Vice President Al Gore, Nobel Peace Laureate, venture capitalist, author, lecturer, Academy Award winner, activist, the man Denialists love to hate, and the man some others canonize as the path-breaking visionary on the threat of global climate change, has a new book out:  Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.  It has a series of solutions and it’s a call to action for people all over the world.  Gore is making the rounds to both promote the book and to talk about the looming crossroads at Copenhagen.

The preeminent journalistic voice on climate change, Betsy Kolbert, interviewed Gore at her blog for “The New Yorker.”  It’s a wide-ranging conversation and Gore’s optimistic about prospects, both for Copenhagen and beyond.  I had one cavil which I expressed in a comment there:  “I’m somewhat at a loss, though, in reading this conversation, to note the absence of reference to greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide. As we all know, methane, nitrous oxide, the F-gases, ozone and black carbon are all pernicious actors in warming and need to be addressed.”  I think they both know this perfectly well, but there seems to be a sense that the issue has to be dumbed down for the general public, a perception that I challenged when Bill McKibben did it last summer in a book review.  In any event, Kolbert, McKibben, and Gore are three of the greatest rainbow warriors of our age and should be regarded as such.

Gore was at the American Museum of Natural History earlier this week and “Scientific American” covered the event.  Gore talked about population, a too-neglected part of the equation in the climate change calculus, and he talked about gender equality.  “Near-zero growth, however, could be attained with four basic societal achievements, he said. The goals include: the education of girls, the empowerment of women, the spread of fertility management and a higher child survival rate. Regardless of climate change, he noted, these aims are ‘all things we should be doing for good and beneficial reasons otherwise.’”

The good folks at Salon.com did an interview with him too.  Asked his expectations for Copenhagen, he said:  “I think it is realistic to expect a treaty. It will not be as strong as I would like it to be. But it will put a price on carbon and change the forward planning of businesses and cities and states, provinces and nations.”  Putting a price on carbon is one of the cornerstones of climate policy that the IPCC, the Stern Review, the EU, and most economists in the world concerned about the issue have all trumpeted.

Perhaps some of the most visible and controversial commentary he had this past week happened in an ABC interview.  He said that people should eat less meat, agreeing with Lord Stern’s recent pronouncement.  (See the two posts immediately below for more on this approach.)

Gore is going to Copenhagen as a sort of Ambassador Plenipotentiary for the planet.  He’s well suited to the role.

As I noted yesterday, I’ll be visiting the subject of the intersection of animal agriculture and climate change more often here.  For now, I want to note two recent items, one a “NY Times” op-ed, the other a book review in the “New Yorker.”  (Yes, I live in New York City.)

The former, an op-ed by a “livestock rancher” and author, basically says yes, meat consumption as we know it today has serious problems globally but if you buy only “green” beef it’ll all be fine.  We are given a reasonable survey of the environmental burden of modern meat production and told “Don’t worry, be happy.”  The letters in response are revealing.  One comments “Ms. Niman’s argument amounts to lowering an ethical standard to fit the demands of our meat-centric culture and Western privilege.”  (See, for instance, Nature, Poison and “Eco-Nomics” at the blog.)  One letter argues for hunting and fishing for food, another for eating poultry instead of beef.  And one letter posits the humane argument:  “When Nicolette Hahn Niman refers to ‘a conscientious meat eater,’ she is using an oxymoron. Can anyone in good conscience be complicit with the unnecessary suffering and slaughter of another sentient being?”  (That’s where I started with my vegetarianism 38 years ago.)

This brings us to the subject of Betsy’s Kolbert’s “New Yorker” review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.  Foer is a novelist, but delves into some new, not-uninteresting territory in this book.  He looks at the massive pollution engendered by industrial meat production.  “The pigs processed by a single company, Smithfield Foods, generate as much excrement as all of the human residents of the states of California and Texas combined.”  And, “According to the Environmental Protection Agency, some thirty-five thousand miles of American waterways have been contaminated by animal excrement.”  He looks at the extraordinary amounts of antibiotic pumped into animals we eat and how this has led directly to “…producing new, resistant strains of germs-so-called superbugs.”  And he looks at the pain inflicted on the animals on which we feed.  Good review of what appears a most compelling book.

This discussion appears to be one that is not soon going away.

Not everybody would have caught the headline, but when you’re as tuned into Climate Change as I am - and many of you are - then Climate chief Lord Stern: give up meat to save the planet is going to grab your attention.  Who is Lord Nicholas Stern?   He is a world-class economist and leader of the UK’s seminal “Stern Review on the economics of climate change“ that boosted the potential economic devastation of climate change into the forefront of public policy discussion.  When Lord Stern starts talking about animal agriculture as a concern, people are going to listen.

