"Julia Butterfly Hill is known for climbing a 1,000 year-old redwood tree in 1997 when she was 23 years old, and remaining there without touching the ground for two years, as part of a successful effort to call worldwide attention to the destruction of California's ancient redwoods. Since then, she has addressed the U.N., lobbied Congress, and continued to stand on the front lines of environmental and social justice issues all over the world. She is the author of The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods and One Makes the Difference: Inspiring Actions That Change Our World."
Our universe was formed by nuclear reactions and radiation from those nuclear reactions. Where are these nuclear reactions? In stars like our own Sun. All the heavy elements were created through nuclear fusion in stars.
In the 1940's humanity developed nuclear weapons. Only the latest in the horrifying methods we humans develop to kill each other. In the 1950's and 1960's many films were made to explain nuclear weapons, and this is one of them. Two versions were made, one in the 1955 the other in 1963. It attempts to explain the "fallout" from nuclear weapons weapon explosions so that we may survive nuclear war.
Looking back at this it's rather curious how the films try to minimize the effects nuclear war. The films give lots of useful information, giving valuable warning, but portrays it as a survivable thing.
On March 20, 2010 and then on April 14, the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano in Iceland erupted. This led to widespread disruption of air travel in Europe from 15 April, grounding planes and affecting the travel plans of millions of passengers worldwide. What I'm finding interesting isn't the direct effect this eruption has put on airlines and airline travelers, but what it demonstrates about our future as oil supplies tighten.
The eruption's aftermath affected travel around the world, with air space across more than 20 European countries remaining largely closed until April 20. The volcano erupts on a very long time scale, with the last eruption lasting (on and off) for over a year between 1821 and 1823. Since previous eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull have been followed by eruptions at its larger neighbour, Katla, there is some concern for a larger eruption to occur very soon. The Icelandic Meteorological Office published a study last December pointing to a rise in seismic activity that obviously was a precursor to this eruption.
The news is full of reports of economic trouble being faced by airlines, and by the inconvenience to travelers. The airlines problem is that, being unable to conduct flights, they cannot earn revenue, while at the same time they're spending money just from airplane ownership and other operations. As a result there are calls for an airline bailout. And of course the traveler inconvenience makes for heart wrenching stories with people struggling to find a way to get home from their holiday trip.
What this demonstrates is the clinging to the way things are. The situation is a disruption of normalcy, and the stories are entirely about the effort to return to normal. The airlines are returning back to business as usual, and the travelers are breathing a sigh of relief that normal travel routines will resume.
This specific instance is obviously a temporary disruption. Well, "temporary" in this case is determined by the length of the eruption and the actual effect of the airborn ash on airplanes. Air travel was grounded because of policies stemming from experience that turbine powered jet airplanes, when exposed to silicate ash from volcanoes, experience engine failure which would tend to cause an airplane crash. In any case, as a temporary disruption it isn't worth much pondering except for the discussion over better determination of the how much ash it takes to actually ground all air travel.
What I think it demonstrates though is the future when rising oil prices, due to depletion of oil production, will be a long term disruption of airlines functioning as business entities. One reason airplanes have become the dominant form of world travel, and global airplane travel has caused globalization, is due to the cheap oil that's fueled this great orgy of high energy living.
As oil prices rise (due to peak oil) airline travel will be less affordable causing a decline in travel. When that occurs airline companies will be facing a similar financial problem to the one they face today, declining revenue and a fleet of expensive airplanes on the tarmac demanding maintenance, insurance, and other costs. Unlike today, in that future it won't be a temporary disruption, the supply of oil based fuels will simply rise, and rise, and rise even more, with no end in sight.
Today's struggle to return to normalcy will seem like a minor blip in a couple months. It demonstrates that the airline executives and travelers will struggle for normalcy before giving up on airline travel. It demonstrates that in our future there will be an oil price shock that drives the airlines out of business, and there will be worldwide denial over the issue, and a worldwide struggle to return to the normalcy we experience today.
On TWiE Episode 13. Engineering a miracle my fellow electric vehicle online journalist (Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield) had an interesting thing she said. That simply by existing humans are destroying the environment. No matter what we do to minimize our impact on the environment, no matter how green we are, we're destroying the planet.
While I grok and agree with what she's going after, there's something this is missing. And the thing she's missing has in it an interesting bit of teaching that I've been pondering.
