Government Folly in the Face of Climate Change (the re-post)

The following was published March 19, 2015, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.

Also: I followed up this piece for WWF with  posts here in March and April 2015 about some new instances of  folly -- governments constraining their own climate/environmental scientists in Florida and Wisconsin.

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The great historian Barbara Tuchman took a hard look at governmental policy missteps in her 1984 book The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. As someone studying modern climate change policy, it is hard not to draw parallels to her definition of folly: The pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved.

She uses these criteria to zero in on the most serious instances of government folly:

1. The policy must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not just in hindsight.
2. A feasible alternative course of action must have been available.
3. The policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and persist beyond any one political lifetime (“collective government” folly is the more significant problem).

How is hiding climate change science “folly”?

Many governments are acknowledging climate change, even creating new positions to work on the problem. Governments taking slow and measured steps—perhaps too slow and measured—can be viewed as insufficient action, but it is not folly; governments ordering their scientists to study climate change and then burying the results? I call that a classic example of Tuchmanesque folly, and the U.S. federal government and three U.S. states— Nebraska, South Carolina, and North Carolina—have all done it. The press and science-friendly politicians have widely called out the counter-productivity of governments burying climate science. Incorporating the science into planning is (to some degree or another) feasible, since other governments are doing it. The subterfuge is not being done by one person, but government decision-making bodies. Governments burying their own climate science is the definition of folly.

When did the U.S. government bury climate science that it itself ordered?

The details about three states’ climate follies were recently published by the Business Insider’s science desk (read: These States Have Reportedly Tried to Hide Scary Climate Data from the Public [Oct. 30, 2014] and This Is the Climate Report South Carolina Spent Years Hiding [Dec. 29, 2014]). The author points out that “good climate reports were ultimately made public in the above three states, even if the reports are not currently being utilized to their full potential.” While that is true, North Carolina’s infamous official denial of sea level rise data will hamper planning for at least another year.

North Carolina’s House Bill 819, passed in June 2012, prevents the state from basing coastal policy on anything but historical data, ignoring any emerging climate change science through 2016. The governor failed to veto the bill, and it became law in August 2012. Almost simultaneously, in June 2012, a scientific article by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) placed North Carolina’s coast within a 600-mile “hotspot” for sea level rise. North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue, a Democrat, had the input of the legislature and the USGS put in front of her at the same time, and she let the political current pull state policy away from where science was pointing. Meanwhile, in 2013 she was replaced by a Republican, Pat McCrory, who installed an oil developer as head of the state’s Coastal Resources Commission and believes in responding to climate change by “cleaning up the environment in a cost-effective way.” Besides this, coastal Carolinians might also worry about the lagging constraints on public safety planning caused by the May 2014 vote by the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission to ignore sea level rise impacts projected too far out. Adaptation to sea level rise will—by collective government vote—only prepare for the next 30 years of impacts.

What about the U.S. federal government? Didn’t official climate science denial get voted out in 2008?

There are many ways government can delay or bury the release of inconvenient scientific findings. Many are familiar with the second Bush administration’s direct censorship of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the topic of climate change. The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was also censored, leading to its senior official Rick Piltz turning whistleblower in 2005. He founded and directed the Government Accountability Project’s Climate Science Watch initiative from 2005 until his death in October 2014 (read his obituary from the NYT). In March 2013 Mr. Piltz told students during a speaking tour that:

[T]he chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, a former energy lobbyist, would hand-edit reports, deleting references to the ecological impact of climate change and adding passages that exaggerated the uncertainty of climate-related findings.

In January 2009, Barack Obama promised in his inaugural speech, “We’ll restore science to its rightful place,” and two months later issued a memorandum to agency heads to improve scientific integrity. Under his administration, the direct White House interference with the EPA and USGCRP may have stopped, but Congress has found ways to delay action on EPA findings about dangerous chemicals, and in the same manner may be playing shell games to delay action on rational, climate change science-based adaptation planning.

