Alternative Facts

Its all part 

of my rock and roll fantasy

Its all part 

of my rock and roll dream

     -Bad Company

This is not my beautiful house

       -Talking Heads

Greetings

      Well, we apparently have moved into the "truth free" area.    Here is a funny ( I think)  take on how the founding fathers might react to our current way of doing things.

"Two hundred years ago no one would have thought sheer volume of available facts in the digital information age would fail to produce informed Americans. Founders of the republic, steeped in the Enlightenment as they were, and believers in an informed citizenry being vital to freedom and democracy, would be delirious with joy at the prospect. Imagine Jefferson and Franklin high on Google. 

The fatal assumption was that Americans would choose to think and learn, instead of cherry picking the blogs and TV channels to reinforce their particular branded choice cultural ignorance, consumer, scientific or political, but especially political. Tom and Ben could never have guessed we would chase prepackaged spectacle, junk science, and titillating rumor such as death panels, Obama as a socialist Muslim and Biblical proof that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. "  (from here)

      So, where am I going with this?    As far as energy and the environment are concerned, we are caught between two visions of the future, neither of which seem to be particularity likely to occur.  On the one hand we have the views of the current administration.  This used to be called "Drill Baby Drill" ,but is now known as   "The "America First Energy Plan", .  

    This plan has three desired goals,  all of which were met in the 1950's, but unfortunately in today's energy world, only two could be realized at the same time. 

Two out of three

To close, let’s look again at the three goals of Trump’s America First Energy Plan:

• Abundant fossil fuel

• Profitable fossil fuel

• Cheap fossil fuel

With remaining resources increasingly represented by unconventional oil such as that in the Permian basin of Texas, there is indeed abundant fossil fuel – but it’s very expensive to get. Therefore if oil companies are to remain profitable, oil has to be more expensive – that is, there can be abundant fossil fuel and profitable fossil fuel, but then the fuel cannot be cheap (and the economy will hit the skids). Or there can be abundant fossil fuel at low prices, but oil companies will lose money hand-over-fist (a situation which cannot last long).

It’s a bit harder to imagine, but there can also be fossil fuel which is both profitable to extract and cheap enough for economies to afford – it just won’t be abundant. That would require scaling back production/consumption to the remaining easy-to-extract conventional fossil fuels, and a reduction in overall demand so that those limited supplies aren’t immediately bid out of a comfortable price range. For that reduction in demand to occur, there would have to be some combination of dramatic reduction in energy use per capita and a rapid increase in deployment of renewable energies.   (for more details see  here.)

           On the other side we have our shiny new renewable plan which also has three goals. - cheap abundant energy, universal prosperity, and no significant environmental impact.

     Once again we find these goals to be internally inconsistent, as illustrated by Professor  William Reese, the creator of the ecological footprint analysis.  In In a nice review of the situation , Chapter 4 of the  Worldwatch Institutes,  "State of the World" 2013 , Professor Reese explains  how thoroughly unsustainable our current situation is, and that on average we are using the "ecological income " from  1.5 planets, each year.   Carbon emissions are of course, a major part of the unsustainable situation, but other population dependent factors such top soil loss,  over fishing and forestry also continue the increase..

  

        But, of course, the  current lavish, energy rich lifestyles of the "developed nation" , exists overwhelmingly as a result of the use of fossil fuels.   Reese provides a  recipe for sustainability for the west.,  First he punctures the "sustainability through efficiency " meme noting that ..". total resource and energy demand in most of the world’s industrial countries has increased in absolute terms over the past 40 years despite efficiency gains of 50 percent in materials and 30 percent in energy use".

       He then explains what it would take:

Clearly, lifestyle choices have a significant impact on our Ecological Footprint. However, even if average Vancouverites followed a vegan diet; avoided driving or flying and only walked, cycled, or used public transit;lived in a passive solar house that used almost no fossil-based energy; and cut their personal consumption by half, they could only reduce their per 

capita Ecological Footprint by 44 percent (from 4.96 to 2.8 gha per capita).That seems like an impossible challenge already—and yet it is still a full global hectare beyond the one-planet threshold.

