A Change in the Wind
From an interview with Amory Lovins, who began as a photographer, and recounts how his first editor — David Brower — who pioneered the much-loved Sierra Club nature books, would edit photographers:
"Everyone knows the sky is there. So don't show it unless it's doing something interesting, and then show a lot of it."
Maybe something he learned from Ansel Adams?
Joel Achenbach is a super-popular writer for the Washington Post who happens to be interested in science-y developments such as climate change, asteroids, and disasters. He's also a man with a giant pen, or, perhaps these days, keyboard. He can write! So refreshing in science, may I say.
His latest thinking out loud, from this month:
The apocalypse will be budgeted. That is our trajectory, anyway: The
bureaucratization of disaster. That which cannot be stopped will still
be crammed, heroically, onto a spreadsheet. We like to tell ourselves
that we’re ready for the day when the eschatology hits the fan.A week after 19 firefighters died in their emergency shelters in Arizona, and just days after a Quebec town
was largely destroyed in an explosive train derailment, we’re
collectively steeled for the next calamity. Death and destruction are
carefully enumerated in the modern world. There were 18,200 weather
catastrophes (or “loss events”) worldwide between 1980 and 2012,
totaling $2.8 trillion in losses (in 2012 dollars), including
$885 billion in insured losses, according to the reinsurance giant
Munich Re. These disasters have killed 1,405,000 people. (Stalin,
apocryphally: “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions
is a statistic.”)At any given moment you can look at a NASA Web site
to see which asteroids have the potential to strike the Earth. There’s
one called 2007 VK184, for example, that’s about 425 feet in diameter.
It’s a minus-1.57 on the Palermo Scale and a 1 on the Torino Scale. What
does that mean? It means that it’s very unlikely to hit us when it
swings close in 2048, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.At some
level, we’re all doomsday preppers now. We’re part of a paradoxical
society that is, in the aggregate, wealthy and powerful, yet feels
vulnerable and insecure. The flip side of a cultural sense of
entitlement — to life, liberty, happiness and the freedom from accident
or misfortune — is the hurt and outrage when something goes terribly
wrong.Our civilization is increasingly like a fine-tuned sports
car that is very expensive to fix. It burns too much fuel. It’s
dangerous to drive. And when it’s not in the shop, we’re anxious about
the slightest dent or scratch.We have a sense of being constantly
on the verge of disaster or in the midst of one. If there’s not a
disaster in the news, wait a week. There are disasters that come with
warnings, and those that appear from nowhere. Bulletin: On Friday, an
engineer parked a train hauling crude oil
on a hill above Lac-Megantic, Quebec, and went to a hotel for the
night. For some reason, the air brakes failed. The unoccupied train
rolled for miles, back into town. When it derailed, the explosion
leveled much of the downtown, including a bar packed with late-night
partyers, and killed at least 15 people, with dozens more reportedly
missing. They never knew what hit them.Perhaps a modern
civilization always feels disaster-prone because we’re all so connected,
with live-streaming video from every part of the globe. There are no
faraway disasters anymore.So the question is: How much of this vulnerability is real, and how much is it some kind of mass hysteria?
We’ve got our best committees working on that right now.
Honestly — how many studies is that opening-with-metaphors worth, when it comes to putting our national situation into perspective? Ten? Twenty? A hundred?
Impossible to say…but note how he parses the language. This is how we build understanding: By knowing the concepts — such as "exposure" — on which our thoughts are routed. A map to the paths in our minds. And like any map, it has edges, perceptual flaws, and limits. But the inclusive nature of language allows us to see these limits instantly, and respond in kind, emotionally.
Our common language — you have to love it. Or, I do.
But meanwhile, our overheated world refuses to wait…
Yep, time to get back on the trail. Fortunately I have completed section B, from Warner Springs to i-10 at the San Gorgoinio Pass, so the Mountain Fire in the San Jacinto range is behind me.
NASA can see this fire from space:
I'll be mostly in the San Bernardino mountains, but descending to the desert. Section C. I've left some posts for your amusement. Big issue on this section is water. Wish me luck.
Will walk to the I-15, south of Palmdale. How SoCal, right? Everything is freeways. Good news is we're getting a monsoon, as forecasters predicted, and so temps should moderate a bit.
Movie conspiracies — such as Three Days of the Condor — always work until a brave victim stands up to the bad guys and brings them down, usually violently, sometimes by informing the NYTimes.
In real life, conspiracies usually fail because someone who is part of the plan screws up. (And this is why some of us have difficulty believing in elaborate conspiracies — what some call "the Bubba Factor.")
