b l a s t u l a reblog++

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.

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

Originally
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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

Posted under reblog environment

Computers and cacti go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

Bill McKibben once lamented the unsexiness of waste heat recovery, an energy efficiency technique that languishes in obscurity despite its potentially huge environmental benefits. Perhaps this story will capture the public imagination: in a move that will save money and cut carbon emissions, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana has begun housing some of its computer servers in the nearby “Arizona Desert Dome,” a conservatory for cacti and other desert plants.

Computer servers create a lot of waste heat — so much so that keeping them cool is a major cost driver and engineering challenge for data centers. Particularly in coal-fired Indiana, air conditioning for data centers equates to a lot of carbon emissions.

Cacti, on the other hand, need a lot of heat, particularly in the winter, when South Bend is blanketed in snow.

You can see where this is going. Housing servers in the desert dome, where air currents can carry away their waste heat, is expected to save the university about $100,000 in cooling costs. Meanwhile, the city will save some of the $70,000 it spends each year to keep the conservatory warm. Given that the conservatory was cut out of the city’s 2010 budget altogether, such steps toward self-sufficiency are necessary to ensure its continued existence.

And here’s some recycled energy news with perhaps wider impact: Vinod Khosla is backing a company that creates solar energy systems designed to harness the waste heat from traditional solar photovoltaic panels.

Details on the technology are scarce. It sounds a bit like a solar panel smooshed together with a solar hot water heater — presumably alongside some clever engineering to make the smooshing as efficient as possible. The company claims to be able to double the energy capture of today’s solar photovoltaics, which, if true, would represent an an enormous leap forward for rooftop systems.

Recycled waste heat presents one of the biggest, cheapest opportunities for slashing our carbon budget. It looks like the idea is starting to get its day in the sun.

Adam Stein is a co-founder of TerraPass, where this post originally appeared. He writes on issues related to carbon, climate change, policy, and conservation.

Photo credit: University of Notre Dame

.

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(Posted by Adam Stein in Columns at 9:00 AM)

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by Adam Stein


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on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

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

Posted under reblog environment, reblog innovation

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.

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

Originally
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by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

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

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

This is interesting:

In an analysis of the potential impacts of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles projected for 2020 and 2030 in 13 regions of the United States, ORNL researchers explored their potential effect on electricity demand, supply, infrastructure, prices and associated emission levels. Electricity requirements for hybrids used a projection of 25 percent market penetration of hybrid vehicles by 2020 including a mixture of sedans and sport utility vehicles. Several scenarios were run for each region for the years 2020 and 2030 and the times of 5 p.m. or 10:00 p.m., in addition to other variables.

The report found that the need for added generation would be most critical by 2030, when hybrids have been on the market for some time and become a larger percentage of the automobiles Americans drive. In the worst-case scenario—if all hybrid owners charged their vehicles at 5 p.m., at six kilowatts of power—up to 160 large power plants would be needed nationwide to supply the extra electricity, and the demand would reduce the reserve power margins for a particular region’s system.

The best-case scenario occurs when vehicles are plugged in after 10 p.m., when the electric load on the system is at a minimum and the wholesale price for energy is least expensive. Depending on the power demand per household, charging vehicles after 10 p.m. would require, at lower demand levels, no additional power generation or, in higher-demand projections, just eight additional power plants nationwide.

Of course, there’s a mechanism for helping people plug their cars in at the right time: pricing energy in response to demand, through miracle smart grid technologies that will be available sometime in the very near future like, well, yesterday.

Of course, even the coolest of hybrids plugged into the smartest of grids won’t save our bacon if we don’t change the sources of our energy and the design of our communities.

Vehicle-to-Grid Plug-In Hybrids, for Free 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 9:26 AM)

Originally
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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, reblog innovation

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


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 Joel Makower in March 2008. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

The promise of the green economy and the clean-tech revolution is that they will bring a new wave of job opportunities — productive and respectable jobs at every part of the economic spectrum, from line workers to senior managers. Nonprofit groups like the Apollo Alliance have made this part of their raison d’etre.  A steady drumbeat of studies since the late 1990s has told us that burgeoning markets for solar, wind, clean transportation, and other technologies would represent the next big wave of job creation. Cities and states have been positioning to become clean-tech hubs, eyeing the workforce development potential. Organizations representing low-income populations have been viewing the green economy as an entry point for those near the bottom of the economic ladder.

So, now that clean technology and the greening of business seem to be in full swing, where are all the jobs? So far, they’re nowhere in sight — at least not in any appreciable numbers.

