Joe Romm: The Really Awful Truth About Climate Change

by Joe Romm, Climate Progress, May 18, 2015

Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in a scene from the movie “The Awful Truth.” (AP Photo)

So Vox ran a story Friday, “The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit” by former Grist columnist Dave Roberts. While I’m a longtime fan of Roberts, the piece is filled with inaccurate and misleading statements, historical revisionism, and a fatally flawed premise.

The premise comes from an equally flawed commentary in Nature, “Policy: Climate advisers must maintain integrity” in which German analyst Oliver Geden argues that climate scientists (and others) have been “spreading false optimism,” about our chances of stabilizing below 2°C total global warming. Geden’s piece has drawn significant criticism from scientists on BuzzFeed, ClimateWire, and here, as Roberts notes.

But Roberts asserts, “the heated reactions elicited by Geden’s piece do show that he’s on to something.” Dave, Dave, Dave, if heated reactions proved someone is “on to something,” then I guess Fox News is fair and balanced after all….

So what is “The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit”? Roberts asserts that no one wants to admit “The obvious truth about global warming is this: barring miracles, humanity is in for some awful shit.”

No. And by “no” I mean that, setting aside the vagueness of the word “miracles,” lots of people have been saying in recent years that humanity faces some awful shit if we don’t don’t adopt super-aggressive action ASAP. But they have not been saying it’s scientifically hopeless or requires religious miracles — since that isn’t true, though it seems to be what Geden and Roberts want them to be saying.

No, the really awful truth about climate change is that while climate scientists, the International Energy Agency, and many others have been increasingly blunt about how dire our situation is — and what needs to be done ASAP to avoid catastrophe — much of the so-called intelligentsia keep ignoring them.

The most recent example comes in a report out earlier this month from 70 leading climate experts (click here). The parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (aka the world’s leading nations) set up a “structured expert dialogue” from 2013 to 2015 to review the adequacy of the 2°C target. Early this month, the experts reported back. Thoughtfully, they simplified their key conclusions into 10 core messages. Among them:

• Message 1: “Parties to the Convention agreed on an upper limit for global warming of 2°C, and science has provided a wealth of information to support the use of that goal.” Incorporating concerns about ocean acidification and sea level rise, “only reinforces the basic finding emerging from the analysis of the temperature limit,namely that we need to take urgent and strong action to reduce GHG emissions” (emphasis in original).
• Message 2 (again, original emphasis): “Limiting global warming to below 2°C necessitates a radical transition (deep decarbonization now and going forward),not merely a fine tuning of current trends.”
Yeah, scientists just love to spread false optimism.
• Message 4: “Significant climate impacts are already occurring at the current level of global warming” (which is about 0.85°C) and so additional “warming will only increase the risk of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts. Therefore, the ‘guardrail’ concept, which implies a warming limit that guarantees full protection from dangerous anthropogenic interference, no longer works.“
• Message 5: “The 2°C limit should be seen as a defence line … that needs to be stringently defended, while less warming would be preferable.”
• Message 6 (from the 2014 IPCC mitigation report): “Limiting global warming to below 2 °C is still feasible and will bring about many co-benefits, but poses substantial technological, economic and institutional challenges.”

I reviewed all the mitigation literature in my January post, “It’s Not Too Late To Stop Climate Change, And It’ll Be Super-Cheap.”

Again, no one is saying it would be easy, but it is straightforward, and the literature couldn’t be clearer on how low-cost it is. Geden asserts, “The climate policy mantra — that time is running out for 2 °C but we can still make it if we act now — is a scientific nonsense.” Even Roberts points out, “No. It may be a nonsense, but it’s not a scientific nonsense. No branch of science, certainly not climatology, can tell us what the humans of 2050 are capable of.”

Almost. Thank goodness these pundits weren’t around when we had to do somethingreally difficult, like suffer millions of casualties and remake our entire economy almost overnight to win World War II.

It may well be true that policymakers are unlikely to do what is scientifically, technologically, and economically possible (and morally necessary). But what precisely would Geden have climate scientists tell policymakers — “You folks can’t stop unimaginable catastrophe because you’re simply too greedy and myopic so we’re not even going to tell you how you could do it?” In fact, Geden never tells us what he thinks the advice should be nor what target he would recommend to policymakers (which makes his piece mostly a time-waster).

Note: Geden conflates climate scientists with climate advisers, so he can make it sound like climate scientists are overly optimistic about our ability to hit the 2C target. Even today, most climate scientists didn’t consider themselves experts on energy technology or economic analysis or policy — their job in the IPCC was to tell policymakers what the science says will happen if we act and if we don’t. The job of economists, energy experts, and their ilk has been to tell policymakers what different scenarios entail and how much they would cost, which turns out to be virtually nothing in the 2C case.

