Making Decisions in a Climate of Doubt

A billboard by the Heartland Institute outside of Chicago, May 2012.

What's going on with climate change? How are we doing?

As of this writing, the concentration of CO₂ (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere, as recorded atop Mauna Loa mountain in Hawaii, is a little over 394 ppm (parts per million) and rising at an accelerating rate.    Carbon dioxide, as we all should now know, is the primary greenhouse gas that is driving anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) global climate change.  The higher the concentration, the greater the change.

For some time, climate scientists have warned that atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ above 350 ppm would take the planet into a realm that is outside of historic human experience.  Indeed, "350" has become the mantra of a global grassroots movement seeking political and social solutions to this imminent threat.  Atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ have exceeded 350 ppm since the late 1980s.  Given the current trajectory, some scientists and policy makers have proposed a new target.  In order to keep the change in global average temperature over the next century to less than 2 degrees Celsius (a small number with massive implications), we need to keep the concentration below 450 ppm.  At a recent open lecture at Northeastern University, Henry Jacoby, Professor of Applied Economics at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at MIT, warned, "We are about to blow through that level."  Massive change is going to happen.  He suggested, somewhat resignedly, that we will likely need to move the goal post back to something like 650 ppm - a concentration that projects a global average temperature rise somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 - 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.  This is a global temperature difference not seen since dinosaurs walked the earth.  No polar ice caps.  Sea levels from 30 to 120 meters higher than they are today.

There are lots of bright spots. Since about 2008, emissions of greenhouse gases from the wealthier, industrialized nations of the world have actually flattened, or even decreased.  This is good, although it appears to have had more to do with the economic recession and the rapid replacement of coal with suddenly cheaper natural gas (from fracking) than with with any deliberate effort.  Unfortunately, these decreases have been more than offset by rapid growth in emissions from industrializing nations, especially China and Brazil.

There is significant global action on climate change, but it is widely distributed or dispersed.  This action has been happening almost entirely at the local or regional level: by the European Union, by many states or provinces, by cities, and by a variety of non-governmental organizations, from businesses to non-profits.  Coordinated global action by the world's governments, however, is notably absent.  This absence of global leadership is striking.  The science around climate change has only improved.  The signals of rapid global change are not only clearer, but appear to be moving faster than even the worst case scenarios had predicted.  And for the last twenty years, it's been popularly assumed that a single, global treaty is the only viable way for the world to avert disruptive climate change. What happened to global leadership?  There is no simple answer to this question, but one issue that must be confronted is the role of the social and political movement against action on climate change.

The Kyoto Protocol was the first, and up to this point, last, serious international attempt at a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gases. The Kyoto Protocol was drafted in December 1997 by hundreds of delegates from around the world under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  It called for binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions, starting with the developed nations most responsible for the bulk of emissions to date.  At that time, the climate change policy debate was informed by more than three decades of accumulating scientific analysis from around the globe.  That's right, three decades.  Negotiations over this global treaty were intense and plagued by uncertainty, but advocates at the time had more than just decades of science on their side.  There was precedent for coordinated, global action on environmental threats.  Only a decade before, the U.S. led the charge on the Montreal Protocol.  This successful, global treaty banned the production of CFCs, a ubiquitous class of chemicals eating away at the ozone layer - a thin layer of gas in the atmosphere that protects life on Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. A variety of other international environmental efforts, from the control of transboundary air pollution to whaling, seemed to show that there could be coordinated, global action.

Proponents of the Kyoto Protocol argued that the science around climate change was well supported, the problem was urgent, action today would reduce the necessity of more costly and disruptive responses in the future, etc.  To a contemporary reader, what is probably most striking is how much these arguments haven't changed, and how they have only been reinforced by accumulating evidence and improved scientific understanding.  However, advocates of the Kyoto Protocol faced a new breed of political opposition.  New conservative organizations, many of which only emerged in the late 1980s, launched a well-funded and strategic campaign to cast doubt on scientific predictions about climate change and to thwart any policies aimed at controlling greenhouse gas emissions. In the early 1990s, these efforts were strengthened by a dramatic political shift in the U.S. that enabled conservative Republicans to take control of Congress, giving skeptical, conservative voices a powerful platform to amplify their message and to steer the U.S. away from making binding commitments. It was a critical moment in the incipient effort to tackle climate change, and we are still grappling with the implications of those decisions.

