Proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline

On Wednesday, January 18, in a move fomenting consternation within Republican circles and celebration within environmentalist ones, President Barack Obama announced the rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. Though there is debate over how many jobs the pipeline’s construction and maintenance would actually create—Keystone builder TransCanada posits that 20,000 jobs will be created while a Cornell study puts it closer to 5,000—an infrastructure project like this in a period of high unemployment would almost certainly help improve the economy. For this reason alone the President’s decision to block Keystone was the wrong one. But more importantly, the movement opposing the pipeline, as noble in its ambitions as it may be, is utterly misguided.

The greatest concern surrounding the pipeline is not the danger of polluting the Ogallala Aquifer, a crucial water source in the American Midwest, as surveying is well underway to find a route that bypasses both the Aquifer and the ecologically sensitive Sand Hills region altogether. No, the issue bothering environmentalists about the Keystone XL pipeline is the fact that it is associated with the development of the Alberta oil sands, a move that has been hyperbolically categorized as “Game Over” for the planet by one particularly vocal opponent. When protesters swarmed the White House last year, their logic was simple: end the pipeline, stop oil sands development. But this logic is severely flawed.

The Canadian government and the Canadian energy industry have made clear that development of the oil sands will continue regardless of the ultimate fate of the pipeline. Development is underway, permits have been issued, and a political party eager to promote Canada’s energy resources has recently strengthened its majority in Parliament. The United States is far from the only consumer interested in oil from the Alberta oil sands; growing demand in parts of Asia means that there is no shortage of potential Canadian business partners.

Plans are already being made to transport the oil sands by other means if Keystone falls through, including proposals to transfer the oil to the US by rail or to China by sea. Rail environmental regulations are far more lax than those associated with pipelines, and China’s environmental record is unimpressive to say the least. Environmental protesters opposing the Keystone pipeline fail to understand that stopping it does not change Canada’s economic and political interest in developing the oil sands, and if anything paves the way for more environmentally unsafe means of transporting the oil to prospective buyers.

The moral of the story is this: the controversial development of the Alberta oil sands will continue no matter what, and transportation by pipeline to the United States is far safer and far more likely to create greatly-needed American jobs than any other method. Rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline not only fails to address the potentially legitimate concerns environmentalists have with the development of the oil sands and our continued reliance on fossil fuels, it also throws away thousands of jobs, threatens to derail the United States’ professed goal of energy security, and potentially increases the risk of an oil spill.

With the midterms less than 50 hours from now, it’s fascinating to note how the environmental furor of the summer, especially in the aftermath of the Gulf Oil Spill, seems to have largely subsided in discussions about the elections. Nevertheless, the outcome of the midterms, especially in the House, could have disastrous ramifications for the future of climate legislation.

It’s important to note that climate change is not a forgotten issue in local elections. Politicians in states that perceive themselves as would-be victims of cap-and-trade legislation have spoken out against climate change legislation far-and-wide. The folks over at the environmental blog Grist and Think Progress have done an excellent job of detailing key gubernatorial, House and Senate races between global warming deniers and candidates who would “vote for climate action.”

There is no eloquent way of describing the comments by many of these candidates, other than to point out that they’re downright scary. They represent a brazen disregard not just for science, but for national security and for economics. Left and right, these politicians have turned their backs on their own words and the health of their nation.

Economics is undoubtedly a driving factor for their climate change denials, Grist notes. These politicians have received vast donations from groups like Koch Industries, but more importantly their states often thrive off of industries that are harmful to the environment. Take this ad by Joe Manchin, Democratic candidate for senate in West Virginia, aired to virulently show his opposition to cap-and-trade legislation. Manchin is desperate to demonstrate that he will protect his state’s coal-based economy were he to be elected senator.

It would be unfair to ask politicians to ignore the economic implications of climate legislation, but the extent to which they blatantly discredit science with impunity is reprehensible. While some states may suffer in the short-run, as energy prices could potentially increase, it would be an act of great courage for just one Republican in the Heartland to proclaim that fighting climate change now will have economic benefits in the future.

In this report from NPR, All Things Considered reports that the Republican pollster Frank Luntz attributes lack of voter concern on climate change to the even more dismal economy of 2010, as compared to 2008. The problem here is again one of perception. Voters see climate change legislation has having a slew of detrimental effects and few positive ones, while neglecting the strain on the economy that non-renewable resources presently have. It’s hard to track where this antipathy originates – news reports often frame politicans as skewing their views on climate change to appease voters – but Luntz’s appraisal seems to be the most accurate.

