How do we address social problems? It helps if we can identify them as social problems, and come to some agreement as to what is causing them, who is harmed by them, who might be benefiting from them, etc. Keep in mind–if no one were benefitting from a social problem, chances are it would go away, wouldn’t it? Someone benefits from toxic waste dumps that don’t get cleaned up. Someone benefits from poverty. Groups benefit from war. You get the picture.

Is global warming a social problem, or an ecological problem?

First, we need to try to understand a few things. Sociologist Joseph Gusfield talked about a different way of looking at social problems: causal responsibility (who’s causing the problems), ‘ownership’ (who has the power to define the debate on a specific problem?), and political responsibility (who should do something about it?).

What’s driving global warming?

Social processes

• Electricity generation (takes a lot of energy, and as the second law of thermodynamics says, that energy doesn’t disappear, it just gets transformed into less usable forms, often heat–think about how the energy of a light bulb turned on is transformed).
• Food production, agriculture (confined animals, nitrogen, fossil fuels). Our industrial agricultural system is totally dependent on fossil fuels to produce pesticides, fertilizers, and to fuel the machines that do the work.
• Transportation — hopefully you can see the contributions in transportation to greenhouse gas production
• Globalization and consumption — In a global economy, goods get produced in countries with cheap labor, and consumed mostly in wealthier countries. How does it get ‘re-exported’ to the wealthy consuming societies?
• Industrialization (India and China)–1/3 of the world’s population in two rapidly industrializing countries. What happens when they’re fully on the electricity grid?
• Human population growth — from one billion 250 years ago to over 8 billion today
• Deforestation (land clearing, biomass fuel) — huge tracts of tropical forest are cleared, to satisfy consumption needs in norther countries, and to clear land for agriculture and (later) grazing in those countries. Tropical forest left without tree cover quickly deteriorates–all the nutrients are held in the vegetation. Cut the vegetation (and the release of carbon with it), and you’re left with grasses, which don’t have root systems capable of keeping nutrients near the surface where they’re available to plants.
• Politics — we talked briefly in class about the American automotive industry, their political power, and their disinclination to make more fuel-efficient automobiles. Keep in mind also that they give lots to politicians seeking public office, and they do lots of advertising that keeps commercial media outlets flush with cash to add lots of cool special effects to their news casts!
• What happens to the economy otherwise? If we converted to bicycles as our main source of transportation, we’d definitely have cleaner air, less congested cities, less greenhouse gas emissions. How would the structure of our economy and employment look?
• Economic systems — Capitalism and markets — capitalism operates on short-term horizons. Companies in it for the ‘ecological long haul’ will quickly get out-competed by companies making decisions that, though they may trash the environment, lead to greater profit in the short term.

How can the earth absorb all of this extra consumption of resources, burning of greenhouse gases? How indeed. And are humans reducing their production of greenhouse gases?

Ecological processes

• Geology-glaciation, sea level changes — keep in mind, we’re in a glacial recession right now. 14,000 years ago, cities like Chicago were under a few thousand feet of ice. As climate changes lead to temperature decreases (as a general rule, temperatures also decrease with increasing elevation, and as you go north in latitude), more precipitation will be of the snow variety, and less will melt. More water will be retained on the continents, and less will make it to sea, causing sea levels to drop. With warming trends, ice sheets and glaciers melting, more water makes it to sea and levels rise. Who would likely be the first affected by rising sea levels, and how far would they have to rise to be a problem?
• Greenhouse effect — this one keeps us alive. The atmosphere functions like a greenhouse–radiation penetrates, but much is absorbed, and the more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the more heat is absorbed. The more energy we transform, the more heat is produced. The thicker the atmosphere gets, the less re-radiation there is to space.
• Climate system is complex — a change of one degree can cause dramatic changes in climates around the world, making it difficult to grow food and produce many of the resources human societies depend on. Maybe humans can adapt, but can plant and animal species? Genetic engineering, anyone?
• Laws of thermodynamics–this should be pretty clear–humans pull fossil fuels out of the ground, or carbon-based organisms decompose (e.g., deforestation, forest fires), or greenhouse gases are released (e.g., thawing of permafrost), and it goes into the atmosphere, holding more heat. Energy isn’t created or destroyed, it changes form when used, and often that form is waste/heat.

Who benefits?

Obviously those invested in industrial processes that produce greenhouse gases benefit from the status quo. Even farmers require–in the industrialized world–huge inputs of fossil fuels in the form of fertilizer, pesticide, fuel, and the manufacturing capacity to produce expensive equipment for mass production. And that doesn’t just mean the executives, but the investors, who may not really ‘see’ the effects of their investments, but are no doubt sensitive to the returns on those investments. 

Consumers in the industrialized world benefit, especially to the extent that they can consume goods and services where some of the costs of warming and climate change have been ‘externalized.’ That is, they are paid not by the consumer, but by others, in various forms like more greenhouse gas production at every stage of the process from pulling minerals out of the ground (including oil) to shipping them, refining them, shipping the refined products to wholesale and retail consumers, and ultimately, ‘using’ them–meaning combustion or other waste products. 

Media benefit as well. After all, even the commercial news media make their money off of selling advertising. Making media consumers feel bad about their own consumption probably wouldn’t be good for business (which is increasing audience size to increase advertising revenue). Perhaps there’s a reason climate change ranks pretty low on Americans’ list of concerns heading into most elections

Framing the issue

Who ‘owns’ the debate? Who has the power to access media, to frame the debate in one way or another (some being more self-serving than others)? Some possible candidates include:

• Industry and public relations firms
• Scientists
• Countries (North/South divisions)
• Politicians 
• Who above has the money to spend trying to influence public opinion?

Political responsibility: What should be done, and who should do it?

To seek solutions, identify the problems

• Claiming ownership. Carrying the debate. The biggest challenge faced by those on the global warming side is trying to convince populations that something they might not feel right now is a real threat today. Which is a testament to a media system that insulates consumers in the industrialized world from the realities people are facing around the globe. Those threatened economically have worked very hard, using public relations groups, to muddy the waters and suggest this is all natural climate change (an example from the early 2000s).
• Social movements — there are groups of scientists, (e.g., UCSUSA), groups of activists (a small sample), and industry groups posing as grassroots movements (see American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, and then check out their rap sheet) and attempts to credit global warming science as ‘junk science.’
• Technologies
  • cleaner fuels
  • energy conservation as source of energy supply (versus supply side policy and more oil and gas drilling-what’s the difference?)
  • ANWR example–a small increase in fuel efficiency of American automobiles would rival the amount of oil under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
  • New sources of energy, for instance new power plants, pollute more than conservation, or saving energy by reducing consumption
• Changing behavior
  • Personal changes (carpooling, recycling, conservation, etc.)
  • Cultural changes (in schools, etc.)-‘ecological literacy’
  • Institutional changes – mass transit, economics, energy policy
  • International issues-multilateral bodies, cooperation, enforcement of treaties (e.g., the Kyoto Protocols, which the Bush White House backed out of after taking office)
    • Carbon tax–this would be a more market-based solution to the problem (more conservative, versus a liberal approach that would entail more government regulation. Right??)