No Impact Man

What I'd say if I was wrong about climate change

Yesterday, a reader calling himself "Richard Miller" left behind a critical comment about my meeting with Congressman Nadler in which I will ask him to sponsor a "Sense of the House" resolution calling for climate change policy based on what is scientifically necessary rather than just politically possible.

Richard asked, "How are you going to feel in a few years when your pet causes are proven to be hoaxes and frauds?"

I thought it would be fun, in today's post, to answer that question:

First off, almost no one serious, except for oil industry spin doctors (and welcome, "Richard," even if you are one), discounts climate change anymore. Even the current Administration accepts that it exists.

Indeed, most political observers agree that the real attacks on science pointing to climate change come from people and organizations who don't like the regulatory implications. They find it easier to try to obfuscate the science than to fight the resulting legislation on its merits (though, "Richard," if you would like to actually discuss the merits here on the blog, you would be very welcome).

Only yesterday, in fact, New York's Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, called attention to the anti-regulatory attempts to manipulate science. According to Andy Revkin of the New York Times blog DotEarth, Bloomberg compared climate-change naysayers to tobacco-industry spin-merchants:

[Bloomberg] focused on smoking, reviewing how the tobacco industry spent decades sprinkling doubt into discussions of science showing links between smoking (and secondhand smoke) and cancer and other illness. While many wealthy countries have moved to constrain and tax smoking, the world, Mr. Bloomberg said, is still on a path toward a billion smoking-related deaths in this century.

He then shifted to climate and energy, describing how science has been distorted not only by industries and anti-regulatory groups, but also political operatives working within government agencies. The latest example, Mr. Bloomberg said, was the ongoing politics-driven push to subsidize ethanol from corn. [Read the text of Bloomberg's speech here.]

But to return to your question, "Richard," since many of the measures needed to deal with climate change have a lot of positive benefits, if it turns out to not exist, I will first praise God in thanks and then I will think:

1. I am glad we created 5 million or more new jobs here in the United States in the fields of energy efficiency and renewable generation.
2. I am glad we created a culture that relies less on foreign oil, so that our children can live secure lives, knowing that the energy rug can't be pulled out from under them.
3. I am glad we have found a way to save people and industry billions upon billions of dollars by making the use of energy more efficient.
4. I am glad the millions of children who suffer from asthma can now breathe easier thanks to the fact that we aren't pumping the air full of toxins from our exhaust pipes and smokestacks.
5. I am glad that, by no longer burning oil and coal into our air, we've put an end to acid rain and the devastation of our aquatic life.
6. I am glad that we created good, reliable, fun-to-use public transportation system so that families no longer have to raid their budgets to pay for cars and gas.
7. I am glad we've stopped building suburbs, which make people unhappy and are designed for cars not people, and instead build villages where people can have strong community bonds that help make life fulfilling.
8. I am glad we now have fuel-efficient automobiles.
9. I am glad that we've learned as a culture to get off the work-more-to-spend-more treadmill which gobbles up resources and leaves us unfulfilled and instead turned to a way of live full of meaning and purpose.
10. I am glad that we have rejected the philosophies of survival of the fittest and competition for resources as driving philosophies and have instead embraced a philosophy of compassion and justice.
11. I am glad that we have understood that a sustainable society cannot work without supporting all of its people and that we looked for and found ways to improve the lives of everyone.
12. I'm glad that we've come to see people rather than things as our most valuable resource and that, in embracing the respectful and loving principles of not wasting, we have learned not to waste youth in prisons but instead to get them help for their drug addictions and alcoholism.
13. I am glad that, in realizing our resources are limited, we have come to use them to do what is important and to help each other rather than compete with each other.
14. I am glad that we have come to see education as the ultimate in sustainable industries.
15. I am glad that we have developed distributed, renewable energy technologies that allow kids in all parts of the world to have electric light so they can learn how to read.
16. The list goes on and on, but in short, I am glad that we have embraced the opportunities presented by the crisis of climate change in order to improve our society in ways we should have done anyway.

