It’s still astounding to me that we are rushing headlong into widespread fracking without truly understanding what its environmental implications are. It’s a classic example of our inverted approach to technology in which a technology is accepted until someone proves it is dangerous, instead of having the wisdom to hold off on a technology until it is (reasonably) demonstrated that it is safe.
Anyhow, this sort of finding illustrates why this inverted approach is perhaps unwise:
In the state of Pennsylvania, home to the lucrative Marcellus Shale formation, 74 facilities treat wastewater from the process of hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. “fracking”) for natural gas and release it into streams. There’s no national set of standards that guides this treatment process—the EPA notes that the Clean Water Act’s guidelines were developed before fracking even existed, and that many of the processing plants “are not properly equipped to treat this type of wastewater”—and scientists have conducted relatively little assessment of the wastewater to ensure it’s safe after being treated.
Recently, a group of Duke University scientists decided to do some testing. They contacted the owners of one treatment plant, the Josephine Brine Treatment Facility on Blacklick Creek in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, but, “when we tried to work with them, it was very difficult getting ahold of the right person,” says Avner Vengosh, an Earth scientist from Duke. “Eventually, we just went and tested water right from a public area downstream.”
Their analyses, made on water and sediment samples collected repeatedly over the course of two years, were even more concerning than we’d feared. As published today in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, they found elevated concentrations of the element radium, a highly radioactive substance. The concentrations within sediments in particular were roughly 200 times higher than background levels. In addition, amounts of chloride and bromide in the water were two to ten times greater than normal.
This may or may not turn out to be clear proof of how misguided our assessment of fracking turns out to be. But it is clear proof that we should do more to assess fracking’s full implications before pumping fracking fluid into every underground formation that contains the slightest whiff of shale oil.
It’s one of the key questions of the global warming puzzle, and the X Foundation is stepping in to incentivize the scientific world to invent a good way to monitor ocean pH:
Scientists know this is killing coral reefs and dissolving the shells of marine animals, but the overall danger of ocean acidification is still poorly understood. To fix that, the X Prize Foundation announced a new bounty this week: $2 million for anyone who can figure out how to figure out what all this extra CO2 is doing to the pH of our planet’s oceans.
Named the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health X Prize, the 22-month competition is scheduled to kick off in early 2014 and name its winner(s) in 2015. The $2 million jackpot is divided into two purses, which can be won separately or by the same team. The X Prize Foundation provides this description of the potential winnings on its website:
Accuracy award ($750,000 first place, $250,000 second place): To the teams that navigate the entire competition to produce the most accurate, stable and precise pH sensors under a variety of tests.
Affordability award ($750,000 first place, $250,000 second place): To the teams that produce the least expensive, easy-to-use, accurate, stable and precise pH sensors under a variety of tests.
This is the latest of many such trophies from the X Prize Foundation, which launched in the 1990s with a $10 million contest aimed at spurring commercial space travel. (It was inspired by the Orteig Prize, a $25,000 jackpot won by aviator Charles Lindbergh when he flew across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927.) The original X Prize went to aerospace firm Scaled Composites in 2004, whose technology is now part of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two.
One the one hand, this is the sort of out-of-the-box technology strategy that could help the planet confront warming. On the other hand, it is sort of depressing that we have made the oceans about 30 percent acidic over the past 250 years without really bothering to understand what the implications might be. Humanity has never been skeptical enough about the potential impacts and unintended consequences of technology.
The more we learn about what is happening in the oceans, the more we understand about how bad the trends are. That truth is perfectly captured by the latest State Of The Ocean report, which is a global look at what science is telling us about how the oceans are faring. Here’s the key point of the Executive Summary:
The scientific evidence that marine ecosystems are being degraded as a direct result of human activities is
overwhelming; and the consequences both for the vital and valuable ocean goods and services we rely on,
including for the maintenance of a healthy Earth system, are alarming. Recent assessments by the UN’s
climate change panel the IPCC, for example, show that these changes are progressive and relentless: whilst
terrestrial temperature increases may be experiencing a pause this is not true for the ocean, which
continues to warm regardless. For the most part, however, the public and policymakers are failing to
recognize –or choosing to ignore— the severity of the situation and are not taking the action necessary to
address it.