Again, that doesn’t mean 2C is easy to do or that we will do it — just that if we ever got off of our asses the way the Greatest Generation did, it would require us to invest only a smidgen of our wealth to make the transition, and we’d be paid back again and again in productivity gains and health gains and energy security gains. And of course there’s that whole not destroying a livable climate thing.

The reality of the transition is no longer theoretical. Last fall, China pledged to “increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 20% by 2030.” That “will require China to deploy an additional 800-1,000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar, and other zero emission generation capacity by 2030 — more than all the coal-fired power plants that exist in China today and close to total current electricity generation capacity in the United States.”

Over the next 15 years, the Chinese will build enough clean electricity to power America. So how exactly is it “nonsense” to think the U.S., EU, or even India could not do the same over, say, twice as much time? Answer: It isn’t.

Here’s Message 8 from the world’s leading climate experts: “The world is not on track to achieve the long-term global goal, but successful mitigation policies are known and must be scaled up urgently.”

Such Polyannas, these climate experts.

Roberts writes of Geden’s piece, “Politicians, he says, want good news. They want to hear that it is still possible to limit temperature to 2°C. Even more, they want to hear that they can do so while avoiding aggressive emission cuts in the near-term — say, until they’re out of office.”

This is no doubt true of many politicians, yet last year the entire EU pledged to cut total emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, which is pretty aggressive. And last month, Governor Jerry Brown (D-CA) issued an executive order setting the same goal for California.

But it’s where Roberts (and Geden) leap next that bears scrutiny:

Climate scientists, Geden says, feel pressure to provide the good news. They’re worried that if they don’t, if they come off as “alarmist” or hectoring, they will simply be ignored, boxed out of the debate. And so they construct models showing that it is possible to hit the 2°C target. The message is always, “We’re running out of time; we’ve only got five or 10 years to turn things around, but we can do it if we put our minds to it.”

That was the message in 1990, in 2000, in 2010. How can we still have five or 10 years left? The answer, Geden says, is that scientists are baking increasingly unrealistic assumptions into their models.

No, no, and not quite. This is a complete revision of history.

Climate scientists were not saying in 1990, “we’ve only got five or 10 years to turn things around.” Read the IPCC’s Overview of its 1990 First Assessment Report here. Warning: It’s a yawner.

But that’s no surprise since the UNFCCC wasn’t even negotiated and ratified until 1992. That treaty’s goal was to set up an international process to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [human-caused] interference with the climate system.” The UNFCCC did not define what that level was at the time. It wouldn’t officially pick 2°C for almost two decades!

And so climate scientists were not saying in 2000, “we’ve only got five or 10 years to turn things around.” Read the IPCC’s entire 2001 Third Assessment Report here. Another yawner.

There are, however, two specific and synergistic reasons why scientists became increasingly concerned during the 2000s.

First, in that decade, Chinese emissions soared, taking us off of more moderate pathways that scientists had been anticipating. You can see that in a chart Roberts posts.

Historical emissions have of late been tracking RCP8.5, catastrophic 4°C warming. But until 2000, emissions were tracking scenarios of much less warming

CREDIT: GLOBAL CARBON PROJECT

Second, at the very end of the 2000s, the world community finally settled on 2°C as the threshold for dangerous warming, which meant CO2 levels in the air needed to be stabilized below 450 parts per million. That consensus, as many people have explained, solidified with the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report.

That’s why, for instance, in 2004, when Princeton Professors published a landmark paper in Science, “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies,” they wrote: “Proposals to limit atmospheric CO2 to a concentration that would prevent most damaging climate change have focused on a goal of 500 +/- 50 parts per million (ppm).”

So it was only around late 2007 that people paying very close attention, like climate scientists, could see that (1) emissions were veering onto a worse case scenario track (2) just as a scientific and political consensus was forming around the need to set the bar at 2°C, which was now starting to look like a best-case scenario.

That’s why in 2010, a previously reticent Lonnie Thompson explained why previously reticent climatologists had begun speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.” It’s why, when I launched Climate Progress nine years ago, I created a category called “uncharacteristically blunt scientists.”

But again, it wasn’t actually until December 2010 that the parties to the UNFCCC officially adopted 2°C as the upper limit.

Besides climate scientists, many other climate advisers were becoming increasingly blunt, such as the International Energy Agency, which warned in 2009 “The world will have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delays implementing a major assault on global warming.”

Their 2011 World Energy Outlook [WEO] release should have ended once and for any notion that climate advisors were pulling their punches. The U.K. Guardian’s (misleading) headline captured the urgency: “World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns … If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change.”

Half right. Yes, rapid change is needed. But the IEA did not say the climate change would be irreversible in five years. They wrote:

If internationally co-ordinated action is not taken by 2017, we project that all permissible emissions in the 450 Scenario would come from the infrastructure then existing, so that all new infrastructure from then until 2035 would need to be zero-carbon, unless emitting infrastructure is retired before the end of its economic lifetime to make headroom for new investment. This would theoretically be possible at very high cost, but is probably not practicable politically.

