On April 17 I did an Earth Day post that featured a one hour talk on energy and the future. The focus of the post was a a thought provoking recent talk on the Energy/Climate Conundrum.  The talk itself was about an hour, with Q&A for most of another.  The YouTube link is here. The blog itself here.  I highly recommend taking the time to watch the film.

At Nobel Peace Prize Festival Augsburg University Minneapolis MN Mar 5, 2009

There were some very substantive comments, which are presented below.  Chuck summarizes the contents of the film for his own list.  At the end of these comments I offer my own thoughts about my own history.

COMMENTS:

from Larry: VERY interesting! His topics remind me of some of the things Bill Gates talks about but he presents more of a 360 view; it’s not as simple as building and using electric cars..his part on C02 is understandable and one learns something in Dr. Tinker’s talk. Thanks for sharing…LG

from Claude:  I’m sorry to tell you, Dick, that I was not a fan of this guy and his message. He seems to me to be a mild form of climate denier.

from J.:  I looked through my notes from yesterday’s view of his Zoom.

I really liked his mention that we need multiple generations working together on the climate problem. I also very much liked his caution that we “Don’t Blame!” and that we build coalitions that work together and are willing to compromise. I completely agree with him on those routes. Many climate advocates, including Fresh Energy, very much embrace all of these ideas.

However, the entire lengthy talk (over an hour!) didn’t give me any hope that anything could really be done. Many times he used very similar graphs designed to tell us that the human’s influence was tiny. It made me shudder that his main job is teaching students (indirectly). Yikes!

[Personal note: I am a strong supporter of J Drake Hamilton”s. organization, Fresh Energy, which has been and continues to make a great contribution to the conversation, including at the implementation level.  Take a look at their site too.]

from Chuck, a long-time advocate for social justice in the Washington DC area:  Thank you!  I needed this! 😉

My Rotary colleagues made me Co-Chair of our Districts Environmental C0mmitee.  And I’m regularly on our global environmental zoom calls with great speakers.

I’m certainly going to share this with both.

Below are my notes from listening…and some of my thoughts from working on all these issues for 45 years.

Hope you don’t mind my added narratives.  Any editing suggestion would be helpful.

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Notes on the Energy/Climate Conundrum, with Dr. Scott Tinker [here, per Chuck]| HMNS Distinguished Lectures 

Speaker begins about 3 minutes in….main program goes about an hour…then Q&A.  The notes below reflect the key points he makes. (what is in parentheses are not).

We must reduce emission while improving human flourishing at the same time.  There is no binary option!

Fear is getting in the way!  Fear as a narrative that drives motivation and money!

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”  Aristotle

And “All the ill that is in us comes from fear, and all the good from love.” Eleanor Farjeon.

Energy’s global context is a triangle.  Environmental security (low emissions), Economic security (affordable), and Energy security (reliable!).

Energy needs to affordable, reliable, and low emissions.

Three primary variables:  Humans, Energy, Climate.

Poor people have optimism and Hope…(not so much in Haiti). In the rich world…the west…live in pessimism and fear.   Division and Anger pulling us apart.

“Poverty is the worst form of violence.”  Mahatma Gandhi.

Some 60% of the world lives in some kind of energy poverty.  5 billion people?

The road out of poverty is fueled by energy.  Lots of it!

The cleanest air in the world is in the wealthy nations.  The worst…in the poorest. They can’t afford to clean up the environment. They are trying to do basic human needs kind of things.

Achieving zero emissions is not possible (without killing the economy and global security.  There must be trade-offs.  A balancing of needs and wants).

Energy is a basic human need. (it will also help build resilience for dealing with the problems to come because we didn’t start doing this earlier as we were warned by the bipartisan 1980 Presidentical Commission on ending World Hunger- see summary at bottom of emai).

Energy security varies greatly around the world and this is the great energy paradox:

Energy won’t end poverty!  But they can’t get out of poverty without energy!

It’s time to “power the people” of the world. Energy access for everyone!

We must provide energy affordable energy to those most in need, reliably. Because secure energy underpins solutions to all the global challenges.

Human summary:  Lifting the world from poverty is the critical issue of our time.  Everything else depends on that!

Secure energy is vital for human flourishing!  (When your electricity goes out or your car runs out of gas you quickly remember this fundamental principle.)

Energy security varies around the globe.  And demand for secure energy is increasing everywhere!

Energy Summary:  All forms of Energy have environmental impacts.  Asia emits more CO2 than the rest of the world.

CO2 has been much higher and climate much warmer in the past AND Humans are influencing modern warming!,

A portfolio of solutions are needed to address emission.  Different parts of the world need to do the things they are doing.  We did!

