The presidential hopeful says alternative energies aren't just good for the environment -- they're good for America.
U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo. — best known for his zealous opposition to illegal immigration — bills himself on his campaign Web site as “a solid pro-life, pro-gun, small government Republican.” What’s not mentioned on his site is anything about the environment or energy issues. (Considering that he’s got a lifetime approval rating of 11 percent from the League of Conservation Voters, perhaps that’s no surprise.)
But when asked about these issues, Tancredo makes a patriotic call for energy independence, just like the rest of the presidential contenders. And while he likes to joke that Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” is the last book of fiction he’s read, Tancredo also pays lip service to a shift away from carbon-based energy sources and the withdrawal of subsidies from fossil-fuel energy. Still, his free-market-driven vision of America’s energy future includes lots more coal mining and oil drilling, as well as nuclear power.
I caught Tancredo by phone while he was campaigning in New Hampshire and tried to get a better picture of how environmental goals fit into his conservative platform.
You support a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border to curb illegal immigration. Environmentalists have raised concerns that such a fence could be harmful to wildlife and the broader ecosystem in the area. Do you think this is a legitimate concern?
What is even more disturbing is the environmental damages caused by illegal aliens crossing the border. On average, an alien crossing the border will drop about eight pounds of trash on a one- to three-day journey. This amounts to hundreds to thousands of pounds of garbage left in an ecosystem completely unprepared for that type of pollution.
What do you see as the most pressing energy and environmental issues facing the nation?
We can take care of a couple of issues with one sort of strategy. If we successfully reduce our reliance on oil produced by countries that are dangerous to us — and that’s a good thing from a national-security standpoint — you will automatically reduce the amount of carbon we produce in the United States. A major initiative to move away from carbon-based products would accomplish a great deal.
How do you envision such an initiative? Is this a priority for you?
Yeah, it certainly is, because it’s a national-security issue, primarily.
I don’t doubt that global warming is a true phenomenon. I’m saying the extent to which you can attribute it directly to man’s actions, I think, is still at least debatable. But that doesn’t matter if we move in the direction I’m saying.
So what can the federal government do? Besides investment in research and technology, which of course I think it must do, we could require, for instance, all federal vehicles to be alternative-fuel vehicles. A lot of things are happening right now as a result of the market, and I am, frankly, reluctant to tamper with the market to a great extent.
I’ve heard you say you trust the market far more than you trust government. If the market were a level playing field and all subsidies were removed from the energy sector, what would happen to the renewable and alternative energy industries?
You would see the most efficient develop; the most inefficient would lag behind or not survive. I don’t think that subsidies are a good way to go. Even now, the markets are already working. You look at the number of alternative-fuel and hybrid vehicles that are being purchased, it’s really quite significant. Toyota took over GM’s spot as the No. 1 auto producer in the world, and why? Something called the Prius.
Would you, as president, remove subsidies from fossil-fuel industries?
Yeah, I say remove subsidies. I certainly think that’s appropriate.
However, R&D is a subsidy, and I would support efforts in research and development. We can obtain a lot more fossil fuels from things like shale, but it may require some R&D to find ways to make it cheap enough so that you can extract the oil from the shale.
I also think that it is appropriate for us to remove restrictions on the development of fossil-fuel resources within the continental United States and off of the continental shelf.
Again it goes back to national-security issues. What I’m trying to do is rely less and less on any sort of fuel from countries that are potentially very dangerous.
Would you fund R&D for emerging technologies like wind and solar?
Yes, and it can be broader than that. It can be R&D into biotechnology and biofuels. There are two reasons I am willing to do that: One, the national-security thing. The other is that we have OPEC, so there isn’t truly a free market. You have to have some degree of government involvement in this because the OPEC nations can and do control the market to a certain extent. When emerging technologies become a threat to oil, OPEC can [flood the market with oil], driving the price down to make it impossible to compete, and that new technology goes down the toilet.
Can you clarify your take on global warming? It sounds like you think it’s a problem but not necessarily one that’s human-caused.
It may certainly be a phenomenon that’s got nothing to do with the impact of humanity on the environment, or very, very little anyway. It may be a cyclic thing that we will simply have to deal with. I don’t know. There’s plenty of reliable research on both sides.
So I say, look, it really doesn’t matter. The thing we must do is reduce our reliance on potentially violent countries. If in reducing carbon emissions we actually have a positive impact on this global-warming phenomenon, then great.
Do you support a cap on carbon emissions?
I really think there are a lot of problems with that, especially in terms of enforcement — you are talking about the possibility of a lot of fraud. I’d look very skeptically at any type of cap-and-trade scheme. Let’s put it this way: It’s not impossible, but I’d be very skeptical.
What role should the U.S. play in crafting a new international agreement on climate change?
We should encourage countries to rely on markets more than anything else to accomplish the goal.
You’re a strong supporter of nuclear power in the U.S. What do you see as the advantage of increasing nuclear power?
