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A CLIMATE LIFEBOAT AT SEA
Or, When is an Urgency not Urgent?
By Dorothy Cutting
Opinion
Yesterday, I posted the article, “The Wrong Kind of Green” by Johann Hari, which brought to mind an unpublished piece I wrote a year ago, on January 27. I had drafted the short parable below when some of my climate activist friends and I, having come to the same conclusions as Dr. James Hansen and other respected climate scientists about the necessity of lowering carbon emissions quickly enough to prevent runaway global warming, were working to try to encourage other environmental NGO’s to take stronger positions on preventing dangerous climate change. We considered then, and still do, the global climate crisis as urgent. We were supporters of Bill McKibben’s 350.org Initiative and wanted recognition of it included in resolutions and petitions being circulated at the time.
We weren’t having much luck. Here’s a response from one of the NGO’s.
As the UNFCC’s contact organization for environmental NGO participation and input, our organization has no choice but to use IPCC science, the “official reality” or risk losing all credibility. Until recently this was not a problem, not until the empirical evidence showing rapid changes began flowing. Since 2005 or so our organization has been in the position of using IPCC science while knowing it is out of date but it won’t move to stronger-than-IPCC targets because it can’t. Our organization will wait for the next IPCC report and then work with those conclusions and recommendations simply because they form the rule-book every signatory country uses to negotiate the next agreement.
What does this mean for the “urgency movement” and groups like 350.org? I think they play a critical political and educational role. They are helping scientists like Hansen make their case. By public supporting the work of leading scientists they are 1) spreading the urgency message 2) supporting increases in government science funding and making it much harder for governments to freeze/reduce their budgets 3) emboldening other scientists to take bold public positions on urgency.
In addition to influencing general public opinion, the urgency movement can influence the work and findings of the IPCC and ultimately the UNFCC and the targets contained in its agreements. As you know, every word of every sentence in IPCC reports are the product of a grueling consensus process. The movement for stronger-than-IPCC targets can influence the politics around the writing, editing and consensus-seeking processes by bolstering progressive scientists, policy-makers and leaders who support a consensus shift to more urgent recommendations.
The urgency movement IS rewriting the rule book, but it takes time. And frankly, if humans haven’t enough time to wait for the next IPCC report, I’d say we’re done for.
As for our organization, the urgency movement does not need its endorsement to work effectively. It does need its own organizational structure for strategic planning and coordination. Does anything like this exist now? Are like-minded groups talking regularly?
I wrote at the time, “Well, I guess we’re ‘done for’ then,” and proceeded to write this little parable:
The ferry you have been traveling on has hit a rock and you are in the only lifeboat, crammed with passengers. Someone has put himself in charge, and as instructed, you’re rowing steadily toward a distant shore.
But now you notice that the lifeboat is leaking, and although you point this out to the captain, he tells you all to be calm and keep paddling. The passengers continue rowing, even though it now appears reaching land is impossible.
It gets worse. The boat begins to fill with water. So you ask, “Why don’t we try to fix the leak?”
You’re told, “This lifeboat was like this when we got into it. We can’t fix the leak, because it’s already leaking. We don’t want to lose credibility.
“Furthermore, you’re starting to sound like an alarmist. You must be part of the Urgency Movement. If you’re with that group, you should have got on a different lifeboat.”
The name of the lifeboat was Kyoto. It had been given a fresh coat of paint and re-named KyotoPlus, but it was the same leaky craft that first set off from Japan in 1997.
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I noted on that day a year ago that I took strong exception to the remark in the email that the urgency movement is “helping scientists like Hansen make their case.” Dr. Hansen has always based his case on science, not public opinion.
Something else in that email message bothered me, and I’ve been thinking about it this afternoon. It’s the sometimes exaggerated importance given to “credibility.” Admittedly, the need for a certain amount of credibility does exist in civilized society. You don’t show up an appointment with a president or prime minister in a bathing suit and mask and snorkel. Not unless you’re from the Maldives, I guess.
But while compromising your standards in dealing with misinformed, dishonest or incompetent politicians may make you look good to them, this won’t gain you much respect or credibility with your children and grandchildren, who will be forced to live with dangerous future climate change, exacerbated by the lack of meaningful action today. We should approach the great task before us with passion and concern – and not be afraid to show it.
I should add that the email message above came from a organization that has never, to my knowledge, received financial support from industries that do environmental harm. And you can see from reading it, that the writer was certainly well-intentioned.
Corporate Influence on Climate Change and Environmental NGO’s Exposed
Published on Saturday, March 6, 2010 by The Nation. Re-posted at CommonDreams.org
And, please do not miss the audio interview with Johann Hari and Christine MacDonald on DemocracyNow.org on March 9, 2010:
The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with World’s Worst Polluters
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The Wrong Kind of Green
by Johann Hari
Why did America’s leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests–and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as “unworkable” and “unrealistic,” as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?
At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted “brands” in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters–and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.
I have spent the past few years reporting on how global warming is remaking the map of the world. I have stood in half-dead villages on the coast of Bangladesh while families point to a distant place in the rising ocean and say, “Do you see that chimney sticking up? That’s where my house was… I had to [abandon it] six months ago.” I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea. I have stood on the borders of dried-out Darfur and heard refugees explain, “The water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left.”
While I witnessed these early stages of ecocide, I imagined that American green groups were on these people’s side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path–one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation.
