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

In a moving and important article at Grist, Adam Sacks argues that climate activists have made a disastrous mistake in framing climate change as an emissions problem. The root cause of climate change is our culture – our worship of technology and growth.

Greenhouse gases are not the cause of global warming. They are but a symptom of:

300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations. . . [T]he seductive promise of endless growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat, led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on Earth.

Global warming isn’t the only symptom:

[I]f planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water, air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans; nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry—to name just a few.

Sacks says the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions is absolutely over, and we have lost – and that we need to find the courage to tell this hard truth.

Because of the vast inertial mass of the oceans, which absorb temperature and carbon dioxide, there’s a lag of several decades between greenhouse-gas emissions and their effects. The starting changes we are already seeing today are thus the result of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide of well under 340 parts per million (ppm). Today, atmospheric CO2 is 387.81ppm and increasing at almost 2 ppm per year.

Then there are positive feedback loops, which we don’t understand and which haven’t been included in our climate change models.

And then there are “tipping points,” points at which change becomes non-linear. We don’t know where these tipping points may be, where Earth’s climate may suddenly shift into a different state as it has many times before in Earth’s history.

As Sacks says, these bitter climate truths are fundamentally bitter cultural truths.

Endless growth is an impossibility in the physical world, always—but always—ending in overshot and collapse.  Collapse: with a bang or a whimper, most likely both.  We are already witnessing it, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable.  We simply cannot go on living this way. Our version of life on earth has come to an end.

I think the course of action urged by Sacks is the only sane and honorable one:

The sooner we embrace the truth, the sooner we can begin the real work.

A new study from Greenpeace using data from the World Resources Institute finds that the U.S. has contributed far more to global warming than any other country. The U.S is responsible for 29% of total cumulative CO2 emissions over the last 150 years.

You might expect those most responsible for creating a mess should be the ones to take the lead in cleaning it up. So much for American exceptionalism. Some example for the rest of the world.

Wendell Berry writes at OrganicToBe.org (also at The Energy Bulletin) that small farms and other locally-run enterprises are failing because the pattern they belong to is failing. The principal reason for this failure the universal adoption of industrial values which see things and places as assets, all relations as mechanical, and competitiveness as the prime human motivator.

Berry lists the values associated with the family farm: conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community – values suited to a world lived in by human beings, not to a world exploited by managers, stockholders, and experts.

I think Berry is more right than he knows. We must transform our economy and rebuild it based on the human-scale values he treasures.

“The economy” is no more than an abstraction, a description of how we extract our living from and survive in this world. Valuing it more than the global ecosystem on which it depends is blindness and folly. As we see the world economy collapse around us, the evidence is compelling that industrial values – which place “the economy” above all else – are ultimately destructive of life itself.

Conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community: as Berry says, these are the values that offer us survival, not just as farmers, but as human beings. And Berry is right that the transformation that is required cannot be left to others:

“It] cannot be accomplished by the governments, the corporations, or the universities; if it is to be done, the farmers themselves, their families, and their neighbors will have to do it.”

James Hansen warned the leaders meeting at the G8 summit that past approaches to climate change have proved a failure, and that continuing down that path “would doom our children and grandchildren to an increasingly impoverished life on a more desolate planet.” Hansen said if we are to avoid “tipping points” that would lead to catastrophic climate change – in geological terms, the end of the Holocene epoch within which human civilization developed and thrived – we must reduce atmospheric CO2 to no more than350 ppm.

So what was the G8′s bold response? To “move towards a low-carbon society” by endorsing the idea of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050 while failing to set a short-term goal for actually getting their. And by the way, the 50% cut is from current levels, not from the 1990 levels that served as the baseline in Kyoto.

In other words, they set a target that guarantees catastrophic climate change and then failed to adopt any steps to actually achieve that grossly inadequate goal.

The G8 statement says: “Achieving this objective will only be possible through common determination of all major economies[.]” What ever happened to countries, to peoples, to polities? “Economies” don’t make decisions.

Hansen’s letter points out that responsibility for global warming is a physical fact, not an ethical statement; and is proportional to cumulative CO2 emissions, not to current emission rates. This is a result of the long lifetime of atmospheric CO2.  Responsibility of the United States is more than three times larger than that of any other nation. The United States, Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia are responsible for most of the fossil fuel CO2 in the air today. Looking at per capita emission, the United States and Canada are the largest emitters, while per capita emissions of Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom are about half that large.

The main concerns of the G-8, as laid out in the group’s joint statement, are to avoid the most severe consequences of global warming by cutting emissions, but only by guaranteeing “sustainable economic development” and “energy security.” Again paraphrasing, we’re willing to tackle global warming, but only if we don’t have to give up on our belief in unlimited growth.

