Gristmill Scorecard

Posted by on

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

Posted by on

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

Posted by on

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.

Happy Birthday to the Keeling Curve

Posted by on

Charles Keeling’s Mauna Loa carbon dioxide record is a tour de force, one of the great works of science of the 20th century. It shows the inexorably rising levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. But its iconic status today derives from hypotheses confirmed and ideas well understood, things that were anything but certain when Keeling launched the effort. His son does a nice job with a 50th anniversary story in this week’s Science (sub. req.):

At the outset, the decision to place the instrument at Mauna Loa was a gamble. Existing measurements suggested that atmospheric CO2 concentrations varied widely depending on the place and time. Given this variability, could a meaningful record be recovered from an instrument parked in one location?

Roger Revelle had an alternative idea: campaigns involving ships and airplanes, repeated every decade or so, to look for trends. But Keeling won out, and it is worth thinking about how our understanding today might be different if Revelle’s approach had been used:

[A] CO2 record degraded to include only one point every decade or two loses its convincing message. Variations from survey to survey may be instrumental artifacts, or the apparent trend may be a random fluctuation.

Adaptation v. Mitigation, Episode XVI

Posted by on

David Roberts and Roger Pielke Jr. took another turn around the adaptation/mitigation block today. Roger argued, as he has for some time, that adaptation to the problems caused by climate change needs to be given the same due in policy discussions as attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“mitigation,” in the parlance of the field.)

David said that of course everyone agrees, and what’s all the fuss about anyway?

In short, the solutions he (Pielke) advocates are the same ones pushed by just about everyone in the climate debate: a mix of adaptation and mitigation.

Down in the comments, David allows as how most of what he calls the “green commentators” focus mostly on the greenhouse gas reduction part, but they really do believe in adaptation too, they’re just not talking so much about it. But they really do believe it, so what’s all the fuss about, anyway?

The fuss, David, is the problem posed by things like this report, which came across my desk today at work. It’s from NRDC, and looks at the problems posed by climate change in the western United States.

The report offers up a compelling litany of reasons why we’re fucked here in the west because of climate change: dwindling snowpack, seasonal runoff shifts, heat waves, more frequent droughts, etc. I turned with interest to Chapter 7, “Policy Conclusions and Recommendations.”

We must immediately adopt comprehensive policies that will reduce emissions of global warming pollutants.

Energy efficiency initiatives. Low-carbon transportation fuels. Carbon capture. Lieberman-Warner. All mitigation. But not one word about the societal changes we in the west will have to undertake to cope with the climate change already in the pipeline, no matter how successful we might be in curbing future greenhouse emissions.

This would be an unfair response to David’s argument if the NRDC report was an exception, but this is the rule. Over and over, I see climate change in the west used as an argument in favor of greenhouse gas reductions, and over and over I have seen the necessary political and policy discussions of what might be needed for adaptation either implicitly or explicitly off the table, most often because of a fear that such discussions will somehow sap the political will needed to change our energy habits.

I’m out here in arid New Mexico, boots on the ground trying to help my fellow citizens understand what we must do in response to climate change, and we’re sure as hell not getting any help thinking about the issue from David’s green commentators. If these people really believe, as David says, that “a mix of adaptation and mitigation” is needed, they sure have a funny way of showing it.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Cycling Edition

Posted by on

It is about the bike:

I can still remember that exquisite feeling of freedom when I was 10 years old and my friends and I would pack lunches, jump on our bikes and head off. It was the late 1960s, and the place was the distant edge of suburban Los Angeles.

We’d head off down 23rd Street into the orange groves, sneaking into an old barn and climbing up into the attic to eat our sandwiches.

From my grownup vantage point, it is clear we had not gone very far. But that is not the point. The bikes extended our range, and made us self-contained little units of freedom. We had our lunches in our backpacks and we were beholden to no one but our whims and the practical limitations of where our wheels would take us (as long as we got home by 5).

Cost of Diesel

Posted by on

Silver Fox asked a great question in the comments a couple of weeks ago:

I’m wondering why the price of diesel is higher than gasoline right now, when it was the other way around for so long?

TWIP to the rescue!

At winter’s end, we normally expect gasoline and diesel fuel prices to be converging, with gasoline prices then rising above diesel for the remainder of the summer. However, diesel fuel prices have continued to rise at a quicker pace than gasoline through the late winter/early spring period, and the diesel fuel premium over gasoline is now in the 70 cent per gallon range….

Factors in both gasoline and distillate are contributing to the current and projected pricing pattern. Weakness in the U.S. economy has led to softening gasoline demand. While gasoline prices have increased this winter due to surging crude oil prices, they have not risen as high as they would have if year-on-year gasoline demand growth was unfolding at normal rates.

On the other hand, demand for distillates in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East has continued to grow at a fast pace. In Europe, financial incentives continue to promote the transition from gasoline-powered to diesel-powered cars and light trucks, while a growing economy has lifted transportation sector consumption overall. Additionally, emissions standards for diesel fuel continue to tighten across Europe, adding to supply tightness as European refineries catch up to new specifications.

Phase Three: Profit!

Posted by on

I’m a little bit suspicious that we’ve got one of those “underpants gnomes” business models here, but whatever.  Keith Johnson reports on some moves by big-time financial players into the carbon market:

Merrill Lynch launched a new carbon-market index aimed at giving all sorts of investors access to the carbon markets. Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan said it would acquire ClimateCare, a British company that builds clean-energy projects in the developing world as a way to “offset” carbon emissions elsewhere.

I’m inclined to view this as a good thing.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

Posted by on

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the question of what a “journalist” actually is, and how what I do in print differs from what I do on line, and also how it differs from what others do on line who one might not traditionally think of as journalists, but who are doing things that have some similarities to what I do. (Yeah, Coco and Johnny, that means you.)

So here’s a case in point. First, in print, I’m all formal and serious about an Important Issue of the Day.  “Yeah, John, but what do you Really Think?” That’s where the elbows fly out and spit runs down my chin. Not a pretty sight.