Dave Gardner is a gutsy guy.  Gardner, who is 56, a former corporate filmmaker, set his career aside a few years ago to run for office in his hometown of Colorado Springs, CO, and make a documentary film called Growthbusters: Hooked on Growth that puts forth an unpopular idea–that economic growth is bad for the environment and bad for human happiness.

“I want to make it OK for people to be against growth,” Dave says, when asked why he ran for office and made the movie.

Dave and I fundamentally disagree. I think economic growth is vital, not just to lift billions of people out of poverty–global per capita income is currently about $10,700, if Wikipedia is to be believed–but because societies that are more prosperous are better able to deal with the issues of environmental and social justice that matter most to me.

Nevertheless, I would urge you to see Dave’s film (screenings are listed here, or you can buy the DVD) both because he raises a number of important questions and and because, to his credit, has managed to capture on film some of the world’s most provocative thinkers on the topic of growth–Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford professor and author of the controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, sociologist Juliet Schor, whose books include The Overworked American, the heretical economist Herman Daly, environmental activist and author Bill McKibben, and the charismatic political economist and author Raj Patel.

Here are some of the arguments in Dave’s film that I find persuasive:

Cities and states shouldn’t compete against one another to lure businesses. Dave got involved with the growth issue because his hometown, Colorado Springs, was growing fast. Like many cities and states, Colorado Springs offered tax and other incentives to keep its best-known employer–the U.S. Olympic Committee-in the city. The package of incentives was worth $53 million, Dave says, and it’s an expenditure of public money that”is completely unproductive from a national or global standpoint.”

Dave Gardner

Consumption is a big environmental problem–and it doesn’t make us happy. True enough, yet there’s very little conversation about this in the environmental movement.  In the film, Dave says:

We’ve become like rats running in a cage. For too many it’s drudgery, but we are driven by the quest for the good life. What’s worse, most of us never get to the cheese. We’ve all become slaves to a system we created.

Overconsumption, however we choose to define it, is making the planet unhealthier. I have a bumper sticker in my office with a slogan from a small NGO called the Center for the New American Dream: “More fun, less stuff.”

Population is a major environmental issue. This may seem obvious, but it’s not a topic that the big environmental groups  (Sierra Club, NRDC, Environmental Defense Fund, World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, etc.) talk about much. “It has so much baggage attached to it,” Dave says. OK, but isn’t it likely that a world with 8 billion people will be healthier and more prosperous than one with 9 billion people? Making birth control universally available might be a more cost-effective way of dealing with the climate crisis than subsidizing solar panels or wind turbines.

Here are arguments in the film that lead Dave and I to part ways.

We’re running out of resources. As Matt Ridley notes in The Rational Optimist, we’ve run out of some resources–whale oil, Lebanon cedars and guano, all of which were thought to be “renewable.” But we haven’t run out of oil, coal, gas, copper, uranium, etc. For better or worse, there are not fixed amounts of these resources; their availability depends on the price people are willing to pay, and the technology available to harvest them. As Ridley writes:

We now know, as we did not in the 1960s, that more than six bullion people can live upon the planet in improving health, food security and life expectancy, and that this is compatible with cleaner air, increasing forest cover and some booming populations of elephants. The resources and technologies of 1960 could not have support six billion — but the technologies changed and so the resources change.

Paul Ehrlich lost a famous bet with the economist Julian Simon (who’s dissed in this movie) about whether the prices of five metals chosen by Ehrlich would rise or fall during the 1980s. Naturally, Ehrlich said the prices would rise; in fact, they dropped.

Economic growth is unsustainable. Uh, no–business as usual is unsustainable but the film does not take into account the ability of people to innovate. Predictions are hard, especially about the future, but it’s safe to say that 2111 will be less like 2011 than 2011 is like 1911 — before highways, radio, TV, the Internet, mobile phones, air travel, nuclear power, etc. If the costs of raw materials rise, it’s not a great leap to envision a world where everything is powered with renewable energy and everything we no longer need is made into something else.

Finally, and perhaps most important, there’s a group of 1 or 2 billion people who don’t get much attention in the film–the world’s very poor. I also wonder how many of the 14 million unemployed Americans believe economic growth is a problem. I asked Dave about this and, to his credit, he said the answer is redistribution.

“We, in the rich nations, overdid it,” he told me. “We have got to really contract our economies out of fairness to allow those other economies to have their fair shake.”

But it’s unlikely that Americans will ever b persuaded to make sacrifices so that people in China and India can live better. Better to find ways to prudently expand the pie than to fight over who gets which piece. Put bluntly, economic growth isn’t the problem. It’s the solution.

What have you done lately about climate change?

In the last two weeks, about 700 Americans – with more to come – have been arrested in front of the White House, calling on President Obama to block the construction of the $7 billion, 1700-mile Keystone pipeline project that will bring Canadian tar sands oil to largest refineries in the United States.

They include Bill McKibben, the writer, activist and founder of 350.org, who led the protests; James Hansen, NASA’s leading climate scientist; Gus Speth, who lead the Council on Environmental Quality under President Carter and went on to become dean of the Yale School of Forestry; Greenpeace executive director Phil Radford; actresses Daryl Hannah and Margot Kidder; and my friend and rabbi, Fred Scherlinder Dobb of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregration in Bethesda.

Standing behind them are the nation’s leading environmental groups–Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Funds, Friends of the Earth, the National Wildlife Federation and others. In a letter to Obama, they described the Keystone pipeline ruling as “perhaps the biggest climate test you face between now and the election.”

“There is not an inch of daylight between our policy position on the Keystone XL pipeline, and those of the very civil protesters being arrested daily outside the White House,” the groups said.

There are strong arguments for and against the pipeline, which we’ll get to in a moment, but first, a few words about McKibben and  the protestors. I went to the White House to talk with them because I share their belief that climate change is not just another issue, but the defining issue of our time. To be sure, it’s not an issue that mobilizes people, at least not yet, for a number of reasons: You can’t see carbon dioxide pollution, climate science is complex (but clear in its basics), global warming is a slow moving threat and the troubled U.S. economy has crowded virtually every other concern off stage since the summer of 2008.

But….greenhouse gas emissions are rising steadily,  as are atmospheric concentrations of CO2. That means we are edging closer to catastrophe every day.

Bill McKibben talks to protestors

That’s why hundreds of people stepped up to get arrest while many of us enjoyed the last couple of weeks of summer.

Said Speth: “It’s time to step outside the system, and do some things we haven’t done before.”

On the Climate Progress blog, Peter Anderson, a Wisconsin recycling consultant, wrote:

For me – like for most of us – the precipitate that galvanized my newfound resolve in the face of a corporate chock hold on Congress was the simple, elemental, drive to protect my children: my three girls, now grown up, and my 14 year old boy who is still a child. Theirs is the generation that, in place of an inheritance, will be left to inhabit an overheated world that my cohort is callously leaving behind as, in a blissful state of denial, we party the night away.

Thomas Staley, a 69-year-old Harvard-educated artist, traveled by bus from Guilford, Maine to join the protests. He told me:

I’ve been waiting for this for 15 years, The science has been clear. I trust what the science is telling us…If 2,000 people in a very dignified manner are willing to violate the law and get arrested, people are going to pay attention. It’s a beginning.

Bhavani Jaroff, a longtime vegetarian Long Island mother of three who runs a website called iEatGreen, said:

You have to be living in a bubble if you think climate change is not going to affect us. I’m here to remind (President Obama) that he had a climate change agenda.

Yes, he did. Back in 2008, after he won a round of Democratic primaries, candidate Obama declared:

that I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

Uh, no.

Rabbi Fred Dobb, under arrest

It made me proud when I learned that Fred Dobb, a lifelong environmentalist and a member of the leadership of Religious Witness for the Earth, had decided to join the protest. He writes about the experience  on his blog and told me by email:

I felt called to participate because climate change is the defining moral issue of our time.  This pipeline is a bad idea, not just for the boreal forest and the communities and habitats en route, but for the further reliance on fossil fuels it would ensure.  The proper religious term for our current oil- and coal-based energy economy is ‘profane’ – and people of faith must help lead the way toward that which is renewable, sustainable, holy.

Is the Keystone Pipeline the perfect issue on which to draw a line when it comes to climate change? Not really. For one thing, it’s going to be politically hard to Obama to stop the pipeline, although he has the power to do so. The U.S. State Department just gave it a qualified OK, after assessing its environmental impact. Supporters like Gary Doer, the Canadian ambassador to the U.S., say building the pipeline will produce many thousands of jobs and keep gasoline prices down. He told The Times:

It’s good for the U.S. economy, U.S. jobs and U.S. energy security. If you ask Americans, would you choose Canada over the Middle East, they’d say yes.

