According to the Guardian, a newly released Greenpeace study reveals it’s not just Exxon and the Koch brothers who fund the climate denial industry. In a recent article, they describe how a secretive charity known as Donors Trust enabled anonymous billionaires to donate nearly $120m to more than 100 groups campaigning to cast doubt on the science behind climate change. This money helped to build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups dedicated to redefining climate change as a highly polarizing “wedge issue” for hardcore conservatives – as opposed to a neutral scientific fact. During the same period the oil billionaire Koch brothers, who are usually credited with financing climate change denial, donated only a fraction of this amount.

It’s no mystery why the oil, gas and coal industry wants to stymie efforts by the US and other governments to cut carbon emissions by subsidizing renewable energy, public transportation and other initiatives to cut fossil fuel consumption.

The study sheds new light on the so-called “scientists” Donors Trust pays to produce “research” proving there is absolutely no link between carbon emissions, increasing CO2 concentrations, melting ice caps and the recent rash of catastrophic weather events.

Greenpeace writes in more detail about this research (with links to the original data) in their February 15^th blog

Photo credit Greenpeace

Crossposted at Daily Censored

2011, Directed and produced by Dave Gardner

http://www.growthbusters.org/

Film Review

Growthbusters is the inspiring story of Dave Gardner’s efforts to challenge conservative Colorado Springs’ failed growth promotion policies. The film mainly focuses on the insanity of local councils cutting essential public services to “jump start” growth. However it also takes a broader theoretical look at the overall failure of economic growth to solve the global economic crisis.

While Gardner is clearly an environmental crusader concerned about the long term effects of unlimited growth on carbon emissions, resource scarcity and species extinction, he inserts a heavy dose of economic reality into the discussion. All of us who pay any attention to local government have heard the same insipid assertions about the urgent need to cut taxes and regulations to attract new industry and jobs, as well as the need to spend to spend billions of dollars on new infrastructure to accommodate the hoards of people planning to move to our area. The three billion dollar water project the Colorado Springs City Council recently approved to transport water 62 miles uphill is a case in point. Time after time, the companies jump ship and population predictions fall short, leaving existing residents with mountains of debt, higher taxes and reduced police and other services.

Even though the pattern occurs over and over again, no one ever challenges these unproven assertions – that growth equates with prosperity and that communities that don’t grow shrivel up and die. In fact as Gardner learned during his campaign for Colorado Springs City Council, people who oppose growth for growth’s sake are regarded as somewhat looney.

The reality, as Gardner and the experts he features in his film point out, is that people and institutions who promote growth most heavily are those who benefit from it – at the expense of everyone else. This includes real estate developers who derive profits from building more homes, office blocks and shopping center; the mining and fossil fuel companies that fuel this economic activity, as well as heating all the new homes and powering the new cars; and the banks who finance all this. In other words the super rich.

As our other national and local needs are sacrificed for these gung ho growth policies, this 1% gets richer. The other  99% get poorer, as they lose access to education, health care and other vital social services young people need to reach their full potential. Along with all this wealth comes power, as the 1% uses their vast propaganda network to put out messages to get people to consume more, to incur more debt and work longer hours to pay it off – and most importantly to have more babies.

The Population Bomb

In addition to tackling the pro-growth agenda head on, Gardner also makes the important link between exploding population growth and environmental degradation. Paul Ehrlich, who appears briefly in the film, warned in his 1970 book The Population Bomb that mankind was rapidly outstripping the Earth’s natural resources. Dennis Meadows, who directed the 1973 Club of Rome project resulting in the book Limits to Growth, also appears. Based on advanced computer modeling, this controversial report warned forty years ago that population growth and resource scarcity would cause the global economy to falter at the beginning of the 21^st century. This means, as Meadows reminds us, the 2008 global economic crisis was right on schedule.

As Gardner, Ehrlich, Meadows and other experts point out, humankind is living beyond our means, “liquidating” resources we should be should be saving for our children and grandchildren. If we were still growing all our food locally, as we were at the beginning of the 20^th century, it would be obvious there is no longer enough land in cultivation to feed 7 billion people. However because of globalization, most of the industrialized world has no idea where their food comes from. While the one billion people who die of starvation or gradual malnutrition are virtually invisible.

Family Planning: the Best Way to Reduce Carbon Emissions

Gardner doesn’t advocate for mandatory population control like they have in China. However he argues strongly for major environmental groups like the Sierra Club to use their public profile to begin educating governments and communities to start making informed decisions around family size. The other side – the bankers, mining and fossil fuel industry and real estate developers – clearly see the connection between a booming population and economic growth. This is why they constantly pump out messages pressuring women to have more kids.

