Bill McKibben rants eloquently about the need for more than individual actions to combat climate change — it’s a systemic problem, the solutions to which can only come with changes to the systems we are all embedded in. Changing your light bulbs and riding a bike are the easy parts. Organizing a devastating political campaign against the fossil fuel interests is much more challenging, and utterly necessary.
Tag: politics
Shades of Green
There are a lot of voices in the climate and sustainability discussion. I’ve been thinking about where in the spectrum I fall, and why. Who are the people I’m trying to convince? What camp do opponents imagine I’m in? Even amongst those of us who agree that the energy and climate problem is enormous, there’s disagreement about whether change in our daily lives is necessary, desirable, or acceptable.
Below is a list of people I’ve personally been influenced by. Everyone here agrees that the current system has to change, that the magnitude of the required change is large, and that the direction of the change is unequivocally away from fossil energy sources. Where we differ is on what part of the system needs to change, and why. In particular, there seems to be a range of positions taken on the issue of social change. The Pessimists think that no technical solution comes close to being adequate, that large social changes are thus obligatory, and that they will be interpreted negatively by most people. The Optimists think that the best solutions include both technical and social components, and that the required social changes are relatively modest, and not necessarily negative at all. Some Optimists advocate for social change overtly, while others imply that purely technical options look implausible without it. The Cornucopians discount the need for social change, and are thus left with the technical task of supplying virtually unlimited carbon-free energy.
The Danger in Republican Climate Denial
An Op-Ed in the Houston Chronicle warning fellow conservatives off continued climate denial, lest the GOP be left out of climate change policy decisions altogether as public opinion swings behind the scientific consensus. There’s still plenty of FUD and straw man partisan BS in its language, but the fact of climate change and the farce of painting it as some kind of hoax is called out loud and clear.
Doing the Math on Climate Divestment
I just got back from the 350.org Do The Math event in Boulder. The touring show is an outgrowth of Bill McKibben’s piece in Rolling Stone this summer, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math. The argument is elegant and horrifying: if we want to keep global temperature from rising more than 2°C, we can emit at most 565 more gigatons of CO2, ever. Currently, the global fossil fuel industry’s reserves total nearly 2800 gigatons. That carbon accounts for a substantial fraction of their overall market value, and at least 80% of it must never be extracted. Ergo, we must necessarily bankrupt pretty much all of them, and soon. At our present burn rate, we’ll have used up the 565 Gt allowance in about 15 years, taking us well into that part of the map where, as they say, there be dragons.
I get all of the above, and am enthusiastically in support. However, I’m confused by the logic of McKibben’s suggested first salvo against the industry. He is promoting a divestment campaign, along the lines of the one aimed at apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. In this campaign, institutional investors susceptible to moral or public relations arguments — like pension funds, church congregations and university endowments — are being encouraged to purge their portfolios of fossil fuel related securities. There seems to be widespread confusion as to what this would mean in a purely financial sense to the targeted companies. Certainly the audience was confused, but I couldn’t tell what McKibben and the other folks on stage really thought.
So, what would happen if a major swath of the world’s institutional investors dumped their fossil fuel stocks? Presumably, this would depress the industry’s stock prices, by reducing demand. But would this actually hurt the companies in any way? The simple answer is no. Most people I talked to seemed to think that by selling stock, they’d somehow be taking money away from these companies. That’s just not how stock works. The only time you’re buying stock from the company itself, and giving it funding, is at the initial public offering (IPO), or, occasionally, in subsequent public financing rounds, where new shares are issued, diluting existing shares. Institutional investors owning shares of publicly traded companies are trading with other investors, not the company itself. You can’t go to a company and say “I want my money back” after they’ve issued the stock. Sometimes companies that are sitting on a mountain of cash will voluntarily buy back their own stock, but this results in the value of remaining outstanding shares appreciating — you’re sharing ownership of the same business over fewer shareholders. Buybacks are often used as a tax efficient way to return earnings to investors, since dividends are taxed as income, but share price appreciation is taxed as capital gains, and those taxes can be deferred indefinitely.
