Nordhaus and Shellenberger on environmentalism
New design of a parabolic trough solar collector makes the system more efficient.
Photo: Sandia National Laboratory
The challenges posed by climate change – rising sea level, heat waves, droughts, coastal flooding, severe weather, disease – require a radical rethinking of environmentalism.
That’s according to Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, who gained notoriety with their essay called “The Death of Environmentalism.”
They speak with Earth & Sky’s Jorge Salazar about their new book, Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.
The views expressed by Dr. Shellenberger and Dr. Nordhaus lead me to recommend the work of Dr. Jack Alpert of the Stanford Knowledge Integration Laboratory because it has not yet received the attention it deserves.
Basically, Dr. Alpert’s work calls out to the human community to immediately begin reversing the current trend of skyrocketing absolute global population numbers by implementing a program of rapid population decline. Rather than near exponential population expansion, he is advocating rapid population contraction.
What his work indicates is the need for a worldwide, “ONE CHILD PER FAMILY” initiative. He is not the only person to be advocating such a plan of action. Alan Weisman, the author of The World Without Us, has come to precisely the same conclusion.
Just for a moment, imagine that the a majority plus one of the human community accepted the idea that what we are doing now by adamantly advocating and relentlessly pursuing certain distinctly human overgrowth activities would eventually lead to the collapse of either human civilization or Earth’s ecology or both. Let us also suppose that this majority plus one agreed that the ethical thing to do was not to keep doing what we are doing now, but something different. If having multiple human offspring was unethical and having not more than one child per family was ethical, in part because such a program of action would have survival value for the human species, its global economy, other species and the integrity of Earth, then it seems to me that humanity would naturally and democratically move in a new direction, along another path, perhaps to a good enough future for our children and generations to come.
This perspective makes one thing crystal clear: if humankind chooses to follow the current primorse path of endless economic globalization, endless per human consumption and endless population expansion, a colossal wreckage of some kind is in offing.
In light of the great work being done by the contributors to the many discussions by the members of the Earth & Sky community, I would like to ask humbly that you turn your attention to a website, one I presented some time ago.
http://www.skil.org
Once there, I would like to suggest that you begin by reviewing what Jack calls SKIL Notes. There are now 45 of them and they are mercifully short. These Notes show a certain careful and skillful development of thinking about resolving THE PROBLEM that presents itself to humanity now as the proverbial ‘mother’ of all global challenges, I believe.
Always, with thanks,
Steve
As a psychologist, “reframing” is valued and something with which I am familiar. Take the following example of reframing” in the following link,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7078857.stm
“The growth in human population and rising consumption have exceeded the planet’s ability to support us, argues John Feeney. In this week’s Green Room, he says it is time to ring the alarm bells and take radical action in order to avert unspeakable consequences.
We humans face two problems of desperate importance. The first is our global ecological plight. The second is our difficulty acknowledging the first.
Despite increasing climate change coverage, environmental writers remain reluctant to discuss the full scope and severity of the global dilemma we’ve created. Many fear sounding alarmist, but there is an alarm to sound and the time for reticence is over.
We’ve outgrown the planet and need radical action to avert unspeakable consequences. This – by a huge margin – has become humanity’s greatest challenge…................... “
There will always be more problems for us if we do correct something. We tried for thousands of years to make our lives easier and yet our lives are not easier. After all these advancements we have brought more problems upon ourselves.
Dear Bob,
Let me take a moment to thank you for participating in this discussion. It is not an easy thing to come forward here with the realization that “we have brought more problems upon ourselves”. Your words focus our attention on a forbidding subject.
Not in my long lifetime did I ever expect to be confronted with a distinctly human-forced predicament like the one now appearing before humankind, the one dimly visible on the far horizon. Please forgive me for saying so, but it looks to me as if there exists a potentiality for humanity to soon come face to face with daunting global challenges, ones posed to the human community by the huge current scale and anticipated growth rate of ITS unbridled production, unrestrained consumption and unchecked propagation activities now overspreading the small, finite planetary home God has blessed us to inhabit.
Always, with thanks to you,
Steve
!!!! APOLOGY !!!!
Dear Young People,
In behalf of many people in my not-so-great generation of leading elders, I want to humbly apologize to our young people for the many expressions of willful ignorance that are foisted upon you in our time by too many of today’s leaders. It appears to me that at least one of the active exercises of The Willfully Ignorant among us is the use of clever rhetorical devices (e.g., outright lies, half-truths, spinning, disinformation, political posing, appeals to fantasy by presenting the illusory as if it was real) deployed by manipulative, irresponsible people who are apparently bereft of the capacity for intellectual honesty.
My generation has been called the Twisted Me Generation. “What’s in it for me’ is what matters most to most of us. What is going to be left for young people after we have devoured the lion’s share of Earth’s scarce resources is something we do NOT want to talk about.
