Now that official leadership in Copenhagen has predictablyfailed us, for no agreement ever on the table was anywhere near close to whatwe need to salve the savage climate, what do we do?

Here, finally, is some good reason for optimism.  With proper care of ruined grasslands,variously called managed grazing, holistic management, or carbon farming, wecan restore billions of acres of the world’s soils.  Along the way we can pull all the excess carbon out of theatmosphere and put it back into the ground where it belongs - in forty yearsor less.  We can return to ourlong-gone preindustrial atmospheric concentrations of 280 ppm, the atmospherethat made the climate that made the planet very friendly to humans and manyother creatures.  It’s a climatestrategy where we have the world to benefit, at minimal cost and very low risk:

Andall you need is a cow.

But let’s back up a bit.

To statethe obvious: soils, energized by the sun, are the source of all life on land.According to Australian soils scientist Christine Jones,

“Theworld’s soils hold three times as much carbon as the atmosphere and over fourtimes as much carbon as the vegetation. With 82% of terrestrial carbon in soil(compared to only 18% in vegetation), soil represents the largest carbon sinkover which we have control. Soil is also the world’s largest store of terrestrialdiversity, with over 95% of life forms being underground (that is, only 5% ofbiodiversity is above ground).”[ii]

and because of thecomplex water-absorbing carbon compounds formed by living soil, every pound ofsoil carbon enables the storage of ten pounds of water.  Clearly, as a carbon sink soils also play amajor role in hydrological cycles, which thereby also regulate local climate.

Healthy soils are abundant and miraculous collections oflife: green plants, fungi, worms, insects, bacteria, small animals, all ofwhich work together in extraordinarily complex relationships to keep their lifesupport systems supporting them.  Ruinedsoils do little or none of the above.

From a scientific perspective, we have only begun tounderstand how soils work, although on a practical and spiritual level manyindigenous cultures have understood the importance of the earth and itssymbiotic relationships far better than we do.[iii]  But we don’t need to understand all theinteractions and synergies to get started.  Nature has been building soils for eons, all we have to do is watch,listen and learn.  Some people havealready done that, with stunning results.[iv]

Here’s the short version of how it works.  I encourage you to dig deeper; the briefannotated bibliography below is a good place to start.

Grasslands and grazing animals co-evolved - they need eachother.  Long-lived, deep-rootedperennial grasses, essential for pulling carbon into the ground, need to be eatenin moderation by animals in order to be healthy and make room for newgrowth.  So the grasses feed theanimals, the animals feed the soils, the soils feed the grasses, in aniterative cycle all made possible by the sun. 

In the wild, ruminants graze in close herds for protectionagainst predators, and while they graze they loosen the soil with their hoovesand fertilize it with their urine and dung.  Then, not wanting to tarry in their own wastes, they move on to freshpasture before they’ve had a chance to overgraze.  After the browsing and fertilizing, eager dung beetles,nematodes, fungi and bacteria work synergistically with green plants and pullcarbon deep into the soils, where it can remain indefinitely. Soils are farmore stable carbon sinks than forests, where most of the carbon is storedaboveground and is returned to the atmosphere as plants die.

When we farm with the earth as a complex system, we manageanimals and pastures/grasslands the way nature does.  Current practice is to fence out predators and let ruminantswander everywhere, overgrazing, compacting and ruining the soil.  Using managed grazing we keep the animals intight groups and move them on a roughly daily schedule (the precise frequencywill depend on climate and other local conditions).  This approach works well even with high animal densities.  Furthermore, the resulting soil recovery inas little as one year’s time can appear miraculous.

In this process, soilhealth and fertility is restored and maintained.  Biodiversity returns, teeming with complex life andrelationships.  Healthy soils in healthyecosystems remain moist, even during dry spells, improve rainfall patterns, andprevent flooding by readily absorbing water.

For carbon sequestration, we can capture around 0.5 - 1.0tons of carbon per acre per year, possibly more, and soil-building iscumulative.  We have ten billion or moreruined acres across the planet that we could revive, with all manner of localbenefits in addition to carbon sequestration, not the least of which is thatsoil restoration is very inexpensive thanks to the bounteous gifts ofnature. 

If we utilize available lands worldwide, estimatingsequestration on the conservative side at 0.5 tons per acre, we are capturingan additional 5 gigatons of carbon per year from the atmosphere, or theequivalent of 2.5 parts per million.  If we were to stop pushing carbon upwards, in roughly forty years we would be backto preindustrial levels of 280 ppm.  Butthis likely underestimates soil capacity, and it may be possible to accomplishsequestration even faster as we improve our understanding of the way soils workas carbon sinks. 

There are already thirty million acres under this kind ofmanagement in Africa, Australia and North America.  NGOs such as Heifer International are promoting agroecology andmanaged grazing as they provide third-world farmers with animals.[v]  Of course forest restoration efforts,especially in tropical and sub-tropical regions, will also help, as will newlyevolving approaches to growing food.[vi]  And we can all participate in carbonfarming, by turning our lawns into carbon sinks[vii],by supporting local farming, by partnering with farmers and ranchers (perhapsalong the lines of sister city efforts), among a variety of possibilities(please share some of your ideas along these lines).

