I was thus surprised to see the email copied below (which was sent to a bunch of people) from Eric and UCAR Vice President Jack Fellows:

From: “Jack Fellows”
Date: August 5, 2008 7:36:07 PM EDT
To: Bierbaum Rosina , peter backlund , Kelly Redmond , kelly redmond , Brad Udall , david yates , Jonathan Overpeck , kathy hibbard , linda mearns , mary hayden , lawrence buja , tom warner , kathleen miller , philip mote , caitlin simpson , Chester J Koblinsky , lisa goddard , Nolan Doesken , Alan Robock , Mark Abbott , “Mark Z. Jacobson” , dan vimont , Anthony Janetos , greg carbone , “Rudnicki Mark” , Keith Talbert Ingram , brian oneill , Paty Romero Lankao , Liz Moyer , david battisti , urc
Cc: eric barron
Subject: 2008 AGU Fall Session on Climate Adaptation

Eric Barron and I are putting together the AGU session described below. If you have put one of these AGU sessions together, you know that I can’t promise you that it will be an oral session or the day/time it will happen, and you are restricted to no more than 3 first author abstracts for the Fall AGU mtg. That said, we’d love to have you participate in this session. Let me know if you are interested by _17 August _so I can meet an 18 Aug AGU deadline. If you can’t participate but know of a great person, please forward this email on to them. Thanks. This is a large email list, so pls just respond to my email address. Jack

Description: PA03: How Can the Science Community Help Local and Regional Decision Makers Who are Exploring or Implementing Adaptation Options to Climate Change? All weather is local! The same will be true regarding adapting to climate change. This session will examine how local universities and decision makers are working together to adapt to anticipated climate change impacts and explore how these independent activities might be networked together into a “national adaptation network or model”. NOTE: we are primarily interested in people who have really interesting policy research or a project that is partnering with local and regional decision makers to deal with climate adaptation, mitigation, or even geoengineering.

Note that the time stamp of the email is after the brouhaha started about the decision to cut CCB. This appears to be an exercise in damage control — “We really care about adaptation, no really, we do. Look we sponsored a session at AGU!” — since neither Barron or Fellows have even done any work in adaptation (and to my knowledge Fellows is an administrator, not at all a researcher).

Let me try my hand at answering the question that they pose:

How Can the Science Community Help Local and Regional Decision Makers Who are Exploring or Implementing Adaptation Options to Climate Change? . . . This session will examine how local universities and decision makers are working together to adapt to anticipated climate change impacts and explore how these independent activities might be networked together into a “national adaptation network or model”.

First thing, don’t cut a program with a 34-year track record of success in doing exactly this. Are these guys serious that they now want to discuss how to recreate the functions of the NCAR CCB at an AGU session? Seriously?

I’d love to give NCAR/UCAR management the benefit of the doubt and believe that they have a rigorous method for setting priorities and making cuts. But not only is this sort of tone deaf damage control/spin insulting to the actual adaptation research community, but a sign that NCAR/UCAR may have a management problem rather than a budget problem.

What happens when the scientific community’s responsibility to society conflicts with its professional self interest? In the case of research related to climate change the answer is clear: Self interest trumps responsibility.

Our argument was that the scientific community sought to take care of its own interests first while “the needs and capabilities of decisionmakers who must deal with climate change have played little part in guiding research priorities.”

If you need any evidence that little has changed in the five years since we wrote that article, have a look at this story by Andy Revkin in today’s New York Times. The article discusses the termination of the Center for Capacity Building at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the nation’s largest government-supported atmospheric (and related) sciences research lab.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research, an important hub for work on the causes and consequences of climate change, has shut down a program focused on strengthening poor countries’ ability to forecast and withstand droughts, floods and other climate-related hazards.

The move, which center officials say resulted from the shrinking of federal science budgets, is being denounced by many experts on environmental risk, who say such research is more crucial than ever in a world with rising populations exposed to climate threats.

In e-mail exchanges, these experts said the eliminated program, the Center for Capacity Building, was unique in its blend of research and training in struggling countries.

The Center for Capacity Building (still online at ccb.ucar.edu) was created in 2004. It built on decades of work by its director, Michael Glantz, a political scientist who has focused on the societal effects of natural climate extremes and any shifts related to accumulating greenhouse gases.

What were the budget implications of this Center?

