The President's State of the Union speech tonight was a true breath of fresh air, especially in its emphasis on the responsibility of all parties to a pact or an effort to put real, factual information on the table, achieve consensus and accept the consequences of their actions.
A very large part of our problem of dealing with global carbon emissions is the subversion of the entire climate change issue by those who would simply deny science, withhold information and abandon all liabilities for actions that continue to create this problem. There's no accountability on the part of the fossil fuel industry for any of the activities that it pursues in the name of providing energy. All risks are denied or minimized, or information is suppressed to escape any of these very real and very major issues surrounding carbon emissions and pollution. It's come to the point where even a simple request for information from the U.S. Department of Energy is being sued over a Freedom of Information Act to force it to comply with the requirements of the U.S. Congress.
At issue in this case is the very intense water usage of power production; specifically the nearly trillion gallons of water used by coal plant cooling systems each year that represents over 2000 gallons for each person in the U.S. The data being withheld is critically needed in order to allow Congress to make policy decisions about the costs and benefits of power production in the US. This is in the name of coal profits, of course.
The oil companies have, for years, also engaged in a concerted effort to suppress information and facts about the impact of greenhouse gasses on the planet's atmosphere and ecosystems. But this creates a liability that may very well come back to haunt these companies and put complete liability exposure at their door. An article by Christine Shearer lays out how this question of deliberate information suppression could play out in the courts.
She starts her timeline of the study of emissions history with:
Research on climate change goes back over a century. Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming lays out the long trajectory: from realizing GHGs trap heat and help warm the planet, to identifying them, to tracking GHG emissions into the atmosphere and oceans from the burning of fossil fuels, to measuring the effects.
So none of this is new, the popular climate movement began with Earth Day in 1970 with information that was public knowledge, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created in 1988, and yet the denial of information and deliberate disinformation campaign by the fossil fuel industry has accelerated climate change while at the same time increasing their liability exponentially. In a case in 2008 from Alaska, a city attempted to sue the industry for the damage it had caused to their ability to inhabit their ancestral lands. It becomes a matter of deliberate harm to the entire ecology, for which the industry potentially becomes liable. While it was dismissed, it raises the issue that must be addressed, and that is the willful misleading of public policy in the name of profit, and at the expense of life on this planet.
It would seem that a new page has been turned tonight.
Today President Obama rejected a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, amidst growing public outcry and civil disobedience in Washington, D.C. against this project. The extraction process from the tar sands, the piping of crude oil through a major aquifer, the impact of pricing increases in the USA because it's being produced for export, ad infinitum, have given him enough reason to go up against Hillary Clinton's State Department position on this issue.
But that's not really the crux of the issue for the serious environmental protest, primarily that led by Bill McKibben, who takes the stand against the carbon impact of this project and all extractive resources (oil, coal and gas). Reduced to its fundamentals, climate change is being fueled by carbon emissions that continue to increase year over year, even as the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere creates climate change and volatility leading to draught, food instability and increasingly violent and extreme weather that's responsible for tremendous damage globally. The only answer is to stop the use of these fuels before runaway climate change takes place, it's not something that can be "mitigated". The science behind this is now definitive. The time is short.
Orion Magazine has showcased some articles about the ongoing fight by those committed to taking action in the face of a global emergency. Bill McKibben writes about Tim DeChristopher's lone paddle in the oil auction that has landed him in federal prison. McKibben sees this as a beginning of a movement that began coalescing on the first Earth Day in 1970 and that must now move into a more intensive phase.
The Orion interview of Tim DeChristopher is here, a story about "This is What Love Looks Like". It's a beautiful piece about a powerful action that's reverberating through more and more people.
Final 60-day deadline (imposed by a Republican Congress) is 21 February 2012 for Obama to deny the Keystone XL permit. Public actions to support denial are being taken as follows:
TAR SANDS ACTION in SoCal Petition and demonstration at the Culver City office of Obama for America, Saturday Feb. 4, 2012, 12 pm *NOTE* this event has been postponed in favor of a much larger event, keep this OFA page bookmarked for future planning.
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.