Now, a question for you, "Richard." Since I've answered your question honestly, I hope you'll do the same with mine.

What would you feel if we went your way and you turned out to be wrong? What would you feel if we all assumed, as you do, that we need not do anything about climate change, but then that it turns out that we should have? What would you feel if we buried our heads in the sand, ignored the problem, and then irreversibly damaged the planetary habitat that we depend upon for our health, happiness and security?

Image courtesy of WrongWay.org.

When what's happening to gas happens to drinking water

Let's start with the fairy tale that came true for the gasoline magnates:

• Once upon a time, a number of companies bought up drilling rights here and oil refineries there and eventually gained control over the USA's gasoline.
• For a while, gasoline hovered under $2 a gallon, and the companies and magnates had to console themselves with--ho hum--tidy profits.
• One day, some people began to worry that there wasn't always going to be enough gas for everyone. "Demand will grow," they said. "Supply will fall."
• But the gas companies and magnates, instead of panicking, began rubbing their hands together. Gigantic, ridiculously huge profits, they knew, come to those who wait.
• Next, developing countries started buying cars and, at the same time, world gas production pretty much peaked. In other words, demand grew. Supply fell.
• Prices skyrocket, people suffered, but the oil and gas companies and magnates made huge, unprecedented profits.
• Peak oil, it turned out, wasn't their worst nightmare at all. It was their happiest fantasy!
• So the oil companies and magnates lived happily ever after.
• Too bad about everyone else.

Now let's look at the future fairy tale that the companies who privatize our drinking water look forward to:

• Nestle, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Suez and a bunch of other companies buy up water rights around the United States and elsewhere.
• For a while, people buy bottled water for less than $2 a gallon (even though tap water is free).
• The water barons console themselves with--ho hum--tidy profits, selling their water for something like a thousand times what they pay for it.
• Then, the phrase "peak water" gets bandied about, but far from worrying that the water will run out, the water barons begin buying water rights up faster than ever.
• Next, in some future scenario, underfunding to the municipal water supplies or pollution in the aquifers means that clean tap water becomes scarcer and scarcer and drinking bottle water is not a choice but a necessity.
• In other words, demand grows, Supply falls.
• Prices skyrocket, people suffer, but the water barons make huge, unprecedented profits.
• Peak water, it turns out, wasn't their worst nightmare at all. It was their happiest fantasy!
• So the water barons lived happily ever after.
• Too bad about everyone else.

You see, it's not just about the plastic bottles. It's not just about the food miles. It's about the fundamental right of access to drinking water. Are we willing for our children to have happen to them for water what is happening to us for gas?

We can make a difference!

• Take action against privatization of water in California here.
• Support federal funding of clean drinking water here.
• Learn how to boycott bottled water here.
• Read about my ultra-cool reusable water bottle here.
• I don't know what else, do you? Please leave your ideas in the comments!

Living in gratitude instead of desire

Click the image above for a larger version

This could be totally wrong, but I’m guessing that the decline of religious life in our culture has brought with it a decline in gratitude. Not that I am laying some sort of a religious trip on everyone—I am the first to cop to not maintaining an attitude of thankfulness.

But I do feel as though we (and I include me) have come to worship desire. Here in the United States, I sometimes despair that our state religion is consumption and our main prayer is for more.

I’m not even religious, but I sense from people I’ve known who take the spiritual aspects of their religions to heart an emphasis on being grateful for what God or the Universe or the Oneness has given them rather than on what they don’t have. I admire that. I’d like to have more of that in myself, because I, too, often find that my prayer, if I’m not careful, is for more.

Here is what I think: that being grateful for what I have makes me want less. Wanting less makes me consume less. Consuming less makes me treat the planet more kindly. The equation goes, therefore, gratitude equals kindness.