Classic example: On July 4th, perhaps appropriately, the NYTimes revealed that the U.S. Postal Service has been tracking all our snail mail for years. How did it happen? A non-violent bookstore owner, on an FBI list as an "eco-terrorist," found an odd handwritten note in his mail.
“Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out
on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. [Leslie James] Pickering’s name, address
and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word
“confidential” was highlighted in green.
[snip]
Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail
covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail
Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service
computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is
processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It
is not known how long the government saves the images.
In other words, someone inside the plot screwed up. Royally. Which inevitably revealed the plot Whether or not you support the tracking program, you cannot deny this much: No one was supposed to reveal it.
This is why conspiracies always fail in the end. Bubba.
Of course, some have a darker view — cue Ted Rall: 1984 is here: Yawn.
At the enormously helpful Hydraulic Fracturing conference put on by the American Groundwater Trust, State Senator Fran Pavley concluded her talk by alluding to the possibility that if California voters feel that nothing is being done to protect their groundwater, they may take matters into their own hands and vote for an initiative to regulate or ban fracking.
It's not a crazy idea, if you look at the polls. In June more than 70% of Californian's in a Los Angeles Times/USC poll said they supported a ban or strict regulation. Pavley's bill, SB 4, began as a moratorium two years ago, and over time morphed into a suite of comprehensive regulations (see below).
But when I asked Andrew Grinberg, of Clean Water Action, which advocates a halt to fracking until we know it's safe, about an initiative to ban it, he pointed out that the oil and gas industry wields the mightiest of checkbooks, in the legislature, and over the airwaves.
A campaign in Ohio to tax fracking provides an excellent example of his point. A conservative Republican governor proposed a tax on fracking, to raise money for depleted state coffers, and backed by 60% of voters polled in the state. And what happened?
When Ohio Gov. John Kasich pitched his budget a few months ago, he made a big deal about a “fracking tax” that would bring billions of dollars to the state in the coming years.
It was only fair, he said, for Ohioans to share in the bounty of the shale oil boom going on in their own backyard. Almost 60 percent of Ohioans agreed, telling pollsters they favored higher taxes on oil and gas drillers.
Despite that support, the tax never had a chance.
It was dead on arrival at Ohio’s House of Representatives a few weeks later.
If campaign contributions are any measure of influence, the oil and gas industry played an important part in the outcome.
An [Cincinnati] Enquirer analysis has found that 10 of the largest oil and natural gas companies and their main political action committee have pumped more than $660,000 into Ohio legislators’ campaign coffers since 2010.
They’ve given mostly to Republicans, who got 91.5 percent of oil and gas contributions, and most often to Republicans in Ohio’s House, who would later decide the fate of the fracking tax.
House Speaker Bill Batchelder, R-Medina, alone got more than $227,000 – about $1 of every $10 he raised – from oil and gas companies, PACs and individual donors with ties to the industry.
Batchelder’s connections to the industry and opposition to the tax are so strong that Kasich joked about it last month when asked when he might try again to push a fracking tax through the House.
“Well, I think we wait for Batchelder to retire,” he said.
In California, according to local representative Das Williams,, Pavley's bill has a chance, although it's far from a slam dunk. But nobody knows if Govenor Brown will sign it, and he's not saying.
Fran Pavley, the California state senator best known for authoring a global warming measure in our state in 2006, who represents much of Ventura County, was the first speaker at a two-day conference on hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) organized by the American Groundwater Trust in Agoura.
Pavley now is carrying SB 4, a comprehensive bill designed to regulate fracking in California. Hers is the only bill still standing on the issue in this year's legislative session. Here's what she said (in part)
I'm a former middle school teacher, which prepared me for work in the state legislature.
Water supply in California is critical, and that's why I got involved in this issue. From a legislative perspective, I'm concerned about the consequences and the impacts of any activity that jeopardizes the safety of the water supply in California. In 2011, after Gasland first came out, I sent a letter to DOGGR (the state agency that oversees the oil industry in California) asking some basic questions. Where does the water used in fracking come from? They weren't able to answer that. What chemicals were used? They had no requirement to track that. How is the wastewater disposed of? They had no record.
These are the concerns of the public, and this is the role of the government, to protect public safety, to protect the enviroment and our water supply. We must balance that against the role of petroleum. In a state of 28 million cars and trucks, we use a lot of this resource.
It's becoming obvious that the oil companies have not been able to quell the growing concern and skepticism about fracking. It's not just a few activists. I can go to into rooms of Rotary Clubs and Chamers of Commerce and I hear the same questions. People have their own perceptions, but everyone wants to make sure of the safety of our groundwater.
