Authors: Derek Paul and Metta Spencer
This planet is gradually warming, mainly because of the burning of fossil fuels, which add heat-trapping gases to Earth’s atmosphere. The increased temperature changes the climate in other ways too, including the rise in sea levels; ice mass loss in Greenland, Antarctica, the Arctic and mountain glaciers worldwide; shifts in the times when flowers bloom; and extreme weather events.
Life on Earth is dependent on a layer of gases, primarily water vapor, in the lower atmosphere that trap heat from the sun, while radiating some of it back and keeping our planet at a temperature capable of supporting life.
The sunlight that remains trapped is our source of energy and is used by plants in photosynthesis, whereas the remainder is reflected as heat or light back into space. Climate forcing (or “radiative forcing”) is the differential between the amount of sunlight absorbed by Earth and the amount of energy radiated back to space.
Several factors determine the size and direction of this forcing; for example light surfaces are more reflective than dark ones, so geographical regions covered by ice and snow reflect back more than areas covered by dark water or dark forests; this variable is called the “albedo effect.”
Human activity is currently generating an excess of long-lived greenhouse gases that don’t dissipate in response to temperature increases, resulting in a continuing buildup of heat. They retain more heat than other gases because they are more transparent to the incoming sunlight than to infrared radiation, which is the form in which heat is radiated back out. Consequently, if the amount of greenhouse gas increases, more heat is trapped in the lower part of the atmosphere, warming the whole planet.(1)
The greenhouse gases include water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, ozone, and various fluorocarbons (freons). Although water vapor is the most abundant of these gases, it is not much affected by human activity and need not concern us here. The alarming climate changes are mainly caused by the increase of gases that contain carbon. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is especially worrisome; its natural sources include the decomposition of living organisms and animal respiration. The main source of excess carbon dioxide emissions is the burning of fossil fuels, while deforestation has reduced the amount of plant life available to turn CO2 into oxygen.
Besides carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gases are methane, nitrogen oxide, and some heavier molecules such as the various forms of freon. These are more effective per molecule than CO2 in causing global warming, but are present in much smaller quantities in the atmosphere. The molecule N2O (nitrous oxide) and the freons have the additional property of depleting the ozone in the stratosphere, especially near the poles. Methane is a cause for major concern, as it evaporates from thawed tundra, and it is also trapped within clathrate compounds in the ocean, which can release it when warmed. Methane is also produced copiously by cattle because of their diet and digestive system. Methane has been variously said to be 34 (or more) times as effective as CO2 in producing global warming. The freons in the atmosphere are hugely more effective than CO2, per molecule, at inducing global warming. Much of the atmospheric freon comes from leaking refrigerators and air conditioners, especially old or discarded ones. Preventing freon from reaching the atmosphere is thus a municipal concern.
The quantity of greenhouse gas varies over time. For example, there are seasonal variations. The amount of carbon dioxide in the northern hemisphere increases somewhat in the autumn and winter but decreases in the spring. This happens because plants take in carbon dioxide when they are growing but release it when their leaves fall off and decay.
The composition of Earth’s oceans, land, atmosphere, and plants change continuously. For example, gases can dissolve in the ocean, but they also can evaporate and move around in the wind. At present, the oceans are absorbing slightly more carbon dioxide than they are emitting. The amount of carbon being held inside plants varies; when forests are replaced by annual crops, less of it is contained in plants, so more of it is in the air. The more of it in the air, the more the planet warms. Our warming climate is also creating a feedback loop, a “vicious cycle,” by releasing greenhouse gases from the thawing Arctic permafrost, thereby warming the planet even more.(2)
Climate change is an urgent threat to humanity, since the excess CO2 in the atmosphere diffuses slowly into the ocean, which is rapidly becoming less alkaline. Eventually the ocean will become acid, if the present trend continues, and the dying of the ocean will accelerate. A key factor will be the inability of the ocean’s phytoplankton to produce oxygen. About 252 million years ago the Earth experienced a transition similar to the one the human race is setting off today. That transition is known as the Permian-Triassic (or just the Permian), and resulted from a series of natural causes that put a great deal of CO2 into the atmosphere. The transition eliminated 95 percent of then existing species, and it took forests five million years to recover.
Today we urgently need to keep more greenhouse gas “locked away”, instead of circulating in the atmosphere. Whenever it is kept out of circulation, it is said to be “sequestered” in a “carbon sink.”(3) The ocean is currently a carbon sink because it is absorbing more carbon dioxide than it is emitting. Soil and forests are also great carbon sinks that could sequester even more carbon than at present without being saturated. Unfortunately, today they often are instead “carbon sources” because of the way human beings are mis-using them. When more trees are being felled than grown, and when land is eroding or being flooded, those forests and soil are carbon sources – releasing more greenhouse gas to the atmosphere than they take in and sequester.
There are other important carbon sources too: notably “fossil fuels.” Thousands of years ago large carbon sinks (dead plants and animals) happened to become buried and turned into oil, coal, or methane (a carbon-based greenhouse gas). Then in the eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution began in Britain. Machines were developed on a large scale for manufacturing and transportation. These new technologies have spread so widely that global civilization today is dependent on energy produced by burning coal, gas, or petroleum products, though doing so releases more and more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, thereby heating up the planet.
Adding even a small amount of heat to the planet can make a large difference. Already Earth is almost one degree Celsius hotter than during pre-industrial times,(4) and if nothing is done to change the trend, it may become as much as four degrees hotter within the foreseeable future, leading to the catastrophic extinction of life forms.
There are two ways to prevent this: (a) reduce the new emissions of greenhouse gas, and (b) increase the capture and sequestering of greenhouse gas into carbon sinks. Both will require drastic and rapid changes to our current lifestyle, but they should already be proceeding quickly, reducing the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Regrettably, however, many people still even deny that there is a problem, sometimes adducing as evidence the snow outside their windows.
The local weather on any given day proves nothing about the global climate. When the planet warms, the additional heat is not distributed evenly around the globe. Ocean and wind currents are circulating constantly. When, for example, glaciers and polar ice melt, the fresh water flows into the ocean, raising the sea level and possibly changing the direction of ocean currents in ways that alter the climate in many localities. More extreme weather events occur — not only heat waves, droughts, and forest fires, but also blizzards, typhoons, hurricanes, and floods.(5)
Thousands of measurements must be collected from all parts of the world to get an overall picture of the climate as it changes. The greenhouse gases are constantly flowing and mixing. With the exception of air samples from, say, expressways or industrial zones, the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere tends to be similar around the world. There is nowhere to hide from global warming.
This section of the Platform for Survival discusses six policy proposals for changes to allay climate change. If adopted, they will give the world a fair chance of avoiding the impending climate transition, namely, a transition from a generally cool climate to a much warmer climate without ice caps, as was the Permian-Triassic. The prime actions are two: eliminating human-induced emissions of CO2, and sequestering CO2 that is already in the atmosphere. In addition to the natural means of reducing climate change, such as planting trillions of trees, we shall also consider other technological suggestions for sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere on a large scale.
Footnotes for this article can be seen at the Footnotes 2 page on this website (link will open in a new page).
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Learn from PG&E’s mistake: Trim your trees!
Financiers and corporate managers had better pay more attention to climate change or they may suffer the same fate as PG & E: bankruptcy. Erik Kobayashi-Solomon has explained the collapse of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a shareholder-owned company that has provided the electricity for 5.2 million households in central and northern California.
Read more
The managers of PG&E assumed that every home and business would have to use their electricity. The company’s gas-powered generation plants depended on large turbines. But Californians have been installing solar panels on their rooftops, and instead of depending on PG&E’s electricity, many of them even wanted to sell their excess power back onto the grid.
PG&E did not take this decentralization trend into account so their revenues fell and it was more difficult to maintain transmission lines.
Global Warming had meant that between 2012-15 California experienced a severe drought, which dried out vegetation. Since then, it has undergone five of the ten largest fires in its history. Some of the blame even fell on PG&E for not maintaining its power lines properly and keeping trees pruned back so they could not fall and start fires.
Bankruptcy is the outcome. Let that be a lesson to other corporate managers. Climate change is real. Plan for it.
Source: Erik Kobayashi-Solomon, “PG&E: The First S&P 500 Climate Change Casualty,” Medium. https://medium.com/Framework_Erik/pg-e-the-first-s-p-500-climate-change-casualty-47d9e33839df
Airlines consume about 87 billion gallons of fuel per year. Very little of it has been sustainable, and price is one of the reasons. Even if it could be produced in sufficient quantity, biofuels cost now about $16 a gallon, as compared to $2.50 for conventional fuel. But considerable work is being done to develop sustainable fuel for planes and it may be achieved within a few years.
Burn it instead!
Okay, so my question is naive, but I still want to know. Whatever I read about recycling says it is not very helpful. It takes a lot of labor to process it, and a lot of the stuff gets sent to the landfill anyway. And there are other arguments that I haven’t followed closely. But then why not just burn it? Isn’t a big incinerator better than a landfill? Especially if we use the heat for some useful purpose– either to heat something that needs it, or as a source of energy.
There must be a good, reasonable answer or else we would be burning our trash. But I haven’t heard it. Can anyone explain? Thanks.
Heat Pumps Save Energy!
Call more things ‘parks,’ please
The Queen Elizabeth II Wildlands Provincial Park – in Ontario – is the largest undeveloped provincial park in Southern Ontario. That is, there are no central park facilities, etc. It’s a lot of wilderness.
Interestingly, the park – before it was parkland – was extensively logged. It was known as the burnt lands for a while – due to the desolation and lack of trees – from both logging and repeated wildfires. Since then, it has regrown and is now dense bush – including forests, swamps, etc – and is likely a large carbon sink. Perhaps more areas need to be declared parks.
Carbon sinks or carbon dumps?
Earth’s entire atmosphere and water systems are being used as our carbon dumps?
Perhaps due to (everyone’s sole spaceship) Earth’s large size, there seems to be a general obliviousness in regards to our natural environment. It’s as though throwing non-biodegradable garbage down a dark chute, or pollutants emitted out of exhaust and drainage pipes, or spewed from sky-high jet engines and very tall smoke stacks—or even the largest contamination events—can somehow be safely absorbed into the air, sea, and land (i.e. out of sight, out of mind); like we’re safely inconsequentially dispensing of that waste into a compressed-into-nothing black-hole singularity.
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It’s undoubtedly convenient for the fossil fuel industry to have such a large portion of mainstream society simply too exhausted and preoccupied with just barely feeding and housing their families on a substandard, if not below the poverty line, income to criticize the former for the great damage it’s doing to our planet’s natural environment and therefore our health, particularly when that damage may not be immediately observable.
After all, why worry about such things immediately unseen, regardless of their most immense importance, especially when there are various undesirable politicians and significant social issues over which to dispute—distractions our mainstream news-media sadly are only too willing to sell us?
To have almost everyone addicted to driving their own fossil-fuel-powered single occupant vehicle surely helps keep their collective mouths shut about the planet’s greatest and very profitable polluter, lest they feel like and/or be publicly deemed hypocrites.
Sustainable Government Buildings
I am a student at the University of Toronto and often walk by the Ontario legislative and parliament buildings, which abut the campus. I think it would be an interesting initiative to see various government and institutional (colleges, universities, etc.) buildings — such as Queen’s Park, etc. — install solar panels on their roofs, etc. These buildings have large foot prints (surface area) with both angled / flat roofs — and could likely generate a fair bit of electricity from solar panels. This would demonstrate beneficial and innovative land stewardship and create a positive role model for other individuals and property managers in various contexts. It could additionally save money for the government!
(Some of the buildings use skylights for interior lighting – though there is a lot of underutilized space on the structure…)
Buildings such as these could even re-cycle / re-use rain water from the roofs – either for irrigation of the grounds – or for use in the building (other than drinking water).
Oh, lord. If the Pentagon believes it, maybe I should too.
A Use for Carbon Dioxide
What works?
The Short List Of Climate Actions That Will Work
There is more consensus on what solutions are effective than there appears to be
By Michael Barnard. Medium, Oct. 22, 2019 . https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/the-short-list-of-climate-actions-that-will-work-d08c8069d2a8
I spend a lot of time critiquing solutions for low-carbon transformation, and that leads, inevitably, to people asking me: what works? What should we be doing? Most recently, that came in the form of a question on Quora that was well enough formed to trigger me to write down the solution set: “What exactly is the current scientific consensus on steps to combat climate change?“
Consensus is an interesting word. I tend to prefer consilience, where multiple lines of investigation lead to the same conclusions. That said, the following are the solutions or approaches that I see from my investigations and discussions as gaining consensus and consilience. It’s not the how, but the what. There are many paths that lead to these realities. One way to read the following is to consider that it describes the world in 2050.
This list doesn’t necessarily map easily to Project Drawdown because its approach is a cost benefit analysis of CO2e reductions for dollars, while this is a more aggressive transformational vision.
The Short List
Electrify everything
Convert all energy services to work directly from electricity instead of fossil fuels. Transportation, industry, and agriculture. All of it. All gas appliances must go. All road transport must be electric. Most trains and a lot of planes must shift to electric. Electricity creating biofuels or hydrogen for the subset of transportation that can’t be electrified. All heat from electricity. The US throws away two thirds of all primary energy, mostly in the form of waste heat from fossil fuels used in inherently inefficient combustion processes. We only have to replace a third of the actual primary energy we use today to maintain our lifestyle and economy.
Overbuild renewable generation
All other forms of generation with the exception of nuclear were overbuilt, so we’ll do the same with wind and solar, and they are really cheap, so that is not that expensive. Also a bit of geothermal and some biomass. After all, only $3 trillion of renewables would provide all primary energy for everything the US does today.
Build continent-scale electrical grids and markets
And improve existing ones. HVDC became much more viable with high-speed hybrid circuit breakers in 2011, and is an essential technology for long-distance, low-loss electrical transmission. It can replace some AC transmission and be buried along existing right-of-ways.
Build a fair amount of hydro storage
And some other storage too. While storage of electricity is an overstated concern given overbuilt renewables and continent-scale grids, some is still required. Pumped hydro resource potential is far greater than the need, is efficient, and uses very stable, known technologies. Shifting existing hydro-electric dams to be passive, on-demand storage as opposed to baseload is also key. Fast response grid storage can be provided by existing lithium-ion technologies, as Tesla has proven in California and Australia. By 2050, we’ll have roughly 20 TWh of batteries on wheels in US cars alone, available both for demand management to reduce peak demand, soak up excess generation, and to provide vehicle-to-grid electricity as needed.
Read more
Plant a lot of trees
We have cut down about 50% of the six trillion trees that used to grow on earth. Planting a trillion trees would buy us a lot of time as they sucked about a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere per tree over 40 years.
Change agricultural practices
High-tillage agriculture is a process that keeps releasing carbon captured by the soil back into the atmosphere. Switching to low-tillage farming would buy us a lot of time as the CO2 captured by farmland would stay in the soil a lot longer, and some of it would be permanently sequestered.
Fix concrete and steel
8% of global CO2 emissions come from making Portland cement. It’s absolutely critical to urban densification and industry, so we won’t stop making it. But it’s a huge source of CO2, about half from the energy and half from CO2 that bakes off limestone as it is turned into quicklime. Electrifying that energy flow helps a lot, but capturing that CO2 is one of the few places where mechanical carbon capture makes sense. Steel will mostly be fixed by aggressively turning internal combustion cars and other fossil fuel infrastructure into new steel using electric minimills. 70% of North American steel is already made this way.
Price carbon aggressively
The simplest way to get a lot of people and industries to shift away from emitting lots of CO2 is to make it expensive. That’s what carbon taxes do.
Shut down coal and gas generation aggressively
Getting rid of coal is already happening, but it’s by far the biggest single source of CO2 emissions. Aggressive actions to eliminate burning coal are needed. For gas, the question is how few gas plants can we build, how many of them can we run on biologically sourced methane and how fast can we shut them down.
Stop financing and subsidies for fossil fuel
Exploration, extraction, and use, just cut it out. The US alone spends tens of billions of dollars annually on subsidies of various kinds for the fossil fuel industry, and hasn’t done a thing about it since committing to eliminate them in 2009. The G7 and G20 have committed to eliminating subsidies, but progress has been very slow. The World Bank continues to finance coal, oil, and gas projects, despite commitments to end them.
Eliminate HFCs in refrigeration
The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer targets the unforeseen side effects of displacing ozone-depleting CFCs with high global warming potential HFCs. Project Drawdown puts this at #1 on its ranked list of solutions by cost vs benefit. The US has not ratified this Amendment, although 65 other countries have.
There are some mildly controversial things left out of this list:
Nuclear power is too slow to build and too expensive
That’s empirical reality, not an advocacy statement. The conditions for rapid build that existed in a couple of places and times in the past don’t exist today. And we need a lot of clean electricity very quickly. Nuclear need not apply. Keep existing nuclear going, don’t stop new nuclear buildout in China, pretty much the only place building new generation capacity, but don’t expect it to be more than a rounding error in a few decades. New nuclear technologies are decades from commercial deployment at any scale, and we have technologies that are reliable, predictable, cheap, and fast to build, so there will be nothing for new nuclear to do once it actually makes it out of R&D.
Mechanical carbon capture and sequestration is a mostly dead end
This is an overhyped fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry. Virtually every CCS site is actually an enhanced oil recovery site which recovers oil that couldn’t be pumped out before, typically enough that 2–3 times more CO2 is generated from the oil than was put underground. Exceptions are natural gas wells with too high a concentration of CO2, leading to 25 times the emissions once the natural gas is burned. Expensive, unscalable, and wasteful. As stated, it might be useful for concrete.
