Category: Environment

Unfortunately, more than nine million Americans do.  

This from Think Progress:

CDC blocked release of ‘alarming’ environmental report.

The Center for Public Integrity reports today that “for more than seven months, the nation’s top public health agency has blocked the publication of an exhaustive federal study of environmental hazards in the eight Great Lakes states” because of “alarming information” about “elevated infant mortality and cancer rates” potentially threatening “more than nine million” Americans. In July, just days before the report was to be released, the Center for Disease Control “withdrew it, saying that it needed further review.”

Cross-posted from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

An international team of experts has submitted a report that lists nine tipping elements — areas of concern for lawmakers — that quantify how much time is left to address their impending impact.

Produced by scientists from the U.K, Germany and the U.S., the study states: “Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change,” and goes on to predict the critical threshold at which a small change in human activity can have large, long-term consequences for the Earth’s climate system.

“These tipping elements are candidates for surprising society by exhibiting a nearby tipping point,” the report states. “Many of these tipping points could be closer than we thought,” said lead author Timothy Lenton, of the University of East Anglia in England. “Our findings suggest that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under human-induced climate change.”

Link to the list below the jump…

This excellent essay was posted at DKos on Tuesday. Its author, “the Cunctator” has registered for DD and will be here soon!

Is Lieberman-Warner a “Strong” Climate Bill?

by The Cunctator

Friends of the Earth challenged Sen. Boxer to support legislation that resembles the Democratic presidential candidates’ platforms for climate change legislation, not the Lieberman-Warner bill.

Boxer called Friends of the Earth “defeatist.” FoE responded: “We’re being realists.”

ASiegel then wrote: Boxing our way to disaster looking for an “explanation for her strong championing of the fatally-flawed Lieberman-Warner Climate (in) Security Act”.

Then Environmental Defense leaped to attack Friends of the Earth and ASiegel.

Boxer calls the committee passage of Lieberman-Warner the “greatest legislative accomplishment of my political career of thirty years”.

ED and NWF call L-W “a strong bill.” NRDC calls L-W “a very strong start.” The Nature Conservancy calls L-W “a strong starting point.”

So who’s right? Let’s take a step outside the Beltway and check in with some facts.

Is L-W a “good” bill?

The proper metrics to judge mandatory CO2-emissions-reduction legislation such as L-W are:

  1. effectiveness in reducing emissions

  2. effect on economy/society

So, how does L-W rate?

Effectiveness in Reducing Emissions

On the first, the IPCC 4th Assessment Report says that a long-term stabilization target of 2°C above pre-industrial levels is needed to have an even chance at avoiding the tipping point into catastrophic climate change.

The report also says that to achieve that target, the industrialized nations need to cut emissions to 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80-95% below 1990 levels by 2050.

(Developing nations need to simultaneously achieve “substantial deviation from baseline” for overall reductions to be sufficient. See Box 13.7 in the 4th Assessment Report, p. 776.)

L-W is not close to either of these targets. L-W only covers 80% of emissions.  For covered sectors, it hits 1990 levels by 2020 and 65% below 1990 levels by 2050.

At Bali, the Annex I Kyoto signatories (every single industrialized nation except the US and Turkey) agreed to the IPCC targets. The EU has unilaterally committed to achieving 20% reductions from 1990 levels by 2020, and would shoot for 30% reductions if the US makes a comparable effort.

Again: Lieberman-Warner is expected to achieve 1990 levels by 2020, and 56% below 1990 levels by 2050.

So, even assuming that the legislation is well designed and will be well implemented such that the targets in the bill will be met, if by “perfect” one means “an even chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change”, L-W is not perfect in its targets.

Furthermore, its lookback and cap-adjustment provisions are heavily weighted towards short-term economic growth instead of scientific necessity or long-term economic health.

Is L-W good? Is it “strong”? ED, which did not publicly support the Sanders amendments in committee to strengthen the cap targets and lookback provisions, evidently thinks so. I’m not sure what science they’re using to come up with that result.

Similarly, NRDC has said “Effective legislation must be enacted soon to avoid a 2 degree Celsius temperature increase.” I’m not sure what science they’re using to consider L-W “effective legislation.”

Effect on Economy and Society

In this analysis, I am going to make two a priori assumptions:

  1. Catastrophic climate change would be worse for our economy and society than doing nothing

  2. some mandatory regulatory system will be put in place

In other words, I’m comparing L-W’s economic effect against other hypothetical emissions reduction programs, not against the do-nothing scenario.

There is a well-developed consensus for some of the elements necessary to a “perfect” regulatory system, following principles of economic efficiency (maximum benefit to sector-wide industry and businesses) and economic justice (job creation, benefit to poor and middle class, etc.).

These include:

  1. 100% auction of credits

  2. Auction proceeds should go into minimizing economic disruption and investing in energy efficiency, renewable energy and other emissions-reduction technology, sustainable agriculture, and international/local mitigation/adaptation

  3. To minimize economic disruption: Most efficient system is to make overall tax system more progressive (possibly improving other safety net systems like healthcare)

        1. Allocation of about 15% of auction to poorest 20% (preferably by reducing existing taxes, such as payroll taxes) protects them from harm

        2. About 6% of auction revenues sufficient to protect electricity producing sector from harm; can be phased out over time

        3. Similarly for other covered sectors

  4. Energy efficiency:

        1. Short-term emphasis should be more on energy efficiency than new-tech investment (see Architecture 2030) — free allocations to load-serving entities would block/slow this

        2. Smart grid/electranet/distributed grid should be emphasized — support for traditional power system will block/slow this development

        3. Mass transit, smart growth, high-density urban planning should be emphasized — subsidization for traditional highway system, etc. with block/slow this

  5. Technology investment:

        1. no more than $8-$30 billion over 10 years needed to spur carbon-capture and sequestration technology

        2. Subsidization of renewable energy technology should be at least on par with subsidization for nuclear, natural gas, coal, oil. Would make sense to actually be more strongly subsidized. Would make sense to reduce/remove subsidies for gas/coal/oil that aren’t emissions-reduction focused.

  6. Agriculture:

        1. Sustainable agricultural practices (high-carbon farming, local farming, etc.) should be supported — subsidies for industrial agriculture blocks/slows this

        2. Biofuels need to be locally and sustainably produced and used to have a net positive effect

  7. International mitigation and adaptation support — I’m not sure what the “perfect” system is here, but I know that, for example, the Nature Conservancy wants a real emphasis on preventing deforestation

Now, L-W is not “perfect” on any of these. In fact, it has nearly the exact opposite emphasis in most categories. Over its 4-decade span, allocates about 48% of the permits away for free, giving 22% directly to polluting entities. These giveaways are heavily frontloaded. About $350 billion is allocated to supporting CCS (also frontloaded). It lumps nuclear and “clean coal” tech with renewable energy. It allocates permits for free to load-serving entities. It allocates permits for free to state governments (guaranteed to make pricing more inefficient).

The ED and other groups like to argue that we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good. It’s also to remember that the bad is necessarily the enemy of the good.

It is possible to reform the existing framework in the L-W legislation, in my opinion, to arrive at a bill that is “good”. It certainly wouldn’t be perfect.

Perfect climate legislation requires:

  1. 100% coverage of emitters, not 75-80%

  2. Climate-positive / carbon-negative targets–actually reducing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere

  3. Transformative reform of existing agriculture/land-use policy

  4. Transformative reform of existing transportation policy

  5. Transformative reform of existing tax policy

  6. Transformative reform of existing resource extraction policy

  7. Transformative reform of existing electricity distribution policy

So the best that a single cap-and-trade policy can be is “good”. As Al Gore outlined a year ago, a comprehensive and effective climate policy merely starts with a strong cap-and-trade system.

By reasonable economic and scientific metrics, L-W is not a good bill unless you own coal and/or nuclear plants or belong to an investment bank.

Ok the first Docudharma green goodness diary…

India teaching the young about conservation

What’s the most effective way to teach people the value of water and other scarce resources in a world where they are becoming more and more precious? The solution: start young – or at least that’s what progressive, ecologically-minded institutions such as the Vagdevi Vilas at Munne Kolalu, near Bangalore, India, are trying to do. Other institutions such as the Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan, are also aiming to show the way toward a revolution in the way ecology and sustainability issues are addressed in education and local communities.

Begun three years ago, the school now has 2,300 students on an eight-acre property that performs as a laboratory for putting the school’s ecological education into action

Geek oil?

Yep, some boffins believe they can make what they call a bio-crude oil, using their secret Furafuel technology. Dr Steven Loffler of Forest Biosciences with Australia’s government science research body, CSIRO and his white coated mates at Monash University announced they can, via a chemical process, produce a highly stable oil. This can be readily refined to an equivalent of either petrol or diesel from waste paper, timber and crop wastes.

In fact pretty much anything that is endowed with plenty of lignocellulose. They reckon even forest thinnings, straw and household green garden waste will do the trick. An added benefit of their process is that the bio-crude oil is also PH neutral, so it can be held in storage for a while, before further processing.

