Belt and Road

Architect's Newspaper Sept. 2019: "For this year’s international practice issue we looked at China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the trillion-dollar project aimed at tying the world to Beijing, and slavery’s role in the global construction industry. The Belt and Road initiative set up by Xi Jinping in 2013 includes hundreds of infrastructure projects financed or constructed in part or in whole by Chinese entities far beyond its borders. "Belt" refers to roads and railways, while "roads" refers to sea lanes, all of which unifies almost the entirely of Asia and Africa. The number and physical size of these infrastructure projects promises to remake urban landscapes - alter, and destroy - natural landscapes and consume untold millions of tons of natural resources, building materials and fossil fuels. The BRI is as much a geopolitcal experiment as it is an economic development strategy."

And it is definitely NOT a "green vision".  An analysis shows that China's BRI is loaded with coal power.

China is by far the biggest player in Asia, having supplied or pledged $36 billion for coal plants in 23 countries, according to the IEEFA. The Chinese government has provided financing from state-run banks and included many of the projects in its colossal Belt and Road Initiative, which is designed to expand Beijing’s influence through investments in strategic foreign infrastructure projects.

China has modernized their one-party dictatorship with market oriented reforms, i.e., its own version of authoritarian capitalism since Deng Xiaoping's rise to power after Mao's Cultural Revolution.His violent suppression of society and the government resulted in primarily military and police state power. This has led to an economic expansion and more wealth for a few Chinese connected to the right party officials and the Bank of China. It's this monolithic structure that Xi Jinping has inherited and continues to expand using economic levers in many countries with BRI as its mechanism.

A new study uncovers China's massive hidden lending to poor countries. Over 50 developing countries' Chinese debt accounts for on average 15 percent of their individual GDP. An example of their methodology is the way China isolates Taiwan with projects in poorer countries; the price of the development is breaking official ties with Taiwan. In this manner, China magnifies its influence over Taiwan without a direct confrontation with the US, which continues to sell weapons to Taipei. Beijing is withholding the $4.9 billion needed to finish the road project in Kenya, once a flagship for Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative. But with concerns rising globally that BRI was loading poorer nations with unsustainable debt, Xi signaled in April that Beijing would exert more control over projects and tighten oversight. Chinese influence in Myanmar is growing. One of China’s biggest projects is the construction of a deep-sea port on the coast of Rakhine State. China’s ambitions for Myanmar also feature oil and gas pipelines to feed its insatiable energy needs. One of the pipelines cuts right through Rakhine State—suggesting an incentive for the Burmese military’s aggressiveness against the people living there. In Belarus, activists are protesting the massive industrial park development, the Great Stone Industrial Park outside Minsk. To quote one activist, "America and Europe won't give money for dirty factories like this, but China doesn't care and wants business for Chinese companies."

Earlier in 2018, the New York Times did an extensive examination of this topic: "We examined nearly 600 projects that China helped finance in the last decade, through billions of dollars in grants, loans and investments. Taken together, they show the scope and motivation of China’s strategy.41 pipelines and other oil and gas infrastructure help China secure valuable resources. We found 112 countries where China has financed projects. While most fall under its infrastructure plan known as the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has pushed beyond those boundaries.South Africa turned to China for $1.5 billion for a coal-fired power plant. It is one of at least 63 such plants financed by China around the world, which collectively pollute more than Spain." The Times has recently produced a longer investigation of projects in Kazakhstan, in an inaccessible area on the steppes of Central Asia, "The Trillion Dollar Nowhere".

 It's not too late to "green" that Belt and Road project. A couple of years ago, China even issued its own $2.15 billion Green Climate Bond to finance renewables and energy efficiency. But when it comes to that Belt and Road Initiative, China is not big enough. Although the Party centralized authority in Xi Jinping’s hands, those infrastructure projects come from a variety of sources in China, including different government agencies, provinces competing with each other, and the business sector. It’s hard enough for the Chinese state, even with a new and more powerful Ministry of Ecology and Environment and a cadre of environmental police officers, to impose stringent standards within the country. More to the point, China has shown little interest or capacity when it comes to imposing them outside its borders.

While the Chinese initiative initially received an overwhelmingly positive reception, since mid-2017 the democratic Quad—Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S.—and several European countries have begun to signal major reservations about the BRI. A new multi-country survey found that there is little public support for coal projects in key countries for China's ambitious BRI, knowing that country's penchant for leveraging its investments into control, such as has been experienced lately with Hong Kong.

There is rightful international concern about the agenda behind China's development push, particularly since it imposes its own culture and only honors contracts it sees fit. However, some scholars counter that there is no evidence that China’s plan is to entrap developing countries. Deborah Brautigam, director of the Africa-China Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, said the Sri Lanka port is the only one out of more than 3,000 Belt and Road projects that has ended in a 99-year lease. “We’ve not seen a pattern of deliberate entrapment in order to get some strategic advantage,” Brautigam said.

Update 9/23/19: Belt and Road propels Chinese contractors to top of global ranks

Update 9/24/19: China’s BRI: a Marshall Plan in reverse

Update 9/25/19: China’s BRI cargo to Europe under scrutiny as operator admits to moving empty containers

Update 10/3/19: 'Coal is still king' in Southeast Asia even as countries work toward cleaner energy

Update 10/29/19: In Laos, A Chinese-Funded Railway Sparks Hope For Growth — And Fears Of Debt

Update 12/2/19: China’s Renewed Coal Boom - Including India

Update 12/4/19: James Hansen - China's coal emissions

Update 12/14/19: China has invested heavily in the Mediterranean region as part of its Belt and Road initiative and controls a string of major eastern Mediterranean ports, including Piraeus.

Update 12/19/19: Syria plans to join China's Belt and Road Initiative

Update 3/4/20: One of China’s Most Ambitious Projects Becomes a Corridor to Nowhere.

Update 4/29/20: Is China’s 2013 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) a debt trap?

Update 4/30/20: Belt and Road Tracker.

Update 10/3/20: China's Imperial Overreach

Update 9/12/21  China's transcontinental grid of railroads, oil pipelines

Update 10/2/21: The Winner in Afghanistan: China

Update 5/8/22: China's Belt and Road is so enormous that its impacts could accelerate climate change.

Externalities

National governments and subregional agencies are beginning to coalesce around strategies to actually implement the necessary steps towards substantially reducing fossil fuel use as an energy source. They are taking these steps, moving from Paris (COP22) in 2016, to Bonn (COP23) in fall of 2017, and then onto Katowice, Poland (COP24). The recognition that fossil fuels have hidden costs in their production - externalities - is driving more comprehensive agreements between governements and industries. This is being done even with the knowledge that the adopted carbon goals are falling short of the necessary reductions to keep temperatures within the limits that have been agreed to as the carbon emissions reduction targets. The UN and climate scientists have been adamant about the excess emissions that are still being allowed by the adopted targets.

Thousands of government representatives, non-Party stakeholders, members of the press and staff of multilateral organizations are now gathering for the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference from 30 April to 10 May in Bonn, Germany. The Talanoa Dialogue, launched at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn (COP23) last November, invites everyone to engage in finding a solution, first by preparing submissions in response to three questions: Where are we? Where do we want to go? How do we get there? A May 2, 2018 briefing at the global climate action summit in Bonn addressed the participants, showcasing how the real world economy is mobilizing to spur bolder action ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference in Katowice, Poland (COP24) in December 2018.

During this year, governments are charting the road map in Germany's UN Climate Summit for achieving the commitments laid out in the Paris Agreement. The decisions they make will either unlock a sustainable and just future, or they will give Big Polluters free rein to keep polluting and interfering in climate policy. This is a result of the December 2017 meeting of the U.N. climate treaty, when governments agreed to finalize the pathways that will make the Paris Agreement a reality. This agreement came about in spite of the corporate efforts from fossil fuel companies and corporate sponsors that had also descended on Bonn, (COP23) where they were pushing their own agenda behind the scenes, as was reported by Democracy Now! at last years' Climate Change Conference with an interview of "Corporate Accountability" ally Pascoe Sabido (Corporate Europe Observatory, co-author of “Polluting Paris”) and Corporate Accountability Media Director Jesse Bragg. They were interviewed by Amy Goodman.  The interview centered on Corporate Accountability’s most recent report, “Polluting Paris,” the fossil fuel industry’s interference in both EU and U.S. climate policy, and Big Polluters’ fingerprints on this year’s climate talks.

An interview with Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC by Ryan Heath of Politico in December 2017 lays out the growing sense of urgency around the rapid implementation of emissions reductions. She discusses the way she intends to outreach to governments, businesses and other global stakeholders. In the interim, prior to COP24, a Global Climate Action Summit hosted by Governor Jerry Brown and Patricia Espinoza, will take place on September 12-14, 2018 in San Francisco. State and local leaders, businesses, investors, scientists, students, nonprofits and others (“subnational actors”) are a critical part of the climate solution and can help push the world’s leaders to go further, faster.

Some trade and energy agreements are currently being put into play that reflect the need for substantive emissions reductions.In the Clean Energy Package announcement in Brussels on November of 2017, the European Union will start to phase out coal subsidies and reduce its energy usage by 30% before 2030 pursuant to the terms of a major clean energy package. It has come under criticism from Greenpeace for its shortcomings since it allows money to be spent on further coal power supplies.

New research now urges a rethink on global energy subsidies, particularly pointing at fossil fuels. Environmentally, energy subsidies tend to have "substantial carbon footprints" because they tend to favor fossil fuels, such as coal and petroleum. As subsidies lower the price of electricity and fuel, they generally lead to higher levels of consumption. They also generally diminish efforts to promote energy efficiency or to conserve energy. Clearly, it would be a major move to eliminate these global energy subsidies, but it would allow governments to put their money towards clean technologies and energy sources that would rapidly reduce the carbon emissions that are wreaking havoc on our planet.

May 2018: Carbon Debitor Excess and Creditor Shortfall

May 2018: All Country List of CO2 emissions in a credit/debit format with share of global budget

Update May 7, 2018: Revolving Door between corporate and public sector for lobbyists

Update May 11, 2018: China wishes to renegotiate & forces U.N. to provide a new draft for COP24

Update May 12, 2018: Arctic sea ice low as UN delegates talk climate in a sweltering Bonn.

Update May 31, 2018: IMF tallies up fossil fuel subsidies at $1.9 trillion a year. That’s 2.5 percent of global GDP!

Update June 1, 2018:  Corporate conflicts of interest eclipse key climate negotiations in Bonn.

Update June 12, 2018: Benefits of curbing climate change far outweigh costs

The Pilferage Continues

This blog is still comprehensively following an issue that erupted in 2013, and has now grown substantially with the revelation of the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers. The impact of this corruption, legal and extralegal, is to undermine the living systems of this planet by the ownership of the vast majority of its resources by the global one percent of wealthy individuals. It's the vision of unlimited growth that drains the resources from people and the planet with expanding extractive, manufacturing and distribution activities.

