Ten Years After

I'd love to change the world

But I don't know what to do

So I leave it up to you

   - Ten Years After

And I'm sorry when I say that

straight to this very day

It was the wrong way

     -Sublime

Good news

EU parliament declares climate emergency

Coal for electricity falls

Greetings

     Happy Black Friday!

    I just received the latest work from the Dark Mountain Project.  It's their 10th anniversary.   As you may recall 10 years ago, they famously put out a  manifesto, See also this  which suggested that the current approach to reversing the ecological damage reversing by humans was a losing battle, and the efforts to deal with climate change (new green deal) would probably do the ecosystem more harm than good.

Ten years later things haven't improved much. 

  Carbon emissions continue to increase

GREENHOUSE GAS CONCENTRATIONS AGAIN BREAK RECORDS

Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases once again reached new highs in 2018. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says the increase in CO2 was just above the average rise recorded over the last decade. Levels of other warming gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, have also surged by above-average continue to u t Since 1990 there’s been an increase of 43% in the warming effect on the climate of long-lived greenhouse gases.

And, “There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, in greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere despite all the commitments under the Paris agreement on climate change.”

  Recently we passed the 500 CO2 equivalence marker.  

Sea level keeps rising and recent studies show that by 2050, large cities in Asia will be flooded 

According to the new analysis, roughly three times as many people are at risk of being inundated by rising seas than previously reported — 150 million people are now living on land that will be below high tide by 2050. And this is a hopeful scenario, where warming is held to 2 degrees C and the ice sheets don’t collapse in the near future. In a more pessimistic scenario, the numbers double to 300 million people flooded out by 2050. That is roughly equivalent to the entire population of the United States going underwater in the next three decades.

Clean-energy investments in the developing world plummeted last year while coal use reached a record high.

Current carbon credit program may provide little or no environmental gain

“A 2016 study found that 73 percent of carbon credits provided little or no environmental gain, as they

provided little or no environmental gain, as they supported projects that would have happened anyway. That figure rose to 85 percent of projects under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism

Recently climate scientists have published a warning that the earth may be close, or have passed, to several climate tipping points .

Prof Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, the lead author of the article, said: “We might already have crossed the threshold for a cascade of interrelated tipping points. The simple version is the schoolkids [striking for climate action] are right: we are seeing potentially irreversible changes in the climate system under way, or very close.”

“As a scientist, I just want to tell it how it is,” he said. “It is not trying to be alarmist, but trying to treat the whole climate change problem as a risk management problem. It is what I consider the common sense way.”

Phil Williamson at the University of East Anglia, who did not contribute to the article, said: “The prognosis by Tim Lenton and colleagues is, unfortunately, fully plausible: that we might have already lost control of the Earth’s climate.”

The new article comes as the UN warns action is very far from stopping global temperature rise, with the world currently on track for 3C-4C. The commentary lists nine tipping points that may have been activated.

But, it seems that politicians have decided that we can slowly add renewable resources, and continue to use fossil fuels as long as possible.

And if you think Obama might be embarrassed about that, you’d be wrong. As the former president told a cheering Texas audience last year, “You wouldn’t always know it ,but it [oil and gas production] went up every year I was president,” he said. “That whole, ‘suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas,’ that was me, people.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained the logic most succinctly a couple of years ago, speaking to another crowd in Texas. “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there,” he said, referring to the amount of recoverable crude in Alberta’s tar sands region. “The resource will be developed.”

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           The main climate proposal is to electrify everything.  The fires in California demonstrate that if that means lots of power lines going through hit dry country, that could create it's own problems.

Of course, electricity is for stuff like electric vehicles which require lots of new lithium mines

Last week, Bloomberg published a report detailing how the boom in lithium mining is irreversibly destroying the local environment of northern Chile’s Atacama desert. Mining for lithium means removing large amounts of water, which means depleting the water supply for locals. According to the report, the Tilopozo meadow in Chile used to be a shelter for shepherds traveling at night, yet has become barren due to lack of grass or water. That puts a severe strain on local farmers.

“We’re fooling ourselves if we call this sustainable and green mining,” Cristina Dorado, a Chilean biologist, told Bloomberg. “The lithium fever should slow down because it’s directly damaging salt flats, the ecosystem, and local communities.”

Cairn Energy Research Advisors estimates the lithium-ion industry is expected to grow from 100 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of annual production in 2017 to 800 GWh in 2027—not only as a result of electric cars but also because lithium is used in batteries to power various electrical and electronic goods, including mobile phones. Much of this will be mined from South America’s Lithium Triangle, which spans across Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, an area that is said to hold more than half the world’s supply of the metal beneath its salt flats. 

Also cobalt

Then there’s cobalt. In addition to the environmental concerns related to lithium production, cobalt mining is unequivocally destructive on multiple levels. Currently, half of the world’s cobalt is produced in the Republic of Congo. Concerning cobalt mining in the Congo region, journalists have revealed human and environmental abuses ranging from child and slave labor to toxic waste leakage and radioactivity in cobalt mines. “In 2014, according to UNICEF, about 40,000 children were working in mines across southern DRC, many of them extracting cobalt,” The Guardian reported.

             All of which could make a person discouraged.  In a recent article William Reese professor of ecology, and ecological economics says that we have placed ourselves in an untenable situation

"Reducing fossil fuel use on a vastly sped-up schedule, in the absence of adequate substitutes and a comprehensive wind-down plan, would soon produce some combination of inadequate energy supplies, broken supply lines, reduced production, declining incomes, rising inequality, widespread unemployment, food and other resource shortages, at least local famines, civil unrest, abandoned cities, mass migrations, collapsed economies and geopolitical chaos.

What politician is likely to let this scenario unfold? Would the public tolerate it?

As economists have long recognized, humans are spatial, temporal and social discounters — we naturally favour the here and now, and close relatives and friends, over distant places, merely possible futures and total strangers. Under what circumstances would hundreds of millions of people in scores of countries with disparate political philosophies and political ideologies — people who currently enjoy the “good life” — be induced simultaneously to risk wrecking their comfortable lives to stave off a climate or eco-crisis that many are not convinced is happening and, even if it is, it is perceived likely mainly to affect other people somewhere else?

And keep in mind, the world is committed to accommodating several additional billions who have yet to join the energy-addicted consumer party but are pounding on the door to be let in.

....

Perversely then, policy for climate disaster-avoidance seems designed to serve the capitalist growth economy and make the latter appear as the solution rather than cause of the problem. “Unfortunately,” as University of Vienna public policy professor Clive Spash points out, “many environmental non-governmental organisations have bought into this illogical reasoning.” (Note that many NGOs are dependent on the corporate sector for financial support.)

And this is why the international community — despite the Paris accord, Greta Thunberg, climate strikes and mass public protests — seems determined to stay its growth-driven fossil-fuelled course.

In these circumstances, the world can anticipate more and longer heat waves/droughts, desertification, tropical deforestation, melting permafrost, methane releases, regional water shortages, failing agriculture, regional famines, rising sea levels, the flooding (and eventual loss) of many coastal communities, abandonment of over-heated cities, civil unrest, mass migrations, collapsed economies and possible geopolitical chaos.

Perhaps the Dark Mountain Project was on track 10 years ago, as Paul Kingsnorth acknowledged in this interview

 CHARLOTTE DU CANN  Looking back at the decade, from the time of the manifesto to now, what strikes you as most significant in terms of the zeitgeist? 

PAUL KINGSNORTH  Perhaps the most significant fact about the last decade is how much was said in the manifesto that has become pretty much widely accepted. In terms of the culture, it was quite a wild thing to be saying: that it is not possible to stop the collapse and that we need to write about the situation for real. 

Now the kind of things we were publishing in the first books you can find in the New York Times and the Guardian; in the fact that Extinction Rebellion are called Extinction Rebellion. Most people are saying: we are in the catastrophe now, ecologically speaking. Which is a shame because it would have been nice if we had been entirely wrong.  

Some wise person said "Rowing harder doesn't help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction"

Which suggests we should change direction.   Here are William Reese's suggestions

"So, where might we go from here? A rational world with a good grasp of reality would have begun articulating a long-term wind-down strategy 20 or 30 years ago. The needed global emergency plan would certainly haveincluded most of the 11 realistic responses to the climate crisis listed below — which, even if implemented today would at least slow the coming unravelling. And no, the currently proposed Green New Deal won’t do it.

Here, then, is what an effective “Green New Deal” might look like:

1. Formal recognition of the end of material growth and the need to reducethe human ecological footprint;

2. Acknowledgement that, as long as we remain in overshoot — exploiting essential ecosystems faster than they can regenerate — sustainable production/consumption means less production/consumption;

3. Recognition of the theoretical and practical difficulties/impossibility of an all-green quantitatively equivalent energy transition;

4. Assistance to communities, families and individuals to facilitate the adoption of sustainable lifestyles (even North Americans lived happily on half the energy per capita in the 1960s that we use today);

5. Identification and implementation of strategies (e.g., taxes, fines) to encourage/force individuals and corporations to eliminate unnecessary fossil fuel use and reduce energy waste (half or more of energy “consumed” is wasted through inefficiencies and carelessness);

6. Programs to retrain the workforce for constructive employment in the new survival economy;

7. Policies to restructure the global and national economies to remain within the remaining “allowable” carbon budget while developing/improving sustainable energy alternatives;

8. Processes to allocate the remaining carbon budget (through rationing, quotas, etc.) fairly to essential uses only, such as food production, space/water heating, inter-urban transportation;

9. Plans to reduce the need for interregional transportation and increase regional resilience by re-localizing essential economic activity (de-globalization);

10. Recognition that equitable sustainability requires fiscal mechanisms for income/wealth redistribution;

11. A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature.