Everyone's Talking Climate Change

New West Founder Opens Global Warming Conference in Boise

By Jill Kuraitis, 1-22-07

Full text of Jonathan Weber’s speech at the 23rd Annual Frank Church Conference on Public Affairs at Boise State University, January 22, 2007:

Thank you very much, Larry. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. And I’d like to thank Bethine Church and Garry Wenske and everyone at the Frank Church Institute who made this event possible.

I wanted to lead off by saying that I am not an expert on global warming, and I’m sure a lot of people you will hear from over the course of the day are far more knowledgeable about the causes and impacts of global warming than I. We’ve published a lot on the subject at NewWest.Net over the past year or so, but I have to give Todd Wilkinson most of the credit for whatever insight we have provided on the specifics of the subject.

As a journalist and a media entrepreneur in the Rocky Mountain West, however, I do have some observations about how the issue is currently playing out in the press and the political arena. I’ll also talk a bit about how this very global issue is playing out regionally; global warming is an especially acute issue in Rocky Mountain West, and decisions made locally could have a substantial impact going forward. The good news is, the conversation about climate change is far more advanced than it was even a year ago. The bad news is, we are still a very, very long way from the political consensus that would enable strong action to address it.

I want to congratulate the Frank Church Institute for its impeccable timing on this event: as we speak there is legislation in Congress to address climate change, and state legislation in Montana and other places is moving ahead as well. The city of Boise was the first Rocky Mountain City to sign the Kyoto agreement. President Bush is expected to address the issue tomorrow in his state of the union address. Even the energy industry is now showing signs of taking climate change seriously, for political & tax reasons if nothing else. And here in the Rocky Mountain West, the Democratic tide in the last election, and the sense that this part of the country is “in play” politically for the first time in a generation, has created a tremendous amount of excitement, not least among environmentalists. The debate is shifting, from whether global warming is happening, to whether it’s a human-cause problem, to what we should do about it, and clearly that represents progress.

Yet in some ways I think this progress is illusory, or at least less significant than it might seem. I do not think that the hearts and minds of the country have really been won over yet. Even though most people now acknowledge the issue, I do not think we have come to grips with what it will take to address it effectively. So I’d like to talk a little bit about the media’s role in framing global warming, and where we need to go to get to the next steps on this issue.

I’m not generally one to blame the press for our problems, and on global warming as on most issues there has been a lot of outstanding reporting. Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker, Andy Revkin of the NYT and others have done a terrific job of understanding and analyzing the science, and thereby signaling that this is a major global issue that has to be addressed. But climate change is also the kind of topic that the press as a whole doesn’t deal with very well. It’s a complicated problem with hard-to-quantify impacts that will be felt only over a long period of time. Thus it easily gets caught up in the press’s genetic tendency to over-hype scare stories, and it’s not surprising that for many people climate change is part of an undifferentiated blur of dangers.

My favorite example of the press’s ham-handedness on the subject of “things we should worry about” is actually something of an inside joke in the news business: the killer bees. Remember the killer bees, those mean, nasty, stinging “Africanized honey bees?” Well, they’re coming. They’ve been coming for a long time now. But really, they’re still coming, and you should be afraid. Yes, they were coming ten years ago. But really, they’re still coming.

Michael Crichton, the novelist who has built a second career as a global warming skeptic, makes great hay out of the fact that back in the 1970s there were stories in the newspapers about the dangers of global cooling. Every day on the TV is something about a new health risk, often contradictory to the previous day’s health risk. Red wine is good for you. No, it’s bad for you! No, it’s good for you. You should worry about cholesterol and the dangers of excess sun, and the radon in your basement, and the terrorists poisoning the water supply. You should worry about the West running out of water, and about the fish disappearing from the sea, and about your children being kidnapped by child molesters. Real dangers, most of these. But how do we modulate our concerns and sense of urgency amidst this flood of risk? Climate change, with its unknown impacts and long-term time horizon, is an easy one to put on the backburner – especially because solving the problem seems so daunting. It conjures one of my favorite satiric bumper-stickers: Stop Continental Drift!

And this sense of powerlessness in the face of an inexorable force feeds into another aspect of how the media presents global warming, and how people respond to it. Specifically, I think the discussions of global warming have tended to under-state what it will take to deal with the problem. And that in turn has contributed to a sense among global warming skeptics that there is a hidden agenda at play, that global warming is a kind of Trojan horse for the liberal environmental agenda. I believe they are actually right about that.

One of the reasons that many conservationists, myself among them, are very supportive of climate change initiatives is because the things that we ought to be doing to combat global warming are things that we ought to be doing anyway. Reducing energy consumption will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and have all kinds of other benefits: less smog, reduced dependence on mid-east oil, and reduced pressure to drill in undeveloped areas, among other things. To us, this is all the more reason to take climate change seriously. But to someone who is suspicious of the environmental agenda – and anyone who lives in the West knows plenty of people like that – this starts to look like a slight of hand. If global warming is used as a kind of catch-all and political shield for pro-environment measures that are not otherwise popular, that will prove to be counter-productive in the long run.

Running in parallel to this is a deep suspicion that climate change activists are not being honest about the costs of addressing the problem – and I believe this is a valid point as well. A new book by British journalist George Manbiot argues that to really be serious about the problem we in the U.S. need to reduce our carbon emissions by 90%, and that cannot be accomplished without major sacrifices. He suggests that shopping malls be shut down in favor of warehouses and delivery trucks. Most airplane trips would be an impossible luxury. Middle-class and upper-middle-class life as we know it in the Western World would have to change in very deep ways.

I don’t know if he’s right. But I do suspect that turning down the thermostat a few degrees and using energy-efficient light-bulbs, while certainly laudable steps as far as they go, are going to be insufficient. Similarly, the various pieces of legislation currently before Congress, while better than nothing, can only be considered baby steps. In fact, one might easily suspect that these bills are not serious measures to address climate change, but rather politically driven moves that give the appearance of action without requiring most people to give anything up.

We’ve done quite a bit of coverage on climate change at New West, for reasons I will discuss in a minute. All stories at NewWest.Net enable readers to add their own comments, and our coverage of climate change has produced some rather raucous – and, I think, illustrative – discussions. Let me read you just a couple of excerpts from our comments:

“I’ve been called everything under the sun by global warmers for not subscribing to their religion. Either sceptics believe them or else.....
When I see greens stopping their recreational driving, having one small home, no private jets, and their various organizations financially supporting research into alternatives, then I’ll take it seriously. Until those things happen they aren’t taking it seriously.”

“It’s also clear to me that many of the so called “greens” are really using the issue to put in authoritarian, communistic controls over wealth generation and creation. How outrageous is it, really, that some household has five cars? How horrible that someone has a large house on a large lot? It’s these people’s HATRED of the wealthy that I see most clearly.

And we see it on these pages; we have a regular communist poster and there are frequently expressed ideas from others about the noble poor and the evil rich, or the idea that the accident of birth, combined with the lack of ambition, creates a greater nobility than those who migrate and work hard and create wealth.

I’m thinking clearly enough to refute the modern day luddites, too, who think that technology is evil and that a return to subsistence level, low technology, superstition driven, dark ages existence should be enforced by government.

Now, when rational global warming advocates begin to acknowledge the existence of these groups as counter productive, and begin to embrace politically and economically and technology possible solutions, and reject the communists and luddites, and work with rational and freedom loving people, I’ll be glad to join in.

Now it’s easy to dismiss comments like this as the voice of discredited right-wingers who will never be on the right side of this issue. But I think that would be a mistake. These kinds of sentiments, and especially the notion that environmentalists, or at least the environmental movement, mostly consists of wealthy elitists who will impose sacrifices on other people but will use their own privileged position to avoid them, are more widespread than we’d like to think. I believe this sentiment is at the heart of anti-environmentalism, especially in the West, and it needs to be dealt with head-on. Paying to “off-set” your carbon footprint, I would suggest, will have much less impact on this conversation than actually buying a smaller car or otherwise taking real steps that involve personal sacrifice.

And I think the opposition to action on global climate change needs to be seen not as a product of oil industry disinformation or simple lack of education on the subject, but rather as something that is deeply rooted in the political dynamics of the country. When people argue against climate change, they are really arguing against something else, namely the idea that government should act aggressively to protect the environment. This is not a scientific issue, though science certainly informs the debate. It is a political issue. And politically, global warming can’t be – and probably should not be – detached from the broader debate about environmental protection versus economic development. In this context, it’s important to remember that the Democratic party’s political gains in the recent election – and especially in the West – came not on the back of candidates who celebrated their environmental credentials, but rather on those who downplayed them. Pragmatism is the order of the day, which personally I think is welcome. But let’s not confuse voter rejection of ideological Republicanism with an embrace of traditional liberal environmentalism.

All of this is especially important here in the Rocky Mountain West, for a couple of reasons. Mountain regions are particularly sensitive to climate changes, and while I know it’s dangerous to extrapolate from local weather to climate change, it seems obvious that something is going on.  Living in Montana, global warming is, rightly or wrongly, an every day discussion topic due to the obvious changes in the local weather. The winters aren’t as cold as they used to be, and there’s less snow, and the summers are hotter. That’s true throughout the Rocky Mountain West, and people are very nervous about the consequences – for forest fires, for the ski industry, for the glaciers in Glacier, and for the identity of their communities. We’re not going to be inundated by rising sea levels, and in fact this region could actually benefit from climate change from a purely economic standpoint. But the impacts will likely be felt here sooner, and that makes it an issue of especially acute concern here.

Even more important is the simple fact that climate change is closely linked to fossil fuel consumption, and the Rocky Mountain West is fossil fuel central. A lot of decisions are being made at the state and local level about how to exploit energy resources and develop alternatives, and they will potentially have a big impact on climate change. In Montana, for example, Governor Schweitzer has made so-called “clean coal” technology a central initiative of his administration. But the coal part of this has a lot more political support than the clean part, and it’s easy to see how “clean coal” projects could devolve into simply coal projects. Most of the coal-fired power plants now on the drawing boards for this region – and there are a lot of them - do not in fact use clean coal technology, and it’s in part up to states and localities to change that.

Similar choices apply in other areas. Are we going to force coal-bed methane drillers to bear the full cost of water disposal and remediation, or are we going to simply encourage more drilling because it is lucrative? How aggressive area we going to be on wind power, which still requires some subsidies? Are we going to design and build new power transmission systems with conservation & clean energy in mind? Are we going to support stiffer fuel economy standards and apply them to all trucks & SUVs, even if it makes our beloved big vehicles more expensive? And, to go back to my earlier point, are we going to find ways to engage this debate in a pragmatic fashion, or are we going to simplify vilify climate change skeptics as know-nothing rednecks and hope they will eventually be out-voted?

I didn’t set out to bring a dour message, and I don’t mean to minimize the tremendous progress that has been made over the past year in bringing climate change to center stage. But a key theme of this gathering is where do we go from here, and I do think that the political challenges that lie ahead are at least as large as the scientific challenge of understanding climate change. We have an aversion to making tough choices in this country, and a tendency to hear what we want to hear. The media has a responsibility to stay on top of climate change, and to do a better job of avoiding the chicken little responses to routine risks that tend to numb us to what’s truly important.  But it also has a responsibility to engage the conversation, and surface the true roots of the opposition, and to avoid sugar-coating the reality of what stopping global warming might really mean.  -----

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