You know it is bad when former oil execs are out there condemning gas guzzlers

The former chairman of Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell has called on the European Union to ban gas-guzzling cars, saying they are unnecessary, the BBC reported Monday. “Nobody needs a car that does 10-15 mpg (miles per gallon, 19-28 litres per 100 kilometres),” Mark Moody-Stuart was quoted as saying.

“We need very tough regulation saying that you can’t drive or build something less than a certain standard. You would be allowed to drive an Aston Martin — but only if it did 50-60 mpg.”

Got some old suitcases you hate? Turn them into furniture… Just a small article put the pics are cool.

GO MEXICO!!!

In honor of World Wetlands Day, Mexico added 45 wetlands to an international registry that promotes conservation and sustainable development, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. Ramsar, which now covers more than 1,699 wetlands totaling 375 million acres, was signed in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971 to coordinate international efforts to conserve wetlands.

Banks applying environmental standards to business loans.

Top U.S. investment banks are set to impose environmental standards that will make it harder for companies to acquire financing for coal-fired power plants, in preparation for government caps on greenhouse-gas emissions, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The report said Citigroup Inc, JP Morgan Chase & Co, and Morgan Stanley, expect the U.S. government to cap power-plant emissions in the next few years, and will thus require utilities seeking financing for plants to prove that those facilities will be viable under new regulations.

Using nanotech to round up atmospheric gases.

Chemists unveil new process for capturing and storing gas; potential spin-offs include improvements to greenhouse gas  management and fuel cell development

A new process for catching gas from the environment and holding it indefinitely in molecular-sized containers has been developed by a team of University of Calgary researchers, who say it represents a novel method of gas storage that could yield benefits for capturing, storing and transporting gases more safely and efficiently.

And finally for now because this is just cool…Have a condo, you could have a fish farm. No really….

Check it out

Big fish are moving into the big city. Recent headlines about contaminants found in the sushi of New York restaurants gives us all the more reason to love Yonathan Zohar’s city fish farms. Perfect for the basements of large condos or parked near a big city market, Zohar’s commercial fish farms solve a number of problems.

“It is clear that the consumption of seafood and fish is on the rise, because of the great health benefits… but now we are over-harvesting,” warns Zohar, director of the Center of Marine Biotechnology at the University of Maryland. “We need to change that practice and become more efficient in a way that is compatible to the earth.”

Using advanced concepts of microbiology, Zohar has entrained special microbes to live in symbiosis with the fish in order to digest their waste, 21c reports. Aerated by plastic plugs that house the microbes, the fish pools are bio-secure and contaminant free.

If you want to talk Democratic ideas, look no further than the Kennedy clan. They tend to be dismissed as People Magazine American Royalty, but that says more about our media than about them. With Senator Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy having endorsed Barack Obama, and with the Clinton campaign reminding voters that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend have already endorsed Hillary, the Kennedy family is back making headlines. That can only be a good thing.

The Clintons deserve credit for having made our national health care crisis a national issue, in the 1990s. Of course, their plan was a byzantine mess, and it didn’t go nearly far enough. For that matter, none of the current leading Democratic candidates advocate single-payer national health care, so they’re all offering but different flavors of incrementalism. No surprise. As I keep writing, despite the campaign rhetoric, they are all basically traditional Democratic centrists. Of course, as I also keep writing, even as the Democratic candidates approach the major issues with nothing revolutionary, the Republican candidates rarely even notice there are issues to approach. We can argue over the nuances of the incrementalist approaches of Senators Clinton, Edwards, and Obama, but if you want a good, cynical laugh, take a look at the Republican candidates’ approaches. But if you want to talk about vision and leadership on health care, look no further than Senator Kennedy. He wrote a book about it. In 1972. He’s been advocating for National Health Insurance since the 1970s. Among many other issues on which he has consistently been ahead of the times, he’s also been advocating for clean, renewable energy sources, since the 1970s. In our government, there is no greater champion for people, the environment, and innovative ideas than Senator Kennedy. And that has been the case for decades.

I’m also a particular fan of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I’ve long hoped he’d get involved in electoral politics, but I also understand the many and complex reasons for his not doing so. But my admiration of Kennedy has nothing to do with his father or his family; it has everything to do with his ideas. No one better articulates the rationale for environmentalism. The most common criticism of environmentalism is that it’s bad for the economy, and fundamentally opposed to capitalism. In a 2005 speech at the Sierra Club’s National Convention, Kennedy turned that around. Environmentalism is not only not bad for capitalism, it is a means of rescuing true free-market capitalism.

