Global Warming, 
Cut The Carbon Or Die

By Mike Roselle

I have been monitoring the so-called mainstream press for reactions to the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Most pundits had already opined on the subject of global warming. The responses fall into three rough categories. Those who think Al Gore is right. Those who think Al Gore is wrong. And those, like me, who think Al Gore is soft-peddling the crisis.

Those who agree with Al Gore are fond of wind generators, hybrid cars, organic food and the kind of things Amery Lovins proposed in his seminal work, Soft Energy Paths, when he worked with Friends of the Earth in the 1970s. He was considered a kook back then but nowadays I hear folks talk a lot more about what Amery was trying to say.

The deniers are usually religious fanatics, professional skeptics or lackeys of the energy companies. When columnist Ellen Goodman compared these people to Holocaust deniers recently she received the predictable backlash from the guardians of the memory of the Holocaust. I’m guessing this was exactly the debate she wanted to provoke. Her argument that global warming is a holocaust that lies in the future, rather than the past deserves some serious consideration, even if her critics are right that there is an apples and oranges aspect to this comparison that deserves mention.

The Energy companies are not forcing us into getting into the ovens. They are talking us into getting into an oven where we control the thermostat and are turning it up. Exxon and their ilk are not selecting one group of people for this evil deed, but all of us. Eli Wiesel has compared the nuclear arms race to the Holocaust as well, and we generally take this as an attempt to illustrate the enormity of the event. For something to be called a Holocaust it must be a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. I leave that for you to judge.

The third group of people, those who think Al Gore is lowballing the problem, are under attack by both of the other groups. We are the alarmists with an agenda. This has become more and more evident as the discussions on what to do have come up at the highest levels of government and industry. Ellen Goodman, in the same column that she compares global warming to the Holocaust goes on to decry alarmism,  saying that the reason nothing has been done about it is actually psychological as well as political.

She quotes Ross Gelbspan, author of "The Heat is On," who says, "When people are confronted with an overwhelming threat and don't see a solution, it makes them feel impotent. So they shrug it off or go into deliberate denial." She goes on to quote Michael Shellenberger, co-author of "The Death of Environmentalism,” who states that "The dominant narrative of global warming has been that we're responsible and have to make changes or we're all going to die. It's tailor-made to ensure inaction."

Well, I’m no psychologist, but it seems wrong to say that people are not ready for the truth, so we therefore won’t tell them the truth, believing that it will paralyze them with fear, impotency and denial. This is not only blatantly paternalistic, but more importantly, like the intellectual product of most consultants, it ignores the facts. Why are so many people lining up with Al Gore, putting their money and their mouth into solving the crisis, including one of the most self-absorbed billionaires on the planet, Sir Richard Branson? It’s fear!

Like I said, I’m no psychologist, but I do have a theory about this. It’s a simple one. The liberals are the ones who are feeling the fear, impotency and denial. Not long ago, they were among the deniers, the ones who dismissed the scientists and the environmentalists as alarmists, or at least tried to shush us when we wanted to yell FIRE in the theater. Seeing our growing strength as a grassroots movement, they naturally wanted to co-opt us. We were urged by the Shellenbergers to build alliances with labor and to talk about issues that mattered to them. Issues like raising the minimum wage, improving health care and occupational safety, saving social security, and a host of other issues dear to liberals everywhere. In other words, we were asked to join them, elect a Democrat and everybody would get a new bicycle for Christmas. The problem was not climate change, deforestation and extinction, they were saying; the problem was the Republicans.

Well I’m sorry. Deforestation is causing over one-quarter of the carbon loading today. Polar bears are starving on the Arctic ice. Grizzly bears in Yellowstone are also starving, because they depend for part of the year on the seeds of the white-bark pine. Warmer winters are not killing the beetles who are now attacking the trees, they are dying. If the loss of two species of bears does not sound the alarm, what do you need?

You may not care for canaries, but their job in the coal mine is not just to look pretty and sing, but to sound the alarm. If the Canary drops dead, you are not supposed to be paralyzed with impotency, fear and denial. You are supposed to grab a gas mask, locate your co-workers, and find a way out of the mine together.

And as long as we are being psychological, the Bible predicts a tragic end of the Earth by fire. Are theses consultants going around telling the Baptist preachers to ease off this doom and gloom language in order to appeal to the masses? No. A Baptist preacher uses a fear strategy to get converts to repent. It seems to work for them, as there are a lot more churches than bars in the South.

So let’s talk about fear. I mean FEAR. I kneeled and prayed to Jesus in fear during the Cuban missile crisis. It was the fear of mass extinction that drove me into the ranks of the environmental movement. “Fear” as my friend Faik, himself a longtime sailor, would say, “is the best bilge pump”. Fear of a flood caused the Arc to be built. Fear of George W. Bush is getting people to vote. What’s wrong with being afraid of climate change? Are we not human enough to admit that we are afraid?

