Like sparring siblings, China and the United States — the world’s two biggest carbon dioxide emitters — keep passing the climate-action buck back and forth: “Why should I cut emissions if they don’t have to?” Well, China is either the more mature of the pair, or just majorly sucking up to Mama Earth. The country is reportedly gearing up to set firm limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, seriously weakening one of the U.S.’s go-to excuses for climate inaction.
China’s powerful National Development and Reform Commission has proposed an absolute cap on emissions starting in 2016. The proposal still needs to be accepted by the Chinese cabinet, but experts say the commission’s influence makes it likely to pass. China today also announced the details of trial carbon-trading programs that will roll out in seven regions by 2014. In February, the country had said it would implement a carbon tax, but backed off a few weeks later, saying it will wait until early next year to get started on that.
The commission’s carbon-cap proposal calls for Chinese emissions to peak in 2025, five years earlier than previously planned. RenewEconomy explains:
China has already pledged to cut its emissions intensity – the amount of Co2 it emits per economic unit – by up to 45 per cent by 2020. The significance of an absolute cap is that it promises to rein in emissions even if the economy grows faster than expected.
A Chinese carbon cap could shake up future international climate negotiations, The Independent reports:
It marks a dramatic change in China’s approach to climate change that experts say will make countries around the world more likely to agree to stringent cuts to their carbon emissions in a co-ordinated effort to tackle global warming. …
“Such an important move should encourage all countries, and particularly the other large emitters such as the United States, to take stronger action on climate change. And it improves the prospects for a strong international treaty being agreed at the United Nations climate change summit in 2015,” added Lord [Nicholas] Stern, [chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics.]
The 2015 summit will take place in Paris. Previous U.N. climate talks have played out according to a familiar pattern: high hopes giving way to deadlock and failure. When the world’s largest emitters refuse to agree to limits on emissions, it makes the commitments of smaller countries somewhat pointless. U.K. Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey told The Independent:
I’m really much more confident than many people about our ability to get an ambitious climate change deal done in 2015. Obama in his second term clearly wants to act on this and there has been a fantastic and dramatic change in America’s position. Taken together with China’s change, the tectonic plates of global climate change negotiations are really shifting.
It was a quiet year for tornadoes — until last week, that is. A string of twisters have ravaged the middle of the country over the past several days, culminating in a two-mile-wide tornado tearing up Moore, Okla., this afternoon. So far at least 37 people have been confirmed dead in Oklahoma, and that toll is expected to rise.
The weather has twisted a few of our fellow greenies on the internet into a tizzy. “Extreme storm, climate change, OMFG!” they cry. We almost had a seizure reading this missive from the Wonkette folks, and we’re fairly sure they had one while writing it.
Wishing the best for tornado victims in OK. Hope this sells at least a few on consequences and importance of climate change.
But the science on tornadoes and climate change isn’t clear enough to OMFG about it just yet. As Grist’s John Upton reported recently, the number of twisters has been roller-coastering up and down from year to year. “It certainly feels like one of those boom-bust weather cycles that we expect from climate change. But there doesn’t appear to be any evidence directly linking the recent tornado cycle to global warming.”
“Most climate scientists believe that clearer answers will be forthcoming with better climate modeling tools — and patience,” according to the Huffington Post.
Worst tornado damage I have seen since Joplin. Picture of what’s left of a daycare in Moore, Oklahoma. Brings tears. twitter.com/StormCoker/sta…
Post-Superstorm Sandy, we’ve entered a kind of fugue state when it comes to natural disaster, forgetting that there has been a long history of extreme weather events that sometimes have nothing to do with how much carbon is in our atmosphere. For as disastrous as Sandy was, be honest: You relished pointing out that climate change connection.
We really like to find reason in chaos, though, and we also like to blame things! At one point today there were several little kids trapped in the rubble of a building in Moore, Oklahoma that earlier today was their elementary school. If we can’t blame climate change, who can we blame?
Maybe scientists will conclude that this really is the fault of that atmospheric carbon. Maybe they won’t! For now, at least, the only thing I’ll be blaming for this mess is Sarah Palin. Because, you know.
Pack up your temperature sensors, your climate-modeling supercomputers, your tree and ice core sample equipment. Sarah Palin has spoken on climate change, and she says it’s snowing in Alaska, ergo “global warming my gluteus maximus,” Q.E.D. And you know it’s science because she used the Latin word for “ass.”
Prescient Palin only ever backs winning horses like John McCain, Bristol and Levi’s marriage, and her own gubernatorial career, so if she says climate science is a non-starter then by god, we’re just going to throw in the towel. At least until we can get Obama to take inspiration from this completely real and not made up British law:
I suppose if anyone could inspire him to criminalize this kind of idiocy, it’s La Palin.
