It’s Getting Hot In Here

Suicide (n) - The most preventable type of death.

This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don’t. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name “China”.

(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)

Glenn Hurowitz recently wondered who’s going to help Tibet bring down China, like the Russians were brought down in Afghanistan and the British in India.

International pressure and protest seems to carry no weight among the Chinese. Their government is still arresting monks for “unauthorized gatherings”, they’re still shooting and killing Tibetans. They’ve also been shipping weapons to Zimbabwe’s dictator, who’s currently ignoring the results of an election that voted him and his party out of power. They buy 90 percent of Sudan’s exported oil, and sells them small arms destined for Darfur. Darfur, where the Sudanese government is carrying out air attacks against helpless civilian targets. Oh yes, and they’re now the world’s top carbon polluter, though the US still remains the top carbon polluter per capita.

Yeah, that Chinese government, complete jerks, tyrants, to put it charitably. People are surprised that the Olympic torch protests seem only to have stirred Chinese nationalism, surprised that the Chinese don’t understand why people are angry. Still, I think Glenn asks the wrong question. Because who is it that raised China up? The lack of self-awareness in this situation isn’t exclusive to the Chinese, people everywhere have an amazing capacity to accept almost anything as normal.

Indeed, let’s cut right to the heart of the matter: whom else will we buy our shoes from?
Continue reading ‘Global Suicide Pact: Darfur Engine, Pt 1′

Suicide (n) - The most preventable type of death.

This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders had a death wish, and whose members at large mostly didn’t.

To me, “sustainability” means a situation in which your descendants are able to confront their own problems, rather than the ones you exported to them. If people a hundred years from now are soberly engaged with phenomena we have no nouns and verbs for, I think that’s a victory condition.

On the other hand, if they’re thumbing through 1960s Small World paperbacks and saying “thank goodness we’ve finally managed to pare our lives back exclusively to soybeans and bamboo,” well, that’s not the end of the world, but it’s about as appealing as a future global takeover by the Amish. Give me the computronium problems; at least I can get out of bed and not have to mimic every move my grandpa made. - Bruce Sterling

I am not going to survive in any apocalyptic dystopia. My vision’s good, but my knees are dodgy and I can’t function without coffee and a high protein diet. (Maybe I could move to Costa Rica and grow chickens in exchange for the sweet, sweet arabica … Hmmm, if I get out before the travel costs become prohibitive … What!? Sorry. Ahem.) You can see how this would make me not only opposed to immanentizing the eschaton, but to sailing on to a post/pre-industrial civilization of the sort envisioned by mid-last-century back to the land movements or perhaps, the creators of Mad Max.

(And yes, I’ll grant you, there were entirely too many hyphens in that last paragraph. Just wait, though.)

So on that note, you can be certain that when I talk about preserving the environment, I have a deep, parallel interest in preserving civilization somewhat-as-we-know-it. Consider that I’m a big fan of the intertubes, artificial lighting and indoor plumbing, just for starters. Don’t get me started on refrigeration. Though civilization just-as-we-know-it, sorry to break it to you, but it has to go. At once. Couldn’t be soon enough, really. And go it will, whether we want it to or not.

What a lot of people think is that there are three choices. Just, as I wrote here in the comments, it’s that these are our choices:
Continue reading ‘Global Suicide Pact: Amish Takeover’

Suicide (n) - The most preventable type of death.

This is the origin story of a species whose leaders had a death wish, and whose members at large mostly didn’t.

What exactly is efficiency? You probably think about it in terms of hours worked to work product generated. In any science class, it usually means how much energy as applied to a system does useful work, as opposed to what’s lost as heat. In biology, that general science definition gets applied to living things and what powers them, their food.

In every stage of terrestrial food consumption, called a trophic level, about 90 percent of the energy consumed is lost.

At the first level, there are organisms like plants, also called primary producers, which take energy from the sun as food and harness that power to transform carbon dioxide gas into energy-rich sugars; the carbohydrates that are the base fuel for all other organic reactions. Primary producers are chemical factories that supply the base total amount of energy available to all the other chemical reactions needed to sustain life. At every successive level, animals who eat plants, then animals who eat animals who eat plants, about 90% of the remaining energy is lost. This doubtless seems very inefficient.

Unfortunately, everything you know about efficiency is based on a lie. It’s a long story. Maybe it will help if you think of living things for the duration as machines powered by volatile chemicals, but here’s why what we think we understand about efficiency is wrong, and dangerously so.

Continue reading ‘Global Suicide Pact: The Efficiency Trap’

Yet another call for youth to save the planet.

Is it just me, or does that sound like the most lazy, annoying cop out ever? Consider:

… But young people are not cynical or jaded like many adults. They believe they can truly make a difference – and they can. …

This may be true. It had better be true. And the reason it had better be true is because the people who say it have too often given up. So who else is going to do it?