Case in point: according to a Center for Public Integrity 2014 report, the EPA has been prepared since 2008 to assert that arsenic is 17 times more potent as a carcinogen than it now reports. However, its arsenic report was delayed procedurally at the Office of Management and Budget for two years. Then, in 2011, Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, with arsenic-laden pesticide companies among his campaign donors, ordered the EPA to have its findings reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences within a House Appropriations Committee report. In 2015 the review is still ongoing, and nothing has changed in federal regulations regarding arsenic in drinking water.

Eventually the “safe” levels of arsenic may be adjusted and avoidable cases of cancer duly avoided. But evidence is mounting that there is no way to be adequately conservative in our emissions of greenhouse gases or adequately liberal in preparing for climate change hazards. According to a Princeton study published in 2013, even if we halted all greenhouse gas emissions today climate change would proceed unabated for centuries—not decades, as previously thought— because of the ocean’s decreasing ability to absorb heat. And this is not accounting for intersecting hazards and feedback loops causing exponential worsening of conditions, difficult to project with today’s climate models.

The EPA’s arsenic case is awful, but the burial of scientific findings about climate change is potentially catastrophic.

Are there any cases of the U.S. government actually adapting to climate change, despite political pressure to delay?

The U.S. Navy has been at the forefront of actually adapting to climate change since before Obama’s restoration of “science to its rightful place.” A Feb. 12, 2015, article by Jeff Goodell in Rolling Stone describes how the military has long seen the security threat represented by climate change and taken measures—as long ago as 2003, when the report “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security” (by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, downloadable here) was published by the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld, then President George W. Bush’s defense secretary. The home of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, Norfolk, VA, is within the sea level rise “hotspot” called out by the USGS in 2012 (running from Cape Hatteras, NC to north of Boston, MA). So the Navy has been busy planning for climate change, despite occasional Obama-era interference from Congressional climate denialists. The Navy started with replacing critical piers that were becoming submerged in the late 1990’s. Goodell asks the officer in charge of mid-Atlantic Navy facilities, Capt. J. Pat Rios, about the rationale for replacing them:

“We didn’t raise the piers because of climate change” […]. He doesn’t quite wink, but almost.

“Then why did you raise them?” I ask.

“Because we needed new piers. And as long as we were building them, it didn’t cost much more to build them higher.”

Thus, the Navy’s climate change adaption planners find their ways to work around a government bent on folly.


Photo: Capitol Building, Washington, D.C. © U.S. Government

Red-Letter Day for California Adaptation Planning: SB 379 is Law (and Some Other Good Legislation, Too)

Yesterday (Oct. 8, 2015) California's Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 379, requiring cities and counties to include planning for climate change impacts in their general plans starting in 2017.

• Fact sheet about SB 379
• Text of SB 379

SB 379 was proposed by Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson of the 19th Senate District (including all of Santa Barbara County and western Ventura County).

The title of the bill reads like a strange little haiku:

SB-379
Land use: general plan: 
safety element.

Last night I attended a sea level rise planning discussion (part of the Here. Now. Us. project) in Marin County, a county where you could say the default political persuasion was left of "Hippie," and found myself sitting next to not one but TWO climate change denialists. These people spent every minute of airtime they were allowed expressing concern that people are concerned about climate change (because of its illegitimate science, it is too expensive, we are already doing enough to respond to flooding, etc.). So I think this bill takes a bold stride forward. It explicitly uses the words "climate change" and "climate adaptation" -- phrases that provoked loud scoffs from the vocal duo I met last night. Let me offer the strangely titled-with-a-haiku SB 379 my own haiku in thanks:

With a clear task list
you ask us for foresight so
our children are safer.

The Governor also signed two other bills by the same senator yesterday, both concerning oil spill protections: SB 295 Pipeline safety: inspections  and SB 414 Oil spill response.