You can see, from a timelapse video in which Google unveils a 3-decade span of the Earth's envelopment by human habitation, that this destruction is relentless. A charted representation of this time lapse of expanding human occupation and its cumulative emissions is also shown in the green LUC area of Aubrey Meyer's chart,above. Its impact is massive, as big as the USA.

It's time for those remaining with a conscience to take action in the public sphere to make these extractive processes accountable for the damage that they do, and restore the natural world that provides life to all of us. The examination of these damages is being followed here. as is the progression of lawsuits against governments that fail to protect humanity from the predations of global wealth.

Update 11/11/17:  The global oligarchy belongs to a new class, untethered to nation or party.

Update 11/12/17:  Naomi Klein in 2013: How science is telling us all to revolt

Update 11/13/17: COP 23 - Making the Carbon Majors Pay for Climate Action (video)

Update 11/14/17: 15,364 scientists from 184 countries signed this emergency statement

Update 11/15/17: COP 23  Addiction to Growth - Root Cause of Climate Change  (video)

Update 11/27/17: Consumerism is the major cause of global warming - NextSystemProject

Update 12/1/17:  Consumption is the bottleneck for sustainable development

Update 10/4/21:  Pandora Papers - Guardian reports

Update 10/4/21:  United States... centers on its expanding complicity in the offshore economy

Update 12/30/21:  Technology can help anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing efforts.

Update 1/1/22:  Malta is a target of an international money laundering crackdown.

All for a Buck

Just when the arc of US environmental policy began to align with the outlines of the Paris Agreement of December 2015, a new administration takes office in January of this year, one grounded in the denial of physics and science, and in thrall to the fossil fuel industry. The entire disruption of the UN agreement reeks of global oil deals, with the corporate influences reaching into the new administration as well as the tactics brought to bear at the UN table.

The potential future science advisor to the President, William Happer, is a contrarian Princeton physicist who views climate change as a positive factor. "While he has a distinguished career as an atomic physicist, previously serving the administration of George HW Bush as a science director, the 77-year-old’s views on climate science are outnumbered by all the credible evidence, all the credible science agencies and are also being laughed at by the Earth’s thermometers and its melting ice sheets and glaciers", as the Guardian has pointed out.

This, along with a cabinet full of fossil fuel-related corporate executives, seeks to create a triumvirate of oil deals with Russia and Exxon Mobil. “Imagine how much havoc Putin, Trump, and a new, oily Secretary of State could wreak on future negotiations by coercing other countries not to keep making new pledges to ratchet down their emissions, which is the cornerstone of Paris’s strategy to avoid catastrophic climate change.” per The Energy Mix. Perhaps all this results from pressure by the Russian oligarchs that the President is indebted to?

This is an old relationship going back to 2012, when Rosneft and ExxonMobil had signed an agreement to jointly develop tight oil production technologies in Western Siberia. This will enable the companies to later discuss undertaking joint projects to explore and develop prospective areas with unconventional oil potential in Russia.

The way it plays out is this: Exxon Mobil, under Rex Tillerson, brokered a deal with Russia in 2013 for 60 million acres of Russian land to pump oil out of, but all that Russian oil went through pipelines in the Ukraine, who heavily taxed the proceeds, and were applying for admission into NATO at the time. Putin subsequently invaded Ukraine in 2014, secured the routes to export the oil tax-free by sea, and took control of the port where their Black Sea Naval Fleet is based, by taking the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine by force and not giving it back. This was Hitler-tier imperialism that broke every international law in the free world. After Obama sanctioned Russia for the invasion, they could only pump oil from approximately 3 of those 60 million acres. But now Rex Tillerson is our Secretary of State, and as of today, there’s information circulating that Donald Trump will likely unilaterally remove all sanctions against Russia in the coming days or weeks. Putin will make half a trillion (500 Billion) dollars from that much untapped oil. All pumped tax-free through Crimea, stolen from Ukraine, now owned by Russia. Putin may have subverted our government just to become the richest man in the world.

The Republican congress subsequently has a hand in all this, as it moves to rescind the rule requiring Big Oil to reveal foreign government payments.

Since we now have a corporate takeover of our government for profit, it would appear that our chances for survival on our planet are dim. Unless the denizens of this planet can pull the rug out from under this Strangelovian scenario with extremely cheap local renewable energy that doesn't have to be transported or fought over, we're left to deal with this situation without any help from Houston.

But I think we still have a few smart humans left.

Update 2/27/17:  The timeline

Update 2/28/17:  Rachel Maddow explains it all for you - Wilbur Ross at Nexus of Trump Russian Deal

Update 3/2/17: 5 years ago - USA is moving from democracy to plutocracy and corporatocracy

Update 3/3/17: Relationships Between Team Trump and Russia

Update 3/4/17: How a Russian Steel Oligarch and Putin Ally Is Profiting from the Keystone XL Pipeline

Update 3/5/17: Bill McKibben - complete corruption of the fossil fuel industry

Update 3/6/17: Follow the money: the Time Magazine article of Aug 2016

Update 3/11/17: Trump Begins His War For Oil (with Cheney's fingerprints)

Update 3/12/17: In-Depth: Trump's deep Russian financial connections

Update 3/13/17: Democracy Now: A Corporate Coup d’État by Naomi Klein

Update 3/14/17: Leak reveals Rex Tillerson was director of Bahamas-based US-Russian oil firm

Update 3/17/17: Far-right political leaders praise Putin’s aggressive foreign policy

Update 3/23/17: Mercer and a disruptive candidate: Trade of the Century and a Foundation network

The Measure of Drought

Our one-degree warmed planet is deteriorating rapidly. That's a .85C temperature increase since 1880, following the impact of the industrial revolution. We're on the path to 4C right now. Oceans are rising, and the sea is becoming too acidic to support abundant sea life.

Along with the rapid ice melt in the Arctic and Antarctic including the scientific studies of the ice shelf collapses, there is much documentation now of the rapid impact of drought conditions in the recent past and now-imminent future. A summary of data is updated at the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. There's no question that the man-made climate change from fossil fuel use has triggered the collapse of the global ecosphere and set off the runaway climate change that is fueled by natural processes of carbon and methane emissions. NASA is comprehensively compiling the data that will allow us to watch our planet extinguish its life processes.

Drought Global Information System
Water tables dropping worldwide per a NASA study
Scientists warn of unprecedented damage to forests across the world
Mother Jones on the fate of global forests
World Resources Institute examines the impact of local water supplies

Looking down into some of the regional biospheres and how they're enduring under the global heating of the planet from carbon emissions turns up many articles examining local conditions in 2015:

Sao Paulo drought
South America drought
California drought
Arizona drought
Nevada drought
Oregon drought
Washington drought
Mexico City drought
India drought
China drought
North Korea drought
South Africa drought
Ethiopia drought 
Zimbabwwe drought
Indochina drought
European drought 
Spain drought
Peru drought
Australia drought
Australia climate
Papua New Guinea drought
Middle East drought
Yemen drought
Cuba drought

All of this so that these destructive fossil fuel companies can continue to make their profits, enabled by the worldwide governmental subsidies of fossil fuels at their disposal. The drastic impact on a universal by-right resource is simply expendable to these entities. As Bill McKibben posits in his summary of Laudato Si:

Take water, which the pope addresses at length. We probably should not need his words to know that “access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival.” We all know it should not be wasted, and yet we continue to waste it because doing so is beneficial to the rich and powerful: for instance, insurance companies have planted enormous almond groves across California in recent years even as water supplies have started to shrink, and agribusiness planters have drawn down the aquifers of the Midwest.

The global water crisis has triggered a conference on this issue. World leaders, water experts and development professionals have gathered in Stockholm to discuss and jointly find solutions to the world's several escalating water crises.The 2015 World Water Week, themed Water for Development, welcomes over 3,000 participants from more than 120 countries to the Swedish capital, representing governments, academia, international organizations, civil society, the corporate sector, and many others.

Update 9/17/15: Bloomberg article: Tracking the Curse of Global Drought 

Update 2/15/16: Four billion people affected by severe water scarcity

Update 3/22/16: Ten Civilizations that collapsed from drought

Update 4/5/16: The current instability and unpredictability of the world water cycle is here to stay

Update 4/10/16: World Drought Map 2016

Update 5/5/16: World on 'Catastrophic' Path to Run Out of Fresh Water

Case Study

 

In the photo above, W.G. Nye and Loy E. Moore, owners of the Peerless Incinerator Company, display their inventory of backyard incinerators as they hear reports of banning all incinerators. "We're convinced we're being made the goats for some other industry," said Moore, Oct. 20, 1954. Incinerators were finally banned in So Cal on Oct. 1, 1957, and people had to tear them out. Then the trash collection industry went into business, bigtime. Previously only food garbage was picked up. This was before electric garbage disposals were installed in kitchen sinks and changed the habits around food waste, as well.

A very complete article is here, and you'll find the history of trash, going forward, here.

By 1956, Los Angeles County had started to phase in trash collection in areas where incinerator use was being phased out. A total ban on incinerators was in place by October 1, 1957. Thus the death of one industry, backyard trash incineration, gave birth to a massive new one. The public safety issue of pollution in the Los Angeles basin had trumped the "politics as usual" around the smokestack industries because of the obvious pollution impacts on human health and the environment. This legislative route to zero is a good precedent for the methodology that will be needed to phase out fossil fuels in order to get to zero by 2050.

The practical impact of going to zero on fossil fuels will require a layered system of "zero points" on carbon emissions for various fuels. Based upon the weight of carbon emissions, it's necessary to phase out the heaviest fuels first as the transition is made to renewable and zero-carbon fuels. The carbon limits on fuels can be layered so that the most rapid cutbacks are mandated by zero emissions per fuel type by weight of carbon. This can be a VERY effective system in the management of the convergence of emissions if they're adopted globally, based upon a system such as Contraction & Convergence, with the contraction year set at 2020.

For example, in the scenario where the global budget is equitably distributed at RCP 2.6, the "zero year" for these fuels are established as 2020 for coal, 2025 for fracked gas, 2030 for oil, and 2050 for natural gas. The other fuels, wind/wave/solar/geothermal/hydroelectric/algae/ethanol, have no zero date, and thus are the targets for long-term investment strategies.

Setting up a rough chart for this, the height of the carbon emission bar chart of carbon per unit of energy is taken from the EIA page.

 

What this does is tell the global industries and investors the timeline allowed to taper to zero for each fuel under RCP 2.6 so that we don't exceed 2C in our ecosphere; this is the stability needed to get off of carbon sources and move to clean energy with exceedingly rapid investment and development. So the chart for the convergence sequence implementation starts to look like this. The rapidity with which the carbon is reduced is quite revealing, and using sequential zero years shows that this can be very effective, just as it was in Los Angeles in the 1960's and '70's and the air began to clear significantly.

