Alex Steffen, Carbon Zero Book

Alex Steffen, former Seattleite and recent Berkeley transplant and author of Worldchanging has a new book out called Carbon Zero (December 2012).

Resilient Cities - Peak Oil & Climate Change

Excerpt: 

. . . oblivion is [not] necessarily the destiny of urban areas. Instead, . . . intelligent planning and visionary leadership can help cities meet the impending crises, and [the book looks] to existing initiatives in cities around the world. Rather than responding with fear (as a legion of doomsaying prognosticators have done), [the authors] choose hope. First, they confront the problems,

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2010 Had Largest CO2 Emissions Ever

See the NYT Article:

Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers. Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.

The increase solidified a trend of ever-rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.

The trend bodes ill. According to IPCC modeling, which may be conservative, the business-usual-scenario (BUA) will result in a global temerature increase of 6 degrees C by the end of the century), an increase associated with catastrophic climate change for human society. Most scientists fear average warming scenarios above 2 degrees, some consider anything above 1 degree will have highly likely catastrophic results. The IEA's annual report released last week took the position that humanity has five more years to get on a sufficient 100+ year mitigation path or perilous climate change will result.

Climate Warming Scepticism Unsupported

An SF Gate article begins with, "A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly."

Although the scientific method triumphs, the dialogue is still based on a misunderstanding of the implications and use of science for public policy decisions. The notion that global warming must be "proved" to some irrefutable level of all-consuming consensus, or that it matters whether the source is natural or human-made, or that it is "too expensive" to do something about are all points that do not have a scientific answer, but a political, policy-based answer, the best of which would reflect humanity's highest intelligence and wisdom, and on probabilities and consequences. 

Hopefully, this progress on the science of global warming will help the world's citizens focus on defining the smart response. When many intelligent people examine the issue deeply, one of the conclusions is that the costs of reversal mitigation now are small and inconsequential to the costs of doing nothing and being wrong (earth/human systems collapse).

Many also find that the reversal mitigation path may even be the best path for economic development and international security for not only a warming world, but for an increasingly flat and crowded one as well (see the powerful synthesis by Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded).

A deeper dive into this arena leads one to the power and potential of creating regenerative economic prosperity by mimicking the economic and engineering design principles of the earth's living systems that have evolved over 3.5+ billion years of evolution. In fact, that was the insight 20 years ago of some of the smartest businesses, communities, and people on the planet, from Dupont, Coca Cola, Interface Corporation, IKEA, Nike, and others to The Natural Step, Paul Hawken, and a variety of regional and municipal ecological initiatives. Inspiring innovations in this emerging integrative arena of strategic sustainability have been expanding since. The Rocky Mountain Institute's recent Reinventing Fire Initiative represents a current culmination of this thinking in a voluntary program that will move the U.S. off fossil fuel by 2050 because it is now cheaper and the best competitive business move.

The real tragedy over the climate denier agenda is not the healthy scepticism upon which science should be based, but the exploitation of society's confusion over the legitimate basis for public policy decisions in light of science, which will always have some element of uncertainty in it. Precious time was diverted from clarifying the legitimate basis for public policy action in this case and identifying the smart response. When the probabilities for devastating consequences are high, but perceived as low, and the costs are relatively inconsequential, and the response is a better business model and would likely be ultimately required in the future anyway, what is the rationale for denial and procrastination? Particularly when the actual probabilities of devastating consequences are extremely high and avoiding them requires instant mass mobilization. What is the down side? To whom? And why are we letting them drive the public response? What exactly is the legitimating basis for that approach to public policy? It certainly is not free-market economics producing maximum social welfare in an world full of imperfect price information, particularly for the information that would be the game-changer in the markets!

It's time to get smart and get going. The data is in. The choices are clear. It can be constructed as a win-win, and any other option is a lose-lose.

At Stanford, GOP members gird for battle against fossil fuels

Finally, momentum may be shifting the game. What irony. The most conservative element in society, the military, "gets" the business rationale for clean energy and increases its renewable energy R&D tremendously over the past few years, when civil society has been decreasing its investment in renewable energy R&D to a mere few to none percent of GDP since the Carter administration.

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Climate Change Denying will be Fatal AND is Fatally Flawed

Public discourse seems to increasingly suffer from a confusion between  fact and opinion, argument and belief, the rational and irrational. Accordingly, society now possesses a declining capacity to make these critical distinctions and comprehend their import for public policy, decision making, and governance. As a result, society is losing or is about to lose its guiding rudder at a time when it is most needed. This capacity is needed to respond

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Communicating Climate Change Effectively

A Q&A exchange in the 2011 Stanford Magazine's Sage column (read both the tabs--(1) Essential Answer; (2) Nitty-gritty) present key explanatory points and strategy in communicating climate change and citing X recent surveys and publications on the topic.

Why does it matter whether you, and others, care about creating a sustainable civilization and curbing global warming?

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Bio-Geo Engineering can Save the Planet?!

Well, i was not expecting either a very cogent summary of the current business as usual (BUA) trends and end-game predicament humanity is facing when i read a recent editorial by Thomas Lovejoy, III, PhD. I was also not expecting a biological-based approach to geo-engineering. The combination is nothing short of brilliant. Lovejoy is an internationally distinguished biologist and educator. Read the article, contemplate the situations and options. A long excerpt follows below.

