Quelle surprise: a new study finds that economic growth causes global warming.

The study, Climate change and the world economy: short-run determinants of atmospheric CO2, is published in the on-line journal Environmental Science & Policy. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall. The conclusion, excepted below, describes the study’s major finding:

The major conclusion of our study is that the annual growth of atmospheric CO2 levels is strongly dependent on the absolute growth of the world economy, so that the annual absolute increase of WGDP is a key variable to capture the annual increase in atmospheric CO2. * * * Our study provides substantive evidence that in the short run, world economic activity is a major determinant of rising CO₂ concentrations (we also show that estimated CO₂ emissions closely follow the oscillations of the world economy). For each trillion that WGDP deviates from trend, CO₂ atmospheric levels deviate from trend, in the same direction, about half a part per million. These findings are important because they reduce the uncertainty in the links of the causal chain implied in climate changing, and allow for quantitative estimates of the required levels of “human activity” that would reduce CO₂ concentrations if business-as-usual conditions are maintained.

Co-author Tapia Granados, researcher at the University of Michigan, says (with a scientist’s usual hedging) what nobody is willing to hear : economic contraction will be needed to reduce atmospheric levels of CO₂. If we want to save Earth’s climate, we’ll have to disavow economic growth and instead embrace la décroissance économique.

Environmentalists made a fatal miscalculation from the get-go in failing to challenge the ideology of growth. Rachel Carson kicked off the environmental movement 50 years ago in 1962, with the publishing of Silent Spring. Carson intimated that the project of progress and growth was fatally infected with hubris. Carson showed that the consequences might be unknowable and awful – awful not only in the sense of “filling with terror and dread” but also of “inspiring awe, filling with profound reverence” as Nature took her revenge. Silent Spring touched deep emotional chords, evoking an archaic world where transgressing inviolable boundaries evoked implacable retribution from forces beyond the control of humans.

But in their minds, environmentalists as well as politicians and economists had left the ancient world and old gods behind. Environmentalists joined in believing that Nature could be negotiated with and appeased if not conquered and subjugated. Scientist and environmentalist David Suzuki points to the movement’s fundamental miscalculation:

Environmentalism has failed. Over the past 50 years, environmentalists have succeeded in raising awareness, changing logging practices, stopping mega-dams and offshore drilling, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But we were so focused on battling opponents and seeking public support that we failed to realize these battles reflect fundamentally different ways of seeing our place in the world. And it is our deep underlying worldview that determines the way we treat our surroundings.

The big mistake was in seeing the environment as separate from and even subordinate to the economy.

[E]nvironmental protection came to be seen as an impediment to economic growth. * * *

Now the human economy has become a force that is altering the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the planet on a geological scale, destroying the very ground of our being.

In creating dedicated departments, we made the environment another special interest, like education, health, and agriculture. The environment subsumes every aspect of our activities, but we failed to make the point that our lives, health, and livelihoods absolutely depend on the biosphere—air, water, soil, sunlight, and biodiversity. Without them, we sicken and die. This perspective is reflected in spiritual practices that understand that everything is interconnected, as well as traditional societies that revere “Mother Earth” as the source of all that matters in life.

It was a mistake from the beginning in failing to advocate for and defend the land and the environment as a spiritual practice. It was a mistake to buy into the growth paradigm, thinking environmentalism would be easier to sell if it could be portrayed as accommodating and even enhancing economic growth. By failing to stand up for the fundamental reality that we are part of and dependent on the web of life that keeps the planet habitable, the battle was lost without ever being engaged.

Similarly in Oregon, land use advocates committed a fatal error at the very beginning. Upon taking office in 1967, Republican Governor Tom McCall had the state’s quarterly economic development publication renamed from “Growth” to “Quality” (and later, to “Progress). In 1971, in an interview by Terry Drinkwater before a national audience on the CBS Evening News, McCall pleaded for people not to move to Oregon:

Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But, for Heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.

In selling and defending new land use regulations,  McCall railed against “grasping wastrels of the land” and and “local officials who cater to developers and exploiters”. But even McCall could not bring himself to reject the economic growth paradigm, attacking only “unlimited and unregulated” growth and calling for “healthy, imaginative, nonpolluting industry”. When Senate Bill 100 emerged from the sausage factory of the legislature, the most visionary piece – “areas of critical state concern” – had been dropped from the bill; environmentalists and a vision as the land as a value in itself just weren’t that important. The bill passed only because powerful economic interests – the agriculture industry and the timber industry – were bought off with a huge property tax break, farm and forest special assessment. Deals were made with other economic interests as well, including homebuilders and industry.

