ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

A 13,700-year-old peat bog in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska shows evidence of the drastic changes afoot due to the Earth’s warming climate: the ground is drying out, and the peat bog is turning into forest. In 50 years, the bog could be covered by black spruce trees. 

Alaska has already experienced the largest regional warming of any U.S. state – an average 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) since the 1960s and about 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.5 degrees Celsius) in the interior of the state during winter months. Climate change will lead to droughts, forest fires, and infestations of tree-killing insects like spruce beetles and spruce budworm moths.

So even as forests spread to areas where trees couldn’t grow before, our changing climate threatens existing forests with destruction. And new research shows that temperate forests play a much more important role in carbon sequestration than we thought. An article in New Scientist reports:

Pristine temperate forest stores three times more carbon than currently estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and 60% more than plantation forests, according to research in Australia.

The effects of climate change are being felt around the world. Researchers in France have found that the delicate balance of wildlife in different ecosystems is changing up to eight times more quickly than previously suspected, with potentially severe consequences for some species.

One problem is desynchronization. If birds and the insects upon which they depend do not react to climate change in the same way, there’s an upheaval in the interaction between species.

The study showed that the geographic range of 105 birds species in France – accounting for 99.5 percent of the country’s wild avian population – moved north, on average, 91 kilometers (56.5 miles) from 1989 through 2006. Average temperatures, however, shifted northward 273 kilometers (170 miles) over the same period, nearly three times farther. While birds are responding to climate change, the gap with rising temperatures is big and getting bigger.

A study released today by marine biologists Robert Diaz and Rutger Rosenberg finds that ocean “dead zones” are increasing exponentially:

“Dead zones in the coastal oceans have spread exponentially since the 1960s and have serious consequences for ecosystem functioning. The formation of dead zones has been exacerbated by the increase in primary production and consequent worldwide coastal eutrophication fueled by riverine runoff of fertilizers and the burning of fossil fuels. Enhanced primary production results in an accumulation of particulate organic matter, which encourages microbial activity and the consumption of dissolved oxygen in bottom waters. Dead zones have now been reported from more than 400 systems, affecting a total area of more than 245,000 square kilometers, and are probably a key stressor on marine ecosystems.”

The study was published online by the journal Science (subs. recq’d.).

Kevin Drum has posted this graph at The Washington Monthly:

click to view graph

An article about the study in the Washington Post quotes Douglas N. Rader, chief ocean scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund:

“The next big challenge, after global warming, is going to be addressing the massive upset of the world’s nitrogen cycle.”

The chaos in the planet’s nitrogen cycle is not only creating dead zones but also inciting the spread of toxic algae, such as the pfiesteria that has appeared in recent years in the Chesapeake.

Albert Bartlett points out that the recommendations for solving the problems caused by population growth – including peak oil and global warming – almost never include the recommendation that we advocate stopping population growth. Political correctness dictates that we never mention overpopulation in the U.S. and the world.

“We can demonstrate that the Earth is overpopulated by noting the following:

“A SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH: If any fraction of the observed global warming can be attributed to the actions of humans, then this, by itself, constitutes clear and compelling evidence that the human population, living as we do, has exceeded the Carrying Capacity of the Earth, a situation that is clearly not sustainable.

“As a consequence it is AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH that all proposals or efforts at the local, national or global levels to solve the problems of global warming are serious intellectual frauds if they fail to advocate that we address the fundamental cause of global warming namely overpopulation.”

One reason this is so stems from the liberal faith in equality and progress. Those who advocate for limiting population are usually rich and white, while those to be limited are poor and dark-skinned. And aren’t the poor and dark-skinned entitled to live as well as the rich and light-skinned?

Rowan Williams observes that the liberal and progressive movements arose in reaction to conservatives, who recognized the reality of limits. Liberals objected to the political reality that limits applied only to the poor and powerless, not the rich and powerful.

Read the rest of this entry »

The bulk of tropical forest loss is occurring in a small number of countries.

Research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that Brazil accounts for nearly half of global deforestation, nearly four times that of the next highest country, Indonesia, which makes up about an eighth of worldwide forest clearing. The new analysis is based on satellite imagery rather than self-reporting by governments.

Mongabay reported on the research and published this graph.

 click to enlarge graph

The geographic concentration of deforestation, coupled with the shift from subsistence-driven to enterprise-deforestation forest clearing, may hold an unexpected benefit: it may make it easier to stop deforestation by targeting major forest-destroying corporations and industries.

