environment Politics: analogies Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 12: There Is No God But Albedo
The Christian Science Monitor speculates about what a climate change strategy would look like, but makes a bad analogy:
For a man with his hands tied, President Obama is offering a decent enough plan to fight climate change. In a speech today, he’s expected to announce federal regulation of greenhouse gases at existing coal-fired power plants, increased energy standards for buildings and appliances, and greater development of renewable energy on federal lands. These are moves that he can try without approval from Congress. And while they are halfway measures, they are better than no measures.
But imagine if his hands were not tied. Imagine if they were joined with lawmakers willing to tackle this issue with the urgency and breadth that the government devotes to fighting terrorism.
Americans don’t think about the threat of climate change in the same way as terrorism, but perhaps they should. Climate change has killed individuals through vicious storms, if not by bombs and planes, and the financial damage is just as real.
Sigh. If the war on climate works as well as the war on terror, we’re completely fucked. June 25:
As an abstract noun, “climate change” is amorphous, too large to grasp either intellectually or emotionally (unless you’re a climate scientist, of course). But up close and personal, the accelerating greenhouse effect can drown your city, reduce your house to kindling, dry up your wheatfields, introduce non-native pest species into regional ecosystems, trigger toxic algae blooms, set the stage for gigantic wildfires, and make our lives more miserable and fearful in countless separate but complementary ways.
Which is, of course, what terrorism does. Our national response to terrorism is anything but serious; rather than reducing the root causes of violent extremism, our “war on terror” has enriched corporations and increased secrecy, while treating protesters and whistleblowers like criminals, and making us more fearful, not less. We need a climate change policy that reduces corporate power, increases openness, treats environmentalists as responsible citizens, and offers us reasons for optimism, not despair.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists farming sustainability
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 11: Roya Garden Blues
More on coffee, from the Burlington Free Press:
The president of Apecafe in El Salvador, a cooperative formed in 1997 to represent more than 400 coffee farmers, Puente has had a front-row seat to “la roya,” the fungus that is devastating coffee plantations across Central America.
“We think outbreaks of violence and famine can occur in some cooperatives as a result of this situation,” Puente said in a recent interview from San Salvador, where Apecafe is headquartered. “The other issue is migration. People are going to want to move to the United States and other countries where they can find food. We place a great deal of importance on treating roya to end all the negative effects of the disease. They are catastrophic. People suffer a great deal.”
Puente says la roya, also known as coffee rust, has affected more than 74 percent of the coffee plantations in El Salvador. He says the country will lose 1 million of the 1.7 million quintals of coffee beans it normally produces. One quintal is equal to about 100 pounds.
“The reality is we have been hit by something very powerful,” Puente said.
The price of coffee has yet to go up in the United States, but Lindsey Bolger, senior director of coffee for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in Waterbury, said that could change next year.
This is just the beginning. June 24:
Like a lot of Americans, I’ve always thought of coffee as a staple food. And like a lot of Americans, I’m dreading a future where it’s turned into a costly luxury. Coffee rust is just one of a host of complex consequences of the intensifying greenhouse effect that are going to make all our mornings that much harder.
In coming years, we won’t be drinking the best-tasting coffee, but that which is most resistant to extreme weather, unpredictable rains, droughts, devastated biodiversity, and fungal pests like La Roya. And it won’t just be coffee, but virtually everything else we put on the table.
How much more news of this sort can we absorb before our politicians stop being terrified of offending their corporate paymasters and start taking immediate steps to protect the world’s agriculture from the consequences of climate change? Each passing day makes action less effective and more expensive.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility Keystone XL Tar Sands timescales
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 10: I Heard It Through The Pipeline
Another day, another ruptured pipeline. Fort McMurry Today (Canada) reports:
Officials have confirmed that hundreds of barrels of crude oil have leaked from a ruptured Enbridge pipeline south of Fort McMurray, contaminating a nearby stream.
According to company spokesperson Glen Whelan, a leak was detected at approximately 5:20 a.m. on Line 37, a pipeline located 70 kilometres southeast of Fort McMurray between Anzac and Janvier.
Emergency crews found that approximately 750 barrels of light synthetic crude oil had ruptured from the pipeline. The crude slid down an embankment, contaminating an unnamed stream. Whelan says Enbridge shut the pipeline down “within minutes of the alarm warning.”
As of Saturday night, Whelan did not know how long it took emergency crews to respond to the scene, or how long the pipeline had been leaking.
The company is still investigating the cause behind the leak. However, investigators believe heavy rainfall in northern Alberta may have loosened the soil surrounding the pipeline, creating ground movement on the right-of-way that may have impacted the pipeline.
Clean up crews have installed booms in the area, preventing the crude oil from spreading to other areas and waterways.
Innumeracy is a useful element in the corporate game plan. June 23:
Good news! Enbridge managed to shut down their pipeline after a mere 750 barrels of toxic crude oil leaked into a nearby stream. That doesn’t sound like that much, does it? Let’s do the math and find out. A barrel turns out to hold just under 159 liters, so 750 times 159…hmmm, carry the four…. Well, that’s not so terribly reassuring. 120,000 liters is actually quite a lot of oil, especially when it gets spilled in a vulnerable ecosystem.
And here is the central problem with trusting the fossil fuel industry to act in the best interests of our society. Their business model depends on our society’s continued consumption of a substance which is highly poisonous across all scales of time, from the short term (contaminated water supplies, devastated ecosystems) to the long term (CO2 buildup in the atmosphere). In Enbridge’s corporate mission statement, responsible environmental stewardship can never be more than a footnote.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility kindness refugees rising seas sustainability
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 9: Homeward Bound
Brian Schatz is a good guy. US News & World Report:
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, introduced an amendment Wednesday to the pending immigration bill that aims to allow Pacific islanders and others affected by climate change to reside legally in the United States.
“It simply recognizes that climate change, like war, is one of the most significant contributors to homelessness in the world,” Schatz said, according to Think Progress.
If enacted as law, the amendment would allow non-U.S. citizens to seek recognition as “stateless persons,” allowing them possible legal residency in the U.S.
“This amendment to the immigration bill gives the Secretary of Homeland Security the discretion, but not an obligation, to take into account situations in which a person cannot return to their country because it’s uninhabitable due to climate change,” a Schatz spokesperson told U.S. News in an email.
“This is not an abstract issue. Hawai’i has had a long, close and enduring relationship with its island neighbors in the Pacific for which climate change is an imminent threat. For Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, the Cook Islands and others, rising seas threaten the very existence of these countries,” said the spokesperson. The amendment’s language does not specify these nationalities.
I ain’t got no home in this world anymore. June 22:
It’s universally human to think of our closest associations before those more distant in time or space. First ourselves, then our families, then our neighbors, then our countrypeople. And for the entire span of human history this has been a sane and logical response to disasters, regardless of their causes.
But we have to to re-imagine these ancient instincts. This makes for heightened understanding between peoples and nations, and widens our network of obligation and reciprocity. The millions of stateless people created by the burgeoning catastrophe of planetary climate change cannot be excluded from our communities; it is the CO2 emissions of the industrialized nations that has triggered their plight in the first place. In these first years of the twenty-first century, we are coming face to face with an irreducible truth: on an Earth made smaller by efficient transportation and instant communication, we are all neighbors; we’re all family.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes carbon tax denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 8: Unfixable
They’re so cute when they dream. The San Jose Mercury-News features Bob Inglis and Eli Lehrer:
If conservatives don’t begin to engage on the important issue of climate change, we’ll cede the debate. The result will be a larger, more intrusive government that hurts business and job creation.
President Obama is readying a major push of administrative action on climate change. There will be new regulations on power plants, new subsidies for clean energy and a number of other big government programs in the name of solving climate change.
To conservatives like us, complicated new regulation is our worst nightmare. There is a conservative approach to dealing with climate change — one that can actually achieve conservative goals: the government-shrinking carbon tax.
Currently, United States tax law embodies everything that’s wrong with the federal government. It’s too big (about 17,000 pages), too burdensome (Americans spend nearly $50 billion a year complying with it), and too prone to manipulation. Working toward a simpler, fairer system with lower overall rates has long been a worthy conservative goal that deserves continued support from all liberty-loving Americans.
But amidst all the talk among conservatives about tax rates and tax compliance costs, activists should focus on what may be the most important flaw in the current system: it taxes the wrong things.
If conservatives want to inject new ideas into the political debate and win elections, they should look at what the government taxes as well as how the taxes get collected.
Over 90 percent of federal revenue comes from charges imposed on income, labor (payroll tax) and investments (capital gains tax). These taxes punish socially beneficial behavior; everyone agrees that society should have more income, jobs and investment. If there is any hope of moving the budget towards balance while cutting existing taxes, political leaders will have to find a better way to generate revenue.
Taxing the things we want less of and eliminating taxes on things we want more of is a common-sense solution. It’s hardly a new idea. The American founders funded the early federal government with sin taxes and a few import duties.
Dream on, suckers. June 21:
Taxing greenhouse emissions is an eminently sensible idea that would help America address the climate crisis responsibly — but the idea that conservatives would accept such a policy is predicated on the essentially preposterous notions that these lawmakers can be influenced by facts and are motivated by sincere desires to help their constituents, their nation, and their species.
Even before the McCarthy-era purges of China experts from the State Department, the Republican Party has been chary of experts, perhaps because people who know a great deal about their subject are less likely to accept ideologically-driven revisionism. But the GOP’s anti-intellectual faux populism has never been as extreme as it is today. When the House of Representatives features sideshow acts like Paul “cosmology and evolution are lies from the pit of hell” Broun and Michael “masturbating fetuses” Burgess, it’s hard to imagine Lehrer and Inglis’ science-based arguments making any headway.
Warren Senders
environment: biodiversity corporate irresponsibility mass extinctions species loss
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 7: Looking Pale And Interesting
Well, that certainly sucks. WaPo:
At the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge, the tiny bodies of Arctic tern chicks have piled up. Over the past few years, biologists have counted thousands that starved to death because the herring their parents feed them have vanished.
Puffins are also having trouble feeding their chicks, which weigh less than previous broods. When the parents leave the chicks to fend for themselves, the young birds are failing to find food, and hundreds are washing up dead on the Atlantic coast.
Biologists worry that birds such as Arctic terns are starving, as climate change is leading to food shortages.
What’s happening to migratory seabirds? Biologists are worried about a twofold problem: Commercial fishing is reducing their food source, and climate change is causing fish to seek colder waters, according to a bulletin released Tuesday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“We’ve seen a 40 percent decline of Arctic terns in the last 10 years,” said Linda Welch, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist at the refuge. Arctic tern pairs in Maine have fallen from 4,224 pairs in 2008 to 2,467 pairs last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service said.
Biologists at the Maine refuge are not sure whether herring sought colder waters elsewhere or went deeper, but they are no longer on the surface, from which Arctic terns pluck them. While other birds can dive deep for food, Arctic terns cannot.
Fuck it. I’m going out to weed the garden. June 20:
As the Anthropocene Epoch lurches into full view, we humans won’t be able to avert our eyes from the consequences of our actions. While it’s hardly intuitive that industrial CO2 emissions may be at the head of a causal sequence resulting in the deaths of countless thousands of migratory birds, it’s no less improbable than the notion that we power our cars, heat our houses, and propel our civilization with the liquid fossilized remains of dinosaurs and prehistoric plant life.
The grim fact is that our consumerist culture is working exactly as advertised: we modern humans devour everything, heedless of the consequences. Ultimately, there is one true economy — the natural resources upon which all Earthly life depends — and we’re overdrawing our environmental bank account several times over. Through no fault of their own, those Arctic Terns are paying a hard price for our profligacy. Will we follow them?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture sustainability timescale
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 6: Well, You Needn’t
The Times-Colonist (B.C., Canada) talks about “adaptation”:
Lemons are growing in North Saanich, and they are just a taste of some of the new crops that are popping up in B.C. as the temperature gets warmer. As average temperatures go up, farmers and gardeners are trying species that are usually found in subtropical or Mediterranean countries.
At Fruit Trees and More Nursery in North Saanich, Bob Duncan gets hundreds of lemons from his tree. Over on the Lower Mainland, Art Knapp nurseries have seen a 20 per cent increase in sales of species like olives and figs.
Global warming is often debated in the big picture, but the details of gradual changes around us bring the debate down to earth. The devastating march of the pine beetle is one effect of warmer temperatures that is clearly visible across vast areas of B.C.’s forests. New crops close to home are another sign of the change.
The Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium expects that by the 2020s, the mean temperature in the capital region will rise by .9 degrees Celsius. That will increase the median number of frost-free days by eight. More than a week of extra frost-free days is a big difference.
Across the province, the mean temperature is predicted to rise by a full degree and frost-free days to rise by 10.
Over the longer term, by the 2080s, temperatures in the capital region are predicted to rise by 2.5 degrees and frost-free days by 20.
A climate like that opens new possibilities for crops that were once inconceivable here.
Pollyannas. June 20:
“Adaptation” to climate change sounds pretty inviting. After all, who wouldn’t like a longer gardening season? But from a larger perspective, the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect are hardly benign. Countless species are finding their habitats changing far faster than evolutionary processes — which almost invariably means extinction. And when one life-form vanishes, the others which depend on it will find their survival compromised as well.
Our current economic system is predicated on the commodification of every available resource: fuel, food, water, and even air (the wealthy breathe freely, while the poor live downwind of coal plants, refineries, and factories). While this allows us to enjoy strawberries in midwinter, it hides the crucial fact that any tear in the intricately woven fabric of earthly life ultimately affects the fate of us all. “Adaptation” all too often is a euphemism for something far simpler, quicker, and more final: dying.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility media irresponsibility sociopaths
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 5: Mi-O-My-O
The Financial Times, on Louisiana’s travails:
But even here, on the front lines of climate change, the people who are witnessing the changes are not convinced that they are the result of global warming. Instead, they say it is the result of the levees and the canals that the oil industry dug in the area in the 1950s.