I.H.T. OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR, Geo-Engineering Can Help Save the Planet, By THOMAS E. LOVEJOY, Published: June 10, 2011

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are pushing 400 parts per million (p.p.m.) — up from the natural pre-industrial level of 280 p.p.m. Emissions for last year were the highest ever. . . . the time to act is now.

The biology of the planet indicates we are already in a danger zone. The goal of limiting temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, as discussed at the Copenhagen and Cancun climate summits, is actually disastrous.

As we push the planet’s average temperature increase beyond 0.75°C, coral reefs . . . are in increasing trouble. The balance of the coniferous forests of western North America has been tipped in favor of wood-boring bark beetles; in many places 70 percent of the trees are dead. The Amazon — which suffered the two greatest droughts in recorded history in 2005 and 2010 — teeters close to tipping into dieback, in which the southern and eastern parts of the forest die and turn into savannah vegetation. Estimates of sea-level rise continue to climb.

Even more disturbing, scientists have determined that, if we want to stop at a 2°C increase, global emissions have to peak in 2016. That seems impossible given current trends. Yet most people seem oblivious to the danger because of the lag time between reaching a greenhouse gas concentration level and the heat increase it will cause.

So what to do? One possibility is “geo-engineering” . . . . An example would be to release sulfates in large quantity into the atmosphere or do other things that would reflect back some of the incoming solar radiation.

There are serious flaws with most geo-engineering solutions because they treat the symptom (temperature) rather than the cause (elevated levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases). That means the moment the solution falters or stops, the planet goes right back into the ever-warmer thermal envelope. Such “solutions” also neglect the oceans because elevated CO2 makes them more acidic. Further, any unintended consequences of global scale geo-engineering by definition will be planetary in scale.

It’s far better to address the cause of climate change by lowering concentrations of greenhouse gases to an acceptable level. That means going beyond reduction and elimination of emissions to things that can pull out some of the excess CO2. Fortunately, because living things are built of carbon, the biology of the planet is capable of just that.

At the moment, roughly half the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from destruction and degradation of ecosystems over the past three centuries. A significant amount of CO2 can be withdrawn by ecosystem restoration on a planetary scale. That means reforestation, restoring degraded grasslands and pasturelands and practicing agriculture in ways that restore carbon to the soil. There are additional benefits: forests benefit watersheds, better grasslands provide better grazing and agricultural soils become more fertile. This must integrate with competing uses for land as the population grows, but fortunately it comes at a time of greater urbanization.

The power of ecosystem restoration to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide and avoid disruptive climate change is great but insufficient. We also need to use non-biological means to reduce atmospheric carbon. The barrier to the latter is simply cost, so a sensible move would be to initiate a crash program to find more economical ways.

Smart Growth & GHGs -- No Clear Link! Really!

How Smart Growth Reduces Emisstions, Sustainable Cities Collective, 060911

And why are people still attempting to refute the irrefutable? Short term gain can be the only rational reason.

Rob writes that the flaw in NAHB’s analysis is that they looked only at the density of residential development, in isolation from other relevant factors:

“If all you do is bring people closer together, you get modest reductions in gasoline consumption. But if you do all of the other things associated with smart growth — that is to say, create a walkable environment with multiple destinations and alternative modes of transportation — the impacts on VMT, energy use, and greenhouse gas emissions are huge.

That is true as far as it goes, but I would go further to clarify the most important factor of all is what transportation researchers call regional accessibility (sometimes also called "destination" accessibility), or the location of a place within a region.  The more central a place is to the region, or to a strong suburban center, the lower the VMT, in large (though not exclusive) part because driving distances become shorter. 

In Ewing and Cervero's exhaustive study of the published literature, they found that such locations are as significant in reducing driving rates as the next two significant factors (street connectivity and mixed land use) combined.  (See graph above comparing the significance of five major factors.)  As Todd Litman puts it, “residents of more central neighborhoods typically drive 10-30 percent fewer vehicle miles than residents of more dispersed, urban fringe locations.”

Climate Refugee Planning - Portland

Portland's resilience to many climate change challenges will make it a magnet for climate refugees from other, harder-hit areas of the west. Within a relatively short time (the next 20-30 years, the forces unleashed by climate change will begin to make extreme weather events daily events, raise sea levels, disrupt or obliterate agricultural and daily-needs economic production, and drmatically reduce rainfall in the west (by 2050), amoung other things.

In short, life and survival will become much harder, shorter, and brutish to paraphrase Hobbs' characterization of a different era.

Yet, hope springs eternal as people substitute the mantra of climate adaptation for humanity's failure over the past 20 years, really 40 years, to make any hopeful and substantial progress on reversing climate change, establishing a new ecologically-based economy, prosperity, and security orchestrated via a soft, short-as-possible, multi-century reversal of climate to pre-1990 conditoins.

Read the article on climate refugee planning in the Portland Tribune's Daily Sustainable Life Section  (Portland should brace for ‘climate refugees’. Eco Thoughts: Climate disruption could be defining issue of the century, By Kat West, Pamplin Media Group, Jun 9, 2011).