British class hate underlies many "environmental" causes

I wonder would British snobs be able to relate to the triumphant working-class culture here. They would be pathetic human beings to sneer at it but I suspect that they would sneer. Just the compere's hat would be deeply offensive to them. I suspect that a lot of American environmentalism is snobbish too. The Hollywood version does come to mind

This column is ... about the hate that dare not speak its name: class hatred. It is about hate-by-proxy: the distaste (I share it) for Dianamania, the dislike of supermarkets, the hatred (I'm not immune to it) of redtops [popular newspapers], the shudder (mine, sometimes) at low-cost airlines . . . all these allergens in the very air the top half of society must breathe have something in common. They remind us of the mob. I submit that, however weak or strong the justifications we may offer for our disapproval of a variety of features of what might be called mass culture, these various antipathies are inflamed by a single, secret anxiety, as old as the French Revolution, which in modern democracy we find it hard to acknowledge: fear of the common people.

Let's start with supermarkets: a touchy subject in modern Britain. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. "Supermarkets -- love 'em or loathe 'em" ran the intro to Jon Manel's series of discussions on the BBC Today programme, running all week. You'd have thought we were encountering one of the great questions of our time, the kind of debate that pits village against village and tears families apart: slavery, the Irish Question, Suez, Iraq, and Tesco.

Which is odd, because the series featured a specially commissioned poll whose most notable finding was that 79 per cent of respondents liked supermarkets. Among a curmudgeonly public it doesn't get much better than this: chocolate-covered cream puffs, Mother Teresa or a beach holiday in the Caribbean would be unlikely to outperform the British supermarket industry's 79 per cent approval-rating. So why, like a recurring theme through public debate in recent decades, does "down with supermarkets" keep elbowing its way into commentary and news? If I hadn't guessed already, a packed public meeting in Andover (where the radio programme took us) protesting against a proposed Tesco warehouse development, gave the game away to any listener with an ear for English accents.

People at the Andover meeting sounded posh. We heard none speaking with anything other than Received Pronunciation. Odd, for I know Andover; my nana lived there, and she had nothing against Tesco. But she was called Nana, not Gran, and that should alert you to something about the majority not present. Nana wasn't, and they aren't, posh. I have checked my hunch with locals and it was right: the driving force behind opposition to this development comes from the better-off: from the villages around the town; not from the estates and housing developments in the town itself.

Dislike of supermarkets is an overwhelmingly middle-to-upper-middle-class phenomenon. All classes use supermarkets, but it is the top half of society that voices (and genuinely feels) a distaste for them. Why? The same question may be asked about the wave of revulsion (I share it) that swept the middle-to-upper echelons of society after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when images of public grief and crowd sentimentality dominated the news. Little had changed yesterday, ten years on. The accents among the crowds were rough. Those voicing distaste for Dianamania were well spoken. This was a well-born woman but the common people loved her and mourned her loss, and the Establishment dislikes both their love and their grief. Why?

And do you remember the arrival in Britain of satellite television? At first its big selling point was sport - football and boxing - plus American cartoons like The Simpsons; and its initial market penetration was stronger on council estates than country estates. With it came satellite dishes: inoffensive objects, a good deal more tasteful and less prominent than the ugly metal TV aerials already on almost every roof. Yet there were endless complaints and letters to broadsheet newspapers, and in some places the dishes were for a while banned as aesthetically unacceptable. Why?

Today we have low-cost airlines like Ryanair and easyJet. With them has come cheap-flight-phobia. My observation as a frequent Ryanair flier is that the better-off use these flights more or less in proportion to our comparative numbers, and a flight to Perpignan or Girona is typically a fair cross-section of British society. It is also, typically, full, with minimum leg-room and restricted luggage, and therefore (in pints of fuel per pound of flesh) the second-most-environmentally friendly form of flight (after hang-gliding) known to man. This has not prevented an often scathing campaign against the whole idea of cheap flights. Among voices raised in this cause I have yet to hear a working-class accent.

