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Big Foot
Michael Specter, New Yorker
In measuring carbon emissions, it’s easy to confuse morality and science.
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… Possessing an excessive carbon footprint is rapidly becoming the modern equivalent of wearing a scarlet letter. Because neither the goals nor acceptable emissions limits are clear, however, morality is often mistaken for science. A recent article in New Scientist suggested that the biggest problem arising from the epidemic of obesity is the additional carbon burden that fat people-who tend to eat a lot of meat and travel mostly in cars-place on the environment. Australia briefly debated imposing a carbon tax on families with more than two children; the environmental benefits of abortion have been discussed widely (and simplistically). Bishops of the Church of England have just launched a “carbon fast,” suggesting that during Lent parishioners, rather than giving up chocolate, forgo carbon.
… As a source of global warming, the food we eat-and how we eat it-is no more significant than the way we make clothes or travel or heat our homes and offices. It certainly doesn’t compare to the impact made by tens of thousands of factories scattered throughout the world. Yet food carries enormous symbolic power, so the concept of “food miles”-the distance a product travels from the farm to your home-is often used as a kind of shorthand to talk about climate change in general. “We have to remember our goal: reduce emissions of greenhouse gases,” John Murlis told me not long ago when we met in London. “That should be the world’s biggest priority.” Murlis is the chief scientific adviser to the Carbon Neutral Company, which helps corporations adopt policies to reduce their carbon footprint as well as those of the products they sell. He has also served as the director of strategy and chief scientist for Britain’s Environment Agency. Murlis worries that in our collective rush to make choices that display personal virtue we may be losing sight of the larger problem.
(25 February 2008)
The entire (long) article is online. Well-written, but leans towards the techno-fix side of the spectrum. -BA
I threw my fears to the wind
Angharad Penrhyn Jones, The Guardian
Eco activists spend their lives agonising over the planet’s future – but that doesn’t stop them having children. We mustn’t give up hope, says Angharad Penrhyn Jones
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There was a time when I thought I wouldn’t have children. I worried about the terrible things the world would do to them. I also worried about what they would do to the world.
Then a fellow environmentalist assured me it was fine to have one or two children if you lived carefully. “It’s all about limiting your emissions,” he said. He had just come across a man who was single-handedly burning 100 tonnes of carbon a year – that’s roughly 10 times the national average – through a pathological love of flying.
This put things in perspective. I hated flying. So, like most people, I threw my fears to the wind. I was going to have a low-carbon, politically engaged child, and I wasn’t going to think too far into the future. My husband, George Monbiot, an environmental campaigner, caved in.
Our daughter, Hanna, is now almost two. So far, she is pretty impressed with the world. Her favourite expression is “Oh wow!”, and she often throws her hands up triumphantly, especially if she has had the good fortune to spot a fire engine. More than anything, she loves to look out of her bedroom window at the A489. There are the timber lorries to admire, the tractors, the boy racers’ overpowered hatchbacks. Military aircraft, ripping through the skies on their training e xercises, are a delight. Hanna adores anything that burns fossil fuels. When do we tell her the nasty truth about climate change?
Growing up in North Wales in the 80s, I was part of a privileged generation. I did have a few ecological concerns: I worried about acid rain, the logging of tropical rainforests and the hole in the ozone layer, which, like everything, was the size of Wales (though luckily for us was situated elsewhere).
Yet there was a fundamental difference between our environmental consciousness then and now. Then, we believed the planet was essentially stable. The seasons were fixed and the sea was contained. Buying food was a happy, uncomplicated affair, and every summer we welcomed the heat of the sun – the hotter, the better – working diligently on our tans. We flew on holiday without a moment’s thought, and carbon was something you came across only when you burnt your toast. The economy was kind to a middle-class family. We had faith in the idea of progress.
What we thought of as progress turned out to be the opposite. Twenty years later, there is a strong and disturbing sense that things are going to get a lot worse. While we are still confronted with a series of single environmental issues, we also have a cumulative, systemic problem on our hands.
Parents have always worried about their children, and our imagination struggles to identify with the suffering of our ancestors.
