growth vs. steady-state — a few quotes

I haven't yet seriously delved into the issue of the growth economy — that is, my third precept, "don't buy any new stuff you don't absolutely need"... This is a tough nut to crack because our society is so totally dependent upon consumerism it seems nearly insurmountable to imagine a way out. Good and well-meaning friends, who do profess to care about the environment and climate change, have reminded me that their jobs, or their loved ones' jobs, depend on people continuing to buy nice things; and that if everyone thought the way I do (and acted on it) the economy would collapse and complete chaos would result.

And yet I can only return to the fact that infinite growth is simply not possible on a finite planet, and any "fix" that allows us to keep growing indefinitely without harming the environment is as imaginary as a perpetual motion machine or a free lunch. As far as I can see, we can choose to follow the made-up dictates of our own made-up system (the economy), or we can follow the rules of the real world... or, as Herman Daly put it, "when faced with the unhappy dilemma of choosing between a physical or political impossibility, it is better to attempt the politically 'impossible.'"

Right now I do not have a concrete solution — as I say, our society is so bound up in this there seems to be no way out of it; I only know there must be alternatives. I'm sure there are traditional cultures who have inhabited the same territory since time immemorial without ruining the land, and perhaps we need to learn from them... I have been reading a bit of Herman Daly — Ecological Economics — on the principles of a steady-state economy. I can't speak with any kind of authority on how to get there from here; but until I have more solid ideas, here are a few quotes from my reading:

"As this is written, there are news reports of a group of economics students in French and British universities who are rebelling against what they are being taught. They have formed a Society for Post-Autistic Economics. Their implicit diagnosis is apt, since autism, like conventional economics, is characterized by 'abnormal subjectivity; and acceptance of fantasy rather than reality.' ... Current 'canonical assumptions' of insatiable wants and infinite resources, leading to growth forever, are simply not grounded in reality." - p. xxi

"We define growth as an increase in throughput, which is the flow of natural resources from the environment, through the economy, and back to the environment as waste. This kind of growth, of course, cannot continue indefinitely, as the Earth and its resources are not infinite. While growth must end, this in no way implies an end to development, which we define as qualitative change, realization of potential, evolution toward an improved, but larger, structure or system — an increase in the quality of goods and services (where quality is measured by the ability to increase human well-being)."  - p.6

"Unfortunately, our ability to increase consumption while depleting our resource base has led people to believe that humans and the economy that sustains us have transcended nature. "  - p. 10

"Does the system generate wastes? Does the system require new inputs of matter and energy? If not, then the system is a perpetual motion machine, a contradiction of the Second Law of Thermodynamics... Since there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, the economic system cannot be the whole. It must be a subsystem of a larger system, the Earth-ecosystem."  - p.29

"The circular low vision [of standard economic models] is analogous to a biologist describing an animal only in terms of its circulatory system, without ever mentioning its digestive tract. Surely the circulatory system is important, but unless the animal also has a digestive tract that connects it to its environment at both ends, it will soon die either of starvation or constipation."  - p. 29

I do have a few quibbles with Daly: in common with most conventional economists, in thinking natural ecosystems strictly in terms of resources for humans and measuring quality by the ability to increase human well-being, he falls into the common trap of thinking the entire world was created for our use — which is exactly the thinking that got us to this point. (I always keep in mind the quote from indigenous rights activist Oren Lyons, "it makes a crucial difference whether humankind thinks of the natural world as consisting of resources or relatives"). But it is useful to get some solid economic thinking on the issue. I will post further as I get further along...

Cowspiracy

We recently watched an absolutely vital film called "Cowspiracy: the Sustainability Secret" — about how most big "green" organizations won't touch the connections between animal agriculture and environmental destruction. It details the connections between beef and climate change, water, and deforestation, and also addresses fisheries and the destruction of ocean life... all done in a gonzo documentary style reminiscent of Michael Moore (although somehow I can't imagine Moore touching this issue either). There's a scene with the California Department of Water Resources in which the filmmaker asks why they don't put out the word about how much water is wasted to raise beef cattle... and they reply with something like "we're a government agency, we deal with water management, and what you're talking about is changing behavior" — as if pushing everyone to take shorter showers and turn off the water while brushing your teeth isn't about changing behavior! The website for the film also has a very helpful graphic with lots of statistics — here are a few tidbits:

