Title: Wanted: a practical guide to saving the planet
earthmother - August 6, 2006 02:57 AM (GMT)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,20...00743_1,00.html
The Sunday Times August 06, 2006
Wanted: a practical guide to saving the warming planet
Andrew Sullivan
Another summer as hot as this one and Al Gore will become the next president of the United States. Yes, of course, one broiled July and sautéed August do not a global warming make. But it does concentrate the mind wonderfully on the claims that a hotter climate is already here, that it is closely related to fast-rising carbon dioxide levels and that this should not be a political but an empirical question.
The debate, of course, is not completely clear-cut and there have been legitimate arguments about whether what we are observing is due to man-made causes, solar activity, carbon emissions or natural cycles. There have been cogent arguments by Bjorn Lomborg, among others, that it would make more sense to invest in immediately tractable environmental issues such as clean drinking water in developing countries.
But there comes a point at which the data reaches a tipping point of credibility for even the most querulous sceptic. For me, that tipping point is the unexpected recent acceleration of global warming and the now-famous feedback loop in which warming can not just increase gradually, but swiftly — as carbon melts the polar ice-packs, decreases the amount of energy reflected back into space and so ratchets the cycle of warming much more dramatically.
The record heatwaves of the past decade are not flukes. Neither are the more extreme hurricanes and typhoons that we have been experiencing lately. The possibility that global warming will not be a smooth and gradual process, reversible at any point, but an unpredictable and volatile jolt upward renders previous, less alarmist cost-benefit analyses more and more beside the point.
Yes, I saw Gore’s persuasive movie, An Inconvenient Truth. But no, I’m not some sudden convert to environmentalism. Twenty-one years ago I worked at Margaret Thatcher’s then-favourite think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, and wrote a policy paper called Greening the Tories. It struck me then, as it has dawned on David Cameron two decades later, that the environment is not an inherently left-wing topic. It is, in many ways, a quintessentially conservative issue.
At the core of conservatism, after all, is the word “conserve”. The earth is something none of us can own or control. It is something far older than our limited minds can even imagine. Our task is therefore a modest one: of stewardship, the quintessential conservative occupation.
Conservatives do not seek to remake the world anew. We do not hope to impose upon it some abstract ideological “truth” or bring about some new age for humanity. We seek as conservatives merely to live up to our generational responsibility and to care for the inheritance we have in turn been given. This ecological vision is a Burkean one, which is why Toryism’s natural colour is as much green as blue.
Of all those likely to be alarmed by freakishly hot summers, potentially freezing futures and drastic events such as super-hurricanes, conservatives should surely be the most prominent. Conservatives tend to like things as they are and have been. They are discombobulated by change, which they always experience as, in some measure, loss.
And loss it is. When an old tree is uprooted by a storm, when an old church is razed or an old factory turned into loft apartment, we all sense that something has been lost — if not the actual thing then the attachments that people, past and present, have forged with it, the web of emotion and loyalty and fondness that makes a person’s and a neighbourhood’s life a coherent story.
Human beings live by narrative. We become sad when a familiar character disappears from a soap opera, or an acquaintance moves, or an institution becomes unrecognisable from what it once was. These little griefs are what build a conservative temperament. They interrupt our story, and our story is what makes sense of our lives. So we resist the interruption, and when we resist it we are conservatives.
Resisting massive climate change is resisting a huge disruption of what we have been and there are few endeavours more conservative than that. The sadness one feels at the destruction of, say, New Orleans, is a conservative emotion. There is also something about British patriotism that stirs most deeply when it is reminded of the physical beauty and fragility of the islands that generations have called home.
In the past, the conservative argument against environmentalism was that it was anti-entrepreneurial, that it inhibits economic growth, that it is synonymous with crude attempts by government to control industry. And there are indeed transactional costs for environmental improvements. Some companies went under because of restrictions on the emissions that gave us the hole in the ozone layer. But others thrived; and as long as government policy rests primarily on incentives for market innovation, rather than clumsy efforts to police pollution, disruption can be minimised.