Air-to-fuel technologies are dead ends
Solutions such as Carbon Engineering’s direct-air-capture with hydrogen electrolysis to create synthetic fuels is a broken model. It’s vastly more expensive and higher CO2 emitting than electrification or biological pathway fuel synthesis. Any money spent on this would have vastly better results if spent on renewables instead. It’s not an either-or, but in this case policy makers should ignore this and governments shouldn’t fund it.
The military is a hard problem
The military requires vast amounts of high energy fuel in places with no electrical supply chain, often for months at a time. The US military is considered by many to be the single largest CO2 emitting organization in the world. However, eliminating global fossil fuel strategic military actions — which describes virtually everything done in the Middle East for the last 100 years — will diminish the need for the US military substantially. A great deal of its current emissions, which hopefully will start coming to light once the US signs the Paris Accord either in 2021 or 2025 once Trump is gone, are related to the ongoing Middle Eastern deployments. There’s only so much we can do for biofuels, but to be clear, the world has been in a period of diminishing military conflict since the end of WWII. Globalization may have downsides, but the ties of trade and treaties which bind countries together have been highly effective in allowing diplomacy pathways to work, and making the military option increasingly difficult to consider.
Where approaches or recommendations from people or groups diverge from the above, question what lobbying groups are involved, where revenue will be lost or gained and in general what the motivations of the people or organizations involved are. This is all empirically grounded analysis. It’s not rocket science.
We have the solutions. We just need the will to execute, which is being sapped by the losers in this necessary transformation, predominantly the fossil fuel industry.
This article originally appeared on CleanTechnica.
Carbon Parks
Is it time for Canada and the world to create carbon parks?
By Dan Kraus
Over the last 134 years, more than 8,300 parks and protected areas have been established across Canada that protect wildlife, examples of different habitats, spectacular scenery, recreational areas and places of cultural importance.
In a world where rapid climate change is impacting the stability of our planet’s health and threatening the well-being of future generations, we need a new type of protected area.
Nature plays an important role in carbon storage and reducing carbon pollution. When we lose forests, wetlands and grasslands, we lose species and habitats. But we also lose the carbon that these lands store in soil, roots and stems.
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Carbon parks and reserves would support Canada’s internationally agreed upon Target 1 commitment to protect 17 per cent of land and inland waters by 2020. Target 1 also includes conserving areas that are of particular importance for ecological services, meaning places that conserve nature’s benefits to people. In a world that is quickly warming and shifting to a new abnormal, carbon storage is a service that we desperately need.
There are few other places on the planet that have as much carbon stored as Canada. It’s been estimated that our northern lands hold an amount of carbon that is equivalent to one-fifth of all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today. The release of this carbon would be like a carbon bomb going off. It would move the Earth into uncharted levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Much of our Canadian carbon is stored in peatlands, a type of wetland often referred to by its Cree name: muskeg. Peatlands cover only three per cent of the planet’s surface, but store more carbon than all of the world’s forests combined. Canada has more peatlands than any other nation, and most of these are still intact. Protecting our peatland along with forests and grasslands that hold carbon can be Canada’s most important global contribution to climate change.
Carbon parks in Canada could play a critical two-for-one role in climate change. Wetlands, forests and grasslands store carbon, but also help to buffer nature and people from the increasing number of extreme weather events, such as floods and drought. The protection of these places also protects the quality of our drinking water and provides places for recreation.
We are a big country blessed with a rich endowment of nature, but it could slip away without our action.
Dan Kraus is the senior conservation biologist with the Nature Conservancy Canada
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/11/17/is-it-time-for-canada-and-the-world-to-create-carbon-parks.html
Hard times ahead!
U.S. Military Could Collapse Within 20 Years Due to Climate Change, Report Commissioned By Pentagon Says
The report says a combination of global starvation, war, disease, drought, and a fragile power grid could have cascading, devastating effects.
by Nafeez Ahmed | Oct 24 2019, 9:00am
According to a new U.S. Army report, Americans could face a horrifically grim future from climate change involving blackouts, disease, thirst, starvation and war. The study found that the US military itself might also collapse. This could all happen over the next two decades, the report notes.
The senior US government officials who wrote the report are from several key agencies including the Army, Defense Intelligence Agency, and NASA. The study called on the Pentagon to urgently prepare for the possibility that domestic power, water, and food systems might collapse due to the impacts of climate change as we near mid-century.
The report was commissioned by General Mark Milley, Trump’s new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, making him the highest-ranking military officer in the country (the report also puts him at odds with Trump, who does not take climate change seriously.)
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The report, titled Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army, was launched by the U.S. Army War College in partnership with NASA in May at the Wilson Center in Washington DC. The report was commissioned by Gen. Milley during his previous role as the Army’s Chief of Staff. It was made publicly available in August via the Center for Climate and Security, but didn’t get a lot of attention at the time.
The two most prominent scenarios in the report focus on the risk of a collapse of the power grid within “the next 20 years,” and the danger of disease epidemics. Both could be triggered by climate change in the near-term, it notes.
“Increased energy requirements” triggered by new weather patterns like extended periods of heat, drought, and cold could eventually overwhelm “an already fragile system.”
The report also warns that the US military should prepare for new foreign interventions in Syria-style conflicts, triggered due to climate-related impacts. Bangladesh in particular is highlighted as the most vulnerable country to climate collapse in the world.
“The permanent displacement of a large portion of the population of Bangladesh would be a regional catastrophe with the potential to increase global instability,” the report warns. “This is a potential result of climate change complications in just one country. Globally, over 600 million people live at sea level.”
Sea level rise, which could go higher than 2 meters by 2100 according to one recent study, “will displace tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people, creating massive, enduring instability,” the report adds.
The US should therefore be ready to act not only in Bangladesh, but in many other regions, like the rapidly melting Arctic—where the report recommends the US military should take advantage of its hydrocarbon resources and new transit routes to repel Russian encroachment.
But without urgent reforms, the report warns that the US military itself could end up effectively collapsing as it tries to respond to climate collapse. It could lose capacity to contain threats in the US and could wilt into “mission failure” abroad due to inadequate water supplies.
Total collapse of the power grid
The report paints a frightening portrait of a country falling apart over the next 20 years due to the impacts of climate change on “natural systems such as oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, reefs, and forests.”
Current infrastructure in the US, the report says, is woefully underprepared: “Most of the critical infrastructures identified by the Department of Homeland Security are not built to withstand these altered conditions.”
Some 80 percent of US agricultural exports and 78 percent of imports are water-borne. This means that episodes of flooding due to climate change could leave lasting damage to shipping infrastructure, posing “a major threat to US lives and communities, the US economy and global food security,” the report notes.
At particular risk is the US national power grid, which could shut down due to “the stressors of a changing climate,” especially changing rainfall levels:
“The power grid that serves the United States is aging and continues to operate without a coordinated and significant infrastructure investment. Vulnerabilities exist to electricity-generating power plants, electric transmission infrastructure and distribution system components,” it states.
As a result, the “increased energy requirements” triggered by new weather patterns like extended periods of heat, drought, and cold could eventually overwhelm “an already fragile system.”
The report’s grim prediction has already started playing out, with utility PG&E cutting power to more than a million people across California to avoid power lines sparking another catastrophic wildfire. While climate change is intensifying the dry season and increasing fire risks, PG&E has come under fire for failing to fix the state’s ailing power grid.
The US Army report shows that California’s power outage could be a taste of things to come, laying out a truly dystopian scenario of what would happen if the national power grid was brought down by climate change. One particularly harrowing paragraph lists off the consequences bluntly:
“If the power grid infrastructure were to collapse, the United States would experience significant:
• Loss of perishable foods and medications
• Loss of water and wastewater distribution systems
• Loss of heating/air conditioning and electrical lighting systems
• Loss of computer, telephone, and communications systems (including airline flights, satellite networks and GPS services)
• Loss of public transportation systems
• Loss of fuel distribution systems and fuel pipelines
• Loss of all electrical systems that do not have back-up power”
Although the report does not dwell on the implications, it acknowledges that a national power grid failure would lead to a perfect storm requiring emergency military responses that might eventually weaken the ability of the US Army to continue functioning at all: “Relief efforts aggravated by seasonal climatological effects would potentially accelerate the criticality of the developing situation. The cascading effects of power loss… would rapidly challenge the military’s ability to continue operations.”
Also at “high risk of temporary or permanent closure due to climate threats” are US nuclear power facilities.
There are currently 99 nuclear reactors operating in the US, supplying nearly 20 percent of the country’s utility-scale energy. But the majority of these, some 60 percent, are located in vulnerable regions which face “major risks” including sea level rise, severe storms, and water shortages.
Containment
The report’s authors believe that domestic military operations will be necessary to contain future disease outbreaks. There is no clear timeline for this, except the notion of being prepared for imminent surprises: “Climate change is introducing an increased risk of infectious disease to the US population. It is increasingly not a matter of ‘if’ but of when there will be a large outbreak.”
Areas in the south of the US will see an increase in precipitation of between .5 and .8 mm a day, along with an increase in average annual temperatures of 1 to 3 degrees Celsius (C) by 2050.
Along with warmer winters, these new conditions will drive the proliferation of mosquitos and ticks. This in turn will spur the spread of diseases “which may be previously unseen in the US”, and accelerate the reach of diseases currently found in very small numbers such as Zika, West Nile Virus, Lyme disease, and many others:
“The US Army will be called upon to assist in much the same way it was called upon in other disasters. Detailed coordination with local, state and federal agencies in the most high risk regions will hasten response time and minimize risk to mission.”
A new era of endless war
The new report is especially significant given the Trump administration’s climate science denial. Commissioned by General Mark Milley, now the highest ranking military officer in the United States, the report not only concludes that climate change is real, but that it is on track to create an unprecedented catastrophe that could lead to the total collapse of US society without serious investments in new technology and infrastructure. However, while focusing on projected climate impacts, the report does not discuss the causes of climate change in human fossil fuel emissions.
The report was written by an interdisciplinary team active across several US government agencies, including the White House’s Office of American Innovation, the Secretary of Defense’s Protecting Critical Technology Task Force, NASA’s Harvest Consortium, the US Air Force Headquarters’ Directorate of Weather, the US Army’s National Guard, and the US State Department. The US Army War College did not respond to a request for comment.
Their report not only describes the need for massive permanent military infrastructure on US soil to stave off climate collapse, but portends new foreign interventions due to climate change.
The authors argue that the Syrian civil war could be a taste of future international conflicts triggered by climate-induced unrest. There is “no question that the conflict erupted coincident with a major drought in the region which forced rural people into Syrian cities as large numbers of Iraqi refugees arrived,” they say.
The resulting conflict “reignited civil war in Iraq,” and heightened military tensions between the US and Russia.
“The Syrian population has declined by about 10 percent since the start of the war, with millions of refugees fleeing the nation, increasing instability in Europe, and stoking violent extremism,” the report concludes.
The most urgent case for a potential US intervention, however, is the South Asian country of Bangladesh.
With half its 160 million-strong population currently living at sea level, some 80 million Bangladeshis are set to be displaced as huge areas of the country become “uninhabitable” due to climate impacts: “How will this large scale displacement affect global security in a region with nearly 40 percent of the world’s population and several antagonistic nuclear powers?”
With a population eight times that of Syria’s, the report explains, “permanent displacement of a large portion of the population of Bangladesh would be a regional catastrophe with the potential to increase global instability.”
The authors recommend the US Army work with the State Department and USAID to “strengthen the resilience of [Bangladeshi] government agencies and provide training for the Bangladeshi military.”
Water scarcity will destabilize nations—and the U.S. Army
While sea level rise offers one specific type of risk, another comes from water scarcity due to climate change, population increase, and poor water management. The report describes water scarcity as a near-term risk driving civil unrest and political instability.
By 2040, global demand for fresh water will exceed availability, and by 2030 one-third of the world population will inhabit the “water-stressed regions” of North Africa, Southern Africa, the Middle East, China, and the United States, the report notes.
The decline in water availability over the next two decades will lead to an increase in “social disruption” in poor, vulnerable regions.
Water scarcity is also a driver of possible global food system failure, which could trigger new “outbreaks of civil conflict and social unrest.”
The report depicts a global food system increasingly disrupted by “rapid freeze-thaw cycles in spring and fall, soil degradation, depletion of fossil water aquifers, intensified spread of agricultural pests and diseases, and damage to shipping infrastructure as a consequence of flooding.”
Such food system instability will result in “significant increases in mortality in vulnerable locations, which are those where DoD-supported humanitarian intervention is most likely.”
But foreign military interventions, particularly in water scarce regions of the Middle East and North Africa, might not be viable unless the US Army invents or acquires radical new technologies to distribute adequate levels of water to soldiers.
The problem is so bad and so expensive, the report says, that the Army “is precipitously close to mission failure concerning hydration of the force in a contested arid environment.”
Water is currently 30-40 percent of the costs required to sustain a US military force operating abroad, according to the new Army report. A huge infrastructure is needed to transport bottled water for Army units. So the report recommends major new investments in technology to collect water from the atmosphere locally, without which US military operations abroad could become impossible. The biggest obstacle is that this is currently way outside the Pentagon’s current funding priorities.
Rampaging for Arctic oil
And yet the report’s biggest blind-spot is its agnosticism on the necessity for a rapid whole society transition away from fossil fuels.
Bizarrely for a report styling itself around the promotion of environmental stewardship in the Army, the report identifies the Arctic as a critical strategic location for future US military involvement: to maximize fossil fuel consumption.
Noting that the Arctic is believed to hold about a quarter of the world’s undiscovered hydrocarbon reserves, the authors estimate that some 20 percent of these reserves could be within US territory, noting a “greater potential for conflict” over these resources, particularly with Russia.
The melting of Arctic sea ice is depicted as a foregone conclusion over the next few decades, implying that major new economic opportunities will open up to exploit the region’s oil and gas resources as well as to establish new shipping routes: “The US military must immediately begin expanding its capability to operate in the Artic to defend economic interests and to partner with allies across the region.”
Senior US defense officials in Washington clearly anticipate a prolonged role for the US military, both abroad and in the homeland, as climate change wreaks havoc on critical food, water and power systems. Apart from causing fundamental damage to our already strained democratic systems, the bigger problem is that the US military is by far a foremost driver of climate change by being the world’s single biggest institutional consumer of fossil fuels.
The prospect of an ever-expanding permanent role for the Army on US soil to address growing climate change impacts is a surprisingly extreme scenario which goes against the grain of the traditional separation of the US military from domestic affairs.
In putting this forward, the report inadvertently illustrates what happens when climate is seen through a narrow ‘national security’ lens. Instead of encouraging governments to address root causes through “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” (in the words of the UN’s IPCC report this time last year), the Army report demands more money and power for military agencies while allowing the causes of climate crisis to accelerate. It’s perhaps no surprise that such dire scenarios are predicted, when the solutions that might avert those scenarios aren’t seriously explored.
Rather than waiting for the US military to step in after climate collapse—at which point the military itself could be at risk of collapsing—we would be better off dealing with the root cause of the issue skirted over by this report: America’s chronic dependence on the oil and gas driving the destabilization of the planet’s ecosystems.
But what are the waste products?
I have heard algae and ocean environments act as both large carbon sinks and produce significant quantities of oxygen. I had not heard of this specific Eos bioreactor device – though it is an interesting article. One of my questions- not addressed by the article – is what waste products are produced by these devices?
Thanks for sharing.
I agree. And I too haven’t heard anything about it lately. Have any of you folks?
I’ve heard that it’s just not at all sustainable. The fish are too close together- if one get’s sick, they all get sick so they always use antibiotics- plus, these fish just bring disease to fish in the wild too.
Who’s Printing Your New House?
Here’s how the Kiwis are doing it
Firstly when you say the best way to reduce the consumption of energy is not to change the building codes but simply to tax heavily the carbon in fuel, I would agree. Tax the carbon in fuel heavily but also incentivise the use of products, services and practices employed by companies. Combine incentives with a combination of preferred local authority contractors at a local authority level, possibly even combined with less red tape at the building consent stage and finally seek at a national / state / province level to add tax breaks to qualifying companies.
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Secondly I would just like to add a comment on the lack of progress inspections for Green Builds. As an inspector, I see building products being substituted regularly during the course of a build. Sometimes product substitutions are easily picked up here in NZ and are either reversed or, must to go back to the licencing authority if it is a major deviation from the plan, especially those that affect high risk areas (also equally high risk in the litigious sense), such as weather-tightness, structure, durability or fire.
My call is that certain declared, low embedded energy products are added to this list and are given the same level of importance. The list does not have to be big and could be directly tied to the LEED or even the Green Building Councils (here in NZ and in Australia) with the cost covered by those green building authorities (to begin with at least) and checked as part of the main build at each stage.
Final sign off from the building authority will necessitate the additional product and practitioner documentation forwarded at the completion of the build before final sign-off as we do here with all other stages of the build.
We tend to treat minor variations in NZ with more latitude if they can be declared, re-designed with revised documentation from the Designer and Engineer and, then approved by the owner or their agent. Following completion of a `Minor Variation’ an inspection can then pass and the build can then proceed with less red tape, this includes certain product substitutions, the idea being that it will still perform to the same standard and will thus comply with building legislation (or indeed to sustainable outcomes) and importantly, is recorded.
