Cannibalizing Earth

Another report today on the state of man’s ecological deficit. What’s that? It’s the rate at which we’re depleting our planet’s renewable resources faster than they can be replenished. That doesn’t sound possible, does it? Well it is.

We have an ecological deficit. It’s everywhere. You can see it from space. It comes in the form of deforestation, the rapid loss of our planet’s forests. It comes in the form of desertification, the transformation of once arable (farmable) land into desert wasteland. It comes in our rapidly emptying seas where we’ve exhausted fish stocks. It even comes underground in the ancient freshwater aquifers we’ve been voraciously draining.

If you’ve got a cow you rely upon for milk, you’re not doing yourself any favours if you begin chewing the flesh off its bones. You’re going to kill the cow, aren’t you? Once it’s dead and you’ve finished off the meat, you’re not going to have meat or milk, are you?

A new report out today, the Living Planet study of just how well we’re doing with earth’s renewables. Full points if you guessed “not good.” The report is the joint effort of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) based in Geneva, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network based in Oakland, Calif. From CBC News:

Demands on natural resources overreach what the Earth can sustain by almost a third, the report says, adding that people are drawing — and often overdrawing — on the agricultural land, forests, seas and resources of other countries to sustain them, it adds.

“If our demands on the planet continue to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles,” said James Leape, international director general of the WWF.

Now here’s a little something to chew on. It was only a few years ago that we figured we had until 2050 to reach the point of consuming two planets-worth of resources. That’s just been moved up by about 15-years.

The report claims that three-quarters of mankind live in countries where consumption is outstripping environmental renewal. Let’s see, that’d be just shy of five billion people. And it’s not just the poor countries that make the list.

Even the United States is facing a looming freshwater crisis. Normally arid parts of the U.S. have been transformed into agricultural powerhouses thanks to acquifer irrigation – that is pumping groundwater to the surface. Think about places that used to be arid, prairie grassland like Kansas. The problem is they’ve been pumping ground water at rates up to ten times their acquifers’ recharge rates. That means pumping out ten barrels of water for every barrel of rainwater that makes its way back in. Do the math, it’s a suckers’ bet. And yet they’re still filling artificial lakes around Las Vegas casinos. Mind-boggling.

There’s the great Colorado River that supplies water to much of the southwest. So important is the Colorado that decades ago the neighbours signed a treaty defining which state got how much. Something like 20% was supposed to be left for the Mexicans. Guess what? The Colorado no longer flows into Mexico and the US states are at each others’ throats over what remains.

Madness? Of course it is. Sheer madness and it’s a mental infirmity that’s rapidly becoming the norm around the world.

 

Tired of Wet Weekend Weather?

Have you ever wondered why the weather so often turns lousy just in time for the weekend? It’s a great annoyance to the Monday to Friday crowd who see blue skies while they’re on the job and rain clouds when they’re not.

Here in the south coastal area of British Columbia, last summer seemed to be a steady pattern of rainy weekends. It was more than just noticeable.

Spanish researchers claim to have found evidence that, in some parts of Europe at least, the weather really does follow a weekly pattern which they claim may be man-made. The team studied Spanish data from 1961 to 2004. Their analysis suggests that weekday work activity generates far more air pollution that drops sharply on weekends. This, in turn, causes changes in air circulation that result in rainier weekends. Or at least that’s the theory.

Out here we know a thing or three about rain. We get to study it steadily from November to May, year in and year out. We know there are a lot of sources of rain. El Nino, La Nina, and the Pineapple Express come to mind. Still, an urban link to weekly precipitation patters would be pretty interesting.

 

China Dirties Up – Coal Liquefaction Underway

It’s possible to extract a form of ersatz oil out of coal. It’s an old technique but one that’s fallen out of favour due to the large amounts of greenhouse gases created in the production process.

China’s willingness to trash the global environment is a question of deeds, not words. The Chinese talk a good game but they’re launching a major CTL, or coal-to-liquid, plant in Inner Mongolia.

The first plant will only produce about 20,000 barrels of oil a day, a drop in the bucket compared to China’s 7.2 million barrel a day consumption. To reach this level of production, China will process 3.5 million tonnes of coal per year into 1 million tonnes of oil products such as diesel for cars.

But wait, there’s more.

China is targeting on transforming half of Mongolia’s coal production into oil by 2010. That would involve processing 135-million tonnes of coal per year.