Pipeline advocates say stopping the pipeline won’t prevent Americans from burning oil. We’ll just import our oil from elsewhere, the argument goes.

But stopping the pipeline will certainly make it harder to export the tar sands oil, McKibben told me when we sat down for a brief interview. Alberta is a remote place, and the other possible pipeline route, to the Pacific Ocean where oil would be shipped to Asia, is tied up in litigation.

“Without Keystone XL, oil sands face a choke point” is the headline over an excellent story in The Globe and Mail of Canada in which Alberta’s energy minister, is quoted as saying: “If there was something that kept me up at night, it would be the fear that before too long we’re going to be landlocked in bitumen.”

Stopping the pipeline “may not keep the oil there forever,” McKibben told me. “Give them 10 years and they may find a way to get it out. But give us 10 years and the world may finally come to its senses and do something about the climate.”

We can only hope.

And, while not all of us can protest, every one of us can act in ways big and small to respond to the climate crisis. As Fred Dobb, looking ahead to the Jewish new year and time of repentance, writes:

Where we have over-consumed, let us scale back.  Where we have ignored the cries of Creation, let us now heed them.  Where we have failed to ‘love our neighbor as ourselves’ – including our impoverished global neighbors who live near sea level with no defense against rising oceans and increased storms – let us re-align our actions with this excellent biblical advice.  Where we have chewed through the planet’s resources and absorptive capacity with no regard for the future, let us now take seriously our responsibility to be stewards of Creation l’dor vador, from generation to generation. Only by seriously starting our sustainability efforts will we inscribe others into the Book of Life – and only then will be deserve to be written into that good book ourselves.

Indeed.

So the verdict is in on the UN climate negotiations that just wrapped in Copenhagen and it’s all but unanimous:

Carl Pope, Sierra Club: The world’s nations have concluded a historic–if incomplete–agreement to begin tackling global warming.  Tonight’s announcement is but a first step and much work remains to be done.

Frances Beinecke, Natural Resources Defense Council: We have taken a vital first step toward curbing climate change for the sake of our planet, our country and our children…. There’s still more work to be done.

Fred Krupp, Environmental Defense Fund: A lot of hard work remains, but a lot of hard work is finished. The new positive steps taken here…president the U.S Senate and President Obama with a n historic opportunity.

Jonathan Lash, World Resources Institute: “Much more is needed, but today marks a foundation for a global effort to fight climate change.

Elliot Diringer, Pew Center for Global Climate Change: The Copenhagen Accord is an important step forward in the international climate effort…it lays the foundation for a system to hold countries accountable. …Much remains to be negotiated.

Hmm..  I thought the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio or the 1997 Kyoto Protocol or the 2007 Bali Roadmap were first steps. Shouldn’t we be taking the second, third or fourth steps by now? Or, if you prefer the foundation metaphor, shouldn’t we hurry up and build the house, before sea levels rise and storms intensify?

This isn’t to suggest that the 15,000 or 20,000 people who descended on Copenhagen during the last two weeks wasted their time. What is being called the Copenhagen Accord sets a target of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times. It promises billions of dollars of aid for poor countries. It points the way towards a resolution of the fundamental conflict between U.S. and China over their so-called “common but differentiated” responsibilities to deal with global warming. That’s important–when it comes to climate and the global economy, the G-2 of the U.S. and China tower over the rest of the world. The leaders of Europe, Japan and other countries at the summit were largely left to rubber-stamp the deal, as The Washington Post reported.

The trouble is, none of this is good enough. Nations can now set own emission reduction targets. (Earlier versions of a political agreement being discussed in Copenhagen had called for specific reductions by 2020 and 2050.) It does not set a deadline for signing and binding treaty. (Until fairly recently, that deadline was supposed to be now.) Sure, aid is promised to poor countries, but aside from some token amounts, no one can be sure where the money will come from.

This isn’t a strong deal. It isn’t  a weak deal. It’s not a deal at all.