As Paul Watson has said, “We are not afraid of the harpoons of the wailers, we are afraid of seeing the last whales being slaughtered”. I am not afraid of the big energy companies, but I am afraid of the Michael Shellenbergers and Ellen Goodman’s of the world. They can handle the truth, God bless them, but not the ignorant masses of people whose causes they habitually champion. Lord help us!

So I have this advice for you liberals out there who think climate change will be a big opportunity to sustain the conspicuous levels of consumption that you have grown so used to. Get over it. Americans will have to make sacrifices to address global warming. The same pundits like Goodman who criticized the President for not asking Americans to make sacrifices for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now unwilling to ask the public to do so to head off the even greater disaster of global warming.

A broad swath of political landscape has opened up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the release the UNIPCC report. The Nation, indeed the world, is waiting for leadership. If the Democrats can’t open up a bottle of Viagra to overcome their impotency, then the field is open to a Republican or even an independent or Green candidate to step in and lead like it was a crisis. In the 2000 Presidential election, to my horror, Al Gore backed away from the soft-core alarmism of his book Earth In the Balance. He is back with some stronger fare and it seems to be working this time. He is still offering hope, and even a Baptist preacher could not operate for a single Sunday without hope. But rational hope depends on action in the face of fear.

I am reminded of the famous Monty Python skit where a pet store owner and his customer are arguing over a parrot. No matter how many times the customer repeats, in ever word imaginable, that the bird is dead, the store owner insists that it’s only sleeping. Well, I got news for you; the Canary is dead! It is deceased! It has kicked the bucket. It has headed to the last round-up. It has expired. It is no longer with us. It is in that tropical rainforest in the sky.

If we are to propose solutions to climate change, they have to be serious ones. We have a crew down in the bilge, and they have formed a bucket brigade in an attempt to keep the ship afloat while they are trying to patch the hull. I can tell you, these folks are scared. If we want to reduce carbon emissions, we simply cannot point to a few hundred new wind turbines while we ignore the strip mining, drilling, burning and dumping that is the chief cause of the problem.

But this is the problem with liberals. They don’t want to upset the apple cart. They are not at heart, revolutionaries. Shutting down coal mines and power plants would cause too much pain to the working class people who they have devoted their lives to. Never mind what this does for the grand children of these workers, children who may never see a wild polar bear or even a grizzly in Yellowstone. Don’t they have a right to ask “Daddy, why didn’t you just get another job?”

New Orleans was our Canary. It lies half dead in its cage, its song silenced, its lungs full of toxic gas. Or, perhaps it is merely sleeping. How you see it depends on how much you are paying attention. The UN High Commission on Refugees has described the half-million, mostly poor, mostly African American citizens who fled the rising waters of Katrina as the Earth’s first climate change refugees. The simple fact that these folks are not dead is a testament to the motivating power of fear.

So yes, go out and build a shiny new windmill on every ridge top, in every estuary, hell, put those suckers on the moon if you want. But we will be judged on the carbon we are emitting today, not by how ecologically diversified our stock portfolio is. It will be the one thousand proposed coal-fired power plants that we do not build, and the thousand operating plants that we shut down, not the ten-thousand new wind mills we build that matters. When we reach a point where for every megawatt of wind power we put on line we take offline a megawatt of coal, then, and only then, will wind energy pay off. Otherwise, we are just tilting at windmills.

How do we shut down the power plants? The answer is simple. First, a stiff carbon tax. Second; aggressive conservation. During the Battle of Britain, monitors went around citing people who weren’t observing the blackout. (They were afraid of Nazi bombers) We need this kind of commitment. Third is efficiency. We need to remove all inefficient production from the grid. Since pollution costs money to mitigate, efficient energy means clean energy. And most important is consumption. We use too much energy in the United Sates. Unless we are very poor, we could use half as much and still maintain our incredibly opulent lifestyles. I suggest we go still further, and cut it by 75 percent. Opulent lifestyles are grossly overrated!

And lastly, you knew this was coming, the issue of growth. Not just population growth, which is a symptom of a much bigger problem, but just plain growth. Poverty and the lack of education are a key cause of population growth, and yet education and prosperity increases the per capita consumption of natural resources. We need to take a lesson from the poor people of the Earth here in valuing what is important in life, and reject this rampant materialism that reduces nature to a commodity and holds humanity above its laws. If we want to save the planet, we will have to meet them half way.

One person’s alarmist is another’s Gunga Din. As a long time professional alarmist, I am glad there is fear in the air. I am glad to see people scurrying about, looking for ways in which to help. The help is better late than never, but no consultant will ever convince me that we have time. We don’t.

Mike Roselle is the Man Without A Bio-Region. Send him an  e-mail.