kelpiewilson

On Energy and Climate: Lead or Get Out of the Way

By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Environment Editor
Thursday 20 December 2007

Last weekend at the UN climate change conference in Bali, after the US had blocked almost every way forward, the delegate from Papua New Guinea finally had enough. He addressed the US representative, saying, "If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please - get out of the way."

When the assembly erupted into thunderous applause, the US negotiator, Paula Dobriansky, must have finally realized how isolated the US had become. Faint and flustered, she caved, and agreed to at least allow the global negotiations to move on to the next stage.

Back home, "lead or get out of the way" is a message the lame-duck Bush administration and some of its legislative dinosaurs are likely to be hearing more frequently as the clock ticks forward to 2009.

An editorial in The Salt Lake Tribune on Tuesday, titled "Move aside: 2009 can't come soon enough for environment," said:

"We expect Mr. Bush will blithely pass on to the next president a nation moving pell-mell toward drought, rising seas and unpredictably severe weather patterns. We urge the new president, whoever that may be, to put America in the lead on emission reduction to help head off that scenario. The most productive thing this president is likely to do is to get out of the way."

Unfortunately, the president shows no signs of complying with that wish. The latest Bush blockage came on Wednesday, when, just hours after signing the new energy bill into law, Bush's EPA administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, announced that he would deny California's application to enforce its own, more stringent auto emissions standards for carbon dioxide.

Bush Gets Dinner While Protesters Fast

Bush Gets Dinner While Protesters Fast
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 26 September 2007

More than 80 heads of state met at the UN on Monday to discuss the launch of post-Kyoto climate negotiations. Although this was the most high-level UN meeting yet held on the global climate emergency, President Bush refused to attend. He did, however, assent to an invitation from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to attend a private dinner afterward.

Ban opened the UN meeting by showing a short film about the rising seas, more intense storms, and droughts that will result from global warming. The film warned there is no time to waste in crafting solutions. But President Bush did not see the film nor contribute to the discussion. He would only agree to dinner.

Ironically, who eats and who does not eat is very much what the climate crisis is about. Scientists with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict global warming is likely to cut African crop production by half in the next dozen years.

On Tuesday, film stars and celebrities from Bollywood and Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry) rallied near the UN with a "Mayday Message" on behalf of Africans and Asians. They said: "Please help save us from climate change. We are the ones who have done the least to cause it, but we are suffering from climate change now. If you don't come to our help today, tomorrow it will be all of you."

Bollywood actress Shabana Azmi said, "There are 854 million hungry people in the world today - 54 million more than when the world leaders pledged to halve hunger 11 years ago." As global warming saps food production in poor countries around the world, the Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger by 2015 recedes into impossibility.

While Bush was eating his dinner with Ban ki-Moon, a half-dozen American climate change activists continued a weeks-long fast to protest American inaction on climate, "so that others might eat." The fast began with participation from more than 1,200 people on September 4, the day Congress came back in session.

"The starting date was deliberate," said Ted Glick, one of the ongoing fasters and an activist with the Climate Emergency Council. "Congress needs to act," he said, despite veto threats from the White House. Feeling physically weak from his fast, Glick made the effort to go to Capitol Hill last Friday to talk to key legislators about climate change and energy bills before Congress. "The main thing I learned," he said, "is that the chances of climate legislation even getting to the floor of one of the houses of Congress this fall don't look good right now. Barring either a major climate disaster in the US or what this fast is calling for, a grassroots political uprising, which galvanizes our elected officials into an urgency mode, the odds look good that the best we can hope for is floor debate sometime in the winter of 2008."

Glick and others are doing their best to organize the grassroots revolution. On Thursday, Glick will join a non-violent civil blockade of the second climate meeting this week, President Bush's "Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change," also known as the "Major Emitters Meeting." This is the meeting Bush announced at the G-8 summit in June when he blocked the G-8 from adopting binding emissions targets. This is the meeting where Bush will try to steer the world away from any mandates or caps on emissions and substitute vague "aspirations" for clear goals, and voluntary action for legal obligations.

To Africans facing famine in the next dozen years, will Bush say, "Let them eat aspirations"?

It is the moral dimension of global warming that keeps Glick committed to his fast. He says the deaths of 35,000 people in the European heat wave of 2003 are what first made him realize he had to put body and soul into this effort. "We only have one life," he said. "What will we do with it?"

Glick describes fasting as a form of prayer and says that religious people of all stripes have joined in the climate fast at various times. A Muslim man fasted in addition to his Ramadan fast, and 39 members of a church in Montana fasted. But Glick does not want to limit climate action to fasting and passive resistance. He also calls for more "ruckus."

"We need more people out in the streets," said Glick. "A Tiananmen Square-type action down in front of Congress would be timely and called for."

In August, climate activists camped out at Heathrow Airport in London to protest aviation's contribution to climate change; and, earlier this month, Australian activists locked down a coal-fired power plant and then a facility loading coal onto ships at the world's biggest coal export port. They were trying to send a message to the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) discussions on climate, another meeting where Bush's "aspirational" climate goals prevailed.

In addition to the civil resistance planned on Thursday, the Climate Emergency Council is holding a rally protesting Bush's "Major Emitters Meeting" at noon on Friday, September 28 near the State Department building where the meeting is being held.

On October 22, peace, justice and climate activists are sponsoring a "No War No Warming intervention" in Washington to pressure the government to stop the war in Iraq, shift funding to rebuild communities, and go green with new jobs in a clean energy economy.

On November 3, Step It Up 2007 is organizing coast to coast actions to demand leadership on global warming. Part of the action is to invite politicians to join the rallies and tell communities what they will do about climate change. Then, says the group's web site, "We'll see who rises to the occasion and who has a real plan to tackle the defining challenge of our time. One year before the election, let's make sure the world witnesses our national call to action."

Glick endorses all these actions and more. "When you have everything from letter writing to riskier actions that push the envelope, you have a powerful movement that can't be ignored."

A powerful movement to save the planet would certainly be worth missing a few meals for.

Global Warming Bush - How to Call His Bluff

Global Warming Bush - How to Call His Bluff
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Environmental Editor
Tuesday 05 June 2007

So G.W. Bush has had his conversion. He now believes global warming is a danger and we ought to do something about it. Call him Global Warming Bush.

The reaction of world leaders and environmentalists to Bush's announcement last week that he has a global warming plan (with no targets and no timelines) was mostly skeptical. Until now, the president has been the "Denier-in-Chief," concerned mostly with deleting climate concerns from the scientific reports and action agendas of federal agencies and doing his utmost to derail international efforts to tackle global warming, like the upcoming G-8 meeting this week.

In fact, the shift was so sudden that one of his appointees, NASA chief Michael Griffin, seemed to have missed the course correction. Griffin said on NPR that he was not sure that global warming was "a problem we should wrestle with." Imagine the reaction if the NASA chief had made a comment like that about an impending asteroid strike.

Of all the analogies and metaphors that have been offered to explain the threat of global warming, the one clearest to me is that global warming is like an asteroid, or perhaps a swarm of asteroids. We are already getting hit by some of the smaller ones that are showing up as hotter weather, more violent storms and mega-droughts, but there is a really big one out there headed our way.