The International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) is publishing a set of five papers on ocean
stresses, impacts and solutions by leading international experts to present the key findings of the workshops
it held in 2011and 2012* in partnership with IUCN and its World Commission on Protected Areas. The
purpose of these workshops, and the papers published today, is to promote a holistic, integrated view of
both the challenges faced and the actions needed to achieve a healthy global ocean for the future.
The central messages from the workshops are that the risks to the ocean and the ecosystems it supports
have been significantly underestimated; that the extent of marine degradation as a whole is greater than
the sum of its parts; and that it is happening at a much faster rate than previously predicted.
The 2012 workshop additionally reviewed new material and evidence, available since the workshop in
2011, and concluded that the threats to the ocean were even faster, bigger and closer than the first
workshop set out: faster with an accelerated rate of change, bigger in scale, and closer in time in terms of
the impacts being felt.
Yes, it’s alarming. But instead of turning away, the right response, as with climate change, is to imagine even more radical and deeper changes in the way humans live and do business, and build the grassroots political will to actually make the sacrifices needed to make a difference. No more nibbling around the edges. Time to reinvent humanity, which would not only be good for the planet, it would be good for humanity.
Here’s a good example of the sort of choice (and there are thousands of choices just like it) that could determine whether we start to protect the oceans instead of ruthlessly exploiting the oceans for financial profit–the question of whether to ban deep-sea trawls:
The biodiversity of the deep sea is equaled only by that of tropical rain forests, and the destruction of rain forests has long been known to affect biodiversity and the global climate. Similarly the deep sea is home to countless species, including the oldest known living animal and to life-forms found nowhere else. Ninety percent of the ocean is below 200 meters, but not much is known about life in the deep sea; expensive research sampling has been done in about 1 percent of this vast area.
Over the years, as fisheries in shallow waters collapsed, the fishing industry began looking to the deep for new species to exploit. Most deep-sea fish have flesh that is not palatable, but a few were found that could be marketed for human consumption, if filleted and renamed to be made more attractive, or for processing into food pellets for poultry. These stocks were readily attacked using trawls large and heavy enough to reach as deep as 2,000 meters, and it took only 10 to 15 years to reduce the fish biomass by about 80 percent.
In 2011, vessels from eight E.U. countries landed 15,000 metric tons of four species of marketable deep-sea fish, which represents only 0.4 percent of Europe’s fish haul. Several deep-sea fish species are poorly fertile (2 to 4 juveniles a year for the shark Centrophorus) and others reproduce for the first time when quite old (up to 32 years). Most of them are more biological curiosities than fishing stocks.
Bottom trawls are not selective; in the Northeast Atlantic alone they catch untold amounts of more than 100 species of fish. Deep-sea bottom communities harbor species that can be large, but are delicate and fragile, such as corals and sponges. Deep-sea corals are not what we are used to seeing in tropical waters, and with a few exceptions they do not build massive reef structures. Instead, many are more akin to trees, sometimes more than three meters high, and sometimes very old, often reaching more than 100 years and occasionally more than 4,000 years. These are smashed by trawl gear. Bottom images of trawled deep-sea areas, and two seamounts I visited with a deep-diving remote vehicle, show that nothing is left standing in the wake of this type of fishing gear.
Reinventing humanity means reinventing how we manage the Earth’s resources. Nation states claiming sovereignty over large swathes of coast waters, where they do what they please, and competing relentlessly and ruthlessly with one another to out-compete and out-exploit each other in the vast swathes of the oceans that are not regulated, is a failing model. The oceans need to be treated as a global resource that is managed for the benefit of the oceans and for all of humanity, through the UN or through an international collaboration of likeminded states with the will and tools to impose real consequences on violations. My guess is the best model would be as large a group of likeminded states who would use their economic and political influence to try and create a new set or priorities and regulations related to climate and the oceans.
Ridiculous, idea, I know. Never gonna happen. Well, the alternative is increasingly apparent, and it is disastrous. Incrementalism is the same as failure. So why shouldn’t we think in revolutionary terms? What other option is there?
I’ve long thought that if Dr. Evil, or an alien race, or Al Qaeda, threatened to slowly warm the planet, acidify the oceans, intensify extreme weather events, wipe out or alter countless species and habitats, and flood low-lying countries, the global media, and the US media in particular, would treat it as the greatest threat to humanity since fascism. Headlines would scream. Editorials would scathe. News article after news article would detail the latest evolution of the threat and its implications. The media would go into full war-footing mode and treat an existential threat like a, well, existential threat. Which is to say it would be given the prominence that it truly deserves.
But if we–humans–are doing it to ourselves, not so much. As the full impact of climate change accelerates and makes itself felt, how the media handled climate change in our era will be a perfect case study in failure to report and communicate the most important news. And it will look all the worse to future generations of media scholars in contrast to the infotainment and twerking obsessions that instead dominate the media.
It may be understandable that the public–endlessly poking away at its smartphones in search of the latest meaningless distraction–gives the media a free pass on the epic climate change fail. But thinkers and leaders don’t get the same pass on not calling out the media. So it is nice to see Al Gore speaking plainly:
Gore, the former vice president who should have been president but instead used Powerpoint to put climate change on a lot of regular folks’ radars, is not shy about using his outsized soapbox. He was blunt in sharing his reflections Friday during a talk at the Brookings Institution. Here are some choice quotes, as transcribed by The Hill:
“Here in the U.S., the news media has been intimidated, frightened, and not only frightened, they are vulnerable to distorted news judgments because the line separating news and entertainment has long since been crossed, and ratings have a big influence on the selection of stories that are put on the news.”
“And the deniers of the climate crisis, quite a few of them paid by the large fossil fuel polluters — really it is like a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage if anyone mentions alcohol, and so the rest of the family decides to keep the peace by never mentioning the elephant in the room. And many in the news media are exactly in that position.”
“They get swarmed by these deniers online and in letters and pickets and all that if they even mention the word climate, and so they very timidly, they get frightened and they are afraid to mention the word climate.”
“Their purpose is to condition thinking and to prevent the consideration of a price on carbon. It’s just that simple.”
I think this is right, but there is a feedback loop that intensifies the problem. As Gore notes, the media these days (especially cable TV) is much more about entertainment than it is about truth-telling or reporting inconvenient truths. But I think the media’s reluctance to really report climate change is less about being intimidated by the drunk fathers of climate denialism than it is about a craven effort to throw before the public anything and everything that will get attention, or go viral, or get page views. And downer news about how we are destroying our own planet with lifestyles driven by materialism and self-gratification, is just not…popular (though dramatic superstorm reporting is). At the same time, if you are going to subject your audience to a grim reality it’s vastly more entertaining to put the drunk uncle in the mix, and let him rant against reality, than it is to tell your audience that the drunk uncle is crazy and needs to be ignored.
And that, in turn, creates the impression that the facts are murky, there are two sides to the debate, and that sacrifice or a deep re-thinking of the destructive culture we have perfected over the past 50 years is simply unwarranted.
But, hey, even Al Gore can make climate reality entertaining:
Here’s some evidence that the media in the US and some other countries is not doing a very good job of explaining the implications of climate change, and how the threat of climate change should be seen relative to other threats. My guess is that far more than 40% of Americans would label “terrorism” a “major threat.” But the sort of terrorism most Americans worry about (bombs on planes, for example) is nothing compared to how climate change will impact humanity and the planet.
There are two existential threats right now. Nuclear terrorism. And climate change. But apparently that’s not the message that the public is getting (click image for full size).
Whales are beautiful and transfixing. So it’s no surprise that increasingly they star in lots of videos. And the videos are sometimes pretty great to look at.
But I have to admit to a feeling of unease when I watch these sorts of videos. I like that we hear from the thought-provoking Alan Watts.
But what are these videos really about?
Do viewers come away more knowledgeable about the plight of whales, or simply gratified and ready to move onto the next viewing experience?
Do they notice the dying coral, dappled with algae, and connect it to human culture, or is their attention entirely consumed by bikini-clad divers?
Do they wonder what the whales think of having their tranquil spaces invaded by video production teams?
Are the whales anything other than props for a slick GoPro promotion?
Sorry to ask. But I have a hard time watching all the ways in which we use the natural beauty of the world and its creatures for our own purposes. Because our preoccupation with our own lives, our own commerce, our own feelings, and its impact on everything else on the planet is the backdrop I increasingly see in all these whale videos.
David Roberts (hey, I thought he was unplugging!) is not hopeful, but tries to make the case for holding onto hope:
Though it may seem odd, I find comfort in chaos theory. For all our sophistication, we remain terribly inept at the simple task of predicting what will happen more than a few years out. All our models fail. That means those who predict a steady extension of the status quo will be wrong, too.
