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.

A U.S. Geological Survey ecologist says the park’s glaciers will be gone by 2020 – about ten years ahead of schedule.

A 2003 USGS study, using 1992 temperature predictions by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), had estimated that the park’s glaciers would disappear by 2030. But the temperature rise in the area has been twice as great as assumed in the 1992 model.

Nonpolar ice is disappearing all over the globe. Major glaciers have entirely disappeared from the Andes, and the Himalayas have lost a third of their snow.

The glaciers of Glacier National Park have shrunk by 67% in the past hundred years.

A lot of sensitive and rare plants are associated with the edges of glaciers. Reduced water is expected to cause drying and die-offs, especially for aquatic species.

We’re now experiencing the extreme effects of economic bad “weather” in the wake of the near collapse of the global financial system. Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch asks, what if we wake up after a “lost decade” only to meet an environmental crisis involving extreme weather? What he doesn’t ask is just as important: what if we wake up to find a world desperately short of energy, especially oil?

Engelhardt points out that nobody seems to be noticing the extreme and even record-breaking droughts that are presently affecting large and disparate parts of world:

• Southeastern Australia has been burning up, its already dry climate growing ever hotter. Its wheat crops have been hurt in recent years by continued drought.
• Central China is experiencing the worst drought in half a century. Temperatures have been unseasonably high and rainfall, in some areas, 80% below normal; more than half the country’s provinces have been affected by drought, leaving millions of Chinese and their livestock without adequate access to water. In the region which raises 95% of the country’s winter wheat, crop production has already been impaired and is in further danger without imminent rain.
• Iraq is another country in severe drought. The lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the “fertile crescent,” are the homeland of agriculture, not to speak of human civilization.
• Serious drought conditions extend across the Middle East, threatening to exacerbate local conflicts from Cyprus and Lebanon to Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel.
• In Latin America, Argentina is experiencing the most intense, prolonged and expensive drought in the past 50 years. Soybeans and corn crops are withering away, and cattle are dying.
• Much of the state of Texas is now gripped by drought, and parts of it by the worst drought in almost a century. Winter wheat crops have failed. Ponds have dried up. Cattle herds may be slaughtered come summer.
• The American southwest could fall into “a possibly permanent state of drought.” A December 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report warns: “In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier.”
• Northern California – which produces 50% of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables and a majority of [U.S.] salad, strawberries and premium wine grapes, is in the third year of an already monumental drought.  Water deliveries to farms have been cut by up to 85%. New Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has warned that “California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century.”
• East Africa and the Horn of Africa are experiencing rising temperatures, prolonged drought, and crop failures.

The U.N. concurs that global warming is already contributing to rising food prices and food shortages. A new Rapid Response Assessment released by the U.N. Environment Program reports grain production has leveled off and fisheries are declining. It warns global food production could fall 25% short of demand by 2050 due to the combined impacts of climate change, land degradation, cropland losses, water scarcity, and species infestation.  The report is seeing through rose-colored glasses, as it projects food production will need to increase by 50% by 2050. It gives no clue how this feat is to be accomplished, only by unspecified “new ways to increase food production.”  Good luck with that.

Scientists agree that climate change will accelerate throughout this century – and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. At best, we can slow down the rate of increase and eventually (hopefully) avoid passing an irreversible “tipping point.” Extreme weather of every sort – which has already arrived – will become ever more the planetary norm.

We’re going to wake up in 2010, or maybe 2012, after a few years of inexorable depletion and cutbacks of investment in additional capacity, to find that we don’t have enough oil to maintain life as we know it, dependent on auto and truck transportation. Maybe we’ll find ourselves short of electricity generating capacity, as well.

The world as we have known it has already changed. Any economic recovery will find us in an unfamiliar and increasingly unfriendly new world.

A new study by scientists from the US Geological Survey and USDA finds that tree mortality in western U.S. forests has doubled since 1955 due to stresses induced by warming temperatures.

The team’s long-term monitoring shows that tree mortality has been climbing, while the establishment of replacement trees has not. In their surveys, the scientists found that a wide range of tree species were dying including pines, firs and hemlocks and at a variety of altitudes.

