Looming Ecological Catastrophe is a Substantive Problem, Not a Political One
Here’s one thing I completely agree with William Galston about: A strong cap-and-trade program seems relatively unlikely to pass. Many Democratic Senators represent relatively coal-dependent states, Republicans seem determined to mount uniform opposition to even the Obama administration’s most popular initiatives, and given the economic downturn voters seem maximally likely to be open to pollution lobby arguments that letting them destroy the planet is crucial to America’s economic health. I also agree with Galston that one might deem this looking collision between Obama’s policy goals and the realities of congressional politics a “catastrophe.”
Where he goes wrong is that he seems to see this primarily as a political calamity in terms of the administration’s standing both domestically and in the eyes of international participants at the coming Copenhagen conference. That’s all true enough, but I think it’s important for people not to write about this issue without mentioning that failure to start reducing carbon emissions in the very near term is a substantive human and ecological catastrophe. Absent emissions reductions, the globe will continue to warm. That will, year after year, keep altering weather patterns around the world. A world inhabited by six billion people based on patterns of settlement established under existing climactic patterns. Climate change means drought and famine, flood and forest fire, all in new and unprepared places. People will die. In the developing world where large numbers of people still subsist in an essentially malthusian state, the stress on resources will lead to armed conflict and even more death, but here in the developed world things won’t be pretty either. Essential as it may be for the administration to savvily adapt its goals to political reality, it’s even more essential for members of congress to adapt their political goals to real-world reality.
51 Responses to “Looming Ecological Catastrophe is a Substantive Problem, Not a Political One”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
March 24th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
And we thought the “politics of fear” were over.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
This would be a pretty crazy catastrophe: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127001.300-space-storm-alert-90-seconds-from-catastrophe.html
But it would indirectly be a good way to curb global warming.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Perhaps more accurately, it would have been a substantive policy problem about twenty years ago when it might have been possible to take dramatic action to limit the worst consequences of rising sea levels and changing climatic conditions.
At it happens, we dithered for twenty years, released exponentially larger amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, and now face a no-win outcome. Even if you propose radical change we’re still likely to experience global sea level rises that would cause massive dislocation. Global warming is a problem unlike any other we’ve experienced due to the long lag-time associated with its effects. I’d bet, at this point, it wouldn’t be untrue to say that the U.S. government already failed to address the problem. We’re just left waiting to see how bad it’s all going to be in the end.
Of course, we still need to take radical action (I’m no George Will)…
March 24th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
well, good luck convincing the Jesus-freaks of that. they don’t care. and as we all know, the vast majority of both parties are Jesus-freaks, who believe that a magical dead man and his magical space-dwelling twin/father can regulate weather patterns with the wave of a hand, and did so in the past.
these people are excited about things looking weird this way. it proves that ‘God is moving through history’, not that we have put ourselves on a one-way trip to self-imposed hell on earth. you’ll never, ever, ever, ever see the problem of climate change taken seriously enough for it to matter throughout the US, until some threshold is reached whereby a only a minority of weirdos believe the bible is true word for word. people are far more afraid of what lurks in the depths of their own self-conscience than they are of catastrophic weather.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Onceler,
Actually, the leadership of the Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Anglican churches have been outspoken in warning of the dangers of climate changes. As have, I think, some evangelical and mainline Protestant leaders. Personally, I see our destruction of the natural environment, and alteration of the climate, as a basic expression of the same desires that led to the Fall. But don’t let that stop your ignorant little rant.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Global warming is, indeed, going to lead to Malthusian catastrophe. This is the reason I was able to justify not voting for McCain last November: global warming is ultimately going to lead to even more deaths than the legalized butchery of abortion.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Even if this is the case, rising sea levels will be pretty miserable for our descendants. So it’s probably worth understanding/framing the issue that my great great great grandchilds(or whatever) life will suck, and might not be sustainable, because of rising sea levels.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Sea ice would return to the poles and world climate would mend if Obama wasn’t spending his time filling out NCAA basketball tournament brackets.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
And we thought the “politics of fear” were over.
Republican logic: Our guys lied about problems, so now your guys can’t tell the truth about any.