The reasons are many and varied. Most of the big companies in the clean-energy business — the BPs, GE, and PG&E’s of the world — don’t seem to be going on hiring sprees, typically creating clean-tech business units from within. So, too, with much of the green business activity — it has to do with efficiency, with doing more with the same or fewer resources, and that includes human resources. Few of the start-ups are undergoing massive hiring, and when they do, they’re more often in the market for engineers and other skilled professionals. And the jobs that are being created are disperse, geographically, meaning that there are few robust Silicon Valley-like clean-tech clusters, where companies congregate and jobs proliferate.

Despite such obstacles, there seems to be new energy building behind the notion of a Big Green Job Machine. Last week in Pittsburgh, for example, a Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference, organized by the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers union, drew more than 900 people from business, government, nonprofits, academe, and labor unions to share strategies for increasing job opportunities in the environmental and clean-tech sectors.

There were about 8 million green jobs in the U.S. in industries that attracted $148 million in investment in 2007, up 60 percent from the year before, Lois Quam, managing director of alternative investments at Piper Jaffray, told the conference. I haven’t yet seen the research on which this was based, but I’m intrigued. As I noted in our State of Green Business report, tracking green job creation has been difficult. One reason is that green jobs, at least by my definition, aren’t often identified as such, and can be found throughout companies of all sizes and sectors. Does a procurement manager — whose job entails implementing her company’s environmentally preferable procurement mandate, thereby seeking out and purchasing millions of dollars a year of recycled, energy-efficient, and other green products — count as a "green job"? What about the loading dock laborer whose job it is to make sure all packaging materials are recycled? Or the facility manager working to replace maintenance staples with green cleaning products? Are these counted among the "green jobs"? Possibly, but I doubt it.

Fact is, there’s no good definition of "green job." Consider this report, released last week, by Raquel Rivera Pinderhughes, professor of urban studies at San Francisco State University. Titled Green Collar Jobs: An Analysis of the Capacity of Green Businesses to Provide High Quality Jobs for Men and Women with Barriers to Employment (Download - pdf), it focuses on opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to Pinderhughes,

Green collar jobs are blue collar jobs in green businesses — that is, manual labor jobs in businesses whose products and services directly improve environmental quality. . . . What unites these jobs is that all of them are associated with manual labor work that directly improves environmental quality.

Pinderhughes lists 22 types of green collar jobs, from food production (using organic and/or sustainably grown agricultural products) to furniture making (from environmentally certified and recycled wood), from parks and open space (maintenance and expansion) to printing (with non-toxic inks and dyes and recycled papers). It’s a good list, but it doesn’t seem to cover all that’s out there.

Another report, Green-Collar Jobs in America’s Cities (download - pdf), released for the Pittsburgh event, lays out steps for creating comprehensive green-collar job strategies at the local level. It also profiles some of the great work already underway around the country. The guide — published by Green For All, the Apollo Alliance, the Center for American Progress, and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy — focuses on local green jobs in clean energy industries: energy efficiency, renewable energy, alternative transportation, and low-carbon fuels.

Yet another new report, Greener Pathways, from the same consortium, profiles some of the best examples in the U.S. where work is underway to develop green jobs, including green construction career development in California, Iowa’s biofuels job-training bonds, wind technician training in Oregon; and Pennsylvania’s green re-industrialization. 

It’s all very encouraging, but it feels like there’s one key group that’s not yet at the table: companies. A look at the impressive speaker roster for the Pittsburgh event reveals only eight of 86 speakers from the private sector — and only three large companies: BP, Gamesa, and Johnson Controls.

Why aren’t bigger companies more engaged? Do they not foresee a need for talent in this arena? Are their labor pools overflowing? Or are they simply not tuned in to the opportunity? Any ideas?

For now, groups like the Apollo Alliance and Green for All will have to go it alone, and they have their work cut out for them, helping to ensure, in the words of Green for All founder and president, Van Jones, that "the clean-tech wave lifts all boats." It won’t be easy, especially without the active participation of companies in the clean and green sector.

As Jones told me recently: "The next set of challenges have to do with going from rhetoric to reality."

Where Are All the Clean, Green Jobs? 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 9:48 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

Back in January, nGenera colleague Derek penned an interesting post on the Eco-Patent Commons, a consortium of large private sector organizations each of whom pledged to release a portfolio of dozens of environmentally focused patents to the public domain. As many of these patents have been lying dormant in the R&D labs of these companies, releasing them to the public as a means of seeing whether outside experts might be able to do something with them carries little risk. But it does mark a departure from the usual process of monetizing unused IP/patents. In fact, given the thrust towards green-tech and environmental sustainability you might question why you’d give up valuable IP in this space, and subsequently one might question the quality/value of these now available patents.

