arts

‘Extreme Whether’ Explores the Climate Fight as a Family Feud

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In "Extreme Whether," a play on climate change by Karen Malpede, a family feud erupts as a brother in law invested in fossil fuels is confronted by nature-loving relatives. Beatriz Schiller

If you’re in the New York metropolitan region, I encourage you to see “Extreme Whether,” an pioneering and brave effort by playwright and director Karen Malpede to use theater to explore the clashing passions around human-driven global warming and our fossil fuel fixation. There are a few more performances in the play’s initial run at Theater for the New City, many with an invited guest discussing the climate challenge after the show (see the list at the end of this post).

I recently saw the play and spoke afterward. You can see excerpts from my conversation with the audience (and mini concert) below.

“Extreme Whether” is a refreshing experiment in bringing the emerging fictional genre called “cli-fi” to a theatrical stage. (Another example is “2071,” coming next month at the Royal Court Theatre in London.)

Malpede’s play is laced with darkness and humor, even in the double meaning of the word “whether” in the title — which I found nicely reflects the deep uncertainty that still surrounds the worst-case outcomes from the continuing buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The play centers on a fractured family that is a stand-in for the human family writ large. John Bjornson, a crusading climate scientist modeled closely on the retired NASA scientist Jim Hansen, is muzzled by political appointees and betrayed by his twin sister and brother in law — both of whom are blinded to looming environmental danger by their investments in fossil fuels. His foes conspire to drill for gas on a shared family estate. Bjornson, a widower, is buoyed by a student who’s become an important Arctic expert (and his lover), and his nature-loving daughter and an elderly uncle who is the estate caretaker take up arms against the gas-drilling plan.

Survivors grapple with overwhelming heat in an epilogue, but with hints of an alternative future in projected images of wind turbines.

Here are some excerpts:

Read more…

energy

Is There Room for Agreement on the Merits and Limits of Efficient Lighting

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A schoolboy in Zambia's Chadiza district  does his homework with the help of a solar lantern that can provide up to eight hours of light on a single day's charge. Crowdfunding helped finance a project to distribute lights to people living off the grid there. SunnyMoney

There was quite a bit of pushback after The Times ran “The Problem with Energy Efficiency,” an Op-Ed article by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger arguing that LED lighting, while deservedly resulting in a Nobel Prize for inventors of the underlying technology, was not an energy panacea.

Below I’m posting some more criticism, from four researchers focused on energy innovation and climate policy: Inês Azevedo, an associate professor and public policy analyst at Carnegie Mellon University, Kenneth Gillingham, an economist at Yale, David Rapson, an economist at the University of California, Davis, and Gernot Wagner, lead senior economist at the Environmental Defense Fund.

[Insert, 1:10 p.m. | Steve Sorrell, the co-director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex, today offered some support for the prime point made by Shellenberger and Nordhaus here: "Will improved energy efficiency lead to increased energy consumption in the developing world? Quite possibly".]

My goal is to find “room for agreement” on ways to make sure the world gets the most value out of this kind of bright idea with the fewest regrets.

One issue, for me, is that an environment-focused debate centered on kilowatt-hours and greenhouse gas emissions misses the priceless societal value of wider access to cleaner, brighter lighting. My favorite part of the “sustainable energy for all” speech given periodically by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is his recollection of his youth studying by lamp or candle light:

I studied at night by a dim and smoky oil lamp.

 Only when I prepared for examinations was I allowed to use a candle. Candles were considered too expensive to use for ordinary homework.

Imagine how many future leaders now have their books illuminated by LED lights.

Clarifying how much energy “rebound” (expanded energy demand) results from access to more efficient technologies is important, of course. David Owen, the New Yorker writer, dug in on this helpfully in “The Conundrum.” I see the Breakthrough Institute, founded by Shellenberger and Nordhaus after they wrote “The Death of Environmentalism,” as a helpful prod to conventional wisdom on many issues related to technology and the environment. But like many players in this fraught arena, they sometimes frame their positions in ways that create more heat than light (sorry).

Read more...
Climate Change

A Passing: Rick Piltz, a Bush-Era Whistleblower

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In the mid 2000s, Rick Piltz helped expose political interference with the communication of federal climate research. Whistleblower.org

Rick Piltz, a gutsy whistleblower who revealed a pattern of politically torqued rewriting of climate science reports during the first term of President George W. Bush, died early Saturday morning after a fight with cancer.

He worked largely under the radar in his many years in the government climate science bureaucracy, but became a passionate defender of climate science and campaigner for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions as a blogger and speaker after leaving government in 2005.

