So what advice would you offer to the next generation?
One of the biggest differences between Homo sapiens and Canis lupus familiaris is that the latter is such a master of living in the present that, one assumes, the issue of worrying about the next generation is largely irrelevant. Definitely not so with us humans.
A few weeks back I was chatting to a good friend of mine, Peter McCarthy, whom I first met when I undertook a sales and marketing project for one his companies. That was many years ago but Peter and I have stayed in touch. One of the many attributes about Peter that I have admired over the years is his instinctive and thoughtful approach to entrepreneurism. Peter is still an active entrepreneur.
Anyway, Peter and I were talking about the sorts of qualities that enable some young people to take a risk-based entrepreneurial approach to life. Peter gave me the links to three videos that he thought were especially relevant to the notion of achieving success in life. So over the next few days I want to share those videos with you, dear reader. To me, these videos are, indeed, the essence of the messages that any person, especially those the wrong side of 60, would wish to leave in a bottle floating down the river of life.
So to the first. The address by Steve Jobs to the University of Stanford’s 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005. Already watched at the time of writing this by 12,690,731 persons!
Let me offer thanks to Resurgence Magazine for the written permission to reproduce this article in full, see terms at the end of the article. More background information about Robert Holden may be obtained from his own website and, finally, the Happiness Project website is here.
Robert Holden was at the forefront of ‘Happiness’ research. Here, he reflects on how that topic – initially laughed off the agenda – has gained credibility and explains why happiness is important
When I set up The Happiness Project, in 1994, the original goal was simple: talk happiness. In my training in psychology, philosophy and psychotherapy my teachers didn’t talk about happiness. We focused solely on the causes of unhappiness. This didn’t feel right to me. After all, how can you know what the causes are if you do not know what happiness is?
My goal, then, was to stimulate a conversation, so as to deepen our appreciation of what happiness is, its benefits, what enables it, and what blocks it. One conversation I focused on was the question of whether happiness is learned and whether it can be taught. To investigate this further, I created an eight-week happiness programme (which still runs today) called Be Happy.
Today happiness is a much more popular conversation than when The Happiness Project began. We are all talking more about happiness than ever before. The conversation is alive and well. Universities, hospitals, economists and governments publish new studies on happiness every week. So, what we have learned? And where does this conversation about happiness need to go next?
Let’s start with what happiness researchers refer to as ‘static happiness’. In a recent US study, it was found that when people in the 1940s were asked, “How happy are you?” the average score was 7.5 out of 10, whereas today the average score is 7.4 out of 10. In other words, in spite of all the ‘progress’ we appear to have made in the last 50 years or so, our happiness levels have remained mostly static. This tells me we need more conversations to clarify what real happiness is. For instance, we need to discern between pleasure, satisfaction and joy; and on my eight-week happiness programme we always begin by asking people, “What is your definition of a happy life?” and, “Are you living it?”
Happiness researchers have also found that most of us are only semi-happy. In 2006, I participated in a BBC documentary called The Happiness Formula. It reported, “the proportion of people saying they are ‘very happy’ has fallen from 52% in 1957 to just 36% today.” Clearly, research like this is questioning our most basic assumptions about what happiness is, and what we think will make us happy. That’s a good thing. An honest inquiry into happiness is an opportunity to rethink your life. It is one of the gifts of happiness.
Do you really know what makes you happy? This is the question both psychologists and economists are asking now. The evidence suggests we do not know. For instance, many of us believe that more money will make us happier. Some money does help, especially to cover the basics of food, rent, clothing, etc. After that, the correlation between more money and greater happiness is vague. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychology Association, and one of the founders of the Positive Psychology movement, concludes most forcibly: “The change in purchasing power over the last half century in the wealthy nations carries the same message: real purchasing power has more than doubled in the United States, France and Japan, but life satisfaction has changed not a whit.”
An inquiry into happiness challenges you to rethink everything. For example, almost everyone agrees with the idea that if their life circumstances improve, their levels of happiness will increase. This is the basis for almost every political and economic strategy the world over. And yet scientific research into happiness tells us this is wrong. New Zealand researcher Richard Kammann reports, “Objective life circumstances have a negligible role to play in a theory of happiness.” The same research concludes that your attitude and personal choices have a far greater influence on your happiness levels.
