Just when the climate change community was thinking things could get no zanier in terms of communicating effectively with the public on climate science …
… along comes word in late January that none other than Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has weighed in on the issue, laying blame at the door of the U.S. and other major industrialized countries for the problems of a warming planet.
With friends like that ….
The world’s most wanted (at least for many in the U.S.), in a tape on the Al-Jazeera television network, urged those concerned about warming to bring “the wheels of the American economy” to a standstill. Pointing to what he sees as risks of increased hunger, desertification, and global flooding, he called for “drastic solutions” to halt climate change, including a boycott of American products and end to reliance on the dollar as the world’s preeminent currency.” He said such a global effort would also hinder U.S. military efforts overseas.
Not all was lost, however, for those scanning recent communications messages on climate change.
James Murdoch Urges ‘Red-Blue-Green’ Approach
Some pointed to an unexpected James Murdoch column in The Washington Post, notable given his role as chairman and chief executive, Europe and Asia, of News Corporation, headed by Rupert Murdoch and home to the Fox cable network often portrayed as being hostile to climate change concerns.
Murdoch, in a column the Post headlined “Clean Energy Conservatives Can Embrace,” paid homage to past Republican leaders in less partisan times and their strong leadership on conservation issues.
“Conservative leadership is critical because the only way to get the job done is with broad bipartisan agreement,” Murdoch wrote in addressing pending climate change policy initiatives. He advocated a “Red-Blue-Green” initiative bring political strange bedfellows together on principles of 1) national security; 2) renewed economic strength based on a clean-energy future; 3) increased employment opportunities; 4) cleaner and healthier communities; and 5) competition rather than regulation.
Set aside differences on finite climate science details, Murdoch wrote, and simply “understand the benefits of limiting pollution and transforming our energy policies.”
“Previously conservation-minded conservatives are missing in the heated partisanship of today’s politics,” Murdoch wrote. “It’s time they found their voice again.”
Bill Gates: World ‘Distracted’ From What Matters Most
Another upbeat message came from another potentially influential voice seldom heard on the climate change issue - Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In an essay first published in The Gates Notes and picked-up by Huffingtonpost.com, Gates lamented that “the world is distracted from what counts on this issue [climate change] in a big way.”
To Gates, part of the confusion stems from the oft-repeated goals of a 30 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2025, to be followed by a goal of reducing by 80 percent by 2050. The latter goal is “the key one,” he wrote, “but we tend to focus on the first one since it is much more concrete.”
To meet that longer-term goal, “we are going to have to reduce emissions from transportation and electrical production in participating countries down to zero …. You clearly need innovation that leads to entirely new approaches to generating power.”
Getting to that 2025 goal of a 30 percent reduction would call for efficiency, “but you can never insulate your way” to the longer term goal “no matter what advocates of resource efficiency say,” he wrote. And forget about reducing consumption habits, even though behavioral changes still will matter, he argued: “Innovation in transportation and electricity will be the key factor.”
“If CO2 is important,” Gates wrote, “we need to make it clear to people what really matters - getting to zero. With that kind of clarity, people will understand the need to get to zero and begin to grasp the scope and scale of innovation that is needed.”
To Gates, talk of “renewable portfolios, efficiency, and cap and trade tends to obscure the specific things that need to be done.” He urges a distributed system of research and development, rewarding innovators and backed by “strong government encouragement.”
“There just isn’t enough work going on today to get us to where we need to go,” he concluded … in large part because people are distracted in the climate change debate from things that matter the most.