The Future is Green

Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization," hosted by Matt Damon on PBS March 30

Lester Brown's visionary book, “Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization,” has been on my top ten list for several years. Now, a documentary based on the book will be broadcast on PBS on Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 10 p.m, hosted by Academy Award winner Matt Damon. I encourage you to watch.

Appearing with Lester Brown are Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Friedman, former Governor and Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, along with other scholars and scientists. Parts of the film were shot on location in China, Japan, Korea, India, Italy, Turkey, Bangladesh, Zambia, Haiti, and the United States.

Describing the film, the LA Times says, “The scope is wide, the photography compelling, the presentation is crisp. Take notice unless you’ve already booked passage to another galaxy.”

What makes “Plan B” so fascinating for me is that it provides a slew of hopeful and realistic strategies to avoid the growing threat of global warming, while, at the same time, strengthening the ecomony. If the film is half as good as the book, it will be an hour well spent.

What Is Nature Worth? A New Animated Video on the Cost of Biodiversity Loss

Whatever you are doing right now, I encourage you to take a 3-minute break and watch "Big Question: What Is Nature Worth?", an eye-opening animated video that offers a fresh look at global biodiversity loss - not only what it is costing humanity, but also what we can do about it.

"Big Question: What Is Nature Worth:?" is part of Momentum magazine's biodiversity issue (http://www.environment.umn.edu/momentum) and was inspired by the Natural Capital Project – a partnership between Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy, the University of Minnesota and the World Wildlife Fund.

I thought it was worth passing along.

Build a Green Economy for Earth Day

I've been thinking about how to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day tomorrow. After considering a dozen topics I concluded that I could do no better than to direct your attention to a recent  NY Times column by Paul Krugman, called Building a Green Economy. If you do nothing else to observe Earth Day, please read Krugman's article.

Addressing the arguments of scientists and skeptics, alike, Krugman's piece offers the clearest and most comprehensive explanation of the causes and effects of climate change, possible remedies, likely costs of mitigation - as well as likely costs of inaction, and rationale for action that I have read in a long time.

After citing the most current scientific evidence, Krugman writes

"models based on [this] research indicate that if we continue adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere as we have, we will eventually face drastic changes in the climate. Let’s be clear. We’re not talking about a few more hot days in the summer and a bit less snow in the winter; we’re talking about massively disruptive events, like the transformation of the Southwestern United States into a permanent dust bowl over the next few decades.

UNCERTAINTY MAKES THE MOST URGENT CASE FOR STRONG ACTION

Despite the high credibility of climate modelers, he concedes that there is still tremendous uncertainty in their long-term forecasts, which leads to his most original conclusion - that it is this very uncertainty that makes the most urgent case for strong action. 

"You might think that this uncertainty weakens the case for action," he continues,but it actually strengthens it." Even if utter catastrophe is not the most likely outcome, the fact that there is a significant chance of catastrophe, which the science supports, acting on that chance — rather than what is most likely to happen — should dominate cost-benefit calculations. 

Quoting Harvard professor, Martin Weitzman, Krugman emphasizes that it is

". . . this risk of catastrophe, rather than the details of cost-benefit calculations, [that] makes the most powerful case for strong climate policy. Current projections of global warming in the absence of action are just too close to the kinds of numbers associated with doomsday scenarios. It would be irresponsible — it’s tempting to say criminally irresponsible — not to step back from what could all too easily turn out to be the edge of a cliff.

During a heavy snow storm this winter, I blogged about how happy such weather must make climate change skeptics, who would have us believe that the continued existence of winter disputes the evidence that the planet is warming. Krugman also notes that "a snowy winter on the East Coast of the U.S. has given climate skeptics a field day, even though globally this has been one of the warmest winters on record."

But one heavy snowstorm isn't going to make this issue go away. There is a good chance, Krugman says, that record temperatures around the world this year will deprive climate skeptics of one of their main talking points, and that, "given the twists and turns of American politics in recent years — since 2005 the conventional wisdom has gone from permanent Republican domination to permanent Democratic domination to God knows what — there has to be a real chance that political support for action on climate change will revive.

"We know how to limit greenhouse-gas emissions," he concludes. "We have a good sense of the costs — and they’re manageable. All we need now is the political will."

Earth Day is a good time to muster that political will.

Urine Powered Cars; Gas Tanks Made From Chicken Feathers. Is This The Solution to Fuel Efficiency?

