I've been reading Greer again. His current theme is how we get caught up in our world views about how things _should_ happen, which throws off our expectations about things _will likely_ happen. He contrasts the the over optimism of those who believe that progress is inevitable with the apocalyptic views of those who who assume that things will soon fall apart. If you are interested in the history of ideas, its worth a read here
As applied to "peak oil" - these two attitudes create different scenarios. The optimists - assume technological changes - new drilling techniques etc, and a continuation of the trend toward more and more energy use. The pessimist, on the other hand, a rapid decline in energy use - not only will energy be more expensive, but those high costs will cause the financial system to collapse.
An interesting illustration of those poles might be the EIA and Gail the Actuary (Our Finite World). As usual, the IEA is making optimistic predictions about oil production. Kurt Cobb notes their dismal track record, and a few reasons why these predictions will also fail.. And here's a report from Chatham House ... which has a nice illustration of how far off the IEA has been
On the other side, we have Gail the Actuary who predicts a (fairly imminent) financial crisis, one from which there is no recovery. As a result the amount of energy use, and CO2 declines rapidly.
Figure 1. One view of future energy consumption for the world as a whole. History is based on BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy.
This, too, seems unlikely. And she doesn't offer much in the way of a compelling evidence. So as much as we might like the sound of this story, in term of climate change, it doesn't look like this type of "solution" is in the cards.
Greer implies that the actual future will be somewhere in the middle. Energy will be become more expensive, and society will make various attempts to deal with it. As always the financial system will have booms and busts. For many of us, there will be a slow decline in living standards. The "New Era", will be much anticipated, but will not arrive. And , Peak Oil will not stop Climate Change
As we approach the end of the time period when climate change can be avoided through reductions in burning, we will hear more and more about the advantages of geo engineering
Here's a thoughtful interview with Clive Hamilton author of Earthmasters. (Interview here)
While he has interesting and insightful things to say about the proposals, what struck me most what the " psychology" of geo engineering. After all, reduction of burning is admitting defeat. It would be giving in to to the superiority of nature. Its admitting that there is a force more powerful that human, and attempting to live in harmony with that force. Geo engineering is the opposite. Its seizing the controls of the planet, and trying to bend it to human will.
Nice piece about whether its the right thing to do In Grist
In the end, whether ist right or wrong won't matter, I tend to agree with Alex Smith at Ecoschock who suggests that we will have a "climate emergency" - e.g. a year of two of poor crops. The pressure to "do something" will be too great.. And "someone" , a nation or a billionaire will start shooting stuff into the sky.
Grimsvotn volcano erupts in Iceland in 2011. Solar radiation management schemes spray particles into the atmosphere to simulate cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. Photograph: Egill Adalsteinsson/EPA
Controversial geoengineering projects that may be used to cool the planet must be approved by world governments to reduce the danger of catastrophic accidents, British scientists said.
Met Office researchers have called for global oversight of the radical schemes after studies showed they could have huge and unintended impacts on some of the world's most vulnerable people.
The dangers arose in projects that cooled the planet unevenly. In some cases these caused devastating droughts across Africa; in others they increased rainfall in the region but left huge areas of Brazil parched.
"The massive complexities associated with geoengineering, and the potential for winners and losers, means that some form of global governance is essential," said Jim Haywood at the Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter.
The warning builds on work by scientists and engineers to agree a regulatory framework that would ban full-scale geoengineering projects, at least temporarily, but allow smaller research projects to go ahead.
Geoengineering comes in many flavours, but among the more plausible are "solar radiation management" (SRM) schemes that would spray huge amounts of sun-reflecting particles high into the atmosphere to simulate the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions.
Volcanoes can blast millions of tonnes of sulphate particles into the stratosphere, where they stay aloft for years and cool the planet by reflecting some of the sun's energy back out to space.
In 2009, a Royal Society report warned that geoengineering was not an alternative to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but conceded the technology might be needed in the event of a climate emergency.
Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, Haywood and others show that moves to cool the climate by spraying sulphate particles into the atmosphere could go spectacularly wrong. They began by looking at the unexpected impacts of volcanic eruptions.
