Whatever gets you through the night

   Do you believe in magic?

         -John Sebastian

Castles made of sand

fall in the sea, eventually

-Jimi Hendrix

  Greeting

         I think Paul Krugman did us all a favor, by publishing his piece on "Climate Despair".   It has  helped all of us better understand his point of view and  some of the  "axioms" of modern economics.     As I see it Krugman is decent guy, who has many of the hopes that I have.  Like me, he is frustrated with the lack of action on climate change, and with the short sighted attitude taken by politicians , and those who fund them.    However,  his passion to convince people that action is needed, her appears to have wished away some problems.      

       And has has pushed front and center the question that needs to be answered "Is infinite economic growth possible?"  Or alternatively "Are there limits to growth".    

         While I am all in favor of a positive attitude, an unreasonable optimism is actually couterproductive.    As this psychologist noted recently in the New York Times.  "Fantasizing about happy outcomes — about smoothly attaining your wishes — didn’t help. Indeed, it hindered people from realizing their dreams."

    Eric Lindberg has an interesting series on the attitude of liberals (Krugman, Reich and MSNBC) toward limits, and its prescriptions for climate change., which provides a useful historical context in the post war time frame.  Their mantra is "If we could do it then, we can do it now".  But its probably worth asking - Is anything different now?  For instance,  then oil was increadibly cheap, and we the world largest exporter. Now, its expensive and we are an importer.   Now, of course, we have plenty of coal, but we can't use it without screwing up the climate even worse. 

       Of course Krugman sees a way out - efficiency and renewables.     And, of course, to some extent, and over the long run, these could reduce the carbon footprint.  (Although historically it seems that such efforts have been swamped by countervailing influences, such as increased population,  GDP, as well as snapback effects - Jevons).

       But, perhaps more significantly, the neo liberal view is that  infinate growth is not only possible, but desirable.   See e.g.  his 2008 column "Limits to growth and related stuff" .   He appears to thinks that we will eventually "de materialize " the economy, to the point that it will continue to grow, but have no carbon footprint, or perhaps a "negative carbon footprint".   ( When hearing such ideas I can't help thinking of the Kurzwelian singulaity fantasy, of leaving our corporeal bodies and moving into silicon.   For an interesting review of technological predictions see -  The Vaporware of Techno Utopianism.  )

      There have been a flurry of responses posted. (see below) The one I found most compelling comes from a physicist.

"Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, for example, chides natural scientists for thinking of growth as a “crude, physical thing, a matter simply of producing more stuff.” They fail to appreciate, he suggests, that growth is about innovation and deciding which technologies and resources to use.

Allow me to explain why I am one of those scientists who are preoccupied with the physical. Economists are correct in saying that growth doesn't necessarily require more pollution, more carbon pumped into the atmosphere or more deforestation, even though we're getting all of the above today. Humans can learn, and we might figure out how to grow differently in the future, separating the benefits from the environmental costs.

There's just one crucial exception: energy.

Growth inevitably entails doing more stuff of one kind or another, whether it's manufacturing things or transporting people or feeding electricity to Facebook server farms or providing legal services. All this activity requires energy. We are getting more efficient in using it: The available data suggest that the U.S. uses about half as much per dollar of economic output as it did 30 years ago. Still, the total amount of energy we consume increases every year.

Data from more than 200 nations from 1980 to 2003 fit a consistent pattern: On average, energy use increases about 70 percent every time economic output doubles. This is consistent with other things we know from biology. Bigger organisms as a rule use energy more efficiently than small ones do, yet they use more energy overall. The same goes for cities. Efficiencies of scale are never powerful enough to make bigger things use less energy."

       So, who cares?    His heart is in the right place, and he is also in favor of necessary action, such as  "carbon tax".  Why quibble?   

        Here are my concerns.  First, any solution to climate change  (or species extinction, etc)  that involves growth is counterprodcutive.   It is at best a temporary band aid, and ultimately is bound to fail.  But probably more imporatntly,  it  is a continuation of our unrealistic fantasy.   It doesn't help prepare us for the future.  We need to start thinking in terms of "less", and start getting used to it.    I think Richard Heinberg, said it best in an interview "Hubris and Substitution" , saying essentially:   ""Growth is already over.  Its time for people to recognize that and plan accordingly."

