Money, Power and Rebellion

On a recent December morning in Washington DC a large number of climate change activists blocked traffic in Washington DC. They were protesting in front of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund headquarters. Most of the protesters, largely young people but with a generous sprinkling of elders, were associated with a group called Extinction Rebellion. Many DC commuters were late for work, and let their ire show, but perhaps they were moved to wonder about what was being protested. 

At its heart, the protests were driven by a concern that the continued use of fossil fuels is leading to disastrous changes in Earth’s climate. Whereas we should be working to eliminate fossil fuels as an energy source, global emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb. All the global climate models point to climate changes that will threaten the lives of billions and threaten the social order.  We’ve got to wake people up!  But why demonstrate in front of these world banks? Why not protest at the front gates of a large fossil fuel power plant instead? The answer lies in the response by the famous Willie Sutton to the question, “Why do you rob banks? He replied, “That's where the money is”. 

These protesters were aware of something that many people don't know about global economics: The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank subsidize fossil fuels in one way or another to the tune of about $1.9 trillion per year. That's a massive amount of money, equal to about four times the total annual budget of the United States of America. These protesters know that replacing those subsidies with carbon taxes or other means of reducing fossil fuel use would result in a very substantial decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.

In an economic policy article written for the Washington Post a few years ago, Brad Plumer dissected the main strands of these fossil fuel subsidies. About $480 billion dollars are direct subsidies to developing nations, mostly in the Middle East and Africa. They are a form of assistance, by helping these nations lower the cost of petroleum, natural gas, coal and electricity for their citizens. The trouble is, the banks are paying the nations to pollute the planet with greenhouse gases!  The subsidies crowd out other expenditures in developing nations and depress private investment in renewable energies. Energy subsidies are often a huge portion of the budget. For example, Egypt, the most populous nation in the Mideast, spends up to 8% of its GDP in subsidizing fossil fuels--more than it spends on education and public health combined. Egypt runs budget deficits of about 8% of GDP.

So why not just stop with the direct subsidies? It's not easy in countries where the standard of living is pretty low and the subsidies impact strongly on people’s survival. When they are removed or lessened, considerable social unrest generally follows. The government of Iran recently raised the price of gasoline from about $0.15 per gallon to $0.50 per gallon, a price very low in comparison with most nations.  The move was met with rioting in the major cities. Over time, subsidies take on a legacy status; people believe they’re entitled to them.

Then there are the even larger indirect subsidies that run to about $1.4 trillion annually. These are found mainly in industrial nations.  They've existed in the United States for a long time. They typically come into place when new industries are being developed and the government wants to stimulate their growth. Subsidies to oil and gas producing corporations have been in place for many years, the products of lobbying and influence peddling.  They're tucked away in all sorts of places in the tax code. The rationales for many of them no longer exist, yet they continue to live on. Corporate influence is such that many new subsidies are created where there is no need for them. The federal government leases land at very low rates to corporations for the development of or extraction of fossil fuels. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute estimates that conservatively  U.S. subsidies to the fossil fuel industry are about $20 billion per year; 80 percent to natural gas and crude oil enterprises that are currently generating massive surplus supplies. Similarly, European Union subsidies are estimated to total 55 billion euros annually.

Aside from these subsidies, fossil fuel industries produce many external costs arising from their production and uses. Think of the high price paid in terms of human health and welfare involved in the mining of coal and of the environmental destruction that accompanies the mining process itself. Add to that the environmental damages and adverse human health effects accompanying the use of fossil fuels: air pollution, contamination of rivers, streams and water sources drawn upon for human consumption. Society pays a high price to address these problems. If the costs of remediating those external effects were charged to coal producers, coal would be much more expensive. Coal is obviously a bad choice of fuel, and it’s uses are declining rapidly, but Robert Murray, former CEO of the bankrupt Murray Coal Company, continues to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to spread misinformation about climate change and to influence legislation in critical states such as Ohio.  Oil, and especially natural gas, have their own sets of subsidies. No one is charging those industries for the special brands of environmental disasters they are producing: contaminated water systems, unstable geological structures leading to earthquakes, massive flaring of excess natural gas that adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and thousands of depleted wells, unplugged, still seeping, abandoned across the Permian basin. 

Inefficiencies in the markets magnify the environmental damages accompanying the development and production of fossil fuels.  Only a decade ago natural gas was being heralded as the fuel of the future and the making of US bragging rights to being the world’s leading producer of fossil fuels.  Now the industry is in decline, forcing refinancing of earlier operations as the current ones lose profitability.  Smaller companies are going out of business or seeking bankruptcy.  One might suppose that’s good riddance, but the surplus of natural gas is actually impeding the work of clamping down on the losses of methane, the principal component of natural gas. A New York Times report tells a tale of horrific levels of methane emissions from production at all levels, from storage, pipelines and especially venting. The Trump administration took the lid off all caps on the ability of fossil fuel producers to vent methane into the atmosphere. The replacement of coal by natural gas as the major fuel for electricity generation was acclaimed as a means of lowering the amounts of greenhouse gas for a given amount of power produced, but the wastage of methane from wellheads and in stages of production may completely erase the purported advantage of natural gas. We can’t be sure, though, because the Trump administration wants to eliminate the requirement that companies even estimate methane loss. This is a modern version of the creation of chemical dump sites in the era when chemical companies weren’t regulated.  The dump in this case consists of odorless, invisible molecules that just happen to be heating earth’s atmosphere and will be at their work for decades as the planet heats up.

