I’m writing today from windy Bismarck, North Dakota. Before I get to details about the Prairie Climate Stewardship Conference, which has so far been pretty interesting, let me first talk about this New England girl’s experience in the Great Plains. North Dakota is beautiful, but also, well, every bit as sparse as you might expect. When we arrived in Bismarck, having driven about six hours from the Twin Cities region, civilization was denser than the past few hours of driving, to be sure, but it was hard to identify any sort of ‘city.’ The Bismarck airport, which we drove past, was minuscule, and I don’t think I have yet seen any building higher than six stories.
Incidentally, the title of this post comes from the tagline of the movie Fargo, and was quoted by the CEO of a Bismarck-based power cooperative. So telling you all this is not (entirely) my way of being snarky. Rather, it should highlight the fact that North Dakota has not beat nature into submission in the way that I’m used to seeing. True, there are big box stores and asphalt expanses, but developments seem to be interspersed with nature, as opposed to the other way around. While I don’t know that much about North Dakota politics and policy, it’s hard to imagine that this has not had an impact.
The conference opened this morning by discussing the faith perspective of climate change. The speakers on this topic did a good job presenting the scope of the issue, as well as the moral implications of a failure to act. While I had heard similar arguments before, I found their approach nonetheless enlightening. Father Paul Schuster addressed a particular interesting issue. On the one hand, by emphasizing the scope of the issue, people tend to get overwhelmed and then despair. On the other hand, people like to think about fighting battles on an epic scale, not least when they are thinking about their faith. But he concluded, “It’s not about good versus evil. Oftentimes, it’s about doing good versus doing nothing.”
For me at least, this was a humbling start. Moving on, speakers over the next few hours covered a whirlwind of scientific and policy issues. I found Steve Brick, Manager of Environmental Programs at the Joyce Foundation, to be particularly interesting. Firstly, he asserted that fossil fuels, an inherently limited resource, are going to continue to become more expensive as worldwide demand grows. Any measures taken to lower prices are short term solutions that cannot possibly be sustainable. If anything, this will merely postpone the inevitable. The second thing he said that really caught my attention is that the limiting factors in the move to cleaner energy are not technological or economic. Rather, we are ready on those fronts, and the true impediments are behavioral and ethical. Green architecture, more efficient industrial processes, mass transit and carpooling: all these things could make a substantial difference in energy use and even prices, but people are not doing it.
The other area of discussion that I found especially illuminating was the talks on agriculture. Growing up, my idea of a farm was an apple orchard that had animals. So, needless to say, I have a lot to learn about the way in which agriculture can affect greenhouse gases. My extremely un-nuanced summary of today’s panels on agriculture is this: agricultural processes emit quite a bit of carbon dioxide, but they also have the potential to capture and reduce atmospheric carbon. Which means that agricultural policy is going to matter a great deal.
I will leave you all with this, as my incredibly finicky laptop battery starts to give me attitude. (Dear Laptop: I’m trading you in in a month. So bite me.) But expect further updates from the conference either later tonight or tomorrow. Wooot North Dakota!
