Political Science

The Bush administration's chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality loves to edit government documents on climate science before they are released to the public. The kind of editing he does modifies words like "uncertainty" with "significant and fundamental" and substitutes "may" where "is" once resided. It's an exercise that gives new meaning to the words political science. Where did Philip Cooney, the man in question, learn to edit like that? In his former job as a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute. Generations to come will have him to thank for brightening up the language that predicted the demise of their world through global warming.

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Am I missing something?

The plan in Japan according to this article in the Times Online is to raise giant, fast-growing seaweed in the ocean to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then convert the seaweed to a biofuel that can be burned. Such a scheme would supposedly be carbon dioxide neutral since it would release no more carbon dioxide into the air than the seaweed had already absorbed. I don't see how that would do anything to fight global warming unless this biofuel energy takes the place of energy currently generated by fossil fuels. Besides this, the processing of the seaweed involves "superheated steam." Where are they getting the energy to create the steam? From fossil fuels? How will they tend and harvest the seaweed? In boats run on diesel fuel?

My point is that it pays to look at the entire process. Both the reporter and the researcher interviewed seem to be confused, and we can't afford that kind of confusion when it comes to evaluating alternative energy sources.

(Via Energy Bulletin.)

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Can we move from clueless to concerned?

James Howard Kunstler is out storming the nation hawking his new book, The Long Emergency, a tale of post peak oil woe. His favorite word on the tour seems to be "clueless." My father called me to tell me about an interview with Kunstler on C-SPAN's Book TV. The word "clueless" kept popping out of the receiver. And, that is the theme of Kunstler's latest blog entry, "Still Clueless." In the Book TV interview, Kunstler indicated that The Long Emergency is already in its third printing after being released only a few weeks ago. Can James Howard Kunstler somehow transform the American nation from one that is clueless into one that is concerned?

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"Climate surprises are to be expected"

"The Discovery of Rapid Climate Change," an article archived on the Physics Today site, takes you through a succinct history of how scientists came to realize that climate change can, in fact, proceed rapidly, that is, within a decade or two. As the article points out, the evidence for such rapid changes has been long available, and its meaning has been correctly interpreted by many scientists. But, it took a particular kind of evidence to bring about a paradigm shift among climatologists. Because so much of the work of climatologists rests on the notion that climate changes take place over long periods, at least centuries and more likely millennia, much of the work available today may be underestimating the possibility of rapid climate change. Thus, as one government report rather understatedly concludes, "climate surprises are to be expected."

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Peak oil solutions: Is simpler better?

Is complexity bad for us? Is simpler better?

Joseph Tainter first posited in his book, "The Collapse of Complex Societies," that complex societies most frequently attempt to solve their problems by increasing their complexity. This usually requires the input of additional energy from people or fuel sources or both. This strategy may be a good one when returns from complexity are high. But, such a strategy may also subject a society to collapse. Returns tend to diminish as complexity increases. Ultimately, returns go negative. In short, more complexity isn't necessarily better.

For Tainter there are many reasons to believe that contemporary civilization has reached the point of diminishing returns from complexity. If he is correct, this calls into question proposals for technical fixes for our energy problems since by definition those fixes will increase complexity in an energy-starved world. Will solar platforms in space or a vastly increased number of nuclear power plants lead to a more stable, sustainable society? There are many ecological reasons to doubt this in the long run. But there are historical reasons to believe that these things might not even work in the short run, say, the next several decades. Increased complexity may result in less resiliency in our current world system making it vulnerable to novel or persistent shocks. Terrorist attacks on infrastructure and proposals to militarize space are just two that relate to the examples given above.

The alternative would be to simplify our systems. This may necessarily lead to a lower standard of living and to decentralized forms of social, political and economic organization. That will be hard to sell to a population accustomed to having giant international corporations and central governments organize large parts of their lives. These same corporations and governments also propagandize their customers and citizens into believing that material wealth is the only true wealth. Even harder will be breaking through a belief in the magic of technology. Hidden from most people is the fact that technology has its greatest effect at low levels of complexity; new technologies may fail to deliver the promised results when societies have become too complex.

Tainter likes to say that resource depletion is not the direct cause of societal collapse. It is the inability of social and political institutions to adapt to resource depletion that leads to collapse. As we approach the peak in world oil production--whether now or sometime a decade or two down the road--we will certainly test whether one more round of technical fixes will work. Those cheering for technical fixes will likely include environmentally minded people who want to believe that "green" energy and ultralight hypercars will allow us to continue to live the way we do now by using sources of energy and methods of efficiency that we haven't exploited to date.

