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If society attempts to maintain current levels of energy services throughout the transition, the result will be a spike in both energy usage and carbon emissions.

Coal and natural gas spot prices have recently soared to record levels internationally, while oil is trading at over $80 a barrel—the highest price in seven years. Newspaper columnists are asking whether people in Europe and Asia who can’t afford high fuel and electricity prices might freeze this winter. High natural gas prices are causing fertilizer prices to spike, which will inevitably raise costs to farmers, with eventual catastrophic impact on people who already have trouble paying for food.

The real energy transition will almost certainly be a shift from using a lot to using a lot less.

Political commentators are naturally searching for culprits (or scapegoats). For those on the business-friendly political right, the usual target is green energy policies that discourage fossil fuel investment. For those on the left, the culprit is insufficient investment in renewable energy.

But there’s another explanation for the high prices: depletion. I’m not suggesting we’re about to completely run out of coal, oil, or gas; there’s no immediate danger of that. However, the energy industry has historically targeted the highest-quality and easiest-accessed of these resources, which means that what’s left, in most cases, are fuels that will be costlier to extract and process—and also more polluting. The proximate causes of current price spikes may be transient market conditions (the see-sawing pandemic, Britain’s decision to leave the European Internal Energy Market, Russia’s reluctance to provide more gas to European buyers until a new pipeline is given final approval, and China’s choice to reduce coal imports from Australia). But behind the energy headlines is persistent, accelerating depletion.

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

The Dreadful “C” Word – Conserve!

February 14, 2021

The Dreadful “C” Word – Conserve!

An article I wrote years ago remains as relevant today as when I wrote it. The subject delved into how candidates shy away from the dreaded “C” word, conserve! It pointed out how the Presidential candidates at the time did not even bother to mention pursuing an innovative initiative to conserve our resources. The reason for pointing this out is rooted in a very ugly weather forecast through the 20th of February. The current weather models suggest a polar vortex will continue pouring Arctic air into much of the central US which has caused natural gas prices to soar along with electricity demand. The sad fact is many Americans will respond by cranking up their thermostats while they watch Netflix shows or use energy to mine Bitcoin.

His Thermostat At Home Is Set At?

Because of my business, over the last several years I have had reason to enter many large buildings and offices in the evenings or during weekends. Amazingly, on cold winters nights, weekends, and over holidays thermostats on many of these buildings are not set-back and these buildings are a toasty seventy degrees. Yes all over America we heat empty buildings as though they are occupied. Also, a fair number of computers and lights are often left on long after everyone is gone for the day, it seems many people don’t care enough to make the slightest effort to turn down the heat or turn off a light.This is an awareness and an attitude problem and, without a gentle nudge to conserve, Americans will continue to damage the environment and add to climate change. Generally, Americans are a spoiled breed.

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

The Revolution Will Not Be “Green”

July 17, 2020

The Revolution Will Not Be “Green”

A truly equitable and sustainable conservation movement must abandon both green capitalism and the idea of pristine nature

Our planet is dying, and conservation as we know it isn’t helping. In fact, it’s making things worse. Long imagined as a bulwark against ecological destruction, players in the mainstream conservation movement—think big NGOs like The Nature Conservancy and their corporate partners—have actually been complicit in that destruction by propping up a fundamentally unsustainable capitalist system and the nature-culture dichotomy it’s built upon.

According to Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher, sociology professors at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, conservation has long been due for a wholesale update—and today, it’s getting not just one but two: “new conservation” and “neoprotectionism.” But in their tightly-argued book, The Conservation Revolution (Verso, February 2020) Büscher and Fletcher make the case that both of these emerging, radical movements contain “untenable contradictions” and that neither can save the planet or humanity from catastrophe. In their place, they propose a new conservation framework of their own, one that complements the variety of ongoing “hope movements” imagining ecologically-sound and democratic alternatives to capitalism.

In the course of just over 200 pages, Büscher and Fletcher build up to this modest proposal swiftly yet methodically, combining history and theory to contextualize and, ultimately, critique their colleagues in the so-called “Anthropocene conservation debate” in a way that is both rigorous and accessible. While their own “convivial conservation” framework, by their own admission, needs further development, it is nonetheless an important addition to revolutionary thought in political ecology.

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

Power Grid Chaos Jolts Texas On Friday, Energy Costs Triple Amid Heat Wave

August 17, 2019

Power Grid Chaos Jolts Texas On Friday, Energy Costs Triple Amid Heat Wave

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has been asking customers to conserve energy this week as spot power prices in Texas triple to a record on Friday.

The state’s power grid operator that serves most of Texas declared an energy conservation emergency for the second time this week, the first on Tuesday when temperatures exceeded 100 degrees, and customers cranked up their air conditioners to escape the heat.

ERCOT asked customers this week to reduce energy use between 3 and 7 p.m. Here is what they asked Texans to do:

Increase thermostats 2 to 3 degrees
Program thermostats at a higher temp when not at home
Use a fan, it can lower temperatures by 4 to 6 degrees
Use appliances less (dishwashers, washers, and dryers) or only in the morning hours.
Run pool pumps in the early morning or overnight hours and shut them off between 4 to 6 p.m.
Keep blinds and drapes closed during the hottest part of the day.

ERCOT reported no rotating power outages.

“High temperatures have resulted in record electricity demand over the last few days and may result in a new record today,” said ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness. “Consumers can help lower energy consumption by taking some simple actions between the hours of 3 and 7 p.m.”

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

Encouraging Energy Conservation: Is Less More?

January 28, 2019

Encouraging Energy Conservation: Is Less More?

Many messages about saving energy use multiple arguments to make their case. But our research suggests that may actually be the wrong approach.

Is messaging about consumers’ home-energy habits important in climate change mitigation? Many organizations say yes, and are conducting outreach to raise awareness and persuade individuals to improve their energy use.

But are the messages being used in that outreach actually working? Our research, recently published in the journal Energy Policy, suggests the types of messages that are typically used don’t always have the desired effect. This research also suggests ways to improve energy-conservation messaging.

Often energy-related messages are crafted under the assumption that the information they contain will be received, processed and acted upon in a rational way. What does this mean? As traditionally conceived, rationality implies that people maximize their utility (more commonly referred to as their happiness) subject to their material constraints (i.e. the money they have) and their beliefs about the world (i.e. the information they have).

The richness of human behavior, however, means that people don’t always act in ways that can be explained by this model. People may, for example, care about the utility of others — in other words, they may care about others’ happiness in addition to their own. Constraints may take the form of time or willpower, rather than money. People’s beliefs may be shaped not only by the objective information they have, but also by their perceptions of what other people believe. Moreover, people don’t always act according to the beliefs they hold.

The behavioral sciences have played an important role in revealing these and other nuances in the decision-making process. As a result they have led to more sophisticated decision-making theories, and consequently, to more sophisticated policy interventions based on these theories.

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

Communism, Fascism and Green Shaming

January 2, 2019

Communism, Fascism and Green Shaming

In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis.”

– Michael Parenti (Blackshirts and Red)

“…the totality of which the psyche is a part becomes to an increasing extent less ‘society’ than ‘politics’ . . . society has fallen prey to and become identified with domination.”

– Herbert Marcuse (Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia)

“By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy … Yet, the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements … Any talk of climate change which does not include the military is nothing but hot air, according to Sara Flounders. It’s a loophole [in the Kyoto Convention on Climate Change] big enough to drive a tank through, according to the report A Climate of War.”

– H. Patricia Hynes (Climate and Capitalism, Feb 2015)

I am sensing — at least in the U.S., a migration of the liberal policing of thought into green movements. A guy ( a writer in fact, one published on several left sites including this one) arguing about plane travel. And this seems to be a thing. The problem of individual travel on jet airplanes is, of course, dwarfed by military pollution of all kinds, including massive nearly incomprehensible jet fuel usage, corporate air travel, and the world of private jets altogether. In other words there is a qualitative distinction. And I’m quite sure most people getting a short break from their miserable day job appreciate the shaming and hectoring of this polyanna bullshit. I’d be happy to travel by train, but since that’s not possible much anymore, nor is sea travel unless you own a sailboat, the point is to change a system of inequality, which would by itself radically reduce the pollution of jet engines.

