So, on to the next of those three precepts: vegetarianism, or the huge carbon cost of eating meat. From what I have seen, this is too often ignored in discussions about solutions to the global warming crisis, for whatever reasons — too personal, too threatening? Or, more cynically, because of the influence of Big Agriculture — or that there is little profit to be made from a wholesale transition to giving up meat (as opposed to, for instance, pushing "green" products like electric cars or solar panels).
When I first began looking up "personal carbon footprint" calculators a few years back, they almost completely ignored the issue of diet, focusing exclusively on how much you drive, what kind of energy you use in your home, how efficient your appliances are, etc. The Sierra Club (as recently as 2008), in its listing of things you can do to lessen your carbon footprint, included small actions such as hanging your clothes out to dry, but did not include eating less (or no) meat. Until pretty recently, Al Gore had never so much as mentioned the environmental impact of meat (according to Ben Adler). I heard only last month that Gore has now adopted a vegan diet (about time, I'd say); and when I looked again at carbon calculators, I found some that were much improved, taking vegan diets and local food into account — but still diet is given very little attention considering the outsized impact it could have on the crisis.
Whatever the reason for neglect in most discourse, switching to a vegetarian/vegan diet is surely the single most effective thing any individual can do to lower demand for fossil fuels and decrease GHG emissions — and some experts believe that a massive reversion to vegetarianism, coupled with re-forestation of lands now devoted to livestock, is our only hope of being able to drastically reduce emissions as rapidly as necessary in our constantly-worsening emergency.
More on that later; first — meat is essentially grain, water, and land, greatly concentrated. Here are a few specifics:
1. Grain: I have often read arguments that it is cereal monocrops — with their profligate use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers — that are most intensively contributing to environmental degradation. Those who point this out often argue that people should stop eating bread and pasta, not meat. This completely ignores the huge proportions of cereal crops that are fed directly to livestock — according to the World Bank, 65% of world corn production is used for animal feed, with only 15% used for feeding humans. In the US the numbers are even more striking: about 80% of the corn crop goes to feed livestock, and 98% of soybean meal is destined to feed animals, not human tofu-eaters! Meat is essentially grain, greatly concentrated. Estimates vary, but even for chicken (the least carbon-intensive meat) it takes about 2 pounds of grain to produce one pound of live weight gain (which presumably includes the bones, beak, feathers, and all the other "waste" parts that get thrown out). Beef is much worse — I've seen estimates ranging from 3 - 16 pounds, but most sources put the ratio at 7 or 8 pounds of grain to produce one pound of live weight gain. Most certainly, we could get much more food much more efficiently from those vast amounts of corn and soybeans if we just fed them directly to humans!
2. Water: Water use may not have a direct effect on climate change — but it is certainly a consideration, given the increased potential for drought (as we Californians are realizing right now). It takes 29 gallons of water to produce a pound of tomatoes, 219 gallons to produce a pound of tofu, and 2,464 gallons to produce a pound of hamburger (Water Education Foundation). Enough said.
3. Land use: Of course, it takes lots of land to grow not only all those cereal crops, but also to graze vast herds of cattle. The total land area of the US is about 2.3 billion acres; the lower 48 states (excluding a lot of ice and tundra in Alaska) totals about 1.9 billion acres. Of that, the USDA lists 614 million acres of pasture and rangeland, or nearly one-third of the total. Even that is a low estimate, as it does not include so-called "cropland used for pasture" — other estimates have put the total as high as 788 million acres, or 41% of total land area in the lower 48! Add to that the 200-plus million acres used to plant feed corn, soy, and alfalfa hay used for feeding livestock, and we can see that approximately half of the total land area in the contiguous United States goes to growing and feeding animals destined to be eaten (dwarfing the 3% that is urban land). On a global scale, "livestock systems" are estimated to occupy 45% of all land on earth — a pretty astounding figure, I'd say.
The carbon cost of meat is truly enormous — even the UN FAO's extremely conservative estimate is that 18% of global GHG emissions can be traced to meat, more than the entire transportation sector; and WorldWatch's Goodland and Anhang, taking into account all of the factors the FAO missed, calculated that an astonishing 51% of worldwide emissions are attributable to meat production. But it is because of that land use that, according to Goodland, switching to vegetarian/vegan diets may be the only hope for pulling back from the brink of our climate catastrophe. James Hansen recently recommended immediate decreases in carbon consumption of 6% a year, coupled with massive reforestation, as the only way to stay below a 2°C rise in global temperatures (subsequent developments have shown that that challenging figure is not enough — we need to cut back something more like 10% per year, starting now — but the principle still stands). But where is it possible for that massive reforestation to happen? Some of us may fantasize about turning shopping malls, parking lots, and golf courses back into forested land — but even if that were possible, the acreage wouldn't be nearly sufficient (remember, we're talking about massive reforestation here). But remember that approximately half of the total land area in the contiguous US, and 45% in the world, is devoted to grazing and feeding livestock, and the solution becomes obvious. According to Goodland, only by taking meat out of our diets and taking these vast rangelands and feedlots out of production could we find enough land for the reforestation that might — just might — give us a chance of averting catastrophe.
I want to be really clear, here — I am not proposing vegetarianism as a solution by itself. There is only so much that reforestation can do, and it could only work if accompanied by those massive cuts to consumption (10% per year until we reach zero), which entail serious changes in the way we do everything we do (another subject for a long post yet to come…). But in terms of what an individual can do, going vegan is undoubtedly the single most effective way to decrease emissions… And aside from the numbers, there is the consideration that going vegetarian is one of the simplest ways to affect climate change as an individual — as Adler says, "consumers may not have a say in whether or not another coal power plant will be built, but they do have control over how much meat they personally eat." Or, in other words, it is probably a lot more feasible to give up eating meat than it is to stop driving to work or to completely turn off the heater in the winter (plus there is the added benefit of better health... not to mention the massive cruelty of factory farming — but that could be an entire subject in itself...).
