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California: climate change law won’t hurt economy
Peter Henderson, Reuters
California’s economy will not be damaged by the state’s 2006 climate change law, a state agency said in a report on Wednesday that counters the business community’s arguments that the economically troubled state will lose more jobs and businesses.
The analysis by the state Air Resources Board, the chief regulator of the law, forecast higher energy prices from new regulations and a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases, but said greater energy efficiency would keep costs manageable in the trend-setting environmental state.
It concluded that the measure will yield modest job gains statewide, will have a negligible effect on the state’s overall economy — the eighth largest in the world — and could benefit some sectors like alternative energy businesses.
In sharp contrast to a 2008 report that was panned as shallow and full of faulty assumptions, the Wednesday analysis was received with cautious approval from academics at Stanford and other universities who consulted on the process.
Business groups however said the state was still making rosy assumptions.
In 2006, California’s Legislature passed and Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law committing the state to developing regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — blamed for global climate change — to 1990 levels by 2020.
“These policies can shift the driver of economic growth from polluting energy sources to clean energy and efficient technologies, with little or no economic penalty,” the report said…
(24 March 2010)
The report can be found here.
Forest loss slows, as China plants and Brazil preserves
Richard Black, BBCNews
The world’s net rate of forest loss has slowed markedly in the last decade, with less logging in the Amazon and China planting trees on a grand scale.
Yet forests continue to be lost at “an alarming rate” in some countries, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Its Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010 finds the loss of tree cover is most acute in Africa and South America.
But Australia also suffered huge losses because of the recent drought.
“It is good news,” said the report’s co-ordinator Mette Loyche Wilkie, a senior forestry office with FAO.
The area of… forests undisturbed by human activity continues to decrease, so countries must further strengthen their efforts to conserve and manage them.
Eduardo Rojas, FAO
“This is the first time we’ve been able to say that the deforestation rate is going down across the world, and certainly when you look at the net rate that is certainly down.
“But the situation in some countries is still alarming,” she told BBC News.
The last decade saw forests being lost or converted at a rate of 13 million hectares per year, compared to 16 million hectares in the 1990s.
However, new forests were being planted to the tune of more than seven million hectares per year; so the net rate of loss since the year 2000 has been 5.2 million hectares per year, compared to 8.3 million in the 1990s.
Globally, forests now cover about 31% of the Earth’s land surface…
(25 March 2010)
The FAO report can be accessed here
Exclusive Excerpt: Hack the Planet
Eli Kintisch, Wired Science
The battle lines on geoengineering have begun to take shape. On one side are modern-day romantics, who consider geoengineering an a priori violation of humans’ role as planetary citizens to let nature be natural and take a humble place within it. Better to solve the climate problem by reducing our impact on the planet, they say. Prominent among their antecedents is American forestry ecologist and writer Aldo Leopold, who asserted in A Sand County Almanac in 1949 that environmental problems demanded that man change his role from “conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it.”
Find out more about hacking the planet in a Q&A with the author.
Eli Kintisch is a reporter for Science magazine. He has also written for Slate, Discover, MIT Technology Review and The New Republic. He has worked as Washington correspondent for the Forward and science reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 2005 he won the Space Journalism prize for a series on private spaceflight. His new book, Hack the Planet, will be available April 19.
“A wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness, the world’s a cage,” wrote David Brower, the former executive director of the Sierra Club. Technology and development, he lamented, had rid most of the world of this essential quality.
Extending this common trope of American environmentalism to the question of climate engineering would be writer and climate activist Bill McKibben, who views geoengineering as the “junkie logic” of a culture addicted to technological solutions. He has urged humanity “to truly and viscerally think of ourselves as just one species among many.”
And then there are the rationalists, who believe that to minimize suffering, it just may be more technological hubris that our species needs. In The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, Brand wrote of humanity’s responsibility as Earth’s gardeners and caretakers, “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” Recently he updated his thinking. “Those were innocent times. New situation, new motto: ‘ We are as gods and have to get good at it.’”
He views geoengineering as part of an “eco-pragmatist” approach. “Whether it’s called managing the Commons, natural infrastructure maintenance, tending the wild, niche construction, ecosystem engineering, mega gardening, or intentional Gaia, humanity is now stuck with the planet’s stewardship role,” he wrote in 2009.
