Decline of the Empire

"We're supposed to be smarter than lobsters"

“…As long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, people are going to keep burning them and going to find them, to dig them up wherever they can find them. …what we need to do is add a gradually rising fee to the fossil fuels, which you would collect from the fossil fuel companies at the source... And that money should be distributed to - all legal residents of the country.

That way the person who does better than average in limiting his carbon footprint will make money, and it will be a big incentive for them to pay attention to their carbon footprint. It will be a big incentive for entrepreneurs to develop no carbon and low carbon energy sources and products. And the economic studies that have been done show that this actually stimulates the economy. So it doesn't cost anything.”

   — James Hansen, from an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria on July 26, 2015

This is a short addendum to Monday's "destroy the town" post.

To be clear, if I thought there was a way to unwind global civilization which minimizes human suffering and preserves a livable Earth, I would be all for it. But I don't see any way to do that. There's going to be a train wreck one way or the other. This Margaret Atwood quote is apropos here.

Can we change our energy system? Can we change it fast enough to avoid being destroyed by it? Are we clever enough to come up with some viable plans? Do we have the political will to carry out such plans? Are we capable of thinking about longer-term issues, or, like the lobster in a pot full of water that’s being brought slowly to the boil, will we fail to realize the danger we’re in until it’s too late?

Not that the lobster can do anything about it, once in the pot. But we might. We’re supposed to be smarter than lobsters. We’ve committed some very stupid acts over the course of our history, but our stupidity isn’t inevitable. Here are three smart things we’ve managed to do...

Destroying The Town In Order To Save It

Back in 1968 during the Vietnam War, long before many of those reading here were born, an AP reporter quoted an army officer to terrible and absurd effect.

A famous quote from the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by AP correspondent Peter Arnett in his writing about Bến Tre city on 7 February 1968:

"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it," a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.

Now in 2015 it seems that the same "logic" has resurfaced, this time with respect to mitigating global warming. Here is the last paragraph of the latest paper from James Hansen and 16 colleagues (emphasis added, references excluded; see the original).

The task of achieving a reduction of atmospheric CO2 is formidable, but not impossible. Rapid transition to abundant affordable carbon-free electricity is the core requirement, as that would also permit production of net-zero-carbon liquid fuels from electricity.

The rate at which CO2 emissions must be reduced is about 6 % yr−1 to reach 350 ppm atmospheric CO2 by about 2100, under the assumption that improved agricultural and forestry practices could sequester 100 GtC [gigatons of carbon].

That is, CO₂ emissions must reduced 6 percent per year starting now and for the foreseeable future.

The amount of CO2 fossil fuel emissions taken up by the ocean, soil and biosphere has continued to increase, thus providing hope that it may be possible to sequester more than 100 GtC. Improved understanding of the carbon cycle and non-CO2 forcings are needed, but it is clear that the essential requirement is to begin to phase down fossil fuel CO2 emissions rapidly. It is also clear that continued high emissions are likely to lock-in continued global energy imbalance, ocean warming, ice sheet disintegration, and large sea level rise, which young people and future generations would not be able to avoid.

Given the inertia of the climate and energy systems, and the grave threat posed by continued high emissions, the matter is urgent and calls for emergency cooperation among nations.

Here, it is not  Bến Tre city which must be destroyed in order to save it from the Viet Cong. Rather, it is our global industrial civilization which must be destroyed to save it from the "grave threat posed by continued high emissions."

Sound And Fury Signifying Nothing

All the world's a stage ... and we've seen this drama several times before, always played by the same actors.

ACT 1

• Protagonist/Prophet of Doom — retired NASA climate scientist James Hansen often plays this role. True to form, he (along with 16 colleagues) has issued a new paper which claims (based mainly on Eemian/marine isotope stage 5e paleoclimate data) that we could see "potentially rapid sea level rise combined with more intense storm systems" in the next 50, 100 or 200 years. Hansen plays the leading role with gusto, concluding for example that sea level rise is “the big impact of human made climate change.”

• Cautious Voices of Reason — this Greek chorus is almost always played by (among others) climate scientists Michael Mann, Stephen Rahmstorf, Kevin Trenberth, Richard Alley and (sometimes) Michael Oppenheimer. Their conclusions are always the same: Hansen's findings are "rife with speculation and ‘what if’ scenarios" (Trenberth). Some of the scenarios modeled are "far-fetched" (Mann). Everyone concurs of course that more research is required to find out what might actually happen. "Many parts of the new paper are likely to stimulate much technical discussion and further research in our community, as we try to weave together the deep-time and recent history to provide useful projections for the future" (Alley).

• Intrepid Climate Journalists — climate beat reporters like The Washington Post's Chris Mooney quote our Protagonist, and gather the reactions of the Cautious Voices of Reason. This play and many similar dramas are always running in some theater near you, so people like Mooney get to keep their day jobs.