Altogether, the eliminated program had an annual budget of about $500,000. The budget for the entire atmospheric research center is $120 million.

According to data from the NSF (p. 384 of this PDF), the primary funder of NCAR, the NSF contribution to the NCAR budget for FY2009 is expected to grow by 9.5%, and the lab’s budget is projected to grow by about $13 million over the next decade. NSF explains (emphasis added):

In FY 2009, GEO support for NCAR will increase by $9.0 million, to a total of $95.42 million to: accelerate efforts in provide robust, accessible, andinnovative information services and tools to the community; enhance NCAR’s ability to provide to researchers world-class ground, airborne, and space-borne observational facilities and services; increase our understanding of societal resilience to weather, climate, and other atmospheric hazards; and increase efforts to cultivate a scientifically literate and engaged citizenry and a diverse and creative workforce.

So why did NSF have to cut a large part of its commitment to the social sciences? Cliff Jacobs, NSF program officer responsible for NCAR, explained the decision as follows:

Clifford A. Jacobs, the National Science Foundation’s section head for the atmospheric research center and related programs, said the decision did not mean that the center was interested only in basic physical climate science.

“This came as a very, very difficult decision,” Dr. Jacobs said. “You have to protect your core activities, but as budgets keep shrinking you have to redefine your core.”

In this case “shrinking” must mean “not growing as fast as we would like” since the budget has obviously not been decreasing in size. Let this be a reminder that as we often enjoy discussing the politics of the left and the right, some of the the most damaging politics are found in the battle among disciplines within academia. Unfortunately, in this case the collateral damage extends far beyond academia:

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Dr. Glantz said that he was let go Monday and that three other researchers were also losing their jobs. One, Tsegay Wolde-Georgis, left a similar program at Columbia University less than a year ago to work with Dr. Glantz. Dr. Wolde-Georgis’s focus is bolstering the ability of African nations to anticipate and withstand drought and other climate shocks.

I look forward to the day when serving the needs of decision makers becomes part of the “core” in the leading institutions of the atmospheric sciences.

Subject: message to staff
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2008 15:03:14 -0600
From: Eric Barron
To: XXXXXXX@ucar.edu (All UCAR Staff)

To All Staff,

The two of us travelled to Washington, DC on July 23 to discuss and review NCAR budget scenarios for FY09 with NSF. NSF and NCAR continue to face significant financial challenges. FY09 budget projections remain at 0% level over FY08 on top of 2004-2008 subinflationary NCARbase increments and NSF priority program requirements. There is also a high probability of a continuing resolution well into FY09, which beginsOctober 1, 2008. In this budget environment, NCAR and UCAR management must continue to take measures to plan for budgets based on NCAR and NSF strategic priorities. The dissolution of the Societal-Environmental Research and Education Laboratory (SERE) was part of our effort to reduce costs in this very difficult funding environment. Unfortunately, based on our most recent analysis, additional actions must be taken, and thus we are eliminating the NCAR Center for Capacity Building (CCB) program. This will save immediate and recurring direct and indirect costs. We very much regret the impacts this has on staff.

We have scheduled NCAR town meetings later this month so that we can discuss the financial, programmatic and scientific challenges and opportunities we will face together in the coming year. We welcome your ideas and contributions.

Eric Barron and Rick Anthes

These reports will provide current evaluations of the identified science foundation that can be used for informing public debate, policy development, and operational decisions, and for defining and setting the future direction and priorities of the program.

An unprecedented process of review was established to keep political appointees far from the reports. However, the significance of the effort and the rigorous review has not been sufficient to result in a quality synthesis report, which in its release for public comment is marred not only by incomplete analysis and selective presentation of science, but also, by plain old sloppiness.

Consider these three examples:

1. Doctored Image. As first mentioned in the comments on this site by Mark Bahner, and shown conclusively by [UPDATED] a commenter at Climate Audit and further discussed by Anthony Watts the report contains a photoshopped image (above) of flood damage in a section discussing precipitation. Not long ago Andy Revkin in consultation with his editors at the New York Times removed a doctored photo of a “wall of coal” when shown to have been altered by Peabody Coal which provided the image — you’d think that the CCSP would have quality control standards at least as high as a leading newspaper. But in this case the CCSP appears to have intentionally procured a doctored image, since it is available for purchase with a clear disclaimer. Anyone should know that presenting a doctored image is not a good idea in a scientific report.

