By David L. Brown
I usually don’t write short posts on this blog. In fact, some may think I’m too verbose. Well, guilty I guess, although I like to examine subjects in depth and analyze the various factors involved. In this case, well, I’m merely going to post the map below, just released by the U.S. Agriculture Dept. It shows those counties reporting drought disaster. It requires no comment.
By David L. Brown
Another example of the way in which energy moguls work to block development of sustainable, clean energy was the recent introduction of Prop. 23 in California. This proposition, which came to a vote on November 2, quite simply was aimed at dismantling the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, passed in 2006. Also known as AB 32, the GWSA calls for the state’s producers of greenhouse gas to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. Many initiatives are well under way to replace fossil fuels, create greater efficiency in existing technologies, and move the state toward a cleaner “green” future. Beginning to take effect in 2012, the act will require about a 15 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from present levels by the target date ten years from now.
This seems a moderate goal, perhaps even less than might be hoped. But nonetheless, it had drawn fire from the usual suspects, who organized Prop. 23 to demand that AB32 be suspended until the state’s employment rate dropped below 5.5 percent for a full 12 months. Because this is an unlikely event (that level has been reached only three times in the past 40 years), the proposition in reality was a move to permanently gut the GWSA.
And who was behind this end run to set California up to continue down the dead end path toward oblivion as resource depletion continues to undermine the old economic infrastructure while forward-looking nations such as China and Germany stake their futures on rapid development of alternative energy? Why, the usual suspects, of course. Although the California Republican and Libertarian Parties signed on to support the proposition, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger strongly opposed the proposition and was joined by GOP candidates Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman among others, proving that the party structure is increasingly at odds with its own candidates.
But politicians weren’s the real conspirators behind the proposition. The individuals and corporate entities that acted in support of the proposition wrapped themselves in a cloak of deception, claiming to be concerned with jobs. In fact, they called their effort the California Jobs Initiative. And yet, a look at the list of major donors to the movement tells a different story. Top contributor was a company called Valero Energy ($4.05 million), followed by (among others) Tesoro ($1.525 million), Flint Hills Resources, LP ($1 million; this is a subsidiary of Koch Industries, a major supporter of anti-global warming initiatives); Occidental Petroleum ($300K), National Petrochemical and Refiners Assn. ($100K), Tower Energy Group ($200K); World Oil Corp. ($100K); Southern Counties Oil ($50K); Frontier Oil ($50K); Murray Energy ($30K); and Berry Petrochemical ($30K).
Hmm, do we see a pattern here? Are these leading supporters of a move to block California from improving its greenhouse gas footprint acting out of concern for the jobs of Californians—or from their own self-interested desire to continue to profit from fossil fuels and the destruction of the environment? It’s rather clear that the answer is the latter, the profit one, the evil one, rather than the charitable desire to protect jobs. for ordinary Californians. In fact, suspending the act would have put paid to at least 50,000 new jobs relating to clean energy initiatives.
To put this in further perspective, let’s take a closer look at some of those supporters of the proposal to block the green act. No. 1 contributor Valero operates two oil refineries in California. No. 2 donor Tesoro is the 24th largest producer of air pollution in the United States. And Koch Industries, the third largest contributor, is one of the top 10 corporate polluters in the nation.
What more can we say, except to applaud the wisdom of California voters who soundly defeated Prop. 23 by a 22 percent margin, approximately 61 percent to 39 percent. The Golden State may face deep and serious problems but at least its people have the courage to stand up against polluters and those that Ayn Rand called “looters,” the corporate highway robbers who want to continue their nasty ways at all costs.
California, and the world at large, needs to vastly expand support of alternative energy programs. It’s not the time to listen to those who advise us to inserting our heads into the sand in ostrich-like denial.
In an editorial written prior to the election, Science magazine editor Bruce Alberts had this to say:
The public and private investment in energy innovation now totals only about 0.3% of U.S. energy expenditures. California’s Proposition 23 needs to be soundly defeated, sending a clear signal to Washington that the people of the United States are ready and willing to mobilize its considerable resources in the vital drive to a sustainable energy future.