Since grazing animals are essential to this process,invariably the methane question is raised. The current orthodoxy tells us thatbecause of digestive methane emissions, raising animals for food is a globalwarming problem, not solution.  This istrue given current practice: crowded feedlots with grain-fed, drugged cattleand manure lagoons on devastated lands, shipped long distances.  But this is clearly not how grazersevolved.  We are drawing conclusionsfrom a very skewed sample, as large as that sample may currently be.  In contrast, one cow’s worth of healthy landactually absorbs one hundred times the methane emitted by that cow in any givenyear.  And the methane-eating bacteria,which need healthy aerated soils to thrive, will continue to remove methanefrom the atmosphere as well.

Here are the obvious birds-eye questions about carbonfarming:  “Why don’t we knowthis?”  “Why aren’t we doingit full speed ahead?”

For farmers and ranchers, it likely has much to do withcustom, habit and pressure from agribusiness and the educational and commercialinstitutions it supports.  Even when thesoil tells us in no uncertain terms that what we’re doing isn’t working verywell it can be hard for us to change, and the prevailing wisdom is to applyever more fossil-fuel based synthetics.  Some of today’s most avid practitioners of holistic management were atthe end of their lassos before they gave it a try.  It requires more complex thinking about interpersonalrelationships as well as earth systems, and sometimes this is not an easytransition to make.  But onceundertaken, it turns farms and lives around, economically as well asinterpersonally and ecologically.

With climate activists, here’s what my surprising experiencehas been: they can’t hear it.  The obsession with chasing green and profitable technofixes and/orreducing emissions drowns out other thinking - they smile, say it soundsinteresting, look quizzical and change the subject, e.g., what about Lackner’sproposed carbon eating machines?[viii]  It’s as if we can’t imagine that naturecould ever be so clever without human invention.  I must say, though, that as climate disruption accelerates,activists and others are slowly opening to the possibilities of soilsequestration of carbon.

Enter the big “If”:  We still have to reduce our greenhouse gasemissions, as close to zero as possible as soon as possible.  But we also have to understand that only reducing emissions is not nearly enough, given already active positive feedbackloops such as melting ice, non-linear phenomena in the wings, and theunpleasant time lag surprises lurking in the thermal mass of the oceans.[ix]  Even though sequestering carbon in soils canhelp blunt the effects of emissions along the way, while providing all theabove-mentioned benefits of restoring soil health, we must stop spewing carboninto the atmosphere.

Here’s a bigger “If”: Will wegrow up?  I am not the first to observethat our globalized Euro-American culture is a world of two-year olds - we wantwhat we want when we want it and throw tantrums (e.g., war, structuraladjustment, etc.) when we don’t get it.  Even real children grow up fast in the face of emergency, so surelythose of us with adult faculties can do the same. 

Part of growing up is ending a culture of exploitation,destructive resource extraction, futile exponential growth, and cruel treatmentof all the denizens of earth, flora and fauna.  Time to pledge allegiance to the new mantra of local, sustainable,self-sufficient.  As Richard Heinberg sopointedly wrote, the party’s over.[x]  Time to kick the hangover and get to work.

Finally, to address a frequent utterance of disbelief: isgrowing animals and restoring the land while stopping global warming too goodto be true? 

Theanswer: only like sunsets and flowers and fish and trees - only like theinexpressible miracle of life on earth - is it too good to be true.

Soil Age Google group.  Some of us who are working on holistic management/carbon farmingsolutions have started this list, currently low volume, to further ourunderstandings and activism (we have begun to plan a climate/soils conferencein the Boston area in 2010).   All arewelcome to join us!  http://groups.google.com/group/soil-age

Dan Dagget, Gardeners of Eden:Rediscovering Our Importance To Nature, Thatcher CharitableTrust/EcoResults! Press, Santa Barbara, 2005.  A great place to start reading, Dagget tells the stories of Tony andJerrie Tipton and others who have brought all but dead soils miraculously backto bounteous life, along with insightful discussions of the fascinatingrelationships in the natural world and the obstacles created by culturalassumptions and dogmatic environmentalism.

Christine Jones is an internationally knownAustralian groundcover and soils ecologist.  Her website is Amazing Carbon, http://www.amazingcarbon.com.  Several informative papers are available onthe site.  You can also listen to herkeynote at the 2008 Queensland, Australia Landcare conference: http://www.qldlandcareconference.com/2008-conference/dr-christine-jones-soil-carbon-keynote/

Holistic Management International (HMI) wasfounded by Allan Savory, a pioneer in the management of grasslands, using hisexperience as a research biologist, game manager, rancher, farmer in Africa,and decades of experience in the United States.  http://www.holisticmanagement.org/  Savory also maintains his own websiteat  http://www.savoryinstitute.com/.  These sites have a wealth of downloadablearticles, including archives of HMI’s journal for farmers and ranchers,“In Practice,” http://www.holisticmanagement.org/n7/Info_07/in17B_In_Practice_archive_07.html.  HMI has also produced a video, “TheFirst Millimeter: Healing the Earth,” and will work with you if you’d liketo host house parties, show it on local television, or hold other educationalevents, http://www.holisticmanagement.org/n9/PBS_announcement/pbs_announcement.php.