Be reminded of the words of a powerful political leader of my generation who was asked about the future. His words are still ringing in my ears: “We’ll all be dead.” Of course, no one questions his statement. His words are absolutely true. That he has no vision for the future is pitiful.
He, I and our generation will be gone soon. What you see my generation doing to our planetary home now and what is to become of your generation (much less generations to come) after we are gone are apparently tabooed topics about which many too many leading elders among us are not willing to speak either openly or in an honest way.
Sincerely,
Steve
The views of Nordhaus and Shellenger are commendable, but if the last 37 years are any indication, it seems the message will be ignored. Does anyone remember Earth Day in 1970, ridiculed by detractors as just another festival for Hippies—like Woodstock? Does anyone remember the brilliant, albeit hockey, 1971 sci-fi film “Silent Running” with Bruce Dern and its poignant and eerily prescient message of the very last forests in the solar system? And finally, does anyone remember President Jimmy Carter’s warning about energy consumption during the oil embargo and the need to do exactly what Nordhaus and Shellenberger propose today 30 years later, only to be roundly ridiculed? It seems nothing has changed: Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” is being ridiculed by detractors through the nit-picking of its science.
As far as environmental messages are concerned, I think the last best hope to raise human consciousness come from two books: E.O Wilson’s “The Creation, An Appeal To Save Life On Earth,” and Ward and Brownlee’s “The Life And Death Of Planet Earth.” If these are ignored then I’m afraid Darwin’s Natural Selection will sooner or later strike again: we will become another extinct species and in a terrible irony Nature will be able to recover because it will win in the end despite our hubris.
Perhaps the Fundamentalists have the answer: turn your back on Nature and the Earth and this secular Life, and hope to last forever after death in a supernatural realm that will outlast the known Universe and any number of subsequent evolving universes!
Too many politicians, corporate CEOs and other powerbrokers in the global economy are ignominiously disregarding consistent and overwhelming scientific evidence of global warming and other pernicious forms of climate change. What is woefully inadequate, what is unconscionable, is the dearth of reasonable and sensible leadership by those who have assumed the responsibilities of positions of power in the political economy.
Business-as-usual that adamantly and relentlessly favors unbridled industrialization and unrestrained economic globalization could be approaching a point in history when the huge scale and rapid growth rate of endlessly expanding business activities are soon to become patently unsustainable on a relatively small, finite, noticeably frangible planet the size of Earth.
Perhaps now is the time for national leaders to acknowledge a nest of world problems, the reality of which most leaders remain in denial.
Given the probability that certain dimly visible but identifiable global problems can be expected to fall into the laps of our kids, it appears somehow not quite right both to willfully leave these problems unattended and, even more disturbing, to fail in the exercise of a DUTY TO WARN our children: a duty to warn them of potential dangers to life as we know it and to the integrity of Earth.
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
http://journals.aol.com/sesalmony/HumanandEnvironmentalHealth/
How is global warming deadly to us? It is gradual and we have more then enough time to adapt to our suroundings. Were not all gonna die all the sudden because of global warming. Why are are we worried about it anyway. For what reason do we waste money trying to guess upon the future. Our problem is that we use to many of the Earths resources and not that it is warming up. Besides how is warmth bad.
If we keep overpopulating Earth;if we keep conspicuously overconsuming limited resources; and if we keep endlessly expanding big-business activities and polluting the relatively small, evidently finite, noticeably frangible planet as we keep doing now, then a good enough future for our children cannot be assured, can it?
Are we in hot pursuit of the golden calf and coming to realize that nothing else matters, not really, but increasing our share of money and power here and now, come what may?
Are too many leaders of economic globalization suffering from what has been named a “nature deficit disorder?” Have many too many people in the developed world lost touch not only with the natural world but also with good science and the family of humanity? Who knows, perhaps people of the industrialized global big-business-culture have become jaded, utterly mesmerized and generally misdirected by their relentless pursuit of material wealth and power.
At its current scale and rate of growth, the continuous economic expansion we see today could be approaching a point in human history when unbridled increases of production capabilities, unchecked per human consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers overrun the limited natural resources and frangible ecosystem services upon which life as we know it utterly itself depends for its very existence.
It is precisely the unrestrained human “overgrowth” activities worldwide that need to change. Perhaps humankind is called upon to regulate the global growth of its numbers, its per capita consumption and its propagation so that we find a balanced relationship with nature and, consequently, give this marvelous planetary home the time it requires to renew itself.
Or we could choose to stay the current “business as usual” course by maximally increasing production capabilities and recklessly dissipating natural resources, thereby causing human numbers and economic globalization to continuously grow in a patently unsustainable way. Then conspicous over consumption, overproduction and overpopulation of the human species would commandeer remaining wilderness and original habitats, extinguish global biodiversity, degrade global ecosystems, dissipate natural resources and eventually ravage the planet.
