The Guns of August

 

 

This title seems appropriate, given that it's the name of a book that examines the historic factors leading to the start of WWI.

The IPCC report is a dire warning delivered with an urgency not expressed in previous reports. The key to climate politics is guaranteeing fossil fuel workers no loss in salary as sustainable energy replaces carbon-based fuel – and this would cost “a pittance” says Robert Pollin on the Analysis.news with Paul Jay:

"The U.S. military is the global largest emitter of emissions. The point being, that to finance scale-level investments in a new clean energy economy, which is — and I take that as part of the sixth assessment report. I think it’s more emphasized in that one than prior ones. That is the first project. We can talk about all kinds of new fancy things. But unless we’re willing to cut carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and transforming into a clean energy system, then there’s nothing really else that we can do.

So we have to stop burning oil, coal, natural gas, and we use the technologies we have that work fine. That is renewable energy and efficiency."

An analysis published by The Conversation in June of 2019 reveals the scope of the US military impact on climate change:

"Greenhouse gas emission accounting usually focuses on how much energy and fuel civilians use. But recent work, including our own, shows that the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries. If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal."

"It’s no coincidence that US military emissions tend to be overlooked in climate change studies. It’s very difficult to get consistent data from the Pentagon and across US government departments. In fact, the United States insisted on an exemption for reporting military emissions in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This loophole was closed by the Paris Accord."

Another report from about the same time out of Brown University, "Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War", digs into the climate pollution from the U.S. Department of Defence (DOD). This includes the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and other defence agencies. This report is used to compare the emissions from the DOD to the computed emissions projected from the Alberta oilsands.

"This chart also lets you see how the oilsands’ pollution surge has accelerated over time. The oilsands added a half tonne per Canadian in the 15 years up to 2005. Then the industry added twice as much climate pollution per Canadian over the next 12 years.

As a result, the oilsands industry is now a ten times greater climate burden for each Canadian, than the U.S. military is per American."

So the US Military is now eclipsed by Canada's oilsands in Alberta, another massive source of carbon emissions that are not included in the computations for emissions and per capita assignments. This is a very, very serious issue that somehow never gets on the table. Without accurate accounting for all fossil fuel emissions, it's nearly impossible to create an accurate carbon framework back at the UN level. And thus all efforts come to naught.

It's Complicated

For those who want to really understand what's happening with big private money driving political demagoguery that disrupts the rule of law, get your hands on the book, Dark Money, by Jane Mayer. This documents in depth what has been shifting the political climate in our country to the point that democracy is now in danger via billions of dollars of undisclosed private money. An excerpt:

Lewis Powell, a corporate attorney who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, was the author of a brilliant battle plan detailing how conservative business interests could reclaim American politics. In 1971, he issued a memo to the business community to fight back against liberal policies.

"He urged America's capitalists to wage "guerilla warfare" agains those seeking to "insidiously" undermine corporate America. Conservatives must capture public opinion, he argued, by exerting influence over the institutions that shape it, which he identified as academia, the media, the churches and the courts. He argued that conservatives should control the political debate at its source by demanding "balance" in textbooks, television shows, and news coverage. Donors, he argued, should demand a say in university hiring and curriculum and "press vigorously in all political arenas." The key to victory, he predicted, was "careful long-range planning and implementation" backed by a "scale of financing available only through joint effort."

Thus was kicked off the conservative think tank structures funded by the Kochs and the ALEC corporate network which has proceeded to do exactly that. So what we have now is a corporate coup fronted by a carney barker. They are dismantling the government agencies and eliminating their tax liabilities, with the intent of removing Medicare and Social Security safety nets, as is laid out in detail in Mayer's book.  There are all the covert strategies outlined in there as well.

The strategy applies *in spades* to the climate change issue, because all of these billionaires, thinktanks and agencies that are heavily invested in fossil fuels, which rely on being extracted and burned to retain their value. Bill McKibben understood this early on as he discussed the Rockefeller Foundation grant that supported his position.

 "For example, Trump may be uniquely hostile to the rule of law, ethics in public service, and a free press. But the assault on our democracy didn’t start with his election. He is as much a symptom as a cause of what ails us. Think of our body politic like a human body, with our constitutional checks and balances, democratic norms and institutions, and well-informed citizenry all acting as an immune system protecting us from the disease of authoritarianism. Over many years, our defenses were worn down by a small group of right-wing billionaires—people like the Mercer family and Charles and David Koch—who spent a lot of time and money building an alternative reality where science is denied, lies masquerade as truth, and paranoia flourishes. By undermining the common factual framework that allows a free people to deliberate together and make the important decisions of self-governance, they opened the way for the infection of Russian propaganda and Trumpian lies to take hold. They've used their money and influence to capture our political system, impose a right-wing agenda, and disenfranchise millions of Americans."