To which I add, bravo! And thanks to California voters the message has been sent.
By David L. Brown
The Great Lakes are artifacts of the last Ice Age, gouged from the earth by massive glaciers that once covered much of Canada and the upper part of the present United States. They form the largest freshwater system in the world. They are also a harbinger of climate change, because they are growing hotter, thus acting as “canaries in the coal mine” for global warming.
I’m particularly aware of this change because for six years in the 1960s I lived in a high-rise apartment on Chicago’s northside. The building was called Shoreline Towers for the fact that Lake Michigan was right outside my window. Waves sometimes washed over the retaining wall to soak my car in the parking lot. In those days, come winter the lake began to freeze over. Not all the way, but out several miles. When there was a strong east wind the ice would sometimes break up into slabs six or eight inches thick and pile up along the shore.
My friends who live in Chicago tell me that that’s no longer the case today. Lake Michigan does not freeze, and that’s about as clear as any evidence I can think of that the lake is warmer than it was 40 years ago.
Lake Superior, the "canary in the mine"
According to an article posted on the Scientific American website (here), this trend has not only been measured, but shows signs of accelerating. All the Great Lakes have been affected, but climate scientists have been keeping a particular eye on Lake Superior, the largest, deepest, and most northerly of the lakes. The canary of canaries.
The article, “Lake Superior, a Natural Global Warming Gauge, is Running a Fever,” quoted Cameron Davis, the senior adviser to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the Great Lakes: “Total ice cover on the lake has shrunk by about 20 percent over the past 37 years, he said. Though the change has made for longer, warmer summers, it’s a problem because ice is crucial for keeping water from evaporating and it regulates the natural cycles of the Great Lakes.”
This year the trend is even more apparent, with Lake Superior on track to reach or exceed its 1998 record-high temperatures of 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Ominously, data from several buoys that measure temperatures in the lake “reveal that the waters are some 15 degrees warmer than they would normally be at this time of year,” the SciAm article quotes Jay Austin, a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. Dr. Austin is associated with the university’s Large Lakes Observatory (link here).
The warming lake waters are not only evidence of global warming, they may be changing the ecology of these freshwater seas by allowing harmful species to gain a foothold there. For example, the charmingly named blood-sucking sea lamprey is spreading through the lakes. Like the vampires of folk myth, these creatures latch onto the sides of trout and hang on, sucking the fish’s blood until it dies.
There are serious concerns about the effect on native American tribespeople who live around the lake and depend upon its waters. Besides threatening their fisheries, increasing warmth threatens their ability to harvest wild rice, a major source of revenue.
When we hear that the waters of a huge lake are 15 degrees warmer than usual, that’s more than just a canary cheeping in a coal mine. Unless, of course, it’s the mythical 500-pound canary from a very old schoolyard joke.*
As I’ve noted in some recent posts, it’s vexing that as evidence of global warming continues to pile up, there seems to be less acceptance of the danger by the general public, not more as one might suspect. Perhaps this is due in part to the short memory horizon of most younger people. Someone who wasn’t around Chicago 40 years ago won’t remember when the ice piled up on the shore each winter. They won’t remember the time in the 1970s when a bitter west wind created a wind chill in the range of minus 80 degrees, threatening to freeze the pipes in my house even though the furnace was running constantly.
Sadly, those who view events in the world from a short timeline cannot have an accurate indication of any trend. It’s too easy to assume that not much is going on, and that those stories Grandpa told about the frigid winters of the past are just that, stories. This problem of what might be called timeline myopia is particularly true in the case of climate change, which may seem to occur slowly but which in fact is speeding at an unprecedented rate.
We’ve already seen that 2010 is the hottest on record so far, and most months have set records worldwide. We also see that Arctic sea ice has been running at record low levels this year, that the Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than ever, and a multitude of other warnings. Other canaries, entire flocks of the little yellow harbingers. Will no one hear them?
* “What does the 500 pound canary say? CHEEEP!” Sorry.
By David L. Brown
As our readers know we have pointed out many problems facing the Earth and human civilization. There is always a common denominator, it seems, a thread that winds its way through all the dangers facing our planet. That is the imbalance between growing human numbers with “improving” lifestyles and the ability of the planet to support the ever-upward pressure of economies and societies based solely on growth.
A recent issue of Science magazine contains an article that highlights one particular example of this, the growing imbalance between the demand of California residents and farmers and uncertainties about the supply of fresh water.
As is so often the case when examining environmental impacts on human beings, the problem in California is not just that there are more people demanding more water—there is also less water, thanks perhaps to climate change. A serious drought has been plaguing the Golden State for the past three years. According to the Science article, titled “California’s Water Crisis: Worse to Come?” (March 27, 2009 issue; subscription required) in February, “Central Valley farmers were told that all water deliveries would be halted, and State Water Project managers said they would be forced to cut water deliveries to just 15% of normal.”
California is the nation’s No. 1 producer of many food crops, and yet the abundance depends in very large part on irrigation. The state has hundreds of miles of canals and waterways such as this:
This is a view of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the hub of California’s fresh water system. This waterway is girdled by more than a thousand miles of levees. According to hydrologists, the levees are bound to fail at some point in the future, creating future problems that could be catastrophic.
Meanwhile, though, it’s drought that is the problem. For now, late winter snowfall brought mountain snowpack up to 90 percent of normal, relieving pressure on administrators to cut off irrigation water to farmers. For now, the bullet has been dodged. However, recent trends have been ominous, hinting at more years of drought and water shortages.
Discussing the future of the delta, Robert F. Service the author of the Science article writes:
Over the next few decades, a one-two punch of climate change and earthquakes is expected to change the delta dramatically. The delta contains some 1770 kilometers of levees holding back water from dozens of stadium-sized sunken “islands” inside which the land has subsided. By 2050, the chance of widespread levee failures is as high as 95%, due to runoff from the northern Sierras, which is predicted to be more concentrated in the late winter and early spring, and the increasing risk of earthquake, according to a report last summer by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). If that occurs, salt water from the San Francisco Bay would rush in to fill the voids, dramatically increasing the salinity of water in the delta, possibly making it undrinkable. Adding sea-level rise to the equation–as climate models predict–brings the date of levee failures closer. “It will happen,” says Ellen Hanek, a PPIC economist in San Francisco.
This looming threat is merely a tiny sampling of a worldwide phenomenon that is threatening some of the regions where a large proportion of the world’s people live. The problem is that glaciers which feed rivers such as the Ganges in India, the Yellow and Yangtze in China, the Mekong in Vietnam and even the Po in Italy are melting. Snow alone does not feed the rivers a steady flow of water through the summer, and as global temperatures climb winter snow in the high mountains melts faster. The result is a growing tendency to disastrous flooding early in the season followed by drought just when crops need the water most.
Fresh water is just one of the many resources which are growing in short supply, and it is a crucial one to human existence. No form of agriculture has been devised that does not rely upon reliable and abundant sources of water. As the California example illustrates, even wealthy and advanced regions can be threatened when water scarcity spreads.
By David L. Brown
We write endlessly about the changes that are taking place in the world, and there is mounting evidence that we are at a cusp of history, a brief moment in time after which things will be far different than they have been in the past. In this essay we are going to look a bit further down the road and see just how different the future is going to be.
Readers of Star Phoenix Base and perhaps anyone who drives a vehicle know of the challenge of Peak Oil, which was predicted more than half a century ago and is now taking place.
To give you an idea of what an unusual position we are in history, and how the future will not be anything like the present (although not exactly like the past either), here is a graph that gives a long view of fossil fuel energy use by the human race, over a period of four thousand years, starting at the time of Christ and extending to 4000 A.D. That puts our present era right in the middle, and it provides a little perspective on the subject:
In effect this graph is a condensed, long-term view of the bell curve used by M. King Hubbert to predict future oil resources, the so-called Hubbert Curve. That same curve can be applied to other non-renewable resources as well. We have in recent months discussed the concept of Peak Food, a time when the world’s ability to produce food is falling behind the needs of the human population. This is a very real phenomenon, and is likely to result in another culminating event: Peak Population.