       In case you skipped that quote, here is the takeaway,  in order to return to sustainability, , we  in the "west" need to do the following things :No driving, no flying, and  little buying.  Oh,yeah, and become a vegan.   And even then, its pretty iffy. 

       

       But that's not picture we get from our leaders, or environmental activists.  They assume, we can have more of the same, with no major changes. How can we have such irrationality on both sides.?  It seems that both on the right and left are able to forget facts when they conflict with dreams.   Here's an interesting article on the appeal of "fake news" to both sides of the political spectrum.  One study found  that both sides were happy not to question or analyze,  and that liberals, were only " slightly more predisposed to think critically than conservatives ."

"Daniel Kahan, a Yale professor of law and psychology, says his research has found that people on the right are no more vulnerable to political bias than those on the left.

""Bottom line," Kahan said in an email, "there's ample evidence of politically biased information processing across the entire ideological spectrum."

         So, one might argue that humans are often  basically irrational, and believe what makes them feel good.  see here  When confronted by opposing facts, they will often, not change their minds , but will even hold their original position more strongly See e.g. The Back fire effect.

         OK, so, how is this likely to play out?

         For one possible future, lets look at John Micheal Greer, who recently wrote,

The Earth’s economically accessible reserves of fossil carbon dwindle day by day; with each year that passes, on average, the amount of coal, oil, and natural gas burnt exceeds the amount that’s discovered by a wider margin  (ed  see above); the current temporary glut in the oil markets is waning so fast that analysts are predicting the next price spike as soon as 2018.  (ed. see here) Talk of transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, on the one hand, or nuclear power on the other, remains talk—I encourage anyone who doubts this to look up the amount of fossil fuels burnt each year over the last two decades and see if they can find a noticeable decrease in global fossil fuel consumption to match the much-ballyhooed buildout of solar and wind power.

The industrial world remains shackled to fossil fuels for most of its energy and all of its transportation fuel, for the simple reason that no other energy source in this end of the known universe provides the abundant, concentrated, and fungible energy supply that’s needed to keep our current lifestyles going. There was always an alternative—deliberately downshifting out of the embarrassing extravagance that counts for normal lifestyles in the industrial world these days, accepting more restricted ways of living in order to leave a better world for our descendants—but not enough people were willing to accept that alternative to make a difference while there was still a chance.

Meanwhile the other jaw of the vise that’s tightening around the future is becoming increasingly visible just now. In the Arctic, freak weather systems has sucked warm air up from lower latitudes and brought the normal process of winter ice formation to a standstill. In the Antarctic, the Larsen C ice shelf, until a few years ago considered immovable by most glaciologists, is in the process of loosing an ice sheet the size of Delaware into the Antarctic Ocean. (ed. see here I look out my window and see warm rain falling; here in the north central Appalachians, in January, it’s been most of a month since the thermometer last dipped below freezing. The new administration has committed itself to do nothing about anthropogenic climate change, but then, despite plenty of talk, the Obama administration didn’t do anything about it either.

There’s good reason for that, too. The only way to stop anthropogenic climate change in its tracks is to stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and doing that would require the world to ground its airlines, turn its highways over to bicycles and oxcarts, and shut down every other technology that won’t be economically viable if it has to depend on the diffuse intermittent energy available from renewable sources.  (ed.  see above).  Does the political will to embrace such changes exist? Since I know of precisely three climate change scientists, out of thousands, who take their own data seriously enough to cut their carbon footprint by giving up air travel, it’s safe to say that the answer is “no.”

So, basically, we’re in for it.