And China may soon be joined by the United States which is believed to have the largest reserves of coal in the world. From ENN:

“DRKW Advanced Fuels plans to start construction on a plant in Wyoming next year in partnership with Arch Coal Inc and with technologies licensed by General Electric and Exxon Mobil. The defense department is experimenting with CTL in an effort to cut reliance on fuel from countries unfriendly to the United States.

But CTL is highly controversial. Experts say the whole lifecycle releases about twice as much carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas,

as fossil fuel. Liquefying coal also requires large amounts of energy and drains water supplies.
The fuel produced through this method has a shelf life of up to 15 years, unlike other motor fuels which is attractive to the military and to governments keen to ensure fuel security.

Though CTL technology was developed about 100 years ago, it has been little used, except in Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, which had difficulty accessing then-inexpensive oil.
Oil prices, which have more than quadrupled this decade to above $130 a barrel, have reignited interest in CTL.

The Oil and Gas Journal in April suggested it costs $67 to $82 a barrel to produce CTL fuel, based on the experiences of South Africa’s Sansol. Exact prices would depend on a range of factors including coal and water prices and of course it is very expensive to build CTL plants.
Shenhua will be the first to use direct CTL technology on a large scale. It is different from indirect CTL, proven in Nazi Germany and by South Africa’s Sasol, and converts coal directly into liquid fuel, skipping gasifying coal into syngas.

“CTL happened only twice in world history, and both times it’s been in nations facing some kind of state of emergency with respect to energy. It should sound an alarm bell,” said Gary Kendall, from the WWF conservation group.”

Think the supposedly green yet lobbyist plagued John McCain will shut this down? Think again.

 

A Government of Liars

I sympathize with the American people for, while they’ve made some stupid mistakes these past eight years, I can’t think of a time in the last six decades when the population of a Western nation has been so overwhelmed by such a malevolent pack of liars in office.

Word of caution here. I am NOT suggesting the Bush regime is on some sort of par with the Hitler administration, not at all, nothing of the sort. That said, I don’t think that state propaganda has been brought to bear on a populace so powerfully and effectively as by the Bushies since Joseph Goebbels and, even then, he openly called himself a propagandist.

It’s easy for us to judge and heap scorn on the American people but when have we ever been subjected to such a subversive onslaught of deceit, fear mongering and hate mongering from our own government? We haven’t. Not to say there aren’t those north of the 49th who wouldn’t try but we haven’t experienced the traumatic underpinning the Americans suffered on 9/11 to let them get away with it.

They lied their way into wars without end. They lied about their tax cuts and the prosperity it would bring to all. They lied about the danger of environmentalism. It’s been one lie atop the next until lie has become indistinguishable from truth.

Now we learn – surprise, surprise – that political appointees (commissars) in NASA’s public affairs office, “worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers’ findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general’s office said yesterday.”

From the Washington Post:

“James E. Hansen, who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has campaigned publicly for more stringent limits on greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, told The Post and the New York Times in September 2006 that he had been censored by NASA press officers, and several other agency climate scientists reported similar experiences. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are two of the government’s lead agencies on climate change issues.

From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA’s public affairs office “managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public.” It noted elsewhere that “news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution.”

Lest we yield to the temptation to get smug about this, remember this is pretty much exactly what Harpo has done by gagging Environment Canada scientists and requiring their communications with the outside world to be subjected to his political commissar’s censorship from the PMO.

“Kristin Scuderi, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in an e-mail that director John H. Marburger III “would not comment until he’s reviewed the report, and he has not yet done so yet. Therefore, OSTP has no comment at this time.”

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), one of the senators who pressed for the investigation, said in a statement that the report showed that citizens had been denied access to critical scientific information that should inform public policy.

“Global warming is the most serious environmental threat we face – but this report is more evidence that the Bush Administration’s appointees have put political ideology ahead of science,” Lautenberg said. “Our government’s response to global warming must be based on science, and the Bush Administration’s manipulation of that information violates the public trust.”

I suppose it must be some comfort to the White House to know that, even if John McCain loses in November, there’ll still be an administration nearby to keep alive the Bush legacy of secrecy and deceit. That is until we send them packing and restore democracy to Canada.

I remember the day when we used to mock and ridicule the Soviet Union for just this sort of thing.

 

Finally – a Good Deficit

The federal government is running in the red and it should bring cheers from all of us.

Transport Canada’s “clean car” rebate programme is running far over budget. The government earmarked $160-million for the two year programme. The department now expects to spend up to $145-million of that in the first year alone.

So, will the Harper Cons build on this success, one of the few they can boast about? Not likely.
Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon says the Reformatories have no intention of expanding the programme because it “served its purpose.”

Way to go, you clowns.

 

Water – Mine and Yours

It appears that Canada has scuppered a United Nations effort to have water, or at least access to it, recognized as a basic human right. It seems we acted out of fear; fear that not obstructing this effort could land Canada in a situation where other nations could claim entitlement to our freshwater resources in the name of upholding basic human rights.

This is a tough question that’s deeply rooted in the larger environmental crisis and, as so typical in these matters, there are no good answers.

What are basic human rights and who is responsible for ensuring access to them? I suppose it would be hard to argue that access to clean air is a basic, as in the sense of fundamental, human right. No one has a right to foul another person’s air. But wait a minute. What do you tell the people of Toronto or Hong Kong or so many other places where residents have to be warned to stay indoors lest they be exposed to the air?

You see, once you recognize something as a basic right, those who interfere with or impair that right must bear some moral, if not outright legal, responsibility to those adversely affected. I won’t get into cases like Rylands v. Fletcher but let’s say you and I live beside each other on a hill. My property slopes down to yours. You have a lovely back yard with a patio and swimming pool, the whole deal. I decide I want to really get my lawn looking great so I have a truckload of manure delivered to my backyard. A massive rainstorm hits, loosening the manure pile and sending it sliding across into your yard and your swimming pool. How would you feel about that?

Do you have a basic right not to have my manure slide into your swimming pool? Of course you do and I’d have to pay to have everything made right and, even then, you’d still be furious with me for a long time to come.

So why then do we feel entitled to release other forms of contamination into our most essential, common property – the air? We don’t keep that pollution on our side of the fence, we don’t even attempt it. Why not? Because we wouldn’t want to live or breathe in such a place. Just to keep going we’d have to spend a lot of money to clean up our mess and that, in turn, would eat into our profits, our prosperity. So therefore our very prosperity is directly linked into having most of that pollution released to be carried elsewhere.

Now, if we were going to recognize access to safe, clean water as a basic human right, how could we resist the argument that access to safe, clean air is an even more fundamental human right? You see, if we let that one slip past us, we could be held to account for the garbage we spew into mankind’s air.

And who would be howling the loudest? Why those poor folks who, while they contribute almost nothing to greenhouse gas emissions, just happen to live where its effects are most strongly felt. We get the prosperity bonus of releasing this contamination into the atmosphere and they get to pay the real price of that. Sounds fair, doesn’t it? Isn’t that sort of like telling your neighbour that as soon as that manure slid across the lot line it became his and therefore he can clean up his own damned yard? Of course it is.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that we can’t treat water and air and resources (renewable and non) on a problem by problem basis. All that will ensure is that we don’t succeed on anything because even meaningful success on one front can be rendered meaningless by failures on others. What good is it if I ensure you have an abundant supply of clean, freshwater yet, at the same time, you can’t breathe the air? What good is it if you have clean air and adequate drinking water but nothing to eat? Sustaining life demands that we deal with all of these issues comprehensively and we’re nowhere near acknowledging that yet even as the clock ticks down.

We need to be really clear-headed on these challenges. There are no Goody Two Shoes solutions. Overpopulation has to be addressed. It’s one thing for an agrarian China to have 1.3-billion people. It’s another thing altogether for an industrialized China to impose on the world the burden of that population. China, like India, is still just getting into second gear but it’s on the accelerator and wants to get into fourth or fifth just as soon as it can and that, friends, spells disaster if we haven’t dealt with these challenges comprehensively. We have to find a workable balance and that’s probably going to mean some measures to curb overpopulation.

I think what we’re most afraid of and yet won’t mention is that, if we’re going to call upon others to make concessions, we’re going to have to be willing to give ground ourselves. We have reached the point where our consumption exceeds our planet’s finite resources. We have hit the wall. Now if these wealthy newcomers decide they want the same sorts of things we Westerners enjoy, somebody is going to have to give up something and all eyes are going to be on those guys who have the most.

The thing is we don’t even have to wait for this to happen. It’s already begun. Look at the food riots in Africa and as close to home as Mexico. Look at our collapsing fisheries. 70% of our food fish species are endangered and we’re switching over to the put the remaining species in the same position. A lot of the world’s poorest people are dependent on fish for their survival. At the same time they’re facing the disappearance of their fisheries, global warming is bringing them freshwater disruptions and desertification.

Here’s something you need to understand, something you have to remember. These people look at their misery and misfortune and they see your face. If you check out any Third World papers there are plenty of reports about just who has brought this devastation to them. We’re not talking about horseshit in a swimming pool, we’re talking about people struggling and failing to find food and water for their kids. Can you see what’s coming?

 

McCain – Talkin’ the Talk and then Walking Away

John McCain wants voters to believe he’s a true champion of the environment. That’s what he says. What he does – that’s a different story.

When tough environmental initiatives come to a vote in the US Senate, you can count on John McCain to be – well, to be absent. From The Guardian:

“Twice in the last three months, the US Senate has come within one vote of overturning $1.7bn in tax benefits for oil companies and using the money to promote renewable energy. Both times, McCain has skipped the vote, effectively killing the proposal and alarming leading green groups.

“McCain also was a no-show during controversial votes on subsidising the conversion of oil to “clean” coal and relaxing rules for oil refineries.

“When the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) released its annual environmental rankings last month, McCain – whose campaign website declares him “a leader on the issue of global warming” – earned a zero for missing all of the group’s votes on key green issues. He was one of nine Republicans scoring the lowest possible rating.”

The Sierra Club and other environmental groups intend to publicize McCain’s environmental voting record in the runup to the November elections. From his embrace of Christian fundamentalism to his call for even more deregulation of the financial sector to his insistence on keeping the Iraq War on the front burner, John McCain is showing the world that there’s a lot more to him and a lot less to him than he’d like you to believe.

 

China – Far Dirtier Than We’d Imagined

Here’s a real setback to hopes of tackling global greenhouse gas emissions.

Reuters news service reports that studies undertaken by researchers from the University of California found that Chinese GHG emissions are set to grow at least 11% annually from 2004 to 2010, not the more benign 2.5 to 5% estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Environment ministers from the world’s 20-top emitters are scheduled to meet on Friday in Japan. These 20-nations produce 80% of the planet’s total GHG emissions.

The UC Berkley report indicates Chinese emissions will have grown by 600-million metric tons by 2010 which vastly eclipses the 116-million metric ton reductions targeted in the first phase of the Kyoto Accords.

“It had been expected that the efficiency of China’s power generation would continue to improve as per-capita income increased, slowing down the rate of CO2 emissions growth,” said Maximillian Auffhammer, UC Berkeley assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics.

“What we’re finding instead is that the emissions growth rate is surpassing our worst expectations, and that means the goal of stabilizing atmospheric CO2 is going to be much, much harder to achieve.”

This report isn’t an anti-Chinese smear job either. The calculations were based on pollution data from 30 Chinese provinces and China’s official waste gas emissions data.

So, the climb just got one helluva lot steeper and the lesson is that something effective has to be up and running very, very soon.

 

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

100-million tonnes of garbage. Flotsam – floating debris. Spread out over an area twice the size of the United States.

It’s all floating off the shores of California and Hawaii and other Pacific Rim nations. Much of it comes in the form of discarded plastic. From AlterNet:

The vast expanse of debris — in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump — is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex”, believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: “The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: “It moves around like a big animal without a leash.” When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. “The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic,” he added.

Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water’s surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. “You only see it from the bows of ships,” he said.

Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.”

Few realize it but, with the exception of a very small amount that’s been incinerated, every bit of plastic that’s ever been produced still exists somewhere. Recycling? Globally, we’re recycling somewhere between 3 to 5% of total production.

Drive through the back country of Mexico, for example. The sides of the roads are covered in discarded plastic bags. The fences are full of them. Unless you’ve seen it you can’t believe it.

 

Taxes Can Reform Attitudes

The New York Times reports on a highly successful Irish initiative to do away with the scourge of plastic bags:

“There is something missing from this otherwise typical bustling cityscape. There are taxis and buses. There are hip bars and pollution. Every other person is talking into a cellphone. But there are no plastic shopping bags, the ubiquitous symbol of urban life.

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.

Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.“

Now I know this is going to send you libertarian folks out there into cardiac arrest but it shows that, like public smoking bans, we can adapt quite easily and, afterward, wonder what all the fuss was about.