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
Dear Steve,
I wanted to share with you my speech from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. Check AlGore.com for video of the event later today.
Thank you,
Al Gore
SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE
OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
DECEMBER 10, 2007
OSLO, NORWAY
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen.
I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.
Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life’s work, unfairly labeling him “The Merchant of Death” because of his invention – dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.
Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name.
Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken – if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose.
Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, “We must act.”
The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures – a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: “Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency – a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst – though not all – of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.
However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: “They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.”
So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.
As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong.
We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.
Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is “falling off a cliff.” One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.
Seven years from now.
In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half million people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another. Climate refugees have migrated into areas already inhabited by people with different cultures, religions, and traditions, increasing the potential for conflict. Stronger storms in the Pacific and Atlantic have threatened whole cities. Millions have been displaced by massive flooding in South Asia, Mexico, and 18 countries in Africa. As temperature extremes have increased, tens of thousands have lost their lives. We are recklessly burning and clearing our forests and driving more and more species into extinction. The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed.
We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel never intended that dynamite be used for waging war. He had hoped his invention would promote human progress. We shared that same worthy goal when we began burning massive quantities of coal, then oil and methane.
Even in Nobel’s time, there were a few warnings of the likely consequences. One of the very first winners of the Prize in chemistry worried that, “We are evaporating our coal mines into the air.” After performing 10,000 equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that the earth’s average temperature would increase by many degrees if we doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Seventy years later, my teacher, Roger Revelle, and his colleague, Dave Keeling, began to precisely document the increasing CO2 levels day by day.
But unlike most other forms of pollution, CO2 is invisible, tasteless, and odorless — which has helped keep the truth about what it is doing to our climate out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, the catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented – and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.
We also find it hard to imagine making the massive changes that are now necessary to solve the crisis. And when large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them. Yet as George Orwell reminds us: “Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
In the years since this prize was first awarded, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been radically transformed. And still, we have remained largely oblivious to the impact of our cumulative actions.
Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth’s climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: “Mutually assured destruction.”
More than two decades ago, scientists calculated that nuclear war could throw so much debris and smoke into the air that it would block life-giving sunlight from our atmosphere, causing a “nuclear winter.” Their eloquent warnings here in Oslo helped galvanize the world’s resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.
Now science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent “carbon summer.”
As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, “Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice.” Either, he notes, “would suffice.”
But neither need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the planet.
We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.
These were not comforting and misleading assurances that the threat was not real or imminent; that it would affect others but not ourselves; that ordinary life might be lived even in the presence of extraordinary threat; that Providence could be trusted to do for us what we would not do for ourselves.
No, these were calls to come to the defense of the common future. They were calls upon the courage, generosity and strength of entire peoples, citizens of every class and condition who were ready to stand against the threat once asked to do so. Our enemies in those times calculated that free people would not rise to the challenge; they were, of course, catastrophically wrong.
Now comes the threat of climate crisis – a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?
Mahatma Gandhi awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called “Satyagraha” – or “truth force.”
In every land, the truth – once known – has the power to set us free.
Truth also has the power to unite us and bridge the distance between “me” and “we,” creating the basis for common effort and shared responsibility.
There is an African proverb that says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We need to go far, quickly.
We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action. At the same time, we must ensure that in mobilizing globally, we do not invite the establishment of ideological conformity and a new lock-step “ism.”
That means adopting principles, values, laws, and treaties that release creativity and initiative at every level of society in multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously.
This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent in all humanity. The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun’s energy for pennies or invent an engine that’s carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.
When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us. The generation that defeated fascism throughout the world in the 1940s found, in rising to meet their awesome challenge, that they had gained the moral authority and long-term vision to launch the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and a new level of global cooperation and foresight that unified Europe and facilitated the emergence of democracy and prosperity in Germany, Japan, Italy and much of the world. One of their visionary leaders said, “It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship.”
In the last year of that war, you gave the Peace Prize to a man from my hometown of 2000 people, Carthage, Tennessee. Cordell Hull was described by Franklin Roosevelt as the “Father of the United Nations.” He was an inspiration and hero to my own father, who followed Hull in the Congress and the U.S. Senate and in his commitment to world peace and global cooperation.
My parents spoke often of Hull, always in tones of reverence and admiration. Eight weeks ago, when you announced this prize, the deepest emotion I felt was when I saw the headline in my hometown paper that simply noted I had won the same prize that Cordell Hull had won. In that moment, I knew what my father and mother would have felt were they alive.