 "In for it" is a short hand way of saying that the feedbacks will eventually make it impossible for the industrial system to continue.   Some people might say "It's about time!   Now perhaps we can give the biosphere a chance to heal itself.!  Maybe we can pick up the pieces and start again on a sustainable basis" .  See e.g  Surviving The Future    But what about between now and when we "pick up the pieces"?   Greer's prognosis for that era is not all that appealing 

" From the early days of the peak oil movement in the late 1990s on, a remarkably large number of the people who talked eagerly about the looming crisis of our age seemed to think that its consequences would leave them and the people and things they cared about more or less intact. That wasn’t universal by any means; there were always some people who grappled with the hard realities that the end of the fossil fuel age was going to impose on their own lives; but all things considered, there weren’t that many, in comparison to all those who chattered amiably about how comfortable they’d be in their rural doomsteads, lifeboat communities, Transition Towns, et al.

Now, as discussed earlier in this post, we’ve gotten a very modest helping of decline and fall, and people who were enthusiastically discussing the end of the industrial age not that long ago are freaking out six ways from Sunday. If a relatively tame event like the election of an unpopular president can send people into this kind of tailspin, what are they going to do the day their paychecks suddenly turn out to be worth only half as much in terms of goods and services as before—a kind of event that’s already become tolerably common elsewhere, and could quite easily happen in this country as the dollar loses its reserve currency status?

What kinds of meltdowns are we going to get when internet service or modern health care get priced out of reach, or become unavailable at any price?  How are they going to cope if the accelerating crisis of legitimacy in this country causes the federal government to implode, the way the government of the Soviet Union did, and suddenly they’re living under cobbled-together regional governments that don’t have the money to pay for basic services? What sort of reaction are we going to see if the US blunders into a sustained domestic insurgency—suicide bombs going off in public places, firefights between insurgent forces and government troops, death squads from both sides rounding up potential opponents and leaving them in unmarked mass graves—or, heaven help us, all-out civil war?

This is what the decline and fall of a civilization looks like. It’s not about sitting in a cozy earth-sheltered home under a roof loaded with solar panels, living some close approximation of a modern industrial lifestyle, while the rest of the world slides meekly down the chute toward history’s compost bin, leaving you and yours untouched. It’s about political chaos—meaning that you won’t get the leaders you want, and you may not be able to count on the rule of law or even the most basic civil liberties. It’s about economic implosion—meaning that your salary will probably go away, your savings almost certainly won’t keep its value, and if you have gold bars hidden in your home, you’d better hope to Hannah that nobody ever finds out, or it’ll be a race between the local government and the local bandits to see which one gets to tie your family up and torture them to death, starting with the children, until somebody breaks and tells them where your stash is located.

It’s about environmental chaos—meaning that you and the people you care about may have many hungry days ahead as crazy weather messes with the harvests, and it’s by no means certain you won’t die early from some tropical microbe that’s been jarred loose from its native habitat to find a new and tasty home in you. It’s about rapid demographic contraction—meaning that you get to have the experience a lot of people in the Rust Belt have already, of walking past one abandoned house after another and remembering the people who used to live there, until they didn’t any more.

More than anything else, it’s about loss. Things that you value—things you think of as important, meaningful, even necessary—are going to go away forever in the years immediately ahead of us, and there will be nothing you can do about it.  It really is as simple as that. People who live in an age of decline and fall can’t afford to cultivate a sense of entitlement. Unfortunately, for reasons discussed at some length in one of last month’s posts, the notion that the universe is somehow obliged to give people what they think they deserve is very deeply engrained in American popular culture these days. That’s a very unwise notion to believe right now, and as we slide further down the slope, it could very readily become fatal—and no, by the way, I don’t mean that last adjective in a metaphorical sense.

That gives the "transition"  a different perspective.  And when might this happen?  Well, Greer suggest that in some sense it is happening; i.e. social and political conflicts are coming to the fore.  I'd suggest that we wont really notice until the next "Great Recession", which at least one pundit , Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, suggests that it's around the next corner.  See  here.     Who knows?

What just happened

Something is happening
But you don't know what it is

-Bob Dylan

Manic depression
Is a frustrating mess

- Jimi Hendrix

Greetings

      Like most people, I spent most of yesterday trying to figure out what happened, how it happened, and what it means in terms of energy and climate.  In my view, Trump is mainly a salesman, who says whatever he thinks will be persuasive , so no one knows what he really thinks, or whether he has any abiding values or policies .   So prediction something of  a crap shoot. ( Here is what he says he'll do)

       Nevertheless, it's worth contemplating some possible scenarios.  Here's a few for your consideration .

    Dave Roberts at Vox, notes that things already looked grim on the climate front.  Now they look worse.  He also notes that either way , with Clinton or Trump, 2 degrees was in the cards  He thinks the fight is now about 3 degrees, and looks towards 2020.

"The truth is, hitting the 2-degree target (much less 1.5 degrees) was always a long shot. It would require all the world’s countries to effectively turn on a dime and send their emissions plunging at never-before-seen rates.

It was implausible, but at least there was a story to tell. That story began with strong US leadership, which brought China to the table, which in turn cleared the way for Paris. The election of Hillary Clinton would have signaled to the world a determination to meet or exceed the targets the US promised in Paris, along with four years of efforts to create bilateral or multilateral partnerships that pushed progress faster.

With steady leadership, the US and China would exceed their short-term goals. Other countries would have their willpower fortified and steadily ratchet up their commitments. All this coordinated action would result in a wave of clean energy innovation, which would push prices down lower, which would accelerate the transition.

The promise of US leadership was never about tons of US emissions; they are only 15 percent of the world’s total. (Though, as Chris Mooney notes, pledged US reductions accounted for about 20 percent of total reductions pledged in Paris.) It was about the US acting as a catalyst that sparked a virtuous, self-reinforcing cycle of escalating ambition, eventually building up the momentum necessary for a chance at 2 degrees.

That story is gone now. Dead. The US will not provide leadership — it will be an active, and very powerful, impediment. Under unified Republican leadership, progress on lowering emissions in the US will halt and reverse and US participation in international efforts to combat climate change will cease. (I will have more to say on the scope of the coming Republican policy disaster in another post.)

....

"... the chance of limiting temperature to 1.5 or 2 degrees is, for all intents and purposes, gone. There’s going to be severe, dangerous climate change. Millions of people will suffer.

The larger climate struggle is not over, of course. It never will be — 3 degrees is much worse than 2 and 4 much worse than 3. The fight goes on. But it is time to honestly acknowledge our failure and grapple with its consequences."

Richard Heinberg  agrees that it will bring to a halt any national action on energy or climate change   He makes a pitch for local resilience

"There will be no more federal support for climate action or research, for environmental protection (the EPA will be gutted), or for alternative energy. All federal lands will be opened up for oil, gas, and coal exploration. Most of Yellowstone will be paved over as a parking lot for a new Trump resort (okay, I’m kidding—a little). With the Executive Branch, Congress, and Supreme Court all dominated by the same party, there will be no brakes on efforts to defund government agencies, or overturn regulations of all kinds (on guns, banks, workplace safety, you name it). Having witnessed Trumpism’s success, a new generation of politicians will adopt the tactics of utterly demonizing their opponents. It’s hard to see how civility can return anytime soon. These will be dire times for women and minorities.

Crises won’t go away because government refuses to acknowledge or address them. Climate change, resource depletion, and over-reliance on debt are wolves at the door. In light of all this, Post Carbon Institute’s organizational strategy continues to make sense: Build resilience at the community level.

For the time being, national policy-based action on climate and other environmental issues is a closed door. But the most promising responses to our twenty-first century crises are showing up at the community level anyway. It’s in towns and cities across the nation, and across the world, where practical people are being forced to grapple with weird weather, rising seas, an unstable economy, and a fraying national political fabric. Whatever workable strategies are likely to be found will arise there. We see our job as helping that adaptive process however we can. This is not about winning; there is no finish line, no election day. Just a new opportunity each morning to encourage, educate, and build.

Erik Lindberg offers a somewhat different way of looking at things . He puts Trump into a more of a historical perspective,  the perspective of the limits to growth.   He suggests that a Trump is a predictable feature of a collapsing civilization, especially one which worships growth.  If we can"t have growth, someone is to blame - we need a scapegoat, and Trump offers a hand full..      

"From the perspective of a contracting civilization, Trump, or someone like him (perhaps even worse) was entirely predictable.  I have been waiting for him—with dread, yes, but also without surprise.  I have thus been able to ready myself for him and the truths he reveals about our fracturing and eroding society.
....For regardless of political affiliation, there is one official story about America: that it cannot contract.  If it does, then someone or something is to blame.  Given the reality of life in an empire that has reached its peak, or of living in a nation that consumes a quarter of the world’s resources, this is just about as bad a narrative as one can imagine.   There is no telling to what depths it might descend, nor how many Trumps it might create."

He points out that a Clinton victory would really have little effect on the slide that has been going on for years.    Its interesting to note that one could argue that we have run out of fuel for the "post war" prosperity, and that the white working class is feeling the pinch..   Median household income has stagnated.   Off shoring and automation had taken their toll.  And much as we might wish for it, neither Clinton nor Trump   (nor Sanders)  would be able to turn the clock back .

"Educated liberals are able to see directly through Trump’s story about making America great again.  But do these same people really believe that Clinton has some magic way to reverse years of job loss, deindustrialization, disenfranchisement?  Have you looked at a rustbelt city, driven over Gary Indiana on the freeway, or through the miles upon miles of Milwaukee (where the GMC plant once stood) beyond the sliver of prosperity sitting along the lake?   All this is not going to be made great again.  Our IPhones are not going to save us.   Clinton is not going to discover a hidden trove of low-hanging fruit, an untapped market of new cheap labor or of eager and moneyed consumers ready to buy more of the crappy stuff and junky culture that we market and sell, but can’t even make ourselves.  The coal mines are not coming back, Trump’s promises notwithstanding.  But neither is sort of sudden and unrepeatable consumer expansion that returns us to the 1964 poised for reemergence in our political fantasies.  No one is going to discover a way to grow the global economy at 3% per year without, at the same time, devastating the planet’s environment and ecology.  Clinton doesn’t have some magic new way forward or path into the future.  That little of this is noticed can of course be explained by the disgusting and repellent personality of Trump.  

      The fact remains that we still live in an incredible wealthy country, which is over shooting our resource base 4 or 5 times over.    This is not a sustainable and will not be sustained.   The American dream, that everybody can be rich, is just that : a fantasy.       Reality is beginning to creep in..   

      As for what is an appropriate response, I tend to agree with Heinberg, that a program of local resiliency will be useful.  Getting to know our neighbors, and helping each other out.  An of course, we will need to oppose scapegoating.  As Heinberg points out, these will be tough times for gays, immigrants,  women and people of color.   We will especially need to show that we stand with them. 

Teach your children well

But let us not talk falsely now

the hour is getting late

-Bob Dylan

You say you've got  real solution

we' d all like to see the plan

-The Beatles

Greetings

       I just saw a new presentation by Nate Hagens.   It's short version of a course he taught at the University of Minnesota called  Reality 101.    Got me thinking.   Suppose you were going to give some 18 year-olds an idea of what's in store for them.  What would you say?

          Strangely enough he never mentions Overshoot,  or Footprint.  But he does give an overview of the economy, energy, climate, extinctions  and the crowding out of wildlife.   He calls it The Great Acceleration, and displays a vary of graphic indicators noting that there are "hockey sticks everywhere".  He suggests we will be seeing things never seen before.  And  of course this is already happening.  Things  like a 50 degree temperature spike at the North Pole.  Things like climate change as a "disease muliplier", such as the Zika virus

As of today, authorities in Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, El Salvador and Venezuela were urging women to avoid getting pregnant… It is unthinkable. Or rather, it is something out of a science fiction story, the absolute core of a dystopian future. — Bill McKibben in a recent statement on global warming and the now pandemic Zika virus. 

        As for the the economy, he believes we are near the end of growth, and the beginning of a deflationary depression.  He points out that in the US , growth has been over for the bottom 95% of us since 2000, when the median household income peaked.  He expects more poverty, noting that even now, most (63%) Americans don't have enough emergency saving to handle s $500 car repair bill, or $1000 medical emergency.   So, his advice is to prepare for LESS:   Less Energy, Stuff and Stimulation, and recommends focusing on more important things, like nature, friends and family.

        He expects the cost of energy to rise significantly,  He doesn't accept the mainstream view, which is that we can continue to live our high energy lifestyle based on renewable power.   Hagens says, of course build as much renewable power as you can, but recognize that wind and solar are not a panacea.  Even with the incredible growth , wind and solar are not replacing fossil fuels, but are merely increasing total energy consumption.  And despite their growth, they still only represent around 3% of total world energy use  And wind and solar only impact the electricity market, which is less than 20% of our energy use.  He says "no combination of  fossil fuels and renewable energy will maintain economic growth.".  Eventually,of course, we will be forced to move to a system of all or nearly all renewable power, but he estimates we'll have only 1/3 to 1/2  the power we have now.   Have to learn to "cook when the sun shines".  

       This view is echoed by Richard Heinberg, (see Can we have our climate and eat it too?, who notes that any attempt to transition to renewable power will result in much less available energy, especially if we attempt the transition called for to keep temperature growth near 2 degrees.

"It is unclear how much energy will be available to society at the end of the transition: there are many variables (including rates of investment and the capabilities of renewable energy technology without fossil fuels to back them up and to power their manufacture, at least in the early stages). Nevertheless, given all the challenges involved, it would be prudent to assume that people in wealthy industrialized countries will have less energy (even taking into account efficiencies in power generation and energy usage) than they would otherwise have, assuming a continuation of historic growth trends.

This conclusion is hard to avoid when considering the speed and scale of reduction in emissions actually required to avert climate catastrophe. As climate scientist Kevin Anderson points out in a recent Nature Geoscience paper:

According to the IPCC’s Synthesis Report, no more than 1,000 billion tonnes (1,000 Gt) of CO2 can be emitted between 2011 and 2100 for a 66% chance (or better) of remaining below 2 °C of warming (over preindustrial times)… However, between 2011 and 2014 CO2 emissions from energy production alone amounted to about 140 Gt of CO2… [Subtracting realistic emissions budgets for deforestation and cement production,] …the remaining budget for energy-only emissions over the period 2015–2100, for a ‘likely’ chance of staying below 2 °C, is about 650 Gt of CO2.

That 650 gigatons of carbon amounts to less than 19 years of continued business-as-usual emissions from global fossil energy use. The notion that the world could make a complete transition to alternative energy sources, using only that six-year fossil energy budget, and without significant reduction in overall energy use, might be characterized as optimism on a scale that stretches credulity."

   And even if we could,  what would be the environmental effect?

Heinberg says:

"According to the Global Footprint Network’s Living Planet Report 2014, the amount of productive land and sea available to each person on Earth in order to live in a way that’s ecologically sustainable is 1.7 global hectares. The current per capita ecological footprint in the United States is 6.8 global hectares. Asking whether renewable energy could enable Americans to maintain their current lifestyle is therefore equivalent to asking whether renewable energy can keep us living unsustainably. The clear answer is: only temporarily, if at all . . . so why attempt the impossible? We should aim for a sustainable level of energy and material consumption, which on average is significantly lower than at present.

Efforts to pre-adapt to shrinking energy supplies have understandably gotten a lot less attention from activists than campaigns to leave fossil fuels in the ground, or to promote renewable energy projects. But if we don’t give equal thought to this bundle of problems, we will eventually be caught short and there will be significant economic and political fallout."

       Is this the "reality" which most young people are expecting?  Probably not. Because,  most people they tune out such information.  Hagens also addresses this "cognitive dissonance",  which he defines as "believing something that is totally contrary to reality".  He explains that it is a well known  in psychology as way of reducing stress.     