I believe that we have developed the technology to where it is very safe. The biggest problem we have, of course, is with storage [of the nuclear waste]. We’re having a hell of a time trying to get Yucca Mountain certified [as a waste-storage site]. In the meantime, we’ve got communities in Texas that are saying, “Let’s do it here.” Why? Because there are a lot of jobs involved. There’s a lot of money involved. It’s a great market-oriented solution. It also allows us to have an alternative fuel that is clean and plentiful. What more could you ask for?
So your waste-storage solution would be Yucca Mountain or a distributed storage plan?
Absolutely, we can keep looking at Yucca Mountain as the important place, but it’s not the only place. There are already sites in Texas that we are working to try to open. It will happen. We will get the storage. It’s all about supply and demand.
What role do you think coal should play in America’s energy future?
I think coal gasification, especially if we can perfect the in-ground storage of carbon. [Oil] prices are high enough now that it makes it feasible to move in the direction of coal gasification.
What about liquefied coal?
Same thing — lots of it. Again, the trade-off there is the carbon issue. As you know, there’s a lot of technology being developed to try and store the carbon.
What about ethanol?
Same thing. That’s another point where markets will be helping to determine this, because at a certain point [ethanol] becomes less than efficient both in terms of the energy trade-offs that are involved and just the sheer cost. When you mandate a certain amount of fuel like we do now, it is an indirect subsidy. Subsidies for the creation of biofuels — that’s not something I’m crazy about, theoretically speaking.
There’s growing belief among evangelicals and other communities of faith that we need to be stewards of the earth and protect the planet from global warming. What’s your take on this?
I think it would be better for them to deal more directly with issues relevant to their communities of faith.
There are some Republicans in Colorado who have been disgruntled by the increased drilling for oil and natural gas in the state. What’s your take?
I’m supportive of the drilling, especially [for natural gas] on the Roan Plateau. It’s an important source of clean fuel, and the footprint is very small. Everyone wants to use the energy, everyone wants to claim that they are supportive of a greater environment — and yet here when we can accomplish that, when we increase the use of coal-bed methane and natural gas and a variety of other alternatives to petroleum-based products, they are screaming, “Not in my backyard.”
It’s sort of the hypocrisy of the Kennedys, in a way. They talk about how much they want the rest of us to make sacrifices in order to accomplish [environmental] goals, but they are not willing to have a wind farm where they can see it from [Cape Cod].
We all have to accept the responsibility. I don’t like it when states are talking about “you can’t drill off of our coast” or “you can’t drill here,” but they have no reluctance about consuming all of the oil production that originates from the rest of America. There’s a lot of hypocrisy there.
What environmental achievement are you most proud of?
My work on the Healthy Forests [Initiative] — frankly, I think that’s enormous. If we could begin to implement that in a more effective way, I think we could see a lot of really important developments, not the least of which is the reduced risk of major, catastrophic forest fires. Healthier forests are also healthy for the environment because they suck up out of the environment what we don’t want, and produce what we do.
Who is your environmental hero?
I have none.
Can you talk about a memorable outdoor experience you’ve had?
I just got done with a competitive shooting event here in New Hampshire, outdoors. It was great! First you shoot trap, and then you move to a target range with a rifle, and then you move to a target range with a pistol. I finished all three a little bit ago. I did really well.
Do you enjoy hunting?
Yes, I do. A while back, Mitt Romney said he’s been hunting all his life, but he just got his first license last year. I actually have been hunting all my life.
I had golden retrievers for years. You get mesmerized by them and sometimes miss a good shot because you’re watching the dogs work. They’re just wonderful. They’re in their element, doing exactly what they were born for.
If you could spend a week in a natural area, where would it be?
I actually love the grassland, the Pawnee National Grassland in northeastern Colorado. It’s quite beautiful. I know most people don’t think of grasslands as offering that kind of beauty, but to me they do. You just look over that sea of waving grass, and I think it is breathtakingly beautiful.
What have you done personally to reduce your environmental footprint?
I have a 2005 Prius. It’s a great car. It also lets me drive in the restricted lane on the way to work.
This article is part of a series of interviews with presidential candidates produced jointly by Grist and Outside.
Trench warfare rages over Keystone pipeline
The GOP tries every which way to undo the Greens' modest victory
Protestors outside the White House demand a stop to the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline. (Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)
When the Obama administration announced last month that the Keystone pipeline project would be delayed pending a more thorough environmental review of its impacts, Keystone’s opponents celebrated, but warned that the fight was far from over. Sure enough, pipeline politics remain front-and-center as those in favor of the pipeline seek to circumvent the longer review process while its opponents struggle to fend off attacks on their tenuous victory. The past few weeks have seen a burst of legislative maneuvering as Republicans seek a way to rubber-stamp the pipeline without the president’s approval.
The maneuvering is intense because the struggle over the 1,600-mile proposed pipeline has become a proxy battle in a larger war over climate change, corporate influence and the legacy of the Obama administration. Both sides agree that the fate of Keystone XL will influence more than just whether oil is transported from the tar sands of central Canada to the United States. It will signal whether the U.S. is moving away from the carbon-fueled economy or embracing it anew.
