[Sust-mar] Re: Where to Live

[IBS]

On the topic of where to live and global warming this was recently sent to me....

Natural History Magazine this month documents a looming global crisis, driven
in part by the U.S., but far more by China, whereby skyrocketing coal use will
greatly accelerate the already alarming pace of global warming. The cover says
Cooking the Earth with Coal. It is long, but well worth reading, if you're in a
bad mood and have no wish to remedy it. 

First, an aside re Scientific American, Natural History, The Scientist, etc. I
have been reading these journals, month in and month out, for nearly 25 years.
I have never seen anything approaching the level of frustration and alarm
conveyed among all of the countrys foremost scientific organizations and
publications over the neo-luddite rejection and suppression of science by the
current administration. That every other edition includes lamentations over the
suppression of science at top levels is absolutely not an indicator of liberal
bias of any sort, but is instead a plea for sanity and American ambition. I
have mentioned my disgust that our country has lurched, in five short years,
from a longstanding commitment to lead the world in science, progress,
research, breakthroughs, achievements, education, cures, to a childish bumpkin
attitude toward all those eggheads and their fancy gizmos and fancy talk.
America no longer wants to be the smartest nation on earth. We no longer want
to have the best doctors and engineers and chemists and biologists and
physicists and professors and textbooks and laboratories and clinics. Jesus and
guns, Jesus and guns, Jesus and guns  that's our national slogan now. How very
sad.

Now, I understand the principle of deferring hard decisions, to later
administrations or later generations. Its tawdry, but hard to avoid. And I
also appreciate that notwithstanding the idiot obstinacy of the Far Right in
claiming that global warming and acid rain are merely myths of tree-hugger
snake-oil salesmen, there is a sensible centrist line of thought that asks:
"how many caribou will actually die if we dig for a bit of oil in Alaska  it
might be worth a few caribou". The Left cannot continue to be against acid rain
AND against nuclear power  solar won't cut it yet, nor will cow farts. So, to
the degree that global warming gets lumped in with cancelling hydroelectric
dams to protect the snail darter, there is a broad swath of America that
understands that it's a problem some time down the line, and who might be
willing to downsize from a Navigator to an Xterra  just as we gave up
spraycans in the 80s  but who are not willing to undergo the massive economic
dislocations required to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.

China and India and Brazil have every right to say to the U.S. and Western
Europe: "Hey, YOU industrialized on the cheap, using coal and oil and trees 
dont you dare tell us that we have to go much slower and not use those
selfsame resources in our own industrialization process." All we can do is hope
that voluntary commitments, such as the Kyoto Accords, will prompt the other
big burners to burn a little less. Oh
 except we refused to burn less, and
didn't sign, so we have no moral authority whatsoever.

Still, there is vigorous and healthy debate to be had on how fast Detroit must
come around with better fleet mileage and how soon modern scrubbers must be on
every single coal plant smokestack and what sort of safety protocols must be
established before we increase nuclear plant construction, etc. But what is
just plain ridiculous is an administration who stakes out Americas energy and
climate policy as being the following: "We reject all science that might reduce
ExxonMobils profits. Not only do we claim that none of that bad stuff is
happening, but we forbid our best government scientists from researching it or
even discussing it. We will never ever do or say or permit anything to happen
that will question our reliance on the Bush family business, ever. Ever. And in
fact well claim just the reverse, and accuse scientists and the rest of the
world of being bad stupid baddie stupidies for suggesting that global warming
and pollution even exist."



Honestly, my Righties, its time for even the rightiest of you to concede that
saying global warming is a hoax and silencing people at NASA and NOAA who point
out the obvious is really a foolish and even dangerous way to run a country.
It's time for debate, not chimp see-no-evil pantomime. In my not uninformed
view, the current climate acceleration is, with the possible exception of the
disappearance of all the worlds frogs over the past 6 or 8 years, one of the
direst bellwethers for humanity. Asian flu, despite its vaccine being produced
by the company whose CEO is Donald Rumsfeld, is but a wart on a toe compared to
the disastrous consequences of unbridled coal and oil burning by the U.S.,
China, and India, in the next quarter century. Sic. Twenty-five years, not a
century.

If Avian Flu in a suspended droplet vector (cough transmission) hits
California, the entire country will be infected within 35 to 40 days. If the
kill rate remains at 5 percent, I bet America's vaccination programs and public
health quarantines will halve that. So I bet we'll see a kill rate of closer to
2.5 percent. With 280 million Americans, thats 7 million deaths. Wow. Big
trouble. Probably 60 or 80 million worldwide. Worse than a world war.

A likelier scenario is that to spread quickly enough, a variant of Avian Flu
would need to have a much lower kill rate, since dead people dont travel or
cough. I'd bet one tenth the kill rate, meaning three quarters of a million
American deaths and under 10 million worldwide. That's still bad, and we're
admitting it, preparing for it, paying Don Rumsfeld a lot of money to protect
us against us.

Now, lets imagine a world where all coastlines are ten miles inland. Where
Category 4 and 5 Katrinas hit a dozen times per year. Where droughts and
wildfires rage across continents. Where overcrowding in the third world is
aggravated to the breaking point by the refugees from the coast. Where
Manhattan and Hong Kong and Singapore and LA have been forced to relocate. And
where the thawing of dead organisms buried under glaciers for eons will unleash
new plagues among far denser populations with over-taxed medical
infrastructures. And all that thawing releases, ahem, CO2. And then therell be
the algae blooms, decimating fisheries and shellfish beds.

Is this apocalyptic scenario likely? Sadly, yes. And the arrival date keeps
moving closer, as we keep ignoring the warnings, But heres where the
Greenspans of the world need to be heard. There will be tremendous economic
dislocation and hyper-inflation if we abandoned coal and oil too quickly  but
they pale beside the economic catastrophe of a crockpot atmostphere and a
15-foot rise in sea levels. Economists must begin calculating the cost of doing
nothing.