Hurrah for algae!
This algae bioreactor can remove as much carbon dioxide as an acre of trees
By Mike Brown | Sept. 17, 2019
On Tuesday, A.I.-focused technology firm Hypergiant Industries announced a machine that uses the aquatic organisms to sequester carbon dioxide. Algae, the company claims, is “one of nature’s most efficient machines.” By pairing it with a machine learning system, its developers hope to make these talents even more effective.
That’s not all. The team claims the device, which measures three feet on each side and seven feet tall, can sequester as much carbon as a whole acre of trees — estimated somewhere around two tons.
“We’ve been thinking about climate change solutions in only a very narrow scope,” Ben Lamm, CEO of the Austin-based firm, tells Inverse. “Trees are part of the solution but there are so many other biological solutions that are useful. Algae is much more effective than trees at reducing carbon in the atmosphere, and can be used to create carbon negative fuels, plastics, textiles, food, fertilizer and much more.”
It’s not the only ambitious idea in the works at the six-division Hypergiant Industries. Its Galactic division is aiming to build a multi-planetary internet by using satellites as relays. Last month, it took the wraps off a prototype Iron Man-like helmet that could aid search and rescue teams. The company, founded last year, counts Bill Nye and astronaut Andy Allen among its advisory board members.
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Hypergiant’s algae-powered bioreactor is the sort of idea that could be needed now more than ever. Despite a push to greener technologies, global annual carbon emissions rose in 2018 to hit an all-time high of 37.1 billion tonnes. That’s after two years of a relative plateau between 2014 and 2016. This has resulted in a global climate shift, where 2018 was the fourth-hottest year on record. Several countries, including the United Kingdom, have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
Research has shown that restoring forests by an area the size of the United States could cut carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a staggering 25 percent, reaching levels not seen for a century. While planting trees could play an important role in the pushback, alternative solutions like carbon capture and storage and new sequestering technologies could also help remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Algae bioreactor: how to supercharge natural processes
Algae, Hypergiant Industries explains, needs three elements for growth: light, water, and carbon dioxide. The machine monitors factors like light, available carbon dioxide, temperature and more to maximize the amount sequestered by the algae.
“One Eos Bioreactor sequesters the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere as an entire acre of trees,” Lamm says. “With enough Eos devices, we could make whole cities carbon-neutral or even negative, and at a rate that is so much faster than that of trees. That’s the dream: breathable, livable cities for everyone and right now.”
When the algae consumes carbon dioxide, it produces biomass. The company has suggested that this biomass could be used in a number of applications, like making oils or cosmetics. A smart city could take the biomass and use it for fuels. The machine is small enough to fit inside office buildings, and Lamm tells FastCompany that the initial prototype it’s currently operating can attach to a building’s HVAC system to clean the air inside.
https://www.inverse.com/article/59334-this-algae-bioreactor-can-sequester-carbon-dioxide
Shouldn’t we worry about those planned wooden skyscrapers?
Chicago and London are both researching wooden skyscrapers 80-storeys tall, whereas Taiwan has one planned (70 storeys) for 2041. Is this possible with the compression that will be exerted on the on the wood materials as the weight of the upper floors press down on the base? How will these survive potential intense storms and/or earthquakes? Even if it is possible, is it wise to construct such large buildings out of a material such as wood?
Tip: Sneak in Through an Open Stoma!
By Kathy Voth
Imagine you’re a carbon molecule floating in the atmosphere and your mission is to get from there into the soil and stay there for decades.
Your first step — slip into a plant through an open stoma.
Stomata are microscopic openings on the surfaces of plant leaves that allow for the easy passage of water vapor, carbon dioxide and oxygen. They are crucial to the function of leaves as photosynthesis requires plenty of carbon dioxide as well as the release of waste oxygen and excess water.
Inside the plant you go through your first transformation: photosynthesis. You’re combined with water (H20) and photons from sunlight to become glucose (C6H12O6). You’re now part of the body of the plant. From here, there are multiple routes to your destination, some that take much longer than others. You could become part of the body of a cow, or part of her manure. You might be part of a plant that gets trampled onto the soil, or you might be part of the roots that get sloughed off periodically underground.
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Which ever route you take, you eventually end up in the soil as organic matter -– a tasty meal for soil microbes. As they eat, they respire carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2. That means that if you’re going to accomplish your mission of staying in the soil, you have to avoid these hungry microbes.
How do you get away and become sequestered?
That’s the puzzle that scientists have been working on, and they’ve recently discovered how carbon molecules escape: through very tiny pore spaces in the soil.
A team of researchers led by Alexandra Kravchenko found that the pores in the range of 30-150 µm (about the size of 1 to 3 human hairs) can trap carbon molecules, making them inaccessible to the microorganisms that might otherwise consume them and send. Of course, the more of these tiny spaces there are, the more carbon is effectively sequestered in the soil. Knowing how to create those environments will help us sequester more carbon, improving soil fertility, improving forage production and wildlife habitat, and increasing resilience to droughts and floods.
To help us with this, over a nine-year period, Alexandra Kravchenko and her team studied five cropping systems: continuous corn, corn with cover crops, a switchgrass monoculture, a poplar system with trees and undergrowth, and native succession. In the end, only the two systems with high plant diversity, poplar and native succession, resulted in higher levels of total carbon.
“What we found in native prairie, probably because of all the interactions between the roots of diverse species, is that the entire soil matrix is covered with a network of pores. Thus, the distance between the locations where the carbon input occurs, and the mineral surfaces on which it can be protected is very short,” says Kravchenko. Having these readily available escape routes means that more carbon is sequestered for the long-term.
Kravchenko writes that the 30-150 µm pores are associated with the most active microorganisms that can respond rapidly to increased carbon inputs. When these pores are spread throughout the soil, as they were in the more diverse systems the team studied, the volume of the soil matrix receiving and protecting the products of microbial decomposition is greater as well, and the more soil carbon is accrued. So, while the switchgrass monoculture had the largest root mass and did create the small poor spaces necessary, there was an absence of the necessary volume of pore spaces. Once the layer next to the pore was saturated, most of the carbon was oxidized into CO2 and returned to the atmosphere…
Simply increasing biomass, in the form of above ground residue or below ground roots, does not necessarily help us accumulate more carbon in the soil. We now know that, not only does the plant community help determine the soil microbial community, but by adding to and changing soil pore space, they help define where microorganisms can live and how well they can function. The larger the “footprint” of the microbial community the better it is for keeping carbon in the soil.
What can you do with this?
The lesson once again is that diversity is important. If you’re looking across your pasture and see one species, think about how you might add more. Some folks have found that all it takes is better grazing management to create an environment that helps a greater variety of plants to thrive and grow. If you’re considering seeding, talk to your supplier or with Natural Resources Conservation Service, Conservation District, or Extension staff in your area about what kind of mixes will work best for you. If you’re managing row crops, use a variety of cover crops. Avoid monocultures whenever possible.
New Discovery on the Mechanics of Keeping Carbon in the Soil and What It Means For Your Pastures
By Kathy Voth / On Pasture. October 21, 2019 . https://onpasture.com/
Mass Timber is Supposed to be Safe
Allegedly the timber components are stronger than conventional wood – as they are multiple layers of wood glued together. This increased density of material additionally assists with fire prevention purposes. Do you have any insight – from your perspective – as to why wood skyscrapers have become somewhat popular in Scandinavia?
Builders, We’re Out of Time!
We are out of time. I have been working on offgrid passive buildings since 1992. The good news is that we have had the technology to do net positive buildings for decades.<'em> With cheap polluting fossil fuels propagating false economies, it didn’t make financial sense to do it. Now, every building that is not built net zero or positive bakes in even more costly climate impact. Pay now or pay later.
I’d like to see the 2030 Challenge (with its Energy Use Intensity target in eKwh/ m2/ year) adopted worldwide but even that has shortcomings. B.C.’s Step Code is on the right path with a Carbon Use Intensity target, but we do need life cycle targets that consider the embodied energy built in to incentivize getting away from the concrete and steel.
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We need low-rise to mid-rise fairly dense developments—transit-oriented development (TOD). This type of development easily makes low-cost wood structures (no fancy glue-laminated timber or heavy timbers required) and makes public transit cost-effective and viable. Mid-rise developments support small businesses, reduces transportation fuel and reduces embodied energy.
We need mandatory occupant climate impact survey so that people are aware of the impact that their electricity and water usage has and where they sit compared to our targets (www.projectneutral.org). There is no need for high-rise concrete structures with window walls even if they have a thermally-broken balcony (Schöck Isokorb). These buildings are all currently dead buildings on life support and they are dangerous if the power goes out during a winter storm or summer heat wave. We need passive survivability and Total Energy Demand Intensity (TEDI) targets help measure that.
In addition, we have to address food production and waste, and childcare. Why? Our food production systems are going to collapse—they are predicated on fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and a stable climate. So the design of our buildings needs to embed alternative means for food production (greenhouses and shared gardens), preparation (shared cooking) and childcare (the madness to get to the 6 pm pickup must end!). Our human culture is based on eating together and raising the next generation. Let’s do this more effectively.
Everyone should have a carbon ration and they can choose how to spend it. Some will indulge in long showers and others will go on a flight once every two years. Ideally, we are living in low-carbon buildings in walkable neighbourhoods, using very little electricity and water, and helping each other raise the next generation.
Beware of wooden high-rise buildings
Timber high rises are a PR effort by companies like Weyerhauser and Georgia Pacific. It’s ridiculous to build high rises from wood, which is both heavier and weaker than steel. They are strictly PR stunts, subsidized by the timber industry. No architect or engineer would design them on his own. When one of them catches fire, and they can’t put it out, we will hear all kinds of excuses. Anything but the truth.
Why Everybody Wants a Lawn: And Why it’s Killing the Planet
By Matt J. Weber
This article may shake you up. You’ll probably decide to turn your lawn into something more convenient. But the article (unfortunately) doesn’t suggest that you turn it into a forest. Why not? That’s what the world really needs — about two trillion additional trees, and your lawn is the best place for you to plant your share of them. Still, this great article may motivate you to turn in the right direction. Please share it with everyone you know who has control of a piece of land that’s not already devoted to food crops or trees.
–Carol Wells
This is my lawn. I mow it, water it, pull weeds, and occasionally enjoy it. Though it’s not the greatest lawn in the world, it’s pretty typical. Everybody on my block has one. In fact, pretty much every house in this town has a lawn — each one tended to relentlessly by its owner-occupier.
But what insidious force compels me to expend so much energy on this measly plot of grass? Why not let it grow to its full potential? What’s wrong with a few dandelions? Why do I need a nice lawn at all?
Well, like most things in this world, I can pin the blame squarely on medieval aristocracy. But seriously, the invention of the lawn mower, the passage of the 40-hour work week, and the mass production of cheap housing all contributed to my insatiable desire for a nice, big lawn.
First, though, let’s talk about Angiosperms.
Angiosperms rule the Earth. They’ve been around since the dinosaurs. Today, they occupy over 90 percent of the planet’s land surface. Angiosperms are flowering plants. They constitute most of the plant species on the planet, including all flowers, fruiting plants, deciduous trees, and yes, grasses. Grass itself covers over 40 percent of the Earth’s surface. Our ancestors evolved in the vast grasslands of prehistoric Africa. We are grassland animals. It’s our natural habitat. No wonder it is by far the most common plant used in our lawns.
In the United States, lawns take up more acreage than the top eight crops combined.
But it wasn’t always like this. We didn’t really even start having lawns until the 19th century. And they didn’t really take off until after World War II.
Before that, lawns were mostly limited to the wealthy upper classes of medieval Europe. Nobility were the only ones who could afford to set aside and maintain land that didn’t produce food or contribute to their livelihood in any way. See, maintaining a lawn was hard work back then. The grass had to be cut by hand, using a scythe or shears. Of course, the landed elite that owned these lawns weren’t going to be rolling up their ruffled sleeves and getting their cravats dirty scything their own lawns. No way. They paid people to do that for them. So not only was a lawn a ton of work, it was very expensive.
That is, until the invention of the lawn mower in 1830. Through mechanizing lawn care, virtually anyone — not just the extremely rich — could maintain a lawn. As sports and lawn games became more popular, so did lawns. If you could afford the land and the lawn mowing machine, you were set.
Because extreme wealth was no longer necessary for lawn maintenance, an aspiring lawn owner need only the time to tend to it. But before 1938, many in the U.S. had to work more than eight hours a day during the week and half days on Saturdays. That left little time to take care of a lawn. But in 1938, congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, mandating the 40-hour work week. Suddenly, workers were free (enough) to conceivably manage a lawn.
But the lawn’s greatest ally was still to come.
Enter, the Suburb
As the cities of the 19th century grew more crowded and industrial, those who could afford it began to move. But they couldn’t move too far away. The jobs were still in the city. So communities sprang up on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, far enough to escape from the density and pollution of the inner city but close enough to commute to work. These were the first suburbs. Many of the houses in these suburban communities were built on enough land to have their own lawns.
Soon, the condition of the lawn became synonymous with the caliber of its homeowner’s character.
While suburbs began to surround most major cities in the US at the turn of the 20th century, they didn’t really take off until after World War II. An influx of war veterans seeking homes increased the demand for cheap, plentiful housing. The GI Bill made it possible for these returning soldiers to buy homes at discounted rates. To keep up with the housing demand, cheap, mass produced housing began to expand throughout the United States.
It was all thanks to William Jaird Levitt.
By circumventing unions, cutting out middlemen, and turning the construction of a home into 27 systematic steps, Levitt created what was essentially the first assembly line for large-scale, low-cost housing. Soon, these Levitt-style housing developments were popping up all over the United States, each one ordained with a pristine plot of well-manicured grass.
Now everybody could have a nice, big lawn.
Well, not really.
Levitt was super racist and restricted the sale of his homes to white Americans. Sales agents were explicitly instructed not to accept any applications from African Americans — even if they were war veterans. So not everybody got a nice, big lawn.
But these suburbs began to represent the American Dream — a place where anyone with a can-do spirit and a hardworking attitude (and the right complexion) could obtain their own piece of land with their very own pre-fabricated home, complete with 2.5 kids and an immaculate lawn. Soon, the condition of the lawn became synonymous with the caliber of its homeowner’s character. A well-maintained lawn meant a well-run, hardworking household, populated by true Americans who work 40 hours during the week but don’t spend their weekends in idleness. No, they have a lawn to take care of. It needs to be mowed and watered. Unwelcome plant varieties need to be removed to make room for a perfectly uniform mat of green grass. An overgrown, neglected lawn reflected laziness on the part of the homeowner, even a decrepitude of moral fiber. Because if you’re not maintaining your lawn to the same standards as your neighbors, you must be some kind of social deviant. Just as Levitt was enforcing a monoculture within his suburbs, his homeowners were cultivating a monoculture of plants in their lawns.
Having a nice, big lawn is more than just a symbolic act. Many communities across the U.S. actively police the upkeep of their neighborhood’s lawns. Homeowners can be subject to a fine if their grass isn’t clipped short enough or if their yard doesn’t adhere to the community’s standards of lawn care.
It’s all pretty insane when you think about it. But humans are weird. Especially Americans.
Lawns, Meet Climate Change
Our national obsession with lawns is putting a real strain on the environment.
We apply more synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to our lawns than an equivalent area of cropland. Not only can this hurt local wildlife, these chemicals can end up in our own drinking water. The manufacture and use of these chemicals require large amounts of fossil fuels and contribute to global warming. Lawnmowers and landscaping equipment account for 10-18 percent of non-transportation related gasoline emissions. Running a single lawn mower for an hour emits just as much pollution as 40 automobiles, according to the EPA (though some dispute this claim, they agree that a single lawn mower produces more pollution than multiple cars). In a year, a hectare of lawn can contribute as many greenhouse gases as a jet flying halfway around the world. Not to mention that an estimated 17 million gallons of gasoline are spilled every summer while refueling those lawn mowers. That’s almost two Exxon Valdez-scale oil spills every year, right in our front yard.
Most critically, lawns require a lot of water: 50–70 percent of all residential water in the United States goes to landscaping. Irrigated lawns take up nearly three times as much space as irrigated corn. To maintain that amount of grass on a daily basis, nine billion gallons of water need to be allocated to our lawns. That’s like every person in the United States dumping 30 gallons of fresh, drinkable water onto the ground, every single day.
Properly maintained, a lawn can actually help fight climate change while still providing space for barbecues and bocce ball.
But our lawns don’t have to be this much of a drain on the environment. First, we can reduce the amount of fertilizers and pesticides we use just by switching up the plants in our lawn. We don’t need uniform mats of grass. Low maintenance shrubs, herbs, or perennials can take the place of grass and increase the biodiversity of your lawn. Some plants can reduce the amount of time needed for mowing, and increase the natural carbon sequestration potential of our lawns. After all, grasslands are the planet’s great carbon sinks. Properly maintained, a lawn can actually help fight climate change while still providing space for barbecues and bocce ball.
We need only change what it means to have a nice, big lawn.
Truly, environmentally sustainable lawns would be better measures of our moral fiber as citizens of planet Earth than any of those old medieval lawns ever were.
