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:

A) We do either nothing or not enough and become subject to drastic reductions in population and standard of living, or …

B) We make significant progress towards sustainability and have a chance of preserving a climate and ecosystems sufficient to support 6 billion people and counting.

There is no ‘C’ option, where we can sort of keep doing what we’re doing now, but with a slightly lower emissions profile. That gets us to the same point as doing nothing. That equals failure and catastrophe. Even if it were a political “success”, it would be a real world tragedy and lead to the deaths of millions, perhaps billions by century’s end.

(I’m not trying to be alarmist, here. See, because that suggests a pale knock-off of being actually alarming, which is what I’m going for. I’m not joking about the suicide thing we seem to be attempting. Just continue to bear in mind that there are solutions, otherwise, instead of writing this, know in your heart of hearts that I’d be holed up even now in a European backpackers’ hostel with a bottle of Scotch that is itself of legal drinking age and a scantily clad raver. Right then.)

And our current order, the one we think we have, may even be gone before we realize. Our minds are slow to register change, so we still expect well into adulthood (and sometimes into old age,) many of the things we expected as children. Yet as the material conditions of prosperity, particularly our ability to grow food and the health of the land on which it’s grown, are degraded, our economy suffers and food shortages are already causing riots.

We have a global rise in food prices, especially of corn, rice and wheat. The grain shortages are such that people are smuggling wheat into Afghanistan and riots are breaking out all over the world as per capita demand for grain and farmed goods outstrips our dwindling stocks of agricultural lands and compete with biofuels.

About those biofuels, they’re supposed to be helping our carbon emissions. At the point of use, that may be true, but overall, they cause more emissions than fossil fuels. So just like the converging credit crunch and fuel crises we face, biofuels will contribute to further unfavorable weather and pest infestations that decrease our ability to feed ourselves, and hence, to solve our problems.

I mean, you don’t think we’re going to suddenly discover rationality on this matter when the worsening climate starts starving whole continents, do you? Me neither. And it’ll get bad:

Climate change is likely to create new food insecurities by further pushing up the already rising prices and bringing down the world agriculture GDP by 16 per cent by 2020, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) report said.

“Impact on developing countries will be much more severe than on developed countries. Output in developing nations is projected to decline by 20 per cent, while output in industrial countries is expected to fall by 6 per cent,” it said in the report ‘World Food Situation: New Driving Forces and Required Actions’.

… Stressing on crop yields, the report said, “With the increased risk of droughts and floods due to rising temperatures, crop yield losses are expected to be imminent. Cereal yields are projected to fall, with mean losses of about 15 per cent by 2080 in more than 40 developing countries”. …

If the biofuels, the already-worsening climate, and the spread of pest and crop disease weren’t bad enough, we’re also starving people out preemptively as we do other things to magnify these problems. Consider that what we’re doing right now in Iraq, ending their system of seed saving in favor of forcing them to buy agribusiness’ seed that can’t be saved either by law or by design, has been done incrementally in many developing nations.

The food distributors that run the world market often only take certain varieties of crop, which means that farmers are forced to abandon crops suited to local growing conditions and buy often unsavable seed that requires a lot of extra water, pesticides, fertilizers and work, as compared to the old varieties.

This runs a lot of farmers out of business, which means even more families that have to buy food instead of growing it, and then when per capita supplies get crunched, they have an even harder time buying it. This also often means that their land gets turned into single-cropped, industrial farm land, which makes that patch of ground rapidly emit carbon stored in the soil as carbon dioxide, store less carbon in biomass (living tissue), and increase demand for greenhouse gas-intensive pesticides and fertilizers. You can see how this can make the climate crisis worse, which makes the other problems worse, which makes the food supply problem worse, which … you get the picture.

And if it weren’t so serious, it would be funny. Because tropical kitchen gardens, and traditional farming methods that grow a lot of crops on the same ground, store a lot of carbon in the soil and biomass, while also yielding more total food per acre than industrial agriculture. Funny. Ha, ha.

Right about now, you’re probably wondering what you can do. This is about that point, right? I’ve told you it’s happening now. I’ve told you it’s big and scary. I did say there were solutions, which there are.

However, I didn’t write this tonight in order to advise you on who to write a letter to, or what sort of appliances to buy, or where to shop for your food. We’ll save that for another time, perhaps.

Nor did I write this in order to cause you to despair of your fellow citizens. Because they’re waking up all over to our peak habitat problem. They get it, even though the politicians don’t.

And that, at last, is what I hope you take away from this. This is a battle of minds and attitudes between that majority of the public who wants to do the right thing and the status quo power brokers who act like money is something people could eat, who act as though we should move from civilization to a war of all against all, as they say.

