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

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reports that Arctic sea ice extent continues to track way below normal, despite cool temperatures over most of the Arctic Ocean in January.

Reuters quotes NSIDC director Mark Serreze:

It’s not that the ice keeps melting, it’s just not growing very fast.
We’ve grown back ice in the winter, but that ice tends to be thin and that’s the problem. You set yourself up for a world of hurt in summer. The ice that is there is also thinner than it was before and thinner ice simply takes less energy to melt out the next summer.

With thinner, more fragile ice and less cover,

You’ve got a double whammy going on.

If Arctic ice fails to build up sufficiently during the dark, cold winter months, it is likely to melt faster and earlier when spring comes.

A Canadian research project has found that climate change is happening much faster than the most pessimistic models expected.  Models predicted only a few years ago that the Arctic would be ice-free in summer by the year 2100, but the increasing pace of climate change now suggests it could happen between 2013 and 2030. Losing sea ice has impacts on everything else that goes on in the Earth’s systems.

A new study by the Pew Environment Group estimates the financial cost  to the world economy  of a warming and melting Arctic will be at least $2.4 trillion over the next 40 years. The study looks at the “social cost of carbon,” including the cost of climate change on agriculture, energy production, water availability, sea level rise, and flooding.

By the end of January, ice extent had dropped below the extent observed in January 2007. This winter continues the recent trend of slower Arctic ice growth.

The summer Arctic sea ice melt season now lasts nearly a month longer than it did in the 1980s. A later start of freeze-up and an earlier start to the melt season both contribute to the change. A recent paper by Thorsten Markus at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center suggests that the later freeze-up is the dominant factor lengthening the melt season. The analysis shows that, on average, autumn freeze-up starts nearly four days later each decade. Extensive open water at the end of the summer melt season, combined with warmer autumns, delay the autumn freeze-up. The larger expanses of open water absorb more solar energy, and before ice can form again, that heat must be released back to the atmosphere. This trend is most pronounced in the Beaufort, Chukchi and Laptev seas.

Sergio Gabrielli, CEO of Petrobras (a Brazilian multinational energy company headquartered in Rio de Janeiro), says global oil production (including biofuels) will peak in 2010 due to oil capacity additions from new projects being unable to offset world oil decline rates.

Gabrielli points out in his presentation that the world will need to produce oil from new sources equivalent to one Saudi Arabia every two years to offset future world oil decline rates – which he sees at about 5% per year.

Finding and bring to production the needed magnitudes of new oil simply not going to happen. Even managing to maintain historically observes decline rates may prove to be a challenge. Take Nigeria, for example. As the world teeters at the edge of economic and political collapse,  Nigeria seems to be going over the edge. Nigeria, which in 2008 produced over two million barrels of sweet crude a day and today provides 9% of U.S. oil imports, could vanish as an oil exporter, virtually overnight. Despite its enormous reserves, Venezuela is looking none to stable as a producer and exporter, either.

Chris Nelder takes a close look at Mexico, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia and warns the oil export crisis has arrived – we just haven’t felt it yet:

[W]hen oil prices rise again, the pain will be far greater for the U.S. than it is for our top suppliers. Next time, the spear of declining oil exports will puncture a lung.

If the gap between demand and supply shown in the chart above cannot be filled with new supply, the only alternative is for prices to increase to reduce demand to equal supply: “demand destruction.”  That means economic shrinkage rather than growth, and a consequent financial crisis of epic proportions. consequence we are going to find it harder to extract other energy and mineral resources. As George Mobus points out in a post at The Oil Drum, our net energy is already in decline and that is at the root of the global economic problems we are seeing. You cannot have a growing economy when the basis of all economic wealth production is in decline.

The economic tremblings we’ve seen over the last couple of years may prove to be mere foreshocks. No matter how many trillions we throw at the problem, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Rather than try to save the irretrievably lost, we’ll have to accommodate ourselves to the new reality:

We can only start simplifying our societies and giving up the many discretionary expenditures of energy that we currently enjoy without much thought. We can learn to once again live on real-time solar influx via our food raising systems. And even then we are talking about an ability to support only a small fraction of the current population. Ironically the simplification of society involves the increasing complexity of individual lives. What this means in practice is that each individual must start to become more of a generalist in terms of the functions that support life. Everyone will have to become a food grower! Believe it or not that isn’t simple! Knowing how to grow your own nutrients is actually quite complicated and will demand a whole new set of cognitive skills.

