LA Weekly

"Where is the MoveOn of climate change?" asks comment-poster mernitman a few weeks back. It was a good question and I didn't have the answer. As far as I knew, there was no nonprofit zapping emails to the masses, no one entity that had appointed itself the task of spurring collective action among our legislatures. And given the dire nature of the warnings recently handed to us, that seemed wrong.

Then, a few days later, I heard about Avaaz. Co-founded by MoveOn's Eli Pariser and ResPublica's Ricken Patel, the organization plans to take the MoveOn model -- small gifts from Internet contacts buy time for fresh, new television spots, community house-party organizing around a cause, etc. -- to a global audience.

The idea is that, with enough pressure on lawmakers around the world, we can press for real legislation to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. That means mandatory carbon caps. That means fuel efficiency standards for passenger cars in the U.S. twice as high as the current one. The kind of rules you can't make without a hard press of political will.

Blogs have been gushing about Avaaz. "Some ideas are just so good that once you hear them explained, you wonder, Why hasn't anyone done this already?" says Liza Featherstone on The Nation's "The Notion" blog; Treehugger likes Avaaz just as much, and even linked to the group's smart new commercial spot. Only Micah Sifry asks questions about the org's origins, and then mostly to wonder whether the "spawn of MoveOn" will be effective with its progenitor's model.

So I looked at Avaaz myself. I wanted to blog good things about them; really I did. The name alone, which means "voice" in several languages I don't know, drew me in. But when the Web page loaded, it was like a glass of ice in the face. In addition for a big call to "Wake Up!" about climate change(okay, I'm awake! I'm so very awake!), there was Tony Blair's mug staring out, like an abandoned dog in a pound, above a caption: "Stop the Escalation in Iraq." Though the ad has moved down somewhat in the last few days, it remains, and the point is clear: Cutting back on our climate-changing pollution also means lining up behind a whole lot of issues that have little or nothing to do with caps on carbon.

And according to Featherstone on the Nation's blog, they plan to expand even farther into global politics:

Avaaz also expects to take up Middle East politics (war in Iraq, the need for an Israel-Palestine peace process, potential war with Iran, and Guantanamo), and global poverty.

I suppose they also eventually plan to address domestic abuse, Free Mumia and perhaps even bring back the South Central Farm.

I'm against the escalation in Iraq, just as I was against the war in the first place. In fact, in varying gradations of intensity, I'm probably for everything Avaaz stands for. But many, many people across the globe are not, and we can't wait for them to get on all of our political bandwagons while we talk them into saving the planet.

It's probably the worst thing humans ever did to the earth: We allowed the environmental debate to become politicized. The property-rights fanatics of the Wise Use movement started it; the current crop of right-wing-head bangers have continued it by trying to link the words "eco" and "terror." But liberals played right along, and continue to: Since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its frightening but not surprising report last week, many a writer has used the report to threaten Bush with impeachment.

Yeah, that'll help a lot. While the seas deepen and the ice retreats, we here in the carbon-squandering U.S. are busy twisting our president's arm behind his back, trying to get him to admit he thought the climate wasn't changing, or that human's didn't cause it. And, in the meantime, we're confusing and perhaps alienating the right-of-center environmentalists the polar bears need real bad.

On Wednesday in front of a market in Hollywood, I met a young man canvassing for Greenpeace, which has just opened up an office nearby. I told him I supported him but couldn't sign his petition; as a journalist I try to keep my name off those rolls. "But it's not a petition," he told me. "We're just talking to people, and we're stressing that it's non-partisan." I almost hugged him, but instead walked over to vent about the political bickering while coal-fueled power plants spew and Hummers chuff. "Right," he said. "We don't have time to worry about who said what and when they said it. Let's Move On." Yes. Let's.

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I had planned, tonight, to comb through all the naysayer responses to last week's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The United Nations report declared the evidence of a changing climate "unequivocal" and pointed the blame at fossil-fuel-burning humans. I expected an outcry from the global-warming-is-a-hoax set.

The title of the post would have been, "You can lead an industry-funded pundit to data, but you can't make him think," or something to that effect.

I figured would cull from all the usual suspects' commentaries: Ronald Bailey in Reason Magazine, Richard Lindzen in the Wall Street Journal and James Inhofe, that abject oil-funded idiot some ill-informed blockheads in Oklahoma elected as their senator, to make the point that no matter what you tell these people -- no matter what evidence you present that carbon emissions largely caused by the burning of oil and coal have contributed to the quickening warming of the planet -- they will continue to spout the nonsense that pays their salaries.

There is, then, no hope for reasonable, rational discussion. No chance to arrive at truth.

The paid-pundit curse, I would call it: As all these people enjoy oil-industry largesse, I don't see why their opinions should count anyway. But, you know, it's American journalism: Fair and balanced, unbiased and objective. So even if someone tells you 2+2=4, you must investigate and give audience to the people who will tell you that 2+2=5 (anecdoate stolen from Michael Kinsley, with apologies).

Oh, but I was wrong.

Sure, there's Inhofe in the Senate, arguing that "The same people who are hysterical about this, who have pictures of the poor polar bear standing on the last remaining ice cube, were the ones who were saying, just a few years ago, another ice age is coming and we're all going to die" -- a hoary argument if there ever was one, one that had some diginity in 1988, when George Will was weighing the data about the greenhouse effect, but just seems goofy now.

(In response, Senator Barbara Boxer offered a document written up by the leaders of several U.S. Corporations, from DuPont to Duke Energy to make the pont that "my dear friend Jim Inhofe is pretty alone on this.")

Other climate naysayers stayed quiet in the wake of the IPCC report. Still others, such as Bailey, admitted he was wrong (I think. I can never be sure). And many others ran for cover.

From the Toronto Globe and Mail:

[Canadian Prime Minister] Stephen Harper moved yesterday to mend his government's frayed international reputation on climate change by dispatching his Environment Minister to Paris for a key conference and promising to join an emergency UN summit on the issue.

The decisions came as the Prime Minister was battered for a second day in the House of Commons over a letter he wrote five years ago in which he called the Kyoto accord a "socialist scheme" aimed at sucking money from wealth-producing nations. . . .

From the UK Guardian:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments forarticles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

From the WHITE HOUSE Press Office (!)

The Administration welcomes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which was developed through thousands of hours of research by leading U.S. and international scientists and informed by significant U.S. investments in advancing climate science research," U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman said. "Climate change is a global challenge that requires global solutions. Through President Bush's leadership, the U.S. government is taking action to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and encouraging the development and deployment of clean energy technologies here in the United States and across the globe."

"President Bush's leadership"? They're such kidders over there in D.C.!

Anyway, you guys, the jig is up. You're surrounded, outnumbered and outclassed. Now listen up: You take over the service jobs, the typing, the barista duty and the note-taking; we who paid attention early to the harbingers of a changing climate, we get to run the world. Pour us a nice, cold drink and get out of our way.

If only it were that simple.

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Yesterday morning the Los Angeles Business Council (“sort of like the Chamber of Commerce only more altruistic,” says one of its spokespeople), hosted a breakfast so business leaders could quiz H. David Nahai, current president of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s Board of Commissioners, on the specifics of the DWP's renewable energy program.

A developer and a RAND scientist sat among the interrogators; a realtor moderated.

And whatever is wrong in Los Angeles today, however mismanaged its agencies, rotten its public school system and clueless its developers – whatever skepticism I personally harbor about the sincerity of the city’s efforts to clean up the deadly air around its blighted port (or its power to do the same) -- there was something thrilling about sitting in the 17th-floor Regency Club and hearing not about how the city should raise its “renewable portfolio standard” (RPS), or how business must learn to cope with the financial hardship of such changeover, but that, hell or high water, the DWP will get 20 percent of its power from non-polluting wind, solar and geothermal by 2010.

“Our green program has not been as vibrant as it could have been,” Nahai admitted. “But now we’re on an inexorable path. We have an irreversible commitment.”

This is not just because the Los Angeles City Council decided the DWP should make that commitment. It’s not just that the good people at the DWP suddenly realized in December of 2005, when they set this goal, that Wyoming’s dirty air is our dirty air: Climate change has taught us we all live on one small planet. It’s that three bills to reduce greenhouse gases have cleared Schwarzenegger’s desk, and more anti-carbon bills will no doubt emerge the Democrat-controlled federal House and Senate, and every utility in the country could soon face fines for continuing to get their power from dirty-burning coal. Add to that nutty natural gas prices and supplies that mess with the state’s electricity rates (California gets almost 40 percent of its electricity from natural gas – and if you think natural gas is clean and ecologically neutral, think again, real hard), and the shift toward renewables becomes “an investment worth making,” Nahai said. “The time is right to move forward aggressively on a number of fronts.”

But it’s not going to be easy.

The LADWP currently derives only around two to five percent of its power from solar, wind, geothermal and small hydroelectric sources. In times past, the utility’s deciders have seen many a contract with a renewable-energy provider fall through; this time around, they’re trying to develop their own projects in addition to buying green power from other places. A couple of projects are in the works, including 100 megawatts in geothermal power from the Salton Sea and 120 megawatts from the Pine Tree Wind Farm, scheduled to begin bird-mincing – I mean, operations – later this year (“There were some delays in that project,” Nahai said, “but we’re over the worst of them.”) But none of them provide anywhere close to the 1,440 megawatts needed to supply 20 percent of the utility’s power. And 2010 is only three short years away.

“Have you looked at putting photovoltaics [solar panels] over all city parking lots?” one of the panelists asked. Nahai gave some kind of upbeat response, but to me the very question seemed overwhelming.

But that 1,440 is 20 percent of the utility’s generating capacity. Twenty percent of its peak demand is more than 1,000 megawatts. And what if we didn’t ever need 5,200 megawatts? What if our peak demand was more like, 4,000 megawatts? Wouldn’t that 20 percent figure be easier to hit?

As city leaders in Austin, Texas learned when they set their own renewable-energy goal, conservation and efficiency can displace a whole coal-fired power plant.

Chicago cleared the 20-percent-renewable hurdle in part by retrofitting tens of millions of square feet of public buildings with efficient equipment for heating and cooling, lighting and ventilation. The retrofits have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 30,000 tons each year – enough to offset the carbon dioxide emissions of 15,000 people.

In Portland, a separate non-profit, Portland Energy Conservation, Inc. (PECI), conducts energy audits on buildings around the city.

So how about something like Kill-A-Watt Electricity Usage Monitor in every home? Studies have shown that they work: For the residential watt-squanderer, nothing beats feedback. People use less electricity if they’re constantly reminded how much they’re using.

That may be easier and faster than carpeting every roof with solar panels. Because there’s another consequence to all the legislative and energy-market pressure:

“I don’t want to admit it,” Nahai said. “But we’re dealing with a seller’s market.” Since 2004, the price of photovoltaic technology – individual cells that take (sun)light (in Greek, photo), and turn it into volts – been steadily inching up.

L.A.’s playing catch-up here. But with a mayor who pushes and environmental agenda and a city council that takes pride in its many projects to green the city, we may be able to fire up our fluorescent light bulbs without worry so much about our impact on the polar bears. Here’s hoping.

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