Carbon Capture: Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?

[XemaSab]

by Jonathan Franzen

Last September, as someone who cares more about birds than the next man, I was following the story of the new stadium that the Twin Cities are building for their football Vikings. The stadium’s glass walls were expected to kill thousands of birds every year, and local bird-lovers had asked its sponsors to use a specially patterned glass to reduce collisions; the glass would have raised the stadium’s cost by one tenth of one per cent, and the sponsors had balked. Around the same time, the National Audubon Society issued a press release declaring climate change “the greatest threat” to American birds and warning that “nearly half ” of North America’s bird species were at risk of losing their habitats by 2080. Audubon’s announcement was credulously retransmitted by national and local media, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune, whose blogger on bird-related subjects, Jim Williams, drew the inevitable inference: Why argue about stadium glass when the real threat to birds was climate change? In comparison, Williams said, a few thousand bird deaths would be “nothing.”

I was in Santa Cruz, California, and already not in a good mood. The day I saw the Williams quote was the two hundred and fifty-fourth of a year in which, so far, sixteen had qualified as rainy. To the injury of a brutal drought came the daily insult of radio forecasters describing the weather as beautiful. It wasn’t that I didn’t share Williams’s anxiety about the future. What upset me was how a dire prophecy like Audubon’s could lead to indifference toward birds in the present.

Maybe it’s because I was raised as a Protestant and became an environmentalist, but I’ve long been struck by the spiritual kinship of environmentalism and New England Puritanism. Both belief systems are haunted by the feeling that simply to be human is to be guilty. In the case of environmentalism, the feeling is grounded in scientific fact. Whether it’s prehistoric North Americans hunting the mastodon to extinction, Maori wiping out the megafauna of New Zealand, or modern civilization deforesting the planet and emptying the oceans, human beings are universal killers of the natural world. And now climate change has given us an eschatology for reckoning with our guilt: coming soon, some hellishly overheated tomorrow, is Judgment Day. Unless we repent and mend our ways, we’ll all be sinners in the hands of an angry Earth.

I’m still susceptible to this sort of puritanism. Rarely do I board an airplane or drive to the grocery store without considering my carbon footprint and feeling guilty about it. But when I started watching birds, and worrying about their welfare, I became attracted to a countervailing strain of Christianity, inspired by St. Francis of Assisi’s example of loving what’s concrete and vulnerable and right in front of us. I gave my support to the focussed work of the American Bird Conservancy and local Audubon societies. Even the most ominously degraded landscape could make me happy if it had birds in it.

And so I came to feel miserably conflicted about climate change. I accepted its supremacy as the environmental issue of our time, but I felt bullied by its dominance. Not only did it make every grocery-store run a guilt trip; it made me feel selfish for caring more about birds in the present than about people in the future. What were the eagles and the condors killed by wind turbines compared with the impact of rising sea levels on poor nations? What were the endemic cloud-forest birds of the Andes compared with the atmospheric benefits of Andean hydroelectric projects?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/carbon-capture?mbid=nl_033115_Daily&CNDID=25377169&spMailingID=7626856&spUserID=MzM2NzQ3Mjk2MzMS1&spJobID=642824779&spReportId=NjQyODI0Nzc5S0

[DetlefK]

1. Step 1: Protect the birds. Step 2: Give up combating global warming, let Earth die, pray.

"The problem here is that it makes no difference to the climate whether any individual, myself included, drives to work or rides a bike. The scale of greenhouse-gas emissions is so vast, the mechanisms by which these emissions affect the climate so nonlinear, and the effects so widely dispersed in time and space that no specific instance of harm could ever be traced back to my 0.0000001-per-cent contribution to emissions. I may abstractly fault myself for emitting way more than the global per-capita average. But if I calculate the average annual quota required to limit global warming to two degrees this century I find that simply maintaining a typical American single-family home exceeds it in two weeks. Absent any indication of direct harm, what makes intuitive moral sense is to live the life I was given, be a good citizen, be kind to the people near me, and conserve as well as I reasonably can."



First he argues that we need to protect wild birds because they will be needed in the future.

Then he argues that wild birds will probably do fine with increasing pollution and global warming.

Then he argues that personal responsibility for global warming effectively doesn't exist because his personal responsibility for global warming is so small compared to the whole rest of mankind.




"The Earth as we now know it resembles a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy. We can dam every river and blight every landscape with biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines, to buy some extra years of moderated warming. Or we can settle for a shorter life of higher quality, protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on, at the cost of slightly hastening the human catastrophe. One advantage of the latter approach is that, if a miracle cure like fusion energy should come along, there might still be some intact ecosystems for it to save."

That's the suggestion of this nature-lover: Protect environment from the blight of alternative-energy projects while keeping dirty technologies in place. Sacrifizing most of nature to keep some of it intact.

[silverweb]

2. Sounds kind of crazy.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]Even knowing that it's not even close to being a real analogy, it makes me think of this abomination: "We had to destroy the village to (maybe) save it."

Meanwhile, doing nothing constructive but wait for the admittedly "miracle" cure that can never come in time.

[hatrack]

3. Here, let Joe Romm run the bulldozer for you!

EDIT

Franzen is a bird lover, of sorts. A 2012 Slate headline explained, “Jonathan Franzen Is the World’s Most Annoying Bird-Watcher.” How annoying? The New Yorker piece begins with an extended attack on the Audubon Society and its recent report on Climate Change. Franzen argues that somehow this is a distraction from Audubon’s main mission of bird conservation. Yet Franzen’s palliative “give up” approach to climate change would doom a large fraction of bird species to extinction. And, as we will see, Franzen is on the board of a different bird conservation group that argues climate action is essential to bird conservation.

David Yarnold, president and CEO of the National Audubon Society, called Franzen’s entire analysis “Woody Allen-esque” and “out of touch with reality.” Franzen, we learn, “came to feel miserably conflicted about climate change.” Why? In part it was Audubon’s press release for their study, which said “nearly half” of North American bird species risked habitat loss by 2080, and that climate change poses “the greatest threat our birds face.”

The press release did warn that nearly half of species were at risk of losing much of their habitat. As an aside, I’m reasonably confident that the impact of climate change on birds would be far worse than that over the next hundred years if we adopted Franzen’s “it’s hopeless” posture. If coastal wetlands are inundated, and much of the best land in this country turns into a near-permanent dustbowl, and forest fires increase multi-fold, and temperatures rise some 9°F, I don’t see most birds doing very well. Humans won’t do well either, but that simply isn’t Franzen’s concern. I digress.

How did Audubon’s peer-reviewed report help make Franzen miserable? “What upset me was how a dire prophecy like Audubon’s could lead to indifference toward birds in the present,” he wrote. Seriously! This is NOT an April Fool’s piece. In his next piece, Franzen will argue the Surgeon General’s dire science-based prophecy that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health could lead smokers to indifference toward obeying traffic lights because, like, why bother?

EDIT

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/04/01/3640975/jonathan-franzen-bird-brain-climate-change/