If the technical fixes fail us and we have made no plans for a less complex and thus lower energy future, we may be faced with a hard and devastating collapse--one that might have been mitigated by a more skeptical response to promises of technological deliverance.

What a pity it will be if the first civilization to publish a thoroughgoing analysis of the dynamics of collapse chooses to ignore that analysis altogether.

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Bad education: Are we teaching our young people to be ecological illiterates?

Environmental educator David Orr makes the case in a 1991 commencement address that the typical college graduate knows nothing about ecological principles. Quite the opposite. What that graduate has learned to do is to wreak more havoc on the planet while calling it by pretty names that add up to something named "success." Perhaps most jarring is Orr's assertion that ignorance is not a solvable problem. More knowledge is not more wisdom. And with any knowledge gained--he uses the example of the discovery of chlorofluorocarbons--some is also lost: No one bothered to ask the ultimate destination of these gasses which turned out to be the ozone layer.

He offers instead six principles for a proper education:

1. All education is environmental education.
2. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one's person.
3. Knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world.
4. We cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities.
5. The importance of "minute particulars" and the power of examples over words.
6. The way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses.

Can any college or university say it is teaching using these principles today?

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Europe isn't freezing over anytime soon

Thanks again to RealClimate, a blog run by climate scientists, for giving us excellent if somewhat complex information about recent reports concerning the slowing of the Gulf Stream and the possible effect of that slowing on European climate. As the writer and subsequent commenters explain there are several things which contribute to the warming northern Europe including the shape of the jet stream and the movement of warm surface waters toward the region. The Gulf Stream is technically only part of a larger set of heat transporting currents and the one alluded to in the recent Times of London story is actually the North Atlantic Drift.

The RealClimate piece explains how the currents work and that they show significant variations in strength from decade to decade. While there is precedent in the geologic record for short-term dramatic slowdowns and even stoppages, that is not what is now being observed. It appears to be a gradual process that may take a long time, perhaps a century. Nevertheless, the author warns, the situation bears careful watching since the data available is difficult to gather in the icy climes of Greenland and its associated seas and conditions could change for unforeseen reasons.

The situation is a little less alarming than the reporting would make it seem. On the other hand, the slowing noticed so far is occurring sooner than expected. The trick will be to establish whether this is a normal variation or the beginning of a breakdown in the heat-transporting currents.

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Clueless in California

The Unplanner, a planning official for a county in central California, has for weeks been preparing us for the moment when he would broach the subject of limits on energy supplies to his boss. What followed when he did should scare everyone. If planning departments throughout the United States are this clueless about the energy challenges we face and remain so, we will walk right off the edge of the energy cliff without warning.

Can anyone make a dent in the planning establishment so that it will at least consider the uncertainties we face in the area of energy? If so, can it be done in time?

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What's the big deal about biodiversity?

When most people think of biodiversity they think of endangered species that have been ridiculed in the media for holding up development projects or blocking logging or mining ventures. If that's all biodiversity meant, then we would have little to worry about. So poorly is the concept understood in the media that we get bland, almost meaningless journalism about something that is central to our continued existence as a species. Even the experts don't seem to get it saying that we should aim at "slowing" the loss of biodiversity.

What does biodiversity do for us? It cleans the air and the water and moderates the climate. It provides myriad products for medicinal uses. It is essential for the pollination and thus proper growth of many food crops we depend on. It essential for soil fertility. The Union of Concerned Scientists has a basic primer with additional links that will give you a good start in understanding this idea.

So, next time somebody starts talking or writing about biodiversity, don't let your eyes glaze over. Think instead, "My life is on the line here and so is the life of everything else on the planet!"

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Hurtling toward the Stone Age in style

Our fossil fuels will run out some day, even if that day isn't soon. Then, the only way we will be able to keep many of our modern conveniences is to run the world on renewable sources of energy. Wind power is currently the most viable candidate in the renewable energy quiver. That may account for why it is now the target of the fossil fuel industry. Two U. S. senators, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and John Warner of Virginia, have introduced legislation that would end federal wind power tax credits and would prohibit or allow vetoes over the siting of wind farms in most of the prime wind areas of the United States.

Their supposed concern is aesthetics. It's a truism that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps they are in touch with the inner beauty of the coal-fired power plants that will have to be built instead and the coal from moutaintop removal that will supply them.

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