We knew this 20 years ago, as my little pamphlet argued. Instead of crude limits on certain emissions, governments can create markets in pollution permits, allowing companies to buy and sell rights to pollute and so allow economic costs to be minimised. Or the government can tax petrol so the global market makes it more profitable for the private sector to develop new energy technologies more quickly.
In America, car emissions standards are beneath China’s. That is a scandal. Petrol, in real terms, is cheaper in the United States than in the past; and yet the Bush administration still will not touch the tax on it. Mercifully, the states are leaving Washington behind — witness the unlikely alliance last week between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tony Blair. And if the polls are correct, Congress may be in Democratic hands before too long. As Churchill once remarked, Americans always do the right thing . . . eventually. The question this time is whether “eventually” will be too late to avoid some of the more drastic environmental consequences of more inertia.
There is to my mind one central decision that Washington has to take: to tax petrol to a level that jolts the private sector into serious non-carbon-based energy investment. This is not an impossibility, as some assume. Many on the religious right — dedicated to what they see as moral stewardship of God’s creation — are joining hands with liberal activists to support such a move.
The dreaded neocons are also potential recruits. Weaning the West off oil which is increasingly controlled by Islamist terror regimes is a geo-strategic necessity. If you need a selling point, why not call an increase in petrol taxes a “war tax”? Maybe if Gore had been president in September 2001 we would already be seeing the benefits of such a posture.
What, after all, are the costs of action? Yes, the economy may take a hit from an increase in petrol prices. But the US economy has powered through a sharp increase in energy costs these past few years. If it can survive an increase that is largely financing Islamist terror, why could it not weather an increase that could innovate non-carbon energy resources?
Yes, China and India will be the biggest threats to the atmosphere in the next century. But if the West innovates new energy sources, China and India will adopt them — and buy them from us. That was the core of the call by Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, for emergency investment in non-carbon technology last week. But the public sector need not do this alone. There is money in green technology. Just as the private sector innovated anti-HIV drugs which then helped to save many in developing countries, so new energy sources can soon be adopted elsewhere.
This kind of green politics is not anti-human or impractical. It’s humane and pragmatic. It’s not ideological; it’s empirical and prudent. Far from violating conservatism’s philosophical core, concern for the world that we inherit is the central animating feature of Toryism at its most imaginative and serious.
We need government to unleash the private sector to protect the country and landscape we love, the seasons we remember, the places we call home. If that isn’t an essential conservative calling, what is?
The Sunday Times August 06, 2006
Wanted: a practical guide to saving the warming planet
Andrew Sullivan
Another summer as hot as this one and Al Gore will become the next president of the United States. Yes, of course, one broiled July and sautéed August do not a global warming make. But it does concentrate the mind wonderfully on the claims that a hotter climate is already here, that it is closely related to fast-rising carbon dioxide levels and that this should not be a political but an empirical question.
The debate, of course, is not completely clear-cut and there have been legitimate arguments about whether what we are observing is due to man-made causes, solar activity, carbon emissions or natural cycles. There have been cogent arguments by Bjorn Lomborg, among others, that it would make more sense to invest in immediately tractable environmental issues such as clean drinking water in developing countries.
But there comes a point at which the data reaches a tipping point of credibility for even the most querulous sceptic. For me, that tipping point is the unexpected recent acceleration of global warming and the now-famous feedback loop in which warming can not just increase gradually, but swiftly — as carbon melts the polar ice-packs, decreases the amount of energy reflected back into space and so ratchets the cycle of warming much more dramatically.
The record heatwaves of the past decade are not flukes. Neither are the more extreme hurricanes and typhoons that we have been experiencing lately. The possibility that global warming will not be a smooth and gradual process, reversible at any point, but an unpredictable and volatile jolt upward renders previous, less alarmist cost-benefit analyses more and more beside the point.
Yes, I saw Gore’s persuasive movie, An Inconvenient Truth. But no, I’m not some sudden convert to environmentalism. Twenty-one years ago I worked at Margaret Thatcher’s then-favourite think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, and wrote a policy paper called Greening the Tories. It struck me then, as it has dawned on David Cameron two decades later, that the environment is not an inherently left-wing topic. It is, in many ways, a quintessentially conservative issue.
At the core of conservatism, after all, is the word “conserve”. The earth is something none of us can own or control. It is something far older than our limited minds can even imagine. Our task is therefore a modest one: of stewardship, the quintessential conservative occupation.
Conservatives do not seek to remake the world anew. We do not hope to impose upon it some abstract ideological “truth” or bring about some new age for humanity. We seek as conservatives merely to live up to our generational responsibility and to care for the inheritance we have in turn been given. This ecological vision is a Burkean one, which is why Toryism’s natural colour is as much green as blue.
Of all those likely to be alarmed by freakishly hot summers, potentially freezing futures and drastic events such as super-hurricanes, conservatives should surely be the most prominent. Conservatives tend to like things as they are and have been. They are discombobulated by change, which they always experience as, in some measure, loss.
And loss it is. When an old tree is uprooted by a storm, when an old church is razed or an old factory turned into loft apartment, we all sense that something has been lost — if not the actual thing then the attachments that people, past and present, have forged with it, the web of emotion and loyalty and fondness that makes a person’s and a neighbourhood’s life a coherent story.
Human beings live by narrative. We become sad when a familiar character disappears from a soap opera, or an acquaintance moves, or an institution becomes unrecognisable from what it once was. These little griefs are what build a conservative temperament. They interrupt our story, and our story is what makes sense of our lives. So we resist the interruption, and when we resist it we are conservatives.
Resisting massive climate change is resisting a huge disruption of what we have been and there are few endeavours more conservative than that. The sadness one feels at the destruction of, say, New Orleans, is a conservative emotion. There is also something about British patriotism that stirs most deeply when it is reminded of the physical beauty and fragility of the islands that generations have called home.
In the past, the conservative argument against environmentalism was that it was anti-entrepreneurial, that it inhibits economic growth, that it is synonymous with crude attempts by government to control industry. And there are indeed transactional costs for environmental improvements. Some companies went under because of restrictions on the emissions that gave us the hole in the ozone layer. But others thrived; and as long as government policy rests primarily on incentives for market innovation, rather than clumsy efforts to police pollution, disruption can be minimised.
We knew this 20 years ago, as my little pamphlet argued. Instead of crude limits on certain emissions, governments can create markets in pollution permits, allowing companies to buy and sell rights to pollute and so allow economic costs to be minimised. Or the government can tax petrol so the global market makes it more profitable for the private sector to develop new energy technologies more quickly.
In America, car emissions standards are beneath China’s. That is a scandal. Petrol, in real terms, is cheaper in the United States than in the past; and yet the Bush administration still will not touch the tax on it. Mercifully, the states are leaving Washington behind — witness the unlikely alliance last week between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tony Blair. And if the polls are correct, Congress may be in Democratic hands before too long. As Churchill once remarked, Americans always do the right thing . . . eventually. The question this time is whether “eventually” will be too late to avoid some of the more drastic environmental consequences of more inertia.
There is to my mind one central decision that Washington has to take: to tax petrol to a level that jolts the private sector into serious non-carbon-based energy investment. This is not an impossibility, as some assume. Many on the religious right — dedicated to what they see as moral stewardship of God’s creation — are joining hands with liberal activists to support such a move.
The dreaded neocons are also potential recruits. Weaning the West off oil which is increasingly controlled by Islamist terror regimes is a geo-strategic necessity. If you need a selling point, why not call an increase in petrol taxes a “war tax”? Maybe if Gore had been president in September 2001 we would already be seeing the benefits of such a posture.
What, after all, are the costs of action? Yes, the economy may take a hit from an increase in petrol prices. But the US economy has powered through a sharp increase in energy costs these past few years. If it can survive an increase that is largely financing Islamist terror, why could it not weather an increase that could innovate non-carbon energy resources?
Yes, China and India will be the biggest threats to the atmosphere in the next century. But if the West innovates new energy sources, China and India will adopt them — and buy them from us. That was the core of the call by Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, for emergency investment in non-carbon technology last week. But the public sector need not do this alone. There is money in green technology. Just as the private sector innovated anti-HIV drugs which then helped to save many in developing countries, so new energy sources can soon be adopted elsewhere.
