Desertec Takes Another Giant Leap - I’ve written a few times about this project, bursting with promise to provide clean energy, build bridges and make the desert bloom, most recently here.  The “FT” said today that Desertec has been embraced by several major European financial, utility and industrial concerns.   ”A dozen companies are today set to launch a renewable energy initiative that its backers claim could within a decade provide Europeans with electricity generated from the Sahara - at a cost of €400bn ($557bn).  Munich Re, the German insurer, Deutsche Bank, utilities RWE and Eon and industrial conglomerate Siemens are among the bluechip names that will form a company to explore the technical and geopolitical challenges of peppering the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East with solar mirrors.”

The press release from Siemens talks about several of the technologies for this project that Siemens has already mastered, such as high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission where line loss is minimal compared to traditional AC lines.  Munich Re’s release has a raft of quotes, including this one from HRH Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan:  “The partnerships that will be formed across the regions as a result of the Desertec project will open a new chapter in relations between the people of the European Union, West Asia and North Africa.”

Today’s announcement launches Desertec off the drawing board into the real world.

Buses in Bogota - Libby Rosenthal is the veteran “NY Times/International Herald Tribune” reporter who has been writing a series of stories over the past several months on low-tech - and relatively low-cost - approaches to sustainability and the climate crisis.  I had a chance to talk with her briefly in February at an event at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs (where I’ve been teaching) and we discussed the importance of low-tech.  Her story from last week on Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) was another in this refreshing series.  Bogota’s system not only has radically reduced air pollution from the thousands of private buses that added to traffic and pollution, eliminated hours of the day stuck in traffic for commuters who choose it, but it has also reaped over $100 million in payments through the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism.  This is a critical model for the future for other developing nation cities seeking to capitalize on smarter and leaner approaches to transportation.  See the video on this story too.

The Global Food Crisis in NGM - “National Geographic Magazine” has been producing really solid stories on the climate crisis and sustainability for some time now.  Their special report from June zeroes in on some critical issues, one of the most important being how the “green revolution” in agriculture may have, at the end of the day, created more problems than it solved.  What problems?  Here are a few:  costly inputs like fertilizers and pesticides, the attendant pollution that includes not only toxic runoff in the water supply and estuaries but greenhouse gases as well, an over-reliance on irrigation and the inevitable stress that puts on water, and the devastation by monoculture to the soil and the biota that creates the conditions for growing.  Biofuel production and the raising of much more meat worldwide than was ever consumed before have added extraordinary pressures to agricultural production - and they have driven up prices, often beyond the reach of hundred of millions of the world’s poorest.  “Such agflation hits the poorest billion people on the planet the hardest, since they typically spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food.”

I want to comment on one of the recurring themes in discussions of world food production and consumption:  meat.  The assumption always seems to be that meat consumption is going to continue to expand and intensify as developing nations become more affluent.  That certainly has been the trend, but why shouldn’t we be looking at ways to avoid the extraordinary proven health and resource burdens of meat production by looking for ways to reduce consumption?  I wrote about Galloping Consumption a while ago and the idea that we need, globally, to find a way to reduce our essentially insane levels of resource use in the developed world while helping the developing world to avoid the pitfalls of pollution, ill health and expense that accompany these practices.  If we know that renewable energy and energy efficiency are key pathways to sustainability, then why shouldn’t we equally recognize the ills of some of the food and drink we continue to use and the manifest benefits of doing things differently, at the level of both production and consumption?

You’re probably way ahead of me and know all about this little blockbuster 20-minute video, but in case you don’t, it’s fabulous and well worth the visit.  You may have any number of quibbles, big and small, with some of what’s being said, but it is definitely lucid, well-argued, and smart.  I’ve touched on some of what the auteur, Annie Leonard, is saying so interestingly here, notably at Galloping Consumption and Nature, Poison and “Eco-Nomics”.

Leonard has put up this superb website, with the whole video available, plus tons of information and a pretty active blog.  This describes the big picture:  “From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.”

For a taste of what’s being said, see this:

I got back about an hour ago from walking my daughter to school.  We live in a big city with a big park through which my wife or I walk the kid.  It was snowing this morning - one of those intense squalls that come to us here in late winter and early spring.  It was quite lovely in the park with the fat snowflakes lightly pummeling us and the air fresh with all the wetness and swirling motion.  The quietness was also nice.  I love snow.