These other two good bills were also signed over the last two days, upping the ante on the state's GHG reduction goals and inaugurating representation of vulnerable populations on the board that oversees the state's main GHG reduction measures:

• SB 350 (De León and Leno) Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act of 2015 (Also see the Governor's Oct. 7, 2015, press release about it)
• AB 1288 (Atkins and Pavley) Air resources (to ensure the California Air Resources Board "is more representative of the state's diversity and those most impacted by pollution" according to Governor Brown's Oct. 8, 2015, press release about it)

So now in the article of California's Health and Safety Code that deals with the make-up of the Air Resources Board, Section 39510 (e) reads:

"The Senate Committee on Rules and the Speaker of the Assembly shall each appoint one member to the state board who shall be a person who works directly with communities in the state that are most significantly burdened by, and vulnerable to, high levels of pollution, including, but not limited to, communities with diverse racial and ethnic populations and communities with low-income populations."

That is indeed another step in the right direction. Part of my 2009 Master's thesis was devoted to the "lessons learned" from the failed Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (EJAC) mandated by AB 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. That committee's participation in the initial roll-out of AB 32 resulted (as of 2009) in a lot of anger on both the EJAC and the ARB. A lot of the roll-out process was already determined by the time the EJAC was formed, setting the committee up for failure. Having actual front-line community representation on the ARB should improve trust, and hopefully the health outcomes of our state's most vulnerable populations.

Other legislation of note signed this week:

• AB 1482 (Gordon) Climate adaptation, requiring the state to update the state's adaptation plan every three years (which was already being done by Executive Order, but now it's a law)
• AB 1496 (Thurmond) Methane emissions, supporting monitoring and reduction of emissions of this extremely dangerous greenhouse gas.
• SB 246 (Wieckowski) Climate change adaptation, setting up a "Integrated Climate Adaptation and Resiliency Program" at the Governor's Office of Planning and Research, which has been the lead agency on climate planning under this governor, and tagging it with responsibility for updating the state's Adaptation Planning Guide (published in 2012).

Also noteworthy in state adaptation news-- today the California Natural Resources Agency released the 199-page draft document "Safeguarding California: Implementation Action Plans" for which it is holding public comment sessions in Oakland, Sacramento, and Los Angeles.

Mon. Oct. 12: Bay Area Listening Session on Climate Adaptation

6-8 PM, MetroCenter Auditorium, 101 Eighth Street, Oakland (right above the Lake Merritt BART Station). 

Mon. Oct. 26: Sacramento Public Workshop on Safeguarding California Implementation Plans

10 AM- 12 PM, Rosenfeld Hearing Room, California Energy Commission, 1516 9th Street, Sacramento, CA 95814

Tues. Oct. 27: Los Angeles Public Workshop on Safeguarding California Implementation Plans

1:30 - 3:30 PM, Carmel Room, Junipero Serra Building, 320 W. 4th Street,, Los Angeles, CA 90013

California’s Adaptation Clarion Call (the re-post, with updates)

The following was published Sept. 2, 2014, on the WWF ClimatePrep blog (climateprep.org) -- which now appears to have gone defunct. You can still see the original on Archive.org. See my blog post about the writing of this article here.

Two updates on the content of this article:

First: the California Adaptation Forum that I am reporting on below is scheduled to be held again September 7-8, 2016, in Long Beach, California. To subscribe to get updates on the conference go here. Find the presentations from the 2014 conference here.

Second, Alicia Torregrosa (USGS), the convener of the panel that I moderated at the 2014 California Adaptation Forum, and our two other panelists, Travis O'Brien (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and Ian Faloona (UC Davis), have since published an article encapsulating the topic of our panel: Coastal Fog, Climate Change, and the Environment (Dec. 2014, Eos Earth and Space Science News). Not behind a paywall!
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"Decision makers must expect to be surprised with increasing frequency."

- National Research Council 2009 report, Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate, as paraphrased by Alice Hill, Senior Advisor for Preparedness and Resilience, White House National Security Council.

“Plan for surprises” is a sentiment I’ve seen expressed in various contexts regarding climate change, and it was repeated last week at the California Adaptation Forum’s second day opening plenary by Obama adviser Alice Hill. It was a laugh-line. Surprises, by definition, can’t be planned for.

In a graduate seminar on climate change adaptation in 2010—amid complaints about the popular denial of climate change—I asked my classmates: who has an earthquake kit at home? Two out of ten. I would revise the National Research Council’s order: “decision makers must expect human denial of the element of surprise.”