The stock price of a company that’s in financial trouble goes down, reflecting that financial trouble. Artificially depressing that company’s stock price doesn’t induce financial trouble. What would it do? It would lower the price to earnings (P/E) ratio, which would increase the dividend rate. It would make the companies with stable underlying businesses more attractive stock purchases, and in a purely financial world, other less morally encumbered investors would buy up all the dumped shares, probably severely limiting any depression of the stock price.
The fact that climate divestment won’t starve the fossil fuels industry of capital doesn’t necessarily make it a bad idea. So what are the other potential consequences of a successful divestment campaign?
Getting churches, universities, pension funds and other institutional investors to divest would decouple their financial interests from those of the fossil fuels industry. This might make it easier for divested institutions to take strong political stances on climate change. At the same time, as an individual, unless you have a lot of money invested, or live in a very efficient house and refuse to drive and fly, you’re more tightly bound to the financial interests of these companies via the prices of the fossil fuels you consume, than by the prices of the stocks of the companies that produce them.
If you’re feeling optimistic, getting institutions you care about (or depend on) to divest from the carbon industry might be seen as self-interested. If we succeed in keeping 80% of the world’s booked fossil fuel reserves in the ground, then all these companies are the walking dead. Like the hordes of zombie banks created in the financial collapse a few years ago, in a world that rises to meet the climate challenge, they are already bankrupt — they just don’t know it yet. If you really believe we’re going to succeed, divesting is clearly the right thing to do financially in the medium to long run.
Probably most importantly, the campaign is aimed at branding fossil fuels as a morally repugnant investment, both explicitly and by analogy with the apartheid divestment movement. In the case of South Africa, it was successfully argued that companies taking advantage of apartheid were benefiting from a form of legalized slavery, and anybody sharing in those profits was, in some part, morally equivalent to a slaveholder. In the case of the Carbon Lobby we’re not slaveholders, we’re waging a war on the future. This is particularly ironic in the case of university endowments, which support the education of young people, who will live further into that war-torn future than the rest of us, and pension funds that ostensibly work to ensure we are supported in our old age, as much as 50 years hence.
Morally repugnant industries are often allowed to operate, but their political influence becomes diminished and expensive. Unless you’re actually representing a tobacco growing district, it’s tough to stand up publicly these days as a politician and rub shoulders with tobacco companies. Their veneer of respectability has been peeled away. This has made advertizing restrictions and smoking bans and hefty sin taxes politically possible. If fossil fuel extraction were broadly accepted as a repugnant transaction, would it remain politically feasible to continue spending five times as much on fossil fuel subsidies as we do on climate mitigation?
In the case of the technology driven oil and gas development and exploration, one might hope that a successful re-branding of the carbon industries as repugnant dinosaurs waging a war on the future would make it more difficult for these companies to recruit young technologically savvy talent, at any price. Will petroleum and coal mining engineers one day feel unable to mention their work, for fear of public shaming?
This shift in our cultural norms about whether releasing geologically sequestered carbon is morally defensible is necessary, I think, but like virtually all climate campaigns it is not alone sufficient. Especially in the energy-intensive developed economies, shaming and shunning the fossil fuel industry must also involve some amount of self-flagellation today. It runs the risk of guilt-tripping people whenever they buy gas or fly, or leave the coal-fired lights on in the kitchen overnight. That guilt can induce people to tune out, if they don’t feel like they have any alternative to their “bad” behavior.
We need to aggressively create those alternatives by creating paths to high-renewable penetration electricity, building cities for people that don’t depend on cars, inter-city high-speed rail that doesn’t suck, re-solarizing our agricultural systems, requiring the highest possible building energy efficiency, and mandating closed-loop zero-waste materials systems whenever they’re possible. We also need to make sure we brand the fossil fuel industry as other. We need a Them. They take hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies every year. They fund disinformation campaigns on climate. They spend half a million dollars a day lobbying congress. They are the problem, preventing necessary change, preventing us from adopting systems that don’t wage war on the future. This otherness can forestall that feeling of short-term guilt.
