It’s Healthy to be Skeptical, Just Not Cynical

Whenever I come across global warming/climate change deniers, I try to carefully listen or read what they have to say.

Some don’t really deny it’s happening.

They believe we’ll just overcome it somehow as we have major crises in the past without seeing that those were ultimately overcome by action, after being made worse by waiting.

I used warming/change in my opening because a new Yale University study shows that Americans feel a sense of urgency when the term global warming is used.

Which, in part, is why more than a decade ago savvy Republican researchers suggested the substitution of “climate change” to make it seem less threatening.

That warm and fuzzy approach to global warming turned out as predicted to not only divide Americans but cause 1-in-5 to be not at all worried (p. 16.)

As an Independent I may have been cynical about the motives of “professional confusers” behind today’s gridlock but now having read this memo I’m not even skeptical.

Ironically, the 2002 Republican research called for a flip-flop.

A decade earlier conservatives had teamed in a bipartisan effort under the first Republican President Bush to break a 13-year logjam by deploying market-based “cap and trade” to successfully curb another harmful emission.

In 2002 there wasn’t the overwhelming scientific consensus there is today that climate change/global warming is a real and present danger or that it is due to human actions above and beyond natural causes over the last 250 years, especially the last 60.

If you are a skeptic who happened to read this far, you may want to read the research by scientists at Berkley Earth who until recently were also skeptical.

It is summarized their new report entitled, Know The Facts: A Skeptic’s Guide to Climate Change.

Then again, studies of “motivated reasoning” find that in many people skepticism is really a cognitive cover used to deflect unwelcome information.

This is especially true when it is sincerely held that what ordinary people believe will not make a policy difference.

Showing irrationality is often rarely enough to “induce individuals to process information in a different way.”

There is a difference between being skeptical and being cynical.

Skeptics have reservations.  Cynics believe others are motivated by selfish concerns and don’t believe in altruism or even honesty.

If you’ve never been into reading and understanding various philosophical outlooks, a new book illustrates each one instead, entitled Philographics.

Deniers often fall into both categories though it seems more often the latter while global warming believers sometimes can get caught up in being cynical about deniers.

New science shows that cynics on both sides run a much higher risk of dementia, especially perhaps those cynical about scientific studies.  The study also shows that cynics won’t die any earlier, perhaps they just won’t remember.

That 2002 Republican research memo predicted more than a decade ago what a new Yale study confirms: use of the terms global warming and climate change are synonymous to Republicans and Conservatives (or as we Independents often joke, is that now redundant?)

But the term climate change “actually reduces engagement” among Independents, Democrats, moderates and liberals.  Fortunately, groups that will soon dominate elections such as minorities and young adults light up when global warming is used instead.

And that might be why global warming is still the most used by Americans personally, as well as in the news media, and in conversation according to the Yale study.

The Berkley Earth report meant for climate change/global warming skeptics includes a breakdown of what events are unrelated, e.g. tornados and earthquakes.

Hurricanes, droughts, forest fires and floods may change due to global warming/climate change but the amount hasn’t been established.

There is a link established to increased heat waves and coastal flooding.

New research also shows that global warming is not only reducing snow pack where water has historically been stored until released into rivers and reservoirs each spring, the means by which 1-in-6 people worldwide receive fresh drinking water.

But paradoxically, the resulting switchover to rainfall also means these water ways are less full in part because it is held in place by soil instead.

Sitting idle, we are likely to see much more rainfall but much less available for human use for drinking water.  This also mean less available for electrical power and agriculture.

Of course the use of climate science has been outlawed for the time being by the legislature in North Carolina because it was inconvenient for a few coastal land developers.

And some members of Congress are trying to do the same regarding military research which over the last 60 years has been the foundation of nearly all of the technological changes driving American innovation.

Fortunately, corporations are paying no heed and building the price of reversing global warming into strategic plans. Nor are many states.

Nine northeast states which banded together to cap emissions in 2009 have seen their economies grow faster than the other states while reducing greenhouse gas emissions nearly five times quicker.

A similar combine of five western states and two Canadian provinces fell apart after conservatives seized control in 2010.  But British Columbia in 2010 and California last year moved ahead.

Regressives such as those banning the use of studies on global warming and other research are easy to spot.

Even those who make it onto the governing boards of much smaller organizations where research is a core value are obvious by using every opportunity to demean it and to starve it of resources and focus.

All conservatives are not regressives, nor are all regressives conservatives. What they have in common is a disdain for research and resistance to progress.

In the words of the famous Brooklyn Dodgers then Yankees announcer Red Barber, “back, back, back, back (smile.)”

Regressives in the North Carolina General Assembly today are failing to head the warnings in that landmark 2002 research for Republicans, because that would, uh, be using scientific research.

It warns that while conservative attempts to negatively brand environmentalists had been successful by 2002, Americans as a whole remain overwhelmingly sensitive about the environment.

They just prefer instead labels such as pro-environment and conservationist.

The memo warns that “when we [Republicans] talk about ‘rolling back regulations’ involving the environment, we [Republicans] are sending a message Americans don’t support” and when it comes to regulations, Americans are “most comfortable with local oversight.”

The last part is lost on North Carolina regressives seeking every means possible to strip local governments of any oversight while demonizing science and regulations meant in the publics interest.

Not all narcissists in high office (found in greater proportion and much further up the spectrum than the general populace) are regressives, but uber narcissism among regressives may explain their claim “we don’t give a damn how many people this hurts.”

Oops, I hear someone banging on my door but keep the faith.  Whoever it is that thinks I’m part of a conspiracy probably won’t remember long.

The Circular Economy is No Place for Whiners

Regulations aren’t designed to set the best standards, only the minimum bar for those who seek benefit at the expense of the general public.

It is typically those who are part of the “whiner” economy who make a fuss about regulations.  Everyone else cleared that regulatory bar long ago and strives instead for best practices.

One of those best practices is the movement toward the “circular economy,” as described in an article this month by McKinsey alum Markus Zils.  Those who fuss about regulations typically take more of a linear approach.

The circular approach is just better business.  It seeks to preserve the “embedded labor, material and capital costs.”  This is true of organic as well as technical materials.

It isn’t just about recycling by breaking down and reusing the products but also involves refurbishment.

The short term benefit is better profit margins but the long term benefit is a “decoupling of the economic growth from material intake.”

Often called the “triple bottom line” or “full-cost accounting,” the improvements aren’t just in manufacturing.  You saw it at work this week when CVS decided that selling tobacco didn’t make sense for a company in the business of providing healthcare services.

At the same time, undeterred by gridlock among nation states, fifty-nine mega-cities around the globe that have banded together to address climate change issued their annual report.

Even McDonald’s is moving toward more sustainable, antibiotic-free beef for its burgers, hopefully by 2016, a movement led many years ago in that food genre by Chipolte.

This even gives hope that marketers for the largest enabler of roadside billboards may one day connect the dots about the harm they are doing by enabling the sacrifice of the equivalent of a good size national forest as well as blighting neighborhoods and property values.

The marketplace likes sustainability.  A CDP report two months ago to inform investors, noted that nearly 30 of America’s largest global corporations - including five major oil companies - aren’t waiting for the U.S. Congress either.

