Climate Progress | |
| The insincerest form of denial Posted: 16 Aug 2009 07:50 AM PDT
As the Ecclesiastes quote suggests, coming up with original ideas has always been hard. Whenever I research something I am thinking about writing, I inevitably find that someone has already come up with the basic idea or phrase. More likely than not, if you think somebody took your idea, they probably just came up with it independently — or you both "borrowed" it, intentionally or not, from the actual originator. And so in general one should be very, very careful about of the word "plagiarize." Unless, of course, you are a global warming denier, in which case you should throw the word around casually because it is a very good way of smearing scientists, making the discussion coarser, and generally turning off the public from wanting to have anything to do with the climate issue — all key goals of the anti-scientific community. And this is all the more ironic because deniers are notorious for doing cut-and-paste jobs with the work of other deniers — see Memo to media: When the EPA ignores internal non-expert comments filled with falsehoods cut-and-paste from anti-science deniers, that isn't "suppressing a report." And why have you completely ignored a major scientific report revealing what a sham that "EPA report" is? After all, there is exceedingly little original scientific research that supports the position that humans are not the dominant cause of current global warming. Also, the deniers understand the central principle of rhetoric that the most effective messaging strategy is to endlessly repeat a few key points (see "Why scientists aren't more persuasive, Part 1"). So the main tactic of the deniers has been to repeat the same long-debunked arguments over and over and over again — hence there is a remarkable sameness to their attacks. If you follow the climate blogosphere or read the comments section of this CP post, then you know that there has been a big push by the deniers and delayers to smear a couple of the climate scientists who contributes to RealClimate. RealClimate has thoroughly debunked that notion here:
And Deep Climate has excellent post on the hypocrisy of the denier community on the issue: Deep Climate, you may recall, helped show that the EPA "report" by Alan Carlin was a cut and paste job. He points out in his new post:
I think it is important to be clear that just because somebody had posted some idea on a website before you write about that idea does not make your work plagiarism. Indeed, if that were the major criterion, I'm afraid essentially everybody on the blog0sphere would be committing plagiarism all the time. I certainly can't identify everybody who wrote about something before I do — and lots of people write about things that I have after I do. Jeez, look at all of the political and energy and climate analysis I have done on natural gas and the climate bill dating back to my June 3 post PClimate Action Game Changer art 1: Is there a lot more natural gas than previously thought? It now seems everybody is writing about it, often without mentioning me at all (see here). That's life, not plagiarism — especially since one can't attribute the "idea" to me in the first place. And don't get me started on — Another "Hell and High Water" — how annoying is that? — you can read the other author's explanation in the comments for how he came to publish a book after mine with the same title. Again, that's life, not plagiarism — especially since I didn't invent the title, even if I was the first to apply to this subject (I think). So it is quite inappropriate to use the word "plagiarism" without the smoking gun – indisputable evidence that the original author knew of the original work and lifted directly from it. Usually, the smoking gun exists in the form of multiple identical repeated passages, as in the Carlin case. I wrestled with whether or not to use the word in a more recent case, which had far fewer borrowed passages, and ultimately settled on the milder but clearly accurate "cut and paste" — Did Time magazine's Bryan Walsh cut-and-paste a faulty critique of Obama's clean energy efforts? In any case, it is now quite clear the RealClimate scientists did not commit plagiarism or anything close to it. All those who accused them of doing so should devote as much space to apologizing as they devoted to attacking those scientists. |
| Rebuilding America: A Policy Framework for Investment in Energy Efficiency Retrofits Posted: 15 Aug 2009 10:28 AM PDT This post by By Bracken Hendricks, Benjamin Goldstein, Reid Detchon, and Kurt Shickman was first published here.