This may sound like irresponsible heresy in the face of a tidal wave of consumer green marketing. However, the vast majority of our emissions and resource utilization are systemically determined, and are not susceptible to significant change through personal choices alone. Those necessary systemic changes are being blocked in large part by industry lobbying and disinformation. In that arena of systemic change, which is what matters most, it really is Us vs. Them.
The Industrialization of Solar Power
The LA Times is reporting on the impacts of utility-scale solar power plants in SoCal’s desert counties. What do you get when you start building multi-billion dollar solar installations? Solar land-men, in three piece suits, leaning on your local politicians for favorable tax treatment? Solar astro-turf campaigns, with corporate sponsored buses bringing solar supporters to public meetings? Yeah. Of course you do. How else could it be, within our system? If we do the responsible thing for the climate, and create a wholesale shift away from fossil fuel to renewables like wind and solar, we will have replaced one trillion dollar industry with another, and trillion dollar industries all behave badly. At some level, what we’re fighting for is to create a trillion dollar climate advocate. An incumbent corporate interest, invested in not breaking the sky. And when we’re done, we’ll still have all the greater governance issues lying around, waiting to be dealt with.
The Silos of the Status Quo
Strong Towns looks at the absurdity of having separate city departments of transportation and land-use planning, which often end up directly at odds with each other, even when they’re both doing their jobs. In Boulder this dynamic has been bad enough that the city recently made the two departments go to conflict resolution training together. Like, inter-departmental couples counseling or something. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to have done a whole lot of good.
When the facts don’t tell your story
Chris Mooney was out in Boulder last week talking about his most recent book, The Republican Brain. I went to a two day workshop he ran at Caltech with Matt Nisbet several years ago on climate communication, and it was really good, so I was interested to hear what he’s been thinking about lately. It sounds like the basic idea of the new book is that the liberal-conservative dichotomy is fairly persistent and widespread in humanity, though it’s been expressed differently throughout the millennia in different cultural contexts. I think that several of the underlying characteristics of Mooney points out interact in our financially driven political landscape in an interesting (and distressing) way. Given that:
Liberals:
- are more tolerant of ambiguity — they don’t need there to be One True Answer to every question.
- are more open to and even desirous of new experiences, and thus willing to accept the possibility or necessity of change generally.
Conservatives:
- are more sensitive to issues of insubordination — to anything that upsets established hierarchies or trusted authorities.
- place a high priority on in-group cohesion, whether it be a religious community or patriotism for the nation state.
Thus, we find that liberal groups are willing to accept the need for change and innovation, but tend to defeat themselves through in-fighting — they have a hard time staying “on message”, and will often get lost bickering in the weeds of policy detail, while their conservative opposition takes a simple, one-dimensional position, sticks to it, and wins.
Conservative groups on the other hand are more defensive and cohesive. They can effectively vote together as a bloc, because naysayers from within their ranks tend to be punished quickly and severely, even whey they’ve got the facts on their side.
These dynamics suggest to me that any time an incumbent monied interest is not well served by new facts (think Big Tobacco or King Coal), their best hope is probably to ally themselves with conservatives preferentially. This is different than what most industries do most of the time. Given how cheap it is to influence policies and elections through lobbying and campaign contributions — the ROI is enormous on these activities — most industries simply donate to everyone, and thus maintain their access and influence.
Why would this asymmetry be advantageous? Because if you can frame the issue at hand it conservative terms strongly enough, then it’s possible to trick conservatives into insulating themselves against facts that threaten their cohesion around the issue. Up to a point, they’re willing to dismiss new information if it means bucking their political in group or trusted authorities, and they’ll do it as a bloc.
Everybody is prone to confirmation bias, but it’s much harder to get liberals to take up a causeen masse simply because it sounds like something they ought to agree with. Instead you get internal disagreement — Mooney used the idea that vaccines cause autism as an example of an issue that hits some liberal buttons, and has some passionate activists around it on the left, but which won’t be taken up broadly, because it’s not supported by facts, and the left is willing to disagree with itself.
