Joe Romm: Words Matter When Talking Global Warming: The ‘Good' Anthropocene Debate

by Joe Romm, Climate Progress, June 19, 2014

CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

We spend more of our waking hours communicating than perhaps any other single activity. And while the principles of effective writing and speaking have been understood for centuries if not millennia, they are largely ignored today — sometimes intentionally, as Orwell pointed out nearly seven decades ago.

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” George Orwell wrote in “Politics And The English Language” in 1946. “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”

Nowhere is that clearer than in the arena of climate politics and journalism — which often seems driven by the unproductive extremes of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and “STAND BACK AND WATCH THE WORLD BURN.” Ultimately, they are both equally pessimistic, since they both push the premise that there is no chance the human race could actually embrace the kind of aggressive action needed to have a realistic chance of avoiding multiple catastrophes.

I am more optimistic, as I explained in my reply to Ezra Klein’s pessimism. I suppose if I had a motto, it might be: Do Worry, Take Action, THEN Be Happy.

I’ve been thinking about all this because I was on two recent science communications panels: a “Science & Policy Communications Workshop” this week for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a Communications Workshop at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Summer Policy Colloquium last week. Everything I know on the subject can be found in my 2012 book, “Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln and Lady Gaga.”

For those who want the pithy version, start with the great 20th Century essayist, Orwell, in his greatest essay, “Politics And The English Language” — and the great 20th Century orator, Winston Churchill, in his essay metaphorically titled, “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric.”

Orwell offers six simple rules for writing with clarity, “rules that one can rely on when instinct fails,” when you are “in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase”:

• (i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
What’s interesting is that in his essay, Churchill says some very similar things even though he is focused on oratory. “There is no more important element in the technique of rhetoric than the continual employment of the best possible word,” he argues. “Whatever part of speech it is it must in each case absolutely express the full meaning of the speaker. It will leave no room for alternatives.”
So clarity is king, just as it is for Orwell. Churchill then takes on a very common myth about rhetoric:

The unreflecting often imagine that the effects of oratory are produced by the use of long words…. The shorter words of a language are usually the more ancient. Their meaning is more ingrained in the national character and they appeal with greater force to simple understandings than words recently introduced from the Latin and the Greek. All the speeches of great English rhetoricians … display an uniform preference for short, homely words of common usage….

Short words win. Jargon loses.
In preparing for my AMS and AGU talks, I asked a senior legislative aide with over two decades of Hill experience for some advice. He told me that if scientists speak to a Legislative Assistant (L.A.) for a member on the climate issue, they “can’t assume the L.A. knows anything.” It would be a mistake, he said, to even use a phrase like “statistically significant”!
Susan Joy Hassol, an expert in climate communication, made the same point in a 2010 post here — avoid jargon: “Words that seem perfectly common to scientists are still jargon to the wider world and always have simpler substitutes. Rather than anthropogenic, you could say human caused.”
And this bring us to the latest dust-up over jargon and euphemism. The New York Times climate blog published a piece titled, “Exploring Academia’s Role in Charting Paths to a ‘Good’ Anthropocene.”
I think it’s safe to say that both Orwell and Churchill would have gagged at “Anthropocene,” which, as perhaps 1% (0.1%?) of the U.S. population knows, means “an informal geologic chronological term that marks the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.”
Inside the tiny community of people who actually understand the term, there was widespread objection to the entire phrase, “Good Anthropocene.” Australian author, climate expert and Professor of Public Ethics Clive Hamilton wrote, “those who argue for the ‘good Anthropocene’ are unscientific and live in a fantasy world of their own construction.”
I very much agree. Elizabeth Kolbert, one of the most thoughtful climate journalists, tweeted: 



The NY Times blogger (Andy Revkin) criticized Kolbert for having tweeted that without having watched the hour talk he gave, “Paths to a ‘Good’ Anthropocene” (video here).
After she watched it, Kolbert emailed me:

I don’t see the value in the “good Anthropocene” as a rhetorical construct, even if it’s well-intentioned. What we are doing to the planet, which is of course the reason geologists are considering renaming the epoch in which we live, is in no way good. A few years ago, Paul Crutzen told me that he hoped the word Anthropocene would serve as “a warning to the world.” I think part of the power of the term is that it resists modification.

I’ve watched the video. In its own way, it is just as much a pessimistic, self-fulfilling prophecy as Ezra Klein’s “7 reasons America will fail on climate change.” We know what we need to do to avoid catastrophic warming — quickly embrace a series of policies (at a national and global level) including a carbon price that drive emissions down sharply decade after decade. The good news is that the world’s leading governments and scientists and energy experts have explained that this strategy is cheap (far cheaper than inaction), and that we have the technology to start ASAP. Oh, and deployment-driven innovation will keep providing new and better and cheaper technology.
It is certainly a legitimate view to argue that the nation (and the world) aren’t up to that task, as Klein and Revkin do. But it is Orwellian to climate that making such an argument is optimistic and not self-fulfilling. That’s especially true if your recommended alternative is to basically give up (Klein) or to abandon quantitative targets and embrace personal growth and some R&D (Revkin).
As Hamilton writes:

The advocates of the “good Anthropocene” do not attempt to repudiate the mass of scientific evidence; instead they choose to reframe it. As you declare so disarmingly in your talk: “You can look at it and go ‘Oh my God’, or you can look at it and go ‘Wow, what an amazing time to be alive!’ I kind of choose the latter overall.”

Talking of a “good Anthropocene” while proposing strategies that can’t possibly achieve it — and while repeatedly attacking those (including the National Academy of Sciences) who propose strategies that could — is the road to a very, very bad Anthropocene. In jargon-free terms, it is the road to Hell and High Water.
The phrase “good Anthropocene” as some are using it, is a euphemism as Orwellian as “enhanced interrogation.” As Hamilton puts it:

… the “good Anthropocene” is a story about the world that could have been written by the powerful interests that have got us into this mess and who are fighting so effectively to prevent us from getting out of it. In the long term this kind of thinking will prove more insidious than climate science denial.

The eco-pragmatists, as Hamilton calls them, never offer any set of specific proposals that any credible group of independent experts has said could possibly keeps us far from 7 °F warming (the end of modern civilization as we know it) — let alone the unimaginable 10+°F. All they offer is the euphemism, hand-waving, and sheer cloudy vagueness Orwell warned about.
Revkin tweets: “I trust those bridling at vision of a “good” #Anthropocene aren’t hoping for bad one. http://nyti.ms/1qdcd0F @CliveCHamilton @ElizKolbert.”
Seriously. Hamilton and Kolbert have dedicated themselves to informing the public about the worst impacts — and how to avoid them. Kolbert’s terrific 2006 book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, famously ends, “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”
That kind of clarity is what we are missing from the current discussion. The climate debate isn’t about what people are “hoping for” — it is about the kind of future that we are choosing through our climate policy. So far we have chosen poorly.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/06/19/3450400/orwell-language-good-anthropocene/

The Brutally Dishonest Attacks On Showtime’s Landmark Series On Climate Change

by Joe Romm, Climate Progress, April 9, 2014

Percent of Americans Who Believe the Effects of Global Warming Have Already Begun to Happen, by Political Ideology, from McCright and Dunlap

The good news is the video of episode one of Showtime’s climate series, “Years Of Living Dangerously,” has been getting great reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere.

The bad news is the Times has published an error-riddled hit-job op-ed on the series that is filled with myths at odds with both the climate science and social science literature. For instance, the piece repeats the tired and baseless claim that Al Gore’s 2006 movie “An Inconvenient Truth” polarized the climate debate, when the peer-reviewed data says the polarization really jumped in 2009 (see chart above from “The Sociological Quarterly”).

As I said, “Years Of Living Dangerously” — the landmark 9-part Showtime docu-series produced by the legendary James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jerry Weintraub — has been getting great reviews. Andy Revkin, often a critic of climate messaging, wrote in the NY Times Monday:

… a compellingly fresh approach to showing the importance of climate hazards to human affairs, the role of greenhouse gases in raising the odds of some costly and dangerous outcomes and — perhaps most important — revealing the roots of the polarizing divisions in society over this issue….

George Marshall, “an expert on climate and communication,” — who is also often a critic of climate messaging — wrote me:

What impressed me about the two episodes I watched was the respect that it showed to conservatives, evangelicals and ordinary working people…. it is still the best documentary I have seen.

The New York Times op-ed is from the founders of the Breakthrough Institute — the same group where political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr., is a Senior Fellow. It pushes the same argument that Pielke made in his fivethirtyeight piece — which was so widely criticized and debunked that Nate Silver himself admitted its myriad flaws and ran a debunking piece by an MIT climate scientist.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, two widely debunked eco-critics who run The Breakthrough Institute (TBI), begin by asserting “IF you were looking for ways to increase public skepticism about global warming, you could hardly do better than the forthcoming nine-part series on climate change and natural disasters, starting this Sunday on Showtime.” But they never cite anything other than the trailer in making their case, dismissing the entire enterprise on the basis of 2 minutes of clips!

They base their entire argument on a misrepresentation of climate science and a misrepresentation of social science. They assert:

“But claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global warming simply can’t be supported by the science.”

I asked one of the country’s top climatologist, Michael Mann, to respond to that, and he replied:

The statement is disingenuous, very carefully worded to imply doubt where there is none. The term “the latest” is used as a sleight of hand. Of course, we don’t attribute individual meteorological events to climate change in a purely causal manner, because the link is statistical. It is like the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, or the link between a baseball player taking steroids and the number of home runs he hits in the season. We don’t talk about any one home run being caused by the steroids. Its the wrong question, the wrong framing. We know that statistically, the player hit more home runs because of the steroids. And, analogously, we know that we’re seeing more severe and prolonged heat waves and drought, extreme flooding, and more devastating hurricanes, because of human-caused climate change. Just the opposite of what the authors appear to want you to think.

We need good faith discussions of climate risks in leading media outlets like the New York Times. To quote Winston Churchill, we’re living in an age of consequences. There is no room for misleading screeds which seem intended at distracting and confusing the public about human-caused climate change at a time when it poses a critical threat to our planet.

In fact, the show isn’t about “the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane.” It does show the impact of some specific record-breaking extreme weather events that have been documented in the scientific literature to have been worsened by climate change (as I discusshere). These include the Hurricane Sandy storm surge, the record Texas drought and heat wave of 2011, and the drying out of the Mediterranean, particularly Syria.

TBI’s Nordhaus and Shellenberger assert of human-caused warming, “there is little evidence that this warming is increasing the loss of life or the economic costs of natural disasters.” If that argument sounds both very familiar but wrong, that’s because it is. TBI Senior Fellow Roger Pielke, Jr. made the same exact argument in his opening piece for Nate Silver’s website fivethirtyeight, which quickly became one of the most debunked posts of the year.

Climate scientists and others so thoroughly refuted the piece that Nate Silver himselfadmitted its myriad flaws bus and ran a response piece by MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel eviscerating Pielke.

Why the NY Times would publish an article pushing such a widely debunked scientific thesis is truly inexplicable.

Then we have the article’s untenable social science. The authors assert that one reason we know that “Years Of Living Dangerously” will fail is:

Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” popularized the idea that today’s natural disasters are increasing in severity and frequency because of human-caused global warming. It also contributed to public backlash and division.

As an important aside, back in October 2007, the authors took a completely different view of the effect of Gore’s move: “Consider that despite extensive publicity, Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth,” had almost no impact on public opinion. Seriously.

TBI bases its claims on a few cherry-picked polling results, which appear to justify whatever conclusions they want to push. Unsurprisingly, the peer-reviewed social science literature concludes differently. The McCright and Dunlap study cited above makes crystal clear that the polarization jumped in 2009, long after Gore’s 2006 movie. If anything, that chart suggests polarization decreased after the movie.

I asked Prof. Robert Brulle, whom the NY Times has called “an expert on environmental communications,” about TBI’s assertion. He replied:

This editorial ignores the peer reviewed analysis of the impact of An Inconvenient Truth. This research clearly shows that polarization in Congress declined and concern about climate change increased during the period surrounding the release of this movie.

As evidence, Brulle directed me to his detailed 2012 study on the subject (discussed here), which aggregates data from 6 different polling organizations precisely to avoid the kinds of mistakes so commonly found in hand-waving op-eds.

The bottom line is that there just is no polling data or social science scholarship to support the charge that Al Gore’s movie began the polarization of the climate debate — and there is much polling data and scholarship to the contrary. I’ve asked many leading experts on social science and public opinion — including Stanford’s Jon Krosnick as well as McCright and Dunlap, authors of “The politicization of climate change and polarization in the American public’s views of global warming, 2001–2010″ — and they all agree the data don’t support this myth. Can we kill it once and for all?

The rest of TBI’s analysis of what they call “a fear-based approach” to messaging is also flawed. They assert:

In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.

As I explained at the time, that study, if it proves anything, finds that the strongest possible science-based messaging is effective. Climate hawks should feel confident explaining to the public as clearly as possible the dire consequences if we fail to take action to reduce emissions together with the myriad cost-effective solutions available today that make averting catastrophe so cheap compared to the alternative.

TBI also cites a 2009 study in the journal Science Communication as making their case against the 9-part TV series they haven’t seen. Yet that study has this key finding:

The results demonstrate that communications approaches that take account of individuals’ personal points of reference (e.g., based on an understanding and appreciation of their values, attitudes, beliefs, local environment, and experiences) are more likely to meaningfully engage individuals with climate change.

I was not one of the producers of the show, but I have worked with them long enough to know that that sentence sums up their guiding philosophy. As George Marshall says, he thinks YEARS is the best climate documentary he’s seen in this regard.

I asked Revkin, who has generally been sympathetic to TBI, whether he stood by his positive review of the show. You can read his full response here. He sums up:

The bottom line? Episode 1 works. There’s more challenging terrain ahead in the series. I wish you all luck in navigating it and I see your effort as well worth trying.

The producers behind this series learned their craft at 60 Minutes and have 18 Emmys between them. They are the finest journalists I know, and they know how to tell stories “that take account of individuals’ personal points of reference.”

I hope that you will withhold judgment until they have had a chance to blow you away with what they have done, starting with Episode 1, which you can watch here.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/09/3424593/showtime-years-dangerously-response/

Eli Rabett: The Mysterious Mr. Revkin

by Eli Rabett, Rabett Run, April 9, 2014

With all the goings on, Eli was poking through Dot Earth, you know, today's edition where Andy Revkin is against "Years of Living Dangerously" after he was for "Years of Living Dangerously."

The background to that is the Breakthrough Boys are against it and with someone perhaps to be named later in an interesting way, managed to jackhammer their hate it into the New York Times Op-Ed page.

Well, for one reason or another Eli Yahooed  -Andy Revkin and Breakthrough Institute -, and what do you think came up?

1. The Breakthrough Institute - Andrew Revkin

   thebreakthrough.org/people/profile/andrew-revkin   Cached
   

   Andrew Revkin Environmental writer, The Times. Download Hi-Resolution Picture. Andrew C. Revkinis an American, non-fiction, science and environmental writer.

Interesting said the Bunny, and followed the link.  Well, what do you know, a picture of Mr. Fair and Balanced with a blurb:

This file is in the part of the Breakthrough Institute web site which gives little bios of the Breakthrough People, folks like Roger Pielke, Jr., Dan Sarewitz, Bruno LaTour, bunnies know the types, but you only find Andy's Page (btw, Eli has a webcite) hanging out there without a link to it. 

Now, some, not Eli to be sure, might think that it a bit curious that Andy Revkin flacks for the Breakthrough Guys on a NY Times Blog.  Others might ask why he did not disclose in the post that he is or was one of the Breakthrough People, although evidently under deep cover.  That there might be a bit of a conflict of interest even if it were printed in a deep footnote on some obscure web page.

Still others are wondering why Andy is truncating comments that have already been posted on the current post with extreme prejudice, you know the ones that call him, Teddy and Mike S out for their acts.  Perhaps some of those questions are now answered.

Eli has inquired of the New York Times Public Editor.  Perhaps she will reply.

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-mysterious-mr-revkin.html

Activist vs. Inactivist: David Roberts calls out Revkin’s ‘Handwaving’ on climate and Keystone

a guest post by David Roberts on Climate Progress, February 20, 2013

Sometimes a debunking piece is so good it saves me the trouble. Funny how often those pieces are written by Dave Roberts. I’ll add some thoughts of my own at the end — JR.

The virtues of being unreasonable on Keystone

by Dave Roberts, via Grist

I know Andy Revkin of The New York Times writes posts like this in part to bait people like me. But like Popeye, I yam what I yam. So consider me baited. Self-proclaimed moderates want to lecture anti-Keystone XL activists that they are “distracting” and “counterproductive,” without spelling out what the hell that means, yet they seem bewildered when that makes the activists in question angry.

Let’s review. This weekend, close to 50,000 people gathered for the biggest rally ever against climate change, a threat Revkin acknowledges is enormous, difficult, and urgent. Revkin and his council of wonks took to Twitter to argue that the rally and the campaign behind it are misdirected, absolutist, confused, and bereft of long-term strategy. They had this familiar conversation as the rally was unfolding.

As a result, Revkin suffered the grievous injury of a frustrated tweet from Wen Stephenson, a journalist who has crossed over to activism. This gave the wounded Revkin the opportunity to write yet another lament on the slings and arrows that face the Reasonable Man. He faced down the scourge of single-minded “my way or the highway environmentalism,” y’all, but don’t worry, he’s got a thick skin. He lived to tell the tale.

This is all for the benefit of an elite audience, mind you, for whom getting yelled at by activists is the sine qua non of seriousness. The only thing that boosts VSP cred more is getting yelled at by activists on Both Sides.

So let’s not yell. Instead let’s take a calm look at the Reasonable Revkin take on Keystone activism, representative as it is of a certain VSP consensus. In his post, he says it could be “counterproductive” to focus an activist campaign on the pipeline. I want to dwell on that word for a second, because it’s crucial to his case.

If you want to argue that activists shouldn’t focus on Keystone, you can’t just establish that rallying around and/or blocking Keystone won’t reduce carbon emissions much. So what? Why not try it? Something’s better than nothing, after all. Even if it’s a total waste of time, that may be unproductive, but it’s not counterproductive.

No, you have to establish that the Keystone campaign is impeding or preventing something else better and more effective from happening. That’s what it means to say the Keystone campaign is counterproductive — that it’s detracting from other, superior climate efforts.

What are these other efforts, and how is a focus on Keystone impeding or preventing them? That’s the causal relationship folks like Revkin need to establish to make their case, but they are maddeningly vague about it.

Back before the election, Revkin acknowledged that “the pipeline, in isolation, is not in the national interest,” but “overall,” Obama “should not stand in the way of the pipeline.” Huh? It’s not in the national interest but he should greenlight it? Why? Because “it’s very much in the national interest for Obama to avoid saddling himself with an unnecessary issue that would be easy for his foes to distort into an Obama anti-jobs position.” So Obama should sacrifice the national interest in the name of political positioning. Got it. Time’s Bryan Walsh and Mike Grunwald echoed Revkin’s sentiment, warning that Keystone activists risked empowering Obama’s opposition and getting a Republican elected, which would be way worse for the climate than the pipeline.

A couple things have happened since then. One, Obama got reelected, pretty easily. Two, it’s become clear that literally anything Obama does will be distorted as anti-jobs by congressional Republicans, which is one reason they are so widely hated.

Obama’s reelection is no longer at risk. He’s got nothing to lose and no reason to trim his sails to please an unpleasable opposition. Has that changed Revkin’s calculus? (Or Walsh’s? Or Grunwald’s?) If so, I haven’t heard it.

Instead, we continue to hear vague references to things Obama could be doing if he weren’t stuck with these meddling Keystone kids. Revkin says Keystone is a “distraction.” (Distracting whom? What would they be doing if they weren’t distracted? He doesn’t say.) Professional wanker Matt Nisbet says it “distracts” and “limits” Obama’s ability to broker a deal. (A deal on what? With whom? He doesn’t say.) Michael Levi says it makes 60 Senate votes for a price on carbon less likely. (Less likely than impossible?) I could cite a dozen more examples, people casually accusing Keystone activism of impeding or draining energy from other solutions.

What is this good-faith bipartisan progress just waiting to happen if only activists weren’t being unreasonable about Keystone? What do the VSPs have to offer? I don’t see it. I see self-pleasuring dreams of bipartisan Grand Bargains with no awareness of changed political circumstances. I see visions of elite-driven incrementalism with no sense of the ticking clock. I see, above all, the elitist instinct that activists should pipe down, quit being so darn angry and unreasonable, and let the Serious People sit down and work it out together in a spirit of comity and mutual respect. There’s no reason to drag politics into politics, after all.

Revkin himself was asked directly about his alternative strategy. He waved his hands at a seven-part video and a homily.

Keep in mind, these nebulous alternatives — brokered deals, deep thoughts on global energy poverty, China something something — are supposed to outweigh the benefits of drawing 50,000 (mostly young) people together to express their passion on climate change, and possibly to impede or block the continued development of an enormously carbon-intensive energy source.

Intensity wins in politics, as I’ve said many times before, even if — Levi’s unreasonable demand notwithstanding — its effects cannot be easily predicted. There are benefits to an activated, impassioned constituency and the social and political machinery that brings them together in large numbers. It’s what the right has: an intense core, fighting on behalf of the status quo (using the status quo’s money), that has captured one of America’s two political parties. It’s what the fight against climate change does not yet have: an intense core, fighting on behalf of social and political change, with at least one political party that is scared to cross it.

Intensity is built through conflict, through the drawing of political and moral lines. That’s what activists like Bill McKibben are trying to do, with activist logic, not wonk logic, taking advantage of symbolism and opportunity. If there’s some other groundswell for change from which those efforts are “distracting,” I haven’t heard about it.

Revkin seems preoccupied with the fact that Keystone is part of larger systems and not particularly significant in light of that context. And it’s true: Everything is insignificant in light of some larger context. Climate change is a “wicked problem,” which means that everything passing as a solution will be flawed, partial, and impermanent. What to do? We are rapidly losing ground, on the verge of locking in a trajectory scientists tell us will lead to disastrous and irreversible consequences. We can sit around and fill our blogs with reasons why this or that solution is the wrong one, inferior to some better one that we’d already have, goldarnit, if those meddling pushers-of-other-solutions weren’t “distracting” from ours. We can fall in love with the ineffable intellectual tangle, as Revkin has, and accept that anything specific enough to build an activist campaign around will be meaningless in the context of global energy demand and emissions. We can read the Serenity Prayer and get used to the fact that it’s all out of our hands anyway.

But some people want to fight! Some people actually haul themselves out from behind their keyboards, call a bunch of friends, put on warm clothes, and go stomp around in public yelling about it. These are the folks throwing sand in the social gears, the ones trying to wrest the levers of power out of hostile hands. As a professional word-typer, like Revkin, I have come to believe that those people deserve a certain level of respect and forbearance. Maybe shouting advice down to them from the bloggy heights isn’t as helpful as we word-typers are inclined to think. At least we could refrain from pissing on them while they’re rallying.

No one wants to shut down discussion, insist on One True Way to sustainability, or banish Revkin to “the highway.” Those are strawmen. I admire Revkin immensely as a reporter, like him as a person, and would love nothing more than to see him and Phil Aroneanu play banjo together. We can disagree without ill will.

The argument of Keystone protestors is not that there’s One True Way, but that eventually there has to be some way. Somebody’s got to start taking these dire warnings seriously and do something, something specific and concrete. You can’t support Doing Something but oppose Doing This Particular Thing forever. Sooner or later, people have to draw lines and take sides. Progress does not happen without struggle.

Maybe Keystone isn’t the right line. Maybe the next line won’t be the right one either. But the longer folks like Revkin hover over such fights at an ironic distance, never quite satisfied with this target, or that spokesperson, or this policy, or that strategy, the more they’re going to get blowback from people gripped by a sense that there’s not a lot of time left to fuck around and at the very least we have to stop making it worse. The ranks of such people are growing. At some point, dithering over incrementalism in the imaginary center will come to be seen as a failure of moral clarity and judgment. I wouldn’t want to be the last person dug into that trench.

The situation calls for large-scale, rapid, systemic change. That kind of change doesn’t happen when wonks and bloggers agree on the perfect solution and achieve multiple PDFs. It happens when people put their asses on the line and fight. It happens when power shifts.

Editor’s note: Bill McKibben serves on Grist’s board of directors.

– Dave Roberts

What follows is a Climate Progress Editor’s note: Roberts’ piece redoubles my belief that attacking those who propose various forms of climate action and activism is little more than hand-waving IF the critic has not spelled out what their emissions or temperature target is and how to get there (see “Study Confirms Optimal Climate Strategy: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy, R&D, Deploy, Deploy, Deploy“ – not in that order):

Revkin continues to this day to only endorse his vague R&D-focused “energy quest” and criticize those of us (including the National Academy of Sciences) who push for strong emissions reductions starting now.  Since Revkin refuses to tell us what level of concentrations he thinks the world should aim for – even a broad range, say 450 ppm to 550 ppm — he retains the luxury of attacking those who are willing to state what their target is while maintaining a faux high ground that they are being politically unrealistic while he can pretend his essentially do-nothing do-little* strategy is scientifically or morally viable, which it ain’t….

* The asterisk of mine above is because science journalist John Rennie has written: “I’ll differ from Joe in that I don’t consider Andy’s favored approach to be a do-nothing strategy: a quest for cleaner, more affordable energy would be scientifically and morally desirable for plenty of reasons, and it would almost certainly help to reduce future warming eventually. The problem is, there’s a very good chance it would do too little, too late.”  Point taken.  It is a “do-little” strategy.

As Roberts notes, Revkins recommends this hand-waving (jaw-dropping?) strategy for green groups:

1. Watch ’03 Smalley talk: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnf4Z6Yq17hTjScHB52Or5rCqrOi20EFh … 2. Assess with Serenity Prayer in mind. pic.twitter.com/pE4jEttW

A 7-part video on the values of R&D from ten years ago? Seriously. I have also strongly endorsed the value of expanding R&D in numerous pieces — 20 years ago. Smalley died in 2005, so he isn’t around anymore to say whether even he thinks what made sense in 2003 still makes sense in 2013 as a primary strategy given how the science and emissions have advanced. Oh and do assess with the Serenity Prayer in mind:

God, grant me the … serenity to accept the things I cannot change … Courage to change the things I can …  And wisdom to know the difference.

Problem solved. See, if only we were wise enough to realize that the problem can only be solved by watching a 10-year-old video, then we’d stop wasting our time trying to do things like cut emissions now or keep large pools of carbon in the ground.

Note to Revkin: The full Serenity Prayer is perhaps even less relevant for the task at hand. And given how many gazillion folks have tweeted out the short version of the Serenity prayer — 280 in the last 24 hours (I counted), which is 100,000 a year! — it’s a wonder we have any climate problem at all…. Oh I forgot, they didn’t watch that darn 2003 video….

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/02/20/1613381/activist-vs-inactivist-roberts-calls-out-revkins-handwaving-on-climate-and-keystone/