“I’m not sold on the whole global warming thing, but I know every storm is a problem,” says Mr Weber, 41, recalling how when he was a child they used to have “hurricane parties” in their back yards. Now, evacuations are frequent.
Despite the rapid changes to the bayous, there is little discussion of climate change in Louisiana. Mary Landrieu, the Democratic senator, and David Vitter, the Republican, avoid making reference to climate change, apparently for fear of antagonising the oil companies that are big donors to both.
“Climate change doesn’t play at all here,” says Pearson Cross, head of the political science department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “People in Louisiana are so wedded to the petroleum industry and to the money and jobs and prosperity that oil and gas has brought.”
Good job! June 19:
That fishermen in the Louisiana bayou are “not sold” on climate change is a tribute to the remarkable success story of an under-appreciated force in American media. Armed with nothing more than billions of dollars and an energy economy almost completely dependent on their products, the fossil fuel industries have single-handedly deflected the irrefutable and steadily accumulating scientific evidence for human-caused global heating into a contentious, veriphobic circus of accusations, counter-accusations, false equivalencies, strawmen, and denial.
Of course, the laws of physics and chemistry are not affected by the posturings of media figureheads and their collaborators in politics and industry. Those laws, interpreted by people who are able to leave electoral exigencies out of the equation, suggest that what’s happening in Louisiana today is going to get worse, not better — and will no longer be restricted to one state, one coastline, one industry.
Alas, that story’s harder to sell.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility facing the apocalypse media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 4: Find The Cost Of Freedom…
The Washington Post channels its inner tree-hugger:
THE INTERNATIONAL Energy Agency (IEA) last week warned that global carbon dioxide emissions in 2012 were the highest ever. Yet international climate negotiations have floundered. Many Americans and their representatives in Congress still doubt climate change is a problem worth addressing. And as the developing world advances, its peoples are polluting more to obtain higher standards of living.
Forget for a moment the ideal or rational response; what’s the bare minimum global leaders could do? The IEA had some useful, if modest, suggestions.
An energy-gobbling world emitted 31.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide in 2012, the result of extracting and burning vast amounts of coal, oil and natural gas. Last month, the world reached another milestone that scientists and policymakers said they wanted to avoid — CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere that exceeded 400 parts per million. Scientists reckon that the last time concentrations were that high, the Earth was far warmer. Though the planet’s sensitivity to carbon emissions is still a matter of intense study, the IEA figures that, under policies in place now, the planet could warm between 3.6 and 5.3 degrees Celsius, mostly over the next hundred years. By contrast, world leaders have committed to limiting warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, the point past which the consequences could be very negative.
Very negative. Indeed. June 18:
Any appropriately robust response to global warming must take place on multiple levels of scale. Regional projects like infrastructural reinforcement need to be supported by local-level changes in roadway use, power consumption, and waste processing, such as New York City’s plans for comprehensive composting. Ultimately, however, all strategies will succeed or fail based on two factors.
Without comprehensive reform of our energy economy and a global move away from the destructive fossil fuels that caused the problem in the first place, all other initiatives are doomed to failure. And without a reformed and responsible news media that recognizes the severity of the situation and the crucial importance of accurate reporting on climate change, there will be no widespread societal support for any actions could possibly impact the problem. When it comes to the civilizational threat posed by the climate crisis, ignorance has profound moral implications — and delay is suicidal.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: cities community media irresponsibility rising sea levels sustainability urban development
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 3: My City By The Bay
The Arizona Daily Star continues on the what-cities-are-doing-to-prepare-for-when-the-shit-hits-the-fan angle:
BONN, Germany – From Bangkok to Miami, cities and coastal areas across the globe are already building or planning defenses to protect millions of people and key infrastructure from more powerful storm surges and other effects of global warming.
Some are planning cities that will simply adapt to more water.
But climate-proofing a city or coastline is expensive, as shown by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s $20 billion plan to build flood walls, levees and other defenses against rising seas.
People think we’re going to technologize our way out of this. Nope. June 17:
When it comes to planning ahead for a climate-changed future, the world’s cities are definitely ahead of the curve. Reinforced infrastructure is critical for a world in which extreme weather events are routine occurrences, and coastal areas which fail to anticipate rising sea levels may well face guaranteed submersion— which means millions, perhaps billions, of disrupted lives.
But physical infrastructure can only be part of a comprehensive strategy for coping with the consequences of an accelerating greenhouse effect. Two other elements must be integrated into the equation. Without a resilient social network — a culture which fosters cooperation, sharing, and mutual assistance in times of stress — all the physical and technical infrastructure in the world won’t make a difference. And without mass media that is morally and ethically committed to telling the truth about the climate crisis, societal support for these measures will always be hamstrung by ignorance and denial.
Warren Senders