Deciding what role geoengineering should play as the climate crisis unfolds in the twenty-first century will take balancing both Enlightenment perspectives. And yet we may not have a choice between embracing the God role with climate models and artificial volcanoes or shunning it to take our place among the rest of the species. Events, and catastrophic ones, may dictate our decisions.
Perhaps climate stewardship simply won’t work, and tinkering with the atmosphere won’t be available. Or it will — and we’ll kill one another over the thermostat. Now we contemplate wielding global powers previously imagined only in science fiction. Maybe the biggest question we’ll face may be how changing the planet will change ourselves….
(23 March 2010)
Find out more about the book here.
Breaking the Growth Habit: A Q&A with Bill McKibben
Mark Fischetti, Scientific American
The April issue of Scientific American includes an exclusive excerpt from Bill McKibben’s new book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, plus an interview that challenges his assumptions. Expanded answers to key interview questions, and additional queries and replies, appear here.
McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont and is a co-founder of the climate action group, 350.org. He argues that humankind, because of its actions, now lives on a fundamentally different world, which he calls Eaarth. This celestial body can no longer support the economic growth model that has driven society for the past 200 years. To avoid its own collapse, humankind must instead seek to maintain wealth and resources, in large part by shifting to more durable, localized economies—especially in food and energy production.
[A Scientific American interview with McKibben follows.]
SA: You entitled your book Eaarth, because you claim that we have permanently altered the planet. How so? And why should we change our ways now?
McKibben: Well, gravity still applies. But fundamental characteristics have changed, like the way the seasons progress, how much rain falls, the meteorological tropics—which have expanded about two degrees north and south, making Australia one big fire zone. This is a different world. We underestimated how finely balanced the planet’s physical systems are. Few people have come to grips with this. The perception, still, is that this is a future issue. It’s not—it’s here now.
SA:Is zero growth necessary, or would “very slight” growth be sustainable?
McKibben: A specific number is not part of the analysis. I’m more interested in trajectories: What happens if we move away from growth as the answer to everything and head in a different direction? We’ve tried very little else. We can measure society by other means, and when we do, the world can become much more robust and secure. You start having a food supply you can count on, and an energy supply you can count on, and know they aren’t undermining the rest of the world. You start building communities that are strong enough to count on, so individual accumulation of wealth becomes less important.
SA: If “growth” should no longer be our mantra, then what should it be?
McKibben: We need stability. We need systems that don’t rip apart. Durability needs to be our mantra. The term “sustainability” means essentially nothing to most people. “Maintenance” is not very flashy. “Maturity” would be the word we really want, but it’s been stolen by the AARP. So durability is good; durability is a virtue.
SA: In part, you’re advocating a return to local reliance. How small is “local”? And can local reliance work only in certain places?
McKibben: We’ll figure out the sensible size. It could be a town, a region, a state. But to find the answer, we have to get the incredibly distorting subsidies out of our current systems. They send all kinds of bad signals about what we should be doing. In energy we’ve underwritten fossil fuel for a long time; unbelievable gifts to the “clean coal” industry, and on and on. It’s even more egregious in agriculture. Most of the United States’s cropland is devoted to growing corn and soybeans–not because there’s an unbelievable demand to eat corn and soybeans, but because there are federal subsidies to grow them—written into the law by huge agricultural companies who control certain senators. Once subsidies wither, we can figure out what scale of industry makes sense. It will make sense to grow a lot of things closer to home…
(18 March 2010)
More info about Bill’s book here.
How the Conservatives dodged the climate bullet
Gloria Galloway, The Globe and Mail
During his high-profile appearance on YouTube this week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was asked if his government is willing to take strong action to combat global warming.
In response, he reminded his Internet audience that Canada is an emerging energy superpower, “but we want to make sure that we are a clean energy superpower.
“That’s why we are investing in things like carbon capture and storage. We have the green infrastructure fund in our economic stimulus program, we have a series of what we call ecoEnergy initiatives to encourage the development of new technology and energy efficiency.”