Yesterday I was thinking about all the many ways that we humans have conjured to subvert nature.  More than that, it sometimes feels as if we truly want to kill nature, to poison it with our effluents.  This is self-destruction, pure and simple, because we are in nature and of nature and without it, we will be nothing.  I really don’t like zoos or aquariums because, to me, a lion in a zoo is not a lion.  A lion on the veldt is a lion.  A dolphin in the ocean is a dolphin.  See this old “Calvin and Hobbes” strip to better get my drift.

Similarly, if we destroy our home, we destroy ourselves.  We are spewing our fertilizer waste into the oceans creating dead zones.  We are drowning the developing world in our e-waste.  We burn off $40 billion worth of natural gas every year, adding still another greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.  We blow the tops off mountains in incredibly rich and diverse ecosystems, release toxic sludge from mining into our lands and waters, and all to feed the ravenous appetite of our power plants which themselves are sending forth billions of tons of carbon dioxide year on year.  Thus we feed our own ravenous appetites.

What is it with us?  We should know better at this late date.  I wrote about all the poisons we ingest and put out at Detoxification - For Fun and Profit a few years ago.  There are so many other, better ways for us to live with ourselves and our planet.  We know what they are and, according to some ways of thinking, we have the free will to exercise smarter, more creative and healthy choices.

Good people like Bill McKibben (The End of Nature and Deep Economy), Barry Commoner (Making Peace with the Planet), Paul Hawken (Ecology of Commerce) and others have written eloquently in recent years about the need for us to think and act differently.

Rob Watson, the editor of “Greener Building News,” part of the truly comprehensive, thoughtful and progressive “GreenBiz.com” complex of publications and information services, had a great essay last autumn, Sacking the Temple of Ego-Nomics.  He says that the laws of industry and commerce as they are presently written and understood ignore the impacts of our actions.  “Under ego-nomics the only things that are truly invisible are the non-economic impacts of a transaction (pollution, exploitation, extinction), which are aptly described as ‘externalities.’”

But, he writes, “‘Eco-nomics,’ on the other hand, is a 21st century concept that actually embraces the REAL laws of the planet-the ones that apply to ALL species, not just one: chemistry, biology and physics.”  Can we get there from here?  Watson isn’t sure.  In fact, he’s a little pessimistic.

My perspective is that the phenomenal work of journalists like him, the architects and developers he’s writing about, the other many extraordinary entrepreneurs, policymakers, philosophers, economists, environmentalists, engineers, and others who have been really trying to move us in the right direction, is beginning to pay off.  We are in the soup - let there be no mistake.  We are fast approaching monstrously dangerous tipping points:  the thawing of the permafrost, the melting of the glaciers and the icecaps, the withering of the rainforests, etc.  However, we are also gathering a good head of steam on building out a new energy infrastructure, on housing and transporting ourselves better and smarter, and maybe, just maybe we are learning that consumption doesn’t equate with well being.  The quality of our lives, material and inner, may not yet forever be judged by our per capita GNP, whether or not we have the newest model car or smartphone, or the cut of beef we eat and the quality of the wine we drink.

Tom Friedman, a High Panjandrum of the Cognoscenti, has a column today that indicates that his sense of the dire pass into which this civilization of ours has fallen is growing.  I’ve written about Galloping Consumption and I’ve noted, here, that one important commentator, Bill McKibben, has taken Friedman to school on his Green Fantasia.

In his column, Friedman references an Australian environmental business expert, Paul Gilding, who warns of a moment “…when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once - ‘The Great Disruption.’”  We have been gorging on credit, not only from the banks and not-a-few hucksters, but also from Gaia.  We have leveraged ourselves well beyond our immediate ability to meet our obligations to the planet.

Friedman quotes Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International:  “‘Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we’re living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets.’”  You got that right.  “But, he cautioned, as environmentalists have pointed out: ‘Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.’”

But at least some of the economic stimulus packages around the world are driving toward sustainability.  As I noted here the other day, South Korea has the highest percentage of green stimulus in its plans - 81%.  Friedman puts it this way:  “South Korea’s new national paradigm for development is called: ‘Low carbon, green growth.’ Who knew?”

We, the environmentalists,  have known for quite some time, Tom, for your information.  I’m glad that someone whose bully pulpit is so important is helping to promulgate the message.

Here are some reviews of some books on two environmental visionaries, an article about a world-famous campaigner against the looming specter of climate change, and a lucid, comprehensive and deep report on managing solid and hazardous wastes.

