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To fully and systematically address the climate/energy crisis, the plan will have to be far broader in scope than what is currently being proposed. And while we need to mobilize society as a whole with a World War II-level of effort, the reality is that there’s never been a challenge like this before.

The idea is infectious. Could a big government jobs and spending program succeed in kicking into gear the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and ultimately save us from catastrophic climate change? The energy transition is currently going way too slowly; it needs money and policy support. And many people would need job retraining in order to work in re-engineered, renewable-powered industrial systems. In the 1930s, the New Deal programs of Franklin Roosevelt helped create jobs while also building critical infrastructure, including rural electrification, roads, bridges, and government buildings. Today, as we confront the requirements to produce energy sustainably; to use it differently in transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture; and to reverse the current trend toward increasing economic inequality—in effect, to save and reinvent industrial civilization—the need is arguably much greater.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Could a Green New Deal Save Civilization?

January 22, 2019

Could a Green New Deal Save Civilization?

(Image: Michael Duffy)

The public champions of the Green New Deal (GND) in the U.S. include Democratic progressive representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Deb Haaland, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Antonio Delgado. The idea is also supported by writer-activists Naomi Klein and Van Jones; by the Green Parties in the US and Europe; and by the Sierra Club, 350.org, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Climate Mobilization. The proposals currently circulating in Washington aim to provide 100 percent renewable energy in 10 to 20 years while supporting job retraining and aiding communities impacted by climate change. Some proposals also include a carbon tax (often with a fee-and-dividend structure that would rebate funds to low-income people so they could afford more costly energy services), incentives for green investment, public banks, measures to re-regulate the financial system, and the first steps toward a global Marshall Plan.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Opinion: Sooner or Later, We Have to Stop Economic Growth–And We’ll Be Better For It

January 14, 2019

OPINION: SOONER OR LATER, WE HAVE TO STOP ECONOMIC GROWTH — AND WE’LL BE BETTER FOR IT

The end of growth will come one day, perhaps very soon, whether we’re ready or not. If we plan for and manage it, we could well wind up with greater well-being.

Illustration by Kelsey King

January 8, 2019 — Both the U.S. economy and the global economy have expanded dramatically in the past century, as have life expectancies and material progress. Economists raised in this period of plenty assume that growth is good, necessary even, and should continue forever and ever without end, amen. Growth delivers jobs, returns on investment and higher tax revenues. What’s not to like? We’ve gotten so accustomed to growth that governments, corporations and banks now depend on it. It’s no exaggeration to say that we’re collectively addicted to growth.

The trouble is, a bigger economy uses more stuff than a smaller one, and we happen to live on a finite planet. So, an end to growth is inevitable. Ending growth is also desirable if we want to leave some stuff (minerals, forests, biodiversity and stable climate) for our kids and their kids. Further, if growth is meant to have anything to do with increasing quality of life, there is plenty of evidence to suggest it has passed the point of diminishing returns: Even though the U.S. economy is 5.5 times bigger now than it was in 1960 (in terms of real GDP), America is losing ground on its happiness index.

So how do we stop growth without making life miserable — and maybe even making it better?

To start with, there are two strategies that many people already agree on. We should substitute good consumption for bad, for example using renewable energy instead of fossil fuels.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Living in the Concretaceous Period

January 7, 2019

Living in the Concretaceous Period

Scientists long ago determined that Earth had entered the Anthropocene period, based on a determination that humans were altering fundamental planetary parameters such as biodiversity and the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans to the degree that it warranted an entirely new geological designation. Following another millennium of observation and analysis, skilled observers now tend to divide the Anthropocene into brief but distinct phases, including the Concretaceous, the Hellocene, and the current Depletozoic—which began centuries ago and appears likely to persist until the next awful thing happens.

While biologists have long agreed that humans are the dominant lifeform of the Anthropocene, some geologists now argue that, during the pivotal Concretaceous phase, it was the automobile that served as the true apex species. It was for the sake of automobiles that concrete—the signature rock stratum of the Concretaceous—was laid down over millions of square kilometers of landscape. The automobile served as a kind of exoskeleton for Concretaceous humans, as well as a status symbol, and it was for the powering of automobiles that millions of years’ worth of ancient sunlight, stored in the form of petroleum, was wrenched from the ground and combusted—thus altering the climate and triggering the swarm of events that led to the second phase of the Anthropocene, the Hellocene.

This latter observation has led some historians to explore the evolution of the automobile, from the primitive Stutzes and Locomobiles that rolled the primordial roads of the early Concreteaceous, all the way to the sleek Teslas and other electric cars that began to proliferate just as the swiftly intensifying events of the brief Hellocene brought the Concretaceous to a hot, chaotic end.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Big Picture

December 17, 2018

The Big Picture

Humanity has a lot of problems these days. Climate change, increasing economic inequality, crashing biodiversity, political polarization, and a global debt bubble are just a few of our worries. None of these trends can continue indefinitely without leading to a serious failure of our civilization’s ability to maintain itself. Taken together, these metastasizing problems suggest we are headed toward some kind of historic discontinuity.

Serious discontinuities tend to disrupt the timelines of all complex societies (another name for civilizations—that is, societies with cities, writing, money, and full-time division of labor). The ancient Roman, Egyptian, and Mayan civilizations all collapsed. Archaeologists, historians, and systems thinkers have spent decades seeking an explanation for this pattern of failure—a general unified theory of civilizational collapse, if you will. One of the most promising concepts that could serve as the basis for such a theory comes from resilience science, a branch of ecology (the study of the relationship between organisms and their environments).

Why Civilizations Collapse: The Adaptive Cycle

Ecosystems have been observed almost universally to repeatedly pass through four phases of the adaptive cycle: exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization. Imagine, for example, a Ponderosa pine forest. Following a disturbance such as a fire (in which stored carbon is released into the environment), hardy and adaptable “pioneer” species of plants and small animals fill in open niches and reproduce rapidly.

This reorganization phase of the cycle soon transitions to an exploitation phase, in which those species that can take advantage of relationships with other species start to dominate. These relationships make the system more stable, but at the expense of diversity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Foreword to Oil, Power and War

November 27, 2018

This month’s Museletter is my Foreword to Matthieu Auzanneau’s excellent new book Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History published by Chelsea Green Publishing. For information on where to get hold of a copy see the links at the end.

Foreword to Oil, Power and War

Come and listen to my story ’bout a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer barely kep’ his fam’ly fed
And then one day he was shootin’ at some food
And up through the ground come a-bubblin’ crude.
Oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea.

Well the first thing you know old Jed’s a millionaire.
The kinfolk said, “Jed, move away from there.”
They said, “Californy is the place you ought to be,”
So they loaded up the truck and they moved to Beverly.
Hills, that is. Swimming pools. Movie stars.

(Paul Henning)

Perhaps the most instantly recallable verse on the subject of petroleum, the theme-song lyric to the hit 1960s television series “The Beverly Hillbillies” tells a tale of sudden wealth. It is a perfect touchstone for the real story of humanity’s experience with liquid hydrocarbons.

In the real story, riches consisted both of the billions accumulated by the great magnates of the petroleum industry—including John D. Rockefeller, J. Paul Getty, H. L. Hunt, and Charles and David Koch—and also the quickly growing economic output of industrial civilization once it came to be fueled by oil. This novel source of energy spawned entire new industries—notably the automotive, aviation, and plastics industries—while revolutionizing existing ones (agriculture, forestry, fishing, shipping, manufacturing, lubricants, chemicals, paints, dyes, cosmetics, road paving, and pharmaceuticals). It propelled humanity into an age of mobility and rising expectations.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Bonus Decade

October 29, 2018

Our Bonus Decade

“The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.”

–George Eliot, Silas Marner

It’s been ten years since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. Print, online, and broadcast news media have dutifully featured articles and programs commemorating the crisis, wherein commentators mull why it happened, what we learned from it, and what we failed to learn. Nearly all of these articles and programs have adopted the perspective of conventional economic theory, in which the global economy is seen as an inherently stable system that experiences an occasional market crash as a result of greed, bad policies, or “irrational exuberance” (to use Alan Greenspan’s memorable phrase). From this perspective, recovery from the GFC was certainly to be expected, even though it could have been impeded by poor decisions.

