Historian Joseph J. Ellis recently wrote an excellent opinion piece for the L.A. Times stating the need for government to address some of our most significant problems. In doing so, he captured thoughts I’ve had over the last several years.

Ellis traces anti-government rhetoric back to Thomas Jefferson and pro-government rhetoric to Alexander Hamilton. He eventually makes the following vital points:

For much of our history, the Jeffersonian hostility to an energetic federal government served us well. But with the end of the frontier and the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the expanding role of government in protecting and assuring our “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” has become utterly essential. All the major problems now befuddling us — the destructive excesses of finance capitalism, a profit-based healthcare system, an increasingly contaminated atmosphere — are only soluble if we regard government as the chosen representative of our collective interests as a people and a nation.

I recommend reading Ellis’s piece in its entirety to get a better sense of his argument.

On Friday I eagerly waited to hear news on whether the U.S. House of Representatives had passed the climate change bill, called the American Clean Energy and Security Act. When I finally heard the news that it had done so, I gave my wife a high-five.

The legislation is far from perfect, but it’s clear that given the way our political system works, this is the best we could get from the House right now. Finally as a nation we have begun to take responsibility for the changes that we are making in the climate. Too often in the past, our actions on this issue have been shameful. Still, advocacy group emails are saying that the fight over the bill in the Senate will be even tougher, as Republicans deride the bill as simply an “energy tax” and many Democrats succumb to coal and oil interests in their states.

I have a family connection to this legislation as well. My brother-in-law is an economist working on the legislation for the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, chaired by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).

Here are some of the key provisions of the bill, as reported in a press release from that committee: Read the rest of this entry »

My wife and I attended the 21st Annual Nobel Peace Prize Forum at St. Olaf College last Friday and Saturday, March 13 and 14. In an arrangement with the Norwegian body that grants the prize, the forums are held at a group of Minnesota and Iowa colleges founded by Norwegian settlers. Since the 2007 Peace Prize was given to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the topic was, of course, climate change. Fortunately for me, the location for this year was St. Olaf.

It was a wonderful and inpsiring conference, and I wanted to share with you the two sessions that stood out the most for me:

The first was the opening keynote address by Dr. Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University. He gave an excellent and entertaining lecture about the scientific understanding of climate change. He also explained the process that the IPCC uses in making its reports, and in the question-and-answer session he made some informative comments about climate change skeptics, among other things (the questioner had asked about George Will and his views on climate change). I recommend watching the video of his talk. It’s worth the investment of time. (Alley starts at around 32 minutes into the video.)

The other particularly inspiring session was a presentation by college and high school students about their work on climate change. This gave me great hope for the future. The youth are taking action: forming groups, lobbying politicians, organizing their fellow youth, getting people to do energy audits, and more. Many of the students had just attended PowerShift, the big climate change student conference in Washington, D.C. the week before. Timoth Den Herder-Thomas of Macalester College was especially impressive in his comments, and he told about the upcoming Summer of Solutions event, in which youth will work on grassroots project related to climate change and also potentially lay the groundwork for careers in this burgeoning field. There is so much to do, and we need their leadership. Now the older folks just need to get out of the way.

Today is the Capitol Climate Action, a rally that will feature mass civil disobedience and protest at the Capitol Power Plant, the coal-fired power plant that provides electricity to the U.S. Capitol. One thousand college students are expected to participate. Among those who will risk being arrested are Bill McKibben, the climate change activist and author; James Hansen, noted climate scientist; Gus Speth, a Yale University professor and environmental advocate; and Wendell Berry, the author.

Could this possibly be a watershed moment in the climate change movement? It will be interesting to see how many will be there and how the media handle it.

Below is an excerpt from an email about the protest. It was signed by McKibben and sent by 350.org, the climate change action organization that he helped found:

Read the rest of this entry »

I recommend Thomas L. Friedman’s recent book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America. Friedman has done his homework for this book, talking with dozens of scientists, business leaders, policy analysts, and environmentalists. He argues that we face five major problems that have reached a crisis point today. As he writes, “The convergence of global warming, global flattening, and global crowding is driving those five big problems – energy supply and demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, energy poverty, and biodiversity loss – well past their tipping points into new realms we’ve never seen before, as a planet or as a species” (p. 37).

Friedman deserves special praise for highlighting the problems of biodiversity loss, or the extinction of species. Based on my reading of science sources over my years of doing test development work, this is a problem that our leaders have not dealt with effectively, and it is being accelerated by climate change.

The strengths of this book are its detail and its wide-ranging inquiry. It does have some weaknesses: Friedman’s tendency to personalize his analysis, as when we learn about his many visits with the global elite at posh spots throughout the world; occasional overly specific detail, as in the section on the future “Energy Internet” or “smart grid”; and his nearly exclusive focus on technological and business-oriented solutions, a focus that many environmentalists criticize.

