/* Written 5:39 pm Jul 19, 1991 by toma in cdp:en.climate */
/* ---------- "GREENHOUSE BLUES" ---------- */
Howdy. I hate to come out as a pinko, but here's an essay which I just published in Socialist Review. It's the new technoscience issue and may be of general interest.
-- toma
GREENHOUSE BLUES
"A permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms,
and it doesn't occur... Apocalypse has become an
event that is happening, and not happening. It
may be that some of the most feared events, like
those involving the irreparable ruin of the
environment, have already happened. But we don't
know it yet, because the standards have changed.
Or because we do not have the right indexes for
measuring the catastrophe. Or simply because this
is a catastrophe in slow motion.
-- Susan Sontag [1]
The 1990 edition of the Worldwatch Institute's annual State of the World [2] claims we have about 40 years to establish a sustainable economy -- or be engulfed in a self-perpetuating spiral of ecological and economic decline. It's an odd, precise figure, the sort usually discounted as a product of apocalyptic excess. These days, though, it seems to warrant extra consideration. For one thing, the elements of the projected catastrophe -- from pollution, extinction, and population growth to deforestation and the ecological costs of energy production -- have become depressingly familiar. For another, the power, inertia, and sheer dilapidation of the global economy have begun to sink in, as have the depth and power of institutionalized militarism.
Twenty years after the first Earth Day, we are then perhaps only 40 years from the abyss. If the greenhouse theorists are right -- and the bulk of the evidence suggests that they are -- local ecological crises must be seen in the light of, and indeed as elements of, the
even more threatening catastrophe of climatic destabilization. This aggregation offers the perverse satisfaction of rendering equivocation and half-measures absurd, but it may also set the stage for a tragic denouement that has been centuries in the making.
Death, to misquote Samuel Johnson, concentrates the mind wonderfully, and it's for just this reason that global warming makes so potent a subject of reflection. The frames within which it is presented reveal, with rare clarity, the presumptions and prejudices of the framers. This is true in the media battle between those who emphasize the near-consensus among scientists on the warming and those whose stories abet equivocation and business-as-usual. And it's true in the environmental movement, where the warming, though unproven, is taken dead seriously, and the debate centers on its political and cultural significance.
THE SCOPE OF THE THREAT
The major consequences of a rapid greenhouse warming have been envisioned in detail: dying reefs, withering forests, seas of refugees (many of them leaving the United States), extinction, drought, and crushingly violent storms. Still, and despite the clarity of such foresight, uncertain and prospective events are difficult to force onto the policy agenda -- especially in the United States, where much of the ruling elite regards the costs of prevention as a threat more dire than the warming itself.
The bulk of the greenhouse warming is caused by carbon dioxide (CO2), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and methane, gases which have been called "nontraditional" pollutants because they take their toll not by despoiling isolated regions but by accumulating globally and destabilizing the biosphere as a whole. CO2, which because of its sheer abundance is the most damaging of the greenhouse gases, is an unavoidable product of fossil-fuel consumption -- and the cheap, easy energy available from fossil fuels has played a major and largely unappreciated role in the history of industrial capitalism. Now, it seems imperative to drastically reduce the use not only of methane and CFCs, but of the fossil-fuels as well, even though this reduction implies a radical break with the energy economy that has underlain capitalism from its very earliest days. As the Gulf War has once again shown, this break will not come easily.
There is -- and this is crucial -- much that can be done, though not an indefinite time to do it in. This is clear from the gap between "bad case" and "good case" scenarios, both supplied by the World Resources Institute [3]. In the bad case, no substantive effort is made to slow C02 emissions, increase energy efficiency, or speed solar development, although CFC production and use is brought in line with the Montreal Protocol. The outcome? By 2020, an average global temperature of from 1.8 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit greater than it was a century ago, and by 2075 a rise of 5.8 to 17.5 degrees! If coal use increases as well -- a real possibility, particularly in China -- the warming could soon reach a truly staggering magnitude. (Even this isn't the worst case scenario, since there's a possibility of a "super greenhouse effect" set off by a relatively small warming and a series of "positive feedbacks" on it. Melting permafrost ice, for example, could release massive amounts of methane, an extremely powerful greenhouse gas.)
In the "good case" scenarios, such as they are, strong global efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions allow the atmosphere to stabilize. Oil, gas, and coal prices are sharply increased, per capita energy use declines in industrialized countries, and support for solar development is radically increased. Tropical countries not only stop decimating their rain forests but begin large-scale reforestation efforts. And so on. The World Resources Institute model indicates that, even if all these heroic efforts had begun in 1988, there would still be a warming of 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2075, when the temperature would level off. Such a temperature increase, over such a short period of time, is unprecedented in human history, and could well be large enough to cause massive ecological and social disruptions. According to the First Assessment Report [4] of the scientific committee of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. agency chartered with the task of coordinating global warming policy, the "state of scientific knowledge" indicates that such a "stabilization" is the best that can be expected, and would require "an immediate reduction in global man-made [CO2] emissions by 60 to 80%."
So, if greenhouse theory is valid, the whole global economy must be restructured, fundamentally and soon. The longer marketeers push their phony optimism, the longer politicians dispute, equivocate, and lie, the longer technicians strain for faith in the viability of half measures, the worse the odds will get. Not that these are the last days -- humans are adaptable and will likely survive (which is more than can be said for lots of other species). But each moment wasted is another step along a path to an ugly and inauspicious future.
As the predictions of greenhouse theory have become familiar, they -- like ecology in general -- have emerged as key social metrics. We now know, for example, that ours is not a "sustainable" society, and as the ecological crisis worsens this charge becomes damning in a manner that somehow exceeds all prior accusations. It's no wonder, then, that ecological and climactic science are clotted with politics, or that the media frames imposed on greenhouse theory often emphasize "uncertainty," cost, and the putative dangers of "over-reaction." The issues here are difficult, for science resists reduction to ideology, even as it can offer ideology its firmest ground. Witness the influence of John Sununu, architect of U.S. greenhouse policy and probably the first high U.S. official to hold a PhD in fluid dynamics, a PhD he uses to disguise a corrupt and technocratic optimism as legitimate scientific skepticism.
The outlines of at least the immediate future are clear. The Bush Administration has distinguished itself by the vehemence of its opposition to meaningful anti-greenhouse policies, while every other wealthy industrial country has taken at least tentative steps toward stabilizing or reducing CO2 emissions by the year 2000. Germany, New Zealand, Denmark, and Australia have committed themselves to emission reductions of at least 20 percent by 2005, and though this is cause for hope, global negotiations have been all but paralyzed by the U.S. delegation. (The first U.N. session, held February 1991 in Chantilly Virginia, was spent, by U.S. insistence, on procedural matters. All substantive proposals were deferred.) Meanwhile, in the Third World, particularly India and China, efforts to engage the greenhouse issue have been caught up in charges of "environmental colonialism." And in the old Soviet bloc, particularly the Soviet Union itself, rapid progress does not appear likely. All in all, it's fair to say that the politics of the greenhouse are inseparable from the politics of the larger world system -- which suffers its fossil-fuel dependency as only one element in a rich variety of debilitating legacies.
ENVIRONMENTAL OPTIMISM, ECOLOGICAL DESPAIR
The most compelling of the new greenhouse books are probably Stephen Schneider's Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century?, Michael Oppenheimer and Robert Boyle's Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect and Bill McKibben's The End of Nature [5]. Taken together, they form a grim syllabus, not only about global warming but also about the depth of the environmental movement's break with systemic political analysis. Each chooses, in its own manner and for its own reasons, to present the erosion of climatic stability by the fossil-fuel economy -- coal and oil! -- with barely a nod to the political, economic, or ideological dynamics of the society within which it developed.
Stephen Schneider, head of Interdisciplinary Climate Systems at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, is among the most famous of the greenhouse scientists, and serves well to reveal the contours of mainstream environmentalism. Schneider cuts an interesting figure -- the liberal public scientist as statesman of the greenhouse age. His world is big science and big government, and though he spends a good deal of time debating Reaganesque bureaucrats and politicians, he doesn't allow himself to lose hope. Trained in the habits of rationalism, he sees an emergency and thinks the need for a cooperative global response will soon be undeniable. He is a pragmatist, as he believes the times require.
In Scientific American's special "Managing Planet Earth" issue, Schneider argued that conversion to a post-greenhouse economy would cost "hundreds of billions of dollars every year for many decades, both at home and in financial and technical assistance to developing nations," yet he was confident that this was a realistic possibility. Anticipating a pessimistic reading, he argued that pessimism was too easy, that not long ago "a massive disengagement of NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in Europe also seemed inconceivable." [6] And so it did, to many. But today, with the flush of post-Cold War euphoria long past, the case for pessimism is again obvious. It is well known that world military expenditures, at almost a trillion dollars per year, could feed and educate the entire human race. They could also build a post-greenhouse economy. The question is whether they'll ever be spent doing so.
Optimism can be dangerous. When the Worldwatch Institute's ten-hour series, The Race to Save the Planet -- which took five years and $7 million to produce -- was recently broadcast in the San Francisco Bay Area, one local critic remarked that it devoted so much time to upbeat segments (designed, presumably, to avoid spreading doom and gloom) that it left the impression that the situation wasn't that grim after all. The producers had stumbled in the great, precarious tug-of-war of ecologic politics, which, despite widespread grassroots activism and an increasingly coherent analysis, is torn between despair on the one side and liberal optimism on the other.
Here's an extreme dose of inspirational liberal optimism, from Dead Heat, written by Michael Oppenheimer, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, and Robert Boyle. This text was reprinted (as "Techno-Hope") in the 1990 Earth Day issue of Mother Jones:
The change began in 1992 when the nations of the world, under the
guidance of the United Nations Environmental Program, signed an
agreement to limit greenhouse gases. Cynics scoffed at a
"toothless" accord, but they failed to notice the underlying
currents. Battered by foreign economic invasion and constrained
by a limited budget, the United States canceled the Super
Collider, the Space Station, and Star Wars and diverted billions
to research and education. By the mid-1990s, it had concluded a
series of treaties with the Soviet Union, which led gradually to
a mutual reduction of forces. But the expected blow to the
defense contractors never materialized because the government
poured some of the billions of dollars saved into procurement of
solar energy sources, and several large companies quickly
converted to renewable-energy development. The trend accelerated
when the Great Drought of the late nineties struck and industry
began the total phaseout of fossil fuels. Now rich nations
compete to supply smaller countries with solar cells rather than
weapons.
One must ask the purpose of such prose. Should it be excused as bad exhortatory fiction, or is it true to the dreams of Washington environmentalists? If this the hope they can imagine, it's no wonder that "radical environmentalism," as it has emerged in the last decade, has chosen pessimism.
Examples of radical pessimism are easy to come by, but Bill McKibben's The End of Nature is distinguished by its vivid evocation of greenhouse crisis and by its relentless despair. McKibben is an apostle of deep-ecological radicalism. Not being a scientist, he need not posture at objectivity -- yet neither does he accept political and economic views. To even name this society as "capitalist" and insist that the distinctions made thereby are significant strikes him as absurd. The warming is only the last in a long series of attacks on the environment, and politics too small a thing to place against the end of wilderness. We can and should resist -- with direct action, by consuming less, wearing sweaters around the house, not having children -- but it won't be enough, not really. Soon we'll find ourselves almost alone, with only the plants and animals we've chosen to save, on a desiccated and lonely world.
It's a view so tragic as to be almost absurd, were it not for its desire to face the whole grim truth. With the U.S. Administration bent on resisting any real greenhouse treaty, there's a strong temptation to see the measures being taken elsewhere -- like Germany's commitment to a 25 percent cut in CO2 production by the year 2005 -- as substantial alternatives. But are they? The Third World is now well along on the road of fossil-fuel industrialism -- will the Europeans pay to help it go solar instead? In the next 40 years? McKibben knows of the calls for massive military cuts and a crash campaign of conversion to a post-greenhouse economy; he just doesn't think it's going to happen.
"UNCERTAINTY" AS IDEOLOGY
In February 1990, when President Bush addressed the UN's climatic change panel, many environmentalists were bitterly disappointed. They had allowed campaign rhetoric about a "White House effect" to seduce them into hope for emergency initiatives, and now Bush, instead of giving voice to any spirit of emergency, had insisted that greenhouse policy "be consistent with economic growth and free-market principles." [7]
Just days before Bush delivered his speech, revisions had transformed it from one that emphasized the seriousness of global warming to one that emphasized scientific uncertainties and made no recommendations for action. In the preceding months, the media had taken the same turn, buzzing with reports that scientists (except for a few greenhouse radicals) in fact doubted the warming predictions. On December 13, 1989, for example, The New York Times ran a cover feature on the "greenhouse skeptics," and Forbes -- which subsequently began advertising itself as "The magazine that's not afraid to take a little heat" -- ran an expose on "The Global Warming Panic" (in its 1989 Christmas issue.)
