A future of poisoned oceans, withered crops, and irate polar bears is nobody's idea of a good time. It's clear to anyone who is paying attention that our civilization is due for an upgrade. Bright Green covers the news, ideas, opinions, and trends littering the road to an environmentally sustainable future.
This wooden pallet was originally mistaken by the Brazilian Air Force for debris from the Air France plane crash. Officials later said that the cargo pallet and two buoys, pulled from the ocean actually came from another source, most certainly a ship. Such debris is a huge environmental problem. (NEWSCOM)
Search for Air France wreckage spotlights problem of ocean debris
When the search teams combing the ocean for the lost Air France flight last week mistook floating garbage for plane wreckage, it raised a question. Is ocean debris so widespread that it turns up in a search for a plane? Just how much garbage is floating in the ocean, anyway?
The simple answer, say marine experts, is lots.
Oceans are full of abandoned fishing gear, junk thrown overboard from ships, and plastic washed out to sea from land. A report [PDF] released this week by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Ocean Conservancy found that marine litter was a growing problem worldwide.
The wooden pallet pulled out of the Atlantic by Brazilian search teams during the search was likely discarded by a passing ship, says Keith Criddle, professor of marine policy at the University of Alaska.
"Pallets are common out there,” says Professor Criddle, though he adds that often garbage is concentrated in certain areas. “You’ve got shipping going all the way across the ocean regularly. A lot of that stuff is loaded onto pallets,” which end up getting dumped when they’ve outlived their usefulness.
Wooden pallets – along with shipping and packing materials, glass, metal, paper, and food waste – fit into the categories of debris that ships can lawfully dump into the ocean as long as they're certain distances from shore. Those distances vary according to the type of material they're dumping.
“You just have to be 12 nautical miles offshore to get rid of cargo residue,” says Criddle. “That’s not very far out.”
Ocean debris can entangle wildlife, harm habitats, and damage or pose navigational hazards to ships. The junk can also cause economic losses by deterring tourism or hampering fishermen.
Criddle led the National Research Council committee that produced a report on marine debris last year. The report, which found that current measures to reduce marine debris aren’t working and the problem is likely to worsen, called for a “zero discharge” policy for dumping waste at sea.
He says that one factor contributing to the problem is that the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) allows dumping except in certain circumstances and regions. Instead, he says, it should prohibit all dumping, except for certain exceptions.
“Societies evolve, and our standards we set ought to evolve as we evolve,” Criddle says. “Historically it was technically not possible to retain all the garbage on board [ships]. We now have the ability to be able to hold the garbage onboard and get it to the shore system where we can dispose of it properly.”
UNEP says that economic incentives are essential to encourage ship operators not to dump their waste at sea. According to the report, some ports, particularly in the East Asian Seas region, charge ships a fee for disposing of certain waste onshore, so the ship operators choose to dump the garbage at sea instead. Doing away with those fees, says the report, would discourage dumping in the ocean.
In 1988, MARPOL did prohibit dumping all plastics, which account for much of the trash filling the ocean. But up to 80 percent of it comes from land, not ships – flowing from rivers, storm drains, sewage outflows, or even blown from beaches by the wind.
Plastics aren’t biodegradable, but they do break down into smaller and smaller pieces. Those tiny pieces, which scientists say attract and concentrate toxins, can be mistaken for food and ingested by fish and seabirds. The toxins then leech into the animals’ tissue. Numerous studies have shown plastic bits in the bellies of fish and seabirds.
Another common source of ocean debris is lost or abandoned fishing gear, particularly nets and “fish aggregating devices,” which are sometimes heaps of debris lashed together by fishermen and then left to float out in the open seas where fish often congregate underneath them. Fishermen can attach satellite beacons to find the devices later, but those that drift too far away or are no longer useful can end up as just another piece of trash floating in the ocean.
West Virginia names coal as its official state rock
The black bear, the Golden Delicious apple, and Monongahela silt loam now have a new member in their ranks. Last week, West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin signed a House of Delegates resolution adding coal to the list of official state symbols.
The resolution, which was introduced by 46 sponsors and passed by a vote of 96 to 0, notes that the coal industry is an "integral part of the economic and social fabric of the state" and that "Bituminous Coal is hereby designated and declared to be the official state rock."
