2011 in Review

This has not been a good year. Climate change is accelerating around the globe, and action to slow the rate of change is relatively miniscule in the United States. What can be more important that addressing rising global temperatures and catastrophic change?
Why politics, of course. President Obama MUST be a one-term president, in the Republican Party's view, and all else is secondary to that objective.
For others, addressing the faltering U.S. and global economy is an issue of more importance than fighting climate change. Any attempt to show that the two efforts are compatible is thwarted by politics and the Republican Party. We are appear to be caught in an endless loop that is only dragging us down.
I personally am discouraged to the point of not wanting to write about the issue any longer. I just do what I can as a caring citizen of the Earth. I drive as little as possible, and at an optimum speed for fuel efficiency when I do. I try to live sustainably, re-using, recycling, and up-cycling as often as I can. It's a meditative sort of life that I use to attempt to come to peace with the direction the human race is heading.
Peace.

Mixed Messages

(Cross-posted at 1Sky)
Election day 2010 is over, but the fight to address climate change is not--so say many of the bloggers posting since the election Tuesday. We survived the U.S. Senate's inability to pass climate change legislation before the election recess. We survived attacks against the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gases (so far). And we can and will survive the loss of the Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Yesterday's press release (here) noted:

Corporations and their allies in Congress may play politics with our climate, but our climate isn’t playing politics.

The National Audubon Society had a similarly pithy statement in their press release:

Americans may have voted for change in Congress, but no one voted to increase pollution.

One of the bright spots in Tuesday's election was the defeat of Prop 23 in California. By a large margin, voters successfully preserved California's landmark legislation which regulates greenhouse gases and promotes clean energy. It was, as Van Jones said, a broad and diverse coalition that was able to overcome massive money from out-of-state Big Oil interests. His inspiring post from the weekend before the election is a must read.:

What the polls do not show and what few news outlets are covering, is the striking diversity of voices that are demanding clean energy, and rejecting the false notion that protecting the planet and our public health will hurt the economy.

...These groups represent just the tip of iceberg in a movement that includes environmentalists, politicians from both parties, students, public health organizations, big and small businesses, labor groups, consumer groups, senior citizens, and public safety organizations.

...But what we see happening in California gives the green movement a reason for continued optimism. This time we are on the defensive, protecting our climate laws already on the books. The fight has unmasked the opponents of clean energy, as well as vetted their arguments — the same tired talking points they have been using for the last four decades.

The bad news is that the majority in U.S. House of Representatives has been lost by the Democratic party, with many seats lost to Republican climate change denialists. For a round-up of how bad a change in House leadership will be, look here. Whorunsgov.com highlights the worst of the new members here. Climate Science Watch echoes concerns about the changing make-up of House majority leadership next year:

Overall, the influx of denialists is a major loss for the country, as the new House leadership and committee chairmen gear up to make a mockery of the preeminent problem facing our society, and the Senate drifts ever further from taking long-overdue action on climate and energy reform.

A post from the Director of the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) Action Fund, however, found a silver lining in highlighting Senate races won by climate champions. Likewise, a late-breaking re-election win for Senator Michael Bennett in Colorado may actually be attributable to the Republican opponent's denial of global warming science. Grist has more on the influence of support of climate legislation on incumbent re-election. Contrary to a popular media theme, votes for climate legislation were not connected with tipping an election against the inncumbents:

In fact, Democrats who voted against clean energy were more than three times as likely to lose their seats than those who voted for it.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress demonstrated in detail that the 'climate vote' did not lead to defeat of House members.

It’s worth noting that even in the midst of a Republican tsunami, 80% of the Democrats who supported a carbon cap kept their seats. Perhaps more noteworthy is how many Democrats who opposed a carbon lost their seats.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and NRDC remind us that, even though climate denialists were elected or re-elected, Congressional elections really weren't about climate change at all. And UCS notes that scientists are actually widely respected and listened to by a majority of Americans. So when the inevitable hearings are held next year in a denialist-led congressional committees, activists are right to call on them to speak truth to power in the strongest possible language.

Finally, 1Sky's Liz Butler posted on Huffington Post on Wednesday. Her 'action' item is critical right now, and I'll repost it:

The battle for what will become the "conventional wisdom" in the press about yesterday's election is on-- and we can't allow Big Oil and Dirty Coal to spin this election as a legitimate victory for them. That's why we're asking all our supporters to write their local newspapers and tell them how big polluters bought this election -- and that it can't happen again.

Hear, hear!

The bees and the birds.

"Let me tell ya 'bout the..."
bees and the birds?

Bees have been in the news of late, and I am not referring to either Colony Collapse Disorder or the threat to agricultural production as pollinators decline.

The news I'm referring to relates to climate change, and how bees and the plants they pollinate may get out of synch as climate change affects dates when they emerge each spring. Biologists have theorized that food webs might be disrupted by climate change, but it is very difficult to detect. (I will be writing soon about recent findings regarding migratory birds and their food sources.) In the special case of bees and the plants they pollinate, there are a lot of interacting variables besides climate change affecting pollination:

There is growing recognition that plant–pollinator interactions can be drastically influenced by anthropogenic changes to ecosystems. Climate change, habitat fragmentation, agricultural intensification, urbanization, pollution, pesticides
and species’ invasions all have the potential to affect plant–pollinator interactions directly and indirectly.

