<\/p>\n
His <\/p>\n I <\/p>\n As <\/p>\n Straight Up is a <\/p>\n Take <\/p>\n The <\/p>\n Similarly, <\/p>\n Having <\/p>\n The <\/p>\n As <\/p>\n Citing <\/p>\n Moreover, <\/p>\n His <\/p>\n In <\/p>\n That <\/p>\n Nevertheless, <\/p>\n On While <\/p>\n More <\/p>\n I <\/p>\n Romm <\/p>\n But <\/p>\n Toward <\/p>\n But <\/p>\n We <\/p>\n Where <\/p>\n This <\/p>\n But <\/p>\n Unfortunately, <\/p>\n Perhaps <\/p>\n The <\/p>\n Environmentalists <\/p>\n The <\/p>\n That is the real question facing us today. It is a question that requires courage. It is Related Links:<\/strong><\/p>\n Oil rig leak and the week in fossil-fuel industry disasters<\/a><\/p>\n Obama blandly invokes ‘American Dream’ in tribute to miners who were denied it<\/a><\/p>\n The good news about the very bad news (about climate change)<\/a><\/p>\n
\nlatest book, Straight Up<\/a>, takes on the oil and coal
\ncompanies, the skeptics, and the press. His unfailing sense of priorities shines
\nthrough his startlingly thoughtful and brutally blunt writing.<\/p>\n
\nhave one problem with his book—but more about that later. <\/p>\n
\nan assistant secretary of energy during the Clinton administration, Romm
\ndeveloped expertise in the area of renewable energy technologies. As a climate blogger,
\nhis even greater asset is his intelligence. <\/p>\n
\ncompilation of posts from Romm’s popular blog Climate Progress<\/a>. And while one
\nwishes Romm would have stitched the blog posts together into a more coherent
\nnarrative—and omitted a few that addressed transitory, fleeting events—his
\nbook is absolutely on point in its insistence that climate change long ago
\nceased to be a scientific issue and, instead, is most clearly a political one.<\/p>\n
\nthe climate bills pending in Congress. Even though all the proposals on the
\nlegislative table are pitifully inadequate to the catastrophic threat of
\naccelerating climate change, Romm’s book makes the subtext crystal clear.<\/p>\n
\nconflict in Congress is not really about the science. “The conflict is actually
\na political one between those who believe in government-led solutions and those
\nwho don’t.” As Romm points out, a central reason that most political
\nconservatives and libertarians deny the reality of human-induced climate change
\n“is that they simply cannot stand the solution. So they attack both the
\nsolution and the science.” I don’t
\nrecall reading that simple truth in The
\nWashington Post, The New York Times,
\nor any other major news outlet—virtually all of which treat the climate
\ndebate as though it actually had some legitimacy.<\/p>\n
\nI share Romm’s critical take on the news media for their complicity in creating
\nour gathering nightmare.<\/p>\n
\nspent 30 years as an editor and reporter at some of the country’s major
\nnewspapers, I don’t think the worst offenders in the hierarchy of climate
\nvillainy are the executives of Big Coal and Big Oil. They’re simply doing what
\nthey’re paid to do: bring us cheap and abundant energy—and defend their
\nindustries against the imperatives of the science and the onslaught of
\nenvironmentalists.<\/p>\n
\nlarger villain, from my point of view, is the mainstream press that has
\nconsistently failed to prepare the public for the coming turbulence. The major
\nU.S. news outlets have failed to prominently highlight major climate science
\nfindings. They have failed to mention the role of warming in the increasing
\nfrequency and intensity of extreme weather events. And they have failed, in the name of
\n“journalistic balance,” to distinguish between legitimate, peer-reviewed
\nscientific research and the deliberate obfuscation by a cadre of climate
\nskeptics, many of whom have been funded by coal and oil companies.<\/p>\n
\na result, the public has no idea that we are already at a point of no return in
\nterms of staving off climate chaos. <\/p>\n
\nthe dire forecasts from the most recent IPCC report—which significantly underestimate
\nthe urgency of the situation—Romm blasts the media for treating climate
\nskeptics “as if they had a scientifically or morally defensible position.”<\/p>\n
\nbecause the media largely continues to report the climate controversy as though
\nit had a middle ground, “they push us closer to the certain catastrophe of
\ninaction,” as Romm writes.<\/p>\n
\nchilling conclusion: “It appears to me
\nthat today’s media simply can’t cover humanity’s self-destruction.”<\/p>\n
\na similar vein, Romm skewers the media for failing to connect the
\nintensification of extreme weather events around the world to our burning of
\ncoal and oil.<\/p>\n
\nconnection was established as early as 1995, when Tom Karl, David Easterling,
\nand other scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center concluded that as
\nearth’s temperature increases, we will see more temperature extremes, more
\nintense downpours, and more protracted droughts, among other consequences. Those
\nfindings were elaborated in a 1997 Scientific
\nAmerican articled titled “The Coming
\nClimate<\/a>.”<\/p>\n
\nRomm points out that the coverage by the majority of the U.S. news outlets of
\nlast year’s hellish wildfires in Australia contained no mention of warming-driven
\nheat waves and droughts. Romm cited a
\nReuters headline which read, “Australia Fires a
\nClimate Wake-up Call: Experts<\/a>.”