Medium Environment, June 26, 2018
https://medium.com/s/story/this-is-why-everybody-wants-a-lawn-98066ce7aee3
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U of Toronto is planning a timber-based 14-storey high-rise
What are your thoughts on this trend of timber-based high-rises? The University of Toronto is proposing plans for a 14-storey high rise adjacent to the Munk School of Global Affairs – but it will be constructed of a timber frame…
I think context is important… how do the clear-cuts (as bad as these are) compare in Borneo vs. Brazil vs. Canada? Are some more sustainable sources of lumber than others? Surely clear-cutting is not the best forest management strategy by any means.
What role does reclaimed lumber play in relation to ecological / environmental impacts? I heard several years ago that reclaimed lumber (including some from logs sank to the bottom of the Ottawa River in the 19th century) was a designer trend.
Sugar Cane Paper
Several years ago, I used to use sugar cane paper (notebooks) when writing notes – particularly in high school and first year of university. I have not seen these notebooks for sale for a while — though will check more stores the next time I go to buy a notebook. This paper was made from leftover components of the sugar cane industry — which made a paper similar to contemporary wood pulp paper.
I recently looked back into this and it turns out there is some research in the field — as it reduces waste from the sugar industry – and may have environmental benefits. Some of the products use an estimated 80% less wood-based products than traditional papers. One of the technical names for this is called bagasse — this is the name for sugar cane by-products – used in various industries, such as biofuel or paper manufacturing.
Perhaps some school boards could look into this initiative based on affordability and environmental benefits – as a way to reduce their environmental footprints.
Blame Americans first
I’m tired of Americans pointing fingers at places like Borneo and Brazil. We consume 25% of the earth’s wood products, and build houses out of lumber, 1/3 of which comes from Canadian clearcuts. Our “green” organizations are scared of the American timber industry. Until that changes, we all go down.
It’s time for an Energy Transition in South East Asia
By: Liming Qiao, Asia Director of GWEC
This urgency is all the more pressing in South East Asia, a region that still relies on fossil fuels in a time where power demand is on the rise as the region’s economy and populations continue to grow.
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While most people can agree that we must decarbonise our economies, the challenge for our industry to become the mainstream energy source is also daunting. There is unprecedented pressure on cost reduction for the whole industry as support schemes are changing around the world. While wind energy in many countries is transitioning to zero subsidies schemes or grid parity, heavy subsidies continue to sustain the fossil fuel industry. While wind energy is still struggling with project financing and bankability challenges of PPAs in several emerging countries, the traditional energy sources are securing their funding easily with investors not fully realising the risks of the “stranded assets”, that is their investment decisions are based on the outdated risk factors, where climate risks are not properly taken into account.
The challenges are even greater in South East Asia region, where population growth, economic development rate and electricity demand are forecasted to soar for decades to come. Yet, this is exactly where the transition to a cleaner energy system is needed the most. Clean energy can not only help to deliver the carbon reductions needed to meet the climate mitigation targets, but also to shield these countries from the volatility of the fuel market and provide a more secure energy supply.
This is the paradox of promoting renewables in this emerging region: there are perceived difficulties of managing and balancing variable renewable energy (VRE) that prevent countries to see the benefits that VRE can provide: a more sustainable, cost-effective and secure source of energy for a national energy system. These perceived difficulties can actually be overcome efficiently through modern technologies and a shift in mindset of grid operators. A system change is crucial to provide a full set of flexibility measures that allow countries to embrace the benefits of VRE. For this to happen, the industry must work together with the government and other stakeholders to make it happen.
We are not yet there and the fight is just beginning. Through GWEC’s South East Asia Task Force, we will continue this fight for an energy transition in the region by engaging with government authorities in key countries to directly promote wind energy, with local and national associations in SEA countries, as well as build an industry networking platform with events and conference in the region to bring all stakeholders together and move the transition forward.
About GWEC Southeast Asia Taskforce
Established in June 2019, GWEC’s South East Asia Task Force is the official industry platform driving wind energy growth and the energy transition in the region. With one of the highest potentials globally for wind energy, South East Asia is the next big market for the industry with a growing population and economy needing more clean and reliable power.
GWEC will host our next SEA Task Force meeting in Singapore on the occasion of Singapore International Energy Week (SIEW) and the Asia Clean Energy Summit (ACES) to discuss our strategies on priority markets in SEA.
If you are interested in learning more about our GWEC Asia SEA Taskforce and other membership benefits, contact Raveen Singh at raveen.singh@gwec.net.
Green Hydrogen
Decarbonisation impacts depends on how hydrogen is produced. Current and future sourcing options can be divided into grey (fossil fuel-based), blue (fossil fuel-based production with carbon capture, utilisation and storage) and green (renewables-based) hydrogen. Blue and green hydrogen can play a role in the transition and synergies exist.
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Falling renewable power cost and falling capital cost for electrolyzers is creating an economic case for green hydrogen
With falling cost of renewables, the potential of green hydrogen particularly for so called ‘hard-to-decarbonise’ sectors and energy-intensive industries like iron and steel, chemicals, shipping, trucks and aviation is rapidly becoming more compelling given the urgency to limit CO2 emissions. This includes direct hydrogen use but also the production of liquid and gaseous fuels such as ammonia, methanol and synthetic jet fuel from green hydrogen. Electrolyzer deployment is currently ramping up from MW to GW-scale as witnessed by dozens of projects worldwide.
Large-scale adoption of hydrogen could also fuel an increase in demand for renewable power generation, IRENA’s report finds. In total, IRENA sees a global economic potential for 19 exajoule (EJ) of hydrogen from renewable electricity in total final energy consumption by 2050. This translates into around 4-16 terawatts (TW) of solar and wind generation capacity to be deployed to produce renewable hydrogen and hydrogen-based products in 2050.
However, deployment of hydrogen-based solutions will not happen overnight, IRENA’s report cautions. Hydrogen might likely trail other strategies such as electrification of end-use sectors, and its use will target specific applications. The need for a dedicated new supply infrastructure may also limit hydrogen use to certain countries that decide to follow this strategy. Existing natural gas pipelines could be refurbished, but implications must be further explored.
Low-carbon, clean hydrogen should be understood as part of a larger energy transition effort
Green hydrogen could make a substantial contribution to the energy transition in the long run. The report recommends acknowledging the strategic role of hydrogen in the transition and at the same time calls on governments and private sector to better understand energy system benefits, cost-reduction and investment requirements to tap into the potential of a hydrogen future.
Tucson, get with the program!
Renowned linguist and cognitive scientist (etcetera) Noam Chomsky has noted that: “A very good economist, Dean Baker, had a column a couple of weeks ago in which he discussed what China is doing. They are still a big huge polluter, but they are carrying out massive programs of switching to renewable energies way beyond anything else in the world. [American] States are doing it. Or not.” … In Tucson, Arizona, for example, “the sun is shining … most of the year, [but] take a look and see how many solar panels you see. Our house in the suburbs is the only one that has them [in the vicinity].
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People are complaining that they have a thousand-dollar electric bill per month over the summer for air conditioning but won’t put up a solar panel; and in fact the Tucson electric company makes it hard to do. For example, our solar panel has some of the panels missing because you’re not allowed to produce too much electricity …
People have to come to understand that they’ve just got to [reform their habitual non-renewable energy consumption], and fast; and it doesn’t harm them, it improves their lives. For example, it even saves money. But just the psychological barrier that says I … have to keep to the common beliefs [favouring fossil fuels] and that [doing otherwise] is somehow a radical thing that we have to be scared of, is a block that has to be overcome by constant educational organizational activity.”
He concludes: “The way every other popular movement developed — the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the feminist movement — just constant, often very small groups, growing into bigger groups for activism. Occasionally they have a dramatic action like a demonstration, but mainly to stimulate ongoing activity. And it can’t be delayed.”
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/12/features/noam-chomsky-couple-generations-organized-human-society-may-not-survive-has-be
Save the Organgutans
Willie Smits wanted to save organgutans. The effort led him to restore a rainforest and provide livelihood and food for the local people. There’s a lot for us to learn from this TED talk.
The Renewables Pull Ahead!
In 2019, for the first time, more electric energy was produced in UK by green sources than by fossil fuels!
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https://electrek.co/2019/10/14/green-energy-more-electricity-than-fossil-fuels-first-time-uk/
Solar panel farm grows 17,000 tons of food without soil, pesticides, fossil fuels or groundwater
In addition, the technique can save what are clearly finite resources from extinction, something all of us should clearly favor.
As reported by Natural Blaze, as the world’s population grows, so too does its demand for food. Right now, activist organizations are battling the spread of the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) which have become prevalent in modern agriculture, despite the dangers they pose to our health.
The primary argument for GMO makers like Monsanto and backers in industry and government is that they are necessary because the world is running out of resources, and GMO crops are a better way to boost yields (which is not true, actually). On first hearing it, this argument might sound cogent and believable; after all, it’s “science” and scientists aren’t trying to harm us.
Technology to make agriculture sustainable and environmentally clean
But digging deeper into the impact of GMO crops and the herbicides used to make them most effective, demonstrates well that chemical farming is what’s doing real harm to finite land and soil resources.
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So GMOs aren’t a viable, long-term option. Thankfully, however, a new innovation that is efficient and environmentally friendly – as well as productive – has been developed.
A new start-up called Sundrop Farms has developed what can only be called high-tech greenhouses that employ several solutions to grow crops with far less reliance on finite natural resources, even more than conventional greenhouse production. With offices in the UK, Australia and the US, the company is working to educate, enlighten and, most of all, expand.
Sundrop Farms’ reinvents the resources
In order to grow crops, you need land, water and energy – all finite resources. But Sundrop Farms’ technology sort of reinvents the resources.
In 2010, when the company launched its first pilot farm in Port Augusta, South Australia, it was located in the middle of a desert, where it would have been impossible to grow food using traditional agricultural methods. However, by combining seawater and sunlight, Sundrop Farms has managed to change the agricultural dynamic. It is a technology that negates any effects of climate change (real or imagined), land grabs by biotech companies who only want to spread GMOs, droughts, floods and other natural and man-made occurrences.
Using coconut husks, 23,000 mirrors to reflect solar power, and desalinated water on 20-hectares (roughly 49,400 acres), the developers have grown tons of fresh, wholesome, organic food.
As further reported by Natural Blaze, the facility in South Australia uses seawater from the Spencer Gulf, desalinating it and then using it in a massive greenhouse lined with cardboard, thereby eliminating the need to rely on groundwater or rain for growing produce.
Year-round production and tons of food per year – organically
In addition, the facility also grows food hydroponically – which you can also do at home – thereby further reducing the overall need for water and eliminating the need for soil.
Utilizing the mirrors for power to redirect the desert sun, all that is required is sunlight and seawater to grow as much as 17,000 metric tons of food a year.
And none of it is genetically modified.
What’s more, this kind of agricultural operation can produce year-round. During winter months, the greenhouse is fed with 39 megawatts of clean energy that comes directly from the sun. While the $200 million price tag may seem excessive, consider that with the renewable technologies and year-round growing seasons, such operations can quickly pay for themselves.
But the bigger issue is that Sundrop Farms is redefining the way food can be – and should be – grown in a world where the population is only expanding, along with competition for resources.
https://wisemindhealthybody.com/naturalnews/solar-panel-farm-grows-17000-tons-of-food/?c=aan&utm_term=aan&fbclid=IwAR17964WO6FNQb29CfpNzp5EdaU2qc53os6r25MeGTmCWZ81QH5h0mFZonQ
IRENA. — International Renewable Energy Association — is an organization that seems to be doing a great deal to promote energy self sufficiency. I saw its Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/irena.org/
Germany decided after Fukushima to quit, not only coal, but also nuclear. And it’s working!
Germany has released plans — several months ago — to shut down 84 of its coal burning plants to help with climate change.
The decision to quit coal follows an earlier bold energy policy move by the German government, which decided to shut down all of its nuclear power plants by 2022 in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011.
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At the time, that was harshly criticized as reckless by business leaders, who worried that it would raise electricity prices and make their industries less competitive against foreign rivals. They also pointed out the futility of the move because no other major industrial country followed Germany’s nuclear exit.
Twelve of the country’s 19 nuclear plants have been shuttered so far.
The plan to eliminate coal-burning plants as well as nuclear means that Germany will be counting on renewable energy to provide 65% to 80% of the country’s power by 2040. Last year, renewables overtook coal as the leading source and now account for 41% of the country’s electricity.”
[…]
“German CO2 emissions fell appreciably in the early 1990s, largely because of the implosion of Communist East Germany and its heavily polluting industry. Still, the country continued to rely on coal-fired plants for a significant share of its electricity.
Powerful utilities and labor unions helped keep coal-burning plants operating and previous governments even planned to expand the number of coal plants to compensate for the pending withdrawal from nuclear power. There are still about 20,000 jobs directly dependent on the coal industry and 40,000 indirectly tied to it.”
Here is a link to an article by Erik Kirschbaum in the Los Angeles Times with more information: https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-coal-power-20190126-story.html
Hydrogen-powered aircraft produces zero emissions
by Katherine Gallagher on Inhabitant
Alaka’i Technologies has launched a zero-emissions aircraft with six rotors, electric motors and hydrogen fuel cells as well as a range of 400 miles or four hours. The helicopter-meets-drone aircraft was designed to be piloted either in person, remotely or autonomously, with ample space for up to five passengers.
The most impressive feature — that it runs on hydrogen fuel cells — gives this aircraft the potential to become one of the greenest modes of air transportation. The hydrogen fuel cells allow Skai to travel farther and carry more weight, and they are 95 percent reusable, with 99 percent of the remaining materials being recyclable. An Airframe parachute feature adds an additional level of safety, and there is no need for long runways thanks to the vertical take-off and landing capabilities.
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So who exactly designed this futuristic, environmentally friendly aircraft? The creators are an impressive team of nationally recognized aerospace experts, engineers and veteran pilots that have completed top-level positions at organizations such as NASA and the Department of Defense.
Alaka’i Technologies has been around since the 1990s, earning recognition with its development and testing of the world’s first Fly-By-Light aircraft. These days, the company is focused on transportation though hydrogen-powered mobility. For Skai, Alaka’i Technologies teamed up with Designworks, the design studio for the BMW Group. This collaboration promises a sleek, fashionable design in line with the luxury and style for which BMW is known.
Skai also offers so much more than commercial air travel. Brian Morrison, the co-founder, president and chief technology officer of Alaka’i Technologies, suggested that this eco-friendly aircraft can provide affordable and responsible solutions to “everything from relieving traffic congestion to delivering supplies during natural disasters.” Currently, Skai is in testing with the FAA, pending certification. The company plans to launch the piloted version of the aircraft initially and follow with an autonomous version.
https://inhabitat.com/the-skai-hydrogen-powered-aircraft-produces-zero-emissions/
First Time Success for Ocean Cleaning Device!
By Jordan Davidson Oct. 03, 2019
Ocean Cleanup has been hard at work on creating a device to attack the plastic waste crisis for seven years, by creating a device that captures plastic in its fold like a giant arm, according to Business Insider. The company announced that it was able to capture and hold debris ranging from large cartons, crates and abandoned fishing gear — or “ghosts nets,” which are a scourge to marine life — to microplastics that are as small as one millimeter, according to an Ocean Cleanup press release.
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“Today, I am very proud to share with you that we are now catching plastics,” Ocean Cleanup founder and CEO Boyan Slat said at a news conference in Rotterdam, as CNN reported.
The system’s success in capturing microplastics came as a welcome surprise since microplastics tend to fall to the ocean floor rather than float on the surface, according to the press release. Since microplasitcs tend to sink, Ocean Cleanup focused on large pieces of plastic.
Slat posted a picture on Twitter of collected debris along side a forsaken wheel.
“Our ocean cleanup system is now finally catching plastic, from one-ton ghost nets to tiny microplastics! Also, anyone missing a wheel?” Slat wrote.
The Ocean Cleanup device is a U-shaped barrier that drops a net below the surface. As the current moves, the net traps faster moving objects that float into it. Fish, however, are able to swim beneath it, according to CNN.
Slat first presented the concept of a giant barrier near the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a TEDx talk when he was 18 years old. But the project has been slowed by some spectacular failures that Slat and his team learned from. Last year, a design flaw stopped the barrier from holding onto the plastic it captured and a 59-foot section of the barrier disconnected from the device. In its next attempt, the design team noticed that plastic was floating over the top of a cork line that was supposed to stabilize the system, as Business Insider reported.
The team also noticed that the barrier, known as System 001/B was picking up speed from the ocean currents that outpaced the plastic litter. Therefore, after some rethinking and some upgrades, the device was slowed down by a parachute-anchor. That allows faster moving plastic to float into the barrier. After the parachute-anchor was on, the team fixed the corkline so very little plastic was able to pass over the top of the barrier, according to Ocean Cleanup’s press release.
“Our team has remained steadfast in its determination to solve immense technical challenges to arrive at this point,” said Slat in the statement. “Though we still have much more work to do, I am eternally grateful for the team’s commitment and dedication to the mission and look forward to continuing to the next phase of development.”
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is twice the size of Texas, is a swath of plastic debris brought together by the ocean currents and kept in formation by a whirlpool of currents, as The Guardian reported. Ocean Cleanup now wants to scale up the project so it can hold plastic for a year before collection is necessary. It has the goal of removing half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The Ocean Cleanup said in its press release that it will now start on its next iteration, System 002, a full-scale cleanup device that will endure rough ocean conditions and retain the collected plastic for long periods of time between collections. Once the plastic is collected, it will be returned to land for recycling.
ttps://www.ecowatch.com/ocean-cleaning-device-plastic-2640832397.html?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1
The science says it is true: https://globalnews.ca/news/5119325/canada-warming-rate-environment-canada/
Climate change catching up with us
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/climate-activists-block-roads-protest-in-australian-cities/2019/10/08/
Methane in Siberian Sea
Sea in Siberia is “boiling” with Methane bubbles
The team, led by Igor Semiletov, from Tomsk Polytechnic University in Russia, traveled to an area of the Eastern Arctic previously known to produce methane fountains. They were studying the environmental consequences of permafrost thawing beneath the ocean.