The slow-moving disaster being visited on the village of Newtok is a familiar one in Alaska. People are losing the ground beneath their feet, because of erosion.
Climate change has accelerated the normal process of erosion along Alaska’s rivers and coasts — especially near the shores of the Bering and Arctic seas.
Warmer temperatures melt the permafrost, or frozen sub-surface layers which helped bind together the soil. Heavier rains produce more floods, and swollen rivers which wash away the soil. Waves break higher, because of sea-level rise, clawing at beaches.
Meanwhile, the sea ice that provided a barrier against intense storms has thinned and retreated, exposing coastal areas to tsunami-sized waves and 100 mph winds that are not uncommon in storms coming off the Bering Sea.
Alaskans have already begun exploring how to find the way back to solid ground. Some small communities may be able to reinforce coastlines by building broad, sloping rock walls known as revetments. But bringing heavy equipment, building materials and skilled labour to remote locations is prohibitively expensive — three or four times more than a comparable project anywhere else. The construction season is also short, further adding to the cost.
“Coastal erosion is a really, really expensive problem to deal with in an engineering mode,” said Orson Smith, an engineering professor at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. “It costs $10,000 to build one linear foot on a shoreline in a remote area, and you have thousands and thousands of feet of shoreline.”
Then there’s the matter of how the structures would stand up to the harsh Alaskan environment.
Shishmaref, a native Alaskan village located on a barrier island, has gone through an entire array of engineering projects — concrete blocks, wire mesh baskets, a broad sea wall made or gravel and rock. “A museum of erosion control,” Smith said.
Some of the early versions failed on deployment, and it’s not clear how the other structures will stand up over the years.
It’s also far from clear where Alaska will get the money for such ambitious engineering works, especially for small and remote communities.
Climate change is already adding billions to the bill every year just for maintaining existing infrastructure. A state government report estimated that erosion, flooding and other effects of climate change would add up to 20 percent to those costs over the next 20 years.
Then there is the issue of assigning priorities. About 90 percent of Alaska’s population lives within 20 kilometers of a coast, and the state’s most valuable resources — oil, fishing, minerals — are also in close proximity.
“There just isn’t enough money to go around to build a $50 or $100 million revetment for a village of a few hundred people that has other problems,” Smith said. “The money that is spent on those kinds of structures to save a village could be applied to move the families to somewhere else.”
There are other remedies for villages that want to protect against erosion. Communities are now looking at how to plan for a slow retreat to higher ground, gradually replacing old buildings by new raised structures, or moving buildings to higher elevations. But many communities have no higher ground or room to retreat.
Others, like Newtok, are situated on low-lying, wetlands that simply can not support the large engineering projects that would be needed to make them safe. They have no choice but to move.
DCRA / Alaska Department of CommerceOnce the snow melts, people make their way around Newtok on wooden boardwalks set down on the mud. But the melting permafrost no longer provides stable ground for village buildings or the boardwalks, and people complain that it’s been years since there has been money spent on maintenance.
One afternoon in the waning days of winter, the most powerful man in Newtok, Alaska, hopped on a plane and flew 1,000 miles to plead for the survival of his village. Stanley Tom, Newtok’s administrator, had a clear purpose for his trip: find the money to move the village on the shores of the Bering Sea out of the way of an approaching disaster caused by climate change.
Newtok was rapidly losing ground to erosion. The land beneath the village was falling into the river. Tom needed money for bulldozers to begin preparing a new site for the village on higher ground. He needed funds for an airstrip. He came back from his meetings in Juneau, the Alaskan state capital, with expressions of sympathy — but nothing in the way of the cash he desperately needed. “It’s really complicated,” he said. “There are a lot of obstacles.”
Those obstacles — financial, legal, and a supremely frustrating bureaucratic process — had slowed down the move for so long that some in Newtok, which is about 400 miles south of the Bering Strait that separates the U.S. from Russia, feared they would be stuck as the village went down around them, houses swallowed up by the river.
“It’s really alarming,” said Tom, slumped in an armchair a few hours after his return to the village. “I have a hard time sleeping, and I’m getting up early in the morning. I am worried about it every day.”
The uncertainty was tearing the village apart. It also began to turn the village against Tom.
Over the winter, a large group of villagers decided that their administrator was not up to the job. By the time he returned from this particular trip, the dissidents had voted to replace the village council and to sack Tom — a vote that he ignored.