In The Ecstasy of John Muir, Robert Pogue Harrison reviews an apparently magisterial biography, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster.  (You have to have the print edition [imagine!], or an electronic subscription, or pay $3 to read this.)  Harrison praises the book and eulogizes the man.  I’m an old Sierra Club activist and so share a very high regard for Muir from way back.  Harrison centers much of his review on Muir’s anti-materialist ethic, his affinity for nature.  Looking at our world today, Harrison asks:  “What human civilization must do to survive materially is a question that is bound to engage us in the decades to come, yet alongside it there are other questions, easily brushed aside, that are no less paramount in import.  Will a greener technology transform our relation to nature?  Will a more sustainable economy merely provide a more sustainable basis for our consumerist sloth?  Does nature make any spiritual demands on us, or is it purely the supplier in a supply-demand relationship?”  (Is nature a mere provider of “ecosystem services?”)  For some more on this theme, see Galloping Consumption from the blog about a year back.

The FT’s Fiona Harvey, who I cite and laud often, as I did in the last post below, has reviews here of a book by James Lovelock and one about him.  I consider Lovelock a hugely less important visionary than Muir, but important nevertheless in his contemporaneity with the global environmental crisis.  He has been talking about what’s happening now.  His Gaia hypothesis, as Harvey points out, presaged the study of “… earth systems sciences, a new discipline that seeks to understand how the natural processes of the earth interact with one another.”  He is also a prophet of climate change doom, and wholeheartedly embraces nuclear power, and these are both points with which I, among a good many others, take vigorous exception.

Another environmental warrior, Tim Flannery, is profiled here at the “FT” this weekend.  His book, The Weather Makers, came out just before “An Inconvenient Truth.”  Flannery, universally recognized as an important contributor to the message of concern regarding warming, says “People like myself, with a perhaps more in-depth view, may have influenced specific people but for the mass movement, I think it was really Gore.”

Finally, I touched on waste management in the last post below.  Here is an excellent look at the subject from “The Economist.”  Great reading, well worth your time.

A truly thoughtful essay from Harry Eyres, Freedom and the price of oil, appeared in this past weekend’s “FT.”  It’s a meditation, to a great extent, on the ecologist Ivan Illich.  Eyres writes of Illich:  “He had the barmy-seeming idea that we would do better - that is to say would lead more human, fairer and freer lives - if we consumed less energy. Far from freeing us up, the addiction to ever-greater quanta of energy enslaves our souls, making us passive consumers rather than active doers, and concentrates power in mega-institutions.”

I wrote on a similar theme about a year ago:  “Can we reduce our dangerous rates of consumption and maintain and improve our standards of living worldwide?  You bet.  Making Peace with the Planet will also make us happier.  You can take that to the bank.”  (See Galloping Consumption.)

Or, as Bill McKibben wrote in a review of Tom Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded, “Does it ever occur to him, in the grip of a fantasia like this, that if the sun is shining brightly, or the breeze is blowing steadily, you could dry your clothes on a $14 piece of rope strung off your back deck, or for that matter on a foldable rack in the apartment hallway? And that since most of the world already knows how to do it, we might be smarter moving in their direction instead of insisting that they buy into our entire high-technology suburban dream?”  (See my review of McKibben’s review here.)

Here are some great stories from major media that merit a look.  Beyond these stories, these publications have consistently great coverage on climate change and matters directly relevant to our subject.  There’s also a book here for your consideration.

National Geographic - This old and universally respected magazine has had an increasingly high profile on critical environmental stories over the past several years.  Here is one startling and, frankly, depressing article about the decimation of Borneo’s rainforests in the service of producing palm oil for junk food.  At the NGM page for Borneo’s Moment of Truth, you will find a video, some of the stunning photography, and the article itself.

Borneo seems a microcosm of much of what’s wrong in the world:  our appetite for energy and cheap consumer goods, our disdain for biodiversity and the lives of indigenous peoples, and our indifference to rainforest destruction and how that relates to global warming.  The photographs and video remind me of the havoc wreaked in Appalachia, another breathtakingly wild and diverse environment, by mountaintop removal coal mining.  (See last post below.)

For more on palm oil, see this report from Greenpeace:  Forest destruction, climate change and palm oil expansion in Indonesia.

© Greenpeace / Natalie Behring Chisolm

There’s another compelling story at NGM, on light pollution:  Our Vanishing Night.  The excellent environmental writer, Verlyn Klinkenborg, writes about the surprisingly enormous burden imposed on wildlife by the lights of cities and industrial complexes , even fishing fleets.  As an urban dweller (a small metropolis called New York City), I can attest to the fact that we’ve got too much light.  The article references the work of the International Dark-Sky Association, a nonprofit “dedicated to protecting and preserving the nighttime environment and our heritage of dark skies through quality outdoor lighting.”  See also the Dark Sky Society.

I’ve noted the amazing, now-annual phenomenon of Earth Hour.  Light pollution not only disrupts the natural cycles of wildlife, it also sucks thousands of megawatts of  power, unnecessarily, from our grids, hugely exacerbating global warming.  Simple stuff, it seems to me.

Update:  See this article from the “NY Times” on efforts in the Big Apple to cut down on unnecessary lighting.

The NY Review of Books - This eminently intelligent and readable periodical has had, like NGM and many others, more and more to say about climate change.  Their go-to environmentalist is the incomparable Bill McKibben.  (See any number of references I’ve made to him and his writing at the blog, including talking about the “Step It Up 2007″ campaign.)

In the most recent issue, McKibben reviews Tom Friedman’s new blockbuster Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution‚ and How It Can Renew America.  The review is titled “Green Fantasia.”  McKibben both praises the book for some of its emphases and damns it for an overabundance of conventional thinking.  Indeed, the review opens by saying:  “Thomas Friedman is the prime leading indicator of the conventional wisdom, always positioned just far enough ahead of the curve to give readers the sense that they’re in-the-know, but never far enough to cause deep mental unease.”  Ouch.

An example of praise:  “His basic policy guidelines, and most of his specific suggestions, for managing this crucial transition are sound.”  McKibben here notes another useful insight:  “Friedman knows that innovation in the financial services industry will be almost as important as progress in engineering.”   But McKibben also derides Friedman for, for all intents and purposes, dismissing the important arena of international climate regimes:  What was finalized in Kyoto and what will be, ostensibly, finalized in Copenhagen in December 2009 to replace the existing protocol, are of utmost importance.

He also gets to the crux of the title of his review here:  “Does it ever occur to him, in the grip of a fantasia like this, that if the sun is shining brightly, or the breeze is blowing steadily, you could dry your clothes on a $14 piece of rope strung off your back deck, or for that matter on a foldable rack in the apartment hallway? And that since most of the world already knows how to do it, we might be smarter moving in their direction instead of insisting that they buy into our entire high-technology suburban dream?”

That’s been one of my thoughts, and occasionally an argument here:  Why don’t we try to get more bang out of the low-tech buck?  Solar-box cookers and, indeed, hanging the laundry out to dry!  I wrote about Galloping Consumption a while back.  I said then, in conclusion:  “Can we reduce our dangerous rates of consumption and maintain and improve our standards of living worldwide?  You bet.  Making Peace with the Planet will also make us happier.  You can take that to the bank.”

Great review.  Check it on out.

“Der Spiegel” - This venerable German periodical has a most useful section devoted to Climate Change here.  For a particularly good and well-informed look at what’s going on in Germany and Europe, you should check in here from time to time.

DK - Dorling Kindersley has a fabulous series of “Eyewitness” books that illustrate all sorts of important subjects with interesting text and eye-catching, vivid graphics.  When I visited the AMNH exhibit on climate change (see post below from Oct. 20), I picked up their new volume Eyewitness Climate Change.  This is great for kids, particularly, but it’s perfectly great reading for adults too.  It’s quite informative, very good at making some complex ideas accessible.  With a CD-ROM of clip art, and a great poster too, you can’t miss.

India - The second-most populous country in the world is rapidly industrializing. That means its GHG output has been rising inexorably, as more heavy industry serves the country’s burgeoning economy, and roads fill with cars.

India is intricately and inextricably involved with the ongoing UNFCCC negotiations leading to a post-Kyoto international agreement. It has also been working with the G8 and other parties on energy, the environment, and climate change. There was the G20 Conference on Global Warming and Clean Energy in Tokyo in March, the environment ministers’ meeting in Kobe in May, the energy ministers’ meeting in June, and the forthcoming G8 Summit in Hokkaido will address climate change with India very much at the table.

Dr. Manmohan Singh, India’s Prime Minister, yesterday unveiled his country’s National Action Plan on Climate Change. In this article from the BBC, Singh is quoted as putting solar at the center of their scheme. See also this summary from “The Guardian.” There will be eight “National Missions” that will be the key components of the plan: on Solar Energy, Enhanced Energy Efficiency, Sustainable Habitat, Conserving Water, Sustaining the Himalayan Ecosystem, and on creating a “Green India,” plus one on Sustainable Agriculture and a last on establishing a Strategic Knowledge Platform for Climate Change.

In his speech, Singh was poetic at times. “This is a world which we hold in trust, a world which has created and nurtured life for countless generations.” (This evokes the National Association of Evangelicals’ “Creation Care” project that I’ve mentioned a couple of times, including here.) He also said: “India has a civilizational legacy which treats Nature as a source of nurture and not as a dark force to be conquered and harnessed to human endeavour. There is a high value placed in our culture to the concept of living in harmony with Nature, recognizing the delicate threads of common destiny that hold our universe together.” Works for me!

Singh didn’t pull any punches either on where we find ourselves at present. “There is a real possibility of catastrophic disruption of the fragile life-sustaining ecological system that holds this world together. Science is now unequivocal on this assessment.” He further said that it’s time to move to renewables. “Over a period of time, we must pioneer a graduated shift from economic activity based on fossil fuels to one based on non-fossil fuels and from reliance on non-renewable and depleting sources of energy to renewable sources of energy.”

Finally, he talked about the inequities in consumption rates in the world. “Long term convergence of per capita emissions is, therefore, the only equitable basis for a global compact on climate change.” (See Galloping Consumption from March at the blog.)

To paraphrase Shelley, if India comes, can China be far behind? (See this space soon.)

According to CoalSpeak, The Official CoalRegion Dictionary, the above term refers to "tuberculosis, or some virulent strain of TB. Consumption was a common word for tuberculosis many years ago ("consuming' the lung tissue). "Galloping' refers to the speed at which the disease progresses."  Ironic, perhaps, that I'm using this term to illustrate one of the thornier problems associated with global warming , ironic because of its association with coal, and coal's association with runaway global warming. 

Jared Diamond, professor of Geography and author of the hugely popular Guns, Germs and Steel:  The Fates of Human Societies and Collapse:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, wrote a terrific op-ed for the "NY Times" early in January:  "What's Your Consumption Factor?"  In it he noted that the developed world has consumption rates roughly 32 times that of the developing world.  "If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates)," Diamond wrote.  It would be difficult to suppose that world resources, strained as we are today with a world population of 6.5 billion, could support those levels of consumption.  Consider, while we're at it, the output of GHG and the further destruction of ecosystems from industrial agriculture and fishing, overdevelopment, and conventional water and air pollution from such galloping consumption.  Are we thus doomed?  Diamond's answer:  "No, we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels."  But then we would have to reduce our access to labor-saving devices (driven by electricity, for the most part), and infant mortality would go up, gains in nutrition worldwide would evaporate, and literacy rates would plummet.  Right?  Wrong.  Diamond reminds us, if we had forgotten, that "living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates." 

The seminal Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, published in October of 2006 by the UK government, warns, in its Executive Summary, (and available in 22 languages other than English), of catastrophic economic consequences if climate change is not confronted fully, vigorously, and now.  It also says:  "Tackling climate change is the pro-growth [my emphasis] strategy for the longer term, and it can be done in a way that does not cap the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries."

Are you still with me?  Now today an op-ed from the "Wall St. Journal" came in over the transom to me from the esteemed editor of this and my sister Foreign Policy Association blogs, Robert Nolan.  (See the right margin for links to these many, diverse and interesting blogs.)  Sins of Emission, by Oxford professor of energy policy Dieter Helm, notes that " the U.S. and the EU together account for nearly half of world GDP. And it is consumption, not production, that matters. This means that if global warming is to be limited, the U.S. and Europe will have to take much more drastic action to reduce those emissions embedded in their own consumption. Their appropriate emissions-reduction targets will have to be based on the consumption of goods that cause those emissions in the first place."  I'll buy that, as it were.  But Helm makes what Diamond, the Stern Review, and many, many others conclude is a false assumption:  "It will probably mean living standards will have to be cut if our consumption is going to be environmentally sustainable."

Economic growth, according to a growing number of analysts, will be stimulated by how we confront climate change.  I wrote, for instance, in February about a new analysis that said that our response to global warming can " spur $7 Trillion in Clean Energy Investment by 2030."  (See Trillions for Renewables! here.) 

Getting back to consumption:  How do you get at it?  One way was detailed by Yale professor Judith Chevalier in an another op-ed from the "NY Times" in December:  a tax on carbon consumption.  I wrote about this here and described it thus:  "So, if you can't get China or some other recalcitrant to restrain GHG emissions through some international protocol (to which the Bali meetings were supposed to point the way), then take it out of their exchequer by creating barriers to products created in high-GHG economies."  Professor Chevalier explains it more lucidly than that, but you get the idea.

Can we reduce our dangerous rates of consumption and maintain and improve our standards of living worldwide?  You bet.  Making Peace with the Planet will also make us happier.  You can take that to the bank.