Sinks Or Swim

Round and Round, Going Nowhere

It's the weekend and I have been cleaning out files (I need to make room in my cramped office for new ones, right?). One hanging folder I came across was marked "Climate Change" and the materials in it were mostly from the late 1990's though there were a few from the late 80's, too. I may list them (for fun) in another post, but here I want to hightlight one nicely produced letter size 16 page pamphlet from July of '97 put out by a group called Environmental Media Services (now replaced by Science Communication Network).

It is called "Understanding the Economics of Global Climate Change," and from the laid in letter from the Executive Director and the beginning of the introduction it is clear that it is a counter-piece to the PR of the (then) well know energy industry group called the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a fog-wash group I used to follow that tried to muddy the policy waters of Washington and forestall any kind of meaningful action on GHG reductions (GHGs largely produced by their member companies).

What strikes me about the pamphlet is this: we may have marginally more data about the changes in the global climate (most registered locally...a common and misguided critique that I have dealt with elsewhere) but the core arguments have not advanced an iota. I will be out front about the fact that I believe this is due to the lack of vision on the part of elected officials that has made them susceptible to the direct lobbying pressure of interest groups like GCC, and the indirect pressure of constituents who have been propagandized by GCC and their allies. They succeeded just enough during the corporate democrat Clinton years, and dominated during the grease-the-skids-to-hell Bush years, and so we have gone, really, nowhere (except farther into the abyss) to the extent that most of this 16 page booklet could have been written yesterday.

Ah, like the Buddhist Wheel of Life, we go round-and-round, learning nothing.

Reading through this tract was like revisiting the last thirty years of my education (or was that life....or what is the....oh, yeah<G>)

"Often treated like a hard science, economics is in fact a far more subjective discipline."

"...conventional economic methods are poorly equipped to process issues like those posed by climate change, where effects are long-lasting, widely dispersed and irreversible." (By far the best explanation of why this happens is in the British book Timescapes of Modernity by Barbara Adam, which I bought at Blackwell's some years ago and can recommend highly.)

"...in the case of climate change, there happens to be a consistent structural bias against taking steps to solve the problem."

That structural bias has two main parts, valuing of natural sources and sinks at zero, and the use of Net Present Value to discount future benefits of current investments while costing the investment in them at present value. This is nothing new. We have known this a long time -- I personally have known this since hearing it in my college courses at UMass Amherst in the late 70's, which means it was common academic / policy knowledge long before -- and yet we are still stalled at the stop light, one foot on the brake of prudence (we'd like to think, but more likely inhibition, or caution, or cowardice) while the other foot is full down on the throttle of consumption, and the Monster Truck of our path to (environmental) Hell is burning rubber and making a helluva scream that the crowd loves in its Colliseum fervor. Duce! Duce! Thumbs down!

Going Dutch In Bangladesh?

No I think they'll stick with Bengali, at least for now. The New York Times ran a piece yesterday about redirecting the flow of sediment down the Ganges Delta in a low tech way to raise the elevation of especially flood prone areas. The idea is that doing so could ameliorate some of the effects of sea level rise from climate change. A comparison to the Netherlands -- first world high tech versus third world low tech -- is especially interesting as the reporter quotes the Dutch Ambassador. Also noted: that it is a village himself who discovered the process, which uses natural flows themselves to increase the protection of his land -- and raise agicultural yields and income.

And just as the Dutch have employed very high tech, very expensive methods to hold back the North Sea, there are plenty of solutions out there for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) that take the same kind of approach. Meanwhile there are farmers and foresters all over the world in a position to do the same thing in a much more low tech way; the big question is how to quantify, coordinate, and increase the efficiency of their efforts, many of which represent the "technology" of millenia.

The farmer, Abdul Lateef apparently discovered his trick by accident, a process I am familiar with from my own days as a farmer. Much in the same way that European farmers discovered the crop Belgian endive by mistake back in the early 1800's, I discovered how to grow radicchio in the Northeast US by mistake. And how -- according to evolutionary theory -- do plants and animals adapt to their environment? Natural selection of any number of "mistakes." Accidental discovery and improvement.