     

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http://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2014/10/krugman-versus-economic-growth.html

http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2014/10/what-is-real-and-what-is-not.html#more

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-10-05/economists-are-blind-to-the-limits-of-growth

Krugman lashes out

"its a frustrating mess"
      -Jimi Hendrix

Which side are you on?
     - Pete Seeger

Greetings

      About a week ago, Paul Krugman put out a piece on climate.  Good for him !    Unfortunately he included a section denouncing the de-growth movement  and the Post Carbon Institute, as  "prophets of climate despair".  I suppose its understandable.  After mall it is pretty frustrating.  And things aren't likely to change in a hurry.

        As Dave Roberts points out in a recent Grist article, despite the "awesome", and "thrilling" march in New York, the chnaces of the US  adopting a carbon tax, or any other reasonable response, is pretty much nil..  The reason?  Gerrymandering has made the  House of Representatives bullet proof.  It will remain in Republican hands for the foreseeable future.  See e.g  "Why the Democrats can't win the House".    In those solidly red districts, climate change is not on the agenda - protest or no protest.

    "As long as climate sanity is defined as heresy in the epistemologically vacuum-sealed Fox bubble, no conservative lawmaker will touch it with a 10-foot pole. It doesn’t matter if you get a million or 10 million people marching in the streets — as long as you don’t get any of the resentful white guys who vote Rs into office, Republican reps won’t care. To see all those unions and brown people and professors and feminists and queers gathered in one place, shouting for an international treaty, just confirms their worst fears.

      

        On the China front, Harvard professor, and author of 3 IPCC reports, Robert Stavins, notes in a New York Times editorial:

    "Similarly, in China, which leads the world in carbon emissions at 29 percent of the total, the prospect in the near term for a meaningful climate policy appears dim, because of the country’s predominant focus on economic growth.

"China may achieve its goal of reducing the carbon intensity of its economy (the ratio of carbon dioxide emissions per unit of output) by 45 percent below its 2005 level by 2020. But the country is growing so fast that its coal consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are expected to continue to increase. China is expected to add the equivalent of a new 500-megawatt coal-fired electric plant every 10 days for the next decade, according to projections by the United States government."

           So the last thing Krugaman needs to hear from the Post Carbon Institute that there are other problems    Unfortunaletly, solving climate change is not just a political problem.  Its an energy problem. A build out of non carbon energy devices is a good idea, but it is not that simple in a energy constrained world. It will be expensive, and we will have to give up other things in order to accomplish it.  Something has to give.

           Krugman appears to believe  that solving climate change is both (?) "cheap and free".   The only ones who will suffer will be the fossil fuel companies. Utility rates,and energy costs will not rise.  GDP will not fall.  We will be able to continue to have unlimited growth.

     Anyone who disagrees with that view , he asserts is giving "aide and comfort" "to the anti environment right" 

"... climate despair produces some odd bedfellows: Koch-fueled insistence that emission limits would kill economic growth is echoed by some who see this as an argument not against climate action, but against growth. You can find this attitude in the mostly European “degrowth” movement, or in American groups like the Post Carbon Institute; I’ve encountered claims that saving the planet requires an end to growth at left-leaning meetings on “rethinking economics.” To be fair, anti-growth environmentalism is a marginal position even on the left, but it’s widespread enough to call out nonetheless.

  As Hienberg  notes a few problems with Krugmans' views (below) and says

"To be clear, we at Post Carbon Institute advocate massively deploying renewable energy and putting a price on carbon. If humanity has any hope for the future, there is simply no other option. But we just don’t see how this can be achieved without: 1) raising the cost of energy and 2) leading to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions during the renewables build-out, unless other parts of the economy are allowed to contract. When it comes to energy, there is no free lunch."

   Greer has an interesting take on this whole controversy.  Why does Krugman care what PCI thinks?   Greer suggests that  the fact that Krugman  attacks PCI's position is itself a warning sign.  In his piece , he states:

 "When a significant media figure uses one of the world’s major newspapers of record to lash out at a particular band of economic heretics by name, on the other hand, we’ve reached the kind of behavior that only happens, historically speaking, when crunch time is very, very close. Given that we’ve also got a wildly overvalued stock market, falling commodity prices, and a great many other symptoms of drastic economic trouble bearing down on us right now, not to mention the inevitable unraveling of the fracking bubble, there’s a definite chance that the next month or two could see the start of a really spectacular financial crash.