“The way I see it, we need someone who knows how to do the work,” said Katherine Charles, one of Tom’s most vocal critics. “I feel like we are being neglected. We are still standing here and we don’t know when we are going to move. For years now we have been frustrated. I have to ask myself: Why are we even still here?”
It’s been more than a decade since Tom took charge of running Newtok, and leading the village out of climate disaster to higher ground.
The ground beneath Newtok is disappearing. Natural erosion has accelerated due to climate change, with large areas of land lost to the Ninglick River each year. A study by the Army Corps of Engineers [PDF] found the highest point in the village would be below water level by 2017. The proximity of the threat to Newtok means that its villages are likely to be America’s first climate refugees.
Officials in Anchorage say Tom has worked tirelessly to move the village out of the way of a rampaging river. Among the relatively small circle of bureaucrats and lawyers who concern themselves with the problems of small and remote indigenous Alaskan villages, the Newtok administrator has a stellar reputation. He has won leadership awards from Native American groups in the rest of the country.
Tom said he hoped to make a big push this summer, acquiring heavy equipment that locals could use to begin moving some of the existing houses over to the new village site at Mertarvik nine miles to the south.
“It’s really happening right now. The village is sinking and flooding and eroding,” he said. He said he was planning to move his own belongings to the new village site this summer — and that villagers should start doing the same.
But Tom, despite his lobbying missions to Juneau and strong reputation with government officials, has failed to inject federal and state officials with that same sense of urgency.
Melting permafrost, sea-level rise, erosion — these are some of the worst consequences of climate change for Alaska. But none of those elements in Newtok’s slow destruction are recognized as disasters under existing legislation.
That means there is no designated pot of money set aside for those affected communities — unlike cities or towns destroyed by floods or tornadoes.
“We weren’t thinking of climate change when federal disaster relief legislation was passed,” said Robin Bronen, a human rights lawyer in Anchorage who has made a dozen visits to Newtok. “Our legal system is not set up. The institutions that we have created to respond to disasters are not up to the task of responding to climate change.”
In Bronen’s view, Congress needed to rewrite existing disaster legislation to take account of climate change. Communities needed to be able to access those disaster funds — if not to rebuild in place, which is not feasible in Newtok’s case, then to move.
The authorities also had responsibility under the treaty agreements with indigenous Alaskan tribes to guarantee the safety and well-being of indigenous communities, she argued.
“This is completely a human rights issue,” Bronen said. “When you are talking about a people who have done the least to contribute to our climate crisis facing such dramatic consequences as a result of climate change, we have a moral and legal responsibility to respond and provide the funding needed so that these communities are not in danger.”
Until then, however, it was up to Tom to find new ways to prize funds out of an unresponsive bureaucracy. It turned out that he had a knack for it.
Government officials praised Tom for finding other sources of funds, such as development grants, and putting them to use for building the new village site. But it has been a laborious process for the remote village to find its way through the different funding agencies and a maze of competing regulations.
As Tom found out, each agency had its own set of rules. The state government would not build a school for fewer than 10 children. The federal government would not build an airstrip at a village without a post office. But the rules, from Newtok’s vantage point, appeared to have at least one point in common. They seemed to conspire against the village ever getting its move off the ground.
In 2011, Alaska’s government published a timetable for Newtok’s move [PDF], setting out dates for building an emergency center, housing, an airstrip — all items on Tom’s list. Two years later, the plan is already behind schedule and the official who oversaw that original timetable said there was little chance of getting back on track.
Officially, the government of Alaska remains committed to helping Newtok and all the other indigenous Alaskan villages that are threatened by climate change.
Almost all of Alaska’s indigenous villages — more than 180 — are experiencing the effects of climate change, including severe flooding and erosion. Some may be able to hold back rivers and sea, but others will have to move. About half a dozen villages, including Newtok, face extreme risks.
But the cost of relocating just one village — Newtok — could run as high as $130 million, according to an estimate by the Army Corps of Engineers [PDF]. That’s more than $350,000 per villager. Multiply that by half a dozen, or several more times, and the cost of protecting indigenous Alaskan villages from climate change soon soars into the billions.
So far, Newtok has received a total of about $12 million in state funds over the past four years, according to George Owletuck, a consultant hired by Tom to help with the move. Much of that has already gone, to build a barge landing, a few new homes, and an emergency evacuation center — in case the village does not manage to move in time.
Officially, federal and state government agencies have spent some $27 million getting Mertarvik ready, although a considerable share of that figure, some $6 million, did not go directly to the relocation, said Sally Russell Cox, the state official overseeing the move. And there is still no major infrastructure completed at Mertarvik.