I’m so glad that party is dying.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
When you say ‘low lying areas’, I read ‘coastal cities’. There’s also the problem that most of the news I read on climate change talks about how everything is moving faster than predicted. At the rate things are going, we’ll be lucky if we make it to 2020 without some major flooding issues.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Braden is right, we really needed to start taking meaningful action on this 20 years ago. It’s going to take a miracle to avert catastrophe at this point.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
1) The human race is like mold rotting a cantaloupe — just look down as you fly over the country from East Coast to LA. It might not be a bad thing if it died back by 4 or 5 billion people.
2) The overpopulation , of course, was driven by abundant food which in turn was driven by cheap oil which allowed mechanization and fertilizer.
Plus religious nuts like Hector’s Catholic Church — which is a form of organized insanity that is a direct threat to the rest of us.
Although its not clear if the enormous overpopulation and poverty spawned by the Vatican’s stupid edict on contraception is offset by the millions in Africa that have died from AIDS due to its campaign against condoms. Sometimes the Pope’s right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Of course, when it comes to organized insanity, the Protestant Evangelicals are even more venial and stupid. And some of them are just as prone to large families.
It is one thing for a person to have religious faith, based on mediation/prayer and study of the Bible and other books.
And to have moral values based on those beliefs which they support in a public debate.
But large churchs lead by men with a thirst for power — and who think God is whispering in their ear –are enormously destructive.
Our primary problem is that we can’t address looming dangers because we tolerate the existance and spread of deeply malign organizations that sabotage any rational discourse.
Even if we established a sustainable civilization here in North America, the Catholic Church would destroy it by supporting massive illegal immigration from it massive hordes to the South.
And we NOURISH these malign organizations — unlike any secular political organization, they can give tax-free salaries to their operatives, they can own property that is not taxed, and they can raise huge sums of money by untraceable money transfers. I think Rev John Hagee’s collection plate should be audited just as rigorously as someone talking on the phone to the Middle East.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
This is the unique feature of the climate change/CO2 reduction battle that hasn’t gotten much attention. We’ve battled back against environmental catastrophe on a global scale before: NOx/SOx restrictions in the 90s to combat acid rain, CFC restrictions at the same time to patch up the ozone layer, smog abatement once folks had to start wearing surgical masks in major cities a couple decades ago. All of these solutions came after the problems associated with a particular type of pollution (acid rain, cancer, inability to breathe) had come to pass.
What Matt alludes to here is the fact that increases in atmospheric CO2 will simply become irreversible on a time scale of a few decades at most. Nathan Lewis gives the best explanation of this that I’ve seen, concluding that (paraphrasing), “It’s legitimate to doubt the certainty of disaster resulting from increased atmospheric CO2, but increasing CO2 well beyond its highest level in many thousands of years is an experiment I don’t want to do.”
There are two things related to this that are incredibly frustrating to me:
1. No one with a big enough megaphone is making this point. An Inconvenient Truth is still the only thing to have broken into popular culture and that was years ago. Who’s going to fund the necessary PR here? Frankly, the Gore-linked “We” ads that I catch on TV don’t even come close to matching the problem.
2. I recently caught some policy folks from MIT, Harvard, and AAAS discussing how best to address the issue; they rightly spent most of the time focusing on reducing consumption. However, there’s was an undue degree of concern of the effects of CO2 reduction on other environmental issues — land use, water use, etc. These problems are all reversible provided enough time and money and don’t have the potential to change the entire world.
CO2 reduction is the biggest global priority right now; I’m all for whatever Draconian measures are required to halve CO2 emissions domestically so that we can come to the international table with the leverage to demand similar efforts wherever it won’t lead to national instability. I think the political argument is hard to make, but certainly possible and it needs to start today. Framing the issue as weening ourselves off of foreign oil is incredibly cowardly and underplays the severity of the problem to an extent that makes it impossible to convince the public of what needs to be done.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Most posts on MY’s blog generate reasonable comments. But here we have Don calling for the death of 4 billion people and calling someone else a nut in the same post. And Onceler’s rant is just stupid and bizarre. Look, I hate Jesus as much as the next guy but that really has nothing to do with global warming. As a factual matter, the claim that majorities of both parties oppose efforts to reduce carbon emissions on religious grounds is completely ridiculous.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Re Don Williams
Actually, Mr. Hector belongs to the Anglican Church, which some consider Roman Catholic light.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Re: Look, I hate Jesus as much as the next guy
The true voice of the hipster: res ipsa loquitur.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Here’s an article in PNAS from a month ago that’s not firewalled that looks at the consequences on atmospheric CO2 and the predicted environmental consequences should CO2 emissions continue to increase at 2% per year and then suddenly drop to zero.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
A link would be nice – http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/01/28/0812721106.abstract
March 24th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Too much cold pizza for breakfast Matt?