I couldn't resist this. A blog post on the GenGreen Life web site this week reveals two innovations in hydrogen-powered car research.

One of the problems, it seems, with hydrogen fuel cell cars is that the fuel tank needs to be extremely strong in order to store enough compressed hydrogen for a decent driving range. A tank made of carbon nanotubes would do the trick but would add about $30 thousand to the price of the car. But researchers at the University of Delaware accidentally discovered that inexpensive hydrogen tanks of great strength could be made using keratin fibers found in chicken feathers, a plentiful and renewable resource.

The other discovery noted in the article was that hydrogen can be derived very efficiently from urine. I know, I know. But think of it - you're on the road and running low on fuel and you need to find a bathroom and there's no gas station for miles. Voila! Talk about killing two birds with one stone. 

You can read the entire blog post here.

TELL THE SENATE TO FIX CLIMATE BILL LOOPHOLES

I just did something to help secure a clean energy future for the United States. It took exactly 30 seconds. Maybe 25 seconds. You can, too.

All you have to do is visit the EarthJustice web site where a simple, easy-to-use form will enable you to send a letter (already written for you - how thoughtful is that!) to your senators asking them to support the climate bill passed by the House recently.

THIS IS IMPORTANT.

It is also important to ask the Senate to fix a couple of shortcomings in the House version in the bill.

A recent editorial in the New York Times (see below) explained what the Senate must do to strengthen the bill.

Why is it so important to write to your senators? EarthJustice explains:

Your senator is hearing daily from opposing voices, among them far-right bloggers and talk radio hosts, who do not believe global warming is real and want to keep our nation hooked on dirty fossil fuels. It is time for us to demand that the Senate act swiftly to combat global warming and usher in an era of clean renewable energy. The world cannot wait. The Senate must craft a bill that sets science-based caps on carbon emissions.

Please visit EarthJustice today and send a letter to your senators. It only takes 30 seconds. While you're at it, why not ask ten friends to do the same.

NY TIMES EDITORIAL, "CLIMATE LOOPHOLES"

Published July 21, 2009

The House’s approval of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill earlier this month was a remarkable political achievement and an important beginning to the task of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But in all the last-minute wheeling and dealing, the House bill acquired two big loopholes that the Senate must close.

The first loophole involves coal-fired power plants. Coal is the world’s most abundant fossil fuel — producing more than half the electricity in the United States — and also its dirtiest, with twice the carbon content of natural gas.

The House bill would limit emissions from coal-fired power plants in two ways. It imposes a cap on emissions from all industrial facilities that tightens slowly over time. It also sets tough performance standards on new power plants permitted after 2009, requiring emissions reductions of 50 percent or more. The bill would help underwrite advanced technologies capable of capturing carbon dioxide and storing it underground.

The bill does not, however, impose any performance standards on existing power plants. And it explicitly removes these plants from the reach of the Clean Air Act. This is a mistake. The overall cap on industrial emissions will not be fully effective for a long time, and, meanwhile, the government should be able to impose lower-emissions requirements on the older, dirtiest plants.

There is little doubt that the Clean Air Act authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency to require existing plants to reduce emissions by, say, using cleaner fuels or increasing efficiency. But the House bill says otherwise, at least when it comes to carbon dioxide. The Senate must fix this problem by writing standards for existing plants into its bill or restoring the E.P.A.’s authority to do so. The old plants simply cannot be let off the hook.

The second loophole involves the tricky matter of offsets.

Exxon-funded scientist says CO2 emissions are good for us and we need more

Opinions, it has been said, are like a certain part of our anatomy associated with elimination - everybody has one. That, I suppose, might explain the bizarre testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last week by Physicist, Dr. William Happer of Princeton University. Happer offered the opinion that we are actually in a CO2 famine - compared with Earth's atmosphere of 80 million years ago - and that increased CO2 emissions would actually be good for mankind.

Happer's testimony, part of which you can see below, drew an incredulous response from the committee's chairwoman, Senator Barbara Boxer who said, "I don't even know how to say this, but a lot has happened since then," before noting that conditions on Earth 80 million years ago were probably not something we would find particularly pleasant today. Boxer later noted that Happer is Chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, which receives a large part of its funding from Exxon. Hmmmmm.

Happer claims that Earth, during the Pleistocene era (which was actually from 1.8 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago - NOT 80 million years ago) had many times more CO2 in the atmosphere than it does now, and that, as a result, the planet prospered.

In fact, CO2 levels in the Pleistocene - the period when the the planet was much colder and glaciers reached their furthest limit - were roughly 200 ppm (parts per million). Today's atmospheric CO2 level is about 386 ppm.

80 million years ago, by contrast, during the Cretaceous Period, when CO2 levels were 3.7 to 14.7 times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm, the climate was very hot. Ice sheets had melted and sea levels were 120m higher than today. This map, published last year in the journal, Science, shows what the world would look like today with sea levels similar to those of 80 million years ago. The dark blue areas would be completely under water.

Perhaps Dr. Happer would prefer it that way, but I suspect most of us would not.

Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip. Approaching the tipping point on climate change

This brilliant animated film by Leo Murray was just brought to my attention and I wanted to waste no time in posting it here. It does a masterful job of explaining, in lay terms, exactly how close we are to a tipping point, beyond which it may be impossible to prevent the most catastrophic consequences of global warming.

I urge you to watch this lovely, engrossing, terrifying, yet ultimately empowering short film and then send five or ten friends back here to see it for themselves. Ask them to do the same once they've seen it.

Gentle readers, this is not hyperbole. I wish it were, but it's not. We are dangerously close to a point of no return. It is still possible to pull back from the precipice, but that will require lots and lots of people demanding action and refusing to take no for an answer.

This is a matter of survival. The need to act is urgent. We ignore it at our peril.

p.s. You can see the film's script, along with references for all the science behind it here.

Q: What is the most important number on the planet? A: 350.

Many of the worlds leading scientists now say that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is 350 ppm (parts per million). Our atmosphere is currently at 386.92 ppm - up from 310 ppm fifty years ago and 280 ppm a century ago. This trend urgently needs to be reversed or we'll be cooked - literally.

An organization called 350.org has created a very cool little video to communicate this concept in 90 seconds with zero words. Worth watching.

Set your Tivos

This is a little off topic, but author, Jonah Lehrer will be on The Colbert Report tonight discussing his new book, "How We Decide." Lehrer writes a fascinating blog about how we tick called The Frontal Cortex, to which I've become addicted of late. His first book, "Proust was a Neuroscientist" made a big impression, so I'm really looking forward to reading the new one. Maybe it will provide some clues about how to get people to decide to embrace sustainability. In any event, Lehrer is a brilliant guy who's writing is always thought provoking and fun to read. Set your Tivos.

Irreversible climate change - don't expect a soft landing

There's an old joke that illustrates our apparent inability to comprehend the full implications of climate change.

A man is falling from the 80th story of a skyscraper. As he passes the 37th floor an office worker opens a window and shouts, "How are you doing?" The falling man replies, "So far, so good."

That about sums up the massive failure of collective imagination that is responsible for our painfully slow and timid response to the single greatest threat to our existence since the invention of the atomic bomb. The hard landing we face will be harder and sooner than almost anyone outside the scientific community imagines.

It is still possible to soften the blow, at least to some extent. But time is desperately short. According to a paper being published in today's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the damaging effects of climate change are essentially irreversible. Even if carbon emissions were to cease now, temperatures would remain elevated for at least a thousand years.

The paper’s lead author, Susan Solomon, a leader of the International Panel on Climate Change and one of the world's best known researchers on the subject, noted that global warming has been slowed by the ocean, because water absorbs a lot of energy. But that good effect will not only wane over time, the ocean will help keep the planet warmer by giving off its accumulated heat to the air.

Solomon's paper concludes that if CO2 is allowed to peak at 450-600 parts per million, [as it is expected to do by mid-century] the results would include persistent decreases in dry-season rainfall that are comparable to the 1930s North American Dust Bowl in zones including southern Europe, northern Africa, southwestern North America, southern Africa and western Australia.

What should we make of that information? Should we conclude that it is too late to do anything, throw up our hands and say, "We give up?"

On the contrary. All the more reason to act decisively, and soon. When we know that the effects our actions cannot be undone, we need to be especially careful about what we do. 

Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research summed it up like this: "The policy relevance is clear: We need to act sooner ... because by the time the public and policymakers really realize the changes are here it is far too late to do anything about it. In fact, as the authors point out, it is already too late for some effects."

Yes, the Obama administration is starting to take some significant steps. But it is still too little and too slow. Gentle readers, do not be sheep. Speak up. Act up. Write letters. Make phone calls. Demand action before the hard pavement of reality breaks our fall.

