$4.00 Per Gallon Gasoline

I just had an article posted on the progressive news website Common Dreams. Here's the start, click here for the full article....

$4.00 per Gallon Gasoline and Climate Change Both Call for the Same Solution: Collective Investment in Clean Energy


“What do you have to say about global warming to the whole segment of Americans who are just waking up to energy issues with $4.00 per gallon gasoline?”

That question came from the audience during a workshop on climate change I led recently.

There is an assumption behind this question, one that seemed to be everywhere I turned last week — in the press, on talk radio, and even on the floor of the US Senate. The assumption goes like this: now that energy prices are rising we can’t afford to charge the costs of greenhouse gas pollution because that would place an unacceptable burden on people already struggling to meet high energy costs.

On Climate Change, Our Reasoning Should Be The Exact Opposite of the US Senate

"What do you have to say about global warming to the whole segment of Americans who are just waking up to energy issues with $4.00 per gallon gasoline?"

That question came from an audience member at a workshop on climate change Phil and I presented at last week, and it's the same question that comes up again and again in the news coverage of the blockage last week of the Climate Security Act in the US Senate.

Any economist will tell you that markets only serve us when they include all the costs of a good or service. We find ourselves so close to the edge of climate catastrophe because, for several hundred years, our energy markets have failed us by not charging the costs of preventing climate change or repairing the damage it causes. That may have been understandable in the days before the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that human greenhouse gas production is its cause. But today, with the world's leading climate scientists telling us that we have already exceeded safe levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, allowing the distorted signals of the energy market to persist is like knowing that tobacco causes lung cancer and dithering about putting warnings on cigarette packages, charging a tax to support public health and education, or banning second-hand smoke.

The CSA act, while not going far enough in its targets to provide safety against the most dangerous impacts of climate change, was a step towards rectifying the distortions of energy prices, because it introduced a cost for the production of climate pollution, and made plans for using some of revenues for supporting the transition to a cleaner energy system. It would have also used some of the revenues to help consumers switch to cleaner energy alternatives.

This cost for greenhouse gas pollution was framed by many Senators – aided by the news media and fueled by a campaign by the oil and coal lobbies – as a tax that would place an added burden on working people already struggling to cope with rising gas and food prices.

According to Senator Mitch McConnell (from the coal producing state of Kentucky): "At a time when the economy is struggling, when the price of gas, food and power bills are skyrocketing, this giant tax would be an unbearable new burden for Americans.”

At its most stark, this way of thinking says: "We've gotten used to the lie our energy markets have being telling us, we've gotten used to the mistaken impression that energy use has little cost, and, frankly, even though we now can see that this has never been true, we can't imagine how we will go on if that distortion is removed."

If we accept this framing without thinking about it, then trying to correct our energy markets to protect ourselves our communities, the ecosystems we depended upon, the agriculture that feeds us, the mountain snow pack that provides irrigation and drinking water starts to feel like a politically impossible task.

The good news is we don't have to accept this framing. If we stop to think about it, stop to push on it, even a little bit, we see that it has deep flaws.

Americans don't need cheap gas and electricity from coal. We need what cheap gas and electricity from coal have come to provide - affordable convenient ways to get to work in the morning, ways to get around our communities, access to food we can afford that is good for our bodies and our children, homes that are comfortable, activities that interest us, use our minds, muscles, and hearts and make a difference.

Americans are burdened by the rising cost of fossil energy not because of some immutable human need for fossil energy, but because we haven't yet created the shared infrastructure that will allow us to meet our primary needs without fossil fuels. We are burdened not so much by a gasoline price crisis as by a forethought crisis. The only way to make up for this lack of planning in the past is to do what could have been gradually over decades much more quickly now.

Oil supplies are dwindling, but reserves of coal, tar sands, and oil shale are vast. There is more than enough carbon dioxide locked up within these reserves to send our Earth into a period of irreversible warming, should we, in our race to meet our 'needs' dig up and burn those reserves. With so much at stake, we can't allow the voice of the oil and coal lobbies to tell us what our needs our.

Yes we need to get to work and put food on the table. AND, to have jobs to get to and a farming system to grow that food we need a stable climate.

These needs intersect in one place: the creation of a shared, clean, renewable energy infrastructure.

At this intersection advocates for climate protection and people hurting from $4.00 gas are, in fact allies, not the opponents McConnell and the coal lobby would have them be. By calling for affordable ways for people to get to work without depleting their bank accounts or the resiliency of the climate, by staying oriented to the common cause that can be found when we orient towards our true needs, perhaps we can find the power to repair the disorted incentives of our energy system while there is still time.

To Lead, Politicians Need the People

Yesterday morning, Phil and I spoke about some of the latest signs and symptoms of climate change before a group of Massachusetts legislators and their staff.

We did our absolute best to share clear, accurate information. We told them:

-- Climate change is already dangerous, for people around the world, including those suffering in 12 out of the 13 regions where the UN operated major humanitarian relief operations in 2007 - because 12 out of 13 of 2007's major disasters were 'climate-related'.

-- Current levels of greenhouse gas (at 385 ppm) haven't yet had their full impact on temperature and will take hundreds of years to do so.

-- Prolonged exposure of the planet to current levels of CO2 increases the likelihood of runaway warming, where warming feeds upon itself.

We told them we were convinced by the analysis of James Hansen and his colleagues that CO2 levels should be brought as quickly as possibly to 350 ppm or below, and that this would require dramatic action, on the order of phasing out coal use worldwide by 2030 and ending deforestation by 2015, and avoiding the temptation to tap tar sands or oil shale.

Such changes are ambitious, we said, but feasible, given the collective will to act.

It is, for me, always a strange feeling to share this information. We stood there speaking in ordinary tones, as people sat in chairs, took notes, sipped coffee. Did any of us believe what we were saying, what we were hearing? Twenty-two years to phase out coal, on a planet with billions hungry, in need of better shelter, schools, and health care? Seven years to end deforestation? There were no gasps of shock (except when we showed the graph of Arctic ice melt last summer), no muttering about the magnitude of the challenge being laid out.

But no one disagreed, or quibbled with our facts. No one said the danger was less grave than we suggested.

In fact, the representative who addressed his colleagues after we had finished said he agreed with everything we had said.

But then his remarks took a, for me, unexpected turn:

You can't expect to pass legislation to protect the climate on its own merits, not without showing other benefits.

And anyway, some crops might grow better with higher CO2.

And they are building so many coal plants in China it might not matter what we do here.

And we have to be careful, to not take steps that might harm the economy.

I don't know why it played out this way, why he didn't feel free to urge his colleagues to take bold and decisive action by supporting the climate legislation currently under consideration. I don't have the background to understand the subtleties of this particular moment in Massachusetts' political landscape.

But it did not look like a lack of understanding of the science or a lack of caring about this issue.

It looked like an elected leader unable to go farther without the people urging him forward or protecting his back.

I know how easy it is for us ordinary citizens to think of politicians as the ones with power, and us as the ones without. I fall into that belief easily myself.

But, coming home from our brief foray into the world of political decision making to the news that, in Washington, Senate Republicans succeeded in blocking the global warming legislation under consideration by that body (after Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky required that all 492 pages be read into the record - a move that took 8 1/2 hours) it is clear to me that - on the issue of global warming - it is going to have to be the people who make it possible for the politicians to lead.

Science Gives Us The Numbers, We Make the Meaning

800,000 - the number of years for which CO2 levels in the Earth's recent past have been measured in a new analysis of ice core data.

180-280 – the range of CO2 levels (in parts per million) during all but the last 100 of those 800,000 years.

385 – the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere.

60 - the percentage of 1,598 species examined in a new study who have already been affected by climate change.

These are just numbers, the products of science and careful measurement. The most they can do is tell us what is happening. They can't tell us what to think about it. Or what to feel. Or what to do.

We all have to do that for ourselves in the ways that are right for us - in silence in the woods, in noisy debate around the kitchen table, in prayer in our faith communities, at the ballot box, and, maybe, in public when we raise our voices to say loudly, fully, clearly, exactly what we think about these numbers, what we feel, and what, exactly what, it is the elected leaders who hold the public trust need to do.

Numbers are only numbers. Data is only data. Numbers alone, without our response, don't shape the future.

Falling in Love with a Piece of the World

We picked up our older daughter from a week at camp this afternoon.

In the backseat she pummeled her younger sister for news of home. How are Tango and Ishult (horses)? How are Nikky and Ave (parakeets)? How's Dusky (hen) and Chickadee (rooster)?

And then one that surprised me - How's the maple?

How's the maple? Before asking about friends or community news?

But it shouldn't have surprised me that a tree - that particular tree – figured so prominently in her questions of home. Ever since their Dad helped them hang a rope swing in the maple at the bottom of the hill, our girls and most of their friends have been busy falling in love with that maple.

They've invented games with complicated rules played in its branches (going down has the right of way over going up). They've given it a nickname (Mape). Our younger daughter notices every maple of the same species on our drives around town and points each one out with the breathless excitement of one who has discovered treasure. They both notice how the tree changes from week to week (a rotten spot at the bottom; some bright pink leaves that don't seem 'quite right') and both speculate about its past (did the last children who played in it, when it was a much smaller tree, the ones who built a platform high in its branches, discover the same route to the top?)

The neighborhood kids who go to school have taken to swinging in it while they wait for the bus. The kids who do their learning at home have taken (when they can negotiate it) to carrying their books down to work underneath its shade.

Younger sister's report was highly detailed and focused mostly on the fact that a branch had broken (not anybody's fault) but that the rope swing and the games were mostly unaffected by the change in architecture. It makes me sad, though, she said.

There was silence in the back seat for a while, and then: Yeah, me too, it makes me sad too.

E. O. Wilson has said that we will only save what we love.

Luckily for all of us, this love lives close to surface. Twelve feet of rope and sufficient unscheduled time to touch, clamber, and explore is more than enough to call it forth.