Regardless, it’s unlikely that serious action on climate issues will occur unless a chorus of Republicans works with the Administration and congressional Democrats. It’s sad to say that a Republican in favor of climate change legislation in many states is now a matter of courage. The midterms are likely to be disastrous for climate legislation, and while I fervently hope this weren’t the case, I’ll have a full post-election analysis next week.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Climate Research Center at the University of East Anglia, home of the Climategate "controversy

Last week, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies released a report called Americans’ Knowledge of Climate Change. The document is the result of an extensive analysis of how well Americans grasp the practical and scientific nature of climate change, and by the fifth page, the authors have declared the quality of the knowledge for 52% of those surveyed is worthy of an “F”.

The report received some coverage in the media, notably on The Huffington Post, where a slideshow detailing the most egregious gaps in knowledge appeared on Thursday. Yet the Yale researchers noted that their grades “should be interpreted with ca

ution,” while rightly observing, “…many of the questions reveal important gaps in knowledge and common misconceptions about climate change and the earth system.”

My first impression upon reading the report was that it isn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. From the start, data shows that 87% of Americans have heard of the “greenhouse effect” and 66% have an understanding of what that term entails. Slightly more worrisome is the slim majority (63%) of Americans, who “understand” that global warming is happening, coupled with only 50% of Americans who believe that this warming is tied to human activity.

The authors of the Yale report use certain words that aren’t often found in popular discourse on climate change. Typically, polls report the percentage of Americans that “believe” in climate change, while this document relies heavily on the word “understand.” Each observation is clearly made from the perspective that global warming exists and is a significant issue confronting America. This is a worthy and necessary change in the verbiage that scientists and policymakers use when analyzing the intersection between popular belief and scientific consensus.

The existence of this scientific consensus – affirmed by the national academies of 32 countries, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the American Association for the Advancement of Science – is question by the respondents in this report. Only 39% believe that “most scientists think global warming is happening.”

This statistic is by far the most damning, and the most revealing. Americans deserve a robust defense for gaps in knowledge about climate change. Firstly, earth and climate science isn’t easy to grasp. It’s part of a standard middle school curriculum, sometimes taught in high school, and confined to the environmental science test in the panoply of Advanced Plac

ement exams. Global warming, as a phenomenon, is still relatively recent. While it is indubitably important that Americans understand the rhythm of climate and planetary processes, it’s absurd to expect that vast numbers of Americans have had the time to study them and gain a confident understanding of how they work.

The onus, therefore, is on scientists. The report revealed that 94% of Americans who believe that global warming is not happening are extremely, very, or somewhat sure that it isn’t. This belief is fairly entrenched, but that is 94% of the 19% percent who responded with a definitive “no” to “Do you think global warming is happening?” It is then necessary to account for the statistic regarding scientific consensus, as a vast number of the respondents who believe in global warming doubted that consensus.

This consensus is so broad that scientists must do a better job of communicating the evidence for anthropologic climate change. Scientists have a hard enough time with their media image; they need to form an organized front on climate change. A debate about the minutiae of climate change is necessary, but that should occur at academic conferences. In the public sphere, it is imperative that scientists reinforce the consensus.

It’s also possible that the media, in one of their perpetual attempts to appear non-partisan and unbiased, is too often giving climate change deniers a public forum for their claims. It is essential that the press incorporates voices from all facets of an argument, but absurd climate deniers are given the stage they need to spread misinformation. The “Climategate” debacle, which erupted last year when emails from researchers at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain were intercepted and released to the media, is a prime example. The emails represented an exchange of scientific ideas and hearty debate, but soon the media had painted “Climategate” as a threat to scientific integrity and evidence that climate data was being suppressed.

The Yale report gave Americans a weighted grade of “C” for their climate knowledge, which seems fairer than the original F. Two additional reports are necessary, however, before a full grasp of the nebulous web of political, social, economic, cultural and scientific factors that contribute to the knowledge of global warming can be assessed. Yale should study “The Media’s Knowledge of Climate Change,” and “Scientists’ Ability to Convey Their Findings.”

