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What’s the smarter solution for bringing mobility to 21st century cities: bus rapid transit (BRT) or light rail? With questions this big, it’s important to consider all the perspectives.

A team of researchers at the World Resources Institute (WRI) recently produced a report that goes against the grain. WRI analyzed and compared BRT and light rail as two options for Maryland’s Purple Line Project, a 16-mile transit corridor that will connect the D.C. suburbs. In January, the Institute came down in favor of BRT, with a statement announcing that “enhanced buses … would cost less, offer similar services, and fight global warming better than light-rail cars.”

Our main question related not to what’s in the study, but rather, what seems to be left out. It’s a common observation that light rail delivers benefit beyond transit alone, in the form of transit-oriented development that springs up as a result of developers, business owners and homebuyers seeking proximity to the train stations.

The team at WRI was happy to share their take on this and other issues. I interviewed the study’s lead author, Greg Fuhs, and WRI’s senior transport engineer Dario Hidalgo, about BRT/LRT, transit prejudices, and how other cities can apply this analysis to their own planning process.

Julia Levitt: In your study, you found that BRT outperformed light rail in cutting overall CO2 emissions. How did you come to that conclusion?

Greg Fuhs: Our study actually corroborates what is already stated in the Maryland Transit Administration’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS): that BRT would be better on CO2 emissions for the Purple Line. This is a surprising finding to many, because it is often assumed that switching to an electric system such as light rail would reduce CO2 emissions. However, it is very important to consider the electricity source, and in our region the dominant source is currently coal-fired power plants.

So, while energy consumption from roadways would decrease with introduction of either light rail or BRT, for light rail the resulting emissions reduction is not enough to counterbalance the effect caused by the high electricity CO2 emission factor. In fact, CO2 emissions are projected to increase from business as usual with a light rail Purple Line. While this could change in the future with a major and permanent shift to low-carbon energy sources, for the foreseeable future we would likely continue to see higher CO2 emissions from light rail in this case.

JL: Critics of your report have pointed out that in North America, many people own cars, which gives them a choice that many riders overseas don’t have, and that people who have the choice of driving a personal vehicle are often inclined to find light rail cars an acceptable alternative, but are less likely to ride buses. What’s your take on this argument?

Dario Hidalgo: It is a common perception that a light rail system would attract more riders than BRT, and that is reflected in the demand estimations incorporated in the DEIS. However, I would raise two points:

First, in this case it is not at all certain that there would be a large enough increase in ridership to justify the significantly higher cost of light rail. For example, if we take just MTA’s ridership estimates, for the “Medium Investment” LRT and BRT alternatives we see a projection of 62,600 and 51,800 riders per day, respectively. That’s only about 20% more riders for light rail, yet the projected capital cost of the light rail system is more than twice that of BRT ($1.2 billion vs. $579 million), and also includes higher annual operation and maintenance costs.

Second, it is worth drawing a distinction between “buses” and “BRT.” The concept of bus rapid transit is not well understood in the United States, where there are only a few systems currently in operation. In reality, BRT would be designed more like a light rail than a standard bus system, with features like dedicated lanes, signal priority, pre-pay boarding, elevated station platforms, and efficient and comfortable vehicles that make it much more efficient and appealing than a traditional bus service. For the Purple Line, BRT would also offer travel times that are competitive with light rail. With a well-designed, well-operated, and well-advertised BRT in place, there is good reason to believe that many people would use and appreciate the system.

JL: Although your report shows that BRT will cost about half the amount of a light rail system, other studies show that light rail systems, because they are permanent structures, do more to encourage transit-oriented development. Was TOD a factor in the EMBARQ study? Do you think that BRT can facilitate and encourage dense development at a similar level?

GF: We did not look specifically at the TOD factor in our study. However, one cannot assume that transit-oriented development would be sparked by light rail but not BRT. For example, a recent study by the American Public Transportation Association looking at this issue considers both rail and traditional bus systems (although unfortunately it does not look at BRT specifically), and indicates that both can lead to significant positive land use changes. In any case, there is no reason to assume that LRT has a greater impact on land use than high-quality BRT if the systems provide similar travel times, capacities, and overall quality of service, as would be the case for the Purple Line. Moreover, developers can benefit from the shorter implementation time that BRT projects bring as compared to LRT.

DH: Also, regarding permanence, this is a somewhat relative concept. For example, there were thousands of miles of tram networks in the U.S. by 1940; much of this system was dismantled before 1970 with the rise of the automobile and suburbia. The forces behind development are not limited to the technology of transit vehicles, but also depend on factors such as accessibility, enabling policies, and background economics.

JL: Do you feel that the EMBARQ study comparing BRT/LRT can be easily applied to other regions and cities, or is this evaluation case-specific? What factors do you suggest other cities consider as top priorities when making their own decisions about public transportation?

GF: While certain general principles may apply to multiple locations (e.g., public transit is generally an asset to the community and its development should be encouraged), in reality every evaluation like this must be case-specific. After all, even if different locations have similar demographic and/or geographic characteristics, every local population has different needs and preferences and faces unique transportation challenges and political circumstances.

In considering public transportation projects, the first priority must be to determine if there is a need for a transit system to move people within the proposed corridor, and the entire decisionmaking process should be conducted in close consultation with the affected communities. Other important considerations include determining how much benefit a transit system could bring in terms of improved mobility, greater access to transport, incentives for economic development, and improved environmental quality. Further, and particularly in these lean economic times, the cost-effectiveness of the proposed system is a critical factor (especially in terms of competing for scarce state and federal funding). There is also evidence that urban infrastructure projects entail high risk of not meeting preliminary demand and cost estimates, and thus not realizing the projected cost-effectiveness. Such risks should be considered in the analysis and decision making process, but so far this has not been the case for the Purple Line project. Our study does attempt to quantify this risk by providing a sensitivity analysis of Purple Line cost and ridership projections, and we recommend that similar efforts be undertaken in future transit proposals.

In our study specifically, we emphasize that in this time of financial and climate crisis, cost-effectiveness, risk, and greenhouse gas emissions are especially important factors to consider. And in these three cases, BRT comes out as the better option for the Purple Line, as can be the case in other projects. Going forward, we would encourage decision makers and communities not to select a project based on perceptions, but on good analytics.

Photo: The bus rapid transit system along Insurgentes Avenue in Mexico City, a project of EMBARQ. Source: flickr/World Resources Institute Staff, CC license.

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in Columns at 10:22 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by Julia Levitt


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Julia Levitt from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

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China and the United States should focus on their similarities, rather than their differences, to jumpstart bilateral climate negotiations, a pair of former White House staffers recommended yesterday.

Unable to agree on each other’s role in addressing climate change, the talks between the world’s two largest greenhouse gas emitters have remained in gridlock since the United States excused itself from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001.

To ease into a new era of policymaking, both countries should focus on popular initiatives that could still significantly reduce emissions, such as shared efforts to develop electric vehicles, green buildings, and carbon sequestration projects, the former staffers said in a Brookings Institution report.

“Climate change evokes philosophical disagreements, whereas clean energy evokes economic opportunities,” said co-author David Sandalow, who served as associate director for the global environment in former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s Council on Environmental Quality.

The report comes a few weeks before U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s first visit to China in her new position. Clinton, who is expected to discuss climate change, will likely set a new tone for U.S foreign relations toward China.

Rather than grapple with the most controversial issues in the climate change debate - trade competition, coal use, and emission targets - a focus on mutually beneficial, large-scale projects would “capture the public’s imagination” for further emission reductions, said Sandalow, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who is rumored to earn a new position in President Barack Obama’s administration.

The two countries could also strengthen pre-existing local partnerships that exchange technology and expertise in a range of climate-related industries. For example, Denver, Colorado, and the Chinese city of Chongqing have joined forces to develop electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. These partnerships currently suffer from “information barriers” and a lack of funding, the report said.