Just as Hull’s generation found moral authority in rising to solve the world crisis caused by fascism, so too can we find our greatest opportunity in rising to solve the climate crisis. In the Kanji characters used in both Chinese and Japanese, “crisis” is written with two symbols, the first meaning “danger,” the second “opportunity.” By facing and removing the danger of the climate crisis, we have the opportunity to gain the moral authority and vision to vastly increase our own capacity to solve other crises that have been too long ignored.
We must understand the connections between the climate crisis and the afflictions of poverty, hunger, HIV-Aids and other pandemics. As these problems are linked, so too must be their solutions. We must begin by making the common rescue of the global environment the central organizing principle of the world community.
Fifteen years ago, I made that case at the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro. Ten years ago, I presented it in Kyoto. This week, I will urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty that establishes a universal global cap on emissions and uses the market in emissions trading to efficiently allocate resources to the most effective opportunities for speedy reductions.
This treaty should be ratified and brought into effect everywhere in the world by the beginning of 2010 – two years sooner than presently contemplated. The pace of our response must be accelerated to match the accelerating pace of the crisis itself.
Heads of state should meet early next year to review what was accomplished in Bali and take personal responsibility for addressing this crisis. It is not unreasonable to ask, given the gravity of our circumstances, that these heads of state meet every three months until the treaty is completed.
We also need a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store carbon dioxide.
And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon — with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution. This is by far the most effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis.
The world needs an alliance – especially of those nations that weigh heaviest in the scales where earth is in the balance. I salute Europe and Japan for the steps they’ve taken in recent years to meet the challenge, and the new government in Australia, which has made solving the climate crisis its first priority.
But the outcome will be decisively influenced by two nations that are now failing to do enough: the United States and China. While India is also growing fast in importance, it should be absolutely clear that it is the two largest CO2 emitters — most of all, my own country –– that will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act.
Both countries should stop using the other’s behavior as an excuse for stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment.
These are the last few years of decision, but they can be the first years of a bright and hopeful future if we do what we must. No one should believe a solution will be found without effort, without cost, without change. Let us acknowledge that if we wish to redeem squandered time and speak again with moral authority, then these are the hard truths:
The way ahead is difficult. The outer boundary of what we currently believe is feasible is still far short of what we actually must do. Moreover, between here and there, across the unknown, falls the shadow.
That is just another way of saying that we have to expand the boundaries of what is possible. In the words of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, “Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.”
We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures – each a palpable possibility – and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.
The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, “One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door.”
The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: “What were you thinking; why didn’t you act?”
Or they will ask instead: “How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?”
We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.
So let us renew it, and say together: “We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act.”
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Finally, we have some worthy leaders, ones capable of intellectual honesty and courage.
Thanks are due Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri for providing uncommon and desperately needed leadership.
Until just now, the world has been dominated by a tiny minority of wealth accumulating and power-driven leaders. I am able to suppose for the first time that these self-proclaimed masters of the universe will shortly stand out as an ominously looming threat to humanity, every bit as serious a threat to human wellbeing as global warming. One day the threat they present to humanity and the integrity of Earth will be given the attention it deserves. Sometime thereafter, this threat will be acknowledged and addressed in an intellectually honest and courageous way. Then the threat posed to human and environmental health by a small number of people advocating evermore patently unsustainable economic growth, come what may, will be confronted and overcome.
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
We are not hearing much these days from the “captains” of economic globalization, the self-proclaimed “masters of the universe” like the Bilderbergers and members of the Trilateral Commission. But, then, for them silence is golden.
In a remarkably timely fashion, it appears we will hear something from representatives of the masters of the universe afterall. This time the message comes to us from a group of denialists and naysayers who are evidently being forced by circumstances in Bali to make a “have the courage to do nothing defense” of their predominant position in the world as a way of defending their non-negotiable, only right way to live.
Perhaps this duplicitous rear-guard action against necessary change that is perpetrated by representatives of the wealthy and powerful, and others who find their riches, power and privileges to be all that really matter, come what may for our children, biodiversity, the environment, for the integrity of Earth as fit place for human habitation, and for the future of life as we know it.
Hear ye, hear ye, words from representatives of the “Masters of the Universe” in my not-so-great “What’s in it for ME” generation of elders.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/925
United Nation Climate change, Bali
Skeptical Scientists Urge World To ‘Have the Courage to Do Nothing’ At UN Conference
By EPW Blog Tuesday, December 11, 2007
BALI, Indonesia – An international team of scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore, descended on Bali this week to urge the world to “have the courage to do nothing” in response to UN demands.
Lord Christopher Monckton, a UK climate researcher, had a blunt message for UN climate conference participants on Monday.
“Climate change is a non problem. The right answer to a non problem is to have the courage to do nothing,” Monckton told participants.
“The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,)” Monckton added. (LINK)
Monckton also noted that the UN has not been overly welcoming to the group of skeptical scientists.
