Birthday Climate Update

Does it mean anything that my first climate update is on my birthday? Probably not. 29 today! That means, like I told my mom earlier, this is my last year before I'm officially old. May as well make the best of it ;-)

h/t ClimateProgress.org for most of this.

Triage: US Army Corps of Engineers Floods 130,000ac of Farmland, Saves Small Town

These sort of decisions will be made increasingly more frequently.

The Army Corps exploded the Birds Point levee near Wyatt, Mo., after nightfall Monday, potentially sacrificing 130,000 acres of rich farmland and about 100 homes in Missouri to spare the town of Cairo, Ill., with its 2,800 residents, located at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

But even as the Corps carried out its bid to save the city, floodwaters were rising downriver, including in Memphis, Tenn. And the breach in the Birds Point levee wasn’t expected to ease those flooding concerns.

Army Corps of Engineers Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh, who made the decision to blast, said it was a heart-wrenching but necessary move.

The fact that the Army Corps is intentionally causing 1/3 of billion dollars in damage is stark evidence of just how serious this flood is. The Birds Point levee has been demolished only once before, during the 1937 flood.

Defending the Atmosphere

Starting on May 4, young people in the United States and several other countries will file petitions and lawsuits in an effort to force public officials into protecting us all from climate change.

The international legal intervention – the sponsors call it guerrilla law – is believed to be the first of its kind. It is being organized by Our Children’s Trust in Eugene, Oregon. It’s part of a broader campaign that will include “iMatter” marches by young people around the world May 7-14, the brainchild of 16-year-old Alec Loorz of California.

Behind these demonstrations and legal actions is a principle that goes back to Roman law: the “public trust doctrine”. The doctrine holds that government officials are “trustees of the commons” with a fiduciary responsibility to protect critical natural resources on behalf of present and future generations. Attorneys working on the campaign will ask the courts to rule that the atmosphere is one of those critical resources.

More concretely, the lawsuits will ask that public officials be required to create plans to return atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million, the level scientists such as NASA’s Jim Hansen say is necessary to avoid catastrophic climate impacts.

The court action is meant to empower young people who have the most to lose from climate change but are too young to vote. Loorz explains it this way:

Young people will be affected most by decisions that are made today and yet we can’t vote and we don’t have money to compete with lobbyists. We do, however, have the moral authority and the legal right to insist that our future be protected.

Global Sea Level to Rise At Least 3.0–5.2 feet by 2100

That's enough to make refugees out of several million people on the East Coast alone (Boston, NYC, Philly, Miami, etc.). I'd also consider that a minimum, not a maximum.

A major new multi-country scientific assessment of the Arctic has concluded that on our current greenhouse gas emissions path, we face 3 to 5 feet of sea level rise — far greater than the 2007 IPCC warned of.  This is fully consistent with several recent studies (see “Sea levels may rise 3 times faster than IPCC estimated, could hit 6 feet by 2100“).

(source)

Growing Dust Bowl in Midwest Worse Than in 1930s

For those who think the impacts of climate change are in the future, you are sorely mistaken. Quoting from a recent (and terrible) New York Times piece:

While tornadoes and floods have ravaged the South and the Midwest, the remote western edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle is quietly enduring a weather calamity of its own: its longest drought on record, even worse than the Dust Bowl, when incessant winds scooped up the soil into billowing black clouds and rolled it through this town like bowling balls.

With a drought continuing to punish much of the Great Plains, this one stands out. Boise (rhymes with voice) City has gone 222 consecutive days through Tuesday with less than a quarter-inch of rainfall in any single day, said Gary McManus, a state climatologist. That is the longest such dry spell here since note-keeping began in 1908.

This is just the beginning, sad to say.

The Dust Bowl itself maintained a severity of around -3, though it briefly spiked to -6. (source)

Corbett's Pet Frackers

(source)

Thanks for this go to PennLive, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Clean Water Action Pennsylvania.

According to a recent report by Clean Water Action Pennsylvania and an analysis of violations from the Department of Environmental Protection, eight of the drilling companies with representatives on the Pennsylvania governor’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission were cited with environmental violations last year. The companies represented on the governor’s commission accounted for 42 percent of all drilling violations last year — 514 out of a total 1,227.


Those companies also donated more than $790,000 to Corbett's campaign.

When you cross-reference the list for violators and campaign-contributors, you find that every one that meets those two criteria is on the Governor's Pet Frackers Commission -- I mean, the Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission.

One member of the Commission, Acting Secretary of Community and Economic Development C. Alan Walker, has a track record of environmental problems at mines operated by three of his companies in Clearfield and Centre counties.