The resolution makes no mention of coal's other varieties – lignite, anthracite, and graphite – suggesting that they will continue to be classified by the state as nonofficial rocks.
According to a press release from the West Virginia Coal Association, the effort to have the Carboniferous mineral deposits granted official status originated with Britnee Gibson, a high school senior in Wharncliffe, W.Va.
As part of a project for a regional school fair backed by the industry group, Ms. Gibson compiled the required 2,500 signatures to place the measure before the state legislature.
"I realized the state didn't have an official state rock," Gibson said in the press release, "and I thought, what better to be the state rock than coal."
The release notes that Gibson's father, Dwain, is a diesel mechanic for a coal hauling company.
West Virginia, the nation's second largest coal producer, is not alone its designation of the fossil fuel. Kentucky and Utah also count coal among their state symbols. Wyoming, which produces the most coal among US states, does not have a state rock (although it does have a state fossil: the Knightia, a prehistoric ancestor of the herring).
In any case, environmentalists tend to take a dim view of coal, because of the huge amounts of poisonous waste created by mining it and the air pollution and greenhouse gases emitted by burning it. Currently, coal accounts for about half of human-caused atmospheric increases in carbon dioxide, more than any other fossil fuel.
Writing for the eco-news website Grist, David Roberts argues that coal hasn't been particularly great for West Virginia's economy, either. He notes that the state ranks last in household median income, educational services, and social assistance.
Mr. Roberts's argument is supported by data from the environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices, which noted a significant correlation between surface mining and poverty rates in Appalachia.
The governor's signing of the resolution was not the first time the Democratic governor rankled environmentalists with tweaks to the state's symbolism. In 2005, he changed the welcome signs along roads leading into the state.
The signs, which formerly read "Welcome to Wild, Wonderful West Virginia" were changed to read, "West Virginia: Open for Business."
[Hat tip: Kate Galbraith of the New York Times's Green Inc. blog]
Will planes be fueled by flowers in the future?
Fuels made from plants hold much promise - they're biodegradable, engines that use them may last longer, they cut carbon emissions, and, it's hoped, they could lessen dependence on oil. So far, though, biofuels have at least an equal number of disadvantages to match the potential benefits.
But research – especially into non-food biofuels – continues. Especially intriguing are experiments that replace traditional jet fuel with fuels made from algae, coconuts, and flowers.
This isn't science fiction, or even just the stuff of laboratories. It's happening right now. Writes David Biello in Yale Environment 360:
Earlier this year, a Continental jet accelerated down the runway at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. Nothing out of the ordinary for Capt. Rich Jankowski, who countless times in his 38-year career had eased such two-engine Boeing 737-800s into the sky. Except on this experimental flight, one of the engines Jankowski relied on was burning fuel derived from microscopic algae to push the 45-ton aircraft into the air and keep it aloft — a first in aviation history.
Last year, Virgin Atlantic flew the first commercial jet on biofuels, a 40-minute jaunt between London and Amsterdam in which one engine burned a mix of 80 percent conventional jet fuel and 20 percent biofuel derived from coconuts and babassu nuts. Other test flights have followed, culminating in a 90-minute Japan Airlines flight with one engine burning a blend of biofuel from camelina — a weedy flower native to Europe — and regular jet fuel at the end of January.
So far, some test flights have demonstrated greatly lessened emissions and that a biofuel mix should save considerably on the amount of fuel needed.
Not that the biofuels tested so far don't have their own problems. Jatropha, for instance. But the president of Boeing Japan said that the company is hopeful of flying revenue passenger flights within 3 to 5 years using biofuels," reports Biofuels Digest.
Do you think you'll be flying on a biofueled commercial flight that soon?
A primer on the science of global warming
Talks between the US and China last month broached the topic of how the world's two greenhouse gas-producing behemoths might deal with the problem, but got nowhere concrete.
The Heartland Institute, meanwhile, released what it calls "an 880-page, 1-1/2 inch-thick, six-pound rebuttal of global-warming alarmism": "Climate Change Reconsidered: the 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC)."
Two years ago, Newsweek's Sharon Begley said – somewhat controversially – that this sort of stuff was the product of a global warming "denial machine."
For my part, I thought I'd review the basics of global warming science – how and why carbon dioxide molecules absorb heat. Thankfully, it has nothing to do with whether you drive an SUV or a hybrid, whom you vote for, or even whether you think global warming is nonsense. It has to do with physics.
Carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation (aka heat) because of its molecular size, and how it vibrates. That may seem weird – and quantum mechanics can be quite weird – but that's simply how it works. The CO2 molecule jibes perfectly with infrared wavelengths – it's in tune with them – so it absorbs their energy.
Other gases in the atmosphere, such as oxygen (O2) and nitrogen (N2), don't "harmonize" with infrared. They're "invisible" to that wavelength. (They do "scatter" the blue wavelengths, however, giving us blue skies.)
Here's a graph of what molecules absorb what wavelengths.
So let's begin at the beginning – the sun. The sun emits photons. Photons have no mass, but they have energy and a wavelength. The sun emits most photons in the "visible light" spectrum – the wavelengths of a rainbow. They hit earth's atmosphere. Ultraviolet frequencies are the first to go. Why? Again, it's about harmonization. The ozone molecule, a trio of oxygen atoms, jibes perfectly with UV wavelength, and catches it. (That's also how your sunblock works.)
Photons traveling at visible light frequencies keep going through the atmosphere. About half make it to Earth's surface. About 4 percent are immediately reflected back the way they came. We wouldn't see much if they weren't. But we're stuck with the energy of the rest. That means lots of excited and vibrating molecules.
These molecules re-emit photons not in the visible light spectrum, but at longer wavelengths – what we experience as heat.
Here's a slide show of how it all works.
CO2 molecules in the atmosphere absorb those outgoing infrared photons, reradiating them in all directions. (Here's an animation.) Imagine those infrared photons as balls bouncing around a pinball game. Eventually they exit, but the more obstacles there are, the longer the journey.
Likewise, the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the longer heat – photons traveling at infrared frequencies – takes to escape back to space. And if you're sitting in the middle of it, you experience that extended journey as raised temperatures. That's global warming in a nutshell.
To illustrate this point, look at our planetary neighbor, Venus. It's one stop closer to the sun, so it receives more of the sun's energy. But constant clouds reflect about 75 percent of that energy back into space. Still, Venus' surface temperature is around 860 degrees F., hot enough to boil mercury and melt lead. Why? Its atmosphere is 97 percent carbon dioxide.
Now look at Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. It receives even more energy than Venus, and daytime temperatures also surpass 800 degrees F. But nighttime temperatures sink below -300 F. Why? The planet has little atmosphere. There's nothing to keep the sun's energy from immediately escaping back into space.
Back to Earth. Life as we understand it is possible here only because, among many other things, we have a nice concentration of heat-absorbing gas in the atmosphere. Not enough to vaporize our thermometers, but not so little that we freeze solid every night.
So here's the question: If you increase the amount of those gases in the atmosphere, will it get a little toastier? The physics says yes.
Earth's climate system is, of course, much more complex than the picture I've painted here. And certainly there's much uncertainty surrounding what extra energy in the climate system might do: Will more water vapor, a potent greenhouse gas, further warm the atmosphere? Or will more clouds cool it? Will warmer oceans cause more hurricanes, or will changes in the atmospheric temperature gradient snuff them out?
All good questions, but as to the fundamental physics, there's no doubt. CO2 absorbs and reradiates infrared radiation. More of it means more heat.
How green are trains, public transportation, and hybrid cars? It depends.
Most of us assume that some things are givens when it comes to environment-friendly transportation choices. Among those assumptions: Taking the subway is better than driving an SUV, riding a train tops hopping on a plane, and a hybrid car is much preferred over a conventional gasoline-powered vehicle.
But that's not always true. Recent research [PDF] points to just the opposite, sometimes.
Environmental engineers Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath of the University of California found that instead of taking a train into the city from suburbia, there are times when "people would be better off traveling through town in a gas-guzzling, high emission SUV," reports Red Orbit. Ouch!
But it gets even worse: Taking the commuter train across Boston results in higher greenhouse gas emissions than traveling the same distance in a jumbo jet, says New Scientist.
