Wednesday, November 26, 2014

The Habit


It's my wife
And it's my life
   - Velvet Underground ( Heroin)
They say it'll kill me
But the don't say when
     - Traditional
     -
Greetings
       They say that before you can quit your addiction, you have to recognize it.   I'm pretty sure that most of us don't really want to accept the truth.  Not so much that we are destroying the planet.   That's pretty obvious.     But it's our lifestyle that's doing it.   And we just don't want to give it up.   So we pretend it's not a problem
     Doesn't matter whether  it's a progressive, a socialist, or a libertarian.   We still want to " good life"   and that trumps everything else.  So we resort to finger pointing.

"We have a situation, then, where one half of the population says it is not happening, and the other half says it is happening but fighting it doesn’t have to change our way of life.  Like a dysfunctional and enabling married couple, the bickering and finger-pointing, and anger ensures that nothing has to change and that no one has to actually look deeply at themselves, even as the wheels are falling off the family-life they have co-created.  And so do Democrats and Republicans stay together in this unhappy and unproductive place of emotional self-protection and planetary ruin."

    Here are some of the stories we tell ourselves, to allow us to continue this behavior.    How to kick the habit?   That's a little tougher.
           "The problem is daunting; making changes can be difficult.[vii]  But not only can you do something, you can’t not do anything.  Either you will continue to buy, use, and consume as if there is no tomorrow; or you will make substantial changes to the way you live.  Both choices are “doing something.”   Either you will emit far more CO2 than people in most parts of the globe; or you will bring your carbon footprint to an equitable level

   

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Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question

by Erik Lindberg, originally published by Transition Milwaukee  | TODAY
Myth #1:  Liberals Are Not In Denial 
“We will not apologize for our way of life” –Barack Obama
The conservative denial of the very fact of climate change looms large in the minds of many liberals.  How, we ask, could people ignore so much solid and unrefuted evidence?   Will they deny the existence of fire as Rome burns once again?  With so much at stake, this denial is maddening, indeed.  But almost never discussed is an unfortunate side-effect of this denial: it has all but insured that any national debate in America will occur in a place where most liberals are not required to challenge any of their own beliefs.  The question has been reduced to a two-sided affair—is it happening or is it not—and liberals are obviously on the right side of that.
If we broadened the debate just a little bit, however, we would see that most liberals have just moved a giant boat-load of denial down-stream, and that this denial is as harmful as that of conservatives.  While the various aspects of liberal denial are my main overall topic, here, and will be addressed in our following five sections, they add up to the belief that we can avoid the most catastrophic levels of climate disruption without changing our fundamental way of life.  This is myth is based on errors that are as profound and basic as the conservative denial of climate change itself.
But before moving on, one more point about liberal and conservative denial: Naomi Klein has suggested that conservative denial may have its roots, it will surprise many liberals, in some pretty clear thinking. [i]  At some level, she has observed, conservatives climate deniers understand that addressing climate change will, in fact, change our way of life, a way of life which conservatives often view as sacred.  This sort of change is so terrifying and unthinkable to them, she argues, that they cut the very possibility of climate change off at its knees:  fighting climate change would force us to change our way of life; our way of life is sacred and cannot be questioned; ergo, climate change cannot be happening. 
We have a situation, then, where one half of the population says it is not happening, and the other half says it is happening but fighting it doesn’t have to change our way of life.  Like a dysfunctional and enabling married couple, the bickering and finger-pointing, and anger ensures that nothing has to change and that no one has to actually look deeply at themselves, even as the wheels are falling off the family-life they have co-created.  And so do Democrats and Republicans stay together in this unhappy and unproductive place of emotional self-protection and planetary ruin.
Myth #2:  Republicans are Still More to Blame
“Yes, America does face a cliff -- not a fiscal cliff but a set of precipices [including a carbon cliff] we'll tumble over because the GOP's obsession over government's size and spending has obscured them.”  -Robert Reich
It is true that conservative politicians in the United States and Europe have been intent on blocking international climate agreements; but by focusing on these failed agreements, which only require a baby-step in the right direction, liberals obliquely side-step the actual cause of global warming—namely, burning fossil fuels.  The denial of climate change isn’t responsible for the fact that we, in the United States, are responsible for about one quarter of all current emissions if you include the industrial products we consume (and an even greater percentage of all emissions over time), even though we make up only 6% of the world’s population.  Our high-consumption lifestyles are responsible for this.  Republicans do not emit an appreciably larger amount of carbon dioxide than Democrats. 
Because pumping gasoline is our most direct connection to the burning of fossil fuels, most Americans overemphasize the significance of what sort of car we drive and many liberals might proudly point to their small economical cars or undersized SUVs.  While the transportation sector is responsible for a lot of our emissions, the carbon footprint of any one individual has much more to do with his or her overall levels of consumption of all kinds—the travel (especially on airplanes), the hotels and restaurants, the size and number of homes, the computers and other electronics, the recreational equipment and gear, the food, the clothes, and all the other goods, services, and amenities that accompany an affluent life.  It turns out that the best predictor of someone’s carbon footprint is income.  This is true whether you are comparing yourself to other Americans or to other people around the world.  Middle-class American professionals, academics, and business-people are among the world’s greatest carbon emitters and, as a group, are more responsible than any other single group for global warming, especially if we focus on discretionary consumption.  Accepting the fact of climate change, but then jetting off to the tropics, adding another oversized television to the collection, or buying a new Subaru involves a tremendous amount of denial.  There are no carbon offsets for ranting and raving about conservative climate-change deniers.
Myth #3:  Renewable Energy Can Replace Fossil Fuels
“We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” –Barack Obama
This is a hugely important point.  Everything else hinges on the myth that we might live a lifestyle similar to our current one powered by wind, solar, and biofuels.  Like the conservative belief that climate change cannot be happening, liberals believe that renewable energy must be a suitable replacement.  Neither view is particularly concerned with the evidence.
Conventional wisdom among American liberals assures us that we would be well on our way to a clean, green, low-carbon, renewable energy future were it not for the lobbying efforts of big oil companies and their Republican allies.  The truth is far more inconvenient than this: it will be all but impossible for our current level of consumption to be powered by anything but fossil fuels.  The liberal belief that energy sources such as wind, solar, and biofuels can replace oil, natural gas, and coal is a mirror image of the conservative denial of climate change: in both cases an overriding belief about the way the world works, or should work, is generally far stronger than any evidence one might present.  Denial is the biggest game in town.  Denial, as well as a misunderstanding about some fundamental features of energy, is what allows someone like Bill Gates assume that “an energy miracle” will be created with enough R & D.  Unfortunately, the lessons of microprocessors do not teach us anything about replacing oil, coal, and natural gas.
It is of course true that solar panels and wind turbines can create electricity, and that ethanol and bio-diesel can  power many of our vehicles, and this does lend a good bit of credibility to the claim that a broader transition should be possible—if we can only muster the political will and finance the necessary research.  But this view fails to take into account both the limitations of renewable energy and the very specific qualities of the fossil fuels around which we’ve built our way of life.  The myth that alternative sources of energy are perfectly capable of replacing fossil fuels and thus of maintaining our current way of life receives widespread support from our President to leading public intellectuals to most mainstream journalists, and receives additional backing from our self-image as a people so ingenious that there are no limits to what we can accomplish.  That fossil fuels have provided us with a one-time burst of unrepeatable energy and affluence (and ecological peril) flies in the face of nearly all the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.  Just starting to dispel this myth requires that I go into the issue a bit more deeply and at greater length.
Because we have come to take the power and energy-concentration of fossil fuels for granted, and see our current lifestyle as normal, it is easy to ignore the way the average citizens of industrialized societies have an unprecedented amount of energy at their disposal.  Consider this for a moment: a single $3 gallon of gasoline provides the equivalent of about 80 days of hard manual labor.  Fill up your 15 gallon gas tank in your car, and you’ve just bought the same amount of energy that would take over three years of unremitting manual labor to reproduce.  Americans use more energy in a month than most of our great-grandparents used during their whole lifetime.  We live at a level, today, that in previous days could have only been supported by about 150 slaves for every American—though even that understates it, because we are at the same time beneficiaries of a societal infrastructure that is also only possible to create if we have seemingly limitless quantities of lightweight, relatively stable, easily transportable, and extremely inexpensive ready-to-burn fuel like oil or coal. 
A single, small, and easily portable gallon of oil is the product of nearly 100 tons of surface-forming algae (imagine 5 dump trucks full of the stuff), which first collected enormous amounts of solar radiation before it was condensed, distilled, and pressure cooked for a half-billion years—and all at no cost to the humans who have come to depend on this concentrated energy.  There is no reason why we should be able to manufacture at a reasonable cost anything comparable.  And when we look at the specific qualities of renewable energy with any degree of detail we quickly see that we have not.  Currently only about a half of a percent of the total energy used in the United States is generated by wind, solar, biofuels, or geothermal heat.   The global total is not much higher, despite the much touted efforts in Germany, Spain, and now China.  In 2013, 1.1% of the world’s total energy was provided by wind and only 0.2% by solar.[ii]  As these low numbers suggest, one of the major limitations of renewable energy has to do with scale, whether we see this as a limitation in renewable energy itself, or remind ourselves that the expectations that fossil fuels have helped establish are unrealistic and unsustainable. 
University of California physics professor Tom Murphy has provided detailed calculations about many of the issues of energy scale in his blog, “Do the Math.”  With the numbers adding up, we are no longer able to wave the magic wand of our faith in our own ingenuity and declare the solar future would be here, but for those who refuse to give in the funding it is due.  Consider a few representative examples: most of us have, for instance, heard at some point the sort of figure telling us that enough sun strikes the Earth every 104 minutes to power the entire world for a year.  But this only sounds good if you don’t perform any follow-up calculations.  As Murphy puts it,
"As reassuring as this picture is, the photovoltaic area [required] represents more than all the paved area in the world. This troubles me. I’ve criss-crossed the country many times now, and believe me, there is a lot of pavement. The paved infrastructure reflects a tremendous investment that took decades to build. And we’re talking about asphalt and concrete here: not high-tech semiconductor. I truly have a hard time grasping the scale such a photovoltaic deployment would represent.  And I’m not even addressing storage here." [iii]
In another post,[iv] Murphy calculates that a battery capable of storing this electricity in the U.S. alone (otherwise no electricity at night or during cloudy or windless spells) would require about three times as much lead as geologists estimate may exist in all reserves, most of which remain unknown.  If you count only the lead that we’ve actually discovered, Murphy explains, we only have 2% of the lead available for our national battery project.  The number are even more disheartening if you try to substitute lithium ion or other systems now only in the research phase.  The same story holds true for just about all the sources that even well-informed people assume are ready to replace fossil fuels, and which pundits will rattle off in an impressively long list with impressive sounding numbers of kilowatt hours produced.  Add them all up--even increase the efficiency to unanticipated levels and assume a limitless budget--and you will naturally have some big-sounding numbers; but then compare them to our current energy appetite, and you quickly see that we still run out of space, vital minerals and other raw materials, and in the meantime would probably have strip-mined a great deal of precious farmland, changed the earth’s wind patterns, and have affected the weather or other ecosystems in ways not yet imagined.
But the most significant limitation of fossil fuel’s alleged clean, green replacements has to do with the laws of physics and the way energy, itself, works.  A brief review of the way energy does what we want it to do will also help us see why it takes so many solar panels or wind turbines to do the work that a pickup truck full of coal or a small tank of crude oil can currently accomplish without breaking a sweat.  When someone tells us of the fantastic amounts of solar radiation that beats down on the Earth each day, we are being given a meaningless fact.  Energy doesn’t do work; only concentrated energy does work, and only while it is going from its concentrated state to a diffuse state—sort of like when you let go of a balloon and it flies around the room until its pressurized (or concentrated) air has joined the remaining more diffuse air in the room.
When we build wind turbines and solar panels, or grow plants that can be used for biofuels, we are “manually” concentrating the diffuse energy of the sun or in the wind—a task, not incidentally, that requires a good deal of energy.  The reason why these efforts, as impressive as they are, pale in relationship to fossil fuels has to do simply with the fact that we are attempting to do by way of a some clever engineering and manufacturing (and a considerable amount of energy) what the geology of the Earth did for free, but, of course, over a period of half a billion years with the immense pressures of the planet’s shifting tectonic plates or a hundred million years of sedimentation helping us out.  The “normal” society all of us have grown up with is a product of this one-time burst of a pre-concentrated, ready-to-burn fuel source.  It has provided us with countless wonders; but used without limits, it is threatening all life as we know it.
Myth 4: The Coming “Knowledge Economy” Will be a Low-Energy Economy
"The basic economic resource - the means of production - is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge."  -Peter Drucker
“The economy of the last century was primarily based on natural resources, industrial machines and manual labor. . . . Today’s economy is very different. It is based primarily on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone.”  -Mark Zuckerberg
A “low energy knowledge economy,” when promised by powerful people like Barack Obama, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg, may still our fears about our current ecological trajectory.  At a gut level this vision of the future may match the direct experience of many middle-class American liberals.  Your father worked in a smelting factory; you spend your day behind a laptop computer, which can, in fact, be run on a very small amount of electricity.  Your carbon footprint must be lower, right?  Companies like Apple and Microsoft round out this hopeful fantasy with their clever and inspiring advertisements featuring children in Africa or China joining this global knowledge economy as they crowd cheerfully around a computer in some picturesque straw-hut school room.
But there’s a big problem with this picture.  This global economy may seem like it needs little more than an army of creative innovators and entrepreneurs tapping blithely on laptop computers at the local Starbucks.  But the real global economy still requires a growing fleet of container ships—and, of course, all the iron and steel used to build them, all the excavators used to mine it, all the asphalt needed to pave more of the world.  It needs a bigger and bigger fleet of UPS trucks and Fed Ex airplanes filling the skies with more and more carbon dioxide, it needs more paper, more plastic, more nickel, copper, and lead.  It requires food, bottled water, and of course lots and lots of coffee.  And more oil, coal, and natural gas.  As Juliet Schor reports, each American consumer requires “132,000 pounds of oil, sand, grain, iron ore, coal and wood” to maintain our current lifestyle each year.  That adds up to “an eye-popping 362 pounds a day.”[v]  And the gleeful African kids that Apple asks us to imagine joining the global economy?   They are far more likely to slave away in a gold mine or sift through junk hauled across the Atlantic looking for recyclable materials, than they are to be device-sporting global entrepreneurs.  The Microsoft ads are designed for us, not them.  Meanwhile, the numbers Schor reports are not going down in the age of “the global knowledge economy,” a term which should be consigned to history’s dustbin of misleading marketing slogans.
The “dematerialized labor” that accounts for the daily toil of the American middle class is, in fact, the clerical, management and promotional sector of an industrial machine that is still as energy-intensive and material-based as it ever was.   Only now, much of the sooty and smelly part has been off-shored to places far, far away from the people who talk hopefully about a coming global knowledge economy.  We like to pretend that the rest of the world can live like us, and we have certainly done our best to advertise, loan, seduce, and threaten people across the world to adopt our style, our values, and our wants.   But someone still has to do the smelting, the welding, the sorting, and run the ceaseless production lines.  And, moreover, if everyone lived like we do, took our vacations, drove our cars, ate our food, lived in our houses, filled them with oversized TVs and the endless array of throwaway gadgetry, the world would use four times as much energy and emit nearly four times as much carbon dioxide as it does now.  If even half the world’s population were to consume like we do, we would have long since barreled by the ecological point of no-return. 
Economists speak reverently of a decoupling between economic growth and carbon emissions, but this decoupling is occurring at a far slower rate than the economy is growing.  There has never been any global economic growth that is not also accompanied by increased energy use and carbon emissions.  The onlyyearly decreases in emissions ever recorded have come during massive recessions. 
Myth 5: We can Reverse Global Warming Without Changing our Current Lifestyles
“Saving the planet would be cheap; it might even be free. . . . [It] would have hardly any negative effect   on economic growth, and might actually lead to faster growth” –Paul Krugman
The upshot of the previous sections is that the comforts, luxuries, privileges, and pleasures that we tell ourselves are necessary for a happy or satisfying life are the most significant cause of global warming and that unless we quickly learn to organize our lives around another set of pleasures and satisfactions, it is extremely unlikely that our children or grandchildren will inherit a livable planet.  Because we are falsely reassured by liberal leaders that we can fight climate change without any inconvenience, it bears repeating this seldom spoken truth.  In order to adequately address climate change, people in rich industrial nations will have to reduce current levels of consumption to levels few are prepared to consider.  This truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.[vi]  
Global warming is not complicated: it is caused mainly by burning fossil fuels; fossil fuels are burned in the greatest quantity by wealthy people and nations and for the products they buy and use.  The larger the reach of a middle-class global society, the more carbon emissions there have been.  While conservatives deny the science of global warming, liberals deny the only real solution to preventing its most horrific consequences—using less and powering down, perhaps starting with the global leaders in style and taste (as well as emissions), the American middle-class.  In the meantime we continue to pump more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with each passing year.
Myth 6: There is Nothing I Can Do.
The problem is daunting; making changes can be difficult.[vii]  But not only can you do something, you can’t not do anything.  Either you will continue to buy, use, and consume as if there is no tomorrow; or you will make substantial changes to the way you live.  Both choices are “doing something.”   Either you will emit far more CO2 than people in most parts of the globe; or you will bring your carbon footprint to an equitable level.  Either you will turn away, ignore the warnings, bury your head in the sand; or you will begin to take a strong stance on perhaps the most significant moral challenge in the history of humanity.  Either you will be a willing party to the most destructive thing humans have ever done; or you will resist the wants, the beliefs, and the expectations that are as important to a consumption-based global economy as the fossil fuels that power it.   As Americans we have already done just about everything possible to bring the planet to the brink of what scientists are now calling “the sixth great extinction.”  We can either keep on doing more of the same; or we can work to undo the damage we have done and from which we have most benefitted.  

[v] Schor, Juliet.  Plentitude, p. 44.
[vi] As Flannery O’Connor would say.
[vii] Making changes is especially difficult to do alone.  Fortunately, community efforts such as Transition Towns are popping up around the globe, giving people both practical help and the emotional support necessary to tackle such a large task.

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Thursday, November 20, 2014

Fork in the Road


 Did you ever have to make up your mind
to pick up on one
and leave the other behind?
      - Lovin' Spoonful
A naked lunch is natural to us now
we eat reality sandwiches
       -Alan Ginzberg

Greetings
       It seems we are committed to the "E and R"  (efficiency and renewables)  strategy on climate change.  
       In order for this to succeed at least three things have to happen
.  First, the renewable energy must "replace", not merely supplement fossil fuel use.  If no fossil plants come off line, CO2 does not decline.   So far, despite E and R, CO2 continues to rise.  As the article below points out, this is not yet happening - 
     Second, the manufacture of the renewable plants, must not create some other insult to the biosphere.  Biofuels that cause corn fed dead zones, palm oil plantations that destroy habitat,   hydro facilities that " produce more of these greenhouse gases than power plants running on fossil fuels."     or mining for exotic elements that destroy rivers.   Climate change is not our only problem.   We are already in overshoot . There is no future in going further into overshoot.
  Third, the EROI of the energy system must be great enough to support the complexity needed to maintain, repair and replace it.   For instance, solar and wind facilities require, at least the following :   high tech manufacturing,  international banking,   international trade, with supply chains from around the world.,   In other words, the same complex society we have now.  The EROI  required for that is estimated at 10-15 .
    As to this EROI issue,  this article reports on studies indicating that while PV and wind have reasonably high EROI with the grid as a backup,  but that when you factor in the need for storage the EROI are much less, 1.6 for PV and 3.9 for wind.   See the study here.    Thus, in order to support the necessary complexity, coal,  or natural gas plants must be also part of the mix.  Which means that we would be unable to "cease" burning fossil fuels.
      (The need for storage is recognized.  Recently the California  put out a call for utilities to adress the issue with discouraging results  see e.g.  California Utilities vote no on energy storage.)
see also  this   interesting piece Gail Tvberg, addressing other pitfalls 
         So, is E and R, the only solution?  What about "turning the knobs to the left"?
"We certainly need to swiftly end fossil fuel burning and the destruction of ecosystems and that will require us to rely on the least harmful energy sources such as wind and solar power. But the myth of plentiful "clean" energy stops us from focusing on the far deeper changes needed - a transformation toward a low-energy society. A depressing conclusion? Not necessarily. As UK climate change campaigner and author George Marshall has pointed out, we could cut flights (and probably all transport emissions) and slash energy used for home heating by 80 percent overnight by going back to the way people used to live as short a time ago as 1972, provided we used home insulation and efficient boiler technology developed since then. Instead, 40 years of efficiency gains have been wiped out by ever-greater consumption. Yet UK "personal satisfaction" surveys show that people's sense of satisfaction or happiness peaked in 1970. Once people's basic needs for energy are met, rising energy use remains vital for corporate profits and economic growth, but not for people's quality of life.


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Abundant Clean Renewables? Think Again!Sunday, 16 November 2014 00:00By Almuth Ernsting, Truthout | News Analysis
Although "renewable" energy is growing faster than ever before, it is neither carbon neutral, "clean" nor sustainable. We need to transform into low-energy societies that meet human - not corporate - needs.
Renewable energy is growing faster than ever before. Sure, some countries are lagging behind, but others are setting widely praised records.
Germany has installed over 24,000 wind turbines and 1.4 million solar panels, and renewables generate 31 percent of the country's electricity on average - and as much as 74 percent on particularly windy or sunny days. According to the German government, 371,400 jobs have been created by renewable energy. Norway generates 99 percent of its electricity from renewable energy. Denmark already generates 43 percent of electricity from renewables and aims to phase out fossil fuel burning by 2050.
Many view such news as rays of hope in a rapidly destabilizing climate. We all need some good news - but is renewables expansion really the good news people like to think? Can we really put our hopes for stabilizing the climate into trying to simply replace the energy sources in a growth-focused economic and social model that was built on fossil fuels? Or do we need a far more fundamental transition towards a low-energy economy and society?
Here's the first problem with celebratory headlines over renewables: Record renewable energy hasn't stopped record fossil fuel burning, including record levels of coal burning. Coal use is growing so fast that the International Energy Authority expects it to surpass oil as the world's top energy source by 2017.
Perhaps the 1,500 gigawatts of electricity produced from renewables worldwide have prevented a further 1,500 gigawatts of fossil fuel power stations? Nobody can tell. It's just as possible that renewables have simply added 1,500 gigawatts of electricity to the global economy, fueled economic growth and ever-greater industrial resource use. In which case, far from limiting carbon dioxide emissions worldwide, renewables may simply have increased them because, as discussed below, no form of large-scale energy is carbon neutral.
As long as energy sources that are as carbon-intensive and destructive as fossil fuels are classed as "renewable," boosting renewable energy around the world risks doing more harm than good.
Germany's Energy Transition illustrates the problem: Wind turbines and solar panels have certainly become a widespread feature of Germany's landscape. Yet if we look at Germany's total energy use (including heating and transport), rather than just at electricity, energy classed as renewable accounts for just 11.5 percent. The majority, 87.8 percent, of Germany's energy continues to come from fossil fuels and nuclear power (with waste incineration accounting for the difference of 0.7 percent). Coal consumption, which had been falling until 2008, has been rising again since then. Germany remains the European Union's (EU) top coal consumerNet electricity exports are being blamed for the rise in coal burning and carbon dioxide emissions, yet they account for just 5 percent of Germany's electricity - and electricity accounts for less than half of the country's energy use.
The picture looks even worse when one examines the mix of energy classed as renewable in Germany: Solar photovoltaic (PV) makes up 11.5 percent of renewables, wind, 16.8 percent. The bulk of it - 62 percent - comes from bioenergy, much of which is far from low carbon or sustainable. It includes biofuels, many of them made from imported soya and palm oil that are being expanded at the expense of tropical forests and peatlands and that destroy the livelihoods of small farmers, indigenous and other forest dependent peoples worldwide. It includes biogas made from 820,000 hectares of corn monocultures in Germany - a key driver for biodiversity loss in the country. And it includes wood pellets linked to forest degradation across Central Europe. On closer examination, therefore, 24,000 wind turbines and 1.4 million solar panels have scarcely made a dent in Germany's fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions.
Norway's situation is unique in that virtually all of the country's electricity is generated from hydro dams, which were gradually expanded over the course of more than a century. Fossil fuels (mostly oil) still surpass renewable energy in Norway's overall energy mix (with electricity accounting for less than half of the total), though only marginally so, and Norway's economy remains heavily dependent on oil and gas exports.
Norway's own hydro dams - many of them small-scale - have raised little controversy but the same cannot be said for Norway's efforts to export this model to other countries. The Norwegian government and the state-owned energy company Statkraft have been at the forefront of financing controversial dams and associated infrastructure in Laos, India, Malaysian Borneo and elsewhere. One example is Statkraft's joint venture investment in a new dam in Laos that has displaced 4,800 people and is causing flooding, erosion, and loss of fisheries and land on which people relied for growing rice.
Another example is Norwegian aid for transmission lines for mega-dams in Sarawak, a Malaysian province in Borneo which has seen vast areas of tropical rainforest - and the livelihoods of millions of indigenous peoples - sacrificed for palm oil, logging and also hydro power. One dam alone displaced 10,000 people and at least 10 more dams are planned, despite ongoing resistance from indigenous peoples. Far from being climate-friendly, hydro dams worldwide are associated with large methane emissions - withone study suggesting they are responsible for 25 percent of all human-caused methane emissions and over 4 percent of global warming. The disastrous consequences of Norway's global hydro power investment illustrates the dangers of the simplistic view that anything classed as renewable energy must be climate-friendly and merits support.
What about the much-heralded renewable transition of Denmark? There coal use is falling and around 21 percent of total energy is sourced from renewables. Denmark holds the world record for wind energy capacity compared to population size. Unlike many other countries where wind energy is firmly controlled by large energy companies, Denmark has seen strong support for locally owned wind energy cooperatives, widely considered an inspiring example of clean, community-controlled energy. Nonetheless, wind energy in Denmark accounted for just 3.8 percent of Denmark's total energy use in 2010.
Bioenergy accounts for a far greater percentage of Denmark's "renewable energy" than does wind - and indeed for a greater share in the country's overall energy mix than is the case in any other European country. As in Germany, Denmark's bioenergy includes biofuels for transport, which studies show tend to be worse for the climate than equivalent quantities of oil once all the direct and indirect emissions from deforestation, peatland destruction and other land use change associated with them are accounted for. And it includes wood pellets, with Denmark being the EU's, and likely the world's, second biggest pellet importer after the United Kingdom. Most of those pellets come from the Baltic states and Russia, from countries where clear-cutting of highly biodiverse forests is rampant. Studies show that burning wood from whole trees can be worse for the climate than burning coal over a period of decades or even centuries.
Thus, on closer inspection, many of the "great renewable energy successes" don't look so great after all.
Clearly, the current catch-all definition of "renewables" is a key problem: Defining methane-spewing mega-dams, biofuels, which are accelerating deforestation and other ecosystem destruction, or logging forests for bioenergy as "renewable" helps policy makers boost renewables statistics, while helping to further destabilize planetary support systems. As long as energy sources that are as carbon-intensive and destructive as fossil fuels are classed as "renewable," boosting renewable energy around the world risks doing more harm than good.
A saner definition of "renewable energy" clearly is vital but would it open the door toward 100 percent clean and plentiful energy? Comparing the rate of wind energy expansion in Denmark and wind and solar power expansion in Germany with the tiny contribution they make to both countries' total energy supply indicates otherwise.
Wind and solar power require far less land per unit of energy than biomass or biofuels, but the area of land needed to replace fossil fuel power stations with, say, wind turbines is vast nonetheless. According to a former scientific advisor to the UK government, for example, 15 offshore wind turbines installed on every kilometer of the UK coastline would supply just 13 percent of the country's average daily energy use. And offshore turbines are more efficient than onshore ones.
Researchers agree that the life-cycle impacts of wind and solar power on the climate and environment are definitely smaller than those of fossil fuels, as long as turbines and panels are sensibly sited (not, for example, on deep peat). But this doesn't mean that the impacts are benign. Generating that 13 percent of UK energy from offshore wind would require wind turbines made of 20 million tons of steel and concrete - more than all the steel that went into US shipbuilding during World War II. Steel manufacturing is heavily dependent on coal, not just as a fuel for the furnaces but because it is needed to enrich the raw material, iron ore, with carbon to make it stable. And concrete is hardly "carbon neutral" either - cement (a key component) accounts for 5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.
Solar PV panels are up to four times as energy and carbon-intensive to produce as wind turbines: Aluminum - used to mount and construct solar panels - is about as carbon and energy-intensive as steel. Silicon needs to be smelted at 2,000 degrees Celsius and materials used to replace silicon have an even higher environmental footprint. Then there's an array of highly toxic and corrosive chemicals used during manufacturing. Yet with regards to pollution, building wind and marine turbines is likely worse than making solar panels, because efficient and lasting turbine magnets rely on rare earth mining and refining. One 5-megawatt turbine requires a ton of rare earths, the mining and refining of which will leave behind 75 cubic meters of toxic acidic waste water and one ton of radioactive sludge. Two-thirds of the world's rare earths are refined in one town in China, where people have become environmental refugees and virtually all who remain suffer from ill health associated with toxic chemicals and radiation. In the quest for "clean energy" rare earths mines are being sought and opened around the globe. The only US rare earths mine, Molycorp's in California, has been reopened, after having been shut down due to a long history of repeated spills of toxic and radioactive waste. Since reopening, the operators have already been fined for spilling yet more hazardous waste.
Zero-carbon, clean energy? Well, no. And yet, there are no large-scale energy sources with lower carbon emissions and less harmful environmental impacts than wind and solar power. As one scientist argues from the perspective of thermodynamics: "To talk about 'renewable energy' or 'sustainable energy' is an oxymoron, as is 'sustainable mining' or 'sustainable development.' The more energy we use, the less sustainable is humanity."
We certainly need to swiftly end fossil fuel burning and the destruction of ecosystems and that will require us to rely on the least harmful energy sources such as wind and solar power. But the myth of plentiful "clean" energy stops us from focusing on the far deeper changes needed - a transformation toward a low-energy society. A depressing conclusion? Not necessarily. As UK climate change campaigner and author George Marshall has pointed out, we could cut flights (and probably all transport emissions) and slash energy used for home heating by 80 percent overnight by going back to the way people used to live as short a time ago as 1972, provided we used home insulation and efficient boiler technology developed since then. Instead, 40 years of efficiency gains have been wiped out by ever-greater consumption. Yet UK "personal satisfaction" surveys show that people's sense of satisfaction or happiness peaked in 1970. Once people's basic needs for energy are met, rising energy use remains vital for corporate profits and economic growth, but not for people's quality of life.
Most readers will have never lived in a low-energy society. Imagining what such a society might look like and how to move toward the transformation required to get there, and to overcome the corporate interests that depend on profits from ever rising energy use, must be priorities for anyone aware of the seriousness of climate change. Daunting no doubt, but once we've abandoned faith in plentiful "clean" energy, we can finally make a start.

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Friday, November 14, 2014

Feeling lucky?


Baby, even the losers
get lucky sometimes
   -Tom Petty
Greetings
     It seems that China and Obama have agreed on terms for a Climate Change treaty.   Ignoring for a moment whether Obama a can deliver, one might ask, whether it makes any difference.
      We are all used to the notion of compromise, and a " first step"  or a "step in the right direction".   And using that sort of measuring stick, you could argue that any US and China commitment to reduce emissions is a good thing. 
     Some folks are calling it  a landmark  agreement.   Grist calls it a "game changer"
    It's a little short on details, so it's hard to evaluate.    But let's assume the best.   According to this analysis, China' s 2030 peak is pretty much a given.   The US  reductions are a little more iffy.   So, that's 45% of the emissions . If the rest of the world made  similar commitments, ( also iffy) we might have a 50 - 50 chance of staying under 2 degrees.  
Are you feeling lucky?
      Other analyses may differ. Here's a recent piece from Scientific American where,  Dr Michael Mann shows argues (using an ECS of 3), in order to stay under 2 degrees, "  fossil-fuel burning would essentially have to cease immediately" , and that we will probably hit 2 degrees by 2036 (ECS of 3) or 2046 (ECS of 2.5).  
        Below, Kevin Anderson discusses the underlying question " Is some deal better than no deal"    ?      As you might guess,  he' s not too enamored  with a weak deal, because we'd just end up with " a slightly modified business as usual future heading for temperature rises of 4C or more."
"If we can’t get anywhere, then let’s have the international community be honest about this and admit they have failed to deliver and that the world must prepare for very high levels of climate change. We mustn’t continue to hide our abject failure behind some long, eloquent document absent of substance."
  --------
former director of the Tyndall Centre, the UK's leading academic climate change research organisation, talks to chinadialogue's Tom Levitt about climate politics and his hopes for a global deal on reducing emissions by the end of 2015.
Tom Levitt (TL): Is any deal better than no deal at the UN climate summit in Paris next year?
Kevin Anderson (KA): No, I don’t think it is. If no worthwhile deal appears to be forthcoming from Paris then first we have to be open and honest about that, and put in an emergency timetable to bring leaders together again to hammer out a deal. What will happen with a weak deal is targets or frameworks far removed from those necessary to meet the 2C commitments - first agreed by leaders at the Copenhagen Summit in 2009 - will be used to inform the basis of national policies. In practice we’d then likely only achieve a proportion of those and thereby lock in a slightly modified business as usual future heading for temperature rises of 4C or more.
Rather than having a weak and irrelevant deal that would stop the process of significant mitigation for another four or five years, we have to drive a process to bring our leaders back to negotiations. If we can’t get anywhere, then let’s have the international community be honest about this and admit they have failed to deliver and that the world must prepare for very high levels of climate change. We mustn’t continue to hide our abject failure behind some long, eloquent document absent of substance.
TL: How do you see the European Union’s leadership role on climate change?
KA: The EU has not developed internal policies that are in any way consistent with its repeated and expressed goals of avoiding the 2C characterisation of dangerous climate change. The EU is now aiming for what it says is an ambitious target of a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030. That’s far too weak. We need to achieve more than double that for the EU to be making its reasonably fair contribution to a 2C future as outlined by the IPCC. The science and the numbers that come out of the IPCC report in terms of the carbon budget – taking into account a reasonable element of equity - would mean nations and regions like the US, EU and Australia would need to reduce their emissions at a much faster rate than even the EU is considering.
TL: The UK has been seen as a leader on climate change since the passing of the Climate Change Act in 2008. But is it now in danger of ditching or failing to meet its commitments?
KA: To its credit the UK does have carbon budgets, but, unlike the 80% target for 2050 outlined in the Climate Change Act, they are not enshrined in law. The long-term, 2050 targets are irrelevant and worse still misleading in relation to climate change. The only thing that matters is the build-up of greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, in the atmosphere, in other words carbon budgets. The problem with the UK’s 2050 80% target is that it allows us to think that we can do things tomorrow that we failed to do today. If no agreement is reached in Paris next year, there may be increasing pressure on the government to repeal the Act itself. And even if the Act remains, I think the influence of the Committee on Climate Change may be reduced, and there is a risk that it could be abolished.
TL: If we were to have a realistic chance of meeting the 2C target, what expectation would that put on China?
KA: If we look at the IPCC's carbon budgets for a reasonable chance of staying within a 2C framing of climate change, then the message is fairly stark for Annex 1 countries, i.e. the US, Europe, etc. They have to eliminate fossil fuel use from their energy system early in the 2030s. For non-Annex 1 countries, including and dominated by China, they would need to eliminate all fossil fuels from their energy system by 2050, but also they need to peak their emissions by the mid 2020s and, by 2030, be delivering decarbonisation rates of at least 10% reductions year on year. Together these give a good chance of staying below a 2C rise in temperature.
A big point for China is the issue of infrastructure development. When China constructs airports, ports, roads or buildings it is currently locking in very high energy-use and hence carbon futures, as even China will not be able to transition to low-carbon energy sources at sufficient rate. The other issue is trying to overcome the way the West frames success and progress. China has a very different philosophical and cultural background to that of the West so has real scope to think differently about what it means to be successful. The model we’ve developed in the West is dominated by consumption – that’s how we repeatedly measure success – let us hope China can propose alternatives.
TL: How far can the policies promoted by The New Climate Economy report and others like them take us in reducing GHG emissions and tackling climate change?
KA: The first thing to bear in mind is that these reports are primarily about greening growth. They are not about climate stabilisation. That’s an important distinction. They are genuinely interested in how we can green the process of economic development, but they are not thinking about what the science says about carbon budgets and keeping to the 2C target. That’s a real danger because there is an assumption that if we green growth that’s adequate. But if the temperature keeps rising then the implications of a rapidly changed climate will, overall, play out negatively in terms of economic development.
These reports are authored by well meaning people trying to figure out how far you can push the current socio-economic and political systems to address climate change. The fact is that the speed and depth of mitigation now required for 2C begs fundamental questions of the current systems. Perhaps these systems could have addressed climate change if they’d responded appropriately at the time of the first IPCC report almost a quarter of a century ago. But in 2014 our emissions are 60-65% higher than they were in 1990 and are showing no signs of coming down in the next few years.
TL: Do you still have faith in the UN process or is it time to pursue alternatives like bilateral deals?
KA: I am all for continuing with the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and related processes, I think we need to be pushing them as hard as we can. But there are other things we should do alongside them. The UK’s Climate Change Act was a separate process, outside of the UNFCCC, as were the EU negotiations. We already have a mix of approaches. It’s a mistake to think that these can’t be designed to complement the UN negotiations. Ultimately however, if you are serious about climate change as a global problem then a global framework is necessary to understand the collective implications of everyone’s efforts. It is foolish and naïve to decry the UN process assuming you could substitute it for smaller, bilateral or other negotiations – these are necessary, but only as a complement to the UN process.
TL: Why do you think that message about 2C isn’t getting through to policymakers?
KA: Those of us in the scientific community who have been developing emissions scenarios and pathways have not served the policy-makers or civil society well. We have collectively adopted the approach of the New Climate Economy authors in trying to second-guess how hard we can push the political and economic system. It is our job as academics to stand outside of such constraints and say if the international community wants to meet it targets of 2C then these are the necessary carbon budgets and these are the range of accompanying emissions pathways. We should stand our ground as independent, objective analysts, much more than we have.
By trying to serve the political system in a way that is well meaning, we have ultimately undermined a robust understanding of the severity of the situation we have got ourselves into. It’s led us to the point today where we have squandered any reasonable opportunity of an evolutionary transition to 2°C, and now face revolutionary changes to our energy systems. The scale and timeframe of such systemic re-writing of energy supply, demand and distribution inevitably raises fundamental questions about the structure of contemporary society. 
We have squandered any reasonable chance of keeping within 2C of climate change unless we take draconian action, says climate scientist Kevin Anderson
The former director of the Tyndall Centre, the UK’s leading academic climate change research organisation, talks to chinadialogue’s Tom Levitt about climate politics and his hopes for a global deal on reducing emissions by the end of 2015.

KA: The EU has not developed internal policies that are in any way consistent with its repeated and expressed goals of avoiding the 2C characterisation of dangerous climate change. The EU is now aiming for what it says is an ambitious target of a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030. That’s far too weak. We need to achieve more than double that for the EU to be making its reasonably fair contribution to a 2C future as outlined by the IPCC. The science and the numbers that come out of the IPCC report in terms of the carbon budget – taking into account a reasonable element of equity – would mean nations and regions like the US, EU and Australia would need to reduce their emissions at a much faster rate than even the EU is considering.
TL: The UK has been seen as a leader on climate change since the passing of the Climate Change Act in 2008. But is it now in danger of ditching or failing to meet its commitments?
KA: To its credit the UK does have carbon budgets, but, unlike the 80% target for 2050 outlined in the Climate Change Act, they are not enshrined in law. The long-term, 2050 targets are irrelevant and worse still misleading in relation to climate change. The only thing that matters is the build-up of greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, in the atmosphere, in other words carbon budgets. The problem with the UK’s 2050 80% target is that it allows us to think that we can do things tomorrow that we failed to do today. If no agreement is reached in Paris next year, there may be increasing pressure on the government to repeal the Act itself. And even if the Act remains, I think the influence of the Committee on Climate Change may be reduced, and there is a risk that it could be abolished.
TL: If we were to have a realistic chance of meeting the 2C target, what expectation would that put on China?
KA: If we look at the IPCC’s carbon budgets for a reasonable chance of staying within a 2C framing of climate change, then the message is fairly stark for Annex 1 countries, i.e. the US, Europe, etc. They have to eliminate fossil fuel use from their energy system early in the 2030s. For non-Annex 1 countries, including and dominated by China, they would need to eliminate all fossil fuels from their energy system by 2050, but also they need to peak their emissions by the mid 2020s and, by 2030, be delivering decarbonisation rates of at least 10% reductions year on year. Together these give a good chance of staying below a 2C rise in temperature.
A big point for China is the issue of infrastructure development. When China constructs airports, ports, roads or buildings it is currently locking in very high energy-use and hence carbon futures, as even China will not be able to transition to low-carbon energy sources at sufficient rate. The other issue is trying to overcome the way the West frames success and progress. China has a very different philosophical and cultural background to that of the West so has real scope to think differently about what it means to be successful. The model we’ve developed in the West is dominated by consumption – that’s how we repeatedly measure success – let us hope China can propose alternatives.
TL: How far can the policies promoted by The New Climate Economy report and others like them take us in reducing GHG emissions and tackling climate change?
KA: The first thing to bear in mind is that these reports are primarily about greening growth. They are not about climate stabilisation. That’s an important distinction. They are genuinely interested in how we can green the process of economic development, but they are not thinking about what the science says about carbon budgets and keeping to the 2C target. That’s a real danger because there is an assumption that if we green growth that’s adequate. But if the temperature keeps rising then the implications of a rapidly changed climate will, overall, play out negatively in terms of economic development.
These reports are authored by well meaning people trying to figure out how far you can push the current socio-economic and political systems to address climate change. The fact is that the speed and depth of mitigation now required for 2C begs fundamental questions of the current systems. Perhaps these systems could have addressed climate change if they’d responded appropriately at the time of the first IPCC report almost a quarter of a century ago. But in 2014 our emissions are 60-65% higher than they were in 1990 and are showing no signs of coming down in the next few years.
TL: Do you still have faith in the UN process or is it time to pursue alternatives like bilateral deals?
KA: I am all for continuing with the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and related processes, I think we need to be pushing them as hard as we can. But there are other things we should do alongside them. The UK’s Climate Change Act was a separate process, outside of the UNFCCC, as were the EU negotiations. We already have a mix of approaches. It’s a mistake to think that these can’t be designed to complement the UN negotiations. Ultimately however, if you are serious about climate change as a global problem then a global framework is necessary to understand the collective implications of everyone’s efforts. It is foolish and naïve to decry the UN process assuming you could substitute it for smaller, bilateral or other negotiations – these are necessary, but only as a complement to the UN process.
TL: Why do you think that message about 2C isn’t getting through to policymakers?
KA: Those of us in the scientific community who have been developing emissions scenarios and pathways have not served the policy-makers or civil society well. We have collectively adopted the approach of the New Climate Economy authors in trying to second-guess how hard we can push the political and economic system. It is our job as academics to stand outside of such constraints and say if the international community wants to meet it targets of 2C then these are the necessary carbon budgets and these are the range of accompanying emissions pathways. We should stand our ground as independent, objective analysts, much more than we have.
By trying to serve the political system in a way that is well meaning, we have ultimately undermined a robust understanding of the severity of the situation we have got ourselves into. It’s led us to the point today where we have squandered any reasonable opportunity of an evolutionary transition to 2°C, and now face revolutionary changes to our energy systems. The scale and timeframe of such systemic re-writing of energy supply, demand and distribution inevitably raises fundamental questions about the structure of contemporary society.

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Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Talking Like a Crazy Person



Crazy
I'm crazy for feeling so lonely
I'm crazy
Crazy for feeling so blue
           -Patsy Kline

I'm going off the rails
on a crazy train
       -Ozzy Osbourne

Greetings

  Here's an interesting interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction.  (see below)    One point she makes is that no one bothers to deny that we're in the midst of the sixth great extinction.   Species are going at a rate 1000 times faster than normal.   And no one bothers to deny that it's human caused.  
      Why not?   Perhaps, unlike Climate Change,  there's not much of a groundswell to take any action to address it.   Killing off everything else on the planet isn't worth stopping.    (As if nature, the biosphere, was something "out there" , whose demise, although sad,   is of no real concern).
     For those of you interested in the details, the World Wildife Fund publishes the Living Planet Report.  The 2014 issue is now out.  Here's the highlights:
     "The report writers, based on data kept by the Zoological Society of London, studied 10,380 populations of 3,038 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles from 1970 to 2010. Over these four decades, the average decline of these vertebrate species was 52 per cent – all in less than two human generations."

        How does this happen?   Here's one way of looking at it , from Paul Chefurka -  We think  the only species that matter are us, and our "resources" - i.e. livestock.     Everything else is expendable.
"Human societies, which have now coalesced into the global super-organism of techno-industrial civilization, are complex adaptive systems. As such they can be described in terms of their feedback loops: negative, stabilizing loops that keep the system from disintegrating; and positive, amplifying loops that keep it growing.
As the system grows, its primary positive feedback loop requires more energy, more energy efficiency, more resources,....
"Resources" in this assessment are all the things that can be used to promote system growth, whether those things are animal, vegetable or mineral, human or non-human. Anything that can't be used to facilitate growth is not a resource, and is either ignored or eliminated by the system. Domestic animals and other humans are understood to be resources, wild animals are not.

And here's a nice chart which shows the results of this program:

 
"I used three data sources to develop the chart: a paper by world-respected ecological scientist Vaclav Smil, called “Harvesting the Biosphere”, linked below; world population estimates from the Wikipedia article of the same name; and the UN’s Medium Fertility variant for the human population in 2050 (9.6 billion). "...I estimated the carrying capacity in this case as being about the same as the world’s wild animal biomass in 10,000 BCE, with the assumption that the unassisted carrying capacity of the world would have been fully utilized at that point. I estimated the wild animal biomass in 10,000 BCE as being somewhat less than the combined wild and domestic animal biomass in 1900, per Smil. I made it lower in order to account for the technological intensification of farming already well under way by that time.
  
   Kolbert  is often asked what her prescription would be to improve things.  She says


"My book lays out issues on a very, very large scale. What are the drivers of extinction today? I could actually have chosen different ones, but I chose ones that are the major drivers of extinction, and they are really big forces at work. Climate change, habitat loss, moving species around the world ... for me to propose a way to stop any one of these, I would sound like a crazy person. That’s not going to happen. I don’t do that. I just say, this is what’s happening, this is what’s driving these extinction rates, and I leave it to people to draw their own conclusions about what we could or should be doing. 
------

Exploring another extinction


New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s upcoming lecture at UW-Madison, “The Sixth Extinction: The Legacy of the Anthropocene?” is billed in a rather apocalyptic way:
“Over the last half billion years, there have been five major mass extinction events. We are currently bringing about the sixth. This will be the legacy of the Anthropocene, and it will determine the future of life on this planet, for all intents and purposes, forever.”
Kolbert’s book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” released earlier this year, explores the recent disappearances of species in the context of a larger extinction, one triggered by humankind. Her talk is part of a larger event at UW-Madison, “The Anthropocene Slam: A Cabinet of Curiosities,” a three-day event sponsored by the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
Kolbert was reached by Skype at her home in Rome, where she explained the meaning of Anthropocene (a geological term with a questionable start date of sometime between the inception of farming about 8,000 years ago and the 1950s), among other things.
Q: What’s the evidence that we’re in the middle of another extinction?
A: The obvious evidence is that extinction rates are very high. Paleontologists have this concept of “background extinction rate,” and there are different ways to measure it. Literally you measure it by going to the fossil record and seeing how long a species tends to last. If you look at our extinction rates in our own moment, and there was just a paper on this, they’re about 1,000 times higher than they should be. So that’s a very elevated rate of extinction. Now, whether that brings us to a mass extinction, which is defined by a very, very significant proportion of the world’s species dying off, that depends obviously on how long you have those elevated extinction rates.
Q: Is there any chance that evolution will save the day? That the world will adapt and adjust to us?
A: I think there are two time frames in which to answer that. The first is, if you have very elevated extinction rates, evolution is just not fast enough. You would not assume that because things are dying out faster than normal that they’re speciating faster than normal. We don’t have any evidence of that. Evolution has its own time scale, which is dependent on reproductive rates. If you’re an animal that reproduces only every 20 or 30 years, there’s a limit to how fast you can evolve. In the short term or the medium term, I don’t think there’s much chance of evolution keeping up.
In the very long term, when you look at the mass extinctions of the past, yes, eventually. Those empty ecological niches get filled and diversity ramps back up again. In the fossil record, that tends to take millions of years. We’re talking about a long time. A mass extinction is not something where we can just hope for the best. It doesn’t work that way.
Q: What can we do?
A: My book lays out issues on a very, very large scale. What are the drivers of extinction today? I could actually have chosen different ones, but I chose ones that are the major drivers of extinction, and they are really big forces at work. Climate change, habitat loss, moving species around the world ... for me to propose a way to stop any one of these, I would sound like a crazy person. That’s not going to happen. I don’t do that. I just say, this is what’s happening, this is what’s driving these extinction rates, and I leave it to people to draw their own conclusions about what we could or should be doing. All of these things are very much tied up with the way we live today, with globalization and modernity and industrialization. The idea that we’re going to suddenly undo those things — unfortunately, I don’t think that’s in the cards. How this is going to play out is the question of our time, really.
Q: So what do you say to people who deny this?
A: It’s an interesting thing. You have global warming deniers, but you don’t really have habitat fragmentation deniers, or invasive species deniers. You really don’t have extinction deniers. You can argue that that’s because people don’t really care about other species. They really don’t even get worked up about that. You don’t get a lot of pushback when you say that extinction rates are really high today. I don’t think that’s debatable.
Q: Is there any happy note to end on?
A: People ask me why I wrote this book if I don’t lay out a prescription for what we should do. I make the point that I think it’s quite important that we realize what we’re doing, what’s going on. That’s the only way to even begin to think about how we might ameliorate this situation. I do want to say there are loads of things we could be doing. It’s just that there’s nothing we could do that would be easy. So, there are tons of things to do. The first thing we could do is very dramatically reduce our carbon emissions, which we could do, but we would have to choose to do that.
Q: Any final thoughts?
A: The Anthropocene is a really important concept that has a lot of appeal even to people who are not geologists because it brings home that we have become the dominant force on the planet. I think it’s great that Madison is doing this conference because this is an idea that deserves to be very widely discussed. The ramifications of it need to be explored, and not just by a bunch of geologists

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