Dr Hansen Explains It All For You

Dr. Hansen gave a video lecture at NASA on May 21, 2013, in a 45 minute presentation with question and answer. His presentation gave an overview of his approach, and how he got involved in climate change and what his motivation is now for speaking out on a very complex science issue. He's now taking a very public stance on climate change after retiring from his position at NASA in order to speak out with the necessary urgency and clarity. He has developed extensive resources on climate change and developed research papers with his team of scientists. A Ted Talk video from February 2012 documents his reasons for retiring from NASA to raise the climate alarm with the public and US government policymakers.

 What this slide above is showing is that coal and unconventional recovery of oil and gas are not acceptable as future sources of energy, and along with that, methane hydrate processes which add to the forcing of climate change.

There will need to be a very drastic and immediate change in the way that the global economy operates and procures the necessary energy to keep our systems of commerce and trade in place without the destruction of the ecosphere.

Update 2/10/19: Dr. Hansen's website with his papers, maps and publications is here.

Dilemma

Since the development of a proposed contraction and convergence formula in the early 90's, things have changed. In the intervening 20 years, the relatively backward nation of China has moved from the category of a developing country to the second largest GDP on the globe with an economic system that's the biggest expression of crony capitalism in history. China has done this with a monolithic governmental banking system that operates purely in the interests of expanding Gross Domestic Product with export trade, as Japan did in the post WWII economy, except without the structure of the Marshall Plan. What this has done in the globalized economy is create a massive leveraging of Chinese economic influence into a global powerhouse, albeit with internal instability, pollution and toxic emissions that threaten to destroy the local environment.

The extreme ramp-up of energy development using coal to manufacture the world's solar panels and the myriad products of trade using an undervalued yuan to expand exports has moved China into first world status. It has also made up for tremendous amounts of carbon emissions; it has far overshadowed all other countries in its growing emissions and apparently intends to maintain this status quo. Thus, China now shares the obligations of the United States and Europe in the emissions reductions scenario.

China's responsibility for climate change is discussed in a book by Paul Harris. It describes China's contribution to global warming and analyzes its policy responses. Contributors critically examine China's practical and ethical responsibilities to climate change from a variety of perspectives. They explore policies that could mitigate China's environmental impact while promoting its own interests and meeting the international community's expectations. Mr. Harris has also explored this issue at a climate change conference at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, in June of 2009.

The conference paper outlines a new paradigm of sustainable cooperation with other countries around the globe in order to bring emissions under control.The dimensions of Chinese carbon governance will also need to work coherently together across scales if contraction and convergence towards a national cap is to be implemented properly and cohesively, without further exacerbating problems around the distribution of harms and benefits, particularly to poorer regions. China's current methodology of moving resources and people across its vast countryside reflects the old World Bank paradigm of development at all costs: physical, ecological and social. China's Guizhou province will move two million people out of its mountains and barren terrains before 2020, Guizhou Deputy Gov. Chen Yiqin said this month, as Xinhua reported. The province plans to move 100,000 people in 2012, and the plan is key to the Guizhou's supposed work against poverty. But the government is relocating these massive populations of Chinese without consideration of the social, economic and ecological impacts of these strategies, which are considerable yet not "on the books".

Such is the error of creating huge scenarios based upon an outmoded measure like GDP. It fosters destructive behaviors that are justified by accounting machinations. The same bookkeeping tricks that brought the global financial system to its knees. The time has come to create a different set of values that measure the integrity of the processes, the value of its citizens and resources of the land, such that the world can restore its natural properties and avert the worst of the climate change impacts, which have already begun.

It is imperative that China take its place at the table with the largest players and implement its contraction on par with the US and Europe, and abandon its headlong emissions growth fueled by coal sources. It has achieved the global position its government has sought, and along with that comes the responsibilities of protecting the planetary systems and resources that give sustenance to life.

The GDP Chimera

A fiscal "measurement" being tossed about these days as a means of allocating global carbon emissions allowances with respect to climate change is unfortunately not an accurate or reliable means of establishing parity in these emission goals. Gross Domestic Product is actually made up of many financial banking ledger tricks, between countries as well as global regions. It is ultimately a political tool. Inasmuch as GDP has been used as part of a "broad brush" look at consumption via the I-PAT formula, that is only an assumed relationship. This is a balance that fluctuates wildly and shifts with the flows of capital between corporations and governments, and is highly subject to interpretation. Further, it is based upon a growth fallacy that is fundamentally unsustainable. GDP is measured in value terms set by the market, not by physical reality, which is what carbon emissions are all about.

As an example of the feedback loops embedded in GDP, let's look at how China is pumping up its GDP in order to create wealth for buying resources from other countries. At the Yangtze River, near the town of Luohuang, another dam is proposed. This section of the river belongs to a nature reserve created to protect hundreds of species of fish, including the Chinese Paddlefish. When built, the Xiaonanhai Dam will destroy the reserve, flooding it, creating an enormous reservoir. At around five billion dollars, the dam is one of Chongqing's largest investment projects. Critics say Bo Xilai championed the project to help the city achieve historic GDP growth numbers, thereby securing himself a spot in China's top leadership, but with seriously destructive actions that negate the environmental commitments.

China is also a huge importer of coal. As a result of this consumption demand, western USA ports are figuring out how to increase their transit supply lines to export coal to China, which is the only big remaining market for coal. This of course simply balloons the whole carbon problem out of control, and is also utterly destructive to the existing local communities that would get mowed under by these giant infrastructure systems tailored to expand oil-fueled transport for their profit. This is the vicious cycle unleashed by the GDP economic model, and it feeds on itself to destruction, very similar to the fiscal banking collapse that we've experienced in the last few years, where none of the risk was priced into the model. This kind of risk exclusion is what the climate deniers are engaging in.

GDP is a disincentive if it's used to allocate carbon quotas because it discourages profitable investment and development of clean energy technologies. Why spend money developing profit if it's counted against a country or region's old industries that have already paid out on their investments? That also discourages pollution controls and regenerative development if it creates an additional obligation to fund technologies and infrastructure in third-world countries, at the cost of NOT reducing the biggest carbon emissions in the major leading countries. Additionally, third world countries should not be burdened with GDP-generated obligations if their profits and industry create a profitable reduction their carbon emissions and per capita energy use. This focuses on the principle of the "common good" as a primary human goal.

The measurement of energy use itself and carbon emissions is the only straightforward way to tackle the factors driving climate change: it can be objectively measured and calculated by the activities that drive the emissions. That ties it to the land itself and becomes a form of land value tax. If these criteria are set across the global economy, then they are simple to track and transparent with satellite and industrial production measurements that are externally verifiable. This creates rewards for restoration of ecology and reduction of consumption. Farmland becomes more viable, and pristine forests and tundras, even arctic areas, become extremely valuable in their natural state. And therefore there is no need to "consume" it.

This creates a level playing field so that the corporations, which are now far wealthier than many countries, have no where to run. It holds all activities accountable and measured against common agreed-to standards. Enforcement is achieved with cooperative global data sharing, with a fair means of rewarding industries that reduce carbon emissions. That means oil, gas, coal and shale extraction are heavily impacted, while farming is protected, renewable power is promoted, and natural resources are highly valued and conserved. That, in turn, makes it possible to reward population reduction and ecological restoration; the inverse of our current accounting system inherited from the old world of superstition and fear.

A comprehensive article on changing the value system from the GDP is here from Orion Magazine.

Update 5/23/15: The Paradox of Wealth  GDP measurements become everything, despite the fact that such measurements are concerned only with economic value added, and not with the entire realm of material existence.

Update 8/21/16:  GDP is a financial construct at its heart, a political and philosophical abstraction (from John Mauldin)

Setting an Equilibrium

The Nash Equilibrium, named for the Nobel Prize winning economist John Forbes Nash, is an important concept  for developing a framework of international cooperation on action to counteract climate change. Nash's equations demonstrate that if one party takes an action unilaterally for its own benefit then the overall benefit to all parties will decline. This is an important principle that needs to guide global cooperation in reducing carbon emissions and controlling the human impact on the environment. There should no longer be any tolerance for countries that flout global guidelines and proceed with their own energy and resource consumption methods that produce unsustainable carbon emissions.

The vision that nature needs rights as well as the entire spectrum of human habitation is crucial to this balance and its success, otherwise a flawed agreement will doom efforts to reduce the impact of human activity on our planet. The world needs an agreement that includes the natural processes and resources of the earth, and all humans need to internalize its key principles if the planet, and we, are to survive. Unlimited human growth is not a viable model for life on this planet.


An example of the unilateral approach to growth and energy production at all costs is in China, with the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. A description of the project in 2008 only begins to scratch the surface of the ecological impact of this dam. Increasing energy demands are driving higher carbon emissions as China relies more on coal and shale gas, as well as tar sand supplies of energy. This is partially due to the lack of projected rainfall by 40% that has reduced the anticipated power production of the Three Gorges Dam. This is how climate change impacts all of the projected costs and benefits of these major infrastructure projects. Chinese scientists predicted many of the effects of this dam, yet their voices were silenced in what the government claimed was the national interest. In multibillion-dollar projects, the national interest is often taken hostage by political prestige, bureaucratic power struggles, and the generous kickbacks of a bribery-prone industry. These vested interests need to be balanced and held accountable by a fully transparent and participatory decision-making process.


So the international framework that must be agreed to in the climate change discussions - which are ongoing - must be put into position recognizing the benefit that it will have for all human societies and the global ecosystems. The issue is becoming urgent.

Here's the Dirt

The presentation above is from The UC Davis Chancellor’s Colloquium Series, a 45-minute presentation with question and answer for 30 minutes. It's presented by Ralph J. Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences and Chair of the National Research Council. His expertise is in atmospheric chemistry, and he's one of the pre-eminent scientists speaking out on documented climate change in order to mitigate the increasingly critical impact of human activities on the global ecosystem.

In a nutshell, earth's climate is changing, as can be seen from measurements of rising air and water temperatures, decreasing amounts of polar ice and rising sea levels worldwide over the past three decades.Human-caused increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, chiefly carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel combustion, are the likely cause of contemporary climate change. The rate of rise of carbon and greenhouse gasses has become frightening in the rapidity of change that's now being observed, particularly with the increasing rate of the melting of the polar ice caps. The changes in the last 50 years are unprecedented even in geological history.

The bathtub analogy is used to show how it's necessary to manage the global carbon dioxide cycle. The challenge of scale that it will take to reduce the carbon going into the ecosystem is daunting. Energy efficiencies are an approach that can be tackled immediately: greatly reducing oil and coal consumption through various strategies. Cicerone lays out approaches to geo-engineering that are possibilities that affect the factors of population, energy consumption and technology. A global per-capita emissions cap agreement (contraction and conversion model) seems to be the most necessary step in reversing the carbon impact that is projected in the future, particularly from developing countries.

Carbon capture doesn't seem to be a very viable part of the strategy; however, there are some steps being taken that produce possible solutions to creating more carbon sequestration. A big problem on the planet is the acidification of the oceans that results from the carbon absorption over the earth's seas that takes place as a result of increasing carbon levels. Research and examination of a science-based response to our impending self-inflicted catastrophe is critical. However, putting carbon genie back in the bottle is essentially a zero-sum game, once its released it takes eons to absorb it back into the global structure.

