Notes & Comments

From KURT COBB -- "Governing the Ungovernable"
The following are the final two paragraphs of the essay by Kurt Cobb posted on his blog on November 9, 2008. For the excellent full essay go to www.resourceinsights.blogspot.com and click on the archive for 2008. Scroll down to Nov. 9.

And this brings me to my final point. The reason I call this piece "Governing the ungovernable" is that I believe the problems we now face will not be solved at the central government level. They might be mitigated or exacerbated, but not truly solved. In essence, the world as currently constructed has become ungovernable. So, along with new ways of living, we must find new ways of governing, and I believe those new ways will emphasize the local and the regional over the national or the international.

This tempers my enthusiasm for the new administration about to take power in Washington, one with whom I already have many disagreements especially in the area of energy policy. To the extent that Barack Obama and the team he assembles inspire and empower people to act in their own communities to address energy stringency, climate change, food self-sufficiency and the repercussions of the financial meltdown, the next administration will succeed. But the real successes will have to be imagined and implemented closer to home.

By Carl Pope, Sierra Club, about Fighting the Notion of "Clean Coal."
We still need to explain to people that for King Coal, the idea of sequestering the carbon dioxide

• which is essential if coal is ever to be clean, along with responsible mining and clean combustion
• is not a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Really, clean coal is the coal industry's worst nightmare
• because it would cost them money to clean up their mines and power plants, and they have no intention of doing so. That's why the real research on carbon sequestration is not being funded by this very rich industry
• instead, they're funding ads that are eco-porn.

Quotations for Consideration

"For humanity, a new era of enforced localism is likely, where globalization goes into reverse and people reassert more restricted identities." --Mark Lynas, SIX DEGREES: OUR FUTURE ON A HOTTER PLANET (National Geographic, 2008)

"Western governments are pretending to take actions that alleviate climate change. But their ‘cap-and-trade’ approach is a minuscule tweak to business-as-usual. Cap-and-trade is a Temple of Doom for life on our planet, worshipped by lawmakers who are afraid to confront fossil special interests." --James Hansen, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, May, 2009

"I can't understand why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants." -- Al Gore

"Climate change is the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen." --Sir Nicholas Stern, adviser to UK government on the economics of climate change.

"If we are to meet the greatest challenge of our time, we need real action and real solutions. While carbon trading may have some limited role to play, do we really want to rely on it as the backbone of international efforts to stop climate change? In short, if climate change is the greatest market failure ever, can we really rely on markets to solve it?" Source: "The Current Credit Crisis: Lessons for Carbon Finance?" FRIENDS OF THE EARTH NEWSMAGAZINE, Fall 2008, pp. 6-8.

As renowned climate scientist James Hansen recently told federal lawmakers on the 20-year anniversary of his first congressional testimony on climate change, this is our "last chance" to change course. The world around us has been in a period of profound ecological change, like an invisible cancer that has spread so far that the external signs of organ damage are now unmistakable. --Larry J. Schweiger, President & CEO, National Wildlife Federation

Soil and vegetation are our biggest carbon sinks. Industrial agriculture
destroys both. --Vandana Shiva, SOIL NOT OIL (2008), p. 113.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal. --Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Goals and Questions to Guide Our Transition to a Post-fossil Fuel Era
by Ken Dahlberg
The increasing spread of modern industrial society around the world has generated a series of crises: loss of cultural and biological diversity, global warming, losses of arable land and fresh water, and general environmental degradation and destruction. It has also magnified traditional ones, such as wars and cultural conflicts.

Much has been written about each of these. Unfortunately, most analyses are based upon Western assumptions and beliefs that helped create the crises in the first place. These include:

• deep cultural and religious-based convictions that humankind is separate from nature and holds dominion over it;
• a strong faith in the superiority of Western civilization;
• the modern belief that science and technology are the source of social progress, but that technologies are neutral;
• unquestioning confidence in the value of the division of labor, individualism, the functional specialization of society, and standardization;
• ideological beliefs in the autonomy and absolute value of markets, competition, "free" trade, the "efficiencies" of large scale infrastructures and organizations; and most recently;
• an optimistic faith that globalization and its various manifestations - the mass media, consumerism, cheap food, easy and inexpensive mobility, etc. - will eventually benefit all.

