Farming remains one of the few modern professions that hangs on the weather, a dependency that new technology can only partially remedy. That’s why I’m especially concerned with the climate disruptions that are already increasing damaging droughts and flooding worldwide, and either destroying crops outright or sharply cutting yields.
Though there are some people who don’t seem to know where food comes from, who are forever denying the severity of the problem. Too many of them have positions of authority, leading audiences to assume that there isn’t enough information to make a decision on. They tune it out. This makes the job of those trying to educate the public that much harder because there are a limited number of issues that can grab public attention at any one time, and citizens need to be heavily involved in pushing for meaningful change before it can happen.
Yet you don’t encourage anyone to get involved by putting them to sleep. No one calls their congressmember to ask them to please try and do something when you get around to it, if it isn’t too much trouble, after you deal with the other pressing concerns of the day, if it doesn’t cost too much and no one makes any kind of fuss. Any issue on which you can place that many caveats can’t be very urgent.
Which is exactly what so-called climate moderates would like people to believe. They’ve lost the battle over whether or not climate disruption is important, and are now fighting to keep people in the dark about how pressing it is. Unfortunately for all of us, the latest incarnation of climate skepticism is getting plenty of help from the New York Times, where book reviewer Andrew Revkin decides that the solution to all the arguing is to split the difference between the people who say it’s an urgent problem and those who think it isn’t a problem.
Without a serious consideration of the facts, Revkin awards the victory in the debate to the people who say it’s a problem, but not anything to get agitated about. Not anything to act on immediately. Don’t be hasty. He quotes author Michael Shellenberger invoking the name of Rev. Martin Luther King to firmly tamp down any zeal readers might have to take action:
“… In a recent interview, Mr. Shellenberger reprised a central point of the essay and book. “Martin Luther King didn’t give the ‘I have a nightmare’ speech, he gave an ‘I have a dream’ speech,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “We need a politics that is positive and that inspires people around an exciting and inspiring vision.” …”
That sounds very reasonable. But it’s dead wrong, both as a prescription for the sustainability movement right now and as an analysis of MLK’s message. Consider the following quotes from the original “I have a dream” speech:
“… 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
“In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
“It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
“But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice. We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.
“… It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. …”
Those were not the words of a man who was afraid of giving people the vapors. They followed a history of public speaking that minced no words about the seriousness and injustice of the situation. There was a message of hope, to be sure. But that message was grounded in a frank discussion of the facts on the ground and the dire future that would result from a failure to change course.
King was no equivocator. To paint him otherwise diminishes both his message and the importance of meaningful action on climate change.
King’s words of hope weren’t powerful because he tried to reassure both sides of the argument. They weren’t moving because they came from a rose-colored filter. His speech still towers over the political landscape precisely because he spoke out with hope in spite of dreadful, ongoing injustice and as a member of a class of people with very little political power.
And what is our situation today? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that it’s likely too late to avoid the worst case scenarios. The glaciers in Greenland are collapsing and melting rapidly. The Arctic sea ice is melting faster than the IPCC’s worst case scenarios, disappearing this summer at a pace that the IPCC didn’t expect to see for decades. We are in dire straits and the time to act is now. Hastily.
So where’s the hope? Try green jobs. Try a full auction of carbon credits. Try wide scale solar power. Try getting biofuel from algae, which would have a small land footprint and be highly productive.
Just try these things soon. When the Governor of Georgia is publicly praying for rain, it’s time to speak frankly and act boldly, because it might not be too long before all our nation’s farmers are holding their own public prayers for rain.
First off, can you expand upon your statement, “But it’s dead wrong as a prescription for the sustainability movement right now.” Do you honestly believe that talking about doom-and-gloom nightmare scenarios is motivating and effective?
More generally, and this taken from my post at Revkin’s Dot Earth Blog:
As expected, much of the criticism of Revkin’s piece illustrates how egregiously so many climate activists misjudge the current political consensus on global warming and its policy implications.
It’s easy to write off Revkin’s piece if you believe, as do so many climate activists today, that we’ve seen a “tipping point” in public perceptions on global warming over the past year. Indeed, how can Shellenberger & Nordhaus represent a new middle way if the center has already shifted so dramatically and everyone’s ready for bold action (i.e. strong regulations)?
No doubt there has been incredible political progress, but unfortunately the center remains far from bold action. By and large, global warming ranks extremely low among voter priorities and energy prices are of utmost and growing concern. No wonder Californians rejected a proposition (Prop 87) last year that would have funded clean energy through an oil tax. And no surprise that the Washington Post runs front-page articles like “Climate Is a Risky Issue for Democrats,” or that Pew polls continue to find global warming ranking nearly dead last out of the top 20 voter priorities.
It’s not just about misjudging the political consensus, though. Policy literalists seemingly fail to understand the importance of tone or political and social change in general. They read Revkin’s piece and say, “so what?” If today’s books and their ideas don’t present immediate policy solutions, they say, then who cares?
But tone, framing, and ideas matter. That Newt Gingrich is pushing the right to take global warming seriously is, in fact, a significant and noteworthy change (I go to Johns Hopkins, a relatively conservative college campus where Gingrich came to speak last year, and I can say first-hand that his book is causing a ruckus). As is Shellenberger and Nordhaus challenging mainstream environmentalists on how they’ve sidelined public investment.