Mr. Walker was the first cabinet member Mr. Corbett selected. In the governor's budget plan, he also was given the unusual authority to place permit applications on the fast track when job creation is involved.

The DEP's then-secretary David E. Hess had this to say about Mr. Walker back in 2002, in reference to an injunction forcing him to pay for environmental cleanup from his mines:

"We have to take strong action against some folks who just don't get it when it comes to fulfilling their environmental obligations. And that's exactly what happened this week to a mine operator who told us he wasn't going to spend a dime treating over 173 million gallons of polluted mine water," Mr. Hess wrote. "It's unfortunate with all the discussion nationally about corporate irresponsibility that we have a homegrown environmental example right here in Pennsylvania."

I think possibly Governor Corbett just doesn't get it.

What is Transition?

If I were given just one word to describe Transition, what would it be?

Relocalization.

Relocalization is the antithesis of globalization, which means it is the sine qua non of democracy. It is an essential precondition for democracy. It is also a deliberately buoyant response to the tripartite challenge that is peak oil / climate change / financial collapse. Relocalizers say "hey, more of the same probably won't work. Let's try something different. Let's disengage from this global clusterf@#k and chart our own course." Thanks to James Howard Kuntsler, by the way, for that wonderfully descriptive word. I tried hard to think of another, equally eloquent descriptor -- and failed.

If I were given two words to describe Transition, what would the second one be?

Resilience.

Resilience builds on relocalization. It qualifies it. It says that simply getting back to here isn't quite enough. It acknowledges directly that this isn't going to be a Sunday walk in the park. This Transition business is serious. Just as in Maslow's hierarchy of needs self-actualization comes after physiological and safety needs like food, water, shelter, security, in Transition we can't expect to maintain or improve our quality of life if we don't secure those basic needs that are under direct and concerted assault by peak oil, climate change, and slow-motion financial collapse. We know it must be possible to build resilience to these threats because these threats have faces -- ours. Peak oil is a fundamentally human phenomenon because (though the amount of oil is determined by geology) we have a choice in how we respond to it. There's nothing inherent in the laws of nature that humankind bury its head in the sand upon being confronted with the entirely prosaic fact that a non-renewable resource will eventually be exhausted. We could acknowledge it as a fact and then move on. Climate change is a fundamentally human phenomenon because the present bout of it is a direct and completely predictable result of evaporating billions of tons of ancient carbon into the atmosphere in what amounts to the blink of an eye. We've known for well over a hundred years that carbon dioxide (CO₂) is a greenhouse gas. And financial collapse? Despite mainstream economists' protestations to the contrary, economics as a science is a far cry from, say, geology, physics or chemistry. It has much more in common with sociology or political science than anything. This means it is a fundamentally human problem and, thus, amenable to human intervention. Screw the invisible hand.

Finally, if I had a third word with which to describe Transition? What would it be? This is the easiest:

Restoration.

Relocalization and resilience are necessary but not, as they say, sufficient conditions for saving our buts from the many-horned dilemma that is today's world. The final, and ultimately most necessary condition, is restoration. Even though I referred to climate change as an inherently human phenomenon, there will come a point, if it hasn't already, that the train set in motion by human hands will stop responding to those hands and start listening to higher-order beings: gravity, for example. And thermodynamics. Try getting into an argument, with thermodynamics, over who should be conducting the train: we'll see who wins.

At the risk of sounding terribly cheesy, we need to restore our connection with our planet, with the Earth. Against all reason, we've come to believe that we live outside of nature. Anyone paying attention can see the daily examples to the contrary, supplied by our apparently contrarian universe. We were able to believe, for a short while, in our invincibility, thanks to the discovery of seemingly endless free energy in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas. That was a blessing for some and a curse for most. Now we've got to deal with the consequences. We need to restore our planet's damaged life-support systems.

It is my belief that, doing so, we will find new purpose and new fulfilment. I believe there is no other way. This is what Transition means to me.

Oh, by the way -- there are a few other 'R'-words out there that I might use, but I'll leave them to your imaginations ;-)

The Fundamental Problem

I just came across this video of Thomas Linzey, of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), which is an amazing organization that has, for example, helped Ecuador institute the rights of nature right into the fabric of their national constitution. In this series of four videos, Linzey gives a powerful speech describing the roots of our present-day problems. You might be surprised to hear what he has to say.

CELDF is also very active in Pennsylvania. They recently helped the City of Pittsburgh assert local rights against a state legal framework that left them with little authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing of natural gas. Well, with CELDF's help, Pittsburgh has banned fracking within city limits.

A Transition

Most of you who read this probably know I also maintain a weekly e-newsletter for Transition Lancaster. One of the major features of that newsletter is the collation of what I consider to be Transition-related news and opinion from around the state, nation and world. Typical categories include climate change, peak oil and other energy-related news, economic and financial news, updates on hydro-fracking the Marcellus Shale here in PA, food, land-use, and more.

As much as I enjoy forwarding on news in that fashion -- and I do -- it's become, at times, a bit of a burden. Also, I'm not convinced it's the most effective way to do it, or even the best use of my time.

I have concluded that my single over-riding goal for the near-term is bringing more people into the local Transition movement. Transition Towns are sprouting up all over this region, like wildflowers after a Spring rain. There's a Transition Lancaster, a Transition Harrisburg, a young Transition York, a Transition Town Media (PA's first official TT), a nascent Transition Ambler, a Transition Philly, and more.... Transition is clearly an idea catching on, and for good reason. However, we here in Transition Lancaster need to be doing a better job helping more people to become actively involved, to know what that means, and to see the benefits to them personally.

I intend to refocus the weekly newsletter around that goal. I also want to make better use of this blog. Right now, at a post a month, it's really really underutilized. As an experiment, I'm going to start treating this as my "news" feed, rather than the newsletter. I'll also be publishing the occasional original essay, such as City of Trees. In fact, I have one germinating in my brain right now called City of Bikes, and another, called The Recycled City. You might think you know what those titles mean, but you just wait ;-)

Well, let's give it a shot, shall we?

City of Trees

(source)

This is the first in a new series I'm calling Lancaster 2030. In it, we'll be taking a look back on Lancaster from a vantage point 20 years in the future. What will Lancaster be like? How did it get to be this way (in 2030)? It's impossible to know for sure, but one thing is certain: "you've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there." Let's figure out where we're going, then aim to get there.

Lancaster City (PA) -- Hard to believe, but not even 20 years ago, Queen Street was twice as wide -- twice as much asphalt! I almost didn't believe it myself, but the old satellite photos are not to be denied.

Now, as we all know, Queen Street is dominated by the verdant and beautiful -- and invaluable -- Queen Forest Corridor, which itself is part of the much larger Lancaster Urban Forest Reserve. Well, that's what the planners call it, anyway. To the rest of us, who've grown up with it, tended it, walked in it, ate from it, heated our homes from it and studied in it, it's just another part of our home, our beloved Lancaster.

This is the first in a series of retrospectives on the evolution of Lancaster since the Great Transition began nearly 20 years ago. In this inaugural report, we'll look at what many consider to be the foundation of Lancaster's Renaissance -- our very own Queen's Forest.

Some history
In the Spring of 2012, the second oil shock in four years hit hard. While, in 2008, the price of oil ran up to US$147 per barrel, the 2012 price was much more muted -- not even US$130. However, with the US economy still limping through a half-hearted -- and much disputed -- recovery from the "Great Recession," and many nations around the world experiencing cascading economic crises (what commentators today call "the death throes of the infinite growth paradigm"), even a muted oil shock was a big enough straw to finally break the camel's back. Economic activity came to a screeching halt nearly everywhere. Many were declaring it a second Great Depression.

Paradoxically, this moment proved a liberating one for many older American cities, particularly Lancaster, with its access to high-quality farmland, fresh water, and relative immunity (unlike the old coastal cities of New York, Miami and, to a lesser extent, Philadelphia) from sea-level rise (though we have had our share of coastal refugees). Although the price of gasoline had dropped back below US$2, it turned out that most couldn't afford the gas at any price (and with hardly anyone buying gas, there was simply no incentive to invest in new oil infrastructure, exacerbating the problem). We were a city unemployed, and if what little money available wasn't going to food, it was going to housing and other necessities.

The boom in home gardening, which began after the 2008 financial collapse, really picked up in 2012, til it seemed like nearly everyone was growing food in any sunlit corner of the Earth they could find. Community gardens, such as at County Park and some School District property, really began to take off, particularly among renters.

Late in 2012, Mayor Gray took a decisive step when he imposed a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Though decried by the banks, this action was very popular and has been credited with averting  a new homeless crisis and preserving the burgeoning spirit of solidarity among the citizens of Lancaster.

Studies from that time show that many had less leisure time than before, yet since they were now working from home, they were reporting higher levels of satisfaction.