Other countries, especially Japan and the European Union, have also provided services to help develop green buildings, electric vehicles, and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology in China. The United States now may interfere with the other countries’ efforts if it suddenly increases its attention, said Elizabeth Economy, director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“I don’t mind duplicating their efforts, but we don’t want to undermine them,” Economy said. “Maybe we should look ahead, [for instance] at India, for issues where China is already under way.”

China has focused much of its climate change policies on improving energy efficiency, with significantly greater renewable energy investments as well. Its leadership has opposed binding emission reductions because much of the country is still developing, and its per-capita emissions are much smaller than those of the United States and other developed nations.

“China has done a lot, but of course it’s not enough,” said Zhou Wenzhong, Chinese ambassador to the United States, at the Brookings report launch. “Our most urgent issue is to limit poverty and develop the economy for one-fifth of the world’s people.”

The administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush refused to rejoin international climate treaties until China also agreed to cut emissions. Obama has also stated that China should participate in global emission reduction efforts, but he has promised that the United States will lead in a new international agreement.

The United States and China, combined, contribute more than 40 percent of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. World leaders such as United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon have requested that both countries increase their reduction commitments.

“Neither side is doing enough,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, a co-author of the Brookings report who served as senior director for Asia on President Clinton’s National Security Council. “Each of us plays a major role in the politics of this issue in either country, and none of us are very sensitive to that.”

In addition to the Brookings recommendations, the U.S.-based research group Asia Society released a roadmap yesterday for United States-Chinese climate cooperation.

The report, which U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu co-chaired before his selection, outlines several bold, sweeping changes to reduce both countries’ emissions. For instance, the report suggests greater investment in CCS from coal-fired power plants, a “smart” electrical grid, and broad deployment of wind and solar energy.

The Chinese government has requested that foreign governments provide greater technology transfers as part of an international climate regime. But China should still be more proactive in its requests during negotiations, Economy said.

“They don’t have the capacity to do what they really want to get done,” she said. “So [priorities] need to come from them.”

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

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(Posted by Ben Block in Climate Change at 11:40 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by Ben Block


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on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Ben Block from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

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First and most importantly, the room was full. Not long ago, a seminar on climate change adaptation here would have been a lower-profile event. It might have drawn a few dozen people, most of them academics, activists and development workers. Even the topic would have been seen as controversial, even taboo: “Don’t talk about adaptation,” went the argument, “because that will signal that we’ve given up on stopping global warming.” But as the evidence mounts that climate change is here, and that adaptation is imperative, that taboo has finally begun to crumble away.

And today, there was a room full of officials, business execs, and consultants like me crammed into a rather small auditorium to hear about “Climate Change Adaptation — Finding the Business Opportunities.” (The seminar was sponsored by Sweden’s agency for international development aid, SIDA, and the networking group Globe Forum.) There was not a whiff of taboo in the room. In its place was the whiff of entrepreneurship — driven in part, I sensed, by a healthy dose of genuine fear.

Why haven’t the opportunities in adaptation been “found” already? After all, the world is plainly going to need new ways to do everything from watering crops in newly drought-prone areas, to keeping buildings cool in extreme heat waves, to responding quickly to floods and other extreme weather events. Somebody is going to make money finding — and selling — the answers to those problems. What’s stopping them?

Actually, some people are already making money helping the world adapt to climate change. Australia, for example, has new desalination plants under construction in every major city, a friend there just related. Someone is surely making money on those. But the overall level of global progress on private sector investment to address adaptation to climate change is still just as frustratingly slow as progress on climate change generally.

The reasons have principally to do with the current rules of the game in financing, and — said speakers at this symposium — a simple lack of good communication and networking between the relevant players. Investors still don’t talk enough with CleanTech entrepreneurs, mostly because the CleanTech people don’t know how to talk to them. The interest is there, especially in the energy sector; but the flow of dollars, which requires first a flow of words, is still weak.

Moreover, the relevant technologies, which usually go under the heading of CleanTech (new energy, water, recycling, and waste disposal methods), are still perceived as high risk. Even risk-capital investors therefore want higher-than-normal returns. They are interested, they are moving in that direction, but they are wary — especially since the relevant markets are highly politicized. As experience in countries like Denmark shows, your investment in something like wind energy may be entirely dependent on which government wins in the general election, and what policies they set.

Add the challenges of operating in a developing country, where the legal frameworks and working cultures are nowhere near as predictable as, say, Sweden, and you get a world of pent up demand for investment capital … and a dribbling supply.

Nearly everyone at this seminar spoke of the need for greater partnership, dialogue, and collaboration between sectors. Those working on climate negotiations, like EU climate negotiator Angela Kallhauge, spoke urgently about this: “We have 325 days left till Copenhagen,” she noted, and mobilizing stable investment flows over the long term was just one of the great challenges she saw ahead for the world. (The others were agreeing on ambitious mitigation targets, securing the participation of all parties, creating a sense of shared responsibility, and enhancing the role of adaptation in the negotiation process.) “We need to open up the ‘black box’ of what the private sector is doing … We know things are happening, but we need to pull them into the debate” before the world meets to determine its climatic fate in December 2009.

Actually, much adaptation work has become mainstream business practice — something several speakers noted. Nowadays, banks looking at “long-term risk management” for a dam project routinely include climate change projections in their calculations (or they should be doing so). This is adaptation work by another name. Kallhauge spoke of other examples, such as South African mining firm that projected an increasing, and therefore increasingly costly, prevalence of malaria among its workforce as global warming proceeded. So they invested in a strong malaria prevention program. It looked like a health program, with present-day benefits — but it was actually a program to protect a key corporate asset against future climate change.

Strangely, the current financial crisis seems to be having no negative impact on the steady, if slow, growth in investment heading in this direction. Indeed, the economic crisis seems only to be strengthening the case for climate change investment. A senior executive from PriceWaterhouseCoopers spent half his speaking time quoting, verbatim, from a December 2008 speech by Prince Charles of the UK. The Prince drew the parallel (as others have done) between the credit crunch and the “climate crunch.”

Both the credit and climate crises are characterized by (1) a huge increase in debt (in the climate case, the debt is a drawdown of natural capital); (2) overconfidence in the ability of markets and regulatory systems to identify and mitigate the risks of this accumulating mountain of debt; and (3) incentives driving individuals and organizations to prioritize short-term gains irrespective of their long-term sustainability. “Both crises require us to work together with urgency,” said Lars-Olle Larson of PWC. “A growing chorus of voices urge a response that is geared to dealing with both [the credit and the climate] crises at the same time” and create a “transformation toward an ecologically durable economy.”

Lars Wärngård, who heads a Swedish funding agency that provides hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to advance Swedish business innovation for sustainability (Vinnova), closed with some counter-intuitive thoughts about how to make that transformation happen. “We must be problem-oriented,” he said, not oriented around today’s perception of the solutions. Long-term focus on the problem of climate change — how to stop it, and how to adapt to it — will give rise to many solutions, over many years.

At long last, the issue of climate change adaptation is on the world’s table — and not just as a problem for researchers to study and activists to chant about (as well they should). The problem is reaching quickly into senior levels of business and government, and being framed as a problem, yes … but as an opportunity-creating problem.

And where investors see opportunity, change is sure to come.

This article originally appeared on the AtKisson Group blog, WaveFront.

Photo credit: flickr/C.Nichols, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Alan AtKisson in Columns at 11:10 AM)

Originally by Alan AtKisson from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

This isn’t just about carbon … it turns out that cap and trade could be the largest economic redistribution program the US has ever seen.

I attended a symposium a few weeks ago at Evergreen State College about preparing our communities for climate regulation. The keynote was a thought-provoking talk about the economic implications of cap and trade system design by Peter Dorman, an economist and professor at Evergreen. This post is based largely on his talk.