This kind of green politics is not anti-human or impractical. It’s humane and pragmatic. It’s not ideological; it’s empirical and prudent. Far from violating conservatism’s philosophical core, concern for the world that we inherit is the central animating feature of Toryism at its most imaginative and serious.
We need government to unleash the private sector to protect the country and landscape we love, the seasons we remember, the places we call home. If that isn’t an essential conservative calling, what is?
thisplanet - August 7, 2006 11:29 AM (GMT)
[QUOTE] What, after all, are the costs of action? Yes, the economy may take a hit from an increase in petrol prices. But the US economy has powered through a sharp increase in energy costs these past few years. If it can survive an increase that is largely financing Islamist terror, why could it not weather an increase that could innovate non-carbon energy resources?
[QUOTE]
Some really good thinking here in this article, thanks Earthmother.
We are paying how much for Bush's war in Iraq? There is money and then there is the cost of lives too. There are a number of different sacrifices each individual can make that are more sensible than sending young people to die in a country where the people have no idea of the value of democracy. Where democracy takes a back seat to hate, hate for Jews, Sunnis hating Shiites, Shiites hating Sunnis, hate for Kurds, and hate for Americans. Democracy? We might as well bring democracy to lions and zebras, wolves and rabbits.
I took a 237 mile trip last week and drove 55mph. With my 10 year old big car(w/V8) which I am unfortunately stuck with due to my small retirement pension, I got 30.7 miles per gallon. Driving 55mph is boring, I admit it but it is easier to live with than the guilt I feel for being wasteful and polluting irresponsibly.
After receivng a reply to my last letter, I just wrote another letter to my senator who informed me that they went ahead and voted to screw up the ANWR (Alaska) anyway even though I pleaded with him to read the National Geographic article. Eh, so I thanked him for his good work regarding public radio and tv and then went at him again to consider some alternatives like 55mph. I said in particular that given the choice between sending our servicemen to die so we can burn fuel like there was no tomorrow - or - driving 55mph ( I would still like driving fast, I'm not that old) and taking care of our environment, 55mph sounds like a sweet deal.
There are things each person can do that help or hinder but like the article says. [/QUOTE]What, after all, are the costs of action?[QUOTE]
Getting Gore as president, priceless.
[QUOTE]
Some really good thinking here in this article, thanks Earthmother.
We are paying how much for Bush's war in Iraq? There is money and then there is the cost of lives too. There are a number of different sacrifices each individual can make that are more sensible than sending young people to die in a country where the people have no idea of the value of democracy. Where democracy takes a back seat to hate, hate for Jews, Sunnis hating Shiites, Shiites hating Sunnis, hate for Kurds, and hate for Americans. Democracy? We might as well bring democracy to lions and zebras, wolves and rabbits.
I took a 237 mile trip last week and drove 55mph. With my 10 year old big car(w/V8) which I am unfortunately stuck with due to my small retirement pension, I got 30.7 miles per gallon. Driving 55mph is boring, I admit it but it is easier to live with than the guilt I feel for being wasteful and polluting irresponsibly.
After receivng a reply to my last letter, I just wrote another letter to my senator who informed me that they went ahead and voted to screw up the ANWR (Alaska) anyway even though I pleaded with him to read the National Geographic article. Eh, so I thanked him for his good work regarding public radio and tv and then went at him again to consider some alternatives like 55mph. I said in particular that given the choice between sending our servicemen to die so we can burn fuel like there was no tomorrow - or - driving 55mph ( I would still like driving fast, I'm not that old) and taking care of our environment, 55mph sounds like a sweet deal.
There are things each person can do that help or hinder but like the article says. [/QUOTE]What, after all, are the costs of action?[QUOTE]
Getting Gore as president, priceless.
earthmother - August 7, 2006 05:45 PM (GMT)
I haven't noticed anybody slowing down on the highways. They still drive as fast as ever, and for some reason today I was aware of what seemed like more than the usual number of Aviators, Navigators, Sequoias, etc. I should add that not one of them had a trailer hitch on the back, so these monsters, which some people say they NEED so they can tow a boat or a trailer, are being bought by these idiots just so they can have a BIG car and feel like King Shit on the highway. I have a minivan, which isn't a small car, but when I go nose-to-nose in the parking lot with one of these monsters, I can never believe how big they are.