Luton is a more efficient and less bothersome airport than Heathrow, yet people I know affect disdain at the idea of flying from there. Why? You have only to remind yourself of the horror expressed by the educated in the 19th century at the advent of railways (Wordsworth shudders at the idea that any fool in Bakewell could be in Buxton in half an hour, and vice versa) to understand their modern counterparts' excess of eco-sensitivity in the face of cheap flying.

You have only to read the 18th-century coffee shop derision at the mass hysteria of the grieving London mob at the hanging of the Rev Dr Dodd to understand modern Highgate's horror of Dianamania. To understand today's snootiness about Tesco, recall the early 20th century's snootiness about the very idea of cooperative stores. Popular newssheets have appalled the well-bred since popular newssheets began. The Hillsborough tragedy brought mountains of wreaths nearly a decade before Diana.

Diana's death did not change Britain. It reminded the modern Establishment of its deep insecurity in the face of the English mob: an object of fear, wonder and distaste since long before Spanish travellers returned to the imperial court in Madrid with horror stories of rough and volatile crowds who shouted in public and kissed and embraced each other in front of strangers. Ever since the French Revolution the top half of English society has glanced nervously at the crowd outside the window and muttered "could it happen here?".

We don't really trust democracy. We don't really like our countrymen. We no longer dare say so, not directly. So we sneer at their shops, shudder at their newspapers, disapprove of their means of mobility, find their joys tasteless and recoil even from their grief.

Mock tacky TV soap-opera all you like - and then tune in to The Archers; joke about shell suits [jogging gear] then fork out for silk; bemoan the greenhouse gas emissions of a cheap flight then emit four times as much flying business class. But don't pretend this is about quality or worth, the environment, taste or even beauty. It's partly about class. It always has been. It still is.

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Global Warming, the Great Lifesaver

Bjorn Lomborg says balmier weather could ward off millions of deaths. Yes, Bjorn Lomborg, the controversial Danish economist, believes that "global warming is real and man-made." But he is convinced that we are not thinking the problem through correctly and are, in fact, lost in a kind of green fog about how best to deal with global warming and other major environmental threats. In this excerpt from his new book, "Cool It", Lomborg illustrates how a major climate-related killer goes underreported, while human deaths from heat waves make front-page news.

The heat wave in Europe in early August 2003 was a catastrophe of heartbreaking proportions. With more than 3,500 dead in Paris alone, France suffered nearly 15,000 fatalities from the heat wave. Another 7,000 died in Germany, 8,000 in Spain and Italy, and 2,000 in the United Kingdom: The total death toll ran to more than 35,000. Understandably, this event has become a psychologically powerful metaphor for the frightening vision of a warmer future and our immediate need to prevent it.

The green group Earth Policy Institute, which first totaled the deaths, tells us that as "awareness of the scale of this tragedy spreads, it is likely to generate pressure to reduce carbon emissions. For many of the millions who suffered through these record heat waves and the relatives of the tens of thousands who died, cutting carbon emissions is becoming a pressing personal issue."

While 35,000 dead is a terrifyingly large number, all deaths should in principle be treated with equal concern. Yet this is not happening. When 2,000 people died from heat in the United Kingdom, it produced a public outcry that is still heard. However, the BBC recently ran a very quiet story telling us that deaths caused by cold weather in England and Wales for the past years have hovered around 25,000 each winter, casually adding that the winters of 1998-2000 saw about 47,000 cold deaths each year. The story then goes on to discuss how the government should make the cost of winter fuel economically bearable and how the majority of deaths are caused by strokes and heart attacks.

It is remarkable that a single heat-death episode of 35,000 from many countries can get everyone up in arms, whereas cold deaths of 25,000 to 50,000 a year in just a single country pass almost unnoticed. Of course, we want to help avoid another 2,000 dying from heat in the United Kingdom. But presumably we also want to avoid many more dying from cold.

