Monthly Archives: October 2012

McKibbon's Kick-Ass Campaign to Divest From Oil

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I hereby take back every mean and snarky thing I’ve ever said about Bill McKibben.

I’d already apologized at the end of last year about my potshots at him. But now? I am blown away. His and 350.org’s latest campaign, scheduled to kick off the day after the election, is exactly what the enviro movement needs:

McKibben and 350, the folks who brought us the Keystone XL pipeline protests, are now calling for a nationwide divestment campaign aimed at fossil fuel companies’ bottom line. Beginning with student-led campaigns on college campuses, modeled on the anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s, they’ll pressure institutions to withdraw all investments from big oil and coal and gas. Their larger goal is to ignite a morally charged movement to strip the industry of its legitimacy.

“The fossil fuel industry has behaved so recklessly that they should lose their social license — their veneer of respectability,” McKibben tells his audience. “You want to take away our planet and our future? We’re going to take away your money and your good name.”

Now that’s how it’s done.

To kickstart this organizing, they’re doing a tour around the country.

The tour builds off of McKibben’s Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” which appeared in July and is one of the most widely read pieces in the magazine’s history. Buzz is clearly building, and not just in McKibben’s home state of Vermont. The Seattle show is sold out. The Boston show, on Nov. 15, sold out in less than 24 hours and has moved to a venue three times larger, the Orpheum Theater, with 2,700 seats. (Full disclosure: McKibben sits on Grist’s board of directors.)

Part multimedia lecture — with video appearances by 350.org allies like Naomr Klein, James Hansen, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu — and part organizing rally, with a live musical performance, the Burlington event gave a taste of what’s to come. The tour will “evolve,” with different elements and onstage guests along the way — for example, Klein and filmmaker Josh Fox, of Gasland fame, will join McKibben onstage in various cities. Although it was a little rough around the edges on Saturday night, nobody seemed to mind (McKibben was playing, wisely, to his hometown crowd). The basic structure and central message of the show were well in place — and, just as important for 350′s objectives, the organizing wheels were well in motion.

Another really good sign about this campaign is that they’re already targeting outeach to the folks they need to build this movement.

As 350′s Matt Leonard, serving as “tour manager” for Do The Math, explained it to me, the tour isn’t simply about “getting butts in seats” for a lecture or concert (thus the relatively low emphasis on the musical guests in each city, most of whom are yet to be announced). It’s about getting “the right people” in those seats. “This isn’t just for publicity and outreach,” he says. “We’re putting tremendous effort into making sure students, community leaders, college trustees, and influential decision-makers are a part of this event, because they are the ones that will turn this from a talk into a hard-hitting campaign.”

McKibben sees this movement as the next logical step after the Keystone fight.

“Fighting Keystone,” he told me by email, “we learned we could stand up to the fossil fuel industry. We demonstrated some moxie.” But, he added: “We also figured out that we’re not going to win just fighting one pipeline at a time. We have to keep all those battles going, but we also have to play some offense, go at the heart of the problem.”

The Rolling Stone piece and McKibben’s Do the Math lecture leave no doubt what the heart of the problem is. Drawing on a widely circulated report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a group of U.K. financial experts and environmentalists, McKibben shows that the fossil fuel industry’s known reserves contain five times the amount of carbon needed to raise the planet’s temperature more than 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels — the point beyond which, according to international consensus, all bets for a livable climate are off….

Obviously, given the sheer amount of money at stake — many trillions of dollars — the odds of anything like that happening under current political conditions are nil. McKibben is arguing that, if there’s any hope at all of preserving a livable climate, those conditions must change decisively. And they can — but only if and when enough people understand the simple climate math and realize that the fossil fuel industry is prepared to cook humanity off the planet unless somebody stops it.

A key part of this new strategy is identifying a clear-cut enemy we can go after.

“There’s always been this slight unreality to the whole climate change thing,” he continued. “Because most people, at some level, kept thinking — and rightly so — Yeah, but no one will ever actually do this. No one will actually, knowingly, destroy the planet by climate change. But once you’ve seen those numbers, it’s clear, that’s exactly what they’re knowingly planning to do. So that changes the equation, you know?”

Campus divestment, obviously, isn’t enough by itself. The point of it is to pick a place in the ground we can stand and start fighting to win.

“I think it’s a way to a get a fight started,” McKibben said without hesitation, “and to get people in important places talking actively about the culpability of the fossil fuel industry for the trouble that we’re in. And once that talk starts, I think it does start imposing a certain kind of economic pressure. Their high stock price is entirely justified by the thought that they’re going to get all their reserves out of the ground. And I think we’ve already made an argument that it shouldn’t be a legitimate thing to be doing.”…

“It’s not a question of coming up with the right set of policies,” he said. “Nobody’s really come up with a new set of policy stuff for 20 years. We just haven’t ever tried the things that the economists all told us to try, because the fossil fuel industry got in the way. So it’s about figuring out what power is in the way.

“Look, our job as organizers, our most important job, is to take the next step — throw a big rock in the pond, see what ripples it creates, and then figure out how to surf those and how to launch the next one. We think that if we’re able to explain to people what the fossil fuel industry is doing, it will weaken their position — weaken it morally, politically, and economically. And that will make more things possible than are possible now.”

I’m not saying the campaign is perfect. They’ve definitely got some serious work to do around jobs & addressing the economic anxieties of working families. But as a place to start after we reelect Obama, this is fabulous.

The Climate Change Debate: 2008 vs Now

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When you’re talking about climate change, it’s easy to forget just how recently the Right managed to shut down all debate. Courtesy Ezra Klein, an excerpt from the 2008 Townhall presidential debate:

an undecided voter in Nashville asked the two candidates: “[W]e saw that Congress moved pretty fast in the face of an economic crisis. I want to know what you would do within the first two years to make sure that Congress moves fast as far as environmental issues, like climate change and green jobs?”

McCain agreed that climate change was a critical issue, even in the face of a struggling economy:

“Look, we are in tough economic times; we all know that. … But when we can — when we have an issue that we may hand our children and our grandchildren a damaged planet, I have disagreed strongly with the Bush administration on this issue. “

“Now, how — what’s — what’s the best way of fixing it? Nuclear power. … Nuclear power is safe, and it’s clean, and it creates hundreds of thousands of jobs. We can move forward, and clean up our climate, and develop green technologies, and alternate — alternative energies for — for hybrid, for hydrogen, for battery-powered cars, so that we can clean up our environment and at the same time get our economy going by creating millions of jobs.”

Obama wholeheartedly agreed—he just thought McCain was placing too heavy an emphasis on drilling for fossil fuels:

“This is one of the biggest challenges of our times. And it is absolutely critical that we understand this is not just a challenge, it’s an opportunity, because if we create a new energy economy, we can create five million new jobs, easily, here in the United States. It can be an engine that drives us into the future the same way the computer was the engine for economic growth over the last couple of decades. … “

“One last point I want to make on energy. Sen. McCain talks a lot about drilling, and that’s important, but we have three percent of the world’s oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world’s oil. So what that means is that we can’t simply drill our way out of the problem. And we’re not going to be able to deal with the climate crisis if our only solution is to use more fossil fuels that create global warming.”

In other words, far from being a long-term success by the Right, the clampdown on talking seriously about climate change didn’t happen until after 2008. That’s not to say there weren’t plenty of deniers and folks playing games around Climate Change before 2008. But for every one of those, you could point to a Schwarzenegger or a Bloomberg — or, sporadically, Bush Jr — who were engaging with the issue. It was only after the finance meltdown, when folks were starting to question the sanity & viability of our current casino-style version of capitalism, that the mainstream Right decided that climate change was a disguise for socialism.

David Roberts On Reframing the Climate Change

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A few weeks ago, Bill McKibben gave a conservative on Bill Maher’s show a nice, solid smack down. Although McKibben won that particular exchange, Grist’s David Roberts asks whether there’s a way to avoid one of the traps the conservative set.

Conversations about climate change in the U.S. tend to devolve into uncertainty vs. certainty. The panel discussion that followed Bill’s initial remarks demonstrates how it happens.

Conserva-twerp Will Cain (do they make these guys in a factory?) faithfully delivered the conservative attack, which is twofold. First, they argue that solutions proposed by climate hawks will strangle the economy — Cain compares them to a tourniquet. Then they ask, “Shouldn’t you be really certain before you ask us to do something like that? Are you that certain? Because I heard scientists are still arguing over stuff.” Climate hawks, in my experience, tend to respond with some variation of, “Yes! Scientific consensus! We’re certain!”