In the United States, after years of local climate action pursued in the absence of federal involvement, we are suddenly standing in the midst of an unprecedented opportunity. We need climate action, we need economic intervention, and we have federal leadership that just might understand how deeply they are interrelated.

It seems certain that federal action on climate will involve a cap and trade system. It is of primary importance that citizens understand what’s at stake in its design. This policy will impact citizens as individuals, and our economy as a whole. Personally, I have not had a full appreciation of the economic changes this one mechanism could bring. As Dorman points out, global economic growth has been driven by increasing carbon densities for 2000 years – that is the size of the historical trend we are attempting to shift. Cap and trade will trigger a massive transfer of dollars from certain losers to certain winners. We can be confident that the economic implications of system design are not lost on those parties.

“Harry and Louise x 25”
Here is a wonderful cautionary tale: in 1993, we had a young, passionate new president with a mandate to change the way the US dealt with health care. It was part of the platform he ran on, and people had hope that it would finally happen. But the administration failed to anticipate the strength of the opposition (mainly the insurance industry), who responded with an expensive and well-organized ad campaign - centered around the fictional couple Harry & Louise - aimed at frightening citizens away from supporting the policy. The plan went down like a lead zeppelin. What was at stake? Twelve billion dollars in potential losses, back when $12 billion was real money.

The annual estimated value of carbon permits in the first year of a nationwide cap and trade program is $300 billion. We have seen nothing yet… and I see that we are unprepared for that fight. We expect our exciting new administration to lead on this, and it may. But do we dare pit an Obama administration against the combined fury of the oil, coal, gas, and chemical industries (and agriculture, and automobiles, and etc…)? Who represents the counter-force to industry in this? Us. How do we ensure that our voice is heard?

A large part of the problem is the emphasis in current media stories on setting the targets – what percent reduction by what year. Dorman charges that this is entirely the wrong emphasis; climate science continues to evolve, so whatever targets we set now will be revisited later, more than once. The targets need to be set, but we don’t need to get them exactly right, right now. But the opposite is true for what matters: the architecture of the mechanism. Once put in place, it will be – must be – hard to change. If it is easy to change, it will keep changing and a market will never develop. Yet if we make it hard to change and design it badly, it will fail.

The Architecture of the Western Climate Initiative
Dorman turned his attention to laying out his criteria for what good policy architecture for cap and trade looks like. He then used those criteria to inspect the Western Climate Initiative (WCI). Eric de Place, senior researcher at the Seattle-based Sightline Institute, has written an excellent series on the WCI, including discussion of implications. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in digging deeper than I will go here.

The main question as it is currently asked is one of setting the scope of the permits – who will fall under the regulations of a cap and trade scheme? This tends to be done – it is in WCI – by economic sector. But sector-by-sector emissions rights are an inherently political decision about the relative value of industries. The danger here is that clout trumps science. That’s a fail.

“US to Auction 100 percent of Emissions Permits, in Cap and Invest System”
So if it’s not the emissions targets, and it’s not the industries affected, what is the big question that we should be asking? What should the media headline include? We should be discussing the two most important points of system design: the percentage of emissions permits that will be auctioned, and how auction revenue will be disbursed.

These are the big stories, because the success or failure of a cap and trade system depends on getting these things right. According to Dorman, the best system will be fair, efficient, and transparent; will address the issue of price spikes (price signals are good, price spikes are bad); will auction 100 percent of credits/ permits; will recycle all auction revenue to the public; and will not allow offsets.

I’ll unpack these statements, briefly, one at a time:
1. Fair, efficient, and transparent
This is accomplished by making the regulations as comprehensive and upstream as possible. In practice this means regulating carbon as it enters the United States, so that the market – rather than politicians – determines who gets to emit how much.

2. Price spikes
In Dorman’s view, regulatory mechanisms for anticipating and addressing price spikes don’t need to be included in the cap and trade regulation itself. After all, price increases are part of how cap and trade works. But there needs to be some means of addressing prices that have escalated beyond a social/political standard.

3. 100% auction
The way a cap works is to drive down emissions by driving up prices of permits that allow the holders to emit. As those prices are transferred to consumers, we decrease our carbon consumption – this is how the carbon market works. So as Dorman says, rising energy prices will mean money leaving our pockets … where will that money go? There are two options: if the permits are given away, the money stays with the businesses, as profits; if the permits are auctioned, the money is reclaimed by the government. It is useful to think of cap and trade (in its function) as a sales tax. Prices for goods and energy will rise, and the impact will be regressive, hitting the poorest hardest. How will these impacts be dealt with? With revenue from the auctioning of permits. No auction, no revenue.

4. Revenue Recycling
If there is revenue, it should be returned to households — that’s revenue recycling. There are many differing opinions about how to best spend this money, with some advocating investment in specific programs, and some encouraging redistribution to the workers and businesses most affected. Dorman’s point here was interesting – that if we expect this program to survive, it must be exceptionally fair, with all of the money being recycled, in an equal amount to every citizen.

5. No offsets
Voluntary offsets are good. They represent efforts by citizens and businesses to pay for emissions-reducing projects. But as part of a cap and trade system, Dorman argues that “they create incentives for both the companies buying the offsets and the companies whose investments are being subsidized by the offsets to exaggerate their carbon benefits, and their additionality can never be fully determined.” (Additionality is itself a concept that not everyone supports, but that’s another post.)

Now, keeping these arguments in mind, let’s examine how the WCI design recommendations address each one:

1. The WCI is sector-based; non-comprehensive and downstream. Dorman described the process as a “free-for-all wrangle between business sectors to determine who gets to burn the most carbon.” Sightline’s de Place is more optimistic, reminding me that the WCI will cover more emissions than either the RGGI or the EU cap and trade market (recently written up here). In that sense, the WCI is fairly comprehensive. However, its shortfalls are that different business sectors are treated differently, with phased-in timelines, differential auction rates, and other unequal treatment.

2. The WCI only requires that 10 percent of the permits be auctioned, meaning up to 90 percent could be given away. See the point above about the importance of auctioning all the permits.

3. Up to 49 percent of reductions can be offset. Ditto for offsets.

4. The stakeholders throughout the process have been predominantly businesses. An indication, in Dorman’s opinion, of whose opinion mattered in crafting this agreement.

5. The economic analysis performed on the WCI focused on impacts to business. The more important question of economic impacts on households was not measured. This stands in clear contrast to what Dorman calls the “most elementary economic principles for evaluating a public policy” i.e. its impact on average citizens.

So how much does this matter to households? To you and me? If, as Dorman put it, life before cap and trade has been about trying to get meaningful action, then life after will be all about dealing with the many implications of higher prices for damn near everything.

In an analysis by Boyce & Riddle in 2007 on the distributional impacts of carbon regulation on households, researchers found the following: with no revenue recycling, the lowest economic quintile lost about 10 percent of their income due to higher prices. With revenue recycling, they gained nearly 15 percent, while the highest quintile lost only about 2.5 percent.

This isn’t just about carbon… it turns out that cap and trade could be the largest economic redistribution program the US has ever seen.

Now it’s important to point out that the WCI is not the final word – the states are crafting their own systems. And while we hope that they go further, recent news stories do not make me hopeful here in Washington. But even that is not the final word – I started this post discussing a federal cap and trade system. But we risk much if we pin our hopes on the federal government correcting our mistakes.

We talk about this kind of legislation as though we knew what we were talking about. But 2050 is 40 years away. We should be thinking hard about where and how much we can compromise. We need to be thinking about policy sustainability. We’re attempting to put in place a program on the scale of Social Security. We have to get it right.

Justus Stewart is an urban planner and designer living in Seattle. He currently works on climate planning for local governments. Justus’ main interest is the overlap and interrelation of fields usually held as separate.

Photo of smokestacks, credit: flickr/Broken Haiku, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Justus Stewart in Columns at 11:16 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by Justus Stewart


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Justus Stewart from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

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As many of our readers know, Worldchanging’s Alex Steffen has brought the message of big-picture, bright green change to audiences around the world, from Toronto to New Zealand. He has held the attention of world leaders, businesspeople in suits, students in sweatshirts, and many others in between (including the distinguished audience members at TED).

Last spring, Alex delivered the keynote at the Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival here in Seattle. Though this intimate event was more informal than most, it’s one of the few presentations from which we have a recording in full. We’re happy to have the chance to share it with you here:

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 12:02 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

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This article was written by Saul Griffith in March 2008. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Saul Griffith is a remarkable guy: inventor, entrepreneur, Squid Labs, ThinkCycle and Instructables founder, columnist, genius grant winner and now president of the clean energy start-up Makani Power. A couple weeks ago, I did a talk at eTech, and while I was there, I had the fortune to hear Saul give his presentation on energy literacy and climate change.

Saul’s essential point is that climate change is a problem we can choose to tackle: that the means are within our control, if we’ll learn to think clearly about them. It’s a great talk, and like all great talks, there’s lots to quibble with in it (I’m sure Worldchanging readers will spring to the task), but at it’s core, the message could not be more consonant with our goals as a site. Saul has kindly turned his talk into a series of posts for Worldchanging, which we’ll be posting over the course of the week. –Alex

This is an old story, hopefully told in a new way.

Al Gore’s documentary “An inconvenient truth” reached many people but his is just the most recent telling of a story that has been told many times before. At the peak of the energy crisis in the 1970’s, Amory Lovins wrote a book called Energy Strategies that largely outlined the problem we have today. In the 1950s Buckminster Fuller wrote many similar treatises on the dangers of over-consumption of energy and materials and its effects on the earth’s ecosystems. At the turn of last century, Henry Thoreau wrote a beautiful book about simple living in the woods of Massachusetts as an antidote to the destructive lifestyle of modern living he perceived at that time. Walden has sold many copies and inspired the modern conservation movements. Muir and Carson should be attributed for their contributions also. 2 millenia ago, in his book “Critias”, Plato wrote about the demise of the forests:

“What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all fat and soft earth having wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left…there are some mountains which have nothing but food for bees, but they had trees not very long ago, and the rafters from those felled there to roof the largest buildings are still sound.

There are many more books and speeches and documents beside these that are available today to further discuss humanity’s influence on the environment. Except for the fact that we now have better information thanks to the concerted efforts of modern science and the many tireless individuals that study the effects of humans on the environment, I’m not telling you a story much different than these.

The principal difference here is that I’ve approached telling this story as an engineer would approach a challenge. “Tell me what I have to do and I’ll make it work” might well be the call cry of engineers. This document is thus set out as a resource and an open document for other people to critique and improve until we can specify the task for engineers. Once we know what we have to do, we will certainly do it.

This document started out as a very cold and impersonal look at the physics, and the thermodynamics of Earth’s energy systems. It was clearly apparent that while audiences enjoyed that conversation and it provided valuable perspective, the numbers were too large, and the issues so impersonal, that it was difficult to understand the implications.

In an effort to remedy that this document now has two stories intertwined: The larger, global energy picture, and the more personal energy accounting for all of earth’s individuals. The larger story is about very big numbers and very big implications. The personal story is about each of us living and working in this shared planet, and the cumulative effects that each of our lives make.

I remember first watching Al Gore give a tremendous, and important, presentation at a conference with his climate change talk. The immediate questions from that audience were “How does this effect me?” and “What can I do to make a difference?”. A few years later the answers to these questions ended up in the credits of his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”. Because the answers to those questions are the only way we as individuals can understand our global challenge, we have tried to bring them into the center of this conversation rather than the appendix. This isn’t meant as a gross criticism of Gore, just that I personally want a deeper understanding of the consequences, and to know what to do.

Without doubt, the only way to move forward is to know what the target is, know how to measure progress towards that target, and have the data and information to make good personal decisions as well as good global decisions.

Each of the following steps will be addressed at greater length in its own post:

Step 1 CO2 = Climate
Understand the link between CO2 concentration and climate change. Understand the models, their predictive power, their accuracy.

In laying out the logic of this document we hope to give you the tools to rebuild this story as it relates to you. If you disagree with any specific assumption or piece of information, you have the approach outlined here to return to.

If you believe global warming isn’t happening at all, this logic is still valid for you. You will merely conclude that nothing needs to be done immediately, and you will walk away with a greater understanding of your own energy consumption, ways to save money, and ways to increase the security of energy supplies as fossil fuel supplies slowly dwindle.

If you believe that we should return to pre-industrial levels of CO2 this story is still valid - you will reach more drastic conclusions about the urgency of action, and the things we must start to do. The real point here is that this is an approach which really lays out climate change for what it is. A collective choice for humanity. A choice that determines the aesthetics of our future planet, the way we live, breathe, work, eat, and play.

The first step in the problem is understanding the relationship between greenhouse gases (principally CO2) and climate change. This is very well studied and the IPCC has been at the forefront of collecting and vetting this information for humanity. The other goal of laying out the logic this simply is to push the conversation forward for climate change. It is going to have to come down to a choice, where we set a real goal - not a diluted percentage of industrial output goal like the Kyoto goal - but a global CO2 concentration and emissions goal and consequent clean energy production goals. People will do what they need to do once they have a goal in place. We all love challenges.

Step 2 Temperature Choice
Choose the temperature at which you would like to stabilize the earth. Acknowledge the implications of your choice.

As we increase CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, the temperature rises. By halting or reversing the rate at which we emit CO2 to the atmosphere we are in effect choosing the CO2 concentration that the atmosphere will eventually stabilize at. This concentration determines the temperature that the world will stabilize at. The idea is that once you have an understanding of the relationship between CO2 and temperature (with all of its uncertainties) you can make a choice of what temperature you would like to live at, and what effects that has on the environment.

This is a choice that nobody seems to want to make. No one wants to be wrong. No government wants to say “3 degrees more heat is OK”, and then find out that it isn’t. It’s hard not to conclude that the safe and sane choice is the conservative one. Act now, and if we over-estimated the threats and consequences then the next generations can change our estimates and resource use because they will know more than we do now.

Step 2: Choosing a global temperature target.
This choice of temperature is obviously going to be the most difficult choice humanity has ever made.

The first time I publicly gave this talk it was at a technology conference for the programmer / hacker community. The temptation was to say that “Earth’s climate is humanity’s operating system” and that “what temperature we choose determines what functional calls we have, how stable the platform is, and what chances there are that we crash the OS and have to reboot”. That mightn’t be the best metaphor for general audiences, but the point of bringing it up here is we need to find the metaphors for every audience. Everyone needs to develop an intuition for what this means to us all.

One principal reason the temperature choice will be difficult is that at different temperatures you have a different set of winners and losers. This is probably only true for small temperature changes where the argument is about how this wine producing region increased in productivity while this rainforest dries out. At larger temperature changes, like those beyond +2 degrees Celsius, I think there is a compelling argument that no one wins. The world changes so much and the struggle for resources for survival will become so great, that no one can hide, and no one wins.

Step 3 Allowable Carbon
Determine from your choice of climate change the amount of carbon you are allowed to release into the atmosphere annually.

Having chosen a temperature, we can infer what CO2 concentration we should aim at for creating equilibrium on the planet. This is a number measured in parts per million (ppm) of CO2. This talk largely ignores the other green-house gases of CH4 and NO2, methane and nitrous oxide respectively. Methane is produced in large quantities by our livestock (sheep and cows in particular) and our landfills, as well as natural sources. Nitrous oxide is a by-product of our nitrogenous fertilizers for agriculture and produced in air travel through the jet-fuel combustion process. The concentrations of these gases is sometimes measured as CO2 equivalent. Methane per molecule is a 21 times more absorbing greenhouse molecule than CO2. Nitrous oxide is even worse, with an effect 310 times that of CO2. Obviously we need to address all of the molecules that contribute to climate change, and work to reduce the concentrations of all of them. This conversation will however focus just on CO2. I’m assuming that if we develop the awareness of climate implied by this document, that will happen in parallel to our focus on the largest contributor, CO2.

Carbon has an atomic weight of 12. Oxygen has an atomic weight of 16. Each time you combust, or burn, a carbon molecule, it is oxidized to become CO2. Some people measure carbon input into the atmosphere in terms of C, others in terms of CO2. To convert between these values multiple Carbon by 3.67, or divide CO2 by 3.67.

C : C02 = 12 : (12 + 16 + 16 ) = 44 hence 44/12 = 3.67.

Step 4 Useable Fossil Energy
Determine from the amount of carbon you can release to the atmosphere the amount of energy available to us from fossil fuels and carbon emitting sources and therefore what “new clean power component we need to generate.

Knowing the concentration we wish to stabilize at, we know how much power we can make burning carbon based fuels, over what time frame we need to reduce it, and to what ultimate value. This is an extremely important number to determine because it sets us our target of how much non-carbon power we will need to produce to support the lifestyles we want to live.

With these choices and their consequences, we can now understand the grand challenge of renewable (or non-carbon emitting) energy, or indeed whether it is a challenge at all.

My personal interpretation of the information laid out here is that this is the biggest engineering challenge ever faced by mankind. That barely implies that it is also the biggest social, economic and political challenge in history!. I personally would conclude that you should support a concerted effort to meet this challenge in every way possible whilst also learning to live your personal life in healthier and happier ways.

Every choice you make is important here: your choice of how much climate change you can tolerate; your choice of lifestyle and the power generation it implies.

The other intent of laying out this logical framework and making this an open document is that this story needs to be told in different ways by different people in order to tell the story as far and wide as possible. The wisdom of many eyes on this document interpreting it in better ways will surely help humanity face and conquer this challenge. - This is after all about our collective choice, not the choice of any single player in the game. The coal companies get their vote, the environmentalists get their vote, middle Americans get their vote, Indian peasants get their vote. It’s everyone’s climate. Thats what we have to realize. It’s everyone’s climate. It’s everyone’s choice.

Step 5 Clean Energy Sources
Analyse from what sources we can possibly make the clean power component

This step allows us to know where all of the earth’s energy resources are, how they can be tapped, and what we can expect of each of them. Even which secondary effects each of those choices might have: how much land area we devote to this or that, or what ecosystem effects solar panels and wind farms have. The important thing here is to know what the possibilities are and to inform wise investment choices in the potential of each one.

Finally we get to the really fun part. This is where the challenge turns to engineering. This is where we get our hands dirty, put our shoulders to the grindstone, and solve the problem.

Step 6 New Energy Mix
Choose a mix of technologies to make “the clean power component” and estimate the industrial and engineering effort to meet the challenge.

Pick your new energy mix, how much wind, how much solar, how much coal, how much gas, how much petroleum, how much nuclear, how much wave, how much tidal, how much geothermal. Once picked we are only a bunch of good new jobs and fulfilling work-days away from meeting our challenge.

“The sun pays all the bills”
- Kim Stanley Robinson.

The personal side of the story:
where does your energy go?

Step 1 My Lifestyle
Calculate my own current energy consumption as a result of my lifestyle.

Step 2 Carbon Calculators
Compare to other people’s “Carbon Calculators”

Step 3 My Share & Energy Demographics
Make it personal: give everyone an equal share of the current total energy resource. Compare my equal share to world’s current demographics.

Step 4 My New Life
Re Evaluate my own personal footprint to see what impact an equal share would have on my lifestyle.

The personal side of the story: Step 1.

Step 1 My Lifestyle
Calculate my own current energy consumption as a result of my lifestyle.

No one is exactly like anyone else. That’s part of why it is fun to be human. We all live in different ways. How we live determines the impact we each have on the environment. In recent times this has led to a public conversation about “Carbon Footprint”. I personally prefer to think about it as your own personal power requirement. Carbon and power are like the chicken and the egg. It is hard to figure out which came first and which one we should think in.

I am definitely unusual. As I write this I am a 34 year old scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur living in California. I have my own company that is trying to invent new ways of harnessing renewable power sources. I live in ‘the Mission’, a small yet colorful district in the city of San Francisco. I rent a small stand-alone house with two bedrooms that I share with my partner. I fly a lot, both for business and pleasure, and generally those trips are combined. I don’t drive very much, and when I do it is mostly in a very efficient Hybrid, or a reasonably efficient vintage VW beetle. I am an omnivore - I eat meat - regularly. I try to commute by bicycle and public ferry most days. I like to think of myself as environmentally aware and as motivated to building a better future for the planet. In spite of all these things, preparing this document has shown me that I am a major part of the energy problem. I don’t buy as many things as most other people, but the things I do buy (like lap-tops and cell phones) are particular energy intensive products.

I have a strong background in mathematics and physics and engineering and a PhD from MIT to show for it. Even with that I find it very difficult to calculate my own ecological footprint to the accuracy I would like, and during the analysis I found myself repeatedly stumbled for lack of information. I am sure it is hard for everyone. I have every modern resource available and I still find this whole issue extremely challenging to understand and deal with.

By calculating in detail my own energy consumption I hope to make more people aware of their own personal environmental impacts. I hope also to induce an improvement in the reporting
of personal environmental impact by the companies that provide us with our material goods.

Step 2 Carbon Calculators
Compare to other people’s “Carbon Calculators”

By now nearly everyone is aware of the concept of a “Carbon Calculator”. There are many freely available on the web. Critiques of the system already get air-time in the press. I will compare a large set of them here to see how they compare using the same data I used myself. The bad news : the results are more variable than they are accurate. Why would I want to show this? If these are going to be the principle tools for the average person to figure out their progress in helping the world, then let’s make them precise, and accurate. As all engineers know (and athletes!), you can only improve if you measure well and if you have benchmarks.

Step 3 My Share & Energy Demographics
Make it personal: give everyone an equal share of the current total energy resource. Compare my equal share to world’s current demographics.

It’s worth here looking at the demographics of humanity’s energy use, and the way our collective behaviour is the contributor. I include this quick study of demographics not to point the finger at any country in particular, but to put things in perspective, to help plan the future. We have to remember that our lifestyles and cultures changed and went in these directions before we knew a lot about climate change and the relationship with personal consumption. Rather than have Europeans thumb their noses at Americans and say “Look how much better we are” it would be hoped everyone says “OK, here we are, how do we all improve”… “what do you know that can help me improve, what do I know that can help you”. The thing about living on the same planet tied together with the same atmosphere is that we can’t simply ignore our neighbors.
We are all in it together.

Step 4 My New Life
Re-Evaluate my own personal footprint to see what impact an equal share would have on my lifestyle.

I found it very powerful to look at the global power consumption,
and the global population, and determine the average global power consumption per person. I then used this number to re-evaluate my life. Can I reduce my lifestyle to this average? Will it be hard? Easy? will it improve my life or make it less interesting? I’d recommend everyone go through this exercise and make your own choices: it helps you think about what is important to you. I still choose some portion of international travel because my family lives overseas. You might not. What really surprised me is that my new life actually looks a lot better for my health. I can also imagine that it will really improve the quality of my life. People will call me an optimist. I am!

I’m not trying to imply that equal distribution of the earth’s energy resources is the right solution, I’m merely using it as a starting point for perspective. It certainly can’t hurt to use this as your target.