For Europe as a whole, about 200,000 people die from excess heat each year. However, about 1.5 million Europeans die annually from excess cold. That is more than seven times the total number of heat deaths. Just in the past decade, Europe has lost about 15 million people to the cold, more than 400 times the iconic heat deaths from 2003. That we so easily neglect these deaths and so easily embrace those caused by global warming tells us of a breakdown in our sense of proportion.

How will heat and cold deaths change over the coming century with global warming? Let us for the moment assume-very unrealistically-that we will not adapt at all to the future heat. Still, the biggest cross-European cold/heat study concludes that for an increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the average European temperatures, "our data suggest that any increases in mortality due to increased temperatures would be outweighed by much larger short-term declines in cold-related mortalities." For Britain, it is estimated a 3.6øF increase will mean 2,000 more heat deaths but 20,000 fewer cold deaths. Likewise, another paper incorporating all studies on this issue and applying them to a broad variety of settings in both developed and developing countries found that "global warming may cause a decrease in mortality rates, especially of cardiovascular diseases."

But of course, it seems very unrealistic and conservative to assume that we will not adapt to rising temperatures throughout the 21st century. Several recent studies have looked at adaptation in up to 28 of the biggest cities in the United States. Take Philadelphia. The optimal temperature seems to be about 80øF. In the 1960s, on days when it got significantly hotter than that (about 100øF), the death rate increased sharply. Likewise, when the temperature dropped below freezing, deaths increased sharply.

Yet something great happened in the decades following. Death rates in Philadelphia and around the country dropped in general because of better health care. But crucially, temperatures of 100øF today cause almost no excess deaths. However, people still die more because of cold weather. One of the main reasons for the lower heat susceptibility is most likely increased access to air-conditioning. Studies seem to indicate that over time and with sufficient resources, we actually learn to adapt to higher temperatures. Consequently we will experience fewer heat deaths even when temperatures rise.

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More pesky climate variability from natural causes: India's monsoons more variable than thought

India's monsoon is much more variable than previously thought, a new study by an Indian origin geologist has revealed. To study changes over long periods of time, Ashish Sinha of California State University in Carson, and his colleagues studied a section of stalagmite from a cave in eastern India.

First they dated its layers by looking at thorium and uranium isotopes, and then looked at levels of the oxygen-18 isotope in these layers. Higher oxygen-18 concentrations correlate with lower rainfall.

Findings revealed that in the past, rains have declined drastically for periods lasting up to 30 years, causing severe droughts. The monsoon supplies nearly 80 per cent of South-East Asia's rainfall, and is vital for agriculture. Instrumental records going back 150 years show that the monsoon has occasionally failed for several years at a time.

The findings appear in the Geophysical Research letters, reports New Scientist.

Source

Journal abstract follows:

A 900-year (600 to 1500 A.D.) record of the Indian summer monsoon precipitation from the core monsoon zone of India

By Ashish Sinha et al.

We present a near-annually resolved record of the Indian summer monsoon (ISM) rainfall variations for the core monsoon region of India that spans from 600 to 1500 A.D. from a 230Th-dated stalagmite oxygen isotope record from Dandak Cave. Our rainfall reconstruction, which spans the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the earliest portion of the Little Ice Age (LIA), indicates that the short instrumental record of ISM underestimates the magnitude of monsoon rainfall variability. Periods of severe drought, lasting decades, occurred during the 14th and mid 15th centuries and coincided with several of India's most devastating famines.

GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 34, L16707






The cost of cooling the climate

United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki Moon is convening a high level meeting on global warming at the U.N. headquarters on September 24. The idea is to jump-start the climate change negotiations for the 13th Conference of the Parties (COP-13) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). COP-13 is scheduled for December 3-14 in Bali, Indonesia.