The natural gas example I’ve just described is an example of an indirect subsidy to the producers in the sense that they are not being charged for the inevitable future costs to society of adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It might be argued that we don’t know just what those costs are likely to be, so we can’t charge the producer for them. But there are many smart economists and scientists in this world who know how to create models, draw up scenarios and look a bit into the future to come up with estimates of the costs of remediating the damage that will be done.  That damage is likely to be so overwhelming that a proper tax on it would be so large as to put the producers out of business.  What we might hope for, though, are taxes on enterprises contributing to global warming and the destruction of irreplaceable ecosystems that are sufficiently large to serve as powerful disincentives.

There is a lot of talk about carbon taxes, but they may be a nightmare to establish, and people are not likely to see their value.   Something about taxation doesn’t sit right with many people, even when they’re not directly in the line of fire, which in fact they generally are. You really have to look closely when the plan is fostered by corporations. A business-driven organization, the Climate Leadership Council has an advocacy arm called Americans for Carbon Dividends that supports an economy-wide carbon fee, with a provision that the proceeds would be returned to the citizens in the form of a check. As Ellen Wald wrote in Forbes magazine when this plan was first announced, it looks like a sleight of hand to make to make the average American think he’s getting something for free.

About a decade ago my beloved son, Ian Ayres, Professor of Law at Yale University, wrote a book entitled Carrots and Sticks: unlock the power of incentives to get things done., in which he touches on the subject of conservation commitments.  Applied to the current topic, the general idea is that rather than punish the bad behavior of those emitting greenhouse gases with a tax, we should incentivize them to stop emitting, with funding that would be paid in proportion to their success in doing better. Governments do that now by providing subsidies for renewable energy development and deployment. We want money spent now to obviate in some measure future costs of coping with the adverse consequences of planetary heating. 

This is a big, difficult subject.  For now, I would be happy just to see reforms in the rule-making philosophies embraced by the Trump administration’s executive agencies, which so shamelessly encourage profligate waste of energy, and careless despoiling of the environment.   As I post this, we're coming up on a new year. If we can't begin to stop this in 2020, maybe beginning in 2021? 

Making change is the work of many hands

The large figure below is a product of the Prairie Rivers Network,  an organization of Illinois citizens founded in 1967 to block the plans of the Army Corp of Engineers to build an ill-advised reservoir near Decatur, Illinois. Over years of advocating for environmental causes the organization grew and became part of the Coalition of American Rivers, dedicated to resisting other Corps of Engineers projects throughout the Midwest. Under the leadership of John Marlin, the first paid Executive Director (1973-1983), the Coalition drew people from varied political and social backgrounds to protect rivers from federal water projects that threatened most of the nation’s rivers in the 1960s and ’70s.

Their figure is loaded with information that calls us to pay attention. Let’s start with the statement about nutrient pollution.  Illinois, like all the other midwest prairie states, is heavily into industrial agriculture. Corn and soybean crops dominate the landscape. Which of the crops dominates in a given year is determined by many factors; predominantly weather, market forces, the trade wars, government subsidies, crop insurance.  In any given year, most of the available land is planted in one of the two crops. The processes of plowing, planting, irrigating, fertilizing and keeping the bugs and weeds under control result in enormous runoffs, that flow into small streams, then flow into larger ones, eventually empty into the big rivers and thence into the Gulf of Mexico. That water, further enriched with the runoffs from animal feedlots, is seriously polluted. All along its long journey It infiltrates local aquifers and surface sources for municipal water systems, kills wildlife and--year by year--depletes the originally rich, loamy soil of its organic matter. When it arrives in the Gulf, it creates a huge nutrient-rich dead zone.

Very little of the corn and soybean grown on those Illinois fields goes directly into the food chain. A lot of it goes to feed animals that are converting it into manure and methane gas,  and another large fraction is converted into bioethanol, a transportation fuel. The entire system could not be more cleverly designed to convert enormous quantities of fossil fuels into greenhouse gases, notably  carbon dioxide and methane.  If we were to set out to poison the planet, we’d build something like present-day industrial agriculture as a prime element. 