It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Having said that, I understand the thinking behind the first-step-much-work-needs-to-be-done analysis coming from the inside the Beltway environmental groups. With the climate debate now shifting from Copenhagen to the U.S. Senate, they need to tread carefully. They can’t be overly critical of President Obama or undecided senators; they need to suggest that something real was accomplished in Copenhagen, to help persuade legislators that the U.S. can enact strong climate regulation without giving a competitive edge to China or India. Carl Pope of the Sierra Club made this argument explicitly, saying: “Now that the rest of the world–including countries like China and India–has made clear that it is willing to take action, the Senate must pass domestic legislation…”

But, again, the rest of the world has not committed to anything.

For a reality check on where we stand, let me refer you to the Climate Scoreboard put together by scientists at MIT, the Sustainability Institute and Ventana Partners, with the support of Nike, Citigroup, Fidelity Investments and others, which uses computer simulations to  model the long-term climate impacts of decisions being undertaken today. Please see the Climate Interactive blog for more detail.

Put simply, we’re not going where we need to go.

A big part of the problem here, as Bill McKibben has written eloquently, is that the world’s governments treat climate change as just another political problem–and it’s not.

Think about the health-care agreement reached this weekend. It’s the product of a series of compromises, some of them quite ugly, but it has the support of President Obama and Democrats in Congress because they believe it’s the best they can do, for now. Maybe they’ll come back to “reform” health care again in a few years. It’s a step, even a big step, in the right direction.

This is how politics usually works. It’s incremental. Even on great moral issues like civil rights, governments move piece by piece–first the military was desegregated, then came schools, then  voting rights, finally housing and employment bias were barred, if I remember my history right. This approach gives people time to get used to change. It’s the mindset behind first-step-much-work-needs-to-be-done.

But incrementalism isn’t going to do the job when it comes to climate change. Every day that goes by when we emit more global warming pollutants into the atmosphere than nature can take out, the job gets harder to do. So a small but inadequate step, even one in the right direction, can actually leave us worse off than before.

One metaphor that helped me understand this is a bathtub: The faucet (industry, transportation, deforestation) is pouring more water in to the tub than the drain (nature’s ability to absorb CO2) can take away, and there’s no way to make the drain any bigger. Just turning down the faucet a little doesn’t help; the water level in the tub can keep rising, albeit not as fast as before. The longer the faucet pours in more water than the drain can take away, the more radically we have to turn it down to stop the tub from overflowing.

McKibben explains it this way:

Physics has set an immutable bottom line on life as we know it on this planet. For two years now, we’ve been aware of just what that bottom line is: the NASA team headed by James Hansen gave it to us first. Any value for carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million is not compatible “with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.”  That bottom line won’t change: above 350 and, sooner or later, the ice caps melt, sea levels rise, hydrological cycles are thrown off kilter, and so on.

And here’s the thing: physics doesn’t just impose a bottom line, it imposes a time limit. This is like no other challenge we face because every year we don’t deal with it, it gets much, much worse, and then, at a certain point, it becomes insoluble—because, for instance, thawing permafrost in the Arctic releases so much methane into the atmosphere that we’re never able to get back into the safe zone. Even if, at that point, the U.S. Congress and the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee were to ban all cars and power plants, it would be too late.

Oh, and the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already at 390 parts per million, even as the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been spiking in the last two years. In other words, we’re over the edge already.  We’re no longer capable of “preventing” global warming, only (maybe) preventing it on such a large scale that it takes down all our civilizations.

There’s the argument for Flopenhagen.

As for Hopenhagen, well, I saw a lot of things to get excited about during my week in Copenhagen.

Denmark itself, for one: The nation gets 20% of its energy from wind, it’s rolling out a national system for charging all-electric cars and roughly 55% of the people of Copenhagen ride a bike every day, most to go to work. You won’t be surprised to hear that they are thinner as a group than those of us in the U.S.

Speaking of wind, Tulsi Tanti, the founder of Suzlon Energy, told me that China is the world’s biggest and fastest growing market for win energy. His company is manufacturing turbines in China, and he says the government there is committed in a serious way to clean energy — even if it doesn’t want to be held to absolute limits on emissions.

Finally, the kids. There were thousands of them in Copenhagen. They are committed to organizing to stop climate change, they are smart, they are idealistic, they are not pragmatic and they are not fans of the first-step-much-work-needs-to-done approach. For more, check out 350.org or Avaaz or the Youth Climate Movement.