President George W. Bush is also inviting representatives from the major industrial countries and large developing countries to come to Washington, DC to discuss climate change on September 27-28. The goal of both meetings is figure out what to do about reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, after 2012 when the Kyoto Protocol expires. Under the Kyoto Protocol most industrialized nations-with exception of the United States and Australia-have agreed to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent below what their 1990 levels.

What is the optimal climate change policy-the one that sets future emissions reductions to maximize the economic welfare of humans? Yale University economist William Nordhaus,perhaps the world's leading expert on the economics of climate change, has just released a new study, The Challenge of Global Warming: Economic Models and Environmental Policy,which estimates the costs of various proposed trajectories for limiting carbon dioxide over the next couple of centuries.

Nordhaus and his colleagues have developed a small but comprehensive model that combines interactions between the economy and climate called DICE-2007, short for Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy. Nordhaus first computes a baseline that assumes that humanity does essentially nothing to limit its output of carbon dioxide. By 2100 CO2 atmospheric concentrations would rise from the pre-industrial level 280 parts per million (ppm), to 380 ppm today, to 685 ppm in 2100. Global average temperature would rise by 2.4 degrees Celsius by 2100. In this baseline scenario, the DICE-2007 model estimates that the present value of climatic damages is $22.6 trillion. DICE-2007 includes damage to major sectors such as agriculture, sea-level rise, health, and non-market damages.

Nordhaus then uses his model to assess the ambitious CO2 reduction proposals made by British economist Nicholas Stern and former Vice President Al Gore. Nordhaus calculates that the Stern and Gore proposals for steep immediate emissions reductions produce very similar cost/benefit results. Nordhaus also evaluates explicit temperature and concentration goals, e.g., limiting average temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above current levels or greenhouse gas concentrations to no more than 1.5-times pre-industrial CO2 atmospheric concentrations.

So what did Nordhaus find? First, the Stern proposal for rapid deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would reduce the future damage from global warming by $13 trillion, but at a cost of $27 trillion dollars. That's not a good deal. For an even worse deal, the DICE-2007 model estimates that the Gore proposal would reduce climate change damages by $12 trillion, but at a cost of nearly $34 trillion. As Nordhaus notes, both proposals imply carbon taxes rising to around $300 per ton carbon in the next two decades, and to the $600-$800 per ton range by 2050. A $700 carbon tax would increase the price of coal-fired electricity in the U.S. by about 150 percent, and would impose a tax bill of $1.2 trillion on the U.S. economy.

In addition, scenarios which attempt to keep the future average temperature increase below 1.5 degrees Celsius and concentrations below 1.5-times pre-industrial atmospheric concentrations are also not cost-effective. The DICE-2007 model calculates that both would cost more than $27 trillion in abatement costs and provide only about $13 trillion in reduced damages.

The optimal policy? Nordhaus reckons that the optimal policy would impose a carbon tax of $34 per metric ton carbon in 2010, with the tax increases gradually reaching $42 per ton in 2015, $90 per ton in 2050, and $207 per ton of carbon in 2100. A $20 per metric ton carbon tax will raise coal prices by $10 per ton, which is about a 40 percent increase over the current price of $25 per ton. A $10 per ton carbon tax translates into a 4 cent per gallon increase in gasoline. A $300 per ton carbon tax would raise gasoline prices by $1.20 per gallon.

Following this optimal trajectory would cost $2.2 trillion and reduce climate change damage by $5.2 trillion over the next century. "The net present-value global benefit of the optimal policy is $3.4 trillion relative to no controls," writes Nordhaus. "While this is a large number absolutely, it is a small fraction, about 0.17 percent, of the discounted value of total future income." Keep in mind that in this optimal scenario climate change damages would still accumulate to $17 trillion (lower than $22.6 trillion in the baseline case), but they are not abated because to do so would cost more than the benefits obtained.