Many policy issues really aren’t intrinsically liberal or conservative — certainly there’s no shortage of ways to frame climate change as something conservatives would want to avoid — but once a particular frame has taken hold, it’s very difficult to dislodge. This makes it imperative for interests not served by new facts to pre-emptively frame their position in conservative terms, and to do everything in their power to make sure that frame sticks.
And then the waiting game begins. How long can they keep the facts from overwhelming the position they’ve put forward? How can they gracefully exit, without make it obvious they’ve duped a huge fraction of the electorate into supporting them illegitimately? For liberals, this ironically makes it all the more important to frame fact-based issues early, in terms that are attractive to conservatives. We need to get better at developing pre-emptive consensus.
Oh, right, and we need to amend the US constitution to overturn Citizens United too.
UK Betrays Basic Values To Get Assange At Any Cost
Did the UK seriously just threaten to storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London to retrieve Assange? I mean, seriously? They’re willing to violate longstanding international diplomatic norms to get someone who’s just wanted for questioning related to a relatively minor alleged crime? Right. This is all quite surreal.
Preventing Bicycle Fatalities at US-36 and Violet
Two bicyclists have been killed at the intersection of US-36 and Violet Avenue since 2009. The most recent was TJ Doherty, on July 24th, 2012. Both cyclists were headed southeast on US-36, and were hit by cars traveling northwest, making left turns onto Violet. In this area US-36 is just outside of Boulder’s city limits, in the county, but it’s the Colorado Dept. of Transportation (CDOT) that’s responsible for it. Looking at the aerial view below we can explore why this intersection might be particularly dangerous for cyclists.
Northwest bound vehicles on US-36 have a dedicated left turn lane, and no obligation to stop before making their turn. The angle that Violet Ave. makes with the highway is quite oblique, meaning that it can be taken at high speed, and because US-36 has a speed limit of 55 mph in this area, cars often will take it at high speed if they don’t see any oncoming traffic.
From a southeast bound bicycle’s point of view, there’s no obviously correct place to be on the road, if they’re planning to proceed through the intersection. The shoulder on the west side of the road narrows to a few inches, and it’s to the right of a right-turn-only lane. If you ride all the way to the right, you risk a vehicle turning in front of you onto Violet. Your intent to continue through the intersection is also unclear to oncoming traffic. Most cyclists instead take a position that’s well within the right turn lane, to prevent right-turning vehicles from passing them and immediately turning right in front of them. However, this lane position still leaves their intent ambiguous to oncoming traffic. Alternatively, you might choose to straddle the line separating the through travel lane and the right turn lane. This makes the bike relatively visible, and more clearly conveys the intent to continue through the intersection, at the expense of potentially sandwiching the cyclist between right turning vehicles and very fast moving through traffic. If the cyclist instead chooses to behave exactly like a motor vehicle, moving into the through lane of traffic, the very large difference in speed between the bike and the other vehicles in that lane creates a hazard. Thus, there’s no right place for a cyclist to be on this road if they’re planning to continue through the intersection.
When we combine the unavoidable ambiguity of the through cyclist’s intent with the very high left-turning speeds of oncoming traffic, we have a recipe for disaster. A recipe which has killed two people in three years.
Continue reading Preventing Bicycle Fatalities at US-36 and Violet
Why climate change is a wicked moral problem
Dave Roberts at Grist picked over a recent Nature paper examining the fact that climate change doesn’t spark moral outrage, the same way terrorist attacks or even oil spills do. and the ways we might try and work around those cognitive issues if we’re going to get sustained political support for dealing with it seriously (original paper here).
In a related vein William Gibson recently commented:
I assume that we live in the first era in human history against which all posterity will have reason to hold a sad and bitter grudge.
Many people responded with things to the effect of “What about slavery?”, referring to past egregious social and economic injustices we’ve inflicted upon each other. I thought his response was poetic:
The difference between knowing murders were committed in your ancestral home and knowing fools let it burn to the ground. Hence your tent.
Thankfully that Nature paper also included potential cognitive and messaging work arounds, so we can hopefully get people to react, and then respond appropriately. Now if only we can bring ourselves to use them.