And also, it turns out, gratitude equals happiness. According to the relatively new field of positive psychology (read an article about it in Time here), one way to cultivate happiness is to keep a

“gratitude journal, a diary in which subjects write down things for which they are thankful. [Researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky] has found that taking the time to conscientiously count their blessings once a week significantly increased subjects' overall satisfaction with life over a period of six weeks, whereas a control group that did not keep journals had no such gain.”

Notice how the blurb at the top of this post (courtesy of Time Magazine via Authentic Happiness, by the way), doesn’t mention anything about getting more stuff to make us happy? Instead, among other things, it gratitude at the top of the list (and I’m not suggesting this for the underprivileged or the poverty stricken). So by my reckoning, cultivating gratitude is another case of happier people, happier planet.

PS If you're a regular reader, you may notice this is a repost. Sorry. Isabella has brought me home another doozy of a cold.

If it's hurting other species, it's hurting us

One of the things I regret not posting more about is biodiversity and the crisis in the huge number of extinctions occurring on the planet. I think that is because one of the things I have been trying to do is get away from the environmentalists-care-more-about-animals that people stereotype.

Personally, I care a lot about the extinctions, not because of the utility of other species to humans but because I think they have their own value. But I consider my job not to be to write about just what I care about but to write about what other people care about. And one thing I think we can safely say is that we all care about human health and happiness, which is why I write a lot about the connections between our health, happiness and security and the health of our planetary habitat.

Anyway, what I wanted to mention is something that makes total sense to me--the fact that extinctions are occurring at an unprecedented rate is a direct harm to human health. The systems are complex, and I can't say that I understand how this manifests, but the blog Mongabay reports, as one example, that new cures for human ailments are under threat because of the global extinction crisis:

A new book Sustaining Life: How Human Life Depends on Biodiversity... is the largest text yet regarding the possible cures that have already been lost—and those that we are losing due to the globe's increasing loss of biodiversity...

... The gastric brooding frog of the Australian rainforest is just one example. Its unique style of parenting may have provided new cures for treating peptic ulcers in humans. The frog raised its young in its stomach; to survive the baby frogs produced a substance that halted acid and enzyme secretions, and stopped their mother from digesting the babies into her intestines. Unfortunately the two species of gastric brooding frog went extinct in the 1980s, and with them a possible cure.

I admittedly don't know much about this subject, so please, if you know more about how the extinction crisis harms human health and happiness, please leave behind a comment.

Photo by Rhett A. Butler courtesy of Mongabay.

Dear Clorox, Please reuse your Brita Filters

You probably didn't know that Brita, America's number one pour-through water filter, was owned by Clorox.

Now, the great news about Clorox's Brita filters is that they help make Americans feel good about tap water from our excellent municipal water systems, move off the throwaway plastic bottles (wanna try my ultra-cool reusable water bottle, by the way?), and stem the insidious privatization of drinking water. The bad news about Brita is that the filters themselves are disposable--throwaway--when they don't need to be.

Indeed, in Europe, the German company Brita, which sold its American operations to Clorox in 2000, takes back its cartridges. It shreds the plastic for reuse and reactivates the inner components--charcoal and "ion exchange resin"--for reuse either in more filters or wastewater treatment plants.

How cool is that? That's what you call treating resources with respect in a way that makes both the planet and its people happier. No poison fumes coming from incinerated Brita filters in Europe. Imagine how cool it would if we could say that here in the United States?

So why doesn't Clorox take back its Brita filters?

That's the question being asked by a group calling themselves Take Back the Filter, started by Beth Terry of Fake Plastic Fish, the blog about getting away from all things plastic. They want Clorox to start taking back Brita filters for processing and reuse in a Clorox facility (not for pawning off to some massive waste management conglomerate that will just ship them to developing world).

Already, Take Back the Filter is closing down on a thousand signatures on a petition, and people are taking it upon themselves to send used filters to the CEO of Clorox. It's been enough already to warrant a phone call to Beth from a Clorox executive.