It’s deeply frustrating to me to to hear someone with 20-30 years worth of professional experience, social networking, capital accumulation and political influence say that what they’re really waiting on is for a bunch of people with none of those advantages to come do what they couldn’t manage. In the same vein, I know that leading figures in many activist issue camps, whether elected officials or NGO staff, hope that young people, or bloggers, or ‘local’ activists, really, anyone else, will get out and start rocking the boat so it doesn’t have to be them. I’ve heard some version of this conversation too many times.

So, yes it would definitely be nice if the young people manage to fix the climate problem, and we should try, as should everyone else. It would be great if bloggers could manage all by ourselves to push the boundaries of debate and give cover to NGOs with large staffs and research budgets, or to elected officials with ready access to establishment media megaphones. But hey, a little help, that would make everything go better, right?

Yet time and again, the people who’ve been designated as leaders by the electoral process or getting high level promotions within powerful organizations so often fail to be out in front on important issues like global warming. They come over all Whitney Houston, with the “I believe the children are our future,” (and we sang that song at my 6th grade graduation, to my enduring irritation) and defer actions to some shining white knights of the future whom they fantasize will take the reins when they’re retired or whatever. Thing is, we absolutely don’t have time for this nonsense, but I thought it might be useful to explore some possible reasons for it.

Continue reading ‘The Terrible State of Adult Activism’

I do fall easily into using religious language. It comes natural, it’s the way I was raised.

But seriously, the advice not to put one’s faith in people, that’s just good sense all day long. No shared ideology or affiliation should encourage us to turn off our skills of critical observation when dealing with others of our kind. Trust the people you have a reason to trust and be on the lookout for false friends.

I have friends who’ve held my head and hands and brought me tea when I was so sick I just wanted to be put out of my misery. I trust them. I have friends and family who helped me when I didn’t know where my rent or grocery money was coming from. I trust them. Settled and done.

Then there are people who’ve argued and worked and fought for the ideals I hold dear for crappy, but mostly no, pay, through times when it seemed that the whole world thought they were a laughingstock; and I include bloggers in that, but also people in the larger, global progressive movement. I trust them.

Continue reading ‘Advice, fwiw’

At some point, I’m going to turn this into a longer and better linked post, but this has got to be said. Right now. Again.

The worst thing, the most depressing thing, about global warming, isn’t the melting ice cap or the short time horizon. It certainly isn’t the current state of our technological advancement or knowledge, which is largely sufficient to the problem. It’s the stupidity, inactivity, timidity, shortsightedness and fecklessness of humanity’s ruling elites. Really. That’s why I think the proper way to refer to it is as a suicide pact, because it’s both deliberate and avoidable.

Consider that we’ve got at present tremendous financial liquidity. The environmentally unsustainable suburbs are emptying out like mad due to wave upon wave of foreclosures and debt-ridden consumers mailing their keys to the bank. There’s a large reserve labor force of unemployed, underemployed, and discouraged workers. Fuel is becoming more expensive, but is still cheap and abundant enough that it could be put to use setting the country on a path towards sustainability. Altered land use is one of the largest causes of climate change and industrialization, deforestation, suburbanization, and a mad paving craze have been exacerbating every single (very expensive) climate-related problem. These crises are making our current system unsustainable, pushing us into financial meltdown in the US and destabilizing world markets, which is going to have the inevitable result of decreasing this society’s ability to well address even one of these problems, let alone all of them at once. All together though, I think these issues could solve each other.

Shorter, the scenario: We have a lot of money, people, recently available land, and resources. This is not always going to be true, and if society were better governed, it would be seized as a golden opportunity for positive change rather than an excuse for more of the same. Continue reading ‘Stupidest. Problem. Ever.’

Farming remains one of the few modern professions that hangs on the weather, a dependency that new technology can only partially remedy. That’s why I’m especially concerned with the climate disruptions that are already increasing damaging droughts and flooding worldwide, and either destroying crops outright or sharply cutting yields.

Though there are some people who don’t seem to know where food comes from, who are forever denying the severity of the problem. Too many of them have positions of authority, leading audiences to assume that there isn’t enough information to make a decision on. They tune it out. This makes the job of those trying to educate the public that much harder because there are a limited number of issues that can grab public attention at any one time, and citizens need to be heavily involved in pushing for meaningful change before it can happen.

Yet you don’t encourage anyone to get involved by putting them to sleep. No one calls their congressmember to ask them to please try and do something when you get around to it, if it isn’t too much trouble, after you deal with the other pressing concerns of the day, if it doesn’t cost too much and no one makes any kind of fuss. Any issue on which you can place that many caveats can’t be very urgent.

Which is exactly what so-called climate moderates would like people to believe. They’ve lost the battle over whether or not climate disruption is important, and are now fighting to keep people in the dark about how pressing it is. Unfortunately for all of us, the latest incarnation of climate skepticism is getting plenty of help from the New York Times, where book reviewer Andrew Revkin decides that the solution to all the arguing is to split the difference between the people who say it’s an urgent problem and those who think it isn’t a problem.

Continue reading ‘The Sorry State Of Global Weather Reporting’

A new report based on oil industry production data says that we’re past peak oil as of 2006:

World oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 2030, according to a report which also warns that extreme shortages of fossil fuels will lead to wars and social breakdown.

The German-based Energy Watch Group will release its study in London today saying that global oil production peaked in 2006 - much earlier than most experts had expected. The report, which predicts that production will now fall by 7% a year, comes after oil prices set new records almost every day last week, on Friday hitting more than $90 (£44) a barrel. …

Forget about how you’ll afford gas to put in your car to get to work as declining production, increasing demand, and the devaluation of the dollar push us towards $100/barrel oil. What needs to be understood is that peak oil likely means peak food. About 17% of US energy use goes into agriculture. The food in the grocery store that you buy traveled a long way to get to you, and it was probably grown with fossil-fuel intensive fertilizers and pesticides. As of 1994, it took 400 gallons of oil and equivalents to feed each US citizen, and that number has probably gone up.

Our current agricultural system depends on having an abundance of cheap energy with which to make up for growing plants in places where they ought not to be grown. In places where there isn’t naturally enough water for them, in places where the soil can’t maintain enough organic matter or other nutrients to support them, in climates that put them under stress, or in places where they’ve got no resistance to the pests. All these conditions can be somewhat overcome by fossil-fuel powered irrigation along with fossil-fuel based fertilizers and pesticides.

Farming used to require the careful selection of plant breeds that worked well with local conditions. Now, it makes use of breeds that have been designed (often literally designed in a lab) for high yields of edible plant parts, with the understanding that local variation in soil and wildlife conditions will simply be obliterated to allow them to do well. That takes a lot of energy. When farms are commonly measured in the hundreds of acres, very little of that energy is in the form of elbow grease.

Continue reading ‘After Peak Oil, Peak Food’

It looked for a moment there like the EPA was going to do the right thing after 54 scientists wrote to oppose the approval of methyl iodide for use as a pesticide on crops. The chemists noted that methyl iodide (also: iodomethane) is a well-known cancer hazard among people who work in chemistry labs, that it warps DNA, causes miscarriages in lab animals, damages the thyroid and nervous system, and readily turns into a gas or dissolves in water.

But no, they approved it after “a thorough evaluation process,” at rates as high as 175 pounds per acre. Ahem.

I wonder if that evaluation process involved looking at the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for methyl iodide:

May be fatal if inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through skin. Highly toxic. May cause cancer. Possible teratogen. Vesicant. May cause harm to the unborn child. Readily absorbed through the skin. May cause sensitization. Severe irritant. Narcotic. Typical [Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL)] ca. 5 ppm.

In a lab, heavy-duty, puncture-resistant, nitrile gloves are recommended for handling this substance. In a lab, methyl iodide would only be used inside a fume hood, even when dealing with very small amounts. If you’ve never been in a chemistry lab, a fume hood is a glass-fronted cabinet with permanent suction that pulls air in from the room and vents it outside so that when you open bottles and pour things back and forth, you won’t breathe any of the vapor coming off the chemicals.

Methyl iodide is the planned replacement for methyl bromide, which has been phased out as a fumigant because it was harmful to the ozone layer.

Methyl bromide was used to turn soil into a sterile, lifeless medium. The top layers of soil get pumped full of it, and all microorganisms, insects, plants and fungi die. Then the dead dirt can be put to work for useful things, like growing strawberries. It’s the exact opposite of greening the desert, which you can see an example of in my favorite YouTube clip.

Aside from the potential direct harm to humans of using methyl iodide, these highly destructive fumigants are powerful weapons in industrial agribusiness’ war against healthy soil. Every year, a certain amount of the carbon that’s turned from gas into solid sugars by photosynthesis will become part of the pool of soil organic matter, which is the largest pool of carbon on land. The more living things you have in soil, the more carbon it tends to store, reducing the balance of carbon held in the atmosphere. But healthy communities of living things pose complications when you decide that you want to grow only one thing, very predictably, out in the soil. Instead of investing in learning how to work with an abundance of life, modern agriculture wipes it all out with chemicals that are also immediately hazardous to human life.

I find it so interesting that our ‘pro-life’ administration has not only approved a chemical that will indiscriminately wipe out the climate-protective web of life beneath the ground, but that is known to cause cancer in humans and probably birth defects, as well.