The backstage maneuvering had been going on for some time, with both greenhouse theorists and skeptics pressing their arguments in Washington as the time for Bush's speech approached. In September 1989, for example, Richard S. Lindzen of M.I.T and Jerome Namais of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography wrote the White House, arguing
that current global warming forecasts "are so inaccurate and fraught with uncertainty as to be useless to policy makers." Sununu and Bush, according to press reports, "welcomed the input." [8]
Lindzen and Namais are both noted meteorologists and members of the National Academy of Sciences. Lindzen, who is perhaps the leader of the anti-greenhouse scientists, has made major contributions to atmospheric theory. Their views carry weight. Yet Lindzen's theories are, by his own words, of a "theological or philosophical" nature [9], and reduce to a faith in the existence of atmospheric dynamics, yet undiscovered, of sufficient magnitude to counter the known effects of the greenhouse gases. That such faith can be used to justify U.S. intransigence in U.N. greenhouse negotiations indicates how strong the political currents running below the surface of "objective" science can be. More specifically, it demonstrates the ideological uses, not only here but in a variety of debates over cancer and toxicity, of the "uncertainty" of scientific data. (Incidentally, one of Lindzen's chief claims -- that water vapor may diminish rather than amplify global warming -- was refuted by research published only a month after Bush's speech. [10])
Uncertainty plays such a key role in scientifically loaded policy debates because it converts the question "What is to be done?" into "Should anything be done at all?" Witness Warren Brookes' Forbes article, which asks whether greenhouse warming is "the 1990s version of earlier scares: nuclear winter, cancer-causing cranberries and $100 oil?" and goes on to assert that "just as Marxism is giving way to markets, the political `greens' seem determined to put the world economy back into the red, using the greenhouse effect to stop
unfettered market-based expansion." [11] Further, Brookes says, even though "60% of the public is convinced [global warming] will worsen," in reality "the evidence of that alleged trend is under increasingly sharp and solid attack."
Is it indeed? This claim, common in the popular press, directly contradicts the scientific consensus and the conclusions of the U.N. IPCC's scientific committee. (The United States has its greatest veto power in the policy committee). Yet because climatic dynamics are both complex and poorly understood, uncertainty can always be made to seem plausible simply by citing data selectively. Brookes, for example, is careful to focus on U.S. statistics, rather than the global statistics that would contradict his chosen view.
All scientists acknowledge uncertainties in the atmospheric models. The real debate turns on the meaning of that uncertainty, and its ideological uses. These uses are both conscious and deliberate, as demonstrated by a White House memo to the American IPCC delegation, which was leaked to the press in April 1990. The memo's list of "debates to avoid" included whether "there is or is not" global warming and how much warming could be expected. "In the eyes of the public," it went on, "we will lose this debate. A better approach is to raise the many uncertainties that need to be understood on this issue." [12]
"Uncertainty" has a different meaning in the laboratory than in the White House press room. Though scientists argue over the details, the scientific community accepts the thrust of greenhouse theory for the simple reason that it dovetails with routine laboratory physics. Carbon dioxide, methane and the CFCs do trap heat; that's why they're called greenhouse gases. The rising atmospheric concentrations of these gases are not in dispute; nor is the geological record, which indicates that increases in CO2 correlate with increased temperatures. And though the earth's metabolism incorporates many buffers -- ice sheets, forests, oceans, clouds -- there's no scientific reason to believe that these buffers will neutralize the vast seas of CO2 that will be spewed into the air in the coming century.
The summer of 1988, with its wilting heat wave and corresponding spike of greenhouse fear, was ages ago in ideological time. (Though globally 1990 was the hottest year on the recent record books.) The anti-greenhouse counter-revolution began in 1989, and today, as oil, recession, and militarism push hope, ecology and Eastern Europe off the front page, it's wise to brace for a wave of denial and lies. Even before the Gulf War, with ecology still in the media foreground, the greenhouse debate had begun to thicken with equivocation. Now, stonewalling is official U.S. policy.
The near future of the debate is reasonably predictable. It is only necessary to project current trends, and to review the history of another atmospheric crisis -- the destruction of the ozone layer by chlorinated chemicals. Here, too, laboratory science predicted the threat. Here, too, the difficulty of proving atmospheric damage made it possible for interested powers to frame a scientific near-consensus as controversy -- even though it was already clear in 1973 that CFCs damaged the ozone layer. Only the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole finally turned the tide. (If indeed it has been turned at all. The 1990 revision to the Montreal Protocol allows half again the CFCs produced in the past 50 years to be produced in the next ten! [13])
Sherwood Rowland, the scientist whose lab discovered the ozone-shredding properties of CFCs, once commented "It is quite common on the scientific side of industry to believe that there aren't any real environmental problems, that there are just public relations problems." [14] It's an astute remark. Public relations, not physics, is the paradigm science of the modern age, and it's difficult to imagine it counting for more than it does today, when 76 percent of the American people describe themselves as environmentalists.