Animal agriculture is responsible for 91% of Amazon destruction
110 animal and insect species are lost every day from rainforest destruction
Livestock cover 45% of earth's total land mass
The meat and dairy industry use 1/3 of the earth's fresh water
5% of US water use is domestic; 55% is animal agriculture
A plant-based diet cuts your carbon footprint by 50%

I would definitely class this as one of those movies everyone should see. As it happens, the filmmakers have a campaign for Earth Day this year: anyone can watch Cowspiracy online for just a dollar, starting on the real Earth Day (Wednesday, April 22nd, not whatever weekend day organizations tend to pick for events)... Highly recommended!

Chris Hedges on the case for going vegan

Chris Hedges has gone vegan as a response to climate change, saying that "becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species." In his column explaining his decision (Saving the Planet, One Meal at a Time) he lays out a treasure trove of statistics. Here are just a few (I've left out the sources, but they are easily found in his footnotes):

• A person who is vegan will save 1,100 gallons of water, 20 pounds CO2 equivalent, 30 square feet of forested land, 45 pounds of grain and one sentient animal’s life every day.
• Crops grown for livestock feed consume 56 percent of the water used in the United States.
• In the United States 70 percent of the grain we grow goes to feed livestock raised for consumption.
• Land devoted exclusively to raising livestock now represents 45 percent of the earth’s land mass.

If you have yet to be convinced, please read the full article!

the climate march and "green energy" wishful thinking

Well, it's been way too long since I've posted here, for a few reasons… For one, I've been pretty preoccupied advocating for, then starting, a new high school dance program (another story for another blog); for another, I've been meaning to take up and expand on that third precept (not buying any new stuff you don't absolutely need) but felt I needed to do a lot more research first to be able to put my thoughts in any authoritative order — and got stuck with that same time crunch (but I have been reading some Herman Daly and will post some tidbits soon).

But — it would feel negligent not to take some notice of the big, highly-touted climate demonstrations over the weekend… Unfortunately, my main impression is disappointment over the rhetoric I've heard leading up to the rally. Every time I hear some activist interviewed, I invariably hear plenty of happy talk about how "we already have the technology" to run the economy "sustainably"… It seems that no one, from Bill McKibben on down, is ready to be the grownup and tell us the real truth — that we can't hope to save a habitable planet without radically changing the way we live. We are so obsessed with finding a magic techno-fix for the climate crisis — one that will let us continue to self-identify as "consumers" — that even our environmental leaders can't bring themselves to talk about just plain using less (a lot less). Yes, renewables are important — but only when coupled with a serious program of energy austerity; otherwise, all those renewables only make it possible for everything to keep growing even more.

I keep hearing mention of Germany as an example of scaling up solar power — how on some days, Germany gets as much as 75% of its electricity from solar! What is not mentioned so much is that Germany's GHG emissions have kept right on increasing over the past few years, even while it was adding all that solar capacity. Others have pointed to Spain as a leader in wind power — while glossing over the fact that Spain's GHG emissions keep rising as well, right along with all those wind turbines. Not long ago, the San Francisco Chronicle printed an article about the giant Ivanpah solar plant in the Mojave desert: not only does the facility incinerate every bird, butterfly, or other flying creature who strays into the path of its beams; but a UC Riverside study found that the emissions savings from the plant are minimal at best, and may even be negative because of the lost carbon sinks in the pristine desert habitat that was destroyed to make room for all those mirrors. Yet we keep building (and subsidizing) these monstrosities because we just can't face the fact that we cannot keep growing indefinitely on a finite planet. A "green" energy source that will allow us to keep using all the energy we want (rather than what we actually need) without harming the environment is as fictional as a free lunch or a perpetual motion machine.

