New Sheriff in Town

 

The new Biden administration has awakened the Federal beast, which is stirring with new life on the carbon issue. Biden’s pledge on Earth Day 2021 is in line with what environmental groups and hundreds of executives at major companies have pushed for. The president announced the target at the closely watched global leaders’ climate summit on April 22, during which he hopes to urge global cooperation to address the climate crisis.

“This is the decisive decade,” Biden said at the summit on Thursday morning. “This is the decade that we must make decisions to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis.”

“This is a moral imperative. An economic imperative. A moment of peril, but also a moment of extraordinary possibilities,” the president said.

At the state level, California is setting policies in concert with many organizations that are moving ahead with their goals and solutions to the carbon emission emergency that has been declared. The architects and contractors are already developing their methods for reducing not only emissions, but are also the decarbonization strategies that drastically reduce the impact of construction in cities and towns. This is being done in concert with the American Institute of Architects California (AIACA) and Architecture 2030 leadership by Ed Mazria FAIA.

Rocky Mountain Institute, headed up by Amory Lovins, is working with industry to transform the global energy system to secure a clean, prosperous, zero-carbon future for all. They are developing zero-carbon roadmaps for harder-to-abate sectors; accelerate development and deployment of breakthrough technologies; cultivate zero-carbon industries and ecosystems. These are some of the goals of their China program.

The response to the climate change issue has several major policy supporters that share similar climate goals. Recognizing that buildings account for nearly half of global CO2 emissions, the Carbon Leadership Forum, a non-profit organization at the University of Washington, is dedicated to accelerating the transformation of the building sector to radically reduce the embodied carbon in building materials and construction through collective action. This group's document was published in March 2021. To learn more about different policy initiatives related to embodied carbon or track updates on the policy initiatives in this document, visit the Carbon Leadership Forum’s Policy Toolkit.

The goals of the UNFCCC policies of 1.5C established in Paris are facing some serious pushback by the fossil fuel industry. It's not just a disinformation campaign, but steering governments to implement actions that will keep the oil flowing. For example, a human rights lawyer is facing prison for holding an oil giant to account talks about his Kafkaesque case.

"One of the critical facts is it’s not an accident. It’s a deliberately designed pollution event where Texaco decided to do it this way, essentially to play God with the people of Ecuador in order to save $2 or $3 a barrel of oil produced. The net result today, 50 years after this started, is you have the world’s worst oil disaster. You have thousands of people dead or dying from exposure. You have virtually no medical care. You have indigenous groups decimated, on the way to extinction because the forest is now poisoned by these deliberate acts of destruction. It can no longer sustain the culture, so it’s a disaster from every angle."

And at the same time, cities face new roadblocks in their quest to decarbonize buildings with policies that cripple efforts by local governments to establish sustainable policies.

The International Code Council (ICC) — an organization that manages building codes for much of the U.S. — this month removed the rights of local governments to vote on future energy efficiency building regulations, a move that could have major implications for cities as they seek to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within building sectors, according to industry experts.

So we're looking to Biden's leadership to help untangle these issues and policies that are colliding in the US as well as the global community acting under the United Nations oversight.

Update 10/8/21: Take three steps to begin designing zero carbon buildings today

Update 10/9/21:  CarbonPositive: COP26 

Eye of the Needle

The coronavirus pandemic is reshaping our world. An article by William Rees points out that "clearing skies and cleaner waters should inspire hopeful ingenuity. If we wish to thrive on a finite planet, we have little choice but to see the COVID-19 pandemic as preview and our response as dress rehearsal for the bigger play. Again, the challenge is to engineer a safe, smooth, controlled contraction of the human enterprise. Surely it is within our collective imagination to socially construct a system of globally networked but self-reliant national economies that better serve the needs of a smaller human family. The ultimate goal of economic planning everywhere must now turn to ensuring that humanity can thrive indefinitely and more equitably within the biophysical means of nature."

This is impacting the schedule of the World Climate Foundation summit, as well as the COP26 date. "In 2020, climate action must take on a new format to ensure global momentum is maintained. Short and long-term objectives should aim to overcome the socio-economic disruptions of COVID-19 and kickstart the global economy through resilient and ambitious green agendas, prioritizing net-zero commitments and low carbon investments now and throughout the next ten years.

With the postponement of the COP26 to 2021, World Climate Foundation is equally postponing its annual World Climate Summit to 2021, and now offers an exciting new series of digital, regional World Climate Forums. At these Forums, governments can transform climate ambitions into successful markets for climate business and market players in major regions of the world and instigate collaboration on policy, innovation, and investments."For decades, scientists have been demanding that climate crisis be taken this seriously. But despite numerous international agreements, governments have been slow to take action to reduce carbon emissions."

The coronavirus pandemic may have one silver lining: the potential collapse of big oil. "As Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, recently pointed out,  the drop in oil prices also offers an opportunity for countries around the world to lower or remove subsidies for fossil fuel consumption,  which disproportionally line the pockets of wealthy individuals and  corporations with money that could go to education, health care or clean  energy projects."

Optimists are encouraged by people such as the director of the Paris-based International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, who last April called the crisis an “historic opportunity today to steer [energy] investments onto a more sustainable path.” With G20 governments already pledging around $5 trillion to stimulate their economies in the wake of the shutdown, Birol called on them to “put clean energy at the heart of stimulus plans to counter the coronavirus crisis.” Birol said he had urged political and global financial leaders to design “sustainable stimulus packages” that focus on investing in clean energy technologies and accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. In its latest short-term projections, the US EIA says that it expects the biggest hit to oil demand in the second quarter of 2020, but that the reduction will only “gradually dissipat[e] over the course of the next 18 months”

The Rocky Mountain Institute is issuing a series of stimulus white papers to respond to the climate crisis, the economic shifts and provide guidance to governments and industry for rapid decarbonization."As the effects of the COVID-19 crisis ripple across the globe, strategic stimulus and recovery investments can get world economies back on track now and help us build back in a way that ensures greater resilience to the disruptions and crises we will inevitably face in the future. The current pandemic shows many parallels to, and interconnections with, a looming climate crisis. A response that addresses both crises at once will advance a low-carbon economy that is more resilient and helps mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, while improving the economy, the environment, and our health and communities."

In response to the impact of the pandemic, the RMI's recommended programs aim to catalyze industries, technologies, and practices shown to improve public health, decrease costs, create enduring job opportunities, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The four programs are:

• Build Back Better Buildings: A building retrofit program to catalyze residential and commercial building improvements at an unprecedented scale.
• Enhance Access and Electrify Mobility: Investment to prioritize pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit over the automobile, while also supporting the growth of the electric vehicle market.
• Debt Forgiveness for a Sustainable Recovery: A financial incentive program to provide companies with debt relief based on verifiable emissions reductions.
• Economic Recovery Facility for Financing Low- and Zero-Carbon Activities: A federal entity dedicated to facilitating the financing of clean energy and infrastructure projects.

A simple debt forgiveness approach can help industries and workers feeling economic pain now and build toward a more sustainable, low-emissions future.

Update 6/26/20: Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance

Update 7/23/20: Tom Steyer - Clean Energy as a job generator

Update 7/30/20:  Some Earth system tipping points may be linked together

Update 8/5/20: What a virus means for climate

Update 8/9/20: Observing recovery through a climate 'magnifying glass'

Update 8/16/20: Exponential growth bias: why most people don't understand the risk of runaway climate change.

Earth Day 50th

It's discouraging to look back at 50 years of environmental activism (an entire lifetime!) and see how little has been accomplished in spite of the overwhelming emergency that we're faced with in ecological destruction. The result of endless growth vectors in human culture and economics carried out in trade, the industrial carbon emissions over the last 200 years has finally impacted our planet in devastating ways. With no constraints on growth, a violation of natural processes and structures, human civilization has overrun the natural checks and balances that kept the planetary cycles in balance. But in the end there's always a reckoning because, well, physics.

Sierra Club recaps these issues in an interview with Dennis Hayes. "Fifty years later, we have different environmental challenges, some much larger, most notably global climate change. Despite the existential threat of climate change, today countries are rolling back environmental protections, failing to live up to the Paris Agreement and dragging their feet on climate action. Meanwhile, the environmental movement has gained momentum, thanks in no small part to an infusion of energy and outrage from the youth climate movement."

As described in Nature magazine, a new synthesis shows what a wasted decade means for the climate pact made in Paris. "In global climate projections, no single model can predict the future, and such analyses by necessity exclude the most recent developments. Nevertheless, it is clear that, collectively, current policies will not limit global warming to well below 2 °C, let alone 1.5 °C, as agreed in Paris. Clearly, the annual audit of the emissions gap has not altered poor performance. The gap concept has nonetheless proved useful. The reports and numbers have continuously informed the UN climate summits and the emissions gap was noted as a serious concern when parties were adopting the Paris agreement." This article includes a chart demonstrating the impact of this process.

Aubrey Meyer of GCI has continually emphasized that the global rate of the rise of temperature & CO2 concentrations is determined by the global contraction rate/weight/date of the future global CO2 emissions budget. An international carbon-sharing strategy is essential for UNFCCC-compliance if we are seriously risk-averse. "A lot of valuable time has been completely wasted over the last 25 years when total annual CO2 output was around 7Gt C/year. As it is now ~14 Gt C & temperature looks likely to be taken over the 2° C threshold, the situation is now obviously urgent." Insufficient climate action during the past decade means that transformational development pathways are now required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on time to meet the 1.5C Paris target.

Strategies for addressing this have been put forth. For example, Rocky Mountain Institute has proposed Decarbonization and Debt Forgiveness: A Path Forward. "A simple debt forgiveness approach can help industries and workers feeling economic pain now and build toward a more sustainable, low-emissions future."

Important legal precedents are being set in UK and US courts. The recent UK decision against allowing another runway to be constructed at Heathrow is a moment of truth. "That’s why the ruling sets such a powerful precedent, both in the UK and beyond. The message has gone out loud and clear that governments can no longer do what they’ve been doing for decades: claiming to be serious about tackling the climate crisis while marching us headlong towards disaster."

The recent impact of the coronavirus pandemic as well as a trade war in oil has produced an enormous shock to the fossil fuel industry. It has completely changed future projections for the industry, and has had had an immediate impact on its viability as an investment vehicle, as outlined in the article, The Beginning of the End for Oil?

It appears that the entire global population is facing a pivot point in which the need for serious, drastic climate action is clear to most people and governments now. One can only hope that this opportunity is not wasted as well.

