Environment

“The Kardashians and Climate Change: Interview with Judith Curry”

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From an interview with the climatologist Judith Curry at OilPrice.com:

Judith Curry: The debate is polarized in a black-white yes-no sort of way, which is a consequence of oversimplifying the problem and its solution. Although you wouldn’t think so by listening to the Obama administration on the topic of climate change, the debate is becoming more complex and nuanced. Drivers for the growing number of layers in the climate debate are the implications of the 21st century hiatus in warming, the growing economic realities of attempting to transition away from fossil fuels, and a growing understanding of the clash of values involved.
 
Oilprice.com: How does the climate change debate differ, in your experience, in varying cultures; for instance, from the United States to Western Europe, or Canada?
 
Judith Curry: The U.S. is more skeptical of the idea of dangerous anthropogenic global warming than is Western Europe. In the U.S., skepticism is generally associated with conservatives/libertarians/Republicans, whereas in Western Europe there is no simple division along the lines of political parties. In the developed world, it is not unreasonable to think ahead 100 or even 300 years in terms of potential impacts of policies, whereas the developing world is more focused on short-term survivability and economic development.
 
Oilprice.com: How significant are cultural elements to this debate?
 
Judith Curry: The cultural elements of this debate are probably quite substantial, but arguably poorly understood. A key issue is regional vulnerability, which is a complex mix of natural resources, infrastructure, governance, institutions, social forces and cultural values.

Worth reading.

“Charlie Crist Flies Private Jet to Global Warming Media Event”

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This is exactly the sort of phoniness and hypocrisy that Glenn Reynolds likes to point out.

When reporters asked Crist why he did not drive to Tallahassee, fly commercial, or hold his press conference in Tampa, Crist said, “Listen, I’m trying to win this race and Florida’s a big state.”

See, he’s trying to get elected. That’s important — unlike, by implication, the things that matter to lesser citizens. Therefore he should be exempt from the rules of environmentally correct behavior that his party wants to force on the rest of us.

Crist doesn’t seem to be a bad man as politicians go. Nor is Rick Scott, the incumbent governor, without significant flaws. However, Scott has at least been somewhat consistent in holding down spending and overzealous regulation as he promised (this is doubtless part of the reason why my Democratic acquaintances all vehemently dislike him).

Crist, by contrast, has been astonishingly cynical and unprincipled in his political career. He used to be a conservative Republican, then morphed into an Independent and finally a Democrat as Florida’s political demographics shifted leftward. His only constant has been opportunism. His use of a donor’s jet to avoid a four-hour drive makes clear that he doesn’t believe the climate alarmism he publicly supports.

We would be in better shape if we paid more attention to the personal integrity of public officials as revealed by their long-term personal and professional records, and less to their ability convincingly to repeat current talking points.

Of Energy and Slavery

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Christopher Hayes, who writes at The Nation, sees a connection between human slavery–in particular, human slavery as practiced in the US prior to 1865–and the use of fossil fuels. Specifically, he argues that the reluctance of energy companies and their investors to lose the financial value of their fossil-fuel assets is directly analogous to the reluctance of pre-Civil-War southern slaveholders to lose the financial value of their human “property”…and he goes on the assert that environmentalists attacking the use of fossil fuels are in a moral and tactical position similar to that of the pre-war Abolitionists.

His article reminded me of a few things.

1) Sometime around 1900, a young  PR man who had recently been hired by GE in Schenectady realized that he had a problem. He had gotten his job through glowing promises about all the great press coverage he would get for the company.  But his boss had called him in and announced that he had “a terrific front-page story” about a 60,000 kilowatt turbine generator that the company had just sold to Commonwealth Edison…and the PR man accurately realized that this story would get maybe a paragraph on the financial pages.  Looking for ideas, he went to see GE’s legendary research genius, Charles Steinmetz, explaining that headlines need drama, and “there’s nothing dramatic about a generator.”

Steinmetz picked up a pencil and did a little calculating…and quickly determined that this one rotating machine could do as much physical work as 5.4 million men. The slave population in the US on the eve of the Civil War had been 4.7 million.  To the young PR man, Steinmetz said:  “I suggest you send out a story that says we are building a single machine that, through the miracle of electricity, will each day do more work than the combined slave population of the nation at the time of the Civil War.”

2) Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, visited a shipyard in New Bedford shortly after obtaining his freedom.  Here are his comments on observing a cargo being unloaded:

In a southern port, twenty or thirty hands would have been employed to do what five or six did here, with the aid of a single ox attached to the end of a fall. Main strength, unassisted by skill, is slavery’s method of labor. An old ox, worth eighty dollars, was doing, in New Bedford, what would have required fifteen thousand dollars worth of human bones and muscles to have performed in a southern port.

3)  Speaking of GE…Owen Young was a farm boy who grew up to become Chairman of that company.  To his biographer (Ida Tarbell), he  provided a vivid word-picture of what life had been like for a farm wife back in the slightly earlier times. Here, he remembers Mondaywash day:

He drew from his memory a vivid picture of its miseries: the milk coming into the house from the barn; the skimming to be done; the pans and buckets to be washed; the churn waiting attention; the wash boiler on the stove while the wash tub and its back-breaking device, the washboard, stood by; the kitchen full of steam; hungry men at the door anxious to get at the day’s work and one pale, tired, and discouraged woman in the midst of this confusion.

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Give Me Land, Lots of Land

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This would appear to be the new theme song for the Fed-Gov’s Bureau of Land Management that bane of ranchers like Cliven Bundy as well as a whole lot of other ranchers, farmers, loggers, small landowners, and owners of tiny bits of property on the edge of or in areas of spectacular natural beauty, west of the Mississippi and between the Mexican and Canadian borders.

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