See, we really can make a difference! And if you join in, we can make more.

Here's how you can help Take Back the Filter:

1. Sign the petition.
2. Write a letter to Clorox executives.
3. Send us Take Back the Filter your used filter cartridges.
4. Spread the word!
5. Read more at Take Back the Filter
   

No one, by the way, is saying Clorox is bad. We're just offering them support in changing their business to a more sustainable model. The CEO has a lot more ammunition at his board meeting if he has a dump-truck full of consumer-returned filters to show. And dump-trucks full of filters will make great TV images, too (think of it: your old filter on TV!).

Lastly, you may be wondering, Brita filters? Why bother? Aren't there bigger fish to fry?

No way! The journey of a thousand miles and all that.

What Beth and her pals have started is the best kind of consumer activism. This campaign has the benefit of aggregating individual consumer power in one place. Its message has a much bigger corporate audience than just Clorox. Successful or not, Take Back the Filter shows all American companies that American citizens are ready to band together to demand better.

Go Beth! Go Take Back the Filter! Go all of us!

A really big man with a really small ukulele

I'm kind of a musical dunce. Name just about any band and I have no idea who you're talking about. I mean, I dig music, I like to dance (especially with my little girl Isabella), and we sing together loads as a family.

Mostly we sing songs we make up. Sometimes we sing our conversations.

Anyway, because I am such a musical illiterate, I cycle through a grand total of three songs at Isabella's bedtime: "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," James Taylor's "You Can Close Your Eyes," and Peter Yarrow's "Puff the Magic Dragon."

It's pathetic to know only three songs, but it's also comforting. The songs have become like a favorite baseball hat or old slippers.

So last night, Isabella, who is feeling a bit under the weather, sat on the couch next to me and asked if we could watch Dorothy on YouTube. By this, she means, can we watch Judy Garland singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, because, hell, it's just about the only song we know.

Next comes a shout from the bedroom where Michelle is reading: "Can you play the version I like?" What Michelle wants is to hear is a version of Rainbow by the Hawaiian singer and ukulele player, the late Israel Kamakawiwo'ole (see above or click here if you can't see the video).

Now it's true that Isabella does not like this version as much. She says about Israel, "He doesn't know how to do it right."

But as for me, I watch this incredibly obese man (he weighed 758 pounds at one stage, apparently) playing this incredibly tiny instrument, and he sings the most beautiful version of one of our three bedtime songs and--sue me for being corny--I suddenly feel incredibly sentimental about being part of the human race.

And Isabella starts to sing. With her lisp. "Thumbwhere" over the Rainbow. And she sits on the couch and, despite her objections to Israel instead of Dorothy, she belts it out.

What this has to do with saving the planet? It's hard to say. But it says something. Because as F'ed up as we all are, as much as it sometimes seems that we're more destructive than anything else, as few songs as we know, I'm proud to say we all still sing.

Too busy patting myself on the back to write a post (joke)

Actually, just too tired and it's late. All the same, if you read this blog at all, I hope you'll agree that I'm not taken to bragging, but geez, when a guy gets a chance, he ought to glory a bit in his accomplishments, don't you think?

So I'm giving myself a night off in celebration of the fact that Time.com, the online version of Time Magazine, named No Impact Man one of the world's top 15 environmental websites.

Check out the other 14, who are doing excellent work helping to change the planet's hearts and minds:

1. Grist
2. TreeHugger
3. Dot Earth
4. Climate Change
5. RealClimate
6. Environmental Capital
7. No Impact Man
8. EcoGeek
9. Ecorazzi
10. Switchboard
11. Mongabay
12. Climate Ethics
13. Climate Progress
14. World Changing
15. Planet Ark

Is it in your nature to try?

Can the way I live really make a difference?

That's one of the things we worry about, right? When it comes to figuring out whether to get involved in the political process or to make our lifestyles more sustainable, we all wonder if, in fact, we will make the slightest bit of difference. Is it worth the effort?