 Agriculture is estimated to produce somewhere around 14 to 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally. That makes it the single largest contributor to global warming.  Even more concerning is the fact that nations around the world seem to be eagerly looking to emulate US agricultural practices. We have a  great challenge before us: to feed a growing global population. It's become evident, though, that we’re going about it in the wrong ways.  Fortunately, there are solutions to the problem.  One of them is indicated at the top right of the figure. Regenerative agriculture practices can reverse the path we’re on. The problem is, what society should do as a matter of great urgency  isn’t consistent with the business plans of corporate agriculture. It will take a lot of hard politicking and good government to make progress in shifting from the wasteful, poisonous farming methods of today to no-till farming, use of cover crops, and more thoughtful management of water systems. 

Cover crops are a big factor in making the system work.  As the large figure at the top shows, there is movement; in Illinois, more than 700,000 acres devoted to corn and soybeans are utilizing cover crops.  Ah, but it’s going too slowly!  We need to get to about 18 million acres. Data from an Illinois EPA analysis indicates that at the current rate of adoption, we’re 200 to 500 years away from where we need to be. Time is running out!  Similar states of affairs are found in the other midwestern states, even in the face of wonderful examples of what can be achieved using regenerative agriculture.  Gabe Brown’s Youtube video talk on his experiences in North Dakota provides an inspiring example of how effective regenerative agriculture can be.  

Five years ago, as part of the Paris Accords, a $100 billion multilateral Green Climate Fund was established within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The United States committed $3 billion to the initial creation but has to date paid in only $1 billion.  With the Trump administration moving to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, there is no prospect that the US will pay any of its shortfall, let alone contribute more funds to the cash-strapped fund. These monies are intended to assist with climate adaptation in poor countries.  The goal for the Green Climate Fund was $100 billion per year.  At this point, commitments are falling far short of what was promised. Still, nations are responding, and one can hope that over time the urgency of the situation will impress itself.  

It will take a great deal of hard work and determination to buck the established ways of doing things, and brilliant new science and engineering to create a way forward.  Here are two examples of promising new technologies that could play a role:

• The company Indigo Ag was founded to develop technologies around using microbes living within a plant to help plants protect themselves from insects, disease, and drought. That description does not do justice, however, to the range of the company's activities, which stretch across virtually all aspects of the agricultural enterprise. They are off to a fast start and have operations running in many parts of the globe.  The CNBC interview with CEO David Perry gives an idea of the breadth of their vision.  They are moving toward a radical disruption of modern agricultural practices for producing the major grains that feed the world.

• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced additional support for a project at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign entitled Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE). A key aim of the RIPE project is to provide farmers, particularly those in some of the world’s poorest countries, with seed that will yield substantially more without requiring more inputs. Scientists working in RIPE take advantage of a long history of scientific research, coupled with the latest discoveries in plant biology, to tweak photosynthesis to produce improvements. According to the project director, Professor Stephen Long, seen here with co-Director Donald Ort,
  

  

  “Our models predict that by combining several strategies we could achieve a 50 percent yield increase, which will go a long way to meeting the demands of this century.”  The RIPE project has a long way to go before it can be transferred to food crops, tested for safety and widely deployed on a global scale.  The scientists are all too well aware that they are racing against the increasing effects of climate change. Government needs to increase its support of this and other promising research efforts.  

It's inspiring to see that there's a kind of two-pronged system at work. The Prairie Rivers Network advocates at the local level for sustainable agricultural practices, lobbying legislators, educating in the school systems and in the public sphere generally about what is at stake, and what individuals can do to build support for effective legislation. Those folks are living in the same community as the researchers at the University of Illinois engaged in world-class research with the aim of finding technological solutions.  And the people at Indigo Ag are engaged in developing commercially successful answers that will be applicable globally.

So what can you and I do?  We can read and learn; use the Internet to ask questions and find answers; find the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of state and federal legislators and make calls; lobby regulatory agencies when we see examples of counter-productive cancellation or relaxation of effective rules ( In this regards, try following Huffpost Agriculture for a daily feed that can be interesting and surprising).  What we mustn't do is give up, or get too busy with other things.

Wake up time! Let's get contagious!

After a painfully long time during which shortsightedness with respect to global warming ruled the public domain, changes are afoot. This is a fun topic to write about. Start with two quotes from the November 5, 2019 issue of the Policy Alert of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):

“State legislators in Florida are starting to evaluate the state’s exposure to climate risks for the first time since former Gov. Rick Scott ® reportedly forbade the use of the phrase “climate change” in state publications in 2011. In a recent hearing of the Florida Legislature’s Committee on Infrastructure and Security, State Sen. Tom Lee (R) acknowledged that lengthy delays in evaluating climate risks and exposures have amounted to a “lost decade” of time within which opportunities to craft solutions had been squandered.”

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) has issued an order requiring the state to begin evaluating climate risks and planning for resiliency measures. The order calls for a multi-agency effort, led by the Department of Environmental Protection, to evaluate and report on climate risks to the state. An initial report to address opportunities for New Jersey to avert the consequences of rising and warming seas, as well as more frequent and intense extreme weather, is due by September 1, 2020.

