In which Lou attempts valiantly to tie off a gaggle of loose ends without sounding even less coherent than normal…
I’ve revamped the Energy and Environment Clocks stuff with a new color scheme and new home page for the entire project. The home page will always have links to all of the online clocks.
I will post updates here as new clocks are released or existing ones are updated.
Let me stress one more time that I’m open to suggestions for changes or new clock versions, bug reports, etc.
And please do spread the word about this project, via the above links. The more people we can get to look at and (gasp!) think about these numbers, the better for everyone involved, which is, well, everyone.
Don’t forget the graphs page [•], too.
Yesterday I started using a new link style, like the ones in the EE Clocks stuff above–notice the “[•]”? That’s meant to indicate that the page opens in a new window. I couldn’t find a concise, generally accepted, text-only way of doing this, so I made up this convention. (Why don’t browsers add an indication to the status line when you’re hovering over a link that will open in a new window? As far as I can tell, none of them do that, and it would be very simple to implement. Oops–I feel coherence slipping away. Better get back on topic.)
If “[•]” is too visually intrusive, what should it be? “•”? Something else? Or should I forget the whole thing and let people continue to guess what my links will do unless they hold down the Control key when they click them?
What does “sustainable” really mean? The easy answer is “something we can do forever without exhausting a needed resource” (assuming the capacity for the atmosphere, oceans, etc. to act as waste sinks is another form of resource). This begs the question: What does “forever” mean, in this context? Until the entity performing the activity ceases to exist? Until the entity in question no longer wants to perform the activity? Until the sun burns out?
And what about transitional activities? You can argue that listening to music on old media–LPs, cassettes, eight tracks, CDs–has a high enough consumption of resources per unit of music (album, song, whatever) that it wasn’t sustainable in the long run, but electronic distribution of music is much more sustainable. At some level, almost everything we do, if viewed narrowly enough, is a transitional activity; with sufficient economic incentive we could continue to make LPs or whatever without petroleum. That would clearly move those products toward the “more sustainable” end of the spectrum, but would they then be sustainable in absolute terms?
Perhaps I’m just in a Very Bad Place right now, but I just can’t get excited over the news that G-8 Agrees to 80% Cut in Carbon Emissions by 2050 [•]. (It seems the media can’t agree on what happened. Obama broadens push for climate change pact [•] says that the agreement was 50% reduction by 2050, but “developing nations refused to go along”.)
I’m certainly not convinced that 2C is “enough” to prevent the kind and scope of climate chaos impacts that we don’t want to endure. (See Two degrees of separation [•] for why I’m ambivalent on this detail.)
I’m also less than convinced that the G8 embracing the standard prescription of an 80% CO2 emissions reduction by 2050 “fixes everything, forever!” as the saying goes. Trying to get from that declaration to a policy that “should” deliver the desired results to actually seeing that level of emissions cuts is a very treacherous road. Just getting the current climate bill through the US House of Representatives, even with the astounding level of sausage making involved, was like pushing a full-size SUV up a steep hill with the parking brake on. And the US Senate awaits.
What happens when we have to take the steps needed to get the last 20 percentage points of that 80%? Will there be enough of a shift in public consensus by then, and enough technological advancement, to overcome the myopia and ideology and just plain greed that form the biggest single barrier to climate progress? I hope so.
My wife and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary two days ago. Thirty years. Wow. And to think my wife is still my 21-year-old college sweetheart. I have to ask her some time how that works.
I was planning to do a long “look at how we’ve changed” post that talked about energy, the environment, our personal consumption (including my V6 Gremlin X) and technology in general, but I honestly didn’t have the heart for it right now. There are too many other, more productive things I can do with the considerable amount of time it would take to do that idea justice.
Who would you nominate for an Energy and Environment Hall of Fame? I’ve pondered doing that on a separate page on this site, if only as a way to help educate people about which topics more important than others, and where specific contributions came from.
There are a few no brainers: James Hansen, Bill McKibben, Matt Simmons. Some legacy names get in with zero debate, as well: M. King Hubbert, Rachel Carson, Svante Arrhenius.
Some of my favorite, and often overlooked, current writers, would get my vote: Fred Pearce, Lester R. Brown. Probably Chris Mooney, if Unscientific America turns out to be another home run.
Some people don’t fit into a neat category. I’d vote for Joe Romm, for his combination of books and his relentless blogging over at ClimateProgress. Same for George Monbiot for his books plus newspaper/online writing. Heidi Cullen gets in for her work on The Weather Channel (and likely other TV shows) and her appearances in documentaries.
Al Gore? No one has been a bigger, more abused target of the wackaloon deniers than the former US Vice President. But who has single handedly done more to educate the public than Gore accomplished via An Inconvenient Truth?
How to fairly pick some of the unsung heroes? Who gets the nod from the real scientists? Does Michael Mann and his co-authors get in solely for their hockey stick graph? How about Mark Serreze, Director of the [US] NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data Center)?
Organizations and web sites? NRDC, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, EDF; Treehugger, RealClimate, … ?
Do any of those wackaloon deniers make it, in the sense of treating “fame” literally and not merely as “good”? No.
How about the relentless Apocalypticons? No. Even though they do help to publicize the problems of peak oil and climate chaos, they also make it much harder to get many people to take action. I’ve personally seen this effect many times as newbies Google “peak oil”, land on a couple of Apocalypticon doom-fest sites, and instantly decide the entire topic is so much balloon juice.
There’s an undeniable fact that overhangs peak oil, climate chaos, and probably a few hundred other issues one could name. Far worse than being merely an “inconvenient truth” or a “nasty reality”, it’s the issue that stands between humanity and the action needed to deal with those problems. And this is it: We live in reality, but we respond to our perceptions of it.
Underwhelmed? You shouldn’t be. This mapping of reality onto our perceptions acts as a multiplier, often with a value less than one, that makes us over- or under-react to circumstances. It is the “conversion rate” or filter between the outside world and our minds, and it determines how much urgency we feel about everything from the most trivial of personal decisions or problems to worldwide catastrophes happening right before our eyes. And that urgency dictates the nature of and effort we put into our responses, including whom we vote for and which public policies we support.
Do I really have to provide an itemized taxonomy of our misjudgments, how we underestimated risks in the past and paid a price for that faulty perception (thalidomide), or how some of us overestimated a threat and caused needless grief (Y2k doomers who “knew” we couldn’t possibly fix that very real problem), or how we foolishly took steps that either weren’t needed or would have been pointless (backyard fallout shelters in the US in the 1950’s)? I didn’t think so.
This dichotomy of the universe into reality and our perceptions of it is conspicuously relevant to peak oil and climate chaos, for an absurdly simple reason: A large portion of people around the world, especially here in the US, either don’t know the facts or refuse to believe them for reasons of ideology or financial gain. As a result, there is nowhere near an appropriate level of pressure on politicians to take action, and there isn’t even enough urgency among the mainstreamers to change their own consumption patterns. The universe is infinitely indifferent to how busy our lives are or whether we philosophically oppose government action to limit CO2 emissions or accelerate our transition away from oil or even whether we’ve advanced science enough to understand what’s going on any more than the dinosaurs did 65 million years ago when they experienced one hell of a push on nature’s reset button.
While I’ve been thinking about writing something along these lines for a while, the impetus to make me do it today came from a few things that popped up in my news feeds this morning:
NASA data shows ‘dramatically thinned’ Arctic ice [•]:
Arctic sea ice thinned dramatically between the winters of 2004 and 2008, with thick older ice shrinking by the equivalent of Alaska’s land area, a study using data from a NASA satellite showed.
Using information from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Satellite (ICESat), scientists from the US space agency and the University of Washington in Seattle estimated both the thickness and volume of the Arctic Ocean’s ice cover.
ICESat allows scientists to measure changes in the thickness and volume of Arctic ice, whereas previously scientists relied only on measurements of area to determine how much of the Arctic Ocean is covered in ice.
Scientists found that Arctic sea ice thinned some seven inches (17.8 centimeters) a year, or 2.2 feet (67 centimeters) over four winters, according to the study by NASA and the University of Washington, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans.
They also found that thicker, older ice, which has survived one or more summers, shrank by 42 percent.
“Between 2004 and 2008, multi-year ice cover shrank 595,000 square miles (1.5 million square kilometers) — nearly the size of Alaska’s land area,” a report of the study’s findings said.
And don’t forget another subtle feedback, pancake ice [•].
Polar blog: ‘There’s something afoot in the Arctic’ - CNN.com [•]:
Never before has the channel between Ellesmere Island and Greenland been this ice-free in mid-summer; it’s usually blocked with ice until August. Over the past week we’ve placed GPS trackers and time-lapse cameras on and around the Petermann Glacier, in anticipation of it losing a piece of ice around 100 square kilometers in size. Massive cracks are spearing across the “tongue” of this enormous floating ice shelf (16km wide and 80km long) heralding one of the biggest glacier calvings ever recorded in the northern hemisphere.
…
This week, world leaders are meeting up in Italy for the G8. It’s a real — and possibly the last — opportunity for them to take a stand on climate change in the run up to this December’s climate meeting in Copenhagen, by making cuts of 40 percent in greenhouse gas emissions for developed countries.
Forget minus 50 in 2050 - COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009 [•]:
According to a draft document seen ahead of talks at the 17-nation Major Economies Forum tomorrow, major nations have failed to agree to set a goal halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
China and India have upset the applecart, opposing any mentioning of the target, a source familiar with negotiations told Reuters.
The two countries first want to see developed nations commit to making deep cuts in their emissions by 2020. They also want rich nations to come up with plans to provide developing nations with short-term finance to help them adapt to climate changes like more floods, heat waves, storms and rising sea levels, the source told Reuters.
A draft G8 statement seen by Reuters today, states that the rise on global temperatures should not exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). If the statement passes, it would mark a breakthrough by EU states in convincing the United States, Japan, Canada and Russia that the limit is a necessary threshold beyond which climate change will have incalculable consequences.
There it is: Too many decision makers are too concerned with short term or personal issues to take appropriate action. Instead of saying, “We’re all in this together, and the situation is urgent. We will find a way to deal with climate chaos, no matter what.”, the “developed” and “developing” countries are staging a food fight. And it just keeps getting worse–check the Energy and Environment Clock [•].[1]
The Cognitive Gaps in the title of this post should be pretty obvious to regular visitors to this site. The first and most obvious is the one between what the mainstream accepts as true and what climate scientists know. This Mainstream Gap is a product of people being “too busy to pay attention”, plus the fact that some are so ideologically opposed to the obvious solutions, or have such large financial incentives to defend business-as-usual practices that they simply wrap themselves in denial and shout down the scientists. Whatever the cause, the universe doesn’t care. Non-renewable fossil fuels come out of the ground, CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases go into the atmosphere, and all the natural systems and their emergent properties we depend on for our very lives respond.
Related: See the RealClimate review of Chris Mooney’s newest book, Unscientific America [•]. I will review it as soon as I receive my copy.
The other is the Science Gap, the one between reality and what even the climate scientists know. We’ve seen a growing stream of “it’s worse than we thought” reports regarding climate chaos in the last year or so. Arctic melting, ocean acidification, reduced oceanic buffering of CO2, threats to species, sea level rise, and so on. It’s tempting for the non-climate scientists (like me) to scream, “How could they get it this wrong???” That would be a horrible misreading of the situation, of course. The core problem is not that the climate scientists weren’t smart or diligent enough, it’s simply the mundane issue of timing. We humans poured many billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere before we figured out it was a serious problem. Once we did make that connection we had a tremendous amount of science to perform before we could understand just how our planet’s systems would respond to the enormous jolt from that CO2. Even with all the attention the climate is getting now, the scientific process can only be pushed so fast before we start leaping to wildly inaccurate and costly conclusions.
It didn’t have to be this way, of course. We could have evolved on a planet with a geologic history that produced little or no fossil fuels, allowing science to advance, even if at a slower rate, far enough to understand our planet before we poisoned it. Or perhaps things would be different if the continents were not in a formation that put so much land close enough to the North Pole to form permaforst but far enough from it to let it melt in response to just a couple of degrees of warming and trigger a huge, amplifying feedback. Or perhaps a different philosophical approach would have modified our behavior enough to keep more of the carbon in the ground, no matter how vast the reserves, until we better understood. You can play your own what-if games with counterfactuals; the unblinking reality is that we’re surrounded by the set of circumstances we inherited from random chance plus our own past actions, no matter how much we wish it were otherwise.
So this is our challenge: Close not just one of those gaps, but both. We have to understand better what our past and current actions are doing to the planet, and then we have to make sure that enough people beyond the science community and concerned laypersons, like us, also understand it at least well enough to pressure their representatives to take action. And we have to do it quickly enough so that we can act in our own best interest and avoid the worst impacts of peak oil and climate chaos.
[1] Could this possibly be my ulterior motive for bringing back the clock and creating new versions (in development as I type this)–to help people visualize what humanity is doing on the energy and environmental fronts, in real time, and therefore (hopefully) feel some urgency? Whether you think I’m that subtle or not, please help promote this experiment by sending a link to the current clock [•] (which you’ll notice is free of advertising) to some friends and relatives.
See It’s all about energy for a pretty decent, concise summary of alternatives:
The global energy scene is currently dominated by two overriding concerns that strongly affect decisions on energy development priorities: security of supply and climate change.
Worldwide, renewable energy is still dominated by the ”old” renewables: hydropower and traditional biomass. They supply respectively six and nine percent of global primary energy demand.
Only about two percent of the world’s primary energy is currently provided by ”new” renewable sources such as wind, photovoltaics (solar cells) and mini- and micro-hydro.
If greenhouse gas emissions are to be reduced substantially, renewable energy technologies arguably have to obtain a greater share of the global energy supply. But even if renewables get a larger market share, this only takes care of the climate problem. To become commonplace, they also need to satisfy the demand for security of supply.
”One of the main challenges is that all of the sophisticated sustainable energy technologies – be it wind, solar, wave or something else – produce energy when it suits them. But Mrs. Jensen does her laundry when it suits her,” says Hans Larsen, Head of Division at Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy, Denmark, and a review editor of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
The problem is storing the energy for later use and also transporting it over greater distances with a minimum of loss.
”If someone were to come up with a major storage breakthrough, the world’s entire need for energy could be covered by renewable energy,” says Hans Larsen.
In addition to storing and transporting energy, two other factors are a key to optimizing energy use and obtaining a higher degree of sustainability: intelligence and energy systems.
”The intelligent energy system is an area you don’t think so much about, but where there is a whole lot to be gained. It is key to making all current and future energy technologies meet and work together,” says Hans Larsen.
Below are listed 12 energy technologies. The overview shows the current technological status and growth of each technology, as well as the major challenges and barriers for further exploitation. The current and projected global market shares are noted, and so are the possible adverse effects of the technology. The overview is based on Risø Energy Report 7 – Future low carbon energy systems.