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Paul Krugman’s Errors and Omissions

by Richard Heinberg, originally published by Post Carbon Institute  | SEP 22, 2014


In a New York Times op-ed published September 18 titled “Errors and Emissions,” economist-columnist Paul Krugman took a swipe at my organization, Post Carbon Institute, lumping us together with the Koch brothers as purveyors of “climate despair.” No, the Koch brothers are not in despair about the climate; apparently our shared error is that we say fighting climate change and growing the economy are incompatible. And, according to Krugman, a new report from the New Climate Economy Project (NCEP) and a working paper from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) show that the falling cost of renewable energy means this is happily not the case.
 
But in our view Krugman himself is guilty of five critical errors, and three equally serious omissions. First the errors:
 
1. He mistakes post-growth realism for anti-growth activism. While Krugman linked to my book The End of Growth, it seems he may not have actually read it. If he had he would understand that we are not advocating the deliberate termination of growth that could otherwise be easily sustained; rather, we see clear evidence that growth is ending of its own accord because our economy is hitting biophysical limits at a speed and scale that are outpacing humanity’s ability to adapt. The most critical limit to economic growth is the availability of affordable fossil fuels, those extraordinary resources around which we’ve organized the entire global economy (and its hundreds of trillions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure) over the last century. Economists do generally recognize this limit, but summarily dismiss it as a problem seamlessly fixable by the market. 
 
2. He misrepresents his sources. According to our reading, the IMF working paper suggests that the majority of emissions cuts (above 10.8 percent reduction) will be at a net economic cost, even considering co-benefits. The NCEP report—commissioned by former heads of state, the CEOs of major banks and the head of the International Energy Agency—itself admitted that “On their own, these measures would not be sufficient to achieve the full range of emissions reductions likely to be needed by 2030 to prevent dangerous climate change.” In fact, the report’s authors made clear “The question the project has sought to explore is not ‘how can greenhouse gas emissions be reduced?'...but ‘how can economic decision-makers achieve their principal goals while also reducing their impact on the climate?’”
 
3. He assumes that wind and solar can substitute for all uses of fossil fuels. Oil fuels transportation, which is at the core of the trade-dependent global economy. It is far and away the world’s largest single source of energy—and there just aren’t any alternatives ready to replace oil in all the ways we use it, at the scale required, and in the time available. Electric cars are making inroads, but we’re not about to see battery-powered airliners, bulldozers, container ships, tractors, or long-haul trucks. Compressed natural gas is no help from a climate perspective, and methane is another depleting fossil fuel. America’s experiment with biofuels has been an expensive failure.  How do we get more growth with less trade?
 
4. He claims it is easy to slash carbon emissions. The rapid build-out of renewables constitutes an enormous infrastructure project that will itself consume significant amounts of fossil-fuel energy. New solar panels won’t immediately pay for themselves in energy terms; indeed, research at Stanford University recently showed that all solar PV technology installed until about 2010 was a net energy sink. It will fully “pay back the electrical energy required for its early growth by about 2020,” but if we hasten the transition, energy break-even gets delayed: it is only once solar build-out rates level off that the system as a whole will start to turn a significant energy profit. That leads to the deep irony that we’ll be powering the energy transition largely with fossil fuels. The faster we push the transition, the more fossil fuels we’ll use for that purpose, and this could lead to the extraction of more tar sands, fracked tight oil and shale gas, deepwater oil, and Arctic oil (we’ve already used up the cheap, conventional oil; what’s left will be expensive and dirty—and expensive oil is itself a drag on economic growth). 
 
5. He assumes that a meaningful price on carbon would only impact direct energy prices. The entire economy is energy-dependent. One example: as minerals deplete, we have to use more energy (per unit of output) in mining and refining ever-lower grades of ores. When energy prices rise, that impacts all we do. Does Krugman believe that the global economy can continue to grow despite higher prices across the board?
 
Now Paul Krugman’s omissions: 
 
1. He omits mentioning what rate of greenhouse gas emissions reduction he thinks is necessary. Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, who has taken the important step of producing a carbon budget that puts society on a safe trajectory to the internationally agreed-upon limit of 2 degrees Celsius warming, calculates that industrialized nations need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by over 10 percent per year starting now.  In Anderson’s opinion, this is “incompatible with economic growth.” The only hope of maintaining economic growth while cutting emissions at such a pace is to rapidly decouple GDP from CO2; PriceWaterhouseCoopers says  the decoupling would have to proceed at 6 percent per year, which is entirely unprecedented. Is that rate achievable, in view of errors 3, 4, and 5 above? 
 