Would the government of Alaska commit to picking up the rest of the tab for Newtok and the other villages?
Alaska’s oil revenues have fallen off over the years. In 2012, the state slipped into second place for oil production behind North Dakota. Treadwell admitted the state government would not cover the entire cost of fortifying or moving all of the villages threatened by climate change.
“On the question of is there money to help them with one check? That is something there clearly is not,” he said.
Treadwell suggested some of the at-risk villages could raise funds by setting themselves up as hubs for oil companies hoping to drill in Arctic waters.
However, a number of oil companies have put their Arctic drilling plans on hold for 2013 and 2014. Treadwell admitted there was as yet no comprehensive climate change plan for Newtok and other villages. “I think it’s going to be piece by piece with each community and many different pots of money,” he said.
In the case of Newtok, Owletuck, the consultant, had big ideas for financing the move: growing fruit and vegetables hydroponically in greenhouses, or testing the possibilities of producing biofuels from algae.
He let it be known the village may even have found a mysterious benefactor. Owletuck said he’d had an approach from private individuals, whom he declined to name, wanting to donate $22 million to the move.
None of those propositions have materialized, however. And after more than a decade of uncertainty about the future under climate change, the basic infrastructure of Newtok is coming apart.
Snow covers up a lot of Newtok’s flaws: the open sewage pits, the broken boardwalk over mudflats, some of the abandoned snowmobile wrecks.
Newtok has for years been considered a “distressed village,” with average income of $16,000, well below the rest of the state. Fewer than half of adults in the village have paid work. But even within those dismal measures, conditions have sharply deteriorated in the years since the village has been planning to move.
Aside from the clinic and the school, most buildings are in a state of advanced dilapidation. The floor in the community hall sags like an old mattress. The community laundry is out of order.
In the cramped offices of the traditional council, where Tom works, the furniture dates from the 1970s or 1980s, mid-brown vinyl chairs where the casing has split open, revealing the dirty foam inside. It’s not unheard of to find families of 10 or 12 children living in houses of less than 800 square feet — and none of those homes have flush toilets or running water.
Early mornings find the men of the household trudging out of their homes with five-gallon buckets of waste, which get dumped at various spots on the edges of the village, including a small stream.
The diesel-powered generator was nearing the end of its life span. The water treatment plant was shut down last October after people began getting sick. Tom said there was contamination from leaking jet fuel at the airport.
For now, villagers are drawing water from the school, which had a separate system. But the school principal said he would have to cut that off in May to preserve the system for the schoolchildren.
Tom said there was nothing he could do. Government agencies would not fund improvements at the current village site, because of the plan to move. “There is no money to improve our community,” he said. “We are suspended from federal and state agencies and there is no way of improving our lives over here. The agencies do not want to work on both villages at once.”
By last October, frustration with the stalled move and conditions in the village exploded. Villagers accused their own council of failing to hold regular elections, and raised a petition to throw out the leaders and replace Tom.
Some accused him of presiding over a dictatorship in the village. Others speculated that he and the paid consultant, Owletuck, were plotting to rob the relocation funds.
One of the dissidents, a relative newcomer to the village, posted ferocious criticism of Tom on Facebook calling for rebellion.
The dissidents organized elections, voted out the old council, and installed their own leaders. Tom ignored the result. “Let them cry all they want,” he said. “I don’t care. They are not going to help my community. I am way ahead of these guys.”
The upheavals in Newtok are sadly familiar to those who have worked with indigenous Alaskan villages confronting climate change. “I don’t think you would find one community that says they are happy with the pace that’s gone on,” said Patricia Cochran, director of the Alaska Native Science Commission.
“To be honest with you, I think the state and the feds have done a terrible job, not only in assessing the conditions that communities are living within but in responding to them,” she said. “Because these communities are listed as threatened and may potentially be relocated, they are not able to get any funds now for infrastructure that is being damaged right now.”
That leaves communities stuck in a limbo that can carry for years or even decades.
That’s what has become of Newtok. The effects are devastating, said Charles. Beyond all her anger she admitted was an all-enveloping fear. “Sometimes I get scared. I’m scared for my own family. How will I take care of them if the relocation doesn’t start right away?”
She had been waiting for years to see the beginnings of any new settlement in rural Alaska rising up on the rocky hill of Mertarvik: the airport, the barge landing, the school, the houses. None of it was there yet, and Charles said she was coming close to despair.
“It’s been going on for I don’t know how long, and I am beginning to lose hope.”
