Goodman Speaks

My cousin’s husband writes a good, chatty blog about life in Vermont and other things. He just sent this one on, which is a revelation about the trials of running an electric car in the harsh Vermont winters. At the same time Bill Schubart sees the value in electrics, in fact their necessity.

This fall for only the second time in my life, I bought a new car. It’s an emission-free Nissan Leaf. I named it “Greta.” Last night, I ran into a friend who has a Tesla all-electric vehicle (AEV) also named “Greta.” I’m now wondering how many AEVs there are in the world bearing the Swedish teenager’s name.

I’m comfortable saying it was the extraordinary courage of this young woman who could be my granddaughter that drove my decision to go all-electric. “Okay boomer,” I said to myself, “It’s your turn to help leave a habitable world for the next generation.

When Green Mountain Power held a get-acquainted session on AEVs for its customers, my wife and I drove up. They had most current models available there for customers to test drive and dealers to answer questions. I chose the Leaf and, thrilled that I fit in it, took it for a spin. It was a distinctly different experience… silence, no auto-shifting clunks. I learned that by using the eco-pedal, I didn’t need the brake pedal and could extend Greta’s range. I was hooked!

I’m 1200 miles into Greta and my early experience with her sent me searching for the encyclopedic instruction manual in the glove compartment. Like most consumers, I had read the FAQ’s and thought I knew it all. At the time of purchase, my key question was driving range between charges, a deciding factor for most potential buyers. The range is nominally 150 miles. My benchmark was the 88-mile roundtrip between my home in Hinesburg and Montpelier.

I set out on my first excursion with a full 152 miles on the meter. When I got to Montpelier, I expected to find it down 44 miles, but it was, in fact, down twice that – about 66 miles left to go before I needed a charge. This didn’t register, so before heading home, I pulled out the manual and read what I’d neglected to read before committing to Greta.

Like all living things, her capacity is temperature-dependent. It was 10 above zero when I left the house and I had turned on the heat to make it worse as both heat and lights reduce Greta’s range. I risked the straight shot home and made it with 12 miles to go by turning off the heat and arrived home in a near cadaverous chill, scraping my frozen breath from the inside of the windshield with a credit card. Did this mean driving at night with no lights and no heat? Should I buy a flashlight and a wool blanket for Greta?

I also learned Greta’s batteries can be severely damaged by exposure to temperatures below minus 13. I’ve lived in Vermont for 70 years and have yet to experience a winter where it didn’t get colder than that. I remember a sunny, dry winter day in Lincoln at 38 below. Could Greta even survive here, much less provide frigid transportation beyond a few miles from home? I began to worry.

But I’ve learned that by monitoring the temperature and my energy usage as I drive, using the eco-pedal to recharge as I drive, charging every night at home during off-peak hours, I can manage quite well and I haven’t eaten in a gas station in two months. I’m finding more and more charging stations, all searchable on my cellphone. Besides if it’s freezing cold and I have a round trip to Montpelier, a stop at Red Hen Bakery in Middlesex for a quick charge, a latte, and a croissant isn’t much of a price to pay for doing my part. Sometimes, slowing life down enhances it.

But more important than my comfort are the larger environmental implications of continuing to burn fossil fuel. According to a recent VTDigger article, transportation accounts for 43% of the state’s carbon emissions and in spite of earnest expressions of concerns and many unfulfilled commitments, emissions have increased in recent years and are 16% higher than they were in 1990.

. . . As I get even older than I am now, I know that much of the remaining work I have left to do on earth is to try and leave a better, more just place for my children and grandchildren.

It’s disheartening to hear special interests and climate deniers froth on about their temporal material interests. I wonder what they think when they gather over the holidays with their children and grandchildren. As they play together, do they never imagine their progeny trying to make it in a world of uncontrollable fires, floods and rising sea levels, massive climate migrations, and dying food systems, all so they can drive a fossil fuel car or get their convenience foods in unrecyclable plastic? Our children comprise a quarter of our country. They will inherit our mess.

In Matthew 5:5 from the Sermon on the Mount, one of the Beatitudes tells us the meek shall inherit the earth. Our children are finding their voice and are no longer meek. We owe it to them to listen.