How could that possibly be?
Part of it comes down to how the power that fuels the transportation is generated. Boston's electric commuter trains use electricity that comes mostly from burning fossil fuels.
What makes this study different from some in the past: Instead of comparing the climate effect of modes of transport according to their emissions, the researchers looked at emissions caused by building and maintaining various types of transportation,the infrastructure associated with them, and the generation of the fuel required for each.
To represent short, medium, and long-haul travel, they measured light rail systems in San Francisco and Boston, three types of gas-powered vehicles (2005 models of Toyota Camry, Chevrolet Trailblazer SUV, and Ford F-150 truck), and Embraer 145, Boeing 737, and Boeing 747 airplanes.
Then they figured out how many passengers each would carry over its lifetime, how many miles it would travel, and the life expectancy of its infrastructure – tracks, roads, and airports.
According to New Scientist:
"Including these additional sources of pollution more than doubles the greenhouse gas emissions of train travel. The emissions generated by car travel increase by nearly one third when manufacturing and infrastructure are taken into account. In comparison to cars on roads and trains on tracks, air travel requires little infrastructure. As a result, full life-cycle emissions are between 10 and 20 per cent higher than 'tailpipe' emissions.
Occupancy also matters when it comes to measuring greenness – almost-empty buses at off-peak hours were less efficient than even SUVs and pickup trucks.
This way of measuring the environmental impact of transportation should be taken into account when planning new initiatives, say the researchers.
"We should avoid building rail systems that are disconnected from major population areas and require car trips and parking to access," Chester advises.
Electric cars were mentioned by Chester and Horvath (their green score can depend on how the electricity is generated), but hybrid cars didn't make the report. Still, they were in the news this week: Hybrid cars are great for air quality, they save money at the pump, and they make the owner feel good, but, in the words of the Houston Chronicle, "They’re terrible for roads."
Do hybrids cause huge potholes? Do they emit some kind of chemical that destroys blacktop?
Well, no. "Fuel-efficient cars are draining government coffers of money needed to repair roads and build new ones," the Chronicle says.
In other words, because hybrids use less gas, they generate fewer tax dollars to pay for transportation infrastructure.
Many think that the fairest way to tax car use is not on gas purchased but on the number of miles driven. Hybrids and electric cars could certainly hasten that.
Of course, none of this is to deny the long list of benefits of buying a hybrid vehicle (or even taking the train or bus). But it does point out the complexity of many environmental issues.
ADDED LATER: Click here for a discussion about the latest in hybrid buses.
Making every day Earth Day – literally
It's June 8, and you know what that means: Happy World Oceans Day!
We understand that you might still be exhausted from having just celebrated World Environment Day this past Friday, International Day for Biological Diversity on May 22, and Bike to Work Day on May 14, but we hope that you can muster a little more energy today to, you know, think about the oceans.
We know what you're thinking: Didn't we just have a World Oceans Day?
Nope. You're probably confusing it with World Water Day, which was held on March 22 (the day after World Forestry Day), or perhaps World Wetlands Day, which was Feb. 2.
You'd think that the world's weather experts would be a bit peeved about someone declaring a wetlands holiday on Groundhog Day, but don't worry: The weather people got their due on March 23, World Meteorological Day, in which participants – and we're sure you were one of them – took some time to think about "weather, climate and the air we breathe."
And then five days later, on March 28, you pondered the atmosphere a little more during Earth Hour, when we all turned our lights off for an hour (and possibly made things worse with all those paraffin candles).
Things settled down the following month, when the only major environmental holiday was the big one – Earth Day – on April 22, followed two days later by Arbor Day, an old holiday that has fallen out of vogue, perhaps because planting a tree requires physical labor.
But we're only halfway through the year. Next Monday is National Get Outdoors Day followed by World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought on Wednesday, and then it's time to gear up for World Population Day (July 11), National Wildlife Day (Sept. 4), World Ozone Day (Sept. 16), Green Consumer Day (Sept. 28), World Vegetarian Day (Oct. 1; not to be confused with World Vegan Day, which is Nov. 1), World Animal Day (Oct. 4), World Habitat Day (Oct. 5), World Food Day (Oct. 16), America Recycles Day (Nov. 15), and International Mountain Day (Dec. 11).
