The Age of Green Economics

In the run-up to the December 2007 Bali talks, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced that we have entered a new historical era: "We have witnessed three economic transformations in the past century. First came the Industrial Revolution, then the technology revolution, then our modern era of globalization. We stand at the threshold of another great change: the age of green economics." According to Ki-moon, capitalism can solve the crisis it has created by investing in alternative energy, thereby generating huge profits and millions of jobs. "Handled correctly, our fight against global warming could set the stage for an eco-friendly transformation of the global economy -- one that spurs growth and development rather than crimps it, as many nations fear."

A Dry Las Vegas?

A new computer modelling study conducted at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography suggests that one of the West's biggest boomtowns may go bust in a little more than a decade. The study concludes "that human demand, natural forces like evaporation, and human-induced climate change are creating a net deficit of nearly 1 million acre-feet of water per year from the Colorado River system that includes Lake Mead and Lake Powell. " As a result, Lake Mead, the source of 90 percent of Las Vegas' water, stands a 50/50 chance of going dry by 2021.

Mixed Green Consciousness

According to a December 2007 GfK Roper poll, three quarters of Americans plan to reduce their household energy consumption and recycle more in 2008. Two thirds planned to reduce their use of household chemicals. One third reported feelings of guilt about not making more environmentally responsible lifestyle choices. The results show the depth to which the politics of green consumerism have penetrated popular consciousness in the last few years.

At the same time, an October 2007 poll conducted by the same company shows that most Americans recognize that environmental problems require large-scale responses by society as a whole. Three quarters of respondents supported efforts by local governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by subsidizing alternative energy sources, passing stringent efficiency regulations, and zoning to reduce sprawl, even if doing so would mean higher property taxes, utility bills, fuel prices, and housing costs.

Bush Monkeys with Science

On the same day that the US delegation in Bali called for dropping numerical targets for cuts in greenhouse gases by rich nations, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (COGR) issued a report stating that the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) routinely edited policy documents and scientific reports to cast doubt on the reality of global warming. In the COGR report's words, "the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming" (i). Republicans claim that the COGR is just a partisan dog pack. After all, it is chaired by Los Angeles Democrat, Rep. Henry Waxman. But the committee's claims have been corroborated by an extensive report published by the independent watchdog group, the Government Accountability Project.

During the first Bush term, the White House CEQ was headed by Philip Cooney, who had spent the previous 15 years as a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute (API). An API brief entitled “Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan,” likely authored in part by Clooney, states that "Victory will be achieved when … average citizens 'understand' uncertainties in climate science; … recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the 'conventional wisdom'" (122).

Under Cooney, the CEQ vetted all media requests for interviews with scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, steering reporters to people who would question whether global warming was in fact happening and if so whether it was caused by human activities. After Hurricane Katrina, there was a concerted White House effort "to direct media inquiries to scientists who did not think climate change was linked to increased hurricane intensity" (7).

On several occasions, staffers at CEQ and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) exercised advance censorship of the congressional testimony of government scientists, systematically weakening and even removing statements about the human causes and potential effects of global warming. In the case of Dr. Julie Gerberding, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they eliminated two entire sections entitled “Climate Change is a Public Health Concern” and “Climate Change Vulnerability.”

CEQ staffers also extensively edited key government documents, like the Climate Change Science Program's Strategic Plan and its report to Congress, Our Changing Planet. CEQ staffers eliminated an entire chapter on climate change from the EPA's 2002 report, Latest Findings on National Air Quality. The next year, when EPA employees objected angrily to CEQ changes to the Report on the Environment, agency head Christine Todd Whitman simply withdrew the section on global warming altogether.

The COGR's investigation only reveals the tip of the iceberg when it comes to manipulation of climate science. In a survey of 1600 climate researchers conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, almost half of respondents reported experiencing some form of political interference with their work during the Bush presidency. One of the nastier examples is a revival of McCarthyite tactics by Joe Barton, chairman of the House of Representatives committee on energy and commerce. After a Wall Street Journal report singled out three top climate scientists and questioned their work, Barton used the investigative powers of his committee to demand copies of everything they had ever published, all their raw data, and information on their sources of funding.

Finally, the Bush Administration has monkeyed with the science of many more issues than global warming. Others include abortion, contraception, sexually transmitted diseases, drug use, stem cell research, and evolution. As early as 2003, the COGR reported a pattern of "misleading statements by the President, inaccurate responses to Congress, altered web sites, suppressed agency reports, erroneous international communications, and the gagging of scientists. The subjects involved span a broad range, but they share a common attribute: the beneficiaries of the scientific distortions are important supporters of the President, including social conservatives and powerful industry groups."

Green and Gated

The United Arab Emirates has announced plans for Masdar City, a high-tech, zero-emissions, zero-waste subdivision near Abu Dhabi International Airport. This solar-powered, car-free, walled city will allow about 50,000 wealthy residents to live the enviro-capitalist dream of a zero-impact life. The project is projected to cost $22 billion.

Money for War, Not for Warming

According to a new study by the Institute for Policy Studies, "For the 2008 fiscal year, the government budgeted $647.51 billion for military security. It budgeted $7.37 billion to slow climate change." In other words, "For every dollar allocated for stabilizing the climate, the government will spend $88 on achieving security by military force." This is actually an improvement. For the last five years, the ratio has averaged 97 to 1.

Biofuels Make Warming Worse

The New York Times reports that two studies published in Science show that "almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these 'green' fuels are taken into account...." Biofuels sound good on paper, since plants absorb CO2 as they grow, offsetting what is released when the fuel is burned. But the land use changes associated with biofuel production heavily outweigh this marginal benefit. As rain forests and other wild plant communities are destroyed to allow for production of fuel crops, they release their stored carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Even when existing farmland is used to grow plants for fuel, food production is simply displaced into new areas. "The clearance of grassland releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land."

The Road to Hell

Local governments across the US have enthusiastically taken up the fight against global warming, committing themselves to reducing CO2 emissions significantly in the next few decades. But they're quickly finding that it's easier to make commitments than to fulfill them. "Constraints on budgets, legal restrictions by states, and people’s unwillingness to change sometimes put brakes on [their] ambitious plans...."

It's the Economy, Stupid

Paul Monbiot points out that economic growth "could be 32 times a big an environmental issue as population." Sometime in the next century, world population is expected to stabilize at around 10 billion, or about 50% higher than its current level. The world economy, on the other hand, will grow by 1600% larger if it grows at just 3% per year. "By 2115, the cumulative total rises to 3,200%, by 2138 to 6,400%. As resources are finite, this is of course impossible, but it is not hard to see that rising economic activity - not human numbers - is the immediate and overwhelming threat." Monbiot notes that we rarely hear anyone complain that "people like us are breeding too fast" and to suggest "that population growth is largely responsible for the ecological crisis is to blame the poor for the excesses of the rich."

Green Means Green

Al Gore argues that when we are asked to choose between economic and environmental progress, we are being asked to make a false choice, since "if we do the right thing, then we're going to create a lot of wealth and opportunity." Gore argues for "using market capitalism as an ally" and approvingly quotes General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt: "We think green means green. This is a time period where environmental improvement is going to lead toward profitability."

--An Inconvenient Truth (Rodale, 2006), pp. 271, 270, 275-276.

Summary: The Future of Life

In The Future of Life (New York: Knopf, 2002), ecologist E. O. Wilson argues that we have entered the “Century of the Environment,” a “post-ideological” era in which we must “shift to a culture of permanence” in order to avoid a planetary ecological catastrophe (22-23). Wilson begins by surveying the "membrane of organisms" that cover the Earth, showing that from "Everest's Peak to the floor of the Mariana Trench, creatures of one kind or another inhabit virtually every square inch of the planetary surface" (3). Only a small percentage of those creatures, about 1.5 million species, have been identified to science.

Increasingly, the Earth's living membrane is dominated by a single species, Homo Sapiens. Taken together, the planet's 6 billion people make up about 100 times more biomass than any other large animal species that has ever existed. And global population is projected to reach as much as 10 billion before stabilizing sometime later this century. Already, human beings consume 40 percent of the solar energy stored by the planet's green plants. And Wilson calculates that for “every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet Earths” (23).