The climate problem isn’t going to be solved with Liebermann-Warner or any of the smaller measures being considered in today’s energy bill. This is a half-century undertaking that will require the establishment of new political identities and majorities. Whether or not you agree with calling these authors the “new center,” we can recognize that Revkin has reported on some very important trends.
The work that IPCC has done is really commendable. Objective science that’s advancing the argument. It’s encouraging to see the biodiversity people now following that game plan, with IUCN (World Conservation Union) this weekend convening people in France to create an ICCP-like organization to generate the research and reports to build a global discussion about the sixth mass extinction. I have a link to story on my frog blog. http://frogmatters.wordpress.com/2007/11/16/global-warming-squeezing-out-biodiversity-debate/
Needless to say, I have to agree with some of the points made by Teryn N.
I encourage IGHIH readers to read the reasoned dialogue I engaged in with Dave Roberts of Grist here (http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/grist-and-dot-earth-framing-the-climate-challenge/
) to get some useful depth on ‘framing’ of the climate/energy challenge (how to energize a growing human population, most of whom have NO energy choices, without overheating the planet).
New and greatly advanced non-polluting energy technologies will be needed to do this. Review our Energy Challenge series to see more — http://www.nytimes.com/energychallenge.
Many studies show that a growing carbon cost and moves toward efficiency will not drive the necessary changeover in an energy system that took 150 years to build (our embedded fossil reality) in time to avert a lot of warming. And that’s just in the US. Unless solar panels are competitive with the current price of coal in China (it’s very cheap) China will just keep exporting them to Germany (with the big subsidies paid to installers). Germany could be blanketed in PV, but if China and India remain “fossilized” (and us of course), emissions keep climbing for decades to come.
Another sobering reality is it will take many years to work out any carbon cap or tax, even in California, let alone the USA, China, and beyond.
So if the climate-energy challenge is taken seriously, according to heaps of experts I’ve talkd to on this issue for 20 years, everything is needed, including the actions Gingrich et al are focusing on. Some might say it’s a waste of time to worry about whether they are labeled centrist or not.
Your activism is also needed, by any calculation (see my recent Dot Earth post “Whose Climate Is it Anyway?” for more on the youth climate movement). But I’ll bet there are many who’d say that tossing the Gingrich gang out of the conversation is probably a mistake.
My job as a journalist is also to be sure that the Lomborgs of the world are put on the record when they agree that a carbon tax or equivalent is needed. There are heaps of citizens out there who are not “progressive” or on the front lines, and who cling to the Lomborgs of the world like an intellectual lifeboat. Imagine the next time Lomborg is called as a Senate witness… “I support a carbon tax,” he says.. Is that bad?
Thanks for reading The Times, and please follow my posts on Dot Earth (and comment there too).
Andy
Natasha, I’d encourage you to actually pick up a copy of Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s Break Through. If you’d read the introduction, you’d know that the duo actually spends most of it talking about the very section of MLK’s speech that you quote. They are in complete agreement with you that the “I Have a Dream” speech was so powerful because it followed what could be called the “Nightmare Speech” – a fact we often forget. And you are dead wrong if you think Shellenberger and Nordhaus are in league with Bjorn Lomborg’s camp and think that climate change is nothing to be agitated about, not a problem. That was Revkin’s mistake, tossing them together with the likes of Lomborg. Please, read Break Through and then tell me that Shellenberger and Nordhaus don’t think climate change is a big deal.
The two authors spend most of the Introduction to their book making the case that King’s speech was so powerful because he took us into the Nightmare but then quickly lifted us up with the Dream of a brighter tomorrow. This is exactly what many environmentalists fail to do. They spend so much effort “educating” the American people about the tremendous dangers of climate change and talking about the impending global warming apocalypse.
Think about “An Inconvenient Truth,” the most highly praised and visible example of the efforts of environmentalists and global warming activists to “wake up” the American people by getting them to truly understand the dangers we face. But where in the Nightmare scenarios of “An Inconvenient Truth” is the Dream? The film ends with a short statement that we have the tools we need to avoid climate chaos, and all you need to do is screw in a few light bulbs, try to drive less, or buy a hybrid car. In fact, Al Gores’ inconvenient truth is not the fact that climate change is occurring, but that it will require us to change our lives, presumably for the worse, an inconvenience to us.
That’s no Dream of a brighter future there. Where’s the vision of the future we could have, if we tackle the climate crisis?
People are highly unlikely to acknowledge a problem and be motivated to action, no matter how severe the dangers, if they either a) can’t see a solution to the problem (why worry about something you can do nothing about?) or b) don’t see the solution as any better than the problem (why trade the bad for the worse?).
The conventional framing and messaging around climate change fails to recognize these key facts. The apocalyptic messaging alone will not motivate action. The Nightmare can be effective in motivating a sense of urgency, but only if paired with the Dream, the Vision of a brighter tomorrow that is possible if we rise to the climate challenge. (That’s what I’ve tried to do here)
This should be our task. It’s no longer enough to merely talk about the frightening future described in the IPCC reports, or the even worse scientific reports that seem to come out every week. We’ve got to envision and articulate a compelling vision of the future we will inherit if we DO act, if we DO rise to the climate challenge and seize the opportunity it truly presents.
There IS no “Inconvenient Truth” about climate change, except that we can no longer ignore it. It in fact presents a very convenient opportunity, the motivating rationale to end our unsustainable, unjust and unhealthy energy system and replace it with something better: a sustainable, just, and prosperous energy future.
It’s high time we start talking less about the Nightmare and much more about the Dream.