In this time of ecological crisis, giving ourselves – child and adult alike – that time might be the most important action we can take.

We might not even need the rope.

We are not helpless...

Events this week left me remembering the column my mentor Dana Meadows wrote about the depressing signs from the Arctic. (This from 2001, when the forecasts were that it might take fifty years before the Arctic was free of sea ice in the summer, a prediction that some reports are now saying was too optimistic.) The way Dana ended the column then rings true for me today.

"Is there any way to end this column other than in gloom? Can I give my friend, you, myself any honest hope that our world will not fall apart? Does our only possible future consist of watching the disappearance of the polar bear, the whale, the tiger, the elephant, the redwood tree, the coral reef, while fearing for the three-year-old?

Heck, I don't know. There's only one thing I do know. If we believe that it's effectively over, that we are fatally flawed, that the most greedy and short-sighted among us will always be permitted to rule, that we can never constrain our consumption and destruction, that each of us is too small and helpless to do anything, that we should just give up and enjoy our SUVs while they last, well, then yes, it's over. That's the one way of believing and behaving that gives us a guaranteed outcome.

Personally I don't believe that stuff at all. I don't see myself or the people around me as fatally flawed. Everyone I know wants polar bears and three-year-olds in our world. We are not helpless and there is nothing wrong with us except the strange belief that we are helpless and there's something wrong with us. All we need to do, for the bear and ourselves, is to stop letting that belief paralyze our minds, hearts, and souls."

Re-reading this, I have decided, again, six years later, to believe that these words are true. There is nothing wrong with me. I have decided (again) to believe that the way I feel is the way any sane person would on a rapidly sickening planet. I have decided (again) to believe that millions of people feel the same way, even if they don't wear those feelings on their public faces.

And I see the possibility -available to us as soon as we stop assuming there is something wrong with us – that we could decide together that we are not helpless, either. That, too, would be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Everyday People

In the course of sharing my reactions to the latest snapshot of the Arctic I've been having some interesting conversations. In one a friend and fellow Vermonter asked: 'help me learn how to convey what everyday people ... and their local governments .. can do [in response to climate change.]

I took her question with me out into the fading afternoon light while I shoveled snow and did chores.

What can ordinary citizens do, both to lessen the extent of climate change and to prepare their communities to withstand the climate change that is already inevitable?

Shovelful by shovelful I came up with quite a list.

1. Don't leave the thinking about how to respond to climate change to the 'experts.' Ordinary people have all the authority they need on this issue simply by virtue of common sense and a stake in the future. Ordinary people are technically qualified to say that it makes no sense to produce more pollution than the Earth can absorb and that exponential growth cannot continue on a finite planet. Ordinary people are morally qualified to say that we shouldn't expect others in distant lands or future generations to bear the consequences of our actions. Ordinary people have the authority to raise questions about the viability of ideas like sun shields in the upper atmosphere or iron fertilization of the oceans.

If you must, find some resources that explain climate science in clear non-technical terms (you might try the Our Climate Ourselves resources page or this climate change simulator), but above all trust yourself. We need the logic ordinary people on the climate change question. We need the logic of grandfathers and teen-agers and home-makers and farmers and workers, the logic of stewardship and the instinct to care for future generations.

2. Trust and speak out of your own authority, but find ways to do so in the company of others. This is a collective problem that began before our births and will not be fully solved until well after our deaths. It is a problem that cuts across all the lines that divide us, a problem for anyone who eats, drinks, loves a child, cares about a community, or a river, or a tree on a city street corner. All sorts of inspiring organizations are emerging to facilitate collective action. Find the one that suits you (or start your own at whatever scale is right for you) and find solace in the way that the tiny drop of your one lifetime joins into the rising ocean of people who are ready for this problem to end. (A few vehicles for collective action on climate change in the US that I am aware of include: Step It Up, 1Sky, and Focus the Nation.)

3. Don't let a new coal plant be built in your community. See this graph if you wonder why. While supplies of oil are declining around the world, reserves of coal are massive. Because the odds of avoiding dangerous climate change if we allow electricity-generating coal plants to transfer the carbon in the coal from below the Earth's crust to the atmosphere are very low one of the most powerful places a citizen can act is at hearings in their region about any plans to build new coal plants.

4. Be creative about what is possible in your own community. Look especially for the opportunities that simultaneously reduce carbon emissions, build community, and buffer your community against instabilities of all sorts that could be triggered in a warming world. Organize your community to insulate the homes of anyone in your community who can't afford or isn't able to do so for themselves. This would decrease carbon emissions from wasted fuel consumption, bring your community together (with everything from pot-lucks and tool sharing to friendships built on the tops of roofs and ladders), and help create the kind of social network that will serve your community in the face of any of the likely threats of climate change, from droughts, to dangerous storms, to heat waves and public health crises. From community to community the opportunities will be different, but I'm willing to bet that all communities will have opportunities to cut carbon emissions while becoming healthier, safer, and more resilient.

I shoveled a long path, and so my list goes on, but I'll stop here for now, with more to come another day.