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I Love the Green New Deal But …

March 13, 2019

I Love the Green New Deal But …

Ever since our first ancestor lit a fire, humans have been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Add to that the first herder because ruminants are another large emitter of greenhouse gas (GHG).

Some people want to declare a national emergency and ban fossil fuels within ten years. How? I am for it and all ready to go. But please tell me how. Think of the quarter billion vehicles in the U.S. and the infrastructure supporting them; the myriad gas stations and repair shops and the people employed in them; the thousands of miles of domestic gas pipelines to homes using gas stoves and gas heating. Think of the restructuring, the replacement, the energy required, the megatons of metal and other materials used and their production which all require one thing — energy. And what about air travel and the shipping industry?

What of the millions of jobs lost? Think of the jobholders and their families. Most of these workers cannot switch skills overnight. These are not just the million and a half employed in the industry directly, but include gas company employees, your gas furnace repair and maintenance man, the people building furnaces, gas stoves, the auto repair infrastructure — electric motors of course are darned reliable and need attention only to brakes, tire rotation and battery coolant checks for the most part — and so on.

When you offer this laundry list, the response is likely to be, “Well I didn’t mean that.” In effect, it defines the problem with the Green New Deal: It is remarkably short on the ‘whats’ and especially the ‘hows’. Funny though I first searched for the Green New Deal at Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (whose courage I admire greatly) official web page and surprisingly found … well nothing. Why not something practical like mandating solar collectors on new homes constructed?

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Developing Country Issues at COP24 … and a Bit of Good News for Solar Power and Carbon Capture

December 19, 2018

Developing Country Issues at COP24 … and a Bit of Good News for Solar Power and Carbon Capture

Photo Source Doman84 | CC BY 2.0

We humans are an interesting species … instead of seeing eye-to-eye, we are inclined to see eye-to-nose.  We focus on the present and ourselves, particularly where our comfort is concerned, no matter how dire the predictions for the future.

Although these are now over, such has been evident at the climate change talks in Katowice, Poland.  An effort to mandate the Paris agreement, in light of the dire 1.5C report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has been stymied repeatedly by Saudi Arabia, the US, Russia and Kuwait.  Particularly disturbed are island countries like the Maldives that are literally disappearing with sea-level rise.  One of the last spats was on the word “welcoming” as in welcoming the IPCC 1.5C report.  It has been changed to “welcomes the timely completion of … ” in the final draft thereby not endorsing its conclusions, stark warnings or more ambitious goals.

The serious sticking point has been Article 6.  It deals with country plans and is of special concern to the poorer countries promised financial support.  But to obtain it Measuring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of carbon emissions reduction is sought by donor agencies and private sector groups.

Thus Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) is an international organization promoting balanced economic growth, that is without harming the environment.  It can help prepare a low emissions development strategy by assisting in developing viable MRV schemes.   It has for Colombia, Fiji and Mongolia, and is pursuing the same for others like Laos, Mozambique, Nepal and Senegal among others,  Sri Lanka, a vulnerable island nation, has prepared MRV systems for energy and transportation but requires help in other areas like agriculture, animal husbandry and industrial emissions.

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War, Anniversaries and Lessons Never Learned

December 12, 2018

War, Anniversaries and Lessons Never Learned

Photo Source NARA FILE #: 208-YE-7 | CC BY 2.0

On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered the Second World War. A war of horrors, it normalized the intensive, barbaric bombing of civilian populations. If the Spanish Civil War gave us Guernica and Picasso’s wrenching painting, WW2 offered up worse: London, Berlin, Dresden to name a few, the latter eloquently described in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughter House Five.” Against Japan, the firebombing of Tokyo, and above all the revulsion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki radiated a foretaste of ending life on the planet.

Reparations demanded from Germany had led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and a thirst for revenge.  Thus Hitler demanded France’s 1940 surrender in the same railway carriage where the humiliating armistice was signed in 1918.

If the war to end all wars — its centenary remembrance a month ago — killed 20 million plus, the successor tripled the score.  Disrupted agriculture, severed supply chains, fleeing civilians, starvation and misery; civilian deaths constituting  an inordinate majority in our supposedly civilized world.

One of the young men baling out of a burning bomber was George H. W. Bush.  He was rescued but his crew who also baled out were never found, a thought that is said to have haunted him for the rest of his life.  He went on to serve eight years as vice-president under Ronald Reagan and then four more as president.  Last week he passed away and was honored with a state funeral service in Washington National Cathedral.