He gave a wide-ranging interview recently to “The Times” in which he said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”  “The Times” also reports that “UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds such as soy.”

(If full disclosure from me is of any note, I’ve been a vegetarian for pretty much the entirety of my adult life.  I had my last hamburger 38 years ago and have never looked back.)

Not surprisingly, when someone as prominent as Stern makes a pronouncement as unequivocal - and controversial - as this one, there’s going to be a rapid backlash.  Thus, Critics round on Lord Stern over vegetarian call is a headline from the very next day from “The Times.”  They wrote:  “Farmers and meat companies across Britain reacted with a mixture of anger and exasperation yesterday after one of the world’s leading climate change campaigners urged people to become vegetarian to help to fight global warming.”

When another highly visible and respected climate change leader, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, delivered the same message a year ago, there was a not-dissimilar reaction.   See this from “The Guardian.”

There is a fair bit to be said on this subject - and I will be saying more here.  There are an awful lot of reasons why meat consumption is a big net negative for people and the planet, and climate change is high on the list.  There is a growing movement to highlight the connections.  Witness, for instance, this useful comment on a recent post.

I’ve been reading a great book on the history of vegetarianism, The Bloodless Revolution by Tristram Stuart, and find, quite to my surprise, that many of the same arguments made today regarding natural resource protection and the medical benefits of vegetarianism were made hundreds of years ago.  Pierre Gassendi, for instance, the 17th Century French philosopher and scientist, was a prominent proponent of a vegetarian diet.  As the book notes, “…Gassendi produced the mandate for philosophical vegetarianism, by proclaiming that ‘The entire purpose of philosophy ought to consist in leading men back to the paths of nature.’”

This echoes a quote that I love from Alex Steffen, the Executive Editor of Worldchanging, here (in the context of geoengineering as “bad planetary management”):  “Our goal should be to cool the planet in ways that reinforce and restore the resilience of its natural systems.”  Many would argue that animal agriculture - and certainly the industrial farming that produces most of the world’s meat today - does not reflect how earth’s natural systems were meant to operate.

Whether you subscribe to the idea that we need to return to 350 ppm of carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere or not, last Saturday’s worldwide expressions of concern were wonderful, eye-opening further evidence of how deep and how broad that concern runs.

I wrote a thumbnail sketch the other day of where we are in the US on domestic climate change and energy legislation.  Let’s now take a quick look at how things are shaping up only 37 days before Copenhagen.

As you know, the world has been building toward the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for several years.  COP 13, in Bali two years ago, created the “roadmap” for further talks under the UN’s aegis.  In Bali, for one thing, avoiding deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) was embraced as a necessary mechanism for an international agreement after the Kyoto Protocols expire in 2012.  For another thing, the idea that adaptation, with an adaptation funding mechanism, needed to be a key building block in “a strengthened future response to climate change” was established.

Copenhagen is where the international community is going to create the framework for how we proceed.  We will have a more vigorous regime than Kyoto provided.  The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, it should be recognized, was never meant to be the alpha and omega for addressing the climate crisis.  It should be celebrated, nevertheless, for the mechanisms that it established.

What we will have after Copenhagen is somewhat well defined in some areas, and as-yet unclear in others.  The big bones of contention remain to what extent the developing nations will adhere to a quantifiable program of greenhouse gas reductions, how much and in what way the developed countries will pay for mitigation and adaptation efforts in the developing world, and the new and improved mechanisms for achieving the climate-cooling ends nations agree are necessary.

What’s been going on as part of the preparations for COP 15?  The Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF), for one thing, has been having a series of meetings all year.  The MEF nations’ leaders met in Italy in July and made several declarations, among them that “Developing countries among us will promptly undertake actions whose projected effects on emissions represent a meaningful deviation from business as usual in the mid-term …”  (My emphases.)  Developing nations represent a large burden of the GHG emissions now and there is plenty more ahead before any “meaningful deviations” start to kick in.  (China, Indonesia and Brazil are 1, 3 and 4 when you count Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry [LULUCF].)  These major developing economies, and others such as India, South Africa, and Mexico, all have a critical voice and a critical role to play in effecting a good agreement in Copenhagen.

Meeting just before the MEF, the G-8 called for a 50% reduction overall in greenhouse gases by 2050, the most advanced economies reducing by 80%.  In mid-September, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon organized the Summit on Climate Change.  A number of world leaders further delineated their intention to address climate change, in Copenhagen and beyond.  The G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh later that week produced a declaration of intent to end fossil-fuel subsidies worldwide, a not-inconsiderable outcome.

