John Michael Greer at his site The Archdruid Report (also available at Energy Bulletin) has a thoughtful piece titled “Pieces of the Puzzle,” pondering the uncertainties in our future. He begins by thinking about agriculture, then wanders into energy. He quite reasonably concludes that we’ll feel our way to the future through a process of trial and error.
“. . . nobody alive today has the least idea how an ecotechnic civilization – a society that can maintain relatively advanced technology on the basis of sustainable resources – might best be constructed. All the experience of the last three centuries has focused on the opposite end of the possible spectrum of technic societies, where you’ll find the civilizations that burn through nonrenewable resources at the fastest pace they can manage. We’ve followed that road just about as far as it can go, far enough that the dead end at its terminus should be visible to anyone who is willing to notice it. . .
“In energy, just as in agriculture and in many other fields, all we have are pieces of the puzzle. It will likely take ruthless sorting and a great deal of trial and error to make those pieces fit together in any sort of meaningful way.”
His advice that we not be “fixating on a single response” is both modest and wise. Achieving it will require that we rediscover within ourselves the ancient and universal spiritual practice of letting go of attachment.
A new report by the environmental group Pacific Environment finds that greenhouse gas emissions from LNG, when considering the entire life cycle of production, transportation, and combustion, can be as bad as coal.
The report is titled “Collision Course: How Imported Liquefied Natural Gas Will Undermine Clean Energy in California.” The executive summary contains important findings that are applicable to the ongoing LNG controversy in Oregon, including:
Building new fossil fuel infrastructure to supply LNG commits us to a multi-billion dollar investment. This investment requires a minimum 20-year commitment of fuel purchases by utilities, and likely longer. LNG is not a transition fuel to renewables; rather, it will heighten dependence on foreign fossil fuels for at least another generation.
LNG will compete directly with, and likely undermine, renewable energy and energy efficiency programs.
Meeting the state’s renewable and energy efficiency goals requires that all additional electric generation built between now and 2020, including replacing aging generators, come from renewable sources.
The scale of financial commitment implied by LNG is similar in size to what is required to meet the state’s clean energy goals, but LNG carries much higher environmental, financial, national security, and public safety risks.
Thomas Prugh writes at WorldWatch Institutethe fundamental ideas of mainstream economics – including reliance on GDP as the key index of general well-being – have outlived their time and usefulness. But these ideas still dominate assumptions and thinking about economic matters in academia, the media, governments, businesses, and popular consciousness.
In recent decades, economic thinkers have suggested ways to make economics truer, greener, and more sustainable. A “green” economics would consider:
Scale. How big is the global economy relative to the global ecosystem? This is crucial, because the economy resides totally inside the global ecosystem. Economic activity is basically converting bits and pieces of the ecosystem to human uses: trees and forests into lumber and houses, grasslands and other habitats into farms to feed the billions of humans, and so on. Our focus on economic growth has resulted in exceeding ecosystem limits. Symptoms include climate change, species extinctions, dwindling rainforests, water shortages, etc.
Stress development over growth – that is, make the economy better at satisfying human needs, not simply bigger. The global economy simply cannot keep growing forever. And, beyond a certain and fairly modest point, there’s no correlation between material wealth and happiness. There is a correlation between happiness and things like social relationships, family life, and a sense of community.
Make prices tell the ecological truth. The reform would be actually applying this rule to the ecosystem through measures such as carbon taxes. Other ecosystem services we’re not accounting or paying for include such things as the pollination performed by honeybees, air and water purification, soil generation, pest control, seed dispersal, and nutrient recycling. Not properly accounting for these services results in destruction of ecosystems and the undermining of these services.
The precautionary principle. This is just the age-old wisdom of “first, do no harm” and “look before you leap.” It’s just good risk management.
Commons management. People generally believe that there are only two workable regimes for managing resources: private property or government control. But commons management regimes are a third way, one that taps the strong human impulse toward cooperation and the common good. Commons management has proven itself over centuries of experience.
Value women. All over the world, women earn less than men for equivalent work, they lack access to land and credit, and they do more than their share of child- and elder care, volunteer work, and other unpaid labor. This gender bias actually suppresses economic activity.
Ugo Bardi at The Oil Drum: Europe has a post comparing the “Hubbert modeling” used by the peak oil community and “world modeling” used to produce the first “Limits to Growth” study in 1974 and its 2004 update.
Unlike the Hubbert model, the authors of the LTG studies always emphasized that their models were not “predictions” but rather scenarios and that their purpose was understanding what policies should be implemented for avoiding collapse.
Unfortunately the first LTG study was very effectively demonized and marginalized. Rather than follow any of the policy prescriptions, we continued blithely along our unsustainable path.
The LTG “world model” took into account many more elements than resource depletion models. One element of the LTG model was called “pollution” – something that we can now see as mainly related to global warming. Depending on the input parameters chosen, the collapse that the LTG world models generate may be caused mainly either by resource depletion or by a runaway climate change.
Bardi asks if the current creaking of the world’s economic system is a sign of the collapse foreseen by the LTG model. His answer? We may soon find out.
“If global warming hits us first, our worries about resource depletion are of little importance and the reverse is also true. At present, we can’t say which problem is the more immediate one. What we can say is that fossil fuels (and crude oil in particular) are the crucial resource of the world’s economy. In the hypothesis that resource depletion is a more pressing concern than global warming, the vision of impending “peak oil” and “peak fossils” is equivalent to that of the “base case” model of the LTG studies. In both cases, we see the collapse of the industrial society due to resource depletion.”