Cross-posted from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has updated its policy on climate change with the pronouncement that changes to the Earth’s climate system are “not natural.”

The Earth’s climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming. Many components of the climate system-including the temperatures of the atmosphere, land and ocean, the extent of sea ice and mountain glaciers, the sea level, the distribution of precipitation, and the length of seasons-are now changing at rates and in patterns that are not natural and are best explained by the increased atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity during the 20th century.

More below the fold…

This is a book review of Joan Martinez-Alier’s 2002 classic “The Environmentalism of the Poor.”  This is a book about the history of environmentalism that tries to fit the struggles of native peoples into that history.  

My last review was of a recently-published biography of Sup Marcos, the EZLN (Zapatista) figure; my next review will to a certain extent integrate the insights of Zapatismo into Martinez-Alier’s framework.  This, to a certain, extent, forms the knowledge background for my interest in people’s movements (centered on, but not exclusive to, peasant movements) as a counterweight to the environmental predations of the mainstream of capitalist industry.

(Crossposted at Big Orange)

“Climate” is a word with several definitions. From Answer.com, here’s the dictionary definition:

1. The meteorological conditions, including temperature, precipitation, and wind, that characteristically prevail in a particular region.
2. A region of the earth having particular meteorological conditions: lives in a cold climate.
3. A prevailing condition or set of attitudes in human affairs: a climate of unrest.

For additional clarity (at risk of exceeding “fair use” restrictions), here’s the thesaurus listing:

1. The totality of surrounding conditions and circumstances affecting growth or development: ambiance, atmosphere, environment, medium, milieu, mise en scène, surroundings, world.
2. A prevailing quality, as of thought, behavior, or attitude: mood, spirit, temper, tone.

So, to truly address “climate change” in today’s world, should we not address both functional definitions — namely, not just the meteorological but also the social/political?

Switchgrass is nothing less than amazing!

BBC News reports on a new study, Grass biofuels ‘cut CO2 by 94%’.

This is good news for the United States in so many ways:

1. Fewer CO2 emissions – 94% is almost “carbon neutral”

2. 540% EROEI – Growing “energy independence”

3. Better than corn and soy – Less need for harmful herbicides and pesticides, such as Atrazine

4. Native prairie grass – Improves local biodiversity

5. Plant once – Reduces erosion and farm fuel consumption

Cross-posted from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

The University of East Anglia (UK), working with the British Met Office, has made its annual temperature prediction for 2008:

2008 is set to be cooler globally than recent years say Met Office and University of East Anglia climate scientists, but is still forecast to be one of the top-ten warmest years.

Each January, the climate scientists at the university work with the British Met Office to forecast the expected temperature, taking into account conditions such as El Niño and La Niña, greenhouse gases, industrial aerosols, particulates, ocean trends and solar impact.

The assessment for 2008 is that there will be a “strong La Niña” event in the Pacific, which will limit the warming trend for the year (whilst still being one of the warmest years):

During La Niña, cold waters upwell to cool large areas of the ocean and land surface temperatures. The forecast includes for the first time a new decadal forecast using a climate model. This indicates that the current La Niña event will weaken only slowly through 2008, disappearing by the end of the year.

More below the jump…

This is about how we respond to the Climate Crisis and the relentless bad news about it-with despair, or with hope.  I’ll tip my hand and say it is really about how to fight off despair and find hope for the future.

It’s not easy to find hope.  For thanks to the climate crisis, the prospects for a livable future just keep getting worse.

I’ve written many times about the Climate Crisis over the past several years on various community blogs, and I notice several repeated reactions in comments.  Some offer their favorite solutions, or write about what they are doing personally to limit their carbon footprint.  But many responses are more emotional.

 There is fear, partly the product of quite natural denial-not denying the reality of global heating, but staying in denial about it as much as possible, while obsessing on much smaller issues.  There is anger, about how we allowed this to happen, etc. And there is despair: the world is coming to an end, and there’s really nothing we can do about it.

Despair, like anger, is another expression of fear.  But it is not entirely irrational.  How can it be, when we do face the real possibility of catastrophe?  

People have basically two reasons for despair: they believe that in its present state, humanity won’t meet this challenge.  There are too many political, economic and cultural barriers.  Humanity isn’t smart enough yet, mature enough, enlightened enough. And then there’s human nature: greed and fear will overcome.  

The second reason for despair is that resistance is futile: that the tipping points have all been passed, and there’s nothing humanity can do anyway to prevent catastrophe.  

It’s hard to argue with either of these reasons.  They may prove to be true.  But there are also counterarguments to each of them.