Reform environmentalism, a third paradigm, is a more pragmatic approach that recognizes the limits of natural systems and attempts to address them within the parameters of the existing order. Reform environmentalism has roots in various theoretical traditions, including systems theory, which emphasizes the interdependence of the economy and the environment, and the stakeholder perspective, which points to corporate obligations toward, and dependence on, groups other than shareholders, including consumers, the community, and government. Axiomatic for reform environmentalism is the reconciliation of environmental and economic goals, expressed in the concept of “sustainable development,”defined by the Brundtland Commission as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Ecological modernization, or eco-modernism (Hajer, 1995) is an optimistic expression of reform environmentalism that places considerable faith in technology, entrepreneurship, and markets in the efficient use of environmental resources and the pursuit of sustainable development. Rather than view economic growth as the source of negative environmental externalities, it posits that growth enables the investment to address environmental issues, giving the Kuznets bell-curve relationship between pollution and national income. Simultaneously, growth and modernization lower population pressures on the environment.

Environmental Management

Ecological modernization theory has provided fertile ground for the rapid growth since the mid-1990s of environmental management as an academic field and as managerial practice. Gladwin, Kennelly, and Krause (1995), for example, proposed a “sustaincentric” synthesis of traditional and ecocentric paradigms, which would privilege humans as intelligent stewards of the environment, embraces innovation, and offers a managerialist approach to prevent business activity from exceeding ecosystem constraints. Environmental management proponents argue that successful firms proactively seek profitable “win-win” opportunities to reduce pollution or develop new green product markets. Environmental management is held to offer the prospect of lower costs for energy, materials, waste disposal, and litigation, and the potential for higher sales stemming from green product differentiation.

Implicit in the field of environmental management are a number of ideological assumptions that are rarely articulated and problematic (Levy, 1997). One is that the environment can and should be managed at industrial scale, a second is that win-win opportunities give corporate managers the financial motivation to do so, a third is that corporations are the best equipped societal organizations, in their possession of financial and technical resources, to accomplish this task, and a fourth is that existing disciplines of management are readily adaptable to the cause. A larger question is whether  environmental management efforts at the level of individual firms addresses sustainability efforts at the macro-level of the economy-ecosystem interface.

Hajer (1997: 34) asks whether ecological modernization is “the first step on a bridge that leads towards a new sort of sustainable modern society” or whether it is a “rhetorical ploy that tries to reconcile the irreconcilable [environment and development] only to take the wind out of the sails of ‘real’ environmentalists.” Ecological modernization and environmental management can better be understood as a Gramscian accommodation between business and environmental concerns, in which environmentalist pressures are assimilated with modest adjustments to the economic systems. It is not empty rhetoric, or “greenwash”, as it demands a degree of compromise and practical steps to address more egregious environmental harms, especially those that threaten the resource base and political legitimacy of capitalist production. In mobilizing the language and practices of environmentalism, leading business sectors can sustain their hegemonic position, construct alliances with key environmental groups in civil society, and marginalize radical environmentalists calling for deeper structural and cultural transformation in the social and economic order.

References

Egri, C. P., & Pinfield, L. 1996. Organizations and the biosphere: ecologies and environments. In S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy, & W. Nord (Eds.), Handbook of organization studies. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Gladwin, T. N., Kennelly, J. J., & Krause, T.-S. 1995. Shifting paradigms for sustainable development: Implications for management theory and research. Academy of Management Review, 20(4): 874-907.

Guha, R. 2000. Environmentalism: A global history. New York: Longman.

Hajer, M. A. 1995. The politics of environmental discourse: ecological modernization and the policy process. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hoffman, A. J., & Ventresca, M. J. 2002. Organizations, policy and the natural environment : institutional and strategic perspectives. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Levy, D. L. 1997. Environmental management as political sustainability. Organization and Environment, 10(2): 126-147.

Merchant, C. 1992. Radical ecology. New York: Routledge.

Naess, A. 1989. Ecology, community, and lifestyle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pepper, D. 1993. Eco-socialism. London: Routledge.

Portney, P. S., Robert N.  . 2000. Public policies for environmental protection. Washington DC: RFF Press.

Prakash, A., & Potoski, M. 2006. The Voluntary Environmentalists: Green Clubs, ISO 14001, and Voluntary Environmental Regulations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Salleh, A. 1992. The ecofeminism/deep ecology debate: a reply to patriarchal reason. Environmental Ethics, 14: 195-216.

I was asked recently to write a short essay on environmentalism to be published in a book on ‘Key Concepts in Critical Management Studies’ to be published by Sage later in 2010. I hope it’s useful for those who want a little bit of history and critical understanding of environmentalist as a concept and a movement. It’s not directly about climate change, but my thinking about climate change is certainly influenced by these frameworks. The references should also prove useful to anyone who wants to follow up further. A bit academic in terms of style, but accessible, nonetheless!

Environmentalism refers to a social movement and associated body of thought that expresses concern for the state of the natural environment and seeks to limit the impact of human activities on the environment.

Environmentalism has grown out of concerns that the natural environment and human health are adversely affected by the rapid growth of urbanization, industrialization, population and consumption in the modern era. These processes are associated with loss of natural habitats and endangerment of species, land degradation, natural resource depletion, and pollution of air, land, and water due to waste products. Environmental concerns have shifted over time and vary by location (Guha, 2000). Urbanization and industrialization created expressions of environmentalism directed toward urban effluent and hazardous factory wastes. Wilderness conservation and species protection have played a key role in the United States, through the national parks system and private land trusts.

North American environmentalism has traditionally highlighted the intrinsic, experiential, and recreational value of nature for humans. In Europe, where high population density and industrialization largely preceded the rise of environmentalism, efforts have focused more on managing industrial pollution and waste, protecting human health from toxics and nuclear risks, and energy efficiency. More recently, attention has shifted to transboundary regional and global issues such as acid rain, ozone depletion, and climate change. In developing countries, priority has been given to desertification, water resources, soil erosion and degradation.

Economists regard environmental pollution and resource depletion as negative externalities, costs that are imposed on society and not taken into account by private firms in their decision making. The ability of firms to externalize environmental costs while appropriating profits from production generates incentives for firms to overproduce goods with harmful environmental impacts and under-invest in measures to reduce these impacts (Stavins, 1989). The standard economic solution is to force firms to internalize the environmental costs by taxing environmentally harmful products or processes, enabling legal processes for damages, or direct regulation (Portney, 2000).

It is therefore not surprising that business has traditionally viewed environmental concerns as a threat to profitability and managerial autonomy. Business has generally opposed new environmental regulations and the establishment of regulatory authorities, frequently contesting the scientific basis for understanding harmful impacts and pointing to high compliance costs.