Until now, George Bush has barely acknowledged that the asteroid exists. As of Thursday's announcement, the asteroid now exists and it is a danger, but any attempts to head it off must be voluntary and can only be deployed if they will not hurt economic growth.

It is obvious that Bush does not really believe in the asteroid. His announcement is an attempt to subvert the global effort to fight climate change. Nancy Pelosi, returning from a trip to Greenland, where she observed the rapid melting of the ice sheet, said: "The president continues to be in denial. He says now he believes that global warming is happening, and he accepts the science that it is. But if that were so, if he truly understood that, he could not have come up with a proposal that is 'aspirational.' He would have to come up with a commitment that is real."

Still, some leaders and some environmentalists feel that the president has given ground on the issue just by admitting that it exists. What we need to do now is call the president's bluff. For world leaders, that means sticking to their guns on hard targets and timelines and not allowing Bush to divert their energy to another round of meaningless talks.

From statements made this weekend by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, there is hope that European leaders will stay the course. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Merkel said "One thing is clear. We must agree on a successor to the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012, as part of a process led by the United Nations.... There will certainly be other meetings and initiatives before then.... They can even be helpful. What matters is that they all eventually merge into the UN process. This is non-negotiable."

Domestically, the Democrats need to seize this opening and pass veto-proof legislation to combat global warming as soon as possible, but it should not look like the bill that Senate Energy Committee Chair Jeff Bingaman is drafting. Bingaman's bill, which he plans to introduce in June, includes an economic "safety valve" that puts a limit on how high carbon prices can go. The safety valve is there to make it easier for Bush to sign the bill, but according to the Environmental Defense Fund, the safety valve could "undercut the development of the very technologies that some high emitting-industries will need in the future to meet their emissions targets."

It would be a mistake to establish watered-down emissions targets during this administration. It would be far better for the Democrats to focus on a different aspect of the problem for now - one where they can hope to make some progress. They might follow the president's lead here and emphasize technology, but with a different spin.

President Bush says that technology is the answer to global warming. His idea is to fund lots of research on coal carbon capture and storage, nuclear power and ethanol. The big corporations that dominate these industries will benefit from the additional subsidies and from Bush's plan to export these so-called "clean energy" technologies to India and China. This is the essence of Bush's climate deal.

But the real challenge of using technology to combat global warming emissions is not developing new technologies - it is deploying the ones we already have. We already know how to drastically reduce the energy consumption of everything from buildings to appliances. The technology of heating water with the sun has been around for 100 years, but only two percent of America's hot water is heated by solar power. This is what is known as "low-hanging fruit," and America has bushels of it.

The most efficient way to achieve these efficiency gains (and emissions reductions) would be to use the markets under a carbon tax or a strong cap and trade system, but the Bush administration does not believe in free markets. Almost every policy it gets behind is aimed at boosting the fortunes of a select group of corporations in the resource extraction (oil, coal, nuclear, minerals) and weapons industries.

So for now, the Democrats will have to abandon the idea of using markets to make a rational change in our energy systems, and get behind a massive program of public investment instead.

Democrats should pass global warming legislation that repeals Bush's tax cuts for the rich and uses the funds to pay for energy efficiency audits for homes and businesses, rebates and tax incentives for improving energy efficiency, and training for efficiency technicians.

The bill should also have an expanded, long-term production tax credit for wind and solar power, as well as job training funds for a new work force to install these energy sources.

The bill should allocate funds for a major overhaul of the electricity grid and the re-creation of a national passenger rail system.

Finally, we need to invest in global warming preparedness. Many of us may not realize it yet, but we are exceedingly vulnerable to this asteroid called global warming.

Americans who live on the coasts will experience fiercer storms and rising seas. They need levees and storm barriers. Americans who live in the tinder-dry forest lands of the West and South will experience more and hotter forest fires. They need better-funded fire prevention and fire fighting programs. Americans who live in drought-prone areas or who get their water from mountain snow packs need investment in alternative water supplies. America's public health system needs to be prepared to deal with a rise in infectious diseases as the climate warms. We really need a study of impacts to agriculture in a hotter Midwest.

If you have any doubt that global warming is in the same league with asteroids, I recommend you read, "With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change," by Fred Pearce.

We need to make this kind of public investment, and we need to make it fast.

Kookaburra in the Coal Mine

By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Environmental Editor
Thursday 24 May 2007

A recent trip to Australia to cover a conference on agrichar allowed me to see the Australian drought crisis on the ground and talk to a few Australians about their thoughts on climate change. Agrichar is an agricultural technique that sequesters carbon, see Birth of a New Wedge.

The conference took place in Terrigal, New South Wales, a beach town just north of Sydney. Out on the blue horizon, I could see an endless train of coal ships headed for the booming economies of Asia. Coal is Australia's No. 1 export and a mainstay of the economy. But at the same time, as a major contributor to global warming, it is undermining almost every other source of wealth in the country.

A few days after I arrived, Prime Minister John Howard suggested a solution for the multi-year drought that is shriveling Australia's farmland: "Pray for rain," he said. Only a superabundance of rain can head off the government's plans to cut off irrigation to thousands of farms that are dependent on Australia's largest river system, the Murray-Darling basin.

Howard is not willing to admit, however, that global warming is the cause of the drought. At most, he says "there does appear to be a change in the weather pattern." He said Australia might be "going back to a drier period," but he is conspicuously alone in that assessment. Unlike hurricane Katrina, whose global warming origins were more strongly debated, most Australians blame the drought on human-caused climate change.

Scientist Tim Flannery, whom Howard named "Australian of the year," speaking at the Agrichar Conference, said that, despite some encouraging recent rainstorms, "it is extremely unlikely that enough rain will fall this winter to let the Murray-Darling river system be used for agriculture."

Flannery, in his book "The Weather Makers," has an explanation for the severe drought. For the first 146 years of European habitation in southwest Australia, winter rainfalls were reliable, he says, but everything changed in 1975, when winter rainfall began a decline of ten to twenty percent. Half of the decline is due to global warming, which has pushed the temperate weather zone farther south, and half has come from destruction of the ozone layer over the South Pole.

Twenty percent may not seem like a big decline, but the agricultural systems in many regions of Australia were finely balanced, and the drop has been enough to do them in. Farmer Ed Fagan, who has seen his pastures destroyed by drought, said, "We're on a knife edge."

While not recognizing its cause, Howard clearly sees the need to do something about the drought, which nicked nearly one percent off Australia's economic growth last year. Other than praying for rain, his solutions are all techno-fixes. He wants to spend six billion Australian dollars on a new piping system, and he wants to transfer control of the river to the federal government. But the state of Victoria is resisting that control. More efficient management of a dwindling resource may not be able to accomplish much anyway. According to the "Economist," the Murray-Darling river system is already one of the best-managed in the world. There's not a lot of efficiency to be gained, because just about every drop that can be squeezed out of the Murray-Darling already has been squeezed.

If irrigation is cut off this year, the biggest damage will be to the perennial trees and vines that produce Australia's valuable fruit, nut and grape harvests. Wine production was down by 50 percent in many areas this year, but if irrigation is cut off, vines and trees will die and farmers will have to start over.

In the wheat belt, Australian farmers have deployed new high-tech, no-till methods that use precision sowing tractors guided by GPS. By not disturbing soil, they retain more moisture. Without such advances, last year's poor harvest of 10 million tons of wheat (a normal year produces 25 million tons) would have been much worse. But high-tech solutions can't substitute for an absolute lack of water.

