The prophetic image from the March 1984 issue of Environmental Action Magazine, drawn by La Mouche (the late Peters Day), for a story, "The Endless Summer," by Francesca Lyman. |
PROVIDENCE – A few
months ago, I heard Dr. Douglas Eby, a physician with the Alaska Native Medical
Center, tell an audience at Brown University’s Warren Alpert School of Medicine
that one of the keys to his health center’s success in improving outcomes and
lowering costs was the explicit direction given to providers: learn to listen
in 10 different ways when talking with patients.
He urged his colleagues to break free of the
diagnosis-treatment treadmill, and its wrong-headed focus on treating illness
instead of promoting wellness. Eby argued the focus of health care needed to be
on what he called “messy human relationships.”
In conversations that followed his talk, I found that Eby’s
message had not necessarily been “heard” by many in the audience – filled with
the top echelon of doctors, hospital executives and health care officials in
Rhode Island.
Why didn’t Eby’s message resonate with those higher up on
the health care totem pole?
Because, many were accustomed to seeing themselves as being
the smartest people in the room, skilled at making snap decisions. These are
not people who easily share in decision-making, nor do they respond well to
being told they are wrong. The truth is, they often don’t listen very well.
The dynamic they have been trained to believe in is that
they are the ones who talk, and the patients listen. To paraphrase Stan Lee,
creator of the comic book superhero Spiderman: with great power comes great
arrogance.
At a fundamental level – both from an economic and
philosophic approach, it can be argued, as does Dr. Michael Fine, the director
of the R.I. Department of Health, that we don’t have a health care system, but
a health care market, which operates as a “wealth extraction” system. If you are a member of the luxury class
on life’s cruise ship, not much time is spent conversing with the rest of us
traveling in steerage – until the ship’s engine breaks down, or a Norovirus
strikes.
Yet the inability to “listen” by those in power – and the
difficulty in “being heard” by those who are not – has been driven home like a
wave crashing down on our disappearing coast line in the aftermath of Hurricane
Sandy.
ARE YOU NOW OR EVER BEEN a believer in “climate change” and “global warming?”
The evidence is not hard to discern: sea levels are rising
60 percent faster than expected; the first decade of the 21st
century was the warmest on record, nine of the 10 hottest years on record have
occurred since 2001; the polar ice cap shrank to a record low in 2012; the
concentration of greenhouse gases hit new record levels; and the incidence of
extreme weather events is increasing around the globe.
Still, there are those who would disparage those who warn of
the threat from climate change as un-American, socialistic and downright
communistic, with tactics that are reminiscent of Sen. Joe McCarthy
The economics of Hurricane Sandy make the environmental
evidence harder to discount. The relief bill to be paid by the federal
government [you can read that taxpayers] for the cost of clean up is $50.5
billion.
The question is: why are we still burning coal to produce
steam to turn turbines to make electricity? Emissions from burning coal are one
of the major causes of climate change and global warming. There is little doubt
about the cause and effect. The diagnosis is as urgent and plaintive as a
Carolina wren’s call to greet the morning sun. Do we hear it? Are we listening?
What prevents us from rising out of our proverbial bed and taking action?
If you ask many of the so-called “smartest people in the
room,” they will tell you it is because coal is abundant, less expensive, and an
American fuel source. But the math only works if you don’t include
externalities in your economic cost equation – the very real health,
environmental and economic consequences of burning coal. Imagine if the relief
costs of Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Irene were made an actual, transparent
and understandable part of your electric, home insurance and health insurance
bills.
These same “incontrovertible” arguments have been made for
years about nuclear power – it’s “cheaper” than other forms of power production
for electric utilities. Once again, the arguments only hold true in a world
where external costs – waste disposal, the limited lifespan of the plant and
its decommissioning, the environmental and health hazards of the nuclear fuel
production cycle, etc., are never part of the economic calculation of “cheap.”
Not to mention the trillions in government subsidies [once again, read that
costs that consumers, as taxpayers, already shell out] for research, fuel
production, and insurance protection. Most of our aging nuclear plants, built
in the 1960s and 1970s, will be forced to close in the next decade as their
piping and shells become too brittle to operate. These relics of the second
half of the 20th century will not be replaced by other new nuclear plants,
because the cost is too high – and because utilities have not yet figured out a
way to transfer such costs to consumers.
There are even those so-called “smartest” energy experts
that call the nuclear option a “green” technology, because it doesn’t, they
claim, have carbon emissions associated with it. Conveniently left out of that
equation is the high carbon emission “costs” of the power required to enrich
uranium for fuel.
The big question on cost these days, if you listen to the
“smartest people” on TV, appears to be whether the low cost of natural
gas-fired power plants, the “cheapest” fuel during the current fracking boom,
has undercut the cost assumptions for nuclear power.