As a result of the massive growth of human population, natural habitats and biodiversity are declining at unprecendented rates. The primary causes are anthropogenic deforestation, pollution, climate change, and biological transfer. Species are disappearing at as much as one thousand times background extinction rates. As many as half of existing species may be extinct within a century. As a result, Wilson writes, "The most memorable heritage of the twenty-first century will be the Age of Loneliness that lies before humanity" (77).


What's being lost is of incalculable value, not only for its own sake, but also to human society. Forests, fisheries, and other ecosystems provide irreplacable economic inputs, and they are most productive when most biodiverse. More critically, almost all of world food production relies on a few dozen plants. Hundreds of thousands of potential cultivars exist in the wild, waiting to be developed into food plants or medicines. More importantly, Wilson argues, biophilia or love of nature is a fundamental element of our human nature. In a world without wild nature, we will lead deeply impoverished lives.

Wilson argues that the solution is a cultural revolution in which science and religion join forces. He places his hopes in the development of a global land ethic informed by solid environmental science. And he proposes a list of concrete goals including: protecting the world's biodiversity hotspots and old-growth forests, protecting critical freshwater and marine habitats, mapping the world's ecosystems to inform a planetary conservation strategy, restoring degraded ecosystems, gene-banking in zoos and gardens, and aggressive support for birth control programs.

Wilson points out that the cost of these efforts would be minimal: "The tropical wilderness areas and the hottest of the hotspots . . . which together contain perhaps 70 percent of Earth's plant and animal species, can be saved by a single investment of roughly $30 billion [which] is only about one-thousandth of the annual combined gross national products of the world" (183). And he concludes with kudos to the green NGOs that built the global justice movement of the 1990s who recognized that the two biggest problems confronting humanity are a "devastated environment" and "the press of land-hungry people with nowhere else to go" (189).

Factoids

Less than half of the planet’s arable land is being farmed (about 4 billion acres).

Since WWII, world grain production has more than doubled, but so has population. In 1950, the world grew about 550 pounds of grain per person. By 2000, that number had risen to about 660 pounds.

In the last 150 years, more than 10 million new chemicals have been synthesized.

About 1.5 million species have been identified, named, and described to science. Estimates of the total number of species on Earth range as high as 100 million.

Carbon dioxide makes up about 80% of greenhouse gas emissions. The next two biggest contributors are methane and nitrous oxide.

Increased CO2 emissions are taken up by the oceans in the form of carbonic acid, lowering the Ph of seawater and killing coral and other organisms.

US is responsible for more than 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Population Explosion?

Natural populations tend to grow along an S-curve, with numbers increasing exponentially until a limiting factor like disease or resource scarcity causes them to level off. Earth’s human population remained below one million for most of the species’ history. Since the dawn of capitalism in about 1750, our numbers have exploded, reaching six billion on October 12, 1999.

Neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich argued in The Population Bomb (1968) that humanity had overstretched the planet’s carrying capacity and that a catastrophic collapse was around the corner. Instead, we’ve seen the beginnings of a slowdown. Most statisticians now predict that the human population with stabilize at around 8-10 billion sometime in the next century.

Green Revolution

The post-WWII Green Revolution spread intensive modern agriculture around the world, introducing highly productive strains of wheat, rice, and other grains, along with mechanical cultivation and chemical fertilizers and biocides. Productivity gains were spectacular. Mexico, for instance, saw its grain harvest increase eight-fold in just 20 years. Along with higher yields, though, came growing environmental problems, including toxicity and vulnerability to disease and pests.

Competition vs. Cooperation

Competition for resources both within and between species is a fundamental dynamic of life of Earth. Just as basic and widespread, though, are symbiosis and mutualism. Almost all living things depend for their survival on cooperative relationships with other organisms, not the least of which are the gastrointestinal microorganisms that make it possible for animals to digest their food.

Shrinking Biomes

Most of the Earth’s major biomes have shrunk rapidly in the last 200 years. At one time, forest covered about 40 percent of the Earth’s surface. But about half of all tropical rainforest have now been destroyed. Only 30 percent of tropical dry forests remain. Only 25 percent of grasslands, which once covered one third of the Earth, have survived. The only expanding biome is deserts.

Primary Productivity

About one percent of the solar energy that reaches Earth is captured by plants through photosynthesis, which store it in the form of living matter. Humans use about 40 percent of this primary productivity every year, leaving only 60 percent for other animals, both wild and domestic.

Carbon and Life

Humans, like all other living things on Earth, are carbon-based organisms, meaning that the human body’s most fundamental biochemical processes rely heavily on carbon’s exceptional ability to bond with other elements to form millions of complex organic compounds. In other words, the planet’s carbon cycle, which we are changing rapidly, is absolutely fundamental, not just to human life, but to all life. Most of the planet’s carbon is stored in the crust, the oceans, and biomass. The atmosphere stores a relatively small amount, about 650 billion tons, in the form of carbon dioxide, a number that has been steadily growing for the last 200 years.

Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson (1907-1964) is widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement with the publication of Silent Spring (1962). The book reported on the toxicity of DDT and other synthetic pesticides and herbicides, presenting a stark picture of a world without birds. Environmentalism took root in the rich political soil of the 1960s, taking its place alongside the black power, women’s liberation, and anti-war movements.

Conservation vs. Preservation

Throughout the 20th Century, the environmental movement has been divided between conservationists, who argue for the wise management of resources in order to maximize their value over time, and preservationists, who argue that nature is intrinsically valuable and deserves to be protected from human impacts.

John Muir

Early environmentalist John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892, leading a successful campaign to designate California’s Yosemite Valley a national park.

Haeckel

The word “ecology,” which combines the Greek words for “home” and “to study,” was coined by German socialist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). A professor of zoology at the University of Jena, Haeckel was a student of the pioneering naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose studies in South America focused on the complex ways that organisms interact with their environments.

Marx on Labor and Nature

"Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values ... as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.... And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth.... [P]recisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission."

--Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, Part 1

Fencing Out Endangered Species

Far too many environmentalists fall for anti-immigrant racism. They complain about the detritus that border crossers leave behind in order to stay light as they race for the North. And they too often support the construction of the border fence, implying in their arguments that undocumented immigrants are no more than human trash.*

But immigration is driven by the same neo-liberal forces that have all but overturned hard-won federal and state powers to protect the environment from industry and development. Most importantly, the North American Free Trade Agreement allows companies to challenge environmental regulations as barriers to trade. It has also allowed US agriculture corporations to strike down Mexican tariffs on farm products. By flooding Mexico with cheap corn and beans, American companies are driving another generation of farmers off the land, driving a fresh wave of migrants onto the road north.

Moreover, militarization of the border is seriously disrupting some of the most remote and healthy North American ecosystems. Non-stop SUV, ATV, helicopter, and foot traffic along the border is taking a heavy toll on sensitive arid wildernesses. And because the Department of Homeland Security can overrule any environmental restrictions that impede its plans, the fence is being built through the middle of regions that should be treated as international treasures.

In Arizona's remote Coronado National Forest, a few jaguars have begun to repopulate the area just north of the border after the endangered species was extirpated from the US by government bounty hunters. One of the Southwest's most inspiring animals, this large predator is also an important indicator of its habitat's overall health. The 12- to 18-foot border fence will bisect its newly established range, almost certainly putting an end to its recovery and that of the Baboquivari mountains it has only recently reclaimed.

Cat Fight on the Border (HCN)

* Thanks to Sarah Jacqette at the University of Oregon for this insight.

Toilet to Tap

San Diego imports about 90% of its municipal water from hundreds of miles away, mainly from the Colorado River and Northern California. Both sources are becoming less and less reliable as a result of competition and a decade-long drought. As a result, local politicians recently approved a pilot program for "toilet-to-tap" recycling.

San Diego already has two plants that recycle effluent for non-culinary uses like irrigation and manufacturing. But the city has not been able to find enough customers, so the plants are operating below capacity. The new plan calls for treating recycled water even further and then pumping it into a local reservoir where it will enter the primary supply. In theory, what comes out of the tap should be just as pure as water that has moved through the entire natural cycle of evaporation, precipitation, and biological and geological filtering.

In fact, given the levels of pollution in the Colorado River, toilet-to-tap water might even be purer than the existing supply. Las Vegas dumps roughly 60 billion gallons of wastewater a year into the Colorado. Samples from Lake Mead contain "prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, caffeine, sunscreen, synthetic compounds used in plastics and detergents, and even methamphetamines...." San Diego's supply contains "small but measurable quantities of ibuprofen, the insect repellent DEET, and the anti-anxiety drug meprobamate" before it goes through treatment to become drinking water. City planners argue that they will have control of reclaimed water through its entire life-cycle, rather than dealing the effects of this upstream pollution.

On the other hand, water treatment is a notoriously difficult process to get right, especially in an era of deregulated utilities, shrinking municipal budgets, and privatization. San Diego sees regular accidental spills, in which millions of gallons of raw sewage flood the area's lagoons and the ocean. And monitoring regularly discloses elevated levels of synthetic chemicals and medical compounds in the recycled water discharged from treatment plants around the country.

Toilet to Tap Takes Flight
Facing the Yuck Factor (HCN)

Hot Water

Radioactive and chemical wastes dumped by Sandia National Laboratories threaten to contaminate the Albuquerque aquifer that provides drinking water for the city's half million residents. Just up the road, plutonium from Los Alamos has already been detected in Santa Fe's municipal water supply.

Toxic Legacy (HCN)

Engels on Unintended Consequences

Classical political economy, the social science of the bourgeoisie, in the main examines only social effects of human actions in the fields of production and exchange that are actually intended. This fully corresponds to the social organisation of which it is the theoretical expression. As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions. What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees – what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different....

Dialectics of Nature, "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man"

Engels on Mastery of Nature

The animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction.

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.

Dialectics of Nature, "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man"

Engels on Darwin and Revolution

The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to organic nature of Hobbes’ theory of bellum omnium contra omnes and of the bourgeois economic theory of competition, as well as the Malthusian theory of population. When once this feat has been accomplished (the unconditional justification for which, especially as regards the Malthusian theory, is still very questionable), it is very easy to transfer these theories back again from natural history to the history of society, and altogether too naive to maintain that thereby these assertions have been proved as eternal natural laws of society.

Let us accept for a moment the phrase “struggle for existence,” for argument’s sake. The most that the animal can achieve is to collect; man produces, he prepares the means of life, in the widest sense of the words, which without him nature would not have produced. This makes impossible any unqualified transference of the laws of life in animal societies to human society. Production soon brings it about that the so-called struggle for existence no longer turns on pure means of existence, but on means of enjoyment and development. Here – where the means of development are socially produced – the categories taken from the animal kingdom are already totally inapplicable. Finally, under the capitalist mode of production, production reaches such a high level that society can no longer consume the means of life, enjoyment and development that have been produced, because for the great mass of producers access to these means is artificially and forcibly barred; and therefore every ten years a crisis restores the equilibrium by destroying not only the means of life, enjoyment and development that have been produced, but also a great part of the productive forces themselves. Hence the so-called struggle for existence assumes the form: to protect the products and productive forces produced by bourgeois capitalist society against the destructive, ravaging effect of this capitalist social order, by taking control of social production and distribution out of the hands of the ruling capitalist class, which has become incapable of this function, and transferring it to the producing masses – and that is the socialist revolution.

Dialectics of Nature, "Notes"

Engels on Conscious Organization

In the most advanced industrial countries we have subdued the forces of nature and pressed them into the service of mankind; we have thereby infinitely multiplied production, so that a child now produces more than a hundred adults previously did. And what is the result? Increasing overwork and increasing misery of the masses, and every ten years a great collapse. Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organisation of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for men in their aspect as species. Historical evolution makes such an organisation daily more indispensable, but also with every day more possible. From it will date a new epoch of history, in which mankind itself, and with mankind all branches of its activity, and especially natural science, will experience an advance that will put everything preceding it in the deepest shade.

Dialectics of Nature, "Introduction"

Henry Thoreau on Capitalism and the Environment

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched.

What sort of a country is that where huckleberry fields are private property? When I pass such fields on the highway, my heart sinks within me.... I cannot think of it ever after but as the place where fair and palatable berries are converted into money, where the huckleberry is desecrated.

[When] we exclude mankind from gathering berries in our field, we exclude them from gathering health and happiness and inspiration and a hundred other far finer and nobler fruits than berries which are found there, but which we have no notion of gathering and shall not gather ourselves nor ever carry to market, for there is no market for them, but let them rot on the bushes. We thus strike only one more blow at a simple and wholesome relation to nature.

Among the Indians the earth and its productions generally were common and free to all the tribe, like the air and water, but among us who have supplanted the Indians, the public retain only a small yard or common in the middle of the village, with perhaps a graveyard beside it.

Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several—where a stick should never be cut for fuel—nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses—a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.

(Walden 26-27; Wild Fruits 57-58, 235, 238)

Cap-and-Trade Goes to Congress

Seven separate CO2 emissions bills were floated in Congress in 2007. All claim that they would achieve comparable targets to those called for by the scientific community: roughly a 20% reduction in emissions from current levels by 2020 and a 70% reduction by 2050. The "Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act" introduced by Bernard Sanders and Barbara Boxer set a target of 80% by 2050. It has now died, making way for "America's Climate Security Act," sponsored by Joe Lieberman and John Warner, who claim it will produce a 63% reduction during the same time frame. The five other bills set targets that fall within the range set by these two.

Deemed most likely to win bipartisan support, the Lieberman-Warner bill jumped to the head of the pack as soon as it was introduced in October. On December 5, the Environment and Public Works Committee sent the bill to the full Senate, the first time a comprehensive emissions reduction bill has made it out of committee.

Mainstream environmental organization have been engaged in an intense battle over Lieberman-Warner. Business friendly groups like Environmental Defense, the Sierra Club, and Earthjustice support it as a deal that can get done. Meanwhile more radical groups like Friends of the Earth and 1Sky argue that it is too weak. They also recognize that Bush is likely to veto any bill that passes, so they favor waiting till 2009 when a greener president may lead the charge for real change.

What's most remarkable about this debate is its narrowness. All seven bills rely on cap-and-trade permitting schemes to achieve their projected reductions. And no one asks whether this method will actually achieve anything approaching the emissions reductions claimed by the bills.

Existing cap-and-trade schemes have shown notoriously mixed results. The first emissions market was created by the Clean Air Act of 1990 to control the acid-rain causing pollutant, sulfur dioxide. It has managed to achieve significant overall reductions since it was implemented, mainly because it is simple, governing only emissions of a single chemical from a single industry, coal-fired electricity plants. Acid rain is less severe, but it continues to be a problem. And rather than serve as a foundation for improvement, the plan has become a ceiling, since companies can claim double jeopardy when further reductions are proposed.

Some skeptics prefer the term "cap-and-giveaway" because of the way emissions markets are rigged to favor already dominant companies. When a new emissions market is implemented, permits are usually handed out free to historical polluters (so-called "existing users of the atmosphere"). Ironically, start-up companies then have to buy their way into the market, meaning there's a built-in barrier to the deployment of newer, cleaner technologies. Inevitably, the cost of emissions permits will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher energy prices, and older companies will reap the biggest profits.

Finally, politically powerful companies have proven to be very good at manipulating the design of emissions markets. In Europe's recently introduced CO2 market, for example, corporate lobbyists won an overall emissions cap that was much higher than needed. When the market began to function, prices crashed from $30 to 1$ a ton, allowing big polluters to buy up permits on the cheap. At the same time, they used the new program as an excuse to hike consumer prices by 25%, raking in huge profits.

Supporters praise market-based plans for giving companies flexibility to determine how to achieve sector-wide goals. What that really means is that they give polluters carte blanche to do what they already do best: buy their way out of compliance, then pass the cost on to the rest of us.

Wal-Mart Goes Green?