The article, “Widespread Increase of Tree Mortality Rates in the Western United States” is unfortunately behind a paywall. Here’s the abstract:

Persistent changes in tree mortality rates can alter forest structure, composition, and ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration. Our analyses of longitudinal data from unmanaged old forests in the western United States showed that background (noncatastrophic) mortality rates have increased rapidly in recent decades, with doubling periods ranging from 17 to 29 years among regions.  Increases were also pervasive across elevations, tree sizes, dominant genera, and past fire histories. Forest density and basal area declined slightly, which suggests that increasing mortality was not caused by endogenous increases in competition. Because mortality increased in small trees, the overall increase in mortality rates cannot be attributed solely to aging of large trees. Regional warming and consequent increases in water deficits are likely contributors to the increases in tree mortality rates.

Co-author Mark Harmon from Oregon State University told the BBC that he feared the die-back was the first sign of a “feedback loop” developing:

“We may only be talking about an annual tree mortality rate changing from 1% a year to 2%, but over time a lot of small numbers add up.

Increased mortality due to global warming sets off a positive feedback loop. As warming causes an increased number of trees to die, there would be fewer living trees to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. At the same time, the increased proportion of dead trees would be releasing carbon as the wood decays, inducing more warming.

Another member of the team, Dr. Nate Stephenson, said increasing tree deaths could indicate a forest that was vulnerable to sudden, widespread die-back:

That may be our biggest concern – is the trend we’re seeing a prelude to bigger, more abrupt changes to our forests?

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress warns this is just the beginning of the bad news:

the planet is on an emissions path to warm 10 times as much in the coming century as we warmed during the period examined in this study.

Barack Obama has only four years to save the world.

This stark warning from James Hansen leads off an article in Sunday’s The Observer (UK). The article contains this quote from Hansen:

“We cannot afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead.”

Hansen says current carbon levels in the atmosphere are already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming, yet the levels are still rising. Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and rising sea levels and threatening further widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns.

Cap-and-trade schemes – the best of the efforts so far seen from politicians and scientists – have so far proved feeble and futile. Too little, too late. What are needed are a stiff carbon tax and, most crucially, a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, with a phase-out of existing plants to follow.

So how do the prospects look for action from the Obama administration? Not good, judging from these quotes compiled by Kate Shepard at Gristmill from testimony at the confirmation hearings of Obama’s nominees to head up crucial energy and environment agencies.

Steven Chu, nominee for secretary of energy:

I am optimistic we can figure out how to use those resources in a clean way. I’m very hopeful that this will occur and I think that we will be using that great natural resource.

Lisa Jackson, nominee for EPA administrator:

Coal is a vital resource in this country. It is right now the source of generation of about 50 percent of our power. And I think that it is also important for us to say in the same sentence that it is – the emissions from coal-fired power plants are – the largest contributor to global warming emissions. So we have to face square-shouldered the future and the issues of coal and then move American ingenuity towards addressing them.

Ken Salazar, nominee for secretary of the interior:

Coal is a controversial subject. The fact of the matter is it powers today much of America, and there are lots of jobs it creates . . .  The challenge is how we create clean coal . . .  I believe that we will move forward with the funding of some of those demonstration projects so we can find ways to burn coal that don’t contribute to climate change. I will certainly be an advocate of making that happen.

In Oregon, environmentalist were (embarrassingly) agog over Kulongoski’s “jobs and transportation” plan, which threw them a few crumbs while continuing our “war against space.” Now even those crumbs are being retracted. Concerned about economic damage, Kulongoski’s office is signaling the governor is ready to accept a less restrictive cap than the state’s greenhouse gas reduction goal would require. Brian Shipley – Kulongoski’s deputy chief of staff for energy, climate change and natural resources – is quoted in an article in the Saturday Oregonian as flatly stating that the economy comes first, the environment and climate be hanged:

The governor is not going to approve a proposal that’s going to damage the Oregon economy.

The myriad forces of the status quo are girding for battle under the Orwellian umbrella “Oregonians for Balanced Climate Policy.” Represented are realtors, paper mills, loggers, industry, cattlemen, dairy owners, farmers, metals industries, food processors and builders. Even labor, Kulongoski’s staunch ally, wants more protections for affected workers.