Environmental groups used to be funded largely by their members and wealthy individual supporters. They had only one goal: to prevent environmental destruction. Their funds were small, but they played a crucial role in saving vast tracts of wilderness and in pushing into law strict rules forbidding air and water pollution. But Jay Hair–president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995–was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source of revenue: the worst polluters.
Hair found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world’s pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilizing the climate–the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that didn’t make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their wrongs and pay to preserve the environment. He began to suck millions from them, and in return his organization and others, like The Nature Conservancy (TNC), gave them awards for “environmental stewardship.”
Companies like Shell and British Petroleum (BP) were delighted. They saw it as valuable “reputation insurance”: every time they were criticized for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for being involved in the killing of dissidents who wanted oil funds to go to the local population, or an oil spill that had caused irreparable damage, they wheeled out their shiny green awards, purchased with “charitable” donations, to ward off the prospect of government regulation. At first, this behavior scandalized the environmental community. Hair was vehemently condemned as a sellout and a charlatan. But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled–so they, too, started to take the checks.
Christine MacDonald, an idealistic young environmentalist, discovered how deeply this cash had transformed these institutions when she started to work for Conservation International in 2006. She told me, “About a week or two after I started, I went to the big planning meeting of all the organization’s media teams, and they started talking about this supposedly great new project they were running with BP. But I had read in the newspaper the day before that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] had condemned BP for running the most polluting plant in the whole country…. But nobody in that meeting, or anywhere else in the organization, wanted to talk about it. It was a taboo. You weren’t supposed to ask if BP was really green. They were ‘helping’ us, and that was it.”
She soon began to see–as she explains in her whistleblowing book Green Inc.–how this behavior has pervaded almost all the mainstream green organizations. They take money, and in turn they offer praise, even when the money comes from the companies causing environmental devastation. To take just one example, when it was revealed that many of IKEA’s dining room sets were made from trees ripped from endangered forests, the World Wildlife Fund leapt to the company’s defense, saying–wrongly–that IKEA “can never guarantee” this won’t happen. Is it a coincidence that WWF is a “marketing partner” with IKEA, and takes cash from the company?
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Disturbing New Information on the Arctic Methane Bubbling to the Surface
In the past two days, there has been many breaking news stories published on “a large but overlooked source of methane gas escaping from permafrost underwater”. Here is one report from the National Science Foundation and a commentary by by Will Steffen at World Changing.com
From the NSF, March 4. (Click title for full story):
Methane Releases From Arctic Shelf May Be Much Larger and Faster Than Anticipated
The permafrost of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (an area of about 2 million kilometers squared) is more porous than previously thought. The ocean on top of it and the heat from the mantle below it warm it and make it perforated like Swiss cheese. This allows methane gas stored under it under pressure to burst into the atmosphere. The amount leaking from this locale is comparable to all the methane from the rest of the world's oceans put together. Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Credit: Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation
Methane Melt: The Most Important Story You Don’t Follow
Published March 5, 2010 at WorldChanging.com by Alex Steffen
We’ve written before about the danger that climate change will lead to the thawing and release of methane frozen on the ocean floor, and indeed the worrisome news that some scientists were observing patches of Arctic sea foaming with gas bubbles from “methane chimneys” rising from the sea floor.
Now, researchers in Alaska have found a similar process underway:
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Ecopsychology: A New Environmental Frontier
Guest post by West Coast Climate Equity Advisor Ray Grigg
Psychology has recently turned its attention to our relationship with nature. Deep within this complex subject lie hidden insights about ourselves that may help to explain our treatment of nature, reveal our innate dependence on nature, and provide us with the self-awareness we will need to exist harmoniously with nature. Indeed, this inward search may so important that the continued existence of civilization as we know it could depend as much on our understanding of the inner workings of our selves as the outer workings of our physical environment. This new frontier of study is called “ecopsychology”. And a useful place to define it is with the history of psychology itself.
Psychology began as “intrapersonal”, the study of what happens within any individual. It slowly expanded to examine “interpersonal” forces, the relationship between individuals. The expansion continued, examining the dynamics of individuals within families and groups, and then with the larger societal interactions that shape who we are and how we behave. As the next step in this expansion process, we are now considering our relationship with the planet itself and the natural systems that sustain its complex web of life. At this point, because we are an inseparable part of this web, psychology becomes ecopsychology (Daniel B. Smith, “Is There an Ecological Unconscious“, New York Times, Jan. 31/10).
The emergence of ecopsychology seems to have had its recent roots in the 1960s with the “counterculture” that was seeking an alternative to the “isolation and malaise infecting modern life” (Ibid.). This search for new meaning reacted against mindless materialism, seeking substance in human relationships and a return to nature – think “hippies”, “flower power”, communes and a “back-to-the-land” impulse.
In psychology, new “alternative” therapies were being tried. And an American professor of history, Theodore Roszak, published The Voice of Earth, an intellectual work that became a virtual “manifesto” for ecopsychology (Ibid.). “He criticized modern psychology for neglecting the primal bond between man and nature,” writes Daniel Smith in his New York Times piece. “Mainstream Western psychology,” notes Roszak, “has limited the definition of mental health to the interpersonal context of an urban industrial society. All that lies beyond the citified psyche has seemed of no human relevance – or perhaps too frightening to think about.” Ecopsychology is searching in this unexplored territory.
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