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Kevin Anderson on flying
I'm still working on the next long post, about the carbon cost of eating meat (I work pretty slowly during the school year, I'm afraid)… in the meantime, I recently heard an interview on Democracy Now with Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the COP 19 climate conference. They had a lot of things to say about many aspects of the climate crisis, and you can read (or watch) the whole interview here; but in light of my last post, I was especially interested in the part about why they took a 23-hour train ride to the conference instead of flying. His basic point is about hyper-mobility — here's a bit of an excerpt, in response to a question about using a train and using a plane, in terms of energy consumption:
"Well, a lot of people just ask me that question: Is the train that much better than the plane? Actually, it doesn’t really matter, in terms of the journey, whether it’s better or not, because what happens if you go by train is you don’t go very often. So you immediately curtail about how much you travel. And also, you plan when you get there to spend longer there. So I went to China, and I spent two weeks doing a lecture tour in China, as many of my colleagues flew there to give 20-minute talks and then flew back the following day, and then probably the following week were flying to another venue. So, it’s not the actual emissions from the journey that matter; it’s how it makes you change your life.
"Virtually everyone that I’ve spoken to who’s flown here say, "Oh, I flew here and then got a taxi into Warsaw." So people who fly already do not then use public transport to, say, travel back into the town. It normalizes a whole load of high-carbon activities, that we then—that then become what we do every single day…
"You know, we manage to engage with scientists around the world using all of the forms of communication that we’re all using here... We do not have to keep flying around the world in a sort of old-fashioned, colonial style. You know, here’s the great white hope, the great white males from the rich parts of the world, flying around to the poor parts of the world, telling them how they should be living their lives. So I think that we really need to be stepping away from thinking about the world like that."
"Well, a lot of people just ask me that question: Is the train that much better than the plane? Actually, it doesn’t really matter, in terms of the journey, whether it’s better or not, because what happens if you go by train is you don’t go very often. So you immediately curtail about how much you travel. And also, you plan when you get there to spend longer there. So I went to China, and I spent two weeks doing a lecture tour in China, as many of my colleagues flew there to give 20-minute talks and then flew back the following day, and then probably the following week were flying to another venue. So, it’s not the actual emissions from the journey that matter; it’s how it makes you change your life.
"Virtually everyone that I’ve spoken to who’s flown here say, "Oh, I flew here and then got a taxi into Warsaw." So people who fly already do not then use public transport to, say, travel back into the town. It normalizes a whole load of high-carbon activities, that we then—that then become what we do every single day…
"You know, we manage to engage with scientists around the world using all of the forms of communication that we’re all using here... We do not have to keep flying around the world in a sort of old-fashioned, colonial style. You know, here’s the great white hope, the great white males from the rich parts of the world, flying around to the poor parts of the world, telling them how they should be living their lives. So I think that we really need to be stepping away from thinking about the world like that."
Monday, August 5, 2013
the climate cost of flying
Okay, it's far past time to get into some more detail about those three main precepts I set for myself and specified in my opening missive — those were, of course: 1. don't fly on airplanes; 2. don't eat meat (or even better, go vegan); and 3. don't buy new stuff you don't absolutely need.
Before I start on details, though, I should add a little disclaimer: of course, I know and believe that individual actions are not enough to solve this dire crisis we have brought on (not even close) — but I also believe that our so-called political leaders are not going to do anything at all to solve it, given that they are nearly all concerned with supporting the corporate empire. So for the time being I am focusing on what we can do as individuals to get the world off of fossil fuels — that is, coming at the problem from the demand side… inspired from a reply to my first post: "I also believe that any radical change worth making has to start with one person which leads to another person which leads to another person…"
So, as to the issue of air travel — I guess we need to start with some numbers. Unfortunately, accurate numbers are a little hard to chase down, but I've seen figures showing the per-passenger cost of air travel in CO2 equivalents as anywhere from 0.4 to 0.64 lbs/mile, where passenger cars are figured at about one lb/mile. However, the real carbon cost for flying is actually much higher, because of the high-altitude climatic forcing effect — the IPCC's commonly cited estimate is 2.7x — so the cost does come out to be greater than for travel by car.
Still doesn't really sound so bad though, does it? Only a little more carbon than driving… But of course, the per-passenger cost is not anywhere near the whole story. To get at the destructive nature of air travel, we need to consider a couple of aspects to this. First, think about how many times you would pack up and travel from (for instance) Los Angeles to New York if you had to get in your car and take a few days to drive there. Maybe once, it could make an interesting family vacation, with stops along the way… but you'd hardly go cross-country for a quick weekend getaway — and those frequent-flyers who work three days on one coast and two days on the other just couldn't do it at all. And there are undoubtedly relatively few people who would choose to vacation overseas if they had to sail those seas on a ship.
The concept at work here is hypermobility — people just move around, at incredibly long distances, a lot more than they used to before air travel was ubiquitous (and cheap). It's nearly impossible to find total miles traveled using various forms of transportation throughout history (believe me, I tried); I doubt they kept statistics on that sort of thing back in the horse-and-buggy days. But the difference must be astronomical (no pun intended, I think) from the days when traveling across the country meant an arduous journey on horseback and covered wagon; or even the middle of the last century, when traveling by air was a rare luxury. Now there are hundreds of international airports in the world (three of what the FAA calls "large primary hubs" in the SF bay area alone); and each one of them has hundreds of airplanes flying in and out every day — even thousands at the busiest. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of miles per flight, and by dozens of passengers on each plane, and the numbers begin to get truly dizzying.
