The Political Climate: an ongoing commentary on the NH Primary and Climate Change

Foster’s Daily Democrat’s Sunday paper was filled with green debate.  This article reports that researchers are questioning how realisitic it is to believe that ethanol will become our nation’s saving grace in efforts to reduce oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions.  Tas Patzek, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkley told Foster’s, “Biofuels can be produced from biomass on a small scale.  They may satisfy local rural needs…[but] [w]e cannot produce them from any source on a scale commensurate with our current level of liquid fuel consumption.”

 Scientific inquiry into climate change is analyzed in another piece where the influence of advocacy and political partisanship is brought into question.  According to David Brown, NH State Climatologist, “only a minority of scientists let politics influence their research.”  However, Massechusettes Institute of Technology professor, Richard Lindzen, disagrees believing “it is probably impossible to find studies that are completely neutral because the issue has been politicized for the past 30 years.”  In another article, “Warming debate centers on human role,” Lindzen states that, “we have only seen very small warming” and “Changes over such short periods of time tell one nothing about the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.”  This, of course, is not the opinion of most scientists.  The Union of Concerned Scientists presents the prevailing view.  Maggie Hassan, Democratic state senator from Exeter, NH, also promotes this “inconvenient truth.”  In an editorial to the Exeter News Letter, Hassan writes that global warming, and the role that humans have played in it, is a pretty “common-sense” concept.  Inspired by a powerful thunderstorm as well as Al Gore’s movie, Hassan declares it is time for our nation to finally act.

The Political Climate has been asked by several people if there is a list of biodiesel stations in New Hampshire. Biodiesel.org does have a list. The link is here. The pickings, for now, are admittedly slim.

To put this in a national context, here is a list of states with the numbers on the different types of alternative fueling stations.

Cass Sunstein had this interesting piece in the Washington Post over the weekend. The thesis is that while the United States and China are the biggest greenhouse gas polluters and will thus have to bear the greatest burden in reducing global emissions, the concrete incentives to do so are significantly less than other countries and there is, in consequence, no great urgency to address this problem.

Sunstein argues that the U.S. and China will not face the agricultural disasters and disease outbreaks that are projected for other areas, particularly India and Africa. They are therefore left to find the political and social will to make major changes in the (relatively) lesser effects of climate change that they will suffer, the fallout from economic turmoil elsewhere on the interdependent globe, or a moral imperative to preserve the planet’s climate more-or-less as it is.

It’s interesting stuff, though I don’t think most Americans, at least, look at climate change and think, “Well, it won’t be a bad for me as a malarial african farmer trying to raise crops in a drought, so I don’t think I’ll do anything.” Americans evaluate things in light of their current situations, and by that measure, the effects of climate change predicted by many scientists should be enough of a spur to action even if they don’t reach the calamitous levels that may occur in other parts of the world.

Zogby International and the National Wildlife Federation released the results of a poll conducted this month and the  attitudes it captures regarding global warming are interesting. Seventy-four percent of respondents had become more convinced of global warming over the past two years and nearly three-quarters believed that global warming can be addressed without harming the economy. The report is here.

UNH’s Ross Gittell argues in the Washington Post that New Hampshire will continue to be crucial in the nominating process…The Nashua Telegraph reports on an exciting partnership between New England Wood Pellet and a Texas company called Zilkha that has developed a better way to use wood to produce electricity…NASA climatologist James Hanson and UNH’s Barry Rock (also a Carbon Coalition Steering Committee member) testify in support of Vermont’s vehicle emissions standards.