Another popular theory is that a better education will make our children happier. This has resulted in more tests for preschool children, more focus on regular exams, and more money spent on private education. Surely this increases happiness? “Sorry, Mom and Dad, neither education nor, for that matter, a high IQ paves the road to happiness,” states Claudia Wallis, who compiled a report called The New Science of Happiness for TIME magazine.
Happiness challenges us to rethink what is a “better education” for our children. I support the idea of happiness lessons for children at school, as pioneered at Wellington College by psychologist Nick Baylis and college Master Anthony Seldon [read his thoughts on this important topic in his article Stillness in Schools]. One opposing argument for happiness lessons at school is that children should not be “taught” happiness, but that they should be allowed to think about happiness for themselves. However, this is precisely the aim of these happiness lessons. The approach is inquiry, not dictation.
People who attend my happiness programme are always telling me, “I wish I’d learned this at school.” It’s time then for more conversations about happiness in school, and at home with our children. I encourage all my students and clients to talk more about happiness with their families. Why? Because one of the ways we evolve is through conversation. Drawing happiness with our children or talking about happiness with our partner helps us to clarify things, to heal, to come together, and ultimately to live a happier life.
And now, even governments and politicians want to talk about happiness. In Britain, David Cameron has commissioned a new survey called Measuring National Well-being. A new organisation called Action for Happiness [see what founder Richard Layard says about this new movement in his article A Better Way of Life] is working closely with the government to help create better social change in society. Again, some people are concerned that governments should not “tell us” how to be happy. I agree with this, but I don’t think governments are trying to tell us. Like us, they are simply trying to understand what happiness is, and how we can be happier.
In my latest book, Be Happy, I have written: “Your definition of happiness will influence every significant decision in your life.” It is essential, therefore, that individuals and governments alike keep happiness on the agenda because, more than ever before, humanity needs a better understanding of happiness. We have learned so much, about atoms and galaxies and other things, but we still do not understand ourselves very well; we still go to war too often, and there is still too much suffering.
I remain deeply committed to talking about happiness. Why? Because I believe that happiness is our true nature (it is the natural state of our Unconditioned Self), and for that reason happiness brings out the best in us, both individually and collectively. Happiness research has found a strong link between happiness and altruism, for instance. In a recent study by a Charities Commission, it was reported that the highest predictor of generous giving is not your income level: it’s your happiness level.
Good things come from real happiness. Happier people make better choices, which is good for society and the planet. Your happiness is a gift to the world. I believe this with all my heart.
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Robert Holden is director of The Happiness Project. His latest book, Be Happy;, is published by Hay House. For more about the eight-week happiness programme visit: http://www.happiness.co.uk
The Gift of Happiness features in Resurgence issue 269, November/December 2011.
This article is reprinted courtesy of Resurgence magazine – at the heart of earth, art and spirit. To buy Resurgence, read further articles online or find out about The Resurgence Trust, visit: http://www.resurgence.org
All rights to this article are reserved to Resurgence, if you wish to republish or make use of this work you must contact the copyright owner to obtain permission
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One final note from yours truly. Perhaps the art of happiness is yet another thing we can learn from dogs!
A delightful trawl by Neil Kelly through the call centre industry.
Picture by Neil Kelly
Are there any more annoying phrases in the English language than “your call is important to us“, or “we are experiencing particularly high call volumes“?
In 2007 companies worldwide spent some $280 billion on outsourced call-centre services, according to NASSCOM, a call-centre trade group in Delhi. Much of India’s call-centre industry, which employs roughly 300,000 agents, is located outside the ring road that encircles Bangalore, in a string of smart new business parks with tidy lawns and private security. Were it not for the stray dogs, a visitor could be forgiven for mistaking the area for Silicon Valley.
Meanwhile in Australia …
Meanwhile …… back in Wales in the United Kingdom … listen to this call centre handling a complaint from an ASDA customer – listen right to the end!
Thanks to David from neatorama.com I was able to put together a medley of hold music and without resorting to The Four Seasons! Hope to have The Top Twenty Hold Music Songs out in time for Christmas.
Finally, you may be interested in reading Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth about Bullshit by Laura Penny which is available as a free eBook here.
In a sense this piece today connects with the conclusions from my review of David Kauders’ new book The Greatest Crash; that we are transitioning into a new era.