       He devotes  some time to similar "biases" which have been useful through out our evolutionary history, but which are now making it difficult to see objectively.     So we we see the world through tinted glasses.  In that sense we are all "delusional".     That we are easily influenced by authority, by charismatic people, by peer pressure,and  by our own bias towards optimism  (all the children are above average).  We are driven to "keep up with the Joneses"  These biases are built in "features",  that by virtue of our new situation, they have become "bugs".

      So, if you've got an 18 year old around the house, you may want to watch this video together, and talk it over.  Then, take a walk in the woods, you'll both feel better

Be Excellent to One Another

We all need someone we can lean on

   - Rolling Stones

Get busy child

  -Moby

Greetings

         Here's is the latest from Nate Hagens, one of the smartest guys around. He's figured out high finance, ecological economics, and evolutionary psychology,  so he has a pretty good idea of the mess were in, and how we are genetically disposed to make an even bigger mess.

      Now he's trying to to turn all those smarts into wisdom, and it seems he's getting somewhere.   So, if you've heard the story before, just fast forward to the end, and check out his prescriptions.

     

---------

Humans and Earth: Transitioning from Teenagers to Adults as a Species (lecture)

Posted on May 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

On Earth Day, I usually ‘swing for the fences’ a bit beyond normal economy/energy issues and reflect/share on where we came from, where we are, and what is at stake from a big picture perspective.   The lecture link below was a talk given on Earth Day at University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. (The sound on the Q&A was poor so that was left off – the Q&A of the previous night starts at the 1:09 mark at this link:  http://youtu.be/iyG95w4TT8w?t=1h9m)

I have concluded that facts are necessary but insufficient to change peoples behavior on the myriad converging crises our species and culture face. I have concluded that we are unlikely to do anything meaningful ahead of time to mitigate some of the major risks (finance/currency, poverty, economy, biodiversity, ocean, climate etc.).  I have discovered that telling people the whole story – firehose style, is kind of like a curse, unless you proffer some action steps.   It’s why I largely stopped speaking a couple years ago (other than on Earth Days)- I could explain the various risks and their intersections, but had no clue what to tell people what to do – I am getting (slightly) better at that and have even more ideas since this talk was filmed. In the end I think its about acknowledgement, integrity and accountability.

Essentially mankind has never had a plan or a goal. We pass the baton each day, each week, each year, each generation without a collective realization of our historical trajectory and future fiduciary.  Many in the tribe of Man think about deep-space. How many are thinking about humans and deep time? If we want a livable world in 100, 500, 10,000 years, with things we value, some long term ethos has to precede any actions we might take.

We don’t know what will happen. But we can know with high confidence what won’t happen, and that is a seriously important thing. The future will also be a matter of degrees; near-infinite variation of outcomes which are not equivalent.  And as much genetic/cultural baggage we carry, we humans have never known and been aware scientifically about ourselves and our natural world the way we are now– there are emergent properties bubbling up at the intersection of our morality and our knowledge. Things might look dark, but there is always a chance for benign and fantastic trajectories for the future – and the odds increase slightly with every person that acknowledges this truth.  “We” might not know how to influence things. Our actions might just as easily make things worse as better. But if one views the future as a fan of possibilities, many are still available, and those in our small but growing demographic who are aware of supply and demand drivers might aspire, at least for some fraction of their time, to synthesize and uphold as examples what this tribe of humans COULD be like what they COULD manifest as, despite the tall odds.

My ultimate point in this lecture is not a call to action, but a call not to rule out action.   What matters?  Caring defines what matters. Not caring also defines what doesn’t matter. We may not know exactly what or how to influence the future in positive ways.  But our situation calls for dignity, integrity, creativity and probably some discomfort.  The combination of 100:1 exosomatic buffer (for americans), scientific knowledge of how we got here, and emergent properties at the intersection of culture and knowledge,  we may pass the baton forward in ways different than the deterministic course that brought us to this point. And there are degrees of both success and failure in any case.