We've become so accustomed to air travel that most of us don't even think twice about flying across the country for a conference, or hopping over to Europe or Asia for vacation, or even just flying a few hundred miles to visit family… while if we had to travel by older, slower methods (cars, trains, or ships) we might think about whether we really needed to take that trip.
Another aspect of this is our global carbon budget — how much carbon we, collectively in the world, can burn up and still have a hope of averting total climate disaster. According to the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), in order to stay under the commonly-cited 2°C of warming we'd need to decrease global emissions to 2 metric tons of carbon per capita annually, right now; and even further, to 0.45 tons, in the near future — all from the current global average of 4 tons.
To do that fairly* means that those of us in the industrial west must cut our own emissions down to two tons per year now, and to less than a half-ton per year very soon. So here's the problem — one roundtrip flight between LA and New York creates nearly two tons of emissions per passenger (715 kilos of CO2, multiplied by 2.7 for the high altitude forcing, equals 1,930 kilos or almost two metric tons). In any sane, fair, and just world, in which we all burn no more carbon than is sustainable, in just one plane trip across the country you would blow through your entire year's allotment in one shot — or exceed it many times over.
*(Of course, our current global average is not distributed at all fairly — we citizens of the US on average spew about 17 tons per year —Australians even more, with a few tiny countries like Kuwait, the Netherlands, and Qatar emitting up into the 30s and 40s of tons — while citizens of Mozambique, Nepal, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Chad, Mali, and Afghanistan (among others) each emit a tenth of a ton or less. And naturally, there's a wide range within those nations as well — the famous 1%, with their 5,000-square-foot McMansions, conspicuous consumption, and frequent flyer miles, obviously contribute a lot more to the problem than my students in East Oakland who live in apartments or little old bungalows, never travel, and have no money to buy much more than what they need to get by. In order to get down to a (relatively) sustainable level of emissions per capita, we can't very well ask those who already get by without using much to cut back as much as those who already use much more than their share… Well, actually we could, and given the appalling political situation here and around the world, I fully expect it — but I'd rather pretend for the moment that we would at least make some attempt to be fair.)
I have heard back from some correspondents that massive changes in the way we live (including giving up flying) would risk making our present lives intolerable for the slender chance of preserving our future. But I see it differently: to quote Yotam Marom, "Climate Armageddon isn’t a Will Smith movie about what happens in 10 years when all hell breaks loose. Climate change is already here." There are people losing their livelihoods, homes, and very lives to droughts, fires, floods, hurricanes… If we widen the circle of concern (which we must — this is not just about humans), plant and animal species are already going extinct at an alarming rate (no, not all because of climate change, but it is exacerbating the situation). So, yes, the chances of preserving a livable future are vanishingly slim — but plants, animals, and humans are being hurt, and are dying, right now; and every gram of carbon we add to the atmosphere, for the sake of the convenience of being able to travel around the world whenever and wherever we want, makes it even worse.
The situation the world is in gives true meaning to the term "existential crisis." In this emergency, we can't afford to wait for governments. Many activists talk about fighting the power of the fossil fuel companies, but relatively few mention the time-honored tactic of the boycott. Granted, it is difficult to completely boycott fossil fuels while living in our fossil fuel-dependent society, but we can radically decrease the amounts we use — and one of the two or three most effective ways for an individual to do that is to stop flying.
Before I start on details, though, I should add a little disclaimer: of course, I know and believe that individual actions are not enough to solve this dire crisis we have brought on (not even close) — but I also believe that our so-called political leaders are not going to do anything at all to solve it, given that they are nearly all concerned with supporting the corporate empire. So for the time being I am focusing on what we can do as individuals to get the world off of fossil fuels — that is, coming at the problem from the demand side… inspired from a reply to my first post: "I also believe that any radical change worth making has to start with one person which leads to another person which leads to another person…"
So, as to the issue of air travel — I guess we need to start with some numbers. Unfortunately, accurate numbers are a little hard to chase down, but I've seen figures showing the per-passenger cost of air travel in CO2 equivalents as anywhere from 0.4 to 0.64 lbs/mile, where passenger cars are figured at about one lb/mile. However, the real carbon cost for flying is actually much higher, because of the high-altitude climatic forcing effect — the IPCC's commonly cited estimate is 2.7x — so the cost does come out to be greater than for travel by car.
Still doesn't really sound so bad though, does it? Only a little more carbon than driving… But of course, the per-passenger cost is not anywhere near the whole story. To get at the destructive nature of air travel, we need to consider a couple of aspects to this. First, think about how many times you would pack up and travel from (for instance) Los Angeles to New York if you had to get in your car and take a few days to drive there. Maybe once, it could make an interesting family vacation, with stops along the way… but you'd hardly go cross-country for a quick weekend getaway — and those frequent-flyers who work three days on one coast and two days on the other just couldn't do it at all. And there are undoubtedly relatively few people who would choose to vacation overseas if they had to sail those seas on a ship.
The concept at work here is hypermobility — people just move around, at incredibly long distances, a lot more than they used to before air travel was ubiquitous (and cheap). It's nearly impossible to find total miles traveled using various forms of transportation throughout history (believe me, I tried); I doubt they kept statistics on that sort of thing back in the horse-and-buggy days. But the difference must be astronomical (no pun intended, I think) from the days when traveling across the country meant an arduous journey on horseback and covered wagon; or even the middle of the last century, when traveling by air was a rare luxury. Now there are hundreds of international airports in the world (three of what the FAA calls "large primary hubs" in the SF bay area alone); and each one of them has hundreds of airplanes flying in and out every day — even thousands at the busiest. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of miles per flight, and by dozens of passengers on each plane, and the numbers begin to get truly dizzying.