There is also the ongoing meltdown of nuclear reactors at
Fukushima and its economic consequences, which conveniently also get left out
of the economic calculation of “cheap.”
Back to coal and carbon emissions – and the health and
economic costs.
In Rhode Island, the greatest single cause in the
improvement of public health and the reduction of mortality in the last 25
years is the ban on indoor smoking, according to health officials. Cigarette
smoking is harmful to your health – as is second-hand smoke. The tobacco
industry has been held liable for the medical costs resulting from smoking
tobacco – that addictive, nicotine delivery system.
Imagine if the same standards were applied to the public
health and climate change consequences of coal-burning power plants.
We can talk about high rates of asthma and respiratory
disease, the growing risk of autism, and mercury poisoning. There’s a good
reason, for instance, why most states in the Northeast recommend that pregnant
women not eat fish – because of the high mercury content in fish due in large
part to coal-burning emissions. The mercury in fish is transmitted directly
from the expectant mother to the fetus, resulting in serious permanent harm to
the baby’s mental and physical development – and increased health costs.
Children with autism are two to three times more likely than
other children to have been exposed to car exhaust, smog and other air
pollutants during their earliest days, according to a new study.
The ideologues in Congress can still attempt to dismiss
climate change as a hoax, but it’s much harder to dismiss the $50.5 billion in
costs.
An image from the May 1985 issue of Environmental Action, by artist Steven Hannock, as part of the Visions issue. |
A FEW DAYS before the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, and the horrific
devastation it caused along the entire Northeast coastline, a former colleague,
Kathleen Hughes, who worked with me as an editor of Environmental Action magazine
in 1984, befriended me on Facebook. It’s one of the ways that people reach out
and “talk” with each other these days.
Kathy, who with her husband now produces TV documentaries
for Bill Moyers, among others, had reached out, she explained, because in the
lead up reporting on the storm, she recalled our cutting-edge reporting on the
consequences of climate change, and wondered why it had disappeared in large
part from the public conversation.
It’s a good question, Kathy; you’ve always asked good questions.
Let me try and answer it.
Together, along with a third colleague, Francesca Lyman, we
had done some of the best national reporting on climate change and global
warming – long before Al Gore, Bill McKibben and others found religion in the
cause.
The magazine cover of the March 1984 issue featured the
story, “The Endless Summer: It’s time to do more than think about the
greenhouse effect,” written by Francesca. http://www.solaripedia.com/files/1105.pdf
With it was a prophetic illustration by La Mouche [the late
Peters Day] of a taxi driver, poling his cab in gondolier fashion through the
flooded streets of New York City. Twenty-eight years later, art turned into
reality.
An equally powerful image was published in the magazine’s
May 1985 issue, a painting by Steven Hannock (an artist whose landscapes are
displayed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art), showing the Hudson River
engulfing Manhattan as a result of climate change.
After Hurricane Sandy, climate change is now hopefully front
and center again in our political conversation, and that is good news. But I
think it’s important to understand why it had faded from our public and
political discourse.
Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a
world of digital distraction and information overload, according to Seth S.
Horowitz, a neuroscientist formerly at Brown University, in a recent New
York Times op-ed. “The richness of life
doesn’t lie in the loudness and the beat, but in the timbres and the variations
that you can discern if you simply pay attention,” Horowitz wrote.
The reality is that we don’t have conversations any more, we
post and we tweet. The give and take of a conversation – one where both
participants are listening, not just “seeing” the words – is absent from our
lives. We turn on our iPods and play our favorites over and over again. If we
don’t hear new things, our cognitive ability to recognize, respond and learn
atrophies, according to Horowitz.
To a large degree, it’s also very much about the ability of
powerful corporate interests – the oil and natural gas industries, the electric
utility industry – to control the conversation and messaging in Congress and
the news media – and in our homes.
OUR WORLD IS OFTEN REDUCED to episodes in a reality show, a race though exotic destinations,
rewarding those who scheme best to survive. Remember that it’s not CBS, NBC,
ABC, CNN and FOX; it’s Viacom, Comcast, Disney, Time-Warner and Rupert Murdoch,
pushing their business and political agendas on us and selling us on
debilitating dreams that we, too, can achieve fame, fortune and success from
happenstance. Step right up, everyone’s a winner, bargains galore.
While New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg deserves some
credit for endorsing his choice for president in 2012 because of climate
change, his conversion will seem much more real when Bloomberg News dedicates
an hour of business programming to climate change issues, and not just stock
market analysis.
Imagine those talking heads on Bloomberg, or CNBC, the
alleged “smartest people in the room” when it comes to business trends,
calculating the cost of future insurance charges to homeowners based upon storm
recent damages, with one of those crisp graphics on screen that measures and
plots the financial consequences as a ratio to emissions from coal-burning
utilities? Hmmm.