There’s an interview with Michael Pollen at E360 in which he calls for the environmental movement to move from “wilderness” to “sustainability.” This perspective fits with what we’ve argued before (for example, here, here, and here) – that the environmental movement made terrible scientific and strategic mistakes in focusing on saving isolated bits and pieces of environment rather than on overall ecosystem preservation and health.

I’m going to pull out the relevant bits, but be sure to read the whole interview.

“We’ve had in this country what I call a wilderness ethic that’s been very good at telling us what to preserve. . . Essentially the tendency of the wilderness ethic is to write that all off. Land is either virgin or raped. It’s an all or nothing ethic. It’s either in the realm of pristine, preserved wilderness, or it’s development — parking lot, lawn. . .

“I think most environmentalists have in their minds a belief, and it’s vindicated by a lot of what we’ve seen, that the human relationship with nature is zero-sum — for us to get what we want from the natural world, the natural world must be diminished. But go to a really well run pastured animal farm where they’re rotating crops, rotating species, and you will find a place where a lot of food comes off the land, and the land is improved as a result. That completely flies in the face of our tragic understanding of nature. I think it’s one of the great sources of hope. It suggests that there might be ways that we can figure out how to get what we need and not diminish nature.

“So I think we’re undergoing a sea change. I think that environmentalists are recognizing that as important as wilderness is as a standard, as a baseline, sustainability is a very different baseline. I think our focus is moving from wilderness to sustainability. That’s not to say we have to destroy the wilderness to have sustainability. It’s just that, okay, we did that. That was the project that engaged us for 150 years. The project now is very much more the gardener’s project, or the farmer’s project, which is how to use nature without ruining it.”

The new atlas Africa: Atlas of Our Changing Environment shows, in nearly 400 pages of dramatic pictures, the devastation that is overtaking Africa: disappearing forests, shrinking lakes, vanishing glaciers, and degraded landscapes.

The atlas was compiled by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Satellite photos spanning a 35-year period show striking environmental transformation in every country.

click on image to enlarge

Michael McCarthy in an article in The Independent/UK offers a summary:

“The “before and after” shots show vividly just how vast the changes have been, not only since the first Landsat satellite in 1972, but on much shorter timescales. Deforestation is shown not only as mass forest disappearance in countries such as Rwanda, but also as the insidious spread of logging roads through once entirely untouched rainforests in countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the replacement of natural forest by bright green rubber and palm plantations in Cameroon.

“Urban spread is illustrated not only by the dramatic expansion of the Senegalese capital Dakar over the past half century, from a small urban centre at the tip of the Cape Verde peninsula, to a metropolitan area with 2.5 million people spread over the entire peninsula, but by the rapid development of a small town like Bangassou in the Central Africa republic, now beginning to affect the nearby forest.

“Shrinkage of mountain glaciers is shown only in the well-known case of Mount Kilimanjaro, but also in the disappearing glaciers in Uganda’s Rwenzori mountains, which decreased by 50 per cent between 1987 and 2003. And to the well-known cases of the drying up of Lake Chad, and falling water levels in Lake Victoria, the atlas adds new cases of disappearing water bodies like the drying up of Lake Faguibine in Mali, as well as many examples of desertification, unsustainable large-scale irrigation and degraded coastal areas.

“Put it all together and you have a picture that is hard to credit, so enormous is the destruction.”

New satellite photographs show that the destruction of Brazil’s fragile Amazon rainforest has exploded this year.

Click on photo to enlarge

Brazil’s DETER real-time monitoring system found that more than 430 square miles of forest, an area a bit smaller than the city of Los Angeles, vanished in the month of April, while about 2,300 square miles, larger than the state of Delaware, were destroyed between last August and April. That nine-month total surpassed the entire acreage in the Amazon that was destroyed over the previous 12 months. What’s worse, the satellites couldn’t see about half of the forest in April due to cloud cover, suggesting that actual deforestation likely was much greater.

The Amazon’s dry season, when farmers do most of their burning and clearing, starts this month. That means the 12-month total ending in August will surely climb

Illegal logging, soybean farming, and cattle production are responsible for the destruction. Brazil is the world’s fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, largely because of deforestation.

The Brazilian government’s efforts to stop deforestation are proving fruitless.

