Over the last few days I’ve listened to an impassioned discussion about reaching out to or engaging in a dialogue with “faux environmentalists” or those who engage in “greenwashing.” I share dismay at measures to “mitigate” the damage from environmentally destructive projects. I share disdain for programs such as carbon credits and cap-and-trade schemes, which have proved nothing more than means to postpone or avoid effective action, than ways to continue business as usual while feeling or appearing to be virtuous. I share wholehearted contempt for international agreements such as Kyoto or Bali that are known to be inadequate even if they were to be taken seriously by all of the world’s governments and were to be successfully implemented.

Yet, on the other hand, I fear we’re much harder on those with whom we share at least some common ground than we are on our avowed opponents.

I think we need to step back and take a broad look at the situation that confronts us. It’s no longer good enough to work to save an endangered species, a stand of old-growth forest, a breeding ground for fish. The entirety of Earth’s ecosystem is now at risk. Uncounted myriads of species are threatened with destruction, including humans and human civilization as we know it.

Averting catastrophic climate change will require massive, rapid, and global action. Is the required response even conceivable?

James Hansen has said that it’s too late – we’ve already gone too far:

“The evidence indicates we’ve aimed too high – that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 ppm.”

The reticence of scientists and of the IPCC itself has become part of the problem, as today’s widely advocated 2ºC warming cap is demonstrably too high and would be a death sentence for billions of people and millions of species as positive feedbacks work through the climate system.

The report Climate Code Red finds that hitting a target of 350 ppm wouldn’t be nearly enough climate catastrophe. The report argues that a crash program to implement policies needed decarbonize our economy and achieve the necessary reductions in atmospheric CO2 levels, over a time period of a few years, is not a choice but a necessity for life.

Yet carbon emissions were greater last year than ever. World population was greater than ever. Consumption was greater than ever. There has been no reversal, not even a significant downtrend, in fossil fuel consumption.

What would it take, now and everywhere, to reduce atmospheric CO2 to safe levels? As Sally Erickson says at Speaking Truth to Power, it would take closing the highways, now and everywhere. It would take ending industrial agriculture, now and everywhere. It would mean shutting off everyone’s natural gas and oil fueled furnaces, now and everywhere. It would mean stopping about 90% of everything because everything we have and do has fossil fuel energy embedded in it. Forget about building nuclear power plants since they have fossil fuels embedded in their construction, large amounts of it. Forget massive production of solar photovoltaics: the mining of silica has huge amounts of fossil fuels embedded in the process. Forget hybrid cars – they take more energy to produce and dispose of than they save. The couch I’m sitting on, this computer, the computer you are staring at. Everything most of us take for granted as part of our daily lives is currently dependent on fossil fuels.

When Bill McKibben says “now and everywhere” he’s talking about the shutdown of industrial civilization. Who really thinks that’s going to happen, voluntarily or involuntarily, by political compulsion?

The stark reality is we are going to continue on this way until we can’t anymore. It is too late.

We’re not going to save the world, so we need to stop trying to fix a dying system. We should rather focus on new growth, on healing.

We won’t get anywhere or achieve anything by accusing those who don’t yet share our vision of lack of integrity. People have the capacity for a good heart, even if we may see them as ignorant or even corrupt. As Gandhi said, if we are to change the world we first need to purify our own thoughts, to aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. And as Buddha said, kindness is key. When words are both true and kind can they change our world.

It’s time to move beyond the traditional rivalries which are based on our attachment to the world as it was. We need to open our hearts to compassion, as it is only through compassion that a new community can emerge from the wreckage of the old.

Biodiverse has a post at Gristmill with this image of a solar home:

Here’s the pitch:

“Picture the north face with fancy wood and slate trim, a deck off of the loft doubling as a carport, double French doors, and lots and lots of windows (and window plugs). Essentially, this is a well insulated 10 x 40-foot park model trailer stocked with highly energy efficiency dual mode gas/electric appliances, and lots of diode lighting under a standardized solar energy system optimized for a given area of the country. Picture an entire neighborhood (or trailer park or commune) of these all facing south.”

What’s wrong with this picture? The building design and orientation is exactly wrong for passive solar design. Passive solar would have the large glassed surface facing south to maximize solar gain in the winter, with thermal mass to store the heat. An overhang sized for the latitude would shade the south surface from the high summer sun, minimizing solar gain. The wall and window surfaces on the east, west, and north faces would be minimized.