Today, it's hard to imagine a time when the issue of climate change wasn't polarized or partisan.  But there was a time, mostly before the late 1980s.  The political division over climate change that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s was profound, and it caught a lot of people off guard.  Some of the arguments against the Kyoto Protocol are still familiar and not particularly radical: concerns about impacts to the U.S. economy, concerns about imposing limits on the U.S. while allowing countries like China and India to continue unrestricted, concerns about the technical ability of the U.S. to even achieve the desired reductions.  There were, of course, more exotic arguments: the argument that more carbon dioxide will be good for plants and make the world greener, the argument that a warmer world will actually be more comfortable, etc.  But the most disruptive arguments have been the distortions and aspersions leveled at the science and scientists themselves.  Attacking the science seems to have sown confusion and left very little space for common ground.

During that last climate change lecture, Professor Jacoby asserted that the "Argument [against action on climate change] is not really about the science; it's about the role of government in your life."  Possibly.  It has often seemed that the debates have been at cross purposes; one side talking past the other.  For the scientifically-literate and the environmentally sensitive, the debate over whether to take action, or whether there even is a problem, has simply been baffling and frustrating.

It seems to me that the drama of climate change is not the increasingly dire message of impending catastrophe.  Rather, the drama is the political debate.  Climate change may be the biggest environmental threat ever faced by humanity, but it is the politics that poses the greatest challenge.

The story of the Kyoto Protocol is an excerpt from the chapter "Should the U.S. have signed the Kyoto Protocol?" in my book The Environment since 1945 (New York: Facts On File, 2012). 

Recycling, Climate Change, and Youth

How young is too young to learn about greenhouse gas emissions, Life Cycle Analysis, and embodied energy?

This past Monday I had the opportunity to present these concepts to a group of 40 5th graders at Brickett Elementary School in Lynn, Massachusetts.  Their teacher, Donna Whalen, had invited me a couple months back to talk about recycling or climate change.  She and her class wanted to learn more about different environmental issues so that they could develop a public project to work on.  This was no small thing.

Mrs. Whalen and her industrious students are known regionally and nationally for their environmental activities. This past spring, Mrs. Whalen's 5th grade class won the Disney Planet Challenge for their project “Think Before You Idle,” which was an effort to decrease needless vehicle idling in Lynn. Their local initiative not only reduced this pernicious source of toxic air pollution near schools, it sent her and her students on a four-day trip to Disney World. Last year, Mrs. Whalen's 4th graders launched a campaign to educate residents about the need for rain barrels and convinced a local cable company to donate the use of one of its billboards to spread their message. The campaign earned them a visit by the Mayor of Lynn, and an official declaration of Monday as Rain Barrel Day in Lynn.  Two years ago, Mrs. Whalen's 4th grade class was recognized with a River Stewardship Award, and a state legislative citation, for their efforts to promote water conservation in Lynn and throughout the state. In fact, I first learned about Mrs. Whalen and her amazing students through a casual conversation with a member of the Saugus River Watershed Council during a regional climate change adaptation planning meeting convened by the Boston Metropolitan Area Planning Council. This individual gushed about Mrs. Whalen and her students.

I'm not generally used to interacting with anyone younger than my cat (i.e. college aged), but this opportunity presented an interesting challenge. I could have talked either about recycling or climate change, but I offered to talk about the connections between these two important issues.