Investments in building efficiency retrofits can simultaneously address the challenges of economic recovery, energy insecurity, and global warming by laying the foundation for sustained economic growth, driving demand in the construction and manufacturing sectors, and creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs across the country. Retrofitting our homes and businesses will also slash consumer energy expenditures, increase real estate values, and provide low-cost, near-term reductions in global warming pollution. Today, buildings account for 70 percent of all U.S. electricity consumption and 40 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Yet much of our housing and building stock is old, inefficient, and unnecessarily wasteful. While building codes and green building standards offer a tool for achieving deep improvements in energy use for new buildings, half of the buildings that will be standing in 30 years already dot our landscape. Any strategy to capture the benefits of energy efficiency in our "built environment" must include a program to retrofit our existing stock of residential, commercial and industrial structures. Deep building retrofits can cut energy use by 20 to 40 percent with proven techniques and off-the-shelf technologies. Best of all, they can pay for themselves from the energy they save. "Rebuilding America," a national program to cut energy waste in buildings, could reduce energy bills economy-wide by hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Energy efficiency retrofits also create good local construction jobs across the country at a time when well over a million construction workers sit idle in a sagging housing market. Demand for the manufactured products needed to retrofit buildings will also result in jobs by revitalizing the manufacturing sector and contributing to sustainable, long-term economic growth. The failures evident in the lack of a thriving nationwide marketplace for energy efficiency products and services include:
Congress and the Obama administration have a historic opportunity to ensure that investments made in weatherization and energy efficiency as part of the recently passed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act evolve into a sustainable clean-energy retrofit program and a linchpin of the American economy for years to come. Together, government policymakers can forge a strategy that pursues clean energy as a tool for local and regional economic development in states and communities nationwide, as well for U.S. global economic competitiveness. Retrofitting our houses and office buildings cannot be accomplished by public programs alone, however. Rebuilding our "built environment" will require changes in our real estate markets, new energy efficiency financing tools, more skilled labor to handle the construction and inspection work, and new private capital investments in the industries, infrastructure, and workforce required for energy efficiency. A coherent and coordinated national strategy for unleashing the market for energy efficiency is essential. "Rebuilding America" focuses on the challenge of dramatically increasing investment in residential and commercial building energy efficiency, with a goal of retrofitting 50 million buildings—40 percent of our building stock—by 2020. Reaching that goal will require $500 billion in public and private investment but will directly and indirectly generate approximately 625,000 sustained full-time jobs and save consumers $32 billion to $64 billion a year in energy costs, or $300 to $1,200 a year for individual families. Clean energy and climate legislation recently passed by the House of Representatives calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 17 percent by 2020, and by 83 percent by 2050. Rapidly improving the efficiency of our existing buildings is essential to meeting these goals, and the House bill and a companion Senate bill now under consideration could help in some very specific ways by supporting:
All of these measures are necessary building blocks for a strong national energy efficiency strategy, but this paper also looks at what more is needed. We've identified five key areas where focused national policy leadership is required immediately to launch a nationwide energy efficiency retrofit industry:
This architecture must be created through a comprehensive national policy approach consisting of a strategic combination of incentives and standards, both of which are critical to overcoming the numerous obstacles that have thus far discouraged consumers and businesses from taking action on energy efficiency. To create the market conditions needed to stand up an industry large enough to perform deep retrofits of 50 million buildings, Congress and the Obama administration should take two key actions: 1. Mobilize major institutions that have strong customer relationships with building owners to market energy efficiency to every building owner in America, provide improved tools for financing and repayment through existing billing mechanisms, and provide a trusted point of access for energy efficiency services that are certified and guaranteed. These institutions include:
2. Encourage the growth of a high-performance, high-standards retrofit industry by taking early steps to ensure performance standards and verifiable energy savings, and engaging market participants at every level, including:
Without a strong public policy framework, the private sector acting alone will not invest to maximize the clear private and public benefits of encouraging comprehensive energy efficiency, and the harm to the global climate will continue unabated. Over time, however, the public-sector role in jump starting these new energy efficiency markets can be reduced as the private sector develops improved business and finance models and once a price is established on global warming pollution. That is the path outlined in this paper. Download this report (pdf) |
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