A healthy democracy needs more people like Piltz. This is just as true under a Democratic administration as it was in the Bush years. (See this 2013 report from the Committee to Protect Journalists to see what I mean.)

As far as I can remember, I first met Piltz in December 2002, at a three-day Washington workshop organized by the Bush administration to chart new directions for research on human-driven climate change. He was a bearish, soft-spoken and bespectacled man with an intensity and focus that took one by surprise.

The Washington meeting was seen by many climate scientists and campaigners as a delaying tactic. Piltz, who had held senior coordinating positions in the U.S. Global Change Research Program since 1995, took me aside and we talked for a long while about what he said was an growing pattern of political interference in the shaping of government climate documents.

Piltz encouraged me to stay in touch, saying that eventually he’d be able to provide concrete evidence.  Read more…

Anthropocene

Never Mind the Anthropocene – Beware the ‘Manthropocene’

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Updated, Oct. 19, 12:16 p.m. | Kate Raworth, who works at the intersection of economics and environmental sustainability, isn’t happy with the composition of the Anthropocene Working Group, which is weighing whether this age of rising human influence on Earth’s operating systems is generating a new geological epoch. After reading my post on the current Berlin meeting of the group, she posted this illustration on Twitter to make her point:

An illustration created by Kate Raworth, a writer focused on the intersection of economics and the environment.

Update, Oct. 19, 12:20 p.m. | There’s been much discussion of the gender question among members of the Anthropocene Working Group, which began in an informal way and is steadily evolving. In an email note, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, the University of Leiscester geologist who is the chairman noted the following:

[W]e do have five women on the AWG (Agnieszka Galuszka, Irka Hajdas, Cath Neal, Mary Scholes, Victoria Smith) — all invited to the meeting — and did have six (Jane Francis, before she asked to step down). So it’s not quite as bad as advertised. We have been alive to this and are working to get closer towards parity, admittedly in our inefficient way (none of us work on the Anthropocene as our day job, if that’s any excuse).

Anthropocene

Does the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans, Deserve a Golden Spike?

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Many boundaries in geological history are demarcated physically with a golden spike in a particular rock layer, as here near Pueblo, Colo. (GSSP is the acronym for Global Stratotype Section and Point.) Brad Sageman, Northwestern University

BERLIN — I just participated in the first face-to-face meeting of the Anthropocene Working Group, a subset of a branch of the International Commission on Stratigraphy examining whether humanity’s growth spurt (in both numbers and resource appetites) has caused sufficient change to Earth systems to leave a discernible trace in layered rocks that will build and endure far into the future.

Here’s another way to frame the question: Have we left the Holocene Epoch — the warm interval since the end of the last ice age some 10,000 years ago — and entered what is increasingly described as a geological epoch or age of our own making? (A 2011 paper, “The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives,” is the best scientific overview; also read this fine Paul Voosen story on the Anthropocene concept.)

As Ian Sample reported in The Guardian, some geologists frown on the idea:  Read more…

David Roberts Questions Naomi Klein’s Capitalism-Focused Climate Quest

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I interviewed the writer Naomi Klein back in 2011, when she used an article in The Nation to lay out the anti-corporate theme that’s now the centerpiece of her new bestseller, “This Changes Everything – Capitalism vs. The Climate.”

David Roberts at Grist has just interviewed her about her book, and his questions deserved much better answers than he got. Here’s a video excerpt: Read more…

arts

Nature Talks Back, and Sounds a Lot like Edward Norton

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Edward Norton provided the voice for the soil in Conservation International's Nature is Speaking campaign. Conservation International

I’m catching up with the “Nature is Speaking” education push by Conservation International, featuring a set of videos in which actors give voice to the oceans, rain forests and other beautiful and bounteous facets of the planet’s sheath of life. The writing is engaging and just a bit edgy and aimed at increasing young people’s awareness that a thriving environment is an underpinning of human wellbeing.

A news release on the videos, citing a 2012 American Psychological Association survey of high school seniors and college freshmen, noted:

Younger Americans are less interested than ever in the environment and taking action to save nature. Only 20 percent of those surveyed from 2000-2009 expressed interest in involving themselves in cleaning up the environment.

Edward Norton is the Soil

One of my favorites is Edward Norton speaking as the soil. The script is below. (I’ve added links to relevant background; it’s the blogger in me.) Read more…

Violence

Can Peru Control the Murderous Resource Rush on its Forest Frontiers?

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Edwin Chota in 2013 at a sawmill with some of the 800 logs that he said were extracted illegally from his community in Peru. Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Six weeks ago, a powerful voice for conservation and governance on Peru’s ragged, violent Amazon rain forest frontier was silenced, adding the name Edwin Chota to the lamentable list of campaigners and others killed around the world in places where a rush for valuable resources takes place in the absence of enforced rules.