We've become so accustomed to air travel that most of us don't even think twice about flying across the country for a conference, or hopping over to Europe or Asia for vacation, or even just flying a few hundred miles to visit family… while if we had to travel by older, slower methods (cars, trains, or ships) we might think about whether we really needed to take that trip.
Another aspect of this is our global carbon budget — how much carbon we, collectively in the world, can burn up and still have a hope of averting total climate disaster. According to the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), in order to stay under the commonly-cited 2°C of warming we'd need to decrease global emissions to 2 metric tons of carbon per capita annually, right now; and even further, to 0.45 tons, in the near future — all from the current global average of 4 tons.
To do that fairly* means that those of us in the industrial west must cut our own emissions down to two tons per year now, and to less than a half-ton per year very soon. So here's the problem — one roundtrip flight between LA and New York creates nearly two tons of emissions per passenger (715 kilos of CO2, multiplied by 2.7 for the high altitude forcing, equals 1,930 kilos or almost two metric tons). In any sane, fair, and just world, in which we all burn no more carbon than is sustainable, in just one plane trip across the country you would blow through your entire year's allotment in one shot — or exceed it many times over.
*(Of course, our current global average is not distributed at all fairly — we citizens of the US on average spew about 17 tons per year —Australians even more, with a few tiny countries like Kuwait, the Netherlands, and Qatar emitting up into the 30s and 40s of tons — while citizens of Mozambique, Nepal, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Chad, Mali, and Afghanistan (among others) each emit a tenth of a ton or less. And naturally, there's a wide range within those nations as well — the famous 1%, with their 5,000-square-foot McMansions, conspicuous consumption, and frequent flyer miles, obviously contribute a lot more to the problem than my students in East Oakland who live in apartments or little old bungalows, never travel, and have no money to buy much more than what they need to get by. In order to get down to a (relatively) sustainable level of emissions per capita, we can't very well ask those who already get by without using much to cut back as much as those who already use much more than their share… Well, actually we could, and given the appalling political situation here and around the world, I fully expect it — but I'd rather pretend for the moment that we would at least make some attempt to be fair.)
I have heard back from some correspondents that massive changes in the way we live (including giving up flying) would risk making our present lives intolerable for the slender chance of preserving our future. But I see it differently: to quote Yotam Marom, "Climate Armageddon isn’t a Will Smith movie about what happens in 10 years when all hell breaks loose. Climate change is already here." There are people losing their livelihoods, homes, and very lives to droughts, fires, floods, hurricanes… If we widen the circle of concern (which we must — this is not just about humans), plant and animal species are already going extinct at an alarming rate (no, not all because of climate change, but it is exacerbating the situation). So, yes, the chances of preserving a livable future are vanishingly slim — but plants, animals, and humans are being hurt, and are dying, right now; and every gram of carbon we add to the atmosphere, for the sake of the convenience of being able to travel around the world whenever and wherever we want, makes it even worse.
The situation the world is in gives true meaning to the term "existential crisis." In this emergency, we can't afford to wait for governments. Many activists talk about fighting the power of the fossil fuel companies, but relatively few mention the time-honored tactic of the boycott. Granted, it is difficult to completely boycott fossil fuels while living in our fossil fuel-dependent society, but we can radically decrease the amounts we use — and one of the two or three most effective ways for an individual to do that is to stop flying.
Thursday, July 18, 2013
ignoring the truth
I recently heard an interview with Clive Hamilton, one of whose books is subtitled "Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change" — and it occurred to me that I disagree with that on only one word: for most of the people I know, folks do not so much resist the truth about climate change as ignore it. Frustratingly, this applies to people who profess to be very concerned about global warming… but when it comes to deciding whether to get on an airplane for a weekend trip, it simply doesn't even enter their thinking.
After I sent my original missive out to friends and family, I got back a few beautiful and encouraging responses — "I, too, have nightmares about this"… "I will do all I can to support your ideas"… But then life goes on, including those flights around the world. My husband and I are literally (and yes, I do mean literally — the rampant misuse of that word is one of my pet peeves) the only people I know personally who will not set foot on an airplane because of the huge climate implications... I hardly even know anyone else who hangs clothes on a clothesline instead of throwing them into an electric dryer. Perhaps I'm expecting too much, but it seems as if even among those who profess to be concerned about global warming, so few are ready to make any serious changes in their own lives, much less take on any advocacy. It's as if everyone is waiting for our elected "leaders" to do something to fix the situation — once again, not realizing (or perhaps ignoring) the monumental scale of the emergency. As always, I feel we have to keep trying — we can't prevent catastrophe whatever we do, but maybe we can prevent catastrophe from being even worse… But it is hard not to give in to despair.
On another note — it's about time for me to start adding some detail to my original "big three" precepts (the three biggest things an individual can do)… so I will try to get to some specifics regarding air travel next week. Coming soon!
After I sent my original missive out to friends and family, I got back a few beautiful and encouraging responses — "I, too, have nightmares about this"… "I will do all I can to support your ideas"… But then life goes on, including those flights around the world. My husband and I are literally (and yes, I do mean literally — the rampant misuse of that word is one of my pet peeves) the only people I know personally who will not set foot on an airplane because of the huge climate implications... I hardly even know anyone else who hangs clothes on a clothesline instead of throwing them into an electric dryer. Perhaps I'm expecting too much, but it seems as if even among those who profess to be concerned about global warming, so few are ready to make any serious changes in their own lives, much less take on any advocacy. It's as if everyone is waiting for our elected "leaders" to do something to fix the situation — once again, not realizing (or perhaps ignoring) the monumental scale of the emergency. As always, I feel we have to keep trying — we can't prevent catastrophe whatever we do, but maybe we can prevent catastrophe from being even worse… But it is hard not to give in to despair.