In the early 2000s, Oregon’s planning program faced a moral challenge as being unfair to property owners, depriving them of their economic rights. The program’s supporters early reliance on economics as its justification left them disarmed in the face of a moral challenge. Their response to the proponents’ “fairness” argument was a feeble, “it’s too expensive”. Their response, when Measure 37 passed, was to save the program by destroying it. Land use “advocates” promulgated and spend millions to pass Measure 49, which enshrined “property rights” as the heart and soul of land use in Oregon. “Fairness” supplanted the admittedly limited goal of “preservation of a maximum amount of the limited supply of agricultural land . . . necessary to the conservation of the state’s economic resources” – a goal that itself embodied the fatal flaw that would eventually lead to the planning program’s demise. Any regulation that hits a property owner in the pocketbook is now and forever anathema.

In saving its land use planning program, Oregon land use proponents betrayed and sacrificed the very land the program was supposed to nurture and protect, too timid to even engage in its defense. As with environmentalism generally, the battle was surrendered without being fought.

This morning at dawn, the sky was filled horizon to horizon with flights of geese, constantly calling as they headed north. Flight after flight passed over the farm, the surrounding woods alive with the chatter of birds. The cacophony was almost enough to drown out the background aspiration of  motor vehicles, inescapable even out here in the countryside, far from any town or highway.

In my darker moments, I am filled with foreboding. Oil and other fossil fuels, humans could and will learn once again to live without. And even thrive, as humans did for tens of thousands of years – although our numbers might not be so great. Perhaps a blessing, as the world would be replenished with other species. But consider: what if, in the last spasms of the fossil fuel age, humans were to destroy the very ground of their being, erasing any chance of transitioning to a more gentle and hopeful future?

Humans have already set in motion forces that are profoundly changing Earth, most likely into an Earth we will no longer find familiar and amenable.

A new study in the journal Science finds only one period in the last 300 million years when the oceans acidified as fast as today: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. Says lead author Bärbel Hönisch:

What we’re doing today really stands out in the geologic record. We know that life during past ocean acidification events was not wiped out – new species evolved to replace those that died off. But if industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about – coral reefs, oysters, salmon.

In his comments on the study, Joseph Romm at Climate Progress notes humans are putting marine life at risk in a frighteningly unique way:

[T]he current rate of CO₂ release stands out as capable of driving a combination and magnitude of ocean geochemical changes potentially unparalleled in at least the last ~300 My of Earth history, raising the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change.

Old species, new species – Earth doesn’t care. But we might. Especially if one of those species is us.

Global temperatures are rising, with Arctic temperatures rising the most. Arctic ice is disappearing, with the oldest and thickest Arctic ice vanishing faster than younger, thinner ice. Sea ice loss is affecting the large-scale atmospheric circulation, which leads to weird weather patterns and extreme weather events in the Northern Hemisphere: longer-duration cold spells, snow events, heat waves, flooding events, and drought conditions.

Earth takes several decades to respond to increased CO2 because of the thermal inertia of the oceans. Consequently, the effects we’re seeing today result from what we thoughtlessly dumped into the air 25 to 50 years ago. And emissions have grown enormously since then. While global crude oil production may have finally plateaued, crude production increased about 25% since 1980. Global natural gas production doubled over that period, while global coal production almost doubled. Climate impacts from the huge amounts of CO2 emitted in the last three or four decades, although yet unfelt, are already locked in.

Emissions are now beyond the control of the U.S. and other western nations. Asia-Pacific coal output has doubled, and doubled again (a 400 percent increase) since 1980. China’s coal consumption is now four times that of the U.S., and China alone is now responsible for about half of the world’s coal consumption.

Global emissions have never been higher than now, and prospects for voluntarily doing anything to lower them are nil. In another thirty or forty years, humans will begin to reap the consequences. Unfortunately, other living creatures will suffer the consequences, too. Resource limits and economic contraction offer the only hope for keeping the consequences of climate change to merely “catastrophic” levels.

One of the reasons we choose to live in the Pacific Northwest is because the region is predicted to suffer relatively less from climate change. But even if those “rosy” scenarios prove correct, how much faith can we place in the continued ecological integrity and productivity of our refuge? Will geese continue to fly north to breed in the spring? Will salmon continue to spawn in our streams? Will the mighty Douglas-fir continue to grow thick in our mountains? Will the rains continue to fall, greening the grass and nurturing our crops? Will the summer warmth continue to ripen our grapes and our tomatoes? After the last couple of summers, who can be sure?

