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.”

.

           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.

Its green they say

Green green
Its green they say
On the far side of the hill
     - New Christie Minstrels

When the light turns green
Put your foot on the gasoline
      - Lead belly

Greetings

       So many people seem unhappy with the candidates suggested by the two main parties.  Perhaps it's worth taking a look at an alternative.     I did take a look and I was quite surprised by what I found.   It turns out there are 2 Green Parties!    There is the Green Party of the US, which is the- one you hear about - Jill Steins party,  But there is another , called the Green Party USA. 

      Stein's party proposes a "Green New Deal"  ,  which looks to me like  the "progressive" wing of the Democratic party.   It's kind of warmed over Sanders.  In fact the Green Party of the Us has invited Sanders to run on their ticket.  To oversimplify, their platform is :   Green growth - fairer distribution.    

       There is also another Green Party.  (Green Party USA)  They promote "degrowth".   Here is what they say about the Green New Deal (GND)

"The GND cannot protect the environment because it is based on protecting corporate power just like the Green Revolution, Green 
Capitalism and Green Economy. It relies on two clearly false corporate myths: that infinite growth is possible on a finite planet, and that growth is necessary for everyone to have good lives.

The GND ignores the impossibility of endless growth and the 
horrible consequences of trying to achieve it. At a 2% growth rate, the economy would double at least every 36 years. At a 3% growth rate, a doubling would occur at least every 24 years. In a hundred years, 
production would be 16 times what it is now. In 200 years the economy would be 256 times what it is now. This would flood the world with 
toxins, collapse biodiversity, and cause uncontrolled climate change.

Suggesting that solar and wind power can meet not only all 
household energy needs but 100% of current industrial needs is a fantasy. Suggesting they could do so for an economy that is 256 times as large is silly"

     I heard a good interview with Kevin Anderson on KBOO  .(H/t Ruben)  .   He got asked point blank about whether we could rely on "green growth" to keep us from hitting 2 degrees.   He was pretty direct, essentially saying that the only way to avoid dangerous climate change, was for the rich people to take a pay cut - to stop growing, to de- grow.

       One might wonder -what is the purpose of a Green Party, if it is going to be one more flavor of the infinite growth paradigm.?   Paul Kingsnorth argues that the whole idea of green politics was to step away from that paradigm altogether .

"It was not part of the conventional argument about how to divide up the spoils of industrial progress. Its purpose was to argue that the definition of progress itself was the problem to be solved: that industrial society, as currently constituted, was a threat not only to the individual freedom cherished by parts of the right and the social justice cherished by parts of the left, but also to the global ecosystem - what both sides referred to as the 'natural world', as if somehow humans were 'unnatural' and apart from it -which both were frantically destroying in the name of that progress. In this sense, I said, green politics was more radical - and much older - than the teachings of either Marx or Hayek."

"One of the original aims of green politics was to go beyond the left/right dichotomy - to speak up for the wider world, for the non-human world, for its own sake, because no other ideology would. An accommodation with the left undermines the founding ethos of radical green politics: ecocentrism. The left, though it likes to lay claim to the green mantle, has no interest in ecocentrism. By definition it cannot have, for the point of the left is to struggle for social justice for human beings. The environment will always come a poor second to the achievement of this historical mission."

Both the mainstream parties as well as the "Green" party are caught up in the same perspective.    A truly "green" political movement would have a different philosophy.   

"It is a philosophy which sees humanity as part of the mesh of life, not as a separate entity which can control and direct something called 'nature' with no consequences for itself. It stresses that what is often regarded as political 'radicalism' is in fact a reordering of the same anthropocentric development paradigm, in which the fruits of the destruction of global ecosystems are simply distributed more fairly than before."

       At base, the problem is the anthropocentric view, that "we can have it all",  and deserve to do so, and any problem that creates for the biosphere can be dealt with by more technology.    

      But perhaps we don't need to "have it all"  .  Perhaps we might have more fulfilling lives if we had a bit less.   Perhaps if we paid attention to what we already had, rather than dreaming of the next thing to get or experience.    I recently read an interesting piece on Buddhism and ecology  (h/t   Susan    ), , pointing out that not only does "having it all" cause tremendous harm , it also is fruitless way to have real satisfaction 

"..... 

because of our constant desires, our mind and body cannot find peace. “At some point, we have to say enough is enough,” His Holiness advised, because desires can be limitless, and if we have strong desires, we will be unable to find contentment. Ultimately, we have to take a further step and turn our back on our desires and let go of attachment. This is renunciation"

Which political party reflects this view, I wonder.  It seems that in terms of political options,  our menu is pretty limited.   What we need, in the words of Barry Goldwater,  "A choice , no an echo."

Progressively worse

I'm free
   - The Who

Do what you like
  -  Blind Faith

Greetings

       Perhaps in this political season, it is a good time to ask.  "Who will do more for sustainability, progressives, or conservatives ?   Which one will put us on the track toward a smaller ecological footprint?

       Given the fact that Republicans have made it an article of faith that there is no such thing as human caused climate change,  and progressives accept that inconvenient truth,  we naturally assume that progressives must have an appropriate response to climate change.   And to the other insults to our biosphere, such as destruction of habitats, over fishing, releases of toxic chemicals, etc.

       But do they?

     
        Which brings me to a recent post by Eric Lindberg  on Resilience.com.   see here  Lindberg is a very thoughtful writer, and we'll worth reading.   His most recent post deals with Pope Francis ' s  recent Encyclical Letter, "On Care for Our Common Home ".   Lindberg takes up the Pope's letter as part of an ongoing series dealing with the notion of  Freedom.    He suggests that our modern view takes freedom, as the central value.  e.g.    "They hate our freedom". 