Photo credit:Wikimedia

P.S. The folks at Huffington Post labeled the framed the slideshow on “Ridiculous Beliefs” about climate change. Americans’ understanding of the effects of climate change on past civilizations, detailed in slide 9, is actually correct.

Last week I mentioned 350.org and the 10/10/10 Day of Work in this space. On Sunday, I went to a small rally on the steps of the Statehouse in Boston. Activists from Greenpeace and a smattering of local groups had gathered on Beacon Hill to rally for environmental change. A microphone was set up on the steps in front of the Bulfinch entrance, and various speakers delivered short messages about their work and their hopes for environmental progress.

I arrived later than I would have liked and left earlier than I should have. Fall sunsets in New England have an alluring quality, and the late afternoon light that had enveloped Boston Common was more attractive than listening to speeches on issues with sobering statistics and a dearth of solutions. As I rode back to Cambridge on the T, I couldn’t help but ponder the efficacy of events like 10/10/10. The rhetoric of the 350.org movement is powerful and so is the symbolism of 10/10/10 – thousands of events in nearly every country on this planet – but I had the distinct feeling that it is one massive vain attempt to sway a brutal path of industrialization that is wreaking havoc on our planet by means of environmental destruction.

I thought about the meetings of various sustainability committees I’ve sat in on, meetings characterized by endless discussion of how to encourage people to turn lights out in classrooms and use less paper, when I’ve wanted to shout. I’ve wanted to remind people that the sum total of “cute” environmental measures, like recycling and not printing emails, can have a tangible impact that will always be outweighed by environmental harm created by the things that we avoid discussing. The environmental toll from the consumption of meat, our reliance on cars, and the production of energy that fuels comfortable Western lives is absolutely unsustainable.

This fact is, of course, well known to the people who fight for environmental change. I felt discouraged after the 10/10/10 rally because the biggest environmental problems aren’t easy to plaster on a bumper sticker. Then I remembered that I became interested in the environmental movement not because of a powerful experience at summer camp or a childhood home near the woods, but because of a high school teacher who opened my eyes to the multifaceted nature of environmental problems.

If you’ve taken high school level American government recently, you learned the term “political socialization.” It encapsulates the process by which children and adolescents acquire their political beliefs, typically at home. Environmental socialization is a whole different matter. Progressive environmental beliefs are not fully embedded in the current crop of parents, and moving adolescents to environmental activism will be a difficult transition. It’s this aspect of the environmental movement – the process by which people who were not raised to be environmentalists become conscious of environmental problem – that is uniquely fascinating and oft unexplored.

The strength of movements like 10/10/10 lies in their potential to facilitate this environmental socialization in an untraditional manor. The community spirit of global workdays can create the conditions that allow for environmental socialization, even for adults and adolescents who are far beyond the age when the foundations of political belief are put in place.

It is my hope that in the next few weeks of blogging, I’ll be able to target issues that highlight the varying response to the same environmental challenges. HPR is known for emphasizing that “everything is politics,” and the politics of energy are particularly strong. Communities worldwide have tackled global problems in the manner that is most efficient for their economies and lifestyle. That’s an obvious statement, but its underestimated in practice. The bold rhetoric of climate conferences and accords will not be met with action when each party holds such disparate interests.

And that’s why global environmental workdays and small events cannot be underestimated. It takes a new form of socialization, a near-conversion, for many people to see outside of the environmental norms they’re accustomed to.

On June 14^th of this year, President Obama appointed a commission of seven men and women to evaluate the events that contributed to the Deepwater Horizon spill. The commission, organized less than two months after the spill began but a full month before the oil stopped flowing, released its initial reports this week. In one report, a working paper titled “The Amount and Fate of the Oil,” the staff of the commission issues a withering criticism of the federal government’s own estimates of the amount of oil in the Gulf after the spill and throughout the clean-up process:

“…the federal government created the impression that it was either not fully competent to handle the spill or not fully candid with the American people about the scope of the problem.”

The aforementioned report challenges administration estimates of the amount of oil that was initially flowing into the Gulf and the amount of oil that remained in the Gulf at the end of August, after extensive clean-up efforts. Crucially, a NOAA scientist reported a flow rate of 5,000 barrels-per-day on April 26^th. This number was used by Admiral Mary Landry, who was the ranking on-scene official at the time. While this number was still being used, a number of credible, non-government scientists estimated flows between 10,000 and 50,000 barrels-per-day, with some internal BP estimates placing the flow above 100,000 barrels-per-day. The danger in the government’s initial reliance on the 5,000 barrels-per-day statistic? The response to the spill was organized based on estimated oil flow.