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

Human and Planetary Health [Part II: Going Upstream]

December 5, 2018

Human and Planetary Health [Part II: Going Upstream]

Transcript of Daniel Wahl’s ‘Findhorn Talk’ on Human and Planetary Health: Ecosystems Restoration at the dawn of the Century of Regeneration; October 13th, 2018

[…Part I] We need to go upstream and look at this ‘crisis of perception’. We need to start rethinking the story of who we are and why we are here. We need to start thinking about what we could do if we actually lived in a way that is: “creating conditions conducive to life.”

[…], Janine Benyus, the founder of the biomimicry work, says “Life creates conditions conducive to life.” This is in nutshell what we should be doing. I would also say that life is a regenerative community (1). We need to rejoin that community.

To do that we need to change the stories we tell about ourselves and we need to change the ‘organizing ideas’ that shape our perception. What do I mean by that? Have a look at that [the image below].

Some of you are seeing the head of an animal, others are seeing only a black and white circle with black dots in it. — If I give you the organizing idea ‘head-of-a-giraffe’. Ahh — some people go ‘ohh, I can see it now’. This is the neck, these are the horn, these are the eyes, this is the snout. She is looking down this way [from center line to bottom right of the circle].

This is just to show that organizing ideas are incredibly powerful. We don’t see things because they are out-there and they just come-in. We see things because we have ideas about what is out-there and we make the world. We bring forth a world together in conversation. That is the power of reshaping the world for us as well.

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

America’s ‘Cadillac Desert’: Is there a substitute for fresh water?

May 14, 2018

America’s ‘Cadillac Desert’: Is there a substitute for fresh water?

Thirty years after Marc Reisner penned Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water his prophesy is being fulfilled. As the chalky rings which mark previous higher water levels around Colorado River reservoirs grow ever wider, Grist reports that major disputes are now afoot over the remaining water supply.

Modern economists have long told us not to worry about resource scarcity. Higher prices will bring on new supplies whenever resource supplies decline. And, if a resource truly is becoming unobtainable, then we’ll always find a substitute.

When I hear this, I often counter: “There is certainly some truth to what you are saying. But, please tell me what the substitute for potable water will be.” The response is usually to change the subject—for the obvious reason that there is no substitute.

A Scientific American article in 2012 put world freshwater usage at more than 9 trillion cubic meters for per year. Per capita, Americans, not surprisingly, consumed more than twice the world average. Certainly, there is much room for water conservation in America and in the American West.

But what does conservation mean when 70 percent of the world’s fresh water is used for agriculture? Of course, it means that conservation is going to affect food production. At first, it might mean simply making irrigation systems more efficient through, say, drip irrigation.

But once conservation has achieved all that it can achieve, what will we do? It is important to remember that what is normally measured when it comes to water consumption is “freshwater” consumption. The water optimists will point to the vast brackish aquifers still available to us humans, not to mention the almost limitless supply in the oceans. The fact that the U.S. Geological Survey was asked by Congress to survey brackish water availability in the United States is an indicator of how serious the situation has become.

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

The Need to Limit Energy Use

October 25, 2017

THE NEED TO LIMIT ENERGY USE

ENERGY: AN ADDICTION OR A NECESSITY?

Energy is arguably the most defining aspect of industrial civilization. For the first couple hundred thousand years of human existence, our ability to affect the world around us was limited by the amount of energy the human body can produce. It is estimated that, on average, a fit laborer can produce about 75 Watts of energy over an eight hour period. To those of us not familiar with energy terms, let it suffice to say that´s not very much energy, at least compared to modern day usage.

Though the elites of past civilizations were able to harness vast amounts of human energy (usually through slavery) in order to build astounding civilizations (think of the Roman aqueducts and the Egyptian pyramids), the majority of our ancestors lived lives that were constrained by the limits imposed by the places and conditions where they lived. They simply didn´t have enough human energy to drastically change the world.

Many scientists who study the history of evolution consider that it was only a matter of time before our species was to make the leap into the world-altering people that we´ve become. A self-conscious brain capable of understanding the world around us coupled with a rotatable thumb that allowed us to modify our surroundings was a combination that undoubtedly was to lead us into the modern civilization that defines us.

When our ancestors first discovered how to harness the power of the steam engine in the early 1800´s something changed in our world. For the first time ever, we were able to harness a power dozens of times greater than what we could produce from our own bodies or from the domestication of horses and other draft animals.

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

Sandra Postel: Repairing The Water Cycle

February 8, 2016

Sandra Postel: Repairing The Water Cycle

It’s now a top priority for our species

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot – Oh Christ!
That ever this should be.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

El Niño has been dropping much-needed rain this winter on a parched American West. But it’s making little difference to the greater water scarcity issues the US as well as the rest of the world is increasingly facing.

Here to talk about the state of the world situation for fresh water — arguably the single most important resource to humans on the planet, next to oxygen — is Sandra Postel, Director of the Global Water Policy Project, author, lecturer, and former National Geographic Fellow. The punch-line to her message: as more and more demands are placed on our finite freshwater supply by human consumption and climate change, intelligent conservation is now an absolute must:

Competition for water that arises when you have increasing scarcity — competition between cities and farms within the same area, competition between states and provinces within the same country, and then of course, competition and tensions between countries that share rivers. And so these are fundamental concerns going forward: we still have rising population and we pursue economic growth — all this places rising water demand against a finite supply. And so just navigating that tricky course in the years ahead is a tremendous challenge.

Our water future is being determined by population, consumption and technology. As well as the failure of policy to move us toward a more water efficient set of practices.

Take agriculture: the fact that we are growing with water in California, water in the Colorado River basin where water is fairly precious, we are growing some very low-value crops and using a lot of water to do that and often doing it inefficiently.

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

Resilience: A New Conservation Strategy for a Warming World

July 14, 2015

Resilience: A New Conservation Strategy for a Warming World

As climate change puts ecosystems and species at risk, conservationists are turning to a new approach: preserving those landscapes that are most likely to endure as the world warms.

The San Francisco Bay was once one of the richest estuaries in North America. Almost completely enclosed and protected from the open ocean, and with more than 200 freshwater creeks feeding into it, it was a fertile refuge for young salmon, halibut, sturgeon, anchovy, and smelt. It was lined with some 200,000 acres of tidal marsh, and the connected Sacramento Delta doubled that, creating a region so rich and productive it was known as the Everglades of the West.

San Francisco Estuary lnstitute

This tidal marsh in San Francisco Bay is one of the key areas on which local environmentalists are focusing.

By the middle of the 20th century, infill for development and diking had shrunk the bay’s tidal marshes to just 40,000 acres. In 1999, the San Francisco Estuary Institute set a goal of bringing the acreage of tidal lands in the bay back to 100,000. Several thousand acres have been rebuilt since then, and the replacement of nearly 30,000 more is in the planning stage.

Then came the specter of climate change.

Environmentalists realized that hard won gains could be undone as the sea level rises and claims the marshes — new and old — which are home to the clapper rail, a shorebird, and the salt marsh harvest mouse, endangered species both. “So the question isn’t just how do you restore tidal marshes,” says Robin Grossinger, senior scientist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute. “But how do you increase resilience as you restore them at the same time?”

Conservation is a moving target and growing more that way, in ways both predictable and not.

