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Mining the Planet to DeathThe Dirty Truth About Clean Technologies

November 10, 2021

Foto: [M]: Hedi Xandt; SABarton / Getty Images / DER SPIEGEL

Mining the Planet to DeathThe Dirty Truth About Clean Technologies

The poor South is being exploited so that the rich North can transition to environmental sustainability. Entire swaths of land are being destroyed to secure the resources needed to produce wind turbines and solar cells. Are there alternatives?

There’s a dirty secret hidden in every wind turbine. They may convert moving air cleanly and efficiently into electricity, but few know much about what they are made of. Much of the material inside wind turbines are the product of brutal encroachments on our natural world.

Each unit requires cement, sand, steel, zinc and aluminum. And tons of copper: for the generator, for the gearbox, for the transformer station and for the endless strands of cable. Around 67 tons of copper can be found in a medium-sized offshore turbine. To extract this amount of copper, miners have to move almost 50,000 tons of earth and rock, around five times the weight of the Eiffel Tower. The ore is shredded, ground, watered and leached. The bottom line: a lot of nature destroyed for a little bit of green power.

A visit to the Los Pelambres mine in northern Chile provides a clear grasp of the dimensions involved. It is home to one of the world’s largest copper deposits, a giant gray crater at an altitude of 3,600 meters (11,800 feet). The earth here is full of metalliferous ore. Just under 2 percent of the world’s copper production comes from this single pit.

Dump trucks, 3,500-horsepower strong, transport multi-ton loads down the terrace roads that line the mine. The boulders are transported by conveyor belt almost 13 kilometers (8 miles) into the valley, where the copper is extracted from the rock. This processing requires huge amounts of electricity and water, a particularly precious commodity in this arid region.

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

Increasing Our Gardening Resilience

November 8, 2021

Increasing Our Gardening Resilience

Thoughts on increasing our gardening resilience

It feels like the world is moving faster and faster in directions I never would have thought possible just a couple of years ago. We knew resilience was important, but now it has become essential, critical to our well being and perhaps even survival. I am going to share some thoughts about pushing a garden to be more productive in ways within the capabilities and finances of most of us. My solutions reflect my agricultural zone (8b) and microclimate, but it is surprising what can be accomplished with very little.

Three resources I lean heavily upon, and will reference here, are: the books written by Eliot Coleman (Maine), Lynn Gillespie’s courses and information found at thelivingfarm.org (Colorado) and the interviews with Singing Frogs Farm (California) found on this website. All three provide a wealth of ideas and processes that those of us growing in residential areas can adopt on a “micro-sized” basis to be quite successful.

It takes knowledge and experience to be successful growing food on a small lot in a residential area, year-round, but it can be done! We can get a general idea of what we need to do through resources like those mentioned and seed company charts, but only dedication, season after season, brings us the knowledge and feeling that we need.

In the garden with the mini greenhouses with peppers and an A frame trellis for tomatoes behind

My garden is about 2000 square feet of actual growing area. It is divided into 40 beds, most of them raised. In this area over the course of a year 140 varieties of 40 vegetables and at least 20 different herbs are grown. Scattered around the rest of the property (a total of about 2 acres) we grow 15 different berries, 10 varieties of grapes, and trees for plums, peaches, pears, apples, cherries, hazelnuts and almonds….

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

Donella Meadows: Sustainable Systems

November 6, 2021

Donella Meadows: Sustainable Systems

Path to a Greener Future: Tax Kids or Just Ban Them Outright

October 22, 2021

Path to a Greener Future: Tax Kids or Just Ban Them Outright

The Greens need to step up to the plate with some truly sustainable proposals. I have a couple of ideas.

Ironies of Build Back Better

President Biden wants free college education, free preschool for kids, and increased child tax credits.

All of these proposals subsidize the single worst thing we can do for the environment: have kids.

Kids eat, need medical services, eventually become teenagers and drive cars. And as shocking as this might seem, kids grow up and travel, eventually by airplane.

Poor Nations Say They Need Trillions From Rich Ones

Yesterday, I commented Hello President Biden, Poor Nations Say They Need Trillions From Rich Ones

It’s one thing for developed countries like the US to demand a cleaner future, but it’s another thing to attempt to force G7 goals on the rest of the world.

About Those Climate Change Goals

John Kerry was speechless when he learned Poor Nations Need Trillions From Rich Ones to meet climate change goals.

At a July global climate gathering in London, South African environment minister Barbara Creecy presented the world’s wealthiest countries with a bill: more than $750 billion annually to pay for poorer nations to shift away from fossil fuels and protect themselves from global warming.

The number was met with silence from U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry, according to Zaheer Fakir, an adviser to Ms. Creecy. Other Western officials said they weren’t ready to discuss such a huge sum.

Kids are the single most destructive thing to the environment. Their toys are mostly made of plastic, diapers are throw-away, and as they get older, litter is inevitable.

A tax on corporations is not the answer. Corporations don’t really pay taxes anyway. Consumers do.

Guarantee Living Wages

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

The Long Descent — Decline and Fall of Industrial Society

October 19, 2021

The Long Descent — Decline and Fall of Industrial Society

The title of this piece is borrowed from John Michael Greer’s 2008 book The Long Descent, the central thesis of which is threefold. Firstly, the industrial civilisation we take for granted is unsustainable and is in decline. The evidence for this is all around us but many choose to downplay or ignore the evidence. Secondly, “The roots of the crisis lie in the cultural stories that shape the way we understand the world.” Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we simply told ourselves a story, created a modern myth, weaved the narrative that endless progress and increasing prosperity were inevitable. Despite a few little bumps on the road, the only way was up. Lastly, it is too late for industrialisation and technology to solve the problems that industrialisation and technology have created. And when we say ‘problems’, we should more correctly say ‘predicament’. Problems have solutions, predicaments have outcomes. We can respond to a predicament, but it cannot be ‘solved’, and our predicament is this: There is simply not enough easily accessible, affordable energy remaining to maintain industrial civilisation as we know it. In general, we are referring here to fossil fuels; the coal, petroleum, natural gas, oil shales, bitumens, tar sands etc. on which industrial civilisation depends. Equally, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that it will be impossible to replace these energy sources with either so-called renewables, or nuclear. Although fossil fuels continue to form within the Earth, only the most trivial use of them could ever have been deemed ‘sustainable’. As things stand, most of the high grade, easily accessible deposits have been extracted, so even using fossil fuels as a way to transition to an enduring and genuinely renewable energy base is no longer possible…

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

Bonus: Galactic-Scale Energy with Tom Murphy

October 16, 2021

Bonus: Galactic-Scale Energy with Tom Murphy

…click on the above link to listen to the show…

The World’s Sustainable Development Goals Aren’t Sustainable

September 29, 2021

The World’s Sustainable Development Goals Aren’t Sustainable

There are big problems with the most important metric used to assess progress toward the U.N.’s environmental goals.

Art for the Global Goals campaign at Liu Bolin Studio in Beijing on Aug. 28, 2015.

In 2015, the world’s governments signed on to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a commitment to bring the global economy back into balance with the living world. Now, five years later, as the U.N. General Assembly convenes online to discuss the global ecological crisis, everyone wants to know how countries are performing.

To answer this question, delegates and policymakers have referred to a metric called the SDG Index, which was developed by Jeffrey Sachs “to assess where each country stands with regard to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.” The metric tells a very clear story. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, and Germany—along with most other rich Western nations—rise to the top of the rankings, giving casual observers the impression that these countries are real leaders in achieving sustainable development.

There’s only one problem. Despite its name, the SDG Index has very little to do with sustainable development all. In fact, oddly enough, the countries with the highest scores on this index are some of the most environmentally unsustainable countries in the world.

