Daily Breakthrough: How to Get Over the Death of Your Paradigm
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In a recent New York Magazine excerpt from their book on the 2008 campaign, John Heilemann & Mark Halperin tell the story of John Edwards' self-destruction -- and his delusional belief that political salvation lay just around the corner, long after he had laid waste to his campaign and his political future.
Take a Long Hard Look in the Mirror It took John Edwards over a year to admit that his political career was dead. Let's hope it won't take greens as long to admit cap and trade is.In admitting paternity of a child he fathered in the midst of his campaign, Edwards has finally accepted that his political career is over. What will it take for greens and sympathetic fellow travelers to accept that cap and trade and the UN climate process is dying and move on?
A look around the blogosphere finds various key players working their way through Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's Five Stages of Grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance).
New York Times reporter John Broder seems caught between Denial and Bargaining. On January 15th he reported that there was new hope that 192 nations, including the U.S., would deliver on the promises they made at U.N. talks in Copenhagen, even though the Guardian had just quoted Obama administration officials saying the U.N. should be sidelined.
The Guardian quoted U.S. official Jonathan Pershing attributing the results of Copenhagen to sleep-deprivation and late night cramming (who ever said college students weren't prepared for the real world?)
A week later, Broder seems to have finally accepted that the "climate deal is at risk" (ya think?). Broder would have learned more reading Newsweek reporter Sharon Begley's obituary for the UN climate process two weeks earlier.
Malcolm Gladwell once defined panic as the "reversion to instinct." Sometimes, like when fleeing danger, the panic instinct can save your life. But in others instances it results in inappropriate action in the face of changed circumstances.
Dr. Kubler-Ross, R.I.P.: Her famous five steps of grieving wasn't quite right - turns out that "yearning" is one of the most common symptoms - but she famously and correctly noted that one must first get over denial before one can move on to acceptance.
In this way green denial has morphed into full-blown panic. The usual sources are claiming that now - with one less Democratic Senator and a looming November bloodbath for Congressional Democrats - is the perfect time for the Senate to take action.
"We're not licked," cried EDF's Sam Perry (what, is Fred Krupp in the Caymans?) in a cap and trade fundraising email. "Call me sentimental, but my favorite political movie is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - one idealistic senator up against the mighty Taylor political machine."
From the sound of it you'd think greens were up against the entire U.S. energy industry.
Alas, no. EDF wrote much of the bill with major fossil fuel energy players like Duke Energy.
And most of the energy industry is backing the bill.
So not quite like Mr. Smith.
EDF's reaction isn't exactly denial. It's more like yearning -- yearning for the days when greens were the little guys winning, as opposed to the big guys losing.
Turns out that yearning is one of the longest lasting stages of grief according to a major study, published in the Journal of American Medicine, in which researchers found that the yearning stage starts about one month after the loss, which would set the time of death at roughly December 22, 2009 -- the end of the Copenhagen talks. (Yes, eerie.)
So it's one part denial that cap and trade could really be dead and two parts yearning for a simpler past when everyone thought we'd solve global warming just like we did acid rain. Yearning is, in this way, nostalgia projected forward.
EDF is no Mr. Smith: EDF looks to Mr. Smith in Washington as an inspiration -- but the coalition it built was not the little guy against the big moneyed interests, it is the big moneyed interest, and includes coal giant Duke Energy.
Happily, some greens are moving on to Acceptance -- and even asking what comes next.
Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, who Breakthrough has alternatively praised and criticized over the years, wrote in Mother Jones about a push for R&D as a potential alternative to cap and trade, and quoted Breakthrough co-founder Ted Nordhaus.
Breakthrough is often accused of being "techno-optimists." In fact, we are techno-pessimists: we don't think fossil fuels will be driven out with a carbon price or pollution regulations. We might succeed in making them a little more expensive, but certainly not enough to close the price gap with clean energy.
What Bill got right in the piece is that it really is the cap and traders who are the techno-optimists. They believe we have "all the technology we need," in Al Gore's immortal words, and a price on carbon and a few pollution regulations will usher in a low-carbon energy economy with little need for investing in R&D and other kinds of innovation to make clean energy cheap.
What Bill missed is that we support investment throughout the innovation process, not just R&D or basic science -- Bill has graciously agreed to make a correction.
In grieving the end of the U.N. process in Copenhagen, McKibben wrote, "I went to church. I cried. Then I got back to work."
Amen to that.
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