Many such announcements are to be found on the web these days, but should we be cheered by them? They don’t as yet amount to more than assessing and planning for a worrisome future. The bank of Norway, which is heavily invested in fossil fuel enterprises, is worried but doesn’t have any good ideas about how to cope with the coming demise of fossil fuel enterprises. To Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist all this awakening seems pitifully slow. The time for action is now!

Many writers have commented on our human propensity for shortsightedness. It’s wired into our brains! There’s a lot of gloomy stuff in this literature, but Bina Venkataraman, an experienced and highly respected former climate change advisor in the Obama White House and currently Director of Global Policy Initiatives at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has a more balanced view. As she writes in her new book, The Optimist’s Telescope, “The future is an idea we have to conjure in our minds, not something that we perceive with our senses. What we want today, by contrast, we can often feel in our guts as a craving."

She goes on to talk about behavioral contagion, a concept born at the turn of the 19th century to account for undesirable behaviors of people in crowds. Venkataraman argues that there is a positive side to this; cases in which individual courses of action have collectively brought about substantial changes. Small actions may in themselves seem insignificant, but through the influence of behavioral contagion, they can lead to sweeping changes: My neighbor installed solar panels, and hey, so did that guy down the block. I should check it out. My friend Alice sent me a link yesterday to a new website, Protecting Florida Together, put up by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, that looks good. It could be a place where I’m reminded of what’s going on, and maybe express my concerns. I should let my friends and neighbors know of this site.

Many public expressions and actions of individuals ripple out into a community. An apparently oddball idea becomes a meme; a municipal election turns out to be a harbinger of larger-scale shifts. The governor of Maine vows that her state will work to meet the Paris Accords in spite of the perverse actions of the Trump administration in pulling out. And the Democratic sweep in Virginia promises aggressive actions to address climate change.

I’ve often written in earlier blogs about how little time we humans have to take actions that could head off climate disasters in the decades ahead. When I reread some of those entries I see that shifts in public perceptions are underway, but progress is so damned slow! Now that there seems to be some movement, and global warming has risen to be a more visible topic in public discourse, how do we go from talking about it to acting? Remember Andrew Marvel, the English poet who pleaded with his coy mistress about the fleeting nature of time?

Here are a few ideas on what each of us can do, depending on our capacities for acting for those of us who can’t get out much, but probably have cell phones, tablets or laptop computers, all of which have a search engine of some sort. If you don’t have one, sign up with Google, and you’ll be all set. If you can’t manage that, ask one of your friends to lend you one of their grandkids when they’re visiting. You’d be surprised how eager your friends are to show off their grandkids’ amazing abilities. Ask your search engine, or Alexa or Siri, whatever you have: Who are my representatives in the state legislature? When I did that, my search led me to the names of my two representatives, one each in the Florida upper and lower house. When I click on Kathleen Passidomo I find her email address and the names of her committee assignments. I notice that she represents big chunks of Hendry, Collier, and part of Lee counties. That means that her constituents cover a lot of agricultural interests in all three counties here in southwest Florida. Collier county includes the city of Naples, which by some measures has the highest per capita income in the state. She’s the majority leader and has a very safe seat in the Florida Senate, after serving for several terms in the lower house.

I can check on how Passidomo voted in recent bills. She’s a Repubican, representing a wealthy district. I need to let her know of my opposition to the excessive development occurring in her district, of my support for legislation reforming Florida agriculture in areas she represents. And when opportunities arise, I should mention my actions to my friends. And for good measure, if I call her office or write her, I can tweet on my account that I did so, with a few words on what message I was delivering. And for good measure, on my Facebook page. These actions are pretty easy to do, and they don’t take a lot of time. They could count for something, especially if I let others know what I've done. My behavior could be contagious. Isn’t it great to think of contagion as a good thing?! I keep in mind that that though I don’t have the wealth and clout of some of her constituents, I have just as many votes on a per capita basis, possibly many more if I spread my view and actions contagiously.

The same approach should apply to contacting your US House and Senate representatives. And by the way, I asked Cortana about State Senator Tom Lee of Florida, whom I quoted in the opening paragraph, got his office phone number and called to tell him that I admired his remarks about the squandered opportunities of the past decades. His staff person seemed glad to hear from me. So easy, a little nudge in the right direction.  Maybe you can help me make this blog contagious.

Will new generations lead the way to plant-based eating?

I recently returned from a memorable visit to the campus of the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where our family lived when I was a member of the faculty. We participated in Homecoming Weekend festivities and had many conversations with undergraduate students.  I was impressed with their intellectual attainments, their energy, and purpose, their sense of where they were going in life. Most of the events we were attending involved food, from breakfast, lunch or dinner to hors d'oeuvres. There was a surprising amount of talk about food. Many students told me that they were vegetarian or—even more commonly—following a vegan diet.  A few said their dietary choices were prompted by health considerations, but more generally they expressed ethical concerns for the future of our nation and global society. I was encouraged by what I heard from these young people. Since returning home (we live in Florida),  I’ve been feeling that it may be time once again to reflect on the importance of moving to a plant-based diet.  So here are some thoughts, in part abstracted from Project Drawdown materials. (Be sure to watch Paul Hawken’s great presentation at this site.)