The Republicans are attacking from several directions. A House bill introduced by Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., in December would require the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to issue a permit within 30 days of receiving an application, essentially removing the Interior Department and Army Corps of Engineers from the oversight process, exempting the pipeline from several state and federal environmental regulations, and eliminating any discretionary review process.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the bill on Feb. 7, while killing Democratic amendments to prevent Keystone oil from being exported after processing, to block TransCanada from using eminent domain to seize private land, and to certify TransCanada’s claims that most of the steel used in building the pipeline would be manufactured in the United States. Republican leaders have also indicated that they’re considering inserting the bill’s language into other legislation in a replay of December’s payroll-tax-bill shenanigans.
Another bill, sponsored by Rep. Connie Mack, R-Fla., would allow Congress to approve the pipeline without presidential review by invoking Congress’s constitutional authority to regulate international commerce; Sens. David Vitter, R-La., Dick Lugar, R-Ind., and John Hoeven, R-N.D., co-sponsored a companion bill in the Senate. And today, Republican leaders added a provision to the same effect to a transportation funding bill that may go up for a vote as soon as Tuesday. In response, anti-Keystone activists are seeking to imitate the success of last month’s anti-SOPA online activism, aiming to inundate senators with a stated goal of half a million emails within 24 hours to demonstrate that opposition to the pipeline remains strong.
The Keystone provision is unlikely to pass the Senate, let alone get a signature from President Obama. But if the past few weeks are any indication, we haven’t seen the last of the pro-pipeline legislation by a long shot. Mitch McConnell gave the game away in a statement to the conservative publication Human Events, saying, “The only way we’re going to get the Keystone pipeline started is to defeat Barack Obama.”
The party’s aim is to make the pipeline’s rejection a symbol of Obama’s alleged failure to stimulate the economy, and more generally, to paint a portrait of the president as a weak leader more concerned with appeasing “special interest groups” than with taking decisive action. Said Mack at a recent press conference, “The president has decided he’s not going to lead on this issue … so we need to get him out of the way,” while Lugar declared, “The president has failed to lead.”
But pipeline protesters counter that Obama’s decision on Keystone represented a courageous refusal to give in to pressure from fossil fuel lobbyists: MoveOn.org called it a “bold stand against the power of the oil industry,” while Bill McKibben said he “did the brave thing” in standing up to the American Petroleum Institute. While the issue is frequently portrayed as one that could divide key factions of Obama’s base, with labor unions in favor of the pipeline and environmentalists against, several major unions have come out in support of the administration’s decision to delay the pipeline, calling efforts to speed up the review the “cynical move” of a “do-nothing Republican Congress” and stating, “President Obama has acted wisely.”
A report released by the State Department investigator general last week also raised concerns about several aspects of the original environmental review. The report found that the original review failed to consider conflicts of interest: One of TransCanada’s lobbyists, Paul Elliott, is a former aide to Secretary of State Clinton, and the third-party contractor selected to conduct the review had prior financial relationships with TransCanada.
Moreover, the State Department neglected to address several regulations and had insufficient expertise to adequately consider issues like the pipeline’s potential impact on endangered species. The findings bolster environmental groups’ claims that the pipeline serves the interests of the oil industry, which is among the Republican Party’s top donors, and TransCanada, whose spending on lobbying has tripled in the past year to $1.73 million, $1.33 million of which went to Elliott for pipeline-related expenditures.
And it’s not just American politics that have been shaken up by the controversy over Keystone. After the delay was announced, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he would begin looking into alternative markets for the country’s natural resources, and during a recent visit to Beijing, “pledged closer trade ties with China.” That, in turn, has sparked a wave of concern about the specter of “foreign oil” back in the U.S., although most of the oil transported by the pipeline would ultimately be exported rather than used to supply the country’s energy needs. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., argues that Keystone would make the U.S. into “a middleman between Alberta and Asia” while doing nothing to reduce the country’s reliance on foreign oil.
Going forward, the coalition of activists opposed to the pipeline plans to deliver the signatures they’ve gathered over the past 24 hours to senators today, as Congress starts to consider the transportation bill. Majority Leader Harry Reid has indicated that a Keystone rider will kill that bill—and in any case, few Democrats support the House version, which Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said ”takes us back to the dark ages.” Even if this attempt to fast-track the pipeline fails, though, there are plenty of other pro-Keystone bills in the works, and the GOP may try to insert a similar provision into the next payroll tax cut extension.
Either way, expect to hear more about Keystone over the next few months, as it’s clear that both sides want to keep the issue in the news. The ultimate outcome will likely depend on whether the public sees Keystone as a jobs issue or an environmental one, and indeed, some polls suggest that Americans are more receptive to environmental arguments than Republicans seem to think. In fact, Democratic leaders—some of whom support Keystone, and most of whom have tried to hedge their bets—may be a tougher sell.