Science and the scientific method.

Science is interesting. In modern day life we are bombarded with scientific study headlines. “Study shows (insert bizarre phenomena and conclusion).” Because of this, the public might be forgiven for becoming complacent to, or inoculated against, the latest “scientific” finding. Next week’s study will likely contradict this week’s. In part this is because the modern media does a fairly poor job of communicating science, and mostly because it tries to “dumb it down” or “sensationalize” it. I think the majority of the problem is that there isn’t a wide understanding of the difference between “science” and “the scientific method”.

Science is the study of some sort of phenomena accompanied by an effort to explain it with a theory. Because of this, great skepticism does and should meet any single scientific study. That skepticism by the rest of the scientific community is really what the “scientific method” is. As a scientist you are obliged to question every assumption and conclusion, and to test and retest them until an established truth emerges. With enough time, and enough questioning, we can build a lot of confidence that the theories are correct. This has been a proven method for generating the incredible amount of knowledge that humanity taps to construct modern life.

This method is particularly easy for easily measurable things like the mass of a neutron or the size of the moon, or for the motions of the planets. More recently it has gotten harder because the complexity of the things that we study has greatly increased. In biology it is very difficult to reach simple conclusions and knowledge because the entire system is so complex and interconnected. This is also true of climate change. The earth’s climate is not completely understood. That is true and will likely always remain true. In the science of complex systems we build models. These models explain large data sets by simplifying the problem for us. We can test these models by measuring reality and comparing it with our models. It takes quite a long time to draw strong conclusions, but in the end, through the scientific method, we can have high confidence that the conclusions are generally correct, even if we do not know the exact details.

At right is a paper by Arrhenius, a great scientist of the late 19th century. He is most famous for the Arrhenius equation, but also studied the chemistry of our atmosphere. His study on “Carbonic Acid” (now referred to as CO2) is one of the earliest studies that links climate change with CO2 in the atmosphere.

A century later the scientific method has concluded with great confidence that our CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions are heating our world and endangering our lifestyles and the future of our children. While it remains wise to continue to doubt the headlines of each new “scientific study” it would be very unwise indeed to ignore the results of the collective wisdom of thousands of scientists working together through the scientific method. The conclusion now reached is that our behavior with regards to how we produce our energy and therefore generate CO2, must change. And now.

(Thanks to Worldchanging New Zealand columnist Craig Neilson for his assistance!)

How to Become Energy Literate and Battle Climate Change is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 8:57 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

This article was written by Alex Steffen in March 2008. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

To get a sense of how complex and tangled the task is of managing the planet, consider Chinook salmon.

The Sacramento River fall Chinook salmon run, which had been recovering in recent years, has suddenly collapsed, and no one seems to know why:

The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for reliable explanations — and coming up dry.

…Fishermen think the Sacramento River was mismanaged in 2005, when this year’s fish first migrated downriver. Perhaps, they say, federal and state water managers drained too much water or drained at the wrong time to serve the state’s powerful agricultural interests and cities in arid Southern California. The fishermen think the fish were left susceptible to disease, or to predators, or to being sucked into diversion pumps and left to die in irrigation canals.

But federal and state fishery managers and biologists point to the highly unusual ocean conditions in 2005, which may have left the fingerling salmon with little or none of the rich nourishment provided by the normal upwelling currents near the shore.

The life cycle of these fall run Chinook salmon takes them from their birth and early weeks in cold river waters through a downstream migration that deposits them in the San Francisco Bay when they are a few inches long, and then as their bodies adapt to saltwater through a migration out into the ocean, where they live until they return to spawn, usually three years later.

What wiped out the run? Climate change? Water diversions? Something we don’t understand? The answer may well be all three, which illustrates the difficulty of trying to manage a complex natural system through highly political processes (which in the real world is essentially the only way they ever are managed).

Why care so much about the salmon? Well, fall Chinook are a $150 million fishery, first of all. That’s a lot of fish missing from a lot of tables, and a lot of fishermen looking at hard times.

But there’s another reason we should care: river and mountain ecosystems throughout the North Pacific depend on salmon to remain healthy. Here’s how Ed Hunt explains it:

Pacific salmon do a strange thing. After they spawn, they die. …After spawning, they leave their nutrient-rich carcasses behind. Many of the microscopic creatures that nibble on the carcasses eventually become prey for the next generation of fish. And so the parents nourish the young.

But salmon provide more than an indirect food source for baby salmon. At least 137 different species — from grizzly bears to gray wolves — depend on salmon for part of their diet. Even trees and plants benefit from the nutrients brought back by salmon from the seas.

Indeed, salmon used to transport so many marine nutrients to terrestrial ecosystems that environmental historian Richard White compared them to a conveyor belt. As Richard Manning explains:

Salmon are born, leave the stream as a pencil-sized fish, spend a few years fattening on ocean’s bounty, then return with a gift to the natal stream, as much as 60 pounds of body mass made of not just carbon, but of the other nutrients the entire system needs. They import nutrients to landlocked life. This is the measure of the power of salmon.

Scientists now estimate that the Columbia River system once gained about 400 million pounds of nutrients from each year’s salmon runs, before the dams broke the cycle. … Samples of salmonberry bushes growing streamside reveal as much as 18 percent of their nutrients are ocean-derived, making it one of the more aptly named plants around. The same is true of trees. Plants are fed when carcasses decay and fertilize the soil, or when the dead salmon enter the food chain and eventually return to the soil as droppings. The faunal section of the chain contains at least 20 vertebrate species, including, of course, bears, but also surprisingly, deer and elk, which during spawning season are known to feed directly on salmon carcasses.

The upshot is that when the wrong forces combine — when upwelling fails, ocean dead zones spread, streamside habitats are logged or developed and rivers are diverted to farmers’ fields — what is lost is not just a whole bunch of big fish, but the fundamental health of the ecosystems of an entire region.

If we’re going to take our obligations as planetary managers seriously, we need to start being able to see through two lenses simultaneously — a human lens and an systems lens — and bring them into focus together. Despite decades of really smart, committed people trying to do that in Western North America, our vision’s still blurry.

What might clear it up?

(If you want to learn more about salmon, by the way, I highly recommend browsing around over on the excellent Salmon Nation website.)

Creative Commons photo credit

Seeing Through Salmon is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 9:10 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

This article was written by Sanjay Khanna in March 2008. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

A small yet growing body of evidence suggests that how people think and feel is being influenced strongly by ecosystem transformation related to climate change and industry-related displacement from the land. These powerful stressors are occurring more frequently around the world.

A case in point: When researchers from the Centre for Rural and Remote Mental Health at the University of Newcastle in Australia conducted interviews in drought-affected communities in New South Wales in 2005, the responses suggested some of their subjects may have been suffering from a recently described psychological condition called solastalgia (pronounced so-la-stal-juh).

Solastalgia describes a palpable sense of dislocation and loss that people feel when they perceive changes to their local environment as harmful. It’s a neologism that Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher at the University of Newcastle’s School of Environmental and Life Sciences, created in 2003.

Albrecht’s work among communities distraught by black-coal strip mining in New South Wales’ Upper Hunter Region convinced him that the English language needed a new term to connect the experience of ecosystem loss to mental health concerns.

“The sense of a home landscape being violated [by strip mining-related environmental damage] seemed to have disturbed the region’s social ecology so much that the psychic or mental health of many people living in the zone of high impact was being affected,” he says.

Albrecht’s stunning insight? That there might be a wide variety of shifts in the health of an ecosystem—from subtle landscape changes related to global warming to desolate wastelands created by large-scale strip mining—that diminish people’s mental health.

In Eastern Australian communities, where the toll of a six-year-long drought has been devastating, interviews with farmers provided additional momentum for the solastalgia concept.