And time is of the essence; a 3 to 5 degree temperature rise in this century is inevitable, bringing us to the cusp of catastrophic climate change in the relatively near future.

Shenanigans

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.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

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.

Tar Sands Action planning on Facebook

Sierra Club - Beyond Coal

Greenhouse Data Tool - search emission sources in your area

Here Comes the Sun

An urgent warning comes from, of all places, China, at Davos last week. It identifies the challenge facing human habitation on a global scale, the need to bring growth and development back into a scale that balances with natural processes. We just can't keep burning it up, and for China to embark on a radical departure from its earlier megaconstruction and expansion is quite startling. But this does resemble its one-child policy that it implemented decades ago in response to an obviously unsustainable population growth spiral.

China is now headed for global economic dominance, and it is trying to direct this growth in a responsible manner, after becoming world-famous for its pollution and environmental destruction linked to top-down bureaucratic control. The fact that this recognition is presented at Davos is unprecedented, as the Chinese government is very careful about positions that are taken globally by its citizens and institutions.

Here in the US, we're stuck in a high-consumption lifestyle that keeps us from moving ahead with the critically needed structural changes to our economy that would turn upside down the old, polluting and destructive industries that are in the grip of the oil and coal industries. It's the leftover Cold War economy. The waste in these systems is prolific and toxic, and its reduction is a key strategy in the transference to energy sources from natural processes. However, making the transition out of these structures and their grip on our economic system will be the biggest challenge the US has had since World War II and the Sputnik era that put man on the moon. We see ourselves falling behind, without the resolve and initiative that it takes to mobilize a common effort that changes the face of business practices in this country. Right now the dinosaurs rule, but every business knows that's the death of the commerce and innovation which drives profit, so perhaps the sun is finally rising. Old slogan from Japan, by the way, which provides an object lesson on the limits of expansion as a profit driver. Streamlining achieves the same objectives.

It's also been obvious that our extreme energy consumption creates political weaknesses as well. With the events now unfolding in Egypt, Jordan and the Mideast, it's clear that energy supplies must come through local distributed networks. Petrocollapse could arrive on the heels of these political changes sweeping the Arab world, triggering spikes in oil prices that threaten economic stability. If we needed something to kickstart the "green revolution", it's certainly here. The aging hippies could finally be right.

The Business Response to Climate Change is a student (no longer "flower children") initiative from the CSRwire news service that lays out a strategy towards shifting the economy and business activity around the new science-based model of streamlined and efficient processes that reduces the grip of these old systems and energy sources on our infrastructure. Unlike India and China, the US no longer has vast undeveloped areas to expand into; the physical frontier is used up. Reflecting President Obama's "Win the Future" point of his recent State of the Union address, it's about restructuring what we have to capture energy and resources effectively. It's also about bringing up the young human capital into the system and using that freewheeling energy constructively. The definition of sustainability, by the way.

We're at the threshold of systemic change that's being driven by the limits to growth. Energy from the sun is a huge part of the answer, but the US has to make those industries viable within a global community that fluidly speaks in songs, videos and pictures, accelerating change and shifting values. The ability to swiftly adapt and respond is a key trait of successful systems. It's called "life".

Our Global Debt

This is not a financial article, but it could be. The parallels are famously congruent, as Thomas Friedman has emphasized repeatedly. The United States, in its aggregate, owes an immense debt to the developing countries of the world. Using the balance of measure of the ecological capacity calculation, the US has a footprint of over 150% of biocapacity. According to the Global Footprint Network, "This ecological debt is not equally spread. The report shows that over three quarters of the world’s population “live in nations that are ecological debtors – their national consumption has outstripped their country’s biocapacity. Thus, most of us are propping up our current lifestyles, and our economic growth, by drawing (and increasingly overdrawing) upon the ecological capital of other parts of the world.”

"The Ecological Footprint has emerged as the world’s premier measure of humanity’s demand on nature. It measures how much land and water area a human population requires to produce the resource it consumes and to absorb its wastes, using prevailing technology."

The global consumption footprint now exceeds the capacity of the planetary resources by 50% and is headed towards 100%. Clearly, this is not sustainable and will have disastrous impacts upon the global systems that currently support life. Much of this is due to population growth and the concurrent industrial revolution that managed to magnify the resource demands while creating toxic pollution, first with coal power and then moving onward to manufacturing and oil-based industries that dumped pollution into the land, air and water that is now breaking down natural processes. In addition, there's the toxicity of building over and suffocating much of the natural landscape and forests that provided the "ballast" against this destructive activity for several hundred years even after being diminished by thousands of years of human habitation.

This doesn't even begin to address the climate change that is increasing the volatility of weather, inflicting flood and drought throughout the globe, eroding the stability of existing resources. We're in a very dangerous vise right now, of our own making, and unless we pull together as nations and people and devise constructive ecological strategies through technology and communication, I don't see a positive outcome to this. The laws of physics and systems will kick in, and we all know what happens when human societies fight over a shrinking pie.

The clear solution is a very, very rapid response to correct these issues of carbon production (energy sources), pollution and trash production resulting from inefficient processes which dump toxins in the middle of what should be a complete cycle of deconstruction and reuse. Some of these strategies are beginning to emerge, for example, as the 2030 Challenge, exemplified in the ICC Code, to achieve zero carbon in construction in 2030, in the building sector - which consumes more energy than any other sector.

This strategy runs in concert with reduction of the physical human footprint with highly efficient structures and a restoration of natural habitats and biodiversity. It means that human societies will have to do more with much, much less. It means we will have to decide what "profit" really is, and demand actual real value for whatever it is we do to come back into balance with the natural world that provides us with life.

I hope we have the will to do what has to be done, before systems start collapsing around us.

An Energy-Independent Future

An Energy-Independent Future

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Jon Stewart nails it. Enjoy!

Philosophical

What's the measure of constructive ecological processes? A hierarchical structure of listings for various methods? Or, to use a tool from philosophy and logic, apply the heuristics of value.

Rather than judge the options for various technologies to liberate ourselves from the carbon cycle, it rather works better to apply the logic of "do no harm" to the various scenarios for obtaining the energy required to drive our civilization. In an article by Carl Pope, the chairman of the Sierra Club, the process is outlined as a rule of thumb approach to energy systems. In this way, nuclear power and especially coal power are ruled out.

What about the emerging technologies that address energy solutions? They have to be evaluated on their track record, which right now is painfully short. Many missteps will occur along the path to successful energy production with minimal costs to the environment. But I believe over the long haul that very rapid moves to viable alternate sources of energy and power will prove beneficial to the ecosphere as well as provide human culture with the means to develop energy systems that work in tandem with natural processes, not against them.

Biomimicry, or the "reverse engineering of nature" is a relatively new and untested approach that doesn't lend itself to reductionist analysis. So a slow and measured implementation of numerous simple strategies becomes the most rational approach to our energy problem. Think of the process as akin to the evolution of software. We'll have energy systems v4.0 issued by university research and adopted incrementally by governments based upon pilot projects carried out by the private sector. As opposed to our system of legislation now that is in bed with the big polluting industries, and getting worse as the corporations and lobbyists increasingly write the regulations and standards for the politicians.

Which is why she's got more of an expression these days.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Despite all the talk of moving towards clean fuels and renewable energy sources, the actual policies in place by first-world economies and its leading institutions result in funding the worst of the old fossil fuels practices. This reliance on oil and coal despite its devastation to the environment indicates clearly that the balance sheet for the biggest players on the globe do not account for the costs of the damage paid by humanity and the environment all over the world. From the Bretton Woods Project:

Despite recent attempts to restyle itself as a green institution, the World Bank's energy lending suggests that it remains wedded to fossil fuels. Meanwhile, independent evaluators and civil society groups have raised serious concerns about the developmental benefits of the Bank's approach to energy efficiency and renewables.

The US itself has created an entire economy based upon destructive practices that remain off the balance sheet. I've been on the National Priorities Project site, and I got into the dataset and generated a report on US gov't expenditure on housing in California 1983 - 2009, chart above (click to enlarge).

Since 2001, there has been an astronomical level of Federal funding pushed into housing. This, along with the repeal of Glass-Steagall at the end of Clinton's term in 2000, generated the entire housing bubble, leveraged by the banking sector. Why was this done? To create "consumer demand" with easy credit, create an artificial asset (nonexistent home equity) that drives sales, employment, development, everything. As well as creating an empire of debt, not real equity. All of this takes a lot of oil, naturally, in energy (power) as well as production of goods and their transportation. More houses, more traffic. And on and on. None of the costs of this are on the corporate or governmental books.

US business has off shored everything else and doesn't create anything of significant value in this country any more. Foreign investment and corporations fund a lot of the industrial and service business that we do have here. It's not local capital, and it's managed outside of this country. The artificial bubble was created to prop up the economy, but as any short-term investment strategy does, there's a big balloon payment at the end of the cycle. The asset is not real, hence there's no way to get out of the bubble except to pop it. Iceland found that out the hard way, as has Ireland, Greece and Spain. It's called "Disaster Capitalism".

While the US Government was fueling a huge real estate bubble as de facto policy, it is also, in the meantime, putting legislation in place to deal with greenhouse gasses under pressure from the global community. Since the government couldn't attack its main engine for creating "wealth", its regulations targeted emissions from traffic, power plants, manufacturing, etc. which produces visible carbon emissions. This policy does not address the embodied energy used to build, produce and furnish new real estate as is accounted for in the LEED energy standard, which emerged from the design and planning community. The GHG emission standards focus on pollution (rightly so) but leave out the biggest cumulative generator of GHG emissions, real estate development. That's not even counting the subsequent demands that this burdens the local environment with, specifically water, power, fuel, traffic, increased trash and other municipal services. So there's a very myopic view of the entire picture of the carbon cycle and its resulting impact, which fails to address the true flaws of unbridled growth. Deliberately. Don't wanna look at it, right?

So California is simply a subset of this whole fiasco, still trying to pump money out of a dry well, once again using Federal money and rerouting state funds to create more of a housing market. Just pushing an already failed strategy that burns oil to stay alive and costs significant tax dollars so that development can claim a profit.

That explains why trying to implement conservation strategies and sustainable design practices is so difficult and happening on a state-by-state basis. The Federal government, including its world institutions, isn't walking its talk.

This current administration is more open to setting guidelines and policies on a national level that reflects the true scope of the energy and resource issues, as well as conservation. Until the sustainability movement can establish concrete returns on investment, it will be difficult to change the Federal policies that put us into our current economic crisis. The global development guidelines will have to change the accounting system, incorporating natural capitalism and social networking to leverage investment, rather than the old accounting tricks that have brought the global community to the brink of fiscal and environmental disaster. When this kind of reform is implemented, then the new technologies and practices will be able to move rapidly to invoke system-changing paradigms and move the economy and our environmental impacts in a constructive direction.