You know how people say we need to save the earth for our kids? I’m starting to think that it’s the other way round, that they are going to have to save it for us.

Today’s guest blogger is Richard Heinberg, senior fellow in residence at the Post Carbon Institute, an expert on peak oil and the author of nine books, the latest of which is Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis. My friend Ed Maibach sent me this essay, and I liked it so much that I obtained permission from Richard to run in on the blog. While I edited it for space, it’s still longer than the usual blogpost—but worth reading, I think, for what it says about the need to rethink economic growth and to have a more honest debate about climate.

Hi. My job is trying to save the world, and I’d like to tell you a little about my line of work.

First, it’s a job I enjoy. I get to feel good about what I do, and I meet a lot of smart, interesting people. I get to travel to exciting places to attend conferences, and at least some people respect my efforts (though many others think I’m crazy or misguided).

It’s not all a bed of roses. The biggest problems with trying to save the world are: first, that it doesn’t always seem to want to be saved; and second, that those of us trying to save it can’t agree on why it needs saving or how to go about doing so. Let me explain.

When I say “save the world,” I mean preventing human civilization from collapsing in a chaotic, violent way that would entail enormous amounts of suffering and death. I also mean preserving the natural world, so as to minimize species extinctions and the loss of wild habitat.

I regard both of these priorities as about equally important, since they are closely interrelated: if civilization collapses chaotically, billions of people will do an enormous amount of damage to remaining ecosystems in their desperate attempts at survival; and if nature goes first, that means civilization will go too, because we rely on ecosystem services for everything we do.

But not everyone who works full-time at saving the world has the same balance of priorities. There are some world-savers who are only (or primarily) concerned about human welfare. Some of these folks are just interested in saving people’s souls by getting them to subscribe to some set of beliefs or other: for them, the world needs “saving” because it is wicked. Others are concerned with human rights or economic justice or international conflict; for them, the biggest threats to our survival are from other people. Then there are those who have concluded that our survival challenge is primarily of an environmental kind: the disappearance of polar bears or honey bees, or the logging of rainforests, or the depletion of resources, or the contamination of the atmosphere or the oceans.

This is a problem. If all of us world-savers can’t get on the same page about what’s wrong, our efforts are likely to lack coherence, or might even cancel one another out. There are no doubt full-time humanitarians who believe that the world needs to be saved from people like me!—from people, that is, who are non-believers and who insist that the size of the human population has to be reduced.

Moreover, if we professional world-savers can’t agree on what the problem is, how do we know there is a problem in the first place? Might the world be better off if we spent our personal energies elsewhere—figuring out how to get rich, or teaching elementary school, or inventing the next generation of social networking software?

Well, I’m personally convinced that the world has some unprecedented challenges on its hands, or I wouldn’t be in this line of work. I could write at great length (as I have elsewhere) about what these challenges are, how they arose, and what we should be doing about them, but there’s no need to repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that I think that we humans, by our very nature, and by the rules of biological existence, will always have problems of fairly predictable kinds, but we have recently gained access to concentrated but depleting non-renewable energy sources that have enabled us to grow our population and appetites for commodities of various sorts to utterly unsustainable levels; and in the process of burning carbon-based fuels we have set in motion a process of climate change that is rapidly spiraling out of control.

This is going to be a tough set of problems to solve, because it involves changing people’s lifestyles and expectations, sharing nature’s dwindling bounty of non-renewable resources rather than fighting over the crumbs, and finding ways to reduce population proactively without interfering too much with human rights.

To me, all of this seems obvious, steeped as I am in data showing the limits to various resources, the likely consequences of continued economic and population growth, and the rapidly worsening damage to our environment (and hence to our planet’s ability to support future generations of humans). But I often meet sincere, dedicated people who see things quite differently.

Given that there isn’t a consensus among us, can we world-savers accomplish anything useful?

Well, there is something of a consensus after all. These days most environmentalist world-savers seem to be focused on the problem of climate change resulting from greenhouse gas emissions, almost to the exclusion of any other concern. If you attend a meeting of environmental activists, you are likely to hear nearly every discussion turn on carbon dioxide emissions—emissions reduction targets, emissions reduction strategies, future emissions scenarios, and climate sensitivity to various levels of emissions. But even within the increasingly numerous and vocal anti-carbon crowd, there are differences of opinion regarding tactics: some (like Dr. James Hansen of NASA, arguably the nation’s top climate scientist) support carbon taxes, reasoning that cap-and-trade policies will take too long to negotiate and can be gamed in various ways; others (like author Bill McKibben, arguably the nation’s top climate activist) support caps, reasoning that new taxes of any kind are a non-starter for political reasons, at least here in the US (don’t worry: Hansen and McKibben are still friends).

Many mainstream environmental organizations back the notion of a carbon market, in which permits to emit CO2 would be auctioned and traded; but Friends of the Earth has come out with a paper titled “Subprime Carbon,” arguing that a market in carbon permits will result in “futures contracts to deliver carbon that carry a relatively high risk of not being fulfilled,” leading to a carbon bubble and an eventual collapse in value. While “world-savers” funded by the big energy conglomerates (I put the term in quotes this time because while these folks act like the genuine article in many respects, their real priority is not to save the human or natural world, but merely some company or industry) want carbon permits to be given away to existing polluters, nearly everyone else thinks the permits should be auctioned. Most existing US congressional cap-and-trade bills (like Waxman-Markey) mandate that proceeds from the auctions should go to government, but many activists (like Peter Barnes, author of Capitalism 3.0) say that the proceeds should be distributed equally to all citizens to help defray the increased energy costs that will result from carbon caps.

US climate policy will soon be decided by Congress, and a global policy will be hashed out in Copenhagen, so environmentalist world-savers are working overtime these days to get their proposals and perspectives heard.

The fact that so many of us are now focused on one problem is good, especially since it is indeed a survival issue. But I fear that some essential details are being overlooked in the process. Here’s a key example.

Reducing carbon emissions essentially means using less coal, oil, and gas (since carbon capture and sequestration is arguably unrealistic on any substantial scale, other than by reforestation and regenerative agricultural practices). Since “clean” sources of energy probably can’t be scaled up to replace fossil fuels entirely, this means the world will have less energy to go around. (It will no doubt soon have less to go around in any case, because fossil fuels are non-renewable and depleting, and we’ve probably already passed the peak of world oil production—but don’t get me started on that.)

Historically, there has been a very close correlation between energy consumption growth and economic growth, so with less energy available it may not be possible to continue growing the global economy in customary ways. Almost nobody in the climate community wants to talk about that, because the very suggestion that strong, effective climate policies will have a significant economic cost makes such policies far less palatable to folks on Main Street, and certainly to politicians.

But I think we should be giving this matter a lot of attention no matter how inconvenient it may be: the fact is, we have an economy that’s designed only to grow; if it stops growing—as has happened over the past six months—the results are perceived as catastrophe. If world energy supplies are set to contract, we need a different kind of economy, one that can still function with a stable or declining throughput of materials and energy. But we’re not even going to start trying to design one until more people start telling the truth about where we’re headed.

This points up one of the dilemmas that go along with trying to save the world: should one just tell the truth fearlessly, or try to frame one’s message so as to make it generally acceptable? The two options aren’t always mutually exclusive, but neither are they exactly the same thing. You see, most people don’t want to be too alarmed, and they don’t want to hear about problems to which there are no ready solutions.

So world-savers frequently try to tailor their public statements so that large numbers of people won’t be frightened to the point of despair and paralysis. How many times have I been told, “Keep it positive! Emphasize solutions!” Yet I can’t tell you how often I’ve sat down with an activist whose latest policy paper is all about solutions, and in heart-to-heart conversation they reveal that they don’t really think our species has much of a chance of avoiding major catastrophe, maybe even extinction.

It’s a tough balance. If you tell the truth to a fault, you don’t get invited to policy seminars, and politicians avoid you like the plague. If you sugar coat the message, you have to live with the knowledge that the vast majority of people on our planet have almost no awareness of what is about to happen to them, and you aren’t telling them.

Some of us in the world-saving business naturally gravitate to one side of the spectrum or the other, and I try to be respectful about why people make their choices in this regard. I like to think I’m more toward the “tell the truth regardless” end of the continuum, but in certain situations I find myself hedging in order to get along.

So being a world-saver is partly a matter of politics and public relations. That’s not what drew me to this line of work; but, now that I’m in it, I realize what comes with the territory.