The informal system of offshoring wealth to avoid taxes by these big money entities has been extensively documented. It helps to remember that many of them are financially bigger than most countries in the world, hence have a place at the table of the formation of global trade policies that undermine the ability of these governments to defend their citizens from destructive profit schemes embedded in these trade agreements which state that they overrule local governance policies and don't offer a means of recourse. Hence the emergence of conservative populists in governments across the globe that promise to enforce geographical borders and retain local economies and jobs. Unfortunately these populists devolve into the corruption of cronyism and self-dealing, directed by the big money that drives their real agenda - an escape from taxes and undermining the social support systems. The government budget allocations are then driven to military budgets that feed the corporate contracts and instigation of wars for profit, usually the fossil fuel and weapons industries.

From Insurge: "We are currently in the midst of a global phase-shift signalling that the prevailing order, paradigm and value-system are outmoded and unsustainable. The breakdown of the global system has led to a heightened state and speed of indeterminacy across political, economic, cultural and ideological structures and sub-systems. We experience this in the increasing confusion across all these systems, particularly expressed in the ‘post-truth’ dislocation of our prevailing information systems."

Again, from Insurge: "When NATO intervened in Libya, when the US and UK backed Saudi Arabia’s indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Yemen, it only destabilised the region further. The arc of collapse across the Middle East and North Africa resulted from a fatal combination: an earth system crisis, compounded by short-sighted and self-serving responses from human systems...The earth system crisis that erupted in Syria triggered a wave of human system destabilisation of which Brexit was merely the first eruption. And so the Syria crisis is indeed a taste of things to come. Europe is already a post-peak oil continent, whose domestic fossil resources are in decline."

So you can see that the systemic implementation of global trade policies are driven by energy costs and those that profit from them. This has the tragic consequence of planetary destruction from carbon emissions because of the embedded fiscal profiteering in these influential industries and the big money of the one percent. They are defending a system that is structured to run on fossil fuel investments that have to be burned to provide the cash flow for these profits. Which is a major factor in the failure of the COP processes that are dwarfed by the annual build-up of atmospheric carbon emissions. In some respects the Paris Agreement hinted at a potential step change but this moment of hope has quickly given way to Byzantine technocracy the rulebook, stocktaking, financial scams and corporate disinformation that undermines the world's governments that are trying to create a global agreement.

Update 1/17/19: How the forever-war crowd holds the reins on US foreign policy and its budget

Denial

The blaze that erupted in London's Grenfeld Tower in June of 2017, resulting in the utter destruction of the structure inasmuch as its steel framework remained standing, is under examination by the government as well as media sources. The search for blame for the inferno resulting from cheap exterior cladding has unearthed a disingenuous claim by the Daily Mail that environmental requirements were the cause of the faulty design, as cited by the Carbon Brief analysis published in The Guardian.

"On page eight is a full-page commentary from Ross Clark, sitting under the headline question: “So did an obsession with green targets lead to inferno?” Clark, who has published various climate sceptic articles and written a book attacking regulations he believes to be “strangling” the UK."

The 2012 planning documents cited by the Daily Mail – and studied by Carbon Brief – show that its reporting of their content to be highly selective and misleading, per the article. This amounts to another systematic attempt to deconstruct environmental regulations with the critique that they are onerous and lead to dangerous building structures. This kind of position could only be taken if one dismisses the facts of the matter, which are that the retrofit did not include fire sprinklers, and that a non-flammable exterior was available for an additional few thousand pounds. It's actually a result of willful disregard for life safety because of cost issues, not environmental issues.

In fact, the position of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) in their report on Grenfell is an emphasis on maintaining professional competency in the engineering profession with even more oversight of design and construction approaches in the building industry.

A documentary film by Jamie Roberts points directly at the impact of pro-business policies which have permitted these kinds of fires to continue to happen over the last half century:

"The Fires that Foretold Grenfell, a well-researched, powerful documentary, is essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand the causes of and background to the June 2017 Grenfell fire tragedy. It includes harrowing interviews with survivors of five fires across the UK over a span of 45 years, their families and firefighters.

It demonstrates that the inferno which claimed 72 lives was not an accident, but a social crime. It was the result of the pro-big business policies of successive governments which ignored the lessons of five tragic fires, resulting in many avoidable deaths."

This form of denial obviously needs to be thoroughly debunked before it becomes accepted as some kind of talking point, as it's clearly fueled by disinformation put out by the fossil fuel industry which supports people who say things like this. It is at the root of the obstruction of the necessary decarbonization of our built environment and energy production. Not only that, this kind of denial serves to confuse the issues and bury the facts in deliberate misinformation about physics and building construction.

For example, this fire is typical of what happens to steel structures that are fully engulfed in major fires; the building materials are consumed, but the steel frames remain intact. And yet another denial tries to construct an alternate reality about these kinds of structures in The 9/11 Commission Report and other reports by the NIST, which have been deconstructed by the 9/11 Consensus Panel, based upon further evidence obtained in many sources as well as accurate engineering analyses. This has been published in the book, 9/11 Unmasked, which points out that no other high rises have ever been structurally destroyed by fire. The Twin Towers came down at the speed of gravity on their footprints, which points straight at a demolition scenario in order to create a "Pearl Harbor" event.

As has been established extensively in the press, this event was used as a pretext for the Bush administration to instigate wars in the middle east on behalf of their Arab allies in order to procure further fossil fuel resources. Thus denial comes full circle as a tool in its deliberate destruction of human lives and our environment on an almost unimaginable scale of annihilation. That it may lead to the extinction of life on our planet by the end of this century is a responsibility that is shirked by the oil industry in its rapacious efforts to protect its profits.

Update 11/9/18: Bill McKibben - Up Against Big Oil in the Midterms

Update 11/14/18:  There is a huge fight by the fossil fuel industry against cheap renewables.

Update 11/24/18: Hunter Lovins - Capitalism v. Ecological Economics in a Hotter World

Update 12/9/18: Large coal holdings investments are held by some of the world’s largest pension funds

Update 3/2/19: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are quietly helping Big Oil destroy the climate.

Update 10/8/19:  The money behind the climate denial movement

Update 4/3/20:  University of Alaska Fairbanks WTC 7 Final Report

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

Momentum to COP 26

COP23 in Bonn has concluded, and the discussions managed to negotiate outcomes agreed to at the UN climate talks. This article by Jocelyn Timperley of Carbon Brief is a succinct summary of the proceedings. She notes a significant comment by  Mohamed Adow, international climate lead at Christian Aid London : "The days when you looked to one country to be able to actually lead the transition are gone. We’re now in a new era, where we are actually seeing more shared distributed leadership emerging, where 200 countries have collectively contributed to the global effort." So the process has now become far more consensus-based.

In another article from Bianca Jagger for Huffpost, the emphasis is that the stakes at COP23 are higher than ever, and time is running out.  At COP 23, James Hansen provided a strong pronouncement on the urgency of the climate change situation, and took clear and unequivocal scientific positions on the danger that the planet is in. This video of his Nov.10 press conference, Scientific Reticence: A Threat to Humanity and Nature, records Jim Hansen, Pam Pearson and Philip Duffy in a dialogue about the rapidly escalating temperatures in the arctic. Their stance is that legal avenues need to be pursued to force goals that reflect science with actions that ensure that the limit of 1.5C temperature is not exceeded, per the agreement struck at COP 21 in Paris.

The big question at COP 23 was the question of who would step into the leadership role that the United States has abdicated on climate change. Perhaps no group has made a bigger splash on the world stage this year than the coalition of United States governors, mayors and businesses who call themselves We Are Still In coalition. Informally led by Gov. Jerry Brown of California; Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, and Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, the group has vowed to uphold the Paris agreement and move ahead with policies to fight climate change.This group of state and local officials are determined to begin implementing strategies that bring US emissions to net zero in the near future. It's a big challenge, not just because of Trump's intransigence on the subject, but also the uphill battle with the fossil fuel majors. The tragedy of this is that we're already in the process of ramping up emissions, when we should be moving as quickly as possible to zero. This is why it's critically important to use accurate, scientific data and measurements to make the substance of the negotiations actually work to prevent runaway climate change.

The WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin reports on atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Emissions represent what goes into the atmosphere. Concentrations represent what remains in the atmosphere after the complex system of interactions between the atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere and the oceans. About a quarter of the total emissions is taken up by the oceans and another quarter by the biosphere, reducing in this way the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. A separate Emissions Gap Report by UN Environment, released on October 31, tracks the policy commitments made by countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and analyses how these policies will translate into emissions reductions through 2030, clearly outlining the emissions gap and what it would take to bridge it.

"The numbers don't lie. We are still emitting far too much and this needs to be reversed. The last few years have seen enormous uptake of renewable energy, but we must now redouble our efforts to ensure these new low-carbon technologies are able to thrive. We have many of the solutions already to address this challenge. What we need now is global political will and a new sense of urgency," said Erik Solheim, head of UN Environment.

Together, the Greenhouse Gas Bulletin and Emissions Gap Report provided a scientific base for decision-making at the UN climate change negotiations.

Update 11/20/17: Nations have agreed to launch the next steps toward higher climate action ambition before 2020

Update 11/22/17: Anthony Doerr: We Were Warned 25 years ago

Update 11/25/17: Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, research archives, Nov. 12 2017

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.

The Year of Storms

We're seeing a series of massive, deadly storms in the midwest, and it's just the beginning of summer. Tornadoes, floods and hurricanes occurring over and over; the atmosphere is unleashing tremendous energies. Storms in Europe are creating unprecedented flooding. The Nation Institute, via TomDispatch.com, has posted an article by Rebecca Solnit, which is in dialogue with Bill McKibben's writings on planet Eaarth.

Her article at Tom Dispatch makes timely comments about how human civilization responds in the face of large disasters, now bearing down upon us more and more often because of climate change. The consequences of climate change are a lance aimed straight at the heart of our oil-supported structure in the United States and now across the globe:

Cheap oil requires our insanely expensive military whose annual budget amounts to nearly as much as the rest of the world’s militaries put together, a crazy foreign policy, and in the past decade, a lot of death in the Middle East. It also pushes along the destruction of nearly everything via climate-change, a cost so terrible that the word “unaffordable” doesn’t begin to describe it. “Unimaginable” might, except that the point of all the data and data projections is to imagine it clearly enough so that we react to it.

Bill McKibben, writing in the New York Review of Books on Nov.5, 2009 makes his usual succinct comments on her previous book "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster". They have proven to be prescient.

"Its also time to ask another question, which is what the future will actually feel like once we don't prevent global warming. That is, what will it be like to live not on the relatively stable planet that civilization has known throughout the ten thousand years of the Holocene, but on the amped-up and careening planet we're quickly creating? With her remarkable and singular book, "A Paradise Built in Hell", Rebecca Solnit has thought harder about the answer to that question than anyone else. And she's done it almost entirely with history - she's searched out the analogues to our future in our past, examining the human dynamics of natural disasters from the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 up through Hurricane Katrina...Solnit's argument, at bottom, is that human nature is not necessarily what we imagine it to be, and the even in very extreme cases, people are cooperative."

This challenge that arises to meet us now may perhaps be the very Frankenstein monster that we've created - which will force us into a moral stance on the lifestyle that we've built -  a lifestyle which violates the physics of natural processes on our planet.

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.

Warlords R Us

“Warfare is inherently destructive of sustainable development. States shall therefore respect international law providing protection for the environment in times of armed conflict and cooperate in its further development, as necessary.” – 1992 Rio Declaration.

With all the talk about climate change and environmental disasters, one major issue seems to have skittered under the radar: the endless propensities for war due to tribal conflicts, formal wars and terrorist activities as defined under Homeland Security regulations. War is the most hideously damaging enterprise of all human activity, and we now have the Military-Industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about in high gear all over the globe.

In particular, the environmental impact of war is devastating.This page has a war timeline that examines the destructive impacts of wars over the last century, and you'll notice that they have escalated significantly in the last 20 years.

From the Learn Peace site:

The earth’s environment is battered by war, its preparation, practice and aftermath. It is destroyed as an act of war; it is used as a weapon of war; and its destruction is expensive and sometimes irreversible. Its integral involvement with war is often secret, widely ignored, and easily forgotten – until now.

Now, some people are beginning to talk and listen. Some people are beginning to act. There is a treaty to ban landmines now. There are moves towards tackling the problems of nuclear waste and weapon stockpiles. There is a growing global awareness – with charters to prove it – that war has created consequences which cross boundaries and ignore territories. Natural disasters are costly enough; the cost of war damage is much higher. Even if politics don’t achieve change, economics might.

