I can't imagine why any serious journalist would cite the work of The Breakthrough Institute (TBI) -- except to debunk it. As we'll see once again, they constantly misstate and misrepresent what others say, and generally put out very bad analysis designed to push their anti-climate-action, anti-environmental agenda.
So why do major media outlets like Time, WSJ, NPR, and The New Republic have already been duped keep citing them? Simple -- the media love contrarians. So if you convince the media you are, say, part of the progressive environmental movement, you can get all the media attention you want by then trashing your supposed allies.
I would ignore TBI if the media did, but because they don't, I can't.
In just the last few months, TBI, and its founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus have gone on a disinformation rampage with the help of the media:
So it is perhaps not surprising that 18 months after I got them to strongly and publicly endorse Obama's cap-and-trade plan, they have launched a series of attacks on it -- attacks based on misrepresentation and misanalysis. What is surprising is that the media keeps treating them as if they were credible sources -- or even worse, as credible sources who are part of the environmental movement. They are not. They are non-credible sources whose core arguments and analsyses are indistinguishable from the anti-climate disinformation campaign driven by fossil fuel companies and conservative media, politicians and think tanks.
TBI has recently written two attacks on Waxman-Markey, "The Flawed Logic of The Cap-and-Trade Debate," which attacks any effort to significantly raise the price of carbon pollution through a tax or a cap (which Yale e360 bizarrely posted, tarnishing their brand), and "Waxman-Markey Climate Bill's Emissions 'Cap' May Let U.S. Emissions Continue to Rise Through 2030," which attacks the offsets provisions in the bill, asserting "If fully utilized, the emissions "offset" provisions in the American Clean Energy and Security Act would allow continued business as usual growth in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions until 2030."
The latter piece has gotten a lot of media attention, including in Time magazine, the WSJ, and NPR, so you'd never know that the TBI analysis is devoid of any analysis -- or understanding -- of the offset market.
I am certainly one of the biggest critics of the offset market as it is currently constituted, having coined the term rip-offsets. And I have previously worried that federal climate legislation would be significantly weakened by allowing domestic emitters to substitute substantial domestic and international offsets for their own emissions reductions.
I have, however, spent the past few months analyzing the offset market and talking to leading experts on it. It is clear that the offset provisions in Waxman-Markey do not vitiate the targets. Indeed, I have previously explained why the supply of domestic offsets provision does not undermine the target (see here). In a regulated market with a cap, many of the domestic offsets will represent real reductions of US greenhouse gas emissions, and the total supply of cheap domestic offsets will be limited for a long time. A recent EPA analysis of Waxman-Markey came to precisely the same conclusion. TBI's analysis never mentions this at all.
After the holiday weekend, I will blog at length on why the international offsets don't threaten the overall integrity of the bill. The bottom line is that the vast amounts of moderate-cost near-term domestic emissions reductions strategies -- energy efficiency, conservation, replacing coal power with natural gas-fired power, wind power, biomass cofiring, concentrated solar thermal power, recycled energy, geothermal, and hydro power (see "An introduction to the core climate solutions") -- will be cheaper (in quantity) than most of the offsets will be in 2020 and beyond.
Let me end this post by showing just what kind of bad analysis and misrepresentation TBI continues to do.
As but one example in "The Flawed Logic of The Cap-and-Trade Debate," Shellenberger and Nordhaus wrote:
"If the price of carbon dioxide is only $5 per ton -- a level Waxman-Markey supporters like the Center for American Progress's Joe Romm says it could reach -- there would be just $3 billion for energy technology and just $250 million for R&D."
It "could reach" $5?
Here is what I wrote:
The price of one ton of carbon dioxide is going to be very low at first maybe around $5 to $10 a ton in the first few years, and then no more than, say, $15 a ton in 2020.
Yeah, the price will START around $5 to $10 in the first few years, maybe 2012 to 2015. As I explained, "We are cramming vast quantities of renewables into the marketplace" and "We are cramming vast quantities of renewables into the marketplace." And we're coming out of a deep recession. It should also be obvious that the CO2 price will continue to rise quickly after 2020.
I subsequently asked for and got a correction from e360 -- too late for Time magazine, though, which repeats the original incorrect number. Worse, like many in the media, Time continues to treat the TBI as if it were part of the "environmental movement," when it would be far more accurate to describe it as part of the anti-environmental movement.
That is clear from the TNR essay, "The Green Bubble: Why environmentalist keeps imploding."
The essay is such a disinformation-filled anti-environmental screed, that I am reprinting a response by Robert J. Brulle, Professor of Sociology and Environmental Science, Department of Culture and Communications, Drexel University -- and a widely published expert on the environmental movement:
The New Conservatism or Ecological Romanticism: A False Dichotomy
In their recent essay, "The Green Bubble", Nordhaus and Shellenberger launch a long attack against the green movement in the U.S. Based on a series of heroic misstatements, revisionist history, and unsubstantiated stereotypes, they construct an image of environmentalism based in liberal elite circles and searching for social redemption in premodern, aesthetic lifestyles. Thus much of what passes for "green" activity comprises little more than symbolic gestures to define an "alternative" lifestyle. Yet at the same time, environmentalists are also portrayed as dabblers in these bohemian lifestyles, floating in and out of aesthetic and consumerist roles. Hence environmentalism takes the form of fads or bubbles that come and go.N&S critique the presumed attachment of environmentalists to romanticist premodernist images of society and celebrate economic modernization, along with the growing affluence, individualization, and freedom that this social process creates. The answer to ecological issues for all, they imply, is to increase economic modernization across the globe. For example, they note that "It is poverty, not rising carbon-dioxide levels, that make them (the poor) more vulnerable than the rest of us."
One can easily critique their essay on a factual basis. Note the sparse nature of their data sources and their lack of reference to any existing environmental histories. They can maintain their interpretation of the U.S. environmental movement only by speaking in broad generalities, without citing specifics. The manuscript is rife with historical inaccuracies and fabricated statements. This essay is a political fiction in which facts are created to support their argument. For example, one of the most egregious statements is that "it has become an article of faith among many greens that the global poor are happier with less and must be shielded from the horrors of overconsumption and economic development - never mind the realities of infant mortality, treatable disease, short life expectancies, and grinding agrarian poverty." Who or what environmental group has ever said anything of this nature? This statement is an out-and-out fabrication. One wonders if there are any fact-checkers at The New Republic.
While this lack of factual basis is an important critique of N&S's argument, it is not the most central. Essentially, they are attempting to dichotomize the environmental movement between hopeless anti-modern romantic yuppies, engaged in symbolic activities, and the sober modernists (exemplified by themselves) who celebrate and promote economic expansion as the only real way to address environmental degradation. The space created by this dichotomy only allows for "responsible" environmentalism, based on economic modernization, and irresponsible, premodern romanticism, and eliminates all other possibilities. Thus the essay seeks to paint environmentalism with a universal brush, and delegitimate the entire movement.
The core problem with this analysis is that we are held between two competing and rigid ideologies. Apparently, in the view of N&S, the modern environmental movement has no ability to reason, or to calculate trade-offs between economic growth and environmental protection. Neither, apparently, do N&S. They are imprisoned within their own ideology of an uncritical and unreflexive modernization, without any corrective capacity based on democratic governance. The idea of the Enlightenment was to subject our institutions, including both the market and the state, to collective democratic control. Our society's capacity to learn, and change is enabled through democratic discussion. While economic modernization is one part of modernization, its uncritical application as the universal solution to whatever ails us is just another form of irrational ideology. Nowhere do we see any critical perspective on the limitations of markets, or the false freedom of consumer choice that N&S celebrate. How can one celebrate "individual choice" in a society permeated by a $300-billion-per-year needs-creation industry in the form of modern advertising? The so-called freedom and individuality lauded by N&S merely amounts to a false choice among consumer lifestyles, not a real and informed participant in our own governance.
N&S can only maintain their simplistic dichotomy by basing their argument on typifications, and ignoring the more complex reality of environmentalism in the U.S. Thus this is a false dichotomy. Thus Nordhaus and Schellenberger deny the legacy of the Enlightenment, and revert to a blind faith in the market and a celebration of the status quo.
There is a third alternative. Through democratic deliberations, we can define the shape of the world we wish to create, and then act collectively to realize it. Dealing with environmental degradation, poverty, and exploitation is a difficult task. But it will only be solved by looking truthfully at our situation, and rejecting easy and simplistic solution. Ideological diatribes only make a hard task more difficult.
We are not trapped in either hopeless romanticism, or at the whim of market dynamics. We can do much better than this.
And the media can do better than quoting the bad analyses and misrepresentations of TBI -- and must stop pretending that Nordhaus and Shellenberger are part of the environmental movement. They are as much a part of the environmental movement as I am of the conservative movement. [Note to self and media: But you do promote conserving energy, conserving resources, and conserving a livable climate -- so maybe you are a conservative after all and deserve lots of media attention for being a contrarian or an apostate.]