        Lindberg calls our modern capitalist liberal democracy ,  "liberalism" , whether is is "progressive"  or "conservative".      Both sorts of liberalism accept the same underlying view of the world, and humanity.   Humans are entitled to be free, free to take what the want, free to "develop", to acquire wealth,  and to modify the environment in the process.  This view assumes no boundaries, that there is always more, and it assumes that we are not connected to the rest of the world, what affects "nature", the "biosphere"  does  not affect us. Both accept the view that humans will continue to reap the benefits of "progress" ,  by providing more consumption to more people.  

         He says that progressives have embraced the Pope's views, under the mistaken view that he also shares these liberal doctrine.    But the Pope's analysis goes deeper.  Environmental ism, is not  really just another progressive movement.  He explains:         

"Previous liberal or progressive accomplishments, without an exception that I can think of, have all been struggles for increased freedom, or increased consumption, and often both, as progressive politics has increasingly united the two.  Whether we are talking about the abolition of slavery, the Nineteenth Amendment, or the end of the 12 hour work-day, the fight against the political or cultural subordination of ethnic minorities, even rural electrification, the creation of the FDA, or victory in Roe vs. Wade--at stake in each case was freedom and material progress--letting people both do what they want and have more.  To return to the language of freedom articulated by Mill, most progressive accomplishments have won the right for the previously excluded “of framing the plan of their life to suit their own character; of doing as they like.”

But here’s the problem: this progressive—“progress”-based approach--has now run into the oncoming walls of a closed world and has therefore nearly run its possible course.  Ecological devastation, including that caused by carbon dioxide emissions and the warming of the Earth, requires an entirely different kind of morality and politics; it is one that may seem inimical to the stated beliefs of most progressives, but also one that some of them (us) may have started to embrace, at least on the down-low.  Rather than increasing consumption, our common home requires that we limit consumption.  Even if we set aside the issue of climate change, as scientists have calculated it we the people of the Earth use up a year’s worth of renewable resources in about nine months; the remaining three months of consumption involve a permanent ecological “draw-down” of  non-renewable resources

There is no formula, then, according to which the entire planet might enjoy “the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly expanding standard of living.”  As Pope Francis notes, “we all know that it is not possible to sustain the present level of consumption in developed countries and wealthier sectors of society, where the habit of wasting and discarding has reached unprecedented levels” (27).  The neo-liberal view that through free-trade and enhanced technology we might all live like middle-class people in the wealthy segments of the world do now, Francis rightly argues, “is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption.” (50).

Although most citizens of industrial nations--having very little experience in imagining drastically different and more simple ways of life--miss this part of the Pope’s message, Francis holds this scientific and moral ground without apology: in order to maintain the integrity of our ecosystems, the wealthy of the world are obligated to live more simply, not only wasting less, but using less.  This is not a life-style choice.  It is an obligation.  Our expectations and entitlements are no excuse for our consumption. This is a matter of life and death in our closed world where our luxury means that others cannot have enough simply to survive.

The American way of life, in short, amounts to transnational and cross-generational genocide.  Although he doesn’t explicitly call consumption out as a sin, probably for strategic reasons, it certainly meets all the relevant criteria Francis would maintain, violating god’s law, despoiling his creation, and doing deathly harm to others.  Except according a moral code where might makes right, there can be no justification for many of the daily activities of the world’s wealthy middle class, not to mention the second homes, the airplane travel, the recreational vehicles, the in-home luxuries, the endless and all too banal array of clothes, novelties, and bewildering world of constant novelty and amusement.  Look around the room you are in.  Most of what you see, Francis would argue, is morally unjustifiable.  Thou shalt not kill, and all this stuff is killing.

         Of course, progressives and conservatives have different views,  but essentially the difference is about how to divide up the spoils.  The spoils of our unsustainable enterprise.  The progressives want to give the poor, minorities, and  woman a slice of the pie.   But they generally assume a growing pie - endless growth.

      Thus Bernie Sanders, who says that Climate Change represents the biggest that to national security,, also calls for a GDP growth rate of 5.3%.

   It appears that the Pope "gets it".   But do "progressive environmentalists"?     I am reminded of Paul Kings Norths article , explaining why he could no longer be an "environmentalist" 

"For fifteen years I have been an environmental campaigner and writer. For two of these years I was deputy editor of the Ecologist. I campaigned against climate change, deforestation, overfishing, landscape destruction, extinction and all the rest. I wrote about how the global economic system was trashing the global ecosystem. I did all the things that environmentalists do. But after a while, I stopped believing it.

There were two reasons for this. The first was that none of the campaigns were succeeding, except on a very local level. More broadly, everything was getting worse. The second was that environmentalists, it seemed to me, were not being honest with themselves. It was increasingly obvious that climate change could not be stopped, that modern life was not consistent with the needs of the global ecosystem, that economic growth was part of the problem, and that the future was not going to be bright, green, comfy and 'sustainable' for ten billion people but was more likely to offer decline, depletion, chaos and hardship for all of us. Yet we all kept pretending that if we just carried on campaigning as usual, the impossible would happen."

It's not the end of the world

we can live beside the ocean
linger far behind
swim out past the breaker
watch the world die

  -Everclear (Santa Monica)

Greetings

    Things must be looking pretty bad if a "doomer" like Kingsnorth gets a spot in the NYT Sunday mag!    

            The sad fact is that we are going past 2 degrees.  (In about 20 years, according to Dr hockey stiock - Michael Mann)  We missed the boat on that.   So, we need to deal with it.  The future isn't what we'd hoped for.  Its going to be a mess.  Its not the end of the world, though.

      Perhaps "giving up hope" is a step toward dealing with reality

Here's another take:

Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/the_myth_of_human_progress_20130113

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-he-feels-fine.html