The one activist I have recently heard mention the necessity of austerity is Naomi Klein: in her recent book, she writes about how much time (and, just by the way, how much GHG emissions) it would take to scale up to replace our fossil fuel-based economy with one based on renewables. And she says that the only thing that "doesn't require a technological and infrastructure revolution is to consume less, right away." Yet so many seem so reluctant to think about that part of the equation… Making the fossil fuel companies the only villain in this lets us all off the hook.

readings on the change needed and the Anthropocene

I’m afraid I have been writing rather sporadically here… but this was originally intended to be a place to expand on the ideas in my original long missive more than a daily or weekly diary… so there it is. I have written more about my first two precepts – that is, not eating meat and not flying on airplanes; I hope to write more about that last one – not buying stuff you don’t need – as soon as I can, but I feel I need to spend a little more time studying the idea of a steady-state economy before I can write with any assurance. I will say that I have had friends respond to my first letter by saying that if we stopped buying, the economy would collapse; my response at this point would be to paraphrase Herman Daly: we can choose to follow the dictates of the imaginary system that we ourselves created (the economy), or we can follow the dictates of the very real systems that we live in and depend upon (physics and the environment).

In the meantime, there are a couple of articles that I read recently that I would like to share:

The first is The Change Within by the always-dependable and always-interesting Naomi Klein. In this one, she lays out some interesting sociological reasons as to why responding to climate change in any sort of adequate fashion is so difficult, if not nearly impossible (hint: it’s not just because of the rapacious oil barons) – a big one being, of course, consumerism: “The problem is not ‘human nature,’ as we’re often told. We weren’t born having to shop this much…”

The second is The Anthropocene: It’s Not All About Us by Richard Heinberg (who is less well-known than Naomi Klein, but no less interesting). The title essentially says it – we have increasingly cut ourselves off from wild nature, and “as is usually the case in discussions about humans-and-wild-nature, the conversation is all about us.” He somewhat disagrees with Klein’s point about “human nature” and not being born having to shop this much – as Heinberg states, “every species maximizes population size and energy consumption within nature’s limits” – which is one of the major problems in any attempts to voluntarily limit our consumption (before we reach nature’s limits in the form of a massive and catastrophic ecosystem collapse). He also focuses on how we have always re-engineered the world and taken over ecosystems: “paleoanthropologists can date the arrival of humans to Europe, Asia, Australia, the Pacific islands, and the Americas by noting the timing of the extinctions of large prey species.” But the main point of the essay is our anthropocentrism our alienation from nature which is leading to environmental disaster – “when individual human self-absorption becomes blatantly destructive we call it narcissism… Our planetary-scale narcissism is just the latest method for justifying our actions as we bulldoze, deforest, overfish, and deplete our way to world domination.” For someone like me, who fully believes in Daniel Wildcat’s axiom that we began to lose our way when we stopped thinking of other species as relatives and began thinking of them as resources, hearing this idea from another writer is powerful indeed.

meat-eating and the drought

Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle included a front-page, above-the-fold story titled "Farmers forced to change ways during drought." It profiled one Central Valley farmer who is going to abandon growing alfalfa, among other things, because of the loss of water deliveries from the Central Valley Project. The part that jumped out at me was far down in the article — it quotes "environmentalists" accusing farmers of exporting water in the form of crops such as alfalfa and almonds, and mentioned that alfalfa's water use far exceeds that of other crops in the state… Then in nearly the next paragraph, it cites the farmer saying that his alfalfa "isn't some thirsty boutique crop — it's vital to San Joaquin ranchers and dairies that put meat and milk in the refrigerators of millions of Californians" — so matter-of-factly, as if there isn't even the slightest question that meat and milk are absolutely necessary to have in our refrigerators!

So — yes, it is true that all that water going to all that alfalfa is used overwhelmingly to produce meat, milk, and cheese... and if lots more of us were vegetarians we probably would have plenty of water in California (even this year!). Of course, as a local columnist pointed out, any attempt by the government to promote vegetarianism would be met with fierce resistance (not that that is in any way possible, given that our current political system is completely beholden to corporate agriculture).

But official promotion is beside the point, all that is needed is to stop the subsidies and water deliveries — if all the corn, soy, and alfalfa farmers had to pay anything like the true cost of all that water, then meat would be so expensive as to become a rare luxury rather than the mainstay of the typical fast-food diet (much as, if carbon were priced at anything like its cost to the environment, flying would be a big deal again instead of a convenient commute option). If that were to happen, we would see a lot more vegetarians and near-vegetarians — with attendant improvements to general health and well-being, as well as the savings in water and carbon...

the carbon cost of eating meat

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...).

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."