It’s worth thinking about these days, especially today, which honors a man who dedicated his life to protesting laws – of segregation and Jim Crow, of intimidation and all-white juries – that brutally contradicted the principles on which this country was supposedly founded.
Read MoreWe raised our kids in southeastern Pennsylvania, which was still largely rural, although the influence of the DuPont Company radiated powerfully from its Wilmington base 18 miles away. Many family members and company executives lived in Chester County, whose jewel is Longwood Gardens, once the country estate of Pierre du Pont and now one of the world’s botanical wonders. DuPont was considered a good corporate neighbor. Family members and employees served on many community boards, and earlier generations had created foundations that were particularly active in land conservation and environmental protection. The company itself had the reputation of being a leader in industrial sustainability and corporate best practices.
That reputation fell apart this month with Nathanial Rich’s revelation of DuPont’s decades-long efforts to conceal the environmental and human costs of its chemical pollution. “They knew this stuff was harmful,” said attorney Rob Bilott, “and they put it in the water anyway.”
You’d think we’d be inured to these stories by now. From the cigarette companies to Dan Fagin’s Tom’s River, 60 years of a single, numbing plot line: cover-ups, bullying and lying through their teeth. “I always thought [DuPont] was among the ‘least-worst’ of the polluters,” the former editor of the local newspaper wrote me. “Turns out they were horrendous” – not in their own backyard, of course, but in West Virginia where they thought nobody would notice.
I don’t think DuPont set out to be a bad neighbor, but before succumbing to the siren song of deregulation, it’s worth pondering how it became one.
With the presidential primary season practically upon us, Donald Trump is rolling in the endorsements of international heavy hitters. Last weekend, Sean Penn reported that Joaquín Guzmán Loera (aka “El Chapo”) had called Trump, “Mi Amigo!”, a double-edged phrase in organized crime, politics and real estate deals meaning roughly, “My Friend!”
Read More“No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.” Now the blustering birther is going after Ted Cruz, although more quietly than his bombastic attacks – which he has never retracted – on Barack Obama’s presidential legitimacy. Cruz, as everyone knows by now, was born in Canada. His father was Cuban, his mother from Delaware. This is a problem, says Trump, not so much because Cruz is ineligible, but because the Democrats will sue and the case will drag through the courts for years. Why take the chance? Vote for me. I was born in Queens.
“Not a problem, experts say.” Cruz is a natural-born citizen because of his mother’s citizenship. So while there are many reasons he shouldn’t be president, this isn’t one of them.
Yet I know people who still doubt Obama’s legitimacy. In the eighth year of his presidency, they’re still talking about the typefaces on his alleged birth certificate. “An obvious forgery,” one said to me recently. Obama was born in Kenya. He was born in Indonesia. He was born – ready for this one? – in Hawaii, Kenya, “which sits right outside the Gates of Hell.”
This is damning stuff, of course, but it doesn’t change the fact that Obama’s mother was born in Wichita, Kansas, which makes him as American as . . . Ted Cruz.
So why are people still demanding the president produce his "real" birth certificate?
Maybe they think Canada is more American than Kenya.
Henry Irving and I go way back. His father was my godfather and our mothers had been classmates. But he was younger than I, and we grew up in different places, so our lives didn’t often intersect. But Henry was a great connector, and he stayed in touch with me, as with many others.
Read MoreI was walking last evening through the bowels of Manhattan, the New York subway system beneath Times Square, with thousands of other people hurrying in all directions, absorbed in our own journeys, seeing each other as little more than moving obstacles to be avoided, when a powerful voice pulled me away from my intended path. In a place where musicians, singers and young Black acrobats perform daily for spare change, Alice Tan Ridley sang songs blending gospel and blues that caused weary, distrustful people to stop, to listen and to acknowledge one another. At one point she was joined by a girl of 10 or 11 with a powerful voice for one so young, who appeared and then disappeared back into the crowd. So magical was the moment that even I deposited some greenbacks in the rapidly filling basket. Alice Tan Ridley, it turns out, has been singing in the subway for 20 years, earning money to support her family, which includes her daughter, Gabourey Sidibe, nominated for an Oscar in 2009 for her role in Precious. The 63-year-old Alice appeared on “America’s Got Talent” in 2010 and now tours nationally. Yet here she was, underground, part of Music Under New York, which since 1985 has provided over 7,500 performances annually by more than 350 artists at 30 locations throughout the city’s subway system.
