Weather, Water, Energy 2-07-08

Well, American kids are being shielded from the evil that is Al Gore in place after place, school board after professional science teacher group whored out by their corporate sponsors, but those idiotic British are actually sending An Inconvenient Truth to every secondary school in the nation. Will this kowtowing to reality never cease??? . . . And to top that, the EU has dropped an 18% mandatory CO2 cut on new cars by 2012. Dare we ask if the automakers are thrilled? Dare we ask if our Congress, with Rep. Dingell (D-General Motors) in charge of a key committee, will join them in sanity? Okay, snark-ending time. . . . Canada appears to be clearly getting serious about its effort as well, although it's still just talk at this point. . . . Don't go skating on Chinese lakes this winter because, well, they're still wet. Good thing the Chinese don't contribute much to this themselves and have declared other people have to take care of the problem. Let's invite the Chinese leadership skating. . . . In India, signs of future coming. Water wars between Indian states, people figuring out that, when it comes to things like water, there is no middle ground between "we'll have it" and "no, we won't." . . . Finally, from Grist, we get a nice analysis of why the IPCC report, while getting press, didn't get the press that one might think a report on A COMING CHANGE IN HUMAN CIVILIZATION might get, including the Super Bowl. Here's the key point:

It's time we all learn and internalize the lesson that's been beating us about the head and shoulders for years: by themselves, facts are inert.

Knowing and understanding is not a passive process of absorbing facts. It's an active process. Facts must be sticky; they must have hooks that connect them to our lives and passions. To truly absorb them we must be able to actively engage them and fit them into the skein of narratives and background understandings of which our worldviews are woven.

So we've got two options:

1. Find some way of engaging people with a problem that's long, slow, invisible, intangible, and immune to near-term solutions.

2. Find some way of getting good policies in place without a groundswell of popular support.

Grist is betting on #2 being the only way. I'll give him a bigger stake for that.