“UN organizers refused my credentials and appeared desperate that I should not come to this conference. They have also made several attempts to interfere with our public meetings,” Monckton explained.
“It is a circus here,” agreed Australian scientist Dr. David Evans. Evans is making scientific presentations to delegates and journalists at the conference revealing the latest peer-reviewed studies that refute the UN’s climate claims.
“This is the most lavish conference I have ever been to, but I am only a scientist and I actually only go to the science conferences,” Evans said, noting the luxury of the tropical resort. (Note: An analysis by Bloomberg News on December 6 found: “Government officials and activists flying to Bali, Indonesia, for the United Nations meeting on climate change will cause as much pollution as 20,000 cars in a year.” – LINK)
Evans, a mathematician who did carbon accounting for the Australian government, recently converted to a skeptical scientist about man-made global warming after reviewing the new scientific studies. (LINK)
“We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don’t cause global warming. We have the missing [human] signature [in the atmosphere], we have the IPCC models being wrong and we have the lack of a temperature going up the last 5 years,” Evans said in an interview with the Inhofe EPW Press Blog. Evans authored a November 28 2007 paper “Carbon Emissions Don’t Cause Global Warming.” (LINK)
Evans touted a new peer-reviewed study by a team of scientists appearing in the December 2007 issue of the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society which found “Warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence.” (LINK)
“Most of the people here have jobs that are very well paid and they depend on the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. They are not going to be very receptive to the idea that well actually the science has gone off in a different direction,” Evans explained.
[Inhofe EPW Press Blog Note: Several other recent peer-reviewed studies have cast considerable doubt about man-made global warming fears. For most recent sampling see: New Peer-Reviewed Study finds ‘Solar changes significantly alter climate’ (11-3-07) (LINK) & “New Peer-Reviewed Study Halves the Global Average Surface Temperature Trend 1980 – 2002” (LINK) & New Study finds Medieval Warm Period ‘0.3C Warmer than 20th Century’ (LINK) For a more comprehensive sampling of peer-reviewed studies earlier in 2007 see “New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears” LINK ]
‘IPCC is unsound’
UN IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports since its inception going back to 1990, had a clear message to UN participants.
“There is no evidence that carbon dioxide increases are having any affect whatsoever on the climate,” Gray, who shares in the Nobel Prize awarded to the UN IPCC, explained. (LINK)
“All the science of the IPCC is unsound. I have come to this conclusion after a very long time. If you examine every single proposition of the IPCC thoroughly, you find that the science somewhere fails,” Gray, who wrote the book “The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of “Climate Change 2001,” said.
“It fails not only from the data, but it fails in the statistics, and the mathematics,” he added.
‘Dangerous time for science’
Evans, who believes the UN has heavily politicized science, warned there is going to be a “dangerous time for science” ahead.
“We have a split here. Official science driven by politics, money and power, goes in one direction. Unofficial science, which is more determined by what is actually happening with the [climate] data, has now started to move off in a different direction” away from fears of a man-made climate crisis, Evans explained.
“The two are splitting. This is always a dangerous time for science and a dangerous time for politics. Historically science always wins these battles but there can be a lot of causalities and a lot of time in between,” he concluded.
Carbon trading ‘fraud?’
New Zealander Bryan Leland of the International Climate Science Coalition warned participants that all the UN promoted discussions of “carbon trading” should be viewed with suspicion.
“I am an energy engineer and I know something about electricity trading and I know enough about carbon trading and the inaccuracies of carbon trading to know that carbon trading is more about fraud than it is about anything else,” Leland said.
“We should probably ask why we have 10,000 people here [in Bali] in a futile attempt to ‘solve’ a [climate] problem that probably does not exist,” Leland added.
‘Simply not work’
Owen McShane, the head of the International Climate Science Coalition, also worried that a UN promoted global approach to economics would mean financial ruin for many nations.
“I don’t think this conference can actually achieve anything because it seems to be saying that we are going to draw up one protocol for every country in the world to follow,” McShane said. (LINK)
“Now these countries and these economies are so diverse that trying to presume you can put all of these feet into one shoe will simply not work,” McShane explained.
“Having the same set of rules apply to everybody will blow some economies apart totally while others will be unscathed and I wouldn’t be surprised if the ones who remain unscathed are the ones who write the rules,” he added.
‘Nothing happening at this conference’
Professor Dr. William Alexander, emeritus of the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, warned poor nations and their residents that the UN policies could mean more poverty and thus more death.
“My message is specifically for the poor people of Africa. And there is nothing happening at this conference that can help them one little bit but there is the potential that they could be damaged,” Alexander said. (LINK)
“The government and people of Africa will have their attention drawn to reducing climate change instead of reducing poverty,” Alexander added.
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
Three humble proposals…..
Hello E & S community,
Thanks for your contributions and for the uncommonly constructive way in which most of you participate.
Perhaps some of you will be so kind and respond to three following proposals.
The first proposal is an idea that has been deeply developed by Dr. Jack Alpert of the Stanford Knowledge Integration Laboratory (SKIL), .
According to his calculations, if we agreed, as one family of humanity, to begin now to implement VOLUNTARILY a “One Child Per Family” policy, it would be possible in the coming 50 years to rapidly decrease absolute global human population numbers to 1.5 billion rather than have human numbers worldwide grow to a fully anticipated 9.2 billion people by 2050 (UN Population Division projections). Although there is much more to say about this proposal, I am going to immediately pass on to the matter of modifying the global economy: the second proposal.
There are remarkably well-developed ideas by Aubrey Meyer of the Global Commons Institute in England regarding a plan for the “contraction and convergence” of the global economy, as a way of protecting the Earth from the reckless and relentless expansion of economic globalization that could soon become patently unsustainable on a relatively small planet with Earth’s limited resources.
It goes without saying that the Earth does not possess enough resources to sustain the human species, if every human being on the planet consumes resources as voraciously as people in the ‘developed’ world do now. My third proposal calls for a plan to be formulated that redistributes resources and caps excessive per-capita over-consumption.
I suppose what I am trying to point out is this: current per human consumption in the ‘developed’ world, unbridled increase of human industrial/production capabilities in the ‘developing’ world, and skyrocketing human numbers in the ‘undeveloped’ world cannot be sustained much longer by the limited natural resources and frangible ecosystem services of Earth.
As many people at the Bali Climate Change Conference have made clear to us, there is plenty of blame to go around for the distinctly human-forced predicament in which humanity finds itself in these early years of Century XXI. At least to me, it appears that all of us in the human community are implicated in this situation, even though no one among us is responsible for our circumstances. Collective thought and action is anticipated; sharing resources more sensibly and cooperating with one another is in the offing, I suppose.
With warm regards,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
Is it possible that the standard for determining what is real and true in our culture is this: whatsoever is widely shared, consensually validated and judged to be ecomonically expedient, politically convenient, socially agreeable and religiously tolerated is true and real.
Evidently good science is ignored and silence prevails when reasonable and sensible evidence comes into conflict with what culture prescribes as real and true. Perhaps good science does present culture with evidence of inconvenient truths.
US leadership in Bali appears to have been full of ideological intensity as well as devoid of humanitarian values and honorable conviction.
These intransigent leaders at the Climate Change Conference evidently became so isolated from the family of humanity at the end of the last day of meetings that their unilateral, morally offensive “rear-guard action” in defense of selfish, irresponsible national aims crumbled, as is common with such unsavory efforts.
It seems logical to me a true environmentalist woulod use as few resources as possible to live! They wouldn’t live in a house that uses 10 times ether electricity of a normal house or jet around the world in a private jet.
The Lysistrata Strategy
by Kelpie Wilson
Wild Earth, Winter 1997/98
Can you imagine what life would be like if everything weren’t always getting more crowded, dirtier and poorer every day with the threat of war and ecological collapse hanging over our heads? The root cause of our global impoverishment is growth. Growth – both the economic kind and the population kind, makes every ecological and social problem worse and more unmanageable. Growth may bring vast wealth to a few, for a limited amount of time, but the legacy of growth is topsoil loss, over-fished oceans, deforestation, global warming, species extinction, pollution, disease, starvation and war. The world needs a strategy to stop growing and start living sustainably. We now have six billion people and may grow to twice that number in the next few generations if we don’t do something. Growth not only needs to be stopped, it needs to be reversed, for a time at least. Some ecologists think that two billion is a reasonable number for the Earth to support in perpetuity.
The good news is that we could humanely reach an optimum global population of two billion in only three generations. When my parents were born, there were only two billion people in the world. If every woman on earth today had no more than one child, the number of people of reproductive age would halve in the next generation. By the end of another two generations, we could achieve our goal of two billion. Think of what a bright new day it would be for those two billion people and the other species they share the planet with. There would be enough of everything, including clean air, clean water and wilderness. War would become a thing of the past and the human war against nature would end.
If we had the will, we women could put the brakes on growth by simply stopping up our wombs for a while. With the planet headed toward ecological collapse, someone’s got to take charge. Could women do it? The only precedent I can think of is a literary one: the classical Greek comedy Lysistrata, by Aristophanes.
Lysistrata — whose name means “she who disbands armies” — organizes Athenian and Spartan women in a sex strike in order to force their men to abandon the war between the two city-states. The women are tired of losing sons and husbands. Lysistrata’s bold plan works because the men, befuddled by horniness and tripping over erections, give in and decide they prefer to make love, not war. The play ends in a celebration of pan-Hellenism with Athenians and Spartans singing of their common battles against the Persians who are “numberless as the sand on the shores.”
By 300 BC, when Lysistrata was written, Greece had supported a civilization with an intensive agriculture and high population density for more than a thousand years. Greek soils were thin and eroded easily. The land was not as productive as it once was, and the cities were overcrowded. Athens and Sparta made peace several times during the Classical period, but war always broke out again because the underlying causes were never addressed. Lysistrata may have been based on an actual revolt by Athenian women against these debilitating Peloponnesian wars.
If Lysistrata had been a real person, what would she have had to do, to end war permanently? First, she would have had to convince Greek women to continue their reproductive strike long enough to reduce population pressure on the crowded and ecologically depleted peninsula. Then a new era of plenty might have encouraged Athens and Sparta to live in peace. Ultimately, to really end war, a Lysistrata would have needed to organize the enemy Persian women in a sex strike as well.
The Lysistrata strategy then, requires women to take control of the means of reproduction in order to reduce population to ecologically sustainable levels. Surprisingly, the Lysistrata strategy is not a new idea. We know that hunter-gatherers practiced population limitation as an important part of their overall survival strategy for thousands of years. It was only when agriculture opened up the possibility of food storage during lean times that populations could afford to grow.
Once we learned how to grow, it seems we can’t learn to stop. It’s like eating potato chips. You can’t eat just one and it’s awfully hard to stop before you’ve consumed the whole bag. The Lysistrata strategy challenges us to stop at just one — one child that is.
What I’m calling “the potato chip factor,” really is related to food. Studies of modern hunter gatherers like the !Kung people of the Kalahari, show that the average woman bears four children. Only two survive to reproduce, keeping numbers stable. A long period of nursing serves to suppress ovulation so that pregnancies are spaced by four to five years. Called lactational amenorrhea, this is the critical factor in keeping birth rates down, but it exists only under certain conditions: nursing must be constant and regular, and a woman’s body fat percentage must be low. When agricultural grains are substituted for grubs, leaves and nuts, body fat increases and natural contraception is destroyed.
Intensive, grain-based agriculture had another effect besides increasing women’s body fat; it also gave an incentive to produce large families. More hands to thresh and sow meant more grain produced and the ability to feed more mouths.
As populations grew, unavoidably there was more conflict between tribes.
Metallurgy and the horse provided formidable war machinery. Military technology combined with large-scale food production, storage, and redistribution systems allowed the first expansionist empires of the Near East to form. With agriculture as sower and war as reaper, humanity was now locked into the patriarchal large family system.
Civilizations formalized their new survival strategy in the first written codes of law. Gerda Lerner, in her book, The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), analyzed four of these codes: the Codex Hammurabi, Middle Assyrian law, Hittite law and biblical law. She found that up to fifty percent of these laws concerned the reproductive and sexual behavior of women. Under Middle Assyrian Law, for example, abortion was a capital crime punished by a stake through the heart of the offending woman. So much for reproductive choice.
Everywhere in the pre-modern world, women’s reproductive function was the foundation of politics because a man was powerful in proportion to the number of kin he could rally to his cause. But outside the empires, in small-scale, tribal societies, this political power took a completely different shape. Maximizing the number of offspring was not the always the best strategy, because as a couple’s progeny increased, the balance of power in the community could shift and kinsmen would began to feel threatened. Because population limitation in tribal societies was so critical, there was also a lack of privacy in family life: sex and babies were everybody’s business.
With the coming of big agriculture and the military state, inhibitions on family size were loosened. Family life became private, under the control of the father, who alone was answerable to the state as a citizen.
Conflict between the private and public spheres was a prominent subject in Greek drama of the classical period. One of the themes of Lysistrata is the men’s denial of women’s right to an opinion on political matters like war. Lysistrata must point out to them that women make a contribution to war ? their sons ? and so have the right to a say in the matter. Aristophanes used the device of inverting the established order (putting women in charge) to dip into the domestic sphere for feminine values to apply to the problem of war. In the end though, the spheres remain separate and the problem of war in real life remains unsolved.
The Greeks, like every other civilization of the time, were locked into the large family system. Not to produce cannon fodder would lead to their downfall. Through their literature, though, we know that they valued the egalitarianism of a small-scale society. Aristotle was among the first to advocate limiting population. He advised abortion for parents with too many children, writing in Politics that “… neglect of an effective birth control policy is a never failing source of poverty which in turn is the parent of revolution and crime.” Democracy itself is a holdover from small-scale, tribal society, not a hallmark of civilization at all. Ultimately, Greek democracy was devoured by internal warfare that weakened its ability to fight off conquerors from outside. Within 200 years of Aristophanes, the Greeks were nothing but a backwater Roman colony.
Our modern form of civilization has been advanced by people who lift their ideals from Greek rationalism and democracy and who hope for an end to war and injustice. These hopes have been based on a projected end to scarcity brought about by technology. Modern progressives often take the position that overpopulation will end only after development is brought to the world and poverty is ended.
What most progressives don’t seem to realize is that overpopulation among the poor is strategically beneficial to the wealthy classes. The French term, proletariat, literally means “breeders.” Marvin Harris and Eric B. Ross provide enlightenment on this issue in their important history of population regulation: Death, Sex and Fertility, Population Regulation in Preindustrial and Developing Societies (1987). They use the fabled Irish potato famine to illustrate the impact of economic exploitation on population growth. Contrary to myth, the potato was an established food crop in Ireland long before the famine of the 1840’s and did not by itself cause the Irish population boom.
Landlords who wanted to switch from cattle grazing to grain production, which required a larger work force, brought about the Irish population boom. Landlords manipulated population growth through the tax structure. They encouraged peasants to marry earlier by allowing them to grow potatoes tax-free in order to feed their large families. But after only a few decades, landlords switched back to grazing to cash in on the market for meat to supply English colonial armies. At the very height of the famine, shiploads of Irish grain and meat were delivered to England’s shores while English politicians and men of letters blamed the profligacy of the starving Irish.
Modernity has seen the final shift of political power from kinship relations to the bureaucratic control of large populations of workers. The corporate state profits from a surplus of people and has every reason to encourage breeding among the masses. Otherwise how will wages be kept so low? Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was an American labor radical and an early proponent of family planning who articulated this relationship back before 1920: “The large family system rivets the chains of slavery upon labor more securely. It crushes the parents, starves the children, and provides cheap fodder for machines and cannons.”
In our day, capitalism finds its cheap labor among the masses of the third world, so there’s no immediate threat to the system by stabilizing population in the so-called first world. But as women step out of enforced motherhood and into other societal roles, the backlash against reproductive choice is coming from a different segment of the patriarchal power structure. As Susan Faludi pointed out in Backlash (1991), the leaders of the anti-abortion movement are often working class white men whose relatively privileged place in society has recently evaporated. Without the little woman under their thumb, they have no basis for self esteem.
In the United States, fundamentalist terrorists have robbed women of their choices. Abortion and family planning services are ever more scarce. The US is the fastest growing industrialized nation in the world and only one-third of that growth comes from immigration. We also have one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the world. Here in my rural Oregon community, where the problem is particularly acute, almost 30% of the female high school students are pregnant or already mothers. Teenagers are less likely to use contraceptives effectively, but for a teenager in my community to obtain an abortion she would have to travel between 75 and 200 miles, depending on which clinics were open. And the fundamentalist right has managed to stigmatize abortion to the extent that most of these teens would not even consider it. Conception happens, and even for responsible adults, abortion will always be a necessary option.
Ginette Paris, in her provocative book, The Sacrament of Abortion (1992), gets to the heart of the matter: “Men have the right to kill and destroy, and when the massacre is called a war they are paid to do it and honored for their actions. War is sanctified, even blessed by our religious leaders. But let a woman decide to abort a fetus that doesn’t even have the neurological apparatus to register suffering, and people are shocked. What’s really shocking is that a woman has the power to make a moral judgment that involves a choice of life or death. That power has been reserved for men.”
In the less developed world, women need more than just attitude changes to give them choices. The 1994 UN Population Conference in Cairo reached a consensus on what is required: Women need basics such as food, clean water, health care and access to contraceptives and abortion. The Cairo Conference concluded that providing better reproductive care worldwide would cost $17 billion annually, which is less than the world spends each week on armaments. Again, we must follow the example of Lysistrata who knew that a sex strike alone wouldn’t be enough ? she had her women seize the treasury of Athens as well.
But if the stakes in these matters of sex and war were high before, they are even higher now. In 1970, Stephanie Mills, in her speech as college valedictorian, declared that she would refrain from bringing any children into the world since overpopulation was threatening global ecological collapse. Since 1970, a few more women have made such public declarations, and an unknown number have privately decided to forego or limit childbearing out of ecological considerations. But, there has been no large-scale, public “procreation strike.” The reasons for this, I believe, are partly found in the public/private dichotomy that is an integral part of patriarchy. It is not socially acceptable to interfere in the reproductive decisions of families, even by verbal persuasion. Even the pro-choice movement defends abortion by using the right to privacy. But given the threat to biodiversity and ecological integrity that is posed by our increasing population, a truly pro-life movement is desperately needed to beat the drum for voluntary limits on reproduction.
We must imagine a world without runaway growth, where war cannot exist because there is enough for all. We must seize the treasury and make full reproductive health services available to every woman in the world. We as women must think globally and act as locally as our own bodies, recognizing that we own the means of reproduction and that we must choose small families in this time of resource shrinkage. That is the message that the postmodern Lysistrata needs to take to the women of the polity.