The California Adaptation Forum (CAF) was a clarion call organized in Sacramento (Aug. 19-20, 2014) to shake California’s political decision makers out of denial and into action.

California has been a world leader on climate change mitigation, aggressively regulating and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a push initiated by State Senator Fran Pavley with her landmark bills in the Assembly, AB 32 (2006) and AB 1493 (2009). I visited Senator Pavley in her office in 2012 to ask her if she had heard anything from her constituents about climate change impacts or was otherwise aware of these impacts and considering any legislative responses. From her response, I got the impression she is still at square one fighting the “climate change is real” battle in her political circles.

So, two years later at the CAF, a few blocks from Senator Pavley’s office, I was pleased to hear eminent state leaders on greenhouse gas reduction like the California Air Resources Board’s Chair, Mary Nichols, and the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research Director, Ken Alex, talk about the importance of preparing for climate threats. The 816 registrants from a breadth of sectors and local to international-level organizations attended 38 sessions and four plenary panels over two days, organized by the Local Government Commission, a private non-profit, in partnership with the State of California. One third of the attendees represented either local or state government offices. Another third represented nonprofit organizations, many of which work closely with local government. Academic representatives came in at 5% of the attendees.

Of the four large adaptation-specific conferences I’ve attended in recent years this was the first emphasizing local solutions at every opportunity. The others I’ve attended (Three Degrees in 2009; the Second International Climate Change Adaptation Conference in 2012; the first U.S. National Adaptation Forum in 2013) all featured an initial presentation of the scariest, latest scientific findings with the bottom line “Did you think we were screwed? Well now you know we are.” We dwelt in the shadow of those projections through the rest of the conference.  Rightly or wrongly, the CAF downplayed the role of climate science.

An aside: there was one science-focused session in the program— I was proud to be the moderator of a panel on the connection between fog and climate change, focusing on its importance as a source of water and cooling. The four scientists on the panel were determined to keep the mood light and positive, featuring fog special effects from a block of dry ice and carafes of hot water, but still got down to the question of whether winds driving upwelling and intensifying fog will outrun climate warming, which may be reducing fog (a trend that has been traced over the past 50 years on the California coast by Johnstone and Dawson, 2010).

Mainly, the CAF sessions presented stories from the field—active projects, lessons learned. The sessions I attended were accessible and interactive, all allowing between 10-30 minutes for questions. Colleagues echoed my impression that attendees had their ears open, were using their beginner-mind (not expert-mind), and didn’t push individual agendas. Their attitude was “I’m here to learn if I can. I’m here to help if I can.”

The California Secretary for Natural Resources John Laird’s morning address on day two was the highlight of the conference for me. Secretary Laird described specific situations from his past as a local politician when he had to push back against angry constituents to make the right decision for the long-term health and safety of his community, such as closing a structurally vulnerable community services center in anticipation of a storm despite strong protests; the storm caused the roof to collapse and his constituents thanked him for not backing down. Laird also communicated a vivid framework for organizing in anticipation of climate change by talking about his time as executive director of the Santa Cruz AIDS Project in the early 1990s, having to assemble resources in advance of things getting worse. Think about it: what did community organizers do in the AIDS crisis? They did mass, urgent, public education targeted to the most vulnerable; created a professional specialization to push research to the edge; made community art—like the AIDS Quilt—displaying visible, clear, accessible representations of the losses already happening, warning against complacence; and aggressively raised funds to create institutions to support the victims and their loved ones. What if we did the same for climate change? What would our quilt look like?

As for what’s next for California, Michael McCormick from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, one of the state partners who developed the CAF with the Local Government Commission, reports:

…[t]he State will be working with the Local Government Commission to distill what we heard into some near term actions that focus on cross-sector/cross-organizational strategies. We’ll also continue working together to ensure the momentum started here will continue towards the 2015 National Adaptation Forum and the 2016 California Adaptation Forum.

Read the Twitter stream from the CAF (#CAF14), and check out the CAF presentation PowerPoint slides. The presentations are listed in alphabetical order, so you’ll find the California Coastal Fog presentation under “C.”