…The current economic crisis is a very big problem for the world-saving industry. Just about all of our money comes from philanthropic foundations, and most of those foundations have a lot less money to dole out than they did a year ago. (Granted, a lot of world-savers already work for free, and many that are currently getting paid will continue to do what they can when their budgets run out; but it’s difficult to get much done with no money at all, and everyone has bills to pay.)

Also, the average family is less likely to get excited about an environmental issue when its economic survival is at question; indeed, people’s very ability to look ahead and focus on large, complex issues begins to falter. “Polar bears? Who Cares! Just give me my job back!”

Another strange wrinkle: this financial crisis underscores the unpleasant truth that business-as-usual simply can’t continue. It’s no longer a matter of telling folks to stop consuming so much; they’re now finding they can’t afford to buy cars, travel, and do other things that entail carbon emissions. Should we environmental world-savers change our message accordingly? I don’t hear much discussion among my colleagues along those lines; instead, speakers at climate conferences seem hardly to have noticed that global trade is down, global employment is down, global energy use is down.

…Trying to explain why something that’s very good for the environment should be correlated with something that’s very bad and painful for ordinary people is understandably awkward, so the possibility that emissions are now declining is hardly being mentioned. But if emissions are truly falling and continue to do so—not because of climate policies, but because of global economic contraction—sooner or later we’ll have to start addressing the fact. And we’d better have a good story. In my view, the fact that the climate movement is being blindsided by this turn of events only underscores the need for a bit more truth-telling about the linkages between energy and the economy.

Are we succeeding? Is the world better off because we’re trying to save it? Well, maybe my opinion is inherently biased, given what I do for a living. As disappointed as I sometimes get about the near-futility of trying to wake my fellow citizens up to the fact that we’re collectively driving straight toward history’s biggest cliff, I don’t see anything better to do with my time. Nor do I see any better hope for humanity than the efforts of the tiny number of our species who understand at least some aspect of our predicament enough to explain it to their fellows and formulate some strategic responses to it.

Would I recommend this line of work to others—to students looking for a career? You bet. There are certainly many other worthwhile things to do with one’s life, but at a time like this we need all the help we can get.

“I can’t understand,” Al Gore said a while ago, “why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.”

Just wait, Al. The Capitol Climate Action, a coalition of activist groups, is organizing what will almost surely be the largest mass civil disobedience for climate in U.S. history. The target: The Capitol Power Plant, a 99-year-old coal-burning plant, situated blocks from Capitol Hill, which heats and cools the U.S. Capitol. (It hasn’t generated electricity since 1952.) Organizers say the plant “symbolizes the stranglehold coal has over our government and future” and the nation’s wrong-headed climate policy. They also say:

As with Ghandi’s walk for independence and Martin Luther King’s march for equal rights, history now calls on people of conscience to peacefully take a principled stand on global warming.

This event could attract thousands of people. It’s endorsed by Greenpeace, the Rainforest Action Network, Global Exchange, SDS (who knew they were still around?) and Tikkun. The writer and activist Bill McKibben, poet and activist Wendell Berry and climate scientist James Hansen all plan to attend. Here’s a link to letter from McKibben and Berry, well worth reading, explaining the thinking behind the event.

Now, there are a lot of controversial questions about coal. Can it be made clean? How else will we power the future? Will more expensive, low-carbon fuels create a drag on the economy? But I was amused to stumble upon a different question that’s sparking debate among the young people planning to attend the action: What should one wear to a protest against coal?

You’ve heard of dress for success? This is all about dress for arrest.

The organizers’ website says: “We will be there in our dress clothes, and ask the same of you.” This led to a “Strategy Note” on a website called It’s Getting Hot in Here, Dispatches From the Youth Climate Movement, headlined: “Dress to Impress at the Capitol Climate Action” noting that McKibben and Berry had asked participants to dress in their “Sunday best.” Blogger Joshua Kahn Russell included this photo from the civil rights movement:

He wrote:

We understand that we are the inheritors of this spirit and its tone of seriousness and respectability. Throughout the labor movement and various currents for racial justice people have chosen to wear suits as part of their message they send through these bold actions.

Debate ensued. One commenter wrote:

I think encouraging people to dress up is capitulating to established power, as though decision-makers won’t listen to us unless we dress up…. We should dress the way we feel comfortable, not to “impress.” Impress who?

Another shot back:

thinking like yours is exactly why progressive movements don’t get anywhere fast. …It may not be ideal or how you think things should be, but appearances matter, and they matter a lot in this country.

Which led to:

Business suits are part of the dominant/hegemonic cultural symbols of Wall Street.

And finally:

Honestly, shouldn’t we be wearing recycled clothing or something so that we don’t look like a bunch of hypocrites?

You gotta love the left. People can argue about anything.

Seriously, though–I’m excited to see the momentum gathering behind this protest. It could deliver a much-needed sense of urgency and a powerful grass-roots boost to ongoing efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and stop the construction of conventional coal-fired power plants that contribute to global warming. The issue is certainly generating attention. The business section of today’s New York Times ran an otherwise unremarkable story with the arresting headline, Is America Ready to Quit Coal?. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, NRDC and Environmental Defense have filed lawsuits to block coal plants and lobbied state legislatures and Congress. What’s been missing is grass-roots action.

Here’s an online ad featuring Susan Sarandon, urging people to attend the protest. Protesters are being urged to get training in nonviolent civil disobedience before the event.

I’m planning to cover the March 2 protest. Not sure yet how I’ll be dressed.

(Disclosures: my wife Karen Schneider of Greenpeace helped create the Susan Sarandon video, with The Concept Farm, a New York ad agency. I’m writing and consulting with NRDC and Environmental Defense Fund.)

The debate over clean coal has come to Washington in a big way. Specifically, you can see it in Metro Center, D.C.’s busiest subway stop, where millions of people, including those headed to town for President-elect Obama’s inauguration, will see walls of posters and banners saying that “clean coal” is a myth.

The ad campaign comes courtesy of a coalition called This is Reality. Behind it are enviros including the Alliance for Climate Protection (Al Gore’s group), the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council (disclosure: they’re a client for whom I do some writing) and the National Wildlife Federation. The “reality” coalition says

In reality, there is no such thing as “clean” coal in America today. Coal cannot be called ‘clean’ until its CO2 emissions are captured and stored safely.

Let’s be clear: there are no US homes, factories, shopping centers or churches powered by coal plants that capture and store their global warming pollution.

Today, coal power plants emit carbon dioxide (CO2), the pollutant causing the climate crisis. A third of the America’s carbon pollution now comes from about 600 coal-fired power plants. And of the more than 70 proposed new coal power plants, barely a handful have plans to capture and store their CO2 emissions. If these dirty plants are allowed to be built, this will mean an additional 200 million tons of global warming pollution will be emitted in America each year. Until coal power plants no longer release CO2 to the atmosphere, coal will remain a major contributor to the climate crisis.

This is, in part, a response to a costly campaign created by a coal industry group called the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a group which says:

As you might have guess, we are pro-coal and proud of it. Not only does coal keep America’s lights on, it keeps everything else that needs electricity running.

ACCCE believes that the robust utilization of coal – America’s most abundant energy resource – is essential to providing affordable, reliable electricity for millions of U.S. consumers and a growing domestic economy. Further, ACCCE is committed to continued and enhanced U.S. leadership in developing and deploying new, advanced clean coal technologies that protect and improve the environment.

The truth is, both the anti-coal and pro-coal forces have a point.

There is, today, no such thing as clean coal—not even close. And there is, today, no way to power the slumping U.S. economy without coal. If you hate coal, then turn off your TV, iPod, refrigerator, air conditioning, etc, for 12 out of every 24 hours – because half of America’s electricity comes from coal.

The reason that the debate is getting so heated is that coal, and clean coal, will be at the center of the debate over greenhouse gas regulation in Congress this year. Environmental groups, scientists and some big companies will argue for a rapid reduction in greenhouse gas pollution—saying that a tight cap will be the only way to stimulate innovation, including the technology breakthroughs needed to capture and store the C02 created when coal is burned. Coal-industry types and utilities will argue that the regulation can’t get too far ahead of clean coal technology or it will wreck the economy by driving up electricity costs.

This morning, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of environmental groups and big companies, will unveil it latest climate change proposals. Here’s a preview from the WSJ’s Environmental Capital Blog.

Six weeks from now, coal will again make headlines. As Bill McKibben writes in Grist, environmentalists are planning a day of protest and civil disobedience at the coal-fired plant that powers the Congress. He writes:

There are moments in a nation’s — and a planet’s — history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction.

So those posters in the metro are just the opening shots in the coal wars.