Energy demand is going up faster than energy supply!!!

Energy supply impacts Climate, air, land, and water (One system interrelated!)

Energy emissions!

We need a rational transition!!! Secure energy underpins solutions to global challenges!

We need more coalition building!!!!  Not the false competition between energy sources.  We need them all.  We need MORE energy! For a rational transition.

So let’s start building coalitions!!!

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point”. CS Lewis.

So what’s the answer?  (prioritizing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and Rotary International’s seven priorities by building coalitions to work comprehensively together).

Energy, security, underpins, economic security.  All the rich countries of the world have Energy security which allows us the choice of cleaning up the environment.

“The beginning of wisdom is to do away with fear.”  Yohannes Gebregeorgis.

Fear is only dividing us.  (If we accept this truth and other truths that we hold to be self-evident – taking care of nature and each other- we can find the options to get us out of this mess. Failing to do this will not work out well for anyone).

Emerging economies need affordable energy. Developing economies need reliable energy.  Developed economies needs sustainable energy.

And then emerging economies want to become developing. And developing economies want to become developed.  So we have to accelerate economic growth in each.  (And to do this we need to invest in people’s health and education -the twin engines of development- and we need to stop wars, corruption, and dysfunctional governments.)

We must advance human flourishing and reduce environmental impacts. (This is not rocket science.  Take care of nature and each other).

You can’t negotiate with physics (“the laws of Nature and Mature’s God – the golden rule. You can resist or ignore them, but that will get very expensive.)

We must end the binary narrative (driving fear).  (this is a non-zero sum game. Everything is interdependent and we will either win together or die together).

Also from Chuck: In 1980 a bipartisan Presidential Commission concluded and its commissioners specifically warned …“The most potentially explosive force in the world today is the frustrated desire of poor people to attain a decent standard of living. The anger, despair, and often hatred that result represent real and persistent threats to international order… Neither the cost to national security of allowing malnutrition to spread nor the gain to be derived by a genuine effort to resolve the problem can be predicted or measured in any precise, mathematical way. Nor can monetary value be placed on avoiding the chaos that will ensue unless the United States and the rest of the world begin to develop a common institutional framework for meeting such other critical global threats… Calculable or not, however, this combination of problems now threatens the national security of all countries just as surely as advancing armies or nuclear arsenals.”

They also stated “that promoting economic development in general, and overcoming hunger in particular, are tasks far more critical to the U.S. national security than most policymakers acknowledge or even believe. Since the advent of nuclear weapons, most Americans have been conditioned to equate national security with the strength of strategic military forces. The Commission considers this prevailing belief to be a simplistic illusion. Armed might represents merely the physical aspect of national security. Military force is ultimately useless in the absence of the global security that only coordinated international progress toward social justice can bring.”

Today’s world is experiencing the consequences of ignoring this commission’s warnings. It specifically warned of increases in “diseases”, “international terrorism”, “war”, “environmental problems” and “other human rights problems” (refugees, genocide, human trafficking…).

Combined, these global pressures have fueled the anti-democratic populist movements thriving today.  Independent governments’ “self-interests” can no longer be more important than humanity’s potential to thrive and survive in the face of these accelerating threats.

Dozens of other prestigious, bipartisan studies and academic reports have followed since that 1980 report. Each clearly documents the direct and indirect links between world hunger, human rights violations, global instability, and the growing array of other threats to our freedoms, nation’s security, economy, and political stability.

I  believe our failure to make the protection of human rights and our environment superior to the protection of national sovereignty and corporate power is the primary driver of accelerating chaos.   The chaos that elections will not stop or even lessen.   Our systems of government are failing us.  Without transforming these systems to prioritize “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” there is not enough money in the world to address all the suffering that’s coming directly linked to so many unsustainable local and global trends that are reactionary in nature, and not preventive.

Preventing these accelerating trends will require a comprehensive global action plan.  An affordable and achievable plan exists today:  the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  No organization has yet taken a leadership role in building a Movement of Movements needed to bring all progress-focused organizations and movements together.   Time is not on our side. The evolution of pathogens, weapons, war, corruption, environmental distresses, and growing economic disparities and debt are outpacing our will to voluntarily change our governing systems. This is literally…globally unsustainable.  Leadership on this is urgently needed.   Which organization will rise to the occasion?

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from Dick, my personal thoughts:  April 30, the U.S. Senate Budget Committee and House Oversight  Committee released a bicameral report “Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change.”.  You can read the summary here, which links in turn to the entire report. .There is a great deal of information available.

The Tinker talk has caused me to revisit my own very limited history of engagement on this issue.  (I searched this blog for post referring to “climate change”.  There were 115 – of 1,994 – posts since 2009.  No, I’m not suggesting looking at them.)

I’ve never been a radical on the climate issue, but I haven’t been passive either.  I watched the Tinker video twice, and am glad I had the opportunity.

My first active engagement in environment was as a junior high geography teacher.  A group of us from two junior high schools got into a project with the University of Minnesota Department of Geography, which came to be called the Anoka Conceptual Geography Project.  As I recall, our first engagement was in 1968-69.  I recall it was called “Blue Lake” or such, for 8th graders, and  based on the taconite (iron ore) tailings problem at the Silver Bay MN plant of Reserve Mining, a major Minnesota venture.  (A re-counting of the longer history can be read here).  What made this a salient issue for we teachers, then, was evidence that tailings from the plant, dumped into Lake Superior, were contaminating the water supply of Duluth MN.  We put together a simulation for students.  It was sufficiently interesting so that we presented it at a national conference of the National Council for Geographic Education,  which several of us, including myself, attended twice, I think in 1968 and 71, in Houston and Atlanta.

While the curriculum wasn’t about climate, it certainly was about environment and the conundrum presented by competing priorities – in this case use of natural resources and their impact on human life.  It was a first step for myself.

Before going further, I admit to being a hypocrite.  This isn’t hard: I think most of us who live even reasonably comfortable lives are fellow travelers.  I drive too much; We don’t keep the thermostat low; we use too much water; on and on.  I think I’m pretty typical.  Richard Alley, in a 9-minute video (link below), made his point very well to young people, 15 years ago.  I was in the audience, then.  The kids paid close attention.

I vividly recall an early jarring reminder that came to my attention, and I still remember it: It was about 1980 and I saw an article on water conservation.  Unfortunately, I don’t remember author, magazine, date.  The essential point was this: There were drought conditions somewhere out west – California sticks in my mind – and a community called for cessation of watering lawns, accompanied by penalties.  Most people followed the rule, voluntarily.  The owners of the fancy houses in the hills simply ignored the rule, with impunity.  Not my problem, they seemed to say.

In a sense, the folks in the fancy houses represented all of us, including myself.

Here’s a few other thoughts I have about the value of the Tinker video.

My 5th blog, of now nearly 2000 at this space, April 9, 2009, was on the topic.   One of the first stops I made after watching the Tinker video was a 9 minute video by Prof. Richard Alley of Penn State, to children at the March 5, 2009, Nobel Peace Prize Festival at Augsburg University (then College).  Prof. Alley was one of the many co-recipients, along with Al Gore, of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.  His short talk speaks for itself.

Earlier, in June, 2005, we were among a large crowd who heard Al Gore give the speech and presentation on climate change that led to the 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, a film which has survived the test of time, including receiving the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

A dozen years later we saw the sequel.  Along the way, in June, 2011, I asked a local climate scientist to ‘grade’ Al Gore’s conclusions.  Here is what Dr. John Abraham  said.  (Hint: he gave Gore 90 out of 100.  Not too bad.)

Pioneers, which Al Gore certainly was, have to deal with uncomfortable realities, including what is reality, which is why there aren’t many pioneers.  On the other hands, without pioneers – risk takers – there would hardly be progress.

Over the years I’ve basically come to believe there is no one-size fits all solution, mostly because we are a world of human beings, addicted to living beyond our means.  Richard Alley pointed this out to the kids at Augsburg extremely well.  At the same time, there are good things happening, including from the business and industry sector, which make it more likely that we can functionally adapt without destroying the planet we live on.

Tinker, as I recall, in his slide show describes near the end a  “Radical Middle” – a need to find some middle ground among competing interests – which can  make an incredible difference simply by doing simple things.  I resonate with that approach!

There is a downside, however.  The people who live in the most desperate economic realities – Tinker says 2.8 billion of us – do not have access to, and could not afford, the kinds of things we take for granted.  In my grandparents day, here in the U.S., it was not at all unknown to use dung (cow chips, manure) for fuel – I have it in my mothers history of growing up.  And burning inefficient wood as a primary fuel.  They use these fuels because there is no other choice.  And it exacerbates the problem.

This is not to say that there hasn’t been evolution in the poor countries.  When I last visited Haiti, in 2006, cellular communication was just entering the conversation.  Now I would guess it is almost universal there.  But cell phones and computers require lots and lots of energy.  And my guess is the average Haitian cannot even conceive of our utilization in the developed world.

My only mantra to myself is to keep on, keeping on.  Last October we had an energy audit of our house, and much to our astonishment we got a grade of 99 (of 100).  Mostly it was common sense changes which we could afford to make.  If you can, at minimum do an energy audit.  You might be surprised.

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