For the environment, peak oil and economic collapse offers a glimmer of hope. For example, oil accounts for 43% of our CO2 emissions from energy use. Consequent economic collapse will mean that a lot of coal plants in the works will never get built, and maybe even we’ll see existing plants begin to wither away.

Solastalgia:  the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault; a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home’; symptoms include anxiety, despair, numbness, a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless, grief.

Solastalgia is a neologism coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003. It describes a form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change. Solastalgia is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment

Wikipedia explains:

As opposed to nostalgia – the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home – “solastalgia” is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment. A paper published by Albrecht and collaborators focused on two contexts where collaborative research teams found solastalgia to be evident: the experiences of persistent drought in rural New South Wales (NSW) and the impact of large-scale open-cut coal mining on individuals in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW. In both cases, people exposed to environmental change experienced negative affect that is exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change process.

An article in the New York Times quotes Albrecht:

There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease.’ People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.

Albrecht has found that this “place pathology” isn’t limited to natives or to the displaced. People can be despairing and depressed without being forced from their homeland. The land changing around them can bring about the same sense of mournful disorientation.

The researchers could have found evidence of solastagia by looking at me in Sacramento, California in the ’70s, as the paradise I was born and grew up in was devastated by rampant and uncontrolled “development.”  It got so bad I fled in a desperate attempt to maintain some semblance of sanity. The Seattle area in Washington proved little better. When at last I found a real home again here in Oregon, that traumatic experience provided the impetus to do everything in my power to prevent a repeat of the California and Washington experience.

In California, things have gone from bad to worse; it is now what Sasha Abramsky in an article in The Nation calls the “west coast wasteland.” California’s population has exploded from a little over 10 million in 1950 to about 37 million today. But as many have warned (including Eben Fodor in his landmark 1998 study “The Cost of Growth in Oregon“), growth costs a lot and doesn’t pay for itself. After 60 years of growth, the bills have come due.

As Abramsky observes, what was a gorgeous state with a terrific infrastructure built up over the past century now has no money or political will to keep the place running properly. Paradise is broken and in a perennial state of fiscal crisis as California threatens to become a failed state. And California is not alone.

My heart still aches for what once was and is now irretrievably lost. I still can’t bear to cross the border. Unfortunately, as the symptom of climate change shows, the disease of growth doesn’t respect borders. Growth now threatens to devastate the entirety of the globe.

Earth is the only home we have, there’s nowhere left to flee. As it succumbs to the ravishes of growth, are we not destined to see solastalgia spread and become a global contagion?

Osama bin Laden in a new tape blames the industrialized states and the U.S. in particular for causing climate change:

This is a message to the whole world about those responsible for climate change and its repercussions – whether intentionally or unintentionally - and about the action we must take.  Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury - the phenomenon is an actual fact.

Bin Laden gives European nations a bit of credit for signing the Kyoto Protocol and agreeing “to curb the emission of harmful gases” but puts the finger on Bush and global corporations:

George Bush junior, preceded by [the US] congress, dismissed the agreement to placate giant corporations. And they are themselves standing behind speculation, monopoly and soaring living costs. They are also behind ‘globalisation and its tragic implications’. And whenever the perpetrators are found guilty, the heads of state rush to rescue them using public money.

Bin Laden calls for targeting the U.S. economy in retribution by boycotting American products and ending dollar hegemony:

They are the true terrorists and therefore we should refrain from dealing in the US dollar and should try to get rid of this currency as early as possible. I am certain that such actions will have grave repercussions and huge impact.

It’s hard to argue with the facts. Here’s a chart of cumulative emissions from 1900 through 2002.

The fact that Chinese emissions are growing fast and have now overtaken U.S. emissions on an annual basis doesn’t do much to relieve the U.S. of its overall responsibility.

Chris Martenson used to be a corporate honcho with a big expensive house in the suburbs on the Connecticut coast. Now he’s downsized, is living in a rural community, has traded in his twin-engine fishing boat for a kayak – and travels the country giving lectures on why we’ll never see a “recovery” from our economic throes. What happened, and why?

