WA I-732 Climate Bill

No, I hadn't heard of it before either.  It is an interesting story to say...well, something about it.  I'll admit I'm rather partial to both sides of this.  A strong push could have actually accomplished something and rather than seeing the glass as half full, should be supportive liberal groups have rather--HULK SMASH--so, ok.

I've also likely got a white dude perspective on this, but if various liberal/social groups state that they want x, y and z and some white dudes write up a bill that includes x and y but not z (even if said white dudes didn't expressly talk to them) why is that so bad?  Yes, I get the seat at the table aspect, but, in the end it comes off as "I want these things, you are giving me some of them, but you didn't talk to me and aren't giving me everything so fuck you and your plan."

On the other hand: anyone who wants to push for any legislation that helps with climate change that preemptively concedes language/policy to imaginary "sensible Republicans" is pretty much a idiot that deserves their inevitable defeat.  You want Republicans to be invested, you have to force them to it.  You are better off with the liberal super fantastic bill that you can really get everyone who is currently supportive of your primary motive(s) behind.

Oh, and also, too: revenue neutral plans are only useful if you have plenty of revenue already, which isn't really true in most of the US, including Washington and if you don't then they're for shits. So: bad fucking idea.

I don't live in WA, but if I did I suspect I'd be pissed at everyone involved but vote for the bill.

"We're F'd"

Probably.  Not a very happy read, this, mostly because no matter how scary the outlook I don't see us (US or globally) doing nearly enough to head off very bad things.  More, I'm not very confident in our being able to successfully deal with said very bad things when they arrive.

At a global level this is insane, and there is no reason we couldn't do something but at an individual level, it's just too hard and too expensive.  I would love to get off the grid and go carbon neutral, but it isn't very feasible.  For commuting: award winning SEPTA kind of sucks for me: too expensive and very inconvenient relative to driving, and the roads I would need to take are kind of dangerous for bicycling (plus riding 10 mi to work in the summer morning would leave me in such a state that no one would want to come near me for the rest of the day).  At home: solar/wind/etc plus the energy storage for load leveling is very expensive, and there isn't enough back from energy companies to offset by feeding the grid.

I think that there is basically no hope without a carbon tax--including gasoline--coupled with a massive [federal] push for renewable energy and more efficient use of that energy.  We need fully electric transportation with more mass transit.  We need more efficient heat pumps.  We need a smarter, more efficient grid.

I suspect we will have most of those things eventually, but I also suspect it will be too late.

Nuclear Power Goes "Oops!"

While I generally think that nuclear power has the potential to be an excellent, carbon-free energy source, there are some pretty not-minor problems with it as it exists today.  Problems that are probably made worse when you build them in earthquake prone regions, and then try and hide how bad the problem is.  Maybe we will all find out how bad the radiation really is when all the dead fish/whales/other sea critters wash up on the US west coast beaches.

Another Sunny Day Out West

Just don't call it global warming.

It May Not Technically Be Too Late, But...

In reality, there is little chance that we will undertake what is necessary to stave off all but perhaps the absolute worst that global warming is likely to bring.

My biggest frustration is the astounding mistrust of science that has been engendered by pro-corporate (fossil fuels companies) shills, primarily among the right wing(nuts).  A somewhat close second is the fact that, even excepting global warming as a real and present threat, most of the things that we should be doing for that, we should be doing anyway!

Fossil fuels are problematic above and beyond carbon emissions: they are limited in quantity (no matter what "peak oil" is we will at some point be past it), they are not equitably dispersed on the globe, they require extraction which has anywhere from mild to severe consequences (coal mines catching fire/exploding, flammable drinking water, mountains of coke from tar sands, mountain top removal, poisoning drinking water, oil spills...), and they contribute to pollution above and beyond CO2.  Any one of these things should be reason enough to try and reduce consumption of fossil fuels and to push hard to develop and put in place alternatives.  But it is the first reason that makes sense no matter your opinion on the environment or geopolitical problems.