The main link between recycling and climate change is energy.  It takes less energy to make products from recycled materials than from virgin materials (a lot less in the case of aluminum).  The amount of energy expended in making products is significant because most of the energy we use (for heating, electricity, transportation, manufacturing) comes from burning fossil fuels (e.g. coal, oil, natural gas).   Using less energy means that we produce less carbon dioxide (CO₂) - the primary greenhouse gas implicated in human-driven climate change. Other greenhouse gases, such as methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O), are also reduced in certain cases as a result of reduced use of chemical manufacturing processes. Greenhouse gas emissions are the primary issue in global climate change. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have the property of allowing sunlight to enter the atmosphere (kind of like the glass of a greenhouse), while blocking (or retarding) the escape of heat back into space (kind of like a global blanket).  This "greenhouse effect" is a natural process, but human industrial activity over the past two centuries has released a lot more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than is normal (more than has been seen in 800,000 years), meaning that a lot more heat than normal has been retained in the atmosphere.  As a result, the world is warming, the climate is changing, and we are experiencing all kinds of hard-to-predict and often undesirable environmental changes.

In the spirit of show and tell, I showed and told my presentation using a few simple props: a glass drinking bottle, a plastic drinking bottle, an aluminum can, and a newspaper.  We talked about the life cycle of each of these products: how they are created (e.g. did you know plastic is made from oil and natural gas?), how they are used, and what can happen to them after we are done with them.  In each case, we identified the resource consumption (e.g. trees, minerals) and the energy use and the greenhouse gases emissions that happen in each phase of a product's life (e.g. did you know it takes 95% less energy to make aluminum cans from recycled aluminum?).  Recycling (as I showed them in a PowerPoint slide), changes the lives of these products in significant ways: reducing natural resource consumption (e.g. did you know it takes 17 trees to make one ton of newspaper?), saving landfill space, reducing energy use, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As a final exercise, we walked through the process of actually calculating the greenhouse emissions that could be prevented if their school recycled all of the glass bottles it consumed. For this last exercise, I had prepared a simple worksheet (although not so simple to produce!) that allowed them to input their own values.

I have to admit that as the day of my presentation approached, I grew increasingly nervous that my lesson plan would be too complex, or worse, too boring.  I am happy to report that my fears were groundless.  These students were really there with me the whole time.  They listened eagerly and had lots of really good, clarifying questions.  Which recycled product has the biggest impact on energy and greenhouse emissions? The least?  If plastic is made from oil, is it possible to get that oil back?  How do all those tons of gasses stay up in the atmosphere?  I was equally impressed by what they already knew - about natural resource consumption, about recycling, about pollution. When we walked through the exercise to calculate their school's greenhouse gas emissions from glass consumption, they called out the answers at each step, and even corrected me when I made a couple of mathematical mistakes. Whoa.

I feel compelled to point out that these students are from a largely non-White, and low income community. These are not privileged kids - or at least not from a socioeconomic perspective. They are, however, clearly advantaged by the quality of this teacher and this institution.

These young people (e.g. 8 - 9 years old) are also clearly capable of understanding and engaging with complex environmental topics.  They need to be.  The social and environmental challenges that face us will undoubtedly span generations, and these young people will inherit these problems, as will their children.  I am hoping that this type of education, and its level of sophistication, can become the new norm.  Understanding the importance of environmental stewardship the way we understand and teach about the importance of washing our hands - something based on decades of complex, scientific research, but in the end comes down to a simple idea: it's good for our own health and welfare and those around us.