We Are Not Alone

"I don't think we're going to make it," John Doerr proclaims, in an emotional talk about climate change and investment in 2007. Spurred on by his daughter, who demanded he fix the mess the world is heading for, he has made a commitment to solving the environmental and climate change issues via technology and green investing. He is chair of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, an American venture capital firm headquartered in Silicon Valley that has backed early investors in many significant companies, including Amazon, AOL, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google, Intuit, Macromedia, Netscape, Segway, and Sun Microsystems, with his focus on greentech.

In 2011, he was part of a group that met with President Obama, including Stanford University president John Hennessy, former Genentech CEO Art Levinson, and Steve Westly, founder of the Westly Group. This group backed the environmental policies of the Obama administration and advocated climate change action.

So there is a serious concern by some of the corporate leadership about directly dealing with the climate change issues. In addition, the US military and the Department of Defense have defined climate change as a national security issue and are moving forward with implementing strategies. In 2016, members of the U.S. national security community - The Center for Climate and Security Advisory Board - signed an agreement concluding that the effects of climate change present a strategically-significant risk to U.S. national security and international security, and that the U.S. must advance a comprehensive policy for addressing this risk:

"Climate Security Consensus Project: Our determinations above are based on the impacts of the most likely case.  There is a small chance that the impacts will be less than expected.  There is a greater chance that the impacts will be even worse. It is therefore of critical importance that the United States addresses climate change in a way that is commensurate with this risk profile. In this context, the United States will need to “manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable.” This requires a robust agenda to both prevent and prepare for climate change risks, and avoid potentially unmanageable climate-driven scenarios. Failing to do so will magnify and amplify risks to existing and future U.S. national security objectives."

They cite a quote from Joe Kaeser,  CEO of Siemens:

“A NUMBER of major companies — from PepsiCo to Walmart to U.P.S. — have recognized that corporations have a responsibility to address the causes of climate change before it is too late. We do not have to wait for an international treaty or new regulations to act..”

This group issued a letter to former Secretary of Defense James Mattis on May 8, 2017. The Department of Defense (DoD) and the intelligence community have been aware of this “threatmultiplier,”and taking actions to address it, since the early years of the George W. Bush Administration. By many measures, DoD has been leading in this area, driven naturally by its mission to protect the United States from harm. More recently they issued a press release: A Responsibility to Prepare – Military and National Security Leaders Release New Reports on Climate Change.

The United States Navy operates on the front lines of climate change. It manages tens of billions of dollars of assets on every continent and on every ocean. Those assets—ships, submarines, aircraft, naval bases, and the technology that links everything together—take many years to design and build and then have decades of useful life. This means that the navy needs to understand now what sorts of missions it may be required to perform in 10, 20, or 30 years and what assets and infrastructure it will need to carry out those missions. Put another way, it needs to plan for the world that will exist at that time.

Scientists and researchers have become far more vocal and insistent upon politically forcing governments to make actual progress in drastically reducing carbon emissions. Nathan Lewis - a chemistry professor from Caltech, Pasadena, CA - describes how he's working with Bill Gates to provide solar fuel technology to power transportation systems. In a similar vein, research organizations such as Climate CoLab and the Rocky Mountain Institute are pushing ahead on developing low-carbon energy sources and distribution systems.

They are taking the initiative to act on providing a low-carbon future, and clearly some of the corporate leadership is providing the funding to make this happen even if they're not making a lot of public statements about it right now, particularly in the face of a US administration that is trying to revive the coal industry. To the people deeply concerned and frightened about the climate change that's happening right now, it would appear that all is lost and the situation is hopeless as our planet continues to disintegrate under rapidly increasing global temperatures. But there's an underlying structure of progress that's evident, and it has the embedded potential for rapidly addressing the carbon emissions issues.

We must unleash these energies around climate change immediately, and undertake the enormous effort that will be required to move off of fossil fuels. It's there and we can all do something about this, but we've got to find the will to deal with these at such point that it makes a difference in the time that's left!

Update 10/22/18: Leaders move past Trump to protect world from climate change.

Update 11/1/18: Hansjörg Wyss is a philanthropist and conservationist who is donating $1B for biodiversity

Update 11/9/18: Paul Allen's quest to save the planet

Update 11/ 11/18:  A coalition of investors has written corporations asking for transparency.

Update 11/29/18:  50 CEOs urge world leaders for ambitious climate policy

Update 11/30/18:  Wyoming billionaire pledges to protect 30% of the planet by 2030.

Update 12/10/18:  Tackle climate or face financial crash, say world's biggest investors

Age of Consequences

First in a series of three lectures comprising the Cambridge Climate Lecture Series 2017, Baroness Bryony Worthington presents the dilemma that is unfolding now between the science and the politics of climate change dialogue:

"The evidence is clear that we are in an age of consequences...There is a constant stream of information now for those who are tuned to it that show us that many of the impacts that we were expecting to unfold over the second half of this century are starting to be felt now."

It's evident that our human civilization is losing the race to stave off catastrophic climate change in the face of its political inaction, and we need to drastically up our game. That takes us to net zero carbon emissions by the middle of this century, per the Paris agreement of 2015. She observes that the threat of Donald Trump had an impact on the Paris agreement in that it caused that agreement to come into force earlier than it might have otherwise done, thus Trump unwittingly helped bring about ratification.

Overcoming political headwinds involves the "Tragedy of the Commons" wherein inadvertent individual actions add up to destructive impacts that nobody takes responsibility for. A classic example is the Pacific Garbage Patch that exists in the Pacific Ocean that is strangling and poisoning sea life with tons of plastic garbage dumped in the ocean over decades. Except there's a Dutch guy named Boyan Slat who is doing exactly that.

"Tragedy of the Horizon" is a phrase that means that short-term thinking is unfortunately endemic throughout our politics, and also, unfortunately, our financial system. This is leading to very poorly informed decision-making, and where attention to only the bottom line by corporate decsion makers is destructive to the long view that encompasses systemic views of the world and addresses the very serious issues involving climate change. The antidote to this is to create and support independent apolitical institutions, such as universities and research facilities.

A third factor is the fossil fuel industry itself, which has contributed greatly to human civilization and its benefits inasmuch as their profits allow them to now wield a lot of power in the political sphere in the act of protecting their profits. The answer to this is a multivalent approach to problem solutions so that one factor doesn't override the entire dialogue; one simple tool like a carbon tax will not accomplish the necessary means to an end.

Having said all of this, there remains an approach to solving this problem via global scenario planning as it's employed by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), an independent apolitical entity:

RMI will release analysis results describing five scenarios to limit global average temperature increases by the end of the century to approximately 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, a goal that most analysts see as nearly impossible to achieve. According to the United Nations Environment Programme’s recently released Emissions Gap report, even if the pledges made by nations participating in the Paris Agreement are fulfilled, global emissions will put us on a path to temperature rise of 2.9 to 3.4°C this century. Limiting temperature increases to less than 1.5°C will require more and deeper change in the years ahead than most analysts contemplate, with shifts not only in the energy sector but also in agriculture and land use. Surprisingly, their assessment indicates that such changes are still within reach, but only if global actions lead to a dramatic acceleration of the energy transition.

Their diagram of positive feedbacks that could accelerate the energy transition shows how multiple actors in many different markets spur the current renewable energy movement. Much of the growth in renewable energy globally is led by private companies and customers, who find compelling economic reasons to make the switch. This is in contrast to a traditional utility responsible for the planning and operation of a grid that supplies power from centrally owned power plants. Instead of large, capital-intensive projects, centralized decision making, and high-risk business-to-business transactions, much of the new energy revolution is diffuse, smaller scale, decentralized, and based on business-to-customer transactions.Renewable resources, on the other hand, are abundantly available worldwide, often in reasonable proximity to demand. RMI’s analysis describes a possible fast track path to a global clean energy future that is led by synergistic and compounding changes in key industries. Rapid scaling of low-cost manufacturing for solar PV, wind, batteries, electric vehicles, and other key technologies is at the heart of this transition.

So this different kind of thinking, in the corporate and political arena, can be driven by a multitude of actions from many players, rather than the top-down assumptions employed by the world's governments. Each player has a significant position and influence in this multi-level sphere of action, and all of them add up to an important resolution of this global problem that we all have to solve. This is a game-solution, not a dictated process, with an outcome that isn't predictable.

This is important because some global corporations have become bigger than many countries, and they have placed themselves beyond the reach of governments and global rule-making bodies. They have so far managed to shirk their responsibilities in solving this problem, but that's no longer an acceptable position because of the damages that they cause to the environment and all the people living in their countries all across the globe. Accountability is about to become the answer to the "Tragedy of the Commons."

Update 5/24/17: California has tried to forge international climate pacts, becoming a significant global player

Let Them Eat Cake

The snapshot above is from an excellent little infographic from the Guardian, in response to the new IPCC report released last Friday. A summary of the problem outlined by the IPCC Report produced for policy makers shows the terrifying range of climate possibilities in the future.

As you can see, the last step in the charts basically says that no matter what the prediction is, it's "infeasible" to cut carbon emissions enough to keep temperature change below 2C. I see. The grandkids can just fry, no food and no water, tough luck.

Not only is this a despicable position to take, and remember that Marie Antoinette got her head handed to her for it, it's not even true. Not only is it fairly straightforward to severely cut carbon emissions and allow the earth to regenerate its forests and natural wetlands, it's even profitable. Unfortunately the big fossil fuel conglomerates are more in love with their profits than with their families, and are standing in the way of a tremendous green revolution driven by social media. But not for long; I think when people understand that it's entirely possible to change this scenario quite rapidly, then it will happen. To hell with these corporations and their damn money at the price of life across the globe. Climatologist and former NASA scientist Jim Hansen has even testified on the feasibility of this:

According to a paper he will soon release, “simple economic modeling shows that if you put a moderate rising price on carbon — $10 a ton, going up $10 a ton for 10 years — by the end of 10 years you would reduce United States emissions by 30 percent. And that’s 10 times or 11 times more than the volume of the Keystone pipeline. So there are much more effective ways of assuring our energy independence and contributing to stabilizing climate than trying to develop more fossil fuel sources.”

This and other strategies, such as lawsuits against governments that fail to protect their citizens, are part of his agenda.

The money therefore goes to a different place and into different pockets. Instead of coal and oil, we have decarbonization by 2030, and we have no need to start wars for oil, especially if the energy comes from distributed local sources, avoiding global shipping.There are many feasible approaches, and the politicians are wrong - 100% renewable energy is entirely possible.

The Rocky Mountain Institute, headed up by Amory Lovins, is fully taking on the challenge of getting to 100% renewable energy systems by implementing their program called "Reinventing Fire". This thinktank has examined the methodology used by Germany to severely reduce their emissions in the energy sector, providing a robust example for other countries to follow. An initiative undertaken by the architects in the USA and the American Institute of Architects is called the 2030 Challenge which intends to arrive at zero carbon in construction in 2030, in the US building sector - which consumes more energy than any other sector. This is being implemented ahead of any regulatory requirements by the building industry.

Many strategies, in concert with global cooperation and implemented by regulation, are capable of moving us all rapidly off of the dirty fossil fuels and into a sustainable form of existence for the sake of life on this planet. I am not buying this "inconvenience" argument for one damn minute. It's now time to take the necessary action. It can be as simple as Wangari Maathai's Hummingbird, and it can also be about "coming unstuck" and using planetary levers.

Reinventing Fire in China

The video above is from Chief Scientist Amory Lovins and Manager of the Office of the Chief Scientist Clay Stranger who discuss their project that involves an international energy development project between the Rocky Mountain Institute, located in California's Bay Area, and China. As they put it, any solutions for climate and the global energy economy must flow through China. RMI's international partnership "Reinventing Fire: China" will investigate the economic, environmental, and social implications of rapidly deploying renewables and energy efficiency technologies in China. The project's analysis and recommendations will offer an opportunity to influence—at a national level—arguably the most important energy economy in the world alongside that of the U.S.

This is possible because of the China Trade Agreement established between Sacramento and Beijing, following on the heels of the international agreement with China signed by US Secretary of State John Kerry on April 14 of this year:

The agreement could impact Canada and the growth of the oilsands where companies predict their expansion will triple their greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. This expansion is largely dependent on the building of pipelines such as the Keystone XL to Texas, which remains a hotly contested issue in the U.S. where it has become the symbol of the struggle for strong action on climate change. Public hearings on the pipeline open in Nebraska Thursday.

If the U.S. and China significantly ratchet up the level of climate action, “that would give the lie to the Harper government’s claims that its policies are in line with those of other developed countries,” Meyer said. “We’ll have to see how this plays out, of course.  Talk is cheap, but the US-China statement, in particular, heightens expectations for something significant later this year.”

This is happening because, as a Scientific American article points out:

Speaking at a clean energy seminar in Beijing, Kerry warned that climate change is happening at a faster rate than scientists predicted 20 years ago and said the United States and China have a particular responsibility to rein in greenhouse gases.

"China and the United States represent the world's two biggest economies, we represent the world's two largest consumers of energy, and we represent the two largest emitters of global greenhouse gases. So if any two nations come to this table with an imperative for action, it is us," Kerry said.

Update: China's legal and cultural systems may prove to be problematic in these agreements. The culture is above the law.

Don't Scrape the Scraper

The effort by the building industry to decarbonize the built environment has been underway for twenty years now. New York City, of all places, has made a commitment to reducing the carbon footprint of its existing structures, including its largest skyscrapers. Many of these examples were demonstrated at an APA Conference in the spring of 2001, called "Green Towers".

In 2009, a $20 million eco-refit of the Empire State Building as an addition to its $500 million renovation was announced, and in 2011 that retrofit was completed. Tony Malkin leads a discussion of the project which involves a 3 year payback on operations and maintenance. And that doesn't include a an accounting of the savings in "embodied energy" of the existing iconic structure and keeping massive amounts of demolished material out of landfills.

Existing buildings are full of energy efficiency opportunities waiting to be realized. While some savings are obvious and easy to reach via one-off upgrades of windows, lighting and appliances, by using an integrated, whole-buildings design approach, profoundly larger energy savings can often be gained at little or no added capital cost. The efficiencies of many systems work together to create a drastic reduction in energy and water use.

The specifics of a deep retrofit are described here, as one of the initiatives established by the Rocky Mountain Institute. There's many tools on this site that help determine the best approaches to different recycling and retrofit issues with these older structures. It involves a whole process beginning with selecting the goals and going all the way through to measurement and verification of the resulting improved structure, thus completing a cycle of design and management.

In greater detail, the RMI has actually made available a complete white paper that discusses creative elements of deep whole building retrofits, published by ASHRAE. It's called "Whole-Building Retrofits: A Gateway to Climate Stabilization", by Victor Olgyay and Cherlyn Seruto. Olgyay is the author of the classic book, "Design With Climate" published in 1963. This approach has been evolving for decades, and the integration of natural principles, technological advancements and digital building managment has opened the door to an era of sustainable practices with the existing infrastructure of historic buildings. You couldn't build many of them today - the structures are the result of the kind of construction labor and material resources that you can't find today, hence the greater value in preserving and improving structures like this.

It's not just an old building anymore, it's a symbol of the new approach to the urban environment, that values what has gone before and conserves the heritage, the embodied energy and keeps that carbon out of the natural environment.

It's Not That Hard

The above graphic is from the Environmental Law Institute, and illustrates a discussion of how the US Tax structure subsidizes foreign oil production, in 2009. Things have changed since then, and now polices are beginning to shift to support renewable energy sources. That, and conservation in many areas, have begun to take effect.

Which is a point emphasized by Amory Lovins and the RMI - the "think and do tank" - who takes the position that we can make this transition without further regulation by congress, by simply invoking the profit motive and efficiencies of scale. In promoting his book, he points out that China is currently the world leader in the use of renewables: photovoltaic, wind, small hydro, biogas, and solar thermal for hot water. This is evolving into a big, profitable business. Lovins goes right to the heart of the strategic argument for renewable energy as a standard:

In fact, to go back to the beginning of the modern climate debate, I think that when the bogus studies were issued claiming that climate protection would be very costly, the environmental movement fell into a trap of saying it won’t cost that much and it’s worth it. What they should have said is, “No, you’ve got it wrong. Climate protection is not costly but profitable because it’s cheaper to save fuel than to buy fuel.”