In an underground tunnel, a place known for shoving strangers and urban crime, a metaphor for the dark life of a big city, a moment of beauty appears – a gift of hope for the New Year.
It’s black everywhere when I wake up this morning, and while I don’t mind winter’s early evenings, I heartily dislike getting up in the dark. But I have an idea to write about “my Hillary problem,” to explain that I have never been a fan – that the emails and the foundation shakedowns are part of an ugly sense of entitlement the Clintons have acquired over the years – but also that she seems now the one candidate for whom the world is a complex place. The desk at which I sit faces east, and when I turn on the light, the window reflects my face looking out at the spreading dawn and simultaneously looking back at me. I am part of what I see. It’s the shortest day of the year; the winter solstice will arrive 12 minutes before midnight. I sit, with my coffee growing cooler, watching the sky turn from black to light blue (which the dictionary says is also called sky blue or angel blue) to gray and then to pink. The light frost lifts from the ground. There is no sound, not even the noisy geese who winter here now are up.
I glance at the morning’s news, but the world outside the window seems immune to the atrocities it reports, just as the press seems too often oblivious to the beauty of the dawn and the resilience of goodness.
I’d like to dwell on that thought. The days are growing longer again. My children are coming home.
Why is it that only Donald Trump seems to have any fun at the Republican debates? Unlike 18 million of my fellow citizens, I listened to Tuesday’s debate on the radio, and without the glitz of the Las Vegas background and the body language of the performers, I was struck by how humorless and wooden were the performances: Ben Carson’s impersonation of a schoolboy reciting recently memorized foreign policy facts; Chris Christie morphing into Rudy Giuliani and trying to scare everybody; Ted Cruz doubling down on carefully targeted “carpet bombing” (“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”).
Yes, we live in dangerous times, which demand seriousness, but we are also looking for a human behind the mask – which brings me back to Donald Trump, who seems to actually be enjoying running for president and whose off-the-cuff retorts contrast so sharply with the others’ carefully calibrated responses. I think part of his appeal, which has endured far longer than anyone thought, is due to his apparent openness, which gives one a glimpse into what kind of president this man would actually be.
What it has revealed, of course, is a man whom only Vladimir Putin could love – a man who insults all his Republican opponents but praises Putin as a strong leader whose poll numbers are more than twice those of Barack Obama.
His candor is good for us. Let's hope it sinks him.
Correction: in Wednesday’s post, the remembrance of Doug Tompkins was written by my son, Jake. The editor apologizes for the oversight.
Yet, what I will remember most about Doug is his passion – a passion that fueled his drive for perfection in everything he did. That didn’t make him easy to work for. He was as cantankerous a person as I have ever met, and he rubbed many people the wrong way. But in the end he was driven by love – love for the land he fought to protect, love for the people who fought with him, love for Kris, his partner in everything.
Read MoreA concerned capitalist's nuclear argument: Real progress was made in Paris over the last two weeks. But optimism must be tempered by these realities: (1) the worldwide political process has rarely imposed short-term costs to produce long-term benefits, and it’s not clear they did so this time; (2) there is still no enforceable regulatory mechanism to ensure compliance at any level; (3) reliance on renewable energy alone will not reduce atmospheric carbon levels quickly enough; and (4) strategies that limit energy use in developing countries will slow the economic growth their people desperately need.
Economics, not politics, is the best hope for CO2 reduction. When energy production from low/no carbon sources costs less than fossil fuel energy, Mr. Market will drive substitution quickly.
But because current fossil fuel prices don’t reflect their true planetary costs, they inhibit investment in green-energy production and technology. A significant carbon fee, levied by the major industrialized nations and imposed on their imports, would make green energy more cost competitive with fossil fuels, but neither the United States nor India seems likely to impose one soon.
