Sadly, the thirteen-day smorgasbord of the 2010 Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital came to an end this Sunday.  

The festival ended with a bang: the world premiere of Carbon Nation, a film by Peter Byck and a (clearly) talented team.  This film had its genesis at the premiere of An Inconvenient Truth, with Byck and his colleagues committing themselves to do a film looking to solutions to the challenges that Global Warming represents.

Carbon Nation is  a documentary film about climate change SOLUTIONS.  Even if you doubt the severity of the impact of climate change or just  don’t buy it at all, this is still a compelling and relevant film that  illustrates how  SOLUTIONS to climate change also address other social,  economic and national security issues. We meet a host of entertaining  and endearing characters along the way.

Entertaining … endearing … and exceptional.

Those same words can be used for the film itself.

The Obama Administration seems to be pulling back, on front after front, in the face of economic challenges, sobering poll numbers, and steadfast Republican obstinacy.

Whether on health care, jobs promoting legislation, EPA regulation of pollutants, and/or energy/climate policy, the political powers that be within the Obama White House have determined that ‘tactical retreats’ toward even more incremental policy concepts is the path forward in an illusive search for bipartisanship policy making with an elusive (and recalcitrant) Republican minority.  Watering down already weakened (and inadequate) policy constructs and approaches is path toward increased problems, rather than solutions, on political, economic, and climate terms.  

Rather than retreat toward ever weaker policy concepts, President Obama would well serve the nation through a step back to consider the totality of the environment with then a strong and aggressive step forward with stronger proposals to seize the huge opportunities that lie before use with real solutions to our jobs, economic, health care, energy, and climate challenges.

A (sometimes too) calm of voice of sanity has been silenced before his time.  Martin Bosworth has passed away, a victim in the nation’s health care wars, the perfect patient for the health care system: he worked mightedly to keep himself healthy and away from doctors’ offices, a strategy that worked well when he was covered by insurance that failed when he took a risk with a new job in going without insurance. From Martin Bosworth’s Facebook Memorium page:

Veronica Martin always demonstrated this never ending positivity. I think this is what I liked best about him. He was always upbeat- and oftentimes it seemed that nothing could bring him down.

David Martin reminded me of Guthrie, Springsteen, and Dylan. A man who could tell you his story in such a way that you could not deny how it applied to you. It didn’t matter if he was telling you about a cause he felt strongly about or what he had for breakfast, if he saw your face every day or you just read his words on a… page, if you even agreed with him or not – There was no denying that his story WAS your story. I feel honored to have been able to have been part of his story, as well as have had him as part of mine.

And, so on …

What struck me about Martin, repeatedly, was his ability to take such a wide range of issues and communicate them with a clarity and structure that laid the issues out bluntly for any with a mind open enough to listen. While he did so on a plethora of issues, at times his clarity of thought and writing related to energy and climate issues simply stood out. There is a reason that I reached out to cross-post one of his pieces at GESN.  In Change in the Weather, Martin tackled ClimateGate with the perspective of a non-expert judging what logic and sensible thinking leads to.  And, he concluded:

Even if global warming isn’t our fault, it is our responsibility. The United States alone produces 220 to 230 million tons of garbage a year – 4.6 pounds per person. Most of this is not recycled, but simply dumped or buried in landfills, where it contaminates groundwater and produces health hazards for anyone living nearby. This is unquestionably our responsibility. We made this mess, and we must clean it up. And when it comes to global warming, the question must be asked, “Who is going to handle it?” Who else can address the issue of sea levels rising as the polar ice caps melt? Who else can come up with solutions to entire cultures being destroyed due to rapid climate change? The answer is the same. It’s up to us. We try to deny the existence of human-caused global warming so as to deny our part in destroying the planet – a concept so vast it renders people utterly helpless. But now’s not the time to be helpless, or to be swayed by naysayers who refuse to accept the truth right in front of their eyes. It’s a time to be bold, brave, and visionary, and step forward to accept our responsibility to clean up the planet and not let Nature suffer for our mistakes. If that’s not being personally responsible, what is?

As Lou Grinzo commented

Extremely well said, Martin.

I agree completely (which is something I normally make a point not to do with anyone, just on principle), and I also want to thank you not only for writing the piece that I was planning for tomorrow morning, but doing such an excellent job.

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls”, since, today, it is for us, our children, and our childrens’ children for whom the bells toll across Denmark.

As Danish police assaulted peaceful climate activists, as fossil-foolish deceivers call climate activists Hitler Youth, as non-governmental organizations accredited to the COP15 face lockouts, and youth activists sit in protest inside the building calling for a FAB (not fabulous, but Fair, Ambitious, and Binding) climate treaty, Danish church bells tolled.

Today, the bells tolled for us.

Danish church bells rang 350 times (as did many around the globe) in a call for the international community, a call on international leaders to set themselves (and all of us) on a path to not just slowing the growth of CO2 emissions, not just eventually stabilizing CO2 emissions at some higher number than today’s levels, but actually striking a path to getting us back under 350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2.