What else could enable you to write such an excellent parody of Hal Lindsey?
Oh wait, this isn’t parody?
March 24th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
I loved Hal Lindsey in “Barney Miller.”
March 24th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Re Paulie Carbone’s comment “But here we have Don calling for the death of 4 billion people and calling someone else a nut in the same post. And Onceler’s rant is just stupid and bizarre. Look, I hate Jesus as much as the next guy but that really has nothing to do with global warming.”
—————-
1) You CAN NOT address major environmental problems while the human population continues to grow.
Look at the dumbshit, two-faced and hypocritical Sierra Club. For years it solicited our money and political support to protect a few forests and preserves for the Rich — only to cave when it came to addressing the major environmental degradation caused by a major expansion in population fueled by a million new immigrants every year.
2) So now we have over 300 million , overweight motherfuckers sitting down three times a day to stuff their faces with meat grown in the horrifying conditions of factory farms. Animals living out their lives in conditions so despicable that Southern legislatures passed laws banning the filming of the interior of those places. Ask Hillary if she’s ever looked into how Arkansas’s Tyson Foods raise their chickens.
3) We are losing species after species of wildlife because every year, thousand more acres of habitat are lost to subdivisions and agribusinesses using herbicides in order to feed those fat fucks.
4)We are by far the biggest emitters of carbon per capita in the world — and the Chinese are trying to catch up. Global warming is DIRECTLY proportional to human population growth fueled by massive consumption of non-renewable resources and massive pollution.
March 24th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
But if you’re some pampered trustfund scumbag sitting on your ass in Sierra Club’s San Francisco’s office, you can knock off on Tuesday mornings and go rock climbing in Yosemite when the hoi polloi aren’t around.
Who cares about that dirty brown cloud to the South –no one goes to Los Angeles anyway, right? Under the Sierra Club’s elite guidance, California is well on its way to a sustainable ecology, right?
March 24th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
I think Don is the dude at the talk I mentioned above who stood up and asked if it was reasonable to look into methods of stopping population increase immediately or reducing population.
Also I have no clue why you loathe the middle of the country. CO2 emissions per capita are much lower there and food production is more efficient. There are a lot of fat fucks who deserve to die, though.
A more efficient way to address your concerns would be to simply ban the sale of motorized scooters to the overweight.
March 24th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
CO2 emissions per capita are much lower there
Link?
I’ve never heard this before. I’d think the opposite, since more people in coastal areas live in cities, and city-dwellers have much lower carbon footprints on average, due to less driving and more multi-family housing.
I’m curious where this statement comes from.
March 24th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Don Williams writes:
1) The human race is like mold rotting a cantaloupe — just look down as you fly over the country from East Coast to LA. It might not be a bad thing if it died back by 4 or 5 billion people.
Hey Matt, aren’t you just so happy you have people like Don Williams on your side of this issue?
March 24th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Climate change means drought and famine, flood and forest fire, all in new and unprepared places. People will die.
Draconian measures to cut carbon emissions would do great harm to the gobal economy and produce poverty, disease and hunger in the developing world. People will die.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Re joe at 28: “city-dwellers have much lower carbon footprints on average, due to less driving and more multi-family housing.”
————-
I think it’s more complex than that — you have massive convoys of tractor trailer trucks going into Manhatten every day to carry food, goods,etc. from the Midwest. The carbon footprint just to feed Manhattan must be enormous. The carbon footprint to carry its daily garbage to distant landfills in Pennsylvania,etc is not small either — although shipping to the South may reduce that.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Plus if you want to design a structure to radiate heat –and consume electricity, you couldn’t do much better than a block of Manhattan skyscrapers. Compare an overhead image of Manhattan to a CPU motherboard design to radiate excess heat.
Most of the electricity is still generated by coal-fired plants in the Midwest –just ask Vermont, if you want to get an earful.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
To be fair, humanity could insitute a reduction in force policy without committing acts of genocide. A generous voluntary retirement package plus simply not replacing the normal attrition of people would likely achieve the desired downsizing in 100 years or so.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Don Williams,
If people in the midwest are exporting goods by truck for a living, then those emissions are theirs, too.