That’s why I was fascinated to come across a long essay about Herbert Marshall McLuhan written by Michael Valpy and published in the The Globe and Mail last July.
Let me quote some extracts from that article to illustrate why I made the connection with my book review.
The University of Toronto professor of English credited with foreseeing the Internet 30 years before it was invented and broadcasting scores of ideas about how electronic communications media was changing the way humans think has been redeemed from labels of McLuhanacy and psuedo-scientific charlatanism.
His work no longer is described, as it was in one erudite journal of the 1970s, as “a hoax so gigantic that it shows every sign of becoming an international intellectual scandal.”
Later on in the article,
Deciding recently to pay a visit to the McLuhan coach house, she wrote: “To be perfectly honest, I had never heard of McLuhan until I moved into residence at SMC, and accidentally stumbled into the book and media studies program. But as I quickly learned, Marshall McLuhan is kind of a big deal. You know that phrase that you hear everywhere: ‘The medium is the message?’ Yeah, that was McLuhan.”
And McLuhan’s problem – one of his problems – is that his message couldn’t escape his medium. As Douglas Coupland points out in a 2009 McLuhan biography, the wonderful, whimsical, boundlessly optimistic and imaginative sixties society that embraced him and lapped up his ideas morphed into the gloom of a change-fatigued seventies society that tired of hearing from him. Yet the brand remained strong. “You know that phrase that you hear everywhere: ‘The medium is the message?’” Ms. Kellogg asks us. “Yeah, that was McLuhan.”
Think of his intellectual history as a journey between two mountain peaks passing through a shadowed valley.
When one thinks of the power of the many new tools we lump under the title ‘social media’ then it’s easy to think that the way that humans are now communicating will have profound implications. Even this humble Blog was read by over 31,000 in the month of October. Back to the article,
McLuhan believed that each new technology created a new human environment and thus a new way of thinking. The medium-is-the-message meant that the content of electronic media is insignificant; it is the medium itself that has the greater impact on the environment. In other words, it wasn’t what we were seeing on TV that was important; it was the fact that we were watching TV (and not doing other things) that altered our brains.
And because, as Prof. Francis points out, McLuhan saw humans as essentially communicative animals, he believed it was the technologies of communication that were primary in shaping who we were, what we thought, and how we acted, with effects that often were subliminal and therefore not recognized.
Finally, the article concludes thus,
To truly understand McLuhan and his ideas, says Prof. Scheffel-Dunand, students have to read him.
Most students of McLuhan today, she says, read scholars who write about McLuhan rather than read McLuhan himself. Which is a mistake, she says, because McLuhan wrote as a poet: he wrote metaphorically, aphoristically, he wrote in what he called “mosaics.”
Biographer Philip Marchand agrees. “My suggestion for students is to begin with the articles written by McLuhan – ‘Acoustic Space’ and ‘The Effect of the Printed Book on the language of the 16th century’ and a couple others that appear in the anthology entitled Explorations in Communication. These articles are lucid, comprehensible introductions to McLuhan’s thought.”
To rejoin UpbeaT blogger Emily Kellogg on her coach house tour: “I don’t want to bore you, dear readers, but I just can’t help gushing. I dig this stuff. These kind of conversations, are the things that make an undergraduate degree worth pursuing. They’re the ones that give you an adrenalin rush because you’re thinking so quickly – and your brain kind of feels like a trapeze artist jumping from idea to idea.
There’s also something innately cool about having an intellectual conversation that ranges from iPhones to Heidegger in five seconds flat in the place that housed Marshall McLuhan as he wrote the books that revolutionized the field of media research.”
Ms. Kellogg: 2011 medium of McLuhan’s message.
Michael Valpy is a freelance writer based in Toronto.
Regular readers know that I do try and write something more or less of substance for each day, Monday to Friday. But today, Monday, it is already well into the afternoon and there is nothing yet written for tomorrow. The reason is that I am completing a lengthy review of David Kauders’ fascinating book, The Greatest Crash. Part One to be published on Wednesday, 23rd.
So thanks to Neil Kelly’s delightful way of seeing life, thought you would enjoy this!
Big thank you to Dennis L. for forwarding this video
Will say no more – just watch
And if that gives you a buzz, then you might want to read a Post that I published on the 30th July Free as a Bird reproduced in full below,
The wonderful combination of paragliding and flying with hawks.
Thanks to Dan Gomez for passing me a short video about this amazing activity. It was a matter of moments to find out the background. But first a picture.
Copyright Scott Mason
There’s a full description of the history of parahawking, as it is called, on WikiPedia.
Parahawking is a unique activity combining paragliding with elements of falconry. Birds of prey are trained to fly with paragliders, guiding them to thermals for in-flight rewards and performing aerobatic maneouvres.
Parahawking was developed by British falconer Scott Mason in 2001. Mason began a round-the-world trip in Pokhara, Nepal, where many birds of prey – such as the griffon vulture, steppe eagle andblack kite – can be found. While taking a tandem paragliding flight with British paraglider Adam Hill, he had the opportunity to see raptors in flight, and realized that combining the sport of paragliding with his skills as a falconer could offer others the same experience. He has been based in Pokhara ever since, training and flying birds during the dry season between September and March.
The team started by training two black kites, but have since added an Egyptian vulture and a Mountain hawk-eagle to the team. Only rescued birds are used – none of the birds has been taken from the wild.
There’s an interesting website for those that want to take a closer including more details about Scott Mason and his team here.
Not too long ago, I came across the website The Big Think. It tickled my curiosity to the extent that I subscribed. On November 6th an essay was published with the wonderful title of ‘Consciousness: The Black Hole of Neuroscience‘. Couldn’t resist that! Here’s how that essay started,
What’s the Big Idea?
“By the word ‘thought’ (‘pensée’) I understand all that of which we are conscious as operating in us.” –Renee Descartes
The simplest description of a black hole is a region of space-time from which no light is reflected and nothing escapes. The simplest description of consciousness is a mind that absorbs many things and attends to a few of them. Neither of these concepts can be captured quantitatively. Together they suggest the appealing possibility that endlessness surrounds us and infinity is within.
That last sentence jumped off the page at me – hence me using it as the title of this post.
If this interests you at all, then do read the full item. That closes like this …
Hirsch sees it more practically. Though functional imaging has not explained where perception comes from, it has important applications for unconscious patients. “The boundaries have been broken a little bit, clinically,” she says. “As we study patients with disorders of consciousness, we can probe their levels of awareness in ways that other traditional ways of asking them to respond.”
It’s no different than any other aspect of the brain that we cannot presently explain, she says:
For example, we don’t understand how the brain creates colors. That’s a perception that is very private – I don’t know that your perception of blue is like my perception of blue, for example. Smells are another one. I don’t know that your perception of the smell of an orange is like mine. These are the hard problems of neuroscience and philosophy that we haven’t made a great deal of progress on.
What do you think? Is the distinction between “hard problems” and “soft problems” useful, or reductive? Does the brain create consciousness? Will we ever empirically understand where it comes from or how it works?
But that’s not the end of it. Browsing the comments revealed a link to the Blog called NeuroLogica Blog. The author is Steven Novella, MD. Here’s a flavour of Steven’s competencies.
The NeuroLogicaBlog covers news and issues in neuroscience, but also general science, scientific skepticism, philosophy of science, critical thinking, and the intersection of science with the media and society.
Dr. Novella also contributes every Sunday to The Rogues Gallery, the official blog of the SGU, every Monday to SkepticBlog, and every Wednesday to Science-Based Medicine, a blog dedicated to issues of science and medicine.
I couldn’t resist doing a search on Dr. Novella’s blog using the search term ‘consciousness’. What a rich vein! Here’s just one example of what came to light,
Neuroscience research has been increasingly fleshing out the fascinating and complex relationship between the subconscious processing of the brain and our conscious awareness. We all labor under the illusion that our decisions, feelings, and behaviors are all conscious. When we do something, it seems, it is because we wanted to do it. We are very good, in fact, at retrofitting a logical explanation for why we consciously did something.
But much of our brain’s decision making occurs at a subconscious level. When presented with a choice various parts of our brains make a calculation – processing the choice, weighing varying factors based upon some neuro-algorithm, and then present that choice to our conscious mind (the global workspace, if you accept this hypothesis). Research shows that if we change the subconscious algorithm, by suppressing, for example, one part of the brain, the decision-making process is altered. We are not aware of this, and we still are under the illusion that the decision was completely conscious.