For our lives it probably doesn’t matter, as the more fearsome consequences of humanity’s perfidity won’t have time to become manifest before the end of our time on Earth. But we shudder for those who will follow.

Pray for collapse. Plan for collapse. Work for collapse. Collapse is humanity’s only hope.

January 11, 2012 was the 125th anniversary of the birth of author, scientist, ecologist, forester, and environmentalist Aldo Leopold. Leopold is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac.

Leopold professed an ethics founded on the biotic community – a community encompasses and includes humans:

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Leopold rejected the utilitarianism of conservationists like Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt, who pursued a conservationism based on expediency, conquest, and self-interest. Leopold was instead an advocate of wilderness, and of its conservation for its own sake. For Leopold, the relationship of humans to the land was an ethical one.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

Leopold saw that humans are part of an ecological community. He saw that humans can thrive only if the entirety of the larger community of which we a part thrives.

But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

Leopold preached “an intelligent humility toward man’s place in nature”, and warned that we should not stray too far from the land.

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

Leopold was a prophet for our times. We should have listened.

A new report just released by the International Program on the State of the Oceans finds the condition of the oceans is declining far more rapidly than even pessimists had expected. It’s bad enough that many marine species — including those that make coral reefs — could be extinct within a generation. Humans may have set Earth on track for a sixth mass extinction event.

The key findings of the International Earth system expert workshop on ocean stresses and impacts Summary Report should be enough to shake any cognizant being out of their lethargy:

• Human actions have resulted in warming and acidification of the oceans and are now causing increased hypoxia – symptoms that indicate disturbances of the carbon cycle associated with each of the previous five mass extinctions on Earth.
• The speeds of many negative changes to the ocean are near to or are tracking the worst-case scenarios from IPCC and other predictions. Consequences matching those predicted under the “worst case scenario” include decrease in Arctic Sea Ice, melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, sea level rise, and release of trapped methane from the seabed.
• The magnitude of the cumulative impacts on the ocean is greater than previously understood, as interactions between different impacts can be negatively synergistic.
• Timelines for action are shrinking. Delays will mean increased environmental damage with greater socioeconomic impacts.
• Resilience of the ocean to climate change impacts is severely compromised by the other stressors from human activities, including fisheries, pollution and habitat destruction.
• Ecosystem collapse is occurring as a result of both current and emerging stressors including chemical pollutants, agriculture run-­off, sediment loads and over-­extraction of many components of food webs.
• The extinction threat to marine species is rapidly increasing due to overexploitation, habitat loss, and, increasingly, climate change.

But don’t count on any response from our political or economic elites, other than wanton disregard. They have proved to not be cognizant beings.

A press release quotes Dr. Alex Rogers, Scientific Director of the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), which convened the workshop:

The findings are shocking. As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the ocean the implications became far worse than we had individually realized. This is a very serious situation demanding unequivocal action at every level. We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children’s, and generations beyond that.

Co-author Dan Laffoley issued a call for action:

The world’s leading experts on oceans are surprised by the rate and magnitude of changes we are seeing. The challenges for the future of the ocean are vast, but unlike previous generations we know what now needs to happen. The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is now, today and urgent.

The chances of any significant action being taken are precisely zero. The sad reality is the ocean and its ecosystems are doomed to succumb to a constantly bombardment of multiple attacks.

Dan Allen at Energy Bulletin scathingly observes that humans have proved to be less than rational:

[A]ny sane society . . . when faced with such an overwhelming abundance of scientific evidence, would be gnashing its collective teeth and running for the powerdown-exits en masse at this point. No sane society would ignore the screaming warnings of every single Earth system. No sane society would knowingly doom their children and grandchildren to misery and starvation. No sane society would stand by and do NOTHING — NOT ONE DAMN THING!! — while their very life-support systems eroded away before their eyes.

But we are surely not sane.

Political solutions have failed us, are failing us, and will certainly continue to fail us. The only option we have – to slam on the brakes and to stop burning coal, tout de suite – won’t be undertaken voluntarily; to think otherwise is delusional. Climate catastrophe is where we are. As Allen says, that’s the bed we’ve made:

So, sadly, at this late hour, we just flat-out NEED the dark angel of economic collapse to swoop down onto the stage, ‘Deus ex Machina’ style, and save the day.

God help us.

Pray for the collapse of the global industrial economy. And do what you can to begin fashioning a replacement.

