I’ve been around environmental news and politics for decades, either chronicling it or participating in it.
It’s a crucial time right now, so I respectfully offer five hunks of advice, based on the past mistakes I’ve seen. Or had a hand in.
1. Don’t expect climate
deniers to go away anytime soon.
When
beliefs become political articles of faith, they die hard, or not at all. It’s
been more than a decade since climate denial escaped the surly bonds of
reality. If a torrent of peer-reviewed science and on-the-ground evidence of a
changing climate can’t change calcified minds, what will?
A
few of the lions of denial will soon fade, but more likely it will be old age,
rather than politics, ecological turmoil, economics, or common sense. Senator
James Inhofe soon turns 81; Charles Koch turns 80 this weekend, and David Koch
is 76.
It’s tragic that the U.S. Congress has become a citadel of anti-science behavior. That won’t change soon, either. Climate deniers like Joe Barton and Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith of Texas, Dana Rohrabacher of California and others routinely coast to re-election in politically safe districts.
If
that doesn’t convince you, stop by my house in Georgia. I’ll introduce you to
some neighbors who haven’t given up on the Civil War yet. If Appomattox Denial
can last for 150 years, climate denial stands to be durable as well. Deal with
it.
2. There are plenty of
perfectly good reasons for clean energy advocates to hate fracking. But ….
Fracking
once flared brightly in the dreams of many an environmentalist. As late as
2010, the venerable Worldwatch
Institute saw natural gas as a long-term partner in the
move away from fossil fuels. The Sierra Club, embracing the “bridge fuel”
language of the day, took $25 million from Chesapeake Energy and others, to be
used against the frackers’ coal competitors. (Now that was a
mistake, folks).
The
more the world learned about fracking, the more the “bridge fuel” seemed like a
wrong turn. The secrecy, the land swindles, the water consumption, the sand consumption,
the health questions, the never-ending truck traffic, the backdoor politics,
the methane leaks, the gas flares, the bomb trains, the earthquakes.
I shudder
to think about what North Dakota, or parts of Texas and Pennsylvania, will look
like in a couple of decades after the boom goes completely bust.
There
are more than enough reasons to fear and loathe fracking. But it’s a mistake to
do so without taking a high-altitude look at what it’s done to the global
energy landscape. Russia’s gas dominance and Saudi Arabia’s tarry tyranny are
on the financial ropes.
Coal, at least domestically, is on death watch. Nuclear
power plants are shutting. Arctic oil and gas aren’t worth the bother or risk.
All primarily because fracking has knocked the bottom out of oil and gas
pricing.
This
is hardly a godsend, since fracking’s price impacts have also slowed, but not
killed, wind and solar growth. But it’s a part of the picture that shouldn’t be
ignored.
Think
of fracking as the despicable rich uncle you loathe to see at the holidays:
He’s nothing but trouble, but in the end, at least you’ll get something out of
it.
3. PLEASE stop
saying we’re doomed in ten years.
Finite
predictions are almost always trouble. The great stand-up philosopher Henny
Youngman observed this when he said, “My doctor told me I had three months to
live. I told him I couldn’t pay my bill, so he gave me another three months.”
In
late 2005, climate scientist Jim Hansen started laying the ten-year deadline in
his speeches. In 2006, he told NBC News, “I think we have a very brief window
of opportunity to deal with climate change ... no longer than a
decade, at the most.”
Al
Gore’s An Inconvenient
Truth set the same timetable in 2006: “We have just ten years
to avert a major catastrophe."
But
as Hansen’s and Gore’s Doomsday Clocks cranked up, others were winding down, or
gone. In 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists assembled an impressive array
of 1,700 scientists to sign a Warning to
Humanity. “No more than one or a few decades remain before the
chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for
humanity immeasurably diminished.”
And
ten years before that, Mustafa Tolba, head of the U.N.’s Environment Programme, foretold an even
earlier doom, predicting: “By the turn of the century, an
environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as
irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust.”
The
long eye of history will certainly look well upon the prescience of people like
Gore and Hansen, NGO’s like the Union of Concerned Scientists, and world bodies
like UNEP. But setting a doomsday deadline for climate action helps no one,
save possibly for the deniers who delight in using it as an example of
“alarmism” after the deadline passes. Just don’t do that.
4. Environmental interest
is cyclical: 1970, Earth Day; 1990, another big push. We’re due for a third
one. Oh, and the interest only lasts a few years.
The
birth of the modern environmental movement is often placed around 1970.
Telegenic environmental catastrophes frequented the evening news—an awful oil
spill along the coastline at Santa Barbara, the flammable Cuyahoga River—as
concern grew about the environment.
Young environmental groups like the NRDC
and the Environmental Defense Fund flourished; new ones were born—Friends of
the Earth and Greenpeace—and old-line groups like the Sierra Club found new
blood, all as Congress and the unlikeliest of treehuggers, Richard Nixon,
passed a flurry of key conservation laws. The enthusiasm faded after a few
years.
By
1990, another series of telegenic disasters re-awakened environmental politics:
Bhopal, Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, and chilling stories about global warming and
ozone holes. Earth Day’s 20th Anniversary was marked with a massive Washington rally
and a two-hour prime-time ABC TV special. And again, it faded.
The
third wave is overdue, and the telegenic disasters are beginning to pile up:
Katrina, Deepwater Horizon, Fukushima, Sandy. Be ready for it, and work
quickly.
5. Don’t take climate
action as a given by the new President.
Humor
me for a minute on this one. Let’s say, come January 20, 2016, that it’s not
Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders or Ben Carson being sworn in as the 45th
President of the United States. What if it’s Hillary Clinton? What does it mean
for climate change?
If
the past two Democratic Presidents are any indication, don’t expect much in the
first term, even with a sharpened global focus on climate. Bill Clinton and his
Vice President, Al Gore, focused on a failed BTU tax proposal in their first
term. Climate change didn’t even rate a State of the Union speech shout-out
until late in the second term in 1998.
And
in a 2012 story in
The Guardian, environmental leaders revealed that they were summoned
to a White House meeting two months into Obama’s first term and told flat-out
that the issue would have to wait. It wasn’t until Obama’s 2012 re-election that
the words “climate change” were frequently uttered by the White House, let
alone acted on.
So
if Hillary Clinton gets in, I have a modest proposal: Michelle Obama made
nutrition her signature issue; Laura Bush had education as her centerpiece.
Perhaps the new First Lady could tackle climate change as his primary issue?
Just sayin’.
For
questions or feedback about this piece, contact Brian Bienkowski at bbienkowski@ehn.org.
