Alex Steffen sees a sustainable future

Joe Bageant on poverty and ecocide

Click to listen

I really like this guy!



Wow, never heard of him until today... and then discover he died this year!
RIP

Sustainable Civilization?

This is true

As Joanne Nova, Australian author, points out: “Everything on your dinner table - the meat, cheese, salad, bread, and soft drink - requires carbon dioxide to be there. For those of you who believe carbon dioxide is a pollutant, we have a special diet: water and salt.” So the next time you drink a beer or eat a meal, beware of that “dangerous carbon pollution.”

Dangerous Carbon Pollution: Propaganda from Climatism

The link is to an article written by denier Steve Goreham

This “carbon pollution” nonsense is driven by Climatism

He quotes a truth in an effort to instill doubt and/or fear, a typical technique.


It also highlights the difficulties we face to save life on Earth. We rely on fossil fuels to such a degree, weaning ourselves off of it will require a Herculean effort. It will require we give up stuff we think we need (but don't). It will require effort at the  community level all the way to global (via UN?). We need to find a successful model for sustainable civilization. Is there such a thing?

Storms

Storms of the unusual kind

Lest you forget, Pakistan is still flooding here and here

...the World Health Organization estimates that 150,000 people are killed by climate change-related issues every year, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said that global warming poses as much of a threat to the world as war

8 ways climate change can kill you


Hurricane Igor made to Newfoundland!


Heard on PBS News hour

Parts of western Wisconsin and southern Minnesota were paralyzed today
after severe flooding. Remnants of Tropical Storm Georgette have dumped nearly a foot of rain this week. That sent rivers and streams rising out of their banks, washing out roads, and forcing hundreds of people to evacuate. The governors of both states have declared emergencies.

Actually Georgette is off the southern tip of Baja.


Lisa, who has been meandering around the Atlantic for weeks, has strengthened into a hurricane, again.

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Financial Storm brewing


PBS talked to Greenspan about letting the Bush era tax cuts lapse.

JEFFREY BROWN: You don't?


ALAN GREENSPAN: I think it will have a negative impact. I'm not -- I don't deny that. This is a tradeoff between bad and worse...


JEFFREY BROWN: Bad and worse.


ALAN GREENSPAN: ... not between good and bad. In fact, I sometimes put it between terrible and catastrophic.


JEFFREY BROWN: Really, I mean, catastrophic?


ALAN GREENSPAN: Oh, indeed. I mean, we have never been in this position before. And you don't have any evidence that we're in control of the budget. There has been no cut that I can -- that I'm aware of in any significant program in recent years, either -- by any Congress.

You ever have a day when nothing went right? You had a dinner party planned and the sink clogged, the refigerator went on the friz and the car broke down? Well mankind is having one of those eras.

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Rex Nutting has it right

The economy can’t grow forever

Some people are in denial. They believe that the Earth’s resources are limitless and that a bean stalk can grow to the sky. Or perhaps they know deep in their heart that we are on the road to an environmental and economic catastrophe, one that they think they alone will survive through wits, gold, and guns.
...
We can downsize the right way, or the wrong way. The right way is to voluntarily rearrange our priorities so we don’t consume more than the Earth can produce, but to do that some of us will have to sacrifice and we’ll all have to share the only planet we’ll ever have. We’ll have to consume to live, not live to consume.


The wrong way is Malthus’s way: War, famine and plague.


Neither way will be easy. Nothing is more important.

Bravo

Tough Realities

Man has never lived a sustainable lifestyle. Is it in our DNA to grow and consume until we've exhausted the resources? We've protected ourselves from most of the natural forces that would keep our populations at a sustainable level. In the past, the civilization might collapse, but the people moved on to a new area to exploit. Now we're out of room. There's nowhere to go.

The good news is that globally we may reach zero population growth by 2080. The bad news is that we will have to stuff a couple billion people into an already crowded and resource exhausted world.

Most people have not considered what a decreasing population growth means to our economy and lifestyle. As birth rates drop the population ages. The ratio of workers per retiree drops. Here in the US that ratio is projected to be 2.1 by 2040 (at current retirement age).

An aging population means that health care costs rise. It is expected that health care costs will consume 20% of the GDP by 2019. As of 2002, those over 65 (13% of the population) consume 36% of every health care dollar. It is clear that ratio cannot hold when 30% of the population is over 65.

The recent economic meltdown has reduced the older worker's ability to finance his/her own retirement. Many had counted on their home equity, which disappeared.

The national debt is $13 trillion and the annual deficit for 2010 is projected to be $1.5 trillion.

There are some tough realities to face here. We cannot continue on the path we're on.

• Young people cannot count on Social Security and Medicare. Like my farmer grandfather, they need to save for their retirement, while still being stuck paying the SS tax.
• We will need to pay higher taxes
• We cannot pay tens of thousands of dollars in health care to provide a sick person an addition month of life. We will have to calculate bang for buck. I don't know whether we're up to that.
• We will retire later and later until we really don't retire at all. We may change what we do, but we will continue to produce as long as we're physically able.
• We will need to improve productivity due to a shrinking workforce.
• We will need to reduce our standard of living.

So we see that only one component of the current convergence of crises will cause significant changes to our way of life.

On the brighter side:
How to Shrink a City

McKibben on the solar panels rebuff

It was all a little odd, to say the least. They refused to accept the Carter panel as a historic relic, or even to pose for a picture with the students and the petition they’d brought with them. Asked to do something easy and symbolic to rekindle a little of the joy that had turned out so many of us as volunteers for Obama in 2008, they point blank said no. In a less than overwhelming gesture, they did, however, pass out Xeroxed copies of a 2009 memorandum from Vice President Biden about federal energy policy.
...
Actually, I’ll be surprised if the White House doesn’t put up solar panels within a year. But even if they do, that would just be the barest of beginnings. We’ve run out of spare decades to deal with climate change -- the summer’s events in the Arctic, in Russia, in Pakistan proved that with great clarity. I may be a wuss, but I’m also scientifically literate. We know what we need to do, and we will do it. Enthusiastically.

Notes on the Enthusiasm Gap


Well here's my idea:
We could go on strike. Stop buying anything but absolute necessities. Reexamine what's needed... do you need that iphone or blackberry? Do you need to eat out? Ever? Can you work from home? Carpool? All these things help us avoid lining the pockets of the big corporations that are currently in charge.  The economic recovery will stall, but perhaps it should be made to adapt to a new normal... one of sustainability, not growth.

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Now here is a segment of the economy that needs to grow

THE global climate change industry is now worth more than $528bn, powered by China's rise as one of the top nations for climate revenues.

China powers booming world climate change industry

Energy: Reducing CO2 Emissions Will Be Harder Than You Think
TIME (blog) - Bryan Walsh

That's a lot of wedges and it means a lot of energy too. Hoffert estimates that maintaining global economic growth while keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations below the magic 450 ppm number—which some environmentalists say is still too high—would require the production of approximately 30 terawatts of carbon-neutral power by 2050. (That's terawatt as in "one trillion watts," as in 826 times more energy than you'd need to send Marty McFly's DeLorean back to 1985.) But we have yet to produce a single terawatt of carbon-free energy, and given the gridlock in the U.S. over climate and energy policy, I can't say we're moving in the right direction either, and neither does Hoffert:

Broad investment will be crucial to enabling such basic research findings to cross the “valley of death” and develop into applied commercial technologies. Carbon taxes (1) and ramped-up government research budgets (2) could help spur investments, but developing carbon-neutral technologies also requires, at the very least, reversing perverse incentives, such as existing global subsidies to fossil fuels that are estimated to be 12 times higher than those to renewable energy (18). We have to stop marching the wrong way before we can turn around.

There are two types of economic growth 1) expansion: it gets bigger and 2)development: it gets different.

So I think we'll need numerous global transformations of culture and economy to save life on Earth... transform our get bigger economy into one that just gets different, and converting our energy production infrastructure (a large part of the economy obviously) to carbon neutral technologies.

We'll need millions of carbon capture devices installed too... only the technology is not there yet.

In addition the scientists are being optimistic about the consequences of having that much C02 in the air.
Dr James Hansen believes even our current atmospheric CO2 (388 ppm) is too high.

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The right’s climate denialism is part of something much larger

Scientific claims are now subject to ideological disputation. Rush Limbaugh is telling millions of people that they've taken the red pill and everything they once knew and could trust is a lie. They've woken up outside the Matrix and he is their corpulent, drug-addicted, thrice-divorced Morpheus. What could go wrong?

Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem by Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend (1993)

Economists will complain that growth in GNP is a mixture of quantitative and qualitative increase and therefore not strictly subject to physical laws. They have a point. Precisely because quantitative and qualitative change are very different it is best to keep them separate and call them by the different names already provided in the dictionary. To grow means "to increase naturally in size by the addition of material through assimilation or accretion." To develop means "to expand or realize the potentialities of; to bring gradually to a fuller, greater, or better state." When something grows it gets bigger. When something develops it gets different. The earth ecosystem develops (evolves), but does not grow. Its subsystem, the economy, must eventually stop growing, but can continue to develop. The term "sustainable development" therefore makes sense for the economy, but only if it is understood as "development without growth"—i.e., qualitative improvement of a physical economic base that is maintained in a steady state by a throughput of matter-energy that is within the regenerative and assimilative capacities of the ecosystem. Currently the term "sustainable development" is used as a synonym for the oxymoronic "sustainable growth." It must be saved from this perdition.

Politically it is very difficult to admit that growth, with its almost religious connotations of ultimate goodness, must be limited. But it is precisely the nonsustainability of growth that gives urgency to the concept of sustainable development. The earth will not tolerate the doubling of even one grain of wheat 64 times, yet in the past two centuries we have developed a culture dependent on exponential growth for its economic stability (Hubbert, 1976). Sustainable development is a cultural adaptation made by society as it becomes aware of the emerging necessity of nongrowth. Even "green growth" is not sustainable. There is a limit to the population of trees the earth can support, just as there is a limit to the populations of humans and of automobiles. To delude ourselves into believing that growth is still possible and desirable if only we label it "sustainable" or color it "green" will just delay the inevitable transition and make it more painful.

That's 17 years ago, so he had reason to feel that we would make the transition in time.

More recent article by Herman E. Daly paints a picture of a sustainable economy:

Read the whole thing

And yet another one:

One problem for the SSE already raised by the demographic
transition to a non growing population is that it necessarily results in an
increase in the average age of the population—more retirees relative to
workers. Adjustment requires either higher taxes, older retirement age, or
reduced retirement pensions. The system is hardly in “crisis”, but these
adjustments are surely needed to achieve sustainability. For many
countries net immigration has become a larger source of population
growth than natural increase. Immigration may temporarily ease the age
structure problem, but the steady-state population requires that births
plus in-migrants equal deaths plus out-migrants. It is hard to say which is
more politically incorrect, birth limits or immigration limits? Many prefer
denial of arithmetic to facing either one.

A Steady-State Economy