The purpose of all these days, of course, is to Raise Awareness. Environmental degradation, the thinking goes, is not caused by running linear systems of production in a world of finite resources; rather, it's caused by mass ignorance. But by getting Congress – or better still, the UN – to designate a calendar date as an "official" observance of your cause, it will help you increase Awareness, allowing you to distribute more pamphlets, T-shirts, silicone bracelets, magnetic car ribbons, tote bags, mugs, calendars, and so on, raising Awareness even more.
Once Awareness has passed a certain threshold, congrats! Your job is done. Now it's time for the problem to be fixed by someone else – such as the government, or maybe Google.
Of course, this threshold has not been crossed yet, which explains why the oceans continue to fill with garbage, species continue to vanish at an alarming rate, and greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise.
But don't worry. By my count, there are at least 340 days of the year that still aren't designated as environmental awareness days. There's still much work to be done, but at least we all know the way forward.
Many smokers don't realize that cigarette butts aren't biodegradable. (NEWSCOM/file)
Have you seen this?
Here's some of the environment-related news that attracted our attention over the past few days:
First, a bit of shameless self-promotion. The Bright Green Blog's Eoin O'Carroll looks at the what might happen to hybrid cars in the government takeover of General Motors: "You just bought a car company. Now what?"
There's been plenty written about the Tennessee Valley Authority coal ash spill, but probably GQ has done it best so far, in "Black Tide," a very long article that explores the human and scientific issues.
We go from coal ash to cigarette ashes. They're both controversial environmental topics, no butts about it.
Most of us would like to live in a green house, and they are becoming more affordable – even prefab homes are going green, reports USA Today. But what about a house you can heat with a hair dryer? One's slated to be finished by September in Oregon.
And one final link - your laugh of the day:
A piece of ice the size of a house crashes into the Rype Fiord from Eielson Glacier in east Greenland. (NEWSCOM)
Pro and con views on the global warming debate
Always-interesting Yale Environment 360 was especially intriguing this week, featuring an opinion piece by Oberlin College professor David Orr. It's titled "Learning to Live With Climate Change Will Not be Enough." Balancing it is a Q&A interview with eminent physicist Freeman Dyson of Princeton University, whom they call "a reluctant global warming skeptic."
Dr. Orr argues that we have two choices on human-induced climate change: adaption and mitigation. He writes:
"The argument for adaptation to the effects of climate change rests on a chain of logic that goes something like this: Climate change is real, but will be slow and moderate enough to permit orderly adaptation to changes that we can foresee and comprehend. Those changes will, in a few decades, plateau around a new, manageable stable state, leaving the gains of the modern world mostly intact – albeit powered by wind, solar, and as-yet-undreamed advanced technologies."
And while he agrees that we should take adaptation actions, such as "developing heat- and drought-tolerant crops for agriculture, changing architectural standards to withstand greater heat and larger storms, and modifying infrastructure to accommodate larger storm events and rising sea levels," he doesn't think they will be enough.
So Orr believes that mitigation will be necessary and suggests giving "priority to limiting the emission of heat trapping-gases as quickly as possible to reduce the eventual severity of climatic disruption." Otherwise, down the road, we're going to have "why didn't we act earlier" regrets, he says.
"Our best course is to reduce the scale and scope of the problem with a sense of wartime urgency. And we better move quickly and smartly, while the moving’s good," he concludes.
The Yale 360 interview with Freeman Dyson was his first after a long profile of him (focusing on his views about global warming) appeared in The New York Times Magazine in March. Afterward, he received plenty of criticism. Not that he hadn't already, in effect, been booed by others in the scientific community. His sin? He criticizes some of the current theories – and supporters – of climate change
In the Times article, he's quoted as saying:
– “The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.”
– "Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen [the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies]. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.”
– “Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.”
In the Yale 360 interview, however, he says that the article overemphasized the importance he places on the global warming debate. "To me it is a very small part of my life," he insisted. Still, he has strong opinions on the topic – ranging from "the intolerance of criticism" of researchers and advocates of current climate-change theories to condemnation of modeling to project future the climate of the future and its effects:
"You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being real. It is also true that the whole livelihood of all these people depends on people being scared. Really, just psychologically, it would be very difficult for them to come out and say, “Don’t worry, there isn’t a problem.” ... I don’t say that they’re dishonest. But I think it’s just a normal human reaction."