Ken's essay continues with cogent discussion of the problems and some possible solutions. Particularly valuable is his discussion of the five criteria to be followed in any decision, whether on the individual, family, local, state, or national level. To read the full essay, go to the web site for the Citizens Network for Michigan Food Democracy: http://www.mifooddemocracy.org/change_directions.php.

*Kenneth A. Dahlberg is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Environmental Studies at Western Michigan University. He has focused his research and writings on sustainable agriculture, natural resources, the conservation of biological diversity, appropriate technologies, and democratic institutions. He is a founding member and currently Chairman of the Board of the Michigan Land Trustees. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance (MOFFA).

"Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?"
A Scientific Report published 31 March 2008. By James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha, David Beerling, Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Mark Pagani, Maureen Raymo, Dana Royer, James C. Zachos.

. . . Human activities are altering Earth's atmospheric composition. Concern about global warming due to long-lived human-made greenhouse gases (GHGs) led to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change with the objective of stabilizing GHGs in the atmosphere at a level preventing "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and others used several "reasons for concern" to estimate that global warming of more than 2-3°C may be dangerous.

The European Union adopted 2°C above pre-industrial global temperature as a goal to limit human-made warming. Hansen et al. argued for a limit of 1°C global warming (relative to 2000, 1.7°C relative to pre-industrial time), aiming to avoid practically irreversible ice sheet and species loss. This 1°C limit, with nominal climate sensitivity of 3/4°C per W/m 2 and plausible control of other GHGs, implies maximum CO2 ~ 450 ppm.

Our current analysis suggests that humanity must aim for an even lower level of GHGs. Paleoclimate data and ongoing global changes indicate that 'slow' climate feedback processes not included in most climate models, such as ice sheet disintegration, vegetation migration, and GHG release from soils, tundra or ocean sediments, may begin to come into play on time scales as short as centuries or less. Rapid on-going climate changes and realization that Earth is out of energy balance, implying that more warming is 'in the pipeline', add urgency to investigation of the dangerous level of GHGs.

A probabilistic analysis concluded that the long-term CO2 limit is in the range 300-500 ppm for 25 percent risk tolerance, depending on climate sensitivity and non-CO2 forcings. Stabilizing atmospheric CO2 and climate requires that net CO2 emissions approach zero, because of the long lifetime of CO2.

We use paleoclimate data to show that long-term climate has high sensitivity to climate forcings and that the present global mean CO2, 385 ppm, is already in the dangerous zone. Despite rapid current CO2 growth, ~2 ppm/year, we show that it is conceivable to lower CO2 this century to less than the current amount, but only via prompt policy changes. . . . (p. 1)

Present policies, with continued construction of coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, suggest that decision-makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation. We must begin to move now toward the era beyond fossil fuels. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects.

The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable. (p. 12)

The full report--35 pages--is available as a download from a wide variety of sources. Go to www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf, or simply do a search on the title of the report. For a shorter (4 pages), more popular version of Hansen's concerns and his findings, try his address to the National Press Club on the 20th anniversary of his historic warning to Congress in 1988, "Twenty Years Later," available at www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TwentyYearsLater_20080623

SIGNS THAT WE'RE NOT REALLY SERIOUS YET
There are many indications that our nation and our culture have yet to take climate change seriously: we're destroying landscapes and ecosystems

• to mine for more coal,
• to extract oil from tar sands in Canada,
• to extract oil from shale andto drill, drill, drill for more oil and natural gas, especially in the western U.S.
• We're hell-bent to claim as much territory in the Arctic as possible, now that the melting ice makes oil drilling easier and cheaper.
• We're likely to lift the ban on offshore drilling, with the complicity of the Democratic "majority."
• We're provoking a new cold war with Russia, including possible nuclear confrontation, largely in order to protect oil and gas pipelines through Georgia. (For the history of our ham-handed, disastrous policiies, See Michael Klare, author of RESOURCE WARS, at Foreign Policy in Focus for August 13, 2008, www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5462).
• We're propping up corrupt and repressive African and Asian governments, just so long as they keep the oil flowing.

