Henry M. Paulson Jr.,  a Republican, writes in the Sunday June 22, 2014 Sunday Review (“The Coming Climate Crash”), saying that managing risk is a conservative goal that Republicans should embrace.  He states, “…viewing climate change in terms of risk assessment and risk management makes clear to me that taking a cautiously conservative stance – that is, waiting for more information before acting – is actually taking a very radical risk. We’ll never know enough to resolves all of the uncertainties. But we know enough to recognize that we must act now.”

Paulson, in this article, supports a carbon dioxide emission tax  that would not only reduce the carbon-footprint that is escalating atmospheric warming (the science is definitive on this) but drive the growth of alternative energy development that would not only reduce the rate of growth of carbon emissions but also fuel job growth in other energy sectors.

So, a significant voice of the largely skeptical if not opposing side of the carbon emission debate that is the Republican rank and file, speaks for significant change in our energy policy to reduce our carbon emissions. And he says we cannot wait.

Michael Grunwald in the June 23, 2014 issue of Time, writes of a new global survey by Time that indicates  many Americans still don’t believe climate change is a real issue or a real thing at all. For example, only 40% of Americans “strongly agreed” that the earth is getting warmer when, in fact, the earth is getting warmer.

There are not enough visible and credible voices keeping climate change issues and policies on the front burner.  There are credible voices by the carbon-footprint load, but they are not visible. We need  both: people who get press and are influential as well as credible.

A person like Paulson, from the tribe (Republican) who is largely dismissing the concern as either second-rate or too economically costly (short-term!) to address, on the cover of the Sunday Week in Review is good.

Creating Environmental Edges in my Thoughts and for our Policies and Directions This Week……

“A goal of the collaboration between Dow and the Nature Conservancy is to create software that helps a company assess its natural resources so that they can be compared with man-made assets. What is a swarm of wild bees worth? One way to answer this question is to determine the coast of pollinating a crop with managed honeybees. To assess the value of a clean river to a soda bottler, you could tabulate the price of purifying a gallon of polluted water. The assumption is that if you want companies to care about nature you must put a price tag on it. Otherwise, as one Nature Conservancy economist told me, “it implicitly gets a value of zero.” The idea is not new: for two decades New York City has been buying up land in its watershed or paying property owner to stop polluting, because the cost is lower than building the purification plants that it would otherwise need. But the Dow collaboration extends this principle much further. They key piece of software, still under development is the Ecosystem Services Identification and Inventory program, which will make it easy for engineers – ideally, in the field, with a tablet – to enter data about a company’s natural resources. The Nature Conservancy plans to make the software publicly available.”

Green is Good: The Nature Conservancy wants to persuade big business to save the environment,” by D.T. Max, The New Yorker, May 12, 2014. 

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 “Bolstered by Tercek (ed.: The Nature Conservancy’s (T.N.C.) CEO) support, Kareiva (ed.: N.T.C.’s Chief Scientist) promoted his views by giving talks, writing blog posts, and publishing magazine articles. The new science of conservation would be data-based, corporate-friendly, and anti-elitist. It would not fetishize biodiversity. It accepted a world more like, say, the Meadowlands, in New Jersey – where MetLife Stadium shares space with twenty thousand acres of wetlands – than Yellowstone National Park. In ‘Conservation in the Anthropocene,’ an article published in February, 2012, Kareiva and two co-authors, Michell Marvier and Robert Lalasz, wrote, ‘By its own measure, conservation is failing. Biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline.’”

Green is Good: The Nature Conservancy wants to persuade big business to save the environment,” by D.T. Max, The New Yorker, May 12, 2014.

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 “And the disasters aren’t just projections for the future. ‘The single most important bottom line is that climate change is not a distant threat,’ said White House science adviser John Holdren. ‘It is happening now.’”

Lighting a Fire: President Obamas campaigns to spread new climate-change warnings,” by Bryan Walsh, Time, May 19, 2014.

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 “Kleeb had spent the last 15 years looking for dramatic, visual stores to advance political agendas, working on the principle that the best way to convert people wa to show them others who were affected by an issue. Here was one of the best stories she’d ever seen: Conservative American farmers rise up to protect their land. She could use the image of the family farm to reframe the way Nebraskans thought about environmentalism. It wasn’t going to be Save the Sandhill Cranes. It was going to be Save the Neighbors.”

This Land is Our Land: Jane Kleeb has organized an unlikely group to protest the Keystone pipeline: Nebraska ranchers and farmers. Is it classic Nimby-ism or the birth of a new environmental movement?” by Saul Elbein, The New York Times Magazine, May 18 2014.

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“One of Kleeb’s tenets of organizing is that if you want to reach a specific group of people, you have to use someone from that group to help you make your case. ‘One thing the climate organizations don’t get is that the scientific numbers don’t move people,’ she said. ‘People here care about their neighbors. So we are looking for a face.”

 This Land is Our Land: Jane Kleeb has organized an unlikely group to protest the Keystone pipeline: Nebraska ranchers and farmers. Is it classic Nimby-ism or the birth of a new environmental movement?” by Saul Elbein, The New York Times Magazine, May 18 2014.

I believe facts are our friends. I believe it’s important to know where you are in order to best configure where you are going. Because of this on this Earth Day 2014 I am dedicating time to review and read deeper into the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently published report. I invite you to do the same. Follow this link: http://www.ipcc.ch/ “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts. In the same year, the UN General Assembly endorsed the action by WMO and UNEP in jointly establishing the IPCC”

Happy Earth Day 2014

It turns out much of the key research on climate change was completed in the 1970’s. The first major report on the subject was requested by President Jimmy Carter. So reports and writes Elizabeth Kolbert in a good piece entitled “Rough Forecasts” in the April 14th issue of The New Yorker. Yes, we’ve been looking at the data for at least that long. At a meeting in Yokohama the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released just shortly ago it’s latest update on the crisis. It’s not pretty. We don’t seem to have the political will and moral power to do anything about the one thing that impacts every aspect of life. As one person in an NPR story Morning Edition story today on the lawsuits pending in Louisiana regarding oil and gas companies having liability in the steady and significant loss of land mass along the coast, most the significantly New Orleans area, stated: We are not talking about paying attention to the pretty little birdies or worrying about how what once was nice and pretty but isn’t nice to look at anymore, we’re talking about survival. Back in 1970, at the first Earth Day, we weren’t just talking about the pretty little birdies either. We were talking about survival. But things are now 44 years later. All attention on earth-keeping is necessary. Not faddish attention. Not stylish attention. Not 9-5 attention. All attention. Elect leaders who get this. Appoint leaders who get this. If you are a leader now, get this. Happy Earth Day 2014.