The commission has also challenged the conclusion of Carol Browner, the White House climate advisor, that “three-quarters of the oil is gone,” a statement she made in early August.

The commission is chaired by two former government officials: Bob Graham, formerly a senator for and governor of Florida, and William Reilly, who served as the director of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush. The remaining five members are all academics, including Cherry Murray, who is Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard.

It is important to note that these reports do not represent the official opinion of the commission, which will be released in a final report next year. It is highly unlikely, however, that these working papers would have been posted to the commission’s website if the members of the commission did not agree with their analysis.

The report is a direct challenge to an administration that has prided itself on its relationship to science. President Obama pledged to maintain a new attitude of transparency in the sciences, in light of President George W. Bush’s perceived neglect of scientific knowledge and method. While President Obama made a series of very public appointments of top scientists to advisory positions, this report reveals the dilemma faced by any politician when the diligence of scientific reporting challenges political expediency.

In a heartbreaking account on NPR’s Science Friday in early June, the renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle (“the sturgeon general”) described the lack of scientific knowledge about oceans. And yet, the administration condoned the release of dispersants into the Gulf post-spill. Earle and her on-air counterpart, the physicist Lawrence Krauss, lamented the public’s expectation that science provide immediate answers to massive crises. This desire, in the eyes of these two scientists and this blogger, is juxtaposed with a general unwillingness to fund scientific endeavor at a federal level.

President Obama has rightfully tried to involve scientists in decision-making, and his administration has demonstrated its belief that science can play a great role in the resolution of national problems, particularly at an environmental level. This willingness, however, needs to be met in practice. President Obama has made a noble effort, but the reports of the Commission show reluctance on behalf of the administration to listen to independent scientists even when an issue of grave national crisis is unfolding. President Bush often did exhibit an outright disregard for science, but proclaiming a love for science but failing to heed its warnings may be downright dishonest.

Photo attribution: NASA

Many of the government and independent estimates of oil flow were made using satellite technology and imagery.

In 2006, an article in Reason magazine declared an age of “corporate environmentalism.” Reason attributes part of the rise of corporate environmentalism to independent environmental groups. Since the administration of George W. Bush was seen as hostile to their goals, the article suggests, groups shifted their lobbying efforts to corporations.

The recent expansion of corporate social responsibility to include environmental issues is notable. A brief web search of the 30 companies on the Dow Jones Industrial Average reveals that each company makes some reference to sustainable practices on its website, and that the majority of these companies have web pages devoted entirely to sustainable environmental practices. Significantly, DuPont, General Electric, Exxon Mobil, and Alcoa all have websites that specifically discuss their environmental practices, yet those four companies all rank in the top 10 corporate air polluters in the United States.

Are companies truly committed to sustainable environmental practices, or are most of their environmentally friendly claims well-placed propaganda, or “greenwashing?” A new Harris poll suggests the latter. Executives are skeptical that corporate environmental efforts will attract consumers, and in a similar vein, consumers have expressed their doubts that claims of corporate environmentalism are genuine. A disconnect exists between the willingness to engage in sustainable practices and the actual implementation and profit from these practices.

This conflict between intent and practice demonstrates some of the pull of environmental groups and activists. The fact that so many companies make sustainable pledges and devote space to issues of sustainability on their websites is a testament to the accomplishments of the environmental movement, but changing practice is another matter entirely.

This breeds an important question: should companies hold themselves to effective sustainable practices?  If they pontificate about sustainability and proclaim their commitment to sustainability in their corporate social responsibility charters, the answer is yes. If a company proclaims its sustainable practices on a glossy website but still pollutes massively, it is not a sustainable company. The presence of some sustainable practices amidst a multitude of unsustainable ones makes for dishonest propaganda.

As to whether or not companies need to be sustainable in the first place, that does tie in to the nebulous, philosophical question of corporate responsibility. From a purely scientific standpoint, companies have to start being sustainable. Most pollution is directly tied to corporate enterprise. If global warming progress is to be made, government regulation will have to restrict pollution, companies will have to take initiative in reducing pollution, or green-tech ventures will have to find universal energy solutions. The first two options are more likely in the short run, so companies will either face regulation or successfully deter regulation.