Wendell Berry has a great article in Harpers exploring the Faustian bargain we have made. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves. Our problem is more than prodigal extravagance – it’s also an assumed limitlessness, a trait reserved for the gods. Yet we have founded our present society upon delusional assumptions of limitlessness.

As the ancient Greeks knew, the inevitable consequence of transgressing limits is tragedy. In Greek tragedy, an important function of the chorus was to ensure that the audience does not forget things, to put the actions of the actors in context. Let’s hope that the audience is paying attention, that the end has not already been written, and that the only thing left for the chorus to do is lament.

This excerpt from an article by David Korten in Yes! Magazine (reprinted at Alternet) sums it up pretty well. We in the U.S. have accumulated a lot of bad karma.

“Cheap oil provided an energy subsidy that defined the wars, economies, settlements, values, and lifestyles of the 20th century. The result was a century of wasteful extravagance and inefficiency that encouraged us to squander virtually all Earth’s resources — including water, land, forests, fisheries, soils, minerals, and natural waste recycling capacity. We are now waking up to the morning-after consequences of a brief but raucous party. These include depleted natural systems, unsustainable economies, an obsolete physical infrastructure, and a six-fold increase in the human population dependent on the diminished resources of a finite planet.”

David Kortenin in a presentation in April at the Seattle Green Festival turned to Star Trek in laying out the task for our time:

“Remember those scenes in Star Trek. Scotty to Captain Kirk. Life support is failing. Kirk to Scotty. Shut down all nonessential systems and direct all available resources to life support. There it is — the order for our time. No resources for war or extravagance. Focus all attention on the health of the crew and the life support system.

“No more throwaway stuff. No more economic growth for the rich. Our priority must be to grow our well-being rather than our consumption. Invest in peace, education, and health care rather than war. Invest in compact communities rather than suburban sprawl. Invest in local economies and environmental rejuvenation rather than in shipping toys around the world and speculating in the global financial casino. Invest in sidewalks, bicycles, bicycle paths, and public transportation rather than cars and highways. Invest in education for living rather than advertising to get us to consume more.

“Here is the kicker. We must eliminate exactly those forms of non-essential production and consumption that our economic and political systems are designed to promote.

We need to redesign the way we live – but we can’t because our world, even our own nation, is not governed by democratically elected governments but rather by global financial institutions.

“We need to grow strong caring communities in which we get more of our human satisfaction from caring relationships and less from material goods. We will need to end war as a means of settling international disputes and dismantle our military establishment. We need to reclaim the American ideal of being a democratic middle class nation without extremes of wealth and poverty. And we need to encourage and support the rest of the world in doing the same. To do all this we will need to create democratically accountable governing institutions devoted to the well-being of people and nature.”

Our biggest problem is neither bad people nor bad institutions, but a bad story that keeps running on an endless loop in our heads – that competition rather than cooperation and compassion ultimately works to the benefit of everyone.

It is time to start filling our heads instead with the story that it is our nature to be caring and giving and that this is all for the good, and therefore we properly set our sights on perfecting our capacity for love and caring and create the world of our dreams. It isn’t a particularly new story. It’s the story of all the world’s great religions.

“if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

This stark warning is from the abstract of a recent report by James Hansen’s team of scientists.

Things aren’t looking good. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising faster than ever – and methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, is soaring as well as the frozen north begins to thaw. If the Arctic ice disappears as feared, the white reflector that sent 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space will have turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun’s heat. We’re already seeing feedbacks taking over. What humans have started, Earth may finish.

If we do everything right, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out, we could be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of irreversible tipping points.

Bill McKibben has an op-ed at the LA Times containing a great summary of what “doing everything right” means:

“[It] means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they’re supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way U.S. automakers made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

“It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.”

As McKibben says, this the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.

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.”

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.

Thomas Prugh writes at WorldWatch Institute the fundamental ideas of mainstream economics – including reliance on GDP as the key index of general well-being – have outlived their time and usefulness. But these ideas still dominate assumptions and thinking about economic matters in academia, the media, governments, businesses, and popular consciousness.

In recent decades, economic thinkers have suggested ways to make economics truer, greener, and more sustainable. A “green” economics would consider:

