Climate Change Solutions - depopulation?

... the most profound way a U.S. citizen can impact climate change is to have fewer children, since every American child born today will add almost 10,000 metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere under current conditions—five times more than a Chinese child and 160 times more than a baby from Bangladesh. Having one fewer child would reduce a family’s greenhouse gas impact 20 times more than driving a Toyota Prius, using Energy Star appliances and other environmentally friendly lifestyle choices combined, according to researchers at Oregon State University.

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Just sayin ... via Seed Magazine

Agitated Ecoist takes climate change matters into his own hands (er, feet I mean)

The Agitated Ecoist takes on a challenge to walk to work every day for one full year. See why in this short two minute video:

The drivers of global famine ...

This is a partial excerpt from the New York Times excerpt of Julian Cribb's book that was discussed yesterday:

The coming famine is also complex, because it is driven not by one or two, or even a half dozen, factors but rather by the confluence of many large and profoundly intractable causes that tend to amplify one another. This means that it cannot easily be remedied by “silver bullets” in the form of technology, subsidies, or single-country policy changes, because of the synergetic character of the things that power it.

To see where the answers may lie, we need to explore each of the main drivers. On the demand side the chief drivers are:

Population. Although the rate of growth in human numbers is slowing, the present upward trend of 1.5 percent (one hundred million more people) per year points to a population of around 9.2 billion in 2050 — 3 billion more than in 2000. Most of this expansion will take place in poorer countries and in tropical/subtropical regions. In countries where birth rates are falling, governments are bribing their citizens with subsidies to have more babies in an effort to address the age imbalance.

Consumer demand. The first thing people do as they climb out of poverty is to improve their diet. Demand for protein foods such as meat, milk, fish, and eggs from consumers with better incomes, mainly in India and China but also in Southeast Asia and Latin America, is rising rapidly. This in turn requires vastly more grain to feed the animals and fish. Overfed rich societies continue to gain weight. The average citizen of Planet Earth eats one-fifth more calories than he or she did in the 1960s — a “food footprint” growing larger by the day.

Population and demand. This combination of population growth with expansion in consumer demand indicates a global requirement for food by 2050 that will be around 70–100 percent larger than it is today. Population and demand are together rising at about 2 percent a year, whereas food output is now increasing at only about 1 percent a year.

These demand-side factors could probably be satisfied by the world adopting tactics similar to those of the 1960s, when the Green Revolution in farming technology was launched, were it not for the many constraints on the supply side that are now emerging to hinder or prevent such a solution:

Water crisis. Put simply, civilization is running out of freshwater. Farmers presently use about 70 percent of the world’s readily available freshwater to grow food. However, increasingly megacities, with their huge thirst for water for use in homes, industry, and waste disposal, are competing with farmers for this finite resource and, by 2050, these uses could swallow half or more of the world’s available freshwater at a time when many rivers, lakes, and aquifers will be drying up. Unless major new sources or savings are found, farmers will have about half of the world’s currently available freshwater with which to grow twice the food.

Land scarcity. The world is running out of good farmland. A quarter of all land is now so degraded that it is scarcely capable of yielding food. At the same time, cities are sprawling, smothering the world’s most fertile soil in concrete and asphalt, while their occupants fan out in search of cheap land for recreation that diverts the best food-producing areas from agriculture. A third category of land is poisoned by toxic industrial pollution. Much former urban food production has now ceased. The emerging global dearth of good farmland represents another severe limit on increasing food production.

Nutrient losses. Civilization is hemorrhaging nutrients — substances essential to all life. Annual losses in soil erosion alone probably exceed all the nutrients applied as fertilizer worldwide. The world’s finite nutrient supplies may already have peaked. Half the fertilizer being used is wasted. In most societies, up to half the food produced is trashed or lost; so too are most of the nutrients in urban waste streams. The global nutrient cycle, which has sustained humanity throughout our history, has broken down.