Many world leaders, environment and finance ministries, key NGOs, and business leaders have been meeting, talking, negotiating, and building to the critical COP 15 in December.  The President of COP 15, Danish Environment Minister Connie Hedgard, has been working hard and long, saying that failure is not an option.  Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen has been engaging some key leaders for extra service in helping to make a deal happen.   Meanwhile, various working groups of the UNFCCC have been plowing ahead, helping to create optimal conditions for the meetings.  The final preparatory meeting before Copenhagen takes place next week in Barcelona.

Just today, after a key EU Summit concluded, José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission announced:  “We have a clear, ambitious, and unified EU message on climate finance.  We can take this message to Washington, New Delhi, Beijing and elsewhere.  Next Tuesday, Prime Minister Reinfeldt and myself are meeting the President of the United States and we will say ‘we are ready to engage, let’s make Copenhagen a success.’”  John Fredrik Reinfeldt is the Prime Minister of Sweden.  (See also this video from Reuters on the EU agreement.)

The SG had an op-ed this past week in the “NY Times” in which he says that a good deal can come out of Copenhagen.  He’s certainly been working hard to effect precisely that outcome.

Another of the central players in all of this is Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC.  In the latest monthly newsletter from them, he delivers an urgent, but I think positive message.  He talks about the successes in the Bangkok talks earlier this month.  He mentions the thousands of NGOs and faith groups that are working toward achieving success on climate and sustainability.  He calls on world leaders to follow through on the commitments they’ve been making to finalize a strong, smart and thorough agreement in Copenhagen.

I went to an interesting show a few weeks back at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, a division of the Smithsonian Institution.  Design for a Living World has been mounted with the Nature Conservancy.  It’s an in-depth look at how a number of designers are putting sustainable materials to excellent use in products like wool rug tiles and packaging made from cocoa.  At the website, there are slide shows, illuminating text, and video interviews with the designers, Isaac Mizrahi and Maya Lin among them.

A couple of years back, they had another terrific exhibition: Design for the Other 90%.  This show looked at innovative, low-tech design breakthroughs in energy, transport, shelter, health, water and education.

If you’re in New York between now and January 4, get over to the Cooper-Hewitt (no relation) to see the show.

As you know, there has been a tremendous amount of activity on climate change and energy on The Hill over the past year.  The House of Representatives got going fast, even before the 111th Congress got underway.  A leading progressive, hardball-playing Congressman from Los Angeles, Henry Waxman, assumed the chairmanship of the critical Energy and Commerce in a palace coup.  He created a new subcommittee, Energy and the Environment, and installed an outspoken Massachusetts progressive, Ed Markey, as the chair.  In late June, after a fair bit of horse trading among key legislators - plus some old-fashioned threats, cajolery and pleading from Speaker Pelosi and her team, and, it’s fair to assume, President Obama and his team - the landmark American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), aka Waxman-Markey, was passed in the House.  The vote was close, 219-212, but historic nonetheless.  There are extraordinary complexities to the politics, the psychology, and the economics.  Nevertheless, Waxman-Markey has become the touchstone for legislative action.

Next stop the Senate.  The Senate leadership, no doubt in full consultation with the House leadership and the White House, decided to put climate change and energy behind health as the focus for the summer and fall.  At the end of September, two forward-thinking, aggressive legislators, both renewable energy and environmental protection hawks, John Kerry, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Barbara Boxer, committee chair for Environment and Public Works, started to turn up the tempo on climate change and energy.  They introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act.  Boxer’s committee will hold three days of hearings this week, and mark-up on the bill is slated to commence the first week of November.

In her announcement of the release of the first full working draft of the bill, Boxer noted that a new EPA analysis showed no discernible difference between Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey in their economic impact on the average American household:  $80 to $111 per year.

This climate change/energy initiative, so critical to the health and well being of the United States - much more so, I would not hesitate to venture, than health care reform - will likely not, according to all reports, make it into law this year, let alone before Copenhagen, but there’s a pretty solid foundation being laid for it for enactment in the second session of this Congress.

The folks at the White House, with President Obama very much driving them, are working assiduously on a number of fronts to make this legislation happen.  This article from the AP delves into how this is being manifested.  A large and growing group of top advisors now meet regularly on Obama’s green agenda.  There has been considerable outreach to mayors, governors, and members of Congress.  Carol Browner, the top White House official on climate and energy said:  “It’s really engaging a wide array of people across the administration to make sure that we’re answering the questions that the Senate needs answered and working with individual members as they think about how they can support comprehensive energy legislation.  It’s just grown and grown and grown, with more and more Cabinet agencies and secretaries wanting to be involved.”