They are incorporating a price for carbon emissions into their long range plans.  The free market isn’t ideological and “whiner” economics, relegated to seeking favors from lawmakers, just isn’t good business.

If We Care So Much For Future Generations…

My favorite portion to read and re-read in the King James Bible has always been the four thousand years of the Old Testament including the frequent mention of some remarkable forests.

In fact, while I haven’t attended church for four decades now, I may be better read than most who do.  I just find it much easier to replenish my “awe” in the quiet of a forest, if even just an urban forest.

But those Old Testament trees I have always found intriguing had already been deforested for much of the span that text covers for uses such as King Solomon’s Temple and to build ships, first for the native-Phoenicians and then the Egyptians.

At one time, these magnificent ancient cedar forests had carpeted the whole of what we call Lebanon today which was the northern reaches of Canaan back then, climbing from the Mediterranean Sea up over 6,000 foot mountain ranges.

Only 1/5th of the world’s ancient forests remain, and the nearly 5,000 acres of cedars that remain in Lebanon - 30% in one national reserve alone - may not qualify.

During that country’s 15-year civil war from 1975 to 1990, a Druze militia leader surrounded this forest remnant with mines to protect these sacred trees as the Roman Emperor Hadrian had tried to do with stone markers in the second century A.D.

Nearly 140-years-ago, British Queen Victoria erected a high stone wall to protect a 250-acre remnant but soon all but 5% of Lebanon had been cleared of the slow-growing forests as slow-burning fuel for to fuel steam engines.

Still, the tree serves as that country’s symbol and an inspiration for reforestation, including initiatives guided by the United States Forest Service.

Humans have deforested fully 4/5ths of the earth’s ancient forests since agriculture emerged 10,000 years ago and deforestation today equals the greenhouse emissions for all cars, trucks, planes and ships on the planet.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that researchers have documented in studies of the Pacific Ocean, that temperatures have warmed 15 times faster in the last 60 years than they apparently did during natural warming cycles over those 10,000 years.

The good news is that while the 22% of Americans that are in denial about climate change have gridlocked the President and Congress from implementing a market-based cap and trade solution (once inspired but now blocked by Republicans) that has been cost effective to reduce “acid rain,” the nation’s largest corporations are building it into long-range plans.

In fact, in a USA Today/Stanford University poll earlier this month, only 30% of Americans felt that arbitrarily taking action to reduce global warming would hurt the economy.  Fifty-five percent believed government should play a role, 58% felt average people should take part and 63% believed business should participate.

One thing was clear from the survey, even among many deniers, it is recognized that the pain from not addressing climate change will fall on future generations.

The Illusion And Unhealthy Paradox of Choice

Fifty years ago, when I first went to work in grocery store as a teenager in the Pacific Northwest, on average they stocked around 4,000 items.  Today’s supermarkets stock an average of 50,000 items.

Yet the top selling 1,000 items generate half of the sales revenue.  Further, the average household buys only 150-200 items regularly and about 400 distinct items a year.  Dropping 25,000 items would decrease sales only 5%.

Conventional consumer theory is that breadth of choice trumps, but research shows that too much choice suppresses sales.  Many suppliers such as Procter & Gamble have increased sales 10% by cutting choice in half.

I must admit, that the primary reason I find myself shopping online for some items is that when I go out shopping, either I can’t remember where I purchased the item I need to restock, or it seems that even big-box stores increasingly won’t have many items in stock.

What’s more important is that much of the “choice” to which we seem drawn as consumers, especially when it comes to groceries, is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a very few suppliers.  The cost of all of this choice is climate change.

On average, conventional food products travel 1,500 miles before we see them on the shelves.  It takes 9 calories of fossil fuels to produce each calories of the food in supermarkets or about 232,000 per week for the average American.

Adding to the toll of hidden costs, 26 cents of every food dollar is spent on packaging.  Some reports estimate the industrial food system is responsible for a third of greenhouse gases.

For example, just one quarter-pound hamburger patty requires 6.7 pounds of grain and forage, 53 gallons of water, 74.5 square feet of land and 1,036 BTUs of fossil fuel energy to bring to market.  According to an NPR report, that doesn’t count greenhouse emissions from animal waste.

But a new report entitled Grocery Goliaths shows that while Americans now spend $603 billion on grocery products each year, half (53.6%) is spent in just four chains: Wal-Mart, Kroger, Target and Safeway.  Most types of grocery products are also dominated by three or four suppliers.

Rapid supermarket consolidation began when Wal-Mart, which now controls nearly 30% of overall supermarket spending, entered the grocery business in the 1990s, which is more than the entire top four retailers controlled in 1997 (20.8%.)

But independent grocery stores and local and regional chains have been fighting off consolidation since the 1920s when thousands banded together in cooperatives such as IGA, including the store in the small Idaho town near where I was born and spent my early years.

At nearly the same time, another coop of grocers called URM formed.  It still has 160 stores across northern Idaho, eastern Washington and western Montana, an area called the Inland Northwest.

There are still 1,750 IGA stores across the nation including one in Durham.  A few are over 10,000 sq. ft., about a third the size of the average supermarket.  Most IGAs are are 7,000-12,000 and many are convenience store size.

Coops such as these coops permit independents to share the costs of distribution and marketing.

There is still a vibrant, neighborhood Red & White food store in Durham, where I live, a remnant of another co-op of independent stores with distribution based out of Chicago.  They were established in the 1920s and thrived after WWII, but independent grocery stores like these seem all but extinct.

Independent grocery stores were squeezed from both ends beginning in the 1930s.  At one end, convenience stores began to chip away at their business until the concept really took off in the 1970s when they were fused with gas stations.

At the other end, supermarkets also grew out of the 1930s and tracked with the growth rate of the automobile.  The supermarket chains really took off after WWII as an unintended consequence of the Interstate Highway System, which made long-haul distribution more efficient.

The profit margin for grocery stores was a penny on the dollar when I worked in the grocery business during high school in the mid-1960s.  Today, it is still only 1.3%.  Wal-Mart smelled blood in the water when many grocery chains became employee-owned in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Some like Harris Teeter tried to go the route of acquisition and expansion beginning when the 1930s Charlotte, North Carolina chain emerged from its local roots in the mid-1980s after watching North Carolina-born Food Town expand and then be acquired by a Belgium company a few years earlier and renamed Food Lion.

In 1988, the year before I arrived in Durham, Harris Teeter entered the Durham market by acquiring the Big Star chain.  By the time they were assimilated by Kroger twenty-five years later, the company had grown to more than 230 stores in eight states.

Kroger astutely maintains the local and regional appeal of its acquisitions by retaining their names.  In the meantime, Food Lion has grown to be a part of the 9th largest supermarket chain including Sweetbay, Harveys, Hannaford and Bottom Dollar Food.

In 231 metro areas such as the one centered around Durham,  just four big grocery retailers make up more than 80% of sales.  Wal-Mart alone now makes up half of all grocery sales in 35 metros, according to the report.

Today, we have bigger and bigger stores owned by fewer and fewer companies carrying product categories produced by a handful of suppliers creating the illusion of choice.  Soon they will be supplanted by online stores such as Amazon Fresh.

In the meantime, the hidden costs to consumers and the planet are immense, and in the United States, we still have 1.4 million households in poverty including 2.8 million children surviving on $2 or less per day in a given month.

5 Dangers To Urban Forest Initiatives

Normally, all of the leaves are down in my adopted hometown of Durham, North Carolina by Thanksgiving, a week from now.

Judging by how full of leaves many of my 60 deciduous trees are, we may miss that benchmark but I wonder what a fly-over by the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO) would reveal?

According to Dr. Greg Asner, principal global ecology investigator for the Carnegie Institute of Science at Stanford University:

“Global carbon emissions from deforestation now equals the global transportation sector.

That is all ships, trains, airplanes and automobiles combined.”

The CAO is a Dornier 228 aircraft equipped with sensors, lasers, spectrometers and 3-D imaging, and of course, scientists working to learn more about the building blocks of the ecosystem.

None too soon, an insert arrived with my water bill yesterday reminding people not to blow or rake their leaves into the street, but to either utilize them or put them out for yard waste collection, steps often missed by less professional lawn services.

We already have a lot of metrics on the value of trees including forests along roadsides and in urban areas.  Multi-agency groups such as Trees Across Durham are attempting to execute a strategic approach to implementing a 12-step national multi-agency call to action launched two years ago called Vibrant Cities and Urban Forests.

Here, they are challenged with reversing a nearly forty-year period of neglect which saw trees surrendered to impervious surface at a rate that outpaced population growth by 8-to-1.  Deforestation in Durham over that period has been the equivalent of more than entire 8 city lots in my neighborhood which would be nearly 800 trees per day.

One day, initiatives such as Trees Across Durham will benefit from an aircraft such as the Carnegie Airborne Observatory.  Until then, they need our collective will to rise above these five obstacles:

• Activity traps that scratch the itch but don’t add up to making measurable progress tied to an overarching, strategic goal.
• Lip service from officials who, having shorted urban forestry efforts in the past, hope to continue to get by on the cheap or fail to grasp that urban forest includes public and private land.
• Special interests such as billboard companies who press legislative allies to sacrifice trees and vegetation so they can lure advertisers into a dead end technology while robbing the public interest.
• Inadequate ordinances and enforcement that fail to compensate for impervious surface by requiring a tree for every two parking spaces and offsets to replace deforestation by reforesting other areas.
• Failure to communicate by grossly underestimating both the extent and intensity with which the benefits of tree canopy must be explained and reiterated.

A Fatalistic Denial

One of my favorite memories of my near-decade in Alaska are excursions across Prince William Sound which always included a stop near the face of the spectacular, tidewater Columbia Glacier.

There are easier ways to see glaciers.  There are more than two dozen named glaciers in or in closer proximity to the Municipality of Anchorage where I was in charge of community destination marketing in the 1980s.

One is tucked into the very southwest corner of Anchorage where during my time there, we were involved in facilitating a far more accessible glacier visitor center and excursion.  In fact, the idea surfaced when our organization conducted the community’s first inventory of potential visitor features.

There are nearly 800 named glaciers in “The Great Land.” An expert once estimated there were 10,000 in Alaska in all.  I expect many have vanished forever.  Even Columbia Glacier has retreated more than 12 miles in the span from a year or two before I left Alaska until now, two miles in just the last six years.

Icebergs calving off Columbia had multiplied by four times between when I first arrived in 1978 and my first visit to the glacier in the very early 1980s. 

By 1989, my first year in Durham, accelerated iceberg production off Columbia was of concern when the fully-loaded Exxon Valdez supertanker changed course to miss hitting one and hit a reef instead, spilling 750,000 barrels of crude oil.

Today, the excursion to the glacier’s face is almost 20% longer than it was during my last visit.   The fastest moving glacier in the world has also lost 1,300 feet of thickness.  Climate warming causes land glaciers to lose mass from run-off, but tidewater glaciers are much more severely impacted.

The Columbia is projected to transition from tidewater to land/shallow water by 2020 after retreating another 10 miles, making it only half the length it was when discovered in 1794.

It will then be stable until the year 2100, according to researchers at the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Science.

I’m no environmental saint. In fact, I drive a Jeep and a Harley and use a commercial-grade blower to manage leaves and pine needles raining down from 110 towering trees on my little city lot a mile from downtown Durham where I still live after retiring several years ago.

Many of my truly environmentalist friends seem on ideological autopilot, as do the few climate change deniers whom I know.  A Yale University survey identified 13% of Americans as the former and 10% as the later.  The majority of Americans were concerned or cautiously concerned.

Like George Marshall, the author of the blog Climate Change Denial, I too wonder “why, when the evidence is so strong, and so many agree that this is our greatest problem, are we doing so little about climate change?”

Even scientists who were climate change skeptics, such as Dr. Richard Muller who established Berkley Earth, have now confirmed that the unsustainable change in global warming we are now experiencing was set in motion by the Industrial Revolution of the mid-1700s. 

As he noted in an op-ed last month, Muller’s team even predicted the current lull.  While this has caused some deniers to go on the offensive, Muller notes this is not the end of global warming.

Deniers who aren’t robotic seem merely fatalistic, believing that eventually the earth will be uninhabitable again one day so why mitigate it.  Fatalism may also shed light on why so few deniers access ideological neutral explanations such as the series of seven videos at this link.

It doesn’t seem American to give up without a fight.  Would these people be similarly fatalistic if economic freedom was at stake?  Somehow, I don’t think so.

This month in the scientific journal Nature, climate scientists pinpoint that 2047 is when the reality of global warming will be undeniable.  They called it the year of climate departure, not the year of cataclysm, but the tipping point.

Unless I live to be 100 years old, I’ll miss that departure, but my grandsons will only be in their 40s.  The researchers index to a period beginning in 1860 and ending four years before I retired at the end of 2009.

Currently, the Columbia Glacier it is calving off 2 cubic miles a year, according to one study.  “That is five times more fresh water than Alaskans use in a year.”

The point that “deniers” miss is that while the earth has always had periods of climate warming and cooling, the severity of the change underway is due to human activity, period.

But all of the recorded swings have impacted humans.  One need only look to those attributed to the so-called “little ice age” between the early 1300s and the late 1800s to see that.

As my ancestors from North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts were converging on the western slopes of the Rockies in the late 1840s, the snout of the glacier feeding the Rhone River extended 1,700 vertical feet further down the Swiss Alps than it does today.

It has pulled back a mile in the past century.  Click here for before and after photos and etchings documenting the change to this glacier and others over that span.  The Portage Glacier attraction I helped evolve in the 1980s during my time in Alaska was a short walk from the road in 1914.

By the time I was born, it was tidewater but still close.  It was barely visible 15 years after I left Alaska for Durham, North Carolina and five years before I retired from community marketing.  In fact, that glacier could only be seen by excursion boat or by air.

Glaciers are something climate scientists study closely because they are, by nature, always in motion.  As an article in the current issue of National Geographic notes:

“Glaciers are supposed to advance and retreat at a glacial pace.  Now they’re disappearing before our eyes.”

Selling Durham’s Urban Forest

In 2007, Durham, North Carolina, where I live set a goal to reduce or offset 90,000 metric tons of the greenhouse gases produced communitywide (city and county, businesses, residents and visitors) by 2030.  Just 17 more years to go.

Hopefully, part of the plan is to place its neglected urban forest canopy on the auction block.  A few months ago, Shell Energy North America announced plans to offset 500,000 metric tones of its carbon emissions by buying into forest regeneration in Michigan.

One of the companies selling the offset is The Forestland Group (TFG), a company headquartered in nearby Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  TFG manages the largest portfolio of hardwood forests in the U.S. but the 3.5 million acres it manages in 24 states are diversified by species, geographic region and age including two areas in North Carolina.

A study conducted by the Institute for Environmental Solutions as part of The Tree Project, concluded that tiny Golden, Colorado (pop. 19,186) could net $20 per metric ton per year by managing its urban forest.  Colorado was the first in the nation to have communities band together to support urban forestry by mitigating climate change.

Colorado’s urban tree canopy is only 13%, compared to 43% in North Carolina and 51% in Durham County, home to the state’s fourth largest city by the same name.  Maybe scarcity helped Colorado cities and towns catch on more quickly.

There is obviously great potential for revenue from Durham’s urban forest, as well as a means to meet its sustainability goal.

However, Durham will need to do three key things in a major paradigm shift in order for this to happen:

1. Take a holistic approach to urban forestry that includes residential and commercial property.
2. Begin to view its green infrastructure not only as a renewable resource but as an investment in not only quality of life but public health, crime reduction, water and air purification, as well as economic development.
3. Overcome years of cutting urban forests short by investing in catch-up, much as it just did with street resurfacing.

As California has already nicely laid out, selling urban forests as carbon credit is not like the song goes “playing the guitar on the M.T.V.” or “money for nothing.”   It requires a detailed management plan.

About five years ago the Congressional Research Service, the public policy research arm of the United States Congress, computed that afforestation of crop or posture land would have the potential to sequester between 2.2 and 9.5 metric tons of greenhouse gases per acre per year.

Reforestation, including efforts to assist natural regeneration, would sequester between 1.1 and 7.7 metric tons per year.  Durham’s forest yields would be on the upper side of those estimates.

Durham also has many areas where afforestation and reforestation can take place including tree “deserts” and areas along the rivers and streams and basins that recharge its water supply.

Like New York City, San Diego and many other cities, it could plant trees in its watersheds where they extend into more rural counties and count this as carbon offset as well.

Tree planting could also be used to mitigate downstream runoff that affects Raleigh’s water supply, which comes from a lake built primarily in Durham during the 1970s – borrowing a page from a tree planting project initiated by Congress and President Reagan.

During the mid to late 1980s, the Conservation Research Program was used to incentivize private property owners to put sensitive lands back into forestland, stream buffers, wildlife habitat, wetlands and ground cover.

At Dow Chemical’s Seadrift Plant, engineers planted 110 acres of trees to do the job of a proposed water treatment plant at 3% of the cost.  Iowa-based Ecolotree has learned that a thousand willow trees on an acre of land can treat ten gallons of toxic water per minute.

Care and deployment of Durham’s urban forest as a form of environmental capital and green infrastructure would include not only tree planting but thinning out brush so both over story and under story trees and vegetation can reach optimal effectiveness.

I hope those responsible for meeting Durham sustainability targets are already aggressively pursuing this. 

12 Disruptive Technologies by 2025

An economic impact analysis has just been published for 12 disruptive technologies that McKinsey Global Institute projects will begin to transform not only how we live and work but the economy over the next twelve years.

For a brief description of what makes a technology worth tracking as disruptive, click on this interview with Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

The McKinsey analysis entitled, Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy is fascinating and filled with interesting tidbits.  One is that 2-3 billion more people will access the Internet by 2025.

Reading that, It struck me as ironic that those in high office who are most boastful  that America is providentially exceptional, something with which I agree to a point, are the same ones restricting the expansion of broadband access in this country.

Gridlocking infrastructure investments such as this will pull us far behind other countries creating a sort of “excluded-ism.”

Mindful of that, maybe that’s why my attention was drawn in particular to two of the disruptive technologies in the report, energy storage and renewable energy.

Many of us see rapidly advancing energy storage in terms of adoption of hybrid and electric vehicles (55% of new cars could be plug-in hybrid by 2025) but according to the report, rapidly advancing storage technology will also soon bring electricity to a billion people who don’t have it.

This isn’t included in what could be a $635 billion annual impact by 2025.  However, that amount does include the boost that improved battery storage will bring to the efficiency and quality of the electric grid while reducing emissions of CO2.

While one of the disruptive technologies in the report is the 100-200% efficiency increase in our ability to wring the last drop of fossil fuels from the earth, it is heartening that renewable energy also makes the list.

The cost of a watt from solar cells has dropped by 85% since the year 2000.  Renewables are being adopted “at scale” in the US and EU and soon in China and India.  The report makes projections based on two scenarios, one that trends breakthroughs and another with “technology frozen at current levels.

Fossil fuel devotees conveniently forget that this energy source has been heavily subsidized over the decades and continues to be today by refusals to adopt full-cost accounting, not only of exploration costs but the cost of shipping, military escorts and to the earth’s inhabitability.

Several scenarios in the report factor in various levels of subsidies for development of renewables as well as net those out of economic impact estimates while adding in estimates of the value of reduction in CO2 emissions.

The interrelated dynamic today of fossil fuel technologies and renewable energy technologies is creating an interesting but conflicting environmental narrative.

As the report notes – “The shift from coal to gas for electricity generation is reducing greenhouse emissions while simultaneously leaching urgency from the drive to develop renewable energy sources.”

In North Carolina, where I live, there is an interesting scenario underway.  Republicans control the Governor’s office and both houses of the General Assembly.

Some, such as Republican Representative Chuck McGrady, still have conservation bonafides, having also been national president of the Sierra Club.  Many however are true to form to this skit by comedian Steven Colbert.

Colbert, who grew up and still has a vacation home in neighboring South Carolina devoted a skit to North Carolina lawmakers who tried to legislate projections for sea level change. As Colbert notes, “…this is a brilliant solution.  If your science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal.  Problem solved.”

The skit is well worth viewing as Colbert provides humorous examples of applying the logic of Republican lawmakers to things such as longevity.

Republicans here are also advancing a prior Democratic tax reform proposal that shifts tax burden from corporate and individual income tax to a sales tax broadened to more equitably include many more types of purchases not only by individual consumers but businesses.

At the time, the sales tax rate would be reduced.

Another comedian, Dr. Yorum Bauman, aka “the world’s only stand-up economist” gives a funny but insightful TED presentation on why a “revenue neutral” carbon tax is a tax reform upon which many Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals and both climate-change skeptics and believers can find common ground.

He explains that the basis of such tax reform is to “tax what we want less of…instead of things we want more of.”  Bauman notes an experiment that lawmakers such as those in North Carolina should study closely.

The Canadian province of British Columbia is gradually increasing a tax on carbon, while offsetting it with reductions to taxes on individual and business income.  North Carolina could expand the reductions to include sales tax.

At a federal level in the US, a similar approach would lower individual and corporate income taxes, reclaiming offshore sheltering while providing much needed revenues for infrastructure and R & D into disruptive technologies while reducing climate change.

In B.C., the arguments about the carbon tax policy have gone from “fur or agin” to how to increase its application and whether to use it all for tax reduction or for other uses that will meet the goal.  Links in this paragraph cover several different perspectives.