Agriculture is not the only sector of the Australian economy being hit. Water restrictions are causing power bills to go up. More than 800 megawatts of coal-fired generating plants have been shut down because there is not enough water to run steam turbines and cooling towers. Large hydropower schemes have also had to reduce output. Roman Domanski of the Energy Users Association of Australia said that if the drought goes on, high power prices would "decimate a lot of industries." He said the economic penalty of the drought was equivalent to adding a carbon tax of forty dollars a ton. That's an interesting comparison because ultimately a high carbon tax may be the only cure for Australia's climate ills.

Mining is being hit as well. The city of Orange, New South Wales, was recently asked to put itself on water restrictions in order to supply the local gold mine with water and save 450 jobs. Mines throughout the country have had to cut back production or redesign water systems.

Most of the areas that I visited in coastal New South Wales were not under the most severe water restrictions, but I heard stories of towns where all water is trucked in. In Brisbane, a city of 2.8 million, people are limited to 140 liters of water each per day. You can't wash a car or fill a child's wading pool.

Animals are suffering too. The conservation group Birds Australia reports that the drought has slashed bird numbers, including many small birds and endangered species. In some cases, large birds have been able to fly to better areas. When I saw a huge white form swoop in front of me on a busy Sydney street, it turned out to be a sulphur-crested cockatoo. "They've been invading the city and wreaking havoc on gardens," I was told. But they are just searching for water, like every other creature on the parched continent.

John Howard, stuck in denial mode, has only nuclear power and so-called "clean coal" to offer as a solution. But Australians don't seem to be buying it. Polls show that more than 90 percent see global warming as a critical issue and prefer solar technology to nuclear power.

There will be an election in Australia this fall. Howard's challenger is Kevin Rudd of the Australian Labor Party. Rudd has called for an emissions-reduction target of 60 percent by 2050, although he has yet to outline a set of policies to get there. As a labor leader, he has the coal and uranium miners to satisfy, as well as the greens. But because Howard's Australia has joined with Bush's America in a coalition of the "unwilling to join Kyoto," Rudd would be a definite improvement, and this could be an important election.

I asked a number of people how they thought the election would go. Ray O'Grady, a farmer who attended the agrichar conference, said, "I saw Al Gore's movie six months ago and I said to myself as I walked out of the theater - this will change Australian politics. All my life, I have never voted for anything but conservatives. But this time I'm thinking differently."

But when I asked him if climate change would swing the federal election to Rudd in the fall, he wasn't so sure his fellow Australians would be with him. "People are going to take a look at mortgage rates and vote their pocketbooks," he said. "Australia has a high level of personal debt."

Peter Shenstone is a director of the Australian environmental group Planet Ark. Peter showed me around the Planet Ark headquarters in the Blue Mountains, which is a model of sustainable building and drought-tolerant landscaping. The complex provides all of its own power and water, using solar panels and windmills. Peter said that the people in Australia are "way ahead of government." He said the response to climate change needs to be "on a war footing," but he wouldn't talk about the election because his organization is studiously nonpartisan. Instead, he is recruiting an army of tree planters through Planet Ark's tree-planting programs. The solution to the drought and to climate change, he says, is to plant 60 billion trees. "People say there's no water," he said, "but we can reverse the positive feedback loop by planting trees, and the water will come back."

Mike, an information technology manager who shared a table with me at a crowded café in Sydney, had little faith in government by either party to solve global warming. "Politicians can't do anything because they always have another election in three years," he said. He sees business as leading the way because "they can afford to take the long-term view."

Part of Mike's cynicism was, he told me, due to what happened to Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam back in 1975. I didn't know much about that, but I had a hunch I could find out more in John Pilger's Australian history, "A Secret Country," which I'd seen in the airport bookstore. I picked up a copy and read it during my journey home.

Gough Whitlam's government was elected in 1972, the first Labor government in 23 years. One of the first things Whitlam did was to pull Australia out of Vietnam. He also demanded more information about secretive US military installations in the outback, including a nuclear facility at a place called Pine Gap. The US grew concerned that Whitlam would close its bases in Australia, and launched what Pilger calls a "coup," that resulted in Whitlam's ouster in 1975.

Pilger does a meticulous job of documenting the details of the CIA's campaign against Whitlam. It's a chilling story involving letter bombs, ginned-up scandals, bought-off union leaders, opposition campaign slush funds and plenty of help from Rupert Murdoch's newspapers. You can also read a shorter version of the story in William Blum's "Killing Hope."

In a March 2007 article in the New Statesman titled, "Australia: the 51st State," John Pilger describes Murdoch's continuing influence, especially his support for the conservative John Howard and for Australia's involvement in the US war in Iraq.

But now we hear that Murdoch has gone green. Last week, Rupert Murdoch announced that all of his operations would slash their energy consumption and, with the help of purchased carbon offsets, become carbon neutral. In addition, his media companies will start promoting awareness about climate change.

If indeed governments have no more power than what corporations like Murdoch's allot to them, then I suppose we should celebrate Murdoch's initiative. But on the other hand, when you look closely into the history of how he has operated you learn that after helping to toss out Whitlam, Murdoch didn't back the conservative opposition. Instead, he helped the next Labor government into power: the CIA-friendly government of Bob Hawke. He is a master at subverting social movements to his own purposes.

One view of Rupert Murdoch is that he simply hates to back losers. In that case, it's somewhat comforting to know that he sees global warming as a winning issue. But it's also important to ask how he will skew public awareness toward solutions that bring him and others of his class personal advantage, but aren't necessarily the best for the planet. Our best hope is that people will continue to be way out ahead of both government and News Corporation, and be actively involved in leading the way.

Here in America, we have to wait until 2008 for our referendum on the climate and war policies of the Bush administration. Many Australians I met seemed to feel that the land down under is perpetually behind the rest of the world. But this year Oz has a chance to take the lead and be the first to turn the losers out.

Climate Change Despair and Empowerment

Climate Change Despair and Empowerment
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Interview
Friday 18 May 2007

An interview with Australian climate change and rainforest protection activist Ruth Rosenhek.

In Australia a few weeks ago I had hoped to connect with my old friend John Seed, but learned that he would be traveling in the US doing a road show on climate change despair and empowerment until May 20. His tour schedule is here.

I first met John in the 1980s when he was touring around the US doing a road show on rainforest destruction and species extinction. I would miss seeing John at his home, but he connected me with his partner, Ruth Rosenhek, who was doing their workshop tour in Australia. Ruth met me at a café in the small town of Nimbin in the beautiful hinterlands of northeast New South Wales where we were surrounded by rainforests, macadamia nut orchards and permaculture gardens. What follows is my interview with Ruth about her climate change workshop.

Q: I was thinking about John's first road show in the US. John Seed was one of the first to bring a more spiritual element into the wilderness protection movement and it was very important.

A: Yes. Someone was asking me the other day about where we got the idea for the road show and I told them about John's US road show in 1984 and how that led to founding of the Rainforest Action Network.

Q: The movement seems to go through these cycles. There's a wakeup cycle and then a bunch of people get recruited. They get committed and then hopefully they start to do things. Although I've seen people kind of wake up and then go back to sleep again.