The UN continues to blithely assume that population growth will continue for another generation or so, reaching something like 10 billion humans by the middle of this century, and then (almost magically) leveling off and remaining stable into the far future. (I am reminded of my image of the Rabbit of Unreasonable Hope hopping out of a magician’s top hat, my analogy for the denial that is so widespread in the world today.
Well, there are more things going on than that, my friend. Everywhere you look there are peaks looming. Some of these will not yield quite so dramatic a curve as the one shown above, but let’s take a look at a few of the resources that may soon reach peaks or have already done so:
WATER — The world is running out of water everywhere. Not only are underground aquifers being pumped dry to irrigate crops and provide water to expanding metropolises, but the very rivers are drying up. It has long been the case that the Colorado River never reaches the sea, because every last drop is used up before it gets there. The same is rapidly becoming true of major Asian and European rivers as well, and not only because humans are using so much of the water but also because the Winter snowpack and glacial melt in high mountains is diminishing. Instead of steady flows of water, the pattern is shifting to Spring flooding as rapid melting occurs, followed by a drop in water flow during Summer when the water is most needed for crops. We have probably passed Peak Water, although it is not a strictly limited resource.
By David L. Brown
The carefully crafted coverup of the problems revolving around the ethanol craze is starting to come unraveled. People have noticed that they are spending more for food; learning how rain forests are being cut down at a rapidly increasing rate; and that — gasp! — turning corn into alcohol to burn in SUVs might even be LESS green than using plain old-fashioned gasoline.
The cover story on this week’s edition of Time magazine is good news for those of us who have spoken out against this bad idea for years — in my case since the whole idea came along back in the 1970s. I was an agricultural communicator at that time, and I knew a bit about how agriculture works. I wrote a technical farm management handbook. I well remember how a man who operated a small printing business that we used was passing out bumper stickers heralding ethanol as the answer to oil scarcity after the first oil shock of 1973. Even in those days of crop surpluses I knew there were many reasons why this was a bad idea that would mine our precious topsoil.
We didn’t hear much about ethanol for a long time, although it was always there lurking in the wings. Then a few years ago it began to pick up steam as Congress and the administration found a new way to subsidize farmers in return for their votes. Yes, the corn used to make ethanol is heavily subsidized by your tax dollars and mine, enriching farmers as it erodes our grocery budgets and spreads the threat of widespread famine in the Third World.
Now the real story is starting to get out about this con game that is driving our planet on a downward spiral toward social and environmental disaster. Here’s part of the Time cover that is on newsstands now:
The six-page article focuses on how rising grain prices and other factors are causing entrepreneurs around the world to mow down forests like fields of daisies, convert grazing land to crops, put fragile soil to the plow, and generally despoil the landscape all in the name of … well, not to put too fine an edge to it: Money. Yes they’re doing it all for money, cash, moolah, the Almighty Dollar, the Root of All Evil. Take note of the “leaves” in the cover illustration above. The whole biofuel scam is really all about nothing more than letting a few get filthy rich while doing nothing whatsoever to help rein in global warming and almost certainly making the situation even worse.
Although it is interesting and well worth reading I will not go into details about the content of the Time article because for nearly two years we have been trumpeting the word about fake fuels here on Star Phoenix Base. If you are interested in reading some of the things we have reported, use the search field at upper right to hunt for our numerous articles on the subject.
I will however quote the last paragraph of the Time article by Michael Grunwald:
Advocates are always careful to point out that biofuels are only part of the solution to global warming, that the world also needs more energy-efficient lightbulbs and homes and factories and lifestyles. And the world does need all those things. But the world is still going to be fighting an uphill battle until it realizes that right now, biofuels aren’t part of the solution at all. They’re part of the problem.