The UN Climate Change Conference last December unfortunately came to a close with no agreement on global NEA goals. National Emissions Allocations are distributed through a global agreement of quotas of allowed emissions per capita for each country. This was proposed by the Global Commons Institute in 2000, and is conceptually accepted as a methodology by many countries. The NEA- based contraction conversion model applies an emissions cap to each country that declines rapidly over 40 years in order to reach the desired global atmospheric goal of 430 ppmv by 2052 (we're at 395 now). It's a cooperative effort, with developed nations assisting the third world countries in their reduction via the transfer of energy and pollution control technologies. Its strategy is that rapidly developing countries such as China and India must quickly pull back on their increasing emissions, and the UK and USA must simply implement immediate reductions in GHG emissions, period. This proved untenable to developed countries at Durban in December 2011, and so no global agreement was achieved. There is a consensus on the model, however, so the negotiation continues.
This, tragically, does nothing to stop the growing emissions that threaten runaway climate change within about 5 years. While our governments dither, the natural world dies, and so do we. As it's necessary to have an overarching framework for cooperative effort on the most critical issue ever to face our human society, there are concrete measures that can be taken "at the grassroots" with parallel efforts in five broad areas of implementation. They are goal-focused and can be benchmarked for progress without specific caps in place because they aim for absolute emission reductions/rebuilding natural capital using public policy and economic levers:
Put an end to corporate rule for profit, especially "wars" (they're not wars)
This approach, admittedly treating our current global situation as an emergency, can develop a synergistic integration which reinforces the various actions to create a more rapid reduction than simply trying to reduce the industrial and human impacts of carbon emissions. Nobody needs permission to implement these measures now, and the usual climate deniers can't make a single-issue argument out of this multivalent approach. Particularly since these measures are starting to take hold already; we all know it's necessary so that our planet has a future that embraces humans.
A meditation on the natural world: Ave Maria (Gounod), performed by Edward Simoni
This time of new birth in deepest winter reminds us to pay attention to our strategies for regenerative landscaping and watershed restoration. Our global forests are the crucial carbon sinks needed to reverse the effects of climate change. Progress made in recent years shows that mankind is not doomed to strip the planet of its forest cover. But the transition from tree-chopper to tree-hugger is not happening fast enough. Read further in this article from The Economist.
Sun's out again after a few dreary days, following a record windstorm here in the San Gabriel valley. We're still digging out after that event, unprecedented in its fury and destruction of the urban tree canopy and the electrical power infrastructure; snapping power poles all through the region, downing trees that were over a hundred years old. While this is a needed rain, due to the overbuilt human environment and its demands, the seasons are tumbling around each other now. That calm, abundant existence of resources has come to an end. We find ourselves fighting to retain stability in things previously taken for granted, such as the turning of the seasons, the replenishment of rain, the chill of the snow that slowly melts and provides the water we've designed all of our systems around.
I reflect on the failure of our country to even cooperate in the Durban climate agreement, let alone establish leadership in a critical area of global threats to the future. There's uprisings all over the world against the kind of oligarchical control that exists in many countries for the benefit of the few, and we're seeing the same now here in the USA with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. This control by power and money has diminished the human ability to creatively address these critical issues and craft new approaches that respond to the changing climate conditions created by our industrial era development. The greater good is no longer served, and the deterioration of natural processes and environment continues unabated due to the blindness of this control in the name of profit.
I've taken a position that this "need for profit" can be re-channeled in constructive ways to benefit the global community and provide the massive profit opportunity that the corporate world demands. This enhances sustainable energy production, clean industrial development and communication infrastructure (the real value investments) as opposed to sales of tons of junk and cheap housing all over the planet and marks a shift away from the "consumer economy" that has proven to be so destructive to PEOPLE (not "consumers") and the systems that support life on this planet.
The economic argument for shifting the global fiscal engine to a larger infrastructure reflects the argument made by Joseph Stiglitz in a Vanity Fair article, wherein he explains that the economic shift that ultimately lifted the globe out of the Depression was the public spending for World War II:
It is important to grasp this simple truth: it was government spending—a Keynesian stimulus, not any correction of monetary policy or any revival of the banking system—that brought about recovery. The long-run prospects for the economy would, of course, have been even better if more of the money had been spent on investments in education, technology, and infrastructure rather than munitions, but even so, the strong public spending more than offset the weaknesses in private spending. Government spending unintentionally solved the economy’s underlying problem: it completed a necessary structural transformation, moving America, and especially the South, decisively from agriculture to manufacturing. The global community needs to prevail over destructive corporate entrenchment in "old economy" approaches so that the transformation to a larger infrastructure is possible. Thus an abundance of life can re-establish itself once the earth is protected from the impacts of industrialism; we need to work as networks and communities of people to re-engage in the natural environment and make constructive change. This change amounts to allowing the earth to regenerate its natural processes while human civilization moves to a larger technological, energy and manufacturing framework that supports our desires to keep expanding our civilization and moving through ever higher levels of scientific and industrial development.