Strongly recommend that you read the article in full; it is deeply fascinating. And then laugh out loud, as I did, when you read the first comment made to that article,
I find this fascinating even though I am not conciously aware of why!
A quick piece of web research turned up a quote by the famous physicist, Richard P. Feynman, as follows,
“In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case
in human affairs.“
I thought the quote an apt introduction to an article written by Bill McKibben of 350 org fame, recently published on Tom Engelhardt’s TomDispatch blog. As always, a vote of thanks to Tom for giving me permission to reproduce his pieces.
The topic is the Keystone XL pipeline, recently sidelined by Pres. Obama and now generating some interesting musings about the political strategy that may be at play here. I have written previously about this pipeline and a quick search from the home page of Learning from Dogs using the search terms ‘keystone pipeline’ will find these articles.
Do read the full article from Bill McKibben. Despite it’s length it’s full of thought-provoking ideas. As Tom Engelhardt says in the closing sentences of his introduction, “Mark my words on this one: sooner or later, Americans are going to wake up to climate change, just as they have this year on the issue of inequality, and when they do, watch out. There will be political hell to pay.Tom”
Posted by Bill McKibben at 8:07am, November 15, 2011.
What’s the biggest story of the last several weeks? Rick Perry’s moment of silence, all 53 seconds’worth? The Penn State riots after revered coach JoePa went down in a child sex abuse scandal? The Kardashian wedding/divorce? The European debt crisis that could throw the world economy into a tailspin? The Cain sexual harassment charges? The trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor?
The answer should be none of the above, even though as a group they’ve dominated the October/November headlines. In fact, the piece of the week, month, and arguably year should have been one that slipped by so quietly, so off front-pages nationwide and out of news leads everywhere that you undoubtedly didn’t even notice. And yet it’s the story that could turn your lifeand that of your children and grandchildren inside out and upside down.
On the face of it, it wasn’t anything to shout about — just more stats in a world drowning in numbers. These happen to have been put out by the U.S. Department of Energy and they reflected, as an Associated Press headline put it, the “biggest jump ever seen in global warming gases.” In other words, in 2010, humanity (with a special bow to China, the United States, and onrushing India) managed to pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than at any time since the industrial revolution began — 564 million more tons than in 2009, which represents an increase of 6%.
According to AP’s Seth Borenstein, that’s “higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.” He’s talking about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which is, if anything, considered “conservative” in its projections of future catastrophe by many climate scientists. Put another way, we’re talking more greenhouse gases than have entered the Earth’s atmosphere in tens of millions of years.
Consider as well the prediction offered by Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency: without an effective international agreement to staunch greenhouse gases within five years, the door will close on preventing a potentially disastrous rise in the planet’s temperature. You’re talking, that is, about the kind of freaky weather that will make October’s bizarre snowstorm in the Northeast look like a walk in the park. (That storm had all the signs of a climate-change-induced bit of extreme weather: New York City hadn’t recorded an October snowfall like it since the Civil War and it managed to hit the region in a period of ongoing warmth when the trees hadn’t yet had the decency to lose their leaves, producing a chaos of downed electrical wires.) And don’t get me started on what this would mean in terms of future planetary hot spells or sea-level rise.
Honestly, if we were sane, if the media had its head in the right place, this would have been screaming headlines. It would have put Rick Perry and Herman Cain and the Kardashians andItaly and Greece and Michael Jackson’s doctor in the shade.
The only good news — and because it unsettled the politics of the 2012 election, it did garner a few headlines — was that the movement Bill McKibben and 350.org spearheaded to turn back the tar-sands pipeline from Hades (or its earthly global-warming equivalent, which is Alberta, Canada) gained traction in our Occupy Wall Street moment. Think of it as a harbinger. Mark my words on this one: sooner or later, Americans are going to wake up to climate change, just as they have this year on the issue of inequality, and when they do, watch out. There will be political hell to pay.Tom
Obama’s Positive Flip and Romney’s Negative Flop
Is Global Warming an Election Issue After All?
By Bill McKibben
Conventional wisdom has it that the next election will be fought exclusively on the topic of jobs. But President Obama’s announcement last week that he would postpone a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until after the 2012 election, which may effectively kill the project, makes it clear that other issues will weigh in — and that, oddly enough, one of them might even be climate change.
The pipeline decision was a true upset. Everyone — and I mean everyone who “knew” how these things work — seemed certain that the president would approve it. The National Journalruns a weekly poll of “energy insiders” — that is, all the key players in Washington. A month to the day before the Keystone XL postponement, this large cast of characters was “virtually unanimous” in guaranteeing that it would be approved by year’s end.
Transcanada Pipeline, the company that was going to build the 1,700-mile pipeline from the tar-sands fields of Alberta, Canada, through a sensitive Midwestern aquifer to the Gulf of Mexico, certainly agreed. After all, they’d already mowed the strip and prepositioned hundreds of millions of dollars worth of pipe, just waiting for the permit they thought they’d bought with millions in lobbying giftsand other maneuvers. Happily, activists across the country weren’t smart enough to know they’d been beaten, and so they staged the largest civil disobedience actionin 35 years, not to mention ringing the White House with people, invading Obama campaign offices, and generally proving that they were willing to fight.
No permanent victory was won. Indeed, just yesterday Transcanada agreed to reroute the pipeline in Nebraska in an effort to speed up the review, though that appears not to change the schedule. Still, we’re waiting for the White House to clarify that they will continue to fully take climate change into account in their evaluation. But even that won’t be final. Obama could just wait for an election victory and then approve the pipeline — as any Republican victor certainly would. Chances are, nonetheless, that the process has now gotten so messy that Transcanada’s pipeline will die of its own weight, in turn starving the tar-sands oil industry and giving a boost to the global environment. Of course, killing the pipeline will hardly solve the problem of global warming (though heavily exploiting those tar sands would, in NASA scientist James Hansen’s words, mean “game over for the climate.”)
In this line of work, where victories of any kind are few and far between, this was a real win. It began with indigenous activists, spread to Nebraska ranchers, and eventually turned into the biggest environmental flashpoint in many years. And it owed no small debt to the Occupy Wall Street protesters shamefully evicted from Zuccotti Park last night, who helped everyone understand the power of corporate money in our daily lives. That these forces prevailed shocked most pundits precisely because it’s common wisdom that they’re not the sort of voters who count, certainly not in a year of economic trouble.
In fact, the biggest reason the realists had no doubts the pipeline would get its permit, via a State Department review and a presidential thumbs-up of that border-crossing pipeline, was because of the well-known political potency of the jobs argument in bad economic times. Despite endless lazy reporting on the theme of jobs versus the environment, there were actually no net jobs to be had from the pipeline. It was always a weak argument, since the whole point of a pipeline is that, once it’s built, no one needs to work there. In addition, as the one study not paid for by Transcanada made clear, the project would kill as many jobs as it would create.
The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson finally demonstrated this late in the game with a fine report taking apart Transcanada’s job estimates. (The 20,000 jobs endlessly taken for granted assumed, among other stretches, that modern dance troupes would move to Nebraska, where part of the pipeline would be built, to entertain pipeline workers.) Still, the jobs trope remained, and you can be sure that the Chamber of Commerce will run 1,000 ads during the 2012 presidential campaign trying to hammer it home. And you can be sure the White House knew that, which was why it was such a tough call for them — and why the pressure of a movement among people whose support matters to them made a difference.
Let’s assume the obvious then: that one part of their recent calculations that led to the postponement decision might just be the suspicion that they will actually win votes thanks to the global-warming question in the next election.
For one thing, global warming denial has seen its apogee. The concerted effort by the fossil-fuel industry to underwrite scientific revision met its match last month when a team headed by Berkeley skeptic and prominent physicist Richard Muller–– with funding from the Koch Brothers, of all people — actually found that, what do you know, all the other teams of climate-change scientists were, um, right. The planet was indeed warming just as fast as they, and the insurance companies, and the melting ice had been insisting.
Still, scientific studies only reach a certain audience. Weird weather is a far more powerful messenger. It’s been hard to miss the record flooding along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and across the Northeast; the record drought andfires across the Southwest; the record multi-billion dollar weather disasters across the country this year; the record pretty-much everything-you-don’t-want across the nation. Obama certainly noticed. He’s responsible for finding the cash every time some other state submerges.