Much depends on making people aware that our dependence on meat as a major component of the Western diet comes at a steep price in terms of global emissions of greenhouse gases.  Present practices of industrial-scale livestock production account for somewhere between 15 percent and 50 percent of global emissions, primarily carbon dioxide and methane. Ruminants such as cows are the most prolific offenders, as they digest their food.  But that’s only part of the story. Agricultural land use and associated energy consumption to grow livestock feed also produce carbon dioxide emissions.  On a per-calorie of food produced basis, industrial livestock agriculture generates much larger emissions than vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes. 

It’s actually much worse than it needs to be. According to the World Health Organization, only 10 to 15 percent of one’s daily calories need to come from protein, and a plant-based diet primarily can easily meet that threshold.  On average, adult males require about 56 grams of protein each day, and women about 46, but in the United States and Canada, the average adult consumes more than 90 grams of protein per day. Where plant-based protein is abundant, human beings do not need animal protein.  It’s interesting to compare the Protein Scorecards of various foods.  One sees that beans and whole grains are much more effective at delivering protein at lower greenhouse gas emissions. Vegetables generally score much higher than animal sources.

Vegetarians and vegans don’t need to sacrifice the pleasures of tasty food by switching away from animal-based protein. If you have concerns about changing your diet away from animal protein, there are many websites worth visiting.  One classic introduction is the film,“Forks over Knives”.  The Forks over Knives recipe website is great! Dr. Michael Greger’s  NutritionFacts.org is a treasure trove of references and good advice on diet and nutrition. The students I spoke with at Illinois were all well aware that one can eat well, in terms of both nutrition and pleasure.  A groundbreaking 2016 study from the University of Oxford modeled the climate, health, and economic benefits of a worldwide transition to plant-based diets between now and 2050. Business-as-usual emissions could be reduced by as much as 70 percent through adopting a vegan diet and 63 percent for a vegetarian diet (which includes cheese, milk, and eggs).  The potential health impact on millions of lives translates into trillions of dollars in savings: dietary shifts could be worth as much as 13 percent of the worldwide gross domestic product in 2050.

If western society and newly affluent societies worldwide could just become less piggish about their consumption of animal protein, that would be a major step in the right direction. A 2018 World Resources Institute report analyzes a variety of possible dietary modifications and finds that “ambitious animal protein reduction” — focused on reducing overconsumption of animal-based foods in regions where people devour more than 60 grams of protein and 2,500 calories per day — holds the greatest promise for ensuring a sustainable future for global food supply and the planet. “In a world that is on a course to demand more than 70 percent more food, nearly 80 percent more animal-based foods, and 95 percent more beef between 2006 and 2050,” its authors argue, altering meat consumption patterns is critical to achieving a host of global goals related to hunger, healthy lives, water management, terrestrial ecosystems, and, of course, climate change.

The case for a plant-based diet is robust. That said, bringing about substantial dietary change is not simple, because eating is profoundly personal and cultural. Meat is laden with meaning, blended into customs, and appealing to taste buds. Meat substitutes made from plants are one way to help shift established ways of cooking and eating.  They can mimic the flavor, texture, and aroma of animal protein and even replicate its amino acids, fats, carbohydrates, and trace minerals. With nutritious alternatives that appeal to meat-centric palates and practices, companies are actively leading that charge, proving that it is possible to swap out proteins in painless ways. Select plant-based alternatives such as those marketed by Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are now in grocery meat shelves.  It’s a rapidly growing development in the food industry. Food columnists such as Mark Bittman, journalist and author of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and Yotam Ottolenghi, restaurateur and author of Plenty are helping introducing new dietary norms. And hey! If Tom Brady of the New England Patriots can eat vegetarian, why can’t the rest of us? 

A key step in reducing the impacts of animal husbandry on climate is ending price-distorting government subsidies of the U.S. livestock industry, so that the wholesale and resale prices of animal protein would more accurately reflect their true cost. It is not easy to get a grip on the total subsidies that undergird livestock production, but when all the various components of the enterprise are taken into account, it’s a heap of money.  Some critics of the present system have proposed levying taxes on meat production that reflect its social and environmental externalities. We’re a long way from that happening, but the social incentives for reducing the scope of industrial livestock production are clear: less contamination of municipal water resources, lower rates of chronic disease, less damage to freshwater resources and ecosystems — for example, smaller aquatic “dead zones” created by farm runoff. Plant-based diets also open opportunities to restore land now being used for livestock production to other, carbon-sequestering uses.

Global warming is putting pressure on humanity’s capacity to fend off disastrous changes in climate.  Figuring out how to feed a growing population is perhaps the most urgent. What is certain is that we can’t continue on the paths we’ve been following.  But we can’t make effective changes until people come to grips with the urgency of our situation, until they understand how corporate and political special interests work to maintain the status quo. There are many questions begging for answers.  For example, why are so many of the livestock operations in this country owned by, or supported by, Chinese interests? Is that in our national interest? More on that in a future blog.