Until major improvements in storage technology can manage solar and wind power’s intermittent production, only advanced nuclear power can effectively supply base-load no-carbon electricity. While additional research is needed to reduce investment costs, we do know that both uranium and thorium advanced reactors could ultimately produce virtually unlimited carbon-free electrical energy at a competitive price.
The United States is ceding nuclear technology leadership to China and India, despite its potential benefits for our economy, our export markets – and for climate change. Let's change our nuclear technology trajectory immediately.
The day after the San Bernardino murders, I read Hanna Rosin’s sad story of teenage suicides in Silicon Valley. With two lethal epidemics, both invoking the name of suicide and each inspiring others – almost all of them young – to follow, I wondered if there were any connections. Almost every culture glorifies suicide in some form – suicide missions in wartime, protesters publicly immolating themselves, Romeo and Juliet. Still, when suicide bombings erupted in the early 1980s, they seemed to me unsustainable, as, by definition, the number of volunteers must diminish. Clearly I was wrong: according to statistics compiled by the University of Chicago, since 1982, when 15-year-old Ahmad Qasir drove a truck bomb into Israeli Defense Forces headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon, there have been 4,814 suicide attacks in 48 countries, leaving 48,465 people dead and 122,606 wounded – 4,814 martyrs for an act the Qur’an considers a grave sin, and many more signing up.
On the surface, suicidal murderers and suicidal victims have nothing in common. We think of those who die by suicide as despondent and lonely, intent on ending their own suffering, inflicting violence only on themselves – the antithesis of the murderous lust for martyrdom that drives suicide bombers. Yet, many suicide bombers – a surprising number of them “mild-mannered members of the middle class” – are also marginalized and alienated, vulnerable to mystical or cynical calls to martyrdom that promise their short lives meaning and gain them entry into paradise.
Maybe better understanding what causes young people take their own lives could shed some light on these murderous sprees.
Part 11. Climate and Energy Series: A Reader Responds Jamie,
In response to Friday’s letter (Wrong Focus), my view is that we can handle both. Terrorism doesn’t require all our attention and resources all the time, and virtually all decisions and deployments have downsides and unintended consequences, requiring considerable forethought. Our overall geopolitics needs some long-term antidotal efforts right now – particularly in what we are trying to achieve in Paris, as climate change issues already significantly affect our geopolitics. Climate change is upon us and will increasingly exacerbate geopolitics. Even Syria has a serious climate component.* It would be a shame to allow our short-term concerns to derail the Paris conference. I say, if not now, when, on climate change?
All that said, I believe we can, should and probably right now are upgrading our efforts against ISIS. Also, of course, we need to be highly attentive to how we address Putin’s pouting and power plays, but he started his provocative behavior quite long ago, and though the risks may feel higher right now, his aggression was only going to get worse, and at least he is now thinking twice. (I do think an aggressive response to Syria’s crossing the red line might have helped, but again there were serious potential downsides.)
As for the violence here at home, obtuse people in the Republican Party are standing in the way of the only obvious remedial answers. The only good thing to come of it is that, hopefully, the bankruptcy of their positions will become increasingly obvious. Voting against restrictions on gun purchase for people on terror watch lists? I hope the American voters find that a very hard sell.
Part 10. Climate and Energy Series Jamie:
With violence continually sweeping public places in the U.S. because it is easy for anyone to buy combat-grade weapons, with Donald Trump at the top of the Republican list of candidates for president and Hillary Clinton leading the Democrats, and with gory internet executions, bombs on planes and pre-war tension between Turkey and Russia – a Middle East that is beginning to resemble Spain during their Civil War (which proved to be a proxy for World War II), I think there are more important things to focus on at the moment than climate change and the environment.
Environmental damage is crucial to the world, but it is an ongoing process and there will be no world unless solutions to increased violence at home and abroad are tackled with common sense solutions and total focus by all governments. President Obama's concentration on the environment while people are dying violently in many parts of the world due to Islamic radicalism, and mass murder in the U.S. carried out by people with military grade automatic weapons (ordinary "citizens" – how do they get hold of AR-15's? Go to Cabelas.com and find out where easily convertible "single shot" rifles are being sold) is substituting a longer-term issue for a crucial short-term major issue.
Please don't make the same mistake. The environment is important, but if there is no world there is no need for global environmental concerns.
Note: My intention has been to intersperse this series with other topics. The posts continue to elicit interesting – and I think important – responses, including this one.
Correction. From Joshua Goldstein: FYI there was an editing error in our Op Ed – solar is 1% of total while wind is 4% more. The conclusion is the same. A solar or wind installation that's used to replace a closing nuclear plant does nothing to replace fossil fuel.
Part 9. Climate and Energy Series Environmental Advocate: We need to favor decentralized over centralized power systems. For example, rooftop solar panels on residences and businesses make much more sense than huge arrays on public lands, which require new transmission lines
Decentralize energy guzzlers. For example, the centralized federal and state water conveyance system uses one third of California’s total energy consumption. The system should be regionalized.
Raise the federal gas tax and apply proceeds to energy-efficient public transportation systems – light rail in cities and fast trains between cities – to get people out of cars and planes.
Increase taxes on airline flights – one of the most damaging forms of carbon pollution – to reduce air travel globally.
Leave carbon fuels in the ground where they belong. Support divestment of companies that hold carbon reserves – oil, gas and coal – in their portfolios.
Beware of hydroelectric power. Dams destroy ecosystems, cultures and fisheries.
The rich nations need to help fund the power sources for the emerging world so developing countries can skip the carbon phase. We – not they – have dumped our wastes into the atmosphere for 150 years without paying for the damage, so we should pay the bill.
Farmer: Addressing the myriad environmental issues is important. It must be approached from a scientific perspective that doesn’t destroy the patient in the process. Making rules without properly looking at ALL the implications is dangerous and will hurt many who have struggled to operate in what they had been led to believe was the correct way.
Part 8. Climate and Energy Series “Solar and wind are growing quickly,” Joshua Goldstein and Steven Pinker wrote recently in The Boston Globe, “but still provide about 1% of electricity production, and cannot scale up fast enough to provide what the world needs.” Overall, renewable energy sources still account for less than a quarter of global energy use.
Renewables, it seems, will get us some of the way toward our carbon-reduction goals. But will they get us all the way? So we talk about transitional options – particularly natural gas – that will reduce our use of oil and coal while we figure out what to do next.
But as one of you asked, “Transition to what?”
In the meantime, the use of fossil fuels keeps rising. Coal has killed far more people – from those who mine it to those who breathe it – than any other energy source. Yet it remains the fastest growing of them all.
Like me, you may never have heard of thorium. It’s a chemical element, atomic number 90, one of only three radioactive elements (bismuth, uranium) to occur naturally in large quantities. As Richard Martin describes in Superfuel, thorium lost out to uranium in America’s nuclear-development history because it can’t be made into a bomb. During the Cold War, that was a deal breaker. It looks pretty good now.
“Thorium is no panacea,” writes Martin in a book insisting it is precisely that, “but of all the energy sources on Earth, it is the most abundant, most readily available, cleanest, and safest.”
Does nuclear have a role in a clean energy future?
Part 7. Climate and Energy Series There has been a stimulating range of responses to this series so far, as you can see below. I want to work in as many of your contributions as possible as we move forward.
Not all renewables are equal.
Nor are all investments.
Please join the conversation – to disagree, to suggest innovative solutions, to provide new ways of framing the issues: jamesgblaine2@gmail.com.
Part 6. Climate and Energy Series A chemical engineer discusses renewable energy.
The Department of Energy’s just-released report is pretty upbeat. They give themselves a big pat on the back for US progress in implementing renewable energy. Much of the success is due to solar and wind achieving grid parity (comparable pricing) with electricity from coal or natural gas. Two trends – (1) the decline in capital costs for solar and wind plants and (2) improvements in solar and wind efficiencies – will continue to drive down the price of electricity from renewable sources.
Two big issues remain: low-cost storage, where battery costs are dropping, and power transmission, where efficiencies are increasing. Finally, it is noteworthy that taller wind-power plants capture power at greater heights, where wind speeds are generally higher.
An accompanying report, Getting to 100, is equally optimistic, claiming, “the mission to reach 100% renewable energy is an increasingly realistic goal” and citing successes:
Although “huge challenges remain,” including market and regulatory barriers, renewables now comprise “approximately 22.8% of total global electricity generation.”
Real progress – although it still leaves the other 77.2%, not to mention all our cars, boats and planes.
Edited to fit my 250-word limit. To join the conversation, please send your thoughts to jamesgblaine2@gmail.com. I am particularly looking for new ways of understanding the climate and energy question and workable solutions.
Part 5. Climate and Energy Series A forester replies:
As to planting trees being a Band-Aid, I would say, yes and no. The larger ecosystems that surround and support us – be they rainforests, temperate forests, extensive prairie root systems or the oceans – manifest a genius for sequestering carbon. We need to enhance that capability while we simultaneously work to stop Jonesing on fossil fuels. Protecting forests, managing them naturalistically to augment their growth and carbon uptake, and restoring wetlands can sequester up to 25-30% of carbon emissions – a solution that works with the grain of nature, as opposed to hubristic ideas like seeding the oceans with iron or spraying chemicals into the atmosphere.
Pursuing such solutions will also help us better understand the connection between our wellbeing and the health of natural systems. Humans are part of those systems, not above or outside them. Nature is our home and life-support system, not merely a source of our raw materials and a sink for our wastes.
Another potentially helpful approach is to increase the amount of wood in buildings. Because of advances in engineering, it is now possible to build 10- to 20-story buildings of wood, which will provide triple benefits: (1) the carbon will be "tied up" in that wood for a long time; (2) concrete and steel are extremely energy intensive building materials, so replacing them reduces a building’s carbon budget; and (3) wood is a beautiful building material.
We must work both to eliminate carbon emissions and to increase the ability to sequester carbon as we make the transition.
Edited to fit my 250-word limit. To join the conversation, please send your thoughts to jamesgblaine2@gmail.com. I am particularly looking for new ways of understanding the climate and energy question and workable solutions.
Part 4. Climate and Energy Series A clarification from the last post in this series: I was not in Santa Barbara, nor did I overhear a conversation on plastics. Those were letters from readers. I have already received several more responses to the series, which has thrown off my congenitally subpar planning, and which I intend to publish in the future. I will print or withhold names, as you wish, so if you want credit for – or censure of – your thoughts, let me know. And welcome to the club.
I begin with the assumption that global warming is real because the vast majority of scientists, as well as the national science academies of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, Great Britain and the United States, are united on that. I mean, you do have to start somewhere.
I do not assume, however, that the last 50 years of warming is due primarily to human activities. While most scientists do believe that is true, I think it raises different issues from the first assumption, and it demands a different solution – adapting ourselves – so let’s talk about it.
Some other matters I hope we’ll discuss:
I happened, the day after the Paris attacks, to pick up an old copy of The New Yorker and find James Wood’s remarkable review of the works of Primo Levi. “Evil is not the absence of the good, as theology and philosophy sometimes maintained," Wood writes of Levi’s Auschwitz memoir, If This is a Man. "It is the invention of the bad." Levi's "clarity is ontological and moral: these things happened, a victim witnessed them, and they must never be erased or forgotten.” Primo Levi never became 17451, the identity tattooed on him at Auschwitz. The insistence on remembering, no matter how horrific the memory; the assertion of one small human voice in response to unspeakable evil; the affirmation of the significance of each one of us – this, for me, is the legacy of the holocaust. And it is this that ISIS is intent on obliterating. Look at its short and ghastly history filled with: the destruction of antiquities and cultural icons; the extermination of the Yazidis and other peoples; the enslavement and rape of women; the mass executions in Tikrit, the bombings in Beirut, the killing spree in Paris. Each of these acts is intentionally indiscriminate, aimed not just at physical murder but at eradicating memory, destroying cultural identity, denying our common humanity.
We must not become complicit, either in demands for indiscriminate retaliation in which innocents are killed or in retreating from the world. “The business of living,” wrote Levi, “is the best defense against death, even in the camps.”
Next time we will return to the Climate and Energy series.