News aggregatorThe Purpose-Driven Wife - NewsweekNewsweek The Purpose-Driven Wife Newsweek At home, Aline hosted a parade of visitors—the Eameses from California, Alexander Calder, