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)

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.

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 »

Something very encouraging is happening at my church, the United Methodist Church of Northfield, Minnesota. A group of us have formed a church “Green Team” to focus on Christian stewardship of creation.

Another label we might have chosen for the group is “Creation Care Team.” In some ways I like that better, since it connects us more to our Christian roots. For some, the word “green” has negative political connotations.

We had mentioned forming a group such as this for a while, but then rather suddenly a few weeks ago, following an adult education forum on energy usage, we decided to meet informally during and/or following the church’s Wednesday night dinners. Many of us were already attending these dinners, and child care is provided, so the setting seemed to be a natural one. Thus we began to talk about environmental issues each week.

Last Sunday, the team made a group presentation at the Sunday education forum, each taking a few minutes to address a specific topic. One person made an impressive, well-substantiated presentation on “peak oil” – the concept that a peak in oil production has been or will soon be reached. Another, an engineer, spoke on his long-standing connection to energy research, including work on solar power and innovative window designs. He said the obstacles to making significant strides in energy conservation are political rather than technological or economic. Another engineer spoke of his work on our city’s energy task force and his use of a device to monitor real-time electricity usage in his home. Read the rest of this entry »

My March 10 post has been edited since the original publication to correct inaccuracies. The declaration it concerned was not a document approved by the Southern Baptist Convention, as I originally wrote. The inaccuracy was a result of my misreading of the New York Times article listed below. I apologize for this error.

Fortunately, I followed up on the post by going to the Southern Baptist Convention web site today. Please see the revised post for a more accurate story.

It’s been nearly a week now since the Bali climate talks ended in a last-minute agreement that involved compromise on both sides: the sides, in this case, being the United States and most of the world. After being booed and hissed, the U.S. delegation, led by the Bush administration, finally agreed to continue talks on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that would limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Here is a summary of the agreement from an excellent Dec. 16 article by New York Times reporters Thomas Fuller and Andrew C. Revkin.

The world�s faltering effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions got a new lease on life on Saturday [Dec. 16], as delegates from 187 countries agreed to negotiate a new accord over the next two years � pushing the crucial debates about United States participation into the administration of a new American president.

Many officials and environmental campaigners said American negotiators had remained obstructionist until the final hour of the two-week convention and had changed their stance only after public rebukes that included boos and hisses from other delegates.

The resulting �Bali Action Plan� contains no binding commitments, which European countries had sought and the United States fended off. The plan concludes that �deep cuts in global emissions will be required� and provides a timetable for two years of talks to shape the first formal addendum to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty since the Kyoto Protocol 10 years ago.

I recommend reading the full article for a sense of the drama of the talks and of U.S. foot-dragging regarding substantive, timely action on mitigating global warming. The U.S. was shamed into action, and in acknowledging that I feel a sense of shame about my country.

Here are some more excerpts from the article, including the description of the two-track approach that the U.S. agreed to, in which developed and nondeveloped countries would come to separate agreements on the response to climate change:

Read the rest of this entry »

This past year turned out to be a record-breaker for Arctic warming, according to scientists quoted in an article by Seth Borenstein, Associated Press science writer. The portents are not good and should embolden us to act more aggressively to curb carbon emissions.

Below are some excerpts from the article. Warning: some of the quotes from the scientists are among the most alarming that I’ve seen on the climate change issue.

Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo. Read the rest of this entry »