In 1912 and 1982, eruptions first at Katmai in Alaska and then at El Chichón in Mexico blasted millions of tonnes of sulphate into northern skies. These eruptions preceded major droughts in the Sahel region of Africa. When the scientists recreated the eruptions in climate models, rainfall across the Sahel all but stopped as moisture-carrying air currents were pushed south.
Having established a link between volcanic eruptions in the northern hemisphere and droughts in Africa, the scientists returned to their climate models to simulate SRM projects.
The scientists took a typical project that would inject 5m tonnes of sulphate into the stratosphere every year from 2020 to 2070. That amount of sulphate injected into the northern hemisphere caused severe droughts in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Chad and Sudan, and an almost total loss of vegetation.
The same project had radically different consequences if run from the southern hemisphere. Rather than drying the Sahel, cooling the southern hemisphere brought rains to the Sahel and re-greened the region. But Africa's benefit came at the cost of slashing rainfall in north-eastern Brazil.
The unintended consequences of SRM projects would probably be felt much farther afield. "We have only scratched the surface in looking at the Sahel. If hurricane frequencies changed, that could have an impact on the US," said Haywood.
Matthew Watson, who leads the Spice project at Bristol University, said the study revealed the "dramatic consequences" of uninformed geoengineering.
"This paper tells us there are consequences for our actions whatever we do. There is no get-out-of-jail-free card," he told the Guardian.
"Whatever we do is a compromise, and that compromise means there will be winners and losers. That opens massive ethical questions: who gets to decide how we even determine what is a good outcome for different people?
"How do you get a consensus with seven billion-plus stakeholders? If there was a decision to do geoengineering tomorrow, it would be done by white western men, and that isn't good," Watson said.
* NB. I am on vacation so postings will be light for 2-3 weeks*
Greetings
The new meme is that the coming decline in oil production will not be a problem. Why? Because the market will anticipate it and already have different energy sources, and infrastructure in place. In fact, some say the peak will occur, because of a lack of demand, not a lack of supply.
So, how's that coming along?
Year to date, EV sales are up 208% 2012 to 2013. PHEVs are up 38%.
That's nice, but how many cars were sold? Well, about 50,000. And the non electric sales? More like 14 million. It'll take a lot more doubling before EV's start crowding out gas vehicles.
50k, 100k, 200k, 400k, 800k. 1.6m. At this doubling rate ( unlikely). We hit 10% by 2018. Can tight oil push back the decline until then? Who knows.
Below, Heading Out of the oildrum, notes a similar lack of interest in natural gas vehicles. There are now only 20,000 on the road.
Why? The same old issues. Range problems. Little infrastructure.
It's not that easy to cut your ties to oil and coal. After all, we swim in it! How closely do non profits look at their funding sources.
Green groups have a hard time staying away from fossil fuels
The giants of the green world that profit from the planet's destruction
A new movement has erupted demanding divestment from fossil fuel polluters – and Big Green is in their sights
Naomi Klein The Guardian, Thursday 2 May 2013
'Purists will point out no big green group is clean, since virtually every one takes money from foundations built on fossil fuel empires.'
The movement demanding that public interest institutions divest their holdings from fossil fuels is on a serious roll. Chapters have opened up in more than 100 US cities and states as well as on more than 300 campuses, where students are holding protests, debates and sit-ins to pressure their to rid their endowments of oil, gas and coal holdings. And under the "Fossil Free UK" banner, the movement is now crossing the Atlantic, with a major push planned by People & Planet for this summer. Some schools, including University College London, have decided not to wait and already have active divestment campaigns.
Though officially launched just six months ago, the movement can already claim some provisional victories: four US colleges have announced their intention to divest their endowments from fossil fuel stocks and bonds and, in late April, 10 US cities made similar commitments, including San Francisco (Seattle came on board months ago).
There are still all kinds of details to work out to toughen up these pledges, but the speed with which this idea has spread makes it clear that there was some serious pent-up demand. To quote the mission statement of the Fossil Free movement: "If it is wrong to wreck the climate, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage. We believe that educational and religious institutions, city and state governments, and other institutions that serve the public good should divest from fossil fuels." I am proud to have been part of the group at 350.org that worked with students and other partners to develop the Fossil Free campaign. But I now realise that an important target is missing from the list: the environmental organisationsthemselves.
You can understand the oversight. Green groups raise mountains of cash every year on the promise that the funds will be spent on work that is attempting to prevent catastrophic global warming. Fossil fuel companies, on the other hand, are doing everything in their power to make the catastrophic inevitable. According to the UK's Carbon Tracker Initiative(on whose impeccable research the divestment movement is based), the fossil fuel sector holds five times more carbon in its reserves than can be burned while still leaving us a good shot of limiting warming to 2C. One would assume that green groups would want to make absolutely sure that the money they have raised in the name of saving the planet is not being invested in the companies whose business model requires cooking said planet, and which have been sabotaging all attempts at serious climate action for more than two decades. But in some cases at least, that was a false assumption.
Maybe that shouldn't come as a complete surprise, since some of the most powerful and wealthiest environmental organisations have long behaved as if they had a stake in the oil and gas industry. They led the climate movement down various dead ends: carbon trading, carbon offsets, natural gas as a "bridge fuel" – what these policies all held in common is that they created the illusion of progress while allowing the fossil fuel companies to keep mining, drilling and fracking with abandon. We always knew that the groups pushing hardest for these false solutions took donations from, and formed corporate partnerships with, the big emitters. But this was explained away as an attempt at constructive engagement – using the power of the market to fix market failures.
Now it turns out that some of these groups are literally part-owners of the industry causing the crisis they are purportedly trying to solve. And the money the green groups have to play with is serious. The Nature Conservancy, for instance, has $1.4bn (£900m) in publicly traded securities, and boasts that its piggybank is "among the 100 largest endowments in the country". The Wildlife Conservation Society has a $377m endowment, while the endowment of the World Wildlife Fund–US is worth $195m.
Let me be absolutely clear: plenty of green groups have managed to avoid this mess. Greenpeace, 350.org, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network, and a host of smaller organisations such as Oil Change International and the Climate Reality Project don't have endowments and don't invest in the stock market. They also either don't take corporate donations or place such onerous restrictions on them that extractive industries are easily ruled out. Some of these groups own a few fossil fuel stocks, but only so that they can make trouble at shareholder meetings.
The Natural Resources Defense Council is halfway there. It has a $118m endowment and, according to its accounting team, for direct investments "we specifically screen out extractive industries, fossil fuels, and other areas of the energy sector". However, the NRDC continues to hold stocks in mutual funds and other mixed assets that do not screen for fossil fuels. (The Fossil Free campaign is calling on institutions to "divest from direct ownership and any commingled funds that include fossil fuel public equities and corporate bonds within 5 years".)
Purists will point out that no big green group is clean, since virtually every one takes money from foundations built on fossil fuel empires – foundations that continue to invest their endowments in fossil fuels today. It's a fair point. Consider the largest foundation of them all: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As of December 2012, it had at least $958.6m – nearly a billion dollars – invested in just two oil giants: ExxonMobil and BP. The hypocrisy is staggering: a top priority of the Gates Foundation has been supporting malaria research, a disease intimately linked to climate. Mosquitoes and malaria parasites can both thrive in warmer weather, and they are getting more and more of it. Does it really make sense to fight malaria while fuelling one of the reasons it may be spreading more ferociously in some areas?
Clearly not. And it makes even less sense to raise money in the name of fighting climate change, only to invest that money in, say, ExxonMobil stocks. Yet that is precisely what some groups appear to be doing. Conservation International, notorious for its partnerships with oil companies and other bad actors (the CEO of Northrop Grumman is on its board, for God's sake), has close to $22m invested in publicly traded securities and, according to a spokesperson, "we do not have any explicit policy prohibiting investment in energy companies".
The same goes for Ocean Conservancy, which has $14.4m invested in publicly traded securities, including hundreds of thousands in "energy", "materials" and "utilities" holdings. A spokesperson confirmed in writing that the organisation does "not have an environmental or social screen investment policy". Neither organisation would divulge how much of its holdings were in fossil fuel companies or release a list of its investments. But according to Dan Apfel, executive director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition, unless an institution specifically directs its investment managers not to invest in fossil fuels, it will almost certainly hold some stock, simply because those stocks (including coal-burning utilities) make up about 13% of the US market, according to one standard index. "All investors are basically invested in fossil fuels," says Apfel. "You can't be an investor that is not invested in fossil fuels, unless you've actually worked very hard to ensure that you're not."