“Hello, world? Hey, John Kerry here. Just wanted to apologize for all those decades of America’s non-leadership on that crazy global warming thing. But now we’ve decided to start making some nice sounds about the issue. Hope you can hear me making them over the din of the Arctic ice breaking up behind me.”
OK, so the Secretary of State didn’t actually say that. But the leader of the department that will rule on the climate-changing Keystone XL pipeline proposal has begun apologizing for the nation’s lack of progress in tackling climate change.
“I regret that my own country — and President Obama knows this and is committed to changing it — needs to do more and we are committed to doing more,” Kerry said Tuesday, referring to climate change, in a press conference with Sweden’s prime minister.
Kerry is in Sweden to attend meetings in the country’s northernmost city of Kiruna of the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum for governments that have a stake in the fate of the fast-melting region. As the Arctic melts, new shipping routes and oil fields are opening up, and the international community is going to need to coordinate and temper the scramble to cash in on these new opportunities.
“We come here to Kiruna with a great understanding of the challenge to the Arctic as the ice melts, as the ecosystem is challenged, the fisheries, and the possibilities of increased commercial traffic as a result of the lack of ice raises a whole set of other issues that we need to face up to,” Kerry said during the press conference. “So it’s not just an environmental issue and it’s not just an economic issue. It is a security issue, a fundamental security issue that affects life as we know it on the planet itself, and it demands urgent attention from all of us.”
The Obama administration on Friday released the National Strategy for the Arctic Region [PDF]. The strategy pledges to “enable our vessels and aircraft to operate … through, under, and over the airspace and waters of the Arctic, support lawful commerce … and intelligently evolve our Arctic infrastructure and capabilities.” All done sustainably and in harmony with other nations, of course. But the 11-page document is not so much a detailed strategy document as it is a vague wish-list for the future of the region, and no federal funds have been committed to turn the strategy’s goals into reality.
That said, the attention that the U.S. is affording the Arctic Council is politically significant. From the BBC:
Mr. Kerry, who held one of the first US Senate hearings on climate change as early as 1988 with then-Senator Al Gore, is hoping to put the spotlight on the issue of climate change again, after efforts to make concrete progress faltered during President Barack Obama’s first term.
Despite a multitude of international crises, Mr. Kerry insisted on attending the meeting of the once-obscure council.
Climate change has countries as far away as India also paying attention to the Arctic — and seeking observer status in the council.
What the Arctic most needs, of course, is a fast and deep cut in the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Actions leading to that — like, say, rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline — will carry more weight than press-conference words.
The National Journal has a long piece out, “The Coming GOP Civil War Over Climate Change: Science, storms, and demographics are starting to change minds among the rank and file.”
Back in October 2010, NJran an article explaining, “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones.”
Now reality is biting back, or, perhaps more accurately, nibbling back. The new piece begins with MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel, a registered Republican since 1973. He switched his registration to “independent” shortly after a not-so-successful meeting with Republican presidential candidates in the run up to South Carolina’s GOP presidential primary, a meeting arranged by the influential Charleston-based Christian Coalition of America:
“The idea that you could look a huge amount of evidence straight in the face and, for purely ideological reasons, deny it, is anathema to me,” [Emanuel] says.
Emanuel predicts that many more voters like him, people who think of themselves as conservative or independent but are turned off by what they see as a willful denial of science and facts, will also abandon the GOP, unless the party comes to an honest reckoning about global warming.
Certainly recent polls (see here) make clear climate change is a political winner. It is a classic wedge issue that divides Tea Party extremists from independents and moderate/liberal Republicans. NJ explains:
The problem is, as polling data and the changing demographics of the American electorate show, it’s likely that the position that can win voters in a primary will lose voters in a general election. Some day, though, the facts — both scientific and demographic — will force GOP candidates to confront climate change whether they want to or not. And that day will come sooner than they think. …
“These polls show that there are a lot of people who are inclined to vote Republican — and believe America should respond to climate change,” says Edward Maibach, director of the George Mason program. “Republicans aren’t inclined to respond to it right now, but in the future, if they don’t take these issues seriously, they’re inclined to alienate a lot of Republican voters.”
As one of the leading experts on public opinion analysis in this area, Stanford’s Jon Krosnick, explained back in October, candidates “may actually enhance turnout as well as attract voters over to their side by discussing climate change.”
Some Republicans have started to figure this out, but that means taking on the Tea Party extremists and their well-funded pollutocrat backers like the Kochs:
And a quiet, but growing, number of other Republicans fear the same thing. Already, deep fissures are emerging between, on one side, a base of ideological voters and lawmakers with strong ties to powerful tea-party groups and super PACs funded by the fossil-fuel industry who see climate change as a false threat concocted by liberals to justify greater government control; and on the other side, a quiet group of moderates, younger voters, and leading conservative intellectuals who fear that if Republicans continue to dismiss or deny climate change, the party will become irrelevant.