When we were in Europe a couple of weeks ago, we rented a car. It was some model of Mercedes (Mer-chay-dehs, as the Italians say--love it!), and it was no big deal to rent because they're a dime a dozen over there. We rented a "Renault or similar," and we ended up with the Mer-chay-dehs. :D In any event, it was the perfect car. It was smaller than a small SUV, but it wasn't like a sedan, either. We used to have a Saturn coupe that was so low to the ground it felt like your ass was dragging on the highway when you drove. But this little car was higher up (easier for us older folk to get in and out of--ahem :rolleyes: ), room enough for the two kids in the back, and enough room for all our luggage. I can't really even describe what it looked like--kind of a cross between a small SUV and a sedan. Those are the kinds of cars they should market here (not necessarily Mercedes, they'd cost too much here, but it's a design that's common in Europe, and I don't know why it hasn't spread here). Also, it ran on diesel fuel, so between that and it being relatively small, the gas mileage was tremendous. These are the kinds of things Detroit needs to be looking into along with alternatives to gas-powered cars.
When we were in Europe a couple of weeks ago, we rented a car. It was some model of Mercedes (Mer-chay-dehs, as the Italians say--love it!), and it was no big deal to rent because they're a dime a dozen over there. We rented a "Renault or similar," and we ended up with the Mer-chay-dehs. :D In any event, it was the perfect car. It was smaller than a small SUV, but it wasn't like a sedan, either. We used to have a Saturn coupe that was so low to the ground it felt like your ass was dragging on the highway when you drove. But this little car was higher up (easier for us older folk to get in and out of--ahem :rolleyes: ), room enough for the two kids in the back, and enough room for all our luggage. I can't really even describe what it looked like--kind of a cross between a small SUV and a sedan. Those are the kinds of cars they should market here (not necessarily Mercedes, they'd cost too much here, but it's a design that's common in Europe, and I don't know why it hasn't spread here). Also, it ran on diesel fuel, so between that and it being relatively small, the gas mileage was tremendous. These are the kinds of things Detroit needs to be looking into along with alternatives to gas-powered cars.
thisplanet - August 8, 2006 12:32 PM (GMT)
| QUOTE |
| I haven't noticed anybody slowing down on the highways. |
Well I can't say I see any others driving 55mph either. Of course, if I am going 55mph I'm not going to catch up to them and visa versa. Besides I don't do what everyone else does if I don't feel it is right. A couple of the brighter aspects of driving 55 is everyone goes past you, especially the irritating ones, the slow down construction zones don't require slowing down most of the time, and you don't have to worry about getting a ticket. Anyway driving 55mph is my choice and just one of the things I can do to help with oil consumption and emmissions. I still feel like a creep driving a big car even if I can get 30.7 mile/gal.
| QUOTE |
| These are the kinds of things Detroit needs to be looking into along with alternatives to gas-powered cars. |
Tell Ford that at
www.jumpstartford.com
I got this from one of my new favorite organizations. I like there tactics and their results.
Rainforest Action Network http://www.ran.org/
I belong to alot and while I get a lot of action alert emails and legislative watch alert emails and constant requests for more donations for each cause/organization. So I give the minimum and fatter donations to my favorites when I can. I even tried contributing to this website but it sent me to a page where I did not see that I was specifically making a contribution to "Al Gore Support Center".
Here is a website to help you weed out the shady organizations.
http://www.charitynavigator.org/
By the way - I am a card carrying ACLU member now too.
HumanistRuth - December 6, 2007 07:34 PM (GMT)
I'm all for driving slower, but any practical approach has to address the underlying causes of our problems too. In the introduction of An Assault on Reason, Gore discusses how TV sabotages our capacity to reason. We need a practical approach to address this issue too. Let's pass laws regulating the frequency of editing effects which elicit the orienting response. We especially need to regulate the number of these tricks to trigger instinctive attention reflexes continuoulsy during scenes where the viewer is vicariously committing heinous crimes. I hate having my "eyeballs glued to the screen" to vicariously commit bloody mass murders.
I know of only one public group on the internet that takes this practical root cause seriously
I know of only one public group on the internet that takes this practical root cause seriously