In one such interview, a female farmer poignantly described the loss of her garden oasis. “Our gardens have had to die,” she said, “because our house dam has been dry…. So it’s very depressing for a woman because a garden is an oasis out here with this dust…you know, to come home to a nice green lawn is just… that’s all gone, so you’ve got dust at your back door.”

While persistent drought and open-pit coal mining may be extreme cases, if the environmental degradation of the past hundred years is any indication, our contemporary lifestyles, built on a dwindling resource base, have failed to acknowledge how much the mental health of people and ecosystems is interrelated.

This may imply that the unrelenting media focus on weather-related and economic aspects of climate change does not adequately take into consideration the challenge of mitigating the psychological impact of global warming. How might we feel when the heat is relentless and our surrounding environment changes irrevocably? How might our mental health be affected?

In a recent Wired magazine article on Albrecht and the concept of solastalgia, “Global Mourning: How the next victim of climate change will be our minds,” writer Clive Thompson sensitively characterized as “global mourning” the potential impact of overwhelming environmental transformation caused by climate change. Thompson cogently summed up Albrecht’s view of what solastalgia might look like were it to become an epidemic of emotional and psychic instability causally linked to changing climates and ecosystems.

Albrecht also emphasizes that feelings of melancholia and homesickness have previously been recorded among Aboriginal peoples in the Americas and Australia who were forcibly moved from their home territories by U.S., Canadian and Australian governments in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Sanjay Khanna: You speak of psychoterratic and somaterratic illnesses. What are they?

Glenn Albrecht: Psychoterratic illness involves the psyche or mind and terra or earth. So a psychoterratic illness would be an earth-related mental illness, where both nostalgia and solastalgia are examples of people being made “mentally ill” by the severing of “healthy” links between themselves and their home or territory.

Somaterratic illness, on the other hand, involves soma or the body and relates to damage done to the human body, its physiology and/or genetics, as a result of the loss of ecosystem health by, for example, toxic pollution in any given area of land.

SK: You note on your blog that there are antecedents to solastalgia.

GA: Yes, David Rapport, a past professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, is a pioneer in the study of the health of natural ecosystems and their relationship with humans. In the 1970s, he described “ecosystem distress syndrome,” which was what happened when an ecosystem couldn’t restore its balance after an external disturbance.

Once I fully appreciated this concept, I realized there must be a human equivalent to ecosystem distress syndrome, that is, a home environment so profoundly disturbed that it affected the balance of well being or the mental health of people within their social ecology.

The interviews of affected people I conducted along with Nick Higginbotham and Linda Connor in strip-mined areas of the Upper Hunter Valley showed that people’s sense of place was being violated and that this was profoundly disturbing them. Their home environment was being desolated and it seemed to us that the vital link between ecosystem health and human health, both physical and mental, was being severed.

SK: Can you tell us a little bit more about the origins of solastalgia?

GA: Solastalgia’s Latin roots combine three ideas: The solace that one’s environment provides, the desolation caused by that environment’s degradation and the pain or distress that occurs inside a person as a result.

Solastalgia brings into English a much-needed word that links a mental state to a state of the biophysical environment. The need for new concepts in the face of what is happening under climate change has seen other cultures develop new terms that have affinities with solastalgia.

The Inuit, for example, have a new word, uggianaqtuq (pronounced OOG-gi-a-nak-took), which relates to climate change and has connotations of the weather as a once reliable and trusted friend that is now acting strangely or unpredictably. And the Portuguese use the word saudade to describe a feeling one has for a loved one who is absent or has disappeared. The upshot is that under the pressure of climate change, your preferred climate and ecosystem might well be thought of as a lover gone missing or turned bad.

SK: How might your research impact on psychiatry and the diagnosis of psychoterratic illnesses such as solastalgia?

GA: Alongside five other researchers, our four-person team co-wrote a summary of our research on the mental health impacts of mining and drought for psychological and psychiatric professionals. The paper, “Solastalgia: the distress caused by climate change,” was published in Australasian Psychiatry, a publication of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, in November 2007.

Our team has mused that people badly affected by solastalgia would benefit from a set of professionally developed diagnostic tools so that solastalgia could be listed as a condition that required diagnosis and professional attention.

We’re happy for other people to take that challenge up and there are some academic psychiatrists who are interested in exploring these ideas further. However, given that key aspects of solastalgia are existential, the traditions of environmental philosophy and medical psychiatry may not come together so harmoniously. The melancholia of solastalgia is not the same as clinical depression, but it may well be a precursor to serious psychic disturbance.

That said, it’s worth remembering that up until the mid-twentieth century, the medical profession viewed nostalgia as a diagnosable psycho-physiological illness in which, for example, soldiers fighting in foreign lands became so homesick and melancholic it could kill them.

Today psychiatrists would see the condition of rapid and unwelcome severing from home as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an outcome of an acute stressor such as warfare or a Hurricane Katrina.

Solastalgia on the other hand is most often the result of chronic environmental stress; it is the lived experience of gradually losing the solace a once stable home environment provided. It is therefore appropriate to diagnose solastalgia in the face of slow and insidious forces such as climate change or mining.

SK: Would you tell us a little bit about the transdisciplinary team that you participate on?

GA: Nick Higginbotham, a social psychologist colleague who specializes in epidemiology and health matters, is working to gather empirical data for our solastalgia research. He has developed a much-needed environmental distress scale (EDS) that teases out the specific environmental components of distress from all the other things that go on in a person’s life. We will be using this scale in the new AUS$430K grant the team has received from the Australian Research Council to extend our earlier work by addressing “the lived experience (ethnography) of climate change” among people in the Hunter Valley.

Linda Connor, an ethnographer and social and medical anthropologist, handles the ethnography or cultural experience of all this. So collectively we have empirical (Higginbotham), cultural (Connor) and philosophical (me) interpretations of health and climate change. Finally, Sonia Freeman, our research assistant, has co-authored a number of papers.

SK: What implications might the recent apology by Kevin Rudd, the new Prime Minister of Australia, to the “stolen generations” of Australian Aborigines have in relation to solastalgia?

GA: The apology by Kevin Rudd to the stolen generations is about seeking forgiveness for the government-sanctioned taking of Indigenous children from their families and from their home territories (their “country”) from 1909 until 1969. There have been profound mental and physical health impacts from this process and many of the remaining stolen generations are now ageing but with a 17-year shorter life expectancy on average than non-indigenous Australians. Those who are alive today may be experiencing genuine nostalgia for a once-sustainable past and solastalgia within contemporary pathological and depressed home environments.

SK: Do you see a relationship between the conquest of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, the state of environmental degradation and the experience of loss that we are seeing today? If so, what is that relationship from your perspective and research?

GA: The answer is, yes, there is a relationship between the two colonial cultures: the two continents were colonized only by the systematic dispossession of complex and formerly sustainable Indigenous societies.

Traditional Indigenous cultures in the Americas and Australasia displayed a profound appreciation of the relationship between human and ecosystem health, something global culture is trying to rediscover under the label of sustainability.

Remnant aboriginal cultures are still being pushed aside by the dominant global model of economic growth and progress. Even today, their chronic health problems are likely related to social and political issues that are connected to ongoing dispossession.

I’ve had recent firsthand experience of the lives of Indigenous people leading semi-traditional lives in Northern Australia to see the importance of the connections between human health and ecosystem health. In Arnhem Land, Aborigines who live on what are called “outstations” have been able to maintain much stronger and healthier links to their traditional land. Their physical and mental health status is, as a consequence, much better than those whose links to their own land have been severed and who now live in crowded, dysfunctional communities.

SK: Some of the solastalgia symptoms you describe are similar to the loss of cultural identity, including the loss of language and ancestral memory. Loss of place seems an extension of this new global experience of weakened cultural identities and Earth-based ethical moorings.