I’ve noted at the blog not only the Obama Administration’s selection of truly impressive environmental and energy leaders to top posts, but its emphasis on green stimulus and jobs, and the fact that it has been consistently pushing the edge of the envelope on regulatory initiatives.  (See recent posts here and here, for instance.)

The President made a major speech at MIT last week “challenging Americans to lead the global economy in clean energy.”  You can see the speech below.

We are, without a shadow of a doubt, making enormous progress in the US, politically and in the business community, on making the transition to clean, smart, economically stable, and conflict-free energy.  More and more people every day in high places, and across the board - witness the burst of concern and action this past weekend - are getting it.  Making peace with the planet, restoring the earth to balance, call it what you like:  It’s happening here.

In the spirit of Step It Up 2007 and Earth Hour, 350.org reports that yesterday’s International Day of Climate Action brought people together in 181 countries, at over 5,200 events, for the “most widespread day of environmental action in the planet’s history.” See a great slide show plus videos and other reports here on this successful expression of the depth and breadth of people’s concern.

Don’t think this is an international effort?  There are over a dozen languages including Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic and Chinese in which you can read about the fun people had yesterday and learn more about how to confront the climate crisis.

See Bill McKibben, the author and 350 organizer, via GristTV, on what this meant and means.

The venerable Matt Wald at the “NY Times” had a revealing story yesterday:  Fossil Fuels’ Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says.  He cites a study, commissioned by Congress, just out from the National Research Council.  Monetizing the value of human life cut short by air pollution - “small soot particles, which cause lung damage; nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog; and sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain” - the NRC estimated $120 billion a year in health costs, based on 20,000 premature deaths valued at $6 million each.

The study did not measure the impacts from trains, shipping, or aviation, nor from the impacts of climate change.  The NRC study neglects then, among other things, what James J. Corbett, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Engineering at the University of Delaware, asserted in a study published two years ago that attributed 60,000 cardiopulmonary and lung cancer deaths each year globally to shipping emissions - and forecast an increase to nearly 85,000 deaths by 2012 under current trends.

The NRC study “…also found that renewable motor fuel, in the form of ethanol from corn, was slightly worse than gasoline in its environmental impact.”  (See Are Biofuels A Bummer? for more on the problems of ethanol production.)  The NRC study did not, however, delve into environmental or health damage from coal mining, oil extraction and refining, nor nuclear power operations and radioactive waste disposal.  (For more at the blog on coal, see Coal - Besides Carbon Dioxide, There’s …)

I’ve highlighted many other problems with fossil fuel and nuclear power here, including the massive capital and operating costs and the extraordinary inefficiency of conversion loss in conventional central power generation.  I’ve touched on the “resource curse” too.  What I and others have been saying is let’s all of us, in the developed and the developing world, be free of these many and diverse drags on our societies.  What the National Research Council is affirming in their study is that health impacts count!

(There’s a P.S. here:  the study found that the health impacts from natural gas are quite small relative to those from coal and oil.  Not surprisingly, there’s a nearly full-page ad from America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) tucked in right next to Wald’s article.)

Someone in my class at Pace University in NYC a couple of years ago mentioned that she thought that earthquakes and other similar phenomenon were being influenced by climate change.  I pooh-poohed the idea, saying that climate change was responsible for a lot of ills - with more to come - but that it couldn’t impact things happening at the level of the earth’s geology, such as undersea earthquakes that generate tsunamis.  Sounds pretty solid, right?  Like the earth.  Well, it appears that I was wrong.  (First time for everything.)

I came across this article from Reuters last month.   “Climate change doesn’t just affect the atmosphere and the oceans but the earth’s crust as well. The whole earth is an interactive system.”  That’s how Professor Bill McGuire of University College London characterized things.

UCL hosted a conference, Climate Forcing of Geological and Geomorphological Hazards, supported by the UK Met Office, the British Geological Survey, the British Antarctic Survey and Oxford university.  There were scores of researchers present, with sessions on climates of the past and future, climate forcing of volcanism and volcanic activity, and climate as a driver of seismic, mass movement and tsunami hazards.

Add these to the growing list of potentially devastating impacts from climate change.  And, when something seems absurd or, at best, implausible, as it concerns the possibilities for climate catastrophe, dig a little deeper to see if maybe there isn’t something really there.  Or perhaps, as Joe Heller put it, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”