Sometimes when I’m driving Greta late at night. I stare at the energy meters on the dashboard anxious about whether I’ll make it home, I hear Greta whisper to me, “Okay boomer, you did good.”

To a brave New Year !

December 28, 2019

The Politics May Kill Us

The Challenging Politics of Climate Change

How the Climate Crisis Is Killing Us, in 9 Alarming Charts

Americans Increasingly See Climate Change as a Crisis, Poll Shows

Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution leads off her piece on climate and politics with a great quote from Colin Jost of Saturday Night Live (10/13/18):

We don’t really worry about climate change because it’s too overwhelming and we’re already in too deep. It’s like if you owe your bookie $1,000, you’re like, ‘OK, I’ve got to pay this dude back.’ But if you owe your bookie $1 million dollars, you’re like, ‘I guess I’m just going to die.’

So there are many reasons Americans (in particular) resist climate change, and Kamarck goes on to document these in a lengthy but very worthwhile essay you should read. In the most recent decade of Gallup’s polling, for instance, we learn that “almost half of the public believes that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated.” A series of natural disasters and dramatic weather events leaves the public mostly unmoved. Jobs, the economy and healthcare top their list of concerns.

Then there’s partisanship. And the complex nature of the climate crisis. Plus jurisdiction and accountability: who’s responsible? by whose laws? And the lack of trust in government—at a new low since the administration of G.W. Bush. Finally, our elites demonstrate a lack of imagination, such as described by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement (reviewed here): we don’t talk about climate in fiction or television or film. Is it too threatening?

Matt Simon in Wired tells us how climate is slowly killing us, referencing a massive study in The Lancet, a medical journal, on climate change and human health. Says one of the authors about living in a world 4 degrees warmer than in preindustrial times:

We have no idea what that looks like from a public health perspective, but we know it is catastrophic. . . . We know that it has the potential to undermine the last 50 years of gains in public health and overwhelm the health systems we rely on.

Simon’s series of graphics should properly scare you. Here’s one:

Scorched by Heat Waves

On he goes, with measures of wildfires roaring, diseases blooming, air conditioning heating up cities, crops declining, etc.

In the face of all this a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll tells us that “A growing number of Americans describe climate change as a crisis, and two-thirds say President Trump is doing too little to tackle the problem.”

About 8 in 10 “say that human activity is fueling climate change, and roughly half believe action is urgently needed within the next decade if humanity is to avert its worst effects. Nearly 4 in 10 now say climate change is a “crisis,” up from less than a quarter five years ago.”

That story was posted September 13 of this year, Kamarck’s on September 23. So who’s right? With a well-earned mistrust of polls, I vote for Kamarck because she uses a wider time spread.

We have a lot of work to do.

December 21, 2019

Impeachment: More Time, More Evidence

The Impeachment Question

Climate Change in the American Mind: April 2019

Trump’s failure to fight climate change is a crime against humanity

Maybe if the Democrats can pull off their wonderful stunt of withholding the Impeachment Articles until McConnell gives them a “fair deal” in the Senate trial, that will give them time to explore some of the more outrageous things the Articles didn’t cover. That’s a long way of saying they need more evidence. I doubt that people will be convinced solely by what was presented to the House. If the Dems can hold out for more time and more investigations, the stain of impeachment will only spread.

Trump’s waffling and bluster about climate change could be one of those areas to explore. Some 69 percent of Americans believe that the climate crisis is very real and/or very threatening. One other ripe area is the Mueller report, which has been all but forgotten in the proceedings. It doesn’t pertain strictly to climate change but reveals an abundance of illegalities and obstructions. Linda Greenhouse of The Times:

The 182-page volume 2, which analyzes thirty-eight separate incidents as potential obstructions of justice . . . reads like a cross between Wolf Hall and Richard III, depicting the White House under the shadow of the Russia investigation in a constant state of crisis, as the president’s top aides struggle to both serve their master and save their own skins—not only from his wrath but from the potential legal consequences of carrying out his orders.

My thinking is that people need more time to absorb the depth and extent of Trump’s behavior, which is an essential part of his failure to address climate change.