The technologies covered in the list following the above quote is:
I could quibble with a few details, but overall it looks like a solid treatment.
With unabated greenhouse gas emissions the world faces a growing risk of “abrupt and irreversible climatic shifts”. This is one of the conclusions in a scientific synthesis report released Thursday.
Based on more than 1,400 studies presented at a congress in March in Copenhagen that attracted some 2,000 scientists from more than 70 countries, the report presents the newest scientific evidence that has emerged since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report came out in 2007.
“The report gives an important overview of what science can tell us today about global warming, and perhaps most importantly what we can do about it,” Professor Katherine Richardson, Chair of the Scientific Steering Committee of the congress and the writing team, said in a press release.
“I hope the busy negotiators will have time to study the report carefully before they meet in Copenhagen, because a lot of new data have emerged,” the Science Faculty Vice Dean at the University of Copenhagen added.
According to the report, rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid “dangerous climate change”.
“Weaker targets for 2020 increase the risk of serious impacts, including the crossing of tipping points, and make the task of meeting 2050 targets more difficult and costly,” the report warns.
“The new report is four years wiser and not filtered by political considerations. It tells the uncomfortable truth that climate change is real,” John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the report, told the Danish engineering journal Ingeniøren.
The synthesis report is intended as an inspiration for decision makers ahead of the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen (COP15) in December this year.
“Once again we have been presented with clear and unequivocal evidence that temperatures are rising – and faster than we even dared think,” Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen said, after having had the report handed over in Brussels, where EU leaders were trying to agree on how to finance poor countries’ adaptation to climate change.
“A precondition for a greenhouse gas emissions cap is that world leaders cooperate on and provide money for projects that are comparable to the lunar landing,” Loekke Rasmussen said, making it clear that each country must commit to binding CO2 targets if global carbon emissions are to stabilize by 2020.
The report is here [39 page, 5.7MB PDF].
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Now on Twitter
I’ve just added several graphs to my quick graphs page. These are all at the bottom of the page, and they come from the US NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
As always, if there’s anything you’d like to see added to this page, let me know.
Tuesday, June 2, ABC will air ‘Earth 2100′: the Final Century of Civilization?, which sounds like a must-watch program for anyone who is the least bit interested in energy, environmental, or sustainability issues:
It’s an idea that most of us would rather not face — that within the next century, life as we know it could come to an end. Our civilization could crumble, leaving only traces of modern human existence behind.
It seems outlandish, extreme — even impossible. But according to cutting edge scientific research, it is a very real possibility. And unless we make drastic changes now, it could very well happen.
Experts have a stark warning: that unless we change course, the “perfect storm” of population growth, dwindling resources and climate change has the potential to converge in the next century with catastrophic results.
In order to plan for the worst, we must anticipate it. In that spirit, guided by some of the world’s experts, ABC News’ “Earth 2100,” hosted by Bob Woodruff, will journey through the next century and explore what might be our worst-case scenario.
But no one can predict the future, so how do we address the possibilities that lie ahead? Our solution is Lucy, a fictional character devised by the producers at ABC to guide us through the twists and turns of what the next 100 years could look like. It is through her eyes and experiences that we can truly imagine the experts’ worst-case scenario — and be inspired to make changes for the better.
Let me state the obvious: I don’t get advance screenings of such shows, so I’m basing my comments on the article above, which was produced by ABC. But judging by the people they mention (most notably Heidi Cullen, Michael Klare, John P. Holdren, and E. O. Wilson), it sounds like they did their homework. We all have our personal hot button topics in the vast, undulating energy and environmental landscape, so I’m sure most of us here will complain about which areas they do and don’t emphasize “enough”. And there’s always the possibility, which hangs like the sword of mediocrity over any such project, that they’ll take refuge in faux balance, e.g. “That’s what some experts say. But the following list of right-wing think tanks and fossil fuel corporations all say we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about such awful tales of woe and instead keep shopping.”
I, for one, plan to watch and see what they came up with.
Yes, ’tis true, Dear Readers–TCOE is now on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/thecostofenergy
Check in, follow me, and I’ll tweet ya as I work on things for the site. If nothing else, it will give you an easier way to send me feedback.
For some time now I’ve kept a minimal HTML file on my system that simply loads a bunch of interesting (to me) graphs of energy and environmental data fro various places on the Intertubes. I finally got a few minutes this weekend (while watching way too much NCAA college lacrosse on TV–GO SYRACUSE!!!) to massage the file a bit and upload it to my site for others to use.
The page is here.
If you have any suggestions for things I can add with just a link (i.e. I’m not interested in creating an ongoing maintenance chore), leave a comment here or e-mail me directly at lougrinzo [at sign] gmail.com.
If any of us still needs a reminder of the sheer size of the online world, surely we get it on a regular basis by “discovering” Really Cool Sites that “everyone” else has known about for a while. Today that happened to me, in the form of Skeptical Science: Examining the science of global warming skepticism. From the site’s About page:
Skeptical Science was created by John Cook, an ex-physicist (majoring in solar physics at the University of Queensland). My interest in global warming began when I got into some discussions with a skeptical family member who handed me a speech by Senator Inhofe. It took little research to show his arguments were misleading and lacking in science.
Since then, I’ve scoured peer reviewed scientific literature in an attempt to penetrate the political agendas and cherry picking. I’ve noticed two patterns in global warming skepticism. Firstly, many reasons for disbelieving in anthropogenic global warming (AGW) seem to be political rather than scientific. Eg - it’s all a liberal plot to spread socialism and destroy capitalism (or sometimes just plain dislike for Al Gore). As one person put it, “the cheerleaders for doing something about global warming seem to be largely the cheerleaders for many causes of which I disapprove”.
Beneath the politics is a more elemental instinct - an aversion to alarmism. We’ve been burnt before. The media predicted an ice age in the 70’s which never eventuated. Y2K was going to destroy society - it was barely a hiccup. And I won’t deny there are alarmists in the global warming camp. Urgent cries that the ice sheets are on the verge of sliding into the sea. Or emotional pleas to save those cute little polar bears. Sadly, alarmists seem to be the loudest voices in the global warming debate. But that doesn’t change the science underneath.
So I ignore the distracting politics and ad hominem arguments. Instead, I concentrate on the science. And I noticed when the discussion did get to science, the same flawed skeptic argument continue to propogate through the blogosphere, Chinese whispers style. This website is an attempt to examine all the scientific arguments that reject AGW.
From what I’ve seen of John’s site so far, he’s true to his word and ignores the politics that envelopes climate change and instead sticks to the science. Very impressive.
One entry that I found particularly good: How to cherry pick your way to Antarctic land ice gain, which addresses the endless claims we’ve all seen recently that Antarctica is actually gaining ice.
And yes, he does offer an RSS feed, for all you news feed junkies.
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
– Richard Feynman
Today is way more hectic than normal, so I hope you’ll forgive me for tossing some things over the wall with minimal commentary…
Even Deep Cuts in Greenhouse Gas Emissions Will Not Stop Global Warming:
Drastic, economy-changing cuts to greenhouse gas emissions will spare the planet half the trauma expected over the next century as the Earth warms.
And that’s the good news.
…
“We can no longer avoid significant warming during this century,” NCAR scientist Warren Washington, the lead author, said in a statement. But “we could stabilize the threat of climate change and avoid catastrophe.”
…
But the emissions slash will not stem the tide: Global average temperatures would still rise by nearly 1º F, about what scientists attribute to date from industrial emissions since 1900.
Sea levels would creep up nearly six inches as a result of that extra heat, with any additional rise due to melting ice sheets unaccounted for in the study’s calculations. And they would keep rising beyond 2100, given the oceans’ thermal inertia.
“Note that despite a 70 percent reduction in emissions over the 21st century,” the authors write, “there is virtually no cooling.”
And while the cut would stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, it holds them at about 450 parts-per-million, according to the study. That’s nearly 20 percent higher than today’s concentrations and at or even above a threshold many scientists fear will trigger a series of cascading and transformative catastrophes.
And if the “magic number” to avoid the truly nightmarish flavors of climate chaos is really 350 ppm… ?
Australia’s largest river close to running dry:
Australia’s biggest river is running so low that Adelaide, the country’s fifth-largest city, could run out of water in the next two years.
The Murray river is part of a network of waterways that irrigates the south-eastern corner of Australia, but after six years of severe drought, the worst dry spell ever, its slow moving waters are now almost stagnant.
Water levels in the Murray in the first three months of this year were the lowest on record and the government agency that administers the river, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA), said the next three months could be just as grim.
With meteorologists predicting another year of below-average rainfall, the MDBA, is bracing for worse to come.
“We do need to ensure that we have a range of secure water sources for Adelaide and other towns along the Murray,” agency head, Rob Freeman said.
But the MDBA faces an uphill battle, as the drought has drained water supplies across the south-eastern corner of Australia. The Murray-Darling basin named after the two biggest rivers that join to form the south-eastern catchment area now holds just 18% of its water capacity.
Stopping climate change — and starvation:
In the summer of 2003, a heat wave hit Europe, leaving roughly 52,000 people dead and farmers across the region reeling. Stressing crops and livestock alike, the extreme heat was responsible for precipitous drops in crucial food stocks such as corn, maize and wheat compared with the year before. Indeed, in Italy alone, maize yields declined 35 percent, while France saw fruit and wheat production fall by 20 and 25 percent respectively. This scenario, while not directly attributable to global warming, serves as a preview of possibilities to come.
Examining 23 global climate models, two leading U.S. climatologists recently determined that there’s more than a 90 percent chance that by the end of the century, the average growing season temperatures in the tropics and subtropics will “exceed the most extreme seasonal temperatures recorded from 1900 to 2006.” In other words, by 2100 the sweltering heat seen during the summer of 2003 could become a common occurrence - potentially causing food and water shortages for up to half of the world’s population.
This holds with a 2007 joint study by the U.S.-based Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which found overall global agricultural productivity, due to global warming, is projected to decline on average between 3 percent and 16 percent by 2080. The impact in particular countries, however, could be much worse. Indeed, according to the study, India could see a drop in crop production of as much as 30 percent to 40 percent and the Sudan could experience as much as a 56 percent reduction.
Sucking carbon dioxide from the air:
Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Then why not capture it and store it out of harms way? So says Roger Pielke, a scientist at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, US.
Pielke has recently analysed the economics of this controversial technique and has shown that it compares favourably to other ways of stabilising greenhouse gases. “This surprising result suggests, at a minimum, that air capture should receive the same detailed analysis as other approaches to mitigation,” Pielke told environmentalresearchweb.
See the article for some additional details. Sadly, the article itself is not freely available; I would love to see the entire analysis.
Yes, probably-but not in the way many people think.
(Editor’s note: The local-food movement has been gaining momentum in developed countries, and in many developing countries as well, in recent years; in the United States alone, sales of locally grown foods, worth about $4 billion in 2002, could reach as much as $7 billion by 2011. Local food’s claimed benefits are driving health- and environment-conscious consumers to seek alternatives to the industrial agriculture system whose products dominate grocery-store shelves. It is also linked to the localization efforts of people who believe that rising transport costs and reaction to globalization will trigger a shortening of economic links and greater reliance on local and regional economies. This two-part series examines the potential impacts of greater localization of food, beginning with the environmental effects and then, in our July/August issue, the economic implications.)
David Archer’s The Long Thaw: How humans are changing the next 100,000 years of Earth’s climate [180 pages] is a must-read for anyone who cares about climate chaos and related energy use and public policy, albeit for not quite the usual reasons people recommend a book like that on a site like this.
If Archer’s name sounds familiar, you probably know it from his occasional writing on RealClimate, or perhaps from some recent news stories (Google “David Archer”). He’s a Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, which explains a lot about the tone and style of The Long Thaw.
True to his title and subtitle, Archer takes the long view of our situation, and for the most part, the very long view. He starts with a couple of foundational chapters on the greenhouse effect and the evidence we’ve collected already that shows how the climate is warming, then spends only one relatively brief chapter on the rest of the current century before placing our present in the context of millenia past and future.
Armchair experts will see some familiar photos and graphs — the Larsen B ice shelf disintegrating, the record of CO2 observations from Moana Loa — but the majority of the non-text elements were new to me, and some of them struck me as very instructive, leading me to wonder why we don’t see them used more often online (assuming they’re not Archer’s creations, obviously).
There’s plenty of sobering-to-scary information here about the global warming that’s “already in the pipeline”, as the cliche goes, ocean acidification, sea level rise, carbon cycle feedbacks (including everyone’s favorite monster under the bed, methane hydrates), and how, depending on our future use of fossil fuels, we’ll likely prevent glaciation (i.e. an “ice age”) in 50,000 or 130,000 or 500,000 years. He even explains the derivation of the infinitely quoted “80% by 2050″ greenhouse gas reduction.
Throughout, Archer presents this material in about as calm and non-sensationalistic a way as one could imagine. There’s no hysteria, no overreaching, no politics, no claims of unwarranted certainty, and no finger pointing. He sticks to his facts and lets them tell the story, which is one reason why I called The Long Thaw a must read: Many of the people who regularly read web sites about energy and environmental issues will learn (or, at a minimum, be reminded of) the value of not turning every discussion about such topics into a cross between a formal debate and a street fight. Of course, the main reason to buy and read the book is that it’s simply very well done, and will no doubt serve as both a tutorial and a reference for concerned amateurs, like us.
One of the few places where Archer’s personality peers at us through the facts comes in the final paragraphs of the epilogue:
We will conclude by considering the awesome potential energy impacts of gasoline on Earth. When it is burned, it yields about 2500 kilocalories of energy, but this is just the beginning. Its carbon is released as CO2 to the atmosphere, trapping the Earth’s radiant energy by absorbing infrared radiation. About three-quarters of the CO2 will go away in a few centuries, but the rest will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years.
If we add up the total amount of energy trapped by the CO2 from the gallon of gas over its atmospheric lifetime, we find that our gallon of gasoline ultimately traps one hundred billion (100,000,000,000) kilocalories of useless and unwanted greenhouse heat. The bad energy from burning that gallon ultimately outweighs the good energy by a factor of about 40 million.
The enormous world-altering potential of that gallon of gasoline has taken the reins of Earth’s climate away from its natural stabilizing feedback systems, and given them to us. May we use our newfound powers wisely.
We can only hope that enough of us get the message.
The US Department of Energy has released the latest edition of their Annual Energy Review (from the Executive Summary):
The projections in AEO2009 look beyond current economic and financial woes and focus on factors that drive U.S. energy markets in the longer term. Key issues highlighted in the AEO2009 include higher but uncertain world oil prices, growing concern about greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and its impacts on energy investment decisions, the increasing use of renewable fuels, the increasing production of unconventional natural gas, the shift in the transportation fleet to more efficient vehicles, and improved efficiency in end-use appliances. Using a reference case and a broad range of sensitivity cases, AEO2009 illustrates these key energy market trends and explores important areas of uncertainty in the U.S. energy economy. The AEO2009 cases, which were developed before enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA2009) in February 2009, reflect laws and policies in effect as of November 2008.
