Warning signs

Rebecca Rosen over at The Atlantic presents a graphic which illustrates the climate crisis in worrying detail:

More from Rosen’s article:

Higher temperatures today are the result of higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide. In 1880, when the study’s temperature record-keeping begins, the concentration of carbon dioxide was 285 parts per million. Today it is more than 390 parts per million and rapidly increasing. Many top climate scientists, including NASA’s James Hansen, have argued that a level not exceeding 350 parts per million is necessary “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.”

The bold was added by me for emphasis as I believe that Mr. Hansen’s words are a succinctly stated warning for us all.

The consequences of complacency

Some stiff medicine is needed when it comes to the general public’s attitude toward the threat of climate change here in America. And UC Berkeley Scientist Dr. John Harte (JH) seems more than happy to administer it. Here in an interview with Forbes’ Michael Charles Tobias (MT) he pushes back against the unfortunate complacency:

MT: Climate has varied throughout Earth’s history as a result of natural processes — why should we be inordinately concerned about the current warming that our species is currently unleashing/triggering/producing?

JH: This enormous irony, if you will, apparently confuses many of those who deny the findings of climate science or, for other reasons, argue for complacency. First of all, some deniers ask “what’s the big deal with 5 or 10 degrees of warming? We see such changes daily. “

MT: Right, floods in Manhattan, a drought across half the U.S. this Summer; temperatures in Texas exceeding three digits week after week after week. Some people are simply packing their bags and moving to Oregon, or wherever they are betting it’s going to be cooler.

JH: Well, one way to think about that is to note that when earth’s average temperature was just ten degrees cooler in the last ice age, a 300-foot thick ice sheet covered much of North America and Europe!

MT: OK? Go on?

JH: Other deniers argue that Earth has changed that much in the past and life survived. True, but previously, Earth warmed much more slowly than it is now, giving animals and plants many millennia to adapt or migrate through wilderness — wilderness undisturbed by exploding populations of people who now occupy much of the planet’s former natural habitats.

Appiah on the arc of moral revolutions

I have been thinking about the principle of intergenerational equity for some time. Perhaps that is why a recent Washington Post article by Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher at Princeton University speaks to me so much. He asks a simple a question with many answers–some of which are challenging in the level of shame they should provoke in most people. The question is “What will future generations condemn us for?” Many people comfort themselves in thinking that the cumulative effects of small and random good acts will lead some divine authority to judge them mercifully in a supposed afterlife but what of the small, deliberate acts of complicity either by silence or participation with what our children will justly judge to be horrendous and immoral systems that we failed to overthrow in the scope of our age. Appiah establishes the criteria to highlight some candidate practices:

First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.
Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, “We’ve always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?”)
And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they’re complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn’t think about what made those goods possible. That’s why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.

Using these criteria he proceeds to highlight four practices that will mostly gain us some ignoble attention from our descendants: our prison system, our institutionalized and isolated elders, our degradation of the environment, and our our abuse of animals through mass production of meat. This is why I love philosophy and philosophers–always holding the mirror up and reminding us how far we fall short of the life we profess to being in pursuit of. Throughout the second half of his article Professor Appiah clearly outlines how these practices should offend our “egalitarian sensibilities” and will offend our children’s more learned sensibilities but it is early on in his article using the examples of slavery, women’s suffrage and homosexuality that he indicates just how long the arc of moral revolutions are.

Giant FAIL

As one of the leading energy consumptive and carbon-emitting nations America continues to fail in meeting its obligations in order to address the serious challenges presented by climate change globally. David Roberts over at Grist gives an excellent review of the unfortunate demise of the variously-purposed climate change/energy/oil spill bill which has been pared down to stultified pulp.

Roberts notes:

“Not only will the bill not contain any restrictions on greenhouse gases — not even a watered-down utility-only cap — it won’t even contain the two other key policies that would have moved clean energy forward: the Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) and the energy efficiency standards.”

And he assigns blame where is very deserved.

The generations that follow will not forgive us if we continue to fail to address this challenge.

Portugal leading with renewable energy

Exciting news from over at The Washington Note on the rapid development of renewable energy usage in western Europe:

Today’s New York Times features a dispatch from Portugal today, discussing the amazing growth as well as the pitfalls of Portugal’s rapid transition in building its renewable energy capacity. Nearly 45% of Portugal’s energy will come from renewable sources this year, outpacing many other countries, including the United States.

This is important when we consider the challenges that we face if America is to take a similar course:

The United States, which last year generated less than 5 percent of its power from newer forms of renewable energy, will lag behind at 16 percent (or just over 20 percent, including hydroelectric power), according to IHS.

The growing gap between the U.S. and other countries in producing renewable is interesting to see, but more telling is the article’s explanations for why so little progress has been made in this country, an alternate combination of aging infrastructure, lack of political will, and pressure from energy lobbying groups. Indeed, it is telling that much of what the article says for why America is not further expanding its development of renewable energy has to do with political considerations.

America is the second largest emitter of carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere and that 29% gap in renewable energy use between Portugal and the United States is an important metric if we are to understand and address the need to establish an economy and energy scheme that transitions from fossil fuel dependency to renewables.

Loopholes, the rich and Copenhagen

Analysis from the Stockholm Environment Institute and Third World Network indicate that developed nations are taking advantage of loopholes that could allow for an increase of up to 9% in carbon emissions above 1990 levels (the standard set in Kyoto and more recently in Copenhagen). The Guardian noted this in a story posted today:

Developing countries have argued strongly for minimum 40% emission cuts from industrialised nations by 2020. But new analysis from the Stockholm Environment Institute and Third World Network (TWN), released at the latest UN climate talks in Bonn, showed that current pledges amounted to only 12-18% reductions below 1990 levels without loopholes. When all loopholes were taken into account, emissions could be allowed to rise by 9%.