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Permafrost is ground that is permanently frozen—in some cases for tens of thousands of years. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, permafrost currently covers about 8.7 million square miles of the Northern Hemisphere.
Locked within in the permafrost is organic material. When the ground thaws, this material starts to break down and, as it does, it releases methane—a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. With global temperatures increasing, scientists are concerned the warming will result in more permafrost thawing, causing more methane to be released, leading to even more warming. This is known as a positive feedback loop.
A huge proportion of Siberia is covered in permafrost, but this is starting to change. Over recent years, scientists working in remote regions have started documenting changes to the landscape thought to be related to it thawing, including huge craters. In 2016, footage emerged of the ground wobbling “like jelly.”
But permafrost is also present under the ocean. In 2017, scientists announced they had discovered hundreds of craters at the bottom of the Barents Sea, north of Norway and Russia. The craters had formed from methane building up then exploding suddenly when the pressure got too high.
In the latest expedition to chart methane emissions coming from the ocean, researchers analyzed the water around Bennett Island, taking samples of sea water and sediments. In one area, however, they found something unexpected—an extremely sharp increase in the concentration of atmospheric methane. According to a statement from Tomsk Polytechnic University, it was six to seven times higher than average.
They then noticed an area of water around four to five square meters that was “boiling with methane bubbles,” the statement said. This could be scooped out with buckets, the researchers said. After identifying the fountain, the team was able to take samples directly from it. Methane levels around the fountain were nine times higher than average global concentrations.
“This is the most powerful gas fountain I’ve ever seen,” Semiletov said, according to a translation from the Moscow Times. “No one has ever recorded anything like this before.”
After identifying the fountain, the team was able to take samples directly from it. Methane levels around the fountain were nine times higher than average global concentrations. The following day they found another methane fountain and conducted a comprehensive analysis of it.
Sergey Nikiforov, a journalist who took part in the expedition, said there will now be more research and experiments in this part of the ocean: “The work to study the secrets of the Arctic seas…continues,” he said in a statement.
https://www.newsweek.com/methane-boiling-sea-discovered-siberia-1463766
Hard Times
“A very good economist, Dean Baker, had a column a couple of weeks ago in which he discussed what China is doing. They are still a big huge polluter, but they are carrying out massive programs of switching to renewable energies way beyond anything else in the world. [American] States are doing it. Or not.” … In Tucson, Arizona, for example, “the sun is shining … most of the year, [but] take a look and see how many solar panels you see. Our house in the suburbs is the only one that has them [in the vicinity].
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People have to come to understand that they’ve just got to [reform their habitual non-renewable energy consumption], and fast; and it doesn’t harm them, it improves their lives. For example, it even saves money. But just the psychological barrier that says I … have to keep to the common beliefs [favouring fossil fuels] and that [doing otherwise] is somehow a radical thing that we have to be scared of, is a block that has to be overcome by constant educational organizational activity.”
He concluded, “The way every other popular movement developed — the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the feminist movement — just constant, often very small groups, growing into bigger groups for activism. Occasionally they have a dramatic action like a demonstration, but mainly to stimulate ongoing activity.
And it can’t be delayed.”
Source: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/12/features/noam-chomsky-couple-generations-organized-human-society-may-not-survive-has-be
Flouting Environmental Law
It’s quite safe to assume that, had the (central B.C., August 4, 2014) Mount Polley copper and gold mine massive tailings pond release of a slurry of years’ worth of waste into Polley Lake—yet for which there were no B.C.-environmental-law charges laid against Imperial Metals regardless of its clear recklessness—been located in plain sight just off of, say, Vancouver’s scenic attraction Stanley Park instead of in a region of natural wilderness, it would not have received the relatively minute mainstream news-media coverage it has to date.
Denial, Even By Kids
And then there’s the astonishing short-sighted selfishness. I observed this last year when a Global TV news reporter randomly asked a young Vancouver man wearing sunglasses what he thought of government restrictions on disposable plastic straws. “It’s like we’re living in a nanny state, always telling me what I can’t do,” he recklessly retorted.
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Astonished by his shortsighted little-boy selfishness, I wondered whether he’d be the same sort of individual who’d likely have a sufficiently grand sense of entitlement—i.e. ‘Like, don’t tell me what I can’t waste or do, dude!’—to permit himself to now, say, deliberately dump a whole box of unused straws into the Georgia Strait, just to stick it to the authorities who’d dare tell him that enough is enough with our gratuitous massive dumps of plastics into our oceans (which are of course unable to defend themselves against such guys seemingly asserting self-granted sovereignty over the natural environment), so he could figuratively middle-finger any new government rules with a closing, ‘There! How d’ya like that, pal!’
No wonder so much gratuitous plastic waste eventually finds its way into our life-filled oceans, where there are few, if any, caring souls to see it.
Plastic roads
However, my questions are – what are the byproducts of this road? Is it recyclable when needing repairs or replacement? Is there run off in the form of small plastic particles / microplastics? Is it permeable / what are the long-term implications for the health of soil in adjacent environments?
Here is a video the World Economic Forum posted on their Instagram social media: https://www.instagram.com/p/B2tSrjYHcCn/?igshid=1m998ig1b50s1
Isn’t this exploitative? I’ve heard that this is bad for other countries. Also when did we even get into the habit of doing this? When did we even stop processing our own garbage? C’mon Canada…
Canada exports its trash!
There have been several alarming articles in Canadian media over the past week or so around the exportation of Canadian waste products to other countries due to a limited capacity and limited industry here in Canada. Several alarms were raised previously – in early 2019 – around this trend – though it is being re-examined in September 2019.
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Of note are the following articles:
“We don’t want to be the next cancer village” CBC news 27 September 2019: Link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/plastics-recycling-waste-overseas-marketplace-1.5292512
and this Marketplace CBC Examination: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/marketplace-recycling-trackers-b-c-blue-box-1.5299176
I am curious if the Swedish model of trash incineration could be used in Canada. “Sweden imports around 1.3 million tonnes of rubbish each year, most of it from Norway and the UK, and has long been hailed for its efficiency in handling waste. Only one percent of waste produced in Sweden ever reaches landfill, with the remaining 99 percent recycled, reused, or converted into energy.” However – from my understanding – the ash produced from incinerating these products is incredibly toxic and requires special containment measures and programs to handle it.
Link: https://www.thelocal.se/20181026/sweden-waste-management-importing-waste-incineration
Australia recently banned the exportation of waste products – could Canada undertake a similar initiative?
Climate change is not smoke or mirrors..it is real and its coming to get us. Observe good scientiffic information coming from the brains of NASA.
CLARREO : a satellite that can help make our space based scientiffic instruments much more accurate and powerful.
And I thought he was just an action hero…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99AwWQ-M2_M
Garbage Bags are Canadian
Did you know garbage bags are a Canadian invention circa. 1950s? Perhaps there is increased research and development potential here. For many years – they were manufactured in my hometown – among other locations – though the City of Kawartha Lakes recently banned black garbage bags in hopes of reducing trash output and promote increased recycling rates (clear bags = ease of identifying recycling materials in garbage; etc.). Residents are allowed one small opaque bag per trash collection cycle.
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https://www.cbc.ca/2017/canadians-invented-the-garbage-bag-can-we-solve-the-mess-they-made-1.4024908
Polluting by Protesters?
Furthermore, does the United Nations track the emissions / climate change impact from their delegates? I have seen on social media and news agencies that the Secretary General (Antonio Guterres) travels all over the place – in short periods of time – such as flying to Mozambique then Tuvalu then Philippines, etc. What is the climate impact of all this air travel over the course of the year?
Greens don’t love pipelines
Could it have something to do with her party’s platform promise, if elected, to kill the Trans Mountain dilbit pipeline expansion project? …
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According to then-publisher of Postmedia’s National Post, Douglas Kelly: “From its inception, the National Post has been one of the country’s leading voices on the importance of energy to Canada’s business competitiveness internationally and our economic well-being in general. We will work with CAPP [Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers] to amplify our energy mandate and to be a part of the solution to keep Canada competitive in the global marketplace. The National Post will undertake to leverage all means editorially, technically and creatively to further this critical conversation.”
Also, during a Postmedia presentation it was stated: “Postmedia and CAPP will bring energy to the forefront of our national conversation. Together, we will engage executives, the business community and the Canadian public to underscore the ways in which the energy sector powers Canada.” [Excerpted from Politically Incorrect, a 2017 book written by Rafe Mair, the late popular and well-respected B.C. lawyer, politician, journalist and radio host.]
More recently, though, Postmedia newspaper empire acquired a lobbying firm with close ties to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney in order to participate in the latter’s government’s new $30 million PR “war room” in promoting the interests of Canada’s fossil fuel industry. But the newspaper giant’s apparent bedding with the powerful industry is not news (albeit it’s little known amongst the general population).
Get your electricity from a quartz crystal
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A nightclub in the Netherlands has already tried to implement this system via a dance floor situated on a number of springs that aim to produce an electric charge as dancers bounce; move; etc. The roads application could allow for adjacent streetlights to have an additional or supplementary source of electricity. Bones and ceramics – not just crystals – are additionally piezoelectric – though each material generates a different electric charge dependent on stress factors, conductivity, etc. Limitations at present for this technology include mechanical fatigue; corrosion; and conductivity limitations.
Artificial Islands?
Several nations have explored options of artificial islands to mitigate climate change and other political situations. One of the most famous at present is China’s activity in the South China Sea around the Paracel Island.
The Maldives constructed an artificial island via dredging a shallow area of sea several years ago. This allegedly is to mitigate congestion on the main capital island of Male.
“A Flood-Resistant Island:
You catch a ferry from a part of Male where motorcycles clog the narrow streets and fishermen gut their morning catch on the sidewalk. A few minutes later, you arrive in a brand new world, the island of Hulhumale. It’s an artificial island built by engineers, not volcanoes.
When the ferry arrives, you step up onto this island. The streets are straight and wide. There’s a new hospital, new schools, new government buildings, new apartments — all several feet higher than the rest of the Maldives.
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The flood-resistant island was created by a huge dredge that sucked up sand from the ocean floor and disgorged it into a shallow lagoon. Eventually, Hulhumale rose from the waters.
That was more than five years ago. Now, several thousand people live here. Gayoom’s goal is to attract at least 50,000.
But unlike their president, residents don’t talk much about climate change.
They say they like Hulhumale because it’s clean. It has wide sand beaches instead of a concrete seawall. Apartments are less expensive than on Male.”
“”The higher elevation of the land is to address the sea-level rise,” he says. “But the primary factor is to create a city to ease the congestion in Male.”
Link: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18425626
What are the environmental impacts on adjacent ecosystems from this process? Are marine habitats being disrupted from large scale dredging activities? Is there an environmentally friendly way to construct artificial islands?
What about floods?
Several urban areas have begun seawall construction to try and mitigate regional flooding and/or evacuation. Are there similar ecosystem options to mangroves for areas where mangroves are not native and/or the climate is not welcoming to them? Malé in the Maldives has begun an artificial seawall construction around the city – funded partly by Japan. New York has additionally begun investigating (if not constructing) systems to mitigate flooding on Lower Manhattan. Is there opportunity for a mix of artificial and natural seawalls and seawall alternatives? Other nations – such as Fiji (and potentially Kiribati and Tuvalu)- have begun looking for land in other countries to purchase to move their population(s) as climate refugees. Is there a clear legal situation for climate refugees? I am not sure if there is a precedent in history before – though there are certainly examples of forced relocation.
MHD additionally has applications for the desalination of water. This has been in research and development since the 1980s (I think).
Next:Try Magnets?
” The fundamental concept behind MHD is the magnetic field can induce currents in moving conductive fluid, which in turns creates force on the fluid and also changes the magnetic field itself. The generator used in this process is called Magneto Hydro Dynamic (MHD) Power Generator. MHD power generator don’t have any mechanical part to produce current and the actual conductor are replaced by magneto-fluid (plasmas gas, liquid metals, and salt water).
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In conventional turbine generator, the rotation of rotor inside the turbogenerator will cut the magnetic flux and the current will produce perpendicular to the magnetic field. The principal of MHD power generator also similar with conventional turbine generator which is the moving fluid (plasma gases, liquid metals, and salt water) move pass through the magnetic fields, the voltage is induced in the conductor, which results in flow of current across the terminals that are parallel and opposite to each other (A.R Kantrowitz, 1962) as shown in figure 1.0. This principle knows as Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction.”
Link: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/114/1/012145/pdf
“A seawater magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) power generator / hydrogen generator is a unique system that not only directly transforms the kinetic energy of an ocean current / tidal current into electric
energy but also generates hydrogen gas as a by-product. The energy of the ocean current / tidal current is expected to be effective as a sustainable energy source because of its independence of both weather and season in comparison with solar energy and wind power energy.”
Link: https://www.scientific.net/AST.75.208.pdf
I wonder what the environmental impacts would be to have a series of these on the bottom of the sea floor in areas with large and persistent tidal forces?
There is additionally applications for space exploration with this form of drive.
Egypt’s big solar park
Have folks heard of the Benban Solar Park? It is a series of 41 land plots in Egypt – ranging from 0.3 to 1 square kilometer. The plots are designed to generate solar energy – in the largest such complex globally. Interesting, instead of one company running it- each plot is to be leased (or sold) to a different company or group of companies. Interesting notion here – as it seems most solar panel installations (on a commerical scale) are managed or owned by one company.
https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/pesticides/index.cfm
How do the big corporate powers get to damage the environment this way?
Pesticides in our Food
Poisoning has a long history
“By the 1920s, U.S. fruit growers were plastering on lead arsenate in such amounts that they were starting to poison their customers. In 1919, the Boston Health Department destroyed arsenic contaminated apples because people were getting sick. The follow year, it had to do it again. In 1919, California health officials discovered with alarm that arsenic residues tended to stick to fruit, meaning the poison was hard to remove.
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A history from Washington State University notes, however, that until the DDT era farmers continued to use the compounds because they were the most effective. That report also notes that arsenic tends to concentrate in the top layer of the soil and – thankfully – that most food crops don’t take it up in any measurable way.
Rice is an exception to that. Scientists have discovered that the rice plant, because it’s designed to pull silicon out of the soil (it strengthens the grain) does the same with the structurally similar arsenic. Researchers at Dartmouth College’s Toxic Metals Superfund Research program note that rice has been described as a natural arsenic accumulator. Most of this accumulation, of course, is due to naturally occurring arsenic in soil and water. But some is due to residual contamination from arsenate pesticides – and that’s what makes rice from the United States so interesting in this regard.”
Link: https://www.wired.com/2012/06/arsenic-pesticides-in-our-food/
China allegedly continued using arsenic-based pesticides until the early 2000s.
Beware of Poisonous Pesticides on your Food
In the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth century, the United States (among other nations) used arsenic and lead based pesticides in agricultural contexts. Arsenic was additionally used to make green paint at this time. I wonder what the legacy of this trend is on environmental health. Could this be impacting bees and/or human health? It is unclear to me how long the compounds stay in the soil – though even the subsequent generations of pesticide chemicals were toxic too.
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“In the early 20th century – enthusiastically supported by the U.S. government – the most popular pesticides were arsenic compounds. How popular? In the year 1929, almost 30 million pounds of lead arsenate and calcium arsenate were spread across this country’s fields and orchards.
And how enthusiastic was the government? Well, in 1935, on a weekly radio program sponsored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the host suggested that the old-time school rhyme “A is for Apple” be changed as follows:
A is for Arsenate/Lead if you please/Protector of Apples/Against Archenemies.”
“I’m indebted to the work of public health historian, James Whorton, for the information above. A more detailed history of arsenic pesticides can be found in his 1974 book, Before Silent Spring: Pesticides and Public Health in pre-DDT America. As the book title indicates, the arsenate pesticides were edged out in the years after World War II, with the rise of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides, like DDT, and organophosphates, like malathion. Even so, arsenate pesticides were not officially bannedin the United States until the 1980s. (And modified arsenic pesticides such as MMA and DMA are still approved for use on cotton). Their story remains a fascinating one. An important one. And one that still affects us. The residues of lead arsenate and calcium arsenate still haunt us, tainting acres of farmland still in use today. Scientists say that a major source of inorganic arsenic in rice from the American southeast is from pesticide residues, seeping from lands once used to raise cotton. During the early 20th century, calcium arsenate was the number one pesticide used by growers to fight the cotton boll weevil. “There’s a legacy of arsenic in some of those fields,” Joshua Hamilton, a senior toxicologist with the Marine Biological Laboratory, told me recently.
Pesticides in our Food
You can help! Hunt for seeds!
“Canadians asked to find ash trees in a bid to preserve the species: Co-ordinator for the National Tree Seed Centre in Fredericton, McPhee is asking Canadians to help him find mature stands where seeds can be gathered and later stored for future generations in the centre’s deep-freeze vaults.
“We’re looking to protect the genetic diversity of the species,” McPhee said in an interview. “We’re looking for natural stands of trees that are in seed …. We want Canadians to be our eyes — to let us know they’re out there.”