A brutal winter
The winter of 2012-'13 proved a devastating one. Though 2012 was, worldwide, the hottest year (yet) on record, one of the counter-intuitive effects of global climate change was that winter temperatures could be as extreme as summer temperatures. In the Northeast, the immediate cause was the disruption of Arctic weather patterns which resulted in occasional spikes of frigid Arctic air lashing southwards, coating the land in ice and snow for months on end. Compounding this was that many could no longer afford the natural gas or oil they needed to warm their homes. It was a crisis. Riots very nearly broke out at one point when, during one very cold morning after an even colder night, over a dozen sick and elderly people were found dead in their homes. The cause? Exposure.

The people were demanding action, but what could anyone do? It later came out that city staff, along with several non-profits worked feverishly throughout the winter months on a plan to save the city. "Those were some cold meetings," said one staffer, in an interview a decade later. "Even the city couldn't afford much heat and, besides, we all felt strongly we had to share the pain with the vast majority of Lancastrians, or live as hypocrites."

The Queen's Forest Working Group, or simply the Group, as they came to be known, had realized something many had yet come to accept: times had changed, and the traffic that was would never return. The city simply had too many miles of useless roadways. With most people now walking or bicycling, the streets were now eerily quiet -- and eerily empty. Recognizing the changed shape of the world, the Group hatched an ambitious plan: they would tear up half the city's roads.

And they'd begin with Queen Street.

Though brutal, the Winter of '12-'13 was mercifully short, with Spring coming a full two weeks early. This was the Group's cue. They quickly unleashed over three thousand residents in a massive public works project -- tearing up twenty feet of road down the entire length of Queen Street, from just north of the bridge over the Conestoga to the train station in the north. Many workers were paid in food, which the city and county had begun to accept in lieu of the old US dollars for property taxes. Many more, though, joined in for the sheer joy of tearing up the macadam, and the satisfaction of doing something with their hands for the greater good. The city then used a substantial portion of its ration of diesel fuel to haul in nearly 30,000 cubic yards of top soil, compost and mulch. And then they began to plant trees.

A forest born and a city reborn
Half-planned, half-wild, Queen's Forest became an icon for a city reborn. The plan was for the forest, stewarded by a corps of trained permaculturists, to provide food, fuel, stormwater management, cool air in the increasingly hot summers, wildlife habitat and a salve for a city in deep need of healing.

In just a few years' time, the planners and foresters expected the new Queen's Forest (the core of a planned city-wide system) to provide a substantial portion of the city's heating needs through a combination of a new centralized boiler system and the production of synthetic gas, or syngas, from sustainably charring biomass from the forest. The syngas would be a nearly 1:1 replacement for the now hard-to-get natural gas.

The next few years were tough, but the spirit of self-help and community action cultivated in those early days proved resilient.

Amazing how much a simple idea can change things, isn't it?

What Should We Do?

Soil-building is one of the answers.

There will be no great leader, this time.

Many have commented that a mass mobilization, on the scale of World War II, is what we need, right now, to prepare for peak oil and preserve a habitable climate and biosphere. There are a number of logical and practical issues with this notion.

First, no one in a position to be a leader -- say, the President, a member of Congress, a Governor, a respected (hah) national news correspondent -- has shown either (a) any understanding of the magnitude of the crises we face or (b) any inclination to be an actual leader on these issues. Instead, we get nonsensical screeds on American "exceptionalism," which I must put in quotation marks due to the fact of its not being either a word or a remotely coherent idea.

Second, the analysis of some very intelligent and thoughtful people (see, e.g., the Hirsch Report) has shown that we would need a WWII-scale mobilization twenty years in advance of oil peaking to successfully avert a peak oil-based global economic and political collapse. Since peak crude oil was five years ago, in 2006, and we are now at the final edge of the "undulating plateau" of oil production, this opportunity was lost nearly 25 years ago.

Third, we have already left the geologic epoch known as the Holocene (from holos = whole, and cene = new; thus: wholly new), which began about 11,700 years ago, and during which we had the steady, stable climate which permitted human civilization to develop for the first time on Earth (anatomically modern Homo sapiens first appeared over 200,000 years ago, and behaviorally-modern humans first appeared about 50,000 years ago). The Holocene is over; we have now entered what geologist call the Anthropocene (from anthropo = human), an epoch characterized by the global extent and impact of human activities on the Earth. This new epoch will be distinguished by (among other things) an increasingly chaotic climatic system, leading to regional and possibly global food shortages, the inundation of human settlements by rising flood waters, continent-sized Dust Bowls in North America and elsewhere, tens or hundreds of millions of environmental refugees, political and economic collapse, regional unrest, disruptions in the shipment of vital materials (such as food, energy, minerals), etc.

(source)

As an aside, I will note that part of the reason for this chaotic climate change is that we have already blown past the global carbon budget by at least 40, if not 90, parts per million (ppm). Present concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere stand at about 390ppm. For at least the past 400,000 years, those levels never went much over 300ppm, and the current rate of increase (2ppm / year) is about 10,000 times the natural rate. Just as with our oil addiction, we have missed our deadline for keeping atmospheric carbon at safe levels by over 20 years.

In other words, in almost ever sense, we have overshot. Too many people consuming too many resources dumping too much pollution and waste into a finite global ecosystem. Every year in which we continue to add carbon to the atmosphere, just as every year in which we fail to ween ourselves off of our oil and lifestyle addiction, is another year in which are digging our own collective grave.

Cheerful, huh?

As I said above, and for the reasons already outlined (plus many more besides), don't expect any person purporting to represent that entity known as the United States (or most any other "nation-state") to take any proactive steps on these issues. Don't expect anyone to exhort you, or your neighbors, to take up any great national cause that might effectively meet these foolishly self-imposed threats. You've got no one but yourself, as hard as that sounds. At most, you've got your immediate geographic community; hopefully, that community is organizing, as Lancaster is, around a Transition movement that recognizes the present importance of these issues, and is seeking ways to meet them positively.

So, you've read the above and you agree on the three following propositions: (1) we are in for some hard times ahead, (2) no one is going to help us but ourselves and maybe our friends, and (3) we need to start working now. So what do we actually do?

The bottom pyramid doesn't look terribly stable, does it?

There are very few things I know for sure on this subject, but thanks to some pretty clear statistics this is one of them: start growing your own food. As I showed in a presentation on October 24, 2009 (the 350.org Global Day of Action and Eastern Market's first annual Green Fest), the United States has a woefully inadequate supply of farmers right now. Over 170 years ago, in 1840, before the advent of industrialism and widespread use of fossil fuels, the world had a basically solar-powered economy. The sun shown, grass and trees grew, and humans and animals ate food that had been cultivated with human and animal labor in a basically (though not entirely) closed-loop system whose driving energy source was the sun. At that time, 69% of the population of the USA, or 11.7 million people (out of 17 million), was directly involved in farming. In 2008, nationally, that percentage was below 0.62%, or 1.9 out of 304 million. In other words, we had more farmers in 1840 than we have now. Since it is pretty clear to most observers that this extraordinary feat has been made possibly by basically free energy, in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas, it becomes clear that one of the pressing needs we will feel as that free energy disappears is for more farmers -- and farm animals -- to directly work the land.

As a supporting statistic, I will note that, for every one calorie of food you consume, approximately 10 calories of fossil fuel-based energy (primarily oil and natural gas) was required as an input. Or, to put it another way, Americans consume, on average, about 400 gallons of gasoline-equivalent annually to produce our food. It also turns out that a barrel of oil is worth about 11.3 person-years of labor. The amount of energy we shovel into the US food system is thus equivalent to about 33 billion person-years of labor (or nearly 5x the population of Earth -- just to feed the USA). If that sounds like a lot, you're right.

Left: nutrient-poor oxisol. Right: an oxisol transformed into fertile terra preta using biochar. (source)

All is not lost! The first step in solving your problem, as they say, is recognizing that you have one. Well, we can check that step off the list. Step two is knowing where you need to get. Well, I would say, in the context of this post, "where we need to get" is a place that has a sustainable food supply, which means we need more farmers working the land directly with the help of domesticated animals and very little, if any, fossil fuels. This will mean, among other things, much smaller farms; but that's ok and even good, because it has been shown that small farms produce more food per acre than large farms. We also need to reduce and then stop emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and then move to start taking carbon out of the atmosphere (to get from 390ppm CO₂ to under 350ppm). Well, damn! Our idea of de-urbanizing and putting more people back on the land as farmers will also help with that as well, as it has been shown that good stewardship of the land and husbandry of animals can actually build topsoil, which means that small farms could actually become carbon sinks rather than carbon sources (topsoil is a reservoir of carbon), especially if they make use of biochar. Might we actually see a return to a stable climate? Well, not in your lifetime, but maybe in your grandchildren's. We need to take the long view on this one. After all, it has taken well over a century to utterly erode the Earth's life-support systems, and it'll probably take much longer than that to restore them. And restoration ought to be our mission.

How likely is all this? Not very, if you're waiting for someone on high to tell you to do it. Doubly unlikely, if you think you can sit idly by doing what you've always done while waiting for your neighbor to take care of all the hard work. Nevertheless, it is possible. If step one is recognizing the problem, and step two is having a vision for the future, then step three is getting there (or maybe having a plan for getting there, followed by getting there, if you are a planner like me).

So how will we get there? What will you do? I look forward to your thoughts.