Well, I have a friend, Mayer Vishner, who has been a peace activist since the 1960s. I help him grow vegetables on his plot at Laguardia Community Gardens in New York's Greenwich Village.

I once joked with Mayer, "Hey Mayer, you've been working for peace for 40 years. Don't you think it's time you looked for a new cause? I'm not sure your peace idea has any traction."

You know what he said? He said, "I've given up on worrying about the results. I have a vision of the way the world should be, and I've just come to accept that it's in my nature to keep trying. So I keep trying."

Michael Pollan, in his New York Times article on Sunday, makes a more rational case for taking action:

"If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries."

I completely agree with Michael. I have faith. On the other hand, maybe he's right. Maybe he's not. How can we know for sure?

So sometimes, the question of whether we can make a difference or not may be the wrong question. I think another line of inquiry might just as productively go like this: Do I want to be the kind of person who tries or the kind of person who doesn't?

It took me 42 years to realize it, but I want to be like Mayer Vishner. I want to be the kind of person who tries. Whether Michael Pollan is 100% right or 50% or 10% right, when the game is over, I want to be one of the people who tried. Whether the world is saved or not, whether I'm still alive to see it or not, I want to be able to say I tried.

And I'm not saying I'm perfect or that I'm never selfish or that I don't ever want an iPhone. I'm saying that given my set of circumstances and my temperament, within those limitations, not willing to martyr myself or anything like that, I still want to be the type of person who tries--even if the chance of results look slim.

So today, writing this blog, given all the effort I spend trying to affirmatively answer that question of whether each of us can make a difference, what I'm much more interested in today is this question:

How can I be the kind of person who tries?

PS For those of you who care, I finally have a profile on Facebook. It's here.

We need more than good "energy policy"

Michael Pollan, in Sunday's New York Times Magazine's green issue, had an excellent article called "Why Bother?"--about whether individual lifestyle change is worthwhile (there is also, by the way, a little snippet in the issue about yours truly). Pollan writes (with my emphasis):

"It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: 'Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.' So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences."

And he's (mostly) right of course, but I'd like to add a little something, too, and then make a small correction.

As for what I'd like to add: At the moment, the public and political discourse, when it comes to climate change, is all about "energy policy." Should we charge industry for their emissions? Should we invest hugely in solar? Can we find a way to store (or sequester) the carbon dioxide emitted from fossil-fuel-burning power plants?

Suppose that we come up with a solution to these problems. Suppose we figure out a way to power the entire planet while reducing our carbon emissions 80% by 2050 (the goal suggested by the International Panel on Climate Change). Suppose that we get to carry on with business as usual except that we do it with clean energy. What will happen?

We will leapfrog to the next planetary crisis.

Because first of all, no one is really sure how much more carbon dioxide the climate can handle. Some think we've already reached it. A group of energy scientists recently published an article in Nature saying that 80% by 2050 is far too modest a goal. NASA chief climate scientis James Hansen recently announced that the EC's goal of 550 parts per million of carbon dioxide must be slashed to 350.

A lot of people think that we are actually going to need a 100% reduction in emissions--a completely carbon neutral economy. It's hard to imagine how that can be accomplished by energy policy without cultural-level lifestyle change.

But furthermore, even if we could stop climate emissions cold, we still have to deal with the facts that we are soon to run out of fresh water (see Wired's May issue article "Peak Water," for example), our oceans are nearly fished out, our forests are being decimated at an alarming rate, food prices are spiraling out of control so that people can no longer afford to eat and on and on.

These looming crises, like climate change, are a direct result of how we much energy and material we in the developed world consume, but there are no techno-fixes. Energy policy alone will not fix them [adding this later in case it isn't obvious: of course we do need good energy policy]. Only consuming less will fix them. And these are other reasons why, to add to Pollan's reasoning, we should bother to change our lifestyle, both at the individual and cultural levels.

As for my small correction, Pollan suggests, both in the paragraph I cite above and at other points in his article, that "climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis... of character." This implies that we--that is the human race--somehow don't have the backbone to deny ourselves in order to live sustainably. But I have and always will argue that we are neither selfish nor slovenly nor that deprivation is required.

No one I know wants to throw a plastic cup away every time they drink a coffee. Or to toss a plastic bag. Or to feel like their living comfortably will cost the earth. Everybody I know feels bad about the way things are going. It's not that they don't want to change. It's that they don't know how to change, not least because much of what makes individual lifestyle unsustainable are the choices that the culture presents us (think, for example, of suburbs built for cars instead of villages interconnected by rail).

Our institutions and systems were all built on the assumption that the planet's resources were limitless, which has been proved, of late, not to be true. What our culture is in the grip of is not bad character but bad systemic habits, some of which will be very hard to break. But that does not make us or our culture bad. It just makes us mistaken.

The good news is that we don't have to change our human characters--which some would argue is impossible. We simply have to correct our societal mistakes and change our systems. We simply have to change the way we live in a way that will make the planet happier but, as I so often argue, will also make the people happier. This brings me to my second correction.

We will not have to deprive ourselves--at least not of happiness. I would argue, in fact, that when people are working two jobs and twelve hour days so they can keep up with Jones when it comes to the number of Christmas presents they buy their kids, they are already deprived. Who wants to live in Stressville?

Instead, what is on offer, when it comes to individual and cultural lifestyle change is a shift of emphasis from stuff to people, from material throughput to potential for meaningful relationships and community. This blog is full of discussion of the opportunities for the improvement in our lives that will come with living more sustainably. I won't go into all of them here. Noodle around.

What I will say though is that I don't look forward to the lifestyle changes will we have to make with anything like dread. Yes, we may have to have less stuff. But I believe that we are finally being forced to change the cultural priorities that most of us know in our guts are wrong anyway. The result I envision, if we approach the coming times in the right way, is a kinder, friendlier, more equitable, more satisfying way of life.

PS For a humorous take on why we need to use less, not just use better, watch the video below.

Why Isabella still doesn't watch TV

I'm still at the New Economics Foundation Conference that I mentioned yesterday and having the time of my life. We've been talking today a lot about how television and advertising promotes a set of values that--by definition--promote resource consumption and undermine sustainability.

After a day of that, I can't tell you how glad we haven't allowed that particular enemy back into the living room since the end of the No Impact project. For fun, I noodled around on the internet, looking into the effects on my little Isabella that we're managing to avoid, and I found an article by Jane Brody of the New York Times that says:

• "The average young child in this country watches about four hours of television a day and each year sees tens of thousands of commercials, often for high-fat, high-sugar or high-salt snacks and foods; thousands of episodes of violence; and countless instances of alcohol use and inappropriate sexual activity."
• "By the time American children finish high school, they have spent nearly twice as many hours in front of the television set as in the classroom."
• "Nearly 60 percent of children aged 8 to 16 have a TV in their bedroom...With access to television wherever children may be, it is hard for parents to control the amount and content of what they watch."
• "It is no surprise, then, that the percentage of American children who are seriously overweight has risen to more than 15 percent today, from 5 percent in 1964. 'TV reduction appears to be the most effective measure in reducing weight gain,' said Dr. William H. Dietz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
• "Studies have found that children who watch 10 or more hours of TV a week have lower reading scores and perform less well academically than comparable youngsters who spend less time watching television."
• "The more TV watched by toddlers aged 1 to 3, the greater their risk of attention problems at age 7. For each hour watched a day, the risk of developing attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder increased by nearly 10 percent."
• "A study two years ago by the Center for Child Health Outcomes in San Diego found that children aged 10 to 15 who watched five or more hours of television a day were six times as likely to start smoking as those who watched less than two hours a day."

The good news for parents who rely on TV to keep their children busy? Anecdotally, people find that kids who lives in households without TV learn other, more active ways to entertain themselves.