That notwithstanding, the good folks at IBM (one of the founders of the consortium) sent us through a little update on the project that I thought was worth mentioning here:

“I wanted to give you a heads up that later today we will announce that Xerox, DuPont and Bosch have joined the Eco-Patent Commons, a first-of-its-kind business effort to help the environment by pledging environmentally-beneficial patents to the public domain. The newly-pledged patents include:

-A Xerox technology that significantly reduces the time and cost of removing hazardous waste from water and soil;

-A technology developed by DuPont that converts certain non-recyclable plastics into beneficial fertilizer;

-Automotive technologies from Bosch that help lower fuel consumption, reduce emissions, or convert waste heat from vehicles into useful energy;

-Technologies developed by founding member Sony that focus on the recycling of optical discs.

The new pledges more than double the number of environmentally-friendly patents available to the public. They are available on a dedicated Web site hosted by the WBCSD (http://www.wbcsd.org/web/epc). Many of the original patent holders have been contacted directly about their patents and we know of at least three patents that have already been used by others since the January launch of the Commons.”

Now regardless of my pessimism around the quality of these patents, the fact that they’re being made available is a significant depature from the usual monetization route and acts as a rather astute form of CSR. Moreover, for developing country research labs this offers a pretty amazing short-cut route to potentially valuable technologies and thus might mean that they gain the ability to produce rather than purchase these new tools. But perhaps where this model is most valuable is the potential that other industries might follow suit….. is anyone in health care and pharma listening?

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Dan Herman


reBlogged

on Sep 19, 2008, 9:07PM

Originally by Dan Herman from Wikinomics on September 19, 2008, 11:07pm

Posted under reblog environment, reblog wikinomics

This article was written by Mara Hvistendahl in October 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Western China is turning into a massive dust bowl. Desertification now affects fully one-third of the world’s population — and what’s happening in Western China represents the largest conversion of productive land to desert anywhere in the world, consuming over one million acres of land each year. The dust isn’t confined to the west: every spring, massive sandstorms roar through Beijing, blanketing the city with tons of dust.

The October issue of the Canadian magazine The Walrus has an excellent feature by Patrick Alleyn on efforts to combat desertification in China (subscription-only, but 10-day trials are available). Benoit Aquin’s startling photos, which accompany the article, have been circulating on Chinese bulletin boards.

In China, desertification is exacerbated by overgrazing by sheep and other animals. As Chinese make more money, they are eating greater quantities of meat; by last year, herd numbers had increased fourfold over 1960s levels. The Chinese government has responded by imposing grazing bans and relocating rural residents to settlements that are effectively ecological refugee camps.

Alleyn describes one of these villages in Ningxia autonomous region. Herders reportedly vie for the right to be sent there, but once at the village, they sit around, live off subsidies, and wait. I’ve visited similar villages in Qinghai province; Tibetan nomads are being relocated to these villages, also in the name of preventing overgrazing, which are similarly bleak to the ones in Ningxia (think rural housing projects). One Ningxia refugee says she hopes to reclaim her land within five years. In greater Tibet, nomads may never get that chance. They are offered more compensation if they agree to hand over their land titles.

What’s a better solution? Tree-planting is a great approach - and has the added benefit of mitigating climate change, the root cause of desertification. But it doesn’t resolve the question of what to do with herders. Alleyn points to more holistic approaches:

Many of the stakeholders involved in the fight against desertification in China, both foreign and Chinese, are calling for investment in a more promising strategy: conservation agriculture, designed around water-saving irrigation systems, more suitable farming and grazing practices, and the inclusion of farmers in the decision-making process.

“China must invest more in its number one resource: its farmers and herders,” advises Brant Kirychuk, manager of a project led by Canada’s department of agriculture in the arid northern provinces of China. “They need to be guided and then take part in decisions.” Between 2000 and 2009, the Canadian government has committed $23.5 million to a sustainable agriculture plan aimed at rejuvenating China’s arid lands. Canadian experts are on hand with Chinese specialists as well as with farmers and herders to share a process that was developed to save the Canadian prairies from the 1930s dust bowl. “In Canada, thirty years were necessary to recover,” Kirychuk says.

There are promising Chinese projects out there as well. Botanist Gaoming Jiang (who also advocates organic farming as a solution for China’s food safety woes) is working closely with locals in Inner Mongolia, persuading them to grow their own feed rather than setting animals out to pasture — and convincing shepherds that they can actually earn more money by cutting back on sheep and goat herds.

China needs more sustainable programs like these, efforts that take the dust bowl’s inhabitants into account.

