Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Krugman lashes out


"its a frustrating mess"
      -Jimi Hendrix

Which side are you on?
     - Pete Seeger

Greetings

      About a week ago, Paul Krugman put out a piece on climate.  Good for him !    Unfortunately he included a section denouncing the de-growth movement  and the Post Carbon Institute, as  "prophets of climate despair".  I suppose its understandable.  After mall it is pretty frustrating.  And things aren't likely to change in a hurry.

        As Dave Roberts points out in a recent Grist article, despite the "awesome", and "thrilling" march in New York, the chnaces of the US  adopting a carbon tax, or any other reasonable response, is pretty much nil..  The reason?  Gerrymandering has made the  House of Representatives bullet proof.  It will remain in Republican hands for the foreseeable future.  See e.g  "Why the Democrats can't win the House".    In those solidly red districts, climate change is not on the agenda - protest or no protest.

    "As long as climate sanity is defined as heresy in the epistemologically vacuum-sealed Fox bubble, no conservative lawmaker will touch it with a 10-foot pole. It doesn’t matter if you get a million or 10 million people marching in the streets — as long as you don’t get any of the resentful white guys who vote Rs into office, Republican reps won’t care. To see all those unions and brown people and professors and feminists and queers gathered in one place, shouting for an international treaty, just confirms their worst fears.
      

        On the China front, Harvard professor, and author of 3 IPCC reports, Robert Stavins, notes in a New York Times editorial:

    "Similarly, in China, which leads the world in carbon emissions at 29 percent of the total, the prospect in the near term for a meaningful climate policy appears dim, because of the country’s predominant focus on economic growth.

"China may achieve its goal of reducing the carbon intensity of its economy (the ratio of carbon dioxide emissions per unit of output) by 45 percent below its 2005 level by 2020. But the country is growing so fast that its coal consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are expected to continue to increase. China is expected to add the equivalent of a new 500-megawatt coal-fired electric plant every 10 days for the next decade, according to projections by the United States government."



           So the last thing Krugaman needs to hear from the Post Carbon Institute that there are other problems    Unfortunaletly, solving climate change is not just a political problem.  Its an energy problem. A build out of non carbon energy devices is a good idea, but it is not that simple in a energy constrained world. It will be expensive, and we will have to give up other things in order to accomplish it.  Something has to give.

           Krugman appears to believe  that solving climate change is both (?) "cheap and free".   The only ones who will suffer will be the fossil fuel companies. Utility rates,and energy costs will not rise.  GDP will not fall.  We will be able to continue to have unlimited growth.

     Anyone who disagrees with that view , he asserts is giving "aide and comfort" "to the anti environment right" 

"... climate despair produces some odd bedfellows: Koch-fueled insistence that emission limits would kill economic growth is echoed by some who see this as an argument not against climate action, but against growth. You can find this attitude in the mostly European “degrowth” movement, or in American groups like the Post Carbon Institute; I’ve encountered claims that saving the planet requires an end to growth at left-leaning meetings on “rethinking economics.” To be fair, anti-growth environmentalism is a marginal position even on the left, but it’s widespread enough to call out nonetheless.


  As Hienberg  notes a few problems with Krugmans' views (below) and says


"To be clear, we at Post Carbon Institute advocate massively deploying renewable energy and putting a price on carbon. If humanity has any hope for the future, there is simply no other option. But we just don’t see how this can be achieved without: 1) raising the cost of energy and 2) leading to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions during the renewables build-out, unless other parts of the economy are allowed to contract. When it comes to energy, there is no free lunch."


   Greer has an interesting take on this whole controversy.  Why does Krugman care what PCI thinks?   Greer suggests that  the fact that Krugman  attacks PCI's position is itself a warning sign.  In his piece , he states:

 "When a significant media figure uses one of the world’s major newspapers of record to lash out at a particular band of economic heretics by name, on the other hand, we’ve reached the kind of behavior that only happens, historically speaking, when crunch time is very, very close. Given that we’ve also got a wildly overvalued stock market, falling commodity prices, and a great many other symptoms of drastic economic trouble bearing down on us right now, not to mention the inevitable unraveling of the fracking bubble, there’s a definite chance that the next month or two could see the start of a really spectacular financial crash.


 -------



Paul Krugman’s Errors and Omissions

by Richard Heinberg, originally published by Post Carbon Institute  | SEP 22, 2014


In a New York Times op-ed published September 18 titled “Errors and Emissions,” economist-columnist Paul Krugman took a swipe at my organization, Post Carbon Institute, lumping us together with the Koch brothers as purveyors of “climate despair.” No, the Koch brothers are not in despair about the climate; apparently our shared error is that we say fighting climate change and growing the economy are incompatible. And, according to Krugman, a new report from the New Climate Economy Project (NCEP) and a working paper from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) show that the falling cost of renewable energy means this is happily not the case.
 
But in our view Krugman himself is guilty of five critical errors, and three equally serious omissions. First the errors:
 
1. He mistakes post-growth realism for anti-growth activism. While Krugman linked to my book The End of Growth, it seems he may not have actually read it. If he had he would understand that we are not advocating the deliberate termination of growth that could otherwise be easily sustained; rather, we see clear evidence that growth is ending of its own accord because our economy is hitting biophysical limits at a speed and scale that are outpacing humanity’s ability to adapt. The most critical limit to economic growth is the availability of affordable fossil fuels, those extraordinary resources around which we’ve organized the entire global economy (and its hundreds of trillions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure) over the last century. Economists do generally recognize this limit, but summarily dismiss it as a problem seamlessly fixable by the market. 
 
2. He misrepresents his sources. According to our reading, the IMF working paper suggests that the majority of emissions cuts (above 10.8 percent reduction) will be at a net economic cost, even considering co-benefits. The NCEP report—commissioned by former heads of state, the CEOs of major banks and the head of the International Energy Agency—itself admitted that “On their own, these measures would not be sufficient to achieve the full range of emissions reductions likely to be needed by 2030 to prevent dangerous climate change.” In fact, the report’s authors made clear “The question the project has sought to explore is not ‘how can greenhouse gas emissions be reduced?'...but ‘how can economic decision-makers achieve their principal goals while also reducing their impact on the climate?’”
 
3. He assumes that wind and solar can substitute for all uses of fossil fuels. Oil fuels transportation, which is at the core of the trade-dependent global economy. It is far and away the world’s largest single source of energy—and there just aren’t any alternatives ready to replace oil in all the ways we use it, at the scale required, and in the time available. Electric cars are making inroads, but we’re not about to see battery-powered airliners, bulldozers, container ships, tractors, or long-haul trucks. Compressed natural gas is no help from a climate perspective, and methane is another depleting fossil fuel. America’s experiment with biofuels has been an expensive failure.  How do we get more growth with less trade?
 
4. He claims it is easy to slash carbon emissions. The rapid build-out of renewables constitutes an enormous infrastructure project that will itself consume significant amounts of fossil-fuel energy. New solar panels won’t immediately pay for themselves in energy terms; indeed, research at Stanford University recently showed that all solar PV technology installed until about 2010 was a net energy sink. It will fully “pay back the electrical energy required for its early growth by about 2020,” but if we hasten the transition, energy break-even gets delayed: it is only once solar build-out rates level off that the system as a whole will start to turn a significant energy profit. That leads to the deep irony that we’ll be powering the energy transition largely with fossil fuels. The faster we push the transition, the more fossil fuels we’ll use for that purpose, and this could lead to the extraction of more tar sands, fracked tight oil and shale gas, deepwater oil, and Arctic oil (we’ve already used up the cheap, conventional oil; what’s left will be expensive and dirty—and expensive oil is itself a drag on economic growth). 
 
5. He assumes that a meaningful price on carbon would only impact direct energy prices. The entire economy is energy-dependent. One example: as minerals deplete, we have to use more energy (per unit of output) in mining and refining ever-lower grades of ores. When energy prices rise, that impacts all we do. Does Krugman believe that the global economy can continue to grow despite higher prices across the board?
 
Now Paul Krugman’s omissions: 
 
1. He omits mentioning what rate of greenhouse gas emissions reduction he thinks is necessary. Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, who has taken the important step of producing a carbon budget that puts society on a safe trajectory to the internationally agreed-upon limit of 2 degrees Celsius warming, calculates that industrialized nations need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by over 10 percent per year starting now.  In Anderson’s opinion, this is “incompatible with economic growth.” The only hope of maintaining economic growth while cutting emissions at such a pace is to rapidly decouple GDP from CO2; PriceWaterhouseCoopers says  the decoupling would have to proceed at 6 percent per year, which is entirely unprecedented. Is that rate achievable, in view of errors 3, 4, and 5 above? 
 
2. He omits mention of constraints to fossil fuel supplies. Oil has become far more expensive in the past decade; production costs are rising at over 10 percent per year. The major petroleum companies are investing much more in exploration today, but their production rates are declining. For oil, the low-hanging fruit is gone. Does Krugman believe there is still excess production capacity for oil to use in building out renewable infrastructure, while still meeting the needs of the rest of the economy? If not, how will society maintain economic growth during the energy transition? If so, what part of the economy would need to contract in order to shift oil consumption to the renewables build-out, so as not to lead to increased overall use of climate-altering fossil fuels during the transition? 
 
3. He omits mention of energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI. It takes energy to get energy, but historically fossil fuels delivered an immense profit on the meager investments of energy required to drill or mine for them. The EROEI figures for renewables are generally lower than current ones for fossil fuels. And energy returns for fossil fuels are declining as companies are forced to dig deeper and deploy more sophisticated (read: expensive) technology to get at lower-grade resources. The overall EROEI of society is falling, and the transition to renewables will not halt that process (though it will lead to an eventual leveling-off). If you think long and hard about what declining EROEI actually means for our civilization, it’s difficult to imagine an outcome that could be characterized as economic growth—at least, growth as we’ve known it for the past century.
 
To be clear, we at Post Carbon Institute advocate massively deploying renewable energy and putting a price on carbon. If humanity has any hope for the future, there is simply no other option. But we just don’t see how this can be achieved without: 1) raising the cost of energy and 2) leading to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions during the renewables build-out, unless other parts of the economy are allowed to contract. When it comes to energy, there is no free lunch.
 
Ultimately, climate change is not the only reason perpetual economic growth is incompatible with a finite planet. The world faces a suite of ecological problems related to water, soil, and biodiversity, all stemming from past growth, and all seemingly requiring reduction in human consumption levels for their solution.
 
We believe that humanity can enjoy an improved quality of life and build a more sustainable future even as we reduce overall resource throughput. There is ample waste to be cut in the excessively consumption-oriented western way of life, and there’s still plenty of opportunity for less-wealthy countries to develop their economic and social systems in ways that are truly equitable and sustainable (and not fossil fuel-reliant). But that means changing priorities. Like fossil fuels, the growth fetish is something we must leave behind if we are going to have any chance of living sustainably on this planet.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Thursday, September 25, 2014

The other side of the post growth economy


You can't always get what you want
   Mick Jagger

We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,
And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all
    - Merle Haggard



Greetings

     Many of who see the current effects associated with a growing industrial economy look forward to the end of the growth.    Whether the end is brought about by climate related restriction, or the growing expense of  obtaining energy, it is hoped that the end of economic growth will also mean the end of a number of ecological  insults, including the growth of CO2 emissions. 

     Many assume (or hope) that there will be a smooth transition to a "simpler" lifestyle, with less focus of consumption, and more on community, gardening, and family.   This sounds like a big improvement, but one has to wonder whether it  is likely to be the result.  Perhaps it's worth taking a closer  look.

      Below is a nice review of some leading thinkers, including Robert Shiller, Studs Turkel, Richard Hofsteader, and "Yves Smith" of the blog Naked Capitalism  on how people react when the economy slows.

    Shiller in his piece "Parallels to 1937" points out that history shows that in tough economic times the populace generally moves to the right.  There is an increase of  nationalism, intolerance and war..

    As Smith says:

"Economists occasionally point out that societies generally move to the right during periods of sustained low growth and economic stress. Yet left-leaning advocates of low or even no growth policies rarely acknowledge the conflict between their antipathy towards growth and the sort of social values they like to see prevail. While some “the end of growth is nigh” types are simply expressing doubt that 20th century rates of increase can be attained in an era of resource scarcity, others see a low-growth future as attractive, even virtuous, with smaller, more autonomous, more cohesive communities. Perhaps they should be careful what they wish for....

From what I can tell, the proponents of a no-growth future have sorely neglected the doctrinal side of their program. If they are right about where we are headed, they need to heed Shiller’s warning. The inertial path is that 
reactionaries take charge."


A quick review of recent history shows  similar trends

"There’s the rise of anti-immigrant parties in Europe, along with actual crypto-fascist parties in places like Hungary, where the leader has openly disparaged liberal democracy. In Germany, the chancellor is expressing concern about a rising tide of anti-Semitism amid vandalism of Jewish monuments. The Middle East has seen the march of the Islamic State in the wrecked countries of Syria and Iraq, a movement that seeks to bring about a caliphate united under fundamentalist Sharia law. Russia has annexed territory in the Ukraine under Putin, a move not seen since before the Second World War causing fears of a new East/West split. A majority of people in China expect to go to war with Japan. Violent insurgencies continue to roil East Africa. In the United States, the “home of democracy,” police in Missouri shake down poor communities for cash and show up in body armor and APC’s and deploy tear gas when protests break out over the killing of an unarmed teenager. Secession movements are popping up all over due to disgust over political governance and a sense of powerlessness over out-of-control elites. And that’s before we even get to natural phenomena like California’s historic drought, rising sea levels, antibiotic resistant bacteria and the frightening spread of Ebola."


-------


Will a Shrinking Economy Lead to Chaos?

A few years back there was a book published called The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. You can read a review of that book here. The thesis broadly stated, was that growing economies produce more inclusive social institutions, tolerance for minorities, expansion of democratic rights, lower crime rates, social mobility and justice. In contrast, shrinking economies produce situations where people are angry and fearful and full of distrust. People turn to reactionary politics and look for scapegoats to blame for their reduced circumstances. Social dysfunction occurs as people fight each other over a shrinking economic pie. The undercurrent is that growth has led to better societies in history and is in fact a necessary prerequisite for stable societies and social inclusion.

This idea is commonly accepted in many quarters. The classic case is the Great Depression, where many European countries turned to authoritarian regimes and engaged in scapegoating, of which the Holocaust is the most tragic example. But periods of economic pain have been associated with state failure in many cases before and since.