Some of us have a different view. From our minority perspective, the global economy as currently configured is inherently not just unstable, but unsustainable. The economy depends on perpetual growth of GDP, whereas we live upon a finite planet on which the compounded growth of any material process or quantity inevitably leads to a crash. The economy requires ever-increasing energy supplies, mostly from fossil fuels, whereas coal, oil, and natural gas are nonrenewable, depleting, and climate-changing resources.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

When It Comes to Sustainability, We’re a Society of Distracted Drivers

October 19, 2018

When It Comes to Sustainability, We’re a Society of Distracted Drivers

We human beings are all, in effect, driving this planet

If we’re asleep at the wheel, the likelihood of calamity skyrockets.(Photo: Screenshot)

“If we’re asleep at the wheel,” writes Heinberg, “the likelihood of calamity skyrockets.” (Photo: St. Joseph Health/stock)

Driving is dangerous. In fact, it’s about the riskiest activity most of us engage in routinely. It requires one’s full attention—and even then, things can sometimes go horribly awry. The brakes fail. Weather turns roads to ice. A driver in the oncoming lane falls asleep. Tragedy ensues. But if we’re asleep at the wheel, the likelihood of calamity skyrockets. That’s why distracted driving is legally discouraged: no cell phones, no reading newspapers or books, no hanky-panky with the front-seat passenger. If you’re caught, there’s a hefty fine.

“The economy, entertainment, jobs, sports, and politics are all fine and suitable objects of attention—as long as we first ensure that society’s speed and direction are safe and sane.”If you think you hear a metaphor coming, you’re right. We human beings are all, in effect, driving this planet. We’re largely responsible for whether it continues more or less as it is for another few thousand (maybe a few million) years, or tips rapidly into a condition that may not support human life, nor permit the survival of myriads of other creatures. But we’re not paying attention to the road in front of us. Instead, we’re distracted.

Our personal distractions are often compelling. Most of us need to make a living. We like to make time for family and friends. We enjoy a wide range of entertainment options.

Our collective distractions seem just as important. We want the economy to grow so that there are more jobs and higher returns on investments.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Will it Take to Avert Collapse?

September 19, 2018

What Will it Take to Avert Collapse?

A lot of people are asking the question these days—including serious folks who work full-time on climate and energy policy. How can the world’s nations reduce greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to forestall climate catastrophe, without undermining either the global economy (which is still 85 percent dependent on fossil fuels) or the hopes of billions of people in poorer countries to raise their economic prospects through “development”—which historically has depended on increasing per capita energy usage?

The United Nations has passed this vexing question along to the global climate science community as a formal request to write a Special Report providing “feasible” pathways to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius while supporting economic growth and meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The science community has responded by publishing papers featuring scenarios to fit those specifications. Until recently, most scenarios have relied on negative emissions technologies, including CCS (capturing carbon from fossil-fueled power plants, then sequestering it), or BECCS (growing biomass crops, burning them for power, then recapturing the carbon and storing it). Critics have savaged these plans as being too expensive and too environmentally risky.

A major new 13-page paper in Nature Energy, with 122 pages of supplementary materials, takes an entirely different approach. The goal of the authors, led by Arnolf Grubler, was to model a scenario that limits global warming to 1.5 °C while meeting economic goals withoutinvoking negative emission technologies—relying instead on energy demand reduction. We and our colleagues at Post Carbon Institute have for years promoted demand reduction as the primary viable pathway to averting catastrophic climate change.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Human Predators, Human Prey: Part 3

September 18, 2018

Human Predators, Human Prey: Part 3

Read Part I, read Part II.

Society as Ecosystem in a Time of Collapse, Part III

6. “Disease organisms” (revolutionaries), “parasites” (criminals), and “immune systems” (law and punishment) in times of growth and release

In his brilliant 1976 book Plagues and Peoples, historian William H. McNeill explored how infectious disease has shaped human societies through the ages. A remarkable paragraph on page 84 of the Anchor paperback edition has stayed with me for several decades and partly inspired this essay:

Very early in civilized history, successful raiders became conquerors, i.e., learned how to rob agriculturalists in such a way as to take from them some but not all of the harvest. By trial and error a balance could and did arise, whereby cultivators could survive such predation by producing more grain and other crops than were needed for their own maintenance. Such surpluses may be viewed as the antibodies appropriate to human macroparasitism. A successful government immunizes those who pay rent and taxes against catastrophic raids and foreign invasion in the same way that a low-grade infection can immunize its host against lethally disastrous disease invasion. Disease immunity arises by stimulating the formation of antibodies and raising other physiological defenses to a heightened level of activity; governments improve immunity to foreign macroparasitism by stimulating surplus production of food and raw materials sufficient to support specialists in violence in suitably large numbers and with appropriate weaponry. Both defense reactions constitute burdens on the host populations, but a burden less onerous than periodic exposure to sudden lethal disaster.

At the risk of over-quoting, I will reproduce McNeill’s next paragraph as well. He’s on a roll here, and the explanatory firepower of these passages is measurable in megatons. These are insights that would later help win a Pulitzer Prize for Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Remember: the context of his discussion is the role of disease organisms in the evolution of human societies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Human Predators, Human Prey: Part 2

August 29, 2018

Human Predators, Human Prey: Part 2

Society as Ecosystem in a Time of Collapse, Part II

For Part I of this essay see here.

4. Our current context: the adaptive cycle, conservation, and release

As we’ve seen, predator-prey relationships shape the flow of energy through ecosystems. But what happens in either a natural ecosystem or a human social “ecosystem” when energy flows increase? As long as sufficient basic nutrients are available and other conditions (such as climate) are stable, the system tends to grow in size (in terms of biomass) and/or complexity.

And that is exactly what has happened within the human “ecosystem,” especially during the past century or so. We humans learned to use exosomatic energy (that is, energy apart from what is released from food through metabolism) when we started using fire several hundred thousand years ago. The domestication of draft animals (primarily horses, oxen, and mules), and the harnessing of waterpower and wind power (at first with sails, later windmills) increased our access to exosomatic energy. More recently, technological developments including metallurgy and the invention of the steam engine opened the way to our use of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas.

Energy usage chart

Fossil fuels, representing tens of millions of years’ worth of chemically stored sunlight, enabled our global per-capita use of energy to grow by more than 800 percent in the past 150 years. With the confluence of science, technology, and fossil energy, many things became possible that were barely dreamt of previously—including aviation, global electronic communications, the mass production of goods, and a way of life (for some, at least) characterized by lavish consumption. Human population grew from under a billion two centuries ago to 7.5 billion today; cities and nations exploded in size; trade soared in volume, speed, and distance; and the destructive power of weaponry became global in scope.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ted Nordhaus Is Wrong: We Are Exceeding Earth’s Carrying Capacity

July 26, 2018

Ted Nordhaus Is Wrong: We Are Exceeding Earth’s Carrying Capacity

The co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute has a cheery vision of the future. If only that vision were plausible.

IN HIS ARTICLE, “The Earth’s Carrying Capacity for Human Life is Not Fixed,” Ted Nordhaus, co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based energy and environment think tank, seeks to enlist readers in his optimistic vision of the future. It’s a future in which there are many more people on the planet and each enjoys a high standard of living, while environmental impacts are reduced. It’s a cheery vision.

The core of Nordhaus’ case is that we are now living in a magical society that is immune to the ecological law of gravity.

If only it were plausible.

Nordhaus’s argument hinges on dismissing the longstanding biological concept of “carrying capacity” — the number of organisms an environment can support without becoming degraded. “Applied to ecology, the concept [of carrying capacity] is problematic,” Nordhaus writes, arguing in a nutshell that the planet’s ability to support human civilization can be, one presumes, infinitely tweaked through a combination of social and physical engineering.

Few actual ecologists, however, would agree. Indeed, the concept of carrying capacity is useful in instance after instance — including modeling the population dynamics of nonhuman species, and in gauging the health of virtually any ecosystem, be it ocean, river, prairie, desert, or forest. While exact population numbers are sometimes difficult to predict on the basis of the carrying capacity concept, it is nevertheless clear that, wherever habitat is degraded, creatures suffer and their numbers decline.