Much as we seem to hate to admit it, we are animals. Human beings are animals. We aren't plants, we aren't fungus, we're animals. It doesn't matter how smart we think we are, nor does it matter how distanced from our animal nature we get due to the our animal nature. We are animals.
Every animal and heck every plant modifies its environment.
As such humans do modify our environment. It's rather obvious that we modify our environment. We humans build buildings, houses, roads, parking lots, airports, etc. All those things modify the environment around us. Other modifications are various chemicals from all the metals and everything we build and use. There is a huge long list of things humans do to modify our environment.
While all animals (and plants) modify their environment, there is a huge difference between the modification done by humans or by other animals. Our ability to harness energy resources act as an amplification to human activity. A single human acting on their own using their hands probably can't do any more environment modification than any other animals. Give a tool to a human, give them a powered tool, give them a car, put them in an airplane, etc, and the amount of dama..er..modification they can do increases dramatically. Give a phalanx of construction engineers the backhoes and jack hammers and concrete mixers etc, and pretty soon you have a highway or a building.
It seems to me that if human beings had kept to non-powered hand tools the damage (modification) we do to our environment would have remained just as minimal as other animals. But we had to go and develop technology, develop oil refining techniques, and develop these huge planet crushing machines.
Taking my tongue out of my mouth ... Sure those planet crushing machines also act to give us the comfortable homes and highways we live among. The benefit however comes at a cost, and that cost is huge dramatic modifications to the environment.
Our fellow human beings may be acting under the delusion that the pitiful puny efforts of humans cannot possibly make any lasting damage to the planet. To an extent dramatic planetary effects like earthquakes (such as yesterdays 8.8 magnitude one in Chile) or hurricanes do demonstrate that the planet is much bigger than us puny humans, even when we equip all 6 billion of us with planet crushing machines. The pattern however is that human ingenuity continually acts to learn new ways to harness energy resources for ever-increasing magnification of our impact on our little planet. Eventually (if it hasn't already happened) this pattern will result in humans literally able to crush planets.
That is, unless humanity learns that there are better ways to live. An idea I took away from watching the recent movie Avatar is that if humanity were to be traveling among the stars (as shown in the movie) that we would be like a horde of ravening locusts swarming over planets stripping them of their resources. Just think how modern businesses act today, and amplify it a million times more.
An ad showed up on my gmail account that was intriguing: "Yes on Proposition 16. - www.taxpayersrighttovote.com - Protect Taxpayers Right to Vote. Voting is Our Right!" Since I believe in the right to vote I was curious what this is about. For example why is "Tax Payer" connected with concern over the "Right to Vote"? In America any citizen is eligible to vote regardless of whether they're paying taxes or not (except -- in many states convicted felons are not allowed to vote even after they've served their time). In any case what I found is even more curious and an example of corporate faux grass roots activism.
The website is a simple one pager with this plea:
Help protect your right to vote. Right now local governments in California can spend public money or incur public debt to take over private electric businesses without letting local voters have the final say in the decision. In tough economic times like these, voters deserve the right to have the final say about how our money is spent. Join us to protect the Taxpayers Right to Vote – Yes on 16.
Uh.. "take over private electric businesses" is very curious especially connected to "letting local voters have a final say". Reading further into the web site I find that the issue is that governments make plans to build local electric systems to replace privately owned utility companies. The phrase "private electric businesses" is pretty strange but what it means is the electric utility. Namely companies like PG&E. And, if you gaze at the bottom of the page is this disclaimer: "Paid for by Yes on 16/Californians to Protect Our Right to Vote, major funding from Pacific Gas & Electric Company, a coalition of taxpayers, environmentalists, renewable energy, business and labor." Let me guess the ratio of PG&E money to other groups is on the order of 90%?
Reading on further the web site makes several claims. By passing proposition 16 "ensures that voters will have the final say—by requiring a vote—when local leaders decide to spend public dollars or incur public debt to go into the retail electricity business." And "it will help communities design alternative energy programs that are more likely to have strong community support and be successful." And "By requiring a local vote, this initiative will increase, not diminish, local control." It also warns that when local governments "enter the retail electricity business" the cost can run into millions or billions of dollars due to the capital required.
Obviously this web site is attempting to appeal to "small government", "low taxes", "rein in government spending" memes being spun around by conservatives.