Climate change denial’s new offensive
Global warming is wreaking devastation, but Big Oil won't give up profits without a planet-destroying fight
A crew member from the Nevada Department of Forestry works to control the Washoe Drive fire in Washoe City, Nev. on January 19, 2012 (Credit: Reuters/James Glover II)
If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet — as we shall see — it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.
In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology. Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.
It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”
In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history — 56 percent of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”
In the face of such data — statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet — you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to… deny there’s a problem.
Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”
Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40 percent over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.
And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.
It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: The fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.)Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.
Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.
Part of it’s simple enough: The giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.
Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology or research and development for the same. As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: Their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.
When I talked about a carbon bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is what I meant. Here are some of the relevant numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: we’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a two-degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with.
If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.
Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).
If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything — including fund an endless campaigns of lies — to avoid coming to terms with its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead. To take just one example, last month the boss of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called for burning all the country’s newly discovered coal, gas and oil — believed to be 1,800 gigatons worth of carbon from our nation alone.
What he and the rest of the energy-industrial elite are denying, in other words, is that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain — pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if you think banks are too big to fail, consider the climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the bailout that would face us when that bubble finally bursts.
Unfortunately, it won’t burst by itself — not in time, anyway. The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, they’re leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt — and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion.
Telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing. That’s why the fight is so pitched. That’s why those of us battling for the future need to raise our game. And it’s why that view from the satellites, however beautiful from a distance, is likely to become ever harder to recognize as our home planet.
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Wind power: Renewable resource, or another corporate scam?
A fascinating new film about one small-town political fight takes on the pseudo-green wind industry
A still from "Windfall"
In telling the story of a small-town political fight over wind power, Laura Israel’s fascinating documentary “Windfall” at first seems like another entry in the long laundry list of post-”Inconvenient Truth” doomsayer environmental films. Indeed, “Windfall” has some of the rural, homespun feeling of Josh Fox’s Oscar-nominated “Gasland,” which helped ignite a national debate over the natural-gas extraction method known as fracking. Israel’s film also offers a direct riposte to Bill Haney’s “The Last Mountain,” in which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is seen promoting wind power as a clean alternative to the dirty and destructive combination of mountaintop-removal coal mining and coal-generated electricity.
Viewed through a long lens, “Windfall” is about much more than the hidden costs and unexpected side effects of wind-power generation, or about a citizens’ uprising in the tiny town of Meredith, N.Y., in the Catskill region 150 or so miles northwest of Manhattan. (Mind you, both are gripping stories.) It’s about the American tendency — and very likely the human tendency — to look for magic-bullet solutions to complicated social and economic problems, where none are available. It’s a microcosmic version of the political divisions — between left and right, environmentalists and free-marketers, corporations and citizens — that have virtually paralyzed our republic. It’s a reminder that whenever a virtually unregulated industry (as in this case) offers capitalists a chance to defraud the little guy and make a bundle, they’ll do it. It’s a tantalizing case study that suggests ordinary people still have the power to steer a course between faceless bureaucracies and greedy capitalists, but only just — and only if they can find a way to overcome their differences and work together.
In the abstract, wind power sounds like a good thing to nearly everybody. It relies on an essentially infinite resource, carries little or none of the obvious environmental downside of coal or oil, and presents no Fukushima-style doomsday scenario. Wind generation has become a major focus of venture capital; Israel includes video of a hearing a few years ago at which T. Boone Pickens told a congressional committee that he could imagine, in the relatively short term, 20 to 25 percent of the country’s electricity demand being fulfilled by wind and other renewables. I have no way to evaluate that claim, but the experts Israel consults in the film think it’s hokum. Given the inherently inconstant nature of wind, they argue, it’s not a stable or permanent solution to our energy crisis, and is unlikely ever to amount to more than a drop in the bucket.
Setting aside the discussion of whether it’s worthwhile to pursue wind power in the first place — and we shouldn’t really set that aside — there might be locations in the Great Plains states, the Southwest and the high western deserts where wind farms, even on the enormous scale imagined by Pickens, would do no great harm. But as people in Meredith and numerous other communities in the wind-friendly rural Northeast and Great Lakes region have discovered, living anywhere near those gargantuan wind-harnessing engines is quite a different matter. These days, the typical industrial wind turbine is around 400 feet high — the height of a 40-story building, or twice the length of a jumbo jet. The blades alone can weigh upward of 35 tons, and the entire assembly anywhere from 150 to 400 tons (resting on a platform of concrete and rebar, which itself may be 30 feet deep and weigh several hundred tons). It’s an enormous construction site, culminating in a high-voltage electrical device, that emits a 24/7 whoppa-whoppa-whoppa noise and incessant low-frequency vibration, and is topped with a brilliant flashing light. By daylight, there’s the nightmarish strobe effect — the vast rotating shadow that falls across an entire neighborhood when the turbine is between you and the sun. (While the question of whether it’s actually unhealthful to live near a turbine is unresolved, it’s definitely unpleasant.) If your neighbor put one up in her backyard without asking permission, how would you feel?
