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http://sciencedebate.org/media20120131.html

Update: I’ve been picked up by The Atlantic!

But cars cause only a part of transportation carbon emissions.  Another large chunk of CO2 comes from jets.  So could networked, self-flying jets cut emissions from air travel as well?  Airbus thinks they could.  In a vision for air travel in 2050, Airbus suggests planes flying common routes could eventually fly in formation, drafting off each other to save 10-12% on fuel costs.  Planes need better sensors and automation to fly so close together safely, but considering recent advances the idea isn’t just pie in the sky.  Self-flying jets could save even more fuel by tracking weather conditions and adjusting routes on the fly.

Mighty Ducks flying in formation to save fuel.

Of course, just to keep this post well-grounded, slight improvements in fuel efficiency won’t be enough to make flying an eco-friendly endeavor as Airbus might want us to think.  Eventually, renewable fuels will have to replace fossil jet fuel.  However, it’s very encouraging that industry leaders are coming up with outside the box, blue sky ideas to cut emissions that make equal sense for both balance sheets and the environment.

Movie

Whoa, people actually seem to like this!  I wrote a quick response to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by a group of climate denialist scientists, including the professor Aliza and I helped defeat in a debate a year or two ago.  Check it out, it’s currently at the top of the Science 2.0 site.

Google News fed me an interesting article last week, a Sunday op-ed in the Philly Inquirer by Jim Geraghty (Climate change offers us an opportunity, 8/28/2011).  The author accepts that climate change is real, but argues that we should welcome it because it will only harm those he does not care about (“those in the poorer, developing world”), while bringing only good to the United States.  Even setting aside, for now, advocacy of more famine in the developing world, that analysis was simply too one-sided and ignorant for me to ignore.  Worse, for someone who takes Geraghty’s claims at face value and isn’t familiar with the real research, he makes a potentially compelling argument and raises an important question: why do we care about climate change?  I decided to take advantage of my hurricane day and draft a response, which the Inquirer promptly ignored.    However, because it’s important to think about why climate matters, I’m posting a version of my response here.

The most obvious problem with Geraghty’s op-ed is that completely ignores the threats posed to America by climate change.  Would climate change swallow America in a giant fireball?  Of course not – we will survive and the Earth will survive – but climate change would cause a heck of a lot of avoidable damage, suffering, and economic losses along the way.  Perhaps more importantly for the short term, even while Geraghty invents an economic opportunity from climate change, his analysis overlooks the true opportunity for American prosperity this century.

Geraghty’s first argument is that America would see increased crop yields.  While it may be true that some crops grow better with more CO₂, crops and livestock are generally not fans of extreme heat and droughts.  Just ask Texas, which has lost $5.2 billion to heat and drought so far this year, making 2011 the fourth time in six years that the state’s farmers and ranchers lost $1 billion or more.  The more greenhouse gases we emit, the hotter and drier the Western U.S. will become.  This is not a good thing in states already struggling to find enough water.

Climate change doesn’t just make America warmer, it shifts rainfall around the country.  As the West dries, northern states will see more rain.  Unfortunately, precipitation will shift in intensity as well as in space, with fewer light rains and more heavy downpours or intense snowstorms.  That means more record floods like those that recently devastated Americans living along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

It’s not just the nation’s heartland that would suffer from climate change.  Since Hurricane Irene is the news of the day, consider that her storm surge of around 3 feet could be considered a normal tide by the end of the century.  That would mean large-scale losses of coastal property.  We would have to move entire neighborhoods of coastal cities to higher ground, at huge expense.  In cities, hotter summers would mean even worse air quality, causing more asthma, lung disease, and heart attacks.

Returning now to the claim that climate impacts might be worse in other countries, let’s remember that we live in an interconnected world.  Crop failures elsewhere drive up food prices here too.  And given the spread of nuclear weapons and terrorist proselytizers, do we really want to foster global instability?  The Pentagon doesn’t think so.  Besides, if the rest of the world is flooding and starving, who are we going to sell our products to?

In my opinion though, the truly scary danger from climate change is in the unknowns.  A look back at the climate over the past million years shows a history of huge fluctuations and inhospitable conditions over much of the globe.  Over the past several thousand years, coincidentally just when human civilization arose, the climate has been unusually stable and human-friendly.  So at the moment, the climate system is a sleeping dragon.  Do we really want to keep poking it in the eye and see what happens?

Fortunately, America does have a huge opportunity this century, if we have the will to seize it.  No, that doesn’t mean waiting a decade or three until “the harmful effects … force the hands of governments, NGOs, and businesses” into the last-ditch crapshoot of geo-engineering, so we can sell cloud-sprayers or giant orbiting mirrors as Geraghty suggests.  Our real opportunity is here and now.  We can take the lead in developing clean, safe energy that poses no threats and is immune to price fluctuations.  We can use American innovation and entrepreneurship to create jobs developing and installing real solutions that will prevent the harmful effects of climate change, and export these to the rest of the world.