On another note — it's about time for me to start adding some detail to my original "big three" precepts (the three biggest things an individual can do)… so I will try to get to some specifics regarding air travel next week. Coming soon!
Friday, July 12, 2013
two brief tidbits — on how far we have to go...
The other day, after I filled up my bottle with bulk olive oil at my local natural foods store and brought it up to the checkout, I got into a bit of conversation with the checker/buyer — when I sighed that I wished I could get the California olive oil in bulk, he asked "Oh — do you like the taste better?" I said no, I prefer not to get my food shipped from halfway across the planet. His reply was "Oh, that carbon footprint thing… I guess it's a matter of your priorities — for me it's all about the taste... I guess I'm part of the problem, huh?" I really couldn't think of a way to answer without being incredibly rude, but of course what I was thinking was "I have a hard time prioritizing slightly better-tasting olive oil over a habitable planet…"
Then two days ago, in an SF Chronicle article about siting huge wind and solar energy plants in pristine southern California deserts, a spokesman for the developer of one of the projects was quoted saying "Those who sincerely care about the birds and the wildlife know that climate change is their greatest threat… and if you want to mitigate climate change while keeping the lights on [my emphasis], responsibly sited wind and solar power is your best answer." Of course, we could never consider just turning off some of those lights! This attitude is so pervasive — we can't even think of changing the way we live, so we must pave over pristine deserts to build more "energy capacity" (however "renewable" it may be). If we were seriously sacrificing and paring down to just what is absolutely necessary to survive, then it might — just barely might — be defensible to think about building energy plants in the desert… But as long as we are using energy to power Las Vegas and pro sports night games (among many other quintessentially nonessential pursuits), even considering this should be beyond the pale. Unfortunately, in our society, this thinking is the norm — there is no greater good than keeping those lights on, keeping up our lifestyles... and preserving life on the planet just has to take a backseat.
Then two days ago, in an SF Chronicle article about siting huge wind and solar energy plants in pristine southern California deserts, a spokesman for the developer of one of the projects was quoted saying "Those who sincerely care about the birds and the wildlife know that climate change is their greatest threat… and if you want to mitigate climate change while keeping the lights on [my emphasis], responsibly sited wind and solar power is your best answer." Of course, we could never consider just turning off some of those lights! This attitude is so pervasive — we can't even think of changing the way we live, so we must pave over pristine deserts to build more "energy capacity" (however "renewable" it may be). If we were seriously sacrificing and paring down to just what is absolutely necessary to survive, then it might — just barely might — be defensible to think about building energy plants in the desert… But as long as we are using energy to power Las Vegas and pro sports night games (among many other quintessentially nonessential pursuits), even considering this should be beyond the pale. Unfortunately, in our society, this thinking is the norm — there is no greater good than keeping those lights on, keeping up our lifestyles... and preserving life on the planet just has to take a backseat.
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Obama's climate speech
Well, I seem to have been pretty well MIA from this blog for the last couple of months — that's what comes of teaching (and dashing between) two schools while trying to look for a new position, I guess… Oh well, now that it's summer break, I should be able to catch up a bit — perhaps even throw some more details onto my big three issues (eating meat, flying, buying stuff)… And I figure that when the so-called leader of the free world finally gets around to recognizing the global warming emergency with more than just a couple of sentences in a state of the union speech, it's as good a time as any for me to jump back in (even if I'm already about a week late — I'm afraid I'm a pretty slow and painstaking writer).
By now I've read plenty of mainstream environmental organizations praising the speech for actually describing the problem in fairly accurate scientific terms, for dissing the deniers ("the Flat Earth Society") for shouting out the divestment movement (just by speaking the word "divest" exactly once)… And it's true that the opening and closing included some beautiful language about the crisis we face.
BUT… the President also boasted — three times (!) — about how we are producing more oil than ever ("produced more oil than we have in 15 years"… "even as we're producing more domestic oil"…), and more natural gas "than anybody else." I guess he at least knew better than to brag about producing coal… but in a speech ostensibly about the climate emergency, this is unconscionable.
He twice referenced that China has passed the US as the world's largest emitter, and made congratulatory mentions of how much the US has "reduced" emissions. Of course, saying that China is the world's largest emitter works only if you start with three givens: 1. you are counting total emissions, not emissions per capita; 2. you are counting the carbon being emitted right now, not cumulatively — even though it is cumulative emissions that matter to the climate (and by that standard, it will take China or anyone else a very long time to catch up); and (and this is the big one) 3. you are counting emissions from the production end, not the consumption end. A big proportion of China's emissions comes from manufacturing for the American market — they are burning all that coal just to make all the stuff that we incessantly shop for...in other words, a huge part of the reason we can boast that "no country on earth has reduced its total carbon pollution by as much as the United States of America" is that we have off-shored our emissions, right along with all those manufacturing jobs going to low-wage countries! Not exactly something to be proud of.
Another theme, revisited four times, was economic growth — "there's no contradiction between a sound environment and strong economic growth." The growth economy is a huge topic that I will take up in another post, but this focus on growth, at the very least, betrays complete ignorance of the extent and scope of the problem. At worst, it betrays something more like indifference — a mindset that nothing (not even a habitable planet) is more important than a growth economy, keeping Wall Street happy while the common people (not to mention the natural world) are left to deal with the crisis the best we can…
As to the Climate Action Plan itself, it could be called a decent start (and could have actually been a decent start, 40 years ago) — but again, the tiny baby steps approach betrays either ignorance of or indifference to the urgency of the situation. The plan prominently recommits to cutting US emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 (which is only a 4% cut from 1990 levels). As a local columnist said, "Here's the bigger issue: Emitting less carbon dioxide isn't a solution to climate change. It beats increases, but by using fossil fuels at all, we're adding to rather than subtracting from the problem. It takes hundreds of years for CO2 to fully leave the atmosphere, and we're already at dangerously high levels." I can't say it better, but maybe a little shorter: the climate doesn't care how fast we put that carbon up in the atmosphere, it only cares about the total amount — so slowing down the rate at which we spew it out does nothing!