The largest company in the world, with $350 billion in 2006 revenue, Wal-Mart has become the new darling of Capitalist Environmentalism. According to Wal-Mart's website, planetary stewardship is now a central corporate value:

"The scope and scale of our business presents great potential to effect positive change. We see opportunities to influence our own operations, while also leading change in the business world at large. Focusing on the environment is key to our mission to improve the quality of life for people around the world. Environmental leadership is critical to our future ability to grow and thrive as a company."

On the advice of consulting firm McKinsey & Co., Wal-Mart has launched an environmental campaign centered on three long-term goals that were announced by CEO Lee Scott in October 2005:

• 100% renewable energy
• Zero waste
• Sustainable products

Shorter term goals include increasing fleet fuel efficiency by 25 percent over three years, reducing CO2 emissions by 20 percent in seven years, reducing energy use at existing stores by 30 percent, and cutting solid waste from U.S. stores by 25 percent in three years. The company is also launching a pilot project designed to encourage reduced-carbon manufacturing by suppliers of seven core products: DVDs, toothpaste, soap, milk, beer, vacuum cleaners, and soda.

One high-publicity effort centers on pushing low-energy lightbulbs. As reported in the New York Times, Wal-Mart aims to sell 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs a year by 2008. If they succeed, total annual U.S. sales of the bulbs "would increase by 50 percent, saving Americans $3 billion in electricity costs and avoiding the need to build additional power plants for the equivalent of 450,000 new homes."

But as activists at Wal-Mart Watch have detailed, these new initiatives will do little to reduce the Arkansas behemoth's environmental footprint : "The company recently announced its goal to cut over two million metric tons of CO2 emissions within six years, yet if Wal-Mart continues to add stores at its current growth rate, its new stores alone will use significantly more energy than any of its energy saving measures will save." New stores eat up huge parcels of undeveloped land and are built with scant attention to local environmental impacts. They also increase regional traffic and vehicular emissions by drawing in customers from a wide circumference.

More globally, Wal-Mart's profitability relies on shipping commodities from cheap third-world suppliers to retail locations across the U.S and around the world. The energy savings captured at showcase stores are a drop in the bucket compared to the environmental costs of all that trans-oceanic freight.

The Jevons Paradox

In The Coal Question (1865), British economist W. Stanley Jevons observed that increased energy efficiency may result in increased energy use. Also know as the "rebound effect," the Jevons Paradox helps explain why higher U.S. fuel economy standards have not reduced oil consumption. Increased fuel efficiency reduced the marginal cost of driving. In combination with population growth, this allowed for sharp increases in the number of cars on the road and the number of miles each car traveled per year.

W. Stanley Jevons. The Coal Question; An Inquiry concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coalmines. 2nd edition, revised. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1866).

San Diego Multiple Species Conservation Plan

With 4200 square miles of inland deserts, high mountains, and coastal mesas, San Diego is the most biologically diverse county in the US. And with 3,000,000 residents, it has the sixth largest population. Breakneck development has destroyed nearly 90 percent of wildlife habitat between the coast and the mountains. As a result, San Diego has nearly 200 plant and animal species that are at risk of extinction.

In 1997, after five years of negotiations between developers, environmentalists, and public officials, San Diego established the country's first Multiple Species Conservation Plan. The plan called for preservation of 172,000 interconnected acres of chaparral and coastal sage scrub in Southwestern San Diego County, about 6% of the county's total area. The resulting preserve would be managed to protect 85 threatened plant and animal species. In exchange, hundreds of thousands of acres of contested land would be freed up for development.

The plan was praised as a win-win solution to a long and bitter fight between developers and environmentalists. It became a model for hundreds of similar efforts across the US. But the results have been mixed at best.

Supporters say the plan is a realistic compromise that protects more habitat than would have been possible otherwise. Critics argue that it amounts to little more than a giveaway to big developers. They point out that politics and money, not science, determined which areas would be slated for preservation and which for development. And they argue that the plan is riddled with loopholes for developers, while it bars the county from conserving new acreage or imposing new rules for 50 years.

Since the plan was adopted, the city and county have bought some 30,000 acres of formerly private land and have started monitoring threatened species. Meanwhile, hundreds of new developments have broken ground. And thousands of acres of high-dollar acreage near the coast, where some of the rarest species live, have been bladed for million-dollar tract homes. Instead of stopping development in its tracks and protecting the county's last remaining stands of high-quality habitat, the plan gave developers the go ahead to bulldoze all but a tattered shred.

Water for Profit

California's Central Valley touts itself as the breadbasket of the nation. And while it does produce about $13 billion worth of food every year, that outcome is a secondary effect of an elaborate mechanism for turning privately owned land and water into profits.

In 2005, California’s Central Valley Project, which manages distribution of water from the several rivers flowing west out of the Northern Sierras, renewed its contracts with the rural water districts it serves. The contracts bind the state to deliver cheap, subsidized water to Central Valley farmers for the next 50 years. Rather than account for drought, retirement of exhausted farm acreage, environmental set asides, and urbanization, the contracts give the farmers the same amount of water they were granted in the first round of contracts, signed more than 40 years ago.

Water is measured in acre feet, the amount of water it takes to cover an acre of land in one foot of water. The average urban household uses only about half an acre-foot per year. So about 80 percent of California’s plentiful supply of water currently goes to agriculture. As the state’s cities grow, they have no choice but to buy water from rural users. While Central Valley farmers will pay less than $60 per acre foot under the new contracts, urban water agencies already pay as much as $500 per acre foot. The Metropolitan Water District, which serves the nearly 24 million people who live in the SoCal triangle, has even begun buying options contracts on hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of agricultural water. In order to hedge against shortages during drought years, MWD pays $20 per acre-foot for the right to call in water from Northern California farms. If the spring is dry and they exercise their options, they'll pay another $80-100 per acre-foot to take delivery. If the don't exercise the options, the money goes down the tubes.

Central Valley water districts are dominated by a small number of big growers who have gotten fabulously rich by gaming the system. The Westlands Water District, near Fresno, is one of the most notorious. Using bought political influence, they have secured exclusive contract rights to 260 billion gallons of water per year at pennies on the dollar. That much water is worth half a billion dollars at current prices. Over 50 years, with prices rising due to inflation and population growth, Westlands’ water could be worth $40 billion. Westlands is just one of 251 irrigation districts in the valley.

Would Cutting Emissions Wreck the Economy?

McKinsey & Company, a business consultancy group has published a report called "Reducing US Greenhouse Emissions: How Much at What Cost?" Reuters summarizes the report's central finding: "The United States could reduce projected 2030 emissions of greenhouse gases by between one-third to one-half at manageable costs to the economy. Its mid-range case found that cutting 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent from the United States by 2030 would cost an average about US$50 billion annually, or a total of US$1.1 trillion. That would represent 1.5 percent of the US$77 trillion in real investment the US economy is expected to make over the period."

US Plan for Global Warming: Free Trade

At the Bali climate change talks, China, India, and nations of the global south are calling for suspension of intellectual property rights in green techologies. The US and the EU have proposed an alternative: free trade. US Trade Representative Susan Schwab said in a statement, "By eliminating tariff and nontariff barriers to environmental goods and services, particularly clean energy technologies, we can lower their costs and increase global access to and use of these important products." That way the countries most responsible for causing the problem will also get to dominate the world market for clean power.

Coal Combustion Wastes

About half of U.S. electricity comes from coal-fired power plants that are the major source of atmospheric carbon dioxide. We rarely hear about their other major byproduct: coal combustion wastes (CCWs). U.S. plants produce enough ash every year to fill a coal train over 10,000 miles long. CCWs are dumped into old mines, bermed into open lagoons, or just piled on the ground at more than 600 sites around the country. These massive ash dumps contain lead, cadmium, arsenic, selenium, mercury, and other dangerous materials that leach into groundwater causing a range of human health problems, from lead poisoning to sharply increased cancer rates. The EPA does not classify CCWs as hazardous and does not regulate their disposal (such as requiring impermeable liners for ash lagoons). As airborne emissions from coal plants are reduced, CCWs increase. As Jeff Stant of Earthjustice told the High Country News, "the words 'clean coal technology" are an oxymoron. There's no such thing as that. Matter doesn't disappear."