Take Sweden, for example. Sweden scores an impressive 84.7 on the index, topping the pack. But ecologists have long pointed out that Sweden’s “material footprint”—the quantity of natural resources that the country consumes each year—is one of the biggest in the world, right up there with the United States, at 32 metric tons per person. To put this in perspective, the global average is about 12 tons per person, and the sustainable level is about 7 tons per person. In other words, Sweden is consuming nearly five times over the boundary.

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

What Should We Want to Hold Onto?

September 12, 2021

What Should We Want to Hold Onto?

The ongoing debates in many different groups (and on social media in general) are really beginning to show that some people have a good comprehension and grasp of the predicaments we face. On the other hand, I still see so many folks who want to try to hold onto things which simply cannot continue (with anything positive happening as a result). So many things which are sold as “solutions” don’t take reality into account and those who buy into these ideas are going to find out the hard way what constitutes sustainability and what doesn’t. Sadly, even things which are sustainable today may not be tomorrow. As the ecological systems we depend upon break down, options keep on narrowing.

As I wrote in It’s a Trap, Don’t Do It, focusing so intently on certain goals can sometimes be seen as foolish once one zooms out and looks at the bigger picture. Many of these goals often come as a result of fears, so looking into those fears more deeply should be undertaken BEFORE embarking on these certain goals. A perfect example is demonstrated in this site. This is yet another trap, although it might take one a while to come to this realization. From the owner regarding the water supply for the silo, quote:

“Water is a 2 inch main from the county water system. There isn’t consistent ground water in this area due to bedrock formations and we are high on a hill. This fact also keeps the facility from having a water problem leaking in like most other remaining silos have.“

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

Sustaining the Unsustainable: Why Renewable Energy Companies Are Not Climate Warriors

September 8, 2021

Sustaining the Unsustainable: Why Renewable Energy Companies Are Not Climate Warriors

In the fight to address climate change, renewable energy companies are often assumed to be Jedi Knights. Valiantly struggling to save the planet, wind and solar interests are thought to be locked in mortal combat with large fossil fuel corporations that continue to mine, drill, and blast through the earth’s fragile ecosystems, dragging us all into a grim and sweaty dystopia.

In the United States and elsewhere, solar panels glitter on rooftops and in fields; turbines tower majestically over rural landscapes. The fact that, globally, the renewables sector continues to break records in terms of annual deployment levels is, for many, a source of considerable comfort. Acting like informational Xanax to ease widespread climate anxiety, news headlines reassure us that the costs of wind and solar power continue to fall, and therefore wind and solar is (or soon will be) “competitive” with energy from coal and gas. The transition to clean energy is, therefore, unstoppable.

By Any Means Necessary

Of course, wind and solar companies are not charities. They are, in a phrase, profit driven. They want to attract investment capital; they seek to build market share, and they all want to pay out dividends to shareholders. In this respect, renewable energy (and “clean tech”) companies are not fundamentally different from fossil fuel companies.

. . . [W]ind and solar companies are not charities. . . . In this respect, [they] are not fundamentally different from fossil fuel companies.

But so what? North-based environmental groups frequently point out that we have just a handful of years to start to make major reductions in emissions. Therefore, this is not a time, they insist, to split hairs or to make the perfect the enemy of the good…

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

Grappling with growth

August 18, 2021

Grappling with growth

Synergies and tensions between degrowth and people’s movements

We live in an age of converging crises. Only days ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a damning report on the state of the environmental crisis. At the same time, while a few countries are recuperating from the pandemic, an on-going third wave of Covid wreaks havoc across the Global South. In both crises, the economic imperative overrides other concerns and appears to render necessary changes illusory. Even among staunch proponents of our current economic system, calls for reform grow louder.¹ The health and environmental crises are illustrative of broader tendencies: environmental disasters, rising global inequality, political polarization, a strengthening of right-wing extremism, anti-immigrant policies, and accompanying human misery.

In light of this, movements are mobilizing. Beyond reform, they argue that systemic changes are needed. Their struggles take a holistic view, emphasizing how the individual crises are entangled and driven by underlying structural factors. A question moving increasingly to the center of attention is growth itself as a driver of social inequality and unsustainability. Critics of growth argue that reckoning with environmental devastation and social inequality is directly tied to leaving behind the growth-paradigm. Among the frameworks and movements criticizing growth, degrowth is especially prevalent.

Degrowth argues that environmental sustainability and social justice necessitate transitioning beyond growth-reliance. In order to address social and environmental issues, we have to transition towards societies that are not just smaller in size but also operate according to a different logic – a logic that is not determined by the market sphere.²

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

What is the Root Issue of Our Unsustainability?

August 10, 2021

What is the Root Issue of Our Unsustainability?

Two pictures from Falls Mill, Tennessee, depicting life in the late 1800s. The mill now houses a museum and is open for tours and a bed and breakfast is also on site.

Last week, I updated the files here with over 250 new articles and studies (see this list). There were 59 new entries in the Climate Change and Collapse file alone. So many of these files now contain new studies which are increasingly worrying; some of these new entries are located in the Species and Biodiversity Loss, Extinction, Disease, Pollution Loading, Tree Decline and Deforestation, and Ocean Acidification and Marine Life files. As can be seen in these studies, this is a rapidly developing situation which is now beginning to gather speed and overwhelming existing infrastructure to deal with the ongoing disasters.

There is a new article regarding methane emissions through permafrost thaw which is rather chilling. Another version in the Smithsonian Magazine describes the “methane time bomb” and lists a paper from Andrew Glikson from July of 2018. Over the past several years, there has been a growing debate over just how much of a threat methane emissions pose to the growing climate situation. Methane emissions coming from hydrates (clathrates), permafrost thaw, thermokarst lakes, and even from behind dams in the thousands of reservoirs we have built are growing, and combined with other methane sources, provide about a quarter of effects contributing to climate change. Some scientists have argued that these pose no threat and that “all we have to do is cut emissions” and nature will solve the issue. This is, of course, pure lunacy, and designed to prevent panic…

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

Beyond the Growth Imperative

August 6, 2021

For 30 years, environmental economist Tim Jackson has been at the fore of international debates on sustainability. Over a decade since his hugely influential Prosperity Without Growth, the world is both much changed – reeling from a pandemic and with unprecedented prominence for environmental issues – and maddeningly the same, still locked in a growth-driven destructive spiral. What does Jackson’s latest contribution, Post Growth, have to say about the way out of the dilemma?

Tim Jackson’s new book, Post Growth: Life after Capitalism (Polity Press, 2021), follows his ground-breaking Prosperity without Growth (2009, updated in 2017). Whilst the previous work reflected, partly, the austerity-driven answers to the Great Recession, Post Growth falls into a different world. It is a world where the recognition of climate change as the greatest challenge facing humankind is moving towards consensus. In the United States, even the Republican Party’s younger members are looking for ways out of the corner into which the party has manoeuvred itself. It is also a world where the Covid-19 pandemic has not only taken many lives and destroyed many livelihoods, but – via the need for state intervention – has also dealt a blow to the gung-ho neoliberalism that is one of the main culprits of financial chaos and the looming breakdown of planetary life-support systems.

US President Joe Biden’s rescue plan as well as the EU’s Next Generation pandemic recovery fund are questioning the free-market paradigm that has held sway the since the Reagan-Thatcher area, and that had trickled down into centre-left politics as well. In parallel, from the Paris Agreement to the European Commission’s European Green Deal, environmental concerns that were condescendingly smiled upon until recently have now moved centre stage. The newly discovered role for the state and the emerging environmental consciousness might not be discussed at length in Jackson’s new book, but they are the backdrop against which it is to be read.

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

The Necessary Climate Solution No-one is Talking About

August 1, 2021

The Necessary Climate Solution No-one is Talking About

For all the talk of renewable energy, electric vehicles and plant-based diets, there’s a gaping hole in the way we’re trying to solve accelerating climate change.

We will not stay below 2°C of warming while pursuing economic growth – yet barely anyone talks about it.