GIS Across the Curriculum

This past weekend my department chair Steve Matchak and I attended the GIS & Spatial Thinking in the Undergraduate Curriculum Conference at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The conference brought together about 70+ people from 50 schools across the country to discuss ways of better integrating spatial applications and geospatial technology in undergraduate education. The event also served the purpose of fostering important networking opportunities.
While there were a number of schools, including Bucknell, that had well established GIS programs (in some form or another), there were equally as many who were there looking for ideas on how to get things started.  What struck me was how many of the attendees were not from Geography or GIS-centric programs.  More importantly, the most consistent message of the conference discussions was that GIS should not be  confined to Geography or GIS-specific programs.  Bucknell is an example of this philosophy in action.  Although it has had a robust Geography program for some time, and its Geographers have been strong advocates of GIS at the school, the rapid and sustained diffusion of GIS across the school has been spear-headed by Janine Glathar, a GIS Specialist, from their Library and IT department (and the organizer of the conference). She is academically non-aligned, and she says that this 'neutral' position has been important to her success in helping more departments integrate this technology into their research and curricula (note that this is the same model adopted by Harvard's Center for Geographic Analysis). In fact, quite a number of the attendees and presenters were from Library IT departments looking to develop the ideas and the capacity to bring in this technology to support faculty and students across their schools.
This expansive, trans-disciplinary perspective of GIS was really reinforced by the keynote speakers and a number of the presenters and attendees who emphasized qualitative applications of GIS, primarily in the humanities.
I think a lot of us were particularly struck by the keynote presentation "Geographic Imagination in the Digital Humanities" by Anne Knowles from Middlebury College. She talked about historical applications of GIS, and specifically, examples of work by her and her students to understand and represent the World War II Holocaust.  Her graphical representations were clever and beautiful and moving.  One might say "cartography at its best," except that a number of these representations were not 'cartographic' in the conventional sense, and they certainly did not use GIS.  The one that sticks with me is an image of a long, snaking line of black silhouettes,  clearly prisoners, on a forced march, against a blank, white background, the line of silhouettes diminishing as it winds its way into the distant horizon. This was probably the most subversive message of the conference: abandon the assumption that GIS -and even maps -  are the best or only ways to represent spatial phenomena. Heck, rethink your ideas of what constitutes "space".
The conference was engaging and well worth our time.  We had a lot of really great conversations and the whole experience really gave Steve and I a lot to think about regarding our own program.  We had expected to hear cheerleading for GIS and were prepared to take back strategies to bolster our existing GIS degree program.  We came away with questions about the wisdom of our technique-specific approach.  Maybe we need to think more about specific, topical foci to ground the GIS training.  Maybe we need to look at ways of engaging more of our colleagues in this technology - utilizing our own Digital Geography Laboratory as a GIS hub for the whole institution.
We're waiting for Bucknell to post presentations and materials from the conference.  As soon as they do, I'll post a link to those here as well.  In the meantime, here are some of the more interesting resources discussed at the conference:

• PLOTS Balloon Mapping Kit - A low-cost kit that you can purchase online to do a class-based aerial photography exercise using a balloon and a camera (remote sensing on the cheap!)
• NEATLINE is a geotemporal exhibit-builder that allows you to create beautiful, complex maps and narrative sequences from collections of archives and artifacts, and to connect your maps and narratives with timeline. 
• Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest - otherwise known as cartograms.
• Floating Sheep - a site dedicated to mapping and analyzing user generated geocoded data. The results provide one glimpse of what internet users (in the aggregate) think about particular places. See the now (in)famous map of racist tweets following President Obama's reelection.  
• SPACIT - Education for spatial citizenship in Europe. 
• TeachGIS - because no one should have to face GIS alone.  A resource (coming soon) for GIS instructors. 
• i-Tree - Tools for assessing and managing community forests.
• The Stanford Spatial History Project - a place for a collaborative community of scholars to engage in creative visual analysis to further research in the field of history.

The Food Project 20th Anniversary Gala

On Wednesday evening Neenah and I attended The Food Project's (TFP) 20th Anniversary gala "20 Years of Growing Together". It was a spectacular event. It was held at the WGBH studios in Brighton and the venue was packed with TFP staff, supporters, and guests, and food stations featuring locally grown cuisine (a good portion grown by TFP youth) prepared by some of the area's top eateries. The gala was a celebration of TFP's accomplishments and growth, and an invitation for continued support of this amazing organization.

The guest speakers for the event were Gordon Hamersley, one of the most respected chefs in Boston, and Frances Moore Lappé, author or co-author of 18 books including Diet for a Small Planet. However, I have to say that our emcee, Robert Lewis, Jr., VP for Programs at The Boston Foundation, really made the event. Toward the end of the night he acted as the auctioneer, helping to auction off a variety of donated items and services, from catered dinners prepared and served by TFP youth, to a beautiful quilt. Two things really struck me: One, I had never seen a man speak so quickly and think even faster on his feet. Two, the level of bidding quickly rose well beyond anything I would have imagined, and I think I wasn't the only one who kept stock still for fear of signaling a bid. But it was fun to watch and gratifying to see individuals with the means and desire to support The Food Project. Of course, TFP relies not just on big donors for support. This organization needs the support of many people, at all levels, to keep doing its work for another two decades.