“There is a divide within the party,” says Samuel Thernstrom, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality and is now a scholar of environmental policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “The position that climate change is a hoax is untenable.”
A concerted push has begun within the party — in conservative think tanks and grassroots groups, and even in backroom, off-the-record conversations on Capitol Hill — to persuade Republicans to acknowledge and address climate change in their own terms. The effort will surely add heat to the deep internal conflict in the years ahead. [emphasis added]
The National Journal says some of the fossil fuel companies backing the right-wing deniers are changing their position:
It’s long been taken as a truism that the powerful oil lobby is the reason nothing happens on climate change in Washington. For many years, that was indeed true. In particular, Exxon Mobil, the nation’s largest oil company and a major contributor to Republican candidates, was associated with a campaign to fuel skepticism about climate science. From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil contributed more than $600,000 to the Heartland Institute, a well-known nonprofit group that holds conferences and publishes books aimed at debunking the science of climate change. Exxon Mobil’s support of Heartland made sense. The oil company stood to take a financial hit from “cap-and-trade” climate-change proposals that would have priced carbon pollution from oil.
For a number of reasons, that equation is changing. Exxon Mobil has ended its support of Heartland’s agenda. It’s not that the oil giant has had a green awakening; it’s just that a series of internal changes have positioned the company to profit from at least some policies that price carbon emissions. …
And the position on climate change at Exxon Mobil that once helped fund the Heartland conferences? “We have the same concerns about climate change as everyone. The risk of climate change exists; it’s caused by more carbon in the atmosphere; the risk is growing; and there’s broad scientific and policy consensus on this,” [company spokesman Alan] Jeffers says.
But even if Exxon Mobil were truly softening on the issue, which is a dubious proposition at best, the hardcore polluters have simply upped the ante.
After quoting Marco Rubio’s recent denialist statements — such as “When we point out that no matter how many job-killing laws we pass, our government can’t control the weather, [Obama] accuses us of wanting dirty water and dirty air” — NJ explains:
Rubio’s view is likely to remain the mainstream one in the party in the short term, thanks to tea-party groups such as Americans for Prosperity, a super PAC founded by David and Charles Koch, the principal owners of Koch Industries, a major U.S. oil conglomerate.
Over the last several years, Americans for Prosperity has spearheaded an all-fronts campaign using advertising, social media, and cross-country events aimed at electing lawmakers who will ensure that the fossil-fuel industry won’t have to worry about any new regulations. The group spent $36 million to influence the 2012 elections.
“We’ve been having this debate with the Left for 10 years, and we welcome having the debate with these new groups. If there are groups who want to do a niche effort with the Republican electorate, we’ll win that debate,” says the group’s president, Tim Phillips. He’s not worried that organizations such as Combs’s Christian Coalition or economists such as Laffer will influence lawmakers — because AFP would hit any such candidate with an all-out negative campaign. “Let them bring a carbon tax on. They know it’s political death for them to bring this forward on their own.”
So right now there is mostly a standoff for the GOP. The deniers can dominate the primaries with voters and fossil-fuel funding for the time being, but that denial hurts them in many statewide and national elections.
Anton Oparin / ShutterstockVictims of Hurricane Sandy receive aid in Queens. Expect more scenes like this in the future.
Ask Dr. Andrew Guzman, a professor of international law at U.C. Berkely, why he decided to write a book about climate change, and he says it’s simple: It’s the biggest issue of our time.
“If I didn’t write about it,” he says, “for my grandkids, I’d sound like somebody who wasn’t interested in Nazi Germany in 1939.”
Gutzman doesn’t want to be painted as an alarmist. That’s why, for the book, Overheated: The human costs of climate change, he assumes that we will see a modest (and increasingly optimistic) 2 degrees centigrade of warming. You know, so as to stay on the conservative side of things.
But it turns out that 2 degrees is enough to sound some serious fucking alarm bells.
Guzman’s main goal, he says, was to look at the social, economic, and political costs of global warming. Most books focus on physical and environmental changes. Guzman wanted to examine human consequences.
Guzman spends a significant portion of Overheated exploring how troubled parts of the world will be affected by food and water scarcity vis-à-vis climate change. But some of the scarier parts of the book are about the overabundance of water that’s coming our way: Two degrees warming probably equates to about a one meter rise in sea level this century. That’s enough to displace hundreds of thousands to millions of people in low-lying nations, and, as of now, there is no plan to deal with environmental refugees.