2. Cribbed, Outdated, Misleading Figure. At Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre and his commenters indicate that the CCSP report reproduces an old figure (above) from the Arctic Climate Assessment report that splices paleoclimate temperature proxies and the modern instrument record, despite expert views that such splicing should not be done. Setting aside the substantive objections, how can the CCSP claim to be an assessment of the latest science when it simply cribs dated materials from other another report with data ending 10 years ago, when that same record goes through the present?

3. Hijacked Executive Summary But what is most troubling is the fact that the Executive Summary of the report repeats much of what the report’s non-governmental editor, Susan Joy Hassol calls her “Elevator Speech” of her personal political preferences on climate change. I personally agree with much of what she says, however the issue is not the details of the substance, but rather, how it is that the report’s editor was able to insert her personal policy preferences into the Executive Summary of the single most important report of the U.S. CCSP.

Below is a slide from one of Ms. Hassol’s lectures on climate change, delivered in the fall of 2006 (PDF). Below that image is am image of the first page of CCSP executive summary. I’ve color coded similar, and in some cases verbatim, phrases. The logic and substance of the two documents is remarkably similar and not at all scientific, but advocacy focused. Advocacy is appropriate in many contexts, and Ms. Hassol’s views are perfectly legitimate, but I expect to see neither political advocacy nor the editor’s personal views in the executive summary of the scientific research covered by the US CCSP Synthesis Report.

The CCSP explains that its authors should be technical experts:

Lead and contributing authors of the synthesis and assessment products are scientists or individuals with recognized technical expertise appropriate to a product. Lead and contributing authors may be citizens of any country and be drawn from within or outside the Federal government (e.g., universities or other public or private sector organizations). These individuals shall be acknowledged experts, known through their publication record and relevant accomplishments and contributions to their field. Lead authors are responsible for the content of the synthesis and assessment products that are submitted to the CCSP Interagency Committee for review.

The CCSP established a rigorous process for the writing and editing of its reports in order to limit the ability of political appointees to massage the report in desired directions. But apparently the CCSP review process has left a gaping hole for a single non-governmental, non-technical, non-expert to shape the report in politically desirable ways.

On an issue as high politicized as climate change, where bloggers and others are paying close attention, the inclusion of a doctored image, the cribbing of an old, misleading figure, and the inclusion of an editor’s personal views in the guise of a science assessment is remarkable, even in a draft for public comment. Even if the excuse is plain old sloppiness, the report is a big fat black eye for the world’s leading climate science program.

Equivocation isn’t a sign of cognitive weakness. Uncertainty is intrinsic to the scientific process, and sometimes you have to have the courage to stand up and say, “Maybe.”

For Achenbach’s efforts he gets called stupid and a tool of the “deniers”. Such complaints are ironic given that Achenbach explains how foolish it is to put too much weight on extreme events in arguments about climate change:

the evidence for man-made climate change is solid enough that it doesn’t need to be bolstered by iffy claims. Rigorous science is the best weapon for persuading the public that this is a real problem that requires bold action. “Weather alarmism” gives ammunition to global-warming deniers. They’re happy to fight on that turf, since they can say that a year with relatively few hurricanes (or a cold snap when you don’t expect it) proves that global warming is a myth. As science writer John Tierney put it in the New York Times earlier this year, weather alarmism “leaves climate politics at the mercy of the weather.”

There’s an ancillary issue here: Global warming threatens to suck all the oxygen out of any discussion of the environment. We wind up giving too little attention to habitat destruction, overfishing, invasive species tagging along with global trade and so on. You don’t need a climate model to detect that big oil spill in the Mississippi. That “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico — an oxygen-starved region the size of Massachusetts — isn’t caused by global warming, but by all that fertilizer spread on Midwest cornfields.

Some folks may actually get the notion that the planet will be safe if we all just start driving Priuses. But even if we cured ourselves of our addiction to fossil fuels and stabilized the planet’s climate, we’d still have an environmental crisis on our hands. Our fundamental problem is that — now it’s my chance to sound hysterical — humans are a species out of control. We’ve been hellbent on wrecking our environment pretty much since the day we figured out how to make fire.

This caused that: It would be nice if climate and weather were that simple.

And the U.S. Climate Change Science Program recently issued a report with the following conclusions:

1. Over the long-term U.S. hurricane landfalls have been declining.

2. Nationwide there have been no long-term increases in drought.

3. Despite increases in some measures of precipitation , there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows (high flows above 90th percentile).

4. There have been no observed changes in the occurrence of tornadoes or thunderstorms.

5. There have been no long-term increases in strong East Coast winter storms (ECWS), called Nor’easters.

6. There are no long-term trends in either heat waves or cold spells, though there are trends within shorter time periods in the overall record.

In the climate debate, you would have to be pretty foolish to allow any argument to hinge on claims about the attribution of observed extreme events to the emissions of greenhouse gases. But as we’ve noted here on many occasions, for some the climate debate is a morality tale that cannot withstand nuance, even if that nuance is perfectly appropriate given the current state of understandings. But given the public relations value of extreme events in the climate debate, don’t expect Achenbach’s reasoned view to take hold among those calling for action. Like the Bush Administration and Iraqi WMDs, for some folks sometimes the intelligence that you wish existed trumps the facts on the ground.

The only way we’re going to get action [on climate change], I’d suggest, is if those who stand in the way of action come to be perceived as not just wrong but immoral.

This strategy of characterizing one’s political opponents as immoral is of course is part and parcel of the debate over abortion (which is why I call such politics “abortion politics” in The Honest Broker). In the climate debate the litmus test for having the proper morality (i.e., defined as not “standing in the way of action,” by being a “denier” or “delayer” or [insert derisive moral judgment here]) is by holding and expressing (and not questioning) certain acceptable beliefs, such as:

*Not questioning any consensus views of the IPCC (in any working group)

*Not supporting adaptation

*Not emphasizing the importance of significant technological innovation

*Not pointing out that policies to create higher priced energy are a certain losing strategy

Deviation for these beliefs is, blasphemy — heresy! Or as Paul Krugman recommends . . . immoral.

Climate change is the new locus of the U.S. culture wars. Unlike the abortion issue which was turned into a referendum on morality by the political right, the climate issue is fast becoming a referendum on morality by the political left. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

My first reaction upon seeing this story was that someone was having some fun. But it doesn’t seem like benthic bacteria . . . So this article from the AFP comes as a surprise, and a reminder that forecasting the future remains a perilous business. With news like this, it seems premature to dismiss skepticism about climate science as fading away, far from it, expect skeptics of all sorts to have a bit more bounce in their steps.

DHAKA (AFP) – New data shows that Bangladesh’s landmass is increasing, contradicting forecasts that the South Asian nation will be under the waves by the end of the century, experts say.

Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images and say Bangladesh’s landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight square miles) annually.

Maminul Haque Sarker, head of the department at the government-owned centre that looks at boundary changes, told AFP sediment which travelled down the big Himalayan rivers — the Ganges and the Brahmaputra — had caused the landmass to increase.

The rivers, which meet in the centre of Bangladesh, carry more than a billion tonnes of sediment every year and most of it comes to rest on the southern coastline of the country in the Bay of Bengal where new territory is forming, he said in an interview on Tuesday.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that impoverished Bangladesh, criss-crossed by a network of more than 200 rivers, will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels due to global warming.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel says 20 million Bangladeshis will become environmental refugees by 2050 and the country will lose some 30 percent of its food production.

Director of the US-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, professor James Hansen, paints an even grimmer picture, predicting the entire country could be under water by the end of the century.

But Sarker said that while rising sea levels and river erosion were both claiming land in Bangladesh, many climate experts had failed to take into account new land being formed from the river sediment.

“Satellite images dating back to 1973 and old maps earlier than that show some 1,000 square kilometres of land have risen from the sea,” Sarker said.

“A rise in sea level will offset this and slow the gains made by new territories, but there will still be an increase in land. We think that in the next 50 years we may get another 1,000 square kilometres of land.”

Mahfuzur Rahman, head of Bangladesh Water Development Board’s Coastal Study and Survey Department, has also been analysing the buildup of land on the coast.

He told AFP findings by the IPCC and other climate change scientists were too general and did not explore the benefits of land accretion.

“For almost a decade we have heard experts saying Bangladesh will be under water, but so far our data has shown nothing like this,” he said.

The west’s biggest oil companies raised their research and development spending by an average of 16 per cent last year but still lag behind many other industries, a survey by the Financial Times has found.

There is also a wide variation in R&D budgets, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of revenues.

Royal Dutch Shell, already the top spender in 2006, raised its budget the fastest with a 36 per cent increase to $1.2bn for 2007. Last year it spent more than twice as much as BP on R&D.

ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company, has a market capitalisation almost twice that of Shell, but spent only two-thirds the amount on R&D, at $814m.

Relative to revenues, oil companies’ R&D expenditures are strikingly low: about 0.3 per cent last year for Shell, and 0.2 per cent for Exxon. That compares with typical proportions of 15 per cent for technology and pharmaceuticals companies, and 4-5 per cent for motor companies.

In other words, compared to revenues technology and pharmaceutical companies spend 50 to 75 times the amount on research and development than Shell or Exxon. Is it any wonder that your desktop computer would have been considered a supercomputer a few decades ago, whereas you are still filling up your car with the same stuff that your great-grandparents did?

First, the report adopts an approach to presenting the science more befitting an advocacy group, rather than a interagency science assessment. The report ignores the actual literature on economics and policy, choosing instead to present fluffy exhortations about the urgency of action and reducing emissions. I can get that level of policy discussion from any garden variety NGO, for $2 billion per year over the past 18 years, I would expect a bit more.

The report opens with this language:

The Future is in Our Hands

Human-induced climate change is affecting us now. Its impacts on our economy, security, and quality of life will increase in the decades to come. Beyond the next few decades, when warming is “locked in” to the climate system from human activities to date, the future lies largely in our hands. Will we begin reducing heat-trapping emissions now, thereby reducing future climate disruption and its impacts? Will we alter our planning and development in ways that reduce our vulnerability to the changes that are already on the way? The choices are ours.

Pretty thin stuff. The report speaks of urgency:

Once considered a problem mainly for the future, climate change is now upon us. People are at the heart of this problem: we are causing it, and we are being affected by it. The rapid onset of many aspects of climate change highlights the urgency of confronting this challenge without further delay. The choices that we make now will influence current and future emissions of heat-trapping gases, and can help to reduce future warming.

It is not within the Congressional mandate of the CCSP to tell policymakers when to act or what goals to pursue. The report does have some limited discussion of options, which would be great (and within the mandate) if it were comprehensive and scientifically rigorous. Unfortunately, it is neither.

Despite recognizing that some adaptation will be necessary, and discussing adaptive responses in the text, the report has a strong bias against adaptation in favor of mitigation:

The more we mitigate (reduce emissions), the less climate change we’ll experience and the less severe the impacts will be, and thus, the less adaptation will be required. . . Despite what is widely assumed to be the considerable adaptive capacity of the United States, we have not always succeeded in avoiding significant losses and disruptions, for example, due to extreme weather events. There are many challenges and limits to adaptation. Some adaptations will be very expensive. We will be adapting to a moving target, as future climate will not be stationary but continually changing. And if emissions and thus warming are at the high end of future scenarios, some changes will be so large that adaptation is unlikely to be successful.

A large body of work, some of which I’ve contributed, indicates that adaptation and mitigation are not tradeoffs, but complements. Somehow this literature escaped the thorough review done by the authors of this report.

The report claims to be focused on bringing together the “best available science.” However in the area of my expertise, disasters and climate change, the report is an embarrassment. For example, once again, it uses the economic costs of disasters as evidence of climate change and its impacts, as shown in the following figure from the report.

Then, later in the report it discusses increasing U.S. precipitation under the heading “Floods” and next to a picture of a flooded house (below). However, in the U.S. there has been no increase in streamflow and flood damage has decreased dramatically as a fraction of GDP. Thus the report reflects ignorance on this subject or is willfully misleading. Neither prospect gives one much confidence in a government science report.

In short, in areas where I have expertise, at best the reporting of the science of climate impacts in this report is highly selective. Less generously it is misleading, incorrect, and a poor reflection on the government scientists whose names appear on the title page, many of whom I know and have respect for. The report asks for comments during the next few weeks, and I will submit some reactions, which I’ll also post here.

So why does the report have such an advocacy focus and rely on misleading arguments?

One answer is to have a look to the people chiefly responsible for the editing of the report, and also the section on natural disasters, where one person’s views are reported almost exclusively to any others.