• The Hoi Polloi — this role is played by the General Public and those trying to exploit them. Thus we see stories like Former Top NASA Scientist Predicts Catastrophic Rise In Sea Levels at The Huffington Post right next to stories like These Companies Made Big Money Off Serving Unhealthy School Lunches and Obama Promises To Keep Jon Stewart On 'The Daily Show' With An Executive Order and Connecticut Teen Made A Drone That Fires A Semi-Automatic Handgun -- And Police Say It's Legal (etc).

INTERMISSION (24-48 hours pass)

ACT 2

• The curtain opens, but nothing happens. There is no ACT 2. The show is over, folks. Go home. 

CONCLUDING NOTES

This one act play is always sound and fury signifying nothing, but admission was free and you get what you pay for.

Notes On The Human Conceit

In an otherwise silly post at Collective Evolution called How Humanity Enslaved Itself, a graphic appeared which made my day.

I wish I'd had that graphic when I wrote the Flatland essays.

If you substitute "instincts, motivations, defenses, biases" for "belief system" in the above, you get a pretty fair description of how the human mind works. And, yes, it truly is unfortunate, so unfortunate. in fact, that there likely won't be anybody around to look at that graphic a few centuries from now.

The author Andrew Barker quotes the confused "mystic" and cult leader "Osho" to make his point.

Man is a slave. He is not born as a slave, he is born free. He is born as freedom, but he is found in chains everywhere. He lives in chains, he dies in chains. This is the greatest calamity that has happened to humanity.

Humans are not born free, for anything which conflicts with our biological (cognitive) heritage is filtered ("get rid of it"). Humans die in chains because they are born in chains.

All that "human potential" stuff was (and still is) "blank slate" bullshit. Today that optimistic nonsense has been recycled and repackaged. Now it goes by the name transhumanism (among others). In fact, it is a clear sign of humanity's unfortunate limitations that people simply rebrand the same (and of course ever-popular) bullshit over and over (and over and over...) again.

The human known as "Osho" (after 1989), but better known as "Rajneesh", was so confused that he kept changing his name, depending on what decade it was.

Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh from the 1960s onwards, as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh during the 1970s and 1980s, and as Osho from 1989, was an Indian mystic, guru and spiritual teacher.

In the United States, he was known as the "Rolls Royce guru." He was also known in India as "the sex guru," so I would have thought near the end of this life (d. 1990) he would have settled on the name "Dildo" 

But that wouldn't have been compatible with a positive self-image, which is actually what I want to talk about.

Magnuson-Stevens Under Threat

Believe it or not, the United States has some of the best managed fisheries on Earth. This surprising fact is entirely due to the so-called Magnuson-Stevens fisheries act passed back in 1976.

The United States rightfully boasts many of the best-managed fisheries in the world thanks to a 1976 ocean fishery management law, which today is known as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the statute, the primary law that governs fishing in U.S. ocean waters, emerged from an era that saw an awakening of environmental consciousness: The Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Air Act all became law on the heels of the first Earth Day in 1970.

The act was last revised in 2006 because it took 30 years to get it right. Even then, overfishing is still a problem in U.S. waters (Talk of the Town, July 17, 2015).

First adopted in 1976 and last updated in 2006, the federal law spells out how regional fishery management councils should measure a stock’s health and the tools it can use, such as catch limits, to keep a species from being overfished.

Such steps have been credited with helping an overall rebound: in 2014, 37 stocks were considered overfished, an all-time low and down from 55 in 2002, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries division.

But can humans accept and preserve even a modest environmental "success" story?

Hell, no!

Notes On Inequality And Growth

Bernie Sanders, presidential candidate and "self-described socialist" in every mainstream media report about him, has noticed that economic growth has no point if most of the gains make the rich richer (Washington Post, July 14, 2015).

There are very few unspoken rules among major-party candidates for president, and Bernie Sanders is breaking one of them.

Actually, there are boatloads of unspoken rules among presidential candidates, but let's ignore the Flatland bullshit.

He’s saying that America’s leaders shouldn’t worry so much about economic growth if that growth serves to enrich only the wealthiest Americans.

“Our economic goals have to be redistributing a significant amount of [wealth] back from the top 1 percent,” Sanders said in a recent interview, even if that redistribution slows the economy overall.

“Unchecked growth – especially when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent – is absurd,” he said.

“Where we’ve got to move is not growth for the sake of growth, but we’ve got to move to a society that provides a high quality of life for all of our people. In other words, if people have health care as a right, as do the people of every other major country, then there’s less worry about growth. If people have educational opportunity and their kids can go to college and they have child care, then there’s less worry about growth for the sake of growth.”

In the original Flatland essay, I made much the same point, but also took care to point out that redistributing the wealth independently of growth goes against human nature (see below). Remarkably, economist Heather Boushey makes a similar point in the Washington Post article.

A Windy Day In Denmark

I see that Germany (among others) butt-fucked Tsipras and the Greek people. Surely this is a new low for the Eurozone, but that's not what got my attention today.

It was this item that made my day 

Due to an unusually windy day, wind farms in Denmark managed to produce 140 per cent of the country's electricity needs.

By Thursday evening [July 9], the Nordic nation's wind turbines were producing 116 per cent of Denmark's electricity needs, a figure that rose to 140 per cent in the early hours of the morning.

