Last week I attended a conference in San Francisco and over the weekend visited Monterey and went to the aquarium. It is well worth a visit. There were many interesting things to see but what really caught my imagination were the sea dragons and the jellies (watch the videos), they were so delicate and beautiful.

What impressed me, other than the marine exhibits themselves, was that the museum takes its educational mission seriously, devoting quite a bit of attention to educating its visitors about what sea food is harvested in a manner that is sustainable and what we should look out for. Their website offers practical guides on what to buy.

The museum is also outspoken about its concerns about the negative impact of climate change. There was no wishy-washy equivocation. It may be that because the museum is run by a private foundation, it is relatively immune to the pressures that the global warming and evolution deniers have exerted on government institutions like the Smithsonian museums.

Some time ago, in one of my posts in my series on climate change, I pondered on why there seemed to be such a vehement opposition to the idea that human actions might be causing an irreversible and disastrous change to our planet. After all, this seems like largely a scientific question that, unlike (say) evolution, has no religious or partisan political implications.

But somewhere along the way, the word seems to have spread amongst right-wing political and religious types that the warnings about possible irreversible global warming represent some kind of deep plot being advanced by leftists and scientists and atheists working together, and this has resulted in a union of right-wing think tanks and politicians and Christians to oppose the idea. How did that happen?

Evidence for the organized nature of the opposition to the ideas of global warming coming from a particular ideological perspective is not hard to find. A new study looks at how the so-called ”Conservative Think Tanks’, (CTTs) play an important element in the propaganda machine by underwriting those who are skeptical of the dangers of climate change.

Our analyses of the sceptical literature and CTTs indicate an unambiguous linkage between the two. Over 92 per cent of environmentally sceptical books are linked to conservative think tanks, and 90 per cent of conservative think tanks interested in environmental issues espouse scepticism. Environmental scepticism began in the US, is strongest in the US, and exploded after the end of the Cold War and the emergence of global environmental concern stimulated by the 1992 Earth Summit. Environmental scepticism is an elite-driven reaction to global environmentalism, organised by core actors within the conservative movement. Promoting scepticism is a key tactic of the anti-environmental counter-movement coordinated by CTTs, designed specifically to undermine the environmental movement’s efforts to legitimise its claims via science. Thus, the notion that environmental sceptics are unbiased analysts exposing the myths and scare tactics employed by those they label as practitioners of ‘junk science’ lacks credibility. Similarly, the self-portrayal of sceptics as marginalised ‘Davids’ battling the powerful ‘Goliath’ of environmentalists and environmental scientists is a charade, as sceptics are supported by politically powerful CTTs funded by wealthy foundations and corporations.

The movement to undermine the environmental movement is largely underwritten by corporations and their supporters who want to prevent having to comply with environmental regulations that might limit their profits. Some of the CTTs are funded by companies (like ExxonMobil) that have a stake in preventing any regulations that limit their profits, and even have their CEOs on the boards.

But even that still does not answer the question of how this opposition became so widespread and vehement. This is why I found this blog entry very interesting. It is by someone who has pondered this same question and, tracing this phenomenon back in time, finds that there is a family of conspiracy theories that have caused this situation. He has created an entire genealogical tree of the theories.

He said it started during the Cold War in 1962 with the labeling of Rachel Carson as a Communist sympathizer. She is often considered the founder of the modern American environmental movement with her book Silent Spring, warning of the dangers of DDT. That allegation became expanded to suggest that some environmentalists may even be Soviet agents seeking to undermine capitalism, and that they were suppressing the work of enviroskeptics.

Meanwhile, on a different front, those who were unhappy with the scientific opposition to Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense shield plan started accusing scientists of being Soviet stooges.

With the end of the Soviet Union, the story has shifted and the target of opposition has changed. Instead of the environmental movement being merely a tool to advance communism by advocating measures that will increase the costs of business and raise taxes, the environmental movement has now replaced communism as the main foe of capitalism.

Of course, since the religious right has always viewed ‘godless communism’ with alarm, they tend to sign on to anything that seems to oppose or restrict the workings of capitalism in any way, even if means allowing unregulated industries unbridled freedom to pollute and destroy the environment.

Thus emerged the coalition of big industry, conservative think tanks, the religious right, and their political allies, all working to discredit any science that seems to suggest that we are doing irreparable harm to our environment.

Although the article is not a scholarly one and not an authoritative source, it is interesting and thought-provoking.

POST SCRIPTS: Amazing back flips

Agriculture has only been around for about 10,000 years and the reasons for its success are not clear since the archeological evidence suggests that early farmers were, nutritionally speaking, not as well off as their contemporary hunter-gatherers. It may have been that since grains can be stored over years of bounty and used in lean years, farmers were better able to withstand adverse times and thus better able to sustain themselves over longer times than their rivals in lifestyles.
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In his February 2004 Harper’s essay The oil we eat, Richard Manning lays out the basic energy equation that underlies food.

All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity.” There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.
. . .
Part of that total—almost a third of it—is the potential plant mass lost when forests are cleared for farming or when tropical rain forests are cut for grazing or when plows destroy the deep mat of prairie roots that held the whole business together, triggering erosion. The Dust Bowl was no accident of nature. A functioning grassland prairie produces more biomass each year than does even the most technologically advanced wheat field. The problem is, it’s mostly a form of grass and grass roots that humans can’t eat. So we replace the prairie with our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind that we feed most of our grain to livestock, and that livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. And never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today.

Humans cannot eat most of the naturally produced biomass each year since it is in the form of grasses and trees, so we destroy that biomass by clearing those fields and planting crops that we can eat more readily or, as is more common, to use as raw materials to produce food in other forms. But each of these things carries with it energy costs. As Manning points out:

America’s biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes. Likewise, you can’t eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can’t eat hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don’t. These four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food; it’s about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food. (emphasis in original)

It turns out that about eighty percent of the grain the United States produces goes to feed livestock and that it “takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way” and “sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork.” Livestock produced this way creates high-quality protein no doubt, but at a cost. In addition, the US produces twice as much per capita protein as the average adult needs each day. This results in over-consumption which leads to fat, resulting in an epidemic of obesity, which now is second only to tobacco in being the cause of health-related problems and fatalities.

The higher you go up the food chain, the more energy that is wasted along the way. All of us know that instinctively but I had not fully appreciated the massive scale of wastage as you ascend each rung of that chain.

Eating a carrot gives the diner all that carrot’s energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other inedibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten. As a rough rule of thumb, that factor of ten applies to each level up the food chain, which is why some fish, such as tuna, can be a horror in all of this. Tuna is a secondary predator, meaning it not only doesn’t eat plants but eats other fish that themselves eat other fish, adding a zero to the multiplier each notch up, easily a hundred times, more like a thousand times less efficient than eating a plant.

As Manning sums up: “Prairie’s productivity is lost for grain, grain’s productivity is lost in livestock, livestock’s protein is lost to human fat—all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.”

Even avoiding meat does not quite solve the problem since there are hidden energy costs in non-meat foods as well.

The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

It seems to me that if we are going to learn how to become better custodians of the earth’s resources, we need to have a deeper understanding of how those resources are used. It seems like it would be advisable to emphasize the energy aspects of food in our educational system to create a greater awareness of where all the energy goes to and comes from. Right now, I think that students learn about photosynthesis as a purely biological process. Including the energy cycle along with it seems like a good idea, both educationally and in terms of creating increasing awareness of our relationship to nature and the Earth’s resources.

POST SCRIPT: Letting Go of God

Julia Sweeney has a CD of her monologue about her drift away from Catholicism to atheism. She was interviewed by late night talk show host Craig Ferguson.

One of the things that appall me is the waste of food. Whenever I have to throw away food that has been uneaten, I take that as a personal defeat. As a result, the refrigerator in our home is relatively bare since it tends to have things that are likely to be used soon. Even then, I periodically go through the refrigerator and use up everything that is there and only throw stuff away if it is beyond salvaging.

I have the impression that in our highly litigious society, manufacturers have become highly conservative in labeling packages, fearful that they will be sued if someone gets ill. And as a result, the “sell by” dates are likely quite early and a lot of perfectly good food is thrown away unnecessarily because of people adhering strictly to them. It would be interesting to see what kinds of statistics are used to arrive at the “sell by” dates.
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Environmentalists use the phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle” to indicate the different ways that we can lower our consumption of resources in order to save the world. It is true that recycling has become more popular now, which is a good thing.

But we must remember that recycle is merely the third item on the descending list of actions to save the world’s resources. The most important one is ‘reduce’ and I think we not paying anywhere near enough attention to that. If we really want to save the world, we have to focus our attention on the first item in the list: reduce.
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In the previous post, when I said that my generation had been poor custodians of the world, I used the word ‘custodians’ deliberately.

I think there is a big difference between those who see their relationship to things in terms of ownership and those who see it in terms of custodianship.

The ownership mentality sees things this way: “If I earn money, that money belongs to me and I am free to do what I want with it. Similarly, anything that I buy with the money is mine to do with whatever I like.” In this view, if I am a millionaire, I should be able to buy five huge homes around the world, each of which uses vast amounts of resources to build and maintain but are empty for most of the time, fly around in my private planes, drive around in huge cars that I replace every year, buy lots of clothes that I discard soon after, and so forth. The feeling is that I have a right to do this because I ‘own’ these things and bought them with my own money.
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Some time ago I was having breakfast with a few friends and during the casual conversation I said that I felt that our children and grandchildren would judge our generation harshly for what we have done to the world.

One of my companions was surprised and after a moment’s thought told me why she disagreed. She pointed out that our generation (the so-called ‘baby boomers’ although I hate cute labels like these) had brought about advances in civil rights, greater equality for women, more tolerance for gay and lesbian lifestyles, and made tremendous medical advances that had resulted in finding cures for some diseases and even the elimination of some.

I agreed with her on all these points. But my concern was more about how we have treated the Earth’s resources, its environment, and its climate. I have written about global warming before and will write in the future about the consequences of our actions on the environment, but what I told her was that I feel that the people of my generation have not been good custodians of the resources of the planet. We have been so wasteful and profligate with the planet’s resources that we are risk leaving future generations resource poor.

My friend challenged me on this too. She pointed out that our generation has become more conscious about recycling in a way that our parents never were.

This is also true but I think that the advances that we have made in recycling have been more than dwarfed by our massive increase in the consumption of resources. There is no doubt that the current generation of people in the first world has the highest standard of living ever. All the scientific and technological advances that we have been witness to in our own lifetimes have resulted in us being able to possess lots of material goods.

But what this has spawned is even greater levels of consumption. Some increase in consumption is inevitable and even desirable because it means that more people are able to live better lives. No one would doubt the merits of the increased availability of potable water, more food and less hunger, more widespread availability of indoor plumbing and electricity, homes that are better able to withstand the elements, and so. All these things enable those people who are currently living in poverty and squalor and susceptible to disease to live better and healthier lives. Increases in consumption to achieve these ends are clearly desirable.

But what bothers me is the increase in consumption just for the sake of it, just because we can. I am referring now to the kind of lifestyle that is driving people to build huge mansions and own multiple homes on vast areas of cleared land that are vacant most of the time. I am referring to a culture that sees consumption for its own sake as something desirable, where luxury is flaunted, where people feel the need to buy new stuff before the old stuff is completely used up, and where waste is endemic.

This is a disease that afflicts the affluent and also those members of the middle class that aspire to the affluent lifestyle. The media celebrates celebrities and corporate tycoons living lavish lifestyles. This infects the middle classes who seek to emulate the very rich by also living an extravagant lifestyle. The global reach of the media creates similar desires in the affluent classes of the second and third worlds, who also live high consumption lifestyles, which creates similar pressures on their middle classes, and so on.

A lot of this consumption is not based on any physical needs but instead seems to result from a competition to flaunt wealth and consumption, for show, to let others know how ‘successful’ we are. This attitude is like a virus that has spread all over the world.

As a result of all this wasteful and image-driven consumption, I worry that we are rapidly using up the world’s resources without even the benefit of a better quality of life. I worry that at the rate we going, we are going to leave future generations very resource poor.

POST SCRIPT: Analysis of ISG group report

Senator Russ Feingold gives a good summary of the few strengths and the many weaknesses of the report put out by the Iraq Study Group.

And editorial cartoonist Oliphant gives his perspective on the responses to the report.