===================================================

The Earth Day lecture linked below is an attempt to look beyond the reductionist trend in vogue and synthesize ecology, environment, energy and behavior with a look to the future.   I already have ideas on how to improve the next iteration, at 2015 Earth Day, if not before. It’s alot – too much really – for an hour but you’re unlikely to be bored.

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http://www.themonkeytrap.us/humans-and-earth-transitioning-from-teenagers-to-adults-as-a-species-lecture

Is that a refrigerator in your pocket?

Or are you just glad to see me?

-Mae West

Greetings

    Here's something I didn't know about cell phones and refrigerators.  First Snowdon asked people to put their phones in the fridge, to avoid eves dropping

    Does it work?    I can't say.

     Second, smart phones use a lot of energy.  Not the phones themselves, of course, but the ah... infrastructure, shall we say.  The "cloud" and all that.  

     (This might open up some alternative ways of looking at other devices - How about that high MPG car?)

A Smart Phone Uses as Much Energy as a Refrigerator?

By Katherine Tweed

Posted 15 Aug 2013 | 17:44 GMT

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When you plug your smart phone into the wall, it draws a negligible amount of energy compared with other household electronics such as your set-top box or refrigerator.

But add in the amount of electricity it takes to move data across networks to deliver a total of, say, an hour of video to your smart phone or tablet each week, and over a year it adds up to more power than two new Energy Star refrigerators consume in a year.

And though phones and other electronics and appliances are becoming ever more efficient, that efficiency does not offset the proliferation of these devices around the world.

A new paper, “The Cloud Begins With Coal: Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power," [PDF] investigates the energy draw of information-communications technologies (ICT) and how they are dwarfing what we traditionally think of as energy hogs in the home. The paper was commissioned by the U.S. National Mining Association and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.

The global ICT ecosystem uses about 1500 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, which is equal to the electricity used by Japan and Germany combined. That figure will only increase, especially as cloud architecture overtakes wired networks.

The study notes that the growth in power demand attributable to these gadgets doesn't just come from people watching videos on tablets. It is driven also by “revolutions in everything form healthcare to cars, and from factories to farms.”

The energy to meet the needs of industrial and consumer applications has to come from somewhere. Data centers, wireless base stations, and wired networks are largely powered by coal, which is still the world's predominant fuel for electricity generation.

The study argues that a 50-megawatt enterprise data center in Iowa that gets 70 percent of its energy from coal and 25 percent from wind will cost US $350 million less to run over its lifetime compared with one in California, with no coal in its energy mix.

But even if the cloud is coal-fired today, that might not be the case down the road if environmental regulations eliminate the favored position of coal generation enjoys because of its low cost. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Is weighing a cross-state air pollution rule, which is currently on hold until further ruling; a rule regulating mercury and other heavy metals is scheduled to go into effect in April 2015. President Obama has also called for existing coal-fired power plants to meet more stringent greenhouse gas emissions standards.

And in India, the second largest mobile market after China, 75 percent of rural and 33 percent of urban cellphone base stations will need to run on alternative energy by 2020. In some areas that are seeing explosive growth in mobile networks, such as India and China, it might make more sense to power rural base stations with renewable energy than extend the grid.

Energy efficiency could also help stem the growth in electricity demand.  “In order for worldwide ICT electric demand to merely double in a decade,” writes Mark Mills, CEO of Digital Power Group and author of the paper, “unprecedented improvements in efficiency will be needed now.”

That work is already underway. By 2015, the GreenTouch Consortium, run by Bell Labs, plans to make ICT networks 1000 times as efficient as those that were in operation in 2010. While the group might not reach the goal by 2015, Thierry Van Landegem, chairman of GreenTouch, said earlier this year that reducing energy consumption in networks by 90 percent by 2020 is well within their reach.

“We are extremely proud of the progress we’ve made in our first three years, yet there is still much more we can do to improve efficiencies and effectively reinvent technologies in the name of environmental stewardship,” Van Landegem said in a statement. “Reducing energy by 90 percent is conservative as we have many projects underway whose effects were not taken into account in that number.”