Feature photo by TD Tillman - the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta at flood stage (2009). © Creative Commons

Wisconsin joins the follies

Wisconsin, really?

Yes, Wisconsin, reports Tim McDonnel in Another State Agency Just Banned the Words "Climate Change," on Apr. 8, 2015, for Mother Jones.

And this time it isn't just one political leader unilaterally deciding to deny those tasked with preparing for changes to the land use of the words "climate change," it's a collective decision, specifically two political leaders on a committee of three. The decision to decree that public employees refrain from "engaging in global warming or climate change work while on [Board of Commissioners of Public Lands] time" was proposed by Wisconsin's new State Treasurer Adamczyk, who ran on a platform of promising to eliminate the State Treasurer's office, and supported by the new State Attorney Schimel, who, as a candidate, said he would have defended the state's ban of interracial marriage in the 1950's, and would have defended the state's ban on same-sex marriage more recently. The third committee member, Secretary of State La Follette, voted against it.

Government Follies, Florida Edition

Hey, I have a new piece up on the WWF ClimatePrep blog!

Wherein I get to talk about my favorite historian the brilliant Barbara Tuchman and her definition of government folly:

Government Folly in the Face of Climate Change (March 19, 2015)

As the piece was being prepared for publication I was wondering if the topic wasn't a little dated, since the momentum is only growing for governments to come to the climate change adaptation table, but then this happened:

Former Florida DEP employees say they were told not to use terms "climate change" or "global warming" (March 9, 2015)

In Florida, of all places. When people want to know in a 3 second sound-bite what I've learned from all my research and work in the adaptation field, I often joke: "don't buy land in Florida."

And now Governor Scott has gone one more step further down the folly-tastic path:

Crazy on you: Scott administration orders employee to get medical evaluation for considering "climate change." Wow. (March 19, 2015)

Wow, indeed.

Read his official reprimand if you want to look at the inner workings of an employee being silenced on the topic of climate change. Now, true, this isn't about burying an inconvenient scientific report about climate change hazards; it's about an administrator feeling like she is being put in a precarious position by an employee's efforts to advocate against the Keystone XL pipeline, citing climate change as a reason to oppose it. However, the employee being asked to get a mental health screening before returning to work strikes me as beyond the pale.

As of this past week, the Florida chapter of the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is taking up Florida Department of Environmental Protection employee Bart Bibler's case. The Florida PEER director Jerry Phillips says "Bart Bibler has no idea whether he will ever be allowed to return to work."

This kerfuffle in Florida doesn't meet Tuchman's definition of government folly (it's not collective folly: it's folly  resulting from the actions of an individual, the governor), but let's see how the Florida legislature responds—or doesn't.

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Update: WWF's ClimatePrep blog apparently went defunct in 2018 and may not be revived.  I'm updating this blog's links to ClimatePrep to snapshots on Archive.org (where available). Some articles look OK there, some not so OK. For a readable version with images intact, see my ClimatePrep articles as reconstructed on this blog:

• Head in the Clouds: The Dream of Harvesting Water from Fog
June 08, 2017

• Story Maps: A Rising Star of Climate Change Communication
April 10, 2017

• The Sea Level Rise Solution that is as Charismatic as Mud
February 17, 2017

• The Internet of Water - October 31, 2016

• Sea Level Rise Seen with New Eyes: the OWLs of San Mateo
August 30, 2016

• California: The Rebeavering
May 22, 2015

• Government Folly in the Face of Climate Change
March 19, 2015

• In the Heat of the Moment
December 02, 2014

• California’s Adaptation Clarion Call
September 02, 2014

• Farmland in Flux
July 8, 2014

• Honest Conversations: Climate Change and Uncertainty
December 12, 2013

Water security alarm bells sound in Canada

On Oct. 4, 2011, the Adaptation to Climate Change Team (ACT) think tank at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver-- "the only university-based think tank initiative in North America dedicated to climate change adaptation" -- released a set of water security reports: Climate Change Adaptation and Water Governance.

Last year I interviewed the executive director of ACT, Deborah Harford, for my thesis on North Pacific adaptation, to get her critique of the British Columbia province-level plan. She was clearly passionate about trying to provoke the government into further action, and I am excited to see this new set of reports coming from her team.