In the meantime, what’s on your dinner menu? If it’s plant-based, tell your friends and family about it. Come on, people, let’s get together!

On not losing faith in climate action

The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management recently filed a final impact statement (EIS) related to oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Predictably, it doesn’t foresee that drilling will have substantial environmental effects on the Alaskan wildlife and environment.  Those would come largely downstream, in the form of burning of the extracted oil and gas. However, the EIS, more or less in spite of its natural inclinations, had quite a bit to say, buried near the back of the report, on the expected long-term effects of climate change on the Arctic ecology:  "The large magnitude of climate change effects, accompanied by increases in already high climate variability in the Arctic, are likely to overshadow smaller magnitude impacts of oil development. ... many species that nest on the refuge's coastal plain already are experiencing decreasing populations, and many could suffer catastrophic consequences from the effects of global climate change in one or more of their seasonal continental or even global habitats…”.   In short, extinction of species can be expected to occur on a massive scale as global warming marches on. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is finalizing regulations that could make it harder to protect wildlife at a time when scientists say the threats against it are growing.

Habitat loss continues apace, while climate change is predicted to increase pressure against species as temperatures climb. In the administration’s new-speak, plants and animals are considered threatened when they're at risk of becoming endangered "in the foreseeable future." The administration wants to limit what counts as “foreseeable future”, and only considers factors it deems "probable," according to its proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act. I could fill this entire blog with examples of the ways that barriers are being formed to listing species as endangered, slowing up the process to the point that the species may become extinct even before being acknowledged as endangered.  

In the prologue to his book, Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, E. O. Wilson writes that our human sensory system and capacity for moral reasoning are deficient for the purposes of modern humanity:  “Like it or not, we remain a biological species in a biological world, wondrously well adapted to the conditions of the planet’s former living environment, albeit tragically not this environment or the one we are creating. In body and soul we are the children of the Holocene, the epoch that created us, yet far from well adapted to its successor, the Anthropocene.”  Wilson is a wise and learned man. Given what he knows about his fellow humans, and about the deep perils that face all the species on the planet, I admire his persistent efforts to enlighten and inspire the rest of us to action. But what actions? Greta Thunberg, and George Monbiot urge us in an excellent short video to PROTECT, RESTORE, FUND.  Yes! Let’s do those things! But most of us don’t know how.  We are, most of us, trapped in our wondrous adaptations to the rapidly disappearing Holocene.  

The physicist Gilbert N.Plass first made me aware of the influence of greenhouse gases on Earth's climate when  I heard him speak at Michigan State University in 1954.  Plass was one of the early pioneers of the modern movement to rigorously compute the effects of greenhouse gases on the planet’s surface temperature.  His work drew a fair amount of attention; Time magazine did a story on him in 1958. I became fascinated by what I learned from Plass, and over the years spent time away from my major research interests as a Chemistry Professor to delve into atmospheric sciences. I wrote about global warming in a short general audience type of book, Energy and the Environment, published in 1971, which received a modest level of use in special topics courses; spent a sabbatical leave at the International Meteorological Institute in Stockholm in 1972, during which time I attended the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm;  a discussion of “water vapor, carbon dioxide and climate” was included in the first edition of Chemistry: The Central Science, a general chemistry text I coauthored with H. Eugene LeMay, which appeared in 1977. I taught myself a lot about climate change during those years, but I also came to recognize, regrettably, that global warming has been a subject of small interest. In a January 22, 2019 report, Climate Change in the American Mind, about 71% of American respondents indicated a belief that climate change is happening. That’s the same percentage reported in 2008. It went down after 2008, and has only slowly crept back up. Further, the percentage of respondents that believe that global warming has a human cause, is only 56%, the same as in 2008. There’s not much to be happy about in those numbers, though I expect that there’s more awareness globally than there is in the US.  

The novelist Jonathan Franzen made a lot of people unhappy with an opinion piece he wrote recently for The New Yorker.  One of his sins in the eyes of his critics is that he promotes what they see as a defeatist view: there’s scant evidence that humans will successfully prevent climate catastrophe. But Franzen isn’t arguing that we should do nothing, he’s cautioning against unrealistic hope. Despite widespread claims that the problem of climate change can be “solved” if we summon a collective will, annual global emissions of carbon dioxide have continued to increase. With the major economies of the world fixated largely on GDP, with neoliberalism still a reigning economic doctrine, what other outcomes can we expect? The Business Roundtable recently issued a revised Purpose of a Corporation.  As reported in the New York Times, the statement says increasing shareholder value should no longer be the sole and exclusive focus of an incorporated business. Companies must also invest in their employees, deliver value to their customers, and deal fairly and ethically with their communities, It may look good, but isn’t it just more temporizing by Jamie Dimon and his ilk?  We have good reasons to be skeptical as to whether corporations will be motivated to mount an effective counter to the threats of global warming.