In a speech before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Martenson lays out the hard facts:

• There are 70 million more people on the surface of the planet this year than last year.
• Each of these new humans consumes some amount of resources such as food, oil, air, soil, water, copper, coal, or timber.
• Someday, perhaps already, maybe a little later, the global flow rate of oil coming out of the ground will peak and then decline inexorably thereafter.
• From 2000 to 2008, eight short years, the total amount of debt in this country doubled while no net jobs were created and median incomes actually went backwards.
• During the industrial revolution, humans have consumed vastly more energy each decade. During the lifetime of a 22-year-old, humans will have burned more than half of all the oil ever consumed throughout history.
• Oceanic fish stocks, ancient aquifers, and topsoil are all being depleted at unsustainable rates.

Martenson goes on to explore the implications of these realities. To summarize:

All these facts share a single common feature: they are tied to exponential growth in some way. There’s nothing inherently wrong with exponential growth, as long as you have unlimited room and unlimited resources. We live on a finite planet. Time runs out in a hurry towards the end of any exponential growth system, forcing hurried decisions and severely limiting options. And there are clear signs that several key resources on our planet are in their final minutes.

Just as higher prices for fish will not cause more cod to come from the depleted fisheries, oil fields will yield their treasures in accordance to geological limits and not because our economics textbooks say they should.

Adapting to a future of less and less oil will take decades of preparation – but we’ve not yet even begun. TIME is a critical factor. SCALE is an issue. And then there’s COST.

COST – now there’s the economic rub. Every dollar in circulation was loaned into existence, with interest. The effect of loaning all of our money into existence, with interest, is this: there is always more debt than money floating around in the system. Always. And the amount of debt will compound over time – that is, it will grow exponentially. To service the debts that are growing exponentially, the economy must also grow exponentially.

See the problem?

An energy crisis rooted in resource limits will quickly translate into an economic crisis unlike any other. Consequently, the era of growth is ending and what Martenson calls “an exciting new chapter” is about to begin.

Why the optimism? Martenson sees our challenge as not to find vast new resources to exploit, but to undertake the far more sophisticated and worthwhile task of using what we’ve got more wisely. A life with less pollution, more free time, meaningful jobs, more happiness, less stress and greater connection to each other as well as to nature are all within the realm of the possible.

As Martenson says, the longer we fiddle around the more our options shrink. Let’s hope it’s not already too late.

New NASA-led research shows that the melt season for Arctic sea ice has lengthened by an average of 20 days over the span of 28 years, or 6.4 days per decade.

The research team discovered that the melt season lengthened the most – more than 10 days per decade – in Hudson Bay, the East Greenland Sea, the Laptev and East Siberian Seas, and the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.

Earlier melt means more heat can be absorbed by the open water, promoting more melting and later freeze-up dates — more than eight days per decade later in some areas.

Thorsten Markus of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. explains how the feedback loop works:

This feedback process has always been present, yet with more extensive open water this feedback becomes even stronger and further boosts ice loss. Melt is starting earlier, but the trend towards a later freeze-up is even stronger because of this feedback effect.

In 2009, cars scrapped in the U.S. exceeded new car sales  for the first time since World War II, shrinking the U.S. vehicle fleet from the all-time high of 250 million to 246 million.

The 14 million cars scrapped exceeded the 10 million new cars sold, shrinking the U.S. fleet by 4 million, or nearly 2% in one year. The U.S. fleet has apparently peaked and started to decline.

Lester Brown at Treehugger identifies “market saturation” as the dominant factor. The United States now has 246 million registered motor vehicles and 209 million licensed drivers – nearly 5 vehicles for every 4 drivers.

Brown points to Japan as an example. In Japan, annual car sales peaked 1990 and have since shrunk by 21%.

Mish Shedlock looks at the data and asks, what about boomer demographics and teenage driving?

The massive wave of boomer retirement is about to hit. Many boomers will go from two cars to one, or from two new cars to one new car and an “emergency” clunker.

As for teens, parents can no longer afford to buy cars for their kids. And with teenage unemployment at the highest rate in history, teens can no longer afford to buy their own cars.

Peak oil, peak autos.  What’s next?

Scientists have upped their estimates of the waves that a “100 year event” might produce along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Their finding heighten concerns for flooding, coastal erosion and structural damage.