How much orange juice does it take to melt Antarctica?

Two articles in yesterday's New York Times help illustrate the extent to which that everything is connected. One, How Green is My Orange? describes Pepsico's efforts to determine the carbon footprint of its products. The short answer is that a half-gallon carton of  Tropicana orange juice is responsible for 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. 

What are we to make of this information? In a perfect world, all products would be labeled with carbon footprint information, enabling us to choose products with the least environmental impact. But the factors that go into these calculations are so complex that it is extremely difficult to come up with a reliable number. At best, carbon footprinting could serve as a general guide, though with plenty of room for interpretation.

An article in the New Yorker last year, entitled Big Foot described the carbon footprinting campaign at Tesco, Britain's largest supermarket chain. Some of their findings were surprisingly counter-intuitive. The article explains, for example,  that

The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised fifty miles away. In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the U.K., which helps productivity. . . That means the yield of New Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates, so the energy required for farmers to grow the crop is correspondingly lower. It also helps that the electricity in New Zealand is mostly generated by renewable sources, none of which emit large amounts of CO₂.

Similarly, if you live in New York it is greener to drink French wine than California wine. The reason? California wine travels across the US in trucks. This produces much more CO2 emissions than shipping wine across the Atlantic by boat.

While it is no simple task to compare the relative carbon footprints of the products we buy, we still need to find ways to reduce our personal, national, and global carbon footprints - a lot, and fast.

The second NYT article that caught my eye cited new evidence that even Antarctica is warming. Contrary to earlier reports that, while some parts of that icy continent were warming, others were getting colder, (which climate-change deniers have been fond of repeating, over and over) new research based on much more detailed measurements indicate that the entire continent is definitely warming.  This is leading to the breaking up of enormous ice shelves and the accelerating sliding of glaciers.

Orange juice is certainly far from our most carbon intensive consumable, but we should remember that virtually everything we do, everything we buy, everything we consume affects the size of our carbon footprint. I don't plan ever to visit Antarctica, but I like knowing that it is still there - something I'll think about next time I drink a glass of orange juice.

Our first green president?

I just published my first post as a guest blogger at CT Green Scene. It asks the question, Is Obama green enough. I think he just might be. At least I sure hope so. It will kill me if he isn't. You can read the post here.

He looks good in green, doesn't he?

Biomimicry - self-cleaning paint, color without pigment, solar cells that mimic photosynthesis

On the last day of Green-Build 2008, in Boston last month, I attended a remarkable talk by Janine Benyus, author of the book, "Biomimicry." What fascinates Benyus is the ways nature accomplishes things that can only be duplicated by complicated industrial processes. Her web site, www.asknature.org provides numerous examples of how mimicking nature can solve various problems more simply and easily, and with a lot less effort, expense, and environmental harm. According to Benyus,

"Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a design discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf.  The core idea is that Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with: energy, food production, climate control, non-toxic chemistry, transportation, packaging, and a whole lot more."

Examples of practical applications of biomimicry include self-cleaning paints that mimic the way water rolls off a lotus leaf, solar cells that mimic photosynthesis, and fabrics that are colored by mimicking the way a butterfly's wing refracts light. Many more examples can be seen at www.asknature.org, which over and over again asks the question, "How would nature solve . . . ?" Some of the answers are truly amazing.

The talk Benyus gave (see below) at the 2007 TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design - always worth a look) is fascinating and beautiful to look at. Carve 18 minutes out of your day and enjoy. It will be time well spent.

World revolves around sun after all: Who knew? Obama believes in science

Something momentous happened today. It hasn't yet received the media attention it deserves but it is a game changer. At a press conference introducing his new energy and environmental team, Barack Obama said that his administration . . . "will value science. We will make decisions based on the facts, and we understand that facts demand bold action."

This is a stunning and extremely welcome change from current policy. For the last eight years the Bush administration has had more or less the same relationship to science as the Catholic church in the 17th Century had to Galileo.

So far, the enormity of this change has failed to capture the attention of the media, which today devoted hours of coverage to airborne shoes. But today's statement by the President-elect, along with his cabinet choices for directing energy and environmental policy, has more potential to reshape our world than anything else that has happened since election night. And this hasn't exactly been a slow news month.

I'll be disappointed if tomorrow's headline in the New York Times isn't World Revolves Around Sun, After All.