But the fatal flaw in the plan — the one which makes it not just too little too late, but actually worse than doing nothing — is its enthusiastic promotion of natural gas (especially fracked natural gas) as a "cleaner-burning" "transition" fuel. Even at best, natural gas is only marginally better than other fossil fuels, only serves to somewhat reduce emissions, when what's needed is to come as close as possible to getting off all fossil fuels, cold turkey, tomorrow… But because of methane leakage at the well, fracked natural gas is actually — please pardon me, but I do feel the need to shout here — WORSE THAN COAL! Methane doesn't hang around in the atmosphere as long as CO2, but over the first 20 years methane is 80 - 105 times more potent as a greenhouse gas (Obama's climate plan calls it 20 times more powerful, but that assumes a 100-year timeframe — and remember, we don't have 100 years!) This means that fracked natural gas is worse for the atmosphere than coal if those "fugitive emissions" are as low as 2%; and the most extensive and credible studies have found up to nearly 8% leakage (other studies have found as much as 17%). Yet this is what Obama is pushing as a way to "reduce our carbon emissions."
And even worse, the plan rests not only upon increasing natural gas production in the US (and exporting that oh-so-dirty fracked gas, which adds even more emissions for transport), but also pushing fracking technology on the rest of the world (through applying "private sector knowhow in countries that transition to natural gas"). This is truly a recipe for disaster… and yes, I am using "pushing" intentionally, because this is also a recipe for keeping the world addicted to fossil fuels — by avoiding any thought of more effective strategies like conservation, or even (perish the thought!) truly changing the way we live our lives...
The plan is at best mistaken — and at worst outright mendacious — on two fronts: first, that natural gas will reduce emissions; and second, that simply reducing emissions is in any way a solution to the emergency we face. I cannot imagine that the President's energy and environment advisors have not informed him about the climate impacts of fracked natural gas — so I'm afraid the only conclusion I can draw is that keeping our economy humming and our energy sector profitable is a higher priority to our leadership than preserving a habitable planet.
I cannot say that this speech was a disappointment, as I did not expect much to begin with; but did I find it to be amazingly frustrating, as the first part really was an eloquent statement of the effects of climate change — and then the rest proceeded to propose policies that will only serve to worsen those effects.
By now I've read plenty of mainstream environmental organizations praising the speech for actually describing the problem in fairly accurate scientific terms, for dissing the deniers ("the Flat Earth Society") for shouting out the divestment movement (just by speaking the word "divest" exactly once)… And it's true that the opening and closing included some beautiful language about the crisis we face.
BUT… the President also boasted — three times (!) — about how we are producing more oil than ever ("produced more oil than we have in 15 years"… "even as we're producing more domestic oil"…), and more natural gas "than anybody else." I guess he at least knew better than to brag about producing coal… but in a speech ostensibly about the climate emergency, this is unconscionable.
He twice referenced that China has passed the US as the world's largest emitter, and made congratulatory mentions of how much the US has "reduced" emissions. Of course, saying that China is the world's largest emitter works only if you start with three givens: 1. you are counting total emissions, not emissions per capita; 2. you are counting the carbon being emitted right now, not cumulatively — even though it is cumulative emissions that matter to the climate (and by that standard, it will take China or anyone else a very long time to catch up); and (and this is the big one) 3. you are counting emissions from the production end, not the consumption end. A big proportion of China's emissions comes from manufacturing for the American market — they are burning all that coal just to make all the stuff that we incessantly shop for...in other words, a huge part of the reason we can boast that "no country on earth has reduced its total carbon pollution by as much as the United States of America" is that we have off-shored our emissions, right along with all those manufacturing jobs going to low-wage countries! Not exactly something to be proud of.
Another theme, revisited four times, was economic growth — "there's no contradiction between a sound environment and strong economic growth." The growth economy is a huge topic that I will take up in another post, but this focus on growth, at the very least, betrays complete ignorance of the extent and scope of the problem. At worst, it betrays something more like indifference — a mindset that nothing (not even a habitable planet) is more important than a growth economy, keeping Wall Street happy while the common people (not to mention the natural world) are left to deal with the crisis the best we can…
As to the Climate Action Plan itself, it could be called a decent start (and could have actually been a decent start, 40 years ago) — but again, the tiny baby steps approach betrays either ignorance of or indifference to the urgency of the situation. The plan prominently recommits to cutting US emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 (which is only a 4% cut from 1990 levels). As a local columnist said, "Here's the bigger issue: Emitting less carbon dioxide isn't a solution to climate change. It beats increases, but by using fossil fuels at all, we're adding to rather than subtracting from the problem. It takes hundreds of years for CO2 to fully leave the atmosphere, and we're already at dangerously high levels." I can't say it better, but maybe a little shorter: the climate doesn't care how fast we put that carbon up in the atmosphere, it only cares about the total amount — so slowing down the rate at which we spew it out does nothing!