Yes, shutting down existing fossil fuel infrastructure is much more costly than not building it in the first place. It is politically difficult (see U.S. coal plants), but it also happens all the time (see U.S. and China coal plants).

Everything about the 450 (or lower) scenario is politically difficult as I (and many others) have been saying for years. In one 2008 post, “Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 1,” I answered the headline question, “Not today — not even close.”

People can use the political difficulty of averting catastrophe as a reason to express hopelessness if they think that is productive, but don’t try to pin this on climate scientists or climate advisors.

There’s an old saying “it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness” that is based on a Chinese proverb, “Don’t curse the darkness – light a candle.”

But it turns out there is a third option. You can curse the candle lighters, maybe because you have your eyes closed. And that’s the really awful truth.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/05/18/3644824/really-awful-truth-about-climate-change/

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/

David Roberts: Why coal has a hit on “America’s Got Talent”

by David Roberts, Grist, July 22, 2013

America’s Got Talent is watched by around 10 million people a week. On Tuesday, Jimmy Rose, a former coal miner and Iraq War vet, appeared on the show to sing an original song, “Coal Keeps the Lights On”:

This is an extraordinary cultural artifact, for all sorts of reasons. There are lessons in here for social change agents in general and climate hawks in particular.

First off: It is genuinely affecting! Not least because Jimmy Rose has the kind of deep Appalachian accent and adenoidal, high-lonesome voice you don’t hear much in country music these days. It brings to mind lots of other amazing music out of that tradition. And of course lyrics about a hard-working man watching over his family can hardly fail to tug the heartstrings, even if “clothes on their back and shoes on their feet” might not be the most original turn of phrase. He sells it.

But the segment also draws a great deal of power from the larger narratives and tropes it evokes. It’s pure Americana: Rose served in the military, which makes him an object of instant, bipartisan adoration in the post-9/11 world. He’s got the twang. He’s got Pineville, Ky., which to these hyper-groomed L.A. judges might as well be another planet. He’s got the anti-style haircut and the fish-out-of-water family. He’s got a dream. And he’s got a history as a coal miner. It’s all of a piece.

What’s fascinating to me, and significant for climate hawks, is how the coal mining piece fits into that larger tapestry.

On the show, before he starts singing, Rose emphasizes twice how dangerous coal mining is — even says he joined the Marines and deployed to Iraq to escape it. Yet the implicit message is not that coal mining is a crappy job or that coal companies are neglectful, inconsiderate employers. Instead the job is presented as a kind of heroism: Rose went underground, put himself in danger, so that he could feed his family and keep the lights on for the rest of us. It’s a kind of national service, an analogue to his stint in the military: These are the guys who work and suffer so that the rest of us can live in luxury. Heroes. It’s powerful stuff, clearly enough to get the crowd rooting for him.

Why does coal mining evoke these kinds of feelings? One obvious explanation is that working-class guys are taking a battering all over the country, not just in Appalachia. Coal mining is hard, dangerous work, but it’s honest work, available to anyone willing to do it, and it can — or could — support a family. Those kinds of jobs have been steadily disappearing for decades. Now America is a land of knowledge workers and service workers, ever-increasing inequality and ever-decreasing social mobility. That kind of economy can work, at least for a while, for large urban areas with lots of knowledge workers to service, but it’s hell on places like Pineville (or Detroit) that relied entirely on decent-paying working-class jobs. Lots of people around the country understand the anger and loss in places like eastern Kentucky even if they don’t share all the cultural signifiers.

But still … with all sorts of workers in all sorts of industries being displaced by automation and economic shifts, why do coal miners elicit such a unique emotional response? We make furniture faster and safer by replacing builders with robots, but few would argue that we should make furniture more slowly or less safely by preserving those jobs. Those builder jobs “put food on the table” also, but it’s not viewed de facto cause to prevent factory automation. We don’t necessarily like it, but we accept in practice that progress means creative destruction and that some people inevitably get screwed. (Indeed, that’s why liberals support a social safety net.)

When it comes to cleaning up and modernizing the power sector — a sector that has resisted substantial innovation for over half a century — we collectively abandon that frame and adopt another one. Coal mining jobs, unlike furniture factory jobs, are seen as intrinsically ennobling, not just a job but a way of life. This quote in National Journal is telling:

“When you attack guns and coal, you’re attacking what they in the mountains consider their birthright,” said Jim Cauley, a Democratic strategist and Kentucky native who managed President Obama’s campaign for U.S. Senate in 2004. “They’ll feel like you’re attacking their culture.”

Coal has been woven into the fabric of Appalachian life for more than a century. It’s not a job, it’s a cultural identity. That’s the nut of it.