Given my other blogs (Big MACC and Hand to Mouth) I would be very curious to know the scale of this farmer's paddies, and what his methods are, because in many parts of the rice growing regions shrimp are no longer the traditional part of the cropping scheme they once were (along with pulses and vegetables on the dikes) due to the use of pesticides in the paddy water.

In the end it is felt that this might be able to make a three foot difference. But predictions for sea level rise -- even in South Asia -- is way more than that, and then the monsoon cycle (unless, I suppose, that changed) adds onto that. That doesn't mean ideas (and actions) like this don't matter -- they do -- but only that we need to keep in mind that there is more to do, on a while range of fronts, if we are successfully deal with the climate implications of our past profligacy.

Green Guilt and the Carbon Offset Market

The post says it all...the Washington Post that is, and what it says is not just that the voluntary carbon market is, so far, as unsettled as the financial markets...it says reams about changes we still need to make in how relate to this world we live and our inherent responbilities to it.

For a front page story October 6th, followed on at few pages further in, the Post's editors chose a pair of winning headlines:

There's a Gold Mine In Environmental Guilt

and

Still a Bull Market In Climate Guilt

Don't get me wrong, I (obviously) am a fan of the way offsets use the market to fund necessary innovation in combating climate change, and I'll let guilt be the motivator (for now) is that is the only way it is going to happen, but I think in the long run we have to get away from the "bummer" of guilt and get to a positive, stewardship view of the relationship.

Overall, the article notes, prices of offsets range from as little as $1.80 per offset ton, all the way up to almost $300, with an average of just over $6. That is essentially wholesale, as CarbonFund.org, one of the larger providers sells its carbon offsets for $10 and another, about to launch -- and specializing in our favorite type: carbon sink offsets -- comes in around $18.

One thing we don't much care for, but comes with the system, is tradeable offsets, which are really just another financial instrument -- not unlike the infamous credit default swaps that are largely responsible for the financial mess that is unrolling around us -- rather than an environmental action.

Arctic Ice – Pattern Recognition vs. Pattern Confusion

 Our long slow slide toward Babel, and our slow submersion by the accumulated effects of our blindness to the big picture do have a connection. Actually the connections are all around us if we could only pick out the salient points, the subtle repetitions – or rhymes, as an article in this morning's Washington Post called them – and have them click into place.

For more than a week I've had an article I clipped from the NY Times sitting on my desk, waiting for me to get a moment (it's Fall, and firewood time) to pop it up here. The headline reads “Arctic Ocean Ice Retreats Less Than Last Year.” As the article relates, that is apparently a fact. Okay.

It's not even a very long article (seven paragraphs) and throughout this decrease is implied to be an aberration. In the first paragraph, the season “ended with the ice not quite matching last year's extraordinary recession.” (I love the use of the word “recession.”<G>)

But it is not in the headline.

Why, and why does matter; why does it rate a post?

Two things. One has to do with headlines and their relationship to actual content. This is no great new observation, and is the print equivalent to the sound bites of television. The other has to do with how the meme of climate change has become sufficiently pervasive that anything that seems to contradict it becomes an item of note to the newserati.

In the seven paragraphs of the article there is evidence of this meme in virtually every one. While those of us who see the evidence of climate change as irrefutable might be pleased that we have gotten this concept squarely planted in the public mind, there is a feedback that is also a slashback. Once the headline writer has a sophisticated (to our view) understanding of the issue, his/her response in the headline will come from that viewpoint and may well confuse the issue for those not yet informed.

So the headline, read quickly, might make it seem like there is some question about the long term trend of global warming and climate change when in fact it is the aberrant deviation from that trend that is the real news here.

In that sense, the condensation of content in a headline is not unlike the compression of an image in the digital world, but seems more easily to slip into a transformation that, in a world where many take only the headline, might convey the opposite impression of the article itself.