The wave of environmental activism in the 1960s and 1970s, originating with the publication of Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, led to the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and similar agencies in other countries. Business acquiesced partly to assuage key stakeholders, including consumers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and government agencies, and partly because federal regulation would preempt an expensive patchwork of varied and sometimes stricter state laws.

Business opposition to environmental regulation grew during subsequent decades as standards became more extensive and stringent. Business perceived that environmental risks were not balanced against compliance costs, and that direct regulation was an inefficient and blunt tool to address environmental concerns. During the 1990s, regulatory authorities began to experiment with market-based measures, such as the trading system for SO2, and industries launched self-regulation initiatives such as the US chemical industry’s Responsible Care program. Business, NGOs, and governmental agencies experimented with partnerships and voluntary agreements as part of the increasingly complex field of societal environmental governance (Prakash & Potoski, 2006). The decade also saw the rise of a “win-win” discourse of corporate environmentalism that framed environmental and economic goals as potentially complementary, and the emergence of environmental management as an academic field (Hoffman & Ventresca, 2002).

Paradigms of Environmentalism

Egri and Pinfield (1996), in a review of the literature on organization theory and the environment, identify three paradigms for understanding the relationship between environment, society, and economy. The dominant social paradigm is anthropocentric and neoliberal, encompassing assumptions that human welfare is aligned with the maximization of economic growth, personal consumption, and corporate pursuit of profits. Unlimited economic growth is assumed to flow from exploiting infinite natural resources, technological innovation, the primacy of markets, and a minimal role for government. The environment, in this paradigm, is regarded as an instrumental economic input, perhaps a constraint, but its sole purpose is the generation of economic value for humans.

Radical environmentalism, by contrast, is biocentric, emphasizing the intrinsic value of nature and the dependence of human economic and social life within larger dynamic ecosystems. In this paradigm, environmentalism derives less from concerns about resource depletion or harmful toxics, but more from respect for other species and appreciation of the interconnected complexity and fragility of ecosystems. Various schools of radical environmentalism have different points of departure (Merchant, 1992). Neo-Marxist variants emphasize production for profit under capitalism and the political power of corporate elites (Pepper, 1993). Deep ecologists also critique modern industrialism but focus on cultural and normative anthropocentrism, in which humankind is distinct from and superior to nature, entitled to control and subdue it (Naess, 1989).

These “red-green” debates raise significant theoretical issues. Neo-Marxists accuse deep ecologists of lacking an analysis of class and power, and view the cultural infatuation with consumption and technology as part of the ideological superstructure of capitalism. Deep ecologists accuse neo-Marxists of harboring modernist anthropocentric ambitions to harness nature for human benefit. Neo-Marxists reply that ecocentrism is both undesirable in its potential for misanthropism and misguided in its efforts to assign intrinsic value and moral consideration to nature. Ecofeminists share this critique of anthropocentrism but point to patriarchy as the ideological underpinning of the construction of nature as feminine and its subjugation by industry, technology, and the military (Salleh, 1992).

(continued in part 2, which looks at corporate environmentalism, an expression of ‘reform environmentalism’)

by Charles Perrow

In 1984 I published a book, Normal Accidents (revised edition, 1999), that argued that we should abandon systems with catastrophic potential if they were interactively complex and tightly coupled, unless they could be redesigned to minimize these dangerous characteristics.  Complexity and coupling can be reduced through modular, rather than integrated designs, and catastrophic potential reduced through deconcentrating hazardous materials close to population centers or sensitive ecologies.  We might decide that some systems with catastrophic potential are so vital that the risk of a rare, but possible system failure is worth running.  Government officials felt that way about our nuclear defense system for many decades, steadily increasing the risks of a huge catastrophe.  I will argue that deepwater drilling, especially in ecologically sensitive areas, should be abandoned, because it combines complexity and coupling with catastrophic potential.

Interactive complexity is not simply many parts; it means that many of the parts can interact in ways no designer anticipated and no operator can understand.  Since everything is subject to failure, the more complex the system the more opportunities for unexpected interactions of failures.  Tight coupling means that failures can cascade through the system since the system cannot be stopped, fixed and restarted without damage; substitutions are not available, and failed subsystems cannot be isolated.

I do not think that the failure on April 20, 2010 of the rig built by Transocean and run by BP had a system accident (or “normal accident”).  While such rigs are very complex and very tightly coupled, it is more likely that faulty executive decisions resulted in knowingly running unnecessary and dangerous risks.  To be a system failure, in my definition, requires that even if everyone tries as hard as they can to operate safely, it is in the nature of complex, tightly coupled systems to inevitably (though rarely)  have the unforeseeable interaction of failures, usually small ones individually, that can cascade through the system.  This was not the case with the Transocean rig; BP management frequently overrode the objections and warnings of its own operators and engineers, and those of its subcontractor, Transocean, and independent consultants.  Nothing that transpired was unexpected.

BP has had a history of ignoring warnings by its own staff in order to cut costs.  A refinery explosion in 2005 and a massive oil spill in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska in 2006, resulted in (small) criminal penalties for executive malfeasance; the pipeline had a smaller spill last year, and there are currently strident warnings about the dangers of a massive spill on the pipeline in Alaska.  The firm had a close call in 2005 with its deepwater drilling Thunder Horse rig.

With this record, perhaps deepwater drilling is safe if the other firms engaged in it do practice safety.  It is hard to tell.  Exxon-Mobil is reportedly very concerned with safety after the Valdez accident, and said to be the industry leader in safety.  But it is not encouraging that in July of this year Attorney General Eric Holden was asked if BP was doing anything different than others in the industry.  He noted “certain commonality of the way oil companies had been operating” in the Gulf, but since the investigation of drilling is ongoing, he would give no specifics.  BP may be an extreme case of putting profits over the safety of their workers, the environment, and the viability of the firm, but disasters in the chemical industry have been increasing in recent decades, so one should not be reassured that BP is the only bad apple.

The Materials Management Service (MMS) reports there are 33 rigs that have permits for exploratory drilling in deepwater in the Gulf; 29 were inspected after the spill and no serious violations were found. One may be skeptical of their finding.  For example, MMS only recommends, but does not require, a backup blowout preventer (the preventer failed in the April 20, 2010 Horizon accident).  MMS does not set specifications for all pipes, allowing BP to use less safe pipes in its rig, and so on.  Furthermore, the unsafe practices in the Horizon rig occurred when the rig ran into trouble; inspection would not catch such bad practices.  We cannot be reassured that BP is an outlier and other firms would operate safely, though a news story about Exxon’s last minute abandonment of a project, the deepest drilling at the time, is encouraging.  Less encouraging is that another drilling firm bought the lease to the abandoned exploratory drilling and has continued to drill, but for two years has recovered no oil from what is expected to be a vast pool.