All of that is true, although the PM failed to mention that ecoEnergy, which channels funds to renewable sources such as solar and wind power, will expire next year, and this month’s federal budget contains no sign of a replacement.
Carbon capture and storage, meanwhile, has been dismissed by environmentalists as little more than a subsidy for the oil and gas industry. “It’s a dead-end technology,” says University of Victoria scientist Andrew Weaver, a world leader in climate modelling, “that is very clearly not a solution to anything.”..
(19 March 2010)
sent in by EB reader SC Lamont, who writes:
The shift in concern from the environment to the economy (as if they could be separated) does not bode well for tackling climate change issues, as economic dislocations related to peak energy may hinder investment in alternatives, at least by governments responding to polls.
NASA: It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be sent in 2010
Climate Progress blog comment
Must-read draft paper: “We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade” and “that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”
NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has released a draft paper “Current GISS Global Surface Temperature Analysis.” It is a must read for warming junkies, but, as James Hansen notes in an e-mail, “it is too long for popular use.” So Hansen offers “some of the main conclusions,” as well as a description of a rather shocking hack of the GISS website (all of which is reprinted below)…
(19 March 2010)
The report is here.
The Secret of Sea Level Rise: It Will Vary Greatly by Region
Michael D. Lemonick, yale environment 360
For at least two decades now, climate scientists have been telling us that CO2 and other human-generated greenhouse gases are warming the planet, and that if we keep burning fossil fuels the trend will continue. Recent projections suggest a global average warming of perhaps 3 to 4 degrees C, or 5.4 to 7 degrees F, by the end of this century.
But those same scientists have also been reminding us consistently that this is just an average. Thanks to all sorts of regional factors — changes in vegetation, for example, or ice cover, or prevailing winds — some areas are likely to warm more than that, while others should warm less.
What’s true for temperature, it turns out, is also true for another frequently invoked consequence of global warming. Sea level, according to the best current projections, could rise by about a meter by 2100, in large part due to melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. But that figure, too, is just a global average. In some places — Scotland, Iceland, and Alaska for example — it could be significantly less in the centuries to come. In others, like much of the eastern United States, it could be significantly more.
And among the most powerful influences on regional sea level is a surprising force: the massive polar ice sheets and their gravitational pull, which will lessen as the ice caps melt and shrink, with profoundly different effects on sea level in various parts of the globe.
If the idea of local differences in sea level comes as a surprise, it’s probably because the experts themselves are only now beginning to fully realize what might cause such differences, and how significant they might be. One Prevailing winds can push water consistently toward the land or keep it at bay. factor, which they’ve have been aware of for decades, is that the land is actually rising in some places, including northern Canada and Scandinavia, which are still recovering from the crushing weight of the Ice Age glaciers that melted 10,000 years ago. That makes sea-level increases less than the global average would suggest, since these land areas are rising a few millimeters a year…
(19 March 2010)
The Big Melt
Brook Larmer, National Geographic
On a warm summer afternoon, Jia Son has hiked a mile and a half up the gorge that Ming yong Glacier has carved into sacred Mount Kawagebo, looming 22,113 feet high in the clouds above. There’s no sign of ice, just a river roiling with silt-laden melt. For more than a century, ever since its tongue lapped at the edge of Mingyong village, the glacier has retreated like a dying serpent recoiling into its lair. Its pace has accelerated over the past decade, to more than a football field every year—a distinctly unglacial rate for an ancient ice mass.
“This all used to be ice ten years ago,” Jia Son says, as he scrambles across the scree and brush. He points out a yak trail etched into the slope some 200 feet above the valley bottom. “The glacier sometimes used to cover that trail, so we had to lead our animals over the ice to get to the upper meadows.”
Around a bend in the river, the glacier’s snout finally comes into view: It’s a deathly shade of black, permeated with pulverized rock and dirt. The water from this ice, once so pure it served in rituals as a symbol of Buddha himself, is now too loaded with sediment for the villagers to drink. For nearly a mile the glacier’s once smooth surface is ragged and cratered like the skin of a leper. There are glimpses of blue-green ice within the fissures, but the cracks themselves signal trouble. “The beast is sick and wasting away,” Jia Son says. “If our sacred glacier cannot survive, how can we?”