Energy dilemma. Advanced farming depends entirely on fossil fuels, which are likely to become very scarce and costly within a generation. At present farmers have few alternative means of producing food other than to grow fuel on their farms — which will reduce food output by 10–20 percent. Many farmers respond to higher costs simply by using less fertilizer or fuel — and so cutting yields. Driven by high energy prices and concerns about climate change, the world is likely to burn around 400 million tonnes (441 million U.S. tons) of grain as biofuels by 2020 — the equivalent of the entire global rice harvest.

Oceans. Marine scientists have warned that ocean fish catches could collapse by the 2040s due to overexploitation of wild stocks. Coral reefs — whose fish help feed about five hundred million people — face decimation under global warming. The world’s oceans are slowly acidifying as carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels dissolves out of the atmosphere, threatening ocean food chains. Fish farms are struggling with pollution and sediment runoff from the land. The inability of the fish sector to meet its share of a doubling in world food demand will throw a heavier burden onto land-based meat industries.

Technology. For three decades the main engine of the modern food miracle, the international scientific research that boosted crop yields, has been neglected, leading to a decline in productivity gains. Farmers worldwide are heading into a major technology pothole, with less new knowledge available in the medium run to help them to increase output.

Climate. The climate is changing: up to half the planet may face regular drought by the end of the century. “Unnatural disasters” — storms, floods, droughts, and sea-level rise — are predicted to become more frequent and intense, with adventitious impacts on food security, refugee waves, and conflict.

Economics, politics, and trade. Trade barriers and farm subsidies continue to distort world markets, sending the wrong price signals to farmers and discouraging investment in agriculture and its science. The globalization of food has helped drive down prices received by farmers. Speculators have destabilized commodity markets, making it riskier for farmers to make production decisions. Some countries discourage or ban food exports and others tax them, adding to food insecurity. Others pay their farmers to grow fuel instead of food. A sprawling web of health, labor, and environmental regulation is limiting farmers’ freedom to farm.

The collapse in world economic conditions in late 2008 and 2009 has changed the prices of many things, including land, food, fuel, and fertilizer — but has not altered the fact that demand for food continues to grow while limits on its production multiply. Indeed, the economic crash exacerbated hunger among the world’s poor, and has not altered the fundamentals of climate change, water scarcity, population growth, land degradation, or nutrient or oil depletion.

Saturday Morning Linkfest - Power to the People

Good morning Vietnam (as Robin Williams said ...)

PICTURE: There's no better example of the energy past and present, meeting its future: Gas station in Nags Head, NC that fell victim to Hurricane Earl's winds.

Here's some articles I've found interesting in the past little while:

Blame the damn plankton for creating those hurricanes and typhoons. (via New Scientist)

The Salt Palace convention center in, where else, Salt Lake City, is getting a rooftop full of solar (America's largest rooftop installation) - enough to supply fully one-quarter of its electrical needs. The convention centre is more than 700,000 sq.ft. in size, including the exhibit and meeting space, and the grand ballroom. (via Solar Feeds)

Are huge solar panel efficiency gains just around the corner? We've all heard that "green is the new gold", but maybe black is the new green. (via inhabitat)

Thorium nuclear reactors? "There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.  Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal ... produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week." Apparently the stuff also "eats its own hazardous waste". Sounds too good to be true?  (via Telegraph)

Another Pollyanna take on infinite energy production? "Take sunlight, add water, and there you have it: free energy. Plants have been doing this for quite some time, splitting water's hydrogen apart from its oxygen, but our efforts to turn water into a source of free hydrogen fuel by mimicking them have borne no fruit. The problem is that splitting water takes more energy than conventional solar-cell technology can realistically deliver. But now we may be tantalisingly close to having economically viable sun-powered water splitters, and with it all the clean-burning fuel we want." (via New Scientist)

Wind power takes an upgrade, both visually and on the efficiency front, via a "wind lens" that boosts wind speed. (via inhabitat)