AEO2009 also includes in-depth discussions on topics of special interest that may affect the energy market outlook, including changes in Federal and State laws and regulations and recent developments in technologies for energy production and consumption. Some of the highlights for selected topics are mentioned in this Executive Summary, but readers interested in other issues or a fuller discussion should look at the Legislation and Regulations and Issues in Focus sections.
Developments in technologies for energy production and consumption that are discussed and analyzed in this report include the impacts of growing concerns about GHG emissions on investment decisions and how those impacts are handled in the AEO2009 projections; the impacts of extending the PTC for renewable fuels by 10 years; the impacts of uncertainty about construction costs for electric power plants; the relationship between natural gas prices and oil prices; the economics of bringing natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope to U.S. markets; expectations for oil shale production; the economics of plug-in electric hybrids; and trends in world oil prices and production.
See the report’s main page for the complete report or pieces, all in PDF format.
I’ve made no secret of my opinions of the DOE/EIA’s track record in making such projections, even while I’ve recognized the awful complexity of the task. While I’ve had only a few minutes to give the latest AEO a very quick skim, I notice that on page 84 there’s a bar chart (Figure 81) that shows CO2 emissions for each sector of the US economy (residential, commercial, industrial, transportation, and electricity generation) rising from 2007 to 2030. The beginning of their explanation for this phenomenon:
Even with rising energy prices, growth in energy use leads to increasing U.S. CO2 emissions in the absence of explicit policies to reduce GHG emissions; however, the appliance efficiency, CAFE, and tax policies enacted in 2007 and 2008, slow the growth of U.S. energy demand, and as a result, energy-related CO2 emissions in the AEO2009 reference case grow by 0.3 percent per year from 2007 to 2030, as compared with 0.8 percent per year from 1980 to 2007. In 2030, energy-related CO2 emissions total 6,414 million metric tons, about 7 percent higher than in 2007.
Slower emissions growth is also, in part, a result of the declining share of electricity generation that comes from fossil fuels—primarily, coal and natural gas—and the growing renewable share, which increases from 8 percent in 2007 to 14 percent in 2030. As a result, while electricity generation increases by 0.9 percent per year, CO2 emissions from electricity generation increase by only 0.5 percent per year. The largest share of U.S. CO2 emissions comes from electricity generation (Figure 81).
The U.S. economy becomes less carbon intensive as CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP decline by 39 percent and emissions per capita decline by 14 percent over the projection. Increased demand for energy services is offset in part by shifts toward less energy intensive industries, efficiency improvements, and increased use of renewables and other less carbon intensive energy fuels. More rapid improvements in technologies that emit less CO2, new CO2 mitigation requirements, or more rapid adoption of voluntary CO2 emissions reduction programs could result in lower CO2 emissions levels than are projected here.
Anyone care to flesh out the world scenario, including international cooperation on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the cumulative effect of those rising emissions on the world, if this projection is accurate? After pondering that, is it any more clear how important the next climate treaty, to (hopefully) be reached late this year in Copenhagen, will be?
In any case, please go check out the latest AEO. It’s a very important document, if only because it’s the work of the DOE/EIA and therefore will greatly influence public policy discussion for the next year.
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
– William Blake
I got into a conversation with a friend the other day about a seemingly simple question that perfectly encapsulates what I call “the measurement challenge” that cuts across energy and environmental topics. The question: Which is “greener”, distributing documents at a meeting in paper form, or as PDF files on a USB drive?
I bet a lot of you just knee-jerked and said it was the USB drive, because paper is Very Very Bad.
Well, not so fast. Before casting your vote for one option or the other, this deserves a bit of thought.
For one thing, how many pages of paper are we talking about? One? A thousand? One hundred thousand? It’s not hard to imagine the lines on a graph crossing at a point of equal environmental cost–below X pages, paper has a lower overall impact, above that page count and the USB drive wins.
Next is the question of what we mean by printing. Are we talking about using 20-pound, 100% recycled white paper with a laser printer (or inkjet, whichever has the lowest impact), or are we printing 28-pound, brilliant white, non-recycled paper on whichever technology does the most environmental harm? I suspect that these details could shift X, our number of pages trade off point, to the left or right on our line graph considerably.
And the fun doesn’t stop there, of course. Are going to use a standard, off the shelf USB drive, or one that’s (apparently) much greener? How much does that do to our X point?
Speaking of fun, what do we mean by environmental impact, anyway? How do we measure things like energy use, CO2 emissions (both direct and indirect), water use (both draw and consumption, two different issues), various other pollutants, like heavy metals, the ease of recycling the paper or USB drive, etc. and combine them into a single number so we can say this solution’s impact is better than that solution’s? Or do we simplify our lives by picking one big goal–fighting climate chaos–and then focus exclusively on greenhouse gas emissions and simply ignore the other measurements we could be making and considering? In the case of a USB drive vs. paper that becomes all the more pertinent, given the waste water issues associated with creating paper.
I’ve heard this particular question of paper vs. USB for document distribution to groups from a few dozen to a few hundred people come up several times recently, and I have to admit that I don’t know the answer. It would take quite a determined effort to find out the impact of those two options, even without throwing recordable CDs into the mix as a third possibility, and even then you’d likely have the ground for yet another debate when you try to weigh some costs against others, as I mentioned above.
(This is a general concept that’s very familiar to economists. Look up utility maximization in an advanced microeconomics textbook, and you’ll be surprised at the level of math the “on the other hand” guys use in analyzing this decision making process.)
So, OK, it’s a tough problem. What’s the point? Simply this: We’re awash in these kinds of decisions, which if made in accordance with our goals, could represent a very significant reduction in the environmental impact of many of our daily activities. Many of these decisions, like the USB vs. paper one, are overt purchasing issues which require you to decide between buying one widget or another. But others are much more subtle, such as whether you drive like the typical US driver (i.e. leadfoot) or you employ some mild hypermiling techniques to burn less gasoline and money and emit less CO2 on your way from point A to point B. Or perhaps once you think about the actual numbers involved, you’ll realize you can avoid some of those trips from A to B entirely.
This all relates to the basic mission of this site, to help educate and activate consumers and voters, so they can make more informed and better decisions that help themselves and the rest of us, in both the short and longer terms. Turning from that ideal to the real world, how far can we go without solid data on which to base our decisions, and what will it take to get much more and much better data for those of us who are willing to look at it and make those more informed decisions?
One of the things I’ve decided to spend more time on lately is reading some of several metric tons of energy and environment books I have stacked around my house. I just finished Chris Wood’s Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America, which I’ll have more to say about shortly.
The next book on my list was Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, which is one of those books that supposedly “everyone” interested in climate chaos should read.[1] All I read last night was the introduction, but it contained one of those jaw-dropping, gob-smacking, statements that makes you want to shout, “Who the hell edited this thing???” and throw the book across the room.
Specifically, on page 2 Flannery says:
Whether we are crossing the road or paying the bill, it is the big, fast-moving things that command our attention. But seemingly large issues sometimes turn out to be a sideshow. The Y2K bug is one such example. Around the globe many governments and companies spent billions to prepare themselves against the threat, while others spent nothing; and 1999 gave way to 2000 with barely a hiccup, let alone an apocalypse.