2. He omits mention of constraints to fossil fuel supplies. Oil has become far more expensive in the past decade; production costs are rising at over 10 percent per year. The major petroleum companies are investing much more in exploration today, but their production rates are declining. For oil, the low-hanging fruit is gone. Does Krugman believe there is still excess production capacity for oil to use in building out renewable infrastructure, while still meeting the needs of the rest of the economy? If not, how will society maintain economic growth during the energy transition? If so, what part of the economy would need to contract in order to shift oil consumption to the renewables build-out, so as not to lead to increased overall use of climate-altering fossil fuels during the transition? 
 
3. He omits mention of energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI. It takes energy to get energy, but historically fossil fuels delivered an immense profit on the meager investments of energy required to drill or mine for them. The EROEI figures for renewables are generally lower than current ones for fossil fuels. And energy returns for fossil fuels are declining as companies are forced to dig deeper and deploy more sophisticated (read: expensive) technology to get at lower-grade resources. The overall EROEI of society is falling, and the transition to renewables will not halt that process (though it will lead to an eventual leveling-off). If you think long and hard about what declining EROEI actually means for our civilization, it’s difficult to imagine an outcome that could be characterized as economic growth—at least, growth as we’ve known it for the past century.
 
To be clear, we at Post Carbon Institute advocate massively deploying renewable energy and putting a price on carbon. If humanity has any hope for the future, there is simply no other option. But we just don’t see how this can be achieved without: 1) raising the cost of energy and 2) leading to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions during the renewables build-out, unless other parts of the economy are allowed to contract. When it comes to energy, there is no free lunch.
 
Ultimately, climate change is not the only reason perpetual economic growth is incompatible with a finite planet. The world faces a suite of ecological problems related to water, soil, and biodiversity, all stemming from past growth, and all seemingly requiring reduction in human consumption levels for their solution.
 
We believe that humanity can enjoy an improved quality of life and build a more sustainable future even as we reduce overall resource throughput. There is ample waste to be cut in the excessively consumption-oriented western way of life, and there’s still plenty of opportunity for less-wealthy countries to develop their economic and social systems in ways that are truly equitable and sustainable (and not fossil fuel-reliant). But that means changing priorities. Like fossil fuels, the growth fetish is something we must leave behind if we are going to have any chance of living sustainably on this planet.

"Some people say not to worry about the air

Some people don't know shit about the...
Air..."

-Talking Heads

Oooh ohh,  the damage done

-Neil Young

Greetings

    Here' s an interesting piece from the Nation's blog.    It shows with great clarity, how our leaders, including such luminaries as Paul Krugman,  are unable or unwilling to accept what is going on , and accept  the required remedy.  

     As the author points out, we are past the point where we could have an " evolutionary" change, merely shutting down coal plants, and continuing to burn oil and gas.    This might have been a possible path years ago.   Now that we have burned up over half of the carbon budget things have changed

"If even the smartest writers, who obviously get the reality of climate change, don’t acknowledge what “facing up” to it would actually mean—essentially, global emissions peaking by 2020 and then plummeting to near zero by 2050, leaving something like 80 percent of fossil-fuel reserves untapped—then where are the truth tellers? What does “facing up” really look like?"

see more below

    Of course, it should be no surprise that opinion leaders like Krugman don't want to see the facts.  None of us do, including many environmental leaders. !    I recently read an interesting article on the psychology and  climate change.  The article suggested that when confronted with a difficult truth, we may resort to a number of psychological tricks to avoid the pain.  Denial is well known.   Another is called " displacement". Which might be considered a form of scapegoating.   One way to do that is to focus solely on the energy supply , and ignore demand.  It is easy to blame oil companies and utilities, but hard to modify  our own behavior

"A second way to psychologically deal with global warming is by displacement.  Those who deal with the issue in this manner agree with the science but place the blame associated with the problem on something other than themselves, such as those who don’t agree with the science.  Environmentalists typically fall into this category.  Most environmentalists would say they recycle, use energy efficient vehicles and use energy efficient home devices.  They may also be a member of an environmental group or groups.

The problem with the displacement approach is that generally those in the group have relatively high incomes and there is a strong correlation between greenhouse gas emissions and income "

He also takes a poke at McKibben's  (supply side) argument that we could easily move to an all renewable economy - "Just look at Germany"

"An April 25, 2013 article by Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone magazine made that argument.  Here is what he stated in his article:

“With each passing month, something else weakens the industry’s (fossil fuels) hand: the steady rise of renewable energy, a technology that’s gone from pie-in-the-sky to panel-on-the-roof in remarkably short order.  In the few countries where governments have really gotten behind renewables, the results are staggering: There were days last spring (that would have been spring 2012) when Germany (pale, northern Germany) managed to generate half its power from solar panels.  Even in this country, much of the generating capacity added last year came from renewables.  A December study from the University of Delaware showed that by 2030 we could affordably power the nation 99.9 percent of the time on renewable energy.  In other words, logic, physics and technology work against the fossil-fuel industry.  For the moment, it has the political power it needs – but political power shifts perhaps more easily than physics.”