How, I wonder, will corporations, government and all of us respond to the powerful remarks of 16 year-old Greta Thunberg at the U.N. Climate Action Summit on  September 23^rd? I was in the midst of writing this blog when I heard them. Greta will not be able to persuade politicians and corporations that promote continued use of fossil fuel to work toward

rapid deployment of alternative energy sources. She will not succeed in bringing to a halt the continued destructive practices of an industrialized food industry. But this young woman moved me. I had begun this blog with the weary feeling that after all these years I might be just wasting my time. After listening to Greta, I know that I should stay active, however small my contribution may be.  My spouse Audrey and I have ten great-grandchildren. We are responsible for the fact that they exist. Don't we have an obligation to do what we can to maintain a habitable planet for them? To push, with our voices, money, and energy for a new politics in which change is possible? If like me you’re an elder, climate change is not so much a burden we will bear as a situation we’ll leave our progeny. We need to answer the call for ethics tailored to the Anthropocene. 

More on secular shifts and episodic events

In my most recent blog, I made an effort to distinguish between two categories of things which should form the basis of our discussions regarding climate change. These are:

• Episodic Events
• Secular Shifts

Episodic events are of short duration-they come and go:  tornadoes, extreme heatwaves, hurricanes of exceptional power, floods.  They grab our attention right now.

Secular shifts, on the other hand, are of long duration, consistently moving in a single direction: sea-level rise, the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, global population increase.

The major message of my blog was that, although we become preoccupied with episodic events and fret over them, it is the secular shifts that threaten disaster for humanity.

It follows from this that when we look at the daily stream of articles and opinions regarding climate change and the environment, we should try to ascertain the extent to which the topic of the discussion is important for one or more secular shifts.  Here are a few examples drawn from the recent flow of environmental and climate news.

• The White House recently announced that it is considering the relaxation or elimination of existing EPA regulations regarding methane emissions from natural gas facilities. Why is this important?  Methane is often found as a chief component of natural gas; it’s a fossil fuel in its own right. When it is consumed as a fuel, carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, is produced.  But when methane sneaks out of oil wells, escapes from pipelines or is vented as a nuisance, and becomes a component of the atmosphere,  it’s a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane emissions have increased markedly in recent decades; methane is now responsible for about a quarter of the planet’s warming. Relaxation of the regulations on methane emissions could result in substantial increases in the rate at which the planet warms, the single most important secular shift we face. 

• We humans are able to live day-to-day, individually or as communities, only within a rather narrow range of temperature.  This fact becomes more salient as the planet warms and weather patterns shift. A large percentage of the earth’s people live in tropical or temperate climate zones.  India has a population in excess of 1.3 billion and contains nearly a fifth of the world’s population.   It has seen six major droughts and drought-like situations in 10 of the last 17 years, devastating India’s farm economy.  The driving force for this unfortunate shift has been lower south-west monsoon rainfall.  Latest studies by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) show that average rainfall during the monsoon period is falling as the Indian Ocean gets warmer. For example, Chennai, a southeast Indian city of 10 million, receives most of its rainfall during the annual two-month autumn monsoon season. In recent decades, however, droughts have become more intense.  At the same time, temperatures have risen substantially during the hot months of the year. Air conditioning is a luxury; most people just have to sweat it out during the hottest periods. Water is so scarce in working-class neighborhoods of the city that the government has been forced to spend huge amounts of money to desalinate seawater, bring the water by train from hundreds of miles away, and distribute it from an army of water trucks into neighborhoods where household taps have been dry for months.  This is a city of 10 million people!  At the same time, the Indian government has documented hundreds of deaths due to extreme heat.

To add insult to injury,  despite the lower total rainfall there have been episodes of extreme downpour.

We in the US make up about 5% of the world’s population. Understandably, we tend to form judgments about global conditions from what we experience in our own country.  But what happens in India is more representative of the challenges facing most of humanity.  The more extreme climatic conditions seen in semi-tropical regions are in many cases portents of what is to come in our country.  All these episodic weather events are the products of secular changes in the planet’s climate, driven by increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases. 

• What about the heat in the U. S.?  The Union of Concerned Scientists recently issued a report on the increasing number of extreme heat events all over the world, and particularly in the United States. Their projections, based on analysis of data covering decades and modeling of expected future weather patterns, shows that the U.S.faces a potentially staggering expansion of dangerous heat over the coming decades.  Dallas, TX , for example, has experienced 31 above 1000 degree days during 1971-2000.  It’s projected to experience 93 such days during 2036-2065 and 124 days during 2066-2099. The trend line suggests that in 2020 Dallas can expect to have perhaps 40 or so days of extreme heat, with all that implies for heat-related illnesses and fatalities, to say nothing of the huge demands for energy to operate air conditioning machinery. The body’s ability to survive at a temperature of 1000 depends on humidity and the availability of water to maintain hydration, but for the elderly and people in poor health, that level of heat is life-threatening.  The air conditioning and refrigeration needed to counter the heat waves consumes exceptionally large quantities of energy.  Episodic extreme heat events worldwide can be expected to increase in number and intensity as the planet continues to warm,  producing a vicious cycle of added energy consumption, thus amplifying the secular shift of global warming.   