His legacy includes the first Iraq war and the liberation of Kuwait.  While he avoided the hornet’s nest of ethnic and religious divisions in Iraq itself, the war’s repercussions led to the Clinton sanctions and the deaths of half a million children.

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Meat and Consequences:  More Bad News for Climate Change

November 28, 2018

Meat and Consequences:  More Bad News for Climate Change

Photo Source Audrey | CC BY 2.0

Thanksgiving is quite a holiday.  In one day, we manage to eat and enjoy 44 million turkeys, twice the number consumed at Christmas.  Yes, vegetarians may live longer and vegans even more so, but the smell of a roasting turkey in the kitchen lingering in the nostrils, titillating appetites as friends and relations gather, is synonymous with Thanksgiving — a meal where it is politic to keep politics away from the table.

Yet the news about our world cannot cease.  The annual greenhouse gas bulletin issued by the World Meteorological Organization reports a new high in CO2 levels of 405.5 parts per million reached in 2017; it is 46 percent higher than preindustrial levels.  The rising trend continues for on May 14, 2018, another high of 412.60 ppm was recorded.

The enthusiastic consumption of meat in industrialized countries is one cause.  The worst culprits are lamb, mutton and beef because sheep, goats and cattle are ruminants and their digestive systems release methane mostly through belching rather than the other end.  Cattle emit so much greenhouse gas that if they were a country they “would be the planet’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter.”  They produce an astounding 270,000 tonnes of emissions over their agricultural life cycle per tonne of protein, multiple times more than pork or poultry or eggs.  Transferring our carnivorous instincts from beef to poultry reduces so much emissions as to be near as good as being vegetarian although not quite.

Another way of imagining the effect is to translate a kilo of food sources into the number of car miles driven to produce the same emissions.  A kilo of beef equates to 63 miles.  Eating chicken reduces this by 47 miles, rice by another 10, lentils by 4 more.

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Weather Disasters: Climate Change and the Potential for Conflict

October 31, 2018

Weather Disasters: Climate Change and the Potential for Conflict

Photo Source U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service | CC BY 2.0

East Island was an uninhabited remote island in the Hawaiian chain, but it was an important refuge for wildlife:  Many of the endangered Hawaiian monk seals numbering about 1400 raised their young on that island; others like the green sea turtle and the albatross used it as a shelter.  Not any more because Hurricane Walaka washed away most of the island a few days ago.

It was not the only major Pacific storm last week for category 5 Typhoon Yutu devastated the Northern Marianas, a U.S. territory.  It was reputedly the worst U.S. storm since 1935.  Perhaps happenstance, but the rise in mean temperature due to global warming also exacerbates storms.

In September, Hurricane Florence hit North Carolina  — 51 people died.  The next month Hurricane Michael slammed the Florida panhandle at 5 mph short of a category 5, a record for the area.  Following just a few days after the IPCC (October 8, 2018) report on restricting global warming to 1.5 C, it seemed like nature’s affirmation.  The residents of the area have not yet recovered from the devastation.  The same is true in Puerto Rico and the other affected areas where over 3000 people reportedly have lost their lives due to Hurricane Maria a year ago.  It followed on the heels of Irma tearing through several other Caribbean islands before arriving in Florida.  And Harvey flooded Houston causing a record $125 billion in damage.

Across the Atlantic, there have been heavy rains in Turkey where a 300 year-old bridge was washed away, and flooding in France, Wales and Scotland.  Hurricane Leslie targeted Portugal weakening fortunately to a tropical storm before landfall, and last year Hurricane Ophelia skirted past, its winds fanning wild fires in Portugal and Spain before becoming the worst storm to hit Ireland in 50 years although not at hurricane force, having dissipated in the colder northern waters.

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Is There Hope and a World Warming at 1.5 Degrees Celsius

October 12, 2018

Is There Hope and a World Warming at 1.5 Degrees Celsius

Photo Source NASA’s Earth Observatory | CC BY 2.0

The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded the finalization of a special report on the impact of a 1.5 degree Celsius global warming above preindustrial levels.  Meeting in Incheon, South Korea (October 1-5), its three working groups of experts and government officials have huddled and jousted to strike a consensus on what will be necessary to restrict warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius when the globe is already up a degree.  What will earth be like with this level of warmth and what will happen if we fail?