Corporatocracy has fueled this unending war strategy for profit, and is now complicit in the global encroachment into human rights that has purchased governments and legislatures, created its own armed enforcers, engaged in systemic economic fraud, and plundered treasuries and ecosystems. Democratic rights even in the US have been eroded as corporations buy police departments with their "donations" to these public instruments of government, and turn them to squelching public outcry against corporate control of government and finance. Corporations fomenting war and weapons of repression (from artillery to guns to financial wealth transfer from sovereign nations and citizens) have become bigger than many countries. A step in the right direction would be massive disinvestment in corporations like Halliburton, Boeing, Rockwell, Northrup Grumman, Blackwater/Xe and this list of war profiteers. Another important step is to increase transparency of corporate money flows and extinguish the corporate shelter tax havens so that corporations carry their share of supporting governments operating under the rule of law, which reduces global systemic risk as well.

The point is, of all of our strategies to combat climate change and achieve sustainable habitation on this planet, ending conflict and repression is the biggest sledgehammer in the toolbox. Corporate influence in this out-of-control war machine must be removed. We've got to make this issue a priority as we pull back on carbon emissions and learn to live within the energy budget that will pass a healthy world onto future generations.

Legislating Zero

A special report from the Architecture 2030 organization notes that a bi-partisan congressional effort reestablishes the 2030 Challenge targets in the US Senate:

The Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act of 2011 was introduced on May 13, 2011 by Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH). The bill places meeting the 2030 Challenge target of zero-net-energy for new buildings by 2030 as the first item in a comprehensive strategy for U.S. energy reductions in the building and industrial sectors. Specifically, Sec. 101 of the legislation, Greater Energy Efficiency in Building Codes, directs the Secretary of Energy to “establish targets for specific years” with each target “higher than the preceding target” on a “path to achieving zero-net-energy” by the year 2030.

The baselines for incremental updates of the codes are the 2009 IECC for residential buildings and ASHRAE Standard 90.1–2010 for commercial buildings. The first code update, the 2012 IECC, which will be released in about a month, meets the initial 50% reduction target of the 2030 Challenge.The 2030 Challenge has been included in numerous other federal, state, and local pieces of legislation. This most recent bill offers another opportunity for the U.S. to realize the energy reduction targets of the 2030 Challenge.

This legislation is an example of the needed "third leg" of the implementation of zero-carbon existence in American culture, the other two being the net-zero industry benchmarks as was laid out in my last post, and the actual change in the supply chain for materials and labor that result in the complete reduction of carbon emissions.

The impetus for this has come from the architecture and engineering profession for decades now, and on Thursday May 12, a keynote speech by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, addressing a capacity crowd during the opening-day session of the AIA National Convention in New Orleans, warned that Americans need to change their values and embrace a green global ecosystem to ward off a truly cataclysmic future. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning author in the fields of economics and US foreign policy.

The 2011 AIA Conference is dubbed "Regional Design Revolution: Ecology Matters". This signals a call for a major turning point in US public policy, which must now move from its thrall to old polluting industries to the clean, regenerative energies that flow with natural processes. No longer can the US simply pig out on cheap, destructive oil and extractive fuels while destroying global ecosystems and bringing on the climate change that is wreaking havoc around the planet, in addition to triggering destructive wars in order to capture other countries' resources for corporate profiteers.

And the students have something to say about THAT, as well. It's their future now, as well as their challenge.

Rite of Spring

The Faust theme, that of risking eternal damnation by selling one’s soul to the devil in exchange for magical powers, can be found in nearly every genre of music as well as in the arts and literature. This is a biblical theme examining humanity’s place in the universe and the struggle between good and evil. It plays out in technology as well, in the energy that enables us to generate heat and light, to fly and race over the globe, and use powerful machines to move the earth, as well as broadcast the beams of information, music, images and ideas across the globe. This magic is powered by that black energy from deep in the earth, coal and oil. Burn that, and you've got the Faustian bargain of carbon loading in the biosphere and the horrific toll that pollution and climate change is taking on planetary systems.

Looking at this issue mythically may help us create a vision of redemption that can be used to trick the devil in the final stretch. Listening to the notorious music by Stravinsky in the ballet by Diaghilev, which created an uproar over its expression of primitive power and seductive entrapment, we can see that there's a way out of the trap. This theme has been re-imagined over and over, the music emerging more recently again in Bob Fosse's choreography in that 1955 play about the Yankees losing the pennant: Damn Yankees. Gwen Verdon does it all justice in "Whatever Lola Wants", the great seduction number.