“Jon Sweeney, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, said the loss of ash trees also means the loss of the 44 species of insects and other organisms that depend on this particular type of tree.
“When the ash trees go, you lose more than the trees,” said Sweeney. “You get complications.”
“Aside from the environmental impact, there will be an economic impact as well, considering white ash is used to make baseball bats, hockey sticks, canoe paddles and many types of tool handles, ladders and furniture.
“It’s going to cost municipalities millions, if not billions, of dollars to cover tree removal and replacement costs,” Sweeney said from Fredericton.
“It can cost you $200 to take a tree down, or it can cost you $2,000 … (And) if your house is no longer shaded, you’ll be paying more for air conditioning.”
More information available here: https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/canadians-asked-to-find-ash-trees-in-a-bid-to-preserve-the-species-1.4568217?fbclid=IwAR3MPf8XD6BNSBCN0TYmC_edX4ReIJWXW3UBq7o6au_oKiK524hb2pWsuIA
Tripping over the Cord
In Toronto – a homeowner owned an electric car and tried to charge the battery while it was parked on the street in front of their home. Municipal bylaw indicated this is not allowed – due to the hazard of someone tripping over the cord running over the sidewalk – city officials indicated this would additionally be a violation of multiple building and electrical codes.
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There was discussion to bury the cable under the sidewalk – which was ultimately not allowed either. There is potential for a city/private partnership with charging infrastructure being installed on adjacent utilities poles – but the question arises from accessibility, safety, as well as both short and long term maintenance. This is an issue to look into in urban areas where many homes pre-date the common construction of garages or alternatives to on-street parking.
Here is a CBC Link to the article in relation to that: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/electric-vehicles-blocked-1.4368014
For many decades toxic materials were used in construction – such as asbestos and heavy metal based paints. When buildings are demolished or renovated – where do these materials end up? I am hoping that in most cases they are safely disposed of – but what if these end up as infill or in a garbage dump? Who’s monitoring this kind of thing?
Nutrition in the South Pacific
Environmental considerations is a rather broad category in this circumstance. I am particularly curious around this in relation to remote areas – such as the South Pacific states. A number of these areas have exceptionally poor nutrition statistics, with high rates of chronic diseases like diabetes, obesity, etc.
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From my understanding – many of these issues arose in the post-war era with the increasing urbanization of these islands. Additionally, salinization of fresh water sources – through climate change – results in limited arable land to grow traditional crops like breadfruit and taro. Of course importing food to remote areas will have a significant impact on emissions due to the sheer volume of fuel required to get food to these places in the first place.
The other consideration is that there is often a significant price related to importing food to remote regions – such as the South Pacific – and as such – often trade offs with the type and quality of food. For example – there is often a lack of fresh produce on remote islands – and as such a high rate of processed foods are imported. Is there an opportunity for a global standard when it comes to food and environmental impacts or should it be considered on a case-by-case, region-by-region metric?
Ontario, does Quebec have a deal for you?
Fence your backyard with solar panels!
Everything for the sake of jobs?
Whether it’s the mass deforestation and incineration of the Amazonian rainforest (which produces 20 percent of Earth’s oxygen), a B.C. midsummer’s snowfall, a vicious heatwave, a near-extinct whale species gradually dying off, unprecedentedly large-scale flooding or geologically invasive/destructive fracking or mass deforestation or increasingly dry forests resulting in record-breaking deadly wildfires in California and B.C. or a myriad of other categories of large-scale toxic pollutant emissions and dumps, there’s discouragingly insufficient political gonad planet-wide to sufficiently address it.
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Astonishingly, what apparently still politically matters most, or too close to it, is the seemingly euphoria-inducing creation of jobs, however temporary, and stimulating/strengthening the economy (whatever that exactly means).
Perhaps due to (everyone’s sole spaceship) Earth’s large size, there seems to be a general obliviousness in regards to our natural environment. It’s as though throwing non-biodegradable garbage down a dark chute, or pollutants emitted out of exhaust and drainage pipes, or spewed from very tall smoke stacks—or even the largest contamination events—can somehow be safely absorbed into the air, sea, and land (i.e. out of sight, out of mind); like we’re safely inconsequentially dispensing of that waste into a compressed-into-nothing black-hole singularity.
Although I have never (nor likely ever will) own and/or operate any form of motor vehicle, there are many green-minded people who rely upon their (probably very efficient) fossil-fuel powered cars since they haven’t had a monetarily feasible opportunity to acquire an electric vehicle.
Also, I believe it’s no coincidence that the first thing upon his “Progressive” Conservative Party’s election into office after a campaign won in part with a large political donation from the fossil fuel industry Premier Doug Ford canceled government rebate incentives for electric car buyers in Ontario. As for our allegedly environmentally concerned Canadian (neo-)Liberal government, besides pushing for the TRIPLING(!) of dilbit-oil tanker flow, it recently gave the old and increasingly outdated dirty-energy Big Fossil Fuel sector 12X(!) as much subsidization as they allocated towards clean renewable energy technology innovations.
Especially with the vocal paid fossil fuel shills, apologists and activists (so many of whom are themselves barely making ends meet), I see our collective selves—including the mainstream news-media and most of institutionalized organized religion—essentially acting as the industry’s Useful Idiots.
Plenty of oxygen
I gained a huge amount of surprising knowledge from this extraordinary article. It explains how the whole carbon cycle works in nature and why we’re not going to run out of oxygen — though humankind is doing something terrible.
The Amazon Is Not Earth’s Lungs
Humans could burn every living thing on the planet and still not dent its oxygen supply.
By Petet Brannen. The Atlantic Aug 27, 2019
Second Life for Plastics
“A pilot project in Whitby, Ont., is using technology to give plastic waste a second life by turning it into diesel fuel and gasoline.
The technology, dubbed the Phoenix, can convert single-use items like plastic bags and Styrofoam — items that would otherwise end up in landfill.
John O’Bireck, president of energy investment company Sparta Group, says he sees plastic “as a resource, not a scourge.”
He says the fuel produced by Phoenix is already being used in his company’s fleet of trucks that transport industrial waste. “Five tonnes of plastic can be converted into about 4,000 litres. And 4,000 litres can drive our whole fleet of 10 vehicles back and forth every day running 16 hours a day.”
O’Bireck says Phoenix uses a process involving pyrolysis — using heat to bring about decomposition — to upcycle plastics that can’t go into the recycling stream.”
Why are climate deniers so hostile to women?
Here’s an article from The New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/154879/misogyny-climate-deniers
The Green Old Deal
By William Hawes
There are a lot of things to like about the recent resolution for the Green New Deal. The commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the acknowledgment of the catastrophic events that will occur if the world does not act soon- these are all healthy signs. Like Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign which removed many stigmas about socialism, raising public consciousness about the structural changes needed to lessen the impacts of global warming are to be commended.
However, there are very serious problems with the language of the resolution, as well as the underlying assumptions, biases, and ideology which pervades the text.
Starting with an obvious problem, the “Green New Deal” is based on the political and economic mobilization of FDR’s New Deal. It was the New Deal, essentially, which saved capitalism from collapse in the US in the 1930s. If the Green New Deal is saying anything, it is offering cover to the ruling class- here is your propaganda model out of this mess you’ve created; here is another chance to save capitalism from itself. It’s a false promise of course, as no purely technological scheme based in a capitalist economy will be able to fix what’s coming, but it’s a very convenient narrative for capitalist elites to cling to.
Roosevelt’s New Deal placated workers and bought time for the bourgeoisie to rally, but it was the combined forces of post-WWII macroeconomic Keynesian economic stability, high taxes on the wealthy, the Bretton Woods agreement, the Marshall Plan and reconstruction of Japan which helped grow the middle classes in the mid-20th century.
Indeed, the Green New Deal (GND) mimics the mainline liberal/reformist agenda when it pledges to try: “directing investments to spur economic development, deepen and diversify industry and business in local and regional economies, and build wealth and community ownership, while prioritizing high-quality job creation…”
That’s about as boilerplate as one can get. You’d expect to hear this blather from anywhere on the mainstream spectrum, out of the mouth of a Chamber of Commerce hack or a College Republican newsletter.
Another issue of basic civil decency is that the GND is blatantly cribbing from the Green Party’s own ideas, and then watering them down, without any reference to their origins. The limitations of the GPUS do not need to be run through here, but the point remains: stealing policies from others who have been campaigning on this platform for decades, without offering even a token of acknowledgement, is not a good look.
I mean, this is all so obvious, and frankly, it’s disheartening and embarrassing to live in a country with such little common sense.
There’s more. The resolution calls for “net-zero global emissions by 2050”. This sounds great, except it leaves the foot in the door for a carbon trading scheme, where polluters will pay to offset their emissions with money, “investments in technology”, false promises to plant tree farms which they can renege on in court battles, etc.
Further, the GND states that it supports:
“to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth”
It calls for:
“[The] Green New Deal must be developed through transparent and inclusive consultation, collaboration, and partnership with frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, worker cooperatives, civil society groups, academia, and businesses…”
First, who in Congress is talking about implementing the kind of direct democratic practices alluded to here, or drawing on the expertise of community leaders, local governments, etc? Nobody. Who in Congress is calling for actually concrete material reparations, reconciliation, and public methods to heal the intergenerational traumas, inequities, and systemic racism and classism which continue to punish vulnerable communities? No one. Who in Congress is calling for an end to our intervention in Venezuela and supporting the Maduro government from the obvious covert and military-corporate machinations currently underway? Not a soul.
I understand that this resolution is a first sketch, a very early draft which may go through many changes. I am not interested in demeaning people who are serious about fighting climate change; or scoring points by being “more radical” than others; or by igniting controversy around a critical “hot take” of the GND.
What I am curious about is how those in Congress foresee the types of jobs being created. Are we going to have millions of people planting trees (the best way to slow down climate change) or millions toiling in wind and solar factories? The most effective way to slow global warming would be to support the Trillion Tree Campaign.
Another ridiculous oversight is the lack of acknowledgement in the resolution of quite possibly the 2nd most pressing issue regarding humankinds’ survival, the threat of nuclear war and militarism. Obviously only international cooperation can determine the nuclear states relinquishing their arsenals, as well as shut down all reactors worldwide. Further, the huge budget of the military and the interests of the defense companies in promoting endless wars are not called out.
The only way a GND can work is through international collaboration. Asking other countries with far fewer resources, infrastructure, and technology at their disposal to “follow our lead” as we undergo a purely domestic New Deal within our 50 states and territories is cruel, shortsighted, and disingenuous. It would be the 21st century analogy to socialism in one country, expecting other nations to simply deal with the wreckage of climate disasters after we’ve fucked over the entire world.
What I’m attempting to sketch out is that to even put a dent in global warming in the 21st century and beyond, the feeble approaches by bourgeois democrats must be denounced for what they are. A GND for the USA as the “leader” is not in the cards; the analogy I’d use is more like a fully international Green Manhattan Project.
This would mean councils of expert indigenous peoples, climate scientists, ecologists, and socio-psychological experts in conflict resolution and ecological and cultural mediation worldwide would begin directing and implementing structural transformations of society, by addressing the separation from nature, historical amnesia, and emotional numbness endemic to Western society.
Natural building methods would have to take prominence over Green-washed corporate-approved LEED standards, massive conservation, ecological and restoration projects would have to get underway, along with the relocation of millions globally who live in unsustainably arid or resource hungry areas, and programs for regenerative organic agriculture would need to begin being taught to our youth right now. Is anything like this happening or being talked about in the mainstream?
These supporters in Congress as well as most progressives are assuming we still have twelve years to act, which the latest IPCC report warned was the maximum amount of time left. Perhaps people should be reminded that 12 years is just an estimate. We might have two years. We may be already over the tipping point.
Really, this is all just bullshit for Democrats to get each other reelected by LARPing as progressives and social democrats, and anyone with half a brain can see that. There can be no mass green transportation system unless urban cores get significantly denser, because as of now, perhaps half the country is still based on a post-WWII design to accommodate the whimsies of suburban property developers who only cared for profit and segregated communities, city planners with no conception of the consequences of rising energy demand, and homeowners in the fifties who likewise did not understand the devastation that sprawl, large energy-hogging single family homes, inefficient energy transmission, and long commutes would contribute to global warming.
How many mountains would need to be mined and blasted, how many wild plants and animals killed and desecrated, and rivers and waterways polluted would it take to get every soccer mom and Joe six-pack a new electric vehicle?
It is possible that only a mass relocation to urban cores with public infrastructure and fair compensation for citizens to move would allow for a green transportation and energy network to work properly. If not explained properly, these positive ideas for change would only feed into conservative far-right paranoia.
There are two people in Congress out of 535 that identify as anti-capitalist. The evidence even for these two is lacking, and we don’t have time to wait electing the other 270 or so. The military, financial institutions, defense companies, fossil fuel multinationals, intelligence sectors, and mainstream media are in total lockstep on the march towards societal and economic collapse and continued ecological degradation. Can anyone see the Pentagon, Halliburton, Shell and BP, and any Democrat or Republican giving away the equivalent of trillions of dollars in renewable technology, resources, IT networks, medicine, etc., to sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, or Southeast Asia? I didn’t think so.
If even self-proclaimed socialists like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez don’t have the guts to speak out against imperial mechanized drone warfare and the CIA literally fomenting a coup in Venezuela, and the majority of citizens having no problem with this, it just goes to show the lack of empathy and education in this country. Both of them are childish and uneducated; and should be treated as such, even if we should show conditional support for this preliminary GND, if only because it could theoretically morph into something promising.
In short, this first draft GND is “old” for a couple reasons: first, the economic model and the signaling in the language come directly from the liberal-bourgeois-reformism of the FDR administration. Second, it is old in the sense of being behind the times environmentally; it doesn’t keep up with what science proves is necessary for humanity to thrive: the GND does not call for economic degrowth, a reduction in energy demand, a sharp reduction in obtaining protein from meat, and a thoroughly anti-capitalist method to regenerate civic life and the public commons.
The flip side is that to thrive in a truly green future, we will have to re-examine truly ancient “old” Green methods to balance the “new” methods of technological innovation: the ancient ways of working with nature that indigenous traditions have honed, which has provided humanity with abundance for tens of thousands of years.
Natural building, creating and promoting existing holistic, alternative medicine, localizing energy and agricultural production, and growing food forests must be at the top of any agenda for humankind in the 21st century. This might seem impossible to our Congress because these methods do not cater to “marketplace solutions”, do not rely on factories and financialization, do not use patents to create monopolies, i.e., because these priorities do not put more power in the hands of capitalists.
Here are a few final thoughts. The first is the whole premise of the GND is based on a very reductionist, analytical, and Anglo style of thinking. Basically, this resolution is insinuating that we can change everything about the economy and forestall climate change without taking apart the financial sectors, the war machine, etc.
The second thought follows form the first, which is that the Continental thinkers offer a more grounded, immanent approach which examines how capital itself has warped human nature.
Specifically, many important researchers demonstrated how the culture industry has manufactured ignorance, false needs, and ennui on a mass basis.
For instance, in a US context, to put it in very crude stereotypes, how are we going to convince one half of the country to stop eating red meat, give up their pickup trucks, put their guns in a neighborhood public depot, and stop electing outright racists and sexists. On the other hand, how can we convince the other half to give up their Starbucks on every corner, give up their plane travel to exotic locations, not buy that 2nd posh home to rent out on Airbnb which leads to gentrification, etc.
Basically, most middle class people in the US don’t want to fundamentally change as of yet, and this resolution won’t have the force to confront the utterly fake, conformist, and escapist lifestyles most US citizens continue to choose at least partially of their own volition.
Simple, clear language is important to energize citizens and can lead to catalyzing change. The concept of the Green New Deal could very well be that theme which unites us. One hundred and two years ago, it was those three special words “Peace, land, bread” which helped unite a nation and sparked a revolution.
Here’s one last thing to chew on. In the 21st century, the nation-state has proven that its time is over, as it provides a vehicle which centralizes corporate and military power that now threatens the existence of life on this planet. The Green New Deal calls for:
“obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous peoples for all decisions that affect indigenous peoples and their traditional territories, honoring all treaties and agreements with indigenous peoples, and protecting and enforcing the sovereignty and land rights of indigenous peoples…”
Although it is clear the writers meant this in a very general and vague kind of way, as obviously not a single agreement has been “honored” going back 500 years by invading settler-colonialists, enforcing the sovereignty and land rights of indigenous peoples would mean the abolition of the USA. That’s a Green New Deal I can work with.
WRITTEN BY William Hawes. Author of the ebook Planetary Vision: Essays on Freedom and Empire. Visit my website williamhawes.wordpress.com
Is 3-d printed construction really green?
More powerful battery systems need to be developed. But another way to reduce the carbon emissions is maybe have more pre-fab housing built then transported onsite. This would make the 3d printing process easy to set up. However it might add to the glut of transport trailers on our highways. But then again even Tesla is building electric trucks.
What is Mass Timber?
Paul, I learned a lot from my interview with you and Michael Yorke — especially about the merits of “mass timber,” which I had never heard about before. I was concerned that using wood for construction might make for firetraps, so it was very instructive to learn that when you use thick pieces of wood they just char on the outside and retain their structure inside quite well. That is certainly reassuring, and I think more other people need to hear that news too.
We must Cut Carbon out of Construction – NOW!