Building on this increased public awareness, I introduced SB 4, which is a broad comprehensive approach. I spent a year working collaboratively with administrators, oil companies, environmental groups, and local government putting this bill together. SB 4 creates transparency, accountability. The truth is that if we can't answer the basic questions, if there's a deep and broad problem with fracking, we want to know. The status quo is not acceptable, everyone agrees to that.
[Pavley discussed the details of the bill, which include notification of all residents surrounding sites to be fracked ahead of time, a list of chemicals used, what is being done with the wastewater, understandings between state agencies on how best to regulate air and water issues, a requirement to report where the water used to frack comes from, and research components.]
I look forward to having resolution this year, and even my old industry friends and colleagues know that they need to prove to the public that that there's not a problem with fracking and acidizing wells, or there will be an voter's initiative.
Folks I talked to at the conference expressed concern — will the bill survive? What if the oil companies try to kill it? Where is the Brown administration on the issue? A lot of Californians' hopes ride on SB 4.
Seems so simple when Jessica Hagy describes it:
May not be that easy, though. In a letter (quoted in this long review by James Fenton) the English poet Philip Larkin also had what I thought was an insightful comment, though perhaps it's obvious in retrospect:
The more sensitive you are to suffering the nicer person you are.
In a review of two new books about World War I, The Sleepwalkers and July 1914, Harold Evans (aka Sir Harry) notes the uselessness of playing "the blame game" when it comes to the start of the tragic war.
[Christopher] Clark declines to join [Sean] McMeekin in what he calls “the blame game,”
because there were so many participants. He argues that trying to fix
guilt on one leader or nation assumes that there must be a guilty party
and this, he maintains, distorts the history into a prosecutorial
narrative that misses the essentially multilateral nature of the
exchanges, while underplaying the ethnic and nationalistic ferment of a
region. “The outbreak of war in 1914,” he writes, “is not an Agatha
Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing
over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol.” Not having a
villain to boo is emotionally less satisfying, but Clark makes a cogent
case for the war as a tragedy, not a crime: in his telling there is a
smoking pistol in the hands of every major character.
One could say the same with climate. It's tempting to blame the US and other industrialized nations for our past emissions, or to blame China and India, who are building coal plants at a frightening rate, for emissions now.
The truth is simpler. We were sleepwalkers back in 1914, and we are sleepwalkers now.
For more on The Sleepwalkers, the book, here's an excellent interview.
Jody Freeman, a law professor who worked for two years for the Obama White House, explains the logic behind the President's plan to tighten emissions standards at existing power plants:
Even the president's…modest plan to set standards for power
plants is legally risky, especially with regard to existing plants. The
law calls for states to set these standards, subject to EPA approval.The most effective approach would be for the EPA to allow states
maximum flexibility. For example, states could comply with the standards
for power plants through emissions cuts that would come from energy
efficiency and renewable energy programs. These reductions could count
as credits, easing the cost of the program for power plants and
reinforcing steps the states have already taken to address climate
change.But the courts might balk at such an interpretation, which seems to
stretch the word "standard" into a broader emissions trading program.
And the EPA has never used this approach.The administration has been sued at every step of its greenhouse gas
program, and these new rules will be challenged too. In recent years,
courts have invalidated EPA pollution rules that offer novel
interpretations if they go beyond the law's literal text. As a result,
the most economically sensible policies run the greatest risk of being
struck down.The situation isn't ideal, but it's what happens when Congress sits
on the sidelines. The action shifts to the executive branch, and then to
the courts.
Freeman makes good points, but letter writers to the paper aren't happy, in a set of letters the paper bluntly calls Earth vs. Capitalism.
And in his own way, Toles describes the political scene, the insanity of which cannot be overstated:
Commentary on Obama's big climate speech of a couple of weeks ago — which Al Gore called the best speech ever given on the topic by a president, but which was completely eclipsed by the Supreme Court just hours later — was nonetheless fascinating. The McClatchy chain of newspapers focused in its lead on the negative, which is often the case with newspapers, and may be appropriate politcally speaking:
WASHINGTON —
President Barack Obama’s plan to curb climate change could transform
American energy, potentially dealing a blow to the coal-fired power
plants that supply much of the nation’s electricity but also pump
planet-warming gases into the atmosphere.
Obama rolled out his long-awaited plan in a speech
Tuesday that outlined broad goals but left the specifics to be worked
out over the coming months.“The question now is whether we will
have the courage to act before it is too late,” he said in a speech at
Georgetown University. “And how we answer will have a profound impact on
the world we leave behind, not just to you but to your children and
your grandchildren.”
In any case, the "war on coal" formulation seems to be accepted by much of the media, from FOX News on the right to Politico in the center of the beltway.
Kit Stolz