Hope and caution

The cognitive upheaval continues over climate chaos as we learn more about how the planet works and especially how it responds to sudden jolts (like all that CO2 we keep dumping into the atmosphere), and then that knowledge seeps through the infosphere, traveling from experts to laypeople.

This process of information propagation is similar to the process of climate chaos, in that we see buffers, like the oceans, slow down and temper the effect of change. The problem is that in the information model, this delay, often caused by well financed or ideologically driven deniers and cultural issues, is a very bad thing. Our climate situation would be vastly worse if not for the buffering effect of the oceans, but the deniers are helping to delay action to reduce CO2 emissions, effectively offsetting that buffering.

This epistemology of climate chaos has been on my mind a lot recently, partially because I’ve been thinking about how to crack the very tough nut of reaching mainstream consumers and voters with the message that things are far more serious than the mainstream media (including the latest Tom Brokaw special, I’d bet) are willing to say. After all, they couldn’t risk being called “alarmists” by the deniers, right?[1]

So, as we wander across this landscape of bad news, opposition, and plain old uncertainty, it’s high time for some hope, in the form of, Major survey finds overwhelming public support for action on global warming and clean energy:

Yale and George Mason Universities surveyed 2,164 Americans last fall about their “climate change beliefs, attitudes, policy preferences, and actions.” Details will be posted at midnight Tuesday here. Here is a first look:

• 92 percent supported more funding for research on renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power;
• 85 percent supported tax rebates for people buying energy efficient vehicles or solar panels;
• 80 percent said the government should regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant;
• 69 percent of Americans said the United States should sign an international treaty that requires the U.S. to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide 90% by the year 2050.

Americans say they are prepared to incure significant costs, as the figure above shows. In fact, they “support policies that would personally cost them more,” specifically (emphasis in original):

• 79 percent supported a 45 mpg fuel efficiency standard for cars, trucks, and SUVs, even if that meant a new vehicle cost up to $1,000 more to buy;
• 72 percent supported a Renewable Portfolio Standard that required electric utilities to produce at least 20 percent of their electricity from wind, solar, or other renewable energy sources, even if it cost the average household an extra $100 a year;
• 72 percent supported a government subsidy to replace old water heaters, air conditioners, light bulbs, and insulation, even if it cost the average household $5 a month in higher taxes;
• 63 percent supported establishment of a special fund to make buildings more energy efficient and teach Americans how to reduce their energy use, even if this cost the average household $2.50 a month in higher electric bills.

The family-friendly version of my initial reaction to this was, “Really? Those numbers look a little too good.” I certainly hope they’re accurate, even with the expected and appropriate micro-parsing that a survey on that topic deserves. Even if the situation isn’t quite that positive, it could still be a very positive sign; voters needs to push their elected officials in this country, hard, to do the right thing on both energy and environmental issues.

Similarly, we’re seeing some positive news on the global public policy front, as Europe, US to work together on global warming:

Top environmental officials from Europe say they are encouraged by the United States’ new stance on climate change.

After spending years encouraging the Bush administration to take action, three European environmental ministers said Tuesday that the U.S. appears ready to work with them on a new international agreement to curb the emissions blamed for global warming.

The officials were in Washington to meet with members of the Obama administration and Congress in preparation for negotiations on a new global treaty, which are scheduled for Copenhagen, Denmark in December. The Europeans also offered to work closely with the U.S. on climate change matters.

“We’ve been waiting for eight years,” said Martin Bursik, the Czech Republic’s environment minister at a briefing Tuesday.

Andreas Carlgren, Sweden’s environment minister, said Washington has definitely warmed to dealing with climate change.

“To come to Washington in these days is to really experience climate change,” Carlgren said. “There is a completely different mental climate here today.”

Again, this isn’t a reason to start popping champagne corks and organizing naked parades down Main Street[2], but definitely something in the good news category.

The other side of this situation is the “input”, meaning the evolving state of knowledge of the climate experts before it’s made its way through the infosphere’s buffers. There, things aren’t so rosy, as People too overwhelmed to act on climate change, say leading scientists:

SCIENTISTS say they are haunted by the failure to convey to the world just how close Earth is to climate catastrophe.

Top researchers who gathered in Copenhagen for a climate change conference said they were worried that people could not psychologically deal with the enormity of the problem and were reverting to doing nothing.

