Our Fate Didn't Rest with the 2010 U. S. Senate

"Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?"

The quote above is by Jeremy Grantham, American investor and Chairman of the Board of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO), a Boston-based asset management firm. GMO is one of the largest managers of such funds in the world, having more than US $107 billion under management as at December 2009. Grantham is regarded as a highly knowledgeable investor in various stock, bond, and commodity markets.

As I've said before here, I think that big money likes to live in a reality based world. To the list we can add Beluga Shipping which has discovered it can save $300,000 per ship by transiting its container vessels over the melting Arctic. We can add the Pentagon, which broke with the Bush administration on the factual reality of climate change and now considers it serious enough to include its main strategic planning document, the Quadrennial Defense Review.

I could pile on other institutions (the CIA, the National Academy of Sciences) and governments (Saudi Arabia and Russia, of all places) and businesses (the property insurance sector and the C. I. C. E.) and power brokers (John Doerr, Bill Gates, James Hanson), but at the end of the day, if all the evidence of the kind that I find persuasive does not start to get a wider public audience, than it is a reasonable proposition that future generations will lose the Blue Planet.

For those who believe for whatever reason that we need to move to a low-carbon energy economy, none of the above answers the question, what now? 2010 has been a miserable year for climate watchers. First Copenhagen, now the U. S. Senate. There are opinions about where to go from here. Ill link to some of the more interesting and influential ones.

Bill McKibben, "How to Create a Real Climate Change Movement"

Shapiro, et al. "What did the Climate Bill Die?"

National Journal, "Can the U. S. Keep Up in the Clean Energy Race?"