Articles by Adam Stein

Global warming could thaw relations between enviros and those who live closest to ‘the environment’

I wasn't particularly planning to continue on the culture war beat, but then, I wasn't expecting Orion Magazine to publish exactly the type of article of which I'd like to see more. In "One Nation Under Elvis," author and environmentalist Rebecca Solnit uses music -- specifically country music -- as a jumping off point to examine the cultural and class markers that divide a movement from itself.

It's become a bit trite to say that climate change isn't (or shouldn't be) a left-right issue. But political coalitions in the U.S. really did once look quite different than they do now. In the '30s, the progressive movement "saw farmers, loggers, fisheries workers, and miners as its central constituency along with longshoremen and factory workers." According to Solnit, this constituency frayed in the postwar period, and blasted apart in the 1960s:

Conventional wisdom declares all candidates equally green

The Wall Street Journal blogs from the ongoing ECO:nomics conference:

The conventional wisdom among the boys on the bus -- including us -- has been that there's essentially no difference among the three presidential contenders on climate-change policy.

Really? I know I live in a bubble, but ... really?

Since there are some rather obvious climate policy differences between the candidates, I'm taking this to mean one of several things:

1. Conventional wisdom relegates the apparent differences between the candidates to the level of rhetoric, not policy. McCain says nice things about nuclear; Obama hearts ethanol; Clinton wants utilities to behave. All of this is just, in the WSJ's words, so much "hot air."
2. Or maybe conventional wisdom holds that the policy differences are so hopelessly wonky as to be irrelevant. Broadly speaking, all three candidates want cap-and-trade, and that's what counts. Airy details around allowance allocations are of concern only to environmentalists and congresscritters.
3. Or maybe the conventional wisdom truly doesn't understand that the candidates differ in any meaningful way on climate policy.

None of these interpretations is particularly heartening, although at least there's a logic to No. 1 and 2. No. 3 is just depressing. In any case, bear in mind that the WSJ reporting on energy issues is generally quite good, so when these reporters casually toss off the opinion that the candidates are indistinguishable, you start to gain some insight into why this issue gets so little play.

(As an aside: I'm a fan of the recent trend in blogs by journalists for just this sort of thing. These sorts of offhand, loosely structured observations would rarely make it into a feature story, and they're damned interesting.)

What drives climate change denial?

David and I have apparently crossed blog streams (very dangerous; never do this), but I do want to expand a bit on this basic idea: climate change skepticism has little to do with science. Rather, it is an outgrowth of the culture war.

This point seems both totally obvious and strangely unremarked. At the risk of generalizing, environmentalists tend to view climate change denialism as a top-down, money-driven phenomenon. Energy producers, auto manufacturers, oil companies, and other interested parties court politicians, buy friendly scientists, and groom armies of lawyers, lobbyists, and op-ed writers to push their agenda. Or so the theory goes. And, of course, there's a lot of merit to that theory. You don't need a compass to follow the trail of money.

But the theory only goes so far. A shrinking but significant proportion of average American citizens reject the reality of climate change. The reasons for this are surely overdetermined -- scientific confusion, media spin, hopelessness in the face of a big problem, etc. -- but it's impossible to ignore the basic cultural resentment underlying everything from Planet Gore to the regular flow of blog comments and email I get from dedicated dead-enders.

What makes a good climate change plan?

'Tis the season for climate plan meta-analysis. I get asked a lot about the presidential candidates' environmental bona fides, which has led me to put together the following long, dense, and absolutely riveting primer on what to look for in a good climate change plan. These principles apply to cap-and-trade style programs, because that's what all the presidential candidates are proposing.

1. Go deep

The "cap" part of cap-and-trade refers to the emissions level mandated by the legislation. Good legislation considers both the short term and the long term.

The available science indicates we need an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. For a variety of reasons (CO2 is a long-lived pollutant; the initial cuts will be easiest, etc.) we should start cutting quickly. Twenty percent by 2020 is a reasonable interim target.

Use these figures as a benchmark, but don't obsess over them. A climate change plan that calls for an 87 percent cut is not necessarily better than one calling for an 84 percent cut. Our understanding of climate change will progress over the next several decades, and we'll adjust accordingly. The important thing for now is that the planned cuts are sufficiently deep and predictable to stimulate a cascade of infrastructure improvements.