Since I follow energy issues closely, I was a bit skeptical of his statement which suggests that a sizeable percentage of Germany’s energy now comes from renewable sources.  I decided to look at data from the U.S. Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration (U.S.DOE/EIA) concerning German energy consumption.  Based upon EIA data, Germany obtained 83.1% of its total energy from fossil fuels in 2012, essentially the same as in 2011. 

The change in percent fossil fuel consumption in Germany over the last decade has been relatively minor.  In 2002 Germany obtained 85.2% of its energy from fossil fuels and in 2007 it obtained 84.5%.   For comparison purposes, the U.S. obtained 82.1% of its energy from fossil fuels in 2012.  The energy transition in Germany isn’t nearly as dramatic as Bill McKibben suggests."

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http://www.thenation.com/blog/177705/climate-truth-tellers-honor-roll-2013#

It’s the closing weeks of 2013 and The Boston Globe, the recently acquired real estate of proud Red Sox owner John W. Henry, still publishes climate denial on its Opinion page. This puts Mr. Henry in fine company, so to speak, as shown in an important new study of the climate-denial funding machine from Drexel University’s Robert J. Brulle and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Of course, Henry’s funding of his op-ed page can’t be compared with the billion-dollar ocean of right-wing anti-science money. But still.

If it’s hard to accept—at this late date, given what we know about the imminent threat ofcatastrophic warming—that one of America’s great newspapers still runs columns denying the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, consider for a moment some of the other forms that denial still takes, many of them far more subtle and yet, perhaps, no less dangerous.

Indeed, you find them in places you’d least expect, such as Harvard’s Massachusetts Hall. AsTim DeChristopher put it in a guest post on this blog in October, when Harvard President Drew Faust issued her public statement rejecting students’ call for fossil-fuel divestment, she revealed, not outright denial of climate science, but a failure to acknowledge what the situation requires. Here’s DeChristopher:

[Faust] touts all the great research on climate change that is done at Harvard, but she ignores the fact that the fossil fuel industry actively works to suppress or distort every one of those efforts. To seriously suggest that any research will solve the climate crisis while we continue to allow the fossil fuel industry to maintain a stranglehold on our democracy is profoundly naive. Faust never admits whether or not she agrees with the basic science of the carbon budget, which is the foundation of the understanding that the current reserves of the fossil fuel industry cannot be burned without condemning us to an unlivable future. If she accepts the science, she should explain how her plan of cooperation will convince the industry to leave those assets in the ground.

But here’s the truly scary thing: Drew Faust is utterly conventional in her failure to connect climate science with our political and economic realities. And I’m not talking about conservatives here. Remarkably, you see it across a broad swath of the center-left and left, from mainstream to radical, where climate is too often completely absent from any analysis—whether it’s Peter Beinart, to take just one example, in one of the year’s most talked-aboutpieces, arguing that millennials are giving rise to a “new new left,” while leaving out of his generational analysis the existential threat looming over today’s young people; or whether it’sJacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara, whose recent “Letter to The Nation From a Young Radical” described a “Next Left” that’s apparently oblivious to climate science. (To be fair, Jacobin has published some searching essays on climate and left politics by Alyssa Battistoni, with another forthcoming in January.)

Even as well-informed a writer as Paul Krugman, reviewing William Nordhaus’s The Climate Casino in The New York Review of Books, seems unable to admit the full magnitude of the climate threat. “Facing up to global warming,” he writes, “would involve virtually eliminating our use of coal except to the extent that CO2 can be recaptured after consumption; it would involve somewhat reducing our use of other fossil fuels…” Wait. What? It’s not clear how Krugman imagines us avoiding the worst-case scenarios—and stabilizing global average temperature at the internationally agreed-upon target of two degrees C—while only “somewhat reducing” our use of oil and gas in the coming decades. (It’s hard to believe Krugman is unaware of analyses like UK climate scientist Kevin Anderson’s, spelled out inthis classic post by Grist’s David Roberts.) But then, he also notes that Nordhaus believes the acceptable warming limit can be raised to 4C, if the near-term costs of emissions reductions are too high—without ever telling readers that a 4C planet, as the World Bank reported last year, is likely beyond adaptation. In other words, he fails to note that Nordhaus is talking blithely about civilizational catastrophe within the lifetimes of today’s children.