All we need is for our leaders to create energy policies that provide long-term support to help renewables make their final push to prices cheaper than fossil energy.  And don’t believe renewables aren’t close – why else would fossil energy be protesting so loudly?  This doesn’t mean we all have to drive Priuses and turn off our heat and A.C.  This just means ensuring stable markets and credits for renewable energy, and providing appropriate market signals to help the innovation happen.  American ingenuity created the light bulb, let’s help American ingenuity come up with the next way to power it.

Would you be willing to risk jail time to fight climate change? That’s what Tim De Christopher, an economics student at the University of Utah did. When public lands in Utah were being auctioned for oil and natural gas drilling during the last months of the Bush Presidency, Christopher decided to disrupt the auction by entering it and outbidding everyone despite not being able to pay. He says he did so with the full knowledge he would probably face jail time, and sure enough, last Thursday a federal jury convicted him. Depending on the judge’s ruling, De Christopher may now face a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

Says De Christopher, in the grist.org interview posted above,

“The climate movement has been really creative in trying a lot of different methods for how we can create this radical shift that we need without anybody really making any sacrifices or taking any personal risks and none of that’s really worked. And I think now it’s time we tried the path of actually putting ourselves on the line… I think it could take far fewer people than we think to do that.”

SURGE doesn’t advocate breaking the law, but I consider this blog to also be an open forum to discuss the climate movement. So, readers, what do you think? Do there need to be more acts of civil disobedience to solve the climate crisis? And if so, who should be on the line? I encourage you to watch the full video of De Christopher and leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Last week I blogged about the House of Representatives attack on the EPA. You can sign this petition from the 1Sky Campaign to support the agency that keeps our country safe from polluters.

Other Eco-News

Bill Mckibben takes on the US Chamber of Commerce; announces “The U.S. Chamber Doesn’t Speak for Me” campaign.
A writer from the Kentucky coal fields explains why he’s fighting to save his community.

Use Facebook? Tell them to get off coal.

Imagine living in an America where the rivers are so polluted they catch fire. Imagine an America where the smog in New York City is so bad that hundreds of people die in a single incident. Imagine an America where companies can dump as much toxic waste into the Hudson as they please.

All these things happened in America before the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Prior to then, there was no single agency tasked with keeping America safe from environmental disasters. But today, the Republican house is trying to declaw the EPA, voting 249-177 to stop the agency from regulating carbon dioxide emissions.

In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA was obligated to take action on climate change. In 2009, the EPA found that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gasses present a danger to the American public, which the agency has the authority to regulate under the Clean Air Act. With this bill, the House is telling one of the most important agencies of the federal government that it is not allowed to do its job.

The House is stripping funding away from the EPA until it is unable to act not only on climate change, but also on other health and safety problems. Progressive magazine Mother Jones has compiled a list of measures in the House bill that will prevent the EPA and other environmental agencies from carrying out their duties:

• Prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating toxic air pollutants, including mercury (No. 201, Rep. Raul Labrador, R-ID)
• Cut EPA funds for curbing greenhouse gas emissions including carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrofluorocarbons (No. 466, Rep. Ted Poe, R-TX)
• Interfere with the EPA’s ability to limit toxic pollution from coal-fired power plants (No. 407, Rep. Ralph Hall, D-TX)
• Bar the EPA from setting new health standards limiting coarse air particles (No. 563, Rep. Kristi Noem, R-SD)
• Reduce the budgets of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service (No. 556, Rep. Steve Pearce, R-NM)
• Defund the Council on Environmental Quality, which coordinates environmental policy among all federal agencies (No. 202, Rep. Labrador)
• Prohibit the Environmental Appeals board from reviewing or rejecting permits for off-shore drilling (No. 533, Rep. Don Young, R-AK)
• Ban any contribution by the United States to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (No. 574, Rep. Pearce)

I am not sure the House even maintains a sense of what the word “cost” means. Even if these measures shrink the deficit more than slightly (And as Princeton economist Paul Krugman points out in his latest column, they won’t), they will take a huge toll on the livability of this country as well as the rest of the planet.

The EPA does more than any other agency to protect Americans’ rights to clean air, clean water, and a safe climate, and if we don’t fight to keep those rights we will lose them. You can start by signing these petitions from the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund. Follow us on this blog and on Twitter, and we’ll also keep you updated on what else you can do as the story develops. It’s time to defend America, and the world.