The truth is that we can’t possibly change enough light bulbs or plant enough trees to compensate for all the babies born to our children and our children’s children. People can save more carbon emissions through responsible family planning than by giving up jet travel. Population control is a critical ecological issue. The “official” environmental movement is letting us all down by refusing to take it up.

New Paths Forward

Gardner himself does his part. When he’s not running for city council or making movies, he’s out in the street distributing free Endangered Species Condoms on the street. The condoms come in choice of packaging featuring endangered panthers, polar bears and cute critters.

He also encourages people to join the Transition movement to help in strengthening their communities, re-localizing economic life and rebuilding skills that don’t depend on corporations and fossil fuels.

Towards the end the film, there is a very inspiring interview with Australian electronics giant Dick Smith, in which he announces the $1 million Wilberforce* Award he has established for “the young person with the best ability to communicate an alternative to our population and consumption growth-obsessed economy.”

*William Wilberforce was an 18^th century British politician and leader of the movement that abolished the slave trade.

More good news this month. All signs suggest that ordinary Americans are winning the battle against Big Coal (see * below). However you won’t read it in the New York Times. The mainstream media is never eager to report on the victories of grassroots movements.  Thus the Times neglected to report, in January 2012, that the EPA had revoked the waste disposal permit the Bush administration granted Arch Coal for one of the largest mountaintop removal projects in the country. It was definitely newsworthy – it’s totally unprecedented for the EPA to revoke an existing permit granted by the Army Corps of Engineers. They only reported the story when a US district judge reversed the ruling.

Mountaintop removal is a controversial method of coal mining in which the company dynamites the top of a mountain to get at the coal seam underneath. The process fills and contaminates hundreds of miles of streams with explosion debris, endangering the health of downstream communities when they lose access to clean drinking water. The EPA ruling resulted in part from a 2011 study revealing that mountaintop removal is linked to an increased risk of birth defects.

Remind Obama that He Works for Us

The Obama administration has sixty days to appeal the court decision. Knowing our President, he will need a really strong nudge to do so. Readers can go to Earth Justice user action to remind him he’s running for re-election and that he works for us, not Wall Street.

The De Facto Ban on New Coal-Fired Power Plants

That being said, the court ruling is a minor setback when viewed against a string of grassroots victories against Big Coal over the last decade. This despite of their well-funded campaign to convince us that climate change is a liberal-funded conspiracy. The grassroots movement fight climate change is particularly strong on the left coast. In the city of Portland, according to Climate Solutions, carbon emissions have declined by 26% since 1990 (you ain’t going to read that in the New York Times, either).

In the US, approximately 42% of electricity is still produced by coal-fired plants. However this ratio is decreasing rapidly, as existing plants become obsolete and a combination of state law and federal regulation amounts to a de facto ban on the construction of new coal-fired plants. The state legislatures of Washington, Oregon and California have outlawed the construction of new coal-fired plants. Plus both Washington and Oregon have passed legislation requiring their two remaining coal-fired plants (they have one each) to be decommissioned in 2025 and 2020 respectively. Although California still has ten remaining coal-fired plants, they only account for 0.7% of their generating capacity. Thus a decision by Los Angeles (population 12.9 million) to end their reliance of coal-generated electricity by 2020 will have a massive impact.

The Insane Scheme to Export 150 Million Tons to China

In the last five years, more than 160 new coal-fired plants across the US have been cancelled or placed on hold. The rapid phase-out of coal-generated electricity has caused American demand for coal to plummet. Accordingly, Big Coal has come up with a cockamamie scheme to export 150 million tons of coal per year (at present the US only burns 8 million tons per year) to China from strip mines in Wyoming and Montana. The coal companies propose to transport the coal by rail from the strip mines to ports in Washington and Oregon. The speed with which rural conservatives and urban liberals in both states have closed ranks against this crazy project  is nothing short of miraculous.

What we’re talking about here is eighty trains per day that are 1 ½ miles long, made up of 125 cars and pulled by four diesel locomotives. Can you imagine trying to get to your job or daycare center and getting stuck at a level crossing waiting for a 1 ½ mile train? Or worse still waiting for an ambulance or other emergency vehicle to get through? To say nothing of the health effects of constant exposure to mercury-laden coal dust or the particulate pollution from the four diesel locomotives.

Can you imagine the greenhouse effects of burning 100 million tons of coal per year? It makes no difference to planet Earth whether we burn the stuff in China or the US. According to Climate Solutions, the yearly CO2 emissions this would produce exceeds a lifetime of emissions produced by the controversial Keystone tar sands pipeline.

Northwest Residents Close Ranks

Thus far Northwest ports governed by elected port authorities (Seattle, Portland and Tacoma) have responded with a resounding “no.” As a fall-back position, Big Coal is seeking permits to build small private terminals in rural Washington – Cherry Point (near Bellingham), Longview and Grays Harbor, in rural Washington, and Coos Bay and St Helen’s in rural Oregon. Because these communities have no publicly elected port authority, they have been self-organizing to prevent environmental and use permits from being granted. More than half (246) doctors in Whatcom County have formed “Whatcom Docs” to fight the Cherry Point terminal. Church leaders, commercial fishermen, farmers, ranchers and elected officials have formed similar interest groups as part of the Power Past Coal Campaign. For more information and to sign a petition, go to http://www.powerpastcoal.org/

*Who is Big Coal? The two biggest US coal companies are Peabody and Arch Coal.

Leaders from 2008 World Economic Forum

This is the second of two posts on Global Risks 2012, a discussion document the global elite is considering this week at the World Economic Forum meets in Davos Switzerland.

How Global Risks 2012 Came to Be Written

The World Economic Forum’s Risk Response Network (RRN) was launched in 2004 to provide public and private sector leaders with “an independent, impartial platform to map, measure, monitor, manage and mitigate global risks.” This is the RRN’s seventh annual report. It’s based on surveys completed by 469 international experts in industry, government, academia and civil society about 50 potential global risks across five categories: Economic, Environmental, Geopolitical, Societal and Technological. Risks in each category are rated according to both the potential damage they could inflict and their likelihood of occurrence. In addition, a specific risk in each category is identified as “the center of gravity,” which feeds other risks, both within the specific category and across categories.

How 469 Experts Rated the 50 Risks

Economic:

• Most damaging: chronic fiscal imbalances (translation – debt) and severe income disparity.
• Most likely to occur: chronic fiscal imbalances and severe income disparity.

Environmental:

• Most damaging: rising greenhouse gas emissions and failure of climate change adaptation (acknowledging that climate change is already occurring).
• Most likely to occur: rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Geopolitical

• Most damaging: terrorism, followed by critical fragile states and pervasively entrenched corruption.
• Most likely to occur: critical fragile states and pervasively entrenched corruption.

Societal

• Most damaging: water supply crisis, followed by food shortage crisis.
• Most likely to occur: water supply crisis, followed by food shortage crisis.

Technological

• Most damaging: cyber attacks.
• Most likely to occur: cyber attacks

Is There a Split in the Ruling Elite?

It’s clear from the spelling (using “our” instead of “or” and “re” instead of “er” at the end of words) that the authors of Global Risks 2012 are either British or Canadian. I find it extremely hard to imagine a report emphasizing carbon emissions and income inequality coming out of the US. I also think find it significant that three of the four companies listed as report “cosponsors” are insurance companies (see * below). If Exxon had helped write this document, it would surely minimize the danger of increasing carbon emissions, if it mentioned them at all.

At times division develop in the ruling elite – between the banking/insurance and the energy/military sectors – over specific issues. Climate change seems to be one of them. Owing to deregulation, there is significant overlap between insurance companies, which derive most of their income from reinvesting premiums, and other financial institutions. AIG, for example, is supposedly an insurance company but had to be bailed out because they owned a substantial chunk of subprime mortgages.

It’s clearly in the interest of oil, natural gas and coal companies for consumers to continue to buy and burn up as much fossil fuel as possible. Insurance companies, on the other hand, serve their shareholders best by reducing carbon emissions. They already face growing claims losses due to a massive increase in weather-related catastrophes. In this context it makes sense for them to cosponsor a World Economic Forum document emphasizing the need for international agreement about reducing carbon emissions. It also helps explain why Wall Street investment banker (and New York mayor) Michael Bloomberg has given a $50 million donation to the Sierra Club’s Anti-Coal Campaign http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/nyregion/bloomberg-donates-50-million-to-sierra-club-coal-campaign.html

* Marsh and McLennan, Swiss Reinsurance Company, University of Pennsylvania Wharton Center for Risk Management, and Zurich Financial Services

Biochar pellets

Book Review-Part IV (of VI)

Fleeing Vesuvius, New Zealand Edition

(2011, Feasta and Living Economies)

Parts 3 and 4 of Fleeing Vesuvius, “New Ways of Using the Land” and “Dealing with Climate Change,” focus mainly on  local and national strategies for reducing fossil fuel use (both to conserve fossil energy and reduce carbon emissions).

Industrial Symbiosis

The first essay in Part 3, “Cutting transport costs and emissions through local integration,” talks about bringing similar and related industries into close proximity with one another. The term for this is “industrial symbiosis.” Emer O’Siochru gives the example of Kalundburg Denmark, where all waste products are someone else’s raw material. Siochru describes how surplus heat from the coal fired power plant is used to heat 3,500 local homes and a fish farm, whose waste sludge is sold as fertilizer. Meanwhile steam from the power plant is sold to a pharmaceutical company, and gypsum collected from the the sulfur dioxide chimney scrubbers is sold to a wall board manufacturer.

Food Security and Localized Food Production

The other essays in Part 3 deal with food production, in an era where energy, water and resource scarcity make food security increasingly precarious. It may be difficult for urban dwellers who are isolated from food production to comprehend the urgent need to transition from centralized industrialized agriculture to small scale local and regional farms. Factory farming is extremely energy intensive. The synthetic nitrogen fertilizers used are manufactured from natural gas, while most pesticides are petroleum-based hydrocarbons. This is in addition to the substantial energy cost of running farm machinery and food processing and packaging, to say nothing of transportation costs (especially in the case of imported foods). In New Zealand, as in many parts of the US and Europe, the cost of meat, dairy products, eggs and fresh fruits and vegetables has increased 20% since 2008, along with the cost of energy.

In addition to skyrocketing costs, there is also the growing risk that extreme weather events – floods, hurricanes, tornadoes – will shut down vital sections of the food supply network. Owing to major cutbacks in federal, state and local emergency response programs, communities may be left to fend for themselves, as New Orleans was after Katrina.

It will take several years for local communities to become the major source of food for their residents. The global sustainability movement has launched a number of initiatives, such as the 100 mile diet, to facilitate this process. Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver describes this quite eloquently in her 2007 book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Nutritional Resilience

The food security essays in Part 3 are quite technical and geared towards communities that have already taken the first steps to increase local food production. “The nutritional resilience approach to food security” addresses the problem of mineral deficient soils, which could cause major nutritional problems in communities that source all their fruits and vegetables from a single region. Healthy soil should contain a range of trace minerals (e.g. calcium, zinc, selenium and boron), which are easily lost through erosion and water run-off. Because industrially produced crops are often deficient in these minerals, they are more susceptible to pests, which results in massive overuse of toxic pesticides.

Bruce Darrell talks about the importance of addressing the mineral composition of soils, even in organic farming. He gives the example of the high prevalence of thyroid goiter in iodine deficient regions of England.

Methane, Nitrous Oxide and Biochar

The final essay in Part 3 discusses a variety of strategies for creating “carbon sinks,” which trap carbon in the soil to prevent its release to the atmosphere. “Refocusing the purpose of the land” also discusses methane and nitrous oxide emissions. These are far more damaging greenhouse gasses than carbon dioxide, especially in countries like Ireland (and New Zealand) with agriculturally based economies. Nitrous oxide comes from livestock urine and the overuse of urea as a fertilizer. Methane is a by-product produced (as a belch) when ruminants (cows, sheep, horses, etc) degrade grass and other high cellulose plants by means of special bacteria in their rumins.

The author, Corinna Birne, focuses heavily on the use of biochar (buried charcoal) to create carbon sinks. In addition to trapping carbon dioxide, it also locks up methane and nitrous oxide and important nutrients. Thus soil treated with biochar requires less fertilizer.

Cap and Share

The essays in Part 4 look at national and international strategies for reducing carbon emissions. Cap and Share is a simple method devised by Feasta in 2008 that is much fairer than either a carbon tax or emissions trading. With this approach, countries agree to a fixed cap on carbon emissions. They also require primary fossil-fuel suppliers (e.g. oil companies) to buy permits to introduce fossil fuels into the economy. Although fossil fuel suppliers pass these costs onto the consumer, revenue from the permits is used to help low income customers pay their energy bills. Over time this causes carbon-intensive goods and services to cost more, encouraging consumers to seek out renewable energy alternatives.

To be continued.