In August Jeffrey Sachs called this failure “a crime against humanity” and indicted Marco Rubio, Rick Scott and Ted Cruz along with Trump. He cites their total failure to respond to the hurricanes in Houston, Puerto Rico, North Carolina and Florida, in which literally thousands have died. “The first job of government is to protect the public,” and that requires education, legislation, full-scale preparedness and disaster response. Trump and his crew have deliberately ignored all this and made matters worse by eviscerating the EPA and slamming environmental science.

Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic in a reductive piece finds that Trump’s belief in carbonism explains all his actions over climate, including backing out of the Paris Agreement.

Carbonism is a belief that fossil fuels—which send carbon pollution spewing into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change and ocean acidification—have inherent virtue. That they are better, in fact, than other energy sources.

Well, Robinson, who couldn’t have figured that one out? Most of the world lives off carbon in its varied forms. “China burns over half of the world’s coal and will account for 50% of global CO₂emissions by 2030”: thus from Kenneth Richard, a smart climate writer who goes beyond carbonism. Remember that in July Trump delivered a major speech on environment without a mention of climate change.

The point of my declamation here is to urge the Democrats to explore the fiascoes of Trump & Co. on climate and see whether they can establish any more “crimes against humanity.” It will be but one of many he has committed.

December 14, 2019

Meditations on a Runaway Crisis

I make it a practice here of giving you three linked articles at the outset that reflect, to some degree, my opinions. It’s part of the tradition of argument to bolster one’s opinions with evidence. So maybe it’s time for my opinions unfiltered.

Climate has become an imponderable, a cloud that never dispenses rain, a storm that never breaks. By that I mean the more we understand the depths of climate change, the more stymied we are in doing something about it. Most of us who aren’t deniers recognize the enormity of the problem but despair of moving the political forces that are needed to attack it. We are immobilized.

As the heat, storms, floods and droughts become increasingly common, more and more people report instances of “climate grief,” high anxiety and depression about what they see ahead. It seems like “a massive government conspiracy to kill us all,” with people increasingly reporting feelings of despair and panic.

I’m not there yet, still too much of a rationalist to give in to despair, still looking to implement answers that are staring us in the face. I ask, what causes this immobility in the face of disaster? Are we like the fools who went to New Zealand’s White Island to watch the volcano explode and got killed in the process?

Climate is like impeachment—the perfect disaster for the Trump era. We all stand by watching a process unfold that we can’t affect while Republicans blow smoke and defend the indefensible. As the climate outlook gets grimmer, with shocking UN reports and more detailed studies, we learn that the oceans are far worse off than we thought, that permafrost thawing in the Arctic will blow holes in our predictions of CO₂in the atmosphere, that the time to apply any fix gets shorter and shorter.

Some offer up palliatives like the Green New Deal when they should be pursuing more achievable first steps like a carbon tax. Some seem to wallow in their grief when they should be out marching in protest. Others look to a false savior like Trump or Boris. All seem to fear for the future.

I have no simple answers but one: get out of yourself and do something that will have political impact. You don’t need therapy, you need action. Politics is the key to all reform efforts and it must be the first response to climate change. Immediately, let’s vote out the Republicans, who are simply “unreachable” on climate. It’s a time for taking sides. The second step is to unify the unwieldy Democrats behind an achievable, staged program of amelioration. The right is always motivated by fear; let the left be motivated by solidarity and action.

David Roberts of Vox put it well here:

To motivate people to action, you have to give them meaningful changes to fight for, people to fight alongside, and, just as importantly, enemies to fight against. You can’t stay on the sidelines, welcoming everyone to the table. You have to pick a side.

Finally, grieving over climate is like grieving over Trump: it gets you nowhere. Pick a side and get to work. Accept the fact that, whether you like it or not, climate will be a political battle.

December 7, 2019

Trump on Climate Change

It’s possible that Trump doesn’t actually know what climate change is

Donald Trump’s New York Times Interview: Full Transcript

Trump says climate change not a hoax, not sure of its source

If we had better criteria for impeachment, the president’s remarks on climate would form Article One. Yet, after pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, he’s babbled and hedged so many times on this that, as Philip Bump wrote, maybe he doesn’t know what climate change is. More probably, he knows but must defend the energy interests that support him. And so he waffles to smoke out his critics.