(Quick reminder: for a million+ years, the earth oscillated between 185 (massive ice ages) and 285 ppm (world climate in which human civilization developed). Today, we are at 387 and already seeing serious climate disruption chaos. Once, the scientific community thought that we could safely stabilize at 450 ppm (and, maybe 550 ppm). Current trajectory (BAU — business as usual) and we hit 950 ppm or so by the end of the century. There is nothing being seriously discussed by the ‘major’ powers in Copenhagen that would stabilize us below 550 ppm, let alone get us back below 350.)

Will the world’s leaders heed the calls for action?

Will the world’s leaders heed the island nations’ pleas for assistance?

Will the world’s leaders hear the tolling bells?

Will the wold’s leaders wonder for whom the bell tolls?

Clean Energy Jobs Go Swimming: $300 million per year for 10,000 jobs

This is part of a series of brief posts on ‘clean energy jobs‘ opportunities for sparking meaningful employment, quickly, in the United States.

Legislation is, they say, analogous to making sausage. Sometimes, in the mixing and mashing, seemingly well-intentioned and sensible options can create counter-productive situations and leave many valued goods on the table. One small example of this could open the door to creating employment, lowering costs for state & local governments (including educational institutions), improving ‘customer’ satisfaction, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

When it came to the stimulus package earlier this year, “swimming pools” were explicitly excluded from ARRA funding mechanisms.  While, amid serious economic stress and government investment to keep the economic from continuing in freefall, it might have seemed morally appropriate to do this, this restriction simply flies in the face of reality and good sense.

Earlier this year, columnist George Will sparked controversy with claims that global ice levels were the same as (if not greater than) 30 years earlier. This was part of George Will’s retread truthiness and deception in his widely syndicated columns falsely asserting that global warming is not happening.

Recent news from the Arctic makes me wonder whether George will revisit the topic from a somewhat different angle.

There are many, many serious problems out there.

And, there are real opportunities to be had from taking on those challenges in smart ways…

Sadly, too much attention is given to those who deceive about the challenges and distort the implications of the options before us.

Best-seller lists, the air waves, oped pages, and blog posts have been filled with Steven Levitt’s and Steven Dubner’s shallow, truthiness-laden Superfreakonomics.   The continued attention feeds on itself, as ignoring the deceptions and  the mediocre interviews booked due to the authors’ Super(freaky)star status has the problem of giving it credence due to non-truthful truthiness and misleading mediocrity on the critical issue of climate change science and other issues. There essentially innumerable works more worthy of our attention and engagement, even if we constrain ourselves simply to books also published in 2009.

Thus, after the fold, ten books published this year that are more worthy of your time and money that the shallow distortions from the Super Freaky Economists of Superfreakonomics.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd spoke at the Lowy Institute. Entitled Check Against Delivery, this is one of the strongest statements seen from a Head of Government of a ‘developed’ nation on climate change and, more specifically, contains very strong denunciation of those deniers and delayers and self-proclaimed “skeptics” who are obstructing movement to mitigate climate change in Australia … and, even more so, the United States.

The full speech is highly (HIGHLY) recommended reading.  This is one of those cases where each read drives one to differing ideas as to which part to quote, which item merits the most attention.

But, as is sometimes best, let us start with the end and what might be termed as a beginning toward strong governmental confrontation of those so ready to mislead and deceive:

My message to the climate change skeptics, to the big betters and the big risk takers is this:

You are betting our children’s future and the future of our grandchildren.

You are betting our jobs, our houses, our farms, our reefs, our economy and our future on an intuition – on a gut feeling; on a political prejudice you have about science.

That is too big a risk, too radical a departure from the basic conservative principles of public policy.

Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Janet – stop gambling with our future.

You’ve got to know when to fold ’em – and for the skeptics, that time has come.

The Government I lead will act.

Rudd has chosen a quite direct challenge to those fighting against action, ready and willing to disseminate falsehoods and deception in their efforts to guard their current fiscal and other interests even at the cost of creating grave risks for all humanity.

Professor Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Louis Block Professor in the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago Geosciences, has published An Open Letter to Steven Levitt, the nation’s Super Freakiest Economist.  To put it simply, Pierrehumbert owns Levitt.

By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics , but what has been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it would have been to get this stuff right. The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them. The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying) in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means think you are stupid. That makes the failure to do the thinking all the more disappointing.

Pierrehumbert then takes one specific point from the chapter to highlight this “failure to do the thinking”.  Pierrehumbert’s examination of the issue of whether solar cells’ low albedo (high absorption of solar energy & thus heat) makes it senseless to pursue solar power provides a tour de force examination of the basics of research (using the web) and how Levitt seems to have totally flubbed.

The point here is that really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you that the claim that the blackness of solar cells makes solar energy pointless is complete and utter nonsense. I don’t think you would have accepted such laziness and sloppiness in a term paper from one of your students, so why do you accept it from yourself? What does the failure to do such basic thinking with numbers say about the extent to which anything you write can be trusted? How do you think it reflects on the profession of economics when a member of that profession – somebody who that profession seems to esteem highly – publicly and noisily shows that he cannot be bothered to do simple arithmetic and elementary background reading. Not even for a subject of such paramount importance as global warming.

Rather than seeking to summarize or crib his work, let me simply emphasize that Pierrehumbert’s discussion is highly recommended reading — for the substance and style.