GA: I have written on this topic in a professional academic journal and expressed the idea of having an Earth-based ethical framework that could contribute to maximizing the creative potential of human cultural and technological complexity and diversity without destroying the foundational complexity and diversity of natural systems in the process.

Our history shows that some people and cultures have a tendency to create pathological ways of thinking, but if we want to support a life-affirming ethic in the twenty-first century, we are in need of reform and change.

SK: In the context of accelerating environmental change, what would you say to young people about the planet they are inheriting? What does sustainability mean in the context of the overwhelming pace of environmental and economic change that we’re seeing today?

GA: This is a tough one because the children of today face the double whammy of the escalating pace and scale of changes under the global forces of development and those of climate chaos. I’ve suggested to my own teenagers that what is happening is unacceptable ethically and practically and they should be in a state of advanced revolt about the whole deal.

From my perspective, supporting and maintaining the status quo is no longer a reasonable response to these big picture issues. At every point, we must challenge and refute this kind of thinking in a society that is clearly on a non-sustainable pathway.

Unfortunately, the lot in life of the youth today is to undo much of what has been done in the name of growth and progress in the last two hundred years. However, this does not mean a return to the past: As Herman Daly (the ecological economist) once said, you can have an economy that develops without growing.

On a personal level, I’m an optimistic, energetic philosopher and I believe that we must get our values more life orientated. I’m not willing to give up on encouraging change towards sustainability even in the face of what look like overwhelming negative forces.

The four-year grant recently awarded to our team will allow us to study the lived experience of climate change at a regional level. We’re happy that we’ll be able to start contributing data on how climate change is shifting culture, values and attitudes.

The next four years are critical. As a member of a research team, I believe that we’re right at the leading edge of change research and we are very committed to supporting the network of ecological and social relationships that promote human health. There’s hope in recognizing solastalgia and defeating it by creating ways to reconnect with our local environment and communities.

###

Sanjay Khanna is a writer and foresight researcher based in Vancouver, Canada. He can be reached at sk AT khannaresearch DOT com. His blog is at www.realisticsanctuary.com.

Photo by Paul Mathews

What Does Climate Change Do to Our Heads? is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 9:34 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


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on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

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This article was written by Alex Steffen in March 2008. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

I’ve written before about my belief that in times like these, optimism is a powerful political act. As I put it in the book,

Optimism is a political act.

Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. It is a long-standing political art to sow the seeds of mistrust between those you would rule over: as Machiavelli said, tyrants do not care if they are hated, so long as those under them do not love one another. Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular culture, but, in reality, cynicism in average people is the attitude exactly most likely to conform to the desires of the powerful – cynicism is obedience.

Optimism, by contrast, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary. Where no one believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe. Where no one believes in the possibility of action, apathy becomes an insurmountable obstacle to reform. But introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better solutions are available, and that a better future can be built, and you unleash the power of people to act out of their highest principles. Shared belief in a better future is the strongest glue there is: it creates the opportunity for us to love one another, and love is an explosive force in politics.

Great movements for social change always begin with statements of great optimism.

Recently, though, I’ve been getting asked a lot how it’s possible to remain optimistic when the news is so bad, and progress on problems like climate change or global poverty seems hopeless slow. These questions started me thinking about why the tone of coverage and debate about the big issues we face is so unrelentingly grim.

Some of that darkness comes, undoubtedly, from legitimate despair: from solastalgia about the loss of the natural world or from compassion for the horrible suffering of the millions whom our global economy has left behind. Some of it is the cynicism of disappointed idealists, folks who’ve seen so much of the underside of human nature that they’ve abandoned hope. Some is the narrative lure of collapse.

But I’ve come more and more to think that the particular dynamic we see in today’s media and political debates, in both North America and Europe, springs also from politics. That its political nature goes largely unrecognized, even by some of that politics’ fiercest partisans, may be merely a matter unexamined assumptions.

Here’s what I see that politics being:

1) An explicit statement that we are incapable of actually solving the planet’s most pressing problems, and that to consider doing so is “unrealistic.”

2) A mostly unstated assumption that the reason embracing bold solutions is unrealistic is because those solutions involve unbearable costs.

3) A rarely voiced belief that “realism” ought best to be defined as “in the interests of those doing well today,” and that “unbearable costs” ought best to be defined as “any meaningful change in circumstances whatsoever.”

4) A widely practiced stance that, therefore, expressions of concern and extremely modest, almost symbolic, small steps and half measures are the appropriate course of action.

Though often combined with the politics of fear, this political stance might better be thought of as “the politics of impossibility.” (It’s as if Eeyore were running the public debate.)

Consider, instead, the politics of optimism:

1) That realism ought best to be defined as “within our capacity” and “necessary.”

2) That we have the capacity to create and deploy solutions to the world’s biggest problems, and the magnitude of the consequences of failure (both for ourselves and generations to come) demands that we act immediately.

3) That it is possible to act in such a way that the prospects of most people on the planet are improved. While certain costs will be incurred, the returns on those investments will be quite attractive, not only in ecological stability, international security and human well-being, but in terms of plain old economic prosperity. These solutions will make the future better than the present for the almost everyone, and greatly improve the lots of our children and grandchildren.

4) Therefore, defining our win scenarios, imagining the kind of future we want to create, describing the solutions that will make building that future possible, and publicly committing ourselves to success are the appropriate course of action.

Nothing about the politics of optimism needs to be naive. We can understand that people are fallible, mostly self-motivated and sometimes even mistaken about what’s in their own best interests. We can stress the importance of informed decision-making, demand rigor and note uncertainty. We can recognize the massive differentials in power and wealth in our society and be clear-headed about the difficulty of opposing those whose power and wealth is tied to planetary destruction. We can anticipate setbacks and failures, disappointments and betrayals. We can expect corruption and demand transparency. We can freely admit the profound difficulty of the work yet to be done, even the possibility of total failure.

We can freely acknowledge the tremendous struggle ahead of us, and yet choose to remain decidedly optimistic, and to work from a fundamental belief in the possibilities of the future. When we do that, we liberate ourselves from some of the burden of despair and powerlessness we’ve all been saddled with at the dawn of the 21st Century.

But when we do it in public — when we stand up and refuse to accept the idea that failure is preordained and action is unrealistic — we strike right down to the heart of the political conflict we really face: the conflict between our party of the future and their party of the past.

I’m more and more convinced that incrementalism in the absence of committed vision almost always serves the politics of impossibility. Paradoxically, a lot of old school activism does as well. The impossibility lobby is entirely OK with Greenpeace or whoever doing direct action to highlight the latest dire predictions about the ruin of the Earth, because they’ve mostly moved on from debating reality to defining response. They’re OK with people thinking the crisis is downright apocalyptic, so long as those same people don’t think there’s really anything we can do differently.

That’s why our best hope lies in a fighting optimism, an optimism that’s willing to confront the impossibility lobby and its messengers and make very clear that a feeble, halting response is not the rational or responsible response, but a corrupt and morally bankrupt response.

Every time we explain how a better future might be built, we redraw the boundaries of the possible. We show that the realm of choice available to us is actually quite large, and even includes paths that might, for instance, harm the interests of rich old guys who own big chunks of coal companies or the petrochemical industry but improve the prospects of pretty much everyone else.

We need to accelerate innovation and magnify vision. We need to school ourselves in the possible, share ideas, imagine outcomes, weigh options. We need to figure out how best to transform the systems we’ve built. I definitely don’t have the answers personally, but Worldchanging aims to be a useful tool for people undertaking that exploration.

Ultimately, though, we need something more than better answers. We need millions of people who are willing to teach the teachable, comfort the disheartened and confront the scoundrels. We need to take our politics public and take on the whole culture of cynical defeatism. On some days, I think we need an optimism uprising.

The Politics of Optimism is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 9:56 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment