environment Politics: economics inequality sustainability
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Year 3, Month 11, Day 21: A Modest Proposal
The Chicago Tribune, on economics and climate change:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. droughts, floods and heat waves likely fueled by climate change in the last two years hit the people who can afford it the least – the poor and middle class, a report published on Friday said.
In affected areas of U.S. states hit by five or more extreme weather events in the last two years, the median annual household income was a bit over $48,000, or 7 percent below the national median, according to the report by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with close ties to the White House.
Floods hit lower-income households particularly hard. Families in areas hit by the largest floods this year and last, many near the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, earned an average of 14 percent less than the U.S. median, said the report called “Heavy Weather: How Climate Destruction Harms Middle and Lower Income Americans.”
“These findings reflect a cruel phenomenon sometimes called ‘the climate gap’” the concept that climate change has a disproportionate and unequal impact on society’s less fortunate,” said the report, which tapped U.S. data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census and other agencies.
This letter doesn’t satisfy me, but after forty minutes of staring at the screen I just said the hell with it. Sent November 17:
Climate change’s disproportionate impact on the world’s poorest people is one of many ways in which environmental and economic issues are inextricably intertwined. Wealthy nations of course contribute the lion’s share of planetary greenhouse emissions, and wealthy individuals of course have more options and resources available when extreme weather threatens. But these facts are only the tip of the (rapidly melting) iceberg.
Climate change is a direct symptom of the greenhouse effect, but an indirect symptom of something far more pervasive and problematic. Any economic paradigm predicated on the notion of continuous expansion will eventually run out of room and resources. Infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet; it’s as simple as that. While American market capitalism has brought us many benefits, it has encouraged us to ignore the repercussions of our heedless consumption. Now that those consequences include droughts, hurricanes and heat waves, can we change our ways?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: hunting Republican obstructionism sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 29: Squeeeeeeeeze….
The Baltimore Sun notices that hunters are hippies:
Last month, a Republican-aligned polling firm called on hunters and fishermen nationwide to get their views. Some of the results were unsurprising: Outdoorsmen regard themselves as politically conservative and register Republican over Democratic by a more than 2-to-1 ratio.
But here’s one response that may have caught President Barack Obama and his re-election team by surprise, if they noticed it at all: A majority of these sportsmen believe global warming is the cause of this past summer’s high temperatures and want the White House and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.
Watermelons! With guns! Sent October 22:
Unlike the despicable pretenders who inflate their egos by blasting away at tethered game, real sportsmen recognize that their hunting licenses rest on a foundation of genuine respect for the natural world. It’s unsurprising that they are aware of climate change and its impacts on local and regional environments everywhere on Earth. Anyone accustomed to the wild already knows that rising atmospheric temperatures are altering things: animal migration patterns, ranges and habitats; plant flowering schedules and pollination cycles; seasonal freezes and thaws. And scientists tell us that the planetary greenhouse effect will have far more extreme effects in the decades to come.
The readiness of conservative lawmakers and media figures to politicize the question of climate change is profoundly irresponsible. To avert a humanitarian and environmental tragedy, we must work together to forestall the devastating consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect — not play political games while the Earth burns.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists droughts Rex Tillerson scientific consensus sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 25: Also Younger Than The Sun
The Belleville News-Democrat (IL) runs an opinion piece on the need for a transformation in our way of thinking about the environment:
For decades environmentalists have been guided in their work by what became known as the “precautionary principle.” This decision-making guide was first put forward in environmental terms by pioneering naturalist and biologist Aldo Leopold in his landmark 1940s essay “Round River.”
His focus was the complexity of the environment.
“If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering,” Leopold wrote.
This is the major logic behind the Endangered Species Act, the strongest environmental law ever written. For the United States to allow a species to go extinct, it must go through an exhaustive process that is politically perilous.
This imperative has strong support. John Turner, the director of the U.S. Wildlife Service under George H.W. Bush, was a Republican president of the Wyoming Senate and a rancher. He regularly told a story of how his grandfather had kept all of the broken farm equipment he ever owned.
“My granddad and my dad used to say ‘It’s important to save all the parts,’ ” Turner said. “You never know when you’re going to need them.”