(23 February 2008)
Imagine a world that’s energy-rich
Richard Smalley, Houston Chronicle
Storing electricity locally was late Nobelist’s dream
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HC Editor’s note: The late Dr. Richard E. Smalley was a Nobel Laureate and professor of chemistry at Rice University. His Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 1996 for the discovery of a new form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene (”buckyballs”) with Robert Curl, also a professor of chemistry at Rice, and Harold Kroto, a professor at the University of Sussex in England. At the time of his death in October 2005, Smalley was focused on finding solutions to the global energy problem. The article below is a summation of Smalley’s thoughts on an energy solution excerpted by his colleague, Amy Myers Jaffe of Rice’s Baker Institute.
I have been on a personal journey for the past year and half in a search to find some happy answer to the energy problem.
I believe the problem is, simply stated, that we have to find a new oil. Oil was, unquestionably, the basis for prosperity for this country and the planet in the last century – particularly the last half of the century.
But it is very clear to many of us, including leading scientists and policymakers, that if oil remains the basis for prosperity for the world throughout this century, it cannot be a very prosperous or happy century.
There are two reasons for this. First, we will certainly peak in worldwide oil production sometime in the earlier part of the century; and second, there will be vastly more people (billions of people) on the planet consuming energy in the future.
(23 February 2008)
Friendly Fire
David Ehrenfeld, Resurgence
What does the idea of friendly fire have to do with the problems, especially the environmental problems, related to the energy crisis in the US? This becomes clear if we look at possible solutions to the energy crisis. I group them in two categories.
The first category includes all technological solutions. There is no need to describe them in detail: nuclear power, biofuels, hydrogen, efficiency gains in transforming, transporting and using energy, non-biological renewable energy, and others. Each has major advantages and serious limitations. Most have the same drawback: they are much more expensive than sticking a pipe in the ground and letting the oil flow out of a tap. Nevertheless, it is clear that some combination of these technologies will allow us to stretch our energy supply a good deal farther than current practice allows.
The second category of proposed solutions to the energy crisis includes the various methods of conservation of energy based on a simple lifestyle. It means, for North Americans, consuming less and reusing more.
The US has opted for the first category: technology. It’s easy to see why. Our present economy is geared to constantly increasing consumption, and dependence on goods and services we no longer provide for ourselves. There is a deadly combination of a sense that we are entitled to all these goods and services, and a fear that we need them and that we can’t survive without them. We don’t worry about the ultimate cost, because we haven’t the faintest idea what it is. In fact, we act as if there will be no cost. Thus, in the US most of those advocating the new energy technologies are not suggesting any reduction in overall energy consumption.
This article is based on the third annual Khoshoo Memorial Lecture, ‘Energy and Conservation’, delivered by David Ehrenfeld in June 2006 at the India International Centre, New Delhi.
David Ehrenfeld is Professor of Biology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University, New Jersey. He is the author of Swimming Lessons: Keeping Afloat in the Age of Technolog
(Nov-Dec 2006)
An older article that I just ran across. Another classic from 1999: Conservation Biology in the Twenty-First Century. The article concludes:
The beginning of the twenty-first century is certain to be unsettled and often dangerous for the majority of people in both the industrial and non-industrial worlds. There will be no magic formula to guarantee that a conservation biologist can work effectively under these conditions, although some individuals will be lucky. But I believe that there is a strategy that can help us cope with some of the problems I have described — a strategy that may, at the very least, tip the odds in our favor.
This strategy has six elements. I advise conservation biologists to consider them carefully:
- Minimize the cost, logistic complexity, and technological demands of your research.
- Design your research to be flexible, so that your methods and even some of your objectives can be modified as changing circumstances warrant.
- Take every opportunity that you can find to learn, in depth, the taxonomy of the groups you are studying and the natural history of as many parts of your ecosystem as it is possible to know.
- Have a practical trade, a skill, or an alternative occupation that you can resort to if conservation biology cannot support you on a full-time basis. There are trades that are always in demand, regardless of circumstances. Pick one.
- Whenever possible, design your research to include the participation and wisdom of the local community. Make it your goal that local people understand, approve of, participate in, and benefit from your work. Make a special effort to involve local schools and schoolchildren; work with the teachers and try to budget some money to help them incorporate your project into their curricula.
- Before the project ends, develop a mechanism to monitor the system and continue local involvement after you are gone.
And beyond conservation biology there is a larger lesson to learn. Both George Orwell and Wendell Berry have said that we are going to have to learn how to live a little poorer. Not poorer in spirit, not poorer in happiness, just poorer in the material things we don’t need. If we can learn this lesson, maybe the best parts of civilization and nature will survive after all. We shouldn’t ask for more than that.