\nBy contrast, ABC News anchor Charles Gibson called them “part natural
\ndisaster” and partly the product of arsonists.
\nABC’s World News Tonight said
\nnot one word about the role of human-induced atmospheric warming in the long
\nheat wave and drought that created such hospitable conditions for the
\nwildfires.<\/p>\n
\nthe economic front, Romm is equally ruthless in his criticism. For one thing,
\nthe press and many economists have consistently overestimated the costs of
\nmitigation, starting with the simplest of all remedies: efficiency. In Romm’s
\nview, the U.S. is the “Saudi Arabia of energy waste.”<\/p>\n
\nthe press parrots the
\nprevailing economic line<\/a> that mitigation will be crushingly expensive. Romm notes
\nthat during his five-year stint at DOE, “I never saw a building or factory that
\ncouldn’t cut electricity consumption or greenhouse-gas emissions 25 to 50
\npercent with rapid payback.”<\/p>\n
\nto the point, Straight Up quotes Eric
\nPooley<\/a>,
\na former editor at Fortune and Time magazine: “The press misrepresented
\nthe economic debate over cap-and-trade. It failed to recognize … that cap and
\ntrade would have a marginal effect on economic growth and gave doomsday
\nforecasts … The press allowed opponents of climate action to replicate the
\nfalse debate over climate science in the realm of climate economics.” As
\nTufts University economist Frank Ackerman<\/a> said recently,
\n“It’s not the costs of mitigating climate change that worry me, it’s the costs
\nof inaction.”<\/p>\n
\nalso share Romm’s impatience with policy analysts who continually call for more
\nR&D to solve the climate crisis. Right
\nnow we have all the technology we need to begin reducing emissions quickly and
\ncheaply. Romm happens to favor both
\nefficiency and concentrated solar thermal power. But, his technological preferences aside,
\nhe’s right on point when he describes the call for more R&D as a stalling
\ntactic to avoid coming to grips with the threat. As Romm writes, “deployment
\ncompletely trumps research.”<\/p>\n
\ndoes overlook one critical point. While
\nrenewable technologies may be relatively expensive at this point, that is not a
\nfunction of economics. It is, first and foremost, a function of political will.
\nWere the world’s political leaders to mobilize around the need to rewire the
\nworld with clean energy, the costs of solar panels, solar towers, wind turbines,
\nappropriate hydroelectric facilities, and other technologies would drop
\ndramatically as they were ramped up to mass production and economies of scale. (For
\none set of strategies to accomplish this, see here<\/a>.) Recall,
\nfor instance, that prohibitively expensive early television sets and computers
\nbecame quickly affordable when their production and marketing were scaled up.<\/p>\n
\nfor all the uncompromising wisdom in Straight
\nUp, I still have a problem.<\/p>\n
\nthe end of his book, Romm wanders into the question of why climate advocates
\nare so bad at “messaging.” It may be a
\nvalid question. Foundations have poured
\nthousands of dollars into exploring how best to communicate the realities of
\nclimate change. George Lakoff<\/a>, for one,
\nhas devoted a substantial amount of time to wrestling with this question. <\/p>\n
\nI’m afraid the issue of “messaging” is a swerve—a diversion from the real
\nquestion facing all of us at this moment of history.<\/p>\n
\nhave already passed the point of no return. We are already beginning to see crop failures, water shortages,
\nincreasing extinctions, migrations of environmental refugees, and all manner of
\npotential breakdowns in our social lives.<\/p>\n
\nStraight Up falls short is in its
\nfailure to deal with this reality head on. It is not a pretty scenario. When governments
\nare confronted by collapse, they too often resort to totalitarian methods to
\nkeep order in the face of chaos. Given
\nthe increasingly precarious state of our climate, it is not hard to foresee
\ngovernments resorting to permanent states of martial law. And it is not hard to imagine a short-term
\nstate of emergency morphing into a long-term state of siege.<\/p>\n
\nis not at all to minimize the value of Romm’s book. To the contrary, if you think the most
\npressing task today is to limit the coming damage through a transition to
\nnon-carbon technologies, I can’t think of a better place to start than by
\nreading Straight Up.<\/p>\n
\nthat transition can only be a start.<\/p>\n
\nwe have already passed a point of no return in terms of staving off massive
\ndisruptions. It is time to begin talking
\nabout how to preserve a coherent human community without a retreat into mass
\nsurvivalism. It is time to start
\nplanning how we can endure in a world that will be far less stable and far more
\nthreatening than the one we grew up in.<\/p>\n
\nthis is an unfair knock on Romm. Perhaps it is not environmentalists—even
\nextraordinarily intelligent ones like Romm—to whom we should be looking for
\nthese kinds of answers.<\/p>\n
\noverriding threat to our collective future used to be an environmental one. Today it has grown into a global existential one.<\/p>\n
\nhave done us a great service by identifying the problem. But the real challenge,
\nI think, goes far beyond the reach and expertise of Joe Romm or, for that
\nmatter, any other environmentalist.<\/p>\n
\nquestion of how to reorganize society in the face of impending collapse comes
\ndown to a choice between a radically more coordinated, cooperative global
\ncommunity and a scatter of fortressed, tribalized, and highly defended enclaves.<\/p>\n
\na question that requires trust. Finally, it is a question that requires the
\nvery best thinking of people from every continent, every discipline, and every single
\nwalk of life.<\/p>\n