The controversy deepens in applying the carrying capacity concept to humans. Nordhaus seems to think we are exceptions to the rules. Still, as archaeologists have affirmed, many past human societies consumed resources or polluted environments to the point of collapse.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Museletter #314: Human Predators, Human Prey

July 26, 2018

Museletter #314: Human Predators, Human Prey

Society as Ecosystem in a Time of Collapse, Part I

This month’s MuseLetter is Part I of a 3-part essay that uses predation as a metaphor to unpack power relations in human societies. Stay tuned!

Introduction

A lion runs down a gazelle; a raiding band brandishing clubs, bows, and arrows descends on a tribal village; a loan shark confronts a delinquent borrower.

In each of these three scenarios one party seeks to gain at the expense of the other. Without a moment’s hesitation, we classify the first interaction, between the lion and gazelle, as a predator-prey relationship. Biologists and ecologists have studied such relationships in detail for many decades, codifying principles that help us understand and predict the behavior of entire ecosystems. Could we use predator-prey relationships among widely divergent species in nature as a metaphor to help in understanding the behavior of people in complex human societies, in which some people gain at the expense of others? Even the best metaphors have limited usefulness, and this one certainly has potential for misapplication; however, as I hope to show, it also has the ability to illuminate.

A complex or stratified human society can be thought of as an ecosystem. Within it, humans (all a single species), because of their differing social classes, roles, and occupations, can act, in effect, as different species. To the extent that some exploit others, we could say that some act as “predators,” others as “prey.” There may even be human analogues to subcategories of predatory behavior such as parasitism and infection.

Within non-human species in nature, forms of competition or exploitation unquestionably exist. For example when a shoebill gives birth to two chicks, the mother and father tend to favor one of them; then the favored offspring attacks the unfavored, which inevitably dies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Personal Resilience

May 24, 2018

Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Personal Resilience

As a writer focused on the global sustainability crisis, I’m often asked how to deal with the stress of knowing—knowing, that is, that we humans have severely overshot Earth’s long-term carrying capacity, making a collapse of both civilization and Earth’s ecological systems likely; knowing that we are depleting Earth’s resources (including fossil fuels and minerals) and clogging its waste sinks (like the atmosphere’s and oceans’ ability to absorb CO2); knowing that the decades of rapid economic growth that characterized the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries are ending, and that further massive interventions by central banks and governments can’t do more than buy us a little bit more time of relative stability; knowing that technology (even renewable energy technology) won’t save our fundamentally unsustainable way of life.

In the years I’ve spent investigating these predicaments, I’ve been fortunate to meet experts who have delved deeply into specific issues—the biodiversity crisis, the population crisis, the climate crisis, the resource depletion crisis, the debt crisis, the plastic waste crisis, and on and on. In my admittedly partial judgment, some of the smartest people I’ve met happen also to be among the more pessimistic. (One apparently smart expert I haven’t had opportunity to meet yet is 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman, the subject of this recent article in The Guardian.)

In discussing climate change and all our other eco-social predicaments, how does one distinguish accurate information from statements intended to elicit either false hope or needless capitulation to immediate and utter doom? And, in cases where pessimistic outlooks do seem securely rooted in evidence, how does one psychologically come to terms with the information?

Systems Thinking

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Richard Heinberg – Author and Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow

March 28, 2018

Richard Heinberg – Author and Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow

Richard Heinberg joins Sustainable Nation to discuss:

The current state of energy and its contributions to the climate crisis
The shale gas and tight oil bubble
Community resiliency
The transition to a fossil fuel free future
Recommendations and advice for sustainability leaders

Final Five Question Responses:

What is one piece of advice you’d give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers?

I don’t know if it’s a piece of advice, but I’d just say, hey you’re doing the most important work anybody is doing right now, so even if it’s tough, keep at it.

What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability and regenerative development?

One of the things I’m excited about is carbon farming. I think there’s a huge opportunity for us to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and put it back in soil, and as a result of that, we could change our whole food system for the better.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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