French glaciologist Claude Lorius, one of the first scientists to publish in 1987 evidence that global warming was real, said he despaired of getting the message across.

“At first, I thought that we could convince people. But there is a terrible inertia,'’ he said.

“I fear that society is not up to the challenge of a crisis like this. Today, as a human being I am pessimistic.'’

John Church, an expert on sea levels at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystem Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart, took an equally dim view of our collective capacity for denial.

“Perhaps society has realised the seriousness, but it certainly hasn’t realised the urgency,'’ he said.

“But even if you are pessimistic - and sometimes I am - it does not help. What are you going to do? Chop off your hands and give up? That’s not a solution either,'’ he said.

But even if it is urgent to let the world know just how bad it could be, there is also a danger of frightening people into inaction, said other scientists.

“As a scientist, I deal with climate change on a time scale of hundreds of thousands of years, and even I have a hard time dealing with it,'’ Williams Howard, a researcher at the University of Tasmania said.

Johan Rockstrom, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute, said: “The risk is that when science pumps out more and more evidence that we are facing dangerous tipping points'’ - triggers that would make climate change irreversible - “that you put your head in the sand and move from denial to despair.”

This is a real problem, and one that cuts to the core of how we feel about our fellow human beings and life in general. Do we say, “Let the truth speak for itself. People are smart and resilient, they’ll adapt to the bad news and ultimately act in their own, and everyone else’s best interest” (essentially the philosophy of this site since day one), or do we say, “People won’t make changes. They’re shortsighted and greedy and a bunch of cowards. Telling them the complete truth will only make things worse. Better to lie to them in order to get as many of the right policies in place as we can without their full support, and hope for the best.”

That second, much more cynical view, is one I’ve been drawn to on more than a few occasions recently in moments of frustration. I’m ashamed to say that, but it’s true. As soon as I post this I’ll Google around and try to find some online pharmacy that will sell me happy-fun-time pills without a prescription.

Back to the core issue–how we should approach the mainstreamers–there is the question of tactics, even if we assume for the sake of discussion that we’ll take the first, more hopeful (and possibly more naive) path mentioned above. Sadly, many of the people who know the peak oil and climate chaos issues the best are the ones who do the worst job of outreach. They’re classic examples of a syndrome we’ve all seen countless times, the person who has all the conviction and domain knowledge one could ask for, but suffers from those traits being weighed down by the fact that they have precious little in the way of visible writing, presentation, or teaching skills.

In the case of many of the people writing online about peak oil and climate chaos, the problem is even more basic than that: They’re not even trying to do real outreach. (Or if they are, they’re so spectacularly bad at addressing their intended audience that we can be forgiven for thinking they’re aiming elsewhere.) Far too many are intent on building a web site community and maybe selling some ads and developing a “following”, but they won’t do anything to break out of their message bubble and reach the 99% of the population in the developed countries who spend zero time and effort online reading such material. Talking to your friends in the echo chamber is easy and fun; trying to change hearts and minds in the real world is work.

The bottom line, after all this navel gazing, is that I think we’re collectively at a crossroads. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the US, where we finally have escaped eight years of an administration that considered science to be nothing more than its private ideological chew toy. But we’ll still be dealing with the aftermath of that and the ongoing efforts by the deniers for the foreseeable future, even as the climate scientists find ever more reasons to be genuinely alarmed. On top of this, as I hasten to add whenever I can, peak oil is drawing closer at a rate of 85 million barrels every day, regardless of whether we’re in a global recession or how occupied we are with climate chaos or other events.

I think we need a new model, a new way of approaching the basic mission of educating and activating the mainstream consumers and voters. And we need it soon. I will post more on this topic as I continue to try to crack this outreach problem. If you have any comments or thoughts on this, please send them to me at lougrinzo [at sign] rochester.rr.com. I’ve turned off comments for this post in an effort to encourage people to communicate with me directly and confidentially.

[1] I’ve been thinking such thoughts lately for two reasons: First, I was working with a local group on an outreach project. That effort seems to be undergoing the organizational equivalent of reinventing itself via the big bang model, so I honestly don’t know what to expect of it. Second, the specter of working on a book project in this area has once again cropped up, which has me staring into my glass of Dr. Pepper and wondering what the point is of trying to reach the non-enviro geeks with a book that only enviro geeks will read.

[2] What can I say, in Rochester we really know how to celebrate, no matter how chilly the temperature.