There’s a technical term from computer science for this line of reasoning: Bullshit!
On a just slightly calmer note, let me make it unmistakeably clear that:
Y2k was indeed a very big, very serious problem.
The reason we had barely a hiccup when those leading digits of the year flipped was because we spent all those billions of dollars to fix the problem. Flannery’s argument is like saying that we shouldn’t spend so much money giving kids polio vaccinations because so few kids get polio any more, without recognizing the causality between those inoculations and the low rate of disease.
Why am I so sure about this? I was a programmer for IBM, where I first learned of the Y2k problem almost 20 years before that uneventful date. And not to drag Mrs. Lou into this conversation, but she was the lead project manager on a massive Y2k remediation project for a company that I absolutely guarantee everyone reading this blog has heard of.
Leading up to 1/1/2000 there was considerable discussion about how difficult it would be to fix this mess in some cases–embedded systems where it wasn’t obvious dates were used in critical calculations, and old programs that existed only in binary form, making a “simple” change to source code and a rebuild of the executable impossible. I know that not all Y2k problems were completely fixed; in some cases people had to resort to some decidedly ugly coding hacks to keep things working, and I’d bet my keyboard that in some cases all they did was set the hardware clocks back 20 or 50 years.
My point is not to beat Flannery over the head with a stack of year 2000 calendars, but to point out how easy it is for someone to make a wildly off base assumption and then follow it into a absurd conclusion. While I suspect that Flannery’s book will prove to be an excellent read, and that I will join the already huge ranks of those who call it a “must read”, on this one very narrow point, he’s flat out wrong.
I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the flip side to this situation, the people who also didn’t know diddly about computers but didn’t let that stop them from inventing an entire horror industry around the notion that Y2k would be TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it), including one very prominent peak oiler. Even months into 2000 this person was still talking about how we weren’t out of the woods yet, the financial system could still collapse, etc., and it was all balloon juice. Yet when he tells us that wind power will never work on a utility scale, and that post-peak oil we won’t have the fuel needed for the trucks and other vehicles needed to maintain wind farms, people still believe him.[2]
Was Y2k a real and very serious problem? Yes.
Was it defused because we made an extraordinary response to an extraordinary threat? Yes.
Therefore, I’m begging everyone who reads this site to take a deep breath and be as objective as you can about climate chaos and peak oil and the looming water and food issues around the world, among the other very real monsters under our bed. Carelessly denying either their existence (or the scale of the threat they pose) or our ability to rise to a challenge will get us nowhere.
[1] Yes, I really am woefully behind on my reading, and I should have gotten to Flannery’s book much sooner. As penance, I will spend an hour sorting through my neighbor’s garbage, pulling out the recycleables that he’s too lazy to separate.
[2] No, I’m not going to name him (again), and you get no bonus points for figuring out who it was.
If you follow energy and environmental news closely, you probably have noticed how dire things are sounding lately. Beyond the immediate, financial problems many consumers in industrialized countries are facing thanks to higher gasoline prices, there’s more than a little cause for concern, including:
Sadly, I can’t convince myself that I’m alone in seeing such a mounting list of problems. For example, this September, ABC (US) will air a two-hour special, Scientists From Around the Globe Join ABC News in a Forum on Surviving the Century:
Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse?
According to many of the world’s top scientists, the answer is yes, unless we take action now.
This September, in Earth 2100, a dramatic ABC News 2-hour broadcast, the greatest minds across the globe will join together in a countdown to the year 2100 to tell us what we must do to survive the next century … And what may happen if we don’t.
The time to act is now, says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute.
“The 21st century is going to be the century which determine[s] whether we live or die as a sustainable species,” Gleick said. “As populations grow, as our use of resources grows, I think we get closer and closer to that edge.”
Experts say that extreme changes in climate, combined with dwindling resources, famine, war and disease have the potential to create a post-apocalyptic world in less than a hundred years. Harvard University and Woods Hole climatologist John Holdrens says we cannot continue going down the same path.
“If we continue on business as usual, we are going to see more floods, more droughts, more heat waves, more wildfires, more ice melting, faster sea level rise,” Holdren said.
“We really have less than a decade to start getting this right. If we’re still dragging our feet in 2015 I think it really becomes at that point almost impossible for the world to avert a degree of climate change that we simply will not be able to manage without intolerable cost and consequences.”
As a trained economist, I’m strongly inclined to be a contrarian and look for the other side of the issue. Won’t we see higher prices signal economies–local, national, and world–to seek a new equilibrium point? Won’t we find ways to make better use of existing technology and invent hew solutions, some technological, some “merely” in the business arena?[3]
Yes, of course we’ll see such things, and we’re seeing them already. GM and Ford are shutting down truck plants or converting them to produce cars, US drivers are driving less and buying smaller cars in droves, and people are increasingly accepting the science behind global warming, albeit with some truly perverse exceptions. You can probably add your own list of adaptations from the large to the trivial.
So, the question isn’t will we make changes when kicked repeated by the mule that is higher market prices, but can we summon the will to make them fast enough? Can we conserve oil quicker than the supply declines post peak? Can we impose enough of a price penalty on CO2 emissions, even with rising energy prices, that we reduce them to 80% below 1990’s level by 2050? Or have we locked our children, including my three nieces and all of our children[4], into an unprecedented struggle for life?
Put another way–now that we’ve created these situations and waited so long to deal with them that convenient or comfortable solutions are no longer possible, can we do the equivalent of pulling an all-nighter and passing our final exam?
For the first time in my life I’m not sure how to answer that question.
[1] By “anyone” I mean “anyone who has a freakin’ clue”, which excludes the misanthropic doomers on the ‘net who see disaster in the pattern of Cheerios in their cereal bowl every morning, as well as the money men we see propped up on business channel telecasts telling us how the magic of the market will make it all better, even as it (surprise!) makes the money men richer. The clueful category includes the real scientists, like James Hansen and the good people over at RealClimate.org.
[2] Which has about the same probability of happening during our lifetime as flying monkeys coming out of the next president’s butt live on a televised press conference.
[3] My favorite example of a business breakthrough is the PPA (power producer agreement) for solar panels. These are the arrangements where you agree to buy your electricity from a company for X years at Y cents per kWh, and they install solar panels on your house or business. The own the equipment and are responsible for repairs, etc., so you don’t have any large up-front costs. This very neatly gets around the very sizable barrier to entry for many consumers in adopting solar PV.
[4] When I talk about “fixing things for the children”, I get that look from people, and I get some amazingly rude e-mail. I no longer care. As I’ve said in presentations and on this site, the children of the world belong to all of us, no matter whose DNA they carry. That’s my motivation, pure and simple. If human beings suddenly went sterile and those of us already here were the last ones ever born, then I wouldn’t care about any of these issues I write about nearly every day. After the last of us died off the planet and nature would recover just fine.
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
– Bertrand Russell
Fifty-four years ago, one of the landmark science fiction short stories was published, a story that has increasingly uncomfortable implications for everyone alive today. Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations, with its unblinking depiction of humanity in an indifferent universe, marked a crucial step in science fiction’s coming of age as an art form as it evolved from escapist crap into a far more serious genre of literature.
Sadly, and perhaps inevitably, it is now time for humanity to take the same steps that science fiction did, and recognize the coldest equation:
Let me take a second to deconstruct this brutally simple equation and it’s inescapable implications:
First, if either our population or our impact per person rises (which they both are), and the other remains constant, then our total impact also rises. There is no flexibility here, no loophole or exception possible.