Another group that appears very far from divesting is the Wildlife Conservation Society. Its financial statement for fiscal year 2012 describes a subcategory of investments that includes "energy, mining, oil drilling, and agricultural businesses". How much of WCS's $377m endowment is being held in energy and drilling companies? It failed to provide that information despite repeated requests.
The WWF-US told me that it doesn't invest directly in corporations – but it refused to answer questions about whether it applies environmental screens to its very sizable mixed-asset funds. The National Wildlife Federation Endowment used to apply environmental screens for its $25.7m of investments in publicly traded securities, but now, according to a spokesperson, it tells its investment managers to "look for best-in-class companies who were implementing conservation, environmental and sustainable practices". In other words, not a fossil fuel divestment policy. Meanwhile, the Nature Conservancy – the richest of all the green groups – has at least $22.8m invested in the energy sector, according to its 2012 financial statements. Along with WCS, TNC completely refused to answer any of my questions or provide any further details about its holdings or policies.
It would be a little surprising if TNC didn't invest in fossil fuels, given its various other entanglements with the sector. A small sample: in 2010, the Washington Post reported that TNC "has accepted nearly $10m in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations"; it counts BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell among the members of its Business Council; Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest US coal-burning utilities, sits on its board of directors; and it runs various conservation projects claiming to "offset" the carbon emissions of oil, gas and coal companies.
The divestment question is taking these groups off guard because for decades they were able to make these kinds of deals with polluters and barely raise an eyebrow. But now, it appears, people are fed up with being told that the best way to fight climate change is to change their light bulbs and buy carbon offsets while leaving the big polluters undisturbed. And they are raring to take the fight directly to the industry most responsible for the climate crisis.
Hannah Jones, one of the student divestment movement organisers, told me: "Just as our college and university boards are failing us by not actively confronting the forces responsible for climate change, so are the big corporate green groups. They have failed us by trying to preserve pristine pockets of the world while refusing to take on the powerful interests that are making the entire world unliveable for everyone." But, she added, "students now know what communities facing extraction have known for decades: that this is a fight about power and money, and everyone – even the big green groups – is going to have to decide whether they are with us, or with the forces wrecking the planet."
It doesn't seem like too much to ask. I mean, if the city of Seattle is divesting, shouldn't WWF do the same? Shouldn't environmental organisations be more concerned about the human and ecological risks posed by fossil fuel companies than they are by some imagined risks to their stock portfolios? Which raises another question: what are these groups doing hoarding so much money in the first place? If they believe their own scientists, this is the crucial decade to turn things around on climate. Is TNC planning to build a billion-dollar ark?
Some groups, thankfully, are rising to the challenge. A small but growing movement inside the funder world is pushing the big liberal foundations to get their investments in line with their stated missions – which means no more fossil fuels. It's time for foundations to "own what you own", says Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund. According to Dorsey, her foundation, which has been a major funder of the coal divestment campaign, is now "99% fossil free and will be completely divested by 2014".
But convincing the biggest foundations to divest will be slow, and the green groups – which are at least theoretically accountable to their members – should surely lead the way. Some are starting to do just that.The Sierra Club, for instance, now has a clear policy against investing in, or taking money from, fossil fuel companies (it once didn't, which caused major controversy in the past). This is good news for the Sierra Club's $15m in investments in publicly traded securities. However, its affiliated organisation, the Sierra Club Foundation, has a much bigger portfolio – with $61.7m invested – and it is still in the process of drafting a full divestment policy, according to Sierra Club's executive director, Michael Brune. He stressed that "we are fully confident that we can get as good if not better returns from the emerging clean energy economy than we can from investing in the dirty fuels from the past".
For a long time, forming partnerships with polluters was how the green groups proved they were serious. But the young people demanding divestment – as well as the grassroots groups fighting fossil fuels wherever they are mined, drilled, fracked, burned, piped or shipped – have a different definition of seriousness. They are serious about winning. And the message to Big Green is clear: cut your ties with the fossils, or become one yourself.
• First published in The Nation; www.naomiklein.org
According to Liebig's law, any system is limited not by the total resources available, but by the scarcest resource. Our current civilization, relies. in the end. on our agricultural system, which in turn requires certain inputs. Things like, water, nutrients, a stable climate, temperature within certain limits, and oil, .
Personally, I had thought that oil would be the factor that would run out first. But, Then I became convinced that ag doesn't really use a great chunk of the oil used, so, humans would presumably ration oil so that ag would continue. See this piece by Stuart Saniford, for an interesting discussion on How Peak oil helps industrial ag)
It's been seven years now since the massive honeybee die off began. But honeybee colonies have been in a gradual decline for decades. The population has dropped from 6 million in 1947 to 3 million in 1990 and stands at about 2.5 million today. One single crop, almonds in California, now require over 60 percent of all managed colonies.
There are eight to 10 common viruses, fungal pathogens, bacterial pathogens and a parasitic mite contributing to the deaths, said Michelle Flenniken, a microbiologist and professor at Montana State University, who studies honeybee pathogens.
"There is no quick fix," said May Berenbaum, head of the entomology department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during a press conference that day. "Patching one hole in a boat that leaks from everywhere isn't going to stop it from sinking."
“There’s going to be a shortage of bees in this entire growing season,” James Frazier, a professor of entomology at Pennsylvania State University, said of the U.S. situation. “The ability to replace bees that have been lost has been exhausted, so there’s a very large question mark about next year. Whether we’ve reached a point of no return, we don’t know.”
The point of no return. Let's back up a bit. I used the word "collapse" in the title. Isn't that alarmist? You be the judge.
For much of the past 10 years, beekeepers, primarily in the United States and Europe, have been reportingannual hive losses of 30 percent or higher, substantially more than is considered normal or sustainable.
But this winter, many U.S. beekeepers experienced losses of 40 to 50 percent or more, just as commercial bee operations prepared to transport their hives for the country’s largest pollinator event: the fertilizing of California’s almond trees.
If this doesn't amount to a population collapse among commercial honey bees, I don't know what would.
Bees are in the news—they are not nearly as newsworthy as Kim Kardashian's pregnancy—because the European Union imposed a two-year ban on the use of neonicotinoids, which are widely used insecticides.
The gravity of the situation was underscored on Monday, when the European Commission (EC) said it intended to impose a two-year ban on a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, now the world’s most widely used type of insecticide. Neonicotinoids are one of the leading suspected causes of colony collapse disorder, and the European Commission announced its controversial decision three months after the European Food Safety Agency concluded that the pesticides represented a “high acute risk” to honeybees and other pollinators.
The EC action will restrict the use of three major neonicitinoids on seeds and plants attractive to bees, as well as grains, beginning December 1. “I pledge to my utmost to ensure that our bees, which are so vital to our ecosystem and contribute over 22 billion Euros [$29 billion] annually to European agriculture, are protected,” said European Union Health Commissioner Tonio Borg.
In so far as "one of every three bites of food eaten worldwide depends on pollinators, especially bees, for a successful harvest," it seems more than a little—what's the word I want here?—misguided to put a monetary value of the ecosystem and agricultural services provided by pollinators, especially Apis mellifora (the common honey bee).
Well, that's the way the humans typically think, and it's damn near impossible to get them to think any other way.
If banning neonicotinoids was guaranteed to solve this problem, there would be no crisis. Withdraw the insecticides, and honey bee populations would eventually recover. Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
No one investigating the issue is suggesting that neonicotinoids are the sole cause of current bee declines.
Tucker, other beekeepers, and entomologists say that the cause of colony collapse disorder is likely a combination of factors that includes the widespread use of pesticides and fungicides, as well as the spread of viral pathogens and parasitic mites in beehives. While mites and diseases have long been known to cause significant declines in domesticated bee populations, no single pathogen or parasite, say entomologists, appears to sufficiently explain the current rate of hive collapse.
A recent study that found unprecedented levels of agricultural pesticides — some at toxic levels — in honeybee colonies is prompting entomologists to look more closely at the role of neonicotinoids in current bee declines...
While not downplaying neonicotinoids as a potential culprit, Eric Mussen, an apiculturiust at the University of California, Davis, noted that the case against these pesticides is not clear-cut.
For example, honeybees are apparently doing fine in Australia, where neonicotinoids are widely usedand varroa mites are not a problem.
Neonicotinoid use is common in Canada, but colony collapse disorder is not significantly affecting hivesthere.
Here we've got a typical good news/bad news situation. The good news is that colony collapse disorder is not global; the bad news is that nobody really knows why these bees are dying in the U.S. and Europe.
We need "more research" says entomologist James Frazier, who was quoted above. I guess so, and speaking of research, I've got some right here. Check this out, from Honey May Be Bees’ Best Medicine for Colony Collapse Disorder (Discover Magazine, April 30. 2013).
Western honey bees have a taste for a range of nectars, so they are exposed to many different chemicals in and on the plants they pollinate. In addition, commercial hives are often treated with insecticides to kill parasitic mites. The trouble is that the western honey bee doesn’t have a lot of defenses: only 46 of its genes (about half that of most insects) can metabolize these potentially dangerous chemicals.
Even more important than how many genes the bees have is knowing what kicks these genes into gear. For the first time, researchers have identified the chemicals that regulate these genes, and have determined that many bees raised in commercial colonies don’t get enough of them.
The researchers identified a handful of chemicals that boost these detoxifying genes. The most potent was an acid called p-coumaric acid, which is found in pollen grains.
By eating honey, which contains traces of pollen, the bees become less susceptible to the range of pesticides and pathogens they encounter on their pollinating exploits.
OK, that explanation seems pretty clear — honey bees like honey. Honey is good for honey bees!
Here's the kicker.
Wild bees are normally raised on honey, so there is no shortage of p-coumaric acid in their diets.
But commercial colonies raised for agricultural pollination aren’t so lucky. To cut costs, many bee keepers harvest and sell the honey their bees produce and instead feed the growing bee babies high fructose corn syrup or other sweeteners.
While nutritionally comparable, the researchers say these sugars lack essential chemicals like p-coumaric acid.
They feed these bees just like they feed obese, pre-diabetic Americans. It's a money-making operation.
To cut costs, they sell the honey and give these bees high fructose corn syrup instead!
This insightful research gives us further permission to pursue the already strong hypothesis that these self-defeating humans are far, far, far too stupid to be allowed to manage commerical honey bees, let alone anything else on this once hospitable blue-green planet.
One of the stories we like to tell ourselves is that at some point humans will have a "light bulb" moment where we will realize that Climate Change is serious, and that we need to take action . The necessary action - a "wartime mobilization" similar to WWII- will turn our consumer economy into a wind turbine, solar panel , and light rail economy. And after a while, we convert back to a peace time economy, and all will be well. This is very nice story, but as Dave Roberts suggest below, it's pretty unlikely.
But, first, why would a "wartime mobilization be required. Why not some smooth glide path, via market forces?
"For there to be a chance — even just a 50/50 chance — of limiting temperature rise to 2°C, global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2020 (earlier for the developed world) and fall by 9 or 10 percent a year every year thereafter.
Nothing like that has ever been done. Not even close. No major energy transition has ever moved that quickly. Carbon emissions have never fallen that fast, not even during the economic collapse brought on by the demise of the USSR. Getting to change of that scale and speed is not a matter of nudging along a natural economic shift, as clean energy cost curves come down and fossil fuels get more expensive. That scale and speed seem to demand something like wartime mobilization."
OK so this" light bulb" moment. How likely is that?
"This entire project is premised on the notion that harsh climate impacts will eventually spur the public to demand emergency action from governments. That is, to put it mildly, a debatable premise. I’ve always thought people put way too much faith in it. It’s really, really difficult to know what kind of impact would be big or frequent enough to spur that kind of public unity, especially directed at climate change mitigation (as opposed to adaptation). After all, no one will be able to prevent climate disasters within their lifetime through mitigation — the next 50 years of climate change are already “baked in.” So we’re talking about the peoples of the U.S. and the world rallying around emergency measures, wartime sacrifices, on behalf of future generations. I can easily imagine that never happening. And if it does, it’s going to take some kind of shock that I can’t even really imagine.
Second, what would the new arrangement look like? Well , lets just say that it won't be a libertarian arrangement. Democracy, maybe. Civil liberties, maybe not.
Long story short, what’s required in wartime mobilization is an enormous amount of centralized federal executive authority, an enormous amount of borrowing and taxing, and an enormous amount of labor displacement and retraining. At least temporarily, the economy will be more government-directed than market-based.
Still, it could worse
"However, it’s worth noting that eschewing mitigation and instead trying to adapt to a 4°C world will create widespread suffering, migration, and desperation. Those, in turn, will lead to civil unrest and resource conflicts. Guess what governments do in the face of massive disruptions and unrest? They get bigger and more authoritarian!
There’s no libertarian choice here. A huge, global challenge like climate change is inevitably going to mean more government action and intrusion. The choice is, do you want managed big government, with a bounded set of plans and some amount of oversight built in, or do you want panicked big government, responding to migrations, famines, and conflict? I’m not exactly excited about either choice, but the former definitely strikes me as the lesser of two evils."
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What would ‘wartime mobilization’ to fight climate change look like?
Deadliestfiction“What, this Death Star? It’s for climate change.”
The United States and 140 other countries have signed or otherwise associated with theCopenhagen Accord, in which it is agreed that the nations of the world should “hold the increase in global temperature below 2°C, and take action to meet this objective consistent with science and on the basis of equity.” For there to be a chance — even just a 50/50 chance — of limiting temperature rise to 2°C, global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2020 (earlier for the developed world) and fall by 9 or 10 percent a year every year thereafter.
Nothing like that has ever been done. Not even close. No major energy transition has ever moved that quickly. Carbon emissions have never fallen that fast, not even during the economic collapse brought on by the demise of the USSR. Getting to change of that scale and speed is not a matter of nudging along a natural economic shift, as clean energy cost curves come down and fossil fuels get more expensive. That scale and speed seem to demand something likewartime mobilization.
That metaphor gets used a lot. I’ve used it many times myself. But is it apt? And what would it mean to take it seriously? There’s been lots of academic attention to the technology side of rapid, large-scale mitigation, but little attention to the governance side. How could a country engineer such a transition? What powers and institutions would be necessary?
The papers, which are focused mostly on the U.S. but meant to draw lessons applicable to other countries as well, “commence the process of developing contingency plans for a scenario in which a sudden major global climate impact galvanises governments to implement emergency climate mitigation targets and programs.”
Let’s pause right here for a second. This entire project is premised on the notion that harsh climate impacts will eventually spur the public to demand emergency action from governments. That is, to put it mildly, a debatable premise. I’ve always thought people put way too much faith in it. It’s really, really difficult to know what kind of impact would be big or frequent enough to spur that kind of public unity, especially directed at climate change mitigation (as opposed to adaptation). After all, no one will be able to prevent climate disasterswithin their lifetime through mitigation — the next 50 years of climate change are already “baked in.” So we’re talking about the peoples of the U.S. and the world rallying around emergency measures, wartime sacrifices, on behalf of future generations. I can easily imagine that never happening. And if it does, it’s going to take some kind of shock that I can’t even really imagine.
Delina and Diesendorf acknowledge that politicians will resist adopting a true emergency posture:
Since rapid climate mitigation responses on the scale and scope of warlike mobilisation mean that governments may have to turn away from business-as-usual and predominantly market solutions to place more emphasis on centrally organised and publicly funded activities, politicians are less likely to support emergency climate actions for the fear of losing corporate support and, in countries with large fossil fuel reserves, tax revenues.
Uh, ya think?
Because of political resistance, moving to a wartime-mobilization footing will require serious grassroots pressure:
Unless the climate action movement can exert strong, growing pressure on governments, by means of lobbying backed up with media, public education, legal actions, building alternatives and nonviolent direct action, it seems unlikely that governments will undertake emergency mitigation, even when life-threatening climate disasters occur.
Yup.
But anyway. For the sake of discussion, let’s imagine such disasters did unfold and there was enough grassroots pressure to force politicians into wartime posture. What would that look like? How would it work?
Delina and Diesendorf take a close look at America’s experience during WWII. (It’s worth digging into the first paper’s section on that topic — there’s lots I didn’t know about the government’s domestic policy during that period.) During that time, the country went from manufacturing almost no war material to manufacturing enough of it to run the world’s biggest military. It was an industrial turnaround of astonishing speed and scale.