Gar Lipow at Gristmill does a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation and concludes that solar uses far less land than coal.

“Nevada Solar One takes up about 400 acres, mostly for mirrors and heat engines. You would have to mine about 5,300 acres to feed a coal-fired powered plant producing the same amount of electricity.”

His calculations are based on a 20-year period. But the need to mine coal goes on forever, whereas a solar facility can occupy the same footprint forever. And then you have to also consider the environmental impacts.

Legendary environmentalist Gus Speth, in an interview at E&ETV, reflects on the failures of environmentalism and calls for a new direction: taking on the ideology of growth.

Speth laments that all of the environmental gains that we’ve made have been overrun by “the expansion of economic activity” – in one word, growth. Environmentalists made a fatal error in their “pathetic capitulation to consumerism.” Every environmental proposal has to be trimmed down and trimmed down and cut down and compromised to the point that it’s often – as Speth understates, “quite weak” – in order to not have any adverse effects on the economy.

And what has our worship of growth got us?

“[I]t’s all illusory because in terms of real human happiness and real well being, because all the studies say that what we really get fulfillment from and a sense of satisfaction from, are relationships with other people. And buying more and more stuff doesn’t work.”

Speth re-emphasizes the basic point: materialism is toxic to happiness.

He points out what should by now be obvious to any sentient being: business as usual simply isn’t an option.

“[T]he really radical proposition is that we can make it just continuing to do what we do today. That’s a really radical proposition, that business as usual will suffice, because if we just keep doing what we’re doing today, releasing the same amounts of greenhouse gases, the same impoverishment of ecosystems, the same toxification, you know, well in the latter part of this century the planet won’t be fit to live on. So, we have to – the pragmatic necessity is deep change.

Gus Speth is dean of the Yale School on environment and forestry, a former chair of the Council on Environmental Quality and founder of both the NRDC and the World Resources Institute, and author of the new book The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability.”

A new study titled “Turning Up the Heat” (pdf) warns continued logging of Canada’s boreal forests could trigger a massive release of greenhouse gases.

The Greenpeace report says cutting down trees in the boreal forest is exacerbating climate change by releasing stores of greenhouse gases trapped in soil and vegetation. It also finds that logging makes the forest more susceptible to global warming impacts like wildfires and insect outbreaks, which in turn release more greenhouse gases.

The Executive Summary says:

“Canada’s Boreal Forest is dense with life. Richly populated with plants, birds, animals, and trees; home to hundreds of communities; and a wellspring of fresh water and oxygen, the Boreal has long been recognized as a critically important ecosystem. But as rising temperatures threaten to destabilize the planet, the potential of the Boreal’s carbon-rich expanses to mitigate global warming continues to be underestimated. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a consequence of energy uncertainty that you probably haven’t thought about. When power is shut off, sewage treatment plants shut down.

The result? Raw sewage pouring into streams and rivers, making a stinking mess and sickening people and livestock. Needless to say, people affected aren’t happy.

An article by Andy Revkin in Sunday’s New York Times notes that recent data show “an unexpected rise in global emissions and a decline in energy efficiency.” Revkin adds that “a growing chorus of economists, scientists and students of energy policy are saying that whatever benefits the cap approach yields, it will be too little and come too late.”

He quotes economist Jeffrey Sachs:

“Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.”

In sum, cap-and trade hasn’t worked, as we pointed out in this blog posting. But god forbid we should question our addiction to “growth.” In fact growth is our god, and economists the priesthood.

So what is Revkin – or as he carefully puts it in his article, what do “others” – suggest? A Manhatten Project-like commitment to and investment in “new technologies.”

Joseph Romm says that we don’t have time to wait for some unknown techno-fix and disagrees that we can’t stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at acceptable levels (below 450 ppm) using existing technologies.

Existing technologies – including, for example, solar thermal can provide sufficient energy to support people around the globe at decent and equitable levels of existence. We know from long historical practice – before the auto age – how to construct aesthetically pleasing and equitable communities that don’t rely on ravaging the Earth and poisoning the atmosphere. And we can probably avert catastrophic climate change if we just stop burning coal.

Global warming is a symptom of a too-large ecological footprint.  But it’s not the only symptom. Peak oil, to be followed by peak natural gas and peak coal, are other symptoms. Other resources – soil, water, rare earth metals, forests, fisheries – are reeling from the relentless assault of “growth” as well.

Global warming and other consequences of stress on Earth’s sources and sinks require much more than a technological fix.  They require that we topple the false idol of growth, along with its priesthood.

The solution to global warming isn’t technical – it’s spiritual.

The Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council has published a new report titled Hotter and Drier: The West’s Changed Climate.

Impacts are most profound here in the West – and, as this map shows, we’re already feeling them:

click to enlarge

The consequences? Snowpacks are melting earlier in spring, leaving less water for summer irrigation and heating up streams. Glaciers, which provide consistent stream flows during summer, are melting. Forests are succumbing to disease, insect infestation, and drought, leaving them more susceptible to catastrophic wildfires. Reservoirs are drying up – Powell and Mead on the Colorado are half-empty.
Over the past five years, average annual temperatures in the Colorado River basin have risen by 2.2 degrees, about twice as fast as the global rate.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has ordered the city to stop buying bottled water. No more bottled water at city facilities and events. The reason? Says Nickels:

“When you add up the tremendous environmental costs of disposable plastic bottles clogging our landfills, the better choice is crystal clear.”

Measures to reduce bottled water use are proliferating. The City and County of San Francisco banned bottled water in 2007. The UK government has banned its use. Santa Barbara has stopped buying bottled water. The mayors of Los Angeles and Salt Lake City have asked city employees not to use bottled water or have banned city spending on it. Ann Arbor urges residents to bring refillable bottles to city council meetings and has stopped buying bottled water for city functions. A proposal being considered in New York would ban individual bottles of water in state facilities.

Chicago imposes a 10 cent per bottle tax on bottled water – but calls it a tax on plastic, not water. Minneapolis also taxes bottled water, at sales tax rates.

Ecologist Tom DeLuca says there’s no way to avoid climate change. But our forests and wildlands have evolved under changing climates, and have some resilience.

To effectively allow for natural adaptation to climate change, size matters.  A substantial core habitat must be present for the migration of species across landscapes and to buffer zones with human development. But our approach to environmental protection has so far been seriously flawed. In protecting wilderness and other resources, we’ve created “islands.” That makes wilderness areas and other protected resources and habitats susceptible to climate change.

DeLuca argues that large-scale land conservation is required, and efforts must extend beyond traditional government management to involve society as a whole. We need a restoration of the land ethic.

But we’ve got far to go. As DeLuca puts it:

  “The efforts being conducted by our government are laughable.”

A couple of articles point out how humans are profoundly altering both terrestrial and marine ecosystems around the globe.

An increasing percentage of greenhouse gas emissions is a result of deforestation and forest degradation. The current split of greenhouse gas contribution is 80/20, between energy sources and deforestation. However, that percentage may alter if we don’t stop chopping down trees.

Deforestation means the complete demolition of forests. Forest degradation means that the larger trees are chopped for timber, leaving the forest with only lesser trees. The three countries producing the most emissions through deforestation and forest degradation are Indonesia with 35% of such emissions, Brazil with 19%, and Malaysia with 10%.

Population growth and development are driving deforestation. Population growth brings demands for more housing and commodities such as timber, paper and agricultural goods. So forests are flattened for residential space or farm plantations and  the wood is harvested for timber or wood by-products. Oil palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia are major culprits. Both countries earn much of their GDP from exports of palm oil, which is used in food, biofuels and cosmetic products. 70% of Indonesia’s oil palm plantations were originally forests.

Carbon emissions – whether from the burning of fossil fuels or land use changes -  are in turn changing seawater chemistry, causing ocean acidification. Currently, the upper layer of seawater averages 8.10 on the pH scale, which goes from 14 to 0 and describes the increasing concentration of hydrogen ions. The pH scale works logarithmically, so 7 means 10 times more ions than 8. Plain water, defined as neutral, is 7, and lower numbers indicate increasingly strong acids and larger numbers of hydrogen ions. Since the beginning of the industrial age, the seawater pH has slipped about 0.11 of a pH unit. By the end of this century, the upper 100 meters or so of ocean water will be more acidic than at any time during the past 20 million years. Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Heinberg makes the case that there is an overwhelming need for non-technological responses to our global environmental crisis.

Heinberg calls the view that climate change is caused by technology and therefore must have a technical solution “blindingly superficial.” It’s not just climate change that threatens us, but depletion of resources including oil, natural gas, coal, fresh water, fish, topsoil, and minerals (ranging from antimony to zinc, and including, significantly, uranium); as well as destruction of habitat and accelerating biodiversity loss – which is exacerbated by climate change, but is also happening for other anthropogenic reasons.

He sums up the problem thusly:

“In essence, there are just too many of us using too much too fast.”

I think his expansion of this theme is worth quoting at length:

“Thus the problem is not merely technological; it is cultural in the deepest sense. Starting a couple of centuries ago, our species embarked on a path of unprecedented growth, founded on a temporary subsidy of cheap hydrocarbon energy. Climate change is a side effect of fossil fuel consumption, and has emerged as the most critical symptom of our growth binge. But unless we address the core of the problem, other symptoms will soon overwhelm us even if we manage technically to resolve the dilemma of carbon emissions.

“Addressing the core of the problem means letting go of growth; in fact, it means engaging in a period of controlled societal contraction characterized by a stable or declining population consuming at a per-capita level far lower than is currently taken for granted in the industrialized world.

“For anyone who understands the basics of ecology—having to do with relationships between population, resources, and carrying capacity—nothing could be clearer. But for those who insist on seeing only technical problems with technical solutions, the forest remains lost from sight behind a single tree. . .

“Once one accepts this larger framing of the problem and its solutions, a whole world of possibilities opens up—a world I intend to explore in future columns. Far from being a world of utter hopelessness, it is one that engages human responsibility, creativity, and community. It is one characterized by cultural maturity, rather than the advertising-fueled teenage—even infantile—attitude that assumes that the world exists only to supply an ever-expanding list of human wants. It is the world of post-carbon living toward which tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of citizens worldwide are beginning deliberately to transition.”

Kurt Cobb at Resource Insights reminds us that human history

“is chock full of wars, the rise and fall of empires and of whole civilizations, ravaging plagues, breathtaking discoveries, vast migrations, world-changing inventions and cultural evolution. So, it is a puzzle why so much emphasis is now put on the supposed inevitable continuity of modern industrial life.”

Humans have squandered opportunities, let their ambition lead them to destruction, run out of natural resources, and despoiled the landscape beyond repair again and again. We’re now witnessing the collapse of the world’s fisheries, the loss of billions of tons of topsoil to erosion each year, the over-exploitation of water supples, the destruction of vast tracts of forests in the tropics and temperate zones alike. Yet we call it “progress.”

Cobb calls this unquestioned belief in progress a “cult of continuity”:

“The word “cult” in its simplest sense means a system of religious worship. In many cults nothing is more important than the acceptance of certain beliefs without the requirement of evidence. And, because cult members require no evidence (in the scientific meaning of the word) to confirm their beliefs, these members are remarkably immune to evidence that might also challenge their beliefs.”

This blind faith is dangerous because it relieves us of the responsibility to make wise decisions, decisions which might enable us to avoid disaster and actually achieve a sustainable civilization.

A new article in Science (subs. req.) concludes that humans are responsible for most of the drying out of the West over the last 50 years – and warns that things are going to get worse.

Here’s the abstract:

“Observations have shown that the hydrological cycle of the western United States changed significantly over the last half of the 20th century. We present a regional, multivariable climate change detection and attribution study, using a high-resolution hydrologic model forced by global climate models, focusing on the changes that have already affected this primarily arid region with a large and growing population. The results show that up to 60% of the climate-related trends of river flow, winter air temperature, and snow pack between 1950 and 1999 are human-induced. These results are robust to perturbation of study variates and methods. They portend, in conjunction with previous work, a coming crisis in water supply for the western United States.”

The ethanol boom isn’t helping. A new article in Newsweek warns that overdrawing fossil aquifers to grow corn isn’t sustainable:

“We’re going to make the area a desert. It’s going to be uninhabitable.”

The Canadian green group Environmental Defence has called Canada’s massive oil sands “the most destructive project on Earth.”

Excavation of the oil sands in the western province of Alberta is producing vast amounts of greenhouse gases and poisoning local water supplies.

The process to strip the tar-like bitumen out of the sands and turn it into synthetic crude oil is very energy intensive.The group called on the Conservative government to impose a firm cap on emissions from the oil sands and enforce regulations designed to prevent pollution. Aaron Freeman of Environmental Defence called for the government to “clean it up or shut it down.”