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Fleeing Vesuvius, New Zealand Edition

(2011, Feasta and Living Economies)

Book Review-Part II

Obviously getting by without fossil fuels (owing to impending shortages of oil, natural gas and coal) will be an incredibly rude shock for all of us. Our current telecommunication, transportation and retail infrastructure, as well as our current system of industrial agriculture, are based on the abundant availability of cheap fossil fuels. On the plus side, Fleeing Vesuvius is full of a number of specific strategies, currently being tried in Ireland and elsewhere, for building resilient communities to withstand this transition to a non-fossil energy  society. In his introduction, the late Richard Douthwaite lays out a kind of road map by identifying nine ways in which fossil energy use has perverted our economies and lives:

1. It has transformed manufacturing methods by displacing human labor.
2. It has transformed agricultural methods, replacing human labor, animal power and sunlight.
3. It has enabled the world population to grow to a level that may well be unsupportable without its use.
4. It has devalued human labour and led to widespread unemployment.
5. It has made the economy reliant on economic growth to avoid collapse.
6. It has enabled extremes of wealth and poverty to develop.
7. It has led to the development of industrial capitalism.
8. It has produced profits that had to be recycles. This led to the growth of the banking system and debt-based money.
9. By fueling powered transport, it has destroyed self-reliant local economies and the nature of local relationships.

I find this approach extremely valuable. It moves away from blaming capitalism, rich people and banksters for the problems of contemporary society. By treating them as a natural outgrowth of fossil fuel dependence, Douthwaite inspires optimism that these “perversions” will be easy to undo once we cease to rely on oil, gas and coal to provide for our basic needs.

Layout of Fleeing Vesuvius

Fleeing Vesuvius is divided into seven parts:

Part 1 – looks at energy and water availability in a post-carbon world, with a detailed discussion of our diminished capacity to produce food.

Part 2 – looks at models for new non-debt based monetary systems that will greatly facilitate our transition to a fossil energy-free economy, as well as alternative, non-corporate methods for financing land and business development.

Part 3 – looks at alternative land management strategies that will improve energy efficiency by promoting the “proximity” of complementary enterprises (for example, building factories near each other that use each other’s waste products), and specific techniques that increase and maintain soil carbon and mineral content.

Part 4 – looks at a novel “Cap and Share” regulatory scheme to rapidly reduce corporate carbon emissions. It would cap the emissions each company (and country) are allowed, while sharing the cost of running the scheme among the entire population.

Part 5 – looks at the immense lifestyle changes we all need to make to survive in a post-carbon world and how the Transition and similar movements are helping communities prepare themselves to make these changes.

Part 6 – looks at specific approaches for breaking through widespread apathy and denial about the imminence of economic and ecological collapse.

Part 7 – is a collection of specific suggestions of what people can do on the individual, community, national and international level.

The final section of the New Zealand edition contains a number a brief essays of the Transition and other sustainability initiatives currently being undertaken in this country.

Part I – “Energy Availability”

I have already discussed the connections made in Part I (i.e. capitalism ends when the oil runs out) in my last blog. However I want to share graphs that summarize the points made about EROI (Energy Return on Investment, aka EROEI Energy Returned on Energy Investment). Although there’s still a lot of oil, gas and coal in the ground, we have most likely passed the point where the “sweet” stuff, the reserves that are easy and cheap to extract, has been used up. Even more importantly, owing to low EROI, renewable energy sources will never replace fossil fuels. Thus we have no choice but to downsize our energy intensive lifestyles.

Illustration 2: An energy source can rarely be used directly. An energy extraction process is required to discover, extract and process the resource before its energy is available to society. This process consumes energy itself, a deduction from the energy otherwise available. The energy return on invested is the ratio of surplus energy to energy required to drive the process.

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Offshore wind and tidal barrages give good energy returns

llustration 1: The world does not need just energy – it needs energy that is delivered with very low levels of carbon dioxide emissions (that is, a low-carbon intensity) while still giving a lot more energy back than it took to produce it. This chart, by Evan Robinson, shows the most promising technologies and those to ignore. The half dots indicate where a technology is beyond the limits of the chart. Source: http://evanrobinson.typepad.com/ramblings/science_nature/

It took me awhile to figure this one out – there’s a lot going on here. You read EROI (or EROEI) from left to right. Energy sources with an EROI of zero (at the far left) use up as much energy in extraction/production as they release. Solar thermal and geothermal have a very low EROI, while tidal energy has an EROI even higher than 1970s oil reserves. The EROI of Middle East oil isn’t listed (Saudia Arabia, Iran, etc aren’t very transparent about their production costs). Different Peak Oil websites estimate that Middle East oil has an EROI of between 20 and 30. This gives it an EROI somewhere between 1970s and 2000s US oil (it costs a lot more to extract US oil now than 30 years ago because it’s harder to get at). This doesn’t include the cost of transporting oil to the US, cleaning up oil spills, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya (Iran?), etc – costs that keep going up and up. The vertical axis is the carbon emissions produced by each energy source.