The lessons that emerge from that period aren’t ones I’m particularly comfortable with, and it sounds like the authors aren’t totally thrilled with them either. Long story short, what’s required in wartime mobilization is an enormous amount of centralized federal executive authority, an enormous amount of borrowing and taxing, and an enormous amount of labor displacement and retraining. At least temporarily, the economy will be more government-directed than market-based.
Among other things, pulling that off will require some sort of large-scale strategy, a set of goals and programs, that is durable enough to be insulated from the ebb and flow of passing administrations and changes in public opinion. It must be focused on long-term mitigation rather than merely immediate adaptation (which is what all the short-term political pressure will favor). At the same time, however, the mitigation strategy can’t be so rigid that it is immune to public oversight and control. Some measure of democratic control must be preserved.
Delina and Diesendorf recommend the statutory creation of two new institutions in particular:
• A special Ministry for Transition to a Low-Carbon Future as the principal agency of rapid mitigation activities to conduct technical requirement studies, set and enforce production goals [for renewable energy technologies], institute efficient contracting procedures, cut through the inertia and ‘red tape’ inhibiting institutional changes, and serve as the coordinating agency for all transition activities.
• A separate institution, independent of the Executive and the above Ministry, reporting directly to Parliament/Congress and the community at large, to prepare a transition timeline specifying the period when executive control starts and ends; to conduct appropriate checks and balances; to scrutinise government/executive actions, especially those of the Ministry for Transition; and, through legal powers, to ensure that the government/executive sticks to its transition mandate.
So it’s your basic balance-of-powers set-up: a single coordinating agency and a watchdog to keep it honest. The delicate dance here is to hand over extraordinary power to the executive branch on the premise that it can and will be handed back after a set period of time.
Among the many dangers in this approach is that executives are not generally inclined to give up power once it’s been granted them. And it’s not like the climate situation will be any less dire in 10 years, or 20. Once you switch over to wartime government in the face of a foe that cannot surrender and never stops, how do you ever switch back? (The parallels to the “war on terrorism” should be obvious here.)
Delina and Diesendorf acknowledge that the WWII mobilization comparison is not perfect, because climate mobilization will be even more difficult and more complicated. (Whee!) It will also involve state and provincial governments, along with civic and private institutions. It will also, crucially, involve international coordination and enforcement. It will eventually have to go beyond particular economic sectors and address the larger issues of population and consumption. “Getting all these acts done in a coordinated and democratic/participatory manner,” Delina and Diesendorf write, “is definitely a huge challenge.”
You could say that.
So. Assuming that the climate movement can tie climate impacts together enough to galvanize the public against climate change; assuming politicians can actually be swayed by public pressure into radical, immediate action; assuming that executive power can be expanded and the economy transformed as though it were 1942; assuming that, at the end of the sprint to zero carbon, the federal government cedes back the extraordinary and democratically suspect powers it adopted … well, assuming all that, we’ve got this climate governance thing nailed! Yeeesh.
One final note about this. A political conservative will see this post and think, “Aha! I knew it all along! Liberals are using climate change as a pretense to grow government and increase its power over our lives!”
As an assessment of the motivations and ideology of those fighting against climate change, this is absurd, of course. But as an assessment of what must be done to secure real climate safety, it is accurate. In any scenario where mitigation is big enough and fast enough, government really will need to be bigger and more intrusive. That is very much worth worrying about; getting through this ordeal while retaining the open, democratic character of U.S. government (such as it is, anyway) will be a tough needle to thread.
However, it’s worth noting that eschewing mitigation and instead trying to adapt to a 4°C world will create widespread suffering, migration, and desperation. Those, in turn, will lead to civil unrest and resource conflicts. Guess what governments do in the face of massive disruptions and unrest? They get bigger and more authoritarian!
There’s no libertarian choice here. A huge, global challenge like climate change is inevitably going to mean more government action and intrusion. The choice is, do you want managed big government, with a bounded set of plans and some amount of oversight built in, or do you want panicked big government, responding to migrations, famines, and conflict? I’m not exactly excited about either choice, but the former definitely strikes me as the lesser of two evils.
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