This has been weighing on a lot of people’s minds of late. We’ve seen over five years of stagnant economies across much of the world with no end in sight (as some of us predicted), and recently the political situation has seemed to be deteriorating rapidly. The fact that this comes in  2014, the 100th anniversary of the First World War, is especially ironic.

There’s the rise of anti-immigrant parties in Europe, along with actual crypto-fascist parties in places like Hungary, where the leader has openly disparaged liberal democracy. In Germany, the chancellor is expressing concern about a rising tide of anti-Semitism amid vandalism of Jewish monuments. The Middle East has seen the march of the Islamic State in the wrecked countries of Syria and Iraq, a movement that seeks to bring about a caliphate united under fundamentalist Sharia law. Russia has annexed territory in the Ukraine under Putin, a move not seen since before the Second World War causing fears of a new East/West split. A majority of people in China expect to go to war with Japan. Violent insurgencies continue to roil East Africa. In the United States, the “home of democracy,” police in Missouri shake down poor communities for cash and show up in body armor and APC’s and deploy tear gas when protests break out over the killing of an unarmed teenager. Secession movements are popping up all over due to disgust over political governance and a sense of powerlessness over out-of-control elites. And that’s before we even get to natural phenomena like California’s historic drought, rising sea levels, antibiotic resistant bacteria and the frightening spread of Ebola.

If you, like me, believe that the long era of expansion is over and that we face a shrinking of the economy thanks to the limits to growth, this is especially concerning. This topic is dealt with in this recent article by 2013 Bank of Sweden (Nobel) prize winner Robert Shiller for Project Syndicate:
The current world situation is not nearly so dire, but there are parallels, particularly to 1937. Now, as then, people have been disappointed for a long time, and many are despairing. They are becoming more fearful for their long-term economic future. And such fears can have severe consequences. There is a name for the despair that has been driving discontent – and not only in Russia and Ukraine – since the financial crisis. That name is the “new normal,” referring to long-term diminished prospects for economic growth, a term popularized by Bill Gross, a founder of bond giant PIMCO.
The despair felt after 1937 led to the emergence of similar new terms then, too. “Secular stagnation,” referring to long-term economic malaise, is one example. The word secular comes from the Latin saeculum, meaning a generation or a century. The word stagnation suggests a swamp, implying a breeding ground for virulent dangers. In the late 1930s, people were also worrying about discontent in Europe, which had already powered the rise of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini. 
The other term that suddenly became prominent around 1937 was “underconsumptionism” – the theory that fearful people may want to save too much for difficult times ahead. Moreover, the amount of saving that people desire exceeds the available investment opportunities. As a result, the desire to save will not add to aggregate saving to start new businesses, construct and sell new buildings, and so forth. 
Though investors may bid up prices of existing capital assets, their attempts to save only slow down the economy. “Secular stagnation” and “underconsumptionism” are terms that betray an underlying pessimism, which, by discouraging spending, not only reinforces a weak economy, but also generates anger, intolerance, and a potential for violence. 
In his magnum opus The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin M. Friedman showed many examples of declining economic growth giving rise – with variable and sometimes long lags – to intolerance, aggressive nationalism, and war. He concluded that, “The value of a rising standard of living lies not just in the concrete improvements it brings to how individuals live but in how it shapes the social, political, and ultimately the moral character of a people.” 
Some will doubt the importance of economic growth. Maybe, many say, we are too ambitious and ought to enjoy a higher quality of life with more leisure. Maybe they are right. But the real issue is self-esteem and the social-comparison processes that psychologist Leon Festinger observed as a universal human trait. Though many will deny it, we are always comparing ourselves with others, and hoping to climb the social ladder. People will never be happy with newfound opportunities for leisure if it seems to signal their failure relative to others.  
The hope that economic growth promotes peace and tolerance is based on people’s tendency to compare themselves not just to others in the present, but also to what they remember of people – including themselves – in the past. According to Friedman, “Obviously nothing can enable the majority of the population to be better off than everyone else. But not only is it possible for most people to be better off than they used to be, that is precisely what economic growth means.”
Parallels to 1937 (Project Syndicate)

Schiller’s article is discussed in this important post from Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism, Are Advanced Economies Mature Enough to Handle No Growth? It asks some very important questions about the ramifications and potential outcomes of a no-growth economy:
Economists occasionally point out that societies generally move to the right during periods of sustained low growth and economic stress. Yet left-leaning advocates of low or even no growth policies rarely acknowledge the conflict between their antipathy towards growth and the sort of social values they like to see prevail. While some “the end of growth is nigh” types are simply expressing doubt that 20th century rates of increase can be attained in an era of resource scarcity, others see a low-growth future as attractive, even virtuous, with smaller, more autonomous, more cohesive communities. Perhaps they should be careful what they wish for....