• 
  Tropical forests globally are being lost at a rate of more than 60,000 square miles per year.  A global initiative to restore large swaths of forest,  termed the Bonn Challenge, was launched in 2011.  Countries were to make commitments to restore large areas of the world’s deforested and degraded land by 2020. Since then the goal regarding the area to be restored has been increased to about 1.3 million square miles by 2030.  That’s a lot of land, about twice the area of Alaska. Ideally, reforestation is a great pathway to mitigating the continued increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Forests are capable of soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They can improve farmers’ lives in many parts of the world, improve drinking water quality, and provide increased habitat protection for wildlife.  So if the Bonn Challenge could be met, it would represent a significant effort to mitigate the secular change in greenhouse gas warming. 
  But as explained in a recent article in the journal Science, “many short term fixes fail to produce environmentally and socially beneficial long-term outcomes”. One of the most common missteps is to favor single-species tree plantations over restoring native forest ecosystems. This obviously has negative consequences for biodiversity and carbon storage, and typically works to the disadvantage of native populations.  Some nations have indeed planted a lot of trees on abandoned poor quality land or land not suited for food production, but much of the restoration involves using trees that are intended for harvesting at some point.  To maximize the benefits of restoration, trees must be left in place for longer times, encouraging diversity in the ground cover and promoting wildlife habitation.  Tearing up the Amazon rainforest to plant coffee trees or create a palm oil plantation is a step backward.  Done right, restored forests could sequester a significant amount of carbon dioxide and help limit global warming and enhance the lives of millions of people. On the other hand, a potentially great secular initiative could slip into being a disappointing episodic event. 

• I have long been an avid follower of efforts to revolutionize agricultural practices globally.  It’s such an obvious place to begin making a serious dent in the rate at which greenhouse gases are being added to the atmosphere.  And this, after all, is the single most important factor in determining how disastrously our anthropocentric imprints on climate change turn out. Agriculture is the world’s largest industry. About a billion people are engaged in farming.  About half the world’s habitable land is pasture and cropland.  Agriculture is essential, and potentially the single most powerful force for improving the lot of humankind generally.  It’s also one of the worst polluting industries on the planet. Of course, there isn’t just one “agriculture”.  This so-called industry varies from pitiable scratching in unproductive ground to behemoths of midwest farmland, costing as much as $400,000 and more--and that’s just for the tractor!  

The huge diversity in agriculture, based on economic factors, the conditions of the land and a host of other climate-related factors, precludes any single approach to raising agriculture’s contributions confronting climate change. It is quite evident, however, that there is room for massive reforms in conventional farming in the US and many other developed nations. Those reforms come under the general heading of regenerative farming practice.  The conventional practices that have become dominant emphasize monocultures, plowing practices that result in topsoil erosion, and heavy use of pesticides and herbicides.  The big ag corporations love it, they’ve grown rich by making the farmers dependent on them.  But there are winds of change a blowin’.  Here’s one example:

One of the precepts of regenerative agriculture is to leave the land as undisturbed as possible.  No-till practices leave the soil able to develop deep root systems with cover crops, which form deep root systems and promote sequestration of water and carbon dioxide. Their roots produce nodules that fix nitrogen which feeds the crops, and holds the soil in place in heavy rainfall, reducing runoff. To read a nice story on how this is playing out in midwest farm country, check this link.   Cover crop acreage is still small, but it’s increasing rapidly. According to a U.S. Department of Agriculture census, cover crop acreage increased 50% nationally during 2012-2017.

As the prospect of global warming looms ever larger, more attention is being paid to how we can offset our current dependence on fossil fuels by switching to renewable energy sources.  There is great enthusiasm for many promising modalities, especially solar and wind, and including also technologies for energy storage which will be essential to sustaining a balanced system with massive capacity.  But I’m not beamish about many of the rosy scenarios being drawn.  California recently set a goal of carbon-free electricity by 2045. This is an ambitious goal.  It ‘s sobering to realize that, ambitious as it is, it does not address the transportation sector, which produces two-thirds of the state’s emissions.  I recently came across this quote on the web:

“Humanity is owed a serious investigation of how we have gone so far with the decarbonization project without a serious challenge in terms of engineering reality.”  

– Michael Kelly, Prof. Electrical Engineering, Cambridge 

The issue of how to get to a carbon-free economy, especially one that might not include nuclear energy, has not been satisfactorily addressed by people who should know how far we are from that goal.  It’s true that, to the extent they can be deployed, renewable energy sources are capable of mitigating the continued increases in greenhouse gases.  But their capacity to do that is actually less than what is achievable by implementing many of the solutions described in Project Drawdown, a roadmap with which everyone should be familiar.