Carbon Farmers of America is an organization foundedby a group of Vermont and Massachusetts farmers that works to support farmersin building high carbon soils.  CFA“trains, equips and provides ongoing consultation and support to memberfarmers across America to rapidly create new, high organic-matter topsoil. Withour member farmers, we carefully record the process of soil building on eachfarm, and scientifically monitor the carbon levels in their soils each year http://www.carbonfarmersofamerica.com/.

The Rodale Institute has been conducting scientificsoils and farming research for almost thirty years, the longest running trialcomparing organic and conventional farming methods, and have documentedagricultural solutions to climate change and the developing “greenrevolution” collapse in food production, http://rodaleinstitute.org/global_warming.

A couple of articles from non-profit organizations addressing soil sequestration of carbon:  Sara J. Scherr and Sajal Sthapit, “Mitigating Climate Changethrough Food and Land Use,” Worldwatch, 2008, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6126;and Ronnie Cummins, “The Organic Revolution: How We Can Stop GlobalWarming,”  Organic ConsumersAssociation, October 19, 2009,  http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_19404.cfm.

Copyright 2010 by Adam D. Sacks

(i) “EUMeets to Discuss €6 Billion Fund For Developing Nations,” Der Spiegel,December 10, 2009 http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,663858-2,00.html.  “Climate change is expensive. Butsomebody’s got to pay for it.”  Well, at least in significant part, it needn’t be so expensive afterall.

[ii] ChristineJones, “Our Soils, Our Future,” July 2008, http://www.amazingcarbon.com/PDF/JONES-OurSoilsOurFuture%288July08%29.pdf

[iii] DanDagget, Gardeners of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance To Nature,Thatcher Charitable Trust/EcoResults! Press, Santa Barbara, 2005.

[iv] Pioneerssuch as Allan Savory, Christine Jones, and Tony and Jerrie Tipton (whose workis reviewed by Dagget, above) have shown that you can take desertified and evenbadly polluted grasslands and turn them into vital soils once again.  For example, Allan Savory, “A GlobalStrategy for Addressing Climate Change,” 2008

  http://www.savoryinstitute.com/storage/articles/AGlobal Strategy for Addressing Climate Change 2 _1_.pdf, and ChristineJones, “Our Soils, Our Future,” http://www.amazingcarbon.com/PDF/JONES-OurSoilsOurFuture%288July08%29.pdf.  See Annotated References at end of text formore information.

[v]  http://www.heifer.org/site/c.edJRKQNiFiG/b.485971/

[vi] See, forexample, Eric Marx, “Going Beyond Organic: Analog Forestry,” ChristianScience Monitor, October 19, 2009, http://features.csmonitor.com/economyrebuild/2009/10/19/going-beyond-organic-analog-forestry/

[vii] See Gaia’s Garden, by Toby Hemenway for a superbintroduction to permaculture, an approach to gardening in full cooperation withnature.  Alternatively, if you must havea lawn, there are ways of doing it with no fossil inputs, in the form of pesticides/herbicides,fertilizers or fuel, and, with deep-rooted perennial grasses, no additionalwater - and store carbon while you’re at it.  See, for example, http://pearlspremium.com/.  And you can always start a business, such asRent-a-Ruminant, e.g., http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/16/goatscaping-goats-a-green_n_158642.html

[viii] KlausLackner has pioneered the development of “synthetic trees,” whichdon’t do a fraction of what trees do, let alone soils, and at a much higherprice with untested technology and unintended consequences.  But hey, it’s high tech!  Lindsey Meisel, “From Synthetic Treesto Carbon Sponges: An interview with Scientist Klaus Lackner,” TheBreakthrough Blog, March 18, 2008, http://www.thebreakthrough.org/blog/2008/03/from_synthetic_trees_to_carbon.shtml.

[ix]  See my earlier piece, “The Fallacy ofClimate Activism,” Grist, August 23, 2009,  http://www.grist.org/article/2009-08-23-the-fallacy-of-climate-activism.

[x] RichardHeinberg, “The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of IndustrialSocieties,” New Society Publishers, British Columbia, 2005,  http://richardheinberg.live.postcarbon.org/partys-over.html

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Terroriststry very hard to spread their disinformation.  A key goal is to getothers to spread it for them, especially ones who are holed up in acave somewhere.  Thus terrorists craft their disinformation into asensational message that they hope gullible members of the global mediawill repeat.

So who got suckered into repeating the message of the number one terrorist in the world?

Amazing.

But Limbaugh isn’t alone.  It’s a top story on Drudge.  And here’s FoxNews:

You can see the disinformation and the core message of hatred throughout the piece, but most especially here:

To stop global warming, he called for the “wheels of theAmerican economy” to be brought to a halt. “This is possible … if thepeoples of the world stop consuming American goods.”

