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Fred’s Footprint: My ancestral carbon footprint
Fred Pearce, New Scientist
The famed US climate scientist Jim Hansen of NASA has been circulating to friends and contacts a draft of a letter he plans to send to UK prime minister Gordon Brown. The main thrust of the letter is to criticise plans for a new coal-fired power station in the country that invented the practice of making energy from burning fossilised carbon.
But along the way, Hansen points out something I didn’t know. Per head of its current population, the UK is responsible for more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than any other nation.
How come? After all, our current per-capita emissions are only half those in the US, Canada and some of the more profligate Gulf states – and about level with Germany, Japan and Russia.
The trouble is that us Brits – whose dogged desire to mine coal and burn it to power dark satanic mills kick-started the Industrial Revolution over 200 years ago – have been at the business of filling the atmosphere with CO2 longer than anyone else. And, as we have all been told countless times, once the dreaded greenhouse gas gets into the air, it sticks around – often for centuries.
The fumes from those satanic mills are still up there, warming the world. Hansen says that if you share out those accumulated emissions among the current British population of about 60 million, it works out at almost 1200 tonnes per head.
So me and my dad, and his dad and his dad, and so on back through the generations, have been responsible for more CO2 emissions than a similar family tree of Americans (just under 1100 tonnes per head), Germans (950 tonnes), Canadians (740 tonnes), Japanese (370 tonnes), and so on.
(18 December 2007)
Charlie Hall’s Balloon Graph
Kurt Cobb, Scitizen
Energy researcher Charlie Hall’s balloon graph challenges the notion that alternative energy sources will provide a smooth transition to a post-fossil fuel society. Scale and energy return remain huge obstacles.
Charlie Hall is one the best-known energy researchers you’ve never heard of. That’s because he puts his effort into understanding whole energy systems such as human civilization rather than perfecting headline-grabbing energy panaceas such as corn ethanol. From the early 1980s onward Hall and his colleagues–some of them former students–have been warning that a society hooked on fossil fuels would find itself up against limits not easily breached–probably sooner rather than later.
With the current boom in biofuels, wind, and solar, and even a revival in nuclear power, many people believe that a smooth transition to a post-fossil fuel economy is already a foregone conclusion. But a careful look at Charlie Hall’s balloon graph tells a different and much more disconcerting story
(19 December 2007)
Hostility to the notion of limits to growth
Jerome a Paris, European Tribune
This is why climate change and energy security are such geopolitically significant issues. For if there are limits to emissions, there may also be limits to growth. But if there are indeed limits to growth, the political underpinnings of our world fall apart. Intense distributional conflicts must then re-emerge – indeed, they are already emerging – within and among countries.
…The optimists believe that economic growth can and will continue. The pessimists believe either that it will not do so or that it must not if we are to avoid the destruction of the environment. I think we have to try to marry what makes sense in these opposing visions.
The above quote, from this article by Martin Wolf, recently described as the “conservative doyen of British economic commentators“, exemplifies the problems we are facing:
- peak oil, climate change, or a combination of both is going to force us to limit our energy consumption one way or another;
- our current economic model is predicated on growth, which itself cannot, in the framework of our existing institutions and mindset, happen without a plentiful, and itself growing, supply of cheap energy in the form of hydrocarbons.
Martin Wolf, to his credit, realizes that these two realities are incompatible, and is looking for compromise. But he is not quite looking in the right place yet:
The response of many, notably environmentalists and people with socialist leanings, is to welcome such conflicts. These, they believe, are the birth-pangs of a just global society. I strongly disagree. It is far more likely to be a step towards a world characterised by catastrophic conflict and brutal repression. This is why I sympathise with the hostile response of classical liberals and libertarians to the very notion of such limits, since they view them as the death-knell of any hopes for domestic freedom and peaceful foreign relations.
Acknowledging reality (and the likelihood of conflict) and trying to prepare for it is not “welcoming conflict.” The meme that environmentalists and socialists are those looking for conflict, even after 6 years (and counting) of pointless but massively destructive and destabilising wars of occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were encouraged and cheered on by all “serious” people is, quite frankly, pathetic.
… The reality of resource depletion and climate change is not going to go away. What CAN change is the following:
- the link between well-being and growth. Growth is convenient in that it helps hide inequality and paper over social ills. But money does not bring happiness, once basic needs are fulfilled. We have to stop trying to value everything in monetary terms and end the dominance of (often short-termist) financial analysis of everything – which just also happens to help concentrate incomes in a staggering fashion in a small number of (investor class) hands;
- as a first step towards that, a reassessment of how value-added and growth are counted. Burning the roof to get heat should not be counted as creating value, but with today’s GDP accounting, it is. As long as the destruction of assets (scarce resources, public goods like the environment, etc) is not counted against the creation of income, things like digging and buring coal will look to be “cheap” and we’ll continue to do them, even as they kill us;
- war and conflict will not make us more prosperous nor safer. We have to get rid of politicians who think these are natural solutions to scarcity …
(20 December 2007)
Also at Daily Kos.
Bags packed for doomsday
John McCrone, The Press (New Zealand) via stuff.co.nz
Is the end really, finally nigh? And if it is, what are you going to do about it? meets some South Islanders who are getting ready for the end of the world as we know it.
The ‘twin tsunamis’ of global warming and peak oil could spell TEOTWAWKI – the end of the world as we know it – and already, quietly, some people are getting prepared because they believe we are talking years rather than decades.
Helen, a petite 42-year-old Nelson housewife, is racing to build her own personal TEOTWAWKI lifeboat.
Earlier this year, she and her American husband cashed-up to buy a 21ha farm in a remote, easily defensible, river valley backing onto the Arthur Range, north-west of Nelson.
The site ticks the right boxes. Way above sea level. Its own spring and stream. Enough winter sun. A good mix of growing areas. A sprinkling of neighbouring farms strung along the valley’s winding dirt-track road.
The digger was to arrive this week to carve out the platform for an adobe eco-house. A turbine in the stream will generate power. A composting toilet will deal with sewage.
Then there is the stuff that could really get her labelled as a crank (and why she would prefer to remain relatively anonymous, at least until she is completely set up). Back at her rented house in Nelson, Helen shows the growing collection of horse-drawn ploughs, wheat grinders, treadle sewing machines and other rusting relics of the pre-carbon era, she believes she will need the day the petrol pumps finally run dry.
There is the library of yellowing books from colonial times, telling how to make your own soap, spin candlewicks, care for clydesdale horses.
“In the kitchen now, I’m always thinking, well, how am I going to do this job if I’m not plugged into the power? I’ve been scouring Trade Me for the things we’ll need.”
…Jurgen Heissner is another Nelsonian who is seeing the writing on the wall.
A founder member of the New Zealand branch of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (Aspo), Heissner says it was like a blow to the stomach when he first comprehended how close we are to the brink.
…Yet while security is a worry in a fast-changing world, Helen, Heissner and Scott, all stress that gun-toting survivalist fantasies just won’t wash.
They say there is no point in attempting to stand alone, creating a private fortress stacked with ammunition and baked beans.
The only solutions worth considering will be community-based ones.
So they see their roles as being the pathfinders, developing the models of how to cope, which they can then teach the rest of us, if the worst does happen.
Helen says there is a bit of a grassroots movement going on, one that shares buzzwords like permaculture, relocalisation and home-scale technology.
(14 December 2007)