Perhaps we should be reassured that the Horizon accident has alerted the industry to the dangers of deepwater drilling sufficiently to make accidents extremely rare, and furthermore has led them to have adequate emergency response facilities on hand if there is the rare accident.  After all, the nuclear power industry appears to have made significant safety improvements since the TMI accident; could not the deepwater drilling industry improve as well?  A rebuttal is that nuclear plants in the U.S. continue to have near misses despite improvements, and are not as much endangered by storms and hurricanes. BP, at least, does not appear to have changed its safety provisions in spite of the Thunder Horse near-disaster on July 11, 2005, because of a pump valve installed backwards and cracks in underwater pipes because of shoddy welding, and its Atlantis rig is being investigated because of whistleblower charges of unverified engineering documents.

An argument against a ban on deepwater drilling is that the expensive rigs able to do this would simply move to other locations that have no ban.  It is similar to intensive policing in one area; it simply drives the criminals to other areas, thus we should make no effort to increase policing in the high crime area – an argument for inaction. Were they to move to Norway or Brazil, where drilling takes place, they would have to have stronger safety standards – e.g. a backup blowout preventer – than those required in the Gulf.  But they might move their rigs to other nations where standards are presumably below those of the Gulf, and where there may be ecosystems as vulnerable as those of the Gulf.  The only response to this argument, unfortunately, is that one has to begin somewhere, and the U.S. ban just might encourage other nations to tighten regulations.

A further argument has been put forth by the oil industry and state governments bordering the Gulf: the economic impact upon the area would be severe in terms of jobs lost and business activity associated with pumping, transporting and selling the oil.  But the effect upon oil-related jobs is not likely to be as severe as the effect upon non-oil activities.  Oil is capital intensive, with few workers per unit of capital; non-oil activities such as fishing and tourism are labor intensive.  More jobs are at stake in non-oil operations.

A final argument is that we need the oil; shutting down deep-sea drilling would raise the price of oil in the U.S. and make us more dependent upon foreign sources.  Raising the price of oil is to be encouraged.  A higher price of oil would mean that investments in non-carbon sources of energy, such as solar, wind, and geothermal would increase, as would investments in efficiency and conservation.  The price of oil should be much higher to encourage these investments.  Since a carbon tax is out of the question in the U.S., and a pollution tax on gasoline unlikely because of public opposition, and especially oil industry opposition, curtailing production is the next best step.  Another step, a bit more likely than a carbon tax, would be a steep tax upon imported oil, reducing our dependency by tipping the market away from imports.  The market at present is not a “free” one, since the true costs of burning oil are not reflected in its price – the “externality” of pollution is treated as a free good when it actually imposes a heavy tax upon citizens and their environment.

The interactive complexity and tight coupling of deep-sea drilling rigs is apparent; even if BP had not skimped on safety and not overridden the objections of their own personnel and those of their subcontractors, the system could have the rare but possible unexpected interaction of failures. They are inevitable since nothing is perfect.  Profit motives and lax regulation only make such disasters more likely.

Roger Witherspoon writes about the “Myth of Technological Infallibility” underlying the arrogance and hubris that led President Obama on April 2, 2010 to give his tragically ill-timed assurance that opening up offshore oil exploration was safe: “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” EPA Administrator Dr. Lisa Jackson explained in a May 24 press conference that there was no federal oversight of emergency plans because “we were told over and over by the industry that it could not happen. So we have few tools out there.”

Witherspoon, like many others, linked the oil spill to the unknown dangers of rushing headlong into a new era of nuclear energy, in an effort to deal with carbon emissions. Witherspoon argues that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission shares the mindset of underestimating risks and being too close to the industry it regulates. For example, the NRC has belatedly recognized terrorism as a threat, but decreed that commercial nuclear operators do not have to plan for such an event because risks cannot be assessed and terrorism prevention is a federal responsibility.

Oil rigs and nuclear power plants are highly complex technical systems, in which the failure of one component can potentially cascade into a larger scale disaster. As oil rigs penetrate ever deeper waters to tap high-pressure deposits, it is difficult to assess the risks and build in adequate margins of safety. But these are not just engineering challenges: the oil and nuclear industries are woven into organizational, economic, and political systems; their technologies and production practices are shaped by market forces, bureaucratic operating procedures, and regulatory agencies. They are complex dynamic systems with unpredictable behavior when certain thresholds are crossed, just like the climate and the economy (as I discussed in A Tale of Two Meltdowns).

Detailed case studies of various disasters by organizational sociologists reveal a common pattern of how complex technologies interact with organizational processes and routines, hierarchical power structures, pressures to cut costs, and lax oversight. Together, these can lead to inertia, distorted cognition, the neglect of warning signals, and poor decisions. In engineering-intense organizations, there is often a hyper-masculine culture in which expressions of concern about risk are treated with scorn. Normal Accidents, Perrow’s classic study of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, concluded that catastrophic accidents were “normal” in the context of highly complex socio-technical systems. Even the most carefully designed safety systems could not always prevent the interaction of human and technological failures from cascading into major calamities. Perrow describes in vivid detail the managerial pressures to ignore risks, to stay on schedule and keep costs under control. Perrow found that information available to decision makers was inadequate, delayed, and sometimes inaccurate, and often subject to misinterpretation under crisis conditions. When people do intervene, there are frequently unanticipated effects that exacerbate matters. Diane Vaughan’s analysis of The Challenger Launch Decision demonstrated very similar characteristics.

Perrow concluded that the unpredictability of complex systems make the risks of nuclear power fundamentally unmanageable, and there are voices expressing the same attitude toward deep sea drilling. But do we have to embrace the deep ecology position that nature “cannot be so confined”? Nature is reliably confined and controlled in the combustion chambers powering cars, planes, and electric power generation. The economy cannot be precisely controlled, but it can be steered. Of course, using historical experience to guide for future decisions in relation to low-probability but high impact events can underestimate risks, especially when technologies are pushing new frontiers.

But there are no absolutes here: the question is always how reliable are the systems, and what are the consequences of catastrophic failure, in time and geographic reach?  Failures cannot be eliminated from complex systems, but they can be managed to tolerable levels. Lean production systems employ statistical process control and input from workers to improve quality and reliability, from the component level to the whole production process. In my doctoral thesis work, I studied how this approach could stabilize international supply chains which had been subject to chaotic disruptions. The Federal Aviation Authority examines airplane safety records and mandates technical as well as procedural changes.

In general, there has been too little attention to the non-technical aspects of risk management, the economic and organizational pressures and wider governance systems. Yet the overall safety record for risky technologies is not bad. More than 4000 offshore oil platforms operate routinely in the Gulf of Mexico alone, and it has been over 30 years since the last major offshore blow out. France has operated 59 nuclear power stations for decades without major catastrophe. About 50,000 commercial flights are operated each day around the world.