Image: Seedlings destined for a Chinese reforestation project. Credit: flickr/autan

Revitalizing China’s Dust Bowl 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 11:25 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 Worldchanging Canada writer Karl Schroeder in August 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

If our civilization requires the resource equivalent of three earths to be sustainable, then we have to stop drawing on ecosystem services that are overstretched. In fact, maybe we should start acting like there are no ecosystem services available to us at all.

What’s an ecosystem service? Here’s Wikipedia’s definition:

Ecosystem services are distinct from other ecosystem products and functions because there is human demand for these natural assets. Services can be subdivided into five categories: provisioning such as the production of food and water; regulating, such as the control of climate and disease; supporting, such as nutrient cycles and crop pollination; cultural, such as spiritual and recreational benefits; and preserving, which includes guarding against uncertainty through the maintenance of diversity.

Economically, ecosystem services provide us with assets that we would otherwise have to produce ourselves. The simplest example is water treatment, which is done for free by our aquifers. It’s possible to directly measure the equivalent cost of a water treatment plant for a given set of wetlands or aquifer, which means you can exactly quantify the value of many ecosystem services. Pollination is another hugely important ecosystem service, which is provided largely for free by bees.

There’s a lot of discussion about ecosystem services these days, and about our ecological footprint. The usual line is this: we’re using three earths worth of resources, so we have to find a way to cut back or we’re all sunk. This is true, but as I’ve pointed out before, there’s a dramatic difference in terms of motivating people, between framing something as a positive, or as a negative. The “three earths” metaphor is good for scaring people, but it’s a negative: it evokes images of austerity and sacrifice. If we want to motivate people to change things, it’s always better to frame the change in terms of opportunity.

Charles Stross recently yanked the collective chains of the space advocacy movement with a little article entitled “The High Frontier, Redux.” In this article he questions the practicality, and ultimately the value, of human colonization of other worlds. To make the point that there’s “no there there” when it comes to space colonization, Charlie quotes Bruce Sterling:

I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.

…And this is where I break ranks with Charlie and Bruce. Because the assumption both of them are making is that the only places worth settling are those that provide us with good ecosystem services. Quite apart from being a spectacularly lazy point of view, this stance takes for granted that alternatives to the Gobi desert (or Mars) are still available to us. But as the “three earths” metaphor makes clear, they aren’t. In fact, if you ask where we should have been building our cities over the last century or so, the answer is in the Gobi desert, and the Sahara, and the barest and emptiest rocky plains we could find. (Even those have thriving ecosystems, of course.)

We should have been colonizing Earth as though it were a planet with no ecosystem resources to exploit.

Look at the difference between what we do when we settle a new area on Earth, compared to what we’d do on a planet like Mars. On Earth we’d take advantage of the free air and water, ready-made soils provided by local fauna, pollination provided by the local bees, all to minimize the costs of building and maintaining our colonies. This process is documented expertly by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel; he points out that the conquest of the Americas was really the invasion of one ecosystem by another, rather than a simple matter of moving human populations. North America is the greatest success story of European expansionism because its ecology was most similar to that of Europe, more than for any political or social factors.

On Mars most of those services are unavailable. Mars is the most attractive local planet precisely because it does have some services, most notably a 24 (and-a-half) hour day, potentially fertile soil, and ready water from underground sources. Still, that’s not much compared with even the Gobi desert. Our assumption on landing there has to be that the 24-hour day is about the only service we’re going to get. Everything else–from air to agricultural production–has to be provided by us.

If we knew how to live on Mars, we’d know how to reduce our footprint on Earth. Space colonization is the Rosetta stone for earthly sustainability because it’s entirely about living in the absence of ecosystem services. The Moon, Mars and the asteroids are a great experimental laboratory that we’re ignoring at our own peril.

Back to the idea of framing something as a positive rather than a negative: we have the historic opportunity to colonize planet Earth, and do the same to our neighbouring planets at the same time. The effort to do one may necessarily involve the other. And doing this no longer has to be reactive, but can be a positive goal for our whole civilization.

If you read my Rewilding Canada entry, you might have figured out that I’m saying exactly the same thing here as I did there; I’m just using slightly different language. The ability to colonize other planets is the ability to rewild our ecosystems–to reforest our plains and mountains, and to restock our oceans. A mature vertical farming technology is precisely the technology needed to do agriculture on Mars, for instance. Grey-water and black-water recycling are necessary in exactly the same ways. Ditto for energy production and conservation.

I’m not suggesting that we all end up walking around our own planet in space suits–but I am suggesting that our industries and agriculture will ultimately need to do the equivalent. I don’t expect Buckminster Fuller’s domed cities to sprout up everywhere. I do think that chemical industries have to be closed-loop, taking nothing from the ecosystem and putting nothing into it. It would be fine for us to continue using coal and oil into the indefinite future, provided none of their byproducts ever enter the ecosystem. That would be equivalent to running industry under a dome.

Colonizing planet Earth–and therefore the rest of the solar system–is a recipe for a future of growth and opportunity that meets the exact same goals as programmes that emphasize austerity and conservation.

We don’t want restraint. We don’t want austerity. We want unlimited growth–just not at the expense of this glorious planet we live on. And we can have that, provided we start by reframing what we think of now as a crisis as, instead, an opportunity.

Colonizing Planet Earth 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 9:58 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 August 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

If we want to build a bright green future, we need to know the actual nature of the problems we face. In terms of climate change, this may be less simple than some might have us believe. In the past few weeks, I’ve come across three concepts that illuminate unexpected angles of the climate crisis (and thus perhaps open the way to unexpected thinking about solutions).

The first is the idea that the emissions for which we’re responsible — our personal carbon footprint, say, or our city’s progress towards climate neutrality — may not tell the whole story. That’s because globalization has tended to move heavy polluting industries offshore, away from Europe and North America, and to places like China and Brazil. We still consume the lion’s share of the goods these nations manufacture, but the carbon is emitted there, not here, while our exports are largely things — like blockbuster films and financial services — whose carbon footprints are comparatively small. As one wag says

If Britain meets its Kyoto target in 2012 (and it may well do), it won’t be because British consumers have made sacrifices to save the planet; it will be because we, like other Western nations, have exported a sizeable proportion of our carbon emissions to China.

Call it offshoring emissions. Or the virtual carbon trade, like the virtual water trade:

When we manufacture goods, we embed energy in them: that is, their existance means we have already spent a certain amount of energy, no matter what we then do with them. In a similar way, when we grow crops we are in a sense embedding water within them. If a kilo of wheat takes a thousand liters of water to grow from sowing to harvest, we can, seen from a certain light, think of that kilo of wheat as containing 1,000 liters of water. When we consider how much water is embedded in the food we transport around the planet, it turns out that there is a massive trade in virtual water. The wetter regions of the world every year ship vast amounts of embedded water to the drier parts of the planet.

In a similar way, the fact that we’ve offshored our emissions by having our consumer goods manufactured elsewhere doesn’t remove what we might think of as the embedded emissions from the carbon footprints of our lives.

Emissions for which we bear hidden responsibility are obscured not just by distance but by time as well. Those of us in the Global North are wealthy today because our ancestors did the things — like burning whole mountain-sides worth of coal, clear-cutting the vast majority of our forests and building an automotive culture — that are causing the climate change we’re already experiencing.

Historic carbon demands attention. Historic carbon — the carbon already emitted, often long ago, not the carbon being produced today — has filled our atmosphere with the current concentration of roughly 383 ppm of CO2. Over the last century, the United States produced over 30% of all the CO2 emitted worldwide (because of our meat-focused diets, our share of all emissions would actually be higher). Our wealth, then, is a form of historically embedded carbon.

The implications here can get a little staggering. For one thing, it means that even if we’ve greened our lifestyles — eating our veggies, driving our hybrids, lighting our rooms with CFLs — these lifestyles are still made possible by using vast stores of embedded carbon. Everything around us is like a landscape of frozen emissions.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t reduce our current emissions. Quite the opposite. Historic carbon emissions burden us with a further ethical obligation. We’ve already used far more than our share of the planet’s ability to absorb pollution. Therefore, we need to move far farther and far faster than those in other countries whose lives are impoverished in part because their nations have been historical light-footed, when it comes to carbon. (There is another benefit of moving quickly, which is that the faster we create better alternatives, the more quickly those alternatives will be available for use in newly-developing countries. This is a win-win for everyone.)

This historical imbalance is why some in the Global South like to call efforts to create a global carbon trading system “imperialism.” There is some legitimacy to their critiques, though many then go on to make claims about climate change that are just stupid… but that’s a matter for another column.

Here let me just end with this: the real imperialism in this situation is not primarily geographic. It is temporal. Unbalancing the atmosphere, creating catastrophic effects, the worst of which will not be felt for decades and then may have to be endured for centuries, is a crime against the future. We are taking from our grandchildren and their grandchildren the temperate, hospitable climate they would otherwise enjoy, and leaving in its place a climate full of droughts, disasters and suffering — and we’re doing it for our own short-term benefit.

This, then, is the real climate imperialism.

Offshoring Emissions, Historical Carbon and Climate Imperialism 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 10:18 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

Posted under reblog environment