Resilience Roundup – Sep 4

September 4, 2015

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

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A roundup of news, views and ideas from the main stream press and the blogosphere.  Click on the headline link to see the full article.


Will California redouble its push for clean energy? It all rides on this upcoming vote.

David Roberts, Vox
It’s difficult to overstate how important California is to the US clean energy effort. For decades it has been serving as a kind of existence proof, growing its economy even as per-capita energy use and carbon intensity have fallen.

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(CA Senate)

California is leading the nation on climate change and clean energy. But the next phase of its leadership is now on the line.

At issue is a set of bills that would substantially expand the state’s existing clean energy programs. The bills will come up for a vote in the California Assembly within the next week or two. The oil lobby has mounted a full-court press against the effort, and a handful of Democrats in the Assembly are wavering. The stakes could not be higher…


How Extreme Energy Leads to Extreme Politics

Aldo Orellana López and Sian Cowman, Foreign Policy in Focus
As corporations and governments around the world scramble to access harder-to-reach fossil fuels in fracking wells and tar sands, the struggles of communities on the front lines of this expansion of extractivism are becoming more extreme — and more visible.

And so is the backlash against any who resist.

Indigenous peoples who find themselves “in the way” of extractivist projects are increasingly finding their territorial rights, among others, violated.

A particularly salient example is playing out in Argentina. There, facing a shortage of traditional energy sources, the government has intensified the exploitation of shale oil and gas deposits. Along with these changes in energy policy has come a crackdown on those resisting fuel exploitation in their communities…


New Study Shows How Climate Change Is Already Reshaping The Earth

Joe Romm, Climate Progress
A landmark study in the journal Nature documents an expansion of the world’s dry and semi-arid climate regions since 1950 — and attributes it to human-caused global warming.

This expansion of the world’s dry zones is a basic prediction of climate science. The fact it is so broadly observable now means we must take seriously the current projections of widespread global Dust-Bowlification in the coming decades on our current CO2 emissions pathway — including the U.S.’s own breadbasket.

The new study, “Significant anthropogenic-induced changes of climate classes since 1950,” looks at multiple datasets of monthly temperature and precipitation over time. The main finding:

About 5.7% of the global total land area has shifted toward warmer and drier climate types from 1950–2010, and significant changes include expansion of arid and high-latitude continental climate zones, shrinkage in polar and midlatitude continental climates….


The Refugee Crisis That Isn’t

Kenneth Roth, Huffington Post
European leaders may differ about how to respond to the asylum-seekers and migrants surging their way, but they seem to agree they face a crisis of enormous proportions. Germany’s Angela Merkel has called it "the biggest challenge I have seen in European affairs in my time as chancellor." Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni has warned that the migrant crisis could pose a major threat to the "soul" of Europe. But before we get carried away by such apocalyptic rhetoric, we should recognize that if there is a crisis, it is one of politics, not capacity….


Dark Germany, Bright Germany: Which Side Will Prevail Under Strain of Refugees?

Melanie Amann, Jan Friedmann, Christiane Hoffmann, Horand Knaup, Martin Knobbe, Peter Müller, Conny Neumann, René Pfister, Maximilian Popp, Cornelia Schmergal, Christoph Schult and Michael Sontheimer, Der Spiegel
…Germany, in this late summer of 2015, can be a confusing place. There are migrants in uniform who have to protect the chancellor, herself from East Germany, from an eastern German mob. The attacks on refugee hostels in Germany have reached a shocking level this year. By July 6, there were fully 199 of them, and the attacks have shown no signs of stopping. At the same time, though, Germans seem more willing to help than ever before. They visit refugee hostels, bringing along clothes and toys. They cook together with the Syrians and Sudanese. They invite migrant boys to join the football teams where their own children play. Which Germany will prevail? The Germany of racist chants from the roadside? The Germany of rioters and drunken rock-throwers? "Dark Germany," as President Joachim Gauck calls it? Or will it be the new, bright Germany, represented by the young policeman with his roots in Afghanistan? Will Western Europe ultimately prefer to allow the refugees to die in trucks rather than to open the door to the desperate? Or will Germany rejoice in helping and in allowing the refugees to take part in the unbelievable prosperity that the republic has enjoyed in recent decades?…


New map reveals ‘astronomical’ scale of human impact on forests

Robert McSweeney, Carbon Brief
New research suggests there are just over 3tn trees on Earth, which is eight times more than scientists previously thought. But this isn’t the good news it sounds, as humans are cutting down over 15bn trees every year. On balance, once growth of new trees is taken into account, that means our forests are shrinking by around 10bn trees each year.

The sheer scale of deforestation means we’re eating into the amount of carbon locked up in the world’s forests, the study suggests…


Even the laggardly IEA admits solar PV is now competitive, having fallen in cost 75% in five years

Chris Goodall, Carbon Commentary
The International Energy Agency published a report today (August 31st 2015) that focuses on the rapid decline in the cost of renewable energy. More precisely, it says that electricity costs from wind and solar have plunged, a word rarely used by international civil servants. On good sites around the world, renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels.

Bizarrely, the IEA says that new nuclear is also inexpensive, a conclusion strikingly at variance with the rampant inflation in construction costs around the world. It may be that the absurd optimism over nuclear is influenced by the joint author of this report, the Nuclear Energy Agency. (The cost estimate of $50 a megawatt hour is one third of what Hinkley C will be paid)…


28 billion annually for the Energiewende?

Craig Morris, Energy Transition
A new study is making the rounds. It puts the price tag for renewable electricity higher than ever before. And it makes the same mistake as other high estimates – no subsequent savings are subtracted from these calculations. What happens if we do that? Craig Morris investigates…


Greener cities are best at taming urban heat

Tim Radford, Climate News Network
For the first time in human history, more than half the world now lives in cities. Later this century, the proportion could rise to two-thirds.

Even without global warming because of a build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, itself the consequence of fossil fuel combustion, the cities are feeling the heat.

That is because dark materials and hard surfaces – tarmacadam, brick, cement, tiles, slates, gutters, railway tracks, flyovers, motorways and so on – absorb the heat but not the rainwater that, as it evaporates, could damp down that heat…


Permaculture in Cold Climates

Lambert Strether, Naked Capitalism
Here are a couple of videos that I encountered serendipitously on the YouTube searching on “permaculture,” because I couldn’t bear to write on the Donald after spending the evening straightening out my routers when the real problem turned out to be outside the house at the ISP, snarl (it was a full moon). Anyhow, the title of the first one — ” Compost-Powered Heating in the Vermont Hills” — caught my eye, partly because Vermont has been all over the news lately, but mostly because winter is coming — as I can tell because now I hear crickets when I sit in my garden — and the prospect of winter concentrates the mind wonderfully on heating. But then I listened to it and found a lot of other great stuff. Here it is:…

News clippings image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.

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