Based on a California law requiring two-thirds majority voter approval before tax increases, the initiative declares that governments should be required to meet the same voter approval standard before "using public funds, borrowing, issuing bonds gauranteed by ratepayers or taxpayers, or obtaining debt or financing to become an aggregate electricity provider." It goes on to state that governments often start such plans without voter approval, and that the source of funds is electricity rates or taxes.
I find it rather curious that the initiative explicitly focuses on electricity providers. Why doesn't it also focus on other activities that governments enter into that also use funds sourced from taxes? Could it be that this is a thinly veiled attempt by PG&E to launch what looks like a voter initiative but is instead a corporation abusing the voter initiative system?
The purpose is to require government to gain voter approval (two-thirds majority) before starting such a project. However they word it the other way around. In their wording the initiative is about guaranteeing a right to vote on these matters. It seems to me a curious wording that implies that somehow an existing right to vote on something has been taken away or that there's a threat our right to vote on things is being threatened. Instead this initiative has a purpose to expand the range of things on which voters must consider.
The initiative would add a new section to the California Constitution. This is where the requirement would live, in the California Constitution.
In my opinion this is a bad initiative by itself even before considering the corporate funding of the initiative. It forces a two-thirds majority requirement that would be nigh on impossible to meet. I haven't been following state politics but if there is a 2/3rds requirement before our government can add new taxes then it's no wonder that the states finances are in such a problematic state.
The thrust of this initiative appears to be wholly to the benefit of the incumbent utility companies. These utility companies obviously would be worried about any threat to their monopoly position in delivering electricity. When governments enter the electricity business it creates a hole in the service territory where the utility is not delivering electricity, and instead a local city or county is doing so. Therefore by imposing a nearly impossible two-thirds majority requirement the proposition would make it nearly impossible for a local government to enter the electricity business, and the follow-on effect would be to preserve the monopoly position of the utility company.
Earth 2100 is a rather television program presented by the American Broadcasting Company network on June 2, 2009. They showed what they called the worst case scenario of our future, rising oceans, fuel shortages, a warming climate, water shortages, the big cities of the south-west abandoned due to a lack of water, diseases, famine, a massive die-off of humanity, and on and on. It's told through the eyes of a baby born on June 2, 2009, and who lives until June 2100 (and beyond) to tell us how she lived through the catastrophe. But then they spent the last 10% of the show saying, well, we don't have to have this catastrophe, not if we do a few things. It's bleak but with a glimmer of hope.
The story is told by Lucy, the child born in 2009. She narrates the story of the coming century and perhaps the latter part of her story is being previewed for us today in earthquake-stricken Haiti. In Lucy's story the problems become so overwhelming that the U.S. government is unable to muster the resources to save New York City from flooding due to a storm and generally rising sea levels. The U.S. government may seem very strong today but faced with a strenuous enough series of disasters the resources of our country might be weakened enough to warrant the abandonment of New York City.
The reason I mentioned Haiti a couple sentences back is that today we are witnessing a country, devastated by an earthquake, the country itself was already very poor and lacking in national resources, and the earthquake devastated the Haitian government itself. The Haitian government was unable for a couple days to field its own people and resources to help with disaster recovery, instead the disaster recovery has been completely in the hands of the people on the streets, and in the hands of other countries who have been organizing a massive relief effort. Haiti's condition today demonstrates what could well happen to other countries as the problems we're facing become bigger and bigger.
In any case let's get back to the show.
One obvious question one should ponder is - just how real is the disaster scenarios they're presenting? Have they strung together a series of made-up disaster stories to alarm the audience and get a bunch of ratings? According to Executive Producer Michael Bicks, "this program was developed to show the worst-case scenario for human civilization. Again, we are not saying that these events will happen — rather, that if we fail to seriously address the complex problems of climate change, resource depletion and overpopulation, they are much more likely to happen." On their web site (see: 'Earth 2100': Is this the Final Century of Our Civilization?) they have a lot of extra documentation and footage explaining all the scenarios and background.
Unfortunately the versions on the ABC website are not embeddable, and fortunately youtube has them.
A bit of history they point to are several societies that collapsed, such as the Roman Empire, the Mayan civilization and so forth. The show I reviewed last week (see Review: Life After People - Depicts the fragility of our modern society) covered some of the same ground. Just because our society seems invincible doesn't mean it will last forever. In Earth 2100 one of the talking experts claims that every advanced civilization thinks at the height of their power that it will live forever. But they've all failed. Perhaps ours will, too, fail. The history of strong empires has not been good, they've all failed. If past events are any indication of future results the American Empire too will fail.
The disasters ABC depicts in this show are:
Migrations of animals fleeing the warming of the climate
Rising oceans and climate refugees due to Climate Change
Strange diseases
Food supply susceptible to disease because the monoculture agriculture practice makes for a theoretical disease/insect which targets the one plant species grown everywhere
The scenarios they paint seem largely based on the events currently happening. The picture they paint is pretty darn extreme but to be honest it's plausible the future could be even worse than they depict. Or better.
One interesting possibility is for our society to get serious about avoiding these problems, to deploy enough society changes to lower greenhouse gas emissions, and none of the disaster scenario events occur. Would those people in our future understand the catastrophe which was avoided? Or would they scoff at us for believing bugaboo scenarios that never happened?
Think that's silly? What's your opinion of the Y2K scare? The Y2K scenario was taken seriously enough by businesses that they spent a lot of money re-engineering their critical systems to remove Y2K vulnerabilities. In the mid-late 1990's there was a resurgence of hiring COBOL programmers for exactly this purpose, to rework old COBOL based computer systems to avoid known Y2K flaws in the software designs. There really were Y2K vulnerabilities and bugs in some software systems. Sure enough on December 1, 1999 at Midnight the world kept on ticking. Even though the overall Y2K scare was overhyped and blown out of proportion, there was enough reality behind it, there were real honest to goodness bugs in some computer systems, that the scenario was one which could have happened.
In the case of climate change and peak oil the science is very well understood. The danger is very real. The costs are immense if we ignore the danger and do nothing.
One of the risks from the warming climate is that the glaciers on Greenland and the Antarctic would melt enough to collapse into the ocean. The melting of sea ice like the Arctic doesn't itself contribute to sea level rise. But if ice that's on land (a glacier) drops into the ocean it will rise ocean levels. Rising ocean levels have already been observed around the world but if a significant chunk of glaciers were to drop into the ocean it's thought to rise ocean levels dramatically. Coastal regions such as the place where I'm writing this article (in Silicon Valley) stand to be swamped by rising oceans.
Pine Island glacier (PIG) is one of many at the fringes of the West Antarctic ice sheet. A new modeling study has identified this glacier as being past a "tipping point" that will cause a 50% collapse of its ice into the ocean within the next 100 years. 100 years? What's the worry? Sigh, humans with their short time span of thinking. It means our children will have to deal with dramatically rising ocean levels.
This "tipping point" is their estimate of the required conditions for the glacier to collapse into the ocean. These glaciers have been there for a long time and obviously conditions change from year to year without the glaciers collapsing. But some antarctic glaciers have collapsed suddenly indicating that other glaciers could also collapse suddenly. A group of scientists have identified a geological feature in the Antarctic that, combined with already rising sea levels, will cause a sudden collapse sometime in the not-so-distant future.
By raising sea levels, and therefore the grounding line, in their model, Katz's team were able to find the point of no return beyond which the glacier would be unable to recover. That's because the Antarctic sea bed has a small lip in it: it rises slowly up the continental shelf, then makes a slight dip before rising again to the shoreline. The researchers found that as long as the grounding line is on the outer rise of the sea bed, before the lip, small changes in climate lead to correspondingly small changes in the glacier's ice volume.
But as soon as the grounding line moves over the lip and starts to move down into the dip in the sea bed, the situation changes critically. "Once the grounding line passes the crest, a small change in the climate causes a rapid and irreversible loss of ice," says Katz.
According to their models this glacier passed the tipping point in 1996.. quite a while ago. It's already too late. The model also says a neighboring glacier has also passed its tipping point. The article on New Scientists closes with an admonishment that the model is a conservative one which ignores some important physics, and that the real rate of retreatment may be faster than the model suggests, which would mean glacier collapse a lot sooner than 100 years in the future.
That is, unless humanity learns that there are better ways to live. An idea I took away from watching the recent movie Avatar is that if humanity were to be traveling among the stars (as shown in the movie) that we would be like a horde of ravening locusts swarming over planets stripping them of their resources. Just think how modern businesses act today, and amplify it a million times more.
