The battle rages on

Rajendra Pachauri, who chair the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has an excellent piece in The Guardian, Climate change has no time for delay or denial:

It is a well-known fact that powerful vested interests and those opposed to action on climate change are working overtime to see that they can stall action for as long as possible.

The Centre for Public Integrity in the US has found that some 770 companies and interest groups have hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence America’s federal policies on climate change in the past year, just as the stakes became higher with the prospect of far-reaching climate legislation in the US. That translates into more than four lobbyists for each member of Congress in Washington DC.

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But, more importantly, even the allegations made on the basis of the stolen emails have proved incorrect. The papers which were criticised in the emails were actually discussed in detail in chapter six of the Working Group I report of the AR4. Furthermore, articles from the journal Climate Research, which was also decried in the emails, have been cited 47 times in the Working Group I report. It is also a well-established fact that the IPCC relies on datasets – not from any single source – but from a number of institutions in different parts of the world. Significantly, the datasets from East Anglia were totally consistent with those from other institutions, on the basis of which far-reaching and meaningful conclusions were reached in the AR4.

The same group of climate deniers who have been active across the Atlantic have now joined hands to attack me personally, alleging business interests on my part which are supposedly benefiting me as well as the Indian Tata group of companies. My institute, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), has no links with the Tata group, other than having been established through seed funding from that group as a non-profit registered society in 1974, much like several other non-profit institutions of excellence set up by the Tatas for the larger public good. As for pecuniary benefits from advice that I may be rendering to profit making organisations, these payments are all made directly to my institute, without a single penny being received by me.

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But importantly, it seems to me that civil society and grassroots action would have to come into their own, not only to ensure that human society takes responsibility for action at the most basic level, but also to create upward pressure on governments to act decisively. If such grassroots efforts do not spread and intensify, nation states may not be able to resolve the differences that exist between them.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the spread of knowledge and awareness would be a critical driver of the transformation that is required to move human society towards a pattern of sustainable development. This would also be the most effective means of thwarting the efforts of skeptics and vested interests, who will do everything possible to maintain the status quo. As the science in the IPCC Fourth Assessment report clearly demonstrates, there is no leeway for delay or denial any longer.

I have to respond to this on two levels.

First, I’ve been saying for some time online that the deniers will fight even more viciously the nearer we get to taking meaningful action on climate change. The simple truth is that fossil fuels, particularly coal and oil, have no long-term future, and those individuals and companies that rely on them for their income will do everything possible to delay that fate. (Am I dismissing the possibility that CCS will allow us to keep burning massive amounts of coal–about a billion short tons of it per year in the US alone? Yes, I am, and thank you for paying such close attention.) So those at the top of the denier food chain, those motivated primarily by money, have an enormous incentive to act in their own best interest, in the most myopic sense of that phrase, even at the expense of human civilization as a whole. If you think that’s being unnecessarily harsh, consider the evidence. Do you think the average denier blogger who crawls from site to site repeating the same stale nonsense is funding all those lobbyists?

And as for those bloggers (and authors of insane letters to editors, etc.), they’re the other major component of the denialsphere, the part motivated primarily by ideology. These are the Emmy Award winners (to borrow George Carlin’s expression) who will oppose any and all government intervention in the marketplace, as if what we have now is a pristine model of what economists call “perfect competition” that should not be disturbed.[1] They’re also the same people who scream about “government meddling in the free market” even while they line up for government tax breaks for energy efficiency or first-time home buyers, and justify it as “just looking out for my own interests” or “just taking advantage of something available to everyone”, etc.

The one thing I would ask the ideological foot soldiers among the deniers: Do you realize how the fossil fuel companies and others pushing their myopic, greedy world views on you are laughing themselves hoarse over how hard you work to help them, at no cost? All they have to do is throw out new talking points and then sit back and watch you swarm to web sites, editorial pages, call in shows, and ballot boxes. You think you’re working hard to keep “big government” at bay, when all you’re really doing is helping a small subset of “big business” drive us over the cliff at an ever higher rate of speed.

Second, the end of Pachauri’s piece really resonates with me, as I’ve been saying since the very early days of this blog that we need more people “educate and activate” themselves on energy and environmental issues. The more people know about the mess we’re in, the more willing they’ll be to change their personal consumption habits, and even more important, the more willing they’ll be to support better public policy.

The real enemy is not the disgusting deniers, but our own ignorance–none of us is born knowing about all this stuff–and our habit of falling on old and often lazy ways of thinking about complex situations. As many others have pointed out, we evolved brains that were optimized for things like avoiding being eaten by a tiger tonight, getting enough food for the next few days, and finding a mate and reproducing as soon as possible. Climate change and peak oil are a terrible fit for that set of skills. Those problems are not immediately visible or obvious (until it’s too late to avoid impacts because we already have long gas lines, no heating fuel, or flooded coastal areas), they require considerable planning long in advance, and they’re not problems (like the Apollo moon missions) that we can delegate to a relatively small group of experts and simply pay their bills. It is in our collective best interest to act decades before those impacts arrive, and that requires us to work against our own evolved nature. We have to find ways to believe our own experts, the climate scientists, about what’s coming and ignore what happens to be outside our window right this moment.

I and many others have tried to accomplish this is by looking for those ways in which short term and long term interests are in agreement. In other words, get people to do the right thing even if only for a largely unrelated reason. Tell them they can use hypermiling to significantly reduce their automotive fuel bill, and they might do it, even though they don’t care about the reduced environmental impact of their driving. The problem here is that such “solutions” barely nibble around the edges of the problem. As Pachauri and McKibben and many others have said, we’re past the point where the easy, comfortable, grass roots solutions are enough. Yes, you should change your light bulbs, reduce your carbon footprint as much as possible, sign up for green electricity where it’s available[2], and so on, but don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re “saving the world” if that’s all you do.

We need the fullest engagement possible of all levels of society, from individual consumers to small businesses to local governments to large institutions like universities and NGOs to national governments and multinationals. The inescapable truth is that we’ve put ourselves in such a tight bind that this level of participation is the only way to avoid some truly horrific consequences. I don’t like that conclusion one bit, and I wish it were otherwise more than most people reading this can imagine. But that’s what the science tells us, and ignoring it certainly won’t make it go away.

[1] I’ll be posting some extended thoughts on the markets and our perceptions of them soon. The free market worshippers and fetishists won’t like it one bit.

[2] Speaking of which–my price for 100% green electricity for all of 2010 just dropped by 1.2 cents/kWh, to about 8.4 cents/kWh. Better yet, the cost of my electricity, which comes from wind and small hydro, won’t be tied to the fluctuating costs of fossil fuels, which makes it easier for electricity suppliers to provide lower prices in constant-price contracts. As I think about the hills of Western NY (and Pennsylvania) I;’ve driven through and the coastlines of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario I’ve visited, I see a mind-blowing potential for additional wind power expansion in just those two states. For me, Hope is [still] the thing with blades.