Besides, you don’t think people in Omaha get their bananas, fish, and breakfast cereal delivered by truck? They aren’t subsistence farmers!
Plus if you want to design a structure to radiate heat –and consume electricity, you couldn’t do much better than a block of Manhattan skyscrapers. Which is quite nice in the winter.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
@joe from Lowell
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/new-high-res-ma.html
I was quite wrong to say much lower; it’s really based on climate as much as anything, and the middle of the country is rather temperate. Comment largely retracted! Totally right that denser=better. Interesting that California urban areas pop out on the map, but ones in the rest of the country (that aren’t also huge manufacturing centers) don’t. That map’s a little misleading because of the log scale; a single red dot surrounded by light green is worse than many green dots in the same area.
That plot shows carbon emissions scaled by population; a better graph for what we’re talking about would be carbon footprint per capita… don’t know if a map like that has been made.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Totally right that denser=better.
The idea that we could achieve meaningful reductions in carbon emissions through denser development over the timescale in which we supposedly need to act to avoid catastrophic climate change is ludicrous.
March 24th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Matt always talks as though (1) destructive climate change is a certainty on our current path; (2) the economic costs of cutting GHG emissions (even with substantial innovation in the energy sector) would not be worse than the forecasted climate change; (3) GHG reduction by the US (either alone, or through some negotiating-convective effect on other countries) will, with high probability, reduce the severity of climate change.
If any of these assumptions falls through, then the case for action is less persuasive. Note, I favor GHG reduction action, but I like nuance, not alarmism.
March 24th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
@Charles
I wasn’t making that claim, and if you look above you’ll see that I’m at least as concerned about the timescale as you are!
March 24th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Zach, you couldn’t possibly be as concerned about the timescale as Charles is. You see, this is the new Republican “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” talking point. Some things, like zoning, will be not worth doing because they won’t work fast enough. Other things, gosh darn it, would be just great if they didn’t happen so darn quickly
In reality, of course, increasing density is something we should be doing as fast as possible. Not only does it do a number of things like reducing our need for transportation (probably our biggest wasted carbon footprint) but once you’re densified the good things just keep on happening on their own.
And people in the future are going to need all the good things happening for them that they can get.
March 24th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
In reality, of course, increasing density is something we should be doing as fast as possible. Not only does it do a number of things like reducing our need for transportation (probably our biggest wasted carbon footprint) but once you’re densified the good things just keep on happening on their own.
There is virtually no potential for achieving meaningful reductions in carbon emissions through increasing density. The key to reducing emissions from transportation is cleaner cars. The key to reducing housing emissions is making existing housing more energy efficient.
March 24th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Matt: “it’s even more essential for members of congress to adapt their political goals to real-world reality.”
Email me when this happens.
The only real-world reality Congress members care about is where their campaign checks (and bribe checks) are coming from.
March 24th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Jove bless you all.
All of you, that is, who believe that if we finally get started now on increasing urban density, cleaner cars, mass transit, cap and trade, wind power, solar power, nuclear (kills me to say it) power and yadda every other green fucking thing yadda, we’ve got a good shot at catastrophe aversion.
I say bless you because this world needs optimists, romantics and long shots. I’m definitely rooting against myself and for y’all on this one. The smart money is against you.
March 24th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Buy Propecia…
http://www.folkd.com/user/buypropeciaonline Buy Propecia…
March 24th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
You’re not fooling anyone, ‘charles’.
March 24th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
or ‘tsg’.
March 25th, 2009 at 3:19 am
Main thing is… we know how to massively reduce CO2 emmissions on a global scale, but what needs to be done is very, very politically unpopular, because it boils down to demolishing the entire fossile fuel electicity generating capacity while building, globally, *several thousand* nuclear reactors, and transitioning automotion to electric drive as fast as at all possible. And the fact that we need a nuclear powerplant near for every 1-2 million people on the planet to have power without cooking the world is not a very comfortable realisation. (among other things.. Noone really wants to entrust third world countries with the running of any of the current designs of nuclear power plant.)
March 26th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Thanks. Nicely said.
Minor peeve: “climatic” != “climactic”, even among the most extreme meteorology enthusiasts I have met.
March 27th, 2009 at 9:08 am
Buy Propecia…
http://url.edna.edu.au/eVAJ Buy Propecia…
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:03 pm
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Joannah
http://easypowerpaint.com
April 10th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
FANTASTIC!