If BP succeeds in installing the new cap and staunching the oil flow in the next week or two, this will count as a major regional disaster, but not necessarily one that should prevent all offshore drilling in the future. Within a couple of years, bacteria will have digested most of the oil, and life will return to the coastal regions. There are technological, political, and economic lessons to be learned, and with a bit of luck, we could go another 50 years till the next big blowout.

The risks associated with oil are modest compared with nuclear power and weapons production. Even if power plants can be operated safely, the waste disposal problem remains stubborn. The New York Times recently reported that “the amount of plutonium buried Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is nearly three times what the federal government previously reported.” Production of plutonium stopped at the 560 square mile site in the 1980s, and clean up has barely begun because nobody seems to know exactly what was dumped where, or how to deal with contaminated soil. Plutonium is highly toxic and can slowly seep into groundwater and the Columbia river. With a half-life of 24,000 years, it needs to be contained for eons of time during which civilizations, languages, and the climate will all undergo profound shifts.

There are some rumors circulating on the web that the BP blowout could trigger a massive release of methane, unleashing tsunamis and toxic gas clouds that would cause massive devastation to the region. A frightening scenario indeed, but the most credible report I can find does not see this as a serious threat. The real risk is that we get back to the business of safely pumping and burning oil and gas as usual, pushing the climate through critical thresholds and triggering global, irreversible changes.

The deep ecology position itself carries some hidden dangers. It reflects the same kind of deep populist distrust of scientific expertise that has animated climate deniers (and which this week’s report clearing the U. of East Anglia scientists of major wrongdoing will do little to allay). And the claim that the existing order is “natural and sacred” has traditionally been used by elites to justify the status quo. Progressive politics demands that we “denaturalize” our systems of production and governance, our assumptions about hierarchy, and our faith – and fears – of science and technology. Progressive politics requires that we be alert to the ways in which science and technology are embedded in social, economic, and political systems, and that we actively manage these systems to transition to a more socially, economically and environmentally sustainable system.

“In essence, the rebate on the boiler (which I’ve already paid for via a surcharge on my electricity bill) is captured by the plumber”

by David L. Levy

This week the temperature hit 90F in Boston, and after appropriate procrastination, I finally started replacing the winter clip-on storm windows with fly screens. We survived another winter with our antiquated and rusting steel casement windows in Brookline, Mass. These single pane windows, which date to the1951  construction of the house, are wintertime energy hogs – they are drafty, provide no insulation, and get covered in icy condensation. We were paying more than $600 a month in the coldest part of the winter, and that’s with my sophisticated solar thermal management system: we have huge south-facing windows, so I raise the blinds when the sun is shining to keep the house comfortable in winter, and lower them for some insulation at night (reverse in the summer…).

In an earlier confessional, I explained why we have not yet splashed out the $20,000 to replace the old windows with new energy efficient ones. The return on investment is only 2% at best, and who knows how long we’ll be in the house, or whether new windows would add much to the sale price. Somehow my own personal experiences don’t square with the conventional wisdom on energy efficiency, which is that substantial reductions in energy use (and greenhouse gas emissions) can be obtained while the investments more than pay for themselves in cost savings (i.e. have positive RoI). McKinsey issued a report in July 2009 claiming that “the U.S. economy has the potential to reduce annual non-transportation energy consumption by roughly 23 percent by 2020, eliminating more than $1.2 trillion in waste – well beyond the $520 billion upfront investment that would be required. The reduction in energy use would also result in the abatement of 1.1 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions annually.”

As Mark Sarro and Jurgen Weiss explained in their guest post last year, the actual costs may be higher than engineering estimates suggest and there are a host of market, institutional, and psychological barriers. McKinsey acknowledges some of these barriers, though they emphasize a lack of financing and the presence of market failures, such as the owner-renter problem and the limited time horizon of residential owners. Most existing efficiency programs at the city and state level, such as Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) address these specific issues. My own experiences, however, lead me to think that, in the residential buildings market, an important but overlooked part of the problem is the high retail cost of efficiency investments, due to small scale and lack of competition.

This point was reinforced by my investigation this winter of options to replace our antique oil furnace. I was stirred to action by a confluence of three events: a promotion arrived in the mail from National Grid promising a 60% discount on a new energy efficient gas boiler, and up to $1500 extra tax credit for a very high efficiency product. Second, the oil company maintenance person said we need to put nearly $1000 into various repairs on the old oil guzzling beast. Third, I began teaching my new MBA Business and Climate Change course and thought that I should make at least some effort to walk the talk. A high efficiency gas boiler promised energy savings of around 15% on efficiency grounds, on top of which gas is currently about 30% cheaper than oil per BTU. The switch to gas would also mean burning a less carbon intensive fuel. With new furnaces running at about $2000 without a subsidy, here was an investment that would burnish my tarnished environmental credentials while appeasing my inner hedge fund manager.

I called the National Grid number, and was assigned a local plumbing company to come by and give us an estimate. The plumber proceeded to recommend an Energy Star high efficiency (85%) Burnham boiler for only $822, including tax, after the 60% rebate. When I asked about installation costs, I got the usual consolation look that electricians and garage service people seem to have perfected prior to giving an outrageous estimate. After poking around a few pipes and the flue, he gave me an estimate of $9200 for installation, plus a few hundred for carting away the old oil tank. Oh, and $1900 for a new gas line into the house, giving a total of well over $12,000.

When I asked about the ultra high efficiency (95%) burners, I was informed in no uncertain terms that this would be a big mistake – these would be less reliable, suffering problems with acidic condensation, and they would need a special flue. Remember, this is the sales pitch from a plumbing company assigned by National Grid for efficiency upgrades! The extra $1500 tax rebate available on these would be more than offset anyway by the higher installation and purchase cost. In any case, didn’t I want some “wasted” heat to keep the basement warm in the winter? We do use it for hanging up clothes to dry, cutting back on our electricity-hungry drier. And our basement boiler sits directly under the living room, keeping the floorboards warm. In any event, the ancient oil relic claims around 78% efficiency on the tag hanging on it, so maybe the energy savings are not so high.

This was a useful lesson for me and for my MBA class. Why the high costs? The old system had accumulated lots of extra pipes and valves over the years, to accommodate several new rooms, making a new installation more complex. Then there are the new regulations, which require a new flue lining and external vent. But I still suspect that the cost estimate is inflated by the lack of competition: National Grid specifies the plumber from their list of preapproved contractors. I found out afterwards that, in principle, I could find my own qualified plumber, but that’s extra hassle (i.e. transaction costs). In essence, the rebate on the boiler (which I’ve already paid for via a surcharge on my electricity bill) is captured by the plumber, who can inflate charges because of the relationship with National Grid. For comparison, I got a quote of $6300 for a new high efficiency (also 85%) oil boiler, all inclusive. Going with gas I save $1200 on the rebate, but pay about $3000 more for installation.