Why, finally, is prudence so difficult, even in the face of a more-than-plausible catastrophe? There are many answers, but rising above the fog is the insistence that the economy be left unfettered unless it can be "proved" that the ecological costs of inaction are
absolutely intolerable. Meanwhile, 1990 was the hottest year to date, the year that dying coral reefs (global warming is the chief suspect) became big news, and the fourth straight record year for coal production.
FOSSIL-FUEL DEPENDENCY
The fossil-fuel economy is expensive, very expensive. In the United States, subsidies to the automobile alone are about as large as the military budget -- amounting to $2,200 per car per year, or $400 billion a year! [15] (The U.S. truck and auto fleet now exceeds 180 million vehicles, up from 108 million in 1970. That's one for every 1.7 Americans, up from one for every 2.4 per in 1970). In fact, the real auto subsidy is much larger: although the $400 billion figure includes highway and road construction and repair, as well as other direct support services like police protection and paramedical aid, it does not include indirect costs like the estimated $47 billion the United States has annually spent patrolling the Persian Gulf -- a figure that has recently been substantially increased. And then there are the billions that go to Big Oil each year as tax shelters and depletion allowances, the health costs associated with the burning of fossil fuels, and the costs of the strategic petroleum reserve and oil-spill cleanups. The cost of this last item alone vastly exceeds the entire solar-energy budget. As for the ultimate costs of oil and coal dependence, these defy calculation.
The fossil fuels benefit from fantastic, almost unaccountable subsidies -- paid in dependence, demoralization, and catastrophe, as well as in cash. In the 1970s, it seemed that a scarcity of oil might force a transition to a new energy economy, but in the last few years more fossil fuel has been discovered than has been extracted from the ground. This trend leaves state regulation standing alone, without increased energy prices to buttress environmental policies -- a situation that will likely remain for the indefinite future. Just before the war OPEC held a meeting that focused on Western European moves to reduce pollution by curbing the use of oil. Calling this "a serious challenge," a Saudi official said that OPEC economists would study the environmental concerns of Western Europe and the effects they might have on the use of oil. [16] Now, after the war, price stability -- at a level advantageous to the winners -- is the order of the day, and there's little chance that the cost of oil will go high enough to force a real energy transition.
The New York Times Magazine recently claimed that "many people, throughout the world, believe that the implications -- scientific, economic, medical, social, technological and political -- of LA's environmental confrontation foreshadow the showdown awaiting the entire world." [17] It's a plausible claim. If even Los Angeles, one of the world's richest cities, can't control its air pollution, can there be any hope in the larger global "showdown"? At issue, of course, is the auto-industrial economy, or rather, the car. Cars mean individual freedom, and given the social and physical structure of the modern world, and especially of its cities, it's not hard to see why. Roads jam and commutes grow ever longer, but instead of real mass transit (which is hard to build for the low-density cities of the automobile age) we get "auto environments" -- quieter cars, CD stereos, recorded novels, cellular phones, and even microwave ovens.
Even technical fixes, long scorned by eco-radicals as means of avoiding substantive changes, are considered threats -- to the point where it's hard to imagine a technology as revolutionary as, say, insulation, being used to anything approaching its potential. In late 1988 a mild EPA report on greenhouse policy became instantly controversial, recommending as it did auto efficiency standards of 40 miles per gallon, plantation-grown wood as a fossil-fuel substitute, and the aggressive pursuit of solar power. Such initiatives pose no threat to capitalism, at least not in the abstract, though they seem to threaten this particular capitalism, with all its ties -- in history, ideology and infrastructure -- to cheap fossil fuels.
If there is to be a conversion to a post-greenhouse economy, the power of the fossil-fuel sector must be broken. This, obviously, is a tall order, for we inhabit a world in which "cheap" fossil fuels face us on every side, objectified as cities, factories, ruling elites. It will take work to get out of here, and luck, and planning. But, at least in the United States, free-market ideology is so strong, and planning held in such ill esteem, that even government research and development funds for computer and networking technologies are threatened. One need be no friend of the high-tech path to see that, if the dogmatic allure of minimal government can endanger developments such as these, solar power and light rail are far from any renaissance.