Lovins also delves into energy strategies that can be adopted immediately, such as net energy metering as well as addressing existing challenges for updating the US electrical grid to include all the issues that distributed systems of electricity create for the ratepayers as well as the utilities. The industry is evolving, and the integration of solar and wind power on an intelligent grid is becoming a fundamental shift from the old model of generated power from distant, dirty plants that also consume considerable amounts of water.

Yet the issue remains that public policy and taxation structures in the US and in other countries must necessarily be rapidly reformed to create even greater incentives for abandoning extractive energy sources. Going back to the global picture, these shifts in global taxes and incentives to renewables will be necessary to be in accord with agreed-to guidelines on carbon emissions by the countries around the globe. The US, being the largest contributor to global carbon over the last 200 years, will necessarily need to reduce its footprint extremely rapidly in order to get its per capita allowance under the probable caps. But if you look at it as Lovins does, it creates tremendous savings that can be applied to productive industries that propel economics forward under a different energy and development model. It's not a cost, it's an opportunity to create better solutions to human existence at a "profit" to those who undertake these challenges, since they'll not be burdened by the costs and responsibilities of carbon cleanup, toxic waste recapture, and a bunch of industrial "legacy" infrastructure.

A synergistic solution is something that's greater than the sum of its parts, and this is where collaboration and information exchange can leverage people and industries across the globe, since these interactions are the result of creativity and knowledge-sharing. Under these kinds of circumstances, constructive change can happen suddenly and in surprising ways. In the same way that no one dreamed of our current internet and global communication network fed by intelligent digtial technologies twenty years ago, there will be new people - driven social and communication structures that make many things possible within a decade that no one can even imagine today.

A future centered on the principles of life and a new view of managing energy could be the strategy that breaks out of the old structures that bind us to the destructive effects of carbon sources and the wars they create in the name of controlling resources for profit. These networks, being less territorial and more flexible than physical structures, could give way to a more vibrant way of existence for all of us.

An Epic Win

Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) is a non-profit thinktank that has been active for over 30 years. Started up by Amory Lovins, it has established a blueprint for a proactive strategy that can actually get the USA to zero GHG emissions by 2050. It's dubbed "Reinventing Fire". In short, their position is summarized as follows:

Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era offers market-based, actionable solutions integrating transportation, buildings, industry, and electricity. Built on Rocky Mountain Institute's 30 years of research and collaboration in all four sectors, Reinventing Fire maps pathways for running a 158%-bigger U.S. economy in 2050 but needing no oil, no coal, no nuclear energy, one-third less natural gas, and no new inventions. This would cost $5 trillion less than business-as-usual—in addition to the value of avoiding fossil fuels' huge but uncounted external costs.

The overarching issues are examined in a global context. For example, Randy Essex of RMI examines the futility of old-think with respect to oil supplies in the Middle East, coupled with military intervention. This perpetuates a destructive cycle which can be dispensed with by moving to renewable electric supplies.

Moving this strategy to the local level of policy boots-on-the-ground, RMI's Smart Garage Initiative partners with major cities to implement an infrastructure for the support of electric vehicle use. This portion of their strategy is the most effective, immediate and profitable action that can be taken by US industries in order to drastically cut auto and truck emissions. It's the easy one that can get the ball rolling into the major reductions necessary for the USA to bring its carbon emissions down into the unalterable lower limits that will contain climate change.

This kind of leadership by the USA could provoke global consensus on emissions levels and carbon capture, particularly if the old extractive practices are brought to a halt. All it takes is for the big guy to step up to the plate.

Reinventing Fire

"Imagine a world where carbon emissions have long been steadily declining—at a handsome profit, because saving fuel costs less than buying fuel; where global climate has stabilized and repair has begun; and where this planetary near-death experience has finally made antisocial and unacceptable the arrogance that let cleverness imperil the whole human prospect by outrunning wisdom."

--Amory Lovins, Co-founder, Chairman and Chief Scientist; August, 2007

In 2004, when the Rocky Mountain Institute released "Winning the Oil Endgame", Lovins received funding from the Pentagon, the world’s largest oil buyer, to outline a plan for making the United States oil-free through the use of modern technology and smart business strategies. “We’ve had a remarkable consistent vision of the kind of world we are trying to help create. Our current statement of that is a world thriving verdant and secure for all forever,” he said. “And the best way we know to do that is to create abundance by design. That is, turn scarcity by in-intention into abundance by design. By using a different kind of design called integrative design, to achieve very large savings of energy and resources.”

The Rocky Mountain Institute has now come blazing out of its corner with a new vision to move the world off of the fossil fuels that have become so destructive to this planet and the carbon emissions that are creating this climate instability and acidifying the ocean. They've come out with a book that outlines the very effective and immediately doable things that can be done about our situation in a constructive way and that are also a path to profitable businesses. This amplifies existing efforts to deal with the damage inflicted by destabilizing climate change.

So in solidarity and support, I dedicate this post to the Rocky Mountain Institute. Get involved in a sustainable future; it's the only thing that matters now.