In this country, those obsessed with contempt for taxes and government are caught up in the futile and counterproductive attempt to starve out waste, starving even the enforcement efforts intended to ferret it out.  In turn, this also forces a counter-reactionary response to program loss rather than waste reduction.

Lose, lose, lose.

As Bauman notes, the B.C. approach is win, win, win because it taxes what we don’t want – pollution – and reduces taxation on what we do want – income – which will “promote innovation, conservation and development of new technologies.”  Sounds more like capitalism than the approach in the paragraph above.

It is amazing what can be done when we find common ground.

The Fortunes of Permanence

Some of my least favorite people are those who text while driving. Seemingly invisible to police, I spot at least three or four every time I’m out.

They drive like they are drunk, jerking near other lanes, driving way too slow and reacting unevenly to traffic signals.  To keep from getting too peeved, I've been keeping track of what their bumper stickers (an early form of social media) say about them.

So far Obama 10, City Councilman Steve Schewel 6, McCrory 4 and Romney 2.  Guess it isn't just trailing Millennials who need to be careful about what others socially post.

The sample of course is not at all scientific. When indexed for party registration where I live, fans of Governor McCrory and former Governor Romney are more likely to be text offenders.  Traffic accidents can unexpectedly change lives in a heartbeat.  Those texts better be worth it.

One of my favorite blogs is Permanent Record, described by its author, Paul Lukas, as “an object-based history project.” If you are involved with marketing you've probably read his work on the subject as a journalist as I often did during my now-concluded 40-year career in community marketing.

Here is a link to his story on Monday about “twist ties vs. plastic clips,” a $10.6 million struggle over fiercely loyal fans of each. I’m a twist tie guy. They are more easily reclaimed for other uses.

I thought of a Permanent Record post earlier this month when I learned of Monday’s tornado where residents of Moore, Oklahoma got just 16 minutes warning before it destroyed 13,000+ homes, killing 24 people and injuring 377.

Lukas blogged about a project that took root following a devastating tornado that hit Joplin and Duquesne, Missouri on this month in 2011. After the event, more than 35,000 personal photographs were found scattered over four states and as far as 350 miles from their owners.

I know from a friend’s pain who lost most of her photographs and mementos in a flood in the late 1990s how much of a loss this was.

The Joplin tragedy spawned formation of the National Disaster Photo Rescue. Nearly half of the priceless photos and other documents have been retrieved and returned to their owners. It is the subject of the documentary film, Photos in the Wind.

I have digitized several thousand family photographs dating back nearly 100 years that captured the images of ancestors dating to the 1840s. I’ve preserved them on DVD, thumb drive and on the cloud and distributed them to my daughter, my mom and sisters, my niece and each of my nephews.

But this doesn't replace the full value of the photographs themselves which need to go in a safety deposit box. I’m really fortunate to have these.  I hope the photo rescue was activated after Hurricane Sandy and that they are already mobilized for Moore.

They are bound to be busy.  Climate change debates aside, it is probably no mistake that 69% of global losses from weather-related catastrophes take place in North America.  It has quintupled here over the past three decades.

As a line in the film trailer states – “If you could only see what this means to people.  If you could see their faces when they get back something they thought was completely gone, it will change your life.”

I suspect future generations may be saying that about a lot of things if the current state of gridlock in Congress remains.

Getting Inside the Heads of My 1816 Ancestors

Even if we are predisposed to leave sketches of personal history as some of my ancestors have, it is sometimes difficult to know what someone reading them a century later will see as the pivotal events that will be thought of as influential.

However, I was able to peer into an event that deeply shaped the lives of six lines of my great-great-great grandparents who came of age in the late 1700s and early 1800s just as America first got its footing as a nation.

Linear narratives of history are not nearly as useful as those that are cyclical, but sometimes insight is best found by taking a cross-section, as two books spurred me to do recently.

One, published last November is entitled Nature Wars, and the other published this past February is entitled The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History.

The latter was co-authored by two Drs. Klingaman, a father and son, one a social historian and the other a meteorologist.

In 1816, six lines of my great x 3 and great x 2 grandparents named Bowman, Harper, Neeley, Messersmith and Shelton were in their 30s and 40s or in their early years as young children.

They were living in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia when the effects of a huge volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora the year prior dramatically changed the climate in those states throughout the summer of 1816, only months following the end of the War of 1812.

Followed by the brief return of Napoleon to Paris from exile on Elba, the eruption in Indonesia spewed enough ash and pumice into the stratosphere to generate 100 million tons of sulfuric acid.

It was 100 times more powerful than the Pacific Northwest eruption of Mount Saint Helens in the 1980s when I was the age of my great x 3 ancestors.

Within months, due to the eruption, the U.S. experienced frost throughout an entire year and snow fell as far south as Virginia on the Fourth of July.

Among the population of the young United States, which had more than doubled since the Revolutionary War, the stark fogged-over summer of 1816 accelerated the volume of Americans and immigrants streaming westward.

Within a few decades half of the farmland in some Northeast states had been abandoned and began a gradual return to forest apparent after the Civil War.

Unaware until later of the impact of the volcanic eruption, the “summer of darkness” also kindled a much more broadly held concern for nature, which had been primarily viewed until then as waste, and with it a resurgence of spirituality.

Washington Irving was 33 at the time of the blast and within four years penned The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with its lyrical depictions of nature.  James Fennimore Cooper, then 27, was inspired several years later to publish the first in the Leatherstocking Tales underlain with the notion that nature was something of value to be preserved.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the eventual leader of the Transcendental Movement, was 13 at the time, while his friend Henry David Thoreau was just born that year.  Joseph Smith who within a few years found revelation in a grove of trees that led to organization the Mormon Church was 11 at the time.

This movement was soon to draw together the six lines of my ancestors who had been Quaker, Amish, Lutheran, Remonstrant and Huguenot before they experienced that summer.  Ultimately it would lead them in a migration up into the Rocky Mountains of my origins.

Thomas Cole, who would found the nature-based Hudson River School of painters, was 15 when the eruptions cloud darkened much of the world.  Within a decade he would brush A View of Two Lakes and Mountain House.

At the time George Perkins Marsh was also 15.  He would go on to write Man and Nature: or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action which would launch conservation as a movement in the decades following the Civil War.

While the “summer of darkness” was transformative for Americans,  despoliation by some would intensify for nearly another century before a new consciousness of the relationship of man and nature would prevail.

Despite the efforts - and some say hubris - of some in high office to take us backwards, overall today we are much less arrogant about nature as we face another era marked not by weather events but catastrophic climate change.

Providential Attentiveness

In 1984 and 1985, as Durham, North Carolina, where I live was taking actions to improve roadside appearance by banning billboards and creating an appearance overlay to further protect appearance along a soon-to-be constructed segment of I 40, research gathered since the mid-1970s was being field-tested to calibrate safety cut-zones.

Since then, studies have been piling up that reveal benefits from trees and other scenic view-sheds that extend far beyond aesthetic benefits or even the health benefits of trees there.  These benefits include removing air and water pollution in addition to regulating climate.

While the gray infrastructure of highways is considered essential to economic development – which includes tourism - the green infrastructure of trees and vegetation is increasingly being proven just as essential to not only tourism but the renewal that spurs human creativity and innovation.

For instance, a study published in 1995 by researchers at Cornell and the University of Michigan founds that natural views were associated with better focus and paying attention.

Failure to focus and pay attention is the cause of the great majority of roadside fatalities, 60% due to alcohol and much of the remainder due to young drivers who are many times more likely than the general population to run off the road.

The national standards for safety zones that states are supposed to follow in managing roadside vegetation have often re-tested since the 1970s and 1980s, in an attempt to protect these populations from themselves.

The policy is 30 feet where there are guardrails and otherwise 40 feet, undulating for exceptions around assets such as bridges to no more than 50 feet. This varies with travel volume and speeds above 65 miles an hour or on steeps hills or around curves.

However, studies show that trees and natural views also improve attention and focus.  This is the opposite of what is intended by outdoor billboards for which the North Carolina legislation has recently enabled the sacrifice of thousands of acres of trees so they can be even more distracting, over the objections of 8 out of 10 voters.

Last December, researchers at the University of Kansas and the University of Utah published a study showing that exposure to nature provides a cognitive advantage including attention restoration, improved concentration and increased creativity and problem-solving ability.

Last month, researchers at universities in Edinburgh published a study using mobile EEGs (electroencephalography) that revealed that traversing green spaces lessens brain fatigue.

There are similar studies that show the danger that the few seconds of distraction it takes to read a billboard pose a significant danger for drivers.  The owners of the companies that own these distractions (increasingly hedge funds) are caught in a conundrum.

On one hand, they try to persuade advertisers that they are indeed distracting and get read by drivers.  Then on the other, they use copious campaign donations to help persuade lawmakers that they aren’t (a technique called “legalized corruption.”)  *AHEM!*

Over the past several hundred years in America, there have evolved at least four different worldviews of the relationship between nature and humans.  The one dating to the 1700s and 1800s is that through “Providence,” nature has been put here to be exploited by humans.

It is still deployed today by some to justify desecrating roadsides.  But could it be that the intent of this “Providence “ is not just so we can create blight and desecration to benefit only out-of-state billboard companies, now found useful by only a fifth of one percent of the population?

Could it be that the “Providence” so intended is for trees and nature to serve as a means for human reinvigoration and attentiveness including a far greater form of resulting economic vitality than sheer exploitation??

Is it possible that by sharpening the senses, trees and vegetation are not only safer than purposeful distractions such as billboards but a means of helping us drive more safely as well as think more clearly and creatively?

Is it possible that when this benefit from trees is factored into maintenance expenses along with those related to removing air and water pollution, providing climate control and preventing erosion, that the greatest expense to society of all is cutting them down?

It is not only possible, it is probable.

The Near Term Future of Flight

On any given day, there are 60,000 passengers passing through an average airport, giving those in North Carolina a population between that of Chapel Hill and Asheville or collectively about the size of Durham, the state’s fourth largest city.

Globally, within three years, the number of airline passengers each year will reach 3.6 billion, an amount equal to half of the earth’s population.  Airline traffic is projected to double by 2030 when I could be just shy of my mom’s age now.

In 1948, the year I was born, there were fewer than 15 million airline passengers in the United States on 2 million departures.  By age 19 when I took my first airline flight, a Pan Am 707 from the Rocky Mountains to New York in 1967, annual airline passenger traffic in the US had grown to 142 million taking nearly 5 million departures.

Between my first flight and when I turned 30 on the eve of airline deregulation, passenger miles had grown an average of 12% a year, according to analysis by Doug Henwood, a former conservative who now blogs at Left Business Observer.

Since then, according to Henwood, airlines have averaged less than 4% growth a year.  Before I turned 30, planes were 57% full.  Since then they have averaged 68% full and over the last three years 82%.

Henwood makes the case that airline deregulation has been a disaster not only for the airlines and passengers, but most certainly for many communities.

Fewer planes with higher occupancy may be better for the environment though.  Climate change calculations estimate that when I fly round-trip from the east coast to visit my daughter and grandsons in the Rocky Mountains, I pollute the atmosphere with about 2 tons of carbon, slightly more than I discharge per year driving.

If I take a 6,000-mile cross country trip to see them, as I do at least once each year, I discharge the equivalent in carbon of a cross-country round-trip flight.

Today, 42% of U.S. adults report traveling by air for leisure purposes and 48% for business purposes.  Air is the mode of arrival for less than 10% of the visitor volume for the typical destination community or state.

According to the updated study, Flying Into The Future, another major shift in air travel over the last few years has been the shift to using smartphones.  More than 70% of airline passengers have smartphones compared to slightly more than 50% of the general public.

A third of passengers now use smartphones for check-in and 40% more than in 2010 are using these devices for mobile boarding.  In three years, the number of airlines using mobile check-in etc. will increase from 50% to 90%.

It wasn’t too long ago that people couldn’t imagine smartphones and tablets replacing computers as a means to conduct banking and now 9 out 10 do.

The same was true not long ago about booking air travel via website but today 74% of passengers do so and 70% of airline executives believe mobile apps will soon be equally dominant. Already, 9 out of 10 passengers want mobile flight updates.

Technologies such as Passbook and near-field communication chips will mean that most of us will merely tap our smartphone to check-in or board a flight and integration of technologies will greatly smooth out clearing security.

Airlines are now putting actual servers aboard aircraft to make it easier and less expensive and cumbersome to use devices via Wi-Fi while in flight, not only for passengers but for crew members using them for company purposes.

However, as my friend and fellow-blogger and former DMO exec Bill Giest writes, “it’s really all about the juice,” so I hope airports and airplanes will now make it easier to charge up devices onboard and while sitting in boarding areas.

Vapor River Irony

Whenever a TV station in my area fails to show the weather for Durham, NC, where I live, but shows it for nearby Raleigh, it is almost always a sign that the sensor used is in neither city but at the jointly-owned airport located midway between Durham and Raleigh in Morrisville, NC.

In most cases, I realize that someone was probably tripped up by the dateline (merely the location from which the forecaster was working) used by National Weather Service’s central North Carolina office.

Of course, with numerous other weather services now available, including those that glean information at the neighborhood level such as the station I maintain for mine in Rockwood, cities and towns have been able to reclaim one more aspect of their identities.

Barrett Smith, one of the forecasters for this part of North Carolina, has written about the rivers of atmospheric vapor that were identified in 1998.  These rivers are 250 miles wide and travel about a mile high (about the height of Mount McKinley as seen from sea level in Anchorage, where I lived in the 1980s).

Vapor rivers carry as much water as 10-15 Mississippi Rivers.  Usually they impact the west coasts of continents, but one is now thought to have come up from the Gulf of Mexico to flood Nashville and other areas of Tennessee and Kentucky nearly three years ago.

My personal experience with one of these vapor rivers was while I was living during November 1967 along the mountains overlooking Los Angeles.  A vapor river trying to lift up and over the San Gabriels dumped nearly nine inches of rain within a few weeks.

It felt like someone dumped a couple of Mississippi Rivers’ worth of water directly on my neighborhood back then, and it is possible that forty-three years later North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains saved my adopted home from the same fate as Nashville.

