Free Environmental Books from the Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation, and Stanford University

I attended a session on Saturday where three rather prominent figures in the climate change discussion were discussing the process of environmental communication and reflecting on how they saw the Copenhagen Conference unfolding. Afterward, they each agreed to distribute a free copy of their books to the students in the room as well as personally autograph each one of them. I do not have time for a comprehensive post, but I can list the authors, books, and a brief write up:

Stephen A. Schneider, member of the 2007 IPCC group that won the Nobel Prize, is the author of Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battles to Save Earth’s Climate. Schneider is a professor of Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford University, a MacArthur Genious grant award winner, and “has been an adviser to every president since Nixon.” The book discusses Schneider’s experience as a science policy adviser and environmentalist from the political fighting as well as the academic battle’s he has faced. The book is very well done.

The Francis Beinecke and Bob Deans’ book Clean Energy, Common Sense: An American Call to Action on Global Climate Change, is intended to be this generation’s Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Beinecke is the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Deans is the federal communication director for the NRDC. The book is short (only 1o3 pages, 106 if you include acknowledgments and biographies), easy to read, yet very comprehensive.

Finally, Larry J. Schweiger’s book Last Chance: Preserving Life on Earth, makes the case for protecting the environment as a duty every generation has to the next. Schweiger is the president of the National Wildlife Federation.

— Adam

Geoengineering the Climate

There are two types of “geoengineering” that can be done to mitigate climate change, and in turn global warming:

1. Increase the earth’s albedo, which is a way of increasing the reflectivity of the atmosphere and the surface of the earth. Large volcanic eruptions do this, as the sulfur dioxide reflects light, and in turn heat, back into space. Right now, the polar ice caps serve as a massive mirror to solar radiation, but as they shrink, the earth becomes warmer…which starts a feedback loop of increased warming and even more shrinking of the ice caps.

2. Capture the  greenhouse gases, usually in the form of carbon-capture and storage (CCS). Technologies to doing anything referring to carbon sequestration like the “clean coal” power plants are designed to do just this, along with other devices like artificial trees meant to capture CO2 from the atmosphere.

The concept of geoengineering the planet to reduce global warming is a scary thought to me because, while I think we should take every effort to reduce emissions so we don’t have to resort to such extreme measures, it only treats the problem instead of preventing it. It also poses the risk of a country acting on its own (unilaterally) to combat climate change and possibly messing up the climate and atmosphere around their neighboring countries in the area of cloud seeding or pumping other things into the atmosphere. If one country decides it needs more rain, that means the water falling on its country is not falling on another one and thus depriving them of water they would otherwise have. If enough alteration of climate occurs, severe consequences will emerge. Many recent papers on geoengineering take into account mostly the moral/political aspects of the issue.

At dinner, some of the U of M students and myself joked about how geoengineering the planet is the equivalent of taking those pills that used to be sold to “trap the fat” in the food you eat. First of all, the pills do not work, and second, wouldn’t it be better to just exercise and undergo some behavioral changes(provided those are why you need to lose weight in the first place and not from a medical condition or disorder) than risk suffering side effects from pills.

Some articles on geoengineering covering both what it is precisely and what it means for the world if it were used:

Foreign Affairs Magazine

Science Daily

Technology Review by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Time Magazine discussing the book SuperFreakonomics and its discussion of geoengineering

The Guardian (UK) Article

— Adam

Climate Justice

In the light of the current economic crisis, many developed countries are trying to get out of their prior, binding deals to reach upcoming emissions targets. Or, as Naomi Klein put it, “They want to start from zero.” Much to their dismay, Klein says, “The world does not have a restart button.” (I will have a short video from the event on here later)

Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine  spoke at the Climate Justice themed side event I attended this morning, along with environmental lawyer and Eco Equity Director Tom Athanasiou, and three other leaders of regional environmental rights organizations from India, the Phillipines, and Ethiopia. The  “polluter pays principal” is something Klein believes poorer nations should use, and have used, to collect damages from the richer countries whose emissions are many times higher than those of the lesser developed countries. 

Climate change is a type of class warfare, according to Klein, because the “actions of the wealthy disporoportionately affect the poor.”