The lead author of the reports, Bob Sandford, is quoted in the Vancouver Sun, directing comments at the government of British Columbia:

"You manage groundwater like a country would in the 18th century!"

Read more in L. Pynn's Oct. 5, 2011, article SFU study calls for coordinated water conservation policies: Surface and groundwater should be managed together.

"America's Climate Choices" final report released

Last Thursday, May 12, 2011, the final report of a series of studies requested by the U.S. Congress was released by the Committee on America's Climate Choices. This committee was formed by the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council.

I'm trying to get a handle on what they have done, exactly. There is a site dedicated to the project: America's Climate Choices Dot Org, but be warned that two videos automatically start playing at the same time when you go to that site, creating a strange duet of professorial voices. You can go from that page to a page that gives their summary of the conclusions of the concluding report of their project. I would reiterate their recommendations here except that-- to me-- they are so vague that I don't believe they'd tell anyone reading this anything new.

You can get a free PDF of the report here.

I've now gone page-by-page through the final report looking for what they have to say about adaptation to climate change. To the authors' credit, there is text in there about adaptation, and it isn't just a paragraph at the end. But it is so vague, again, I don't know who is reading this report who would be educated in any way by what they are reading. It's a 117 page report full of generalities like this:

"Adaptation responses can be improved through research on methods for assessing vulnerability and on integrative approaches for responding to the impacts of climate change in interaction with other stresses." (p. 67)

(End of paragraph, no further elaboration.)

I hate to nitpick, but the text is also full of incorrect comma placement that makes me wonder about the level of editing that went into it. This sort of thing is on nearly every page:

"A wide array of actors ... are already playing important roles and should continue to be involved, in the enterprise of collecting and sharing climate-related information..."

Involved, in?

Who is reading this? What are people learning from it? Was it written with the intention of teaching a particular audience?

I wish I understood... I'll keep poking at the internet and trying to figure out what precipitated this report and what the press said around the report release. If the U.S. Congress was their audience I wish it were more concise and specific.

By the by, it does touch on my favorite topic: criteria. On page 46 it gives the following criteria for "climate-related decision making":

1. Risk reduction potential
2. Feasibility and effectiveness
3. Cost and cost-effectiveness
4. Ancillary costs and benefits
5. Equity and fairness
6. International considerations
7. Robustness

My two cents:

1. Risk reduction potential is the same thing as effectiveness, to me.
2. Feasibility is a whole different thing from effectiveness.
3. Cost (direct, indirect, etc.) -- a whole HUGE different thing from cost-effectiveness.
4. Ancillary costs are costs, and should go under that criteria. Ancillary benefits (also called co-benefits) are really their own criterion.
5. Equity and fairness: good for them for including these! It would have been better if they defined the terms anywhere in the text. They give examples, which is good, but only talk about equity in terms of greenhouse gas reduction measures (e.g., the differential impact of the increasing cost of energy), not the much more pronounced disproportionate difference in impacts on vulnerable populations that we'll see as the direct climate impacts start to ramp up.
6. "International considerations" -- could not be more vague as a criterion. This belongs as a sub-category of costs, benefits, and equity.
7. Robustness is a very clear, well fleshed-out criterion in this document.

My revision of their criteria, to make it logical to me:

1. Effectiveness at reducing risk.
2. Feasibility.
3. Costs (direct & indirect, domestic & international).
4. Co-benefits (direct & indirect, domestic & international).
5. Cost-effectiveness.
6. Equitable distribution of benefits (within process and outcomes) across population groups.
7. Robustness to multiple climate futures.

(Not that anyone's asking my opinion.)

Breathtaking Shortsightedness in the U.S. Congress

U.S. House of Representatives Votes to Repeal Climate Science (a April 7, 2011, blog post by Dan Lashof, Director of NRDC's Climate Center in Washington, D.C.)

The impacts are evident, communities are already having to retreat from coastal erosion and sea level rise, and the House of Representatives is denying the whole scientific body of evidence. Some days you feel more hopeful than others.