By Paul Dowsett, OAA, FRAIC, LEED AP
Principal Architect — Sustainable. Architecture for a Healthy Planet. August, 2019
Five months. That’s all we have to transform as an industry. Seventeen months if we’re being generous. And transform we must! There is no option – or planet – B.
Being an architect, I look at my own industry, to determine the state we’re in, and more importantly, to propose how we can, and must, change.
The act of city building would not be possible without the literal city builders, i.e. the entire construction industry – building owners and managers, architects and engineers, general contractors and tradespeople, and material manufacturers and suppliers.
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And when it comes to the climate crisis, all of us as “city builders” have an important role to play. And that role must change. We must cut carbon out of construction – NOW !
“Pollution” from the construction industry looks like this: Massive amounts of carbon dioxide are emitted into the atmosphere during the construction of a building (embodied carbon) and during the lifetime operation of a building (operational carbon).
The thing is, we as a group must do our part to mitigate the climate crisis. These massive carbon emissions must stop, we as an industry must change, and here’s why and how.
Why we must change
According to a 2017 report by the World Green Building Council (WorldGBC), the global construction industry, which is responsible for 30% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (roughly equivalent to those of China) must operate at “net zero carbon” by 2050 if global warming is to remain under two degrees Celsius — the limit enshrined in the Paris Agreement.
Not only that, but “Every building on the planet must be ‘net zero carbon’ by 2050 to keep global warming below 2°C” (emphasis mine).
When they say “every building on the planet”, this means every building … whether new and existing.
Further, it is likely that, in 2017, WorldGBC was only considering operational carbon, and not embodied carbon.
How can we transform both the operation of existing buildings, and the construction of new buildings, to emit no carbon?
How we will change — existing buildings and adaptive reuse
There is nothing that we can do to reduce the embodied carbon in existing buildings, as it has already been emitted during construction.
But, we can respect that that carbon has been emitted , and maintain the building’s existing structure by retaining it as-is or transforming it through adaptive reuse. The alternative is to demolish that structure and send its component parts to landfill, only to emit more carbon during the construction of a replacement building.
Further, we can retrofit an existing building so that it is optimally energy-efficient, thus reducing its operational carbon going forward.
To reduce operational carbon, in Ontario we could electrify everything — both new and existing buildings. We have one of the most carbon-clean electrical grids on the planet.
Embodied carbon is becoming significant
We’re catching on to the idea that embodied carbon is significant, especially as we develop more and more energy-efficient buildings.
Regarding the term “embodied carbon”, I appreciate Lloyd Alter’s blog post in Treehugger, where he outlines that he is not a fan of the term (because it hides the urgent need to deal with the carbon that is emitted as a result of the construction process). Instead, he suggests we all use “”upfront carbon emissions” (UCE) because that’s what they are.”
Anthony Pak states that, “The importance of embodied carbon becomes even more evident when you consider that, according to the IPCC, to limit global warming to 1.5°C, carbon emissions would need to peak next year in 2020 and then go to net zero globally by 2050. Given that embodied carbon will make up almost half of total new construction emissions between now and 2050, we cannot ignore embodied carbon if we want to have any chance of hitting our climate targets.” (emphasis mine)
2020 is 5 months from now — 5 months to peak our global carbon emissions !
(17 months if we’re being generous and giving ourselves to the end of next year.)
What we cannot ignore any longer is that the manufacturing processes for concrete, steel, and asphalt — the assumed inevitable foundations of our construction industry — are huge emitters of carbon.
Writing in The Guardian, Jonathan Watts calls concrete, “the most destructive material on earth”.
What to use instead ?
A forest — the “wood factory” if you will — is a carbon-sink, drawing down carbon from the atmosphere, and moving us in the right direction with our carbon emissions. According to Project Drawdown, which cites a 2014 study, “Building with wood could reduce annual global emissions of carbon dioxide by 14 to 31 percent.”
The construction industry can, and must, change
But getting the designers and builders in the construction industry to convince the concrete, steel, and asphalt industries to give up their predominant position will be on par with getting the petroleum industry to give up theirs. They are all big, and powerful, and not terribly willing to change.
But there is hope !
A promo piece by Skanska, the world’s largest construction firm, encourages us to: “Think of a world where fantastic buildings …are created …giving [people] great places to live and work in, and where the CO2 impact during construction is …well, there isn’t one. That would be a future we could really look forward to.”
Attention: city REbuilders !
Choosing to bring the embodied and operational carbon of buildings to zero is hard, and it is also necessary for our survival.
We must embark on a program of city REbuilding, and we must do it now !
It is time for all of us to do something. And to do it now.
Medium writer Marta Brzosko says it best: “We are all on this sinking ship together — and we are afraid. That’s only natural. But this is precisely why it’s the time to find courage. The courage for acting and speaking about the climate crisis, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. Because, as Greta Thunberg says, our house is on fire. And to ignore the fact that your own house is burning is just ridiculous.”
Remember the California wildfires…now we have the amazon wildfires…why are these fires happening all of a sudden. CNN is reporting on the situation and its looking pretty grim for global warming. We need trees because they convert carbon dioxide to oxygen, not to mention protect wildlife and provide the ecosystem they need to survive. Hopefully someone will develop a strategy for dealing with these catastrophic events so that action can be taken when something like this occurs. With all the incredibly technology we have we could at least help save some of our important worldly resources. How is fire fighting drone technology coming along? Can it be used under the circumstances? How can it be organized and deployed? I hope the world’s leaders are considering such an option.
Protect the Oak Savannahs
An interesting article by Julie Jocsak at the Saint Catharine’s Standard (1 March 2019) around the restoration of oak savannah ecosystems in the Niagara region of Ontario. Many oak savannas have been over-taken by introduced and invasive species, threatening endemic and native eco-systems’ flora and fauna.
https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/news-story/9201748-work-begins-to-restore-niagara-s-oak-savannah/
Many more cities have floods now, due to climate change. But Berlin is requiring all new developments implement on-site storm-water management. This has led to a building boom of green roofs. I wonder how long green roofs last vs. “traditional” roofing materials. Some areas of Scandinavia have been using green roofs for centuries – such as the Faroe Islands.
“Traditional” roofing material has its drawbacks as well — when Notre Dame burned, the lead roof vaporized, releasing tons of lead into Paris’ atmosphere – leading to health concerns for children in surrounding areas.
In Ontario, several articles recently estimated that 15-30% of landfill waste was from demolished buildings. Is it more environmentally friendly to demolish buildings rather than retrofit them? Do building codes plan for the eventual demolition and disposal of building components? Is there a better solution than simply dumping them in landfills?
How Climate Change Could Trigger the Next Global Financial Crisis
By Robinson Meyer | The Atlantic | 1 August 2019
“In other words, the success of the delaying tactics of the carbon lobby create a situation in which we’re then faced with the possibility of a sudden regulatory shock, something that really inflicts major losses.”
Many ideas discussed in this outstanding interview with the financial historian Adam Tooze.
“Tooze: I mean, that’s been the green-modernization agenda of climate politics, certainly in Europe, since the 1980s, right? This is not simply a zero-sum game; this is a structural transformation that has many very attractive properties. There’s loads of excellent jobs that could be created in this kind of transition.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/how-fed-could-fight-climate-change-adam-tooze/595084/
Everyone is focused on plastic recycling now. I saw a clear plastic bottle the other day that is 45% made from plant material. It looked like any other water bottle. A bit flexible.
The really interesting invention is that place in Arizona or some nearby SW state where they have built a set of buildings out in the desert made largely from old tires. They pile the tires up, put something in them (dirt or is it concrete?) and that is their wall. Terrific insulation. Very thick. I bet the acoustics are good too.
It must have some effect, Beverly, because carbon taxation works. I don’t hearing anyone discussing the price of gasoline, but nevertheless the evidence shows that they don’t drive as much when it is expensive.
Save the Permafrost from Fires
The permafrost is a huge carbon sink. These wildfires in the Arctic must be speeding up the melting. Does anyone know how much effect they are having?
Howard, we should ask a vegan. They are presumably setting the standards for the rest of us to follow. I think Bill Clinton is a vegan now, isn’t he? Do vegans eat eggs?
WhatsApp and Youtube elected Bonsonaro?
Seriously, something has to be done urgently about Bolsonaro’s horrible policies. Surely he must be open to a financial deal, isn’t he? Who is trying to organize a campaign to pay him to keep the rainforest intact?
I just read an article about how he was elected by a combination of YouTube and WhatApp — though they didn’t intend to do it. It seems that the poor of Brazil rely on WhatApp to get clips of videos that they cannot afford to watch with YouTube (I guess the connectivity price is too high or something). So there were right-wing disinformation campaigns on YouTube that got picked up and spread among working class Brazilians, who therefore voted for Bolsonaro on the basis of it.
How can Humanity Defend Ourselves from Demagogues?
See the New York Times on Amazon deforestation here.
Got milk? Not so much. Health Canada’s new food guide drops ‘milk and alternatives’ and favours plant-based protein
Sharon Kirkey
January 22, 2019
Canada’s new food guide, the first update in more than a decade, recommends fruits and vegetables make up half our plates at any meal. . . Drink water. Go light on the animal products. Fill half your plate with fruits and vegetables. Fruit juice is liquid sugar, not fruit. Avoid processed foods. Limit booze.. . .
The International Code Council is not universal. Many states have their own building codes, so presumably China has its own. Probably it is promoting its standards abroad too, as it gains influence around the world. That is fine, so long as the buildings are well-constructed. Remember how some schools collapsed in China a few years ago? That’s not the building code we’d favor!
Use price signals!
The demand system management idea depends on using prices signals to influence consumers, so we use electricity more during the hours when it is cheap. But not many people pay attention to the price of the electricity, do they? Is this an effective motivator?
Demand Management Can Help
The demand management angle is especially important, but not always recognized. Energy demand management systems aim to optimize the demand-supply and optimize energy generation and transmission systems. Energy demand systems are automated systems that send signals to the customers to shed load depending on systems conditions. It also informs the system supervisors about the coming changes in demand patterns.
I heard that the car manufacturers decided to go along with Trump instead of California, damn it! Let’s hope he’s out of office quickly and that (presumably) Biden reverses almost every environmental decision that Trump made.
China’s green architecture goes global
By Charlotte Middlehurst
The future of urban design in China is open source, international and sustainable, the Chinese winner of a 2016 Ashden Award tells Charlotte Middlehurst
Wei Zhang begins his presentation with a slide of striking images. On one half of the slide there’s a photo of a smoggy day in Beijing, where buildings are barely visible because of thick smog. On the other is the same skyline but with blue skies. They read: “damage” and “prosperity”, respectively.
Read more
For three decades industrialisation has been synonymous with economic progress in China, but the pollution produced by this model of growth has exacted a heavy toll on the environment and health, which is reversing peoples’ way of thinking.
Shanghai-based Landsea is a design and engineering consultancy with a simple mission; to show people that housing (still a big driver of economic growth, and carbon emissions, in China) can be energy efficient, comfortable and affordable. Its objective is underpinned by a fundamental belief in sharing knowledge across borders. ….
https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/9007-China-s-green-architecture-goes-global?gclid=CjwKCAjw7O_pBRA3EiwA_lmtft1ryD72SHragzBMfztVRCeBwWLTAi9EHVG7ZtDFd3QnTfG6_fR40RoCjdAQAvD_BwE
The California Effect
There is a term — the “California effect” — that describes the greater power of California than that of Trump. He is trying to relax the standards of efficiency for cars, but California is holding the line on their tough standards. And because they account for so many car owners, the car companies stick to the California standards instead of Trump’s preferred ones. But I read that Trump is trying to force them to go along with the federal law. Where does that fight stand at the moment? I haven’t seen any reference to it in the paper lately.
How Good are Hydrogen Trucks?
Article by Nicolas Pocard | May. 17, 2018
How many trucks do you see on the road on any given day? Likely, quite a few. Heavy duty transport is a crucial element in moving the products we all rely on.
And this transport volume is showing no signs of slowing down. As the global economies further entwine, we are increasingly dependent on the movement of goods via trucks. ….. .
‘This Is Not Normal’: Record-Smashing European Heat Wave Sparks Demands to Combat Climate Emergency
“The climate is changing. Use your voice, wallet, and votes to fight it.”
by Jessica Corbett, staff writer, Common Dreams
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/25/not-normal-record-smashing-european-heat-wave-sparks-demands-combat-climate
Are there still extensive wild fires throughout Europe? I heard they were particularly bad in Portugal among other regions.
N.Y. Commits $55 Million to Long Island Energy Storage
Program includes commercial and residential storage projects
https://www.ecmweb.com/renewables/ny-commits-55-million-long-island-energy-storage
This is a serious critique of the potential that forestry offers for reducing climate change. I cannot appraise it but I think it should be taken seriously I hope someone works through the logic.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2019/07/can-planting-trees-save-our-climate/
For First Time Ever, Scientists Identify How Many Trees to Plant and Where to Plant Them to Stop Climate Crisis
By
Good News Network
–
Jul 7, 2019
Around 0.9 billion hectares (2.2 billion acres) of land worldwide would be suitable for reforestation, which could ultimately capture two thirds of human-made carbon emissions.
The Crowther Lab of ETH Zurich has published a study in the journal Science that shows this would be the most effective method to combat climate change.
The Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich investigates nature-based solutions to climate change. In their latest study, the researchers showed for the first time where in the world new trees could grow and how much carbon they would store.
Study lead author and postdoc at the Crowther Lab Jean-François Bastin explains: “One aspect was of particular importance to us as we did the calculations: we excluded cities or agricultural areas from the total restoration potential as these areas are needed for human life.”
LOOK: Rooftop Panels of Tiny Plants Can Cleanse Polluted Air at 100 Times the Rate of a Single Tree
The researchers calculated that under the current climate conditions, Earth’s land could support 4.4 billion hectares of continuous tree cover. That is 1.6 billion more than the currently existing 2.8 billion hectares. Of these 1.6 billion hectares, 0.9 billion hectares fulfill the criterion of not being used by humans. This means that there is currently an area of the size of the US available for tree restoration. Once mature, these new forests could store 205 billion tonnes of carbon: about two thirds of the 300 billion tonnes of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution.
Photo by Crowther Lab / ETH Zurich
According to Prof. Thomas Crowther, co-author of the study and founder of the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich: “We all knew that restoring forests could play a part in tackling climate change, but we didn’t really know how big the impact would be. Our study shows clearly that forest restoration is the best climate change solution available today. But we must act quickly, as new forests will take decades to mature and achieve their full potential as a source of natural carbon storage.”
WATCH: Tree-Planting Drones Have Successfully Planted Thousands of Saplings – and They’re About to Plant More
The study also shows which parts of the world are most suited to forest restoration. The greatest potential can be found in just six countries: Russia (151 million hectares); the US (103 million hectares); Canada (78.4 million hectares); Australia (58 million hectares); Brazil (49.7 million hectares); and China (40.2 million hectares).
Many current climate models are wrong in expecting climate change to increase global tree cover, the study warns. It finds that there is likely to be an increase in the area of northern boreal forests in regions such as Siberia, but tree cover there averages only 30 to 40%. These gains would be outweighed by the losses suffered in dense tropical forests, which typically have 90 to 100% percent tree cover.
CHECK OUT: NASA Happily Reports the Earth is Greener, With More Trees Than 20 Years Ago–and It’s Thanks to China, India
A tool on the Crowther Lab website enables users to look at any point on the globe, and find out how many trees could grow there and how much carbon they would store. It also offers lists of forest restoration organizations. The Crowther Lab will also be present at this year’s Scientifica (website available in German only) to show the new tool to visitors.
The Crowther Lab uses nature as a solution to: 1) better allocate resources – identifying those regions which, if restored appropriately, could have the biggest climate impact; 2) set realistic goals – with measurable targets to maximize the impact of restoration projects; and 3) monitor progress – to evaluate whether targets are being achieved over time, and take corrective action if necessary.
Reprinted from ETH Zürich
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/how-many-trees-to-plant-to-stop-climate-crisis/?fbclid=IwAR0ZKo8Dv6gI3XoD9xrIj1dHccgdiqFOy4SDE0iYIXlmOX3OAGAbo_C-gwQ
ottAWA THROWS A LIFELINE TO 50 MILLION TREE PROGRAM CUT BY ONTARIO GOVERNMENT
The federal government is putting up $15 million over four years to rescue the 50 Million Tree Program which was cut by the Ontario government of Premier Doug Ford in its last budget, CBC News has learned.
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna made the announcement today in Ottawa, saying the new cash will extend the program for at least another four years.
She said in a statement to CBC News on Tuesday evening that preserving the program will mean cleaner air, a healthier environment and good local jobs.
“While Mr. Ford cuts programs that support tree planting … and tackling climate change, we will continue to invest in a clean future for our environment, our economy and our kids,” she said.
The 50 Million Tree Program had an annual budget of $4.7 million and had planted more than 27 million trees across the province since 2008. Its goal was to have 50 million planted by 2025.
But a day after Ontario’s budget was delivered, Forests Ontario, the non-profit group that oversees the program, was told funding for it was being eliminated.
This new funding will essentially support the planting and growth of 10 million trees, bringing the program’s total to 37 million. Support for the program beyond that target is not part of this announcement.
Ontario cancels program that aimed to plant 50 million trees
Doug Ford government one of the most ‘anti-environmental’ in generations, says Green Party leader
Rob Keen, CEO of Forests Ontario, said it takes three to four years for a tree to go from seed to planting.