A Single Point of Failure

Farming for profit is notorious for boom and bust crises. Farmers chase demand, racing to plant thousands of new acres to high-margin crops. Then they go bankrupt when overproduction drives prices below the cost of production. Nowhere is this pattern clearer than California, the world capital of industrialized agriculture.

Grapes are a recent case in point. Massive overplanting in the 1990s has made it possible for the Bronco Wine Company to produce and sell millions of bottles of Charles Shaw wines. Also known as "Two-Buck Chuck," this good quality table wine sells for about the same price per liter as bottled water. 2005 saw the largest California grape harvest in history, exacerbating the glut. That's a great thing for ordinary people who like to drink wine, but it also means that the industry as a whole is stretched to the financial breaking point. As prices fall, small vulnerable wine-makers will go broke and growers will be forced to let their grapes rot on the vine.

During the boom, landowners in the Southern California town of Temecula jumped on the bandwagon, using imported water to grow wine grapes in the desert. If it is severe enough, industry contraction could bankrupt this new region's dozen winemakers forcing them to lay off their hundreds, perhaps thousands of mostly undocumented immigrant workers.

Crashes are just one of capitalist agriculture's weaknesses. Because commodity production for competitive markets forces the industry to maximize productivity, companies plant contiguous fields to a single crop. This allows for more efficient planting, maintenance, and harvesting. When a region is especially well-suited to a particular plant, monocultural production will spread over hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of acres. In Illinois, for instance, more than 13 million acres are planted to corn.

While industrial agriculture is efficient, it is also risky. Unlike wild ecosystems, which are relatively stable and resilient because they are complex and diverse. Monocultural production processes, relying on a single species and a standardized production methods, have multiples points of vulnerability. Failure at a single point can destroy an entire industry.

In California's Central Valley, 80% of the world's almonds are grown on 600,000 acres that yield more than a billion pounds of nuts per year. High prices have led to a quadrupling of output in just 20 years, and tens of thousands of additional acres will begin producing in the next five years. California growers grossed more than $3 billion in 2005.

The Valley's millions of trees are pollinated by billions of bees. More than 1.4 million hives, about 70% of the mobile hives in the country, are trucked to the Central Valley for the three-week almond bloom. Beekeepers provide pollination services for more than 100 food crops in the U.S. worth over $14 billion per year.

In 2005, bee colonies began to die by the thousands, partly because of of infestation by pesticide-resistant varroa mites, and partly because of something else. Competing theories blame viruses, fungi, pesticides, travel stress, and even an immune disorder that, like AIDS, makes bees vulnerable to secondary disorders. Some beekeepers have lost more than 90% of their hives.

There's no sign that "colony collapse disorder" is slowing. As a result, the demand for pollination services has become so intense that almond growers are flying in hives from Australia and New Zealand. If varroa mites cannot be controlled and the damage continues, the world may soon see a sudden shortage almonds, a nutrient-dense source of high-quality protein.

Stewart Brand's Four Heresies

Environmental guru, Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, makes an intentionally provocative prediction in the May 2005 issue of M.I.T.'s Technology Review.

He begins by observing that the environmental movement has been dominated by romantics who "are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path." This is a good thing, he suggests, when it comes to building mass movements. But it also means that "scientific perceptions are always a minority view, easily ignored, suppressed, or demonized if they don’t fit the consensus story line."

It may sound like Brand is setting himself up to deny global warming, but he's too smart for that. Instead, he predicts that within a decade "the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power."

More than half of the world's population now lives in cities, and wherever urbanization increases, birth rates decrease. "Worldwide, birthrates are in free fall. Around one-third of countries now have birthrates below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) and sinking. Nowhere does the downward trend show signs of leveling off." Environmentalists, Brand argues, should welcome massive migration to mega-cities, since it will stabilize global population and allow for restoration of depopulated rural areas. Instead of romanticizing rural villages, which he notes are often sexist and fundamentalist, greens should work on making places like Mumbai, Istanbul, and Mexico City healthy and just.

Next, Brand proposes that the left's rejection of genetically-modified foods is not based on well-reasoned scientific argument, but on knee-jerk suspicion of anything produced in the labs of a multinational. Now, people are right to be suspicious of corporations, but Brand is right to insist that we need to base our final judgments on evidence, not rumor or guilt by association. After all, there are plenty of corporate products we'd be lost without, like computers. So instead of demonizing "frankenfoods," he suggests, we should take control of genetic codes away from the biotech bosses, the same way "open source" hackers have done with computer software.

Brand's most controversial proposal, though, is that we need to get over our "quasi-religious aversion" to nuclear power since it represents the best available solution to the global warming. "There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective,” Brand told the New York Times. “Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don’t know where it is and you don’t know what it’s doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody’s atmosphere.”

Brand was once a radical anti-nukes campaigner, but he now argues that the "industry is mature, with a half-century of experience and ever improved engineering behind it. Problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design. Nuclear power plants are very high yield, with low-cost fuel."

Whether Brand is right or not about his four heresies, his rational and scientific approach to environmental questions is a badly needed corrective to the Romantic primitivism that too often dominates the movement. "Within the environmental movement, scientists are the radical minority leading the way. They are already transforming the perspective on urbanization and population growth. But their radicalism and leadership will have to increase if humanity is to harness green biotech and step up to its responsibilities for the global climate."

Unintended Consequences in the New West?

Jim Stiles, longtime publisher of Moab's Canyon Country Zephyr, has been a passionate defender of Utah wilderness for three decades. In the Zephyr's June/July 2005 issue, he challenged the most basic assumptions of the mainstream environmental movement in an eye-opening article, "The Greening of Wilderne$$ in Utah." Stiles tells the disturbing story of Moab's transformation from a sleepy ranching and mining town into a world-class adventure travel destination.

Beginning in the late 1980s, environmental groups began touting the economic benefits of wilderness designation. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), for instance, argued that "Rural Utah counties that have booming economies, such as Grand and Washington, are growing because the public land, open space, and scenery provide the setting for a healthy tourist industry with an influx of people who want to live in such a spectacular setting. The future of Utah's economy lies in preservation of its wildlands and quality of life, as opposed to promotion of an economy based on the extractive industries." Striking a Faustian deal with real estate developers and the booming outdoor recreation industry, SUWA and other groups set out to reorient Moab's economy to the delivery of "environmental amenities."

But as Stiles points out, "Ranchers and oil field workers didn't have the money or the skills or the inclination to invest in tourist-based businesses. What was being proposed and embraced by the environmental community was a new economy that would simply destroy the old lifestyle of the rural west and replace it with a new one. Where would the rural westerners go? Perhaps they could get jobs at McDonald's or the Motel 6--environmentalists were vague on the fine points." These old timers had grown up in Utah's wilderness and staked their identities on its solitude and freedom, qualities that would become increasingly rare in the New West.

Tourism boomed in the 1990s as outdoor sports enthusiasts flooded in to town to bike the Slickrock Trail and run in huge cross-county races routed through sensitive habitat. The construction industry exploded as developers built mammoth second homes for rich out-of-towners. Chain hotels and restaurants crowded the tack and feed stores and the implement yards off Main Street.

Soon, all the new traffic developed into a new threat to wilderness just a serious as the herds of cattle environmentalists loved to hate. The "impacts from millions of those well-meaning 'amenity clients' became more obvious with each passing season. Resource damage from hundreds of thousands of bicyclists, as far as 30 and 40 miles from Moab was clearly changing the landscape of Grand County. And it wasn't just the bikes. It was the vehicles that brought the bikes and bikers--it became a bit embarrassing to praise the non-polluting aspects of non-motorized recreation when most bikers drive their SUVs hundreds of miles so they can pedal for ten."

Stiles concludes by arguing that "wilderness values" are intrinsic, not economic. The environment should be protected for its own sake, not because someone can make a profit off it.


Jim Stiles has a new book out this year: Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed.

Eight reasons why the market can't solve the climate crisis

"The fourth report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released on November 17, concludes that there is “unequivocal” evidence that human-induced global warming is already under way and, if left unchecked, will lead to rising sea levels, more fierce storms, and more floods and droughts. The report, prepared by 3000 climate scientists, argues that the window of opportunity for quickly reaching a safer, stable level of greenhouse gas emissions is closing fast. Contrary to the claims by mainstream politicians and commentators, the market cannot solve this problem."

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Bill McKibben on the Idea of Growth

In a Mother Jones article, "Reversal of Fortune," Bill McKibben, author of the landmark book, The Death of Nature, argues that the time has come to quit "aiming for growth at all costs and hoping it will trickle down." McKibben claims that "idea" of growth was invented by Lyndon Johnson, since before World War II, people like FDR talked about the American economy as mature and seemed to think it might not continue to grow. Evidently, the Great Depression doesn't seem relevant to this story, since McKibben makes no mention of it.

McKibben also echoes the popular green idea that capitalism and socialism are equally dedicated to the "dogma" of economic growth, noting that LBJ "wasn't alone in thinking this way. From Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev thundered, 'Growth of industrial and agricultural production is the battering ram with which we shall smash the capitalist system.'" The problem here is that economic growth isn't a faulty doctrine or mistaken priority; it's a structural necessity for both private and state capitalist economies, especially when they are locked into competition for control of the planet.

But McKibben is right when he observes that growth doesn't make most people happier. He cites a number of surveys of "life satisfaction" showing that, during the last half century, as real per capita income has increased in the US, the percentage of people who report feeling happy with their lives has declined.

For McKibben, the culprit is individualism, the habit of seeking self-fulfillment through the pursuit of wealth and consumer goods. Life in affluent societies isolates people from each other, when "we seem to be genetically wired for community." So, he argues, we need to localize our lives, disconnecting ourselves from the global growth economy by doing things like buying food and goods produced near where we live, "working on regional-scale sustainable timber projects," and "building energy networks that work like the Internet by connecting solar rooftops and backyard windmills in robust mini-grids." Not only will doing so be good for the environment, it will connect us to the kinds of communities that can give us real satisfaction.

But individualism isn't a way of life that people simply choose; it's a backwards way of talking about how capitalist labor markets force workers into a competition of all against all. And while well-meaning networks of environmentalists can achieve truly inspiring feats of green innovation and solidarity, what they can't do is prevent global capitalism from destroying the natural systems on which their local economies and communities depend.

25% of US Birds Threatened

More than a quarter of all US bird species are vulnerable to extinction, according to WatchList 2007, compiled by the National Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy.

Anthropogenic Biomes

"Humans are the ultimate ecosystem engineers, routinely reshaping ecosystem form and process using tools and technologies, such as fire, that are beyond the capacity of any other organism. This exceptional capacity for ecosystem engineering, expressed in the form of agriculture, forestry, industry and other activities, has helped to sustain unprecedented population growth, such that humans now consume about one third of all terrestrial net primary production, move more earth and produce more reactive nitrogen than all other terrestrial processes combined, and are causing global extinctions and changes in climate that are comparable to any observed in the natural record. Clearly, humans are now a force of nature rivaling climate and geology in shaping the terrestrial biosphere and its processes.... Recent analyses have demonstrated that more than three quarters of Earth's land surface has been reshaped by human activity."

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Review: Environment, Capitalism, Socialism

Environment, Capitalism, Socialism, edited by Dick Nichols for the Australian Democratic Socialist Party, is impressively international in its range of reference. At the same time, it engages in effective polemics with most major American environmentalists and the strands of green theory that they represent. It's very good on the ecological thinking of Marx and Engels. It mounts a devastating critique of mainstream environmentalism and its obsession with the UN, the World Bank, and the greening of corporations. And it provides a very clear theoretical analysis of capitalism's inherent environmental destructiveness, arguing that a socialist revolution, expropriation of private property, a planned economy, and massive ecological reconstruction efforts are the only realistic solution. It's a little fuzzy on the USSR and China, and it's a little rosy on Cuba and Nicaragua, but these are not major features of the argument. Also, the writing is somewhat flat. Nevertheless, it's an excellent resource.

Plastic Oceans

Plastic has only been produced commercially since World War II. When I was a sixth grader in Monterey, thirty years later, a short walk on the beach showed there was already a lot of plastic trash floating in the ocean. Still, the seawrack of styrofoam cooler lids, soda bottles, and fishing bobbers didn't seem to be much more than ugly. And we didn't worry about it much, except to be careful with six-pack rings since they could strangle birds.

The scale and seriousness of the problem is now more clear. Greenpeace recently released a report, "Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans," that synthesizes the results of a number of studies published between 1990 and 2005. The oceans have become what Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation calls the "world's largest landfill." They are packed with plastic bottles, shopping bags, cigarette butts, syringes, lighters, fishing gear, and more. In what has come to be called "ghost fishing," abandoned nets continue to catch and kill huge quantities of fish. Meanwhile, seals, sea lions, whales, dolphins, turtles, birds, and other animals get entangled in floating plastic ropes, lines, bands, and nets. These are not occasional incidents. One study found that as many as 130,000 whales, dolphins, and porpoises are caught in derelict nets each year. Another found that 40,000 fur seals were killed by plastic entanglement every year in the Bering Sea.

Floating plastic is gradually broken down by sunlight and wave action into particles the size of sand grains that float in the top few fathoms of the water column and even gather in windrows on the surface. In the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, an Africa-sized area of still winds and currents where flotsam accumulates, there is six times more granular plastic in the water than plankton. This is just one of seven similar gyres around the world. Marine animals mistake granular plastic for food, eating it in large quantities. Studies of sea turtle carcasses found that more than half had ingested significant quantities of plastic. Once ingested, plastic blocks the digestive tract, causing malnutrition and starvation. In addition, plastic fragments absorb chemicals that are not water soluble, including DDT and PCBs. These toxins disrupt hormonal functions once they are ingested, reducing the reproductive rates of many species.

Alan Weisman devotes a chapter of his powerful new book, The World Without Us, to plastic in the oceans.

Upside Down Priorities

Cost of the Iraq War as of today: $472 billion

2006 Revenue
Walmart : $351 billion
Exxon Mobil: $347 billion
General Motors: $207 billion

2006 Profits
ExxonMobil: $39.5 billion
Chevron: $17.1 billion
Conoco Phillips: $15.5 billion

2007 Losses in Sub-Prime Collapse
Citigroup: $9.8 billion
Merrill Lynch: $7.9 billion
Morgan Stanley: 43.7 billion
Bank of America: $3.5 billion

2008 Federal Budget Requests
Environmental Protection Agency: $7.2 billion
National Forest Service: $4.1 billion
National Park Service: $2.4 billion
Bureau of Land Management: $1.8 billion
Occupational Safety and Health Administration: $0.5 billion

Carbon Moralism

It's true that we must reduce carbon emissions, but things get absurd quickly when we frame that process in terms of individual decisions, rather than structural changes:

        The flame burning over the 2012 London Olympic Stadium will use a low-carbon fuel, organisers said on Monday.
        "It's early days but it will happen," a spokesman for French energy company EDF, London 2012's sustainability partner, told reporters after a series of environmental targets were announced.
        "We are working with the organising committee (LOCOG) and we will see what options there are for a low carbon fuel for the cauldron. It's a challenge because a 'clean' flame would be invisible and that would not be ideal.... We are looking for a flame of the right quality but with a low carbon footprint," he said.

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Weather disasters quadruple in 20 years

"The number of weather-related disasters has quadrupled in the past 20 years and more should be done to prepare for them, according to Oxfam. The international aid agency blames rising greenhouse gas emissions for the jump in severe storms, flooding and drought. In a report released today, Oxfam says there are now as many as 500 weather-related disasters a year, compared to an average of 120 in the early 1980s. The number of floods has increased six-fold over the same period, while the number of people affected by weather-related disasters has also risen by 68 per cent."

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Requiem

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do."

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.

--Kurt Vonnegut

Houston Principles

Houston Principles
Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment

Preamble

On May 19, 1999, environmental and labor leaders confronted CEO Charles Hurwitz in Houston to demand that his Maxxam Corporation, which owns Kaiser Aluminum and Pacific Lumber Company, be held accountable for its impact on working people, communities and the
environment.

By clear-cutting ancient redwoods in Northern California, and by locking out striking steelworkers in five cities, the Maxxam Corporation and its subsidiaries, Pacific Lumber Company and Kaiser Aluminum Corporation, have become icons of corporate irresponsibility. Recognizing that we have a common interest in making corporations more accountable for their behavior world wide, environmental and labor leaders have formed the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment and circulated the following statement, dubbed the "Houston Principles":

Whereas:

The spectacular accumulation of wealth by corporations and America's most affluent during the past two decades has come with a huge price tag.

Corporations have become more powerful than the government entities designed to regulate them.

The goal of a giant, global corporation is to maximize wealth and to wield political power on its own behalf. Too often, corporate leaders regard working people, communities, and the natural world as resources to be used and thrown away.

Recognizing the tremendous stakes, labor unions and environmental advocates are beginning to recognize our common ground. Together we can challenge illegitimate corporate authority over our country's and communities' governing decisions.

While we may not agree on everything, we are determined to accelerate our efforts to make alliances as often as possible.

We believe that:

A healthy future for the economy and the environment requires a dynamic alliance between labor, management, and environmental advocates.

The same forces that threaten economic and biological sustainability undermine the democratic process.

The drive for short-term profits without regard for long-term sustainability hurts working people, communities, and the earth.

Labor, environmental and community groups need to take action to organize as a counter-balance to abusive corporate power.

The environmental and labor advocates who have signed these principles resolve to work together to:

Remind the public that the original purpose behind the creation of corporations was to serve the public interest — namely working people, communities, and the earth.

Seek stricter enforcement of labor laws and advocate for new laws to guarantee working people their right to form unions and their right to bargain collectively.

Make workplaces, communities and the planet safer by reducing waste and greenhouse gas emissions.

Demand that global trade agreements include enforceable labor and environmental standards.

Promote forward-thinking business models that allow for sustainability over the long term while protecting working people, communities, and the environment.

This ground-breaking alliance of labor and environmentalists invites all people to join with us in a spirit of creative cooperation.

Together, we can forge a partnership that protects people and the planet.

Study: global warming killing coral reefs

"Pacific coral reefs are dying at an unprecedented rate, scientists have found. Almost 600 square miles of reef have disappeared every year since the late 1960s - twice the rate of rainforest loss. Reefs disappear at a rate of one per cent a year. Coral loss has become a global phenomenon caused mainly by climate change, rising sea temperatures and man-made nutrient pollution."

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Arctic sea ice melting

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, "Arctic sea ice during the 2007 melt season plummeted to the lowest levels since satellite measurements began in 1979. The average sea ice extent for the month of September was 4.28 million square kilometers (1.65 million square miles), the lowest September on record, shattering the previous record for the month, set in 2005, by 23 percent (see Figure 1). At the end of the melt season, September 2007 sea ice was 39 percent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000 (see Figure 2). If ship and aircraft records from before the satellite era are taken into account, sea ice may have fallen by as much as 50 percent from the 1950s."

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Study: global warming extends fire seasons

The number and size of large forest fires in the West have grown "suddenly and dramatically" in the past two decades in part because of global warming, a study released Thursday says.

The scientific paper, posted online by the journal Science, says wildfire season in Western states has grown up to 2½ months longer since 1987 because of warmer spring temperatures and earlier, faster melting of mountain snow. The timing of that annual snowmelt, a key source of the West's water, also helps gauge the severity of wildfire season.

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Study: global warming intensifying hurricanes

A new study concludes that rising sea temperatures have been accompanied by a significant global increase in the most destructive hurricanes, adding fuel to an international debate over whether global warming contributed to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina....

According to data gathered by researchers at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the number of major Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has nearly doubled over the past 35 years, even though the total number of hurricanes, including weaker ones, has dropped since the 1990s.

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Is Going Green Good Business?

"Forget the science debate," says Cinergy Corp. CEO James E. Rogers, who was at the meeting. "The regulations will change someday. And if we're not ready, we're in trouble."

A surprising number of companies in old industries such as oil and materials as well as high tech are preparing for this profoundly altered world. They are moving swiftly to measure and slash their greenhouse gas emissions. And they are doing it despite the Bush Administration's opposition to mandatory curbs.This change isn't being driven by any sudden boardroom conversion to environmentalism. It's all about hard-nosed business calculations.

"If we stonewall this thing to five years out, all of a sudden the cost to us and ultimately to our consumers can be gigantic," warns Rogers, who will manage 20 coal-fired power plants if Cinergy's pending merger with Duke Energy is completed next year.

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Green Washing

Guests at Hyatt Hotels find an information card on the bathroom counter. The heading is the old activist slogan, "Think Globally. Act Locally." The text informs the guest that "linens and towels washed daily by hotels worldwide use millions of gallons of fresh water and add tons of detergents to our environment." Fortunately, as part of its "ongoing commitment to improving the environment," Hyatt will now change bed linens and towels only once every three days. Making sure to drive home the good feelings, the card concludes, "Together we can make a difference." And of course, it sports a recycling logo with the caption, "Printed on recycled paper and laminated to reduce waste."

A New Sagebrush Rebellion?

Global warming is not only cutting the U.S. off from the rest of the world, it's also dividing the U.S. ruling class against itself and causing breaches of discipline in the two-party system.

The governors of six western states--California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, and Montana--have decided not to wait for the federal government to act on climate change. Five Democrats and one Republican have rejected the Bush Administration's emphasis on voluntary emissions reductions. After the U.S. Supreme Court turned down Bush's attempt to outlaw state-level regulation of CO2 emissions, these Western renegades are developing their own plans and programs.

For instance, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (D) committed his state to stabilizing CO2 emissions at 2000 levels by 2012. That would mean a 10 percent reduction from 2006 levels, the equivalent of retiring more than 100,000 cars. Richardson calls for a further 10% cut by 2020 and a 75% reduction by 2050.

California, the world's 18th largest producer of carbon dioxide, has a long track record of requiring tighter auto emissions standards than the federal government. And 14 other states have adopted California's standards. In November, Governor Schwarzenegger (R) sued the Bush administration to force quick approval of a waiver that would allow the state to tighten its rules even further.

A New Dawn of Solar?

"Imagine a solar panel without the panel. Just a coating, thin as a layer of paint, that takes light and converts it to electricity. From there, you can picture roof shingles with solar cells built inside and window coatings that seem to suck power from the air. Consider solar-powered buildings stretching not just across sunny Southern California, but through China and India and Kenya as well, because even in those countries, going solar will be cheaper than burning coal. That’s the promise of thin-film solar cells: solar power that’s ubiquitous because it’s cheap. The basic technology has been around for decades, but this year, Silicon Valley–based Nanosolar created the manufacturing technology that could make that promise a reality.

The company produces its PowerSheet solar cells with printing-press-style machines that set down a layer of solar-absorbing nano-ink onto metal sheets as thin as aluminum foil, so the panels can be made for about a tenth of what current panels cost and at a rate of several hundred feet per minute. With backing from Google’s founders and $20 million from the U.S. Department of Energy, Nanosolar’s first commercial cells rolled off the presses this year."

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Nanosolar may bring down the cost of PV cells by 50 percent or more, which would be a significant gain, but would do nothing about the problems of night and batteries. Also, cells only account for about half the cost of a complete system.

The Department of Energy estimates that photovoltaic solar will provide no more than 3 percent of grid electricity in the US in 2030. Coal-burning power plants, on the other hand, will still be producing half of the electricity we use. A new coal plant fires up every week somewhere in the world.

WWF Rain Forest Ad (April 2007)

"15 square kilometers of rain forest disappears every minute."

Melting Permafrost and Runaway Warming

In August 2006, The Guardian reported that a "vast expanse of western Siberia is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warn today. Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere."

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Tipping Point?

In February 2005, climate scientists met in Exeter, UK, for "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change," an international symposium on the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations. The conference steering committee's report, published a year later, focuses on the issue of "tipping points" or critical thresholds. Based on a survey of existing literature, the committee predicts "increasing damage if the globe warms about 1 to 3 C above current levels. Serious risk of large scale, irreversible system disruption, such as reversal of the land carbon sink and possible destabilisation of the Antarctic ice sheets is more likely above 3 C" (5). The committee then suggests 2 C as a threshold beyond which the risk of catastrophic ecosystems failure would become unacceptably high, stating that to limit "warming to 2 C above pre-industrial levels with a relatively high certainty requires the equivalent concentration of CO2 to stay below 400 ppm" (6). The equivalent concentration of CO2 is calculated by adding together the effects of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide.

When the conference report was released, The Independent commissioned Keith Shine, head of the meteorology department at the University of Reading, to calculate the equivalent concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. A widely read article, published on February 11, 2006 under the title, "Global Warming: Passing the 'Tipping Point,'" reported the resulting figure of 425 ppm. The article quotes veteran environmentalist Tom Burke, who argues that "we have actually entered a new era--the era of dangerous climate change.... Governments must stop talking and start spending. We already have the technology to allow us to meet our growing need for energy while keeping a stable climate. Doing so will cost less than the Iraq war, so we know we can do it."

James Lovelock says climate change is unavoidable

In his 2006 book, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back - and How We Can Still Save Humanity, geophysicist James Lovelock argues that global warming has passed a tipping point beyond which profound climate change is unavoidable. According to Lovelock, massive destruction of ecosystems, epidemics of hunger and disease, water scarcity, and even large-scale social collapses are no longer merely possible, they are inevitable. Lovelock calls for societies to adapt to global warming and prevent chaos by retreating from their current levels of development. At the same time, he argues for aggressive replacement of coal-fired power plants with nuclear reactors, arguing that the environmental risks are far outweighed by the benefits.

The Ultimate Feel-Good Sweater

Super-hip gear brand Patagonia offers a "Classic Retro Cardigan" sewn out of fleece made from recycled plastic bottles. Available in four colors, Inca Gold Heather, Natural, Pandora Red Heather, and Velvet Brown, the sweater retails for $175.

Anybody want to do the research to figure out how many bottles they've kept out of landfills? I'm guessing it's about as many as people use in one summer day in Sedona.

Yvon Chouinard's memoir, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman (2005) tells how he started out selling climbing gear from his car, then built Patagonia into a huge business that many see as a model of corporate responsibility.

ISR Article on Global Warming (May 2005)

In order to make our relationship with nature sustainable, we will have to make it rational, and not just on an individual basis. We will have to take control of energy—along with transportation, food, and everything else we need—out of the hands of corporate bosses locked in competition, and instead plan our economy democratically, collectively, and scientifically. In short, stopping global warming will take permanently changing the way our society does business. That means not just challenging corporate power, but getting rid of capitalism altogether and replacing it with a socialist society in which decisions about how we live on the planet are made according to human needs, including the need for a clean and healthy planet.

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11th Hour asks if time is running out

11th Hour powerfully shows the intensity and scale of the environmental crisis. Produced and narrated by Leonardo diCaprio, the film bombards viewers with shots of devastated industrial landscapes, pollution-fouled rivers, raging forest fires, collapsing ice fields, flooded slums, and the diseased bodies of animals and humans. These images are interwoven with interviews of many of today’s most respected environmental thinkers, including physicist Stephen Hawking, Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute and Kenny Ausubel of Bioneers. The result is a forceful and moving call to action. Unfortunately, the film falls apart when it comes time to say exactly what is to be done.

The 11th Hour makes the important point that what is at risk isn’t just pretty landscapes but the survival of human society. It backs up this argument by surveying the biggest threats to the environment: global warming, deforestation, desertification, soil erosion and toxic pollution of air and water. All of the planet’s natural systems are in decline, threatening the most basic physical conditions on which modern society depends, like reliable water cycles, stable weather patterns, and productive farmland, fisheries and forests.

The destruction of society’s physical foundation disproportionately affects the poor, especially poor people of color, who face epidemics of environmental diseases like asthma and cancer. The impending “convergence of crises” threatens to destabilize the planet so profoundly that we may face a catastrophic societal collapse. In short, we have reached the moment at which we must take action. We have reached the 11th hour.

The film identifies the right culprits. In one of its most telling sequences, images of post-Katrina New Orleans alternate with footage of President Bush and other prominent politicians describing global warming as an uncertainty and even a hoax. It goes on to describe how powerful multinational corporations, especially energy companies like Exxon Mobil, have systematically used their spectacular profits to torpedo progressive environmental legislation. Our society, one interviewee argues, is based on a system of organized greed. “The madness of conventional economics” allows a tiny minority of corporate bosses to steal natural resources that should be managed for the benefit of all people.

Unfortunately, when it tries to explain why the environmental crisis is happening and what can be done to stop it, 11th Hour clearly reflects the political weakness of the current environmental movement. The problem, it argues, is one of ideas. The crisis is fundamentally “a thinking disorder.” As a society, we have forgotten the “ancient wisdoms,” especially the idea that we are part of nature. Our “minds are out of balance” and we think of ourselves as superior to nature. The solution, therefore, is a “cultural shift” across the whole of society, from the grassroots to the boardrooms.

The rest of the film is dedicated to a mish-mash of prescriptions. Individuals should get involved in environmental organizations. Green designers should re-engineer all of the technologies that support our lives, from power plants to cars. Governments should replace income taxes with carbon taxes and limit corporate political power. The 11th Hour takes an inspiringly can-do attitude, urging us to see that it’s time for “all hands on deck.”

But the truth it fails to confront is that capitalism is much more than a bad idea. It is a deeply entrenched economic system whose rulers will do anything to defend their right to ravage our lives and our planet for profit. If we want a healthy society that lives in balance with nature, we will need to overturn the most basic structures of power in our society. We will need to take our common home back from the bosses.

first published in Socialist Worker

The inconvenient truth about Al Gore

An Inconvenient Truth does a good job of presenting the latest scientific facts and figures. Gore does know his stuff on this issue, and the film gives hard-hitting examples of the potential consequences of inaction. But the film spends far too much time telling the latest version of Gore’s worn-out life story, packaging him as a crusader who experienced an awakening, and now sees that saving the earth is a “moral imperative.”

And it only gives its last five minutes to the question of what is to be done, demanding that audience members reduce their personal carbon emissions by carpooling, checking tire pressure, buying low-wattage light bulbs, changing the settings on home thermostats and so on. This conclusion falls horribly flat after the film has spent so much time showing that climate change is a global problem, driven by vast forces like the oil economy and population growth.

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Clinton, Bush, and National Forests

In January 2001, Bill Clinton declared 58.5 million acres of National Forest Service land off limits to road building and other commercial development. That's a larger area than the entire state of Utah and represents about one third of the service's total acreage. The new "Roadless Area Rule" could have been an important step forward, but Clinton waited until the last days of his presidency to announce it, knowing that it would be one of the incoming administration's first targets.

Republicans challenged the roadless rule in the courts, convincing U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer in Wyoming to issue a permanent injunction. Then in July 2004, the Bush Administration announced plans to overturn it, allowing state governors to reopen forests to road-building, logging, mining, and exploration for oil and gas. Two years later, Elizabeth D. Laporte, a federal judge in San Francisco, set aside Bush's new policy, reinstating Clinton's rule and setting the stage for a new round of legal challenges.

Instead of making decisions based on the health of the land, Democrats and Republicans have spent the last decade playing a game of political hot potato with the people's forests.

Warming of the Oceans

In 2005, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories announced the results of a new study of global warming. They modeled changes in ocean temperature in response to the release of greenhouse gasses during the last forty years. Then they checked their models against 7 million direct measurements of ocean temperature. They found a 95 percent correspondence between the models and the observed data.

Most modeling studies so far have focused on atmospheric temperatures, but the planet's oceans represent a much larger energy sink, absorbing and holding much more heat than the atmosphere. Ocean temperatures are one of the key patterns determining worldwide weather patterns.

Tim Barnett, one of the authors of the study, told The Independent that, "Over the past 40 years there has been considerable warming of the planetary system and approximately 90 per cent of that warming has gone directly into the oceans.... If we could mine the energy that has gone in over the past 40 years we could run the state of California for 200,000 years."