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The area of each bubble represents the energy return on energy invested — EROI. The most valuable energy resources are those with large bubbles – a high EROI – at the top of the chart because this shows that they also have a high Energy Internal Rate of Return – EIRR. In other words, they pay back the energy invested in developing them rather quickly. Photovoltaic, nuclear and hydropower have low rates of energy return. Graph compiled and redrawn specially for Feasta by Jamie Bull, oco-carbon.com

To be continued, with a discussion of Parts II-VII. No more graphs, I promise.

***

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According to a recent study by Professor Paul Griffin (University of California-Davis), Associate Professor David Lont (University of Otago, New Zealand) and Yuan Sun (University of California-Berkeley), the amount of greenhouse gasses a company produces has a significant effect on its stock price. Griffin, Lont and Sun analyzed four years of data (2006-09) on firms listed in the Standard & Poor’s 500; and five years of data (2005-09) for the top 200 publicly traded firms in Canada. They  also discovered that markets respond almost immediately when a company reports an event that could affect global climate change, with stock values responding the same day as the disclosure.

The researchers developed mathematical models to analyze the exhaustive data. They found the link between stock values and greenhouse gas emissions to hold true in most industries, although the correlation was strongest for energy companies and utilities.

After controlling for normal valuation factors like assets and earnings, the investigators found the value of stocks correlated closely with greenhouse gas emissions. They drew the obvious conclusion that a corporation’s carbon footprint influences investors when they decide to buy or sell stock.

The full study can be downloaded at  http://ssrn.com/abstract=1735555

Much of the work that went into the Voluntary Simplicity and Y2K movements (see prior blogs) has been incorporated into Transition Towns and other sustainability-related movements. There are now literally millions of groups worldwide focused on some aspect of bioregional sustainability. The most visible evidence of their success are the blossoming of home veggie gardens, urban community gardens and orchards and farmers’ markets; the 1,040 cities and towns (nearly 1/3 of the US population) which have signed onto the Kyoto accord; and the 125 communities voting to place citizens’ above corporate rights (see http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/jan2011kanner).

One of the most important factors in this success is the ability of the sustainability movement to address apathy and alienation head-on, by reengaging people in neighborhood and community life. For many people, local civic engagement leads on to re-engagement in the political process. I would never argue that progressives should focus on local community building to the exclusion of critically needed government reforms. Corporate lobbies still have the ability to overturn local and state laws in the courts by claiming that they violate alleged constitutional rights. Thus organizing to end so-called constitutional protections for corporations (which clearly run contrary to the intent of the founding fathers) – either through federal legislation or constitutional amendment (www.movetoamed.org) must be an extremely high priority. At the same time, I see the neighborhood and community sustainability networks playing a pivotal role in building strong grassroots lobbies to tackle banking reform, restoring of civil liberties or ending the wars in the Middle East.

The Basics of Sustainability Organizing

Sustainability-related work can be broken down into concrete, achievable steps, which also lends to its appeal. In preparing for the End of the World as We Know it, Y2K activists predicted local communities would need to prepare for breakdowns in the following services:

• Global commerce (food imports being the most crucial)
• Water and energy utilities
• Waste removal systems
• Telecommunications, Internet and mass media
• Financial institutions
• Transportation systems
• Governance and government services
• Health Care
• Institutions and agencies responsible for education, justice, manufacturing and security

In most places, organizers have found it easiest to begin with food, water and energy security – in part because they are most critical to human survival. However the bioregional economic network established as a first step in addressing food, water and energy security can also be used to prepare for breakdowns in other systems. For 99.9% of human existence people have relied on a bioregional economic model in which they have sourced the vast majority of their food and other essentials for life within a 100 mile radius. The process of re-creating this network is very helpful in learning to shift our thinking away from relying on national and multinational corporations to meet our needs.

Although the sustainability movement receives little attention in the mainstream media, it has it has been quietly building for nearly two decades – often with the support of state and local government (it receives the most state support in California). In Europe it receives national and EU support. The following is just a small snapshot of local accomplishments around energy, food and water security.

FOOD AND WATER SECURITY

• Increased local expertise in permaculture and biointensive agriculture techniques, as industrial fertilizers and insecticides (manufactured from fossil fuels) become unavailable and/or prohibitively expensive.
• De-paving – digging up private and public driveways and parking lots and replacing them with backyard veggie gardens and community orchards and gardens. In addition to improving food security, this restores watersheds by reducing run-off, a major threat to water security in the industrial world.
• Lawn liberation – replacing lawns and ornamental trees and shrubs with fruit and nut trees and veggie gardens.
• Support of local farmers through farmers markets and Community Supported Agriculture Schemes (in which residents “subscribe” to weekly deliveries of fresh veggies and fruit).
• Neighborhood and municipal systems of rainwater collection and purification and gray water collection
• Adoption of active run-off management plans, in which lost groundwater is measured and minimized in development planning – and replaced, for example via the Blue Alternative (in which groundwater is replaced by digging small catchment pools in open spaces).

ENERGY SECURITY

• Reduced fossil fuel dependence in transportation:

o       Beginning work to create local consumer-farmer/consumer-retailer networks, including state and locally owned banks, credit unions and cooperatives. Given that local businesses struggle to compete (their costs and prices tend to be higher) with national and multinational corporations, this can be facilitated via the creation of local barter systems (example from Greece at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12223068) and/or local currencies, such as Ithaca hours, that can only be spent locally.

o       Community and municipal initiatives to increase public and active transport (cycling and walking) through urban planning that incorporates growth management and sprawl reduction, creation of urban villages where residents live closer to essential services, and restricted permiting of malls and big box retailers (Portland and Vancouver, British Columbia are excellent examples).

o       Community and neighborhood street reclaiming initiatives to make streets safer for people to use cars less and walk and cycle more.

o       Increased uptake of car sharing schemes, employing efficient electric or hybrid vehicles or those run on regionally produced biomass fuels.

• Reduced home/business fossil fuel dependence:

o       State, local and power company subsidies for home insulation schemes and solar water heaters.

o       Subsidies and reduced permit fees for Green Building (buildings purpose-built to be energy/water/waste self-sufficient).

o       State and local regulations and subsidies (as per German model) to increase distributed energy systems based on alternate energy sources (solar, wind, tidal, etc).

o       Active promotion of Open Source computer and information technology.

I think Heinberg and Hopkins are right (see previous blog):  sustainability activists should focus on resource scarcity, rather than climate change. It’s just too damned hard to persuade large numbers of people to undertake major lifestyle changes around something they can’t directly experience. Except for extreme weather events, it’s virtually impossible for lay people to observe the effects of global warming. The whole notion of CO2, which is invisible, causing a greenhouse effect that paradoxically produces more rain and colder winters, requires an enormous leap of faith (and confidence in the integrity of scientific experts). Especially given 50-100 year time line required before we see the benefit of our energy saving sacrifices.

In fact, it doesn’t surprise me a bit, given the profound distrust of science, technology and educated liberals embedded in working class culture, that a new conspiracy theory has arisen (with a lot of help from Big Coal according to Climate Wars author Gwynne Dyer) about Climategate being a hoax that George Soros, the New World Order and a bunch of liberal yuppies are using to impose new limits on individual freedoms.

Engaging the Working Class

Resource scarcity, on the other hand, is a daily reality – especially for low income workers and the unemployed – as the cost of gasoline, home heating, and food goes through the roof. Moreover fossil fuel depletion will continue to hit the working class harder than the rest of society, given the staggering income inequality found in all industrialized countries.

People already have experience preparing for resource scarcity, with the disaster kits they keep in their garage or basement. There’s already a whole (mainly blue collar) survivalist industry dedicated to the concept. Community and neighborhood focused survival has already had a dry run, through the Voluntary Simplicity Movement started by Vicki Robins’ book, Your Money or Your Life. The Voluntary Simplicity movement subsequently morphed into the Y2K movement, which arose around the concern that our computer-based infrastructure would collapse in the year 2000 because computers would read “00″ as “1900.”

Obviously millions of lines of code got rewritten in time, and civilization didn’t collapse in 2000. However the history of the Y2K movement is well-preserved, owing to the large number of Y2K websites that remain on the Internet. As a brief member of the Phinney Ridge Y2K group in Seattle, I distinctly recall the ah-ha moment when we all recognized the extent to which technology (thanks to cheap fossil fuels) had replaced mutual relationships with neighbors and the national environment.