In response to an economic downturn caused by excesses of debt run up in pursuit of over-consumption, the Fed has slashed interest rates and Washington is offering tax rebates in hopes that people will spend more on stuff and services and thereby boost the economy back to full-throttle growth.
“It’s crazy, insanity,” says Robert Costanza, director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.
Costanza and other eco-economists challenge the accepted economic wisdom which holds that the measure of a nation’s economic health and well-being of its society is a steadily growing gross national product. Traditional economic accounting doesn’t factor in the cost of resource depletion and environmental damage involved in sustaining a perpetually burgeoning GNP.
The production of ever more “goods” is actually not a good thing. Rather, it could lead to the end of the world as we know it.
He maintains that the general quality of life hasn’t significantly improved over recent decades of GNP growth during which only the relatively few really rich got a whole lot richer and the rich-poor gap steadily widened.
Costanza argues that we need a quality of life stimulus package, not an economic growth stimulus package.
The temptation to inject a faltering economy with a shot of conventional growth stimulant is hard to resist. York University economist Peter Victor uses the analogy of a drug addict who needs a fix.
“The short-term problem for drug addicts is they need more of what they’re addicted to, even though it’s what’s killing them in the long run. But it’s hard to hold it back from them because it’s the obvious short-term cure.”
The system in its present configuration is broken and needs a different and more fundamental kind of fixing.
A report from the Sustainable Development Vision Team is on the agenda for tonight’s meeting of the Eugene Budget Committee is meeting tonight.
Following are my comments on the Vision Team report.
The Report identifies three “Primary [Sustainability] Factors” at p. 3 – but the discussion is so limited or whacked out it’s hard to come to grips with it.
Factor 1: Natural Resources are Managed Responsibly
Five sub-factors are identified 1) climate change mitigation; 2) decreased rate of resource consumption; 3) clean water and air; 4) effective growth management [!!!]; and 5) maximized biodiversity.
The only one of these factors even pretending to be addressed in the “indicators” [discussed below] is “climate change mitigation” – and as I said before, it doesn’t look like the city is really serious about this. “Effective growth management” as a “sustainability factor’? Who are they kidding? Where are indicators that would measure resource consumption, water and air quality, and biodiversity? Where are measures that would ensure that these are not degraded over time?
Factor 2: People have the Ability to Meet their Basic Needs
“Meeting basic needs” could be a sustainability factor only if it relates to meeting people’s needs in a manner that does not degrade other people’s ability to do the same in the future. There’s no mention or recognition of this crucial component of the definition of sustainability.
Factor 3: Livability is preserved and enhanced.
The “team” actually points to the fact that population is increasing as evidence that livability is being enhanced! Ohmygod! Read the rest of this entry »
William Kötke’s book The Final Empire (first published in 1993) is now available in new hardback and paperback editions. The book’s republication has prompted Carolyn Baker to write a review which she calls perhaps “the most important article I’ve ever written in my life.”
Kötke rails against what we have been taught all our lives: that materialistic values of civilization and the accumulation of wealth is progress. The material wealth of the civilization is derived from the death of the earth, the soils, the forests, the fish stocks, the “free resources” of flora and fauna. The ultimate end of this is for all human species to live in giant parasitical cities of cement and metal while surrounded by deserts of exhausted soils.
Kötke traces the environmental scars of civilization through the ages. Empire after empire, desertification of the top soil winds its way around the globe in an erosive helix from China to India to Mesopotamia to Italy to North America.
You may ask what relevance Kötke’s book and Baker’s review have to do with land use. What got my attention was that the attitudes of empire as described by Kötke are embedded in Oregon’s land use planning statutes and goals. Resources exist for no other purpose than to be exploited for economic gain.
“No one in the empire advocates long-term gain in soil fertility when the short-term gain of profit margins or production quotas are the whole point of the effort. This is the reason that nothing real will be done to avoid the final collapse of civilization. The structure of empire is to enrich the emperor/elite at the expense of the earth and society, not to manage affairs for the benefit of the whole life of the earth.”
Kötke’s book is a direct challenge to humankind – a demand for radical change a primer for the recovery of the planet. Read the rest of this entry »
Please join us next Tuesday at Goal One Coalition’s First Annual Event for an evening of socializing and of exploring the impact of land use practices on energy, climate, and Earth’s ecological systems.
John Miller of Salem will give the keynote address on his sustainable development work in China and in Oregon. His company, JD Miller International, is currently part of an international group including “Cradle to Cradle” visionary William McDonough working to develop sustainable designs for villages and New Towns in China. John is also president of Wildwood Inc., an urban design and development firm in Salem; and Mahonia Vineyards and Nursery, a grower of grapevines, wine grapes, and native plants.
The Event will be February 5 from 6:30 – 8:30 PM at Campbell Center, 155 High Street, Eugene. Campbell Center is located along the Willamette River at northeast edge of Skinner Butte.
In this 22-minute film architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account “all children, all species, for all time.” He explains his philosophy of “cradle to cradle” design, which bridge the needs of ecology and economics. He also shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world’s largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan), and the entire sustainable cities he’s designing in China.
What’s the most frequent advice dispensed to people trying to behave more responsibly? Buy green. It’s advice that encourages still more consumption as means to address the problem of over-consumption.
Annie Leonard’s short film The Story of Stuff takes on the shop/consume/dispose culture. It’s ruining the world – while capturing us in a cycle of dissatisfaction.
Her message is that we can step off the work/consume treadmill and change toward a fair, sustainable society. We’ll be happier, to boot.
This short film has gotten a lot of critical acclaim. Take twenty minutes and watch The Story of Stuff.