Joseph Romm's blog & HP's use of the blog is a public service for it exposes a pattern of intolerably bad journalistic practices by the traditional MSM. There is a slight chance that it will stop the use of incorrect & false material from the Breakthrough Institute. The public will learn to ignore media which persists in a pattern of using false material from the Breakthrough Institute. That sort of media could be forced to cease publication, fold & disappear. The individuals who had persisted in a pattern of using material from the Breakthrough Insitute could disappear from MSM since their work wasn't realiable or belivable. That would be a very good thing.
How about the possibility that Cap 'n Trade is too opaque? That all the shennanigans of the financial and banking industry (plus mortgage, credit and Congress' own game of three-card-monte), have made most folks gunshy about another easily gamed scheme? And is there anyone who thinks that at the end of the day, this will be anything but a windfall profit scheme from all the folks we are already skeptical of??
Why not get a bit more honest, and say APCC (or whatever) is so dangerous that we WILL have to pay more--every one of us--for everything we consume. And here is how to do it.
A transparent carbon tax. As a line item on every purchase or billing you receive (similar to VAT). And NO ONE gets to opt out. NO ONE gets to deduct a penny, and EVERY DOLLAR raised by passes Congress and goes directly to buy down the deficit.
Now, I know money is fungible, and Congress can still play budgeting games, but it would be nice to see that deficit go down, and we would know whom to blame if/when it doesn't.
charge a 1$ per ton Carbon tax.
The average car emits about 5 tons per year, so the total increase in gas costs will be 5 dollars per year of driving.
There are a thousand other great reasons to get off of fossil and nukes and replace them with 3 cents per KWH rooftop solar and waste recycling BioChar.
see my profile for complete plan.
I am referring to the cheapest state of the art reported installation and panel costs.
Retail the best I have found it 5$ per peak watt for a kit,
and 6$ installed. Still cheaper for most people.
If Democrat seeing only carbon dioxide as reason, Republican arguing about the same carbon dioxide. Republican is only diminishing role of mankind in producing carbon dioxide.
Please stop nonsense.
"Your points are probably not bolstered by quoting a high school science text published in 2001, when the entire school textbook industry was firmly under the thumbs of the Know-Nothing, Neo-Flat-Earth religious right."
Newton, Faraday, Joule and many others were out of politic and their laws of Physics, are more modern than today junk science, which you support only by believing.
Please do not believe, check and recheck any news by laws of Physics, not agenda!
How do you get liberal commentators like Olberman and Madow to pay attention to the environment?
Rachel and Keith didn't even acknowledge Earth Day on her program. Rachel is by far the worst. It is a sad day when even the most liberal commentators brush the subject completely under the rug.
If I were MIT, I believe I'd be calling myself Massachusetts Tech.
Short version: Because true journalism is all but dead.
Long version: Because true journalism does not include boot-licking well-heeled conservative partisans.
Because true journalism requires editors and owners with intelligence, courage and conviction.
Because true journalism requires a lot of background research work and tedious, time-consuming fact-checking on the part of the journalist.
Because true journalism is frequently rather boring to the average reader/viewer/listener, so the number of eyeballs and earballs captured is low, so associated ad revenue will be low.
Because gathering revenue from ad space is after all the true purpose of the free press---not the dissemination of accurate and fact-based news and commentary.
As Democrat, as Republican for some reason make from science of global warming circus for debate.
If Democrat seeing only carbon dioxide as reason, Republican arguing about the same carbon dioxide. Republican is only diminishing role of mankind in producing carbon dioxide.
Please stop nonsense.
It is not only carbon dioxide or other GHG influent climate:
It is winds and their direction, which send hot air to cloud level.
It is reflection, which send short wave back to space.
It is huge convection forces.
It is evaporation.
It is cloud formation.
It is ocean streams.
It is properties of water and ice.
Please excuse my poor English, and improve your poor understanding of Basic Physics.
It takes 339 kcal of energy to evaporate 1 kg of water.
Water vapor actually cools the air by evaporation of water on ground level, water droplets in atmosphere and by cloud formation.
Droplet of rain will solve GHG and clean the air better than any conservation attempt to reduce emission.
“Why in Hawaii, which close to equator temperature is 70-85º F, while in Texas in summer time 85- 110º F?†It is only because around Hawaii we have a lot of water evaporation.
“Since the Northern Hemisphere contains the greatest proportion of landmass and land heats more than oceans the Northern Hemisphere summer season causes significant increase in the global mean temperature,†It is true because there lack of water, to cool air.
I respect Al Gore, He is a good writer, not scientist. He brings attention to global warming better than anybody else does. He and his advisers-scientists have right to make their parts of mistakes. I am as reader has right on my own opinion about any subject. I am not a denial. I am agreed with Al Gore demand keep “Earth in the balance,†1992.