It doesn’t.  For our fall Business of America issue, Will himself wrote in his excellent article “Clean Energy, Dirty Politics” that

The argument made by proponents of green jobs is a win-win-win: fix unemployment, protect the environment, and establish American competitiveness in a rapidly growing international market. Even in a time of economic crisis, who can disagree with such a proposal? Yet the evidence suggests that “green jobs” has become a hollow political catchphrase, a supposedly economic and environmental boon that could end up as neither. Unless legislation is carefully crafted, its overly optimistic proponents could provoke a backlash against the larger environmental movement and complicate efforts to tackle climate change.

Wind Farm, Shantou, China

So “green jobs” are not the future of the world economy, the sector we would need to dominate to maintain our status as the world’s biggest economy. The remaining reason to be concerned about China’s potential leadership in the rapidly growing clean energy sector (emphasis on “sector,” not “economy”) is that we will be beholden to China for our energy needs, as we are beholden to Saudi Arabia etc. now for oil. Such dependence on China would probably be more damaging than our current dependence on Middle Eastern oil because we already depend on China for cheap manufacturing.

But the nature of clean energy, or at least of the already-existing clean energy technologies, makes such a dependence on China unlikely. By definition, any fuel required by a renewable source must be abundant all over the world. And the existing clean nonrenewables (nuclear is the only one which comes to mind; carbon capture and storage remains unproven) use fuels for which we don’t depend on China.

If China does beat us (and Europe) in the race to the big clean energy breakthrough, then it is plausible that China will use its enormous reserves of U.S. dollars to directly invest in a Chinese-designed, maybe Chinese-built, clean energy infrastructure in America.

What’s so bad about that? We’d have a whole lot of clean energy which we wouldn’t have built so quickly ourselves. Utilities are sufficiently regulated that the Chinese won’t be able to build up a cartel and then rip us off. The biggest problem that I can imagine is that China will somehow maintain remote control over our electrical grid and be able to use that control for political ends. Is that why we’re so concerned about winning the clean energy race? The “race” is just another manifestation of the phenomenon Will described in his fall article, an attempt by environmentalists to argue for action on climate change in terms they expect to be better received than the fundamental environmental justifications, but terms which are ultimately unconvincing.

Photo Credit: Flickr (dcmaster)

It’s easy to forget that global warming has sparked a global response when the stalemate in Congress over national climate legislation continues, even despite the fact that the latest consequence of our fossil fuel addiction – the “worst” environmental catastrophe in America’s history – flickers across televisions nightly.

Yet the global clean energy industry could be worth $2.3 trillion by 2020, according to a December 2009 report by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Who capitalizes on these new markets depends on governments’ willingness to establish favorable clean-energy policies – and everyone except Congress seems to know it.

China, moving rapidly into the void left by U.S. inaction, is poised to leap beyond the U.S. and seize control of the emerging clean energy economy. China’s overall clean energy investments surpassed the United States for the first time in 2009, with nearly $31 billion compared to just under $17 billion.

The Center for American Progress (CAP), fresh from another visit to China, released a memo on Capitol Hill yesterday reaffirming the widening transpacific clean-tech gap in the wake of its latest report. The memo comes on the heels of a comparative analysis done by the Pew Charitable Trusts and Bloomberg New Energy Finance which also concluded that America’s clean-tech leadership is slipping. Without comprehensive clean-energy legislation focused on investment, innovation and infrastructure to match that of its competitors, CAP argues, the United States will forfeit the chance to be a major player in the global clean-energy economy.

Investment

China anticipates 2.88 million new clean-energy jobs by 2020 – just by meeting its national demand. Already, thanks to robust national commitment, it has the most installed renewable energy capacity in the world – even though its economy is a third of the size of America’s. This unprecedented growth can be directly traced to China’s regulatory policies that create stable markets to encourage clean-energy investment.

One of China’s smartest policies, its renewable portfolio standard (RPS), requires utilities to generate 15 percent of their energy with renewables by 2020, with additional provisions that could reach double their target. Germany has a goal of 20 percent by 2020, and Spain aims to achieve 30 percent by 2020. Here, while 24 U.S. states already have RPSs, Congress has yet to pass a national standard (although one is included in the current draft of the American Power Act).

In addition, the Chinese government is aggressively pursuing feed-in tariffs, which most people in the United States haven’t even heard of. Feed-in tariffs set prices for utilities to buy renewable energy that producers feed into the grid, and their incredible success across Europe and in a few U.S. cities is well documented. Together with the RPS and fuel economy standards that are more than a third higher than ours, China’s feed-in tariffs reflect the country’s realization that market-expanding national clean-energy policies matter to global clean-tech investors trying to decide where to place their bets.

Innovation

America is also losing its clean-energy innovation edge, which is crucial to generate more efficient renewable energy technologies.Applied Materials, the world’s biggest solar manufacturing supplier, isrelocating its chief technology office from Silicon Valley to China and constructing the largest solar research center ever built in Xi’an. One of its stated reasons for the move: China’s concrete commitment to a renewable energy future.

The sustained, programmatic R&D funding from the Chinese government looks to eclipse the U.S., where ad-hoc stimulus funding ($6.8 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) doesn’t amount to the long-term support required for good R&D.

China’s national Science and Technology plan contains what CAP’s memo described as “tangible benchmarks” like patent and citation quotas through 2020 and specific clean-energy targets designated by the Ministry of Science and Technology in transmission, wind turbine, and efficiency development.

Infrastructure

CAP representatives also noted that China’s infrastructural commitment left a “particularly deep impression” during their visit – especially the “impressive, tangible, and breathtaking” $300 billion Beijing has allocated for railway expansion through 2020. Coupled with what will be the largest urban rail system in the world, and a vast network of ultrahigh-voltage grid transmission wires, this concrete investment will facilitate rapid movement of people and goods across the burgeoning Chinese economy.

The U.S. Congress, in stark contrast, hasn’t even started talking about a new surface transportation authorization bill, even though the last one expired in September 2009. The Department of Transportation is operating on a series of temporary extensions that barely cover operating costs. Revitalizing the U.S. transportation infrastructure to meet environmental and economic pressures requires cohesive, national leadership which short-term stimulus funding cannot replace.

All too often, critics try to dismiss China’s edge in the clean energy marketplace by referencing that the Chinese passed the U.S. in absolute emissions in 2006, that they build “two coal plants a week,” etc. The emerging work on China’s headlong rush toward alternative energy indicates the opposite. As President Obama heads to the June 26-27 G-20 meeting, he should keep in mind how much we have to learn.

–Will Rafey

Read The New Yorker’s excellent exposé on Beijing’s 863 program here to get a clearer idea of the magnitude of their innovation drive.

To see the analysis by the Breakthrough Institute and Americans for Energy Leadership of the American Power Act’s impact on U.S. economic competitiveness, go here.

Graph courtesy of the Pew Charitable Trusts (“Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?,” p. 17)

Flagstaff Lake, Maine

Last summer I worked for five weeks as a member of an Appalachian Trail crew, living in tents in Northern Maine while performing maintenance on the trail. Apparently I gave them my mailing address, because yesterday I received “The MAINEtainer,” an eight-page newspaper from the Maine Appalachian Trail Club (MATC). One headline stood out: “MATC opposes Highland Plantation wind energy plan.” The article included a map of the area around the proposed Highland Plantation, and I recognized it as Flagstaff Lake, where I spent a week cutting new trail out of the side of a hill with a mattock. The area is part of the ‘Hundred-Mile Wilderness,’ the longest stretch of the entire Appalachian Trail without a town or store.

MATC opens by summarizing their opposition to the installation of wind turbines two miles from the trail: “The MATC recognizes the need to develop wind power as a renewable energy source.  However, this need must be balanced against the recreational, scenic, natural, and cultural resources of the Appalachian Trail in Maine.”

For decades, environmentalists have taken the wrong approach in their advocacy, and MATC’s opposition to the Highland Plantation project is a prime example. Like Thoreau, who wrote, “All good things are wild and free,” they assume and promote an emotional reverence for nature. The assumption misses the point: the true reason to protect the environment is not for the environment’s sake but for our own. Rather than emphasizing this hard fact, environmental groups have relied on a sentimental argument for the intrinsic value of untamed nature, producing cultural antipathy and misguided environmentalism.

Arguing for a deep reverence for nature immediately evokes the 1960s counterculture, an association which mires the environmental debate deep in the baggage of America’s forty-year-old culture war.Consider any of various news stories detailing the latest extreme tactics of anti-whaling activists.  The general public cares little one way or another about whales, but most have a sense of whether or not their political group supports saving whales.  So all the vitriol of a culturally divided nation springs up before anyone can ask why we should care about whales in the first place.  Some people just like whales and think they’re worth saving; others do not.

The World Wildlife Fund is not a radical nut chained to a harpoon cannon, but its arguments for the natural world are not much more complex than the hippie yell, “Save the whales!”  Their standard advertising campaign is essentially a guilt trip featuring pictures of the fuzziest endangered species they can find.  Their species adoption program allows you to donate in the name of a certain animal like the panda, Amur leopard, polar bear, or tiger.  Never mind that your money goes into a general fund; you can feel good knowing that you have helped save the meerkats.  The entire campaign depends on the assumption that there is inherent moral value in these species.  Save the meerkats because they are cute.  Save the leopards because they look noble in the setting sun.

Similarly, the argument for reducing carbon emissions is often simplistic.  Carbon dioxide produced by industry is disrupting the natural balance, so reduce carbon dioxide.  MATC seems to think that we should preserve the Hundred-Mile Wilderness simply because it is wild and beautiful, without unsightly wind turbines.  Environmentalism of this sort depends on a hippie ethos of secular reverence for nature in its purest form.

Little wonder, then, that vocal skepticism of climate change appears to be growing.  Actual science is irrelevant to the issue, because the argument for environmentalism has been cast by environmentalists themselves as a cultural crusade promoting reverence for nature, and cultural crusaders must expect to find stiff resistance.

The crusader’s approach is a terrible mistake, not just because it motivates opposition along cultural lines, but because it is the wrong way to understand our relationship with the environment.  Thoreau-style environmentalists would claim that our capitalist economy spoils the environment, but the very word ‘spoil’ implies, incorrectly, that there exists an absolute, external definition of what a pristine environment looks like.  Rather, economy and environment are inextricably linked in a circular relationship, each shaping the other.  Just as Native Americans used to burn their forest’s undergrowth to produce a healthy deer population and make it easier to hunt those deer, we must devise a sustainable model for the ongoing interaction between our globalized economy and the natural world on which it depends.

In short, we need to manage our environment for our own long-term benefit, not for the whale’s benefit.  Our long-term interests should include a healthy whale population, but we must remember it is for our own good, not theirs.  Recent emphasis on efficiency and sustainability is the right direction to take, but these movements have not yet managed to shed their association with the ever-more-stale teachings of the counterculture.  It is our job, as a fresh generation, to forcibly recast environmentalism in practical terms.

Yes, Flagstaff Lake has a prehistoric beauty about it, but its wildness is a pretty fiction, not an intrinsic good.  The lake was created by a hydroelectric dam in 1950, deliberately submerging the town of Flagstaff in the process.  Rather than clinging to a cultural reverence for a false wilderness, we should plan for the future and install wind turbines in Northern Maine.  Then, perhaps, with the counterculture behind us, we can move past the culture wars and create a working model for an environmentally sustainable economy.

The economic crisis the world is currently experiencing has been the worst since the Great Depression. In such a period, nothing could be easier than pointing out market failures and the inefficiencies of deregulated capitalism. Indeed, it should be the perfect setting for an increase in state control, welfare, and redistributionist policies. In the United States, this took the form of the election of a liberal president. But in Europe, the equivalents of American liberals-that is, Socialists and Social Democrats-are losing ground everywhere.

Why is this happening? While the right is trying to find new strategies and new ideas to tackle the new problems presented by the crisis, socialist and social democratic parties grow more and more attached to their traditional core values. Not only has this kind of left-wing conservatism accounted for the decline of socialist parties in Europe to date, it is likely to cause them to lose even more ground in the future. Indeed, given their philosophical foundation in the vein of Hegel and by Marx, perhaps the socialist parties of today are simply no longer fulfilling the role for which they were born.

A quick look at all major left parties in the most influential countries of the European Union proves the strength of this trend. In France, the country with the strongest tradition of state influence in public life, the Socialist Party is at its historical ebb. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party experienced more than a ten percent reduction in vote share in the last election, while all other parties gained ground at its expense. The UK’s relatively benign Labour Party was surpassed for the first time in history by the Liberal Democrats in the 2008 local elections, compounding the broad defeat it suffered against Tories in the London mayoral election. And notwithstanding the scandals of its leader, Italian right-wing party The People of Freedom has won a parliamentary majority whose size is unusual in Italian republican history, while the left-wing Democratic Party endured a change in leadership after several regional defeats.