Congratulations Oakland on Your New Climate Action Plan!

Congratulations specifically should go to Oakland's Public Works Sustainability Coordinator Garrett Fitzgerald and to all the community members and organizations who worked with him to develop the Oakland Energy Climate and Action Plan (ECAP).

On Tuesday March 1st, two years of community consultation culminated in the adoption by Oakland City Council of the ECAP, which calls for aggressive greenhouse gas reductions in the city alongside climate change adaptation measures.

-- Read Oakland's ECAP (the Feb. 22 variant currently on the Public Works site).

-- Read the Ella Baker Center's March 3, 2011, press release on the passage of the ECAP - highlights of community involvement in the plan (though nothing about how climate adaptation is in the plan).

-- See the Oakland Public Works page on the ECAP, giving a little background, additional links.

-- See Oakland Climate Action Coalition's Webpage - again, the content is more about supporting sustainable economic development along with GHG reductions and less about preparing for climate impacts, but this coalition has a lot of potential to help Oakland identify its community vulnerabilities and prepare accordingly.

Go Oakland!

San Luis Obispo County Climate Plan: "We've never been here before."

Only two counties in the State of California have detailed climate change adaptation plans in the works: San Luis Obispo is one. Last Thursday they held a community workshop on the plan. It is primarily a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but I know researchers focused on climate adaptation have been involved in this planning process, including one of California's leading lights on adaptation Susanne Moser.

From the article "County to Fight Against Climate Change" (David Sneed, Feb. 13, 2011, SanLuisObispo.com - The Tribune):

The county is ...one of only two in California to have had a detailed climate adaptation study done. It looked at the various impacts climate change will have on the county and how to prepare for them.

The study was headed by the Local Government Commission, an organization that advocates centralized community and economic planning based on Ahwahnee Indian principles.

“San Luis Obispo County will be setting the marker for other communities,” [Michael] Boswell [a Cal Poly city planning professor] said.

Environmentalist and government watchdog Eric Greening of Atascadero urged county planners to concentrate on reducing emissions rather than adaptation.

“We’ve got to stop being so full of ourselves,” he said. “We haven’t the faintest idea what we are going to have to do to adapt to climate change. We’ve never been here before.”


It sounds like a good reason why you should focus on BOTH adaptation and reducing emissions (and, personally, I believe reducing emissions is a long-term adaptation strategy).

The article doesn't state which is the other California state county creating a detailed adaptation plan, but here is a November 2010 list (PDF) compiled by the Governor's Office of Planning and Research (OPR) with links to 63 different California city and county, and 36 relevant non-Californian climate planning efforts. Most of these are concerning greenhouse gas reductions, but those are the plans where you can find most U.S. adaptation efforts.

Susanne Moser is working with both Fresno and San Luis Obispo counties on their adaptation plans, so this article might be referring to Fresno as the other county with a plan.

Read more about Fresno's adaptation plan here.

Read more about the San Luis Obispo adaptation plan here.

Read more about Susanne Moser's work supporting climate adaptation in California here.

P.S. If you don't know what the Ahwahnee Principles are, you are probably not a city planner. This author incorrectly refers to them as the Ahwahnee Indian Principles. They are a modern (1991) invention of some California city planners at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite. Read more about their invention here.

The principles basically emphasize developing neighborhoods so that homes are located within walking distance of retail shops, schools, and public transit, and other social and economic efficiency principles. No "Ahwahnee Indians" were involved in the drafting of the principles, from what I can discern.

Read the “Ahwahnee Principles for Climate Change" here (PDF), published in 2008 by the Local Government Commission. Sacramento, CA.

Climate Change, Russia's Fires and the Present Uprising in Egypt

When Russia's fires last year led to the curtailing of wheat exports, it was predicted that world food prices would spike and inflame political conflict.

Climate events inflating food prices is just one example of how climate change is going to drive political conflict. Water and energy are also going to see price spikes that drive conflict.

Right now as we watch Egyptians struggle to transition from totalitarianism to democracy, remember that one of the main sparks behind this revolution was not some new societal level of enlightenment, but a new level of desperation driven by food prices.