Since 1991, The Food Project has engaged high school students from diverse neighborhoods across the greater Boston area to grow sustainable food, and through this activity, engage in both social and personal change. The youth who participate are placed in unusually responsible roles where they learn about the land, each other, and the environmental and social justice issues challenging our society - and ways to personally and collectively facilitate positive change. Food from the farms is distributed through TFP's community supported agriculture programs and farmers' markets, and donated to local hunger relief organizations.

TFP is an unusual organization that operates at the nexus of environment, youth, and community. I have been a member of the Board of Trustees of this organization for more than two years now, and I invite you to learn about this wonderful organization and its good works. You can learn more at http://thefoodproject.org/. To contribute to or get involved with the The Food Project, visit http://thefoodproject.org/get-involved.

New England Environmental Justice Summit

On Saturday, June 9 I attended the first New England Environmental Justice Summit, which was convened at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. This was a day-long event to connect community activists and residents, environmental justice advocates, lawyers, and policymakers from all six New England States who are interested in the environment and public health in low income communities and communities of color. This was a significant event to create a regional consciousness and network around environmental justice in New England. This event was two years in the making and credit goes to the core partners who pulled it off:

• Norbert Kovacs, Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice
• Sheri Neely, Fairfield County Environmental Justice Network
• Staci Rubin, Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE)
• Steve Fischbach, Rhode Island Legal Services

The day started off with a hearty breakfast, a welcome from youth organizers, and then opening comments from two officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): Curt Spalding, Administrator for EPA's New England Region (Region 1), and Lisa Garcia, Senior Advisor to the Administrator for Environmental Justice. The EPA speakers affirmed their support for environmental justice work, citing a number of national initiatives (Plan EJ 2014, Partnership for Sustainable Communities, Healthy Communities Map (EJView Mapper) and local accomplishments (Fairmont Line in Boston), and assured everyone that environmental justice is EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's top priority.

Energy Justice

After the opening comments, I attended the workshop on "Fairness & Energy Justice." Facilitator Rev. Bob Murphy from Cape Cod introduced us to the concept of "energy justice" and asserted that "Energy is a human rights issue." The goal of energy justice, he explained, is "to provide all people, in all places, with an adequate supply of energy that is safe, affordable, and sustainable." Energy, like most basics in life (i.e. food, clothing, shelter), is both vital and dangerously scarce for low income households and communities. Lack of access to safe, affordable, and sustainable energy creates all kinds of hardships: hypothermia in the winter, hyperthermia in the summer (not just uncomfortable, but deadly for the very young and old, as well as those with chronic diseases), and of course, economic strain.

We heard from three speakers on different energy justice issues. Judy Diamondstone and Scott Guzman from Worcester Energy Barnraisers talked about their organization's work to promote environmental sustainability as well as social and economic justice though collaborative home energy efficiency projects. Their modus operandi is an energy barn-raising - an event where the community gets together and spends the day working to weatherize a house, making it more energy-efficient. They've modeled their work on that done by HEET (Home Energy Efficiency Team) in Cambridge. It's worth noting that Massachusetts already has a state ratepayer-funded program in which utilities collect a fee from all customers in order to fund energy efficiency upgrades and weatherization projects. Through the MassSave program, homeowners can get a free "energy audit" and qualify for a variety of free or subsidized efficiency and weatherization improvements: CFL bulbs, door sweeps, weather stripping around windows and doors, insulation of walls. The problem is that the contractors for this program will not work on homes that are complicated by "pre-weatherization" issues: where there is knob and tube wiring, a dirt basement floor, asbestos, or mold. These "pre-weatherization" issues are common in old homes throughout New England, and especially so in lower income homes. The result is that households that could use this help the most are essentially shut out of the benefits of this program (which, it should be remembered, they have paid into through their utility bills). Judy and Scott argued that advocates need to promote funding to address these issues so that these program benefits can be realized for those who most need them. Worcester Energy Barnraisers attempt to fill this gap in Worcester by doing work that MassSave contractors will not.