But the fatal flaw in the plan — the one which makes it not just too little too late, but actually worse than doing nothing — is its enthusiastic promotion of natural gas (especially fracked natural gas) as a "cleaner-burning" "transition" fuel. Even at best, natural gas is only marginally better than other fossil fuels, only serves to somewhat reduce emissions, when what's needed is to come as close as possible to getting off all fossil fuels, cold turkey, tomorrow… But because of methane leakage at the well, fracked natural gas is actually — please pardon me, but I do feel the need to shout here — WORSE THAN COAL! Methane doesn't hang around in the atmosphere as long as CO2, but over the first 20 years methane is 80 - 105 times more potent as a greenhouse gas (Obama's climate plan calls it 20 times more powerful, but that assumes a 100-year timeframe — and remember, we don't have 100 years!) This means that fracked natural gas is worse for the atmosphere than coal if those "fugitive emissions" are as low as 2%; and the most extensive and credible studies have found up to nearly 8% leakage (other studies have found as much as 17%). Yet this is what Obama is pushing as a way to "reduce our carbon emissions."
And even worse, the plan rests not only upon increasing natural gas production in the US (and exporting that oh-so-dirty fracked gas, which adds even more emissions for transport), but also pushing fracking technology on the rest of the world (through applying "private sector knowhow in countries that transition to natural gas"). This is truly a recipe for disaster… and yes, I am using "pushing" intentionally, because this is also a recipe for keeping the world addicted to fossil fuels — by avoiding any thought of more effective strategies like conservation, or even (perish the thought!) truly changing the way we live our lives...
The plan is at best mistaken — and at worst outright mendacious — on two fronts: first, that natural gas will reduce emissions; and second, that simply reducing emissions is in any way a solution to the emergency we face. I cannot imagine that the President's energy and environment advisors have not informed him about the climate impacts of fracked natural gas — so I'm afraid the only conclusion I can draw is that keeping our economy humming and our energy sector profitable is a higher priority to our leadership than preserving a habitable planet.
I cannot say that this speech was a disappointment, as I did not expect much to begin with; but did I find it to be amazingly frustrating, as the first part really was an eloquent statement of the effects of climate change — and then the rest proceeded to propose policies that will only serve to worsen those effects.
Friday, May 10, 2013
"moral authority" and personal choices
I've been thinking more about one of those dichotomies I wrote about a little while back (aaargh! Has it really been over a month since the last time I wrote here?? There's so much I want to write about, and so little time… sigh… a lot, I'm afraid, will wait until summer break) — personal consumption vs. systemic change. Of course, as far as I'm concerned there is no real dichotomy, we absolutely need both — the climate emergency is so urgent we need everything we can do, as fast as we can do it — but there is another aspect to this one, and that is carrying the moral authority to even advocate for changing the systems we live under… or, in other words, simply not opening oneself up to being seen as a hypocrite.
It occurred to me that this is something those in the animal rights community take for granted. Imagine the sneers if animal activists showed up at demonstrations wearing leather shoes and munching cheeseburgers — but it doesn't happen because I have never met any animal rights folks who were not committed ethical vegans (and yes, that does mean eschewing all animal products, including leather and wool). Of course animal activists' main concern is that they do not themselves cause any unnecessary suffering if they can possibly help it (even though individual actions are trivial in the face of the massive suffering of billions of animals); but avoiding hypocrisy is also important to any political movement.
On a similar note, after a recent anti-Keystone XL protest in San Francisco, someone wrote a letter to the Chronicle decrying the protesters for hypocrisy, as (he said) he watched them get into their gasoline-powered cars and drive away… Now this is pretty hard to believe in any case — if you know anything about the parking situation around SF's civic center, you know it would be well-nigh impossible to follow more than one or two people back to a parking spaces (which would be blocks away in various directions), and anyone coming to protest would have been crazy not to simply hop on BART (so much easier for getting to that part of town, even if principles were not an issue). But still these stories crop up, because the opposition is so intent on finding hypocrisy…
… So why let them? Granted, one person's consumption choices are not going to by themselves save the planet; and granted, no one is perfect (certainly not me)… But while we advocate for the end of industrial capitalism, or whatever systemic change might actually have a chance of making a difference, we need to do the absolute best we can to carry that moral authority in ourselves, to walk our talk. Of course, this is nuanced — while it is possible (though difficult) to completely avoid animal products, it is nearly impossible to live in today's society without burning some fossil fuels. But we can certainly try to at least stop doing the big things: eating meat, flying on airplanes, just being part of the consumer culture. Take a hint from the animal rights folks — you can't effectively protest at the slaughterhouse wearing leather shoes and munching cheeseburgers, and you can't effectively protest the fossil fuel industry by using their products (and that does mean flying cross-country to the protest — and munching cheeseburgers, even artisan, grass-fed ones). And it is incumbent on all of us to do as much as we can to avoid causing suffering by our actions, whether that means being an ethical vegan to avoid causing animal cruelty, or not buying any new stuff because it might, just might, help avoid the extinction of one little species somewhere down the line...
It occurred to me that this is something those in the animal rights community take for granted. Imagine the sneers if animal activists showed up at demonstrations wearing leather shoes and munching cheeseburgers — but it doesn't happen because I have never met any animal rights folks who were not committed ethical vegans (and yes, that does mean eschewing all animal products, including leather and wool). Of course animal activists' main concern is that they do not themselves cause any unnecessary suffering if they can possibly help it (even though individual actions are trivial in the face of the massive suffering of billions of animals); but avoiding hypocrisy is also important to any political movement.