We retrofitted our house along these lines. It’s less than ideal, as the concrete floor that doubles as the heat sink isn’t insulated from the ground. But it’s still extremely efficient and comfortable in both summer and winter. We heat entirely with a wood stove. Even without the stove, the inside temperature never drops below 55°, even in the depths of winter.

I found this posting by Hans Noeldner in The Oil Drum:  Local worth repeating in its entirety.

What is your environmental “footprint” on Earth? You can find calculators online and worksheets in study guides, but there is a far simpler, more direct way to comprehend it. Just look at what is below you during your day.

Do you see your feet walking in the grasses and forbs of a meadow, or stepping through the undergrowth of a woodland, or pacing the rows of crops in a farm field?

Do you see a floor, beneath which there is the foundation of a building that precludes natural life and water infiltration? Is the building yours alone, or do you share it with others? Does it extend upwards to accommodate its occupants, or sprawl laterally to maximize the amount of Earth that is suffocated per square foot of interior space?

Do you see a sidewalk or a bike path? Are you alone or amidst a busy throng? Will fifty paces bring you to your next destination? Will 100 revolutions of the pedals fetch you home?

Do you see the floor of a bus or train? Are the other seats mostly full or mostly empty? How many miles of track or lane must the train or bus traverse to convey you to your daily and weekly destinations?

Do you see a runway, and then the whole landscape below wincing from the deafening blast of the engines that thrust you skyward? Can you envision thousands of miles of carbon dioxide contrails in your wake?

Do you see the seat of a car? Do you sit alone or share it with others? Is it a small vehicle, or a big one that projects its mechanized menace far beyond its bumpers? How many lane-miles of asphalt and concrete do you pass over as you go? How many lifeless parking stalls do you occupy when you stop?

If you are going far, going often, and most importantly, going so fast that everything in your way seems an obstacle, stop and ask yourself, “MUST I go where I am going? Can I choose smaller ‘shoes’? Can I occupy smaller spaces? Can I tread shorter, narrower paths?

Can I walk in the footprints of others, and can others walk in mine?

Analyst Jim Kingsdale identifies trends in oil that he believes will be sustained over the coming years:

1. The natural rate of decline in old fields will grow slowly every year.
2. Enhanced Oil Recovery [EOR] methods for improving the recovery of oil from old fields will continue to improve, thus tending to reduce the actual rate of declining production from the old fields to which EOR is applied. But the impact of EOR is already part of the existing 3.3% global decline rate. Improved EOR technologies will not reduce the global decline rate but will keep the rate from rising faster than it would otherwise.
3. Once a given field to which EOR has been applied begins to decline, its rate of decline will be much faster than that of a field to which EOR was not applied since EOR leaves less oil in the ground to be recovered during the extended final life of the field. Cantarell’s 15% decline rate is a paradigm example. At any point in time, this phenomenon could have a substantial impact on global oil supply. If Ghawar were to start to resemble Cantarell, for example, one could see a doubling of the oil price in short order.
4. Rapid growth in oil demand from countries that have high exports of oil or other goods will continue for decades to come. Therefore, global demand growth of roughly 1.5 – 2 mb/d from developing economies will continue for the foreseeable future.
5. Most future new production will come from either deep offshore or from alternative sources such as oil sands. Such resources require long time frames to develop and very high costs to recover. Therefore, new source oil is inherently limited in the rate at which it can be brought on stream and will require increasing marginal oil prices to be feasible.

His conclusion:

“The logical conclusion from these trends, I think, is that oil production beyond 2009 is likely to fall well short of the sum of growing demand and increasing declines in old fields. They lend credibility to the statistical analysis done by Chris Skrebowski that indicates we will see the benefits of numerous new, primarily land-based projects scheduled to come on stream in 2008 and 2009, after which supplies will become significantly tighter, falling off a cliff by 2014.”

And his “fearless prediction” for prices:

2008: $80 – $140
2009: $105 – $195
2010: $150 – $250
2011: $175 – $325
2012: $275 – $500

A new report called The Age of Consequences has just released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security. The report uses the social sciences – in particular history, geography, and political science – to develop scenarios visualizing the consequences of climate change in the coming century.

The Report imagines three potential scenarios, labeled expected, severe, and catastrophic. The scenarios are not forecasts exactly, since forecasting society is even harder than forecasting climate, which is itself pretty dicey on a regional spatial scale. Rather, the scenarios flesh out plausible possibilities – they are a story-telling, visualization-type exercise.

The “expected” scenario calls for 1.3 °C of warming globally. Changes in precipitation and sea level prompt migration at a scale sufficient to challenge the cohesion of nations. The potential responses to this scenario are broken down into specific regions with their particular historical and political settings.

In the “severe” scenario, the globe warms by 2.6 °C by 2040 and sea level rises about a half a meter. Scientists in 2040 conclude that the eventual collapse of Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets has become inevitable in the centuries that follow. Agricultural production declines in the arid subtropics and in increasingly flooded river deltas. To pick a random example from the report: the river systems in the American Southwest collapse, leading to impoverishment of Northern Mexico and increased migration pressure in the U.S.

The “catastrophic” scenario assumes positive feedbacks in the carbon cycle to warm the planet by 5.6 °C by the year 2100, and sea level has risen by 2 meters. But this may dramatically understate the worst-case scenario, for example in terms of sea level rise.

One important ingredient in the prognosis for the catastrophic scenario is the migration of millions of people, a scale unprecedented in human history, potentially enough to undermine the stability of civilized governance.

Kudos to RealClimate bringing this report to wide public attention.

A new study funded by the Chinese government has found that the melting of China’s glaciers to accelerate.

The study found that China‘s glaciers – a source for many of Asia‘s greatest rivers – to have melted by more than 18 percent over the past five years. Previous studies had found that China’s glaciers had shrunk by5.5 percent since the 1960s.

Yao Tangdong, one of China’s top glaciologists, warned last year of an “ecological catastrophe” in Tibet because of global warming. He said most glaciers in the region could melt away by 2100.

In response to the energy crises of the 1970s, Western Europe, Japan, and Korea kept their per capita consumption in check. Not so the United States:

click on graph to enlarge

Or Canada:

 click on graph to enlarge

Check out the awesome autumn slideshow by our own Tony Hayden.

Every once in a while we get a peek of what goes on behind closed doors – and this glimpse at what were meant to be a secret discussion at the OPEC meeting are particularly delicious – a private debate was actually televised until security folks realized what was going on, and pulled the plug.

The Guardian reports:

“On Friday night, during what the participants thought were private talks, Venezuela’s oil minister Venezuela Rafael Ramirez and his Iranian counterpart Gholamhossein Nozari, argued that pricing – and selling – oil using the crippled dollar was damaging the cartel.

“They said OPEC should formally express its concern about the weakness of the dollar when the cartel makes its official declaration at the close of the summit today. But the Saudis, the world’s largest oil producers and de facto head of OPEC, vetoed the proposal. Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, warned that even the mere mention to journalists of the fact that leaders were discussing the weak dollar would cause the US currency to plummet.

It seems that OPEC member states aren’t pleased at what the slow-motion collapse of the dollar means for the purchasing power of their oil revenues, which are largely denominated in U.S. dollars – and, the Guardian reports, “the facade of unity that the cartel so carefully cultivates to a world spooked by soaring oil prices was shattered.”

“Commodity and currency traders said this weekend that oil prices would surge again tomorrow – possibly breaking the $101 per barrel record set in the late 1970s – while the already battered dollar would fall further on the back of the unintentional broadcast.”

The Guardian article concludes:

“The weakness of the dollar is one reason why oil prices are so high, as cartel members seek to compensate for their lower earnings. This means a further drop in the dollar is likely to be accompanied by a rise in oil prices.”

Oil prices are reaching record highs, even in the absence of any extraordinary events upon which to pin the blame. But there are no headlines in the newspapers asking what’s going on, no hint in the MSM that peak oil could have anything to do with this non-happening.

Tom Whipple writes:

. . . as we get closer to the times when the real troubles stemming from the decline in oil availability begin, a broad outline of what could happen is starting to emerge. Throw in some logical deductions and a fragmentary insight or two starts to emerge. . .

Somewhere between now and the day when we only import 9 million barrels of crude and products, we are going to have to confront the issue of who gets how much.

This will rapidly become a political question that will quickly surpass every other political issue of the day by many orders of magnitude. If you think the American people are upset about Iraq, abortion, immigration, taxes and pistols, just wait until the politicians start talking about who gets how much gasoline and diesel fuel. It is going to be something to watch.

What will it mean for our daily lives as we’re forced to cut oil consumption by, say, 50%? We’re going to find out, sooner rather than later. The conversation is about to change.