On Feb. 3, 2011, PRI's Peter Thomson wrote about the Russia fire/ wheat scarcity/ revolution connection.

From "High food prices in Egypt and climate change":

Food price inflation in Egypt was over 20 percent last year. In particular, there’s been a big squeeze from the rising global price of wheat. New York global investment manager Vincent Truglia says depending on how you measure it, the price of wheat went up between 50 and 70 percent in 2010.
[...]

Egypt is among the world’s largest importers of wheat, and the global wheat market received a number of nasty shocks recently. The worst came last summer, when Russia was hit by an unprecedented drought and heat wave that destroyed 40 percent of its wheat harvest.

Russia abruptly banned exports, and Egypt, which had just signed a big wheat deal with Russia, was left scrambling.

The Egyptian government has tried to keep a lid on wheat prices through subsidies and rationing. But Truglia says anxiety over food prices is the key problem facing Egypt today.

And some look further up the chain of events, and trace the problem at least in part to climate change.

“I think we are seeing some of the early effects of climate change on food security,” says veteran environmental analyst Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute. In particular, Brown says the heat wave that led to the collapse of Russia’s wheat harvest was no ordinary weather event.

“If someone had told me that there was likely to be a heat wave in Russia in which the average temperature would be 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm — that’s pushing the envelope. I mean FOUR degrees would be a lot.”
[...]


Vicken Checherian, writing for Opendemocracy.net, wrote on Jan. 26, 2011 (The Arab Crisis: Food, Energy, Water, Justice), about other nearby countries taking measures to try to prevent food price-driven revolution: "Even Saudi Arabia is taking precautions; the kingdom aims to double its wheat reserves to 1.4 million tons, enough to satisfy demand for a year." He also points out that food price-driven revolution hasn't historically led to democracy in the region:

The rise of food and energy prices sparked popular demonstrations in Algeria in 1988 and Jordan in 1989. When the authorities could not suppress the demonstrations by pure repression, and could not reduce the prices for lack of means, they chose to open up a closed political system: single-party rule was ended in Algeria in 1989, and in Jordan restrictions on the media and the work of political parties were lifted. In neither case did this political opening lead to sustainable institutions and democratisation: Algeria eventually degenerated into a fratricidal war, Jordan recalled the old habits once the wave of contestation died down.

Let's hope for a better outcome for Egypt.

The policies I'm analyzing in my thesis, at this point...

At this point I'm examining and analyzing fourteen government policy documents for my thesis on climate change adaptation policies in the North Pacific.

Et voila, links (mostly to PDFs):

• Canada: From Impacts to Adaptation: Canada in a Changing Climate 2007 (2008).

- British Columbia: Preparing for Climate Change: British Columbia’s Adaptation Strategy (February 2010).

- Yukon: Yukon Government Climate Change Action Plan (February 2009).

• Japan: Wise Adaptation to Climate Change (June 2008).

• The People’s Republic of China: China’s National Climate Change Programme (June 2007).

• The Russian Federation: Climate Doctrine of the Russian Federation (December 2009).

• The United States of America: Progress Report of the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force (March 2010).

- Alaska: Alaska’s Climate Change Strategy: Addressing Impacts in Alaska (January 2010).

- California: 2009 California Climate Adaptation Strategy (December 2009).

---Oakland, California: City of Oakland Draft Energy and Climate Action Plan (April 2010).

- Hawaii: A Framework for Climate Change Adaptation in Hawaii (November 2009).

- Oregon: Final Report to the Governor: A Framework for Addressing Rapid Climate Change (January 2008).

- Washington: Leading the Way on Climate Change: The Challenge of Our Time (February 2008).

---King County, Washington: King County 2009 Climate Report (February 2010).

These are all policy documents produced by advisory groups or environmental ministries/ departments, except for the Russian "Climate Doctrine," which came directly out of the office of the president, signed only by Medvedev. I'm not sure what that means, but it's not at all a bad document in terms of laying out a vision for climate change adaptation. For mitigation of climate change... now, that's another matter. Oil producing nations seem keener on adaptation than on mitigation, I'm realizing. But that's another post for another day.