I did appreciate the fact that he calls for the development of an “ethic of conservation,” even if he has doubts about whether major lifestyle changes are required in the new “energy-climate era.” Here is an excerpt related to this issue:

To become good stewards and good trustees, [according to MIchael J. Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard], “we will need to rein in our tendency to regard the earth and its natural resources as wholly at our disposal for present needs, wants, and desires. We have to develop new habits and attitudes towards consumption.”

Otherwise, whatever technologies we devise will simply be used to extend our current habits of profligate consumption to the huge, burgeoning middle classes of a hot, flat, and crowded world…. Does [this] mean that we, as individuals, have to edit our lifestyles down to a bare minimum, or get by with much less than the average American upper- or middle-class family consumes today? There is an anticapitalist, anticonsumerist, back-to-nature wing of the environmental movement that believes we should and almost delights in advocating that. By the way, that may be right, and should not be dismissed. My point is that we don’t know yet, because we have not tried even the obvious stuff that we do know would have real effects and would not involve fundamental changes in our lifestyle.

Telling every individual on the planet who wants or can afford a car that they cannot have one would be changing our lifestyle. But banning cars over a certain weight or engine size, or bringing maximum speed limits back down to 55 miles per hour, or banning taxis that are not hybrids – such efforts do not strike me as fundamentally cramping anyone’s lifestyle…. Forcing everyone to ride a bike to work would involve changing our lifestyle. But requiring municipalities to set aside bike lanes running from suburbs to inner cities doesn’t strike me as cramping anyone’s lifestyle (and might make our whole society healthier). [And Friedman goes through a list of many other examples] (pp. 192-193)

In my interactions with people who live in different parts of the United States, including people from my wife’s side of the family who live in warmer climates, I’m often struck by their visceral reaction at the mention of parts of our world that experience cold temperatures. They shiver when a name such as “Minnesota” is mentioned and say “Cold!” or something like that. Think of the reaction you have when you hear the names “Siberia” “Alaska,” or “Antarctica.” The reaction is milder for a place such as Minnesota, but it is there nonetheless.

Now, I’ve been thinking about the importance of this reaction here in the U.S., where a growing share of the population lives in warmer climates. Demographic shifts have moved the center of the U.S. population in a southwesterly shift for decades now, and it seems unlikely there will be northward shift any time soon (although climate change may affect that). All those people are accustomed to a warm climate and unfamiliar with a cold one. In fact, I would say they have a certain amount of what I call “cold intolerance.”

“Cold intolerance” is a medical term used for a symptom of some illnesses. It’s a severe bodily reaction to cold temperatures. However, I’m using the term here in a cultural sense to describe people’s negative attitude toward cold-climate places.

People who are cold intolerant will not be likely to visit a cold place–certainly not in the winter–nor will they likely want to move there to take a job or attend school. Nor will they be likely to move a company’s headquarters there, nor would they hold a convention there unless it is during a warm time of the year.

I think you see where I’m going with this: in a country (and world?) in which economic and political power is increasingly located in warmer climates, cold-climate regions will likely suffer from more and more cold intolerance, from decisions that are impacted by a lack of experience with living in a cold climate.

I’ve thought about this with regard to the recent merger of Northwest Airlines with Delta Airlines. The former was headquartered in Minneapolis, the latter in Atlanta. There was little discussion of locating the new headquarters in Minneapolis; it seemed to be largely assumed that it would be in Atlanta. To be sure, Delta is larger than Northwest and Atlanta is larger than Minneapolis-St. Paul, but neither are tremendously larger. High-paying jobs will be lost in Minneapolis-St. Paul and gained in Atlanta.

How is this cold intolerance affecting the Snowbelt? I’m open to your insights, particularly if you have facts and figures to back them up.

One further conclusion: I feel that cold intolerance means that northern areas will be more reliant on nurturing their own talent from within, because they will be less likely to import it from outside. Thus strong public education systems and strong government will be needed there. I realize there is currently a lot of migration from impoverished areas of the world to cold-climate regions, so my thesis is less accurate on a global scale than it is on a national scale.

Two Minnesota organizations have released an important document, the Statewide Conservation and Preservation Plan. Created by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR), the new plan makes policy and research recommendations that are intended to preserve the state’s natural resources in the face of increasing demands and impacts from our society, including climate change. Carbon emission reductions are one of the important goals of the plan.

