The bumpy path toward lower greenhouse gases

The Rhodium Group, an independent research provider with a strong reputation for timely and reliable reporting, recently issued preliminary US emissions estimates for 2018.  After three years of decline, emissions are estimated to have risen by 3.4% in the past year.  The increase was spread across all sectors: electricity generation, where cheap natural gas played a big role; transportation, where demand for aircraft and diesel fuels increased substantially; and in the industrial and building sector, where there has been little progress in implementing decarbonization strategies.  This graph from the Rhodium paper illustrates that our national will to address the challenge of climate change has been steadily eroding, as evidenced by the trend from reductions in carbon emissions to an increase.

The documentary, “Paris to Pittsburgh”, available on TV from National Geographic, carries encouraging notes.  And, the new 2018 Farm Bill contains several provisions that directly or indirectly affect global warming. The effects on global warming are not huge, but they’re steps in the right direction, and every bit counts. The bill maintains the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) without new punitive work requirements. It expands funding for the Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentives program, which helps low-income shoppers purchase more fresh fruits and vegetables from local farmers. It also increases research and support for organic farmers, new farmers, and farmers of color, and includes a new Local Agriculture Market Program, which will strengthen regional economies and better connect farmers with consumers.  On farmland conservation, the bill maintains overall funding for programs that help farmers safeguard their soil and protect air and water quality. This provision is very much in line with the aims of the Drawdown initiative I’ve mentioned previously, though it should be much more aggressively promoting regenerative agriculture.

But real change comes slowly, and only in the face of a lot of pushback. To cite one salient example, big ag aggressively defends its right to continue polluting the planet with energy-wasteful and polluting practices in the production of animal meats.  The entire animal production enterprise is responsible for three-quarters of food-related greenhouse gas emissions. I wrote about one example of this in dairy farming in Wisconsin in a recent blog. 

Meat substitutes offer an alternative to animal-based products. In time, we'll have a high tech solution to the traditional wasteful expenditure of energy: it will be efficient to produce meat from cells. This is not the place to detail how this works or how much energy it would save, but it’s a technology destined to move on a fast track. Nonetheless, with all the health and safety issues that need to be put to rest, it is likely to be 5 to 10 years before cultured meat is a force to be reckoned with in the marketplace.  Predictably, the traditional purveyors of meat products will not go down without a fight.  In Missouri, legislators enacted a new statute that carries a fine of $2,000 and up to a year in jail for using the word “meat” to describe something that’s not “derived from harvested livestock or poultry.” I heard just a day or so ago that the Nebraska legislature is considering similar legislation.  I believe I hear the rumble of the ACLU caravan.

Finally, there was a very interesting post on ecoAmerica regarding shifting attitudes among Republicans with respect to climate change.  First off, it's clear that a majority of Americans believe that climate change--and concomitantly, weather--is changing.  94 % of Democrats, 71% of Independents and 64% of Republicans believe that climate change is real. As this bar graph shows, people are not only personally concerned, they see that others are as well. This would seem a good sign for the possibilities of new opportunities for change on the political level. 

   

  

A new Start

This blog has gone quiet for a long time.  Life put too many things on my plate, and I just had to let some things go adrift for a time.   In the meantime, environmental politics have turned worse at the national level, and there’s no sign of slowdown in the rate at which CO₂ is being added to the atmosphere. I believe it’s time for me to restart the blog.  I have no illusions about the importance of any pushback I might generate, but there are new things to say, new dragons to go after, perhaps new readers to attract.  We’re told that there are many hopeful signs for the world’s environment if we just look for them and lean into the future.  Renewable energy technologies have been making substantial progress.  And of late there’s new interest in taking assertive actions to actively draw down the levels of atmospheric CO_2, and address social factors that bear upon the rates of CO₂ emissions.  

Realistically, even with the best efforts of all those on the right side of conserving this planet in a livable state, our progeny are in for difficult times.  But we can get going on doing remedial important work.  I’m enthused about Drawdown, a comprehensive plan to actually reverse global warming through an array of initiatives extending over energy, food, the status of women and girls, land use, transport and materials.  The book, Drawdown, edited by Paul Hawken is exciting in its ambition and comprehensiveness. The Drawdown team proposes 80 “solutions”, steps that are cost-effective and doable, each of which can reverse or mitigate the rate of increase in atmospheric CO₂.

Presently we’re faced with the likes of Scott Pruitt and his fellow cabinet member, Ryan Zinke, to name the two most villainous critters in the Trump cabinet cage. They seem bent on reversing as much as possible of the progress made since the inception of the E.P.A. and other legislation protecting the nation’s treasured wild places.  We can and should keep pressure on our congressional representatives to do what they can to block these political hacks’ attacks on the budgets and scientific frameworks of the agencies they control. But Margaret Talbot’s excellent piece in The New Yorker tells us how tough it will be.  It’s easy to get discouraged.

 My spirits were recently boosted by re-watching Kens Burns’s wonderful series on The Roosevelts. From Teddy Roosevelt through FDR’s New Deal programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps the legitimacy of government’s role in maintaining the commonweal was established.  We have history on our side, in terms of admiration for past accomplishments and determination to continue the fight.  Those of us who treasure a sustainable and beautiful world must not give up—we’ve got to keep pushing back, keep working for change.

Consider trees, just one aspect of the environment. Deforestation has led to loss of a significant fraction of the planet’s forests.  In the early stages of human culture, wood was used as a fuel, to provide warmth, and for cooking.  Then forests were stripped to provide land for agriculture, a process that continues to this day.  But this must not continue, not only because we need trees to contribute to the carbon dioxide balance.  Their destruction leads to loss of habitat for many of the earth’s species, and destabilization of the land, with resultant erosion and flooding. 

And who would want to be without trees?  Richard Powers, one of finest novelists writing today, has just published a new novel, The Overstory, that explores the essential conflict between humans and all the nonhuman living rest, while at the same time revealing the deeply complex webs woven in the natural world.  A lyrical, inventive and heartfelt tale worth reading.   

So now I’m motivated to write regularly, mostly about energy, the environment, food and the politics surrounding energy and the environment.  By way of introducing the topic of my next blog, let me ask a question:  What eventually happens to all the machinery, all the technological wizardry, that makes renewable energy possible?  Everything we make use of eventually wears out, right?  Cell phones, Solar panels, electric car batteries, those monumental wind towers.  If you think recycling now is difficult and complex (it is), just wait.