To understand why this decline occurred, we must consider the case of left parties that do not identify as socialist as well as that of right-wing parties. In both cases, promotion of change and of new ideas unchained to old ideological diktats lead to a positive response in their elections, whereas the traditionalism of socialist parties proved itself to be a detriment. In contrast to the socialist parties, which in the last elections of the European Parliament lost nine percentage points in share of the vote, ranking last in performance, the Greens had the best performance with over 25% gain in seats. Green parties are relatively new compared to socialist parties-and their support of environmentalism, nonviolence, grass-root democracy, and social responsibility reflect ideas that started only in the ’80s as a response to the problems that the increasing industrialization and globalization of the present world.

As for right-wing parties, what unites all cases at a national level is the quite surprising shift they have made towards advocating very different from what was previously considered “conservative.” Recently, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France even claimed, “Laissez-faire capitalism is finished”-a line one might expect from a socialist leader during a time where the deregulated market economy is showing its weaknesses, but Sarkozy heads one of the biggest right-wing parties in Europe. In Italy, new economic policies are more in line with Sarkozy’s philosophy than the ruling party’s official conservative credo. The government’s new self-proclaimed mission is to help those citizens worst affected by the financial crisis-and thus, as Minister of the Economy Giulio Tremonti put it, it is willing to be called left-winged “if being left-winged means being next to the poor people who suffer the crisis.”

Why is the ideological answer of the left-which was, after all, “right all along”-insufficient? As Michele Salvati, the ideological co-founder of the Italian Democratic Party, argues, “The left has adapted to the economic system created by the right and by capitalism and lost its old specificity of being against this whole system.” Thus, it is intrinsically difficult-though not impossible-for left parties to present a sufficiently strong ideological alternative to right wing parties on economical issues. Since “the left has been ‘capitalized’, homogenizing to the market system in force,” And when a crisis like the current one comes along, such adaptation that previously permitted left-wing parties to survive now restricts them to a turf on which they are at inherent disadvantage. The only way to survive as viable political players, then, is to continue to innovate upon capitalism and present alternatives to the failing status quo-which, this time around, the Socialist left has not done.

Given this passive adaptation of the left to the economic model shaped by free-market capitalism, it becomes clear that both the rise of the Greens at an European level and the successes of the right at a national level are due to the fact that they presented a new approach to the problems brought up by the crisis, promoting a change in their parties that led to a positive response in the electorate. In fact, Salvati admits that “the right has now the same credibility going against laissez-faire capitalism than the left has,” so when Socialist and Social-Democratic parties tried to face this period of instability sticking even more to their traditional core values, ideas and policies, the outcome couldn’t be but negative. Because their rhetoric remained focused upon the past and on the implications of the failure of capitalism rather than proactive prescriptions to fix it, the Socialists thus sabotaged their chance at political advantage.

And in a deeper sense, socialist parties that lost their progressive, innovative edge were also deprived of their original revolutionary mantle, so critical to their utility since their birth. The term “left” was coined during the French revolution to describe those who sat in the left part of the Parliament, who advocated a republic instead of monarchy, secularization in the Enlightenment’s philosophical tradition, and a general resettling of class benefits and of wealth distribution. That single word, Left, represented the advocates of change against the status-quo: the aristocracy and the high hierarchies of the church. Within that tradition, socialism was deeply influenced by G.W. Hegel and Karl Marx, who saw history progressing through conflicts between Thesis-a status quo-and its Antithesis-or opposition. Through revolution, progress; from its very birth, Socialism very birth has been inseparably connected to the fact that the ideology of the Left should be an agent of change, of challenge and of new ideas against previous ones.

Given the role of socialist ideology in the past, it is particularly tragic that the Socialist parties of today have lost this role and acquired one which is its direct opposite: defending their past vision of the world without changing it through new ideas. As it is, right-wing parties are instead acting as the real promoters of change towards a new together with the new forces rising in the left. Unless Socialist parties strive to create a new a competing brand of ideas and reassert their true revolutionary, they will remain stuck on the wrong side of history-that of a narrow and conservative vision of politics.