As a result, after years of decline, the number of Americans who understand that the planet is indeed warming and that we’re to blame appears to be on the rise again. And ironically enough, one reason may be the spectacle of all the tea-partying GOP candidates for the presidency being forced to swear fealty to the notion that global warming is a hoax. Normal people find this odd: it’s one thing to promise Grover Norquist that you’ll never ever raise taxes; it’s another to promise that you’ll defeat chemistry and physics with the mighty power of the market.
Along these lines, Mitt Romney made an important unforced error last month. Earlier in the primaries, he and Jon Huntsman had been alone in the Republican field in being open to the idea that global warming might actually be real. Neither wanted to do anything about it, of course, but that stance itself was enough to mark them as realists. It was also a sign that Romney was thinking ahead to the election itself, and didn’t want to be pinned against this particular wall.
In late October, however, he evidently felt he had no choice but to pin himself to exactly that wall and so stated conclusively: “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet.” In other words, he not only flip-flopped to the side of climate denial, but did so less than six months after he had said no less definitively: “I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course, but I believe the world’s getting warmer… And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that.” Note as well that he did so, while all the evidence, even some recently funded by the deniers, pointed the other way.
If he becomes the Republican presidential candidate as expected, this may be the most powerful weathervane ad the White House will have in its arsenal. Even for people who don’t care about climate change, it makes him look like the spinally challenged fellow he seems to be. But it’s an ad that couldn’t be run if the president had okayed that pipeline.
Now that Obama has at least temporarily blocked Keystone XL, now that his team has promised to consider climate change as a factor in any final decision on the pipeline’s eventual fate, he can campaign on the issue. And in many ways, it may prove a surprise winner.
After all, only people who would never vote for him anyway deny global warming. It’s a redoubt for talk-show rightists. College kids, on the other hand, consistently rank it among the most important issues. And college kids, as Gerald Seib pointedout in the Wall Street Journal last week, are a key constituency for the president, who is expected to need something close to the two-thirds margin he won on campus in 2008 to win again in 2012.
Sure, those kids care about student loans, which threaten to take them under, and jobs, which are increasingly hard to come by, but the nature of young people is also to care about the world. In addition, independent voters, suburban moms — these are the kinds of people who worry about the environment. Count on it: they’ll be key targets for Obama’s presidential campaign.
Given the economy, that campaign will have to make Mitt Romney look like something other than a middle-of-the-road businessman. If he’s a centrist, he probably wins. If he’s a flip-flopper with kooky tendencies, they’ve got a shot. And the kookiest thing he’s done yet is to deny climate science.
If I’m right, expect the White House to approve strong greenhouse gas regulations in the months ahead, and then talk explicitly about the threat of a warming world. In some ways it will still be a stretch. To put the matter politely, they’ve been far from perfect on the issue: the president didn’t bother to waste any of his vaunted “political capital” on a climate bill, and he’s opened huge swaths of territory to coal mining and offshore drilling.
But blocking the pipeline finally gave him some credibility here — and it gave a lot more of the same to citizens’ movements to change our world. Since a lot of folks suspect that the only way forward economically has something to do with a clean energy future, I’m guessing that the pipeline decision won’t be the only surprise. I bet Barack Obama talks on occasion about global warming next year, and I bet it helps him.
But don’t count on that, or on Keystone XL disappearing, and go home. If the pipeline story (so far) has one lesson, it’s this: you can’t expect anything to change if you don’t go out and change it yourself.
I want to write a little more about Neil but, first, let me show you what he passed to me a few days ago.
Ten years ago we had Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash, Bob Hope and Jimmy Saville; now we’ve no jobs, no cash, no hope and no one to fix it.
I’m aware that there will be many people who read this who may not be familiar with Jimmy Saville and his long-running television programme Jim’ll Fix It. Here’s a taste of that programme,
Sir Jimmy was an amazing man and natural performer. More on his life later. Let me turn back to Neil.
Those of you who are regular readers of Learning from Dogs will have seen over the last few months a number of entries from Devon friend of many years, Neil K. Neil’s surname is Kelly, no relation to the infamous Ned Kelly! Do a search from the home page of the Blog for more of Neil’s contribtions. Or try this one, The Story of Adam & Eve’s Pets.
Anyway, Neil has very kindly offered to contribute on a regular basis and, of course, I welcomed that with open arms. So a big ‘thank you’ from me and I’m sure many others will look forward to Neil’s contributions. Neil is updating his website, at which point I will ask Neil to say a little more about himself.
Learning from Dogs 