Waves crawl up against the lower level of a structure in Neskowin, Oregon, during a storm in January, 2008. (Photo by Armand Thibault, Neskowin)

As recently as 1996, the maximum in ocean wave heights was estimated to be 33 feet. In a study just published online in the journal Coastal Engineering, scientists from Oregon State University and the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries conclude that the highest waves may be as much as 46 feet and the 100-year wave height could actually exceed 55 feet. Impacts of the bigger waves would dwarf impacts expected from sea level rise in coming decades.

Over the last few decades, increasing wave heights have had 2 – 3 times the impact of sea level rise in terms of erosion, flooding and damage. The largest wave height increases have occurred off the Washington and northern Oregon coasts, with less increase in southern Oregon and nothing of significance south of central California.

Possible causes cited are changes in storm tracks, higher winds, more intense winter storms, or other factors probably related to global warming but also possibly related to periodic climate fluctuations such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. What is clear is that waves are getting bigger.

The significant rise in sea level expected over future decades and centuries will only add to the damage already being done by higher waves.

A new NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows the decade January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record.

Temperature changes for the last decade—January 2000 to December 2009—relative to the 1951-1980 mean. Warmer areas are in red, cooler areas in blue. The largest temperature increases occurred in the Arctic and a portion of Antarctica. Credit: NASA

2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a fraction of a degree behind 2005. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year since modern records began in 1880.

Average global temperatures have increased by about 0.8°C (1.4°F) since 1880. Rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are the key factors causing the rise in temperatures since 1880.

Other factors, including changes in the sun’s irradiance, oscillations of sea surface temperature in the tropics, and changes in aerosol levels, can also cause slight increases or decreases in the planet’s temperature. Aerosols produced by burning fossil fuels have probably counteracted about half of the warming produced by man-made greenhouse gases. In 2009, even the deepest solar minimum in the period of satellite data wasn’t enough to offset global warming.

Scientists have found evidence confirming predictions of climate models that higher atmospheric CO2 levels will lead to acidification of Earth’s oceans.

Scientists from the University of South Florida College of Marine Science measured CO2 levels in the northeastern Pacific Ocean. By comparing pH readings from 1991 and from 2006, they found the first direct evidence of acidification across an entire ocean basin, leaving no doubt that growing CO2 levels in the atmosphere are exerting major impacts on the world’s oceans.

If greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, by the end of the century surface water pH would drop approximately 0.4 pH units and the carbonate ion concentration would decrease almost 50%. This surface ocean pH would be lower than it has been for more than 20 million years. Even if substantial reductions in emissions are made, ocean acidification will continue for hundreds of years to come, which means we are already committed to many centuries of ugly consequences.

The study is published in the American Geophysical Union’s journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Architect and urban planner Andres Duany blames peak oil and global warming on the American lifestyle:

Seth Bauer at the Huffington Post quotes Duany:

It’s where we live, the size of our houses, the distances we drive for work, commerce, play–everything.

And goes on to summarize Duany’s rant:

And it’s all a vicious circle. The reason our houses are so big (and inefficient), he says, is because we have eliminated a healthy civic life. We build homes with giant foyers because we have no public squares. We need media rooms because it’s not easy or pleasant to drive to a multiplex theater, cross a parking lot through an ocean of cars, and pay a fortune for popcorn. We build bars in our basements because there are no neighborhood pubs. We have giant refrigerators and ever-growing storage needs because shopping is both far away and unpleasant (hello, Costco). The result? We heat and air-condition unused rooms in oversized unpleasant houses. And because our home bars and foyers are empty and our media experiences private, we’re lonely, to boot.

But the American lifestyle is really just a symptom of a larger disease – if not industrialization itself, certainly the ideology of growth that it has spawned.

Politicians and economists around the globe are focused on one thing: economic growth. When “the economy” falters, all efforts are towards returning the global economy to a path of growth. As Chris Martenson says in a piece titled Copenhagen & Economic Growth – You Can’t Have Both at the Energy Bulletin:

We need more jobs, we are told; we need economic growth, we need more people consuming more things.  Growth is the ever-constant word on politicians’ lips.  Official actions amounting to tens of trillions of dollars speak to the fact that this is, in fact, our number-one global priority.

Martenson is spot on in pointing out that any solution to global warming requires that carbon emissions be reduced by a vast amount over the next few decades. But economic growth and reduced emissions are mutually exclusive.  You can’t have both.

Even if we can’t muster the moral fortitude do do anything to avert catastrophic global warming, we still may fail in our desperate efforts to maintain economic growth. The primary implication of peak oil is that the era of economic growth is over. The current recession is very much energy-related. The whole concept of recession as a temporary period where growth is briefly interrupted within a long-term trend of economic growth is likely to become irrelevant in a world where oil is becoming ever more expensive to extract and oil supplies are decreasing.

We’re seeing a feedback loop develop with oil eerily similar to the feedback loops operating in the global warming context. The global financial crisis has resulted in oil investment shrinking by 20%, which in turn will result in less oil and more expensive oil in the future, causing more financial turmoil in an ever-worsening downward spiral.

We already are seeing the future beginning to emerge. As the election results in Massachusetts show, that future will hold ugly surprises.

Portland General Electric Co. is preparing plans to shut down Boardman – Oregon’s only coal-fired power plant – by 2020 – 20 years earlier than previously planned. The plant burns strip-mined coal shipped in by train from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, and accounts for about 25 percent of the power generation owned by PGE. Boardman is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon.

Jeff Bissonnette at Blue Oregon points out this is a very big deal. Boardman may be the first baseload coal plant in the nation to be shut down.

The Boardman coal plant is located about 150 miles east of Portland and provides a baseload output of more than 500 megawatts. Under the existing plan, huge investments would be required to control pollution – which would do nothing about the plant’s carbon emissions. If global warming legislation or a carbon tax were to be enacted, the resulting high price of its electricity might force the plant to close anyway. Based on its analysis of carbon and natural gas prices, PGE believes that a 2020 shutdown would be the low-cost, least-risk plan for utility ratepayers and shareholders.

The earlier shutdown needs approval from the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

PGE is proposing to fill the gap left by Boardman’s closure with two new gas plants: a base-load unit adjacent to the existing Boardman coal plant and a smaller unit next to its existing gas plant in Clatskanie.

Scientists have recorded a massive spike in the amount of methane seeping from Arctic permafrost. Methane emissions from the Arctic increased by 31% from 2003-07. The increase represents about 1m extra tonnes of methane each year.

Sharply rising temperatures are to blame. Global warming is occurring twice as fast in the Arctic than anywhere else on Earth. Some regions have already warmed by 2.5C, and temperatures there are projected to increase by more than 10C by 2100 if carbon emissions continue to rise at current rates.

The new study supports scientists who warn that even modest levels of global warming could trigger huge increases in methane release from permafrost. Estimates of the amount of carbon trapped in shelf permafrost are in the range of 1,600 billion tonnes – roughly twice as much carbon as in the atmosphere now. Billions of tonnes of that sequestered carbon could be released by just a 2C average global rise, a positive feedback that could push Earth’s climate past a tipping point leading to catastrophic climate change.

The Guardian quotes Paul Palmer, a scientist at Edinburgh University who worked on the new study:

High latitude wetlands are currently only a small source of methane but for these emissions to increase by a third in just five years is very significant. It shows that even a relatively small amount of warming can cause a large increase in the amount of methane emissions.

Just over half of all methane emissions came from the tropics, with some 20m tonnes released from the Amazon River basin each year, and 26m tonnes from the Congo basin. Rice paddy fields across China and south and southeast Asia produced almost one-third of global methane, some 33m tonnes. Only 2% of global methane comes from Arctic latitudes, the study found, though the region showed the largest increases. The 31% rise in methane emissions there from 2003-07 was enough to help lift the global average increase to 7%.

The study is published in the journal Science.

At the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco this week, scientists report that new data confirm that another positive feedback mechanism is at work. New temperature and water vapor observations have corroborated climate model predictions that the warming of our climate produced by carbon dioxide will be greatly exacerbated – more than doubled – by water vapor. As the climate warms, the atmosphere becomes more humid. Since water is a greenhouse gas, it serves as a powerful positive feedback to the climate system, amplifying the initial warming.

Here’s the abstract to the Science study:

Wetlands are the largest individual source of methane (CH4), but the magnitude and distribution of this source are poorly understood on continental scales. We isolated the wetland and rice paddy contributions to spaceborne CH4 measurements over 2003–2005 using satellite observations of gravity anomalies, a proxy for water-table depth {Gamma}, and surface temperature analyses TS. We find that tropical and higher-latitude CH4 variations are largely described by {Gamma} and TS variations, respectively. Our work suggests that tropical wetlands contribute 52 to 58% of global emissions, with the remainder coming from the extra-tropics, 2% of which is from Arctic latitudes. We estimate a 7% rise in wetland CH4 emissions over 2003–2007, due to warming of mid-latitude and Arctic wetland regions, which we find is consistent with recent changes in atmospheric CH4.

Micronesia is forging new precedent in global environmental law by claiming it is adversely affected by a Czech coal-fired power plant and thus entitled to relief under Czech law.

Micronesia filed a plea with the Czech environment ministry using a measure designed originally to settle disputes between near neighbors, arguing:

The Federated States of Micronesia is seriously endangered by the impacts of climate change, including the flooding of its entire territory and the eventual disappearance of a portion of its state. . . . The commissioning or retrofit of any large coal power plant could play a relevant role in the destruction of the entire environment of our state.

It may be too late for Micronesia. A new study suggests that Antarctica’s Pine Island glacier has passed its tipping point and is poised to collapse in a catastrophe that could raise global sea levels by 24 centimeters.

Pine Island glacier is but one of many at the fringes of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Climate change is warming the Amundsen Sea, which is at the southern margin of the Pacific Ocean. As rising sea levels push the warm water beneath the ice shelves, it melts them from below, pushing the grounding line higher up the continental shelf.

By raising sea levels, and therefore the grounding line, in their model, the scientists identified a point of no return beyond which the glacier would be unable to recover.

The Antarctic sea bed has a small lip in it: it rises slowly up the continental shelf, then makes a slight dip before rising again to the shoreline. The researchers found that as long as the grounding line is on the outer rise of the sea bed, before the lip, small changes in climate lead to correspondingly small changes in the glacier’s ice volume. But as soon as the grounding line moves over the lip and starts to move down into the dip in the sea bed, the situation changes critically. Once the grounding line passes the crest, a small change in the climate causes a rapid and irreversible loss of ice.

News isn’t good from the other pole, either. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley,  predict that replacing tundra with trees will melt sea ice and greatly enhance warming over the entire Arctic region.

Because trees are darker than the bare tundra, scientists previously have thought that the northward expansion of trees would result in more absorption of sunlight and a consequent local warming.

During past episodes of warming, broad-leaved deciduous trees expanded their range north even more quickly than needle-leaved trees. While not not as dark as evergreen trees, broad-leaved trees transpire a lot more water. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas that becomes well-mixed throughout the Arctic.

Taking account of this in a standard model of global warming, the researchers discovered that, while broad-leaved trees do absorb some additional sunlight, the water vapor they pump into the atmosphere causes a more widespread warming.

The increased water vapor would melt more sea ice, resulting in more absorption of sunlight by the open ocean and dumping more water vapor into the atmosphere. This positive feedback will warm the land even more and encourage faster, more efficient tree growth and perhaps an even faster expansion of trees into the Arctic.

California’s new carbon fuel standard will shut U.S. ethanol out of the biggest U.S. market. Why? Because the regulations will count the emissions created when corn is planted, harvested and ground into fuel as part of ethanol’s carbon output. The regulation also counts indirect land-use changes – the impact on other areas of planting corn in the Midwest for ethanol.

Naturally, the two largest ethanol trade organizations have sued California over the standard.

When you count everything, “green” may not be green after all.

A prime example is the newly rolled out “Greenroads” rating system developed by University of Washington researchers and the engineering firm CH2M Hill. The system (the complete version of which is available here) outlines minimum requirements to qualify as a “green roadway”, including a noise mitigation plan, storm-water management plan and waste management plan. It also allows up to 118 points for voluntary actions such as minimizing light pollution, using recycled materials, incorporating quiet pavement and accommodating non-motorized transportation.

What the rating system leaves out is everything important:

Decisions regarding the location, type, timing, feasibility or other planning level ideas are excluded. While planning is fundamental to roadway and community
sustainability, these decisions are often too complex or political to be adequately defined by a point system.

“Greenroads” is greenwashing at its finest.

In overwhelmingly approving the report of its Peak Oil Task Force, the Bloomington (Indiana) City Council,  has endorsed a truly revolutionary idea:

Recognize the need for, and the inevitability of, a steady state economy – one that is not predicated on ever-greater amounts of energy and materials throughput, but recognizes the limits of the biosphere.

The Task Force report – Redefining Prosperity: Energy Descent and Community Resilience - calls for a reduction in community oil consumption by 5% per year in an effort to realize a 50 percent decrease in consumption in just 14 years. The targeted rate of decrease in oil consumption is along the lines laid out by the oil depletion protocol.

Suggested strategies for achieving the reduced fuel consumption goals include:

• Explore new energy sources, greater efficiencies and conservation opportunities for the following energy-intensive municipal services: water and wastewater treatment; law enforcement and fire protection; heating and cooling municipal buildings; and trash removal and recycling. Immediate attention should be given to off-grid water production to meet minimum community needs.
• Promote economic relocalization. Our community’s reliance on a steady supply of inexpensive goods from as far as halfway around the world makes us vulnerable to a decline in inexpensive oil and/or shortages. Producing and processing more goods within the community fosters greater security in a post-peak world while strengthening the local economy.
• Intensify the City’s emerging focus on form-based development, so that residents can easily live within walking distance of daily needs, such as grocery stores, schools and pharmacies.
• Increase home energy conservation and aim to retrofit 5 percent of housing per year.
• Establish community cooperative rideshare programs.
• Advocate for greater local, state and federal funding for public transit.
• Accelerate local food production by training more urban farmers and removing legal, institutional and cultural barriers to farming within the city.
• Plant edible landscapes throughout the city.

The Task Force’s vision is for a city where “most residents live within walking distance of daily needs; most of the food required to feed residents is grown within Monroe County; residents can easily and conveniently get where they need to go on bike, foot or public transit; most of the community’s housing stock is retrofit for energy efficiency; and local government provides high-quality services to its residents while using less fossil fuel energy.”

That actually sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? A post-peak world need not be dismal.

Here’s a great idea from Portland: a tool lending library. The Oregonian has the story:

If you need a table saw, a 10-foot pipe clamp or a 20-foot pruner, you’ve normally got three choices: Buy it, rent it or borrow it from a neighbor.

Portland is fast becoming a leader in a fourth way: checking it out for free at a tool lending library.

The city’s first nonprofit tool library, founded in 2004 in North Portland, is up to 2,300 members. Its second, in Northeast, has already drawn 800 members in 16 months and just expanded to a far bigger space. A third, in southeast Portland, is scheduled to open this spring, which would make Portland the only U.S. city with a trio.

The volunteer-run tool libraries offer low-cost home and garden lessons as well as tools. They help people save money and connect to their community.

Imagine: guys would no longer have an excuse to stuff their garages with every tool they see at Home Depot. Of course, that wouldn’t stop them. On a positive note, divorce or death (as males mostly croak first) coupled with the surviving spouse’s desire to sweep away the past means a good portion of these boy toys might eventually end up in the library:

About 900 of the more than 1,100 tools at the Northeast Portland Tool Library were donated, helping give the library a hardware store’s worth of inventory.

For anyone concerned about the impact of emissions from the transportation sector on global warming (or complacent about peak oil), this chart posted by Stuart Staniford at his blog Early Warning should be sobering:

Heading Out at The Oil Drum reports the Chinese purchased 13.6 million cars and light trucks last year, compared to 10.4 million sold in the USA. China is now the world’s #1 auto market. Not surprisingly, Chinese oil imports are also up. In December, Chinese imports of crude oil rose to 20 million tonnes, or the equivalent of 4.7 million barrels a day. Chinese demand is helping keep oil prices firm despite the continuing global economic disruption.

Then again, this chart from another Staniford post looking at urbanization trends shows that urbanization and vehicle use are in lockstep, growing exponentially :

Of course, correlation does not establish causation. But Staniford shows that as the percentage of the population engaged in agriculture declines and as countries “develop” and become urbanized, per capita energy use tends to increase.

The global climate and energy outlook is grim as China begins to look more and more like us. And notice India, looming there on the horizon.