Every year, the four key nurseries in Ontario participating in the program cultivate 2.5 million seeds between them, which they nurse over three years until they are ready to be planted in their permanent settings.
The funding cut left 7.5 million saplings at various stages of growth in limbo, with nursery owners unsure how they were going to fund their crops until they were ready to plant.
Sustaining the program
Nurseries have been asking if they should be planting seeds to be ready for 2023, Keen said.
“If you don’t have the funding in place … nurseries are not going to plant.”
The new funding “is fantastic because it provides that assurance that there’s going to be funding in there to use up the stock that is currently in the ground and plant some more stock,” he said.
Ed Patchell, CEO of the Ferguson Tree Nursery in Kemptville, Ont., also welcomes the funding. He told CBC News he has three million trees at his nursery at various stages of growth. He said he was unsure what to do with them but is pleased they will now be guaranteed a permanent home when they are ready to plant.
Ontario cuts conservation authority funding for flood programs
Internal poll finds voters have negative opinion of PCs environmental policies
“I think it’s great that the feds have stepped up. I would like to see the province step up, to see a value in the program and contribute as well, but we’ll see what happens,” he said.
While nurseries now have the confidence to plant a crop now for delivery in 2023, Keen said it remains unclear if there will be funding next year to plant again.
About 40 per cent forest cover is needed to ensure forest sustainability, Keen said, and the average right now in southern Ontario is 26 per cent, with some areas as low as five per cent.
“The 50 Million Tree Program has been great, but we need to plant one billion trees to really get the forest canopy up in southern Ontario,” he said.
Balancing the budget
Ontario’s Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry John Yakabuski told CBC in a statement that his government is focused on balancing the budget to “protect critical public services like health care and education.”
“In order to do this we have to maximize value for the taxpayer dollar,” he said. “We remind other levels of government that there is only one taxpayer, and that we have committed to balancing Ontario’s budget in a responsible manner.”
“Previous governments who did not share this commitment to fiscal restraint are responsible for saddling Ontario with a $347,000,000,000 debt.”
Yakabuski said that the 50 Million Tree Program only plants 2.5 million trees per year, while the forestry industry plants about 68 million trees annually.
CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices|About CBC News
From Derek Markham @derekmarkham
Perhaps one day in the distant future we’ll be able to go 3D-print an apple tree, or build an internet-connected modular maple tree from a kit, or have access to hyper-trees that grow at 10X the normal rate, but until that day arrives (and probably for long after), we’ll need to keep buying young trees, planting seeds, and taking cuttings the old-fashioned way, which is actually much simpler and cheaper than any tech solution to anything.
They say that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but since we don’t have an app for time travel yet, we’ll have to focus on planting during the second best time, which is right now. And you don’t have to have a massive lot or backyard in order to plant trees for food, shade, or beauty, as there are many tree varieties that remain small enough to not crowd or shade out everything else, and which can function as either the canopy layer or the sub-canopy in permaculture-style plantings even in a smaller space.
Here are 10 great tree varieties for small yards and gardens:
1. Serviceberry:
A number of species of Amalanchier, or serviceberry, are available, with varying heights ranging from shrub-sized to small tree, and with some producing a delicious blueberry-like fruit after the fragrant white flowers are pollinated. Also called saskatoon, juneberry, shadbush, or sugar-plum, serviceberry trees also produce a flash of fall color when their leaves turn, and can thrive in a wide variety of climates.
2. Crape Myrtle:
Sometimes referred to as the “lilac of the South,” crape (or crepe) myrtle (Lagerstroemia) trees are well-suited to full sun locations, are heat tolerant, and produce showy flowers even in poor soil. A variety of sizes of crape myrtle are available, from a compact shrub to a 30-foot tree, with flowers ranging from white to fuchsia, and with an “exfoliating” bark that offers winter contrast.
3. Dogwood:
Although the flowering dogwood (Conus florida) is the most commonly seen kind of dogwood, there are a number of other varieties of dogwoods, ranging from shrub-sized to tree-sized, but most will thrive in moist, shadier locations. With showy flowers in white, pink, or red, dogwoods can add a burst of spring color to the yard, and certain species, such as the Korean dogwood (Cornus kousa) produce an edible fruit, while other species’ fruit is more suited to the wildlife.
4. Japanese Maple:
Acer palmatum is a fairly common landscape tree, and with good reason, as its small stature and bold colors can be a great accent in a little space. Japanese maple trees come in hundreds of varieties, with a wide range of leaf types, growth habits, and colors, but most of them are best suited for partially shaded locations, and although the flowers are rather modest, the fall leaf color of these trees can more than make up for that. Although the fruit (samara) isn’t edible, according to The Spruce, the Japanese sometimes fry the maple leaves to make candies.
5. Witchhazel:
The source of the common astringent named after it, witchhazel (or witch hazel) grows as a small tree or a large shrub bearing fragrant yellow or orange-red fall or winter flowers (which is why it’s also sometimes called winterbloom). With several species commonly available, and many cultivars, witchhazels come in a number of sizes and shapes, and as the Chicago Botanic Gardens says, “the only major drawback to witch hazels lies at their roots—a preference for well-drained, loamy, acidic soil means that they grow less than happily in clay soil.”
6: Elderberry:
Elderberries (Sambucus) are most often seen as shrubs, although varieties that grow more like a small tree are available, and their flowers and berries are good for pollinators and other wildlife, while the fruit is also prized for making jam, wine, pies, and other delicacies. According to Garden.org, elderberries “grow best in a slightly acidic soil that is high in organic matter and stays consistently moist,” but that is well-drained, and are suited to full or part-sun locaions.
7: Apple:
Although a full-sized apple tree might overwhelm a small yard, dwarf apple trees can stay at or under 8 feet tall, while still producing a good-sized crop of full-sized fruit. There are literally thousands of varieties of apple trees, many of which are grafted onto dwarf rootstock, which keeps the trees smaller, while upper portion (the scion wood) determines the quality and type of fruit. From sweet early summer apples to late season keeper apples, there are apple varieties for just about any eating preference, and while some dwarf varieties can still grow larger than intended, judicious pruning can keep them in check. Many common fruit trees are available in dwarf sizes that would fit a small yard, such as peaches, apricots, pears, cherries, and more.
8: Fig:
There’s nothing quite like a ripe fig, right off the tree, and although figs seem like they’re only for Mediterranean zones, there are fig varieties that can be successfully grown in a number of different climates, and in small spaces. Fig trees can be cultivated in protected areas in some northern climates, and can even thrive in pots or containers, which can then be brought inside or sheltered during the winter, and in contrast with other fruit trees, can benefit from heavy pruning each year to keep them to size.
9. Vitex:
The chaste tree, or monk’s pepper (Vitex agnus-castus), is a multi-trunk small tree with clusters of fragrant purple flowers and lacy gray-green leaves. The fruit resembles a peppercorn and is used in alternative medicine, and the flowers are a favorite of butterflies, bees, and people alike. Vitex grows best in full or part-sun locations with well-drained soil, and can aggressively invade nearby soil in the right conditions. According to folklore, the tree was named so because it was believed that it was an anaphrodisiac, with medieval monks having chewed its leaves to help them maintain their vows of celibacy.
10: Redbud:
Redbud trees, which can actually have white, pink, red, or purple flowers, are a staple showy spring treat in the garden, and although some can grow 20 to 30 feet tall, can be a good addition to a smaller yard or garden, especially with some careful pruning. Redbud seeds are good forage for wildlife, and redbuds are said to be an important source of nectar and pollen for honeybees and other pollinators. This fast-growing tree prefers well-drained soil and full sun to part shade, and because it’s in the pea family, can get some of its nitrogen from the air so that only light fertilization is necessary.
The local climate needs to be taken into consideration, as well as any specific space and height constraints, before getting too far down the rabbit hole of looking at tree catalogs and nursery stock. With hundreds thousands of choices of species and varieties available, there’s a tree or shrub for just about any location, and the best guidance can come from local gardeners, orchardists, and arborists, who have hands-on experience, rather than just buying what looks good on an impulse.
There’s a new study proving that there’s enough room on the earth for another trillion trees at least, and if he hurry and plant the right kinds in the right places, we can slow global warming a lot. In fact, when the trees are mature about 40 to 70 years from now, they will be able to reverse most of the damage we’ve done, pulling back a lot of the carbon now in the atmosphere. But we have to hurry, and we have to do it right! It will take many billions of dollars, but it’s still the cheapest and best way.
What’s the future of meat? This vegetarian meal looks delicious but where’s the protein?
Decentralization makes us less vulnerable. And one great form of decentralization is to own the solar panels on your roof and don’t feed the electricity back into the grid but store it. Here’s a familiar sight — the alternative, older approach.
A triumphant recycler!
The next time you build an office building, make it sustainable! Here’s a nice example.

You can compost even in the desert!
Tom Catino shared a link.
“Compost Building in the Desert w/ Geoff Lawton,”
You need four ingredients, carbon, nitrogen, Water, and Oxygen. You layer them in a certain way and add water. The ratio should be 9 buckets of brown material (the carbon),, six buckets of green material (the nitrogen),, and (optional) 3 buckets of animal manure. Keep it at a temperature of between 55 and 65 degrees Celsius. Stick your hands in it and if it’s too hot for you to stay there more than a second, it’s too hot for any microbial life to survive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do_5xB-Wgs0
Get real about fossil fuel subsidies!
Sandra Leigh Lester commented on this post from ClimateChangeNews.com :
“Four countries have declared climate emergencies, yet give billions to fossil fuels.”
The UK, France, Canada and Ireland have all formally recognised a climate crisis. But analysis shows they give $27.5bn annually in support for coal, oil and gas. For Canada, that figure was $7.73 billion. The government of Justin Trudeau has been accused of sending out mixed signals after approving a pipeline expansion on the day after declaring a national climate emergency.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/06/24/four-countries-declared-climate-emergencies-give-billions-fossil-fuels/
Hooray for good dirt!
Adam Simmonds shared a link.
“PHC Film: Soil is a living organism,”
This is a marvelous video about soil as a carbon sink. There’s a symbiotic relationship of plant roots, rhizobacteria, and mycorrhizae. The widespread use of synthetic fertilizer has a harmful effect on the soil quality. Fewer nutritional minerals remain in the soil. And using fertilizer means that farmers need to plow deeper. The better way: let the roots reach through to the passageways left by other decomposing roots. They can reach deeper year after year. Plants that are given fertilizer will become diseased and need pesticides.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ugaL6wsXME
Where to put new trees?
Here’s new research showing that there’s enough room to plant another trillion trees, and that it is the best and cheapest way to help solve the climate crisis. I say “HELP solve,” because it will take too long for the trees to grow to expect them to do the job alone. But we have to start now.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/planting-a-trillion-trees-could-be-the-most-effective-solution-to-climate-change/
Ocean temperature and acidity
David Marinelli shared a link on the Facebook Group “Two Trillion Extra Trees to Save the World,”:
“Biodiversity; Size Matters.”
Marine life, and ocean coral reefs in particular, are threatened by acidification, illegal fishing, legal overfishing, agricultural runoff, the spread of algae, excessive silt flowing in the seas and oceans caused by deforestation and dynamite fishing. In fact most of marine life will be long gone before acidification would have wiped it out. Author Elizabeth Kolbert calls climate change the equally evil twin of acidification. Climate change is causing the oceans to warm up. Similarly to terrestrial environments, the seas and oceans do not have a uniform temperature.
https://www.davidmarinelli.net/blog/biodiversity-size-matters/
Vitamin content of rice?
But here’s another Josh Gabbatiss article about rice in The Independent.
“Carbon dioxide pollution is making rice less nutritious and could stunt growth in millions of children, finds study”
B vitamin levels decrease under conditions of high CO2. The biggest decline – of more than 30 per cent – was seen in vitamin B9 or folate, which is often taken as a supplement by pregnant women to reduce the risk of birth defects. Scientists also recorded an average reduction of around 10 per cent in protein and iron, and 5 per cent in zinc.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/rice-carbon-dioxide-emissions-less-nutritious-stunt-growth-children-health-a8365556.html
Watch out for that damned rice!
Josh Gabbatiss article in The Independent.
“Rice farming up to twice as bad for climate change as previously thought, study reveals,”
Levels of overlooked greenhouse gas are up to 45 times higher in fields that are only flooded intermittently. The short-term warming impact of these additional gases in the atmosphere could be equivalent to 1,200 coal power plants. Past estimates have suggested that 2.5 per cent of human-induced climate warming can be attributed to rice farming.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/rice-farming-climate-change-global-warming-india-nitrous-oxide-methane-a8531401.html
Metta Spencer adds: “I like barley better than rice. (It’s chewy.) But I have no idea what kind of impact barley cultivation has on the atmosphere or other aspects of the environment. Is it better? Could it be used on a large scale as an alternative to rice?”
The Islanders have to eat too!
This video, narrated by Neil De Grass Tyson, is “Climate Change in the Pacific: Food.”
It is about one of the three focus areas of the Pacific Adaptation to Climate Change (PACC) programme. Fiji, Palau, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands have been working to improve the resilience of their food production systems.https://www.thecoconet.tv/the-ocean/climate-change/climate-change-in-the-pacific-food/
Another win for solar power!
Electric Car Parts Company shared a post by EMMA FOEHRINGER MERCHANT
NV Energy one-upped its huge 2018 solar and storage procurement on Tuesday, announcing three new solar projects totaling 1,200 megawatts paired with 590 megawatts of battery storage.
Colin Smith, a senior solar analyst at Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, called the procurement “hulkingly big.”
(The picture shows miles and miles of solar panels.)
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/nv-energy-signs-a-whopping-1-2-gigawatts-of-solar-and-590-megawatts-of-stor#gs.lrhaz2
Where does your recycled stuff go?
Jonathan Thrift shared this from The Guardian.
“Americans’ plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows.”
Consumers’ efforts to be eco-friendly go to waste as many communities find themselves with nowhere to send their refuse
Where does your plastic go? Revealing America’s dirty secret
by Erin McCormick and Charlotte Simmondsin San Francisco, Jessica Glenza in New York, and Katharine Gammon in Los Angeles
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-recycling-landfills/
Shared by Carine De Pauw:
SAB Mag.
“Emissions Omissions: Carbon accounting gaps in the built environment.”
By Philip Gass, Senior Policy Advisor, International Institute for Sustainable Development.”
To date, evidence for optimizing the choice of building materials has largely been drawn from life-cycle assessment (LCA) studies that consider the GHG (and other) impacts of building products at each phase of their “cradle-to-grave” lifespan (i.e., production, use and end of life).
While LCA is the best-available approach for evaluating GHG performance of alternative building products and designs, policy-makers and building designers should be aware there are also limitations, challenges and uncertainties that need to be considered when looking to decarbonize our buildings.
https://sabmagazine.com/emission-omissions-carbon-accounting-gaps-in-the-built-environment/
Sam Carana shared to the group Geoengineering.
“Q and A: Why cement emissions matter for climate change.: Carbon Brief.”
If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world. And only limited progress has been made so far.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-why-cement-emissions-matter-for-climate-change
From Paul MacDonald
“Tesla and other EVs’ potential to reduce emissions is widely underestimated: study.”
There is a widespread misconception that EVs pollute more than their internal combustion engine-powered counterparts.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-evs-emissions-reduction-underestimated-study/
Of course, there’s this alternative.
From the World Economic Forum:
Video: “Pakistan is Planting Ten Billion Trees”
https://www.facebook.com/worldeconomicforum/videos/301100230524209/
Paul Stamets. Aug 7, 2013. (Video in Australia)
‘The Future is Fungi [how to save the planet]’
Probably one of the most interesting hour and a half science related lectures you will ever watch. Packed with all sorts of invaluable information. I have created a new youtube channel for all mushroom related things, please subscribe there: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3tA…
Category
Science & Technology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwLviP7KaAc&
From Ricky O’Reilly
This video shows a portable set of solar panels that you can bring with you in the car and set up within a few seconds.
https://www.facebook.com/WeNeedThisbyattn/videos/2042846742683598/UzpfSTExMjYwODg3MDI6Vks6MTA2MDQ2NDIwMDgyMzkwOA/
From Olivia Rosane on EcoWatch:
“Climate Crisis Gets 15 Minutes Total in First Two Nights of Dem Debates.”
A special debate on the topic is going to be required. So far more than 200,000 people have signed a petition demanding such a debate, as HuffPost reported, but DNC Chair Tom Perez has refused.
https://www.ecowatch.com/democratic-debates-climate-crisis-2639013262.html
Depends on one’s perspective. I look at it as 1 person and 4,700 trees.
All we need is 637 other like minded individuals, or 319 at 9,400 trees
or….
You have probably seen this wonderful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSTV-KcAd_0
One of the problems with tree-centric innovation, and with too much of agriculture and knowledge in general is the failures to (a) collaborate, (b) listen, and (c) learn and then (d) try.
In some areas an innovation goes viral almost the minute it proves itself (1970’s use of growth hormones to aid beer production). In other areas, e.g. vaccine, the knowledge is resisted for stupid (and sad) reasons.
In the agriculture section here is a new collaboration where I know some of the people on the Indian (ekutir) side. See: https://blooom.farm/
Several years ago I aided a bit in C. K. Mishra’s World Bank trip around Latin America explaining his ekitursb program helping tens of thousands of small farmers in India.
There was polite interest but nobody said “Oh boy, let’s try something like that here”.