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

The Fifth Wave (Part Two)

May 19, 2015

The Fifth Wave (Part Two)

The Third Wave

The next wave of conservation, which stirred after World War II, had two principal components: an emphasis on science and a focus on private land. This was no accident—these components represented important shortcomings of the previous two waves. Federalism, by definition, focused on public lands, which meant that one-half of the American West—its privately owned land—had been largely neglected by the conservation movement. This became a pressing concern after the war as the suburban and exurban development of private land sped up considerably. Meanwhile, the rise of ecology and other environmental disciplines meant that data and scientific study could now complement, and sometimes supplant, the emotional and romantic nature of environmentalism. An illustrative example is the rise and growth of the Nature Conservancy, a landmark nonprofit organization that is now one of the largest conservation groups in the world.

In 1946, a small group of scientists in New England formed an organization called the Ecologists Union with the goal of saving threatened natural areas on private land, especially biological hot spots that contained important native plant and animal species. The protection of biologically significant parcels of land had traditionally been the job of the federal government, state wildlife agencies, or private hunting and fishing groups. Parks, forests, refuges, wilderness areas, and game preserves were the dominant means by which protection was provided to critical areas in the years leading up to World War II. But a growing number of scientists believed this strategy wasn’t sufficient any longer because it largely overlooked privately owned property—land that was rapidly being paved over in the postwar boom.

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

The Fifth Wave (Part I)

May 6, 2015

The Fifth Wave (Part I)

[Chapter 25 of The Age of the Consequences]

“All things alike do their work, and then we see them subside. When they have reached their bloom, each returns to its origin . . . This reversion is an eternal law. To know that law is wisdom.” —Lao-Tsu

The First Wave

In the fall of 1909, twenty-two-year-old Aldo Leopold rode away from the ranger station in Springerville, Arizona, on his inaugural assignment with the newly created United States Forest Service. For this Midwesterner, an avid hunter freshly graduated from the prestigious Yale School of Forestry, the mountainous wilderness that stretched out before him must have felt both thrilling and portentous. In fact, events over the ensuing weeks, including his role in the killing of two timber wolves—immortalized nearly forty years later in his essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” from A Sand County Almanac—would influence Leopold’s lifelong conservation philosophy in important ways. The deep thinking would come later, however. In 1909, Leopold’s primary goal was to be a good forester, which is why he chose to participate in a radical experiment at the time: the control and conservation of natural resources by the federal government.

Aldo Leopold as a new Forest Service ranger in the Southwest

Beginning in 1783, the policy of the federal government encouraged the disposal of public lands to private citizens and commercial interests including retired soldiers, homesteaders, railroad conglomerates, mining interests, and anyone else willing to fulfill America’s much-trumpeted manifest destiny. However, this policy began to change in 1872, when President Ulysses Grant signed a bill creating the world’s first national park—Yellowstone—launching the U.S. government down a new path: retention and protection of some federal land on behalf of all Americans.

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

Not A Drop To Drink: The American Water Crisis [INFOGRAPHIC]

March 12, 2015

Not A Drop To Drink: The American Water Crisis [INFOGRAPHIC]

Almost a year ago, we had talked about how we are potentially on the path to global Peak Water. Today’s infographic elaborates more on the problem on a national basis in the United States.

Right now, the average American consumes about 100 gallons of water per day both directly and indirectly. This is a problem of conservation and efficiency as much as it is supply, as the aging water infrastructure had its last upgrade during the Reagan era.

H/T Visual Capitalist

Source: Last Call at The Oasis via Visual Capitalist

Earth could face another mass extinction – study — RT News

December 16, 2014

Earth could face another mass extinction – study — RT News.

Animals on Earth continue to disappear at an alarming rate, which could result in another mass extinction over the next few centuries, a study by the journal Nature claims, although researchers are struggling to understand the scale of the problem.

Thousands of animals become extinct every year; pressures on species continue to grow, despite renewed conservation policies across the globe to try and slow the process, and the increasing amount of land and ocean areas being set aside for protection.

“In general the state of biodiversity is worsening, in many cases significantly,” said Derek Tittensor, a marine ecologist with the United Nations Environment Program’s World Conservation Monitoring Center in Cambridge, UK, as quoted by Nature.

The so-called Red List of Threatened Species, compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, discovered that there are 46,000 critically endangered species.

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

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