Because there is a finite quantity (well, the replacement rate is << the consumption rate) we should be doing all we can to make sure we are not dependent on these fuels. No rational, thoughtful person looking at the energy situation would do what we are doing.

It seems to me that much of the right wing push back against doing anything succeeds in large part because "environmentalist" has become a tainted word for them, and "things environmentalists want" are inherently considered bad, or frivolous, or otherwise unnecessary.  Sometimes it is all and good to state right and wrong, but this debate is more emotional than rational (indeed, the rational part of the debate is almost exclusively concerned with the best way to convince people of the facts, and how to fix the problem). 

Scientists vs. Non-Scientists

I think that is the biggest problem when it comes to the consistently overly conservative reports on the effects of climate change (global warming).  The IPCC probably does do a very good job of reporting the science, but scientists (due in part to our inherently conservative bent and in part to things like peer review, and the very fuzzy nature of projections) are likely to shy away from more dire positions...at least within journals, and maybe meetings.

Non-scientists, however, simply don't understand scientists.  Scientists want to keep the uncertainty in measurements and predictions as low as possible--or, another way of putting it, to have as high a confidence as possible. But that focus can be problematic when new data doesn't match existing.  There can be an urge to dismiss outlying data, to assume that if something is significantly different than what others have found, it is likely to be wrong.  Prediction in particular is a very difficult area to deal with, especially when those predictions relate to complex systems and long time scales.  Very small changes in initial settings can lead to very large changes in the results. This isn't normally wrong.  Typically, the odds are that if your data is different from all existing data, you messed something up. 

The political particulars of global warming impose another constraint--one that causes a systematic push towards more conservative reporting.  No one wants to get it wrong on the high side and give fodder to the anti-science, anti-gloabal warming crowd (not that they really need anything since they tend to make up crap even without).  (Also, no one wants to be chicken little or the boy who cried wolf.) 

So things are worse than most predictions.  Al Gore was right, but he's fat and claimed he invented the internet so no one should listen to him.  On the other hand the world may end in a couple weeks here when the long count runs out and we won't have to worry about the inevitable humanitarian crisis to come after all.

Sandy

Lots of wind so trees down (image is ~3 blocks from me).  Less rain than I expected (dry basement is nice, particularly when there would not have been power to pump it out).  Power out for 27 hrs.  Frozen foods now safe. 

And this leads me to this article by Kevin Drum, and this one (that I don't agree with quite as much) by George Lakoff.

Yes, hurricanes like Sandy are more likely and more violent as a result of global warming, and yes there is a systemic causation similar to but weaker than smoking and lung cancer (i.e. you can get lung cancer without ever having smoked or even been exposed to smokers, but it is much less likely).  Yet, we are not going to do anything about it because politics...

If you were teaching a graduate seminar in public policy and challenged your students to come up with the most difficult possible problem to solve, they'd come up with something very much like climate change. It's slow-acting. It's essentially invisible. It's expensive to address. It has a huge number of very rich special interests arrayed against doing anything about it. It requires international action that pits rich countries against poor ones. And it has a lot of momentum: you have to take action now, before its effects are serious, because today's greenhouse gases will cause climate change tomorrow no matter what we do in thirty years.

It's depressing, but this will keep happening, and it will get worse, and rather than act to slow or stop it, we will just have to deal.

Evidence and Facts

Will continue to be evil conspiracy things to the skeptics, but the world's climate is not getting better.

And In Other News

The earth: not flat...or hollow...or in the center of the solar system/galaxy/universe. This article on global warming skeptics being wrong should really not need to be published. Worse, though, it won't convince the skeptics because to them facts, reason and logic are all instruments of the devil or something.

At some level I wonder: "why bother?" but I know that this stuff needs to be repeated over and over and over again because repetition is oddly more convincing to many than science and fact.

Global Warming

Deniers apparently operate as a very efficient comment mob whenever some relatively popular website puts up a story/post saying that anthropogenic climate change is real. Fortunately no one reads me :)