There are clearly some market barriers and problems with existing energy efficiency promotion programs that are not being recognized. One idea we came up with in class to squeeze costs out of the system Walmart-style was to aggregate residential upgrades together. National Grid could bundle 100 jobs into a larger contract that it would put out to bid. Other suggestions included a surcharge, or systems benefit charge, on heating oil to fund upgrades, or a multiyear guaranteed price contract for natural gas. A third is to require houses for sale to undergo an energy audit, and provide relevant numbers, as on a new car or refrigerator. This would help ensure that upgrades get reflected in market value. (Yet the real estate industry is opposed, and a similar measure in the UK was recently repealed.) Note that none of these require direct subsidies – rather, they address the barriers and market failures.

There is also a lesson here on the increasing marginal cost of carbon reductions. If I get new windows, the marginal benefit of replacing the boiler is goes down. When I grab some low hanging fruit, some of the other fruit gets a bit harder to reach. It also illustrates what economists call the rebound effect: if I make the house more efficient, I’ll take some of the benefit in the form of more comfort, keeping the house a bit warmer in winter, a bit cooler in summer. I’ve noticed this myself with compact fluorescent lighting: I used to be a “turn-off-the-lights” nudnik, but am less zealous for a 13 watt bulb than for 60.

Several months later, summer is here, the boiler is silent, and there is no pressure for a decision. As with the international climate negotiations and national cap-and-trade legislation, inertia is the default option. At least I’m ruminating on policies that will stir me to action.

Below I’m reprinting a post  of his about the contradictions of building ‘green’ mansions – with buildings, cars, planes, appliances, and other products, we seem stuck on a treadmill of efficiency improvements offset by growing consumption: bigger houses, more cars, more plane travel, more gadgets, etc. I’ll be following up soon with a post about my own experience of trying to upgrade my own energy-sink of a house!

The “Green” House Effect

By John R. Ehrenfeld (link to original post)

The NY Times carried a story on March 10 about a controversy over plans to build a very large home in Berkeley, CA. The plans which have been approved show a total area of about 10,000 square feet, of which 3,500 are for a garage. The owner, Mitch Kapor, is the founder of Lotus and has used his ample wealth for many philanthropic ends including many concerned with the environment. Perhaps he lost so much of his money in the crash that he plans to operate a public parking lot.

The controversy here rose from the designation by a city board that the house qualified as being “green.” Such designation comes via an evaluation scheme that gives points to green features of a building, for example, the use of low-flow faucets and low-volatility paint. The Kapor plan received a score of 91 points, far above the minimum of 30 needed to qualify for a green designation.

The architect noted Kapor’s environmental largess but offered no details on the process. Neighbors and others are appealing the decision to approve the plans. Another architect, William Harrison who builds big houses for wealthy clients is quoted as defending the practice.

William H. Harrison, an Atlanta architect with a stable of wealthy clients, said penalizing people for building large houses could slow the adoption of green building practices. “The people who can afford the green technologies are going to want large houses,” he said. And those innovations, he said, will trickle down to smaller houses.

Mr. Harrison said that one of his clients is planning to build a 25,000-square-foot house in Los Angeles. But he opted out of the LEED system, Mr. Harrison said, when he learned that it was virtually impossible to get the highest LEED rating, known as platinum.

“He’s a billionaire, and he drives a Prius, for God’s sake,” said Mr. Harrison of his client. “He wants to do the right thing, environmentally. And now he’s being told, ‘You’re not good enough, because your house is too big.’ ”That, Mr. Harrison said, “is about socialism, not sustainability.”

Harrison misses the point entirely. It’s not at all about goodness or intention. It is simply a matter that such large houses create enough negative impacts to overcome the benefits by implementing green features whether according to the LEED or any other scoring system such as is used in Berkeley. What this has to do with socialism is beyond me.

In a 2005 article on the environmental impact of house size in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (Disclosure: I am one of the editors of this journal), the authors, Alex Wilson and Jessica Boehland say:

As house size increases, resource use in buildings goes up, more land is occupied, increased impermeable surface results in more storm-water runoff, construction costs rise, and energy consumption increases. In new, single-family houses constructed in the United States, living area per family member has increased by a factor of 3 since the 1950s. In comparing the energy performance of compact (small) and large single-family houses, we find that a small house built to only moderate energy-performance standards uses substantially less energy for heating and cooling than a large house built to very high energy-performance standards.

The article continues with data that show that the impact of house size is not linear; the impact increases disproportionately with size. A house twice the size of the average dwelling (about 2,500 square feet) would typical have about three times the impact based on the materials used in construction. Heating and cooling energy use depend on the details of the design and cannot be compared in a general way.

There’s another very important lesson here besides the substantive issues of the actual environmental impact. Green scores simply do not tell the whole or even enough of the environmental story to be meaningful. There is always an “other things being equal,” qualifier in the background. In this case it would be another 10,000 square foot house using less effective features. The billionaire’s Prius sounds good compared to a Hummer, but can’t come close to a bicycle’s low impact. I say this not as a value judgment on the choice of a large house, hybrid vehicle, or anything for that matter, but as a criticism of the utility of scores as valid indicators of greenness. Quantity or volume almost always trumps lower scores.

You can read more literary reviews of Solar in The Guardian, The New York Times and elsewhere, but these tend to neglect the intimate and acute satire with which McEwan portrays the clean tech business world and the business-climate-academic interface. Some of the reviews suggest that Beard is depicted as a loathsome one dimensional caricature consumed with lust and gluttony, though I found McEwan’s anti-hero, from whose perspective the entire book is narrated, more nuanced, even empathetic. Perhaps it’s a function of familiarity with this milieu and its cast of characters, with their heady mix of save-the-world rhetoric, ego and ambition. The glimpse of self-recognition yields chuckles and goosebumps.

Beard transforms from disgruntled climate skeptic to fervent advocate and cleantech entrepreneur when he acquires the work of a junior colleague, who meets an untimely death. The technology with which Beard and his business partner, Hammer, promise to save the world is artificial photosynthesis, using the sun’s energy to generate hydrogen directly from water. This is far from science fiction, but also in the book, as in reality, far from commercialization. The technology, at first glance, bears an uncanny resemblance to the artificial photosynthesis work of MIT’s professor Daniel Nocera and postdoctoral fellow Matthew Kanan, which was heralded in Technology Review as Solar Power Breakthrough. A close reading reveals the hype in the real cleantech world, as Nocera’s technology is actually an efficient process for using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. By itself, it has little to do with solar power, but combined with a fuel cell it can provide an energy storage system to complement intermittent renewables. Beard’s technology is closer to the approach being pioneered by Prof. Stuart Licht, a former colleague at my own institution, UMass-Boston.  