And there is even more damning information from the story:

In a separate submission to governments, Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN, claimed that industrialised countries were filling all the available atmosphere with carbon pollution, and preventing poor countries from developing. Solon quoted peer-reviewed research by leading NASA scientist Jim Hansen and the German government’s Advisory Council on Global Change which, he said, showed that the world had a “budget” of 750 gigatonnes of CO2 over the next 40 years if it sought a 66% chance of holding temperature rises to under 2C. The world had a smaller budget of just 420GT of CO2 if it wanted to stay below 1.5C, as more than 100 countries have so far demanded.

The “period of consequences” that Churchill mentioned in one of his most fateful speeches is fast approaching.

Green energy is recession-proof

CNN reports that Europe, the US and China are leading the way with respect to the use of renewable energy in new energy sources:

Renewables accounted for over 50 percent of new capacity in the U.S. in 2009 while in Europe the figure was 60 percent, leading the U.N. to predict that the world as a whole will add more capacity to the electricity supply from renewables than non-renewables this year or by 2011.

Efficiency is key

Very interesting article connecting negative entropy and sustainable development.

Three factors behind rise in natural disasters

Found an interesting article over at the humanitarian affairs blog Good Intentions are Not Enough about the rise in natural disasters due to three factors: environmental degradation, climate change and overpopulation. And a profile in courage on climate change in the form of the young Maldivan President Mohamed Nasheed who has led efforts to make his country carbon-neutral by 2019.

the environment is not politically expendable

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or the measure of the total economic output of a nation is a common standby when attempting to consider a nation’s relative standard of living. But it is a faulty one that fails to include the environmental costs of progress. I found myself reading about a succession of Chinese leaders from Deng Xiaoping to the current leader Hu Jintao in the course of studying for the current discussion in my foreign policy course and learned a little about China’s recent experiment with the official use of a green GDP that factors in the environmental degradation of economic growth.

According to the New York Times, the story goes a bit like this:

In 2004, Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, announced that the green GDP index would replace the Chinese GDP index itself as a performance measure for government and party officials at the highest levels. The first green GDP accounting report, for 2004, was published in September 2006. It showed that the financial loss caused by pollution was 511.8 billion yuan ($66.3 billion), or 3.05 percent of the nation’s economy. As an experiment in national accounting, the Green GDP effort collapsed in failure in 2007, when it became clear that the adjustment for environmental damage had reduced the growth rate to politically unacceptable levels, nearly zero in some provinces.In the face of mounting evidence that environmental damage and resource depletion was far more costly than anticipated, the government withdrew its support for the Green GDP methodology and suppressed the 2005 report, which had been due out in March 2007.

I was bowled over by this. Apparently the green GDP was such a success that Beijing had to put an end to it.

I wondered whether this would ever be tried in the US and quickly realized that we have a remarkable indicator of the costs of economic growth in the form of Deepwater Horizon. The oil spill off the coast of Louisiana is a perfect storm of lax or nonexistent government regulation, our hunger for an unsustainable standard of living and a craven corporate commitment to profit-at-all-costs at the expense of any sense of social responsibility.

May the rage that we feel towards BP for their reckless disregard for human and animal life and the Gulf ecosystem as a whole and at the Obama Administration for being so lackadaisical initially in its response lead Congress as it debates the energy-climate bill to actually consider the possibility that the commons we share are not simply political commodities to be exploited in the ridiculously small game of partisan politics.

Of interest: Justice

As we continue to wrap our minds around the magnitude of the ecological disaster that is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, some bittersweet news out of India. Eight officials from Union Carbide India Ltd. (UCIL) have been sentenced to jail terms over the 1984 chemical leak in Bhopal. That is the sweet. And here is the bitter: the sentences are for two years and this comes after a trial that lasted 23 years…this for an ecological disaster that caused the immediate death of thousands and chronic illness for tens of thousands.

And as many Americans grow increasingly frustrated with the response of our government to the crisis in the Gulf, we read that now that the US “hopes that this verdict today helps to bring some closure to the victims and their families”. Those were the words of Robert Blake, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia in response to the verdict and a question on whether the US would take similar action against the American executives of Union Carbide.

If this uninspiring response is any indication of future predilections then the outlook does not look good for efforts to bring BP to justice.

Also, James Warren over at the Atlantic reports that Congress may be on the verge of taking one small step toward righting the many wrongs the US has inflicted upon North America’s original peoples:

The facts are these: Following the House’s approval, the Senate is considering whether to approve a $3.4 billion settlement of a 15-year-old lawsuit, alleging the government illegally withheld more than $150 billion from Indians whose lands were taken in the 1880s to lease to oil, timber, minerals and other companies for a fee. Back then, the government started breaking up reservations, accumulating over 100 million acres, giving individual Indians 80 to 160 acres each, and taking legal title to properties placed in one of two trusts. The Indians were given beneficial ownership but the government managed the land, believing Indians couldn’t handle their affairs. With leases for oil wells in Oklahoma, resorts in Palm Springs, and rights-of-ways for roads in Scottsdale, Arizona, some descendants of original owners receive six- and even seven-figure sums annually. But the prototypical beneficiary, now poised to share in the settlement, is a poor Dakotan who struggles to afford propane to heat his quarters and has been receiving as little as $20 a year. More than $400 million a year is collected from Indian lands and paid into U.S. Treasury account 14X6039.

Move complete.

I am now in Canton for the next few months. It has been a quick and disorienting move. Northeastern Ohio is a place with distinct characteristics. Also, saw a great documentary on climate change called “The 11th Hour” and it is better than “An Inconvenient Truth”.