A: Yeah, but not with climate change.

Q: You don't think so?

A: No. There will be too many reminders.

Q: So what got you started on doing climate change empowerment workshops?

A: I'm not sure what exactly sparked us. The term "despair and empowerment" is one we've been using for years based on Joanna Macy's work. We realized that people would have to deal with climate change emotionally and we wanted to support people as they move from denial to the possibility that they might feel despair and the shield of apathy that might arise after that. There's a line in Al Gore's film where he says too often people are moving straight from denial to despair without stopping in between and the problem with that is that is it lets you off the hook. With denial you don't have to do anything and with despair you don't have to do anything. So the idea of the road show is how do you intervene in there and if they have gone to despair, to use some of the despair and empowerment workshop principles.

Q: I think people have to go through that stage don't they? I don't know about you, but I know that I personally have gone through despair. And I go through it every day a little bit.

A: Yeah. I haven't personally been in despair for a number of years because climate change isn't new for me as I'm sure it's not new for you. Years ago I had more despair.

Q: But how do you deal with hearing how the news gets worse every day? It has been so bad in just the last year. So yeah, sure, we've known about climate change for a long time but I don't think we've realized how quickly it is coming and how little time we have to act.

A: For me it has been more like I am excited that it is front page news and finally I can have my favorite conversation with the average person standing in a queue. It hasn't really surprised me that it's here now. My feeling is more one of excitement that, wow, I'm alive now when the shift is happening and I get to see what I can do to help make the transition away from the industrial growth society. I've been expecting things to crumble at any time just based on my understanding of what's happening to ecosystems.

Q: Are you able to convey that excitement to other people and get them to feel it too? Is that what you're aiming for?

A: Not really. Most people don't have that point of view, although the people who are becoming active are really excited. Instead of endless debating we can finally move forward with solutions.

Q: So what are you finding out there? How did your last tour go?

A: From the time in January when we began until now there's been quite a lot of shifting. People are that much more knowledgeable and that much more ready to get involved and that much more ready to take action. You hear a lot more emphasis on action. People are saying we are not here to discuss, we are here to take action, whereas when we formed our climate group last year, we called it a climate study group and spent the first few months studying the issue. But people are pretty savvy at this point about what's going on and are ready to do something about it. What used to be a presentation where I'd stand up there and deliver all these things has become largely a meeting and there is a whole discussion about real vs. false solutions. But I still do presentations on despair and empowerment and on deep ecology because that's new material.

Q: What else is new to people?

A: One thing that is always left out of the mainstream conversation is deforestation. Forests are always left out. People don't know that deforestation is causing 20 plus percent of greenhouse emissions. So they aren't thinking in their solutions that we also have to protect forests and so I always have to point out that Tazzie's [Tasmania's] forests are being woodchipped at 10 dollars a ton and exported to Japan where they become toilet paper and you can almost hear a gasp in the audience. Previously if I'd been giving a presentation on forests and said that kind of thing I'd have either been preaching to the choir or talking to people who would just dismiss it as a concern of tree huggers and instead you can see people taking it in and realizing we have to protect our forests because of climate change. The other solution they don't know about is the fact we are pumping subsidies into the fossil fuel industry. There's between 6.5 and 9 billion dollars every year.

Q: Is that mostly to the coal industry?

A: It would be coal and also some oil; so one of the things we're espousing is that some of those subsidies be halted and then shifted to renewables and also to a just transition for coal mining communities. So what used to be a presentation on solutions has become a meeting about what the real solutions are.

Q: And is this true in all the communities you're going to?

A: Pretty much. I think the only thing I've found is that some places have attracted mostly burned out activists, people who've been involved for a long time. There were a few places where it wasn't that great of a meeting because people were tired out already. So the really good meetings are when there are all new people in the room.

Q: How long is the presentation? Is it a day-long workshop?

A: No, it's an hour and a half. I talk for about 20 minutes and there are some video clips and then a discussion and at the end of the time we form a climate action group if there's not one in the town already and set a date for the next meeting.

Q: Is there a whole range of actions people talk about doing? You say action but that can mean a lot of different things.

A: Climate action groups in Australia are working on things like food networks to localize where they get their food. Ridesharing seems to be a big one. Lobbying. All kinds of stuff around lobbying like writing letters.

Q: So it's not just about reducing your personal carbon footprint.

A: No not at all. It's more about what we can do as a community. First, how can we support each other in personal changes like shifting to green power in our homes, and next how can we work in our community to shift our community. At a recent meeting here in Nimbin, we talked about how can we get our own decentralized power plant here that's grid interactive so we can pull our own power off of a suite of green power sources like solar and wind before getting it from the main grid and then feed into that grid as a community. Some are working at the council level to get councils to ratify the Kyoto protocol, and some are working with an international project called ICLEI where the councils assess the emissions of the different sectors of the community and set forth a strategic plan to lower those. And they're also working on the state and federal level. If you look at what climate action groups are doing it is amazing. Ordinary people getting together. Some are trying to get every business in their town to turn to green power and every citizen to turn to green power. The last group I did was sponsored by the city council and that's what their climate action group is doing. That's their sole mission.

Q: How are young people getting involved and how are they dealing with despair around global warming?

A: I had one group from a high school where 200 thirteen year olds came to one of my presentations. They were so onto it. They were all in a climate change class. The school actually has a year-long class in climate change. They knew all the solutions and they had some funny ones too that made them laugh. So they seemed to be coping. There were a few sad faces though in the audience.

Q: What are the steps that you go through in the workshop presentation?

A: First we talk about why we're here and that we are not in the delusion of reprieve, and then move on to despair and empowerment, the discussion Joanna Macy pioneered about how there's a taboo in this society against expressing feelings and that actually feelings contain intelligence and wisdom and can be transformed from despair to inspiration and innovation and that if we stopped pushing them down and instead allowed them to come forth, we would not have lost the energy involved in suppressing them. Feelings are a much older part of our intelligence along with our intuition. So we talk about that and then a little bit about deep ecology. I introduce them to the idea of anthropocentrism or human centeredness and how it's important to have a larger perspective and to dispel the illusion of separation between ourselves and nature. It's more important than ever before. For anyone who is involved in this work I advise them to go out into nature to help heal the despair and the grief and to seek wisdom, because we really need it right now!

Q: You don't get people accusing you of foisting a religious belief on them?

A: No, it's not. It's a philosophy, not a religion.

Q: Because we've gotten that a lot in the States. We get told that deep ecology is a religion.

A: No, it's a philosophy and it's compatible with whatever religion people practice. This is not about having to believe that nature is a this or a that. I keep it pretty pragmatic.

Q: Good. So what else?

A: Well, at the very beginning I talk about Exxon's climate change cover up scheme where they paid off scientists and we lost ten years in the fight. The other day I saw a woman's eyes go wide with horror and shock when I said we lost ten years to this cover up and that these were the same scientists involved with the tobacco industry. Her jaw just dropped. She'd never heard about it till that moment. And then we discuss the false solutions.

Q: What are those?

A: Clean coal and nukes. Clean coal - the technology is not here and won't be for ten years. The cost will be high and where are they going to store all that CO2? Nuclear - I point to the fact that beside the concerns over weapons proliferation, uranium mining and waste disposal, it would take at least ten years to put in place power plants and again, they will be very costly. So neither of these address the window of the next ten years and the IPCC is saying we need an aggressive plan for the next ten years. But our prime minister, John Howard, all he talks about is that nuclear power is the solution to climate change.

Q: But Australia doesn't even have one nuke plant, does it?

A: No, but we have a few reactors that are used for health technology and maybe to produce weapons, and we have Pine Gap out in the desert and who knows what's there. And then we talk about biofuels like palm oil and that by the time palm oil gets to your vehicle it's ten times more polluting than diesel. Then I talk about emissions trading, a very complex and confusing issue, and then we move on to real solutions and have a go at what people think the real solutions are.

Q: Do people come up with good ideas?

A: Yeah they do. Someone at the last meeting had something I had never thought about. If you have a dishwasher, then run it after 11 pm at off peak hours because these coal plants actually have to burn a certain amount of fuel to keep running so you not only save money but you don't create extra demand for coal.

Q: The kind of things that in a different era people paid attention to because they were trying to save money. I remember growing up hearing: Turn out the lights when you leave the room! It was about the electric bill, not the environment.

A: Right. So from there we go on to the grassroots and we talk about the Bradley method - that's a bush regeneration method that says if you are trying to regenerate native bush, instead of taking the weeds out of the weediest place first, go to place where the bush is the healthiest and take the weeds out of there, so you strengthen it. You keep doing that until the only areas left are really weedy but they are surrounded at that point by healthy areas. So here we're using weeds to represent consciousness and the weeds are those who are prohibiting the growth of a healthy future.

Q: So that's the program. Tell me a bit about the longer despair and empowerment workshops you do.

A: After we do 8 or 10 workshops in an area, we offer a one-day despair and empowerment workshop and we do a Truth Mandala.

Q: What is a Truth Mandala?

A: It's a process for people to express strong feelings of anger, grief, despair. You sit in a circle and there are four objects in the center. As a person feels moved, they come into the center and pick up one or more of them. There is a stick for anger, and a rock for fear, and leaves for sadness and grief, and an empty bowl for despair or not knowing what to do. Or you can just come in and be freaked out if your feelings don't fit into those. Basically people go in there and they cry or they get angry and express what's in their heart and everyone says I hear you when they go and sit down. That witnessing of ourselves and our feelings creates the potential of the transformation.

Q: Into a strength rather than a drain.

A: Right, because each one of them has an opposite or a flip side. Our grief and sadness is a measure of our caring and our love. The stick for anger is a measure of our desire for freedom and justice. The rock shows it takes courage to express our feelings because until we can feel despair we can't feel empowerment.

Q: Beautiful.

A: And we do more empowering exercises to connect with nature and remove obstacles that might be keeping us from being as effective as we can in our work. The Truth Mandala has been really what we call "going off." They are consistently strong and from a group of people who are not hippies or some kind of New Agers used to catharting.

Q: Catharting?

A: Right, we are not getting any professional "catharters." [laughs] These are regular people who don't do catharsis everyday

Q: So in all the list of actions that people are doing is there any discussion of more hardcore political pressure tactics like hunger strikes or mass protest marches?

A: No, not yet. We do have a march against global warming every year and there were 40,000 people out in Sydney for that last year, but a lot of people got disillusioned because they protested about the Iraq war and we went to war anyway. But that was not during an election year. This year we've got an election in the fall.

Q: So there may be a shift at that point.

A: Right, but what we don't have here is what they have in the UK where the different parties are vying against each other to produce good policies. That's not happening here because John Howard is steering to the right and Kevin Rudd [the labor opposition leader] can move as he would like.

Q: It's the same in the US where the democratic candidates are not coming forward with really strong policies as of yet. And of course Bush and Howard are the two famous Kyoto holdouts.

A: We just have to keep the pressure on. As Al Gore says, we need to do that to give the politicians the courage they need to make the changes. Until they see that the people want this to happen, they won't make those changes. I don't feel too pessimistic about what changes we might see in the political situation. We are just at the beginning of this trajectory.

Q: So what's on for the next six months?

A: Check it out at our website. I've got one more tour and then I'd like to synthesize and integrate and maybe write up more of what we've done and think about what is needed as we move closer to the elections.

Birth of a New Wedge

Birth of a New Wedge
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Report
Thursday 03 May 2007

Terrigal, New South Wales, Australia - As delegates met in Bangkok this week to debate climate change solutions contained in the IPCC's latest report, one technology not mentioned in the draft report was being closely examined at a conference in Australia in the beach town of Terrigal, just north of Sydney.

The first meeting of the International Agrichar Initiative convened about 100 scientists, policymakers, farmers and investors with the goal of birthing an entire new industry to produce a biofuel that goes beyond carbon neutral and is actually carbon negative. The industry could provide a "wedge" of carbon reduction amounting to a minimum of ten percent of world emissions and possibly much more.

Agrichar is the term not for the biomass fuel, but for what is left over after the energy is removed: a charcoal-based soil amendment. In simple terms, the agrichar process takes dry biomass of any kind and bakes it in a kiln to produce charcoal. The process is called pyrolysis. Various gases and bio-oils are driven off the material and collected to use in heat or power generation. The charcoal is buried in the ground, sequestering the carbon that the growing plants had pulled out of the atmosphere. The end result is increased soil fertility and an energy source with negative carbon emissions.

Prominent Australian scientist Tim Flannery, who has written a book on global warming called "The Weather Makers," was on hand to give encouragement to the conferees. "I am deeply committed to your solution," he told the group. In a keynote address, Flannery provided an update on the acceleration of global warming, from the rapidly melting Greenland ice sheet to the unprecedented drought that has gripped Australia.

Because the pace of global warming already exceeds projections, Flannery is convinced that the world must do more than just reduce emissions; we must find ways to rapidly remove CO2 from the atmosphere. According to many researchers at the conference, agrichar has the potential to store billions of tons of carbon safely away in soils.

The attendees were clearly excited by this potential, and, unlike other meetings concerned with climate change, an electric buzz of optimism was in the air. Joe Herbertson, director of a consulting company called Crucible Carbon, said, "When I heard about this technology, the hairs went up on the back of my neck. This is the best news on climate change I've ever heard."

One reason for the excitement is agrichar's potential to address a range of problems from poor soil fertility to waste disposal to rural development. About half the world's population relies on charcoal for cooking fuel, and the production of charcoal drives deforestation in Africa and other places. Smoky, inefficient charcoal kilns pollute the air with noxious gases that harm health and heat the planet.

An effort to replace these kilns with modern, efficient pyrolysis units would relieve the pressure on forests by reducing waste and adding the ability to use any source of biomass, including agricultural waste products such as rice hulls. The ultimate objective is to produce enough charcoal to have some left over to bury and increase soil fertility, leading to a bootstrapping effect where increased yields provide both more food and more biomass for energy.

Projects discussed at the agrichar meeting ranged from a household-size pyrolyzing stove that produces both cooking gas and charcoal, to industrial-scale units capable of processing large waste streams from sugar mills, pulp mills, poultry farms and even municipalities.