Solar gives an insider’s tour of the clean tech world, the politics of securing grants and subsidies, the lobbying, networking and namedropping. Hammer introduces “Beard to the tax break lawyers and accountants who knew the state legislature, the go-betweens in Washington who patrolled the vast and vague territory between commerce and politics, and people who had a line to the grant-givers of the big foundations, the venture capital types who knew people who knew friends of men like Vinod Khosla and Shai Agassi.”  Hammer is beset by doubts, financial and scientific – he worries about the growing wave of climate skepticism, but Beard cynically reassures him:

Here’s the good news. The UN estimates that already a third of a million people a year are dying from climate change. Even as we speak, the inhabitants of the island of Carteret in the South Pacific are being evacuated because the oceans are warming and rising. Malarial mosquitoes are advancing northwards across Europe… It’s a catastrophe. Relax!

Beard the rational, objective scientist has several amusing encounters with postmodern professors who argue that scientific claims are socially constructed stories. Just before Beard’s grand speech to an auditorium full of pension fund managers, he is accosted by a professor of urban studies and folklore interested in “the forms of narrative that climate science has generated. It’s an epic story, of course, with a million authors”. While the book gives a reasonably accurate and convincing account of climate change, the constructivist view is woven deftly into the fabric of the novel. Beard’s life is riddled with doubts concerning the history, memory, truth, and perception. He is almost ruined by the media framing him as a neo-Nazi for some awkward utterances. A central metaphor in the book is the legend of the unwitting thief, in which new information suddenly infuses a set of events with radically different meaning.

Beard’s speech to the pension fund managers is itself a masterful narrative, one from which I would not be surprised to find others plagiarizing liberally. Beard echoes Gordon Gecko from Wall Street, crafting a climate story in which “greed, for lack of a better word, is good”, and heroic entrepreneurs riding Schumpeterian stallions of creative destruction rescue the world from peak oil and climate change. Indeed, it is greed and ego that have energized Beard to develop his photosynthesis technology into a business start-up. The project is certainly more likely to save the planet than the Arctic retreat for artists and musicians he visits, whose participants descend into a tragedy of the commons as they steal from the limited supply of outdoor clothing. Here is the speech:

The planet is sick.  Curing the patient is a matter of urgency and is going to be expensive – perhaps as much as two percent of the global GDP, and far more if we delay the treatment.  I am convinced, and I have come here to tell you, that anyone who wishes to help with the therapy, to be part of the process and invest in it, is going to make very large sums of money, staggering sums.  What’s at issue is the creation of another industrial revolution.  Here is your opportunity.  Coal and then oil have made our civilization, they have been superb resources, lifting hundreds of millions of us out of the mental prison of rural subsistence.  Liberation from the daily grind coupled with our innate curiosity has produced in a mere two hundred years and exponential growth of our knowledge base.  The process began in Europe and the US, has spread in our lifetime to parts of Asia, and now to India and China and South America, with Africa yet to come.  All our other problems and conflicts conceal this obvious fact – we barely understand how successful we have been.

So of course we should salute our own inventiveness.  We are very clever monkeys.  But the engine of our industrial revolution has been cheap, accessible energy.  We would have got nowhere without it.  Look how fantastic it is.  A kilogram of gasoline contains roughly 13000 watt-hours of energy.  Hard to beat.  But we want to replace it.  So what’s next?  The best electrical batteries we have store about 300 watt-hours of energy per kg.  And that’s the scale of our problem – 13000 against 300.  NO contest!  But unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of choice.  We have to replace that gasoline quickly for three compelling reasons. First and simplest, the oil must run out. No-one knows exactly when, but there’s consensus that we’ll be at peak production at some point in the next five to fifteen years. …Second,, many oil producing areas are politically unstable, and we can no longer risk our levels of dependence. Third, and most crucially, burning fossil fuels, putting carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, is steadily warming the planet. The basic science is in. We either slow down, and then stop, or face an economic and human catastrophe on a grand scale within our grandchildren’s lifetime.

And this brings us to the central question, the burning question. How do we slow down and stop while sustaining our civilization and continuing to bring millions out of poverty? Not by being virtuous…this matter has to move beyond virtue. Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilization, it’s a weak force. Nations are never virtuous. For humanity en masse, greed trumps virtue. So we have to welcome into our solutions the ordinary compulsions of self-interest, and also celebrate novelty, the thrill of invention, the pleasures of ingenuity and cooperation, the satisfaction of profit. Oil and coal are energy carriers, and so, in abstract form, is money.  And the answer to that burning question is of course exactly where that money, your money, has to flow- to affordable clean energy.

Imagine if I were standing in front of you 250 years ago – you, a collection of country gentlemen and ladies – predicting the coming of the first industrial revolution and telling  you to invest in coal and iron, steam engines, cotton mills, and, later, railways.  Or a century or so later, with the invention of the internal combustion engine, I foresaw the growing importance of oil and urged you to invest in that.  Or 100 years on, in microprocessors, in personal computers, and the Internet and the opportunities they offered.  So here, ladies and gentlemen, is another such moment.  Do not be tempted by the illusion that the world economy and its stock exchanges can exist apart from the world’s natural environment.  Our planet, Earth, is a finite entity.  You have the data in front of you, you have the choice – the human project must be safely and cleanly fueled or it fails, it sinks.  You, the market, either rise to this and get rich along the way, or you sink with all the rest.  We are on this rock together, you have nowhere else to go…

The revolution has begun. The market will be even more lucrative than coal or oil because the world economy is many times bigger  and the rate of change is faster. Colossal fortunes will be made. The sector is seething with vitality, invention – and, above all, growth.

It has thousands of unquoted companies positioning themselves with new techniques. Scientists, engineers, designers, are pouring into the sector. There are logjams in the patent offices and supply chains. This is an ocean of dreams, of realistic dreams of making hydrogen from algae, and aviation fuel from genetically modified microbes, electricity out of sunlight, wind, tides, waves, cellulose, household waste, of scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air and turning it into a fuel, of imitating the secrets of plant life.

Imagine we came across a man at the edge of a forest in a heavy rainfall.  This man is dying of thirst.  He has an ax in his hand and he is felling the trees in order to suck sap from the trunks.  There are a few mouthfuls in each tree.  All around him is devastation, dead trees, no birdsong, and he knows the forest is vanishing.  So why doesn’t he tip back his head and drink the rain?  Because he cuts trees expertly, because he has always done it this way, because the kind of people who advocate rain-drinking he considers suspicious types.

The rain is our sunlight.  An energy source drenches our planet, drives its climate and its life.  It falls on us in a constant stream, a sweet rain of photos.  A single photon striking a semiconductor releases an electron and so electricity is born, as simple as that, right out of sunbeams.  Less than an hour’s worth of all of the sunlight falling on the earth would satisfy the whole world’s energy needs for a year.  A fraction of our hot deserts could power our civilization.  No one can own sunlight, no one can privatize or nationalize it.  Soon everyone will harvest it, from rooftops, ships’ sails, from kids’ backpacks.

Some of the poorest countries in the world are solar-rich. We could help them by buying their megawatts. And domestic consumers will love making power out of sunlight and selling it to the grid. It’s primal. Basic science, the market, and to grave situation would determine that this is the future — logic, not idealism, compels it. We pass through a mirror, everything is transformed, the old paradigm makes way for the new.

Yet I was skeptical regarding the business model. I know that intense competition and large scale production have been driving down solar prices in the last couple of years, but I’ve still been reading total installation costs of about $6-8 per peak watt (pW). Yet it seems that prices are now even lower than that. Solarbuzz, a solar consultancy, reports that average retail module prices in May 2010 have fallen to around $4/pW, but that the lowest cost multi-crystalline modules are now $1.74/pW retail, while mono-crystalline is $2.07/pW. Inverters, balance of system, and installation add another $2.50 to $3/pW. Installation on parking canopies rather than rooftops adds another $1/pW or so.

Even with total installed costs as low as $4.50 to $5, and a 30% credit on capital costs thanks to the generosity of US taxpayers, the numbers still didn’t add up. What makes Apogee’s business model possible is the value of solar renewable energy credits (SRECs). US states that enact renewable portfolio standards (RPS) have created local markets for renewable energy credits, allowing utilities to meet their requirements by buying RECs. In order to stimulate solar, a number of states have created “solar carve outs”, i.e. a separate standard for solar energy with its own SRECs, which have initial market prices in the 30-60c/kWh range – Massachusetts has set a floor price of 30c/kWh (astute readers will observe that SREC is an anagram of SERC, our very own center for Center for Sustainable Enterprise and Regional Competitiveness here at UMass-Boston).  

This is a massive subsidy indeed, and raises significant policy issues. Even for those who are fervent advocates of renewable energy, does it make sense to provide such huge subsidies to solar, when modest subsidies for land-based wind power of around 2-3c/kWh serve to make it grid competitive in many regions? Would the money be better spent on research and development, and the development of local workforce skills and business clusters? Subsidizing installation at the retail level will generate a few local jobs for developers, electricians and installers, but the panels will mostly be imported. There is a serious risk of consumer backlash when people realize the extent of the subsidies and the impact on their utility bills – just as the proposed cost of offshore wind power from Cape Wind has shocked even some of its supporters. Perhaps these subsidies are needed to jump start commercial scale installations and overcome industry inertia and perceived risks, but in themselves they also constitute a barrier to scaling up new renewables beyond a few percent of grid supply.

In return for discussing the business and economics of SRECs, I promised to give David Weinberg a chance to explain Apogee’s business pitch, so here it is:

Imagine that you’re a business owner or a University president in the Northeastern United States.  Over the past 10 years you’ve watched your cost of electricity soar 69%, and it could double in the next ten years.  Compete with China?  You can’t even compete with most states here at home.  Those high prices will crimp your growth and extinguish your profits.  In fact, if you stay in the northeast, you probably won’t survive another 10 years.

What if you could use solar energy to cut your energy bill 30-40%?  “No way”, you’d respond.  “Not enough sun” or “too expensive to install upfront”. New England averages 4.3 hours of sun per day, almost double that of Germany, the world leader in solar power. As to the upfront cost, what if it didn’t exist? If there is no upfront cost and the solar power costs 30-40% less than what you are currently paying, would that be attractive?

Apogee Solar is a solar energy developer in New Jersey, Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, who harnesses the power of Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs) to lower your energy bill. An SREC is an energy tariff that is amortized over everyone’s bill, so it is a tiny part of the rate base.  Every megawatt of energy that your installed system produces earns me one credit.  I can then take that credit and sell it into the marketplace.  The sale of the credit is what allows me to finance your system with no upfront costs.

How much are SRECs worth?  That depends on where you are located.  New Jersey has a current price of around $650 per credit.  Massachusetts has set a yearly floor of $300 per credit.  Energy systems are designed so the credits depreciate over time.  A system that is 10 years old will generate SRECs that are less valuable than a system that is two years old.  What does that mean to energy prices?  In Massachusetts and New Jersey I can negotiate a starting electricity price of 9 cents/kWh, and in 15 years your price will still be below 13c/kWh. At the end of 15 years you own the system, so for the next 15 years your cost of power is free.

Solar installations are financed with what are called ‘Power Purchase Agreements’ (PPAs).  I like to call them solar mortgages, except that your property and assets remain free and clear.  The collateral for the financing are the generated SRECS.  Like any mortgage, only businesses or universities that are in good health will qualify. You might be wondering if you can finance an installation on your own to save even more money.  That depends on how much time and effort you want to spend.  Because of the variability of SREC prices, most commercial banks won’t finance them. Assuming that you could find financing, you would then have to identify the right solar modules, the right inverters, hire the right design firm, hire a really good union electrical installation firm, and then take your system through the local planning and zoning board for approval. After you have your system installed, you’d have to maintain it. Apogee brings together the whole package: finance, design, installation and maintenance. We save you money and help the planet.

On Saturday night, May 1^st, UMass-Boston celebrated the launch of our new Center for Sustainable Enterprise and Regional Competitiveness (disclosure – I’m the director) and other sustainability initiatives on campus with a gala dinner featuring keynote speaker Gina McCarthy, a graduate of UMass-Boston and currently the EPA’s Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation. In this capacity, she directs EPA’s policy on climate change.

Gina McCarthy gave a powerful and passionate talk, highlighting the EPA’s achievements on clean air, energy efficiency, and climate change, while pointing to the challenges ahead. She also discussed the important role played by UMass-Boston in her own education and now in training the next generation of environmental leaders. Ms. McCarthy put climate policy in the context of the huge oil spill near New Orleans and federal approval last week for the Cape Wind project. More than two hundred people attended the event in the new Campus Center, which offers stunning views over the Boston harbor.

In order to promote “Green Education for the Next Generation,” UMass Boston also hosted a panel discussion on Friday April 30^th focusing on the prospects for “green jobs,” clean-tech regional competitiveness, the role of “green education” and the value of collaborations among universities, business, and government agencies.

Giving presentations were:

David Cash, Assistant Secretary for Policy in the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs

Daniel Moon, President and Executive Director of the Environmental Business Council of New England

Kathleen J. Freeman, Director Environmental Affairs, NSTAR Corporation

Robbin Peach, Executive Director of the Collaborative Institute for Oceans, Climate and Security

R. J. Lyman, partner at Goodwin Procter

The event was moderated by Dr. Robert Massie, former director of Ceres and founder of the Global Reporting Initiative. Robbin Peach showed a video about the climate-security connection.

And while we are into shameless self-promotion, here I am on New England Cable News last week for Earth Day, talking about green jobs and green education!