“We must also stop dealings in the dollar and get rid of it as soonas possible,” he said. “I know that this has great consequences andgrave ramifications, but it is the only means to liberate humanity fromslavery and dependence on America.”

He also called for the “punishing and holding to account” ofcorporation chiefs, adding, “this should be easy for the Americanpeople to do, particularly those who were effected by Hurricane Katrinaor those who lost their jobs, since these criminals live among them,particularly in Washington, New York and Texas.”

It’s amazing that any major media outlet is dumb enough to repeatthis, let alone write analysis as if Bin Laden actual believes anythinghe says.

For the record, it simply is impossible to stop global warming bybringing the US economy to a halt.  Only right-wing ideologues couldget suckered into pushing this crap for the likes of Al Qaeda .

NOTE:  Yes, I’m sorry to be covering this subject at all for mythousands of readers.  I was planning on ignoring this, which is whatthe major media should do for any such message that comes from BinLaden.  But after Limbaugh and FoxNews got suckered into spreading thisdisinformation to their millions of followers, I felt I had no choice. I’d be interested in your thoughts.

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A new coal-gasification company has named itself LoraxAg, after the consummate Seussical eco-hero, The Lorax. It’s admittedly part of a move to brand the company as advancing the mythical-sounding “Green Coal Technology.” (That’s trademarked, naturally.)

“Green Coal” doesn’t sound musical to the Seussical.Photo: Chris1051 via Flickr

“The Lorax is the protector of the truffula trees,” LoraxAg president Mike Farina said. “We think this is the greenest use of coal.”

In response to the outright ridiculosity of the occasion, I’ve composed a brief tongue-in-cheek homage to one of my childhood heros, Dr. Seuss. (Let me just say it was a glum day in first grade when I found out he passed away.)

“Mister!” he said with a coal-ashy sneeze, “I am the Lorax. I speak for coal lobbies.I speak for ‘Green Coal,’ for they have no monies.”

Do you hope the Doctor Seuss their green-washed eggs and ham off?

(Hat tip to The Wonk Room.)

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DUBAI—Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden blamed industrial nations for global warming and urged a boycott of the U.S. dollar to end “slavery” in an audio tape aired by Al-Jazeera television on Friday.

“All industrial nations, mainly the big ones, are responsible for the crisis of global warming,” bin Laden said in the message attributed to him by the pan-Arab news channel based in Doha.

In an unusual message possibly timed to coincide with the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, he warned of the impact of global warming by saying that “discussing climate change is not an intellectual luxury, but a reality.”

“This is a message to the whole world about those who are causing climate change, whether deliberately or not, and what we should do about that,” he said.

The Al-Qaeda leader then slammed the U.S. administration under former President George W. Bush for not signing the Kyoto protocol on combating climate change. “Bush the son, and the Congress before him, rejected this agreement, only to satisfy the big companies,” he said.

Bin Laden then went on to urge a boycott of the U.S. dollar. “We should stop using the dollar and get rid of it ... I know that there would be huge repercussions for that, but this would be the only way to free humankind from slavery ... to America and its companies,” he added.

The broadcast came less than a week after bin Laden praised as a “hero” Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who allegedly tried to detonate explosives on a U.S. plane approaching Detroit on Christmas Day, in another audio message.

Bin Laden has a $50 million bounty on his head and has been in hiding for the past eight years. He is widely believed to be holed up along the remote mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

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U.S. government to cut greenhouse emissions by 28 percent

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WASHINGTON—The White House announced Friday that President Obama would order the federal government to reduce its greenhouse-gas pollution by 28 percent by 2020.

“As the largest energy consumer in the United States, we have a responsibility to American citizens to reduce our energy use and become more efficient,” Obama said in a statement. “Our goal is to lower costs, reduce pollution, and shift federal energy expenses away from oil and toward local, clean energy.”

Government departments and agencies will achieve greenhouse-gas pollution cuts by measuring current energy and fuel use, becoming more energy efficient, and shifting to clean energy sources like solar, wind, and geothermal.

The U.S. government is the most energy-thirsty component of the U.S. economy and spent more than $24.5 billion on electricity and fuel in 2008 alone, the White House said.

The new pollution targets will cut government energy use by the equivalent of 646 trillion BTUs, equal to 205 million barrels of oil or taking 17 million cars off the road for a year. This is also equivalent to a cumulative total of 8 to 11 billion in avoided energy costs through 2020, according to the White House.

Obama issued an executive order in October requiring agencies to set 2020 targets and to increase energy efficiency, cut gasoline consumption by official vehicles, and to save water and reduce waste, in moves which he said would save money and help cleanse the environment.

He has argued that cutting greenhouse-gas emissions and framing a sustainable green economy is vital not just to protect the planet, but also to future U.S. economic prosperity.

Several pieces of legislation backed by his administration—including the mammoth $787 billion economic stimulus package—provide incentives for governments and private firms to build a green economy.