That doesn't make Dyson a global warming denier, though:
"No doubt that warming is happening. I don’t think it is correct to say 'global,' but certainly warming is happening. I have been to Greenland a year ago and saw it for myself. ... And glaciers are shrinking and so on. ... I am not saying none of these consequences are happening. I am just questioning whether they are harmful."
Also, he adds, "Anything that looks bad is reported, and anything that looks good is not reported."
That's just a sampling of what each scientist said. If you're interested in climate change, you'll want to read both.
Greenhouse gases and our perception of risk
On Monday, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs told an audience at the Asia Society in New York City that, given China's dependence on coal to fuel economic growth – and its determination to grow – the United States has no option but more nuclear energy and carbon sequestration. (Here's Grist's account.)
In some ways, that seems fair enough. According to the World Resources Institute, the US is responsible for 29 percent of all human-emitted greenhouse gases (GHGs) for the past 150 years. That's a larger share than any other single country, and more than triple what China, the second largest climate offender, has contributed so far. (See Greenpeace's new report "America's Share of the Climate Crisis.")
The by-country breakdown raises the question, though: Why can't nations be responsible just for what they've emitted historically? Why can't we just clean up our own respective messes?
Because Earth's climate doesn't work like a bank. Customers can't deposit and withdraw GHGs at will and expect the whole structure to remain stable. Who has contributed what, when matters less than how much there is total, and at what point the whole system will go over some tipping point.
On this last point – the risk that GHG build-up could set off relatively rapid and rather unpleasant changes – James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warns that we've already gone too far.
Some years ago, scientists thought stabilizing atmospheric CO2 at 550 ppm would work. Then the figure became 450 ppm. Now Dr. Hansen argues that it's got to be 350 ppm. We're currently at 385 parts per million. We need to backtrack, he says. (Here's more on the science and the "350" rallying cry.)
Hansen's argument [PDF] is essentially about avoiding bad gambles. He says that the specter of what we don't know – how and when Earth's climate system goes over these thresholds – combined with what we do know (that it has gone over these thresholds in the past and that these changes correlate with GHG concentrations) represent an unacceptable risk.
He notes that climate is already changing – a poleward shift of midlatitude deserts and the melting of mountain glaciers – and that many of the changes are coming faster than scientists predicted.
"Impacts of this climate shift support the conclusion that 385 ppm CO2 is already deleterious," he wrote [PDF] last year.
Harvard economist Martin Weitzman breaks the unknown down into economic terms. He says that, even when the probability of a catastrophe is small, if the catastrophe is potentially great – like sea level rise inundating coastal cities and a mass extinction of some life-forms that fail to adjust – then the best investment is acting now to avoid that not-very-likely but potentially game-changing outcome.
He writes [PDF]:
"However measured, the planetary welfare effect of climate changes that might accompany mean temperature increases from 10 degrees C up to 20 degrees C with probabilities anything remotely resembling 5 percent down to 1 percent implies a non-negligible probability of worldwide catastrophe."
When confronting other – some might argue lesser – risks, the US and people in general, are quick to act. Take the war in Iraq. Issues of flawed and/or cherry-picked intelligence aside, the US decided that the costs of not removing Saddam Hussein, who was ostensibly seeking nuclear weapons, outweighed the price of going to war. The country acted to the tune of $3 trillion.
Says Weitzman [PDF]:
"On a US. national level, rough comparisons could perhaps be made with the potentially huge payoffs, small probabilities, and significant costs involved in countering terrorism, building antiballistic missile shields, or neutralizing hostile dictatorships possibly harboring weapons of mass destruction."
So, what's different about how we perceive climate change, which has led, many feel, to not much action so far?
It's not a problem of being unaware. A 2005 survey [PDF] by Yale's Anthony Leiserowitz indicates that while Americans are very aware of climate change, they think that it's happening somewhere else to someone else.
"Americans perceived climate change as a moderate risk that will predominantly impact geographically and temporally distant people and places," writes Dr. Leiserowitz.