It is a question that echoes around the globe, but nowhere more urgently than across the vast swath of Asia that draws its water from the “roof of the world.” This geologic colossus—the highest and largest plateau on the planet, ringed by its tallest mountains—covers an area greater than western Europe, at an average altitude of more than two miles. With nearly 37,000 glaciers on the Chinese side alone, the Tibetan Plateau and its surrounding arc of mountains contain the largest volume of ice outside the polar regions. This ice gives birth to Asia’s largest and most legendary rivers, from the Yangtze and the Yellow to the Mekong and the Ganges—rivers that over the course of history have nurtured civilizations, inspired religions, and sustained ecosystems. Today they are lifelines for some of Asia’s most densely settled areas, from the arid plains of Pakistan to the thirsty metropolises of northern China 3,000 miles away. All told, some two billion people in more than a dozen countries—nearly a third of the world’s population—depend on rivers fed by the snow and ice of the plateau region…
(April 2010)
A Pioneering Biologist Discusses The Keys to Forest Conservation
Caroline Fraser, yale environment 360
Daniel Janzen made his name in 1965 by discovering the extraordinary co-evolution and “mutualism” between two rainforest species, a study so well-known it goes by its own shorthand: “the ant and the acacia.”
In the ensuing decades, Janzen — the Thomas G. and Louise E. DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology at the University of Pennsylvania — has gone on to additional groundbreaking research in the forests of Central America. But by the mid-1980s, Janzen had grown so alarmed at the rapid rate at which forests were disappearing in the region that he and his wife and research partner, Winifred Hallwachs, threw themselves into conservation projects.
Daniel Janzen They worked to expand a small national park in northwestern Costa Rica into a 300,000-acre reserve — the Area de Conservación Guanacaste, or ACG — encompassing dry tropical forest, rain forest, cloud forest, and marine areas. With Costa Rican colleagues, including President Oscar Arias, Janzen demonstrated that denuded tropical forest can be re-grown, a landmark achievement in ecological restoration.
Janzen — who leveraged a $3.5 million donation into a permanent $30 million endowment for the park — recently set the ambitious goal of raising a half-billion dollars to endow the entire Costa Rican park system in perpetuity.
Now 71 — and still pursuing a decades-long inventory of moths, butterflies, and caterpillars of the ACG — Janzen has recently turned to another significant endeavor: the development of a “barcorder” device, a kind of taxonomic iPod designed to quickly identify the world’s organisms (viruses, invertebrates, plants, animals, and birds) by their DNA in conjunction with a vast database to deliver that information to users. Janzen and his partner, Paul Hebert, have championed the device as a way to open the public’s eyes to the world’s biodiversity and the growing threats to it.
In an interview with author Caroline Fraser, who profiled the biologist in her recent book Rewilding the World, Janzen speaks about the vast areas of Central American forest that have been lost in his lifetime, the resistance among entrenched conservation organizations to some of the most promising forest preservation schemes, and the reality that when it comes to saving wilderness, size matters. Only “big chunks of nature,” says Janzen, will survive in the face of two major threats: spreading human civilization and climate change.
Yale Environment 360: The last time we talked in 2007, I started by asking you about something you’d written 20 years earlier, in Conservation Biology. You wrote: “The conservation community is fighting a brave battle in the tropics, but it is losing.”
Daniel Janzen: Right.
e360: And in 2007 you said, “I feel that that’s still true.”
Janzen: That’s right.
e360: Has anything changed in the past few years?
Janzen: In terms of the dark cloud expressed, no. In terms of a possible light on the horizon, because I’m an optimist, and I’m always looking for the light on the horizon… Ironically, this whole carbon fuss does bring a potential bright light. And that bright light is that if the world does get serious about what is packaged under the acronym of REDD [Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation] and puts in a big bucket of money that is used to lock down big chunks of forest in a permanent carbon storage state, that has the potential — and I have to underline the word “potential” — for truly saving big blocks of wild areas. And there are a lot of ifs between the big picture wish or international agreements and actual on-the-ground doing it…
(23 March 2010)