Two earlier versions (January and June 2018) of the report were depressing to frightening.  They were made available for about a month for comment by experts and interested parties.  The real problem is a narrow window because human activity in the world emits 40 billion tons of CO2 per year — about 90 times the emission from volcanoes.  At some point, there will be enough in the atmosphere where the 1.5 degree rise will be a foregone conclusion.  While guesswork to some extent, it appears we have about 12 years before we exhaust the ‘carbon budget’; if we accept a 2C rise the date is 2045.

The tone may have been softened in the second report, but there is ‘substantial’ certainty the 2 degrees C target of the 2015 Paris Agreement, once considered safe, would be dangerous for humanity.  As the agreement also required governments to pursue efforts to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C, the remit to IPCC was to prepare a report comparing the consequences of the two alternatives as well as the feasibility and effort required to limit the rise to the lower figure.  The final report released on Oct 8, 2018 reviews 30,000 publications.

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Culture and Behavior May Clue Climate Change Response

September 4, 2018

Culture and Behavior May Clue Climate Change Response

Photo Source Dan Costin | CC BY 2.0

Behavior acculturated to ancestral norms, originally necessitated by occupation, is the focus of a new study in China with interesting ramifications for climate change.  In general, farming requires more stable relationships than, say, herding with the constant movement of animals.  Now the authors have taken farming a step further:

They observed that northerners were three times more likely than southerners to push an obstructing chair in a Starbucks out of the way; southerners eased themselves around in order not to inconvenience whosoever had placed the chairs.  The behaviors were true to type as northerners are considered brash and aggressive, while southerners are conflict averse and deferential.

The authors ascribe the behavior to ancestral occupation.  Wheat is farmed in the north, and such dry-land farming is more individualized than rice farming in the south.  The latter requires complex irrigation systems for paddies and forces cooperation and coordination among multiple families.  The interdependence also means it is crucial not to offend anyone.  This ancestral culture prevailed despite the fact that most descendants were no longer farmers.

The question of which people change their environment and who change themselves is an important one at a time when the world has to face the existential challenge of climate change.  In the last couple of years we have seen a cooperative Europe facing a quintessential maverick, as in Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump lives in his own world ignoring the mounting research and irrefragable evidence for climate change with its human fingerprint that can no longer be disputed.  Worse still are the consequences and the inevitable danger of conflict fueled by resource needs.  Thus the melting of Arctic ice has made possible new sea pathways, opening up oil and gas exploration, and pitting Russia, the U.S., Canada and other Arctic countries against each other.

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The Plight of Birds and the Hand of Man in the Sixth Great Extinction

June 13, 2018

The Plight of Birds and the Hand of Man in the Sixth Great Extinction

Photo by Mark Gillow | CC BY 2.0

As birds become fewer, wildflowers vanish, butterflies disappear, and animals in the wild are threatened, extinction and a grim future haunts.  How often did Rumi write about birdsong … there is a reason.  Nature revives the spirit.

June 5th was World Environment Day.  A UN outreach program hosted by a different country each year, it is designed to draw attention to its environmental challenges and to offer it support.  This year the host country is India and the theme is beating plastic pollution.  But plastics are not just a blight on the landscape, they are in the seas destroying coral and the species it shelters, painfully killing whales and other creatures … including birds.  Yet, it is far from the only cause of bird distress and their sharply declining numbers.  One example comes from the Arctic, where receding ice has taken with it the nutritious cod, which favor cold waters, and has  endangered the black guillemot now forced to feed their chicks on the bony and difficult-to-digest fourhorn sculpin.

When the EU commissioned a State of Nature report, they expected bad news but not quite as dire a result.  Prepared by the European Environment Agency and sourced from EU-wide data, it found one in three bird species threatened and only a little over half secure.  It also drew a bleak picture of European habitats finding over half of those studied to be unfavorable.  Habitat loss, pesticides particularly neonicotinoids, even excessive hunting, notably in southern Europe, are all to blame.

Earlier, a comprehensive study conducted by University of Exeter (UK) professor Richard Inger and colleagues had analyzed avian biomass across 25 countries over 30 years.  Using data from Birdlife International and the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme, they discovered a surprisingly large and troubling decline:  from 1980 to 2009 the estimated total avian population had been reduced by 421 million birds.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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