A spate of recent studies indicates just the opposite – sea level rise from melting polar glaciers will, it seems, hit North America particularly hard.
But the deeper question is, why do we perceive certain risks – such as flying in a plane – the way we do, while greater ones – like driving in a car – don't inspire the same urgency?
A quick glance at Wikipedia's entry for "risk perception" yields some intriguing possibilities. People prefer running the risk of an unkown loss (a car crash) to paying for a known loss (car insurance), for example.
We think that things that we can imagine are more likely than things we can't. And if a perceived risk fails to induce the enough dread – if you can't imagine it – it won't cause risk-aversion activity.
And, in fact, Leiserowitz's study [PDF] of viewers of the 2004 climate change disaster movie "The Day After Tomorrow" indicates that simply having the mental imagery to work with makes a big difference. After they watched the movie, people were much more worried about climate change.
But there's a flip side to all this. Sometimes the mental imagery we associate with a risk is so powerful that it causes risk-averse tendencies greater, perhaps, than what's warranted. In the same paper, Leiserowitz notes that this has been the case with nuclear energy for three decades.
He writes [PDF]:
[T]he dramatic portrayal of a nuclear accident in The China Syndrome (1979), combined with the subsequent real-world accident at Three Mile Island, arguably shaped the public debate about the safety of nuclear power. This synergism of fiction and reality may have greatly amplified the perceived risk of nuclear power, with ripple effects that still reverberate in public opinion and fundamentally constrain the industry today.
That doesn't bode well for Jeffrey Sachs's emphasis on nuclear.
The Jets, the Giants, and the EPA
Yes, it sounds like a takeoff on one of those jokes that starts: "A priest, a rabbi, and a minister were in a rowboat..." But this is football – and the environment. And it's not humor. Actually, it shows that everyone is hopping aboard the green bandwagon.
The US Environmental Protection Agency sent out a press release crowing about its pigskin partnership with New York's two football teams. Well, not the teams themselves. The Jets and the Giants haven't suddenly announced a switch from harsh detergents to castile soap for washing the players' grungy uniforms.
Instead, the teams – as you may know if you're a football fan – are building a joint venue, New Meadowlands stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. It "will be one of the greenest stadiums in American professional sports,” said EPA Acting Regional Administrator George Pavlou in the e-mailed release. “This ambitious, comprehensive plan set forth by the two team ownership groups is a blueprint for new sports venues everywhere.”
Hyperbole aside, what are they planning?
– Using 40,000 tons of recycled steel and choosing seating made partially from recycled plastic and scrap iron, reports the Star-Ledger's Jenny Vrentas.
– Cutting the stadium’s annual water use by 25 percent, making it 30 percent more energy efficient than Giants Stadium, says Environmental Leader. They'll achieve this, in part, by installing waterless urinals, which will save 2.7 million gallons of water, reports The Associated Press, Synthetic turf will save 3.5 million gallons of water compared to natural grass. (Wonder how the players feel about playing on artificial turf?)
– Providing new mass-transit options for fans, which will, they hope, eliminate 5.6 million miles of car travel each year.
– Reducing air pollution from construction vehicles by using cleaner diesel fuel, diesel engine filters, and shortening the amount of time engines are allowed to idle.
– Replacing traditional concession plates, cups, and carriers with alternatives that can be composted.
– "All told, the goals of the agreement stand to save the equivalent of the emissions of nearly 1.68 million metric tons of carbon dioxide during the stadium’s construction and its first year of operations," says GlobeSt.com. "According to the EPA, that’s equal to taking more than 300,000 cars off the road for a whole year or the emissions from the energy needed to power 150,000 American homes for one year."
The site of the stadium is also a rehabilitated former brownfield.
The owners were serious about their efforts to construct a more environmentally friendly stadium, but at a press conference, Giants chief executive John Mara and Jets owner Woody Johnson had some fun kidding about the "green" building. (The Giants' main color is blue, and the Jets' is green.) "What I will say to my friend Woody Johnson is that today and St. Patrick's Day will be the only two days that green is the preferred color in this building," Mara said.
But many are watching to see if this is the start a new trend in sports. The EPA certainly hopes so, calling the as-yet-unnamed New Jersey stadium a "beacon of green."
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