It's Real

Spent the weekend at a conference sponsored by the Claremont School of Theology and the Center for Process Studies, among others, called "Brave New Planet, Imagining Ecological Communities". The headliner and main plenary speaker was Bill McKibben, author of "Eaarth" and the climate change activist who recently led hundreds of people to get arrested in front of the White House during the massive D.C. protests against the Keystone oil pipeline project. Now that catastrophic climate change is actually occurring at an accelerating rate, the question is whether real people will act responsibly and decisively to pursue ethical outcomes in the face of what is sure to be widespread and unprecedented suffering.This conference is particularly timely in response to Richard Muller's "Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST)" that just recently has verified that climate change is accelerating even faster than initially projected, much to the dismay of the climate deniers who hired him, the Koch brothers.

If one looks at the global oil consumption charts we have now (above) which is, along with coal, a main driver of climate change due to the release of carbon, it's quite obvious that the United States is by far the major producer of climate change. And if one further checks out the projections for oil and other fuels in the Energy Outlook published by the US Energy Information Administration, you can see that out to 2035 this only increases as energy demands rise.

If we're already into an uncontrolled ecological collapse (McKibben), how can this continue? Some answers are emerging in the form of eco-communities and campuses such as the Oberlin Project. Self-sustaining communities that don't consume lots of energy are one response in moderating the built form. Regeneration of natural processes and landscapes go hand-in-hand with highly efficient structures.

Other responses come from the global engineering profession, ahead of December’s COP17 climate change talks in Durban:

“While the world’s politicians have been locked in talks with no output, engineers across the globe have been busy developing technologies that can bring down emissions and help create a more stable future for the planet.

“We are now overdue for government commitment, with ambitious, concrete emissions targets that give the right signals to industry, so they can be rolled out on a global scale.”

In other words, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The Rocky Mountain Institute has come out with an entire 6-point program for immediately reducing the carbon output of human civilization as we try to stabilize our energy use. They emphasize that it's a synergistic approach that involves many strategies in concert with each other.

Since the world governments are not taking the lead on the collaboration and regulation that's desperately needed in order to bring these emissions and habitations into alignment with the earth's ability to support human activities, it's become apparent that people will have to take things into their own hands and just begin to take the initiative to tackle these problems. Some of the ideas for this kind of action have been presented in very humorous and inventive ways, such as Greg Craven's sequence of videos on the subject. They're snarky, smart and creative. He's clear about addressing the need for policy changes and immediate action in his latest video, particularly because of the accelerating climate destabilization we're now seeing.

So, it's real. And so is the need to move very quickly into a new vision of sustainable life for this planet.

EcoRepairs: Urban Forestry

A method of re-establishing the critical carbon sinks around the world in order to balance the destructiveness of human development is that of planting urban forests and managing their growth and care. This vision of nature coexisting with human development instead of being subservient to it is beginning to take hold. What easier thing than to flow with the energy cycles of nature that provide water, oxygen, shade and food to the local climate regions? The principle that life adapts to the available resources is not only universal, but critical to the balance of nature.

There are examples of this urban forestry taking hold through community cooperation with government policies. The city of Johannesburg in South Africa has been documenting, managing and growing its massive urban forest since 2000. It is one of the largest urban forestry projects existent, to the point that it has regenerated lands that were previously barren:

On satellite pictures, the city looks like a rain forest, albeit man-made, but because the city does not get the required amount of rainfall to qualify as one, it passes as an urban forest. In the 1860s, when trekkers first settled on the Witwatersrand, there was not a tree in sight, and the area of rocky grassland was dotted with the odd shrub and several streams.

This was achieved with partnerships by many entities, public and private, and includes, by necessity in all urban reforestation efforts, a public re-education about the actual value that trees in managed ecosystems can provide.

Another one of the oldest and largest urban forests is in Rio de Janiero and its environs. Interestingly, the deforestation caused by human development generated an outcry in 1658 because of the degradation that impacted the water supply; without the trees that had created the natural forest, the wetlands dried up, as did the water supply. So in 1860 it was mandated that the barren hills be reforested with native plants and trees. It's an impressive story, but the warning is that 400 years later the forest has still not recovered its natural biodiversity, so the wild and natural forests are not yet able to maintain natural systems. This means that the natural regenerative mechanisms are still not back in place, and it's incumbent on us to take this to the next level - which is to pull back from the edges and allow natural regeneration to happen. More recent, urgent issues are created by political events in Brazil - In 20 years, Curitiba, Brazil has increased the green space per inhabitant from 0.5 to 52. The intention was to plant one and a half million trees in 20 years for, since the 1988 murder of Chico Mendes (the campaigner to save the rainforest), Brazil had been on the defensive in ecological circles.
Many communities worldwide foster their urban forest in an informal way with guidelines and arguments for citizens to cooperate in keeping the urban tree canopies healthy and promote undergrowth such as shrubs and mulch. It's a much more natural feel than you'd find in typical suburban roof farms that are acres of asphalt and a few scraggly trees captured in concrete sidewalks. This form of cancer can and should be reversed for the sake of sustainable habitation.

Unprecedented

Video here: Democracy Now hosts a discussion on how the Obama administration has handled this catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and explore concrete ways that this country might finally move away from a fossil-fuel economy with three guests: New Orleans attorney Monique Harden of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights; Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune; and Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, widely recognized as one of the world’s most influential energy thinkers.

Sisyphus

Over at the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), Amory Lovins has taken the bull by the horns and restructured the Institute to forge ahead with tackling the fundamental problem with economic growth - energy production. Taking the Natural Capital concept further into nearly zero consumption of coal and oil by 2050, the RMI has established a vision for reinventing energy, and a re-engagement in changing the market economy so that it works with natural processes rather than destroying them. They've called this vision "Reinventing Fire".