“I think the question is whether the exit will be orderly or emergency crisis,” Guzman says. “If a storm comes at the wrong time and the international community is then plucking these people out of the sea, it’ll be horrible.”
The environmental refugee problem becomes eye-poppingly scary when you look at the 150 million people living in Bangladesh. A one-meter sea level rise would swamp about 17 percent of the country.
“We know where people go when they lose their land: They go to cities, and they go to refugee camps,” Guzman says. “So the Bangladeshi cities that remain are going to be overrun and crumbling. Just think of the sewage system alone.”
Lest you think no one has considered what might happen next, in recent years India has increased security along the border with Bangladesh. “But fences are only so good up to a point,” Guzman says. “So how much violence are you prepared to use to keep that border secure? It’s not at all clear to me that the border can remain in tact.”
Global warming is often couched as an environmental problem, but for Guzman, this misses the point. He’s skeptical that drowning polar bears and acidified coral reefs will mobilize the public into action. He’s a realist appealing to self-interested Americans. This isn’t about hugging trees and saving whales. This is about international security, global pandemics, terrorism — and a moral imperative.
Overheated is a fascinating read in part because Guzman goes out of his way not to be hyperbolic. But if you buy his book as you’re boarding a plane, it’s more likely than not that you’ll land feeling alarmed.
Listen in as I talk to Guzman about how he got involved with this topic, the chances that we’ll be able to avert disaster — and what we’re in for, as a species, if we fail to react in time.
This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.
On any given day, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has the power to throw the environmental movement into complete disarray.
Tucked into a nondescript neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the court isn’t well known to the public, but it’s often called the second most important court in the United States. It has particular significance to the environmental movement because of its exclusive jurisdiction over regulations involving vital environmental laws like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.
In the early stages of the modern environmental movement, great progress was made through enterprising lawsuits brought by groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund to enforce the protective mandates of those landmark environmental statutes. But the challenge is different now, with judges on the bench seeking to derail, not enforce, these fundamental safeguards. How environmentalists respond to this threat could dramatically impact the success of the movement in combating 21st century environmental threats such as global warming.
Indeed, with Congress paralyzed by gridlock, the only path forward for effective responses to climate pollution is through administrative implementation of the Clean Air Act — which the Obama administration is vigorously pursuing. But that option is available only because of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2007. In Massachusetts v. E.P. A., the court held that the act, as currently written, empowers the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate pollutants that cause global warming. The EPA is moving to exercise this authority, but the fate of all its regulatory initiatives will be evaluated, and in large measure determined, by the D.C. Circuit.
The court holds the cards on many environmental issues. Indeed, in the first two weeks of this month alone, the court is hearing cases involving emissions standards on sewage sludge incinerators, challenges to EPA rules requiring states to address greenhouse emissions in their permitting requirements, emissions standards for hazardous pollutants resulting from lead processing, and even a pair of cases regarding the importation of polar bear hunting trophies.
These cases sometimes go very badly for environmentalists. In October of 2012, after a 2-1 D.C. Circuit majority overturned EPA’s “Good Neighbor” rule — which constrained individual states’ contributions to air pollution in neighboring downwind states — Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist and George Mason University professor Stephen Pearlstein observed that “dysfunctional government has become the strategic goal of the radical fringe [on the political right]. … Nowhere has this strategy been pursued with more fervor, or more success, than the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where a new breed of activist judges are waging a determined and largely successful war on federal regulatory agencies.”
As Pearlstein makes clear, cases are not decided by the court as an institution; they are decided by the judges who sit on that court. And there has been a concerted effort by conservatives to dominate the federal bench, and this bench in particular. Look no further than Senate obstruction of President Obama’s judicial nominees to the D.C. Circuit. Republicans have already led a successful filibuster against Caitlin Halligan, a highly qualified D.C. Circuit nominee who ultimately withdrew her nomination after more than two years of obstruction. Now they have introduced a bill to reduce the number of seats on the D.C. Circuit from 11 to eight in a nakedly partisan attempt to maintain conservative dominance over the makeup of the court.
President George W. Bush appointed three of the court’s seven currently active judges, Bill Clinton appointed three, and George H.W. Bush appointed one. President Obama has yet to make a successful appointment, despite four of the seats being vacant. But that does not tell the entire story. Many federal courts rely on judges who have taken “senior status” — a form of semi-retirement that involves still hearing cases — to help manage caseloads. Five of the court’s six very active senior judges are appointees of Ronald Reagan or H.W. Bush, and these firebrand conservatives continue to make their mark in environmental cases.