As it happens, I have a personal interest in the events and location of “Windfall,” because I spend summers in a town just a few miles from Meredith. But nothing about the town or its surrounding area (in Delaware County, N.Y., one of the poorest and least populated counties in the Northeast) is untypical of rural America. Meredith has a mix of longtime residents and big-city emigrants, and its longtime dairy-farm economy has largely collapsed in recent years, partly replaced by an unstable mixture of tourist-oriented businesses, craft initiatives and boutique organic farming. These social tensions came to the fore, predictably, during the wind-power debate, with the major landowners and dairy farmers on one side — hoping for the rather skimpy royalties paid by the corporate investors in wind — and many “recent” New York City arrivals, convinced that the region’s economic future depends on its unspoiled landscapes, on the other. (I use the scare quotes because anyone who’s lived in Delaware County less than 30 years is often viewed as a newcomer.)
People on both sides of the issue in Meredith assumed at first that the anti-turbine forces were an elitist minority, partly because the town board had always been dominated by the same landowning families, and partly because wind-power companies had signed people up to secret agreements that forbade them from discussing anything about the relationship. What ensued was a fascinating lesson in democracy (and a version of the same lesson the Tea Party and its supporters may learn later this year). After 826 people — more than half of Meredith’s total population — signed a petition opposing the town board’s pro-development policy on wind turbines, it turned out that the people who thought of themselves as the “real” residents were in the minority, and the jig was up for the wind industry in this one tiny corner of America. Yet as one newly elected board member reflects at the end of the film, nobody came out of this fight feeling good. A formerly harmonious community is now bitterly divided, and the Mitt Romney-style venture capitalists of wind power will just move on to the next town and sell their pseudo-green poisoned chalice to somebody else.
“Windfall” opens this week at the Quad Cinema in New York and the Facets Cinémathèque in Chicago. It opens Feb. 9 at the Art House Cinema 502 in Ogden, Utah, Feb. 24 at the Clinton Street Theater in Portland, Ore., and March 2 at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, with other cities and festival screenings to follow. It’s also available on-demand from cable, satellite and online providers, including Amazon, iTunes and VUDU.
Can saving the Amazon save the planet?
A global carbon market aims to curb emissions and slow climate change by protecting rainforests
In this Oct. 12, 2005 photo, a drought affects the water levels of Anama Lake along the Amazon River, 168 kilometers from Manaus, Brazil (Credit: AP Photo/Luiz Vasconcelos, Interfoto, File)
LIMA, Peru — International negotiators are closing in on a new solution for combating climate change — and saving the world’s remaining forests.
Some 20 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions now come from deforestation, especially in the lush, green band of tropical rainforest that circles the earth.
That is more than from global transport.
So representatives from member states involved in UN climate negotiations are attempting to hammer out a way to make it more profitable to protect forests than destroy them.
By providing cash for maintaining healthy forests, they hope to undermine the economic imperative for poor countries or individuals to cut down trees for timber, to free land for agriculture, or to make way for roads, housing and other infrastructure.
The idea, known as reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation, or REDD, will be included in the successor to the Kyoto protocol, which is now the only international treaty aimed at climate change.
The new treaty is due to be finalized in 2015 and take effect in 2020.
Integral to the plan would be the establishment of a multibillion-dollar international carbon market, in which companies could trade forest “credits,” or papers equal to one ton of carbon prevented from entering the atmosphere.
Businesses would buy the credits to offset their own emissions, in compliance with anti-pollution laws in their home countries.
‘’REDD has huge potential as a climate solution,” said Toby Janson-Smith, senior director of the climate program at Conservation International’s Center for Environmental Leadership in Business.
One reason for its popularity: It makes economic sense.
It costs about $2 to $4 to prevent a ton of “forest carbon” from entering the atmosphere. The price tag for capturing the same amount of carbon from a coal-fired power station hovers between $75 and $115.
REDD is also expected to give a helping hand to all kinds of environmentally-friendly forest businesses, from eco-tourism to the sustainable harvesting of timber, bark, nuts and other forest products by local communities.
But there are also major concerns: among them, determining internationally accepted safeguards to maintain the credibility of this new, abstract commodity, and keep companies from exploiting loopholes in the plan. Human-rights advocates also want to protect the rights of millions of poor people who live in the world’s forests.
Closing the loopholes
And one key question: how to quantify the amount of carbon emissions believed to have been avoided by saving a patch of forest?
To do that, baselines of existing forests, and their “carbon density,” must first be established, using a combination of methods, including satellite imagery and the time-consuming counting and measuring of trees on the ground.
Then comes the hard part: Deciding how much of a patch of forest would have been either completely cleared or significantly degraded had it not been for the REDD project protecting it.
At the latest round of UN climate negotiations at Durban last December, the door was opened for countries to use projected deforestation rather than historical deforestation in their calculations.
Environmentalists now fear nations will exaggerate projected deforestation in an attempt to both earn extra REDD cash and avoid having to genuinely reduce deforestation.