I want you to remember, when you hear the deniers and the delayers, that they’re attempting to make us all commit species suicide. To starve the vast majority of us out. That basically means they’re nuts. People who are nuts are also sometimes very good at making arguments and defending their positions. They can communicate with other people just fine, it’s only that they’ve stopped communicating with the facts.

So I want you, if you’d be so kind, to do these three things: preserve your sense of hope, stop listening to crazy people, and practice compassion.

There isn’t a link for that last one. I think you know what to do. When we care deeply, when we give a damn, when we love our neighbors, we find the path towards doing what’s right. We find the path towards courage and power.

Then the solutions begin to suggest themselves.

I promise.

And I think the Amish would approve of that bit, but that’s okay. As long as it doesn’t require me to dress like Laura Ingalls and pump my own water by hand.

“I don’t believe that any human community can be shown to have survived by the principle of all-out competition among its members, which the Bible (if that matters to you) explicitly forbids. …

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful”

- Wendell Berry, “Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community”

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X-posted from OpenLeft

Other GSP installments:

Transnational Maoism - All hail our corporate mercantilist overlords.
Darfur Engine, Pt 2 - The long burn.
Darfur Engine, Pt 1 - You didn’t think the Chinese had no precedent, did you?
Amish Takeover - Apocalyptic dystopia? No thanks, I’d rather have a civilization.
The Efficiency Trap - Energy flow in living systems and their origins.
The End of Cheap - Political reality, meet physical reality.

The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act is up for a vote on the Senate floor next week — the most progress any major climate legislation has ever made in Congress. So would the bill actually reduce U.S. emissions? Not significantly — at least not until 2030, and perhaps longer. That’s the conclusion of an increasing number of energy experts and commentators, including the World Resources Institute and Joe Romm at the Center for American Progress. I performed an independent analysis (available here) and came to a similar conclusion. The problem? In an effort to contain costs and avoid increased energy prices, the Climate Security Act (CSA) allows firms to delay action into the future and purchase low-cost allowances.

Cost Containment #1: Delay till the end

According to the bill, over 6 billion emission allowances would be taken from allowances allocated for 2030-2050 — around 11 percent of the total for 2030-2050 — and these would be auctioned between 2012 and 2027 in order to contain costs. How might this impact U.S. emissions?

If all cost-containment allowances are purchased, it would delay progress toward the U.S. emissions reduction target by around ten percent until 2028. At that point, the U.S. would have 22 years to reduce its total emissions by 70%. As a result, the U.S. would have to reduce its emissions every year by 135 million tons — nearly 25% more than the 110 million tons it would have theoretically reduced each year between 2012 and 2027. In other words, starting in 2030, our efforts would suddenly have to get 25% better.

Continue reading to learn more about the bill…

And while the absolute annual emissions reduction would stay constant, by the late 2040s the U.S. would have to reduce its annual emissions by 11% from year to year. That’s in part because the bill requires the “removal” of emissions allowances taken from 2030-2050 (to supply 2012-2027) to be lower at the beginning of that period and higher at the end. When you do the math, you find that the rate of U.S. emissions reductions would have to more than triple between 2028 and 2050 — from a rate of around 3% in 2028 to a rate between 9 and 11% per year in the last three years.

Many energy experts predict that the final emissions reduction efforts will be the most difficult, since low-hanging fruit such as efficiency will gone. If this is the case, it is likely that the economic impact of such a rapid rate of decrease in emissions would produce a political backlash from consumers, industry, and politicians.

Cost Containment #2: Set a low auction price

Would the CSA result in a high price on carbon? One way to tell is to look at the price at which allowances will be auctioned. Two types of auctions will take place, one for regular allowances, another for future allowances (as described above). The bill indicates that regular allowances will be auctioned at a price floor of $10 and will increase by 5 percent annually (in addition to the rate of inflation). At this rate, the price floor for a regular allowance auction will reach about $21 by 2027 (in 2012 dollars). What about the future allowances? Their auction price floor is $22 in 2012 to increase at 5 percent annually as well, which means their price would pass $40 in 2024. Yet in Europe, we’ve seen that even at a permit price of approximately $38, coal is still economical. Could this mean we won’t see any substantial reductions until 2030?

Click for full-sized table

Cost Containment #3: Buy cheap offsets

The CSA would allow 30% of total U.S. emissions reductions to come from offsets, including domestic and international. Carbon offsets have become increasingly controversial as studies have shown them to be largely ineffective. A recent study by two energy experts at Stanford concluded:

Offset caps as envisioned in the Lieberman-Warner draft legislation, for example, do little to fix the underlying problem of poor quality emission offsets because the cap will simply fill first with the lowest quality offsets and with offsets laundered through other trading systems such as the European scheme…

We suggest that this enthusiasm [for offsets] is misplaced because any offset market of sufficient scale to provide substantial cost-control for a cap and- trade program will involve substantial issuance of credits that do not represent real emissions reductions.

Click for full-sized table

The impact of offsets is unclear, so it is difficult to know what impact this would have on total U.S. emissions. However, if much of the criticism of offsets is correct, it is very likely that actual emissions reductions would only be a fraction of what ends up on paper.

What does it all mean?

Not surprisingly, few analysts have much faith that the CSA, in its present form, will do much to reduce U.S. emissions significantly over the next two decades. Then again, few analysts expect the CSA to pass out of the U.S. Senate, much less be signed into law. But beyond the fate of the current proposal, the evolution of the CSA demonstrates several dynamics that will probably determine the fate of any climate legislation likely to draw serious consideration by the next Congress and the next President.

1. Targets are meaningless: Emissions reduction targets and timetables in proposals to address global warming are largely meaningless. The CSA purports to cut U.S. carbon emissions by 70 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. But no serious analysis of the bill suggests that it will actually do so. The various cost containment mechanisms described above effectively limit the actual emissions reductions well below what the targets and timetables that headline the legislation would ostensibly accomplish. While targets can be useful as goals or a statement of policy intent, we should be under no illusions that those targets will actually be achieved when the details of cost containment mechanisms, offsets, and international trading mechanisms will determine what, if any reductions will be achieved.

Advocates of the current approach will argue that this is simply a problem of closing the loopholes and eliminating the cost-containment mechanisms, which brings us to the second critical dynamic.

2. The Gordian Knot: The Gordian Knot of climate and energy policy that we described almost a year ago is alive and well in the U.S. Congress. For those unfamiliar with the concept, we described a dynamic, already well documented problem in Europe, wherein political leaders tasked with establishing or implementing policies to reduce carbon emissions would not be capable of overcoming public resistance to policies designed, explicitly or implicitly, to significantly increase energy prices.

Cost-containment mechanisms included in the CSA legislation are not the result of drafting errors or provisions slipped into the legislation in the dead of night by energy lobbyists, they are provisions necessary for any climate legislation to be seriously considered by the Congress. Virtually every proposal in the Senate includes explicit or implicit cost containment provisions. Any proposal moving to the Senate floor or beyond will probably need to make its cost containment provisions explicit.

This dynamic has defined virtually all policies around the world to establish carbon emissions reductions and has resulted in little progress in reducing actual emissions where policies have been established non-withstanding the ostensible emissions reduction goals of those policies. All approaches to reducing carbon emissions that depend upon making dirty energy more expensive, be they cap and trade, cap and auction, cap and dividend, or simple carbon taxes, will run up against this dynamic.

The solution may simply require building political power sufficient to overcome public opposition to raising energy prices, but it is sobering to note that the Gordian Knot dynamic continues to dominate the political dynamics of climate change after close to twenty years and many hundreds of millions of dollars spent to build sufficient political support to establish significant limits on carbon emissions and two years after public opinion about the urgency of addressing global warming supposedly tipped.

3. Regulation is Expensive: Cost containment proposals raise the question of how much low carbon technologies really cost. If, as many environmental leaders assert, cutting carbon emissions deeply will not cost as much as it now appears, and if low carbon energy technologies will soon be cost competitive with conventional energy sources, then environmental leaders should not object to cost containment provisions in legislation like the CSA. Modest carbon prices such as those allowed by the CSA proposal should be sufficient to drive the transformation to clean energy technologies, and environmental organizations should not be opposing the cost containment provisions and cranking out analysis of the bill suggesting that it will have little impact on carbon emissions.

But of course that is not what is happening. Environmental leaders are attacking the cost control mechanisms and asserting that the legislation would do little to reduce emissions. These actions speak louder than all the rhetoric of recent years about solar, wind, and other alternatives being cost competitive with current energy sources. The reality is that alternative energy technologies, in real deployed terms, remain vastly more expensive than conventional energy sources. This is the reason why environmental organizations oppose cost containment and why even environmental supporters of the legislation see it as an incremental step that will need to be amended (namely removing cost containment) in order to achieve deep reductions in U.S. carbon emissions.  And it’s why we must focus on reducing the price of clean energy through massive and strategic investments in clean energy technology, rather than focus on making dirty energy expensive.

Here’s an idea the right wing loves to talk about: ‘Liberals think breathing is bad for the planet.’ This theme is apparent in Carbon Belch Day, a day of action on June 12th for participants to create as much carbon as possible.

Yup, you heard me. They’re using carbon calculators to help people figure out how to create the biggest impact. Grassfire.org is a medium sized (couple hundred thousand) grassroots conservative community that uses 501c(4) money to represent its constituents values in the media and politics. And this tactic has been pitched as: “belch to stop Al Gore.”

I don’t have a lot of comments. Check it out for yourself. Mostly, its good to know what people like this are up to.

Activists with Asheville Rising Tide broke ground on a new 800 Mw clean energy power plant in Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers front yard earlier this week. The power plant will tap into a previously unexplored energy source known as hot air which has been found in large concentrations at Roger’s residence, 330 Eastover Rd, Charlotte, NC. “The hot air emitting from Jim Rogers mouth has been around for quite some time, but the last couple of years has seen an exponential growth of this untapped energy source as Rogers parades around the country calling for greenhouse gas reductions while building the dirty Cliffside coal plant. This was simply an opportunity we couldn’t pass up,” said Jill Rockingham, chief engineer for the project.

Asheville Rising Tide believes that the construction of the power plant is a win-win situation for the economy and the environment. “We are taking a very dangerous and volatile gas and turning it into a source for clean, carbon free electricity. The great thing about tapping into Roger’s hot air is that it is a truly renewable resource. At this point there appears to be an endless supply,” said, Rockingham. “Why build another dirty, expensive coal plant, when there are millions of BTU’s of clean, cheap, energy seeping out of their CEO’s mouth every day,” said Jake Tillerman, Asheville Rising Tide’s investment relations manager.

The plant has come under fire from some environmental groups over concern of a little studied element known as BS, a byproduct of burning hot air. The hot air at the Roger’s residence has an unusually high concentration of BS and environmentalist are concerned over potential health effects to nearby residents. “We are currently looking into ways in which to capture and sequester the BS but the technology just isn’t available at this moment,” said Rockingham. “We assure the environmental community that this is the last plant we build that does not have the capability of sequestering Roger’s BS. Besides, we painted the plant green. That seems to be all that corporations like Duke have to do to call a project sustainable.”

I am a unknown voice on Its Getting Hot In Here, despite the fact that I read it daily and have devoted the past two years of my life to help direct the Energy Action Coalition. My silence on this blog ends today - and I will use every platform imaginable to tell the story we need to tell and I’m asking all of you and millions more to join me. I’m ready for a POWER SHIFT.

The youth climate movement encompasses some of the most dynamic, talented, and innovative thinkers and activists around…We have pushed the limits on our campuses, in our communities, and positioned ourselves to be a strong voice for the clean and just energy future. We are amazing, but we are not big enough, we are not loud enough, and we are not yet powerful enough - but we COULD BE!

As I read this blog, and I see such critical debates about the Lieberman-Warner Bill, or positions on Coal or Nuclear, or Bio-Fuels - I’m left with the same thought over and over again…We need to change what’s politically possible, we need to make the demand for our clean and just energy future so loud and so clear that we change the game entirely. That movement can so easily start with us young people modeling the power of the grassroots to grow exponentially in this fight.

Every day we as champion need to be bringing more people along for this ride. We will grow large enough and powerful enough to put the special dirty energy interests out of the driver seat and help drive our country towards the clean and just energy future you and I dream about each day.

Let’s taking the opportunity this fall to flex our muscles, make more noise than we ever have and shift the politics in this country for real. We’re calling the campaign POWER VOTE - but really the campaign could be called almost anything, the fundamental idea behind it is that we organize 1,000,000+ people to fight for the brand of change we all feel so passionate about. We are successful is this effort, not if we raise millions of dollars, or hire the best staff, we are successful if tens of thousands of young people across this country step up to organize those around them…This is about good old fashion community building, and having millions and millions of conversations with our friends and families and classmates. This about being highly visible not only in showing up to vote on November 4th, but following candidates of all parties every step on the campaign trail demanding they address climate change, its demonstrating in front of coal plants, its advocating for the creation of clean and renewable energy choices, it helping our nation vision what a green economy with million of green jobs actually looks like.

This is a long rambling email filled with excerpts of the inspirations streaming through my head and my heart and I thought this was a good place to start.

JOIN US! Run POWER VOTE on your campus, unleash the leader that is screaming to come out inside you! Sign up now to take the lead - www.powervote.org - we’ll help train you and support you to train and support thousands more! Make the commitment to engage 1, 5, 10, 1000 new people in our movement.

I’m standing up and making noise…I’m honored to have this community to share my ideas with and anxious to grow it together. Let’s get to work!