Chota, a leader of the Ashaninka Indian village of Saweto near the border with Brazil, was murdered with three companions on Sept. 1.

As Scott Wallace so vividly reported for National Geographic in 2013, Chota was adept at organizing patrols to confront loggers on tribal territory, echoing the work of Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper who similarly fought — and died — just across the border in Brazil in 1988.

A critical issue in the Peruvian forest is land title. “As long as we don’t have title, the loggers don’t respect native ownership,” Chota told Wallace in 2013. “They threaten us. They intimidate. They have the guns.”

And they use them.

As I wrote in the updated edition of “The Burning Season,” my book on Mendes’s life and legacy, Brazil moved assertively in the years following the assassination of Mendes to bring meaningful governance to the Amazon. There is still violence there, but the rate of killings has plunged since the 1980s (and the deforestation rate is way down, as well).

Peru would do well to follow Brazil’s lead.

The longtime Amazon rain forest researcher Tom Lovejoy and former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt just co-wrote an essay for the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo making this point and gave me permission to run the English version here: Read more…

human rights

Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Defenders of Children’s Rights

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The Nobel Peace Prize for 2014 was awarded to two campaigners for children's rights, Kailash Satyarthi of India and Malala Yousafzay of Pakistan. N. Elmehed, Nobel Media 2014

Struggles around the globe to uphold the simplest rights for boys and girls — the right to a childhood, the right to an education — will not end today. Just look to the continuing plight of the kidnapped school girls in Nigeria. But it’s wonderful to see the Nobel Peace Prize bestowed on Malala Yousafzai, the scarred Pakistani defender of a girl’s right to go to school, and Kailash Satyarthi, a longtime Indian campaigner against slave and child labor.

Here’s how the Nobel committee summarized the reasoning behind the award:

Children must go to school and not be financially exploited.  In the poor countries of the world, 60 percent of the present population is under 25 years of age.  It is a prerequisite for peaceful global development that the rights of children and young people be respected.  In conflict-ridden areas in particular, the violation of children leads to the continuation of violence from generation to generation.

Showing great personal courage, Kailash Satyarthi, maintaining Gandhi’s tradition, has headed various forms of protests and demonstrations, all peaceful, focusing on the grave exploitation of children for financial gain.  He has also contributed to the development of important international conventions on children’s rights.

Despite her youth, Malala Yousafzay has already fought for several years for the right of girls to education, and has shown by example that children and young people, too, can contribute to improving their own situations.  This she has done under the most dangerous circumstances.  Through her heroic struggle she has become a leading spokesperson for girls’ rights to education.

The Nobel Committee regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism.

For more on Malala Yousafzay, there’s no better starting point than this 2013 video report for The Times by Gabe Johnson and Adam B. Ellick on “The Making of Malala“:

Adam B. Ellick/The New York Times

Here’s more background on Satyarthi from coverage of the peace prize announcement in The Times:

In India, Mr. Satyarthi, a former engineer, has long been associated with the struggle to free bonded laborers, some born into their condition and others lured into servitude. For decades, he has sought to rid India of child slavery and has liberated more than 75,000 bonded and child laborers in the country.

Mr. Satyarthi began working for children’s rights in 1980 as the general secretary of the Bonded Labor Liberation Front, an organization dedicated to freeing bonded laborers forced to work to pay off debts, real or imagined. He also founded the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or Save the Children Mission, an organization dedicated to ending bonded labor and saving children from trafficking.

It is a good day.

Update, 2:35 p.m. | This beautiful video, related to “A Path Appears,” the book and TV project by Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, shows the effervescent force just waiting to be released when a child is empowered:

innovation

The Long Bright Path to the Nobel Prize for LED Lighting

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From left, the researchers Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for “the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes, which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources.” Randall Lamb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Here’s to the continual intellectual tussles that produce technological leaps like the super-efficient and durable LED light bulbs that are increasingly displacing incandescent and fluorescent bulbs (and sooty kerosene lamps) and garnered a Nobel Prize for three physicists on Tuesday.

Dennis Overbye provides a nice overview of the award in The Times, as does the Nobel Prize website. The physicists, two from Japan and one from the University of California, Santa Barbara, were lauded for creating a blue light-emitting diode in the early 1990s to complement existing red and green diodes (only with those three colors can white light be generated).

The physics prize has swung in past years from honoring basic scientific advances to rewarding inventors for breakthroughs with broad societal value. This one fits squarely in that category, as Overbye’s piece explained: Read more…