I haven’t yet had time to do more than a cursory reading of the report’s executive summary and its transportation chapter. Here are a few excerpts from the executive summary:

The Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR) funded a unique partnership among the University of Minnesota and the consulting firms of Bonestroo and CR Planning to evaluate the state’s natural resources, identify key issues affecting those resources, and make recommendations for improving and protecting them. More than 125 experts, including University scientists and public and private natural resource planners and professionals, participated in the 18-month effort. …

• The key issues for which recommendations are made in this report are:
• Land and water habitat fragmentation, degradation, loss, and conversion
• Land-use practices
• Transportation
• Energy production and use, and mercury as a toxic contaminant related to energy production

Here are the three recommendations from the Transportation chapter:

• Transportation Recommendation 1: Align transportation planning across state agencies and integrate transportation project development and review across state, regional, metropolitan and county/local transportation, land use and conservation programs.
• Transportation Recommendation 2: Reduce per capita vehicle miles of travel (VMT) through compact mixed-use development and multi- and intermodal transportation systems.
• Transportation Recommendation 3: Develop and implement sustainable transportation research, design, planning, and construction practices, regulations, and competitive incentive funding that minimize impacts on natural resources, especially habitat fragmentation and non-point source water pollution.

The report clearly deserves closer reading and the attention of state leaders. Note especially the involvement of leading state scientists and planners.

For more information, see the official press release and a Star Tribune article.

A friend recently loaned me the spring 2008 issue of Yes!, a magazine dedicated to “Building a Just and Sustainable World.” This was a “Climate Solutions Special Issue” with one of my heroes, Bill McKibben, on the cover.

I haven’t yet read the entire section on climate solutions, but I did read its commentary on transportation, by Guy Dauncey. He proposes a future in which 5 percent of the United States’ surface transportation needs are met by walking, 10 percent by biking, 20 percent by transit, 5 percent by teleworking and teleconferencing, 5 percent by trains (presumably longer-distance), 5 percent by ridesharing, and the rest by personal motor vehicles.

What caught my attention more, however, was the magazine’s “The Page That Counts” section, one of those lists of facts that many magazines publish. For this issue, it begins with these three facts:

Amount of its roads budget that Copenhagen devotes to services and infrastructure for cyclists: 1/3 [1]

Amount of money that a community gains for every mile biked instead of driven: 50 cents [2]

Benefit to Norwegian society for each physically inactive citizen who chooses to bike or walk to work: $4,500 – $5,900 [3]

The quoted facts speak to the generally unrecognized benefits of walking and biking. I was especially drawn to the latter two, because they could capture the attention of elected officials, government staff, and other leaders.

Here are the sources for those facts:

1. “Livable Copenhagen: The Design of a Bicycle City,” Alyse Nelson, Center for Public Space Research, Copenhagen, 2007. This is a 7mb pdf file and will take a while to load depending on your internet connection.
2. “Quantifying the Benefits of Non-Motorized Transportation for Achieving Mobility Management Objectives,” Todd Litman, Victoria Transport Policy Institute, November 30, 2004.
3. “Walking and cycling track networks in Norwegian cities: Cost-benefit analyses including health effects and external costs of road traffic,” Kjartan Sælensminde, Institute of Transport Economics, 2002.

I hope to dig further into these sources and have already glanced at the second one, by Todd Litman, which is quite impressive.

While any hope for a federal response to climate change this year died today in the U.S. Senate, I’m at least somewhat encouraged by the fact that my wife has located another resource that catalogs the many claims made by climate change skeptics and offers responses to each. It’s in Grist, the environmental news and commentary web site that’s based in Seattle, and it’s titled “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.” I don’t know what you’re community is like, but mine has plenty of skeptics, and I need all the help I can get.

I’m not a regular reader of Grist, though my wife is. They take a lighter approach to environmental issues – lighter than yours truly, for example. I like their slogan: “Grist: it’s gloom and doom with a sense of humor. So laugh now – or the planet gets it.”

See also their commentary on the carbon footprint of biking versus driving, in which they run some of the numbers and, as commonsense would indicate, find that biking comes out ahead.

Earlier this month the Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group (MCCAG) released its final report. This group of over 50 stakeholders was formed by Governor Tim Pawlenty to assist in developing a Minnesota Climate Mitigation Action Plan (that’s a lot of capital letters). It has some impressive names on it, including Will Steger, the polar explorer and climate change activist; Prof. David Tilman of the University of Minnesota, one of the most esteemed biologists in the world; and J. Drake Hamilton of Fresh Energy, whom I heard recently give an excellent speech on climate change and our response to it. The group also has many other prominent figures representing business, labor, churches, environmental organizations, and other groups.

I’ve read the executive summary and Chapter 5: Transportation and Land Use and was encouraged by what I found. The group has outlined policies for achieving a nearly 30 percent reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2025 (with 2005 being the base year), and most of the recommendations were approved unanimously.

The public can now enter comments about the report online (deadline is midnight on Sunday, April 27), and I encourage people to do so. At the very least, you can read the executive summary before doing so, though it is not all that short at 16 pages.

It wasn’t entirely clear to me whether the report claimed that enacting the policies would provide a net savings to the state and its people. It seems the policies would save the public money rather than cost them money, judging by the discussion on page 6 of the executive summary. The report does attempt to quantify the cost of various policies. The most cost-effective measure, for example, is improved statewide building codes; that’s the no-brainer. Read the rest of this entry »