It is time for the environmental movement to involve itself more in the conversation about nominations. There is no downside to supporting well-qualified nominees to the bench and opposing mindless obstructionism. It’s also important to make clear that the environmental community doesn’t need treehuggers on the bench; it only needs judges who will follow the protective mandates of the statutes passed by Congress.
When it comes to addressing the nation’s 21st century environmental problems, environmentalists must pay far more attention to the third branch of government — a branch, after all, that is made up of people who are appointed not for four or six years, but for lifetime terms. The future of environmental law is inextricably linked with the future of the federal bench.
On any given day, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has the power to throw the environmental movement into complete disarray.
Tucked into a nondescript neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the court isn’t well known to the public, but it’s often called the second most important court in the United States. It has particular significance to the environmental movement because of its exclusive jurisdiction over regulations involving vital environmental laws like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.
In the early stages of the modern environmental movement, great progress was made through enterprising lawsuits brought by groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund to enforce the protective mandates of those landmark environmental statutes. But the challenge is different now, with judges on the bench seeking to derail, not enforce, these fundamental safeguards. How environmentalists respond to this threat could dramatically impact the success of the movement in combating 21st century environmental threats such as global warming.
Indeed, with Congress paralyzed by gridlock, the only path forward for effective responses to climate pollution is through administrative implementation of the Clean Air Act — which the Obama administration is vigorously pursuing. But that option is available only because of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2007. In Massachusetts v. E.P. A., the court held that the act, as currently written, empowers the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate pollutants that cause global warming. The EPA is moving to exercise this authority, but the fate of all its regulatory initiatives will be evaluated, and in large measure determined, by the D.C. Circuit.
The court holds the cards on many environmental issues. Indeed, in the first two weeks of this month alone, the court is hearing cases involving emissions standards on sewage sludge incinerators, challenges to EPA rules requiring states to address greenhouse emissions in their permitting requirements, emissions standards for hazardous pollutants resulting from lead processing, and even a pair of cases regarding the importation of polar bear hunting trophies.
These cases sometimes go very badly for environmentalists. In October of 2012, after a 2-1 D.C. Circuit majority overturned EPA’s “Good Neighbor” rule — which constrained individual states’ contributions to air pollution in neighboring downwind states — Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist and George Mason University professor Stephen Pearlstein observed that “dysfunctional government has become the strategic goal of the radical fringe [on the political right]. … Nowhere has this strategy been pursued with more fervor, or more success, than the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where a new breed of activist judges are waging a determined and largely successful war on federal regulatory agencies.”
As Pearlstein makes clear, cases are not decided by the court as an institution; they are decided by the judges who sit on that court. And there has been a concerted effort by conservatives to dominate the federal bench, and this bench in particular. Look no further than Senate obstruction of President Obama’s judicial nominees to the D.C. Circuit. Republicans have already led a successful filibuster against Caitlin Halligan, a highly qualified D.C. Circuit nominee who ultimately withdrew her nomination after more than two years of obstruction. Now they have introduced a bill to reduce the number of seats on the D.C. Circuit from 11 to eight in a nakedly partisan attempt to maintain conservative dominance over the makeup of the court.
President George W. Bush appointed three of the court’s seven currently active judges, Bill Clinton appointed three, and George H.W. Bush appointed one. President Obama has yet to make a successful appointment, despite four of the seats being vacant. But that does not tell the entire story. Many federal courts rely on judges who have taken “senior status” — a form of semi-retirement that involves still hearing cases — to help manage caseloads. Five of the court’s six very active senior judges are appointees of Ronald Reagan or H.W. Bush, and these firebrand conservatives continue to make their mark in environmental cases.
It is time for the environmental movement to involve itself more in the conversation about nominations. There is no downside to supporting well-qualified nominees to the bench and opposing mindless obstructionism. It’s also important to make clear that the environmental community doesn’t need treehuggers on the bench; it only needs judges who will follow the protective mandates of the statutes passed by Congress.
When it comes to addressing the nation’s 21st century environmental problems, environmentalists must pay far more attention to the third branch of government — a branch, after all, that is made up of people who are appointed not for four or six years, but for lifetime terms. The future of environmental law is inextricably linked with the future of the federal bench.
Like sparring siblings, China and the United States — the world’s two biggest carbon dioxide emitters — keep passing the climate-action buck back and forth: “Why should I cut emissions if they don’t have to?” Well, China is either the more mature of the pair, or just majorly sucking up to Mama Earth. The country is reportedly gearing up to set firm limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, seriously weakening one of the U.S.’s go-to excuses for climate inaction.