'The average American (just one of 309 million) uses up some 194 pounds of stuff—food, water, plastics, metals and other things—per day, day in and day out. We consume a full 25 percent of the world’s energy despite representing just 5 percent of global population. And that consumerism is spreading, whether it be the adoption of cars as a lifestyle choice in China or gadget lust in the U.S. “Consumerism is now spreading around the world,” says Erik Assadourian, a senior fellow at the Worldwatch Institute. “Is this going to keep spreading? Or are countries going to start recognizing that this is not a good path"?' (via Seed Magazine)

In the totally underwhelming category: "Australia's leading energy [retail] companies today added their voices [by open letter] to calls for the next government to introduce a carbon pricing mechanism as soon as possible, joining a coalition of civil society groups which yesterday issued a statement demanding the introduction of a new climate change bill. The letter said a price on carbon is required if Australia is to meet its target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to five per cent below 2000 levels by 2020." (via BusinessGreen)

There's something rotten in Denmark Greenland. Arctic ice melting is slower this year than the record-setting year of 2007. "This low has yet to be surpassed, but the extent of sea ice is not all that matters, as Barber found. Look deeper and there are even more dramatic changes. This is something everyone should be concerned about because the transformation of the Arctic will affect us all."  (via New Scientist)

Sure our brains are huge - but are they large enough to figure out we must change - change or die? Green bikes in London start taking off. But all is not smooth sailing. (via Business Green)

Sometimes it's the really simple things we forget to change - the poorly weatherstripped door for instance, leaks out a lot of hot or cool air, and therefore wastes energy. Ever wonder what that annoying water drip wastes and the cost? Apparently, "there's a [free] app for that". (via inhabitat)

Passivhaus meets solarhaus. The result? Four times the energy you need to run the house. (via inhabitat)

And finally, I thought I'd close with this one - an attempt to "depower the people". Changing behaviours via incentives - nine ideas. Workable? Some are already. (via greentechmedia)

Hungry Millions on the move, not too far in the future now ...

People don't understand that famines will impinge on them personally. It will affect the prices they see, the taxes they pay, and they will get flooded with immigrants. Think of the Irish Potato Famine. A quarter of the country departed for Canada and American and Australia. A population that's starving will move.

AND

No one will be untouched by it. No person, no country.
- Julian Cribb

Mr. Cribb's book, The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It,   highlights the serious global food situation. It can be thought of this way: dire. There's no need for me to mince words about it, or pretend it's anything other than what it is: dire. The future is coming hard and fast folks, climate change crunches with global wealth creation (and accompanying dietary changes) to produce the upcoming situation: dire.

Longish excepted article, is here.

Interview with author, is here.

Climate Math - 80% cut in emissions far too low

(Energy use per capita: Click this link for ginormous diagram)

You don't have to be a genius or climate researcher to figure out that the widely targeted 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (of 1990 levels), proposed to be reached by 2050, isn't going to cut it.

Here's my math - about one-fifth of the planet has been the heavily-industrialized leading edge for let's say 100 years and contributes about 60-80% of total emissions. Assuming that the rest of the planet aspires to energy use and the wealth of that one-fifth (in other words, eventually adding another four-fifths at similar greenhouse gas emissions), then pealing back everybody to one-fifth of what effectively amounted to almost all the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, means that the total emissions in 2050 will about equal all the emissions in 1990.

So, what are collective political global "leadership" is effectively proposing, is to continue 1990 level emissions. And as we are just beginning the earliest phases of really experiencing that reality, via Russian heat wave and forest fires, Canadian and Californian forests on fire, Pakistani floods, early signs of potentially runaway food inflation, etc. does anybody really think the global ecology can handle that kind of continued annual load?

No? Me neither.

For one creditable plan to reduce the load far, far, more, please read Mr. Monbiot's book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning.

Climate Change Apathy must be overcome

Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.


Arnold J. Toynbee

Question - what "definite intelligible plan" have environmentalists consistently/uniformly articulated to deal with climate change?