Yet Another Climate Report--And More Denials

The latest report from the National Research Council should add some urgency to the debate over how to limit heat-trapping gases. But the responses are predictable, particularly from the global-warming-, climate-change-denying crowd.

The conclusions drawn are clear, if not the specific policy preferences: it is strongly suggested that probably the best way to reign in carbon emissions is to put an overall price on carbon, which has the effect of steering investments into low-carbon, energy-efficient technologies and processes.

The report's authors come from inside and outside the scientific establishment, encompassing business, industry, politics, and representing different ideological stripes.

Still, the broad-based call to arms is falling on deaf ears, even among Democrats who would rather focus on keeping the economy from stalling.

One can only wonder when it will be safe to go outside again and advocate an aggressive, comprehensive national energy policy of carbon mitigation.

The Fastest Passenger Train

The world's "fastest" passenger train service, measured by average trip speed, is currently the CRH Wuhan-Guangzhou High-Speed Railway. The train averages about 200 miles an hour, but reaches top speeds of between 210 and 220 miles an hour. The thing really rips.

I recently took a ride, paying about 70 dollars to get from central China to the coast in a little more than three hours. I taped some of the ride, posted on the right, so you can see and feel the bullet train as it barrels through rural Hunan province.

Compare China's high-speed rail to our fastest train, the Acela, and it's sobering to see how we're being left behind in the development of rail infrastructure. The Acela can go 150 m.p.h., but averages 100 or less between Washington and Boston.

Critics say China's HSR is a boondoggle, a massively expensive showpiece project that squanders energy and saddles the government with costly debt service. Ticket prices cannot be raised high enough--ridership is too low as it is.

Still, this is how China invested its stimulus money and I think the bet on HSR will eventually pay off.

Go East, Young Man!

Florida is the real Big Sky country, make no mistake. Those billowy cumulus clouds that form ten thousand feet over your head are mountains of water.

But if only man could just vacate his sub- and ex-urban habitats and undo the plumbing he imposed on the vast River of Grass we know as the Everglades!

Pictures posted on the New York Times Opinionator blog today provide arresting visual proof of a once pristine wilderness in slow, inexorable decline. Absent any massive effort by the Army Corps to unplug the 'Glades, the region is consigning the place to "death by a thousand cuts."

Edge cities like Weston, Florida, a sprawling tract home development, are partly to blame. All of 20 years old, and constructed on the eastern fringes of what we currently call the 'Glades, Weston is basically an agglomeration of thousands of cookie-cut single family homes piled onto filled land, your archetypal Florida swamp turned into "paradise."

But the root cause of lasting, cumulative damage, has been the Army Corps of Engineers' region-wide latticework of canals, pumps, bridges, and containment ponds, creating the plumbing infrastructure that makes the development of a Weston possible.

While the engineering was lauded as a monumental achievement--a conquest of man over nature, which laid the foundation for south Florida's incredible growth and future real estate frenzy--this so-called "progress" was the 'Glades' environmental regress.

See Christoph Gielen's wonderful aerial photos (of a place I know well) here:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/they-unpaved-paradise/?hp

You are what you eat

In "Eating Animals" (2009), the author asks the reader to exercise her moral imagination.

For example, look at the pig's face. It seems sociable, curious, and intelligent. In fact, pigs are very intelligent. So what are we to make of the fact that man forces tens of millions of them into an overcrowded, hellish existence? We genetically engineer them, render them incapable of living in nature, stuff them with antibiotics, herd them into pens where they live on top of each other, sometimes beat them senseless with pipes or stick lit cigarettes into them, and generally make them suffer an abbreviated life until death at the slaughterhouse. The end must come as a release.

So why, asks Jonathan Safran Foer, when we buy a package of breakfast links, do we support such a system?

Of course, the ends justify the means, right? After all, we eat these animals--they are our food. And factory farming, a mode of corporate production spreading across China now, just as it has in the U.S., brings it to our table cheap. The bottom line is the only thing that matters.

Foer wants us to think about such things, because we currently don't think about them at all. We are in deep, collective denial.

For a moment, though, put aside the moral as well as the obvious dietary reasons not to eat factory farmed animals. The environmental reasons against it are compelling. Foer says millions of individual decisions to boycott farmed animals "will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history (p.257)."

Foer pines for the localized animal husbandry evident in the picture I took of the pig. That was in a small village in Yunnan province, China, where families raise pigs intimately and care for them as if a pet. Don't be confused, though, about the ultimate outcome. That pig will be slaughtered, probably at the hands of the village butcher, some of his parts eaten by the family, and the rest put to market.

The question is not one of animal rights, but animal welfare. Can we treat animals more humanely on their way to our table, or is factory farming here to stay?

Don't like this unit?: I have 10 million more

While rising prosperity in China has spurred demand for U.S.-style suburban tract housing, with gated entrances, man-made ponds, and roomy square footage that would make an Atlanta or Dallas hausfrau envious, there is also a very contrarian development taking place.

High-rise condos and apartment buildings are shooting up like a bamboo forest, many half filled with tenants while construction crews busily finish the other half. It seems they can't be built fast enough for the millions of migrants moving to China's mega-cities.

Construction in China goes on all day and night until completion, a manic energy that contrasts sharply with the seemingly glacial pace of U.S. construction. I remember it took two years to build one New Jersey high school. Time is money, and the difference can only be explained by the politics of union organization. Chinese labor is unorganized and cheap. But I digress.

The consequences of the dense urban living model are salubrious (to the environment), compared to the sprawling, commute-until-you-drop model of, say, a Weston, FL. The collapse of the U.S. residential real estate market, rising energy costs, and the rediscovery of more human scale "communal" urban living may force many Americans to re-examine their preference for the 'burbs.

Take a look at the NYT photoessay on China's "instant cities." The scale and pace of urban development is breathtaking:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/chinas-instant-cities

The 99-cent challenge to liberal orthodoxy

Transiting recently across the Florida-Georgia border, I came across a wholesale bookstore which advertised "no book over $3." Of course I couldn't resist. Imagine my dismay when I discovered it was a Christian bookstore with aisles overflowing almost entirely with bibles, notebooks and calendars, as well as such inspirational bestsellers as "The Christian's Guide to Eating Healthy" and the "The Divine Spirit's Home Repair Kit."

The clerk, however, did point out a small section, basically one table, for "secular" books. And it was there I discovered the "Nordhaus thesis" (a solemn hush comes over the room). Unless you are an environmental policy wonk, you might have missed out on this guy's essay a few years ago called "The Death of Environmentalism." I did.

The book I picked out of the pile, "Breakthrough," or, "From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possbility" is a worthwhile read. The hardcover copy, jettisoned from the Harford County library (Maryland?) cost all of ninety-nine cents. The authors, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, give you bang for the buck, bringing an erudite, and no doubt controversial, analysis to the whole global warming and climate crisis debate.

The book is ostensibly about global warming and the need for a vigorous global energy economy capable of handling it. But where it differs from other books on the subject is in its aim squarely at liberal interest-group environmentalism: its "small-bore" or techo-fix approach born of the sixties that fails today to summon ordinary people's energies and stimulate their imagination for thinking BIG.

Written at the time of the Democratic takeover of Congress, the book is not optimistic that the party of Franklin Roosevelt can transcend liberal, interest-group politics and promote a postindustrial, postmaterial agenda equipped to both grow the economy and slow climate change. Filing lawsuits against corporations is just so late twentieth century.

They bring many contemporary heavy-hitters to bear, including Thomas Kuhn ("The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"), Daniel Bell, and Francis Fukuyama. They invoke memories of old school favorites Nietzsche and Hegel.

Several passages are delicious, particularly the treatment of Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s obvious hypocrisy over the Cape Wind project, an elite case of NIMBY if ever there was one.

And the chapter devoted to Brazil should shame anybody who supports doing something about development in the Amazon forest without mentioning in the same breath the need for action reducing poverty in Rio's favelas. That the two problems are opposite sides of the same coin now seems too obvious.

One of their enduring ideas with me is that environmentalism will have to re-invent itself along the lines of Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. Don't laugh. They make a convincing case that a mass movement that translates into anything meaningful politically will probably need to be spiritual and ingrained in people's everyday lives. Their term for such necessary groundwork is "pre-political."

If you doubt that what they say is true, look around you. How many people are talking with passion about what can be done positively with the climate crisis? Al Gore is the poster boy of environmental "eco-apocalypse"--great for laying out the science, but equally adept at scaring the shit out of young children.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger are the same guys who propose getting us accustomed to the idea of adapting to a hotter world. What's wrong with that? Cope with it we must, no matter how much or quickly we reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

It's clear to me that what they say is true about the untapped potential for change: people are hungry for an inspiring narrative. Both political parties and mainstream environmentalism don't offer one. Until they do, and until a massive Apollo-like green energy program is launched, harnessing the great talents, energies, and aspirations of Americans, we will be left with buying compact fluorescent bulbs and trying to feel good about it.

P.S. Ted Nordhaus is not to be confused with his uncle, Yale economist William Nordhaus, who writes extensively about the economics of climate change.

The beginning and end of life

I have a sense of foreboding about the unabated BP gas and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The sugar-sand beaches at risk, from Pensacola east and south on Florida's gulf coast, are among the most beautiful beaches in the world.

If this disaster continues, what can my children expect to see when they go to the Redneck Riviera on their college spring break? Instead of coping with red tide, will they be forced to swim between bobbing tar balls, the shallow gulf waters devoid of life?

My thoughts turn darker: is man reversing in his short tenure on earth what took hundreds of millions of years of natural improvisation to bring to life in the seas and oceans?

Stromatolites are the first building blocks of earthly life, the single-celled organisms (see the picture) that can be found fossilized in ancient mud. You are looking at a life form billions of years old. And the key constituent ingredient making such life possible is oxygen.

Until these cyanobacteria were producing oxygen on their own through the very first photosynthesis--thereby promoting further experimentation with life--carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane and other gases unfriendly to life predominated in the atmosphere.

What the latest evidence says about the spill is that oxygen could be the first casualty. If oil and gas globules are deeply submerged and suspended in ten-mile-long blobs, how could marine life not be at threat of asphyxiation?

We simply don't know yet what the outcome is.