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In State of the Union, Obama panders to conservatives on ‘clean energy’

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is taking a page out of David Roberts’ book by railing on the U.S. Senate to pass the clean energy jobs bill in this celebri-full video. It formally launches a new video advocacy campaign called This is Our Moment, which is banking on the pure pop-sexiness of stars like Chace Crawford to push the populace toward climate politickin’. They even get Chace to gossip to girls and guys about the senators saying “there’s still time to sit on our ass and wait.” At the same time, Jason Bateman scolds senators for the arrested development of the bill: “If our senators stand up (use a cane if you need to, sir).”

That’s nothing to say of the titanic encouragement from Leonardo DiCaprio, the desperate-for-change call from Felicity Huffman, the clean-energy-Macking of Justin Long, and the hulking green efforts of Ed Norton, among others, in this video.

The stellar call to action asks viewers to create and upload their own video—right this red-hot minute—as well as email their senators directly from the video player in favor of a clean and independent energy economy.

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Upping the ante on climate

First things first: With the electorateangry and frustrated, President Obama delivered a State of the Unionaddress last night that articulated his goals for, among other things,modernizing the U.S. energy system and infrastructure, and addressingclimate change. The president called for “a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that willfinally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America,”including nuclear power. New Va. Gov. Bob McDonnell gave the Republican response,imploring the nation that, “Advances in technology can unleash morenatural gas, nuclear, wind, coal, and alternative energy to lower yourutility bills.”

The speech punctuated a week where everything in theclimate-and-energy space appeared to be in motion. The troika of Sens.John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman(I-Conn.) pressed ahead developing their legislation. Kerry shouteddown the New York Times for an article suggesting the legislators had scaled back their goals. Graham told the Clean Energy, Jobs and Security Forum that “There will never be 60 votes for climate change legislation as itexists today. And it would be a shame if that is the end of the story.”Todd Wooten, director of the Nicholas Institute’s Southeast ClimateResources Center, spoke on a climate, security, and agriculture panelwith Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Roger Johnson, president of theNational Farmers Union.

The BASIC countries—Brazil, South Africa, India, and China—met this week in advance of the Jan. 31 Copenhagen Accord soft deadline forsubmitting descriptions of their greenhouse gas mitigation actions tothe UNFCC. They also called on developed nations to distribute their$10 billion in pledged adaptation aid to poor countries.

Business as usual?: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will issue interpretive guidance to help companies evaluate in disclosure documents the risks andopportunities they face from climate legislation, treaties, and otherdevelopments—including potential global change itself. The move comesthe same week that the CEOs of 83 companies sent a letter to Obamaasking him to push for major legislation.

The five commissioners voted along party lines. Their statementsprovide an interesting snapshot of competing thought on how ourvenerable institutions are responding to climate risk (Schapiro; Casey; Walter; Paredes; Aguilar).Chairman Mary Schapiro emphasized that the guidance is neithercommentary on the vast topic “climate change” nor a set of new rulesfor businesses to follow. Rather, the rules should help bringconsistency to reporting on an emerging public concern. Dissentingcommissioners (Casey and Paredes) questioned assigning SEC resources tothe fruits of social and environmental advocacy when investors andmarkets require so much attention elsewhere.

These competing views encapsulate Washington’s two minds on theissues: One view, going forward and in the long term, the U.S. can notassume without risk that the relative climate stability it has enjoyedfor 233 years will continue for, say, another 233 years; and a secondview, that existing regulations cover what’s needed for climatedisclosure, and the SEC should attend to immediate matters. (The actualguidance has not yet been published.)

Global uncertainty: The SEC refrained fromcomment on climate change itself, or came close. Commissioner KathleenCasey added this sentence to her critique of the interpretive guidance: “This guidance is premature at best, as the science surrounding global warming remains far from settled.” [Emphasis added.] Certainly, that’s an easy conclusion to come to, looking at headlines. A new poll shows that Americans concern about climate change has dropped 14points, to 57 percent, since 2008. It also shows that people trusttheir local weather forecasters more than traditional reporting outlets(although weather forecasters disproportionately resist global warming). Casey isn’t alone. Some legislators vocalizeddiscomfort with Obama’s mention of climate science in his address.China’s top climate negotiator said he is unready to attribute observed warming to human activity.

IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri has come under fire for the body’smistaken prediction that the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, andfor potential business conflicts with his IPCC work. Thehighest-profile all for his resignation came from the Germannewsmagazine Spiegel, where Richard Tol, Roger Pielke Jr, and Hans von Storch write, “Astoundingly, it appears that Pachauri has not broken any rules forthe simple reason that there is no code of conduct governing conflictsof interest for IPCC participants and leaders.” Pachauri has defendedhimself and vowed to stay put. The IPCC has responded aggressively to [pdf] a Sunday Times (U.K.) article about climate change and extreme weather events.

Don’t forget to check your work: Lastweek, a reader wrote in for more information about which 2007 IPCCpredictions have proven to be too modest. One of the sources Isuggested as reference was the UNEP’s Climate Change Science Compendium 2009, a review of the professional literature for policymakers inadvance of the Copenhagen meeting. The next day, thinking about therecently exposed IPCC error, I started checking through the footnotes.In the opening few pages of my hard copy, there’s a reproduction of thefamous “hockey stick”graph, showing proxy evidence for temperature and CO2 over the last1,000 years or so. I saw the reference, to “Hanno 2009,” and looked itup in the bibliography, but it wasn’t there. Another boneheadedfact-checking mistake, I thought. It’s actually worse than that. “Hanno2009” isn’t a peer-reviewed journal article at all but a Wikipediaentry (!). Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit.org had found it lastSeptember and written about it here.

The Himalayan 2035 error returned to the conversation the phrase “gray literature”—science writing that has not been peer-reviewed andpublished in professional journals. But I was surprised and dismayed tosee the UNEP rely on a source that wouldn’t pass muster in a descenthigh school composition class—and then not share the source.

The UNEP in October deleted the “Hanno 2009” graph and replaced it with a graph from this peer-reviewed paper, and a note that says, in part, “UNEP welcomesfurther constructive comments so that the report evolves as a livingdocument containing the latest peer-reviewed science.” Would Irecommend the report again? Probably, keeping in mind that everythingsaid on the topic is one or another kind of “living document.” Ifsomething else smells fishy, follow the notes. The ultimate value inthese review reports isn’t the actual assembled narrative but in thebibliography of primary research papers. You just have to have time andpatience to fall down the rabbit hole, which few people have. Andthere’s always plenty of other interesting material around to consider. Here’s the Wikipedia page with a history of Hanno 2009, clearly written by someone angry about the matter.

So, is the science unsettled? There are a lot of things we’d like to know better (Nature,sub. req.). But when it comes down to atmospheric physics, it sureseems like a lot of smart people have been working hard and coming upwith the same answers for quite some time now. What to do about it iscurrently up to the Senate, in part. If you have any thoughts feel freeto contribute to the comments section or email since Climate Post is a living document.

About the Future …: There’s a tendencyamong probably all the interest-group silos in Washington, whicheverone you choose, to think that policymakers, by not doing specificallywhat it is advocates want, are ruining the future. There’s also atendency to lose track of other policy issues given the focus on one’sown. With that in mind, consider David Broder’s Washington Post op-ed this morning about the U.S.‘s fiscal health, upon which so many of these silo’ed policy discussions depend on for resolution.

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State of the Union: Inefficient

Flickr via Pink Sherbet PhotographyThe other day I came home to find a colorful flyer on myfront door proclaiming, “Your meter just got smarter.”

While I was out and about in Berkeley, a worker from myutility, PG&E, slipped in the side gate and gave my old gas and electricmeter a digital upgrade. So-called smart meters allow the two-way transmissionof electricity data and will eventually let me monitor and alter my energyconsumption in near real-time. I’ll be able to fire up an app on my iPhone andsee, for instance, a spike in watts because my son has left the lights on inhis room and a laptop plugged in.

Now I only learn of my electricity use when I get my monthlyutility bill, long after all that carbon has escaped into the atmosphere. Thesituation is even worse when it comes to water consumption; my bill and detailsof my water use arrive every other month.

“When you tell people what total bucket of water they usedin the past 60 days, the barn door is open and the animals are long gone,” saysRichard Harris, water conservation manager for the East Bay Municipal UtilityDistrict, my local water agency.

EBMUD is currently testing smart water meters in 30households and plans to expand the pilot program to 4,000 homes and businesses laterthis year.

“It’ll give us better knowledge of where our water isgoing,” says Harris. “We also thought if we’re going to ask people to use watermore efficiently, especially when we’re coming out of a drought and haveimposed water restrictions, customers need to have an idea of what theircurrent use is.”

EBMUD’s smart meters take readings every hour andparticipants in the pilot program will be able to go online to check theirconsumption and set up an email alert if their water use rises above a certainlevel. The agency also plans to offer a social networking feature to allowpeople to compare their water consumption with other households in the area.Nothing like a little peer pressure to get you to turn off the tap.

Given that many states expect to face water shortages in thecoming years, one would think we’d be seeing a roll out of smartwater meters akin to the national effort being made to smarten up the powergrid.

The payoff could be enormous. Water agencies and consumerswould be able to detect leaking pipes and toilets in real-time and fix theproblem before the water literally goes down the drain.

Imagine a video screen in your shower that displays how manygallons that long hot shower is consuming. Smart water meters would also openthe door to financial incentives to get people to use less water and penalizewater hogs. (That said, politicallypowerful agribusiness remains by far the biggest water user.)

“You don’t need to send someone out to read the meter orroll a truck to connect or disconnect a meter,” says Guerry Waters, vicepresident for industry strategy at Oracle Utilities, a division of the SiliconValley software giant. “Smart water meters can help you manage assets and detectleaks. There’s a staggering amount of water lost to leaks.”

Yet, according to arecent report by Oracle, while 68 percent of 300 American and Canadian water managerssurveyed said they believe that smart water meters are crucial, 64 percent ofthem have no plans to install them.

Why? Money.

Nearly all water providers are public agencies, which meansthey’re strapped for cash and already facing a long list of capital improvementprojects. The electric utility industry, on the other hand, is largely privateand can either make the capital investments necessary for, say, a smart meterroll out, or can obtain regulators’ approval to raise rates to cover the costs.

In fact, 75 percent of the water managers surveyed said thecapital costs of smart water meters was their main roadblock to rolling outsuch a program.

That presents a conundrum to companies like Oracle, whichalready sells software and services to water districts, hoping to tap apotentially vast smart water meter market.

IBM, meanwhile, has developed sensornetworks and software it hopes to market to water districts to give themreal-time data on water quality and to help manage their pipelines andinfrastructure.

“Water districts don’t have the funding and have to find away to pay for these systems,” Drew Clark, director of strategy for IBM’sVenture Capital Group, told me last year. “There’s this whole issue of how dowe put this intelligence in water systems in a way that’s affordable for theratepayers.”

One solution would be to devote some stimulus money or otherfederal largesse to underwrite a rollout of smart meters.

But Tom Blaisdel, a venturecapitalist with DCM in Silicon Valley, thinks markets are the answer. “Theproblem in water is usually not a lack of technology but a lack of economicdrivers to get people to adopt the technology,” he says. “Until you have marketpricing you won’t have innovation and investment.”

Putting aside agricultural use—which in California is apolitical minefield—residential water pricing tends to be driven by droughtand conservation mandates. As California’s drought dragged on, EBMUD and other wateragencies imposed a tiered pricing structure that bumped up rates for waterhogs.

For Harris, the future of water conservation lies more inproviding data to customers rather than such things as rebates forwater-efficient toilets.

“It’s all about giving customers a smart water toolbox,” he says.

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Today is the National Day of Action on Coal Ash,an effort by environmental advocates and concerned citizens to urge theEnvironmental Protection Agency to release its promised rule regulatingdisposal of the toxic byproduct of burning coal for electricity—andto classify the stuff as hazardous waste.

The effort comes the day after revelations from the watchdog group Public Employees for EnvironmentalResponsibility that EPA has for years allowed coal ash industryrepresentatives to edit official government reports, brochures, and factsheets about coal ash to remove references to potential dangers and toemphasize alleged benefits.

“For most of the past decade, itappears that every EPA publication on the subject was ghostwritten bythe American Coal Ash Association,” says PEER Executive Director JeffRuch, who examined thousands of communications between the industry andEPA. “In this partnership it is clear that industry is EPA’s seniorpartner.”

During the Bush administration, EPA entered into aformal partnership with the coal industry—especially the ACAA—topromote the use of coal ash for industrial, agricultural, and consumer products. The deal helped develop a multi-billion industrythat is now fighting efforts to regulate the coal combustion byproducts—which contain dangerous levels of heavy metals and other toxins—as hazardous waste.

The documents obtained by PEER under theFreedom of Information Act show how the industry was able to make anumber of changes. They included removing cautionary language from anEPA brochure about applying coal ash on agricultural lands andreplacing it with what the industry called “exclamation point !language” “re-affirming the environmental benefits.”

Theindustry also got EPA to alter official fact sheets and Power Pointpresentations to delete references to certain potential “high risk”uses of coal combustion waste, and it lobbied to insert language aboutthe need for “industry and EPA [to] work together” to weaken or block“state regulations [that] are hindering” expanded use of the waste.

Inaddition, EPA staff gave the industry advance notice about conferencecalls and other agency deliberations, including discussions aboutgrowing concerns over the leaching of arsenic from the coal ash. PEERnotes that the working relationship between the EPA and the industry isso close that an industry insider joked to EPA staff in an October 2008e-mail about a news article about mercury contamination from coal ash,writing.

We are in bed with the EPA again, it looks, at least according to this article. The advocacy groups are well organized and have the ready ear of the press.

In an effort to counter the industry’s lobbying efforts against more stringent regulation of coal ash, environmental advocacygroups have organized today’s action. They’re calling on concernedcitizens to contact President Obama and tell him the EPA should treatcoal ash as hazardous waste, and to ensure that residents ofcommunities impacted by coal ash disposal get to have a say in how thematerial should be handled.

For more information about the National Day of Action on Coal Ash, click here.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Activists gather in Copenhagen on the final night of last month’s climate talks.Photo courtesy 350.orgOn the final night of the Copenhagen climate talks, several hundred activists assembled across town for a torchlight vigil, protesting against world leaders for settling on an insufficient climate accord and protesting against the U.N. for locking them out in the cold. None of them expected the work toward an effective global climate plan to end in Copenhagen, but that night it became brutally clear how much farther there was still to go.

In the month since then, I’ve been trying to find out how the outcome at Copenhagen changed the U.S. climate movement.  Whether advocates thought it was a complete failure or just a disappointingly small step, surely it marked a turning point. So what are the big goals now?  How will strategy be different from here on out? What are the next moves? I put these questions to leaders of both established green groups and youthful grassroots organizations. Alas, they largely seem stuck in time at the vigil—resolute, passionate, but removed from the seats of power and not at all sure what to do next. Six leaders I reached all offered thoughts on what must happen next, but they were the same sorts of plans they were offering last fall. It’s not yet clear what the movement has learned from Copenhagen.

From big environmental groups, the consistent message was “bring the fight back to Congress,” which is where the main focus was for all of 2009. Getting Congress to establish a cap on carbon emissions and a impose a price for emitting them would unleash a wave of action from other major countries and a flood of clean-energy innovation from businesses, said David Doniger, climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“If that happens, we get on a virtuous cycle where actions and promises by one country lead to and make possible actions and promises by another country,” he said. That hope was echoed by Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s incoming executive director, and Steve Cochran, Environmental Defense Fund’s national climate campaign director.

Any bill that could pass through Congress would very likely be weakened by concessions to the coal industry and other powerful interests, as was the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House last summer. But getting started, even with an imperfect plan, is the important thing, the three said.

“We’ve got to push the legislative process to produce as much as it possibly can, knowing that it’s not going to be as much as we need,” Cochran said.

“No serious environmental problem, no serious social problem was ever fully solved in one go,” said Doniger. “In order to be effective you have to stick with it. You have to be willing to live with disappointment, and come back at it, rather than getting discouraged.”

The grassroots groups are still focused on galvanizing the public, which they see as a prerequisite to meaningful action in Congress. 

Jessy Tolkan, who worked as executive director of the Energy Action Coalition until she assumed a new post this month as political director at Green for All, said the movement should focus on diversifying its ranks—a perennial goal of environmentalists—but also on making sure leaders notice that diversity.

“We absolutely have to ensure that every member of the United States Senate, whether they’re Republican or Democrat, is hearing from people across the spectrum—from veterans, business owners, and young people, from low-income folks, middle-income folks, and wealthy folks—that this is a top-tier priority,” she said.

350.org cofounder Bill McKibben made a similar point: the focus on Congress is premature. “One of the reasons why it’s so hard in Congress is because they don’t feel any particular pressure,” he said. “There are lots and lots and lots of groups lobbying Congress. But Congress members are good at telling whether there’s anything behind that lobbying or not. I think we have to figure out how to put some pressure behind that lobbying. And the easiest way to do that is movement building.”

“Movement building” has always been 350.org’s goal—and something it’s been remarkably successful at in its two-year history. It organized last October’s International Day of Climate Action, which CNN called “the most widespread day of action in the planet’s history” (a line McKibben is fond of repeating).

But even that unprecedented surge of on-the-ground activism didn’t seem to penetrate many world leaders’ minds.  In a post-Copenhagen reflection in Mother Jones, McKibben wrote, “The failure might be defined this way: The world came together and looked climate change fairly straight in the eye, and then its most powerful nations blinked.”

So what’s the new plan?

“I don’t know,” he said. “We threw up a Hail Mary pass and nobody caught it.”

 “I don’t know” was probably the most candid response I heard, and perhaps the most wise.  Taking time to reflect may be more productive than falling back into the same old habits or rushing ahead without a plan. Next month, 350.org’s core team will gather in Vermont for a strategic retreat. The grassroots group Avaaz is doing the same, according to Executive Director Ricken Patel. Avoiding burnout after the intensity of Copenhagen may be the first imperative.

Meanwhile, outsider green thinkers continue to push their own ideas for refocusing and invigorating the climate movement. 

The Breakthrough Institute’s Michael Shellenberger, who coauthored the controversial essay “The Death of Environmentalism” in 2004, argues that activists should stop focusing on a carbon cap and instead push for more R&D funding for cleaner energy technologies, which the public is much more inclined to support. 

The main barriers to a low-carbon future, he contends, are “a set of very specific technological problems that we just have to solve”: more efficient solar panels, better batteries, non-destructive biofuels, and smaller, cheaper nuclear power plants.

“We’ve spent 20 years under the fantasy that we can increase the price of coal and other fossil fuels enough to make clean energy cost-competitive,” he said. “We’ve wasted 20 years when we could have been taking measures to solve the technological problems we’ve known about for a long time.”

Alex Steffen, editor of Worldchanging and an evangelist for what he calls bright green urbanism, offers a different diagnosis. “The COP [Conference of the Parties, or U.N. treaty] process is at best stalled for a few years,” he said. “Given what’s just happened with the U.S. Senate, and the Supreme Court basically allowing open bribery, I see zero chance of a meaningful climate bill coming from the Senate. I think there will be something, but it will be at a level of watered-down-ness that it just won’t matter.”

While he’s pessimistic about the national and international efforts, Steffen sees great hope and potential on the local level. He points to a growing number of people who are clued-in on sustainability but who don’t consider themselves activists or environmentalists—people working and volunteering in architecture, design, planning, community development, housing, building, local energy, local food, and alternative transportation.

Such citizens are “reconverging on the city as the appropriate battleground for action,” Steffen said. “I think we’re going to see cities emerge as the fulcrum point for change. If we can change cities profoundly, we may have a shot at tackling climate change.”

He continued, “Neither of the two main paths that the environmental movement has been going down”—pushing for national and international carbon caps—“are going to lead to results that we need. I think that ought to have every person who cares about climate action completely rethinking their entire strategy. But I don’t hear a lot of evidence that the professional end of the movement is in fact rethinking its entire strategy.”

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