“We could even end up rewarding countries for increasing emissions,” said Susanne Breitkopf, a climate policy expert at Greenpeace International.
Indigenous rights
Another source of controversy is the role of forest communities, often indigenous peoples whose ancestors have lived in the same forest for millennia.
Many fear REDD could trigger a new land-grab at their expense. Meanwhile, some of the world’s largest investment banks — including those implicated in the 2008 credit crisis — could profit from trading in the new carbon paper.
That fear has been compounded by the rush of unregulated private REDD projects already being launched in forests in developing nations around the world, partly in anticipation of the 2015 treaty.
Yet many green and human rights groups have now swapped their early opposition to REDD for a place at the negotiating table to ensure that it is implemented with the necessary safeguards. The “ideology” has disappeared from the environmentalists’ positions on REDD, says Conservation International’s Janson-Smith.
Too little too late?
As REDD moves off the drawing board, saving the world’s forests will have other huge benefits.
Tropical rainforests cover just 2 percent of the earth’s surface but house half of all plant and animal species. Modern society uses many of those species for everything from cancer treatments to cosmetics and, of course, food.
But the timing of the new treaty, which will not take effect for another eight years, worries many scientists, who believe emissions must be slashed immediately.
As the climate crisis accelerates from New Orleans to Bangladesh, will REDD and the new UN treaty work fast enough to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis?
Big government, our one shot against crazy storms
In our age of devastating droughts, wildfires and hurricanes, the federal government is more important than ever
Flames engulf a road near Bastrop State Park as a wildfire burns out of control near Bastrop, Texas September 5, 2011. (Credit: Mike Stone / Reuters)
Look back on 2011 and you’ll notice a destructive trail of extreme weather slashing through the year. In Texas, it was the driest year ever recorded. An epic drought there killed half a billion trees, touched off wildfires that burned four million acres, and destroyed or damaged thousands of homes and buildings. The costs to agriculture, particularly the cotton and cattle businesses, are estimated at $5.2 billion — and keep in mind that, in a winter breaking all sorts of records for warmth, the Texas drought is not yet over.
In August, the East Coast had a close brush with calamity in the form of Hurricane Irene. Luckily, that storm had spent most of its energy by the time it hit land near New York City. Nonetheless, its rains did at least $7 billion worth of damage, putting it just below the $7.2 billion worth of chaos caused by Katrina back in 2005.
Across the planet the story was similar. Wildfires consumed large swaths of Chile. Colombia suffered its second year of endless rain, causing an estimated $2 billion in damage. In Brazil, the life-giving Amazon River was running low due to drought. Northern Mexico is still suffering from its worst drought in 70 years. Flooding in the Thai capital, Bangkok, killed over 500 and displaced or damaged the property of 12 million others, while ruining some of the world’s largest industrial parks. The World Bank estimates the damage in Thailand at a mind-boggling $45 billion, making it one of the most expensive disasters ever. And that’s just to start a 2011 extreme-weather list, not to end it.
Such calamities, devastating for those affected, have important implications for how we think about the role of government in our future. During natural disasters, society regularly turns to the state for help, which means such immediate crises are a much-needed reminder of just how important a functional big government turns out to be to our survival.
These days, big government gets big press attention — none of it anything but terrible. In the United States, especially in an election year, it’s become fashionable to beat up on the public sector and all things governmental (except the military). The Right does it nonstop. All their talking points disparage the role of an oversized federal government. Anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist famously set the tone for this assault. “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government,” he said. “I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” He has managed to get 235 members of the House of Representatives and 41 members of the Senate to sign his “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” and thereby swear never, under any circumstances, to raise taxes.
By now, this viewpoint has taken on the aura of folk wisdom, as if the essence of democracy were to hate government. Even many on the Left now regularly dismiss government as nothing but oversized, wasteful, bureaucratic, corrupt and oppressive, without giving serious consideration to how essential it may be to our lives.
But don’t expect the present “consensus” to last. Global warming and the freaky, increasingly extreme weather that will accompany it is going to change all that. After all, there is only one institution that actually has the capacity to deal with multibillion-dollar natural disasters on an increasingly routine basis. Private security firms won’t help your flooded or tornado-struck town. Private insurance companies are systematically withdrawing coverage from vulnerable coastal areas. Voluntary community groups, churches, anarchist affinity groups — each may prove helpful in limited ways, but for better or worse, only government has the capital and capacity to deal with the catastrophic implications of climate change.
Consider Hurricane Irene: As it passed through the Northeast, states mobilized more than 100,000 National Guard troops. New York City opened 78 public emergency shelters prepared to house up to 70,000 people. In my home state, Vermont, where the storm devastated the landscape, destroying or damaging 200 bridges, more than 500 miles of road, and 100 miles of railroad, the National Guard airlifted in free food, water, diapers, baby formula, medicine and tarps to thousands of desperate Vermonters trapped in 13 stranded towns — all free of charge to the victims of the storm.