Climate change is sure to make vapor rivers more erratic and it is possible one may slip up the eastern side of the Appalachians to North Carolina at some time.  Unfortunately, even then it is unlikely to phase climate-change deniers.

Rising sea levels could inundate the coastal plain one day, turning that third of North Carolina’s geography, including Raleigh, into a “Doggerland,” recasting my hometown Durham as a coastal resort town and still, according to George Marshall, climate-change deniers would grow only more stubborn.

Marshall is the author of a humorous book entitled Carbon Detox, that makes climate change easy to understand.  He also blogs at Climate Change Denial, where he recently explained why climate disasters probably won’t influence the mind of anyone who doesn’t already have an open mind.

We human beings are horrible at detecting subtle environmental changes, and are becoming gradually inured even to less subtle changes such as blight and pollution.  It may take much more than being inundated by 15 Mississippi Rivers for some groups to open their minds to information.

I’m not persuaded that even a concern for future generations can unstick the stubbornness exhibited by climate-change deniers.  Maybe it will take another flood of biblical proportions such as the one created in Genesis 6:11 and 12 to cleanse a corrupted earth.

Now wouldn’t that be ironic!

Awakening to the Inclusive Cost-Benefit for Burying Utility Lines

As I laid awake in the 1920 bungalow where I lived at the time in Old North Durham, I could barely hear the radio over the sound of windows rattling and the loud ruffling of the soft-top on my Jeep Wrangler parked a few feet away on the street before a huge urban street tree.

As the clock struck midnight on September 5, 1996, the radio newscaster announced that Hurricane Fran, my first-ever, was not skirting the coastline, as most do, but headed 170 miles inland, straight up I 40 toward my adopted hometown of Durham, North Carolina just as some of my community-destination marketing colleagues at the time were rushing into the eye of the storm to get home from a sales mission.

The huge Category 3 storm roared directly over my little house and its adjacent forest at about 3 am that morning taking down a huge portion of Durham’s beloved tree canopy, knocking out power to much the community, flooding storm drains, sending water flowing over stream and river banks as well as bridges and leaving many roads impassable.

Day-break on September 6th brought a beautiful and eerily still and humid morning.  In this part of North Carolina, two decades of polling shows that nearly eight out of ten people characterize where they live by the name of a specific city, town or county.  For the next largest group, it is a specific neighborhood, with only a tiny fraction citing an amorphous region.

That morning, my world was distilled down to only next door neighbors and my block on Shawnee Street.  Maneuvering the Jeep around downed trees and other obstacles, I slowly migrated with others to a friend’s house in the adjacent Trinity Park neighborhood of Durham.

Friends gathered throughout the day and into the night as my friend, then a restaurateur, used his outdoor grill to cook virtually everything from his and his neighbors’ freezers and coolers before the food could spoil without electricity.

Everyone was grateful to drink warm beer or wine and many there that day learned to drink whiskey and vodka “neat.”

Twenty-six people lost their lives to “Fran,” as have more than 1,000 North Carolinians to hurricanes dating to before 1700.  The deadliest, Hurricane Floyd, would come three years after Fran and was recorded with indelible images taken from helicopters of thousands of pigs as they floated above roofs on flooded down-east farmsteads, leaving a memory that my mother, in the Pacific Northwest, still associates with North Carolina.

As Floyd churned north it also flooded the first floor basement and recreation room of the apartment where some friends of mine lived in Basking Ridge, New Jersey at the time, forty miles east of New York City.  The heavy rains that accompanied that huge, slow moving storm overwhelmed storm run off systems and the flooding destroyed everything they had accumulated including invaluable photographs and family heirlooms.

I had only lived six years in Durham, or anywhere east of the Rockies for that matter, when Fran hit.  I was into my 24th year here when Hurricane Sandy, a Category 1, veered overland in the northeastern United States on October 29th this year, passing again directly over Basking Ridge at approximately the same time in the wee hours of the morning that Fran did over my little house in Durham 16 years ago.

We haven’t learned many lessons since Fran.

FEMA has learned and the Corp of Engineers has learned as have emergency officials in some states, but utility companies are still in denial, insisting it is too expensive to bury power lines even in view of the renewed devastation in Basking Ridge.

That’s only because utility companies haven’t factored into the market the vastly greater costs that come with storms and outages in general when power lines have not been moved underground.

Florida utility regulators have persuaded utility companies there to cooperatively track storm-related costs.

If they haven’t already, I can see New York and New Jersey doing the same.  In fact, maybe a silver lining in New York City’s devastation is that Wall Street and Madison Avenue will join forces to finally persuade utility companies to begin burying all utility lines.  While they are at it, they should also take on climate-change deniers.

Even for “ready-aim-fire” types such as myself, change doesn’t begin with “analyze-think”, it begins with “see-feel” to use terms coined by authors John P. Kotter, a Harvard business professor and Dan S. Cohen in their book The Heart of Change.

In my experience over 40 years as a community-destination marketing executive where I took on a multitude of challenges including Durham’s image turnaround, before my retirement several years ago,  I found that analysis, rationale and measurement are important to executing change, but the passion, determination and grit crucial to initiating change always begins with seeing and feeling.

The costs that come from the refusal of utility companies to bury power lines is not the only “negative externality” or transaction spillover that economists and market analysts should insist be computed into costs rather than pushing them off on society.  They also rob communities of the economic benefits of street tree canopies.

Rather than bury the power lines, they have crews mutilate the trees during maintenance and then bully city and county administrators into replacing them with much less beneficial species.  Florida regulators are asking utility companies to track and include a variety of broader costs and benefits into future decisions about burying power lines such as:

• Storm-related costs
• Lost utility revenues during outages
• Costs incurred by customers for losses during outages
• Costs to customers related to lost opportunities
• Damage to green infrastructure and loss of ecosystem benefits to communities

More states such as North Carolina need to emulate the cooperation demonstrated between Florida’s electrical utility teams and academics and policymakers including Ted Kury, an economist and director of energy studies at the University of Florida’s Public Utility Research Center, which has developed a simulation tool to help utility companies assess and make much more enlightened decisions about undergrounding power lines.

Maybe, just maybe, the experience of those still recovering from Hurricane Sandy can finally begin to shift this paradigm.

Tax-Shift Humor and Climate Change

Distinguished as “systemic causation,” if not direct, in a post last week by cognitive linguistic researcher Dr. George Lakoff, even scientists previously skeptical of climate change at Berkley Earth, who are now able to make assessments as far back as 1753, are confident in the “clear agreement between global land ­‐temperature rise and human-­caused greenhouse gases.”

That’s the same year a 21-year-old George Washington rode across the Blue Ridge Mountains and the upper Shenandoah Valley as an ambassador for the British Crown on a mission to assess the intentions of and convey a warning to the French and their Native American allies along the border of what is now Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Following a route I also partially traveled on one of my four cross country trips over the last three years, Washington cut northwest at the Quaker village of Winchester and up through the Forks of the Ohio River, the site of present-day Pittsburgh.

The fall of 1753 was also when the first steam engine arrived in America.  It doesn’t take a crash course in the Industrial Revolution to understand just how much that single machine has influenced our quality of life, but that doesn’t change the fact that we now need another revolution to ensure that quality of life for subsequent generations.

On Washington’s follow up mission in 1754, the first truly global war was ignited which led to the need for British taxes to fund it on this continent which in turn, led to the American War of Independence also led by Washington and the creation of the United States of America of which he was elected the first President.

As Americans were declaring independence, Scottish professor Adam Smith was publishing An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations which upended the notion that wealth could only be achieved by hording and inspired instead our current market economy based on creating wealth.

Ironically, many inspired by Smith have turned to hording wealth and denial of climate change, while, according to public opinion polls, 75% of Americans support regulating greenhouse gases such as CO2 and 60% support revenue-neutral taxes on carbon.

By 3 to 1, Americans believe that protecting the environment “improves economic growth and creates new jobs, while just 17% cling to a notion described by David Jenkins, a Republican conservative and environmentalist (yes they do exist) that:

“we can dig up all of that sequestered carbon from bygone eras, burn it, and send it back into the atmosphere without consequence?”

Jenkins, an official with ConservAmerica then chided a fellow conservative that such a view “is as impious as it is imprudent. It is certainly not conservative.”

Given political will by those elected to office, there is obviously bipartisan support for the ideas promoted fourteen years ago in a book of just 89 pages plus appendix entitled Tax Shift – How to Help the Economy and Improve the Environment, co-written by Alan Thein Durning and a young Reed College research intern named Yoram Bauman.

The now-Dr. Bauman is an environmental economist who teaches at the University of Washington.  He is even more famous as “the world’s first and only Stand-Up Economist.”  Click here for his hilarious five minute explanation of economics textbook author and Harvard professor Dr. Gregory Mankiw’s (pronounced Mank-u) Ten Principals of Economics.

Revenue-neutral tax-shifting has already been shown to work over the last few years in British Columbia, Canada where it was implemented several years ago based on the recommendation of Bauman and others.

It is based on the economic principle that the way to get less pollution is to make polluting expensive.  Revenue-neutral means shifting taxes off of things such as income and payroll and business while shifting them to things such as CO2 emissions.

Beginning in 2008, B.C. began a gradual revenue-neutral tax shift to carbon pollution in 2008 and an assessment four years later by a group of business, environmental, policy and academic leaders shows that it is working by reducing emissions far faster than elsewhere and without any negative effect on the economy there.

The B.C. experiment, while it must to likely be ratcheted up to have the intended impact, is well worth replicating in the United States.  The carbon tax approach is also supported by Mankiw, an advisor on the economy to both President George W. Bush and Republican presidential-candidate Mitt Romney.

In a TED presentation, Bauman quotes conservative columnist George Will, who, when it was noted that he agreed with Al Gore on this issue, paraphrases a quote from 20th-century American newspaper humorist Don Marquis by quipping back that:

“an idea should not be held responsible for the people who believe in it.”

Hope for Collectively Rolling Back Climate Change

In response to one of his fellow-Republicans who had been dismissive of one of my recent posts which took a market-driven approach to reducing carbon as a means to roll back climate change, David Jenkins wrote:

“So are we to believe that we can dig up all of that sequestered carbon from bygone eras, burn it, and send it back into the atmosphere without consequence? That view is as impious as it is imprudent. It is certainly not conservative.”

Jenkins, who grew up in Taylorsville, NC, worked as a volunteer in high school on Jesse Helms Senatorial campaign and then attended Brevard College here before graduating from Furman University in South Carolina, also delivered possibly the most concise, if not best, description of what carbon regulation is and why it is important when he wrote:

“The earth was designed (I happen to believe it was designed by God)with something called the carbon cycle that naturally regulates the chemistry of our atmosphere and keeps it in balance.”

Of course a market-driven approach to reducing emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as methane is to levy a tax on them.  The idea was first proposed by Republican Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush before being stigmatized as a liberal conspiracy by many of the economic conservatives who now control the Republican Party.

Economists all along the political spectrum prefer the use of taxes to curb negative behaviors such as “sin taxes” on tobacco and alcohol.

The idea of substituting a carbon sin tax for taxes that currently exist on productive behaviors such as work, has been supported by many such as Mitt Romney advisory Dr. N. Gregory Mankiw at Harvard and Cornell University’s Dr. Robert H. Frank, author of this year’s award-winning book entitled The Darwin Economy.

Frank argues that a relatively small $80 per metric ton tax on carbon would balance the climate while resulting over time in a gradual increase in the price of gasoline of 70 cents per gallon.  To level the “playing field” it could also be applied to imports from countries who refuse to curb their emissions.

As applied to some examples in or near Durham, NC, where I live, this would translate to $3.1 million for a municipal landfill here and $1 billion to a huge coal fired plant further north along the Virginia border.  Free marketers shouldn’t complain because these are costs to society that should have been accounted for anyway but were left as externalities.

In his book Frank also illustrates that dramatic savings to society through reduction in CO2 would create enough revenue to self-fund vouchers to low income households to be used to replace highly polluting vehicles with  more fuel efficient cars.

Oil tycoon, T. Boone Pickens proposes that we can eliminate 75% of our reliance on OPEC oil by just converting the 8 million 18-wheel trucks on our nation’s highways to natural gas.  Dr. Richard Muller at the consortium Berkley Earth has suggested that one of the most effective things we can do to curb global carbon emissions is to make the technology for natural gas fracking readily available to China as a means to wean that country from coal.

Muller, a longtime climate change skeptic, dramatically reverse his position after analysis published two and a half months ago demonstrated that essentially all of our climate change problem is the “result from human emission of greenhouse gasses” over the last 250 years.

Click here or on the image shown in this blog to watch the impact of greenhouse gasses year by year or decade by decade in a very cool video of the earth.  Watch the video at that link closely for the impact of greenhouse gasses from 1950, just two years after I was born, until to today.

There is a renewed bipartisan interest in a carbon tax, as reported in an August Wall Street Journal story, including those at The Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a think tank formed by Republicans.

Social conservatives including many Evangelical Christians will be important to our coming together as a nation to address climate change.  Jenkins, the VP of Government and Political Affairs for ConservAmerica, formerly Republicans for Environmental Protection, laid this out in a 2009 brief entitled God’s Climate Plan, where he concluded:

“Once we, as Christians, understand how God has designed the earth to keep its chemistry in balance and support life, we have an obligation to respect that design and live within it.”

In their 2009 book entitled A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions, co-authors Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and Dr. Andrew Farley, a pastor, describe the need for urgency in addressing climate change and propose a Christian basis for action.

They note that:

“In the United States, individuals and households produce 21% of the nation’s heat-trapping gas emissions. Another 17 percent is produced by personal transportation.  As individuals, that means we control more than a third of the country’s greenhouse gas budget.”

It is easy to feel futile as my friend Jason Walser, a young lawyer and conservationist, does as he bicycles to work each day in Salisbury, a community in central North Carolina, as he passes a freight train consisting of nearly 200 carloads of coal which are required daily by a nearby Duke Energy power plant.

All this said, I still have a feeling that we’re turning the corner on the debate over climate change and that soon we’ll apply our collective efforts to successfully reverse this problem.

However, while collective action at the national and global level is critical, it is just as important to ensuring a future for our children and grandchildren that we apply the technology now available to pinpoint our efforts to address climate change at the household, street, neighborhood and community level.