Stuart Staniford at Early Warning mines the data contained in Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States (a U.S. government report we covered here) and concludes that all the work environmentalists have done to protect species and habitats is doomed to be in vain:

All the work that’s been done over the past century to preserve some wild ecosystems in national parks etc, is going to be mostly subverted.  The park may still be there, but what grows in it will, in most cases, be nothing like the thing that we were originally trying to save.

As the impacts of global warming manifest themselves over the coming century, warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns will result in just about every landscape in the country changing radically.

Staniford’s piece exposes the flaw in the approach environmentalists took in the 70s, the approach (taken by Oregon’s statewide planning Goal 5 , for example): identify a “significant” resource, draw a line around it, and protect it from conflicting uses. Protecting a living resource requires much more than drawing a line around it.  Rather, you have to maintain the health of the ecosystem within which it is embedded.

Within a global climate system wildly disrupted by human greenhouse gas emissions, how could we possibly expect that more local ecosystems could remain unaffected?

A new study published titled “Mountaintop Mining Consequences” published in the journal Science should put a final end to the myth of “clean coal”:

“Mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for the losses.”

Photo: Charles Pezeshki

The quote is from an article by Ken Ward Jr. in the Charleston (WV) Gazette.

A press release explains:

In their paper, the authors outline severe environmental degradation taking place at mining sites and downstream. The practice destroys extensive tracts of deciduous forests and buries small streams that play essential roles in the overall health of entire watersheds. Waterborne contaminants enter streams that remain below valley fills and can be transported great distances into larger bodies of water.

The paper calls on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the federal Army Corps of Engineers to stay all new mountaintop removal mining permits unless new mining and reclamation techniques “can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems.”

That will never happen. The only rational response: No more coal.

Eco-economist Herman Daly in a recent speech at a United States Society for Ecological Economics conference laid out ten specific policy proposals for moving to a steady-state economy at a level of physical wealth that the biosphere can sustain. Too bad Daly isn’t at the helm of U.S. economic policy rather than Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke – for whom the economy revolves around Wall Street rather than being embedded in the real, physical world.

Daly’s ten policy prescriptions are summarized below – but be sure to read the entirety of his speech at The Oil Drum to catch the flavor and nuance of his argument.

1. Cap-auction-trade systems for basic resources. Caps limit biophysical scale by imposing quotas on depletion or pollution, whichever is more limiting. Auctioning the quotas captures scarcity rents for equitable redistribution. Trade allows efficient allocation to highest uses.

2. Ecological tax reform—shift tax base from value added (labor and capital) and on to “that to which value is added”, namely the entropic throughput of resources extracted from nature (depletion), and returned to nature (pollution).

3. Limit the range of inequality in income distribution—a minimum income and a maximum income. Without aggregate growth poverty reduction requires redistribution. Set fair limits to the range of inequality.

4. Free up the length of the working day, week, and year—allow greater option for part-time or personal work so as to maximize enjoyment of life.

5. Re-regulate international commerce—move away from free trade, free capital mobility and globalization, adopt compensating tariffs to protect efficient national policies of cost internalization from standards-lowering competition. Trade and capital mobility must be balanced and fair, not deregulated or “free”.

6. Downgrade the IMF-WB-WTO to something like Keynes’ original plan for a multilateral payments clearing union, charging penalty rates on surplus as well as deficit balances—seek balance on current account, and thereby avoid large foreign debts and capital account transfers.

7. Move away from fractional reserve banking toward a system of 100% reserve requirements. This would put control of the money supply and seigniorage in hands of the government rather than private banks, which would no longer be able to create money out of nothing and lend it at interest.

8. Stop treating the scarce as if it were non-scarce, but also stop treating the non-scarce as if it were scarce. Enclose the remaining commons of rival natural capital (e.g. atmosphere, electromagnetic spectrum, public lands) in public trusts, and price it by a cap-auction–trade system, or by taxes, while freeing from private enclosure and prices the non-rival commonwealth of knowledge and information.

9. Stabilize population. As a start contraception should be made available for voluntary use everywhere.

10. Reform national accounts—separate GDP into a cost account and a benefits account.

This passage on the Peak Oil News site conveys the powerful message that the myth of growth has proven a failure:

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100.

This extraordinary ramping up of global economic activity has no historical precedent. It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology on which we depend for survival. And it has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems.

For the most part, we avoid the stark reality of these numbers. The default assumption is that – financial crises aside – growth will continue indefinitely. Not just for the poorest countries, where a better quality of life is undeniably needed, but even for the richest nations where the cornucopia of material wealth adds little to happiness and is beginning to threaten the foundations of our well-being.

