How Stuff Works

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I’m a big fan of what I call “how stuff works” journalism: take a topic of the day and step back and explain how the darn thing works. Too often, we write either incrementally, or for insiders who already know the underlying structure of what we’re talking about. (This explains, for example, my ultimately fruitless search, recently for a story explaining what Bear Stearns did for a living.)

My colleague Andrew Webb turned a nice piece this morning about how our gasoline gets here. The news peg was a mixup that put diesel in people’s regular gasoline tanks. But you don’t even need that for this to be a fun and useful story of pigs and water and society’s plumbing.

Weitzman and Ahab

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Martin Weitzman’s paper on the economics of catastrophic climate change is rather like Moby Dick – something we all nod to knowing references while we’re secretly saying to ourselves, “WTF? Did you actually understand this?” I actually went so far as to enlist an environmental economist of my acquaintence (being a journalist has its advantages). He used a white board. It was fun.

The nut of the argument is that climate change involves uncertainty about low probability but potentially very high consequence events, making ordinary cost-benefit analysis difficult.

So I was happy to see in Daniel Hall’s post today on the subject that I am not alone:

Nobel prize winner Tom Schelling, one of the discussants at the event, noted that he read the paper 5 or 6 times without ever feeling that he was sure what it was saying.

The problem is that Weitzman doesn’t really tell us what we ought to do. But it nevertheless is a very significant framework for thinking about the issue.

Biofuel Scam

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As if the built in systemic problems associated with the current biofuel push were not enough, here’s a remarkable story from the Guardian in which biodiesel is shipped from Europe to the United States, then back, to qualify for the US biodiesel export subsidy:

The “splash and dash” scam involves shipping biodiesel from Europe to the US where a dash of fuel is added, allowing traders to claim 11p a litre of US subsidy for the entire cargo. It is then shipped back and sold below domestic prices, undercutting Europe’s biofuel industry.

(h/t WSJ)

Fish

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Lissa counted 10 fish this morning in the pond, alongside the first lily pads of the spring. Me? (Sneeze) All I could see was the scum of pollen floating on top.

update: I was out adding water this evening and noticed the first thin cattail leaves coming up.

Gristmill Scorecard

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Given David Roberts’ apparent conversion to the view that simply everyone who matters in the climate change community agrees that the need to adjust to the problems being caused by climate change (“adapt”, in the lingo) shares equal importance with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“mitigate”), I thought a scorecard of Gristmill’s coverage of this vital issue might be of value.

Gristmill has become an enormously successful and valuable community gathering place for discussion about climate change issues, so this seems like a worthwhile exercise in plumbing the thinking of what David describes as “green commentators”.

Gristmill gets a bit repetitive, but if the last 96 hours of posts is in any way representative, I think I’ve detected a statistically significant trend:

  • mitigation: 29 posts
  • adaptation: 2 posts

One of those adaptation posts was a video of Dean Kamen on Colbert talking about water. (TLDW*, but I think it was probably about adaptation – I got as far as the bit where Colbert left the water running.)

The other was Roberts lecturing the journalistic community about how of course everyone who matters in the climate change community already agrees that adaptation is of great importance, and therefore talking about the importance of adaptation is not at all newsworthy, even though we don’t really talk about it all that much, but we all know it’s really important, so there’s really no need for the mainstream media to talk about it. Because pointing out this problem would be “banal”.

QED.

* too long, didn’t watch

Tail Wags Dog

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Just when you thought this whole adaptation-mitigation discussion could not get more absurd comes this document from California’s state government interagency Water-Energy Subgroup of the Climate Action Team (WET-CAT). California faces some potentially serious climate change-related water problems, and the new report suggests some useful approaches to reduce the state’s water consumption. The reason? Reduced water usage will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It’s frickin’ brilliant! We’ll take important steps toward adapting to climate change, while providing the necessary political cover by disguising it as a mitigation effort! I love these guys!

(h/t Aquafornia)

update: Down in the comments, John Mashey offers some helpful links to a number of adaptation strategies being pursued in California. He’s too polite to say it, but it suggests this was a cheap shot, and he’s probably right.

New Mexico’s Climate Change Initiative

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I’d like to offer up a very concrete example that illustrates the problem with the current dynamic in the political debate over the extent to which thinking about adaptation should be explicitly made a part of the political discussion about our societal response to climate change.

I wrote a story for the newspaper a year ago discussing the issue of adaptation in our national debate. In it, I considered the example of the New Mexico Climate Change Action Plan. The plan was buttressed by a series of reports discussing the problems climate change would pose for New Mexico, especially in terms of water supply. The recommended policy responses are exclusively about greenhouse gas mitigation. Here is how Jim Norton, one of the senior state officials involved in developing the plan, explained the approach in that February 2007 story:

[T]there was a fear, Norton said, that too much emphasis (on adaptation) “could sort of divert attention away from solving the problem of growing greenhouse gas emissions.”

This is not a rhetorical exercise. This is a major effort at the state government level, with the backing of a powerful politician, that has explicitly excluded adaptation from the discussion. It is not that there is no discussion about adaptation underway in New Mexico. But by this very explicit decision, the discussion of adaptation has been robbed of the benefit of a statewide discussion backed by the highest level of the state’s policymakers. The water community in New Mexico has been left to its own devices on this issue. No statewide meetings have been convened with the sanction of the governor. No major policy reports have been prepared discussing broad water-based policy initiatives to respond to climate change.

For a prominent advocate like David Roberts to argue that “just about everyone in the climate debate” favors “a mix of adaptation and mitigation” is to willfully ignore the way climate policy is actually playing out in this country.