That pretty much says it all, and I will add the words of a United Nations food expert quoted in the article, who said that “agrofuels are ‘a crime against humanity’.”
We have said much the same thing here on more than a few occasions, and it is depressing to see this tragic boondoggle continue to gain momentum even as the facts about ethanol are emerging into the light of day. Even Iowa, sometimes called The Corn State, is on the verge of becoming a net importer of the golden grain, thanks to dozens of ethanol distilleries popping up all over the region. There seems to be no end to the enthusiasm for ravaging the environment to make a fast buck, whether there in the American Heartland, in the rainforests of Brazil or Indonesia, or in Europe where rapid expansion of ethanol production has recently been mandated.
As reported in the Time article, Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute has said of the ethanol craze that it “pit[s] the 800 million people with cars against the 800 million with hunger problems.” When the profit motive meets the best interests of humanity, it seems that greed always wins and the poor end up with the short end of the deal.
So who shall feed the hungry when food is turned to fuel? The simple answer is: no one, not while there is money to be made. The rich are abandoning the hungry poor and leaving them to join the legions of the doomed. May their spirits haunt those who engage for profit in turning food into fuel when there are hungry bellies in the world.
The mythic teacher Jesus is said to have turned water into wine, but only a living Satan would turn wine into water or food into fuel.
by Val Germann
The title above comes from a Jimi Hendrix (that’s right!) lyric of 40 years ago, about a time-traveling visitor to Earth. The lines below have stuck with me from the moment I first heard them in the mid-1960s:
“I have been here before, in the age of ice,
and of course this is why I’m so concerned.
I’ve come back to find the stars displaced
and the smell of a world that’s burned,
the smell of a world that’s been burned.”
And so it is in the process of being burned, as has been happening all over the world, and in our American West, in Mexico, and even in Canada. This writer happened to be visiting Rochester, New York, several years ago as fires burned out of control in Ontario province. The smoke and haze was very acrid in Rochester, hundreds of miles to the south, making it difficult to stay outside.
And so it will likely come as no surprise to our readers that enormous forest fires are raging once again, this time on the islands of Indonesia. Today’s TERRADAILY website features a startling article on these new fires, causing trouble thousands of miles away:
But on Thursday, the haze had spread 3,600 kilometres (2,250 miles) to smother islands in the western Pacific, authorities there said.
What is causing these fires? Is it drought? Is it lightning? Is it bad luck? Or is it something else:
The annual illegal burn-off in Indonesia, which officials have been accused of doing little to stop, sees choking smoke billow across the region, with Malaysia, Singapore and southern Thailand usually worst affected.
Yes, indeed, it’s people who are causing these fires, the hundreds of thousands of people in desperate need of land for slash and burn agriculture, torching ever more tropical forest every year. There is no stopping them, apparently, and there will be no end to their burning until there’s nothing left to burn, nothing left but the smell, the smell of a whole world that’s been burned.
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by Val Germann
A town in western Australia has defied the experts and its political leaders by voting down a plan to recycle sewer water back into the city’s main reservior where it would be, uh, used again as drinking water. Like astronauts on their way to the Moon, Australians are being asked to consume their own waste, and they’re not liking it.
They’re not liking it even though the process was said to be perfectly safe. That is, the nastiness inherent in modern waste water was promised to be totally removed. That’s what was said. However, common sense, and the Second Law, say that total removal of nastiness is impossible on its face and if a city is drinking its own waste water it is in big trouble. The voters, to their credit, understood this fact implicitly, as a recent SPACE DAILY article reported:
Toowoomba City Council had proposed treating waste water before pumping it into the town’s main resevoir and said the process would remove viruses, bacteria and hormones from the water. But townsfolk were concerned about health risks and that the project could damage tourism and affect house prices, Beer said.
Gee, I had no idea that a city running on its own waste water would have a problem selling its houses? What an interesting concept. But it’s one that is coming, sooner or later, because Australia is in the midst of a massive and unrelenting drought, one that will force new and unpleasant realities on Aussies, continent-wide:
Toowoomba in the state of Queensland has faced water restrictions for a decade and is one of hundreds of small towns suffering from a shortage of rainfall. Local Mayor Dianne Thorley had urged the 100,000 strong community to back a plan to pump purified effluent back into dams for drinking, and warned the town’s water supply could dry up within two years without drought-breaking rains.
Here in the American midwest, where it’s plenty hot right now, our water supply is fine. This writer has lived within one hundred miles of his current location for over half a century, and never even heard of water problems.
But, of course, that could change.
Read the entire SPACE DAILY article here.
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by Val Germann
The last twenty years or so have been pretty tough on Missouri Tiger sports fans. In general, our University of Missouri “revenue” teams (that’s what they call football and basketball) have not done well, and the athletic department has been rocked by scandal after scandal. Luckily, the state’s sports fans are pretty much proof against reality and continue to show up for games, saving the MU Tiger from what some might call a well-deserved extinction.
If only things were working out as well for the real tigers, the ones in south Asia. But they’re not, as this quote from THE GUARDIAN today bluntly states:
But yesterday, a landmark study by leading conservationists warned that their plight is even more serious than previously feared. The big cat, the report warns, is close to extinction and the area in which it lives has been nearly halved in the last 10 years.
The situation is quite plain. The human population of India has shot through the roof while that of the Tiger has headed into the basement. The one is the same as the other, two halves of the same walnut, and all the hand-wringing in the world is not going to make one ounce of difference. But that isn’t going to stop some people, of course, who think that like King Canute they can bade the tide be still. Groups like Save the Tiger continue to have hopes:
The authors of the report – Setting Priorities for the Conservation and Recovery of Wild Tigers 2005-2015 – advocate a “tiger summit”, involving the heads of state of the 13 countries which still host the species.
But it’s all in vain, as anyone knows who has kept up with the overall situation. India, and all of south Asia, is “developing” at breakneck speed and its rampaging population needs more natural resources every day.
So, let’s hope the Missouri Tigers can avoid athletic extinction and MU’s athletic director can keep that tiger skin (donated by an alum who shot a Bengal Tiger in 1957) hanging on his office wall. That is, what a tragedy it would be if the tiger were to totally disappear!
Read the entire GUARDIAN article here.
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by Val Germann
Star Phoenix Base readers do not have to be reminded that the heat balance of the Earth is changing because of CO2 generation caused by human beings. Here in the United States, where one-fourth of the energy on the planet is consumed, more than 40 Quads are used every year to generate electricity, at a fearsome cost in both money and CO2 production. But there’s more to it than that, as this quote from a Department of Energy website demonstrates:
In 2000, for example, approximately 40 quadrillion Btu of energy were consumed by the electric power sector to generate electricity in the United States, but only 12 quadrillion Btu worth of electricity were actually used directly by consumers.
Read that again, and maybe yet again. One may well ask: “What is going on here?” Well, it’s that entropy law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, this time involving the coal that is used to generate the vast majority of U.S. electricity, and much of U.S. CO2:
Where did the other 28 quadrillion Btu go? Energy is never destroyed but it does change form. The chemical energy contained in fossil fuels, for example, is converted at the generator to the desired electrical energy. Because of theoretical and practical limits on the efficiency of conversion equipment, much of the energy in the fossil fuels is “lost,” mostly as waste heat.
Yes, it is, and how! And it’s when you consider the startling facts above that a solar panel on the roof truly begins to make sense. That panel may have its problems but it does not have the massive inherent losses of a huge and distant power plant.
At a time when exotic systems are being proposed that might offer 25-percent efficiency gains in various U.S. energy systems, the potential energy profits arising from the decentralization of our electricity grid are being ignored. That is:
In the end, for every three units of energy that are converted to create electricity, only about one unit actually reaches the end user.
That should change, don’t you think?
Read the entire entry on the DOE site here.
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