I am disagreeing with him that GHG are the main players in Nature. I disagree with him how to reduce GHG if they are problem.
Please check information and do not believe famous persons!
“Solar radiation reaches the upper atmosphere at a fairly constant rate of about 200
kilocalories per minute/square meter. About 1/3 of this radiation is reflected back into space mostly by clouds. Ozone, carbon dioxide, and water vapor in the atmosphere absorb or reflect most of Earth’s infrared radiation; the rest go through the atmosphere and out into space. Solar energy reflected back into space by thick clouds – 75-90%, thin clouds – 30-50%, water – 10%, grassy field - 10-30%, fresh snow – 75-95%, forest – 3-10%…
The atmosphere consists mostly of gases, but also contains water, ice, dust and others particles. In dry air we have 78% of Nitrogen, 21% of Oxygen, almost 1% of Argon. In air we have traces of another gases: Neon, Helium, Krypton, Xenon, Hydrogen, Ozone, Carbon Dioxide, Nitrogen Oxide, Methane.
Molecular mass of N2 = 28, of O2 = 32, of H2O = 18. Since the lighter water molecules displace heavier air pressure decreases as humidity increases. HUMIDITY UP, AIR PRESSURE DOWN, HUMIDITY DOWN, AIR PRESSURE UP
Wind blow from region of high air pressure to region of low air pressure as in sea breeze, land breeze.
Climate influences: a REGION’S NATURAL VEGETATIONâ€, tilling of land which changed reflection, water vapor actualy cool the air. GHG do not main player in nature! Al Gore is wrong and offer to Government wrong direction!
It's not just Al Gore. It's every major mainstream science group in the world saying rapid global climate change is happening, it's caused in large part by the cumulative effects of the last few hundred years of human activity, and it's worthwhile for civilization if not human existence, to try and slow it down if not reverse it.
Your points are probably not bolstered by quoting a high school science text published in 2001, when the entire school textbook industry was firmly under the thumbs of the Know-Nothing, Neo-Flat-Earth religious right.
HuffPo comment section is probably not the best venue for attempting to argue the scientific minutiae of this issue.
mioffe: “It's not just Al Gore. It's every major mainstream science group in the world saying rapid global climate change is happening, it's caused in large part by the cumulative effects of the last few hundred years of human activity.â€
Dear luziannagirl:
Water vapor is lighter than almost all gases and always going up to clouds level and above where heat more easy escape to space.
It takes 339 kcal of energy to evaporate 1 kg of water.
Water vapor actually cools the air by evaporation of water on ground level, water droplets in atmosphere and by cloud formation.
Droplet of rain will solve GHG and clean the air better than any conservation attempt to reduce emission.
“Why in Hawaii, which close to equator temperature is 70-85º F, while in Texas in summer time 85- 110º F?†Around Hawaii we have a lot of water evaporation.
“Since the Northern Hemisphere contains the greatest proportion of landmass and land heats more than oceans the Northern Hemisphere summer season causes significant increase in the global mean temperature,†It is true because there lack of water, to cool air.
If you will look on this dynamic picture of water vapor, droplet of water you will the same as me ignore GHG and more carefully look at properties of water, winds and their role in evaporation, convection forces, changing of reflection of land by human activities (tilling, growing crops for food, building roads etc).
http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
Romm repeatedly launches ad-hominem attacks on those he disagrees with and has been launching ad-hominem attacks on Shellenberger and Nordhaus, as well as other reputable climate advocates and reporters, for almost two years, which we documented here: http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2008/04/deconstructing_joe_romm_a_prim.shtml
Breakthrough has a long history of advocating progressive climate policy (see our history). In 2003, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus co-founded the Apollo Alliance, the first public campaign calling for a $300 billion federal investment in clean energy. In 2005, former Senator Obama introduced a proposal co-written by Breakthrough to raise CAFE standards, "Healthcare for Hybrids." In 2007, Obama's campaign adopted a $150 billion clean energy investment platform based on Breakthrough's recommendations. In April 2009, the Obama administration adopted Breakthrough's proposal for a National Energy Education Act. Throughout this time we have continually advocated (see our writing page) a national approach on climate change and clean energy capable of achieving the broad transformations we need.
It is shame for science, for mass media to be blind about properties of water, water vapor, water droplet, changing reflection of direct sun radiation by vegetation. Reread "Earth in the balance" 1992, "An inconvenient truth", 2006 as I did, found how Al Gore explain global warming and his laughable recomendation. If you will still believe in everything, what he wrote, give up your diploma. and go back to school from 6 grade level!