Why push a rock uphill all day, requiring tremendous work and wasted energy, only to have the stone fall back, when it's so easy to flow downhill? This is a concept fundamental to the zen philosophy, and is also expressed in traditional Japanese construction principles. We need to use brains, not brawn.

Natural Capitalism: A System

Businesses and corporations are slowly moving towards sustainable strategies that provide a return on investment, and also creates a system of returning capital to natural processes, the very things that create the world we live in. A discussion about creating the Next Industrial Revolution reflects the current thinking on this concept.

It comes from the original Road Map for Natural Capitalism (Harvard Business Review) by Amory B. Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, Paul Hawken. This article was originally published in May-June 1999 and was republished in July-August 2007 as an HBR Classic. The article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading.

To quote the article:

No one would run a business without accounting for its capital outlays. Yet in 1999, when this article was originally published, most companies overlooked one major capital component--the value of the earth's ecosystem services. It was a staggering omission: Calculations at that time placed the value of those services--water storage, atmosphere regulation, climate control, and others--at $33 trillion per year. Not accounting for that cost has led to waste on a grand scale, the authors maintain. This article shows how a few farsighted companies, like DuPont and Xerox, were able to find powerful business opportunities in conserving resources on a similarly grand scale. Their early embrace of natural capitalism is even more important to emulate today. Natural capitalism comprises four major shifts in business practices. The first involves dramatically increasing the productivity of natural resources--by as much as 100-fold. In the second stage, companies adopt closed-loop production systems that yield no waste or toxicity. The third stage requires a fundamental change of business model--from selling products to delivering services. For example, instead of selling light bulbs, a manufacturer sells lighting services, with both the seller and the customer benefiting from the development of extremely efficient, durable bulbs. The last stage involves reinvesting in natural capital to restore, sustain, and expand the planet's ecosystem. Because natural capitalism is both necessary and profitable, it will subsume traditional industrialism, the authors argue, just as industrialism subsumed agrarianism. And the companies that are furthest down the road will have the competitive edge.

Patagonia's founder Yvon Chouinard is extremely pessimistic about the outlook for true sustainability:

I believe the accepted model of capitalism that demands endless growth deserves the blame for the destruction of nature, and it should be displaced. Failing that, I try to work with those companies and help them change the way they think about our resources.

Earth Day - Looking Ahead

Amory Lovins, the very influential Chief Scientist at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), heads up a non-profit that has established leadership in shifting the global economic model to "soft path" restoration of natural systems. Their commitment is to "drive the efficient and restorative use of resources to create a world that is thriving, verdant, and secure, for all, for ever." They take pause on this Earth Day, and look to further partnering with industry and innovative development in a way that changes how our country produces and consumes energy. The explanation of this thrust is as follows:

RMI’s Next Big Thing will bring together all of our 27 years of innovation and engage the world in our most ambitious and important work yet. Put simply, this effort is aimed at changing the way most people have been getting and using energy since the Industrial Revolution.With this project, we want to set in motion a movement to end the increasingly dangerous practice of digging up fossil fuels formed hundreds of millions of years ago from primeval swamp goo, then wastefully burning these fuels to form carbon dioxide that recreates those swamps’ tropical climate.

We will extend from oil to all fossil fuels our experience in envisioning and catalyzing energy systems that, in our Trustee Ray C. Anderson’s words, take nothing, waste nothing, and do no harm. We mean to speed the transformation from pervasive waste to elegant frugality, from causing scarcity by inattention to creating abundance by design, from liquidating energy capital to living better on energy income.

In short, we are Reinventing Fire™: driving the business-led transition from oil, coal, and ultimately gas to efficiency and renewables. This fire in our belly will engage all of RMI’s 88 staff, our global network of colleagues and supporters, and new advisors and partners from the private and public sectors. Reinventing Fire aims to change minds and clarify choices by showing what exists, what works, what makes sense and makes money, what can change the world.

Most importantly, the four principles of Natural Capitalism are outlined as part of the strategy for change:

Radical resource productivity
Biomimicry
Service and flow economy
Reinvestment in natural capital

These provide valuable benchmarks for all efforts at true sustainability, which have to measure the results of this kind of change. This is the path that the future needs to take, and so need to be part of public policy at all levels.

Fourtieth Earth Day

I remember the first Earth Day, 1970, in high school science class, and having a discussion about what effects pollution, deforestation and oil spills were having on the environment. Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" had been published eight years earlier, and we had all just seen the first image ever taken by humans of the whole Earth, from Apollo 8 in 1968. That blue globe floating in space; it was kind of a shocker. The "Population Bomb" had been written by Paul Ehrlich, also in 1968 at the behest of David Brower, Executive Director of the Sierra Club. There was an eruption of awareness that our human civilization was becoming very destructive on a planetary scale. But nobody even thought about climate change then, or what humans could do collectivelly to avert the damage we're doing.

At the time, Sierra Club was the leading proponent of environmentalism. It established a day in honor of its own first president and founder, John Muir, born on April 21. Sierra Club's original mission was to protect Yosemite National Park. It subsequently established Muir Woods National Monument to honor him as well (photo above). National memorial dates were established such as Arbor Day on April 25, and National Park Week on April 18 -25. His writings and papers are archived at the University of the Pacific for research.

John Muir was one of the great naturalists and public activists for environmental preservation in this country. His view was that people had to understand the world through experience with nature in all of its facets. His quote: "The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness".