, now 9, and Andrée’s Simon, 7 and Kuba, 11) get to know each other as neighbors. That thought led us to the old, abandoned store on Bourne and Catherine Streets, a challenge of the sort I, with four building rehabs under my belt, felt confident taking on. As we drew near to home ownership, it seemed natural to check into Boston area low carbon demonstrations, and it was with some surprise we discovered there weren’t any. In fact, there are a mere handful of useful, accessible model homes in the nation (and we only know of one that is low/moderate income). So we thought, “why don’t we build one?” and the JP Green House was born.

The challenge, it turned out, was larger than my construction experience and instead of moving into a basement apartment in our new building as planned, Eli and I moved in with Andrée and her boys – and the boys have handled it better then the adults.

I do not have time to do what needs to be done on climate and the JP Green House and, like my friend David, I cannot finding funding or position to support work that desperately needs doing. The JP Green House represents all that is hopeful, outward, community-engaged, inspirational, kid-friendly, educational and, in the person Andrée, loving.

Writing, organizing and campaigning on my own time contributes little and displaces much, yet how can any thinking person at this moment do anything else?

I have no answer, but I know that I am not alone facing the dilemma. I find self-exposition faintly embarrassing, but these seem like troubles larger than mine alone, and I hope that we will hear from others with the same dilemma.

Recycling a House

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:10:22 +0100

In May of 2008, the property at 133 Bourne St., Boston, Massachusetts was purchased from HBHC Bank by myself and Ken Ward. Ninety-nine years old at the time, it had served the neighborhoods of Jamaica Plain and Roslindale, as both a corner store and a family dwelling, for a century. At the time of purchase, the house had been abandoned, foreclosed, and uninhabited for four years. It would require an almost total rehab, but seemed to hold immense potential, with space aplenty for a blended family of three young boys, a large central room at the front of the house that called out to be made into community space, and an immense yard, with ample space for vegetable gardening, play and a workshop for projects.

Climate activists and community organizers, determined to walk the talk, and somewhat tired of only throwing words at the problem of a completely unsustainable future predicated on endless growth with finite resources, we set out to create the JP Green House: a zero-carbon demonstration home and garden, with a small community center.

Ken and I had been looking at decrepit houses: abandoned houses, foreclosed houses, houses that had keys in lock-boxes which our young realtor had the combination to. We had been informed about short-sales and bad deeds and houses for whom no one would give you a mortgage. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were on a local tour of the dirty underbelly of the housing bubble, just as it was about to explode. We caught some of the flying debris, in the form of 133 Bourne St., and we declared that we had seen the future. It would be a future of un-viable, wrong-headed materialism loving reworked into sustainable, handmade, homegrown urban homesteading.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

Then the bottom fell out for us too.

Within two weeks of claiming the keys and cheerfully setting to work mowing the long grass with a scythe, and gutting the basement, Ken tore through the last of several levels of floor boarding and declared that we had no foundation.

Not a month later, the stock-market collapsed, and we chewed our nails fretfully for two months, while 1/3 of our money dribbled away, until we finally had the sense to pull it out of stocks.

It was winter spent planning, worrying and fighting about money, while the two of us contemplated the “new” JP Green House from the vantage point of a too-expensive rental down the street, and our three boys bounced off the walls. We hired architects--and then we fired them when they produced drawings suitable to some cushy greenwashed fantasy of a suburban rehab. We built our website and distributed postcards and added names to our mailing list, all the while wondering if it could really be done.

The news from the climate scientists grew ever worse. The economy withered. I went to DC for the first major coal-plant demonstration (Capitol Coal, Feb,2). Ken negotiated with Bill McKibben and 350.org for our house to be the Boston hub for 350. Was that, we wondered, more to the point than rebuilding a derelict house?

By spring we were back above water. We had hammered out an agreement with Placetailor, a design-build firm of young, green architects and builders, to do six months of structural work and super-insulation and get us in there. By May they were showing up at 6 am on their bikes and launching into the construction with proper zeal. Our “urban farmer” Gabe, from Green City Growers, built us raised beds and filled them with his magic soil mixture for the first crop of veggies. Ken tackled the inscrutable forms that might get us government money, and set out to plant so many raspberries that they would defeat the “Dog Strangling Vine” that covered our hillside. Simon and I relished our separate composting mechanisms--his a box full of worms, mine a traditional pile in the back. Kuba filled the dumpster and dug in the garden with gusto. And Eli hung around being charming. We were in the local paper, on local TV and local radio.

We still have no money for solar panels, or even a composting toilet. But we careen towards the certain future of more local-reliance and less carbon--steadied by friends and neighbors, inspired by our kids--nonetheless.

Why do US environmentalists remain irrationally commitedd to a losing strategy?

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:04:43 +0100

Watching the remains of a movement strain our every organizational fiber to advance a climate bill we know is a travesty reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s observation about sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.

Waxman-Markey ought to be opposed by U.S. environmentalists for obvious and pragmatic reasons—street arguments, if you like. In the topsy-turvy world of U.S. climate advocacy, however, political lessons wrung from decades of hard experience have been turned inside out, so that down feels like up and wrong is the new right.

Our descent into an Alice-in-Wonderland politics took more than a decade, and there has never been a defining moment when alternative strategies were considered head to head. As a result, we stand on the threshold of cataclysm pushing policy that can’t work and see no alternative.

In hundreds of conversations with friends and colleagues—senior staff and leaders in our major organizations and environmental foundations—a remarkably consistent and fundamentally illogical train of thought emerges ...

What we are doing now won’t work, but we can’t do any better because we don’t have enough power to advance a real solution. We might, in retrospect, have strengthened our position—refocusing resources, energizing our base, binding together our uncoordinated efforts—but institutional barriers stood in the way, and anyway now it’s too late. We must push for the best that can be gotten, because what else is there to do? Should I just give up and become a ski bum/move to Vermont/go to graduate school/start a vegetable garden/etc.?

What a miserable choice; support a joke climate bill or give up. Both actions, it seems to me, are forms of despair. The first option is delusional, the second option is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and neither is acceptable to the human spirit.

Thankfully, intrepid folks working outside the boundaries of our major organizations have honed all the core elements necessary for an alternative U.S. climate campaign that is pragmatic and idealistic, without being naive.

Assembling these pieces will be the topic of an upcoming post (along with the case against Waxman-Markey and an outline of a functional solution, drawing on the only successful model of international action, the Montreal Protocol). There is little point in discussing such specifics, however, without first considering the elephant in the living room.

It is perhaps too late for humanity to draw back from the brink, but we do not know this with certainty. There is no doubt, however, that we have reached the final act and the decisions of senior U.S. environmental leaders this year will decide the outcome.

So why are we allowing the very same architects of our failed strategy of the last two decades to determine our future? When people talk about “institutional barriers,” what they are really mean is that the people at the top aren’t going to shift course or leave in time.

Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation aside, most of our organizations are only three decades old and still run by founders or second-generation leaders who continue to operate under the same basic assumptions, as if the world were not being turned upside down. Stated baldly, however, the assumptions are ridiculous.

U.S. environmentalists should make common cause with corporations like BP, Conoco-Phillips, Dow, Duke Energy, DuPont, Ford, GE, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, PG&E, and Shell rather than stand with climate scientists like Jim Hansen and others.
Any compromise (such as endorsing 450 ppm or exempting super-greenhouse gases from a climate bill) is acceptable in the interest of passing something.
Organizational interests come before effective climate action.
We have lots of time, that’s why it’s OK to pass a weak bill (we can always strengthen it latter), and why it would be foolish to spend our reserves.
Protest, disruption, and civil disobedience are harmful.
There is no alternative to our present course of action (the one we devised more than a decade ago, in which our organizational and personal reputations are invested).

It ought to be obvious that the truth lies in precisely the opposite direction:

Environmentalists must stand on precautionary climate science—major corporations (particularly energy conglomerates) are the enemy.
Environmentalists should speak the truth, which means we must draw a line distinguishing functional climate action from window dressing.
U.S. environmentalists must throw everything we’ve got into a last-minute, cooperative drive to fundamentally shift the U.S. course of climate action.
We have no time, we cannot fix our errors latter.
Cozy accommodation has stripped us of power and compromised our leadership—by not taking to the streets we have shown that we don’t really believe what we are saying.
There are many things we could be doing—we have billions of dollars, thousands of highly trained staff and a core of climate activists desperate for leadership.

It’s hard to accept, because our crisis is slow moving, but U.S. environmentalists stand in the same spot as other small groups throughout history who have had to choose between courageous, difficult stands with long hope of victory or going along with the flow. It’s our decision now.

The Sierra Club candidate I wish I could support

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:44:06 +0100

Checking out the statements of candidates for the Sierra Club national board, I was disappointed to find no champions for vigorous climate action, so in an idle moment I drafted answers to the Candidate Questionnaire from the sort of candidate for whom I’d like to cast my vote.

Q. What leadership positions have you held in the Sierra Club, and what have you accomplished in those positions?

A. None. I stand for the vast majority of members who have a deep and abiding affection for the Club, but lack the time, interest or patience for Chapter politics.

Q. What needed skills or abilities will you bring to the Board of Directors: A team player? Conflict resolution experience? Financial expertise? Technology/communications? Other? Be specific.

A. I intend, to the best of my ability, to live up to the high standard of Board member participation set by David Brower. My skills and talents, I believe, are suited to the task.

Q. A lot has changed in the last six months—President-elect Barack Obama’s victory, the unprecedented economic crises, the number of people energized by the election. How should the Sierra Club view its role in this changed environment?

A. Averting cataclysm is a second tier problem for President Obama, which means that he doesn’t get it. Nothing now on the table is sufficient to address the problem and there is no solution waiting in the wings. The Sierra Club should articulate one, even though it will seem fantastic. Our role, in other words, is to speak the truth.

Q. Please comment on the question of the Club engaging in business partnerships, including the Club’s recent experience in cause-related marketing with Clorox Greenworks line of household cleaning products.

A. The Clorox agreement and heavy handed response to dissenters is a big black eye for the Club. We hooked up with Clorox because income is dropping like a stone and we’re looking to bail ourselves out by selling our name. All the other arguments are window dressing.

This is backwards thinking. What we need to do is deal head on with climate cataclysm - the only relevant question before humanity - and learn to communicate in a completely new technological and social environment.

In other words, let’s become relevant again instead of selling our soul.

Q. What is your experience with outings, and what do you see as their role in the Club?

A. The last time I went on an outing I was saddened to see how drab the fall foliage is in the White Mountains these days as the sugar maples migrate toward Canada. Frankly, I find it difficult to pull away, any hour not spent working on climate seems wasted.

Q. In the spirit of One Club, what do you see as the proper relationship of staff and volunteers to each other and to the mission of the Club in 2009 and beyond, and how would you improve the connection between National Sierra Club operations and grassroots leadership?

A. Staff and volunteers, as we presently understand those roles, are no longer meaningful (see following answer).

Q. What is your vision of ways to finance the Club’s Chapters, Groups, and volunteer structures in the next two, five, and 10 years? Would you support mechanisms such as national-chapter fundraising partnerships, new types of grants, allocation of funds based on non-demographic criteria, or general assistance in outside fund-raising? Suggest other ways. Please be specific.

A. We have less then four years to shift the nation and, through American leadership, put humanity on a new course. Given this reality, the Sierra Club should invest all resources and all reserves in a single-minded, joint effort with other U.S. environmentalists to rewrite American politics. By doing so, we will show that we accept the terrible calamities now bearing down upon our children unless humanity grabs for the brass ring. If we fail to do so, we will continue to demonstrate by our actions that we do not believe what we are saying in public.

Oh, if we do this, we solve our fundraising problems overnight.

Q. What is your experience with grassroots organizing? What do you see as the key differences between 20th century grassroots organizing and 21st century grassroots organizing?

A. I think the question might better be phrased “how does the Sierra Club move from the 19th to the 21st century?” The answer, I believe, is two-fold.

First, it seems clear that there are two fundamentally different forms of human reaction to global catastrophe. Most people try to ignore it, by denying reality or engaging in busy-work, and a tiny number—around 1 percent of the population - go into existential crisis.

I’m speculating here, but it seems probable that this ratio is an evolutionary adaptation. As social animals, we need most of our members to get along by going along, we’d never have survived if most people didn’t stick to the knitting, but it also helps to have a handful - maybe one in each small group—who’re thinking about the big picture and worrying about what’s over the next hill. These are the folks who feel sick to the pit of their stomachs when they watch an evening news program or read a daily paper and see no mention of climate. This cohort is desperate for climate action and leadership, now denied to them because environmentalists, including the Sierra Club, downplay climate in the interest of not offending the rest - that is, the ones who are perfectly happy when there’s nothing on the news about climate.

The Sierra Club, in my view, should transform itself into an organization by and for the 1% who are living in existential crisis.

Second, because this constituency is spread thinly throughout the population, old paradigms of organizing by place, affinity and demographics are obsolete. With internet communications we can find and engage this core at virtually no cost. If we acknowledge that fear, anger and anxiety are appropriate feelings in these last days, come to acceptance that the worst case is already happening, and move forward anyway with appropriately ambitious undertakings, then they will find us.

Q. The Club is undertaking work to bring more youth and diverse cultures into our membership and leadership. What specific strategies would you advocate to accomplish this?

A. As per the answer above, I suggest that these are irrelevant distinctions. Our constituency is those individuals who are genetically pre-disposed to ponder the bigger picture, one type of intelligence among 12 or so (per Howard Gardner), who are sprinkled evenly across all ages and cultures.

If that answer seems to be ducking the question, then I’ll add that youth will flock to the Sierra Club if and when we face up to the grim realities before them and start speaking honestly about it, rather than keeping up the pretense that somehow everything is going to work out.