A more optimistic scenario envisions the invention of a low cost zero-carbon technology. Such a technology would have a net value of around $17 trillion in present value. As Nordhaus notes, "The net benefits of zero-carbon substitutes are so high as to warrant very intensive research." Setting a price on carbon through a rising tax will encourage the development of such technologies. Another good way to hurry the process along would be to offer a substantial prize to the inventor of a cheap low carbon energy technology, e.g., perhaps a better battery, or paint-on solar cells.

Nordhaus cogently argues that neither doing nothing nor trying to halt global warming immediately are sensible policy targets. Nordhaus's study is certainly not the final word on climate change policy, but it would be a excellent starting point for climate change negotiators when they gather in New York, Washington and Bali this fall.

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REALITY CHECK: GLOBAL WARMING NOT A HOT PRIORITY FOR THE PUBLIC

Americans think global warming is real and serious. Poll after poll shows that there are not many climate skeptics left. The issue has received an enormous amount of media attention over the past several years, but it still doesn't rank at or near the top of issues people want the president and Congress to address. In January, when the Pew Research Center updated its yearly poll on priorities for the president and Congress, global warming ranked twentieth of twenty-three issues. Pew described concern about the issue as "lukewarm."

The poll was taken before the latest wave of media attention to global warming, but other more recent polls show the same pattern. In a survey taken in late May and early June by The Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University, the issue ranked eighth of ten issues examined. And it isn't just sentiment in the polls. According to the Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism, the media ratings for the July "Live Earth" concerts orchestrated to draw attention to the issue were "disappointing," with smaller than normal Saturday summer viewership.

Why doesn't the issue have a bigger public opinion footprint? First, many people see global warming as a problem for the future. Other issues such as the war in Iraq and health care seem more immediate to larger numbers of people. For most people, there have been few tangible manifestations of global warming. Polling on environmental issues over the past several decades shows that people are usually most concerned about problems they can see in their communities. Weather patterns seem unusually severe in many parts of the country, but the vagaries of the weather are a familiar story.

Another possible explanation relates to changing views of the media. When the environment emerged as a powerful political issue in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the media had more credibility than it has today. The media has joined government, labor and big business as powerful institutions about which the public is skeptical. In Gallup polls taken yearly since 2001, around three in ten have said the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, while around 35 percent say it is generally underestimated. In Pew's most recent media usage survey from 2006, just 20 percent said that they believed all or most of what they read in Time magazine, for example. Time's overheated tag line for its April cover story on global warming, "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid," probably only confirms the skeptics' suspicions about exaggeration.

It is also possible that Americans think they have been heard on the issue and will let politicians, interest groups and others take over. Again, the manner in which the environment emerged as an issue is instructive. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Americans decided that a clean and healthful environment was important to them. Once they agreed on the ends policy should serve, most people pulled away from the debate about the means -- that is, exactly what kinds of legislation should be enacted to ensure environmental progress. They had neither the time nor the knowledge to get involved in complex debates about ambient air quality or energy options. Americans aren't indifferent, but they are inattentive. Their benign neglect is a backhanded compliment to representative democracy, an indication of confidence in the process.

Lobbyists and activists can't pack their bags and go home. The debates in Washington on global warming will be as intense as ever, but most Americans will be on the sidelines. Interest groups will claim they have public opinion on their side in terms of how to respond to global warming, but how you word questions on complex hypothetical policy choices often determines the answers.

Finally, there may be another reason Americans have not elevated the issue. Most politicians younger than 81-year old House Environment and Public Works chairman John Dingell grew up with the environmental movement. We're all environmentalists now, and it is hard to make a political issue out of a commitment shared by most of the population.

George Bush's marks on virtually every aspect of his presidency are negative, including his handling of global warming, and Democrats lead the Republicans in every poll as the party better able to handle the issue. In a new Newsweek poll, 68 percent say Bush hasn't done enough, but in another question only 4 percent say they will vote on the basis of global warming. Nearly six in ten say the issue will be one of a number of issues that will be important to their vote. There is little evidence from the polls that taking on George Bush or the Republicans on the issue will make it a top-tier issue or increase its political weight.

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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