May 12 2009, 8:25PM
Just how close are we to energy and climate disaster?
(Please ignore the giddy grin on my picture for this post...)
Over the last month or so I've been to several events that suggest
that US scientists and government types are starting to seriously game
out how disasters in energy security and climate change may unfold,
interact, and multiply. At one event, people from various government
departments, national labs, and, um, information gathering agencies sat around tables and tried to play out how, say, black
carbon causing ice melt in the Tibetan plateau would interact with the
struggle for scarce oil resources, the spread of disease, and the
potential for developing countries to leapfrog to new energy technologies.
What would be the first warnings of disaster? How could it be avoided
or mitigated if it was too late?
A few of my totally unauthorized takeaways:
1. The political and scientific establishment is pretty comfortable
responding to impending disaster with avoidance/mitigation while they're
uncomfortable demanding the deep (and still unknown) changes that may be
necessary to address all of the interlocking issues. On the surface,
their confidence in successful response is reassuring; in the long
run it is profoundly dismal because it means we will lurch from one
crisis to the next, devoted to a lifestyle of constant emergency.
2. Smart people are already planning for all sorts of worst case
scenarios, ranging from massive death (which some believe
could take the pressure off the ecosystem) to making the best of species die off.
(The weirdest notion: Since the
oceans are likely to be filled with jellyfish, perhaps we should
genetically modify the jellyfish to make a better food source. "Have a
PB and Jellyfish," said the speaker, giggling appropriately.)
3. There is raging discussion about how to communicate the need for
costly, possibly unpleasant action to the public. Among the scientific
community this translates into trying to get together "blue ribbon
panels" to communicate the need to address climate change and energy
security and economic competitiveness issues together. (To which I say:
blue ribbon panels are great, just be sure you've got a Pabst Blue
Ribbon panel to communicate outside the policy community. More on that
in a second.) But this sense of being unable to get across the danger
we're in has even lead reasonable types to publicly make distressing
suggestions, along the lines of "should we exaggerate danger to spur
the public to action?" To me, that sentiment among reasonable people is
a disaster in public trust, and cannot lead to any positive outcome.
4. If you're a total cynic invest in 3M immediately. Damn! These people
love Post-Its. And if they're even half right about the future, they're
going to need a lot of them.
On to my personal PBR panel moment. Last week I was at a seminar where 2000 logistics specialists for the
National Guard were hobnobbing and thinking about their evolving role.
(They were also shopping for Butyl Hoods "For Mass Casualty and Mass
DeCon Events," insoles for their combat boots, Force Escalation Kits,
and "Mobile Integrated Remains Collection Systems.") It quickly became
clear that the National Guard is now on the front lines of cleaning up
evolving climate disasters, ie freak storms; as well as being involved in the
ongoing energy security issues in Iraq. I had a lot of interesting
conversations over the two days I was there, but one of them showed me
how different the Guard's experience is from that of the rest of us. I asked a captain about all of the talk of climate and energy disasters and he
answered, flatly and without hesitation, that the average American does
not take responsibility for our lifestyle's impact on ourselves or
overseas, that we do not want to think about the risks we're taking,
and that we don't prepare ourselves to protect our communities.
I found his answer more bleak and more motivating
than all the theoretical talk of Black Carbon and PB and Jellyfish. I
think the National Guard needs its own TV show.
But I also wonder if this planning for disaster is new? Does it mean
anything? Or is it part of the avoidance process? Have we been here
before, say during the Cold War or when smog was smothering us and Love
Canal was leaking? What do you think?
The type of gaming Lisa saw is a marvellous distraction activity for clever people who know they need to be worried but really don't want to face hard choices right now. As such it was an excellent treatment for cold war neuroses, distracting our military-industrial complexes from questions of whether or not to actually fight each other to mutual destruction. Where the game is against nature, as in climate change, distraction as a strategy appears suicidal rather than survival promoting. An analogy was the sophisticated international gaming of financial crises by the most competent financial regulatory bodies in the early years of this century. It was completely irrelevant to the crisis which broke.
Stating key points flatly, as the National Guard Captain did, is more uncomfortable, is less fascinating; but is likely to lead to progress towards solutions, and cost less money and less time.
Radical environmentalists have been crying wolf for so long that headlines like this have the opposite of their intended effect on me. I remember reading Bill McKibben's "The End of Nature" in college, where he bemoaned that the end was nigh. He published that 20 years ago, and we still hear the same hysterical claims about global warming (now called "climate change", to make it completely unfalsifiable). Meanwhile, when it comes to real environmental concerns, we are better off today by almost any measure.
Just because they have cried wolf before does not mean the wolf isn't coming.
BTW,
Your bio says that the foundation you work for "seeks to make the transition to a lower carbon economy fairer for working families". By "working families" I assume you aren't referring to families in which at least one parent works, as that would describe pretty much every family except those on welfare. So what families are you referring to? And how do you define fair in this context?
"...we will lurch from one crisis to the next..."
There is a name for this process. It is called "Life".
In Noah's day there were probably those who tried to stop the flood. Noah had it right, build a boat. Same applies today. Don't waste time and money doing things that can not work. If the climate changes, adapt. It is the only formula that has ever worked in the past and the only real option for the future. Just look at who the survivors were in the past. And look at who perished. To survive is to be blessed.