Myth, metaphor, philosophy and wisdom can go beyond the bounds of everyday vision and inspire a collaborative, focused goal of reintegrating with the natural processes and leaving the dark fuels behind. It relies on making the social connections and valuing the smaller, more intimate and ultimately most effective systems and lifestyles. Out of that vision emerges the strategies and solutions that return life to the earth in the manner in which we found it. It's a choice we can make as the inhabitants of this planet - the devil's bargain can be broken. Joe did slam that ball out of the park and with Lola's help, he made it back home to Meg.

By the Numbers

Once again Western policies in third world countries backfire, resulting in deforestation in Africa rather than the preservation of ecologies that balance our planet's ecosystem. Like the World Bank funding of large, destructive dams, the policies foster ecological destruction in the name of finance and "progress".

The problem is, deforestation is one of the major, if hidden, causes of global warming. It goes beyond the destruction of plant absorption, soil and nutrients that creates flooding in deforested areas when the rains hit. Forests are the lungs of the planet. But our Western fiscal structures for integrating better living conditions in these areas are actually contributing to their demise.

Truthdig's article on the deforestation of Africa points out that the financial structure of supposedly using forests to offset carbon credits actually results in their destruction. It has taken local, rural people stepping up to object to these practices to stop the destruction of their resources, an issue raised at the Copenhagen summit only to be rebuffed. As the article goes on to state:

Yet that is the deal that must be done someday soon to avoid climate disaster. For a fraction of the world’s military spending, it could be a Green New Deal that creates new industries, advances new technologies and revives our economy—much like the spending on World War II boosted America into prosperity. It is a proposition that we can no longer afford to refuse.

It's increasingly apparent that the integration of Natural Capital into the balance sheets is necessary to preserve global ecology; the old policies were based upon destructive practices and industries that can no longer be used, as well as failing to account for fully half of the resource consumption cycle. As Thomas Friedman has pointed out numerous times, the financial profits have to be created out of new kinds of practices that are not destructive of the very resources that give them value.

A Small Hiatus

It's time to pay the piper for those actions and policies that our government undertakes in our behalf. Or at least that Congress undertakes on behalf of their benefactors...oil industry, military (same thing), dams and coal plants. The cost of this being the worst insult.

So I can spend my own time and money trying to undo the damage.

You've Come a Long Way Baby

The May 1996 issue of Boardwatch Magazine featured the now infamous Billgatus of Borg with a story of Microsoft's ongoing assimilation of all that is software in the personal computer industry and the Internet. What's happened since then to the infamous billionaire and his proclamations and philanthropy?

Well, on February 12th at the TED conference, he proclaimed that his top priority is now getting to zero emissions by 2050. End of story. Finis. Just as we have all been assimilated by Microsoft (not). But this is an important public commitment for him to make, since at this point his corporate and phlianthropic policies are close to trumping the political policies of entire countries. No behind-the-scenes here like we get with the oil companies (2 wars in Iraq and counting, one in Afghanistan, several in the oven) and the financial/banking industry (one global fiscal collapse so far). Right out there were everyone can see it and let the marketing department know how it plays out in Peoria.

It remains to be seen how we wrangle out the details, since reducing emissions involves a carbon tax, not cap-and-trade. Along with drastic lifestyle alterations and fewer people. But I'm optimistic that people will want to choose how we shrink our planetary impact as opposed to just driving it over the edge and having the whole thing come down. Like we've watched the global financial meltdown over the last year...somehow just selling paper and crunching funny numbers doesn't work. You have to actually accomplish something in the real world.

Can You Imagine?

As I've pointed out in earlier posts here and here, the US is heavily into funding armed conflict with our tax dollars that should be more wisely spent on our programs here at home that support the middle-class safety net as well as provide infrastructure repair and upgrade so that the US can meet the necessary global CO2 goals that are approaching very quickly. I've also mentioned the policy shift that's being carried out by our Secretary of State to shift funding from the military to climate change, now considered a security threat to the USA.

The USA is currently the top arms supplier to conflicts around the globe. This has everything to do with propping up corporations for now, like Boeing/Lockheed Martin, until they can shift to more peacetime production. Our tax dollars are not just going to banks and auto production, they're also being used to support global armed conflict, which drives national public policy. This is a major portion of US industry. The list of aerospace and defense companies is here. This whole thing doesn't strike me as an example of a capitalist free market, it's like a Monopoly game with the winner holding the money bag; no transparency or balance is possible with this kind of an old-boy network.

Many industry publications track this activity and stump via their government connections and lobbyists for further Federal funding for their companies; examples here and here. The DOD has an extensive website on their structure and armed forces organization, very helpful.

What if we spent these dollars not to fund war and conflict, but to heal the eco damage we've done and produce sustainable businesses and global community so that there are equitable returns for countries around the globe? What if we were in balance with natural processes? Could there be better return on investment here? Can you imagine?

But the room will have to be half-full of women...

NOAA - Abandoning the Ark?

From its website: NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the oceans to surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources. Their article, Warmest Global Ocean Surface Temperatures on Record for July was posted last week. Recent investigation of ice cores has documented the direct human impact on global warming.

Doesn't understanding create a responsibility? The USA and its corporations are spending more money on global environmental destruction than any other country. From Seeking Alpha: "The United States, the only superpower remaining on earth, currently spends more on military than the next 45 highest spending countries in the world combined. The U.S. accounts for 48% of the world’s total military spending."

It's YOUR money, as Charlie Gibson is fond of saying.

Digital Insurgency

This morning I was reading the New York Times coverage of the new position being taken by the Department of Defense that climate change is a threat to US Security. This reflects the evolving change in the US position on this issue, which I discussed earlier with respect to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its efforts to negotiate world consensus on climate action. This collaborative process has been attacked by the Cato Institute, among others, who attempt to deny the impacts of carbon emissions on climate.

Checked in at the UN Portal for IPCC, and found that it's been hacked, supposedly from an individual in Brazil, with some message about "those who do nothing" as a quote from Einstein. Well, an attack is an attack, this is direct and illegal, even if it's draped in sentiments about slow-moving global political processes. Until the site top page is corrected, information on the IPCC is still available here, and the other subpages on the site are still functional.

In the meantime, as the NYT goes on to point out, the need for a real climate bill is becoming far more urgent as science data comes in showing the progressive acceleration of change.

Further Adventures of a Space Cadet

As you may know, Google posted a very fun "April Fool" project in 2008 called "Virgle the Aventure of Many Lifetimes", with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin presenting, and joined up with Virgin founder Richard Branson. Original page is at http://www.google.com/onceuponatime/virgle/ Also included is the Virgle Channel http://www.youtube.com/projectvirgle featuring Branson.

Key to this concept is understanding that to achieve this vision, there must be some major on-orbit infrastructure to support construction, development and launch of these exploration initiatives. My 1979 thesis outlines this strategy in a Relevance Tree and shows how a Low Earth Orbit platform, working in concert with lunar mining and large vehicle production outside of earth's gravity well allows for effective use of labor and materials, as well as providing "many futures" rather than just one projection line (dotted). This permits industrial development and production of energy facilities using solar power, which can be beamed to earth as well as used on-orbit. This removes the carbon production cycle from the earth's atmosphere because major construction activity, mining and energy production are done outside of the atmosphere, and pollution from launch, manufacturing and transit are also off-planet. There is also a serious need for the earth observation platform rehabilitation, especially now that tracking global warming and its effects are a crucial dataset. Additional important needs for a low-earth orbit presence are space debris removal and asteroid tracking/deflection.

If the US military budget could be used for this constructive effort in concert with other countries, we could avoid the massive waste on useless military hardware and overblown budgets for failed political interventions, and actually increase the GDP significantly while the government contractors still get their contracts. Win-win. Note the April 20 NYT article about how contractors are "fed" massive contracts and manipulated by the Pentagon. MESSAGE MACHINE; Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand
"Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration's war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized."This approach to shifting military expense to where it is most effective in US long-term security interests fully supports the (Secretary of Defense) Gates doctrine.

The STAIF conference is where the REAL industry development is happening for studies of the components of human habitation in space. They accept research papers from folks in the industry, and have had some very interesting scenarios presented of human habitation development and on-orbit infrastructure for space exploration.

http://www.spaceagepub.com/subscribers/LDarchive/LD20030205.html

My presentation in 2003 was right behind Harrison Schmitt's proposal for a lunar mining colony, presented again later in San Francisco last year in February:

http://starbulletin.com/2007/02/18/news/story02.html