Some participants suggested that energy, rather than agriculture, would be the key driver for adopting biomass pyrolysis. There is a tradeoff between producing energy or charcoal, as the process can be optimized for either one. Desmond Radlein of Dynamotive Energy Systems said, "It is wishful thinking that people will switch to renewable fuels unless it is cheaper. All of this is tied to the price of oil; as it goes up, many more things are possible." Because it costs money for transport and the labor to put agrichar into soil, Radlein feels that the path forward lies with biomass energy plantations fertilized by agrichar, which will become a self-sustaining loop pumping carbon into soils, paid for by the energy yield.

Robert Flanagan, an entrepreneur working in China, had a different view. There are 700 million farmers in China, he pointed out. China could quickly deploy a small, village-level pyrolysis unit he is developing, and because labor is cheap, spreading the agrichar on fields would be affordable even without a large energy harvest.

Others at the conference felt that an expanding market for carbon credits under the Kyoto protocol would be the force that drives the adoption of agrichar. Mike Mason, director of the UK biomass company, Biojoule, said the impact of agrichar on nitrous oxide emissions alone would be enough incentive to fund the needed projects.

Nitrous oxide is 270 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas and it lasts for 150 years in the atmosphere. Use of nitrogen fertilizers is a major source of the gas, and a difficult one to mitigate. But agrichar applied to fields seems to have a significant damping effect on nitrous oxide emissions. Lukas Van Zwieten, a researcher at the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, looking at preliminary results of his field trials measuring nitrous oxide emissions from agrichar amended soils, said "the more I look into this, the more excited I get."

Several farmers attending the conference were primarily interested in the increased yields possible with agrichar. Australia has some of the poorest soils in the world - 75 percent of Australia's soils have less than one percent carbon.

The exceptional properties of charcoal in soil were first noticed in the Amazon where there are large areas of what is called "terra preta" or Amazonian dark earths. These dark earths can be several feet deep and contain up to nine percent carbon, as compared with nearby soils that have only about half of one percent. In one of the most fascinating aspects of this story, the terra preta soils turn out to have been deliberately created by a lost Amazonian civilization. Some of the areas have been dated going back to more than 7,000 years, and they are still highly fertile.

Field trials and experiments in pots show impressive yield gains in charcoal-amended soils, but so far researchers don't completely understand why. One question is whether the effect is primarily chemical and physical or primarily biological. Charcoal is a highly porous material that is very good at holding nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus and making them available to plant roots. It also aerates soil and helps it retain water.

Charcoal's pores also make excellent habitat for a variety of soil microorganisms and fungi. Think of a coral reef that provides structure and habitat for a bewildering variety of marine species. Charcoal is like a reef on a micro-scale.

One of the research papers presented at the conference documented an increased diversity of beneficial microbes in terra preta soils as compared with unamended soils, but there are still no answers about whether the fertility increase is due to physical or biological factors. The best answer may be that it is both.

One very evident tension at the conference was between the scientists who are trying to better understand how agrichar works, and the farmers and investors who want to apply the technology as soon as possible. But one obstacle to deploying agrichar is the ability to quantify its effects in order to create both a reliable product for farmers and a solid guarantee of agrichar's carbon-fixing capacity for the carbon-trading market.

To that end, one of the most important research questions is how long the charcoal stays fixed in the soil. It's important to distinguish char, or black carbon, from soil organic carbon that comes from adding compost, manure or crop residues. According to John Gaunt of Cornell University, this kind of fresh organic matter does not stay in the soil but is almost all released back into the atmosphere as CO2 within ten years. For this reason, soil organic carbon has not qualified as a carbon emissions reduction that would be tradable under the Kyoto protocol.

Johannes Lehman, also of Cornell, is attempting to determine what percentage of the char stays fixed in the soil. Some of it does oxidize, he says, but it's difficult to say how much. He believes that agrichar-amended soils will see an initial period of weathering, after which they will be stable for long periods.

Certainly the existence of the terra preta soils in the Amazon is testimony to the long-term carbon-fixing ability of agrichar, and several conference participants felt that it would be best to settle on a conservative amount of guaranteed carbon fixation and move as quickly as possible to get policy in place to qualify agrichar as a tradable form of emissions reduction.

The feeling in Terrigal was universal that there is no time to waste in deploying the agrichar wedge as a global warming solution.

However, there were some additional cautions sounded about the potential for abuse, especially the pitfall of all biomass schemes - the danger that too much of the planet's land will be appropriated for human needs and not enough left for other species. Mark Glover of Renewed Fuel said that the source of biomass must be carefully determined and that it would not do to repeat the mistakes of the palm oil industry, which is rapidly deforesting the habitat of orangutans in Indonesia, or the American corn ethanol industry, which has ended up pricing tortillas out of the reach of Mexico's poor.

Mike Mason of Biojoule expressed concern over the quantities of biomass needed, but he said that if properly phased in, agrichar can be the solution we are all looking for. First, he said, we must take the four billion tons of agricultural waste products produced every year and turn as much of that as possible into char and bury it in soils to increase soil fertility. After a few years, as the productivity of our fields rises, we can begin optimizing biomass pyrolysis for energy production to help replace coal and fossil fuels. Eventually, as our energy supply becomes decarbonized and we move more and more to rely on solar, wind and ocean power, we can shift biomass utilization back to char again and keep sequestering more carbon to get atmospheric levels back to pre-industrial levels.

In addition to directing Biojoule, Mason is also the founder of Climate Care, a highly successful voluntary carbon-offset program that supports renewable energy projects in the developing world, so he is one of those visionary people who also knows how to make things happen.

By the end of the conference, after the participants had considered the political and economic obstacles to the vision, there was a bit of sobering up, but not much. Robert Flanagan set up one of his pyrolyzing wood cookstoves out on the beach and the scientists and entrepreneurs quaffed beer and roasted marshmallows over the smokeless glowing coals. Occasionally the stove would belch a sudden puff of foul smoke and Flanagan would rush to adjust the downdraft control.

After an hour or so, Flanagan opened the stove and dumped a few chunks of charcoal out onto the sand. Those small morsels of black lying on the white expanse of sand might symbolize the embryonic state of their movement, but for most of the conference participants, agrichar was still the best news they had ever heard.

Global Warming Challenges the Unitary Executive

Global Warming Challenges the Unitary Executive
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Environmental Editor
Sunday 15 April 2007

On April 2, 2007 the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the State of Massachusetts in the landmark global warming case, Massachusetts v. EPA. Environmentalists were pleased that the high court ruled on the merits of the case, agreeing that carbon dioxide meets the definition of a pollutant and that the EPA has run out of excuses for not regulating it.

But some legal scholars were even more gratified by another aspect of the case, the court's ruling on the right of the plaintiffs to sue, known as their "standing." Michael C. Dorf, a law professor at Columbia University, said that "the most important practical effect of Massachusetts v. EPA may be what it does to standing doctrine. And on that point, the decision marks a welcome turn away from recent precedents that imposed gratuitous obstacles to courts' reaching decisions on the merits."

On the other side, Case Western Reserve law professor Jonathan H. Adler decried the court's admission of standing, saying that "Justice Stevens almost certainly lowered the standing bar for future environmental litigants." Adler had participated in amicus briefs submitted in the case by the Cato Institute.

Detroit Should Thank the Supremes

Detroit Should Thank the Supremes
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Environmental Editor
Saturday 07 April 2007

On Monday, the US Supreme Court, in Massachusetts v. EPA, produced what some are calling its most important environmental ruling in a generation, telling the EPA that unless it determines that global warming causes no harm, it must begin regulating CO2 emissions.

