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Japan’s Horror Reveals How Thin is the Edge We Live On
Bill McKibben, Guardian/UK
… What the events reveal is the thinness of the margin on which modernity lives. There’s not a country in the world more modern and civilised than Japan; its building codes and engineering prowess kept its great buildings from collapsing when the much milder quake in Haiti last year flattened everything. But clearly it’s not enough. That thin edge on which we live, and which at most moments we barely notice, provided nowhere near enough buffer against the power of the natural world.
We’re steadily narrowing the margin. Global warming didn’t cause the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Miyagi coast, but global warming daily is shrinking the leeway on which civilisation everywhere depends.
… There have always been natural disasters, and there always will be. For 10,000 years the planet has been by and large benign; you could tell where the safe margin for civilisation was because that’s, by definition, where civilisation was built. But if the sea level rises a metre, that margin shrinks considerably: on a beach that slopes in at 1 degree, the sea is now nearly 90 metres nearer. And it’s not just a literal shrinkage – the insecurity that comes with smaller food stocks or more frequent floods also takes a psychological toll: the world seems more cramped because it is more cramped.
We can try to deal with this in two ways. One is to attempt to widen it with more technology. If the Earth’s temperature is rising, maybe we could “geoengineer” the planet, tossing sulphur into the atmosphere in an effort to block incoming sunlight. It’s theoretically possible. But researchers warn it could do more harm than good, and maybe this isn’t the week to trust the grandest promises of engineers, not when they’ve all but lost control of the highest technology we’ve ever built, there on the bluff at Fukushima. The other possibility is to try to build down a little: to focus on resilience, on safety. And to do that – here’s the controversial part – instead of focusing on growth. We might decide that the human enterprise (at least in the west) has got big enough, that our appetites need not to grow, but to shrink a little, in order to provide us more margin. What would that mean? Buses and bikes and trains, not SUVs. Local food, with more people on the farm so that muscles replace some of the oil. Having learned that banks are “too big to fail”, we might guess that our food and energy systems fall into that same category.
(20 March 2011)
Nicholas Stern: Climate inaction risks a new world war
Brad Johnson, Wonk Room
This is the first in a three-part interview with economist Lord Nicholas Stern on climate policy.
Lord Nicholas Stern, one of the world’s most prominent climate economists, believes that failure to address global warming could eventually lead to World War III. In 2006, he produced the “Stern Review” on behalf of the British government, clearly laying out the potentially catastrophic economic consequences of failing to address climate pollution. Since then, the scientific understanding of the damages from global warming has grown, and Stern has warned that his report “underestimated the risks.”
In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress, Stern described his current understanding of the stark consequences of inaction, which defy the scope of standard economic language. If no global policy to cut carbon pollution is enacted, there is about a 50 percent risk that global temperatures would rise above levels not seen for 30 million years by 2100, an extraordinary rate of change. The “potentially immense” consequences of this radical transformation of our planet, Stern explained, include the “serious risk of global war”:
(10 March 2011)
We won’t trouble Saudi’s tyrants with calls to reform while we crave their oil
George Monbiot, Guardian
Unrest will be seen as destabilising for western governments too until our dependency on Riyadh’s tap is curbed
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Did you hear it? The clamour from western governments for democracy in Saudi Arabia? The howls of outrage from the White House and No 10 about the shootings on Thursday, the suppression of protests on Friday, the arrival of Saudi troops in Bahrain on Monday? No? Nor did I.
Did we miss it, or do they believe that change is less necessary in Saudi Arabia than it is in Libya? If so, on what grounds? The democracy index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit places Libya 158th out of 167, and Saudi Arabia 160th. At least in Libya, for all the cruelties of that regime, women are not officially treated as lepers were in medieval Europe.
Last week, while explaining why protests in the kingdom is unnecessary, the foreign minister, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, charmingly promised to “cut off the fingers of those who try to interfere in our internal matters”. In other parts of the world this threat would have been figurative; he probably meant it. If mass protests have not yet materialised in Saudi Arabia, it’s because the monarchy maintains a regime of terror, enforced with the help of torture, mutilation and execution.
Yet our leaders are even more at ease among the Saudi autocracy than they were in the court of Colonel Gaddafi.
… Why? Future weapons sales doubtless play a role. But there’s an even stronger imperative. A few days ago the French bank Société Générale warned that unrest in Saudi Arabia could push the oil price to $200 a barrel.
Abdullah’s kingdom is the world’s last “swing producer”: the only nation capable of raising crude oil production if it falls elsewhere, or if demand outstrips supply. As a result, political disruption there is as threatening to the stability of western governments as it is to the Saudi regime. Probably more so, as our leaders wouldn’t get away with gunning us down in the street.
(15 March 2011)
Learning from Japan about Resilience
Warren Karlenzig, Post Carbon Institute
Hourly Japan ‘s tragedy grows almost beyond comprehension. There is universal empathy over the pain and suffering being experienced, fear about impacts on Japan’s and the world’s economy, and anxiety about releases of radiation. For those of us living in seismically active coastal earthquake zones (me), or anyone living in the airshed of an active nuclear facility (most of us),or living downwind (the West Coast of the US and Canada), concerns are multiplied.
We must use this teachable moment to comprehensively plan for climate change, energy availability and transformational natural disasters. These multi-dimensional factors present a non-linear problem bound up together, a “wicked problem.”
The urban need for effective resilience planning has never been more urgent or daunting. The Sendai Earthquake shattered existing risk models with a 9.0 initial offshore earthquake, spawning a colossal tsumani from the epicenter toward shore, resulting in a humanitarian crisis underpinned by now-uncontrolled nuclear radiation releases.
Loss of life is rampant, and amongst survivors physical and psychological suffering is acute.
All grids are down, no transportation, communications or energy are available in impact zones. Yet, the modest bicycle has emerged triumphant from the chaos in Tokyo and beyond.
Infrastructure, communications, trains, subways, roads, energy, soil, air, water, and food are all impacted in terms of delivery, quality and supply. People are wisely cloistered indoors, but getting basic supplies will become the next concern for survival even before the radiation leaks subside.
In terms of global economic fallout, supply chains are getting hit, (microcontrollers, airplanes, and the automotive and electronics sectors, impacting global trade at least for the year.
Trend: World supply of renewables are being recalculated and redefined
Nuclear has lost its dubious “renewable” status permanently. Anything that makes land and resources unusable and dangerous for years should not qualify as a first solution. But with coal use likely peaking as an energy source and because its threat to climate, we are forced to consider nuclear as an energy option.
Trend: Need for New Nuclear Power Plant Criteria
Earthquake, and Cat 3 to 5 hurricane and typhoon zones should be taken off the global list of available nuclear energy generation sites. Nuclear needs a complete re-examination in terms of lifecycle energy costs (how much energy is used in mining uranium and other material) as well as lifecycle radiation risks.
Trend: Nuclear won’t be Dismissed Outright
Considering the increase in the cities of the developing world (China, India) and their need for energy–it will be almost impossible to dismiss nuclear as an energy source, unless some very massive leapfrog technology comes along . We’re stuck with most of the nuclear plants we have, at least for now. Plants should be scrutinized, even temporarily or permanently closed if they can’t be run with “Post-Fukushima” confidence.Germany is doing just that to its older nuclear plants. The EU is stress testing more than 100 of its nuclear plants, according to the American Public Radio show Marketplace.
(16 March 2011)