The outcome of the climate crisis depends not just on physical forces but on human beings, complex economic, social, and technological systems, and complex systems are nonlinear. We forget this; our instinct is to think the future will look like the recent past, only more so. We don’t anticipate the lateral moves, the lurches, the phase shifts. Because of this, the Very Serious thing to do is always to predict that things will not substantially change. If you say, “There will be a series of brilliant innovations that make clean energy cheap,” or, “There will be a sea change in public opinion on climate,” or, “Young people will take over and revive politics,” you sound like a hippie dreamer. Those aspirations are a matter of faith, a triumph of hope over experience.
And yet: things change! History unfolds along the lines of what Stephen Jay Gould called “punctuated equilibrium.” Things can appear stable for years and years while tensions gather beneath the surface, hairline fractures develop, and the whole system becomes highly sensitive to small perturbations. (The butterfly flaps its wings and causes a hurricane, etc.)
We do not know what those perturbations will be or when they will emerge, but we know from history that Don Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” are inevitable. The North American natural gas boom, the precipitous decline in solar PV prices, the financial crisis — none were widely predicted. And there will be more like them.
Will unexpected, rapid changes in coming decades be good or bad, positive or negative? That depends on millions of individual choices made in the interim. Some of those choices, if they happen at just the right moment, could be just the perturbations that spark cascading changes in social, economic, or technological systems. Some of those choices, in other words, will be incredibly significant.
Personally, I don’t have much hope. I think that climate change is happening faster than humanity can develop wisdom, or make the political, economic and cultural changes that will blunt its impact on the Earth. We are by evolution a self-interested species, and that is not something that is easy to change. Sure, a miracle is always (remotely) possible, so why utterly abandon hope. And, in any case, because doing more to mitigate the full impact of climate change is better than doing less, we do have a responsibility to keep learning and to try to find ways to live that are more in harmony with the planet and all its other species.
Ecologist Carl Safina, a writer and the founder of Blue Ocean Institute, developed the first sustainable seafood guide in the late 1990s. Before that, there was really no such thing as “sustainable” seafood: “If a piece of fish landed on your plate, you just ate it,” he said. “It was like bread. You didn’t talk about it.”
When we talk about sustainable seafood these days, we’re mostly concerned with whether a population is being overfished. According to the United Nations’ 2012 “State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture” report, about 85 percent of the world’s fish stocks are fully or overexploited, depleted or recovering from depletion. We no longer take it as a given that there are plenty of fish in the sea, and some go so far as to suggest that our generation may be the last to enjoy seafood.
The creators of consumer guides to sustainable seafood, of which there are now many, pay careful attention to overfishing. They also look at whether the methods used to catch fish are harming the aquatic habitat, and if they cause a lot of bycatch – the inadvertent snaring of unwanted fish, dolphins and sea turtles. Some of the guides investigate whether fisheries are well-managed. Other factors, like how suppliers deal with waste and whether they use harmful chemicals, are often taken into consideration as well.
“Consumers making the conscious choice to try and buy more sustainable seafood is an important first step,” Tim Fitzgerald, a senior policy specialist who runs the Sustainable Seafood Program at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), told me. And these organizations do seem to be doing everything in their power to arm consumers with the tools they need to make these choices. The EDF, for example, takes the extra step of providing a version of its guide written in the language of sushi. (When you order “tako,” what you’re getting is octopus, which, by the way, is a very bad choice.)
But in many cases, providing enough information for the consumer to make a truly informed decision is next to impossible. For instance, while there’s a clear distinction between Pacific and Atlantic salmon – Atlantic is always farmed and thus, always bad – whether my Monterey Bay app categorizes my Pacific salmon as a “best choice” or a more cautious “good alternative” depends on how it was caught. There’s really no way, said Safina, for me, or even the restaurant or supermarket I’m purchasing my fish from, to know that.
I wasn’t able to get in touch with the Monterey Bay Aquarium to talk about the way in which they see their guide’s ultimate utility. However, I noticed an extra “consumer note” attached to its entries on salmon. “Buyer beware!” it reads. “Different species of salmon are sold under many market names – and several are available from farmed and wild sources.” Wild and farmed salmon, said Fitzgerald, are among the most commonly mislabeled products. Call a fillet “wild,” after all, and you can sell it at a premium.
“You can’t rely on anybody selling you fish to be truthful 100 percent of the time,” Safina said. This isn’t limited to how the fish are caught; the sustainable option you pick might not be sustainable at all, because it’s an entirely different fish.
It’s not that it isn’t possible (though I have my doubts given the overwhelming global demand for fish). It’s more that our knowledge and understanding of how fish gets to the plate is limited, or even obscured by the fishing industry. Just as more reporting and more investigation led to a better understanding of the depredations and environmental and health costs of Big Meat, the more we dig into where fish comes from and how it is fished the less appealing or sustainable it appears.
For example, take this recent report about farmed salmon and the potential impact of sea lice on wild population:
The scientific study published in Agricultural Sciences by a scientist of Ireland’s Marine Institute, which, it has been claimed, justified the salmon fishing industry’s stance that a mere 1%-2% of wild salmon deaths are due to sea lice, has been challenged in a key publication.
A recent critique by scientists from Scotland, Canada and Norway and led by Martin Krkosek of the University of Toronto’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, published in the Journal of Fish Diseases, argues that the Marine Institute’s work has “fundamental errors”.
Hughie Campbell Adamson, chairman of the Salmon and Trout Association Scotland (S&TAS) is now demanding that the Scottish Salmon Producers’ Organisation (SSPO) retract a statement made by its chairman, Professor Phil Thomas, six months ago dismissing the impact of sea lice on wild salmon.
The new interpretation of the research claims there are “grave mistakes in measuring control and treatment groups, leading to wide inaccuracies”.
The fresh examination of the original data shows that the impact of sea lice on wild salmon causes a far higher loss (34%) of those returning to Irish rivers than the 1% loss that was calculated in the original paper.
Many scientists and environmentalists have been looking to aquaculture — fish farming — as a potential savior for today’s radically diminished wild-fish stocks. Indeed, aquaculture in the crucial Mexican states of Sinaloa and Sonora has doubled every few years over the past decade. In Harper’s, I pointed out that farmed salmon, shrimp, and tuna require massive amounts of fishmeal, which is usually harvested from wild populations. The recent news displays another problem that I didn’t mention, but that is equally problematic: cramming thirty shrimp into one square meter is a little like putting thousands of people into unsanitary prison camps. Disease runs rampant.
Traditionally, there are several ways to address this issue, none of them ideal. The first is simply to desert the ponds as soon as diseases appear, then build a new one instead. This practice is common in Southeast Asia, and it occasionally happens in the mangrove forests of Nayarit and Sinaloa, too. But La Borbolla, one of the most environmentally sensitive farms in the regions, isn’t built on destroyed mangroves, and it isn’t easily moved. Instead, Mexican farms tend to rely on antibiotics, administered via fishmeal. But disease adapts quickly to antibiotics, and it’s a constant struggle to keep producing drugs that can combat the diseases.
Ironically, Mexico’s state of emergency was announced less than three weeks after theUnited States verified that it would certify Mexican wild-caught shrimp imports as environmentally sound. Hundreds of loggerhead turtles were dying after becoming tangled in the nets of the Mexican fishing fleet. (For perspective, the entire Hawaiian fleet is allowed only seventeen accidental turtle deaths per season.)
It turns out, not surprisingly, that plates mounded with cheap shrimp float on a veritable sea of ecological and social trouble. In his excellent 2008 book Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, the Canadian journalist Taras Grescoe took a hard look at the Asian operations that supply our shrimp. His conclusion: “The simple fact is, if you’re eating cheap shrimp today, it almost certainly comes from a turbid, pesticide- and antibiotic-filled, virus-laden pond in the tropical climes of one of the world’s poorest nations.”
Lest anyone think otherwise, these factory farms generate poverty in the nations that house them, as Grescoe demonstrates; they privatize and cut down highly productive mangrove forests that once sustained fishing communities, leaving fetid dead zones in their wake.
And now, a new study from University of Oregon researcher J. Boone Kauffman findsthat the flattening of Southeast Asian mangrove forests is devastating in another way, too, and not just for the people who have been sustainably living in them for generations. Mangroves, it turns out, are rich stores of biodiversity and also of carbon—and when they’re cleared for farming, that carbon enters the atmosphere as climate-warming gas.
Kaufman estimates that 50 to 60 percent of shrimp farms occupy cleared mangroves, and the shrimp that emerges from them has a carbon footprint 10 times higher than the most notoriously climate-destroying foodstuff I’m aware of: beef from cows raised on cleared Amazon rainforest.
Kaufman calls the shrimp-farming style that prevails in Asia “the equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture,” because farm operators typically “only last for 5 years or so before the buildup of sludge in the ponds and the acid sulfate soil renders them unfit for shrimp,” hetoldScience.
Cheap shrimp, like cheap oil, is looking increasingly like a dangerous delusion.
Okay, I’ll stop piling on the shrimp-eaters. But given our very imperfect understanding of how fishing is really being done on the high seas, and how farming fish instead will affect the ecosystems around it, it is misleading for anyone to try and say any fish is “sustainable.”
And until we know more, or we truly do find a sustainable fish-producing strategy, the right thing do do is simply not eat fish. Sorry, fish-lovers and pescatarians, by now we know enough to know that we need to know more.
The ocean is so full of trash, it’s easy to create an entire art exhibition from it. Expedition Gyre hopes that the resulting display will get people who view it to think about their consumption and how so much of the stuff humanity uses or throws away ends up in the oceans.
It’s heartbreaking to see the reality of our consumption culture. So more power to the Expedition Gyre team. They are certainly getting lots of media play. However, in my view there is one thing, and one thing only, which will make a real difference: levy an environmental tax on every item of packaging and plastic, and charge for any garbage that is not recycled. Art can inspire. But make people pay, and they change their behavior. Fast.
We’re on course to change the planet in a way “unprecedented in hundreds to thousands of years.” This is a general statement in the draft report about the consequences of continued greenhouse gas emissions “at or above current rates.” Unprecedented changes will sweep across planetary systems, ranging from sea level to the acidification of the ocean.
Ocean acidification is “virtually certain” to increase. Under all report scenarios, the acidification of the world’s oceans will increase—the draft report calls this outcome “virtually certain.” As we have previously reported, more acidity “threatens the survival of entire ecosystems from phytoplankton to coral reefs, and from Antarctic systems reliant on sea urchins to many human food webs dependent on everything from oysters to salmon.”
Long-term, sea level rise could be 5 to 10 meters. Journalists are already citing the draft report’s prediction that by the year 2100, we could see as much as three feet of sea level rise. But there is also a more long-range sea level scenario alluded to in the draft report, and it’s far more dramatic and alarming.
This also implies a substantial melting of the Greenland ice sheet. The draft report adds that during the last interglacial period, the melting of Greenland “very likely” contributed between 1.4 and 4.3 meters of global sea level rise, with additional contributions coming from the melting of Antarctica. If Greenland were to melt entirely, it is estimated that sea level would rise by about seven meters.
Much of the carbon we’ve emitted will stay in the atmosphere for a millennium…even after we’ve stopped emitting it. The draft report says that 20 percent of the carbon dioxidecurrently in the atmosphere will stay there for an almost unimaginably long time—more than 1,000 years. Even if we were to completely cease all greenhouse gas emissions, the draft report adds, warming would continue for “many centuries.” “A large fraction of climate change,” the document intones, “is thus irreversible on a human time scale.”
But in spite of the continued released of 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere, as if it’s an open sewer, we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point.
The appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world. You mentioned my movie back in the day. The single most common criticism from skeptics when the film came out focused on the animation showing ocean water flowing into the World Trade Center memorial site. Skeptics called that demagogic and absurd and irresponsible. It happened last October 29th, years ahead of schedule, and the impact of that and many, many other similar events here and around the world has really begun to create a profound shift.
A second factor is the sharp and unexpectedly steep decrease in prices for electricity produced from wind and solar and the demand destruction for fossil fuel energy from new efficiency improvements. The difference between 32 degrees fahrenheit and 33 degrees fahrenheit seems larger than just one degree. It’s the difference between water and ice. And by analogy there’s a similar difference between renewable electricity that’s more expensive than electricity from coal and renewable electricity that’s less expensive. And in quite a few countries in the world and some parts of the United States we’ve crossed that threshold and in the next few years we’re going to see that crossed in nations and regions containing most of the world’s population.
Gore’s optimism, unfortunately, is not really about mitigating the damage that the IPCC predicts. It’s more about finally “winning the conversation” about climate change and starting to react to climate change on a global scale. Of course, we are very late in the “conversation” and much of the damage warming will cause is already baked (get it?) into our future.
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