The Breakdown in Civic Engagement

It was hard not to be dismayed at the wholesale disintegration of social ties that occurred around the time I entered adulthood – with people systematically disengaging from extended family and friends, as well as neighbors and community and civic groups (unions, granges, churches, and neighborhood and community centers and groups) that were central to American life prior to the 1970s. At the time we blamed the problem on our long work hours and the failure of wages to keep up with inflation.

It would be several years before I learned the role the National Association of Manufacturers and their brainchild – the massive American public relations industry – in this enormous social transformation. That transforming Americans’ identity from social involved, interdependent citizens to lonely, isolated, insecure, TV-addicted consumers had been a deliberate aim of US PR strategy – to increase sales of consumer goods (and profits).

It was only after coming to New Zealand in 2002 that I learned about the late Australian-born psychologist Alex Carey. Carey describes quite eloquently the deliberate crafting of a pro-corporate, consumption-driven American psyche – beginning as early as the 1930s with the Mohawk Valley Formula (see Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda vs. Freedom and Liberty -  http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/25/006.html).

To be continued, with a discussion of our first major organizing success of the 21^st century (the sustainability movement).

• This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.
  
• Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
• In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects: first, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover. (Introduction to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams)

It’s old news by now. The global climate change conference in Cancun in December was a failure, just like the Copenhagen climate change conference in December 2009. In contrast to Copenhagen, Cancun rated hardly any mention in the mainstream  media. As if failure was a foregone conclusion. Sadly, as each successive climate summit ends in disaster, hopes for an international climate treaty diminish substantially.

The governments that attended Cancun all know, by now, that to prevent catastrophic climate change (around 2050) developed countries must cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2030 – while developing countries limit emissions growth to comparable targets. Achieving these targets will require ending all auto and plane transport, closing all coal-fired power plants and insulating all homes and businesses.

US Responsibility in the Disaster at Cancun

The climate treaty the world hoped for didn’t happen, largely owing to the refusal of the Obama administration to buy into the major cuts he must know are needed. Partly because the US, like all developed and developing countries, is largely controlled by multinational corporations that make immense profits off car and plane travel – and war – one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions. But also because American voters are deeply attached to cars, plane travel, and energy guzzling home and electronic appliances that create demand for coal fired power plants.

My personal view is that our current attachment to cars and air travel is a bad habit bordering on addiction. Even climate change activists who ought to know better have difficulty cutting back their car and plane trips. I’m trying to start a 12-step program, similar to Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and Overeaters Anonymous, but it doesn’t seem to be catching on. Owing to the absence of affordable, reliable public transport alternatives, people who need cars for work or to access basic services can’t give them up. More importantly, one million individuals giving up their cars isn’t going to prevent catastrophic climate change – given that auto emissions only constitute 1/3 of greenhouse gasses. There has to be a simultaneous agreement to eliminate air travel and coal fired plants, as well as ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the US nuclear program and closing 1,000 foreign bases. If the Pentagon were a country, it would rate as the second largest producer of carbon emissions (see http://www.iacenter.org/o/world/climatesummit_pentagon121809/).

Such large scale changes require buy-in from the federal government. And despite all his campaign rhetoric, the best Obama can commit to is a 20% cut by 2020.

Are We Focused on the Wrong Crisis?

Richard Heinberg, Rob Hopkins (founder of the Transition Towns movement) and others believe we should be much more worried about resource scarcity (oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, water, top soil) than climate change – that this will cause an end to the world as we know it long before catastrophic climate change does. Because our modern system of industrial agriculture is only possible with plentiful, cheap oil (for farm machinery, transportation and shipping) and cheap natural gas (used to manufacture synthetic fertilizers), the end of cheap fossils fuels translates into a big increase into the cost off food production and a reduction in the amount of food produced. In fact, this is already starting to play out with the UN and relief agencies describing December 2010 as the worst month on record for global food insecurity (a record number of people unable to afford food). This was in part due to extreme weather events in Russia, Pakistan, Australia, China and elsewhere that drastically reduced grain production.

Eventually, Heinberg predicts, fossil fuels and synthetic fertilizers will become so expensive, world food production will decline to pre-industrial levels long before catastrophic climate change kicks in. Pre-industrial agricultural methods can only support a world population of 2 billion people. According to my math, this means we are looking at a potential die-off (famine, war, disease) of 5 billion (with current global population of 7 billion), unless we think of something fast.

To be continued, with a discussion of how sustainability activists are attempting to confront this dilemma. Remember, DON’T PANIC.