On a similar note, after a recent anti-Keystone XL protest in San Francisco, someone wrote a letter to the Chronicle decrying the protesters for hypocrisy, as (he said) he watched them get into their gasoline-powered cars and drive away… Now this is pretty hard to believe in any case — if you know anything about the parking situation around SF's civic center, you know it would be well-nigh impossible to follow more than one or two people back to a parking spaces (which would be blocks away in various directions), and anyone coming to protest would have been crazy not to simply hop on BART (so much easier for getting to that part of town, even if principles were not an issue). But still these stories crop up, because the opposition is so intent on finding hypocrisy…
… So why let them? Granted, one person's consumption choices are not going to by themselves save the planet; and granted, no one is perfect (certainly not me)… But while we advocate for the end of industrial capitalism, or whatever systemic change might actually have a chance of making a difference, we need to do the absolute best we can to carry that moral authority in ourselves, to walk our talk. Of course, this is nuanced — while it is possible (though difficult) to completely avoid animal products, it is nearly impossible to live in today's society without burning some fossil fuels. But we can certainly try to at least stop doing the big things: eating meat, flying on airplanes, just being part of the consumer culture. Take a hint from the animal rights folks — you can't effectively protest at the slaughterhouse wearing leather shoes and munching cheeseburgers, and you can't effectively protest the fossil fuel industry by using their products (and that does mean flying cross-country to the protest — and munching cheeseburgers, even artisan, grass-fed ones). And it is incumbent on all of us to do as much as we can to avoid causing suffering by our actions, whether that means being an ethical vegan to avoid causing animal cruelty, or not buying any new stuff because it might, just might, help avoid the extinction of one little species somewhere down the line...
Sunday, April 7, 2013
"de-extinction"
Yesterday there was a story in the San Francisco Chronicle about researchers involved in some gee-whiz "de-extinction" experiments to clone long- (or not-so-long)-lost species. It mentioned, in breathless terms, that "the possibility of billions of passenger pigeons once again clouding city skies or the sound of thunder from the hooves of woolly mammoths trampling the Arctic's tundra may be speculation no more."
Gosh — I can hardly wait for the spectacle of "woolly mammoths trampling the Arctic tundra" — only to see it melt away beneath their feet! Or perhaps they might share the fate of the gray wolf and other recently "de-listed" species, shot at will as soon as their numbers barely rise above the threshold for endangered status.
Stewart Brand (referred to as "'environmental visionary' Stewart Brand") appears to be pushing this idea through his Long Now Foundation. In the article, he is quoted crowing that "re-wilding is storming ahead everywhere." This idea is not "re-wilding" — according to The Rewilding Institute, rewilding involves "restoring big wilderness based on the regulatory roles of large predators.” The features needed for true rewilding are large, strictly protected core reserves; connections between reserves so that animals are able to travel; and, most importantly, the reintroduction and recovery of keystone carnivorous species. None of this is fulfilled in any way by cloning a few extinct animals — to quote cinematographer Lois Crisler, who spent years filming wolves in the Arctic, "animals without wilderness are a closed book.”
This is rather the ultimate vanity project, designed to assuage our consciences for wiping so many species from the face of the earth (It's okay! Look — we can bring them back!) It is the same sort of thinking that justifies keeping endangered species captive in zoos, to "preserve" the species as their habitats disappear — it certainly does those individual animals no good to be held behind bars, but we don't like to think we've destroyed another species so we keep the last few "specimens" breeding in cages for eternity. The article mentioned one recently extinct species, the bucardo or Pyrenian ibex, as being "very close to 'de-extinction' even now" as "many implantations" resulted in the birth of a "living bucardo clone" — which died ten minutes after birth! Again, cloning animals so feeble as to survive just for a short time does no good for those individual animals, and serves only to make us feel a little less monstrous.
Meanwhile, we are busily driving more species into extinction at the rate of one every five minutes, as we slaughter them for bling, exterminate them to keep them away from our endless herds of livestock, or pave over their habitats in our insatiable need for more space for our ever-increasing billions. Before we in our arrogance start to clone sickly versions of species we have exterminated, I think we would do better to figure out how to stop annihilating those that still manage to survive.
Gosh — I can hardly wait for the spectacle of "woolly mammoths trampling the Arctic tundra" — only to see it melt away beneath their feet! Or perhaps they might share the fate of the gray wolf and other recently "de-listed" species, shot at will as soon as their numbers barely rise above the threshold for endangered status.
Stewart Brand (referred to as "'environmental visionary' Stewart Brand") appears to be pushing this idea through his Long Now Foundation. In the article, he is quoted crowing that "re-wilding is storming ahead everywhere." This idea is not "re-wilding" — according to The Rewilding Institute, rewilding involves "restoring big wilderness based on the regulatory roles of large predators.” The features needed for true rewilding are large, strictly protected core reserves; connections between reserves so that animals are able to travel; and, most importantly, the reintroduction and recovery of keystone carnivorous species. None of this is fulfilled in any way by cloning a few extinct animals — to quote cinematographer Lois Crisler, who spent years filming wolves in the Arctic, "animals without wilderness are a closed book.”
This is rather the ultimate vanity project, designed to assuage our consciences for wiping so many species from the face of the earth (It's okay! Look — we can bring them back!) It is the same sort of thinking that justifies keeping endangered species captive in zoos, to "preserve" the species as their habitats disappear — it certainly does those individual animals no good to be held behind bars, but we don't like to think we've destroyed another species so we keep the last few "specimens" breeding in cages for eternity. The article mentioned one recently extinct species, the bucardo or Pyrenian ibex, as being "very close to 'de-extinction' even now" as "many implantations" resulted in the birth of a "living bucardo clone" — which died ten minutes after birth! Again, cloning animals so feeble as to survive just for a short time does no good for those individual animals, and serves only to make us feel a little less monstrous.
Meanwhile, we are busily driving more species into extinction at the rate of one every five minutes, as we slaughter them for bling, exterminate them to keep them away from our endless herds of livestock, or pave over their habitats in our insatiable need for more space for our ever-increasing billions. Before we in our arrogance start to clone sickly versions of species we have exterminated, I think we would do better to figure out how to stop annihilating those that still manage to survive.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)