Such is the difficulty for progressives. It’s not just that the status quo has more money, it has more stories, deeper-rooted and more broadly resonant. Novel narratives about, say, “green jobs” do not have the same emotional depth. There is no history, there are no archetypes on which to draw. Coal evokes a rich oral, musical, and cultural legacy.

That’s why the Republican Party has people like Jimmy Rose locked up, despite its relentless support for the very policies that hurt his socioeconomic cohort and make the rich richer. Democrats promise the working class policies that will help them adapt to change — education and job training and a safety net. Republicans promise to stand athwart history and prevent further losses. It’s not about the policies, it’s about the stories, stories of a nobler past and the interlopers degrading or destroying it. Such stories have always had great power.

Democrats, or at least liberals, and especially climate hawks, are fated to forever be pushing the new, promising the future, projecting what could be. It’s an intrinsically weaker position and highlights the great need for creativity and storytelling. Can you even imagine someone in Jimmy Rose’s position singing a song about solar power that brings an audience to its feet?

BLABBY ADDENDUM:

For those of you with longer attention spans, let me share a few more cynical comments on the show.

First, the aesthetics of spontaneous discovery (from out of nowhere, a Heartland Hero!) are just that, aesthetics, and they are not left to chance. This segment has been planned, polished, and scripted to a fare-thee-well, carefully assembled for maximum audience stimulation. Every one of the tropes on display, from his haircut to his clothes to his family to his song, was chosen and crafted to support the story.

And those tropes are targeted squarely at a particular demographic: conservative Americans, mostly white Southerners. A prime-time show like this wants to appeal to everyone, including Real Americans who love coal, love Appalachia, and hate “Obama and the treehuggers,” as the first commenter on this YouTube video puts it. Their intensity and numbers during the Obama years have convinced the entertainment industry that they are both a target demo and a source of perverse fascination (see: Honey Boo-Boo). Real Americans can take heart in the fact that TV executives are now manipulating them into buying Snapple just like the rest of us.

Second, if Rose had stayed in the coal mine he probably would have gotten black lung, assuming he avoided injury, given Kentucky coal’s abysmal safety record. That man in the song, working two shifts in the mine to feed his family? He’ll likely have trouble breathing by the time he’s 50, and the sons he cared for will be faced with the financial and emotional burden of his long-term health care (ailing coal companies have a way of welshing on their workers’ pensions).

Third, the man in the song may well have lost his job already. Just last year the James River Coal company, headquartered in Pineville, laid off 400 employees. Coal mining jobs are indeed vanishing in eastern Kentucky, where 4,000 jobs were wiped out last year, but Obama’s “war on coal” has very little to do with it. The main culprits, writes the AP, are “declining reserves, higher production costs and competition from other coal basins [mainly the Powder River Basin] and natural gas.”

Fourth, a larger point I and others have made many times, coal mining has stripped Appalachia of hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine, biodiverse forest, defiled its water, air, and land, and left it economically devastated. Jimmy Rose’s tiny hometown of Pineville had a household median income of $12,435 in 2000 (the latest census numbers I can find) and that was before coal’s recent battering.

It is absolutely true that the loss of more coal jobs will hurt Rose’s family and friends. There’s no sense dodging that point. And there’s no point pretending, at the moment, that anyone can promise coal mining families anything better after the mines shut down. Van Jones is fond of saying that every coal miner should be give a million dollars and a parade: “Thank you for your service; you may retire in honor.” I’m not sure I’ve heard anything better offered to the people of Appalachia, certainly not from their fossil-owned-and-operated legislators.

The coal industry has done virtually nothing over the last century to build the local capital and institutions that Appalachia needs for lasting prosperity. It has sucked the area dry, left it filthy, corrupt, and exhausted. Now it’s using the suffering of its workers to scapegoat Obama and delay its own obsolescence. Coal companies are bastards. Always have been. [Same goes for the coal companies like Peabody and Arch in southern Illinois -- nothing but devastated land left behind and very high (20%) unemployment.  And then Arch dumped its pension and healthcare obligations into a company set up to go bankrupt, depriving sick and old miners of all benefits.  Is there anything more criminal?]

All this is beside the point, though. You can’t argue with a song. You can’t argue with a feeling: nostalgia and sorrow for what is slipping away, fear at what the future brings. You can only create other feelings.

By way of conclusion, it’s always worth revisiting Machiavelli’s famous quote:

… it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

UNNECESSARY FURTHER ADDENDUM:

In 2011, country-rock artist Neal Spears put out a song called … “Coal Keeps the Lights On.” Here it is:

Pretty good! Certainly much, much better than “Drill Here, Drill Now” by country artist Aaron Tippin:

Hoo boy.

http://grist.org/living/why-coal-has-a-hit-on-americas-got-talent/