Everything is not illuminated – nor heard

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 21^st 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 20^th 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.