Currently we produce half of our electricity with coal, and the administration
has fostered new rules and abandoned old ones that allow much more leeway with
pollution and environmental degradation, so coal mines and coal plants are
proliferating at a remarkable pace. The new "mountaintop removal mines" may be
fabulously efficient at getting to coal, but they annihilate ecosystems and
weather systems that have co-evolved through geologic time. They also ruin
communities for miles around. The industry slogan "increasingly clean" tells
you all you need to know about smokestack emissions. The American suburb
originated courtesy of Henry Ford, and we will not give up our automobiles
either, so we can expect auto emissions to be utterly dependant upon fleet
mileage and exhaust-pipe inspection standards.

But there is not just a tipping point for the climate and the biosphere, at
which point all control over the simmering Crockpot-Earth is lost. There is
also a much nearer tipping point at which the dollar saved by not acting to
control emissions will cost a dollar ten, a dollar twenty-five, two dollars,
five dollars, ten dollars of economic hardship when the tides sweep away the
coasts and the hordes rush inland and the ancient plagues awaken.

We've faced such critical junctures before, at a national level, if not an
international one. At a certain point we accepted the increase in the price of
cotton and sugar that would be the inevitable result of ending human bondage.
At a certain point we saw what happened to the passenger pigeon and the bison
and we enacted some conservation laws that undoubtedly increased the price of
fur and grazing land. At a certain point we saw Lake Michigan catch fire and we
saw Love Canal babies die and we decided that the increased cost of goods due
to forcing manufacturers to dump their wastes safely was worth it.

We already make efforts, perhaps half-hearted, to protect the longevity of our
fisheries and our logging. Every ten or fifteen years, it seems to me, we
decide as Americans to undergo some fiscal hardship in pursuit of a more
promising future. The government tosses bones to the dislocated industries and
workers. Life goes on. We gave up freon and lead paint and asbestos and DDT and
PCBs and PVCs and a host of other substances that were really useful and made
people a lot of money and allowed a lot of good things to happen cheaply.
Because we recognized the downside, and were willing to adapt. Roll-on
deodorant and paint that chips easier and insulation thats not quite as cozy.
The cost of anaesthesia has soared since the introduction of pulse-ox monitors.
Never waking up from surgery doesn't happen anymore.



The cries from the threatened dinosaurs are ever the same. The yellow peril of
unionism at the turn of the last century was going to keep America in the Dark
Ages. The GI Bill was going to ruin American education. First seatbelts and
then airbags were going to permanently cripple the auto industry. The Marshall
Plan would leave America paralyzed at the expense of socialist experiments in
Europe. And every increase in the minimum wage is to be the end of small
business as we know it. Yet the new thrives where the old rots, and tack shops,
railroads, and billion dollar dot-coms relying on advertising alone are all
bygone drivers of the American dream. It's the very depths of pessimism to
dismiss battery-powered cars, efficient solar panels, failsafe nuclear
reactors, smokestack super-scrubbers, vat-grown meat, high-yield agriculture
with nitrogen substitutes, and something we havent even considered yet, maybe
fabricated tree-quality wood, as opportunities that can support enormously
profitable capital returns and become viable economic sectors, as coal and oil
and crazy-grazing and crazy-logging fade. Poor whatsisname at Digital (Olsen,
maybe?), who pounded his fist on the podium and yelled that computers will
never be a part of the American home  his vision was myopic. And this was in
1980 or so, less than a decade before Commodore 64s storing recipes were
replaced by useful machines that talked to each other over an academic and
scientific communication network.

Things change. America will survive its transition to energy sources beyond
fossil fuels. Count on it.

But we return again to the stubborn pigheadedness of current orthodoxy on
Capitol Hill, where the problem is ignored, and more gallingly, denied. As
Americans, we get the notion of trading off current comfort for future
prosperity. We also get that trading off requires trade-offs. They are the
fodder for debate, tugs and tussles, turf wars, compromise. Politics is the art
of the possible, not the ideal. We get it!!! So if the Bushistas and their Oil
Oligopoly want to advocate the tail-dragging side of the argument, okay, fair
enough. Detroit and Galveston and Pittsburgh have their priorities. If the
fleet average mileage must go to 50mpg rather than 60mpg in the short run,
okay. If emissions must be reduced by 3 percent per year rather than 8 percent,
okay. But admitting you have a problem is half the battle, so they say. To deny
global warming and other emissions issues, to trot out manufactured scientists
from this or that "institute"  meaning a fraud-tank funded exclusively by oil
companies, to prohibit NOAA from researching the weather, to muzzle NASA
officials, and to label the other 99 percent of the world "the radical
eco-lobby" is the lowest, meanest, and stupidest sort of response to a genuine
crisis.

By 2020 the worldwide volume of CO2 emissions, which are already cooking the
atmosphere pretty well, will more than double, driven primarily by China, with
the U.S. helping out a lot. The Greenland ice sheet, which slipped toward the
sea at 3.5 miles per year in the 1990s is now sliding at nearly 8 miles per
year. By 2030 it may have melted entirely. There's an ancient fella by the name
of Archimedes who once cried "Eureka!" after he sat in a bathtub.

Get the picture? Its time to talk.
 
Phil Ferraro and Nancy WillisInstitute for Bioregional Studies Ltd.
Fortune RR#4  Souris, Prince Edward Island Canada  C0A 2B0
Permaculture, Organic Agriculture Production and Leadership Training,
Food Quality and Safety Audits and HACCP Planning,
Independent Organic Certification Inspections,
Organic Farm Tours.