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Fear and environmentalism

For a long time I've had a post rattling around in my head about fear. I've had no luck writing the thing. But this great post by Alex, about a Cato Institute paper called "A False Sense of Insecurity" (PDF), finally spurred me to make the attempt. Bear with me.

What harms people in the U.S.?

Mainly heart disease and cancer, along with several other health ailments, accidents (mostly automobile), and suicide.

Homicide used to be among the top 15 killers, but it dropped off that list in 2003. Military attack on home soil hasn't happened since WWII. And terrorism? From the Cato paper:

AB 32 and Arnie’s ABC 32 (C is for “caps optional”)

As I said a couple of weeks ago after Arnie's eco-rendezvous with the British PM, the real measure of the governor's greenness will be in the passage of several bills being deliberated in Sacramento right now.

In the next ten days, assembly members will decide whether The Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32 [PDF])and the Clean Alternate Energy Act (Prop 87 [PDF]), among others, will arrive at Schwarzenegger's desk intact or as grossly watered-down versions. According to this story in the L.A. Times, business groups and even the California Chamber of Commerce are putting major pressure on the governor to reign in those legislators who would be so brash as to listen to their constituency (a poll conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California and released in mid-July indicated that 80% of likely voters support these climate change bills).

Schwarzenegger is indeed straddling a barbed fence: on the one hand, he can ill afford to alienate the businessmen who support his campaign, yet on the other, public opinion is strongly anti-global warming.

‘Tis the Season (for parlor games, Shrimp Louis, and watching the world go to hell on TV)

A few weeks ago I sat down to watch No Reservations, Anthony Bourdain's food and travel show. It was a surreal experience to watch him wend his way through Sweden knowing that he and his camera crew had recently been stranded in Beirut. Indeed, his August 21st show will be devoted to that experience. (He and his crew evacuated safely a few weeks ago.) You can read Bourdain's account of what went on there on Salon.

Meanwhile, back in Sweden, the show included all the sorts of segments one might expect: checking out a herd of reindeer, spending the night in a yurt-like structure somewhere near the Arctic Circle, and going out on the town to see musicians play at a club with a comely Swedish MTV host. (A great deal of the show is dedicated to Bourdain's oft-expressed hatred of Abba.) After he and the young host went clubbing they headed out in search of late-night street food.

At a perfectly normal-looking street-corner establishment they ordered something that Swedes apparently eat all the time (although none of my Swedish friends has ever mentioned it ...), namely a hot dog, shrimp salad, and mashed potatoes served together in some kind of wrap.

Albert, Martin, and … Ralph? Solving the real energy crisis

New crises demand new modes of thought.

In the early 20th century, scientists were baffled by the paradox that the speed of light never changes, even if the observer is rushing toward the light source. Einstein resolved the crisis by redefining time from a constant to a variable.

In the mid-20th Century, America was struggling to escape its centuries-old legacy of slavery and segregation. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement found us all a way forward, by redefining racism as an assault on the souls of whites as well as blacks.

Today, America's and the world's prodigal use of fossil fuels is creating twin crises: a climate crisis from emissions of heat-trapping pollution into the atmosphere, and a security crisis self-created by the industrial world's thirst for other people's oil.

We can solve both crises, but only if we relinquish deep-seated beliefs about fuels and energy. And the attitude we must fling overboard first is our sense of entitlement to cheap energy. We need to recognize that energy does not cost too much; in fact, it doesn't cost nearly enough. To preserve Earth's climate, and wrest political authority from the corporate oil barons and petrodollar sheiks, we must conserve fuel massively and permanently, starting now.

The United States, the biggest consumer of coal, oil, and gas by far, probably needs to cut back by 75% within just two decades.

Yet so long as energy is cheap it will never be conserved, except in token and totally inadequate amounts.

Energy-efficiency standards are often held out as the alternative to higher fuel prices. Standards have proven modestly valuable in some sectors, and going forward they can be a helpful supplement to price-based conservation.

But by themselves, standards will never come close to achieving the necessary reductions in energy usage. For every activity that is brought under efficiency standards, dozens of others will elude regulatory control, either through industry "gaming" or due to the creative unruliness of consumer capitalism, forever finding new ways to burn fuels.

(Cases in point: the "light truck" loophole to CAFE standards that spawned the SUV plague, and the advent of flights-by-the-hour air travel that consumes even more fuel per passenger.)

The lesson should be clear: whether the resource is muscles, water, fuel, or time, we humans squander what's plentiful and husband only what's dear.

To be sure, few people in public life have yet articulated the need to make energy expensive. One prominent advocate missing in action so far is Ralph Nader, the activist icon and two-time Green Party candidate for president.

Make ’em spend it all

The money is lining up against Prop 87 in California.

Prop 87 is a ballot initiative that would impose a small fee on oil drilling in the state. The fee is indexed to the price of oil, making it essentially a tax on oil company profits. Those wells that went in when oil was $25 a barrel? They still cost the same to run. If they were profitable then, they are goldmines now.

Over 10 years, Prop 87 will raise $4 billion. The money will go toward kicking our oil addiction.

<pSounds good. And it is good.

He’s everywhere!

Good interview with Joel Makower over on Treehugger. It's nice to hear someone explicitly involved with green business say this:

What's the biggest eco-myth out there?

That we can shop our way to environmental health.

An environmental toll to war

Today's New York Times details a $64 million U.N. pledge to help clean up "the worst environmenal disaster in Lebanese history," a huge 87-mile Mediterranean oil slick off the Lebanese and Syrian coast.

UNEP has a useful environmental impact page including photos and maps delineating the slick and damaged coastline. In recent years UNEP has gone in after conflicts to do environmental assessments. Reports on Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Palestinian Territories, etc. are online and detail the additional costs of war.

Hirsch on responding to peak oil

For peak oil geeks, the Hirsch Report is a document of near-Biblical significance. It was written by Robert Hirsch at the behest of the Department of Energy, and published in 2005. (You can read a summary here [PDF].)

It's disappointing, then, to hear what Hirsch personally recommends as a response to peak oil. Over at Transition Culture, Rob Hopkins reports on a talk by Hirsch at the (ongoing) International Peak Oil and Gas Conference in Pisa, Italy:

After the Garden

On Neil Young's fairly great Living With War Today site, check out the release of his new video, based on the song "After the Garden."

To me the song sounds like a raucous thirty-years-later revisioning of the enviro classic "Back to the Garden," by Young's old friend Joni Mitchell, but Neil says the song was inspired by An Inconvenient Truth.

Also on the site is the video of the very first run through from this year's raging "The Restless Consumer," the toughest, angriest song Young has recorded in years -- with the loudest guitar to prove it.

Ooh, Kinky

Faithful Grist List readers know that Kinky Friedman is running for governor of Texas. Wacky but true. And listen to this (sub):

Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman (I) released his energy plan yesterday, calling for the state to increase its renewable portfolio standard to 20 percent of its electricity usage by 2020.

"We have the resources to be self-sufficient. We have enormous solar, wind and biofuel capabilities. What we lack is leadership," Friedman said.

He also wants to create a Texas Dept. of Energy -- not a "traditional agency," he says, but a "bully pulpit" headed by, no shit, Willie Nelson.

Awesome.