To Till and to Tend

        President Obama’s inaugural address last week touched on many themes.  One of the most noteworthy of these was the idea that the government could only be part of the response to our economic troubles; that citizens would have to participate in the hard work of national economic recovery.  After eight years in which we were blissfully encouraged to reject personal sacrifice—of paying for two wars with tax cuts, of responding to 9/11 with shopping sprees, of reacting to the end of the internet bubble with the creation and perpetuation of a vastly more destructive housing bubble, it was indeed refreshing to hear a politician actually asking something of the American people.  But what does this have to do with the environment?

Plenty, in my humble opinion.  Last year, when gas prices spiked to over $4.00/gallon, we began to see the emergence of a national consensus on the need to rethink the way we consume energy in the US.  People in mainstream America, and in Detroit, started talking seriously about creating more fuel-efficient cars and investing in research and development to cultivate new energy sources.  Though this sentiment was born out of the economic reality of high gas prices, economics were not the sole reason being expressed for why we ought to purchase hybrids or build more wind turbines.  Instead, everyday Americans spoke about greater conservation and alternative energy creations as ends in their own right.  There was a palpable momentum the likes of which I had never experienced; a momentum which, if maintained, led to the feeling that there was a legitimate possibility of enacting real change.

            The problem, though, is that gas prices have dropped precipitously since then, and people during a recession are inclined to vote with their pocketbooks rather than with their consciences.  If the market is left to its own devices (a proposition whose dangerousness has been laid bare over the past four months of economic disaster), people will not be willing to pay more for electric cars or energy-efficient home insulation but will instead continue to purchase cheaper gasoline-fueled cars and home heating oil.  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/opinion/28friedman.html  And if this continues to occur, the fledgling market for new technology cars and alternative energy investment generally will collapse.  We will be left vulnerable and exposed whenever the next energy shock occurs because we will have failed to develop the energy infrastructure needed to mitigate our reliance on foreign oil.  And we will continue to cause irreparable harm to our planet in the process.

            So what should we do?  I believe it goes back to President Obama’s inaugural address.  We need to be willing to act against our immediate self-interest to provide the incentive necessary to continue the alternative energy momentum and avoid slipping back into complacency.  There is one clear-cut way to do this—a gas tax.  Yes, I know, raising taxes is anathema in America during tough economic times.  But instituting a tax, along the lines articulated here http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/opinion/27sat1.html?scp=2&sq=gas%20tax&st=cse, will achieve what we all know is in our economic, environmental, and foreign policy long-term interests.  Though in the short-term raising gas prices will be hard on certain sectors of the economy, these sectors—like Big Tobacco before them—over time will find ways to compensate and should continue to thrive.  And we will finally stop vacillating in the economic wind about our commitment to a greener, safer, and more secure energy policy.

At a recent meeting of the steering committee of Kansas Interfaith Power & Light, on which I serve, we heard two presentations back to back, and they could not have been more different.  The first, on the most-current science of climate change, was similar in tone and content to the movie, An Inconvenient Truth; the second, by one of the two evangelical members of the committee (in a room full of liberal Christians and yours truly) was about how you can’t really talk about the science in churches, because when they hear “the science” they think “Al Gore” and “partisan politics” and won’t listen to it at all. At the time it struck me as an odd (to say the least) juxtaposition, and thought that ignoring the science in a community like mine – educated, largely secular in outlook – would have you laughed off the bima.

On the other hand, of course, we all know that you can lay science and the polar bears on people all day long and not have it affect their day-to-day decisionmaking one iota.  So maybe, after a fashion, the second presenter was on to something.

Today on Daily Kos, Meteor Blades linked to a report on a study by the Pew Research Center showing that, on a list of 20 voter concerns, the economy ranks first, addressing the nation’s energy needs ranks sixth, while “the environment” ranks 16th and “global warming” dead last. The same study shows that the concern of voters for environmental issues has declined 15% in the past year – roughly the same timeframe as the collapse of the economy.  Given the state of the economy and the fact that we’re still in two wars, this seems unlikely to change during the term of this Congress.

So does that mean we give up on addressing the environment and climate change? No, according to Pew, it means coming at the problem from a different angle – through the things people are concerned about: jobs, the economy, and energy: 

The takeaway message for journalists is that those “stewardship” frames will not be sufficient in terms of galvanizing support for clean energy. In the pursuit of public engagement, the press would be better advised to link sustainability issues to economic growth and “green” jobs.

According to Matthew Nesbit of the Framing Science blog, analyzing the Pew report and also linked from Kos:

Only by “reframing” the relevance of climate change in ways that connect to the specific core values of key segments of the public – and repeatedly communicating these multiple meanings through a variety of trusted media sources and opinion leaders- can the Obama administration and allies generate the widespread public engagement needed to move major policy action forward. (snip)

It’s also time to stop focusing narrowly on remote polar impacts, looming environmental disaster, or symbols such as polar bears. These exemplars are either not personally relevant enough to most audiences, are dismissed as remote and far off in the future, or easily re-framed as “alarmism” sending interpretations back into the mental box of lingering scientific uncertainty. …

In order to generate widespread public support for meaningful policy action, the communication challenge is to figure out how to shift the climate change focus away from the traditional frames and devices towards a new perceptual context that resonates with the values and understanding of a specific intended audience. These new meanings for climate change are likely to be key drivers of public resolve and eventual policy action.