If even the smartest writers, who obviously get the reality of climate change, don’t acknowledge what “facing up” to it would actually mean—essentially, global emissions peaking by 2020 and then plummeting to near zero by 2050, leaving something like 80 percent of fossil-fuel reserves untapped—then where are the truth tellers? What does “facing up” really look like?

Well, here’s one example—and my pick for 2013’s climate truth-teller of the year award.

Back in October, in “How science is telling us all to revolt” in The New Statesman, Naomi Klein highlighted “a small but increasingly influential group of scientists whose research into the destabilisation of natural systems—particularly the climate system—is leading them to…transformative, even revolutionary, conclusions.” Foremost among them is the aforementioned Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of Britain’s leading climate scientists. “In recent years,” Klein writes,

Anderson’s papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as “Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous… Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope”, he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast.

With his colleague Alice Bows, a climate mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies—all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned—that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else….

what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.

Anderson and Bows, Klein notes, have “laid down something of a gauntlet” for fellow scientists, essentially arguing, as Klein puts it, that “in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research.” She quotes Anderson, who wrote this past August:

Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” [his emphasis].

(On December 10-11, the Tyndall Centre hosted a conference on “radical emissions reduction,” at which Anderson and Klein spoke.)

Now, ask yourself what our national conversation on climate would sound like—including (no,especially) on the left—if this kind of brutal honesty broke through with any regularity.

For one thing, it might sound a lot more like Bill McKibben’s latest piece in Rolling Stone,“Obama and Climate Change: The Real Story,” in which McKibben writes:

If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet’s biggest oil producer and Russia as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we’ve begun to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine.

As McKibben points out, “All this new carbon drilling, digging and burning the White House has approved will add up to enough to negate the administration’s actual achievements” on climate.

Or, at least among activists on the left, an honest conversation might sound a bit like Occupy organizer and Wildfire Project founder Yotam Marom’s must-read essay “Confessions of a climate change denier” (Waging Nonviolence and openDemocracy.net), a heartfelt and provocative call to fellow activists who have tended to see climate as an issue separate from their own work. “It wasn’t until I was out organizing on New York City’s outer beaches after Hurricane Sandy,” he writes at the outset, “that I understood my sluggishness on climate justice was nothing short of climate change denial.”

Then again—though this may be far too much to ask—it might sound like James Hansen, recently retired as NASA’s top climate scientist, and seventeen co-authors, who just this month released a major study concluding that warming of 2 degrees C—that internationally agreed-upon limit—would itself set in motion “disastrous consequences” beyond humanity’s control. Instead, Hansen and his co-authors write, we should do everything we can to stay as close as possible to 1 degree C—which means our global carbon “budget” should actually be half of what the international community committed to at Copenhagen (i.e., half the budget on which Kevin Anderson’s already grim analysis is based). It may sound unreasonable. But as Hansen et al. write, “There is still opportunity for humanity to exercise free will.”

But maybe, in the end, truth-telling might also sound at least a little like these parting words from Dave Roberts of Grist, in his farewell post at the end of August, as he prepared to take a year off, exhausted from writing about climate and needing to unplug entirely. (I’m glad Dave had the wisdom to pull back and take care of himself, but his absence has been the most conspicuous feature of the climate conversation these last few months of 2013.) “It looks like things are going to get bad, possibly really bad, even within my children’s lifetimes,” he wrote in August. “The decisions we’re making today will reverberate for centuries, and so far we’re blowing it.” But he went on, “Though it may seem odd, I find comfort in chaos theory.…”

The outcome of the climate crisis depends not just on physical forces but on human beings, complex economic, social, and technological systems, and complex systems are nonlinear….

History unfolds along the lines of what Stephen Jay Gould called “punctuated equilibrium.” Things can appear stable for years and years while tensions gather beneath the surface, hairline fractures develop, and the whole system becomes highly sensitive to small perturbations. (The butterfly flaps its wings and causes a hurricane, etc.)….

We don’t know when history might unlock the door, so we have no choice but to keep pushing on it.

Indeed. And I’d only add: we need a lot more of us out there pushing—and pushing a whole lot harder.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/177705/climate-truth-tellers-honor-roll-2013#