The case began with a lawsuit in 1999 by environmental groups, later joined by a number of states, asserting that under the authority of the Clean Air Act, the EPA had to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars. The auto industry then joined in the lawsuit, coming to EPA's defense.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers also brought a separate suit against California after the state passed its own law regulating CO2 emissions in 2002. The bill, AB 1493, sponsored by California Rep. Fran Pavley, requires new cars and trucks sold in California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 22 percent by 2012 and 30 percent by 2016. Detroit maintains that California has no right to make its own CO2 regulations because regulating CO2 has to mean regulating fuel economy and that is the prerogative of the Department of Transportation. On that basis, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers sued California and two states that adopted its regulations, Rhode Island and Vermont.

Monday's ruling should moot Detroit's lawsuit against California, Rhode Island and Vermont because the Supreme Court made it very clear that CO2 is defined as a pollutant. California has the right to promulgate its own air quality regulations under the Clean Air Act because it had strict air pollution rules in place at the time the act was passed. The Clean Air Act is a minimum standard, and California and other states following California's lead can exceed those standards if they wish.

Courts have stayed the auto industry's lawsuit in California and Rhode Island, but not in Vermont. The judge in Vermont held a hearing on Wednesday to determine if the auto industry's case should go forward. Environmentalists were hoping he would toss it out, but he didn't. Judge William Sessions III said bringing the case to trial means "there will be a full record to go forward to the appeals court or the Supreme Court or a higher authority, if there is a higher authority." The trial begins next week.

While Detroit may not know much about climate science, it doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Reacting to the Supreme Court verdict, Dave McCurdy, chief executive of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers said, "There needs to be a national, federal, economy-wide approach to addressing greenhouse gases." He also said the auto industry was eager to work with Congress and the EPA to make the changes uniform and "constructive."

In the aftermath of Massachusetts v. EPA, Detroit is now calling for legislation and uniform national standards. California is a threat because it has the power to lift standards higher. The auto industry would prefer to pre-empt California and then get a weak standard passed while the Bush administration is still in charge. That's why writer Bill McKibben says "... it's more important than ever that those of us who know enough and care enough to take action ratchet up the pressure. The oil companies and the coal barons read the newspapers too - they know that their days of a free ride are coming to a close, and the only question now is how high the fare is going to be." McKibben calls for people to join a nationwide rally for climate change action on April 14 called Step It Up '07.

In the long run, automakers would be better off if they would embrace strong regulation now, because it might be the only thing that can save them from themselves. If you read the business news, you see that Detroit is not doing very well these days. Ford lost a record $12.7 billion last year and plans to close nine plants by next year. The US big three are bleeding market share to Asian manufactures. Why is that? Ron Pinelli, president of Autodata Corporation, an industry statistics firm, said it is because "the products that the import brands have are just the ones that are hitting a chord with Americans right now. The domestic makers, the reason their sales are down, is they're still dependent on their trucks."

Shareholders of DaimlerChrysler recently lambasted their CEO for the company's tone-deafness in continuing to produce gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks even after high oil prices prompted Americans to begin the shift to more fuel-efficient vehicles. "How could it happen that you were so surprised by the developments in the United States?" asked banker Henning Gebhardt. "Turning away from gas-guzzling vehicles was not really a surprise."

People want a change because gas prices have gone up and, unlike in the past, it's sinking in that they won't be going back down again. Last week the Government Accountability Office released its first report on peak oil, concluding that we will indeed run out of oil and that production declines could actually begin very soon. While the term "peak oil" is not often used in public debate, the term "energy security" is used and well understood. People are getting the idea that their big gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs are fueling the US war in Iraq, and they don't like it.

If Detroit were willing to change, there could be help available. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois) and Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Washington) have floated a proposal for transition financing that would relieve some of the health care burden of auto companies that volunteered to develop new hybrids and other fuel-efficient technologies. The Apollo Alliance, a labor and environment coalition, has more ideas like this.

But there is little indication that the US auto industry is ready to embrace change. At Ford's upcoming annual meeting on May 10, shareholders will vote on a resolution to set goals for reducing total greenhouse gas emissions from the company's products and operations. The board of directors is recommending a "no" vote on that resolution.

In order to really change, Ford and other automakers may need to get more public pressure. This week at the New York Auto Show, the Freedom from Oil campaign dropped a banner inside the Javits Convention Center challenging Toyota. The banner showed a picture of Toyota's big truck, the Tundra, driving over a globe with the tagline, "Toyota: The Truck That's Changing the Climate."

Mike Hudema, co-director of the Freedom from Oil campaign said: "Toyota can't have it both ways; Toyota can't call themselves an environmental leader while fighting legislation to curb greenhouse gas pollution and accelerating into the truck market."

As a member of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Toyota is part of the lawsuit against the states that will be heard in Vermont next week. The Freedom from Oil Campaign issued demands that Toyota drop out of that lawsuit; stop lobbying efforts against fuel-economy standards; lead the way in reducing greenhouse gas emissions; and make a concrete production commitment with a timeline for putting Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles onto the roads as soon as possible.

Toyota, Ford and all the others should listen up because it is not only the earth's climate that is changing. It is the business climate too.

Wearing My Hair Shirt

By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Environmental Editor
Thursday 29 March 2007

Al Gore is really doing it, bringing climate awareness to the doorsteps of opinion makers and forcing them to consider all of its implications. Of course, no good deed ever goes unpunished in this country.

Aside from all the sniping about his annual home power bill (which turns out to be so high partly because he spends an extra five grand or so to buy windpower and might also have something to do with a vice president's security needs), lots of the usual "free market uber alles" types are accusing him and all green-minded folks of forcing them to wear the dreaded "hair shirt" of mandatory reductions in their energy use.

Incredibly, those who aren't complaining about the sacrifices are indignant about Gore making it all seem too easy. In Robert J. Samuelson's New York Times editorial last week titled "Hollywood's Climate Follies," he accuses Gore of painting the issue as "saints vs. sinners" and failing to acknowledge that: "The lifestyles that produce greenhouse gases are deeply ingrained in modern economies and societies.... Those who believe that addressing global warming is a moral imperative face an equivalent moral imperative to be candid about the costs, difficulties and uncertainties."

It's hard to tell exactly what triggered Samuelson's outrage, but it seems to be a line from Gore's Oscar acceptance speech where he said: "We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act. That's a renewable resource. Let's renew it."

But what will it take to renew that resource? Everywhere the conventional wisdom is that Americans will never give up their big cars, big houses, air conditioning set at 65 degrees on hot summer afternoons and incandescent light bulbs blazing throughout the house. This is the American way of life, and the idea that it cannot last seems to drive some people into hysterical fits. Don't just do something, panic! Al Gore and the greenies want to send us back to the 1970s!

Al Gore and the Wedges Game

Al Gore and the Wedges Game
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Environmental Editor
Saturday 24 March 2007

Whether they realize it or not, policymakers dealing with energy and climate issues are now deeply engaged in the wedges game. What is the wedges game? It is a useful way of thinking about how to replace energy technologies that produce greenhouse emissions with less-harmful alternatives.