Other issues stymie these public programs for weatherization. The households most in need of weatherization (to save money, improve their quality of life, and promote energy sustainability) are renters. However, renters have little incentive or authority to invest in a building that do they do not own. Landlords often have little incentive either, especially if energy costs are passed on to renters. Advocates who work on these energy justice issues suspect that, as a result of these and other barriers, the benefits of rate-payer funded energy efficiency programs are being largely or entirely captured by middle and upper-middle income homeowners. This is a potentially serious and regressive public policy problem. However, the data to evaluate the situation are hard to come by. Utilities and contractors that implement these programs have been reluctant to share their data.

Dan Gilbarg of the Coalition for Social Justice and Coalition Against Poverty (CSJ & CAP) spoke about his organization's work with with the Green Justice Coalition to push utilities and the Massachusetts Energy Efficiency Advisory Council to create a publicly accessible database that would allow the public, and especially energy justice advocates, to monitor how these public energy efficiency programs are being implemented, who is benefiting, what neighborhoods are or are not being served, etc. There is a bill pending in the state House Ways and Means Committee to create such a database. I and my student Adam Kohn (who just graduated) have been working on this very same issue, interviewing Massachusetts community organizations involved with energy issues to understand their energy data needs and barriers to energy program implementation. I will post more on our work later.

Dan was joined by Kate Archand, a community activist from Brockton, Massachusetts, who spoke about her organization's efforts to prevent the siting of a fossil fuel-fired power plant in Brockton. Citing a report by Dr. Danny Faber at Northeastern University, Kate pointed out that Brockton is the 9th most environmentally overburdened state in the Commonwealth and one of the top four in terms of asthma rates. The fight over this power plant has been going on for more than five years at this point, and has drawn in numerous community and environmental justice organizations from around the state. CSJ & CAP, in collaboration with StopthePower, have worked to keep residents in Brockton informed about the positions of their elected officials regarding the power plant."

The state of environmental justice

After the morning session, Danny Faber reviewed the current environmental justice issues facing Massachusetts and the country. He argued that the GOP has launched an unprecedented attack on environmental policies, regulations and institutions, and the movement for environmental justice itself. At the same time, the forces that create environmental injustices are still at work, targeting and exploiting communities that are fragmented by race, ethnicity, and language. Drawing largely on his 2005 report, Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards, he rattled off a variety of statistics about the very inequitable distribution of environmental burdens in Massachusetts. Although inequitable burden is the quintessential environmental injustice, Faber asserted that the goal of environmental justice is not for everyone to be polluted equally. Rather, it is to prevent anyone from being polluted. He argued that environmental justice communities need to align themselves with all communities, including more privileged communities, in order to make headway. This is a positive argument that he makes eloquently in his 2008 book Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice. I reviewed this book for the Northeastern Geographer. As I noted in the review, Faber's message is positive, but it is still problematic because he essentially asks the environmental justice community to abandon its focus on institutional discrimination and to focus instead on a class-based, political economic identity.

Safe Housing

After lunch I attended the afternoon workshop "Healthy Housing: A Way to Connect Rural & Urban EJ." This workshop was led by Laura Brion, Childhood Lead Action Project in Providence, Rhode Island, Mary Sliney, from the The Way Home in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Meghaan Tollman from Visible Community in Lewiston, Maine. They each talked about their program work, which revolved largely around safe and affordable housing issues in urban communities: lead contamination, dealing with bed bug infestations, support for immigrant residents, dealing with city government and landlords. The take-home message was about the value of community organizing as an effective and efficient way to deliver services, to educate community members, and of course, to mobilize residents for policy and political action.

Community and Government dialogue

Following the afternoon workshop, everyone reconvened in the main hall for a government and community dialogue. Federal (EPA, HUD, FEMA) and state government representatives sat on the platform along with a group of community representatives to discuss questions from the community. The questions were overly general, as were the answers. It is clearly important for the community to have informal and safe settings to interact with government officials and kudos to the organizers for arranging this opportunity. There is still a lot of distrust and misunderstanding and I could hear it from the community members and activists around me. A lot of work to do still.

Updates on the status and upcoming activities of this New England Environmental Justice coalition can be found at neej.wikidot.com and on New England Environmental Justice Forum on Facebook.