Perhaps it is time to rotate control of U.S. government “science” reports to some new faces?

From Mexico to India to China, governments fearful of inflation and street protests are heavily subsidizing energy prices, particularly for diesel fuel. But the subsidies — estimated at $40 billion this year in China alone — are also removing much of the incentive to conserve fuel.

The oil company BP, known for thorough statistical analysis of energy markets, estimates that countries with subsidies accounted for 96 percent of the world’s increase in oil use last year — growth that has helped drive prices to record levels.

In most countries that do not subsidize fuel, high prices have caused oil demand to stagnate or fall, as economic theory says they should. But in countries with subsidies, demand is still rising steeply, threatening to outstrip the growth in global supplies.

While it is easy to call for the end of subsidies so as to let prices better reflect supply and demand, the politics are enormously complicated. The NYT reports (emphasis added):

Political pressures and inflation concerns continue to prevent many countries — particularly in Asia, where inflation has become an acute problem — from ending subsidies and letting domestic prices bounce up and down.

“You talk about subsidies, you’re not only talking about the economy, you’re talking about politics,” said Purnomo Yusgiantoro, Indonesia’s minister of energy and mineral resources. He ruled out further price increases this year beyond one in May that raised the price of diesel and regular gasoline to $2.30 a gallon.

Central to the politics are the impacts of removing fuel subsidies on the poor. A UNEP meeting held in Sweden earlier this year found that these impacts are real but not well understood (PDF):

Due in part to differing price elasticities of consumption, subsidy removal has different impacts in various regions and among various classes of people of the world. More needs to be done to understand the ways in which subsidies and their potential reform will impact various socio-economic groups. Indeed, energy subsidies seem to improve energy supply and the standard of living of the poor in some cases, but may not help them as much as was previously assumed, and especially not in the long run. In addition, there may be ways to retain these benefits without also providing large subsidies to groups that don’t need them. The degree to which a major reform of energy subsidies will disproportionately and negatively impact the world’s poor requires further study.

Removing subsidies in rapidly developing countries will have the effect of making fuel more expensive. Climate policies that seek to wean the world off of fossil energy will require increasing the costs of fuels to even higher levels. The willingness and ability of governments to remove subsidies will say something about the prospects for increasing the costs of fossil fuels in developing countries. Presently, there absolutely no indication that developing countries will be willing to increase the costs of energy in any significant way to better reconcile supply and demand, much less address the challenge of decarbonizing the global economy. The obvious solution of course is for carbon-free technologies to become cheaper than their (subsidized) fossil fuel competitors. Easy to say, of course.

Not only are the politics of addressing subsidies difficult, but the discussion of the issue is hampered by multiple definitions of a “subsidy”. While there are good reasons for multiple definitions, it also allows political debates to enter the technical discussions. For instance, are countries without strong climate mitigation policies subsidizing fossil fuel use according to the expected costs of future climate changes attributable to the human emissions? Or should the baseline of subsidies reflect a baseline of global market supply/demand?

Wisely, UNEP has recommended moving past such debates:

The conventional wisdom on energy subsidies has been that a reliable working definition of the term is needed before reform efforts can go forward. The logic behind this idea is that subsidy data will not be comparable across sectors and regions if different figures capture different things. Proponents of a single definition have argued that a clear definition, even if not agreed upon by all parties, will help greatly with data gathering and analysis, as well as give subsidy studies credibility in the eyes of policy makers.

However, there is now disagreement as to the appropriateness of a single subsidy definition. Rather, definitions may depend on the particular organisation, or the question that is being answered. Instead of binding all studies by a universal and inflexible definition, a hierarchy of definitions could be employed with the recognition that not all analysts will use the same exact ones. This would also allow for a more nuanced approach that can account for various localised biases.

The NYT reports that President Bush has criticized subsidies for fuel use in developing countries, but you don’t see the president or other politicians raising concerns about fuel subsidies in the United States. And you probably won’t, especially as politicians top priority seems to be concern over high gas prices.

The bottom line? The politics of energy reform — whether to better align supply/demand, to address rising costs, to enhance security, or to address climate change — are going to be impossible if based on an approach that requires higher-priced energy. By contrast, progress toward these goals will be far simpler if accompanied by cheaper energy. How long will it take for this lesson to sink in?