Second, if we can reduce either the average human being’s impact on the world or our population, and the other factor continues to rise, then we’re only buying ourselves time before we exceed the carrying capacity of the planet.
Just to be clear, I’m using “environmental impact” in a much broader sense than I normally do on this site. When people in the industrialized world think of “environmental impacts” at all, they usually associate that phrase with CO2 emissions or mercury pollution, smog over cities, polluted streams and lakes, or perhaps mountain top removal coal mining. I’m using “environmental impacts” to mean all those things as well as the consumption of non-renewable resources. Every day that goes by in which we pull another 86 million barrels of oil, 8 billion cubic meters of natural gas, and 8.5 million tonnes of coal from the earth and pour another 75 million tonnes of CO2 into the air we’re having a huge impact on not just the environment but also on its ability to support us as we live now.
The crucial detail in the coldest equation is one of human perception. We all make the same implicit assumption that is increasingly at odds with the world we’ve created: we assume that those elements of the environment we rely on to sustain us are effectively infinite. Ask almost anyone if there’s an infinite amount of anything on the planet, and they’ll instantly dismiss the question; they there’s no such thing an infinite resource, so it’s obviously a trick. But nearly every one of us in the developed nations lives as if the resources we consume and the sinks of the land, sea, and air we fill with our waste are, in fact, infinite, as if the price of everything we buy or sell reflects its actual worth in the long run. Sum all those countless consumption decisions and the lifestyles and cities and organizations and governments they created over centuries, each ultimately built atop that shakiest of conceptual foundations, and we see a terrifying emergent property, a planet of 6.7 billion people racing ever faster toward a Malthusian cliff. As I’ve said before on this site, we are simultaneously emptying the world of its non-renewable resources and filling its sinks with our waste.
But wait, people say, what about all that energy efficiency stuff and green technology you talk about? Won’t it help? Yes, in one particular and crucial way: It will put downward pressure on the average environmental impact per person and buy us time to figure out a way to control, and then reduce, our global population, as well as find ever more ways to reduce our impact per person. Right now, with the compound and interrelated terrors of peak oil and global warming and food and water shortages all suddenly looming at once, extra time is an exceedingly precious thing.
Which brings us to the thorniest issue, the West not wanting to give up their lifestyles, coupled with the sudden emergence of portions of China and India as a Western-style consumer class. The sheer number of people in these two countries, roughly 2.5 billion or 37% of all humanity, means that even a small portion of them buying their first car or shifting their diet to include much more meat, or their country going on a coal power plant building spree (as China is doing right now) has worldwide implications, enough to raise the global impact per person in our equation. This is only compounded by the US, consumer of 25% of the world’s oil and emitter of about the same proportion of the world’s CO2, refusing to change without concessions from China.
In thinking about this, I believe I know the answer to Nick Bostrom’s question about the Great Filter, as he detailed in his Technology Review piece, Where Are They?: Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing. He ponders where the other intelligent life is in the universe, and whether the Great Filter, the most difficult phase in our development, the one that kills off most intelligent races, lies in our past or our future. My guess is that we’re in it right now, that it began roughly in the time frame depicted in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the use of tools by protohumans, and that we’ve yet to complete the exam. The test is not, as so many have speculated, whether we can overcome our militaristic and territorial tendencies, although that’s certainly a major part of it. The test is whether we can conquer those demons and also take the next and much more difficult step, and learn how to cooperate globally to live in a sustainable fashion, even if only as an open-ended expression of enlightened self-interest.
This is an imposing hurdle. A very large portion of the people in our world have become so cynical, so enamored of one conspiracy theory or another, and so often victimized by genuine conspiracies, that they either can’t, or won’t let themselves, summon the trust and compassion needed for cooperation on the scale needed. Their experience and (sometimes selective) knowledge of history have taught them to see the world as a matter of Us vs. Them instead of Us and Them. Their fear, ignorance, and myopia effectively changes all human existence from being an infinite game, with no set ending and no definitive winner, to a finite game between us and our own inner demons, a contest we can’t possibly win.
All is not lost, by any means, if only because we’ve already displayed the kind of cooperation needed. Perhaps every environmentalist’s favorite example is The Montreal Protocol, which phased out the use of CFC’s, albeit with not enough attention to HCFC’s. But as humanity continues to develop, that undeniable, narrow success is like a young child learning to sing her first nursery rhyme, decades before we’ll know if she can become an accomplished opera singer.
Many people I speak with about energy and environmental issues dismiss it all with a wave of the hand. They’re simply too busy with jobs and the million details of caring for their family and household to be bothered looking more than a few weeks into the future. They are so focused on the hyper-local, in both spatial and temporal dimensions, so tightly held in place by the glass fist that is their here and now, that they fall prey to that easy assumption that they live in a world of virtually infinite resources and sinks, which leads directly to their not taking any meaningful action to help themselves or those they love, let alone humanity as a whole.
Yes, this all sounds incredibly depressing. And it can be, if one surrenders to the cynicism. I refuse to take that step, the spiritual equivalent of suicide, because we humans can be breathtakingly altruistic and compassionate over short enough time frames. Watch news reports of tornadoes in the US, the tropical storm in Myanmar, or the earthquake in China, just to name three painfully current examples, and you’ll see many people risk their lives for strangers. In 1972, when I was a child, my mother and I lived through the Agnes flood in Pennsylvania, and we saw many such acts first hand and benefited from a few. That experience and nearly everything else I’ve seen in my life convinces me that individually we have the right characteristics–the self-interest, the compassion, the intelligence, and the organizational skills–needed to save ourselves and each other from this colossal mess we’ve created. The question then becomes: Can we find a way, and quickly enough, to cooperate on a grand scale and focus our abilities to avoid falling prey to the coldest equation?
Sorry for the difficulties in getting to the site this morning. My hosting service had a “known problem on their end” which made the site all but impossible to get to. It seems to be clearing up now, just in time for me to try to catch up on a little of the day’s lost posting before I have to head off to the Greywolves’ season opener against Tonawanda.
Bill McKibben has an excellent piece online at Orion Magazine’s site, Where Have All the Joiners Gone?:
CHEAP FOSSIL FUEL has made us what we are. Which is to say: rich, powerful—Look at us! We can make the ice caps melt! The oceans rise! But something else too: cheap fossil fuel has made us the first people on Earth with no need of our neighbors. Think, in the course of an ordinary day, how often you rely on the people who live near you for anything of practical value. Perhaps carpooling your kids to school or soccer. If you live in a rural community, there may be a volunteer fire department, which keeps your insurance affordable. But your food, your fuel, your shelter, your clothes, and your entertainment most likely come from a distance and arrive anonymously at that. A meteorite could fall on your cul-de-sac tomorrow, disappearing your neighbors, and the routines of your daily life wouldn’t change.
…
For the rest of us, who aren’t planning to actually till the soil ourselves, relearning neighborliness means joining a CSA or going to the farmers’ market (where shoppers have ten times as many conversations per visit as they do at the Shop ‘n Save).
It means putting solar panels on our roofs and tying them into the grid so that our neighbors can cool their beer with the sunlight that falls on our shingles—and, of course, it means buying that beer from the local brewery. It means buying CDs when the artist is selling them after a concert, and listening to your local public radio station instead of the XM satellite-from-nowhere. It means not just supporting the idea of mass transit but getting on the darned bus sometimes.