The damage to Vermont was estimated at up to $1 billion. Yet the state only has 621,000 residents, so it could never have raised all the money needed to rebuild alone. Vermont businesses, individuals and foundations have donated at least $4 million, possibly up to $6 million in assistance, an impressive figure, but not a fraction of what was needed. The state government immediately released $24 million in funds, crucial to getting its system of roads rebuilt and functioning, but again that was a drop in the bucket, given the level of damage. A little known state-owned bank, the Vermont Municipal Bond Bank, also offered low-interest, low-collateral loans to towns to aid reconstruction efforts. But without federal money, which covered 80 percent to 100 percent of the costs of rebuilding many Vermont roads, the state would still be an economic basket case. Without aid from Washington, the transportation network might have taken years to recover.
As for flood insurance, the federal government is pretty much the only place to get it. The National Flood Insurance Program has written 5.5 million policies in more than 21,000 communities covering $1.2 trillion worth of property. As for the vaunted private market, for-profit insurance companies write between 180,000 and 200,000 policies in a given year. In other words, that is less than 5 percent of all flood insurance in the United States. This federally subsidized program underwrites the other 95 percent. Without such insurance, it’s not complicated: many waterlogged victims of 2011, whether from record Midwestern floods or Hurricane Irene, would simply have no money to rebuild.
Or consider sweltering Texas. In 2011, firefighters responded to 23,519 fires. In all, 2,742 homes were destroyed by out-of-control wildfires. But government action saved 34,756 other homes. So you decide: Was this another case of wasteful government intervention in the marketplace, or an extremely efficient use of resources?
Facing Snowpocalypse Without Plows
The early years of this century have already offered a number of examples of how disastrous too little government can be in the face of natural disaster, Katrina-inundated New Orleans in 2005 being perhaps the quintessential case.
There are, however, other less noted examples that nonetheless helped concentrate the minds of government planners. For example, in the early spring of 2011, a massive blizzard hit New York City. Dubbed “Snowmageddon” and “Snowpocalypse,” the storm arrived in the midst of tense statewide budget negotiations, and a nationwide assault on state workers (and their pensions).
In New York, Mayor Mike Bloomberg was pushing for cuts to the sanitation department budget. As the snow piled up, the people tasked with removing it — sanitation workers — failed to appear in sufficient numbers. As the city ground to a halt, New Yorkers were left to fend for themselves with nothing but shovels, their cars, doorways, stores, roads all hopelessly buried. Chaos ensued. Though nowhere near as destructive as Katrina, the storm became a case study in too little governance and the all-too-distinct limits of “self-reliance” when nature runs amuck. In the week that followed, even the rich were stranded amid the mounting heaps of snow and uncollected garbage.
Mayor Bloomberg emerged from the debacle chastened, even though he accused the union of staging a soft strike, a work-to-rule-style slowdown that held the snowbound city hostage. The union denied engaging in any such illegal actions. Whatever the case, the blizzard focused thinking locally on the nature of public workers. It suddenly made sanitation workers less invisible and forced a set of questions: Are public workers really “union fat cats” with “sinecures” gorging at the public trough? Or are they as essential to the basic functions of the city as white blood cells to the health of the human body? Clearly, in snowbound New York it was the latter. No sanitation workers and your city instantly turns chaotic and fills with garbage, leaving street after street lined with the stuff.
More broadly the question raised was: Can an individual, a town, a city, even a state really “go it alone” when the weather turns genuinely threatening? Briefly, all the union bashing and attacks on the public sector that had marked that year’s state-level budget debates began to sound unhinged.
In the Big Apple at least, when Irene came calling that August, Mayor Bloomberg was ready. He wasn’t dissing or scolding unions. He wasn’t whining about the cost of running a government. He embraced planning, the public sector, public workers and coordinated collective action. His administration took unprecedented steps like shutting down the subway and moving its trains to higher ground. Good thing they did. Several low-lying subway yards flooded. Had trains been parked there, many millions in public capital might have been lost or damaged.
The Secret History of Free Enterprise in America
When thinking about the forces of nature and the nature of infrastructure, a slightly longer view of history is instructive. And here’s where to start: in the U.S., despite its official pro-market myths, government has always been the main force behind the development of a national infrastructure, and so of the country’s overall economic prosperity.
One can trace the origins of state participation in the economy back to at least the founding of the republic: from Alexander Hamilton’s First Bank of the United States, which refloated the entire post-revolutionary economy when it bought otherwise worthless colonial debts at face value; to Henry Clay’s half-realized program of public investment and planning called the American System; to the New York State-funded Erie Canal, which made the future Big Apple the economic focus of the eastern seaboard; to the railroads, built on government land grants, that took the economy west and tied the nation together; to New Deal programs that helped pulled the country out of the Great Depression and built much of the infrastructure we still use like the Hoover Dam, scores of major bridges, hospitals, schools and so on; to the government-funded and sponsored interstate highway system launched in the late 1950s; to the similarly funded space race and beyond. It’s simple enough: big government investments (and thus big government) has been central to the remarkable economic dynamism of the country.