In other words, articulating the potential remedies to climate change through the frames of what people say they are concerned about – the economy, jobs and energy independence – in an intensive, unified way, will be much more effective in getting “the change we need” than 100 slides of Amsterdam under water. That’s just effective politics, which we need a lot more of in the environmental movement, especially now that we have a Congress and president who are willing to listen to what we have to say.

And speaking of effective politics, see also this post by David Roberts on grist.com, claiming that the carbon tax, a beloved approach of climate progressives, is a dead letter in Congress, and that judging by the support it has from business and the right wing, it probably isn’t such a great idea anyway. Rather, he encourages us to return to support of cap-and-trade, which can pass this Congress, may well be more effective than a carbon tax at least in the short term, and is much more easily “messaged” (and less easily demagogued) in the ways described above.

Everyone agrees that our economic crisis is anthropogenic. That is, we brought it on ourselves by living larger than we could afford, taking more than we could return, wanting more than is either reasonable or fair to expect. We loaned more than was just so we could reap more than we sowed; borrowed more than we could replenish with what we can earn; divvied up, spread out, and pawned off the responsibility so that no one truly could be blamed, or could even have been moved to care.

Now we are paying the price.

And the price is very steep. It was forced on us by these regrettable circumstances and we are muddling through. But I can’t help imagining for a moment, what if, way before the crisis, independent of any impending crisis, say two years ago, we had been more generous with our gifts and our tax money. What if we had taken $350 billion dollars and spread it around to invent 98% efficient solar energy conversion panels-, high-mileage electric cars and the infrastructure to support them, fixed all our bridges, roads, schools; built amazing inter- and intra-city public transit; increased teacher salaries; improved our social services to our nation’s most needy. How much good – economic, environmental and social – would have come from that?

Nope. Too expensive. So instead of that money being invested in people, jobs, research and education, we lost it, and more, in the stock market, and are spending billions more to bail out a profligate economy with uncertain returns.

Now, translate all these lessons into the environmental problem. It too is anthropogenic, human-made. Here too we are living larger than we can afford, taking more than we can return, dipping into the principle when we should be living off the interest, forgetting that the atmosphere and sea are finite and not endlessly able to absorb our waste.

But here too, if we do not invest sufficiently now in clean, renewable energy research, waste management, clean manufacturing, healthier products, we will be paying a thousandfold more down the line for scarcer and scarcer resources, and the economic, social and political dislocation scarcity brings.

Scholars, analysts, prophets tell us we do not make radical changes unless faced with crises. But here is the bright side. Perhaps in this one instance, we can use the lessons of the financial crisis to motivate us to respond to an impending yet still avoidable environmental crisis. For the truth is, we will one day soon recover from this economic crisis, hopefully even in the next year or two. But we cannot and will not speedily recover from the crash of the environment, not in our lifetime, or the lifetime of our children, not even in this century.

These dual crises we face are not only similar in their structure, but gratefully and blessedly also in their solutions. By using green technology to fuel economic health; producing goods in a cyclical, no waste, cradle-to-cradle style; living wisely – consuming only what we can appropriately replenish – we can build an enduring, sustainable economy and environment. Tending more to service – being with, educating, doing for and tending to each other – can build an economy pegged to human welfare and not collection of stuff.

The economy should not be a reason not to invest in green programs. It should be the reason we do.

It’s hard to ignore the growing financial crisis.  It dominates the headlines and our dinner table conversations.  It’s also dominating the political space – to the detriment of action on climate change.

 

Even before our economic situation reached its current low, US leaders declared action on climate change would drive the US economy over a cliff.  And last month, the Guardian reported that the European Union may “renege on climate change commitments” because of the financial crisis.  To “save money,” European officials have hinted they may not require polluters to purchase emission permits.  Yet climate legislation is the key to generating money needed to help refuel a struggling economy.  The Lieberman-Warner bill that the Senate considered last spring promised to generate $300 billion for research and development in renewable energy and $800 billion to help defray the costs of climate change legislation on the poor.  And while many celebrated President Elect Obama’s declaration last week that climate change was his “number two” priority (after, of course, the economy), this again ignores the fact that the two problems are one and the same: addressing climate change is the key to getting us out of the economic crisis.  Or, as Thomas Friedman queries in his October 21 Op-Ed, “Bailout (and Buildup)“: “Is the economic crisis going to be the end of green? … Or, could green be the way to end the economic crisis?“

 

Van Jones, author of the Green Collar Economy, clearly believes going green is the way to saving green.  In his words:  “If we were to weatherize and solarize America, we could power our way through this recession, we could cut carbon, we could increase the value of people’s homes and we could show that green solutions don’t cost more. They actually save people money.”  Though these initiatives may require an up-front investment, we’ll be able to pay the government back through energy savings.  And the up-front investment will create jobs. A lot of jobs.  Such spending will create more jobs per dollar invested than tax cuts, military spending, or oil and natural gas.  In fact, green investments could generate four times as many jobs as similar investments in the oil industry. 

 

So, if Congress really wants to stimulate the economy, it should start the green revolution by investing money in renewable energy and building retrofits.  A post-election poll sponsored by the National Wildlife Federation suggests the American public is finally recognizing these connections, with a majority of US voters agreeing that clean energy initiatives can help the economy.  There’s no doubt that our economy is floundering.  But, as Pete Altman at NRDC writes, the green revolution may be “just the stimulus we need.”