It means embracing nonindependence—which to us may seem un-American, but in fact it is just the opposite. Tocqueville, in the greatest clichè of American political science history, called us a nation of joiners. We’ve gotten away from that—become a nation of drive-around-by-ourselfers. But in a world that seems likely to grow a little tougher all around, with weird weather, rising prices, and falling profits, a neighbor is what you’ll need most.
The irony here is almost overwhelming. At a time in our development of computer technology that’s dominated by networked configurations and “mesh” computing, we’re neglecting the most basic form of networking of all, people-to-people relationships. To add another layer to this lasagna of weirdness, it’s networked computers–as in the one you’re using this very nanosecond–that’s helping to accelerate this breakdown.
In the early days of the web (as opposed to the early days of the Internet, which is markedly older), there was considerable optimistic talk about the social and educational possibilities this new medium was creating. People could spend just a few minutes and find out about practically anything on the planet, and do it from just about anywhere on the planet. The potential was breathtaking.
The reality, of course, has turned out to be far less Utopian and far more polarizing. Instead of using the Internet as a learning tool, many of us use it simply to marinate ourselves in our own special interests. Whatever your personal fetish, from food and wine to politics to cars to energy and environmental issues to chess to build reproduction medieval musical instruments to investing to flying sailplanes to lacrosse to, well, the more traditional (a)vocations people usually refer to as fetishes, you can find all manner of online “communities” devoted to the objects of your obsession. A few quick Googles and you’ll soon have a list of discussion boards and web sites and downloadables that you can burn endless hours on, sometimes without even trying, under one pseudonym and manufactured persona or another.
Yet how many of us with an “active” online presence know the names of every neighbor who lives at the dozen addresses closest to our own? I’d fail that test, I’m ashamed to say.
All is not lost, of course. Even today, not all participation in online communities pushes us further into isolation, into a virtual world spinning forever down the ringing grooves of sameness, to bastardize Tennyson. We often find people online who become part of our real world community. I’m a perfect example, thanks to the people I met online associated with several local environmental groups, not to mention the local lacrosse community and team my work for them as team photographer.
But far too often the online world remains not merely a separate realm from reality, but a corrupting one. We shun new information in favor those who agree with and reinforce our own views. We become ever more attached to and self-identified with our positions, with a further, detestable and intractable polarization of society being the emergent property of that hardening of the attitudes. Given the astonishing gift of the world spread before our fingertips, we choose instead to narrowcast ourselves into the merest slice of that spectrum and become part of the problem instead of the solution.
Can we do better? Can we wake up, use information technology in much smarter and more productive ways, both related to energy and environmental issues, and not? Perhaps I’m too naive or optimistic, or maybe I’m just overly influenced by my personal experiences with online communities, but I’m convinced we can and we will make that change. It will take longer and happen more in response to genuine economic pain than most of us would prefer, but we’ll get there.
The Green Datacenter is a commitment, not a product:
Corporate IT initiatives to reduce environmental impact and power consumption is here for the long run. Executives are allocating time, energy and money to invest in Green initiatives. Governments are allocating research, regulations and suggesting laws toward Green Datacenter efficiency. Consumers, policy makers and industry influentials are promoting Green Datacenter models.
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Many view the Green Datacenter as a product feature checklist to gain their one time win. But that is an unfortunate illusion. While new technology from the industry will help, it does not replace the ongoing architectural and process commitment needed.Green Datacenters = An Architectural Commitment, not a product Strategy
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In the past, IT architects gave too little attention to security: Eventually suffering the consequences. Environmental Impact and Power are quickly becoming pervasive architectural issues with new initiatives.
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Reducing power consumption is obvious. Gone are the days of measuring datacenters by square foot of space. Now, datacenters are increasingly sized by mega watt. More efficient technologies with new capabilities are being promoted as the silver bullet. But energy savings is a much more complex architectural issue from architectural power management capacity planning techniques to optimizing operational processes and facilities design.Reducing environmental impact is more challenging. But this industry initiative isn’t called the power reduction initiative. It’s called the Green initiative for an important reason. There is a consensus that serious negative environmental repercussions are the consequence of man made pollution. From the atmosphere to the soils and oceans, governments, partners, consumers and industry organizations want companies to have a more positive impact on the environment.
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The world is changing for IT Architects and we must develop new skills. The days of architecting a system without power and environmental considerations are numbered. Just like other Architectural skills, Green metrics and vocabulary will become pervasive and we will be accountable for this important IT Architectural issue in our organizations for the long run. It’s already happening.
I agree 100% with the views expressed in this item, and I would also contend that this new mindset must and will become pervasive in the industrialized world as a whole, not just that corner of it concerned with all things IT.
Without being overly dramatic, this is analogous to a person finding out he or she has coronary artery disease and must take action to prevent a heart attack, possibly not the person’s first. The patient typically doesn’t like the medical news and doesn’t want a lifetime prescription for drugs, such as cholesterol-lowering meds, plus permanent lifestyle changes, including an emphasis on eating lower fat foods, exercising more, etc. It can feel like the rules of the game were suddenly changed–the person was “healthy” for decades (when, in fact, genetics and/or lifestyle were contributing to a mounting, if unrecognized, problem in the form of arterial plaque), and one day Something Happens–a heart attack or chest pain leads to testing and a diagnosis or a stent or even a bypass operation (a.k.a. “the zipper”, according to my wife’s Uncle Bill). It isn’t “fair” when so many other people walk around eating what they want, exercising no more than they want, all with (seeming) impunity, while the newly-anointed patient must face a lifetime regimen of overt health care in an effort to delay the terrors of a heart attack or a life that ends decades too soon.
Our growing public awareness of our global warming and peak oil situations strike me as being very similar. As a species we’re emerging from our youth into adulthood. We’ve done some astonishing things with science and engineering (make your own list; there’s plenty to pick from), and we’ve had some equally stunning moral failings and acts of rampant inhumanity against our fellow human beings, animals, and the environment (again, you can name them as well as I can). And just like that, the rules have changed radically. We can no longer fowl the air without care or consequence, nor can we laugh at the notion of limits on how rapidly we can exploit fossil fuel deposits. Perhaps most important of all, we now must explicitly manage how we interact with the world’s natural sources and sinks with one eye constantly on the notion of our own mortality. We’re leaving our pervasive escapism behind and taking our first, trembling steps into a new phase of life. Or at least some of us are taking that step; the rest will follow, in time, or be replaced by a new wave of citizenry.
If this sounds like Lou is talking from experience, give yourself a gold star. I’ve had insanely high cholesterol and triglycerides levels (when unregulated), for a long time, and been on the “every three month blood test” regimen for over a decade. In 2004, at the ripe old age of 46, I had chest pains and exactly one medical whirlwind later became the proud host of a drug eluting stent. The fact that this happened only two weeks before we moved to Rochester just kicked the whole experience into overdrive.
And you know what? I’m still going to outlive everyone alive today. I take my meds, I exercise, and I eat one of the lowest fat diets you can imagine. I dodged what surely would have been a major heart attack in 2004, and I’m determined to live long enough to be a very, very old and curmudgeonly energy geek without the added thrill of a heart attack or a bypass operation.
I was not the least bit happy about reality changing the game on me like this, but I adapted with a lot of help from my wife, and we have an excellent quality of life together (especially when our lacrosse teams are winning and I’m not suffering from sinus issues). And that’s the whole point, and the source of my relentless optimism about our environmental and energy issues. Yes, it stinks on ice when reality rains on your parade, and yes, expending the additional time and money on a permanent basis isn’t the way we’d like things to work. But it’s possible and it’s livable and it ain’t so bad once you get used to the routine. And it sure beats the hell out of the alternative.