As to “diverse cultures” it depends on which ones. They’re, well ... diverse. If what is really meant is, “where are all the black people?”, I think it’s a pro forma question. If the Sierra Club seriously wishes to engage large numbers of African-Americans (or Latinos, or Laotians, or Canadians, etc.), then we should shut down half of the services which cater to white, upper-middle class, outdoor interests and invest them in promoting Sierra Club activities of interest within African-American communities (or Latinos or Laotians, etc.). If we do not want to do this, then we should neither be surprised nor feel particularly guilty when we tend to attract white, upper middle class people who like to go on outings or like to be associated with people who do.

Q. How effective are the Sierra Club’s publication and electronic communication tools and which ones do you read or use?

A. I like the calendar.

Lessons from cognitive dissonance theory

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:42:40 +0100

If we accept the worst, or precautionary assessment, then U.S. environmentalists have perhaps a year to avert cataclysm, and nothing we are doing now will work. We are dealing with this terrible situation in a very ordinary and human way: by denying it.

Our denial comes in a variety of forms: we believe that President Obama can and will solve the problem; we ignore Jim Hansen’s assessment and timeline; we concentrate on our jobs and organization agendas and pass over the big picture; we focus on the molehill of climate policy rather than tackle the mountain of climate politics; we assess our efforts by looking back on how far we have come and do not measure the distance still to be traveled; we scrupulously avoid criticizing each other, lacking conviction in our own courses of action and not wishing to invite criticism in turn; and we are irrationally committed to antique approaches that are self-evidently inadequate.

In our hearts we know that what we are doing is futile, but we do not know what else we should or could be doing. The constraints within which we work feel so intractable and out of human scale that we cannot imagine how to break them. Despite our best efforts, Americans just don’t seem to get it or they don’t care, and we are at a loss to explain this. Unable to influence our own nation, we are further dismayed by the far vaster challenge of altering the trajectory of China, India, Brazil, and the rest of the world.

Nothing we now confront should be a surprise. We have known for more than thirty years that the world was bound to reach this state (with twenty years specific warning on climate). The purpose of environmentalism was to alter the self-destructive parabola of growth by introducing new values and sensibilities, which, as has been clear for some time, we have manifestly failed to do.

We are the ones who warned the world what was to come and we are the custodians of the only true solution, yet our current best ideas amount to no more than fiddling with the dials of corporate capitalism (cap-and-trade) and gussying up environmental policy as one item on the domestic progressive agenda (green jobs).

We do not seem capable of taking even the most elementary steps to extricate ourselves from the trap in which we find ourselves. Why, for example, have we never convened a general conference of environmental leadership to consider what to do, or formed an association bigger than the sum of our parts? Why do we not spend some of the billions in our control to experiment with new approaches and campaigning (or support those already doing so)? Why is there no internal debate or discussion other than a quarrelsome wrangling over the minutia of policy?

This is how humankind generally acts in the face of incrementally advancing disaster, it is true. We’re smart as individuals and successful as a species, but the very attributes which make us sociable and industrious tend to turn our societies and institutions rigid and dumb.

While this broad truth might suffice to explain why society at large has yet to come to terms with impending cataclysm, it does not explain why environmentalists are acting as we are. It is one thing for those engaged in running a business, or farming, or studying, or living on the margin to resist the awful prospects of abrupt climate change, but it is quite another for the only group of individuals whose job is to solve the problem to continue with business-as-usual in the face of overwhelming evidence that this road leads nowhere. Besides, environmentalism was intended as a system of thought to overcome myopia and greed and keep our eye fixed firmly on the big picture.

So how and why do we keep showing up to work every day with barely a ripple of disaffection? How can we have arrived a year or so away from a last chance to stave of cataclysm with no clue what to do and not be going nuts?

The best answer, relying on Leon Festinger‘s theory of cognitive dissonance, is that we are going nuts, and our increasing determination to act as if nothing were out of whack is a very ordinary, very human response to the crisis arising from conflict between our beliefs and hard reality.

What is the nature of our crisis? We believe that everything is going to work out, that the ice shelves in Greenland and Antarctica will not slip off into the ocean and our shorelines will not be inundated even though all the evidence demonstrate that this is already underway.

The contradiction between our belief in deliverance and the reality of a rapid descent toward chaos creates within us the turbulent and distressing state Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Caught in a bind, we act unconsciously to ease our psychological burden in two ways: (1) by reducing the sources of conflict, and (2) by avoiding, rejecting or denigrating new information that would increase dissonance. As Festinger observed, these tendencies in individuals may reach mass acceptance, bolstering a catechism of erroneous beliefs. If everyone else thinks the same way, it is much easier to screen out contradictory information.

In order to maintain our personal belief that catastrophic climate change will be avoided, we downplay or disregard information emphasizing how dire the situation and display an unrealistic optimism over progress toward a solution. For example:

Most U.S. environmentalists have yet to endorse Jim Hansen’s call for a 300-350 ppm bright line, continuing our record of trailing well behind climate science in our assessment of the problem. This is a most graphic illustration of our capacity to downplay the problem, particularly when compared with our record in areas other than climate, where environmentalists almost always stake out a precautionary position based on scientific data that is considerably more conservative than scientist’s own recommendations.
We eagerly and endlessly share scraps of information that shore up our sense that momentum is building behind fossil fuel alternatives, but we scrupulously avoid putting that data into context. We want to believe that energy efficiency, solar and wind power, and so on are viable so we focus on phenomenal growth rates in those sectors, and in our mind’s eye a sustainable future appears possible. But this happy fiction can only be maintained by screening out evidence of the far more massive ramp-up in fossil fuel extractions.
The emotional response to Obama’s win is one visible expression of our wish to believe that things will be put right, but the persistence of “cap-and-trade” as the U.S. environmental climate solution is the more important and pernicious example of unrealistic optimism. For all its market rhetoric, “cap-and-trade” is predicated on enforcement of emissions limits (the “cap”). If there is any one thing that environmentalists know with certainty, based on our extensive experience implementing the early milestones of U.S. environmental policy, it is that polluters escape emissions limits with ease. It took decades of vigorous enforcement campaigning and litigation to bring most states into moderate compliance with the federal Clean Air and and Clean Water Acts and even then key sectors and sources managed to loosen restrictions or get around them (as direct dischargers got around permit limits by tying into sewage treatment plants). To imagine that such a system can be imposed without massive governmental enforcement, and that it will work right out of the box with factories in Shanghai, Bombay, or Sao Paulo is a triumph of wishful thinking over hard-won experience.

The fact that political access, foundation funding, corporate and party affiliations, large membership bases and many other factors also drive organizations to downplay climate risk and engage in boosterism of solutions crafted to protect particular interests, is consistent with cognitive dissonance theory, not a contradictory explanation. We seek affiliations that encourage our tendencies to downplay the problem and overestimate the effectiveness of solutions because these relationships shore up our beliefs and reduce dissonance.

We feel better hanging out with upbeat corporate executives, because their story reduces our dissonance, even though it’s a lie, than we do paling around with climate scientists, who’s dismal narrative increases our dissonance because they tell the truth—but this may be changing.

Collapse of cognitive barriers. Our unconscious strategy for suppressing dissonance shows signs of crumbling, though it is by no means clear whether we will come to our senses fast enough to reshape our institution and reorient our approaches in time. Cognitive dissonance theory argues that escalating challenges to irrational world views tend to harden rather than weaken belief. Still, unusual pressure is beginning to build from unlooked-for directions:

Our children. The reality that our children and grandchildren will face catastrophic climate change, collapse of planetary ecosystems and disintegration of global society (if not civilization itself), is transforming from major emotional block to a driver of opening awareness. I’m not able to explain why this is occurring now—it may be no more complicated then the fact that there are more babies being born and kids are getting older and asking questions—but whatever the cause, there is a discernible breaking down of private barriers to awareness and a limited conversation on such matters as how best to prepare one’s children for the life they must now expect, is breaking into the open. Perhaps some evolutionary response to parenting in time of grave danger has begun to kick-in (which may also explain why so many still choose to become parents).

Next generation leadership. Control of our organizations is shifting to a new generation who are not the architects of our present approaches.

Sidelined. Environmentalists are being left in the dust in every area. Although we retain a commanding position in the broad public debate, we are increasingly irrelevant in the specifics. Climate scientists define the problem. Politicians, from Obama to Schwarzenegger, define the agenda. Public education is the province of journalists, educators, specialized media, and web centers. Mass communications is in the hands of consultants to Al Gore. Green building, the one sector where environmentalists did hold a significant share, is being swamped by giants in the construction and building materials businesses. Even critical areas of intellectual inquiry, such as the examination of the roots of climate denial, are underway in conversations between academics and pollsters without our participation, let alone leadership.

Growth areas. The most important climate action and environmental campaigning, like West Virginia’s Coal Spring Mountain campaign and the effort of Bill McKibben and 350.org, originate outside our mainstream organizations.

Personal crisis. The strain of living in existential hell is beginning to wear people down, even if it is mostly unacknowledged. It’s simply getting harder to deny reality.

Is U.S. environmentalism important? Why bother with trying to shift the current agenda if our organizations are increasingly irrelevant and superseded?

For one, climate will be decided by players now on the field and our major organizations and foundations must therefore be changed or they will stand in the way. The argument that climate can be addressed without the need to reshape U.S. environmentalism is based in the perception that U.S. environmentalism cannot be changed, but if we cannot adapt our own organizations and institution to meet the challenge for which they were founded, why on earth would we think it possible to shift the course of the nation?

Second, without environmentalists it is unlikely that there will be an environmental solution. Although environmentalism is now better expressed and advocated outside of U.S. environmentalism, from Jim Hansen’s scientific papers to the planning committees of architect’s trade associations, a comprehensive green vision is still unlikely to be conceived in any forum other than environmentalism.

Third, we are the only sector with the money, skill bank and international reach to undertake the scale of effort necessary to shift the course of the nation.

I have written elsewhere on the lessons to be drawn from U.S. history that argue such a transformation is possible, about conditions which might create a more fluid environment, and on the critical and singular role of the U.S. in driving global change. The odds of success are vanishingly small, but not so small as to be dismissed.

The less utopian argument for aiming high, is that doing so will reenergize U.S. environmentalism, bolster the wider forces behind green solutions, more effectively put our enemies on the defensive and gain better results in present political conditions. If we up accept reality and up the ante, in other words, we win more than we can now, elbow room for more fluid political conditions, and take a shot at winning the whole shebang. If we do not raise our sights and ambitions, then we are guaranteed to fail.

It’s a tough but simple choice and if we continue down our present road, we will leap from foggy thinking into pure madness, there being no other means of keeping reality at bay.

U.S. groups desert precautionary principle

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:41:31 +0100

After ducking the matter for a decade, U.S. environmental organizations finally pulled together a climate policy, but the National Call to Action on Global Warming issued by 53 organizations on March 5 is a mistake and should be reconsidered.

The National Call contains key elements that have been startlingly absent from our efforts to date—an assessment of climate risk, bright-line definition of solution, and a platform—but in attempting to thread a path between fundamentally irreconcilable political worldviews, the groups have fashioned a pushmepullyou compromise that will not gain us the traction we now require and squanders moral capital won at cost.

The National Call was hurried into place when it became clear that the irredeemably flawed cap-and-trade agenda of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership would otherwise be adopted by default. Yet, instead of coming down emphatically, if belatedly, behind Jim Hansen’s precautionary analysis and focusing on the central questions facing humanity—“how bad is it?” how much time do we have left?” and “what do we have to do to avert cataclysm?”—our major organizations choose to fudge the science and aim for something much smaller then the reordering of civics, economy, and society required to avert cataclysm.

What could and should be an illuminating, spirited civic debate between two sharply defined and fundamentally contradictory worldviews is now muddied by the introduction of a confused and confusing middle road position advanced by respected climate leaders. Split into three camps, we are further than ever from sharpening our story and worse off then before the National Call was issued.

No attempt was made to hide the illogic of the National Call, which claims to stand on “climate science” yet recommends inadequate, lower-end IPCC targets based on essentially antique science which does not fully encompass the risk of abrupt climate change. A bland statement acknowledging this fact (“more recent findings since the publication of the latest IPCC assessment suggest that even more urgent action may be needed”) is included in the Call without clarification or conclusion.

This throwaway statement, however, is the nub of the matter, because all recent evidence on factors affecting the pace and scale of ice shelf break-up in Antarctica and Greenland—the climate change “world killer”—is very, very grim, and all projections of fossil fuel use and GHG emissions continue to rise steeply. It could not be clearer that we are running the last lap and there will be no opportunity for “do-overs.”

What’s going on here? None of our organizations and leaders truly disagree with the precautionary position as a matter of science, so why did 53 sign on to an statement calling for less than we know is now necessary to avert catastrophe?

Six organizations—350.org, Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Friends of the Earth (FOE), International Rivers Network (IRN), GlobalWarmingSolution.org and, contrary to original reports, Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection—did not endorse the National Call and there are indications that the decision does not sit comfortably with every group which did. People should be worried, because the National Call puts the majority of our organizations on the same slippery track that compromised the integrity of EDF and NRDC.

I have a half-formed idea that the critical factor for leadership and organizations is no longer whether one accepts the reality of abrupt climate change, as it was for the last 10 years, but whether one believes in the possibility of abrupt political change and is willing to work for it. If so, then there is no reason at this stage to support inadequate compromises that cannot avert cataclysm and will merely run out the clock. We’re playing winner take all now.

If one cannot imagine a new American revolution, or shudders at the thought, then I suppose there is appeal in cutting the best deal going and hoping that Hansen et al. are wrong, but as a matter of strategy, it’s still the bad move. Whether or not “non-linear” social change is thought likely or desirable, driving toward it improves the outcome either way.

Environmentalist power is proportional to our moral authority, not our facility at brokering, and our moral authority is diminished when we speak less then the truth. The National Call to Action on Global Warming, relying on out of date IPCC science, is knowingly built on a foundation of sand. It reduces our moral authority (and we ought to start thinking about our members, donors, and staff in this regard) and should be reconsidered.

Having won consensus for joint action—a tremendous step forward—we must assert the new power that can and should have flowed from the achievement, and the best way to do so is by endorsing Jim Hansen’s call for a 300-350 ppm bright line. If we do this, then we act as a responsible movement, coalescing behind two opposed visions of political change and measures of appropriate precautionary behavior. If we do not do this, we churn already muddy waters and are worse off then if we had done nothing.

Markey/Waxman = Roadmap for Coal

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:41:22 +0100

As an upstart state rep from Malden, Mass, Ed Markey had the temerity to support rules reform, which got him kicked him out of his office by Speaker Tom McGee. Markey set up desk, chair and phone in the statehouse hallway and burnished an image of integrity which vaulted him to the top of a crowded Congressional primary field – running under the slogan, “They can tell Ed Markey where to sit, but no one tells him where to stand” – to capture the Congressional seat he still holds.

When he hit DC in 1976, his patron, House Speaker Tip O’Neil, told him something to the effect of “sit down, you’ll get your chance.” Well, now is the chance for the brash truth-teller whose character still comes through on occasion, as in his rousing speech at Powershift 2009. But to paraphrase Cromwell, Markey seems to have sat too long.

The bellwether for measuring climate policy is whether it guarantees a near-immediate halt to coal emissions (without further ramp-up of oil) through effective domestic measures and a global strategy under US leadership.

This can be done by three means:

a sharp reduction in demand for coal energy (through efficiency and massive expansion of competitive non-carbon emitting energy sources—or economic slowdown),
shutting down coal burning, and/or,
allowing coal burning with technology that guarantees that emissions will not enter the atmosphere.

The Markey/Waxman American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 discussion draft (ACESA) promises to do all three, but does nothing of the sort. In fact, Ed Markey has presented us with a clever roadmap for maintenance of coal.

To check this assessment I went for a second opinion to the most reliable source for sharp political analysis on US climate policy, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCE), which observed ...

… [our objective] is to fashion a national greenhouse gas emissions reduction policy that… preserves fuel diversity as a means of promoting greater energy independence. To that end, we are encouraged that the [ACESA] discussion draft focuses on the key role that coal plays in meeting growing U.S. electricity needs.

It is an iron-bound rule of Congressional action that no regulatory measure shall move unless there is something scarier out there. To the coal industry, that “something scarier” is apparently the threatened US EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Two years ago, the Supreme Court tactfully ruled in a suit brought by NRDC that the EPA had failed to provide an adequate rationale for declining to regulate greenhouse gases, but didn’t insist that they do anything in particular about it, so the Bush administration simply ignored the ruling.

Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Johnson, responding to a Sierra Club petition, recently issued a “declaration of intent to regulate” greenhouse gases. The move is both a genuine effort by EPA staffers to address the unfolding crisis and a calculated move by the Obama administration, as New York Times analysts Kate Galbraith and Felicity Barringer put it, to “pressure Congress to pass federal legislation that could supplant the agency’s plan or guide how it was carried out.”

The decision provoked apoplectic responses from industry. US Chamber of Commerce front man on climate, Bill Kovacs railed that regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act “will require a huge cascade of permits and halt a wide array of projects, from building coal plants to highway construction.”

That sounds pretty good to me, but it has the tinny quality of “protest too much.” In the ordinary course of things, it is worries over aggressive and varied state action that drives an industry to seek protection under federal regulation, not the threat of federal regulation under existing law. Anyone with experience implementing federal environmental law knows that even moderately determined and resourceful interests have a variety of creative and effective means to bollix up environmental regulation. The coal industry must be accounted a master at the game and should have no reason to fear EPA regulation more draconian than Congress is likely to mete out, so why not stick with the so far successful tobacco industry strategy and stiff arm every effort to regulate or legislate?

Granted, cap and trade opens new loopholes and room for creative shenanigans, as EPA enforcement officers Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel note:

… the complex [cap & trade] system of permits and offsets would be extremely difficult to police. A lack of effective enforcement (virtually impossible for offsets given the murky standards for additionality and plans to allow international trading) will encourage fraud and make the program a sham, while interest groups with a stake in the program fight to maintain and to “fix” it.

Even so, the inherent risks of allowing any legislation to move in Congress are high, so by what calculus does the coal industry conclude that Markey/Waxman is a good, or at least interesting bet? I count five factors in a quick read.

It solidifies a 2°C target increase in global temperature as US policy, despite a flood of recent climate science demonstrating that this level of warming will be catastrophic.
It defines the central criterion for federal action, not in terms of coal emissions impact on rate of global warming, but by progress in developing technology for carbon capture and storage.
It makes the federal government responsible for developing that technology and overcoming objections (i.e. to siting).
It treats coal on an equal plane with other fossil fuels.
It ramps up demand for electricity (in sections promoting electrical vehicles).

I’m sure there are perfectly satisfactory rationales on each point; the sort of policy minutia which enables US environmentalists to look at every forest as a collection of trees, but there can be no mistaking the overall thrust. As the ACCE cheerfully put it, Markey/Waxman establishes “the key role that coal plays in meeting growing U.S. electricity needs,” and that is more than enough basis to declare the thing a disaster.

Joe Romm gives the thing a B+, casually brushing aside the sections clearly designed for coal maintenance, commenting that “if the bill is written well, rather then seeing new coal plants, we will see a drop in coal consumption as coal is backed out by renewables.” I respectfully suggest that this is an expression of hope, not a realistic assessment of Markey/Waxman. No measure is ever strengthened in Congressional deliberation. What we have now in hand is the high water mark of 20 years of moderate US environmentalist advocacy – the US Climate Action Partnership is credited directly in the bill – and it has failed.

Ken Ward is a climate campaigner and carpenter whose work can be see at http://jpgreenhouse.org.

"The prayers of both could not be answered."

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:30:38 +0100

As the economy tailspins, President Franklin D. Roosevelt has replaced Abraham Lincoln as the favored Great President of commentators, against whom Obama is most often measured (or illuminated).

President Obama still expresses his "affinity" with Lincoln and, as we are learning about this smart and subtle man, he makes the point with small, deft gestures. Seafood stew was served for lunch on Inauguration Day, just as it was for President Lincoln.

So which is he, another Lincoln or an FDR? And which crisis -- the looming secession of the southern states in 1862 or the Great Depression of 1932 -- is the better model for our own terrible straits?

full post

The Winter of Our Discontent

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:30:15 +0100

originally posted 1/29/09

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lowered about our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

William Shakespeare, King Richard the Third

To complain that President Barack Obama is not serious enough aboutclimate strikes most U.S. environmentalists as strange, almostincomprehensible behavior. This is a time for celebration and newbeginnings and any small doubts we harbor are easily assuaged by ourconfidence in the man who is president. Those who are not swept up inthe new optimism seem small -- either nit-pickers of detail who missthe big picture (what did he mean by "harness the sun and the winds andthe soil"?) or the Gloster's of our victory -- cramped and parsimonious in spirit, prone to petty grievance.

Our feelings now are in accord with our conduct over the lastdecade and more. We are always optimistic, it is our nature. Whenpoliticians send mixed signals we embrace the positive and accept thetroubling as pragmatic, necessary concessions. When offered half a loafwe take it and proclaim ourselves full.

But this is no compromise to be swallowed, is it? After eight yearsin the wilderness, we look out onto a playing field dominated byPresident Obama, House Speaker Pelosi, Senator Boxer, and CongressmanMarkey, and we see immense promise. In Obama's majestic inauguraladdress we heard climate mentioned, then mentioned again, and again,and, "he gets it!" we thought. This is what we endured for, this iswhat we campaigned hard for, and the sweetness in the D.C. air is moreglorious than we had imagined.

Except for three things:

The time-line for climate action has been cut to four years.
The Democratic plan of action is utterly inadequate.
Climate is a second-tier problem for President Obama.

Were any one of these things not the case, we would face a verydifferent prospect. If we had more time (enough to aim for fundamentalchange in a second-term Obama administration), if we had a true,functional, global solution on the table to advance, or if PresidentObama defined the paramount objective for the nation and his presidencyby staving off global cataclysm, then U.S. environmentalists would havea point of leverage and reason to admit a small measure of optimism.

To expect that President Obama will address the crisis, but neithercome to terms with the climate time-line, re-design the solution, orfocus the nation on this single risk, is a willing suspension ofdisbelief, turning politics into a movie where presidents have powersas fantastical as movie kung fu.

It is our job to define the terms of conflict within whichpoliticians maneuver. If we are to do this -- the only other option isto wait until climate impacts become severe, which is certainly toolate -- we must first break our own way out of the three-sided box ofself-reinforcing, self-deceptive policy. That can only occur bymounting a serious challenge to orthodox thinking within our majororganizations and the private foundations that underwrite climateprogram. There is no time to build an alternative institution, nor cancurrent approaches be simply bypassed by faster campaigning. Theworldview of incremental change, accommodation to immoral behavior, andmoderation in the face of fossil-fuel blitzkrieg must be demolished.