The crucial approach to reversing the immense, critical impact that our exponential growth as a species has had on this world involves changing our point of view and shifting the scale of our vision. This 5-minute video by Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams, based upon their book, "The New Universe and the Human Future," makes the very succinct point that right now is the point of necessary inflection of the traditional human expansion and resource consumption in order to preserve our planetary resources for the future.
In urging us to make this change, there's no specific course charted for moving our point of view from a lowly, parochial way of seeing and moving into a larger framework that lets us arc over the globe and understand how to drastically restructure our living conditions and our culture to adapt to a needed dramatic change in our way of living. I think there's a way to sketch out this future.
First of all, understand the reality of the situation. Then take the larger view that we've been expanding upon with our necessary space developments and satellite network, those first fine filaments, and weave them into a viable industry that can accommodate our expansion yet focus its purpose on miniaturizing our impact and reversing the damage we've done. A very logical vehicle for doing this would be to take the vast resources of our military and corporate industrial complexes and turn them towards the objective of creating profitable and constructive industries outside of the biosphere that produce energy and the needed materials for industrial production, scientific research and exploration. These are the big payoff strategies for this world, not the annihilation of people and life on the planet for private profit and governmental gain. It would enlarge our focus and allow us to see solutions that are not readily apparent now.
The big view of our global culture finds that we've stayed too long in the resource extraction phase and have fouled our nest. The only way to harness the expansionary nature of our Darwinian impulses is to expand our wings and fly out into the bigger space of the solar system and the larger vision of a planetary network. We have to cease the destruction on the earth that we're engaging in for power and money, and turn to the values of life and regeneration, and re-frame our concepts of capital investments and understand the real risks of systems. This challenge will lay the groundwork for a shift in our human ideas about what truly matters.
And then we can begin to heal the environment and our society. It's a human problem, a problem of the dying natural world that's struggling under our weight, and a critical juncture in the kind of future this planet will see. We do have the power to make this choice now, as Primack and Abrams are urging us to do.
An open turf area. This open space hosts "civitas", the means to foster, mobilize and coordinate civic concern in the community for sustainable public and private spaces. This includes urban planning, public policy, infrastructure, watershed management, zero impact projects and regenerative "green" strategies. These create innovative spaces and design so people can reconnect with nature.
The California Natural Resources Agency just released its fourth Climate Change Assessment, a call to action on rising global temperatures — the state’s first in six years. August 2018, 132 pages covering these issues:
A space program initially launched in response to the Soviet challenge and put forth in a speech by John Kennedy in 1961 resulted in not only technology advances, but a shift in human awareness of the biosphere we all inhabit. This resulted in the Apollo program that put men on the moon and let human eyes look back upon the world.The view of a blue globe floating in empty space marks a transformation in human understanding and points towards an evolutionary change in collective priorities.
Ongoing action via the Planetary Society - Carl Sagan, from his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us." And that Bulgarian folk song from Sagan's Golden Record that NASA sent off into interstellar space in 1977. And that poem by Maya Angelou inspired by Sagan's "mote of matter". Carolyn Porco writes about how this image of our planet came to be.
Apollo 8 astronauts later presented their experiences to the US Congress: "To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together." Here's a movie of that experience from the astronauts.
Public presentations from JPL/NASA on climate change are available as videos from the Pasadena League of Women Voters as part of their Climate Change Forum series
The Fibonacci sequence is a famous group of numbers beginning with 0 and 1 in which each number is the sum of the two before it. It begins 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and continues infinitely. The pattern hides a powerful secret: If you divide each number in the sequence by its predecessor (except for 1 divided by 0), then as you move toward higher numbers, the result converges on the constant phi, or approximately 1.61803, otherwise known as the golden ratio.
My regenerative concept for the Trade Center was submitted to the New Visions New York panel for consideration as an overarching vision. The documentation is here. The concept of crystalline light shattering at 9:15 am on Sept. 11, in a site regenerated with a tree of life and "green towers" now lives on in many other urban design schemes.
The President's State of the Union speech tonight was a true breath of fresh air, especially in its emphasis on the responsibility of all parties to a pact or an effort to put real, factual information on the table, achieve consensus and accept the consequences of their actions.
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