Evidence for the consequences of climate change is difficult to tease out in complex ecological systems, but it is through long-term studies in pristine environments like Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory that we may be starting to see effects. A recent study conducted there, high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, got quite a bit of attention in the U.S., Canada, and the UK last week.

James Thompson, in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Toronto, has been studying glacier lilies and bumble bees at RMBL for 17 years. This pristine study site is free of the many confounding factors that affect pollination, allowing him to examine changes in bee activity and pollination success for glacier lilies over two decades.

Over that time, he found that both bee numbers and pollination of wild lily flowers have been declining. The change appears to be due, at least in part, to earlier flowering, before bumble bees have emerged from hibernation. And earlier flowering may be due to climate change:

The onset of blooming is determined by snowmelt, with the earliest years starting a month before the latest years owing to variation in winter snowpack accumulation. Fruit set is diminished or prevented entirely by killing frosts in some years.... When frosts do not limit fruit set, pollination limitation is frequent, especially in the earlier cohorts. .... This lily appears to be poorly synchronized with its pollinators. Across the years of the study, pollination limitation appears to be increasing, perhaps because the synchronization is getting worse.

Thompson is cautious in his summary of the study:

[He] admitted the evidence from the study was still weak but said the results were a warning that the phenomenon ‘might be widespread and needs more attention’.

‘It certainly suggests that people who have warned about the possible climate-change consequence of dislocated timing between interacting species have made a reasonable argument,’ he added.

While this is an alarming story, don't worry about glacier lilies. They are common and widely distributed in montane habitats in the western U.S. The bees (and the birds; that story's next) may not be in perfect synch with their flowers (or their insect food, in the case of birds) anymore, but it's not too late to prevent things from getting to the point of losing our favorite species. We still have time before the natural community diversity that exists in the Rocky Mountains is lost.

But we need to start reducing GHG emissions now. Personally, in our communities, and through our local, state, and national governments, we need to push to reduce our carbon footprints. Now is the time.

President Obama Issues a Call for Action

Tuesday night, President Obama gave a prime-time speech to our nation from the Oval Office, an 18-minute outline of the status of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, ‘the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced,‘ and a look forward.

The President summarized the facts of the oil spill and actions taken by BP and the administration to date to contain the damage. The ‘battle plan’ he laid out included commitments by the government and by BP to clean up the spill. But the critical parts of his speech, in my opinion, were the challenges to restore the Gulf region and to move beyond oil.

The restoration of the Gulf coast Mr. Obama talked about last night is not just the clean-up plan for the area, but also a habitat restoration plan on a large scale. This would address not only effects of the oil spill, but also the effects of decades of wetland and barrier island degradation that have resulted in loss of function of these areas as ecological buffers. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar alluded to this plan recently when he talked about restoring the area to ‘better than it was before’, and Admiral Thad Allen affirmed this in comments to the press. A restoration effort on this scale has been badly needed for a long time, as we saw during the hurricane season several years ago.

I make that commitment tonight. Earlier, I asked Ray Mabus, the Secretary of the Navy, who is also a former governor of Mississippi and a son of the Gulf Coast, to develop a long-term Gulf Coast Restoration Plan as soon as possible. The plan will be designed by states, local communities, tribes, fishermen, businesses, conservationists and other Gulf residents.

That Obama is going to take this disaster and make it into an opportunity to restore ecosystem function in the Gulf is a huge step forward, and one we should get behind him to support in Congress.

The President also pointed out that the reason BP was drilling a deep ocean well is that all the ‘easy’ oil is gone, leaving us to attempt to extract it from places we shouldn’t have to.

So one of the lessons we’ve learned from this spill is that we need better regulations, better safety standards, and better enforcement when it comes to offshore drilling. But a larger lesson is that no matter how much we improve our regulation of the industry, drilling for oil these days entails greater risk. After all, oil is a finite resource. We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves. And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean -- because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.

Obama called out for a shift from oil to alternative energy for our nation. That’s right; he referred to the end of our dependence on fossil fuels!

We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. …Each of us has a part to play in a new future that will benefit all of us. As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of jobs -– but only if we accelerate that transition. Only if we seize the moment. And only if we rally together and act as one nation –- workers and entrepreneurs; scientists and citizens; the public and private sectors.

Responses to the speech were mixed, but the most aggravating were the ones that wanted him to do more, or say more, or provide more detail. I do not know what they were expecting. Did they think Obama was going to issue an executive order moving us along a sustainable energy path? Were they expecting him to embrace whatever pet policy position they hold? What nonsense. They didn’t want to hear what he said and what I heard. The President has asked us to face this task together. We are going to do it. We are going to make the movement.

This was a speech to reassure us that the administration and BP are doing the best they can to contain the spill. It was a way to let us know that we, as a nation, are going to make lemonade out of lemons: by implementing a huge Gulf restoration project, and by moving away from our dependence on fossil fuels.

The House of Representatives passed the ACES bill last summer, and the Senate is on the cusp of moving forward on a climate and energy bill of their own. The President has said it’s time to move forward together. And I, for one, am with him. My job, our job is to join 1Sky, Audubon, or any of a number of advocacy groups to push our Senators to act. Write letters to the editor, make phone calls, and send emails. Are you with me? Are you with President Obama?

[This blog was posted in a slightly different form at DailyKos and 1Sky.]