In all this, we demonstrate contempt for our relatively defenseless fellow creatures, human and otherwise. Not only do we expropriate and consume more and more land and natural resources for exclusively human use, impoverishing habitat and driving other species to extinction, we also seem indifferent to the effect of climate disruption on indigenous peoples and the poor nations of the world.

Consider the implications of the National Center for Atmospheric Research's shutdown, because of budget cuts, of a program focused on strengthening ability of poor countries to withstand droughts, floods, and other disasters already stressing their rising populations and forecast to increase drastically because of climate change.

The eliminated program, the Center for Capacity Building, was unique in its blend of research and training in struggling countries. The Center was created in 2004 and built on decades of work by its director, Michael Glantz, a political scientist whose work has focused on the societal effects of climate extremes and the effects of accumulating greenhouse gases.

"Dr. Glantz's science was among the best," said Ilan Kelman, senior research fellow at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo. He was "appalled" that the program was suddenly ended and Dr. Glantz dismissed, along with three colleagues.

Dr. Glantz's research, said Kelman, was "cutting-edge and cost-effective, yet influencing the world. He also ensured that science was used for humanity and by humanity."

The evidence confronts us and challenges us: as a nation and as a culture, we privileged, profligate Americans do not yet really care about the effects of climate change on the natural world or on the most vulnerable of our own human species.

--Tom Small, co-editor, WMCAN Newsletter
Sources: Foreign Policy in Focus, and New York Times

BIODIVERSITY, WARMING, AND EXTINCTION: Thoughts from around the world
"Everybody is waiting for the U.S. cavalry to come over the ridge."
--Tim Wirth, head of the United Nations Foundation, speaking at Poznan, Poland.

"The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don't know yet whether they will have any effect, in the people you have not yet heard of. . . . Turn your head. Learn to see in the dark."
--Rebecca Solnit, HOPE IN THE DARK: UNTOLD HISTORIES, WILD POSSIBILITIES (2006)

"Our kids are going to be so angry with us one day. "We've charged their future on our Visa cards. We've added so many greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, for our generation's growth, that our kids are likely going to spend a good part of their adulthood, maybe all of it, just dealing with the climate implications of our profligacy. And now our leaders are telling them the way out is "offshore drilling" for more climate-changing fossil fuels. Madness. Sheer madness."   
-- Thomas Friedman, "Our descendants will have to pay for our carelessness," Kalamazoo Gazette (Aug. 11, 2008), p. A9.

"Biodiversity is the spectacular variety of life on Earth and the essential interdependence among all living things."
-- Michael Novacek (ed.), The Biodiversity Crisis: Losing What Counts (2008)

"The life-sustaining matrix is built of green plants with legions of microorganisms and mostly small, obscure animals--in other words, weeds and bugs."
-- E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1993).

"Because it is we who decide what plants will grow in our gardens, the responsibility for our nation's biodiversity lies largely with us."
-- Douglas Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home (2007)

"Biodiversity is the foundation of life on earth and one of the pillars of sustainable development. . . . Environments rich in biodiversity are resilient when stricken by natural disaster. . . . However, biodiversity is being lost at an unprecedented rate. This, in turn, is seriously eroding the capacity of our planet to sustain life of earth."  
--Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General, message on the International Day for Biological Diversity," May 22, 2007, GINCANA 3: BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY AND CLIMATE CHANGE, p. 2.

"Climate change isn't like other issues. It doesn't do any good to split the difference to reach a deal everyone can live with. Climate change is about the laws of physics and chemistry, and they don't give."   
--Bill McKibben, quoted by Mark Hertsgard, "The Making of a Climate Movement," THE NATION, Oct. 22, 2007, p. 19. (McKibben is the author of THE END OF NATURE, the first [1989] and still one of the best popular books on climate change.)

"Every form of life is unique, warranting respect regardless of its worth to man, and to accord other organisms such recognition, man must be guided by a moral code of action."  
--United Nations Resolution A-RES-37-7, The World Charter for Nature, adopted October 28, 1982.