As reported by The Guardian, 80 per cent of the surplus power was shared between Germany and Norway, with Sweden taking the 20 per cent left over.

The figures were noticed by the paper on energinet.dk, a site which shows the power output of Denmark's wind farms in real-time.

Oliver Joy, spokesman for the European Wind Energy Association, said: "It shows that a world powered 100 per cent by renewable energy is no fantasy."

It was no fantasy late on Thursday July 9 and early Friday morning on July 10, that's for sure!

In a well-to-do little nation by the sea! 

Denmark

GDP $324 Billion (As of December 2014)

At a Glance

• GDP Growth: 0.1%
• GDP/Capita: $37,800
• Trade Balance: 6%
• Population: 5.6M
• Area: 43,094 sq. km.
• Public Debt As % of GDP: 47%
• Unemployment: 6%
• Inflation: 0.8%

We can be sure that this unusually windy day in Denmark comes as no surprise to liberal economist Joe Stiglitz, who made the remarks below at a circle-jerk climate conference in Paris. Joe knows that creating a "green" economy is no fantasy, if only we can get those evil fossil fuel "narrow special interests" to release their stranglehold on every human thought and action.

Stiglitz backed the affordability of tackling climate change:

“Creating a green economy is not only consistent with economic growth, it can promote economic growth,” especially when there is a lack of demand in the global economy.

He said the best option for an enforceable climate deal was for willing countries to introduce carbon taxes and then penalize nations refusing to do the same with border taxes on their exported goods.

A voluntary agreement could not solve the climate crisis, he said: “The atmosphere is a public good – all want to get the benefits, but no one wants to pay the cost.” He also dismissed carbon markets as being too prone to political lobbying: “It is basically giving away money.”

Stiglitz said it was unsurprising that a carbon price has proven hard to implement on a worldwide scale. “If you own fossil fuel assets, and the impact of any global agreement on climate change is going to push their value down, you are going to resist, using whatever tactics. But the interests of global society have to overcome these narrow special interests.”

The atmosphere is a public good.  

I'll bet you didn't know that!  That's because you're not an economist like Joe is.

Joe forgot to add "and we also need the wind to blow all the time like nobody's business"  

Bonus Anthropocene Slideshow

Great Acceleration 2015  from the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program

"And yet, humans can't seem to stop killing them"

This is a follow-up to Why Should We Protect Nature?, which I wrote earlier this week.

The title quote occurs in a recent Huffington Post report called This Is How A Species Goes Extinct: More Than A Ton Of Frozen Pangolin Meat Seized In Indonesia.

Pangolins are one of the planet's most unique and adorable species. The scaly, anteater-like creatures live in parts of Asia and Africa, and there's an entire task force dedicated to their protection. A popular Pokemon character, Sandslash, was even based on these "artichokes on legs."

And yet, humans can't seem to stop killing them.

Authorities in Indonesia recently busted smugglers trying to transport 1.3 tons worth of dead pangolins into Singapore. Heart-wrenching photos taken by a Getty photographer show dozens of the animals frozen in their trademark armored ball before they were burned by customs officials on Wednesday.

Warning: The pictures below may be upsetting to some readers.

Indonesian officials seized 1.3 tons of frozen pangolin bound for Singapore on July 8

Why Should We Protect Nature?

The title question appears in Brad Plumer's What bees can teach us about the real value of protecting nature (Vox, July 6, 2015). Plumer's article is based on a study of wild bees which recently appeared in Nature Communications.

Conservation biologists have two problems. The greater problem is that there isn't much conservation going on. After all, we are in the midst of a mass extinction.

The lesser problem is deciding on what arguments to use to induce or persuade humans that other species are worth conserving. There are only two such arguments: (1) the moral argument—other species have intrinsic value and (2) the utilitarian argument—other species have economic value to humans.

The wild bees study demonstrates that the economic argument is insufficient if the goal is to protect other species generally. It turns out that only a few wild bee species pollinate human-grown crops. Therefore, the large majority of wild bee species do not appear to have economic value to humans. In that case, why save them?

Yo, Earthlings! Hot Enough For You?

Paul Krugman is hot and bothered about the situation in Greece, which is a strong signal for yours truly to run the other way. And that's my natural inclination in any case. It is however worth noting that somebody had better give the Greeks some cash this week to prevent a total collapse in the birthplace of democracy.

Surprisingly, it seems that humans have turned a blind eye toward the extreme weather afflicting the world in 2015.

It was a cool and wet June here in Pittsburgh, and that trend continues in July. But I didn't realize, though I should have realized, that this persistent unusual weather was yet another product of a meandering but persistent jet stream caused (uncontroversially for me) by Arctic amplification. That point came home to me when I watched the last minute of this BBC video.

The jet stream map in the video clearly shows a big dip just where Pittsburgh is, so we are north of the dip, meaning we are on the "right" side of things. On the "wrong' side, there are all sorts of record-setting heat waves exacerbating drought conditions in various places all over the world. Watch it now.