As in his response to Philip Rucker of the Washington Post:

“I think about it all the time, Phil. And, honestly, climate change is very important to me,” Trump replied. “And, you know, I’ve done many environmental impact statements over my life, and I believe very strongly in very, very crystal clear, clean water and clean air. That’s a big part of climate change.”

In 2016, his climate comments were a way to disparage Obama:

“So he talks about the carbon footprint, okay, and how important the carbon footprint is, I’m not supposed to use hair spray in my hair because it affects the ozone,” Trump said. “Now it fits in an apartment that is totally sealed, but it goes up and it affects the ozone. I don’t think so, personally. But you know, there’s a lot of money being laid on this in that sense.”

Later in 2019, it was the carbon footprint again in a sarcastic tweet:

I think it is very important for the Democrats to press forward with their Green New Deal. It would be great for the so-called “Carbon Footprint” to permanently eliminate all Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas & the Military – even if no other country would do the same. Brilliant!

Then came this canard about wind turbines, which he had campaigned against because they would destroy views from his golf course:

“They’re all made in China and Germany, by the way, just in case you—we don’t make them here, essentially. We don’t make them here.” [This is not true.]

In October of this year, he backtracked on his earlier claim that climate change was a hoax. “I’m not denying climate change,” he said in the [60 Minutes] interview. “But it could very well go back. You know, we’re talking about over a … millions of years.” Earlier in 2012,

he sent a tweet stating, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” He later said he was joking about the Chinese connection, but in years since has continued to call global warming a hoax.

Shortly after the election Trump sat for an extended interview with New York Times staff. There was a lengthy, very smoky discussion about climate change. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. asked Trump in a puffball question whether he had an open mind about it. The response was classic Trump. Is it obfuscation or a reflection of his disordered state of mind?

My uncle was for 35 years a professor at M.I.T. He was a great engineer, scientist. He was a great guy. And he was . . . a long time ago, he had feelings—this was a long time ago—he had feelings on this subject. It’s a very complex subject. I’m not sure anybody is ever going to really know. I know we have, they say they have science on one side but then they also have those horrible emails that were sent between the scientists. Where was that, in Geneva or wherever five years ago? Terrible. Where they got caught, you know, so you see that and you say, what’s this all about. I absolutely have an open mind. I will tell you this: Clean air is vitally important. Clean water, crystal clean water is vitally important. Safety is vitally important.

And you know, you mentioned a lot of the courses. I have some great, great, very successful golf courses. I’ve received so many environmental awards for the way I’ve done, you know. I’ve done a tremendous amount of work where I’ve received tremendous numbers. Sometimes I’ll say I’m actually an environmentalist and people will smile in some cases and other people that know me understand that’s true. Open mind.

November 30, 2019

Climate Dominoes Begin to Fall

In bleak report, U.N. says drastic action is only way to avoid worst effects of climate change

Nine climate tipping points now ‘active,’ warn scientists

The climate chain reaction that threatens the heart of the Pacific

Nobody needs to tell you that you’re going to die. But what if they could tell you not precisely when you’re going to die but the likely causes and conditions of your death? What would you do about it? You would take precautions or you would slough it off, too preoccupied with worldly things. Or you’d worry and do nothing. You’d keep on smoking cigarettes. My parents were like that.

And if you knew the climate was going to run out of control in a relatively fixed number of years? If you understood that life on earth would be forever altered for the worse; that millions would die or live lives of misery? Denying that prospective reality would be the ultimate dismissal of your rationality, even your humanity.

We learn now from last week’s U.N. report—“a grim assessment of how off-track the world remains”—that the present pace of confronting the climate crisis will inevitably lead to disaster. If you read this blog, you knew that already.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science tells us that nine tipping points are now active and menacing. They immediately threaten

the loss of the Amazon rainforest and the great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, which are currently undergoing measurable and unprecedented changes much earlier than expected.

This “cascade” of changes sparked by global warming could threaten the existence of human civilisations.

Evidence is mounting that these events are more likely and more interconnected than was previously thought, leading to a possible domino effect.

Meaning that they are so interlinked as to cause and amplify one another. Such events are, it seems, irreversible. Without our intervention, the dominoes will begin to fall. A revealing description of how interrelated our ocean ecology is was published by the Washington Post here. The salmon catch off the coast of Japan is being depleted by warming waters, and the consequences are like so many dominoes falling. These effects are being felt in many places around the globe.

Remember the fatuous domino theory (predicting the takeover of communism) for our appalling encroachments in Vietnam? This time it’s no political theory but provable scientific facts that are impossible to ignore.

November 23, 2019

Democrats: Get Your Priorities Straight

The Most Pressing Issue for Our Next President Isn’t Medicare

Voters want more climate-change debate, but the Democratic event gave less than 10 minutes to the issue

The climate science is clear: it’s now or never to avert catastrophe

I couldn’t watch the last Democratic debate. I was busy talking politics with two friends, which was more enlightening than what the Dems offered. The debate format is just not for serious debate. It’s mostly for probing your opposing candidates’ weaknesses, establishing your own bona fides, and coming up with a quotable crumb for the press.

The Democrats seem pulled between two opposing forces—what the polls show to be the dominant issues for voters and what are in fact the most pressing issues. That is to say, they haven’t yet found the right political formula to move the voters left. Climate change, the world’s most urgent and least fixable problem, got less than 10 minutes’ consideration in the debate. And so the pattern of denial continues.

. . . Climate experts also worry that a lack of specific policy with price tags and the limitations of a debate format relegate the topic to low priority, even as Wall Street and Corporate America step up their own attention on the issue.

Wednesday’s question lineup was also reflective of current headlines. The Trump impeachment hearings, taxes and foreign policy dominated the debate.

And the outrageous amount of time devoted to health care in earlier debates is just pandering to what the Dems perceive to be voters’ concerns. As some of you know, I worked on the Clinton heath care reform in ’93-’94 and understand how deep the problem is. It’s the most immediate and pressing issue for most voters.

But other big challenges loom, not just with climate but with the parlous state of American democracy, as David Leonhardt mentioned. Consider: voting rights, the collapse of the GOP, the rank inequality in our country, energy, the middle class erosion. Yet, in a sense they are all tied in to climate change.

People like Bill McKibben have been ringing the alarm bells for a long time. Maybe the noise (along with increasingly strong and numerous protests) has finally penetrated a few brains.

McKibben says the climate crisis doesn’t work anything like the health care crisis. The math is against us and the scenario for reducing emissions to nothing in twenty years is an “ungodly steep slope.”

Here’s another way of saying it: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last autumn that if we hadn’t managed a fundamental transformation of the planet’s energy systems by 2030, our chance of meeting the Paris temperature targets is slim to none. And anyone who has ever had anything to do with governments knows: if you want something big done by 2030, you better give yourself a lot of lead time. In fact, it’s possible we’ve waited too long: the world’s greenhouse gas emissions spiked last year, and—given Trump, Bolsonaro and Putin—it’s hard to imagine we won’t see the same depressing thing this year.

2030: that’s only ten years, Democrats. Are Sanders and Warren the only ones talking candidly about climate? If Booker, Klobuchar and Harris want to revive their faltering campaigns, getting serious about climate might be a way to start.

November 16, 2019

Let the Big Banks Pay

Why Central Banks Need to Step Up on Global Warming

Climate Finance

Why We Need Finance to Fight Climate Change

“That’s where the money is” was Willie Sutton’s reply when someone asked why he robbed banks. I’ve used his cool rejoinder before, but it’s especially apt when you think about the overwhelming problems coming: mitigating and adapting to what the world faces in global warming.

Bill McKibben talked about getting the big banks to just quit lending to the oil industry—which they fund to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. This seems about as likely as getting a junkie off fentanyl but, as he said, it’s kind of a Hail Mary pass.

Bernie Sanders’ grandiose climate proposals ($16.3 trillion) are just unrealistic when it comes to funding. Elizabeth Warren’s are only a bit more practical. The amounts for underwriting any kind of comprehensive Green New Deal are staggering. Great bags of money will be required to have any hope of success.

But it does seem right and proper, as Columbia’s Adam Tooze proposes, that “a decade after the world bailed out finance, it’s time for finance to bail out the world.” That is, it’s time for the world’s largest financial institutions to step up on climate change, which a few of them have already committed to do, the IMF being one. But the grand scale that will be required is something else again.