On the Congressional front, it might be helpful if elected
politicians, every time they appeared in a committee hearing to ask questions
of witnesses, wore NASCAR-like jackets with the logos of all their contributors
from the energy and utility industries, so we could see their true colors
emerge – not red, not blue, but dollar-bill green.
And, what a great retribution fantasy (or TV reality show)
come true it would be if Republican Sen. James Inhofe from Oklahoma was to be
trapped in a future storm, with situations similar to the residents or Hoboken,
N.J., or Staten Island during Sandy, and had to survive the hardships of
residents, with flooded streets awash in sewage, no electricity, no drinkable
water, their homes destroyed. Do you think he might sing a different tune?
More than the need of politicians needing to stand in
someone else’s soggy shoes, the storm’s aftermath has revealed something more
basic about what’s missing from our public conversation: the ability to talk
and listen to each other, and for citizens to be heard. Why was it seen as so
surprising – and not common stance – for President Obama and Gov. Christie to
walk and talk with each as they inspected the damages from Sandy?
For the most part, the news media doesn’t help; they only
exacerbate the problem.
Our local daily newspaper, The Providence Journal, is behind an online pay wall now, like so many
others. Unless you pay, you are limited to news in 125-word sound bites online.
However, the feedback mavens who offer comments on stories don’t have to pay to
give voice to their opinions. Day in and day out, these folks are free to dish
out their vitriol, with the newspaper’s apparent blessing. It’s not about
promoting dialogue; it’s about pandering to diatribe, a newspaper’s desperate
attempt to build up its falling circulation by the appearance of dialogue.
The newspaper recently put on its dunce cap known as
“PolitiFact R.I.” to analyze a statement by a coastal geologist who said that
sea levels in Rhode Island “had risen maybe about 10 inches” since 1930, based
upon gauge readings. It gave the statement a “mostly true” ruling, with data
showing the growth was 8.7 inches, according to the research done by an
intrepid Providence Journal reporter.
Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Does it really
matter to know that there is a difference between “maybe about 10 inches” and
8.7 inches? Instead of putting energy and resources into researching what the
rise in sea levels will mean for Rhode Island, we are instead subjected to
mind-numbing analysis that leads nowhere, absolutely nowhere.
These days, when I read the newspaper, I often find myself
singing that Pete Seeger tune: “But every time I read the
papers/them old feelings come on/We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy/And the big
fool says to push on.”
Here’s what some of the readers, not behind the pay wall,
had to say about that particular PolitiFact finding:
“PolitiFact is nothing more
than a left-wing organization anyway. They can always find the ‘facts’ they are
looking for to prove the liberal side correct,” wrote Phil Johnson.
“You have got to be kidding
me, this is a joke and this women should go back to school or at least read the
memo, the term has changed because they know its all false data, it’s now
called global climate change, which on its face is also a joke, climates do
change just look outside,” wrote Marie
Rossi.
The Providence Journal’s problem is not just poor
decision-making about how to deploy its journalistic resources. The newspaper
reported its new electronic edition had a total of 4,224 subscribers, but its
average weekly circulation decreased from 90,085 to 83,733, a drop of 6,352, in
the six-month period ending Sept. 30, 2012. And, the newspaper’s total
advertising fell 13 percent in the last three months ending on Sept. 30,
compared to the previous year.
The solipsistic circle – or, more aptly, noose – grows
tighter and tighter.
Let’s not forget the corporate control of talk radio, where
conservative ideologues rail against climate change as a hoax. Did you know
that Clear Channel Communications, the home of Rush Limbaugh, is now owned by
Bain Capital, the former home of Mitt Romney?
The local leader in talk, WPRO, a Cumulus Media, Inc.,
station, provides a steady diet of right-wing conservative commentators. After
24/7 of constantly bashing President Obama and all the Democratic candidates in
2012, the commentators awoke the day after the election, and, in disbelief,
called it a “nightmare.” What none of them could admit was how little impact
any of their own on-air voices – including a former mayor of Providence who is
a convicted felon – had on influencing the election outcomes.
In the last four years, has there ever been a guest on WPRO
to talk about the impending dangers and economic consequences of climate
change? I believe the answer is no.
The end result is that we consume blips of news, followed by
commentary that is closer to rants than it is to reason. In the news biz,
everything is not illuminated – nor heard.
EARLY ON SATURDAY MORNINGS, I often meet up with a regular group of men (and some women) in their
50s and 60s at the local coffee shop, mothers and fathers and grandmothers and
grandfathers. I call it the “geezer” club, a self-deprecating label that most
of the others are uncomfortable with. The weekend before, our entire town lost
power for more than 48 hours, in the midst of a winter storm that brought two
feet of snow and crippling cold weather in its aftermath. Everyone had their
own Eeyore story of “miserable, miserable” to share.
We talk, we listen, we share (even photos on our iPads) –
and we’re not afraid to disagree – about sports teams and politics.
Most of the members are dyed-in-the-wool conservative
Republicans, unlike me. They, like me, were all old enough to recall the 1978
blizzard, and two or three wondered out loud: We didn’t lose power in 1978. Why
did we lose power during the last couple of storms?
I sensed an opening here, and launched into a critique of
the utility industry, and National Grid, the British company that has a
monopolistic grip on our region. I voiced my suspicions, admittedly unproven
and untested, that the cause of the blackout – the loss of two major
transmission lines – may have been due to the lack of proper maintenance during
the summer months.
Most were surprised to learn that National Grid was a
foreign company. Really? I didn’t know that. None, however, were surprised by
the possibility of a lack of maintenance.
I then plunged into my vision of a potential solution: a
system of photovoltaic electric panels, solar hot water panels, and a rain
barrel system, to be installed on most homes in Rhode Island, at a cost of
about $15,000, with the caveat that the cost, with interest, be paid back when
the home was sold. The grid wouldn’t fade away, but it would be supplanted by a
smart grid system where consumers could make their own decisions about energy
use, instead of being tethered to a dinosaur of an infrastructure.
Such a system would save homeowners about $3,000 to $4,000 a
year in avoided costs. Further, it would create a need for a veritable army of
skilled workers to install the systems. It would serve to cut peak demand for
electricity, the price-setting mechanism for the grid, saving the region
millions of dollars.
How would it be funded? Initially, through a state bond,
which would be replenished by the income realized from repayment of the initial
systems when homes are sold. “It’s a much better use of money than the more
than $125 million that the investment in Curt Schilling’s bankrupt 38 Studios
will end up costing the state,” I argued.
The conservatives dug in their heels: The payback’s too
long. I responded: But you’re willing to dish out money for increased insurance
costs, with no payback? And the business losses each time a new, more powerful
storm hits?
As expected, one fellow geezer got angry – in a friendly way
– with me, pushing back, saying that climate change was a hoax, and that
installing photovoltaic was way too expensive, and a waste of taxpayer money.
Another asked me a more hopeful question: “Where do you get
your information, Richard?” I offered him some suggestions.
He, like so many others, often seems captive of the
ideological news stream from The Wall Street Journal and Fox News and CNBC and
Bloomberg News.
The bottom line: If we don’t talk about it with among our
friends, family and neighbors, and share what we know, who will?
Most of the so-called expert commentators on TV, on radio
and in print, live in cocoons that are far removed from the realities of
everyday life. They are never the ones who lack health insurance, whose homes
are foreclosed on, who lost their job because an actuary says that anyone over
the age of 50 is a health insurance risk and will cost the company too much
money.
Only when tragedies occur – and we get “stuck in the mud
somewhere in the swamps of Jersey” – does
reality intrude. And, with luck, we have to learn how to listen to each other
again, and to talk with people, not at them.
This is the best answer I have, Kathy, as to why people
didn’t want to listen to what we were reporting on back in 1984 – and, for the
most part, not today, either. As you know, good reporting is still what it
takes to change things. Asking good questions. Being persistent. It’s a
willingness to talk about climate change at the dinner table, and at the
“geezer club” on Saturday mornings.
If I look at how public opinion is shifting in regard to
food – the push back against the dangers of high fructose corn syrup, the sugar
delivery system in our soft drinks and its relationship to diabetes and
obesity, the use of toxic chemicals and endocrine disruptors in pesticides, the
growing movement against genetically modified organisms in our food – I take
heart.
And, like you, Francesca is still posing tough questions.
Her recent piece, “Are we ready for the next super storm?” appeared in the
winter 2013 issue of The SE Journal, published by the Society of Environmental
Journalists.
Yes, Kathy, good reporting is still what it takes.
Postscript:
For positive solutions, read my earlier post, “Dancing in the dark, tethered to
a dinosaur”
Another Postscript: Last week, another major storm hit Rhode Island – inexplicably
named Nemo, as if meteorologists had suddenly become fans of Jules Verne and
Captain Nemo in his “20,000 Leagues under the Sea.” More likely, my son pointed
out to me, they were probable fans of the 2003 animated film, “Finding Nemo.”
My neighborhood was without power for 48 hours – and I
had no heat, no hot water, no electricity during that time when temperatures
fell below 10 degrees outside. I survived, thanks in part to my neighbors, who
let me have a warming session in front of their wood stove, brought me a
thermos of hot soup, lent me wood to burn in my fireplace. It was miserable,
and I am still “grouchy” from the experience.
In the daily newspaper – and on talk radio – there was a
lot of noise about the Lt. Governor having been on vacation in Europe during
the storm, a way to distract us and out anger from where it could be directed:
finding out the cause of the power outage, the breakdown of high transmission
lines.
Yes, Kathy. I believe good reporting is what it still
takes.