Look, though, at how this allows conservatives to frame the discussion: “Are you so certain that we have to do this awful thing?” “Yes, we’re certain you have to do this awful thing!”

And that is a pretty strong hand for conservatives.

Roberts has been trying to find a better way to combat this frame. What if McKibben had instead responded:

What Will doesn’t seem to understand is that this kind of uncertainty isn’t a reason to sit back on our laurels and wait for more information. It’s the opposite! After all, if there’s a 50 percent chance things could turn out better than our best estimates, there’s also a 50 percent chance they could turn out worse. And if you’ve seen our best estimates, you know that “worse” should give you nightmares.

If I told you your house had a 50 percent chance of burning down, would you say, “Get back to me when you’re sure”? No: you’d buy insurance! Scientists are telling us there’s a high-and-rising chance of serious, even catastrophic climate disruption. So we need to buy some insurance. That means diversifying our energy sources and ruggedizing our food, water, and transportation systems. We need to be, in a real sense, ready for anything. Oh, and we need to stop raising the chances of catastrophe by carbon-loading the atmosphere.

Being ready for anything in the face of uncertainty costs more money in the short term. But it costs a hell of a lot less than not being ready when the time comes. Just ask New Orleans.

In a follow-up post , Roberts argues that a good model for thinking about this comes from how smart folks think about national security threats. Continue reading →

CA Prop 37: A Major Step in Building a Real Food Movement?

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For the past couple of years, there’ve been a growing number of people who’ve been pushing for a more organic, more locally oriented form of agriculture. From farmers markets to buying organic in your local grocery store, it’s mostly been about individual consumers. But in a few weeks, according to Michael Pollan, we’re going to find out if these individual actions are beginning to turn into something like a movement.

California’s Proposition 37, which would require that genetically modified (G.M.) foods carry a label, has the potential… to change the politics of food not just in California but nationally too.

It’s critical, because we’re at the point where to make more progress, we need to start picking political fights – and winning.

In voting with our food dollars, we enlarge our sense of our “interests” from the usual concern with a good value to, well, a concern with values. This is no small thing; it has revitalized local farming and urban communities and at the same time raised the bar on the food industry, which now must pay attention (or at least lip service) to things like sustainable farming and the humane treatment of animals.

Yet this sort of soft politics, useful as it may be in building new markets and even new forms of civil society, has its limits. Not everyone can afford to participate in the new food economy. If the food movement doesn’t move to democratize the benefits of good food, it will be — and will deserve to be — branded as elitist.

That’s why, sooner or later, the food movement will have to engage in the hard politics of Washington — of voting with votes, not just forks. This is an arena in which it has thus far been much less successful. It has won little more than crumbs in the most recent battle over the farm bill (which every five years sets federal policy for agriculture and nutrition programs), a few improvements in school lunch and food safety and the symbol of an organic garden at the White House. The modesty of these achievements shouldn’t surprise us: the food movement is young and does not yet have its Sierra Club or National Rifle Association, large membership organizations with the clout to reward and punish legislators. Thus while Big Food may live in fear of its restive consumers, its grip on Washington has not been challenged.

Prop 37 isn’t the only sign of life. Big Ag

is being challenged on a great many fronts — indeed, seemingly everywhere but in Washington. Around the country, dozens of proposals to tax and regulate soda have put the beverage industry on the defensive, forcing it to play a very expensive (and thus far successful) game of Whac-A-Mole. The meat industry is getting it from all sides: animal rights advocates seeking to expose its brutality; public-health advocates campaigning against antibiotics in animal feed; environmentalists highlighting factory farming’s contribution to climate change.

Big Food is also feeling beleaguered by its increasingly skeptical and skittish consumers. Earlier this year the industry was rocked when a blogger in Houston started an online petition to ban the use of “pink slime” in the hamburger served in the federal school-lunch program. Pink slime — so-called by a U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist — is a kind of industrial-strength hamburger helper made from a purée of slaughterhouse scraps treated with ammonia. We have apparently been ingesting this material for years in hamburger patties, but when word got out, the eating public went ballistic. Within days, the U.S.D.A. allowed schools to drop the product, and several supermarket chains stopped carrying it, shuttering several of the plants that produce it. Shortly after this episode, I received a panicky phone call from someone in the food industry, a buyer for one of the big food-service companies. After venting about the “irrationality” of the American consumer, he then demanded to know: “Who’s going to be hit next? It could be any of us.”

But Prop 37 takes the fight to hold level.

The fight over labeling G.M. food is not foremost about food safety or environmental harm, legitimate though these questions are. The fight is about the power of Big Food. Monsanto has become the symbol of everything people dislike about industrial agriculture: corporate control of the regulatory process; lack of transparency (for consumers) and lack of choice (for farmers); an intensifying rain of pesticides on ever-expanding monocultures; and the monopolization of seeds, which is to say, of the genetic resources on which all of humanity depends.

And that’s why Big Ag & their friends are going to war over Prop 37.

To prevent the United States from following [Europe's lead], Monsanto and DuPont, the two leading merchants of genetically modified seed, have invested more than $12 million to defeat Prop 37. They’ve been joined in this effort by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, whose president declared at a meeting last July that defeating Prop 37 would be the group’s top priority for 2012. Answering the call, many of America’s biggest food and beverage makers — including PepsiCo, Nestlé, Coca-Cola and General Mills — have together ponied up tens of millions of dollars to, in effect, fight transparency about their products.

If we win this one, says Pollan, it’ll put politicians on notice that the food movement has gotten real.

Over the last four years I’ve had occasion to speak to several people who have personally lobbied the president on various food issues, including G.M. labeling, and from what I can gather, Obama’s attitude toward the food movement has always been: What movement? I don’t see it. Show me. On Nov. 6, the voters of California will have the opportunity to do just that.

Stiglitz, Pareto, and Copernicus

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Recently a friend sent me an article by Joseph Stiglitz from way back in 1993 in which Stiglitz wrestles with Bowles and Gintis, two Marxists who were big names in lefty circles at the time. Here’s how he summarizes the main argument.

Of the many reasons that information economics has identified that markets “fail,” Bowles and Gintis focus on what they call “contested exchange”—the problems that arise because monitoring and enforcing contractual relationships is costly. They provide a clear and intuitive discussion of why the resulting resource allocations may be inefficient; for instance, firms do not distinguish between real resource expenditures that enhance contract enforcement and rent payments, but society should.

Stiglitz, one of the granddaddies of information economics, agrees with their basic point (or his interpretation of it) but thinks they overstate its implications. One thing he said really struck me:

It is in their implicit or explicit policy prescriptions that radical economists fail to make their case. The contention that markets are not constrained Pareto efficient does suggest a role for government, but even that needs to be qualified: the theorems have little to say about whether actual governments can undertake the appropriate roles. Moreover, proving that markets are imperfect does not necessarily imply anything is radically wrong with the capitalist system.…

The critique of information economics can also be interpreted in more conservative terms—that while markets are imperfect, the appropriate response is a limited reliance on a relatively small number of well-designed government interventions, taking into account the limitations of government, including its limited information, with each intervention carefully aimed at a particular market failure.

But what happens when we’re talking about far more than “a relatively small number” of interventions? Regardless of which party is in power, the government has consistently intervened in a deep and profound way into virtually every sector of the economy. That so-called “relatively small number,” “carefully aimed” looks less like a few exceptions that prove the rule and more like Copernicus’ model right before it was tossed out by folks like Galileo.

This doesn’t mean that you therefore have to believe that capitalism doesn’t work. And the quote may not be reflective of where Stiglitz is today – although where exactly he now stands is pretty unclear after I’ve read his latest book. But I still think it’s a useful crystallization of the precarious position in which a lot of moderate and liberal economists find themselves.

This Just in: Bankers Admit They Have No Idea What They Are Doing

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Neil Barofsky, former inspector General of TARP and author of the mindblowing book Bailout, is not happy about a report in the Wall Street Journal article on bank stress tests conducted by the Fed. These stress tests are critical to our finding out banks are in trouble before they once again drag the economy over a cliff. And if they are going to mean anythng, the numbers have to be right.

But at the end of the [WSJ] article the reporters reveal that the Fed recently “backed off” a requirement that the CFOs of the banks actually confirm that the numbers they are providing are accurate. The reason? The banks argued, and the Fed apparently agreed, that providing data about what’s going on in the banks is simply too “confusing for any CFO to be able to be sure his bank had gotten it right.”

So the next time someone says government regulators will just slow down banks because can’t possibly understand what those sophisticated folks at the banks are doing, let em know they’re right — but the people who’re supposedly running the banks are equally clueless.

The New Math of Mitt Romney & Some Progressives

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One of the things that struck me about Mitt Romney’s debate performance was that part of his tone sounded awfully familiar. I couldn’t place it for a couple of days. And then this weekend, while reading some lefty blogs, it hit me: it sounded a lot like some progressives.

When Romney talks about the budget and healthcare, he uses New Math. His budget was nothing but sunshine and kittens – no details as to how it would add up, just a list of happy outcomes. And when he gets called on it, he just doesn’t care. It will all add up, he insists – and if you say it won’t, you’re lying.

When some progressives talk about creating a just economy, it feels a lot like Romney. All we need to do is kick evil corporate butt and we’ll end up with an economy where workers and communities are happy & everyone will have plenty of kittens and sunshine. How exactly? Well, you know, from all that great human capital we’ll unleash. And because they’ll be no more evil corporations.

Of course, there are differences between Romney and these kind of progressives. Romney speaks with the voice of someone who’s used to having power – who’s used to bullshitting his way past clients’ concerns and delegating the ugly details to subordinates. These progressives speak with the voice of someone who’s used to not having power – who assumes that because we are morally pure it’ll all work out combined with the feeling that getting into the inner workings of the economy is… icky (and scary).

But both speak from a place of absolute conviction combined with absolutely no sense of responsibility.

If my framework is going to be successful, it has to help progressives avoid getting caught in this morass of New Math. If we’re going to talk about taking power away from big corporations and putting it back in the hands of ordinary people, the story can’t end there. Romney can get away with his sums not adding up – either way he ends up with $200 million. We aren’t so lucky.

Microsoft: We Didn't Build That

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In an op-ed about the importance of protecting federal research, Steve Lohr cites an interesting stat from a report this year by the National Research Council. The report

looked at eight computing technologies, including digital communications, databases, computer architectures and artificial intelligence, tracing government-financed research to commercialization. It calculated the portion of revenue at 30 well-known corporations that could be traced back to the seed research backed by government agencies. The total was nearly $500 billion a year.

According to the head of the committee that produced the report,

“If you take any major information technology company today, from Google to Intel to Qualcomm to Apple to Microsoft and beyond, you can trace the core technologies to the rich synergy between federally funded universities and industry research and development.”

Who’s the pinko socialist atheist behind that quote? Why that would be Peter Lee, a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Research.

The White Working Class Vs The Southern White Working Class

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Kevin Drum, on a survey of white working-class voters.

Democrats in general, and Obama in particular, don’t really have a huge “white working class problem.” What they have is a huge Southern problem.…

in the West, Midwest, and Northeast, the white working class vote is fairly evenly split. Romney is slightly ahead in the West and Northeast, while Obama is slightly ahead in the Midwest. It’s only in the South that the white working class vote is overwhelmingly Republican, and this is what skews the national results, which show Romney ahead 48%-35%.

"Rational" Scientist Profs Still Discriminate against Female Scientists

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For folks who have a hard time believing women still haven’t achieved full equality, here’s the results of a new study of discrimination against female scientists.

Discussions of gender bias in science and mathematics have long been complicated by a host of factors — including whether women receive preferential treatment through affirmative action or whether innate differences indeed exist between men and women.

To avoid such complications, the Yale researchers sought to design the simplest study possible. They contacted professors in the biology, chemistry and physics departments at six major research universities — three private and three public, unnamed in the study — and asked them to evaluate, as part of a study, an application from a recent graduate seeking a position as a laboratory manager.
All of the professors received the same one-page summary, which portrayed the applicant as promising but not stellar. But in half of the descriptions, the mythical applicant was named John and in half the applicant was named Jennifer.…

On a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 being highest, professors gave John an average score of 4 for competence and Jennifer 3.3. John was also seen more favorably as someone they might hire for their laboratories or would be willing to mentor.

The average starting salary offered to Jennifer was $26,508. To John it was $30,328.

The bias had no relation to the professors’ age, sex, teaching field or tenure status. “There’s not even a hint of a difference there,” said Corinne Moss-Racusin, a postdoctoral social psychology researcher who was the lead author of the paper.

Almost as disturbing, it wasn’t just the male scientists who discriminated.

Female professors were just as biased against women students as their male colleagues, and biology professors just as biased as physics professors — even though more than half of biology majors are women, whereas men far outnumber women in physics.