Government has created roads, highways, railways, ports, the postal system, inland waterways, universities and telecommunications systems. Government-funded R&D, as well as the buying patterns of government agencies — (alas!) both often connected to war and war-making plans — have driven innovation in everything from textiles and shipbuilding to telecoms, medicine and high-tech breakthroughs of all sorts. Individuals invent technology, but in the United States it is almost always public money that brings the technology to scale, be it in aeronautics, medicine, computers, or agriculture.
Without constant government planning and subsidies, American capitalism simply could not have developed as it did, making ours the world’s largest economy. Yes, the entrepreneurs we are taught to venerate have been key to all this, but dig a little deeper and you soon find that most of their oil was on public lands, their technology nurtured or invented thanks to government-sponsored R&D, or supported by excellent public infrastructure and the possibility of hiring well-educated workers produced by a heavily subsidized higher-education system. Just to cite one recent example, the now-familiar Siri voice-activated command system on the new iPhone is based on — brace yourself — government-developed technology.
And here’s a curious thing: everybody more or less knows all this and yet it is almost never acknowledged. If one were to write the secret history of free enterprise in the United States, one would have to acknowledge that it has always been and remains at least a little bit socialist. However, it’s not considered proper to discuss government planning in open, realistic and mature terms, so we fail to talk about what government could — or rather, must — do to help us meet the future of climate change.
Storm Socialism
The onset of ever more extreme and repeated weather events is likely to change how we think about the role of the state. But attitudes toward the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which stands behind state and local disaster responses, suggest that we’re hardly at that moment yet. In late 2011, with Americans beleaguered by weather disasters, FEMA came under attack from congressional Republicans, eager to starve it of funds. One look at FEMA explains why.
Yes, when George W. Bush put an unqualified playboy at its helm, the agency dealt disastrously with Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. Under better leadership, however, it has been anything but the sinister apparatus of repression portrayed by legions of rightists and conspiracy theorists. FEMA is, in fact, an eminently effective mechanism for planning focused on the public good, not private profit, a form of public insurance and public assistance for Americans struck by disaster. Every year FEMA gives hundreds of millions of dollars to local firefighters and first responders, as well as victims dealing with the aftershock of floods, fires and the other calamities associated with extreme weather events.
The agency’s work is structured around what it calls “the disaster life cycle” — the process through which emergency managers prepare for, respond to and help others recover from and reduce the risk of disasters. More concretely, FEMA’s services include training, planning, coordinating and funding state and local disaster managers and first responders, grant-making to local governments, institutions and individuals, and direct emergency assistance that ranges from psychological counseling and medical aid to emergency unemployment benefits. FEMA also subsidizes long-term rebuilding and planning efforts by communities affected by disasters. In other words, it actually represents an excellent use of your tax dollars to provide services aimed at restoring local economic health and so the tax base. The anti-government Right hates FEMA for the same reason that they hate Social Security — because it works!
As it happens, thanks in part to the congressional GOP’s sabotage efforts, thousands of FEMA’s long-term recovery projects are now on hold, while the cash-strapped agency shifts its resources to deal with only the most immediate crises. This represents a dangerous trend, given what historical statistics tell us about our future. In recent decades, the number of Major Disaster Declarations by the federal government has been escalating sharply: only 12 in 1961, 17 in 1971, 15 in 1981, 43 in 1991, and in 2011 — 99! As a result, just when Hurricane Irene bore down on the East Coast, FEMA’s disaster relief fund had already been depleted from $2.4 billion as the year began to a mere $792 million.
Like it or not, government is a huge part of our economy. Altogether, federal, state and local government activity — that is collecting fees, taxing, borrowing and then spending on wages, procurement, contracting, grant-making, subsidies and aid — constitutes about 35 percent of the gross domestic product. You could say that we already live in a somewhat “mixed economy”: that is, an economy that fundamentally combines private and public economic activity.
The intensification of climate change means that we need to acknowledge the chaotic future we face and start planning for it. Think of what’s coming, if you will, as a kind of storm socialism.
After all, climate scientists believe that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide beyond 350 parts-per-million (ppm) could set off compounding feedback loops and so lock us into runaway climate change. We are already at 392 ppm. Even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels immediately, the disruptive effect of accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere is guaranteed to hammer us for decades. In other words, according to the best-case scenario, we face decades of increasingly chaotic and violent weather.
In the face of an unraveling climate system, there is no way that private enterprise alone will meet the threat. And though small “d” democracy and “community” may be key parts of a strong, functional and fair society, volunteerism and “self-organization” alone will prove as incapable as private enterprise in responding to the massive challenges now beginning to unfold.
To adapt to climate change will mean coming together on a large scale and mobilizing society’s full range of resources. In other words, Big Storms require Big Government. Who else will save stranded climate refugees, or protect and rebuild infrastructure, or coordinate rescue efforts and plan out the flow and allocation of resources?
It will be government that does these tasks or they will not be done at all.
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