By David L. Levy

Progress toward building a coalition supportive of aggressive action on climate change seems to have become mired in spring mud. In an earlier posting, I discussed the sudden change in climate in the wake of “climategate”, the cold winter in Europe and the US, the defection of BP and other companies from the US Climate Action Partnership, Scott Brown’s upset senate victory in Massachusetts senate, and rise in climate skepticism. Recently the mass media have begun to look at the reasons for the rise in skepticism. Ever aware of their own importance, they have turned the spotlight on the gulf between weather forecasters, who are mostly meteorologists, and climatologists. Even the Colbert Report joined the fun with a “weather forecaster vs. climatologist” confrontation.

A Columbia Journalism Review article on this topic cites an Emory University survey of  TV meteorologists in which 29% of respondents said that global warming was a scam, and only 24% percent believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century. A more recent piece in the New York Times pointed to a study in the January 2009 newsletter of the American Geophysical Union, which found that while nearly 90% of some 3,000 climatologists who responded agreed that there was evidence of human-driven climate change, only 64% of meteorologists agreed with the statement.

In trying to explain this gap, most of the blame has been placed on the lack of expertise and scientific training of weather forecasters, few of whom have a graduate degree. Joe Romm commented that: “Asking a meteorologist to opine on the climate is like asking your family doctor what the chances are for an avian flu pandemic in the next few years or asking a mid-West sheriff the prospects for nuclear terrorism.” My business school background, however, leads me to ponder explanations that are rooted in some of the more subtle mechanisms of organizations and institutions.   

This divide matters because weather forecasters have far greater media access and influence over the public than climatologists, due to the nature of their professions. Joe Bastardi is an influential meteorologist with AccuWeather who frequently editorializes against climate change on the television channel. Anthony Watts, a retired California weather forecaster, runs the popular climate-skeptic blog Watts up with That?, though he also claims to drive an electric car and have solar panels on his roof. Climatologists, by contrast, are mostly based in universities and research centers, and their highly technical publications in academic journals are difficult for non-specialists to comprehend and receive little press coverage. Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change and an author of a June 2008 on public opinion, argued that “Most people are not interested in digging through the scientific literature, and in that situation trust becomes an enormous factor.” And the study showed 66% of people trusted television weather reporters on climate change, but very few knew any climate scientists personally.

My research on the oil and auto industries’ responses to climate change in Europe and the U.S. sparked my interest in the role of scientists in shaping corporate attitudes and strategies (see my academic papers on the oil industry with Prof. Ans Kolk  and the auto industry with Prof. Sandra Rothenberg). We found that American companies, who had been subject to stringent clean air regulation for years, tended to rely on their internal corporate scientists as their primary source of information on climate change. Indeed, they sometimes served as corporate filters for external information, selectively disseminating and commenting on climate science reports. These corporate scientists were frequently experts in atmospheric pollution and smog formation, not climate change, but were seen as the most accessible and reliable sources of information. In Europe, by contrast, the oil and auto companies didn’t have strong internal expertise, so the companies would rely on independent university-affiliated scientists, who usually hewed closely to the mainstream IPCC view.

Almost all the atmospheric scientists with major American companies were climate skeptics, with the notable exception of Ruth Reck at General Motors, who worked tirelessly in the mid-1980s, and against considerable internal resistance, to put climate on the agenda. The tendency for corporate scientists to be climate skeptics is a complex phenomenon. As with the TV weather forecasters, they have expertise in a closely related fields, but not specifically in climatology, perhaps lending them more trust and credence than warranted.  Unlike TV forecasters, many corporate scientists do have doctorates. After many conversations, my impression is that the key issue is not competence but the subtle socialization processes that affect a scientist’s views and very identity. As air quality scientists, part of their job is to interpret the evidence in a way that minimizes impacts on the environment and human health. They are colleagues with business managers who have traditionally seen environmental regulation as a threat to profits, even to the American way of life.

This doesn’t mean that the scientists deliberately distort the science – atmospheric and climate science does have areas of uncertainty and conflicting opinion. People working in fossil-fuel dependent sectors (and not just the scientists) shape their interpretations to fit organizational interests and norms, and to gain acceptance from colleagues. Psychologists have long observed that people are averse to “cognitive dissonance”, holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. Similarly, conflict between our behavior and ideas is uncomfortable. So people who work for a car or oil company can reduce their internal conflict, or dissonance, by embracing climate skepticism. In fact, in our research on the auto industry we found that the scientists and engineers working on advanced energy efficient or all electric vehicles were quick to embrace climate science – they could believe that climate change was a problem because they were working on a solution, and they were part of team who shared these views.

Weather forecasters and climate scientists cannot escape the institutional and social pressures we all face as workers in organizations and participants in wider professions. One doesn’t have to be a climate skeptic to appreciate that there are subtle pressures for conformity, as well as some financial carrots, within the global climate science community. Climategate has not undone the consensus on climate change, but it has cast some interesting light on the politics of science. While climate scientists are mostly employed in universities and research institutes, weather forecasters work in private media corporations, many of which are part of larger news and entertainment conglomerates.

Media companies don’t share the same interests as oil and coal companies, of course, but writers such as Robert McChesney and Ben Bagdikian have argued persuasively that the major media corporations tend to see their interests aligned with business in general, due to their dependency on advertising, ownership links, or directors’ ties, and we know where the US Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers stand on climate change, despite a few high profile defections from the former last year. This perception of interests in media firms tends to percolate down to the editorial level. Indeed, weather forecasters are more akin to journalists in their professional orientation than climate scientists, and Max Boykoff has written extensively about journalistic bias and media portrayals of climate change.

Weather forecasters are also predisposed to mistrust climate science because their understanding is rooted in meteorology rather than climatology. As the New York Times article notes, meteorologists know that weather is a chaotic system subject to the proverbial butterfly effect: its evolution is highly dependent on initial conditions. Weather forecasts rely on computer simulations that inherently have limitations on spatial resolution and starting conditions, so that their accuracy rapidly diminishes after five or six days. Meteorologists frequently express skepticism that climate models, which are based on very similar principles, can provide accurate information for the coming century. Yet meteorologists, with their short term orientation, also tend to assume that longer-term climate patterns are stable. These are not just individual biases, however – as meteorology has evolved as an organized profession, these views have become more institutionalized as a shared perspective.

Climatologists are working with phenomena that operate on a different scale, and are more concerned with the prediction of long-term patterns and mean temperatures than whether it will rain in Boston on a particular date in 2090. Climate scientists are quick to acknowledge that the climate system itself is chaotic over millennia, as greenhouse gases interact with longer term shifts in ocean circulation, precipitation, ice and forest cover. But the next few decades for climate scientists are like the next few days for weather forecasters – the short term for which models are useful, if not always accurate.