How would you get the central banks—like the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England—to cough up, or backstop, long-term loans? Tooze put it in terms of moral obligation and the threat of financial crisis:

Acting as a backstop to the issuance of a massive volume of publicly issued green bonds is certainly a novel role for the central banks. But after their exertions in the 2008 financial crisis, central bankers, of all public officials, can’t plausibly retreat into an insistence on the limits of their mandate. . . .

Decarbonization is a vastly more complex technical, economic, and social problem. But to embark on solving it we need to mobilize all the resources we can muster. The essential responsibility of the central banks is to ensure that money does not stand in the way.

The World Resources Institute projects the scale (for the short term, it seems) of public/private investment needed to remediate and adapt to what’s coming:

- The World Economic Forum projects that by 2020, about $5.7 trillion will need to be invested annually in green infrastructure, much of which will be in today’s developing world.
- This will require shifting the world’s $5 trillion in business-as-usual investments into green investments, as well as mobilizing an additional $700 billion to ensure this shift actually happens.

How is it possible to persuade the mercantile banking industry to get in on the action—and indeed make money doing it? A National Climate Bank has been proposed to sidestep the big banks and foster greenhouse gas reductions. Read more about that here. I’m not sure that will do the job; it’s mostly for smaller-scale projects.

What’s required is a Congress dedicated to transforming banking regulations to demand that a certain percentage of big commercial bank investments be made in wide-ranging, large green projects with commercial potential. Once again, like so much involving climate change, it’s a political problem. We are talking about trillions of dollars, folks, and Willie Sutton knew where that money was hiding.

November 9, 2019

The Conservatives’ Addiction to No!

Don’t bother waiting for conservatives to come around on climate change

What Motivates Voters More Than Loyalty? Loathing

The GOP’s Opposition to Impeachment Is (Terrifyingly) Principled

They say no to everything: no to impeachment, immigration, voter registration, Merrick Garland, anything Obama tried to do, anything the liberals advocate. However, it’s increasingly hard to say no to climate change.

Their negativism is owing not just to mutual antagonism and the partisanship everyone complains of; it’s built in to the conservative mindset. What liberals understand as democracy and justice is implicitly rejected by conservatives as threat to their programme. Their constituencies are not just the fossil fuel complex but the major power groups in society, the interests that basically run things. For many conservatives, I think, it boils down to fears of a “socialist” takeover that will marginalize them forever.

Their tactics, if you can call them that, have included: increased lawlessness, voter suppression, total politicizing of judgeships, foreign policy fiascos, flagrant giveaways to the private sector, and rampant corruption.

Climate change, if it’s acknowledged at all, is a liberal plot, a hoax, an act of God, a natural series of events not due to human activity. Take your pick. In the face of that intransigence, the persistent liberal argument that the climate crisis is man-made is just futile, says David Roberts of Vox.

Those who fear change, prize order, and pine for an imagined past without all the troubling present-day changes—i.e., conservatives—will be more open to messages emphasizing the maintenance of purity and glories of the past.

. . . The tragic but inescapable fact at the core of climate change is that we are in an era of loss. The stable weather patterns, fertile soil, and biodiversity enjoyed by our ancestors—the biophysical status quo—is going away, whether we like it or not. It’s too late to save it.

Sooner or later, with more climate disasters, this notion of loss, one imagines, will have to penetrate to the conservative naysayers. Who can say how they will respond? Those so imbued with the power of No! and the status quo ante may never come to accept the ultimate change that is climate change. Eric Levitz put it in more strictly political terms:

To acknowledge anthropogenic climate change is to empower liberals, open the door to additional taxes and regulations, and threaten the power of the fossil fuel industry. The Republican Party as currently constituted will simply never do those things. Ever. The arguments are secondary.

November 2, 2019

Big Oil and Big Tobacco Long in Cahoots

New Documents Reveal Denial Playbook Originated with Big Oil, Not Big Tobacco

Did Exxon Deceive Its Investors on Climate Change?

Exxon Climate Plan Wasn’t Fake, Tillerson Says In N.Y. Trial

We are just discovering how long and how deeply the tobacco and oil industries joined together to deceive the public about their toxic products. Their connections go back to the 1950s, studying and funding deceptions about smog science and cancer science.

The Center for International and Environmental Law wrote about this over three years ago, and like most other important news it got swamped by the furor over Trumpism. The Center used documents unearthed from the tobacco industry to establish the connections. Tobacco, they reveal,

used the same playbook of misinformation, obfuscation, and research laundered through front groups to attack science and sow uncertainty on lead, on smog, and in the early debates on climate change. Big Tobacco used and refined that playbook for decades in its fight to keep us smoking—just as Big Oil is using it now, again, to keep us burning fossil fuels.

The New York state attorney general is now bringing suit against Exxon Mobil, charging that the world’s biggest publicly traded energy company “misled its shareholders and the public by misrepresenting the risks that climate change poses to the value of its oil and gas assets.” The company took in $290 billion in revenue last year, and the suit argues not that it helped create climate change but that for years it has schemed (basically by keeping two sets of books) to defraud its investors, analysts and underwriters about the risks of climate change to its business.

That rather seems like begging the real question, though it will finally expose what many have suspected about Exxon’s business practices—assuming the state wins the suit. Ex-CEO Rex Tillerson, Mr. Trump’s one-time secretary of state, knew about this for years. Lee Wasserman, who directs the Rockefeller Family Fund (interesting, isn’t it, that the Rockefeller fortune came from Standard Oil?) wants to hold fossil fuel companies liable for reparations for the massive damages their products and practices have caused.

The company of course denies any attempt to mislead and professes to be proud of its many years of (accurate) research into climate change. The other day Tillerson testified under oath that the company knew long ago that global warming was very real, “a serious issue and we knew it was one that’s going to be with us now, forevermore.”

Tillerson didn’t deny Exxon’s role in creating the problem—which isn’t what the trial was about. But in his nuanced view, the company did its best to address the issue once it became apparent. He also said there may be plenty of blame to share, given that Exxon was providing products demanded by society.

But don’t hold your breath until Exxon becomes accountable for the huge sums that some states and cities are now suing for.

October 26, 2019

Gloom but not Doom?

What If We Stopped Pretending?

Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change

Climate change is like diarrhea. You never know when or where it’s going to hit. Climate change is like getting old. You know what’s coming but are powerless to prevent it. Climate change is like believing in God. As Pascal said, play it safe and believe.

Jonathan Franzen, the novelist, social commenter and birdwatcher, took the fatalistic stance a couple of months ago in the New Yorker (What If We Stopped Pretending?) and got a lot of flak for it. He told us: “The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction. . . . You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.”

Denial seems to be part of our human makeup, or maybe it’s simply an inability to confront anything as far out in time as climate change. Bryan Walsh shows how the present dominates our minds and yet we often consider the welfare of future generations, as in working to cure cancer or trying to avert a catastrophic climate crisis.

Franzen talks about dystopian political denial and how to keep a democratic focus:

any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons — these are all meaningful climate actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and healthy as we can make it.

And yet his essay seems premised on prophetic doom and rather less on how we can face that impossible music. Facing such facts means taking climate science at something more than face value. Naomi Oreskes, who teaches environmental science at Harvard, has written (with others) two recent pieces that shed some harsh light that has been missing on climate science.

In Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change she explains why climate change has been “occurring far faster than predicted by theory” and why and how scientists have underestimated its severity and pace. In Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think, she reflects on how world political leaders “understand neither the magnitude of the risks to lives and livelihoods, nor the urgency of action.” A major reason is that economists have underestimated the impact of climate risks. Worse, they don’t factor in the cascading effects of even small changes. Worse still, what they don’t know or can’t account for, they dismiss or set the effect at zero.

In the face of all this, Franzen is not wrong in saying

a false hope of salvation can be actively harmful. If you persist in believing that catastrophe can be averted, you commit yourself to tackling a problem so immense that it needs to be everyone’s overriding priority forever. One result, weirdly, is a kind of complacency: by voting for green candidates, riding a bicycle to work, avoiding air travel, you might feel that you’ve done everything you can for the only thing worth doing. Whereas, if you accept the reality that the planet will soon overheat to the point of threatening civilization, there’s a whole lot more you should be doing.