• Scale. How big is the global economy relative to the global ecosystem? This is crucial, because the economy resides totally inside the global ecosystem. Economic activity is basically converting bits and pieces of the ecosystem to human uses: trees and forests into lumber and houses, grasslands and other habitats into farms to feed the billions of humans, and so on. Our focus on economic growth has resulted in exceeding ecosystem limits. Symptoms include climate change, species extinctions, dwindling rainforests, water shortages, etc.
• Stress development over growth – that is, make the economy better at satisfying human needs, not simply bigger. The global economy simply cannot keep growing forever. And, beyond a certain and fairly modest point, there’s no correlation between material wealth and happiness. There is a correlation between happiness and things like social relationships, family life, and a sense of community.
• Make prices tell the ecological truth. The reform would be actually applying this rule to the ecosystem through measures such as carbon taxes. Other ecosystem services we’re not accounting or paying for include such things as the pollination performed by honeybees, air and water purification, soil generation, pest control, seed dispersal, and nutrient recycling. Not properly accounting for these services results in destruction of ecosystems and the undermining of these services.
• The precautionary principle. This is just the age-old wisdom of “first, do no harm” and “look before you leap.” It’s just good risk management.
• Commons management. People generally believe that there are only two workable regimes for managing resources: private property or government control. But commons management regimes are a third way, one that taps the strong human impulse toward cooperation and the common good. Commons management has proven itself over centuries of experience.
• Value women. All over the world, women earn less than men for equivalent work, they lack access to land and credit, and they do more than their share of child- and elder care, volunteer work, and other unpaid labor. This gender bias actually suppresses economic activity.

Over the last few days I’ve listened to an impassioned discussion about reaching out to or engaging in a dialogue with “faux environmentalists” or those who engage in “greenwashing.” I share dismay at measures to “mitigate” the damage from environmentally destructive projects. I share disdain for programs such as carbon credits and cap-and-trade schemes, which have proved nothing more than means to postpone or avoid effective action, than ways to continue business as usual while feeling or appearing to be virtuous. I share wholehearted contempt for international agreements such as Kyoto or Bali that are known to be inadequate even if they were to be taken seriously by all of the world’s governments and were to be successfully implemented.

Yet, on the other hand, I fear we’re much harder on those with whom we share at least some common ground than we are on our avowed opponents.

I think we need to step back and take a broad look at the situation that confronts us. It’s no longer good enough to work to save an endangered species, a stand of old-growth forest, a breeding ground for fish. The entirety of Earth’s ecosystem is now at risk. Uncounted myriads of species are threatened with destruction, including humans and human civilization as we know it.

Averting catastrophic climate change will require massive, rapid, and global action. Is the required response even conceivable?

James Hansen has said that it’s too late – we’ve already gone too far:

“The evidence indicates we’ve aimed too high – that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 ppm.”

The reticence of scientists and of the IPCC itself has become part of the problem, as today’s widely advocated 2ºC warming cap is demonstrably too high and would be a death sentence for billions of people and millions of species as positive feedbacks work through the climate system.

The report Climate Code Red finds that hitting a target of 350 ppm wouldn’t be nearly enough climate catastrophe. The report argues that a crash program to implement policies needed decarbonize our economy and achieve the necessary reductions in atmospheric CO2 levels, over a time period of a few years, is not a choice but a necessity for life.

Yet carbon emissions were greater last year than ever. World population was greater than ever. Consumption was greater than ever. There has been no reversal, not even a significant downtrend, in fossil fuel consumption.

What would it take, now and everywhere, to reduce atmospheric CO2 to safe levels? As Sally Erickson says at Speaking Truth to Power, it would take closing the highways, now and everywhere. It would take ending industrial agriculture, now and everywhere. It would mean shutting off everyone’s natural gas and oil fueled furnaces, now and everywhere. It would mean stopping about 90% of everything because everything we have and do has fossil fuel energy embedded in it. Forget about building nuclear power plants since they have fossil fuels embedded in their construction, large amounts of it. Forget massive production of solar photovoltaics: the mining of silica has huge amounts of fossil fuels embedded in the process. Forget hybrid cars – they take more energy to produce and dispose of than they save. The couch I’m sitting on, this computer, the computer you are staring at. Everything most of us take for granted as part of our daily lives is currently dependent on fossil fuels.

When Bill McKibben says “now and everywhere” he’s talking about the shutdown of industrial civilization. Who really thinks that’s going to happen, voluntarily or involuntarily, by political compulsion?

The stark reality is we are going to continue on this way until we can’t anymore. It is too late.

We’re not going to save the world, so we need to stop trying to fix a dying system. We should rather focus on new growth, on healing.

We won’t get anywhere or achieve anything by accusing those who don’t yet share our vision of lack of integrity. People have the capacity for a good heart, even if we may see them as ignorant or even corrupt. As Gandhi said, if we are to change the world we first need to purify our own thoughts, to aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. And as Buddha said, kindness is key. When words are both true and kind can they change our world.

It’s time to move beyond the traditional rivalries which are based on our attachment to the world as it was. We need to open our hearts to compassion, as it is only through compassion that a new community can emerge from the wreckage of the old.

An article in The Washington Post recites a litany of environmental traumas we’ve experienced lately – unseasonal storms, floods, fires, drought, melting ice caps and glaciers, lost species, rising sea levels,  deadly air pollution – and asks:

“What’s going on? Are we experiencing one of those major shocks to life on Earth that rocked the planet in the past?”

And the answer?

“More than a decade ago, many scientists claimed that humans were demonstrating a capacity to force a major global catastrophe that would lead to a traumatic shift in climate, an intolerable level of destruction of natural habitats, and an extinction event that could eliminate 30 to 50 percent of all living species by the middle of the 21st century. Now those predictions are coming true. The evidence shows that species loss today is accelerating. We find ourselves uncomfortably privileged to be witnessing a mass extinction event as it’s taking place, in real time.”

All of Earth’s species live together in tightly networked ecosystems responsible for providing the habitats in which even we humans thrive. The double whammy of climate change combined with fragmented, degraded natural habitats is the real threat to many populations, species and ecosystems, including human populations marginalized and displaced by those combined forces.

And it’s the poor countries of the world who will suffer first and most.

A new analysis concludes that the environmental damage caused to developing nations by the world’s richest countries amounts to more than the entire third world debt of $1.8 trillion. The world’s rich countries – including especially the U.S. – owe the world’s poor countries a huge environmental debt.

LandWatch Lane County president and Goal One Coalition board member Bob Emmons has an opinion piece in this week’s Eugene Weekly recapping the sorry history of land use in Oregon.

The planning program as a realization of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic never made it out of the legislature. Senate Bills 100 & 101 as they emerged from the sausage-making machine 1973 had already been captured by the development interests. And it’s been downhill ever since. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the planning program has been chipped away, until now nothing’s left. With the promotion and passage of Measure 49, progressive forces are now complicit in its demise.

Emmons calls for a new paradigm based on Thoreau’s counsel that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” With the catastrophic consequences of the faith in unlimited growth becoming ever more evident, it’s obvious that the imperative to live in a respectful relationship with the rest of creation can be ignored only at our own peril.

“Since its inception 35 years ago, Oregon’s land-use program has been under attack from the same forces that brought us Measure 37. Little by little, lot by lot, timber and real estate interests, developers and their enablers in legislatures, commissions, councils and land management divisions have been busy night and day eviscerating the system.

“In 2004, taking advantage of a pro-growth governor, an ignorant, inattentive and greedy public and anemic opposition, self-serving, anti-government opportunists transformed Oregon from a positive to a negative model of land use protection. Ironically, the passage of Measure 37 helped defeat similar measures in other states.

“To ‘fix’ M37, Measure 49 supporters delivered to posterity one of the most extreme property rights laws in the country. They undermined the foundation of Oregon’s land use program by reaffirming the premise of Oregonians in Action and (other) Republicans that government takes away people’s rights rather than creates and protects them, that people must be paid for following the law or the law must be eliminated. Read the rest of this entry »

Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, argues in an op-ed piece in the L.A. Times that rising population alone isn’t the main challenge facing humanity. People are a problem only insofar as they consume and produce.

What really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate. The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1.

Cornucopians promise that developing countries could achieve a first-world lifestyle if they only would install honest governments and adopt free-market economies. But this is impossible, a cruel hoax. We are having ever-increasing difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people, and at the cost of threatening  climate and ecosystem stability.

Americans would object mightily to sacrificing our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.

But living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts.

Diamond concludes:

“Just as it is certain that within most of our lifetimes we’ll be consuming less than we do now, it is also certain that per capita consumption rates in many developing countries will one day be more nearly equal to ours. These are desirable trends, not horrible prospects. In fact, we already know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been political will.”

Hans Noeldner at The Oil Drum:  Local writes that our plutocratic caste is particularly fond of the fiscally-based resource entitlements program.  It is deemed essential that we “remember” the distribution of natural resources is not – and cannot be – a moral issue. Rather, the solution is to “internalize” those costs somehow. Of course, this means that when gas prices or other prices go up, other people will conserve.

The combination of our economic paradigm with our willful ignorance of finite realities is a curse upon future generations. Treacherous slopes lie beyond the extraction peaks for all of our major energy resources, but we-the-people have not begun to assemble the ropes and belays we will need to descend them securely rather than tumbling into catastrophe. And so long as we remain silent and allow money to do the talking, we never will.

A fitting topic for a Sunday: Charles Sullivan writes that our relationship to the land is a sacred one, a matter of morality and ethics.

It is impossible to commodify the sacred bonds that exist between the human animal, and the non-human animal—a bond that extents into the landscape that spawned them. To claim ownership of another living being, whether wild forest, or domesticated canine, is to break the sacred bonds and reduce them into commodities—mere objects for use. It is to make them our property and force them into slavery; objects for economic exploitation.

So it is with the land itself.

Earth’s ecological systems have evolved over billions of years, with humans emerging only recently. The idea that humans are apart from and superior to nature, that humans have dominion over the land and the earth, is a dangerous and foolish notion that requires unfathomable hubris and stupidity. With global warming, we are now beginning to see just how dangerous and foolish. We’ll soon see if humans can summon the humility and the wisdom to step back from the brink of catastrophe.