“20 percent of people live in rich countries and produce 75 percent of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Klein,. “While 75 percent of the effects of climate change affect (everyone else on Earth living in) poor countries.”

“Hurrican Katrina,” Klein says,”was a snapshot of climate aparteid.”

Klein, a Canadian, strongly criticised the Canadian government’s efforts to block a stronger Copenhagen resolution. Due to its exploitation of tar sands in Alberta, Canada’s CO2 emissions have risen 25.3 percent since 1990. 1990 is the benchline year set by the Kyoto Protocol that countries are supposed to strive to have their emissions below 1990 levels. She believes Canada’s actions are a far bigger environmental crime than the rising emissions of the United States because, unlike Canada, “the US at least didn’t sign it.”

 Klein also believes in the light of climate change, all of the once fractured “soft” rights movements of water, food, and environmentalism are now merging to form a much “harder” organization because climate change is the factor underpining everything.

– Adam Ellsworth

Adam Has Been Recruited by the Alliance for Climate Protection

I will be doing some reporting type work for the organization The Alliance for Climate Protection for the duration of my stay at the COP15 Conference, enabling me to use my communication skills before the whole world.

I would like for all of my friends who read this who have a webcam to record their response to one of these questions like these people did:

Why is taking action to address climate change important to you?

Why do our leaders need to take action today?

The Alliance is the organization started by Al Gore following An Inconvenient Truth, go here for more. It is going to be sweet.

-Adam

Recent Articles Everyone Should Read 1

I have not had much time to do lengthy entries, but I would really like to share some articles I have read and would like to do responses to:

Apocalypse Fatigue – Good article about recent polls that show fewer Americans believe in global warming today than in 2006, and some of the possible reasons for it. Author’s Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger cite the idea of “system justification theory” as a possible cause. Exerpt:

Why have Americans been so consistently supportive of action to address climate change yet so weakly committed? Why has two decades of education and advocacy about climate change had so little discernible impact on public opinion?…Combine these two psychological phenomena — a low sense of imminent threat (what psychologists call low-threat salience) and system justification — and what you get is public opinion that is highly resistant to education or persuasion.

Calls for economic sacrifice, major changes to our lifestyles, and the immorality of continuing “business as usual” — such as going on about the business of our daily lives in the face of looming ecological catastrophe — are almost tailor-made to trigger system justification among a substantial number of Americans.

As the World Waits on the U.S., a Sense of Deja Vu’ in Denmark – Bill McKibben’s newest article on how our increased understanding of climate change and its implications since the development of the Kyoto Protocol should be enough to  lead to the USA signing on to a binding agreement to mitigate climate change. However, this is looking unlikely, as “If you’re figuring the odds, there will more politicians than scientists on hand in Copenhagen.”

On Climate Data, Trends and Peer Review – On Monday, a significant amount of Dr. Vickery’s Environmental Communication class was spent discussing the nature of validity of scientific claims and how the peer review process needs to be re-examined to allow for greater transparency. In this blog entry, Andrew Revkin of Dot Earth covers exactly those topics.

Foreign Policy’s First Annual List of the 100 Top Global Thinkers – This list includes:

• IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri for “ending the debate over whether climate change matters”
• Nudge author’s Cass Sunstein and Roger Thaler for their work on ‘libertarian paternalism (here is a Grist article they link to explaining what a ‘nudge’ is)
• University of Indiana School of Public and Environmental Affairs Economist Elinor Ostrom for her work on improving how we look at the ‘tragedy of the commons’
• Climate Economist Nicholas Stern for his work to show the costs of climate action or inaction (“The Economics of Climate Change” American Economic Review journal article)
• Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel author and Alma College’s Robert D. Swanson Responsible Leadership Speaker series speaker Dr. Jared Diamond for “helping us understand how societies not only grow, but die.” His 2008 New York Times opinion piece “What’s Your Consumption Factor,” which discusses the implication of individuals living in western societies using 32-times more resources than those in lesser-developed societies.
• Rocky Mountain Institute founder Amory Lovins
• The End of Nature author, 350.org co-founder, and Middlebury College professor Bill McKibben, who I mentioned above
• The list also includes many economists, politicians, philosophers, rights activists, scientists, journalists, and more

– Adam Ellsworth