The reasons for this collective blindness are easy enough to find. The modern economy is structurally reliant on economic growth for its stability. When growth falters – as it has done recently – politicians panic. Businesses struggle to survive. People lose their jobs and sometimes their homes. A spiral of recession looms. Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries.

But question it we must. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the two billion people who still live on less than $2 a day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems on which we depend for survival. It has failed, spectacularly, in its own terms, to provide economic stability and secure people’s livelihoods.

This passage is attributed to the report Prosperity Without Growth, recently released by the U.K. Sustainable Development Commission – the government’s “independent watchdog on sustainable development.” The mystery is, I can’t find anything like it anywhere – in the report itself, in the summary, in any press releases, in any interviews with the report’s author. WTF?

Oops – there it is, right in the Forward.

In effect, underdeveloped countries such as Bolivia are paying dearly for the massive energy consumption of the United States and the industrialized world. The so-called “carbon footprint” of the average Bolivian peasant is negligible, yet Bolivia’s poor are not only among the first to feel the harsh effects of climate change, but also are sorely lacking the resources to adapt to it.

That’s the indictment Carolyn Kormann lays out in her article at Environment 360, Retreat of Andean Glaciers Foretells Global Water Woes.

The great Andean ice caps are swiftly vanishing. Global warming will cause many of the Andes’ tropical glaciers to disappear within 20 years, not only threatening the water supplies of 77 million people in the region, but also reducing hydropower production, which accounts for roughly half of the electricity generated in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador.

Agriculture in the region relies on irrigation during the annual five-month dry season. Water is stored in the Andean glaciers, which melt throughout the year and so provide water throughout the year. No glaciers, no storage, no water for farmers or city dwellers.

On the opposite side of the world, two billion people rely on meltwater from the Himalayas. Himalayan glaciers are the main source of water for five major river systems – the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, and the Yellow – whose flow irrigates and supplies drinking water to China, India, and Pakistan. Himalayan glaciers have lost 21% of their glacial mass since 1962. The Himalayas’ smaller glaciers will be gone by 2035 and many large ones will disappear by century’s end.

In an earlier post I observed that the G20 summit ended without tackling the world’s underlying problems. Others whom I respect greatly are now starting to weigh in with similar observations.

Kjell Aleklett writes, there’s Not enough oil for the G20 package. If the stimulus package that the G20 group decided on is to achieve its stated objective and return us to the growth path we’ve come to expect, then we will need an increase of 8 to 9 million barrels per day during the next 5 years. Such an increase is not possible. He says what the G20 group should be discussing is the investments required to transform the energy system to renewables.

George Monbiot writes the G20 forgot the environment. Climate breakdown, peak oil and resource depletion all dwarf the financial crisis in financial and humanitarian terms.

Monbiot sums up the G20 communiqué:

We, the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, will use every cent we don’t possess to rescue corporate capitalism from its contradictions and set the world economy back onto the path of unsustainable growth. We have already spent trillions of dollars of your money on bailing out the banks, so that they can be returned to their proper functions of fleecing the poor and wrecking the Earth’s living systems. Now we’re going to spend another $1.1 trillion. As an exemplary punishment for their long record of promoting crises, we will give the IMF and the World Bank even more of your money. These actions constitute the greatest mobilisation of resources to support global financial flows in modern times.

Oh – and we nearly forgot. We must do something about the environment. We don’t have any definite plans as yet, but we’ll think of something in due course.

Monbiot accuses the G20 of engaging in “magical thinking”, believing that getting the economy back to where it was – infinite growth on a finite planet – can somehow be reconciled with the pledge “to address the threat of irreversible climate change”.

Friends of the Earth’s executive director Andy Atkins laments:

“Once again world leaders have short-changed people and the planet. The economic system and the global environment are on a devastating collision course – but despite pledging to build an inclusive, green and sustainable recovery little has been done to change direction.

Greenpeace executive director John Sauven said:

Tacking climate change on to the end of the communiqué as an after thought does not demonstrate anything like the seriousness we needed to see. Hundreds of billions were found for the IMF and World Bank, but for making the transition to a green economy there is no money on the table, just vague aspirations, talks about talks and agreements to agree.”

And here’s David Norman, World Wildlife Fund campaigns director:

Any argument that climate change should be moved down the political agenda until the current economic crisis is addressed is incredibly shortsighted. Finance and the climate are inextricably linked, and if we don’t address climate change now, we will certainly pay later.