Since the end of World War II Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth has been the metric of human prosperity in Western nations – the idea being that if the productivity of the economy increases so will the wellbeing of the people within that economy. And for a while that was the case – but since the 1970’s increases in GDP have, on average, failed to translate into increases in wellbeing and happiness.

It is not surprising. Research has shown that once a certain GDP threshold, or level of wellbeing, has been met people gain little from consuming more ‘stuff’ – a necessary requirement for continuous GDP growth.

Robert F Kennedy eloquently summed up the inadequacy of GDP as a metric of wellbeing at a speech he gave in 1968:

[t]he gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

What’s more, GDP has never been, and can’t be, decoupled from material footprint, including energy[i]. This means we cannot roll out renewable energy fast enough to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement – to keep warming below 2°C – if we continue growing our economy.

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

TSHTF

July 30, 2021

TSHTF

You just know everything’s going pear shaped when the venerable acronym TSHTF, well known in our circles, hits mainstream media….. The below article written by Fiona Blackwood from the Hobart ABC Bureau appeared on the ABC News website and it’s so full of ironies I just had to pull it apart. So please bear with what will turn out to be an editing nightmare on my phone while I am still without a working laptop…

“Tasmania has been listed alongside New Zealand, Iceland, the United Kingdom and Ireland as potential havens of the future.” Right….. So whoever wrote this has no idea about food security, because literally nowhere in the northern hemisphere is safe AFAIC.

“The study, published in the journal Sustainability, found Tasmania could become recognised “as Australia’s ‘local refuge (lifeboat)’ as conditions on the continental mainland may become less amenable to supporting large human populations in the future”.

While many people have already moved to Tasmania to escape the heat in other states, some doomsday preppers are weighing up the island state as a post-apocalyptic option.”

Scottsdale's future is changing — Tasmania is already being chosen by mainlanders for its scenic landscape and relaxed lifestyle. (Supplied: Dorset Council)

“Tasmania scored highly in the report in terms of its climate, electricity supply, agricultural resources and population density.”

Mr Polin's land was put on the market in January 2012. — Mr Polin’s land included a bunker during the cold war in case of a nuclear holocaust.(ABC)

“The study states that rising populations and energy use have led to climate change, increased risk of pandemics and ecological destruction.

As a result, it found that human civilisation is in a “perilous position with regards to its future”.

“Professor of Human Geography and Planning at the University of Tasmania Jason Byrne agreed the state would be a good option to seek refuge “if things went pear-shaped globally”.

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

New Zealand rated best place to survive global societal collapse

July 29, 2021

New Zealand rated best place to survive global societal collapse

Study citing ‘perilous state’ of industrial civilisation ranks temperate islands top for resilience

Bunker repurposed for a US ‘doomsday’ community. A study proposes that countries able to grow food for their populations, protect their borders from unwanted mass migration and maintain an electrical grid, are best placed to withstand severe shocks. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

New Zealand, Iceland, the UK, Tasmania and Ireland are the places best suited to survive a global collapse of society, according to a study.

The researchers said human civilisation was “in a perilous state” due to the highly interconnected and energy-intensive society that had developed and the environmental damage this had caused.

A collapse could arise from shocks, such as a severe financial crisis, the impacts of the climate crisis, destruction of nature, an even worse pandemic than Covid-19 or a combination of these, the scientists said.

To assess which nations would be most resilient to such a collapse, countries were ranked according to their ability to grow food for their population, protect their borders from unwanted mass migration, and maintain an electrical grid and some manufacturing ability. Islands in temperate regions and mostly with low population densities came out on top.

The researchers said their study highlighted the factors that nations must improve to increase resilience. They said that a globalised society that prized economic efficiency damaged resilience, and that spare capacity needed to exist in food and other vital sectors.

Billionaires have been reported to be buying land for bunkers in New Zealand in preparation for an apocalypse. “We weren’t surprised New Zealand was on our list,” said Prof Aled Jones, at the Global Sustainability Institute, at Anglia Ruskin University, in the UK.

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

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