From what I can tell, the proponents of a no-growth future have sorely neglected the doctrinal side of their program. If they are right about where we are headed, they need to heed Shiller’s warning. The inertial path is that reactionaries take charge.
The article makes some important points. We are much less self-sufficient than we used to be under the old agricultural economy, with ownership much more concentrated. Now we have an economy where people are dependent upon the labor market for jobs, but the labor market cannot provide enough jobs for everyone. And market fundamentalism holds that everything must be paid for individually in the market out of your own pocket rather than public goods made available collectively to all even as incomes for the vast majority of people are shrinking dramatically. Things like income and life expectancy have actually started to reverse for most people outside the technocratic elite. I'm sure the comments to the article are well worth reading in full.

This article from FireDogLake, Letting the Rich Keep All the Money, makes reference to both of the above posts, and adds:
Shiller talks about Ukraine and Russia, but it works here as well, and may make even more sense. The middle class has been deteriorating for decades, and lately the deterioration is increasing, as the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances makes clear. Stagnation and insecurity, and the rising cost of things that matter most, food, education and medical care, make people unhappy. Mental doors long closed by social opprobrium reopen, allowing the expression of racism, virulent sexism, and loathing for the poor.

We get a similar approach in the norm-based economics described by George Akerloff in his 2007 Presidential Address to the American Economic Association:

    "Studs Terkel’s Working (1972) captures in a single volume much of the ethnographic findings summarized by Hodson. Terkel interviews people from many different occupations about their feelings about their jobs and concludes that people “search for daily meaning as well as daily bread.” (1972, p. xi). Some of the interviewees are successful in this search: like the stone mason, who cruises his Indiana county and basks in pride as he not infrequently passes his past work. At the opposite extreme is an Illinois steelworker, whose work denies him the dignity he seeks. He takes out his frustration at work by being disrespectful, and, in after hours, by getting into tavern brawls. Most workers are somewhere between these extremes, but in all cases, following Terkel, they have a feeling for how they should behave at work. It’s not just about the money; it is also about living up to an ideal about who they think they should be."
 For further reading, let me suggest this 1985 essay by Alan Brinkley, Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform: A Reconsideration, which examines populism and progressivism, looking at the reactionary content of the former, and Hofstadter’s suggestion that the progressive elites were motivated by a loss of status in the aggressively money-centered capitalism that emerged from the 19th Century.

Taking the two extremes Akerloff describes, the stonemason and the steel worker, it’s easy to see how the miserable state of labor in the US today might tilt many people towards the steelworker’s responses. We can see a huge rise in racism in the responses to Ferguson, where the killer cop raised thousands of dollars to enable him to stay in hiding, and the comments about his activities ranged from acceptance to praise. Liberals rapidly ran away from the overt racism that dominates the lives of African-Americans in St. Louis to a discussion of police militarization which might affect them if their protests moved off Twitter and into action, and the use of courts to fill up municipal coffers with traffic fines, which might affect any of us in our own communities.

The most obvious thing about Akerloff and Shiller is that neither discusses the role of raw economic and political power in the creation of the current morass, not just here but around the world. The interests of the rich have always dominated, but from time to time, their rapacity was tempered to some extent by the forces of democracy or in earlier times, by noblesse oblige. That has rotted away. The justifications for obscene wealth and capture of all of the profits from production have been stripped away as well. Who thinks Lloyd Blankfein is doing God’s Work? Who thinks the jackasses who run any business are doing anything beyond lining their own pockets at the expense of everyone else? Who thinks the toads in Congress care about the day to day interests of the regular people of this country? Who thinks the Supreme Court is anything but a bunch of political hacks bent on protecting the rich at the expense of everyone else? And worse, the status of liberal academics and intellectuals is falling, especially as measured by their pay. If Hofstadter is right, the setting is ripe for trouble.

Hard working decent people can’t make a living, can’t get ahead, don’t benefit from the labor and loss of time that go into work, have no sense of security in their jobs or in their health, and don’t see how their children will have better lives. They want to blame someone, and the social barriers that kept the collective id behind bars have dropped, leaving them free to blame those they’ve always blamed: the poor and sick, the immigrant, and the liberal intellectuals who reject their values and their beliefs. The airwaves are full of Fox News and worse encouraging these prejudices. If Hofstadter is wrong, and economic woes are the moving factor, the setting is ripe for trouble.
Finally, here are some related comments from an interview with KMO of the C-Realm podcast on the Agroinnovations podcast:
Frank Aragona (host): "One thing that I picked up on and you haven't really mentioned this in a while...a while back you were making the comment, and it was almost in passing in some cases that the people who are wealthy in this society, in the United States and elsewhere around the world, are perfectly happy for people like you and I to choose poverty because then we basically become marginalized figures. We don't really have any impact on policy or economics or land management, or anything of significance."

"And so this idea that you're going to drop out and have a Permaculture farm in the middle of nowhere, while it's a lifestyle that many people choose, and I don't think it's a bad choice, it also seems like there are some advantages to that lifestyle for people who are controlling the means of production."

KMO: "Absolutely. I mean if you give up your demand that you maintain the quality of life that your parents enjoyed during the height of the petroleum-fueled expansion, that makes it a lot easier on the people at the top of the pyramid. If you are very vocal in insisting that you do notice the fact that your circumstances are greatly diminished and that you're not happy about it and that you demand that the people in charge or the people with resources do something to correct the situation, and you make a pain of it, you become a pain for them. Well, they would much rather have you go and be a happy voluntary peasant someplace."

They discuss the prevalence of the "walk away from society" attitude in some areas of the Permaculture community and why Frank Aragona thinks it may be not the most constructive attitude to take. Frank asks KMO about the fragmented future we seem to be facing.

KMO: "...In the United States in particular, we have a very strong well-funded, well organized movement to make people stupid. To make them completely ignorant, to put them into a reality tunnel that is really really at odds with the available evidence but because it is tied to people's self-worth and their cultural identities and to some extent their racial identities, they're encouraged to believe it and they're strongly motivated to believe it. And it seems like the longer this goes on the harder it is to remedy, because you get just deeper and... particularly as people become more impoverished and more immiserated they're going to cling to comforting stories which seem to validate their lifestyles and their choices and their cultural traditions and in general it just seems..."

"Like, there's this notion, and this is something that I think you'll encounter in the sort of secessionist people [with a] secessionist mindset, the people who think, 'I'm just going to go start my Permaculture farm, I'm going to drop out of the system, I'm going to radically reduce my expectations in terms of my material standard of living.' There's also an accompanying notion that says, 'the worse things get materially for the bulk of the people, the better that is for those of us trying to prompt some sort of positive transformation.' Marxists sometimes think this. But also somebody who has no affinity whatsoever with Marxism, they just think, you know, we need to transition to renewable energy, we need to transition to sustainable agriculture, we need to transition to a more enlightened mode of just being in the world; they think that as long as the middle class is comfortable that they're never going to make any change. But once they become uncomfortable, once they become deprived, then there's an opportunity for people who are pushing a positive agenda to really get their message across and have more people take it up."

"So there's this idea that as the economy gets worse, as jobs become more scarce, that this is all really good, that this is driving some positive development. And it doesn't really work that way historically. Revolutions tend to come in time of risingexpectations. And the labor movement was strongest when the economy was at its best and jobs were well-paying and there were plenty of them."

"So I think it's almost a truism, it's almost not worth saying, but the worse things get, the worse things get, I think. I see a lot of people mobilizing to make change, but as I say in a huge population, a population of 300 million people, a tiny fraction of them, a statistically insignificant faction of them, still is a lot of people and you can immerse yourself in that culture...there are a lot of examples that you can draw from a statistically insignificant fragment of the population."

http://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2014/09/will-shrinking-economy-lead-to-chaos.html

Labels: , , , , ,

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Monkey Trap


Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They’re drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you’d better lift your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe
      -Bob Dylan  (Like a Rolling Stone)

Jewels and Binoculars 
Hang from the head of a mule
      - Bob Dylan (Visioans of Joanna)


Greetings


       Looks like we're still on track for the worst case.  RCP 8.5.   Carbon emission in 2013 increased by 2.3%    Hundreds of thousands protest world wide.  And the governments refuse to negotiate..  India and China's leaders not attend Climate Summit. 

     What do you call this?  From the point of view of nations, it's might be a "Mexican standoff", where   three guys holds guns to each others heads. Wiki explains the tactical problem

     "Mexican standoff is most precisely a confrontation among three opponents armed with guns. The tactics for such a confrontation are substantially different from those for a duel, where the first to shoot has the advantage. In a confrontation among three mutually hostile participants, the first to shoot is at a tactical disadvantage. If opponent A shoots opponent B, then while so occupied, opponent C can shoot A, thus winning the conflict. Since it is the second opponent to shoot that has the advantage, no one wants to go first."

  But  from the point of view of humanity as whole, its more of a "Monkey Trap".

   "We"  can't escape the trap, because we can't let go of the banana - all of the fossil fueled goodies, our high on the hog lifestyle, our throw away mentality.  -  Are "we" ready to change our paradigm?  see e.g. -   Climate marchers leave trail of trash



Inline image 1
-------

Worst Case Carbon Dioxide Emissions Increases Continue — Hitting 40 Billion Tons Per Year in 2013

A new report from the Global Carbon Project shows the world’s machines are belching more carbon dioxide than ever before. The report, which measures global CO2 emissions, found that gases from all sources jumped by more than 750 million tons during 2013 — a 2.3 percent increase in the dangerous hothouse gas over already extreme 2012 emission levels.
In total, 39.8 billion tons of CO2 hit the atmosphere in 2013, up from about 39.1 billion tons in 2012.
Global Carbon Emissions vs RCP Scenario
(Global carbon emissions continued along a worst-case track during 2013. Note that estimated temperature increases are for this century only. For context, it took 12,000 years for the world to warm 5 degrees Celsius at the end of the last ice age. Image source: Global Carbon Project.)
On the current track, global CO2 emissions will double in about 30 years. This pace of emissions increase is along the worst-case path projected by the UN’s IPCC. One that will hit 8.5 watts per meter squared of additional warming at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere and greater than 1,000 ppm CO2 equivalent greenhouse gas heat forcing by the end of this century.
Such a massive increase from human sources does not include amplifying feedback emissions from global methane or CO2 stores such as those now apparently destabilizing in the Arctic. Such emissions could add an additional 20 to 30 percent or greater heat forcing on top of the human forcing, according to scientific estimates, by the end of this century.
The massive blow would be more than enough to trigger a hothouse extinction event — one that could well rival or exceed the Permian (also known as ‘the great dying’) in its ferocity due to the very rapid pace of the human heat accumulation.
IPCC impacts
(IPCC impacts graphic taking into account the RCP 8.5 scenario. Image source: IPCC.)
During 2013, the greatest CO2 emitter by a wide margin was China at nearly 10 billion tons of CO2 all on its own. The US came in a distant second at about 5.5 billion tons with India nearing the 2 billion ton mark and taking the dubious rank of #3 CO2 emitter.
Overall, the pace of emission increase was slightly slower than during 2012, which showed a 2.5% increase over 2011. The lag was due, in part, to slowing economic growth in coal-reliant China. The massive emitter has lately shown trends toward lowering its carbon out-gassing as it half-heartedly pushes for cleaner air and less coal use. The US, on the other hand, showed a jump in carbon emissions as a trend toward greater natural gas usage whip-lashed back toward coal due to higher natural gas prices.
Greater adoption of renewable energy has slowed global carbon emission from absolute worst case levels. However, the pace of renewable adoption and increasing energy efficiency is not yet enough to knock the world off the horrific RCP 8.5 track. Such a switch would require a much stronger commitment from India and China together with an ever more rapid pace of transition away from fossil fuels for the developed world. To this point, both India and China have ominously opted out of a global climate summit to be held at the UN tomorrow. There, 120 global leaders will push for ways to rapidly reduce carbon emissions. But without buy-in from India and China, such measures may well be overwhelmed by increasing emissions from these very large and increasingly heavily mechanized Asian economies.
CO2 minimum september
(Global CO2 concentrations as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory. Image source: The Keeling Curve.)
Meanwhile, global CO2 levels were hovering near their annual minimum at just above 395 parts per million after hitting a maximum level near 402 parts per million in May of 2014. At current rates of increase, global CO2 is likely to remain above the 400 parts per million concentration year-round within less than three years.
For context, the last time CO2 levels were this high, global temperatures were 2-3 degrees Celsius hotter than they were today and sea levels were at least 75 feet higher. But since humans emit a number of other powerful greenhouse gasses, the global CO2 measure alone doesn’t take into account the entire picture. If all other human heat trapping gasses are added in, the global CO2 equivalent heat forcing (CO2e) is around 481 ppm, which is enough to increase temperatures, long-term by about 3.8 degrees Celsius and to melt more than half of the world’s current ice sheets.
At the current pace of emission it will take less than 30 years to lock in a 550 ppm CO2 equivalent value — enough to melt all the ice on Earth and to raise temperatures by between 5 and 6 degrees Celsius long-term.
As such, the need for rapid transition to renewables together with reduction in harmful consumption could hardly be more urgent. With ever more harmful impacts being locked in with each passing year, the world needed strong global climate policy action yesterday. But action today will be better than waiting another decade or more as the situation continues to worsen.
Links:

Labels: , ,

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Paint it Black



I wanted to see it painted, painted black
Black as night, black as coal
     - Mick Jagger

Oh the pictures have been washed in black
Tatooed everything
     -Pearl Jam (Black)


    Greetings 

     Here are some stunning pictures of  the snow in Greenland, taken by Dr Jason Box.   He is not sure where the black dust is coming from, but he knows its not good.

   "Box gives the stunning stats: “In 2014 the ice sheet is precisely 5.6 percent darker, producing an additional absorption of energy equivalent with roughly twice the US annual electricity consumption.”

     Unfortunately recent measurements have shown that  the ice in both Greenland and the Antarctic are melting at an unprecedented rate

     Here's a fun idea.  Climate Change tourism!   

“Some people we met there were saying things like, ‘I want to visit Greenland before it completely disappears. I want to see polar bears before they are completely extinct,’ ” says Alban Kakulya, a photographer in Geneva who spent three weeks in Greenland in 2009. His photographs manage to capture the island’s otherworldly beauty as well as the incongruity of pampered, sneaker-clad cruise passengers milling around what was once regarded as a forbidding landscape.



Photo by Jason Box
Isn’t ice supposed to be white?
Photo by Jason Box
Jason Box knows ice. That’s why what’s happened this year concerns him so much.
Box just returned from a trip to Greenland. Right now, the ice there is … black:
Photo by Jason Box
Dark ice is helping Greenland’s glaciers retreat.
Photo by Jason Box
Photo by Jason Box
Crevasses criss-cross the Greenland ice sheet, allowing melt water to descend deep beneath the ice.
Photo by Jason Box
Photo by Jason Box
This year, Greenland’s ice was the darkest it’s ever been.
Photo by Jason Box
Photo by Jason Box
Box and his team are trying to discover what made this year’s melt season so unusual.
Photo by Jason Box
Photo by Jason Box
Box marks his study sites, appropriately, with black flags.
Photo by Jason Box
Photo by Jason Box
Box’s ‘Dark Snow’ project is the first scientific expedition to Greenland to be crowdfunded.
Photo by Jason Box








The ice in Greenland this year isn’t just a little dark—it’s record-setting dark. Box says he’s never seen anything like it. I spoke to Box by phone earlier this month, just days after he returned from his summer field research campaign.

 “I was just stunned, really,” Box told me.

The photos he took this summer in Greenland are frightening. But their implications are even more so. Just like black cars are hotter to the touch than white ones on sunny summer days, dark ice melts much more quickly.

As a member of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Box travels to Greenland from his home in Copenhagen to track down the source of the soot that’s speeding up the glaciers’ disappearance. He aptly calls his crowdfunded scientific survey Dark Snow.

This year was another above-average melt season in Greenland.

Courtesy of The National Snow and Ice Data Center

There are several potential explanations for what’s going on here. The most likely is that some combination of increasingly infrequent summer snowstorms, wind-blown dust, microbial activity, and forest fire soot led to this year’s exceptionally dark ice. A more ominous possibility is that what we’re seeing is the start of a cascading feedback loop tied to global warming. Box mentions this summer’s mysterious Siberian holes and offshore methane bubbles as evidence that the Arctic can quickly change in unpredictable ways.

This year, Greenland’s ice sheet was the darkest Box (or anyone else) has ever measured. Box gives the stunning stats: “In 2014 the ice sheet is precisely 5.6 percent darker, producing an additional absorption of energy equivalent with roughly twice the US annual electricity consumption.”

Perhaps coincidentally, 2014 will also be the year with the highest number of forest fires ever measured in Arctic.

Box ran these numbers exclusively for Slate, and what he found shocked him. Since comprehensive satellite measurements began in 2000, never before have Arctic wildfires been as powerful as this year. In fact, over the last two or three years, Box calculated that Arctic fires have been burning at a rate that’s double that of just a decade ago. Box felt this finding was so important that he didn’t want to wait for peer review, and instead decided to publish first onSlate. He’s planning on submitting these and other recent findings to a formal scientific journal later this year.

Arctic and sub-Arctic fires were more powerful in 2014 than ever recorded before.

Photo by Jason Box/NASA

Box’s findings are in line with recent research that shows the Arctic is in the midst of dramatic change.

A recent study has found that, as the Arctic warms, forests there are turning to flame at rates unprecedented in the last 10,000 years. This year, those fires produced volumes of smoke and soot that Box says drifted over to Greenland.

In total, more than 3.3 million hectares burned in Canada’s Northwest Territories alone this year—nearly 9 times the long term average—resulting in a charred area bigger than the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined. That figure includes the massive Birch Creek Complex, which could end up being the biggest wildfire in modern Canadian history. In July, it spread a smoke plume all the way to Portugal.

In an interview with Canada’s National Post earlier this year, NASA scientist Douglas Morton said, “It’s a major event in the life of the earth system to have a huge set of fires like what you are seeing in Western Canada.”

Box says the real challenge is to rank what fraction of the soot he finds on the Greenland ice is from forest fires, and what is from other sources, like factories. Box says the decline of snow cover in other parts of the Arctic (like Canada) is also exposing more dirt to the air, which can then be more easily transported by the wind. Regardless of their ultimate darkening effect on Greenland, this year’s vast Arctic fires have become a major new source of greenhouse gas emissions from the thawing Arctic. Last year, NASA scientists found “amazing” levels of carbon dioxide and methane emanating from Alaskan permafrost.

Earlier this year, Box made headlines for a strongly worded statement along these lines:

That tweet landed Box in a bit of hot water with his department, which he said now has to approve his media appearances. Still, Box’s sentiment is inspiring millions. His “f’d” quote is serving as the centerpiece of a massive petition(with nearly 2 million signatures at last count) that the activist organization Avaaz will deliver to “national, local, and international leaders” at this month’s global warming rally in New York City on Sept. 21.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University.

Eric Holthaus is a meteorologist who writes about weather and climate for Slate’s Future Tense. Follow him on Twitter.

Labels: , , , ,