Princeton professors Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala first introduced the concept several years ago, and it has really taken off. The basic concept is this: we have an industrial society built on a shaky foundation of fossil fuels that must be replaced. There is no one technology that can substitute directly for fossil fuels, but by combining technologies and new lifestyle choices, we can ramp down our emissions to a safe level. Each option is termed a "climate stabilization wedge" because it will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stabilize the climate.

Wedges include solar power, wind power, more efficient appliances, green buildings, coal-plant carbon capture and storage, public transportation, auto fuel efficiency, nuclear power and so on. Socolow and Pacala have turned their idea into an actual role-playing game that is being adapted for use in schools.

The wedges game certainly has all the elements of a fast-paced, exciting game: you have to keep the atmospheric CO2 concentration under 450 ppm, but your society is now on track to double its carbon emissions in the next 50 years. If you fail, your planet may lose its Arctic ice cap, which is likely to tip the climate into runaway heating mode and destroy human civilization. If it were just a game, it would be lots of fun, but unfortunately, it is very real.

Richard Richels, a senior engineer at the Electric Power Research Institute, thinks that the wedges idea is useful for helping people to understand that there is no silver bullet solution to the climate-energy crisis. However, Richels is concerned that letting participants just choose the wedges they like best does not consider real-world cost factors. "You've got to get the economics in there," he said. "If the train is really going to leave the station on this issue, the price of the ride is going to have to be affordable." But who determines what is affordable and feasible?

We can find an answer to that question by comparing the public impact of two recent studies that assess the feasibility of different kinds of climate wedges. In early February, the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) released a study showing how the energy efficiency and renewable energy wedges together can reduce US emissions enough to meet the goal of keeping CO2 under 450-500 ppm. Two weeks later, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) released an assessment of carbon reduction wedges for the utility industry that snipped out only tiny slices for increases in efficiency and renewables, while chopping out big fat wedges for new nuclear plants and coal-carbon capture and storage. Both the EPRI and the ASES studies focus on emissions reductions that can be achieved by 2030.

While the EPRI study was covered in the New York Times and elsewhere, the ASES study was covered by only two news organizations, The Daily Camera out of Boulder, Colorado, and Truthout.

Neither the EPRI study nor the ASES study considers the economic costs of its scenarios in a comprehensive way. Each relies instead on the independent judgment of experts in their fields about what is achievable both technically and economically.

The difference in their assessments of renewable energy is striking. EPRI allows renewable energy to grow from today's 1.6 percent to only 6.7 percent of our electric energy portfolio by 2030. ASES says it can grow much more - to 40 percent by 2030.

I emailed Charles Kutscher, editor of the ASES report, to ask him why he thinks the EPRI report downplays renewables so heavily. His answer is worth quoting in full:

"There is an old saying that the challenge in predicting the future is that it 'isn't what it used to be.' EPRI sees a mix of fossil, nuclear, and renewables that does not depart greatly from what we have today. To them the future is basically what it used to be. In his book, 'Energy Autonomy,' Hermann Scheer lists a number of technological and economic assumptions that many people mistakenly embrace. One is 'the functional priority placed on existing energy supply structures.' As he puts it, 'This premise turns the status quo into the standard for determining how much renewable energy can be tolerated.' In support of this premise, EPRI used very low cost estimates for carbon-free alternatives to renewables. For example, slide presentations on the EPRI web give a levelized cost of electricity for nuclear power as under 5 cents per kWh. Back in 1996, the California Energy Commission estimated the cost of nuclear power at 11.1 to 14.5 cents per kWh."

Kutscher also pointed out that the coal-carbon capture and storage program EPRI relies on so heavily for emissions reduction is an unproven technology. Not a single coal plant has been built anywhere in the world that uses the complete capture and storage process. The first US pilot plant that can capture CO2 from coal burning, called "FutureGen" is due online in 2012, but the safety and reliability of long-term storage of CO2 underground has yet to be demonstrated. Kutscher says that EPRI has also low-balled the cost of this technology, accounting only for the cost of capturing the carbon and not for storing it.

So who determines what options are most affordable and feasible? Up until now it has been the utility industry in conjunction with the oil, coal and gas producers. But today there is a revolution in the air.

When Al Gore testified in Congress on March 21, he brought up the idea of decentralized power from renewable energy, and he called for policy changes to make it happen. Here's what he said:

"We ought to have a law that allows homeowners and small-business people to put up photovoltaic generators and small windmills and any other new sources of widely distributed generation that they can come up with and allow them to sell that electricity into the grid without any artificial caps, at a rate that is determined not by a monopsony - that's the flip side of a monopoly. You can have the tyranny of a single seller; you can also have the tyranny of a single buyer, and if the utility sets the price then it'll never get off the ground. But if it's a tariff regulated according to what the market for electricity is ... then, you might never need another central station generating plant. In the same way that the Internet took off and stimulated the information revolution, we could see a revolution across this country with small-scale generation of electricity everywhere. Let people sell it! Don't reserve it for the single big seller."

You can click here to watch this portion of Gore's testimony.

If we are going to play this wedges game, and it's looking more and more like it's the only game in town, then we have to play it fair. What Al Gore laid out in his full testimony was the rules of the game, starting with the goal, which he says is to freeze carbon emissions at current levels immediately, followed by a program to generate 90 percent reductions by 2050.

The details of Gore's testimony can be boiled down to various ways of leveling the playing field. Gore may not want to run for president, but he's looking like a pretty good umpire. Let the game begin!

Al Gore's Ten Point Plan for Global Warming, presented to both houses of Congress on March 21, 2007:

1. Immediately freeze carbon at the existing level; then implement programs to reduce it 90 percent by 2050.

2. Reduce taxes on employment and production, instead taxing pollution (especially CO2). These pollution taxes would raise the same amount of money, but make us more competitive by encouraging employment while discouraging pollution.

3. A portion of the revenues must be earmarked for low-income and middle-class people who will have a difficult time making this transition.

4. Negotiate a strong global treaty to replace Kyoto, while working toward de facto compliance with Kyoto. Move the start date of this new treaty forward from 2012 to 2010, so the next president can start to act immediately, rather than wasting time trying to pass Kyoto right before it expires. We have to try to get China and India to participate in the treaty. If they don't immediately participate, we have to move forward with the treaty regardless, trusting that they will join sooner rather than later.

5. Impose a moratorium on construction of any new coal-fired power plant not compatible with carbon capture and sequestration.

6. Develop an "electranet" - a smart grid that allows individual homeowners and small businesses to create green power and sell their excess power to the utility companies at a fair price. Just as widely distributed information processing led to a large new surge of productivity, we need a law that allows widely distributed energy generation to be sold into the grid, at a rate determined not by the utility companies, but by regulation. The goal is to create a grid that does not require huge, centralized power plants.

7. Raise CAFE standards for cars and trucks as part of a comprehensive package. Cars and trucks are a large part of the problem, but coal and buildings must be addressed at the same time.

8. Set a date for the ban of incandescent light bulbs that gives industry time to create alternatives. If the date is set, industry will meet this challenge.

9. Create Connie Mae, a carbon-neutral mortgage association. Connie Mae will defer the costs of things like insulation and energy-efficient windows that cut carbon but are often not used by builders or renovators because they add to the upfront costs of homes, only paying for themselves after several years of energy savings.

10. The SEC should require disclosure of carbon emissions in corporate reporting.

- From the AlGore.org web site.