Protecting all the parts was a daunting task before. In the face of climate change that could dramatically transform or destroy ecosystems across the globe, it has become impossible.
This is a fairly generic letter; it could go to any source that admits the existence of the problem. Sent October 18:
Earlier this year, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson finally admitted that climate change was both real and caused by human activity. But the oil baron also blithely asserted that humanity would adapt; the problem, he said, was essentially one of “engineering.”
Well, maybe so. Our innovative, forward-looking, technological species will undoubtedly find ways of fixing some of what we’ve broken and restoring some of the things we’ve destroyed. But as environmentalist Bill McKibben asked recently, “What are you going to develop that replaces Iowa?” Global warming is going to drastically reduce agricultural yields, which is hard to reconcile with our expanding global population. Unless we address the causes of the climate crisis, adopting better farming practices essentially amounts to putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
And if climate change can actually be “solved by engineering,” isn’t it time for our fossil-fueled politicians to stop denying the existence of the crisis — and instead aggressively fund the engineers and scientists we’ll be needing more than ever over the coming decades?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists droughts idiots sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 24: Hellzapoppin…
More on the agricultural disaster currently underway: the same article as yesterday, this time reprinted in the Mitchell Daily Republic (KS):
“I don’t have a place to store pinto beans, OK?” said Rowe, who has managed his community’s grain elevator for 25 years. “This is corn and soybean ground. The reason someone else is more diverse is because there’s more money in being diverse. It’s all economics.”
Still, the hotter, dryer weather pattern may change crop rotations even in the heart of the Corn Belt. “Wheat acres will be very high” next year, said Tabitha Craig, who sells crop insurance for Young Enterprises, an agricultural services and input dealer in New Hartford, Mo.
Climate change will probably push corn-growing regions north while making alternatives to the grain more important elsewhere, said John Soper, the vice president of crop genetics research and development for Pioneer, the seed division of DuPont. The company’s researchers anticipate more corn in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, traditional Canadian wheat-growing areas, while sorghum and sunflowers may experience a revival in Kansas as rainfall declines and irrigation becomes less practical, he said.
The company is developing new varieties of corn, both in traditional hybrid and genetically modified seeds, while boosting research in sorghum and other crops that don’t need irrigation in areas where they’re expected to make a comeback, he said.
Still, fighting drought with better seeds and new trade sources only mitigates the effects of climate change, said Roger Beachy, the first head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture and now a plant biology professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Revising yesterday’s letter…very busy today. Sent October 17:
Those parched cornfields are a preview of coming attractions. Scientists predict a 10 percent drop in crop yields for each degree of temperature increase; given that we’re on track for a six-degree rise by the end of the century, we’re looking at agricultural output that could well be cut in half. And that’s not just in America, but everywhere. History and common sense tell us that crop failures trigger food shortages, which can turn whole populations into refugees fleeing a land that can no longer support them.
Unfortunately one of our country’s two major political parties has rejected science, history, and common sense as guidelines for policy, which means that any government attempts to prepare for these environmental, humanitarian, and geopolitical crises will inevitably be hamstrung by irrational posturing and gamesmanship. When the coming century promises to uprooting millions of human lives, such a deny-and-delay strategy is intellectually and morally abhorrent.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialism sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 23: As Dry As An Elephant’s Sigh…
The San Antonio Express-News notes that there is a developing problem out there in flyover country:
WASHINGTON — Joe Waldman is saying goodbye to corn after yet another hot, dry summer convinced him that rainfall won’t be there when he needs it anymore.
“I finally just said uncle,” said Waldman, 52, surveying his stunted crop about 100 miles north of Dodge City, Kansas.
Instead, he will expand sorghum, which requires less rain; let some fields remain fallow; and restrict corn to irrigated fields.
While farmers nationwide planted the most corn this year since 1937, growers in Kansas sowed the fewest acres in three years, instead turning to less-thirsty crops such as wheat, sorghum and even triticale, a wheat-rye mix popular in Poland.
Meanwhile, corn acreage in Manitoba, a Canadian province about 700 miles north of Kansas, has nearly doubled over the past decade because of weather changes and higher prices.
Shifts such as these reflect a view among food producers that this summer’s drought in the United States, the worst in half a century, isn’t a random disaster. It’s a glimpse of a future altered by climate change that will affect worldwide production.
But we don’t need to do anything, because Al Gore is fat. And besides, FREEDOM! Sent October 16:
Scientists have estimated that for each 1 degree Celsius increase in global temperature, we’ll experience a 10 percent drop in agricultural productivity. International climate conferences have produced position papers and draft agreements predicated on a 2-degree rise, but this number is already looking absurdly low; experts warn that we’re on track for triple that by the end of the century.
Aside from drastically boosting the number of storms and extreme weather events, such a temperature increase will cripple agriculture throughout the world. Are we ready for the food shortages and refugee crises that inevitably follow crop failures? When these geopolitical and environmental pressures collide with the American conservative strategy of politicized ignorance and obstruction, horrifying results are guaranteed.
Deny-and-delay ceases to be effective political strategy when millions of human lives hang in the balance. We must address the climate catastrophe before it forces us into what biologists coyly call an “evolutionary bottleneck.”
Warren Senders
atheism environment: antiquity Biblical allusions fossil fuels Old Testament sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 22: We Have Three Days To Learn To Live Under Water
The Jerusalem Post goes Old Testament, in a column titled, “Noah vs. Isaiah: The Torah Of Climate Change.” The final few paragraphs:
THIS BRINGS us to this week’s reading from the Prophets, which provides a strong counter-balance to Noah’s complacency. Isaiah is the prophet par excellence: He admonishes people to change their behavior, speaks truth to power, and lifts the spirit of a nation with visions of redemption and covenants.
Specifically, Isaiah says this week that just as God promised that “the waters of Noah nevermore would flood the earth,” (Isaiah 54:9) so does the Creator promise never to abandon Israel. Isaiah is the leading light of “social justice prophets,” and whose “light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42:6) designation imparts on us, as Elie Wiesel teaches, a special burden: the responsibility and privilege to rebel.
Noah is the luckiest guy on the planet.
Yet not for other reason you might think.
Noah had a non-burning source of light.
“Tzohar ta’ase lateyva” (Gen 6:16), which some of the commentators say was a precious jewel that glowed and provided light in the ark.
The future of life on the planet is wrapped up in the number 350. To prevent the “end of the world” by adding more than 350 parts per million carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, there needs to be non-fossil-fueled “rays of light.”
We have today all the renewable technologies necessary to power and light the world, yet missing is Isaiah’s fiery spirit. Noah’s spirit of acquiesce dominates; therefore, the waters are rising.
So let’s rise to the challenge. Are there any prophets or rabbis – indeed, any Jews – out there willing to decree solar power a mitzvah and burning the fossil fuel remnants of lost and drowned worlds an abomination? Or perhaps, within five years, a crime against humanity?
Only my father’s side of my family was Jewish, but I’d like to think of myself as having an Apikoros quality. Sent October 15:
Leave aside the terrifying mathematics of atmospheric CO2 for a moment, and contemplate the extraordinary miracle embodied in the fossil fuels that we burn every day. Each unit of fossil energy is the long-preserved sunlight of a time innumerable eons before humanity emerged on Earth. 450 million years ago, during the Carboniferous era, giant trees stretched their branches and leaves to the sun, turning solar energy into living matter before dying and joining a slow accumulation of matter on the forest floor, there to concentrate into pools of oil or deposits of coal.
Human beings, no matter what their origins or beliefs, universally regard the very old as worthy of respect. Whether it’s an ancient document, a building hallowed by millennia of use, or a story passed on through countless generations, we venerate these reminders of our species’ long and magnificent history. How, then, can we in good conscience continue to irresponsibly burn the sunlight of Earth’s early life?
The casual consumption of fossil fuels is an environmental tragedy, a moral predicament, and a profound insult to the antiquity of our planet.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists economics extreme weather insurance sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 18: No Joke
More on the Munich Re report, this time from USA Today:
5:07PM EST October 10. 2012 – The number of natural disasters per year has been rising dramatically on all continents since 1980, but the trend is steepest for North America where countries have been battered by hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, searing heat and drought, a new report says.
The study being released today by Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance firm, sees climate change driving the increase and predicts those influences will continue in years ahead, though a number of experts question that conclusion.
Whatever the causes, the report shows that if you thought the weather has been getting worse, you’re right.
The report finds that weather disasters in North America are among the worst and most volatile in the world: “North America is the continent with the largest increases in disasters,” says Munich Re’s Peter Hoppe.
This letter seemed to fall into two parts. I don’t know if it’s effective, but I write the letters I write, not the letters I wish I’d write. Sent October 11:
The Munich Re report linking climate change with three decades of steadily increasing natural disasters everywhere on Earth provides yet more support for those who maintain that the rapidly metastasizing greenhouse effect is a clear and present danger to our civilization. Despite the absurd mischaracterizations of conservative opinionators, this group (aka the “reality-based community”) isn’t just comprised of liberal environmentalists, climatologists, and hippies, but also includes the American armed forces, the intelligence community, and the insurance industry.
While it’d be nice to discover that the free market system is the most effective way to deal with the consequences of a century of fossil-fuel consumption, the evidence so far suggests otherwise. Today’s loudest advocates of deregulation and laissez-faire economics are also the ones most conspicuously ignoring or denying scientific reality. The accelerating climate crisis demands action on a scale that the private sector cannot possibly encompass — a planetary Manhattan project.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture farming sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 5: The Reaper Will Reap
The Fresno Bee (CA) notes the likely impact of a transformed climate on regional agriculture:
New science and research has San Joaquin Valley farmers taking a harder look at the effect that climate change may have on their industry.
If researcher’s predictions hold true, the Valley’s multi-billion dollar agriculture industry will be hit with longer stretches of hot temperatures, fewer colder days and shrinking water supplies.
What that means for agriculture is potentially lower yields, a loss of revenue and fewer acres being farmed.
Farmers and industry leaders say that while there is still skepticism among their ranks, they are doing what they can to stay ahead of the issue, including educating themselves, testing new fruit varieties or investing in water-saving technologies.
“You know, this is sort of like Y2K,” said Joel Nelsen, president of the Exeter-based California Citrus Mutual, a citrus trade group. “You better figure out if it is going to affect you or not and what are the possible scenarios.”
One of those scenarios is not good news for farmers. Researchers predict that rising temperatures over the next several decades could pinch the yields of some Valley crops, including an 18% drop in citrus, 6% in grapes and 9% among cherries and other orchard crops.
Nelsen said he was one of the early naysayers. The early debates about climate change were often mired in politics, or seen by farmers as an agenda pushed by the environmental community. But more credible research has caused many to take the issue more seriously.
“I am not completely buying into it,” Nelsen said. “But as an industry, it behooves us to be out in front of an issue that could affect the production of citrus in the state.”
Nelsen wants to know how hotter temperatures will affect the flavor of citrus fruit and how oranges will develop their vibrant color with fewer colder days.
One of these days the “if it had an Arabic name the Republicans would be lining up to denounce it” idea will see print. Sent September 27:
If a terrorist group threatened our farmlands, Congress would react. If a terrorist group threatened our water supply, Congress would react. If a terrorist group threatened our infrastructure, our power grid, or our communications systems, you can bet your bottom dollar you’d see our legislators sounding the alarm. Why, then, have they been so reluctant to acknowledge the threat of global climate change, which endangers all aspects of our society from top to bottom?
It’s too bad that the greenhouse effect doesn’t come with a scary Arabic-sounding name; that might persuade the Islamophobic Republican Party to pay attention to something that puts more Americans at risk than any jihadist nightmare scenario. Seriously, when we contemplate the effect of climate change on agriculture, it’s absolutely clear that we’re facing a world of hurt, with spiking food prices and diminished production heralding a future in which hunger affects more of our nation’s population than at any time in the past century.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists responsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 4: Zing! Went The Strings Of My Heart!
I really like it when very old people start speaking out. Read the entire article by 88 year-old Tom Bell, in the High Country News (CO):
When World War II was thrust on us, we turned our economic system into a war machine as every American agreed to sacrifice in order to defeat Nazi Germany and its allies. That is the model for what it will take to overcome what now threatens our planet.
Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini, however, were human beings with faces, while carbon dioxide is invisible and yet a part of our everyday environment. How can you overcome something you can’t see?
ABC journalist Bill Blakemore thinks one of the reasons Americans don’t — or can’t — accept the threat of climate change is because of the “unprecedented scale and complexity of the crisis of manmade global warming.” And he adds, “It’s new, and therefore unknown, at first. And we’re naturally frightened of the unknown.”
Yet Rob Watson, an environmentalist, likes to say: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is. You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. … Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is just what we are doing.”
You only need a lick of sense to see that something is terribly wrong. Devastating events, attributable to climate change, are destroying people’s livelihoods and taking lives all around the world. Climate scientists tell us it is only going to get worse unless and until we do something about carbon.
To do something about carbon means reducing our dependence on coal and oil, and here in Wyoming, even talking about it is heresy. But we must begin to talk about it before it is too late, and then we must act.
What can we do? Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy-Progress Energy, the largest electric utility in the United States, said this September: “I believe eventually there will be regulation of carbon in this country.” James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, agrees. In fact, everyone concerned about climate change believes a carbon tax has advantages over every other approach. Still, every single carbon-tax bill introduced in Congress has failed.
I believe it is past time for all of us — and especially those of us who live in Wyoming, where so much carbon is produced — to face the hard truth. We don’t have a choice: We have to face this crisis as if we were at war, because, unfortunately, that is the bitter truth. We are in a fight for our very survival – and for the survival of the whole planet.
I salute you, Mr. Bell. Sent September 28:
When we think about our children, and their children in turn, it’s natural to foresee them living in a world just like our own — growing up amidst the beauty, and the bounty, of nature. And why not? For thousands of years the essential benevolence of Earth’s environment has nurtured our fathers and their fathers before them, helping the growth of our rich and complex civilization. It’s impossible to imagine the future otherwise.
But global warming is transforming this equation. To those who understand its implications, the research of climatologists indicates that our descendants will no longer be able to take the future for granted. Droughts, extreme weather, radically altered growing seasons, decimated biodiversity and ravaged agriculture are some of the things our generation will bequeath to posterity.
Politicians like to invoke future generations in their stump speeches. But unless our leaders address climate change responsibly, we ensure that our children, and their children in turn, will lead lives of struggle, privation and devastation. There can be no excuse for inaction, complacency, or denial.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: oceanic acidification oceans sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 2: Release The Kraken!
USA Today notes a report from NOAA on the transformations currently under way in the Pacific:
Sharks, blue whales and loggerhead turtles look like losers due to climate change coming to the Pacific Ocean in this century, scientists report.
Sea birds, tuna and leatherback turtles, on the other hand, look more likely to prosper as global warming shifts sea temperatures and habitats, finds the report in the journal Nature Climate Change.
“There will be winners and losers,” says National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries scientist Elliott Hazen, who led the study.The report looked at changing temperatures and habitat areas in the Pacific by 2100, under a “business as usual” scenario of increasing greenhouse gas emissions tied to fossil fuel use continuing to heat the atmosphere.
Seabirds, such as the sooty shearwater, which would see their habitat expand more than 20%, appear likely to increase in numbers, suggests the analysis. Blue whales and mako sharks see their habitat decrease due to warming ocean water and less prey, raising issues for these threatened species, Hazen says. The study suggests effects would be noticeable by 2040.
Hope our kids like eating jellyfish. Sent September 25:
When it comes to climate change and its effects on our oceans, the long lag between stimulus and response makes meaningful action politically problematic. While our lawmakers routinely invoke future generations of Americans, the plain truth is that they’re programmed to think, not in decades or centuries, but in the two-, four-, and six-year spans of electoral politics. Since climatic transformations happen over decades and centuries, it will always be easier for our politicians to ignore the crisis.
Our oceans are now showing the effect of the past century’s fossil-fuel consumption, and the picture is profoundly disturbing, with the potential for mass extinctions up and down the food chain, from oxygen-supplying plankton to blue whales. With billions around the planet who depend on the seas for their sustenance, NOAA’s forecast of increasing oceanic acidification and ecosystem disruption isn’t just about whales and turtles, but a wake-up call for our species.
Warren Senders