The TH Interview: Andy Revkin—Climate in the Obama Age
by Jacob Gordon, Nashville, TN 
on 12.18.08
Hopes are high for an Obama-led climate strategy, but when it comes to true details there are still more questions than answers. Andrew C. Revkin has stationed himself at the intersection of science, technology, and policy for two decades, watching closely and writing like a madman. Revkin’s reporting can be found in the New York Times, where he is a senior environment writer, as well as at Dot Earth. He also pops up regularly on TreeHugger around issues like geoengineering, climate taxes, and population growth. We asked Andy to shed some light on the Obama climate picture as it unfolds.
Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.
Full text after the jump.
TreeHugger: I want to talk about Barack Obama and what the incoming presidential administration is going to mean for the climate.
Via your blog, Dot Earth, you've elicited from your readers a list of suggestions on what the transition team should be working on. In the realm of climate, what have people spoken up about?
Andy Revkin: Well, there is a bunch of stuff coming in and I have more coming onto the blog even as we speak. White roofs, for example. Someone just told me white should be the new green as a way to cool places off and blunt some of the warming effect of growing CO2. A more reflective world is a better place, and cities still tend to be very dark.
The post I put up was about saving the planet on a budget. In other words, we know for several years to come at least we're in a time of great economic constraint and rebuilding and uncertainty, and that means whatever gets done has to be done with that in mind.
So, what can you do realistically? Some of the ideas I posed just to prime the pump were as simple as diverting a little bit more foreign assistance money, that's already flowing for communicable diseases, towards family planning; because one thing that got left out of the whole spectrum for a long time is population growth.
And the whole question of how much our influence on the planet will be limited in the next few decades, there's really two questions: how many and how much? How many people? How much stuff? (How much energy? How much food?)
So, if you can modulate either number you're doing something significant, and if you can do it on a budget, so much the better. And again, these aren't always directly related to, like, turning off a smokestack. There are other things you can do, and we have to be creative, I think.
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"Google blacks out the roof of the White House".
I just looked, and it does not. It appears to be a copper roof.
Congress is preparing to spend as much as a trillion dollars to jump start US economic activity over the next few years. Economists almost care less what this money is spent on as long as it gets into the hands of people who can spend it fast. This isn't a time to be thinking that economic problems will be forcing belt tightening: its exactly the opposite. Economic problems are forcing Congress to consider dramatically increasing expenditure.
Congress is preparing to spend as much as a trillion dollars to jump start US economic activity over the next few years. Economists almost care less what this money is spent on as long as it gets into the hands of people who can spend it fast. This isn't a time to be thinking that economic problems will be forcing belt tightening: its exactly the opposite. Economic problems are forcing Congress to consider dramatically increasing expenditure.
Jane Meyer also received the Chancellor award this year. Her friend Jill Abramson spoke in support at the ceremony. If its truth we are committed to, as Andy says, think about something Jill said in her speech: "But let's be honest. The press has squandered some of its moral authority..." She referred to the cheerleading for Bush on ramp up to the Iraq war people looking back see in the press coverage.
Now that the serious journalists handed their Chancellor award to a science reporter calling climate "the issue of our time", Andy is telling us he's ahead on it, and he tells us he started to realize as of 2002 that population is at the root of all our environmental problems, which makes climate a subset of the issue.
I'd say, let's be honest. The press squandered its authority to say they've got an original thought about this a long time ago. The "Our Common Future" report came out in 1987, fifteen years before Andy says he started to absorb its basic idea. This report was described as an emergency call from the UN, and it is also known as The Brundtland report. Andy could not possibly have missed it at the time. This was the report that popularized the term "Sustainable Development". Sustainable development was a strategy to cap the human population at ten billion, as the authors of that report saw the expansion of the human population as the root cause of all other environmental and economic problems.
One more comment:: Note the way Andy speaks about Vaclav Smil, the man who supposedly understands why the IPCC, MIT, IAC, etc didn't get it that carbon capture is too great of a task to undertake because they duh don't get that a molecule of C, i.e. carbon, expands in volume once it is burned and becomes CO2, so if captured and stored, a lot of infrastructure would have to be built. Smil, supposedly, "runs the numbers, and he's a truth teller" so Andy takes what he says as gospel. Fine. But what about someone like James Hansen, arguably of far greater stature and more central to the climate debate? How does Andy speak of him? Hansen is put into the category of "for every PhD, there is an equal and opposite PhD", to the point that Hansen writes to Andy this open letter:
"It does seem to me that you now go out of your way to make a “fair and balanced” summary of everything that I write, which is why I hesitate to send you things these days. Sometimes there are actually conclusions worth reporting without denigrating them down to speculations disputed by other experts."
This is why I'm studying Revkin these days a bit. Why is the supposedly best science writer in the US causing the best climatologist in the US to feel like this? Coinsider this: Andy's "cut to the chase" conclusion to his acceptance speech at the Chancellor award ceremony was that we will never read a global warming story about abrupt climate change. This is an "incremental" issue, and no matter what evidence comes in, for instance Hansen has an open letter John Holdren will be delivering to President Obama once he is inaugurated that tells Obama in no uncertain terms that new evidence has arrived with "startling" implications that the "relevant experts" consider makes the foundation of Obama's entire climate policy obsolete because it is now clear that there is already too much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. The US geological survey has published its Abrupt Climate Change report so great is the concern among many researchers that this subject be more urgently researched. But Andy knows, and writes, with certainty: this is an incremental issue that will continue to creep up on us for centuries. So its starting to look as if he isn't writing truth anymore. He's picking types like Smil to tout, and types who make him uncomfortable, such as Hansen, to cast doubt upon.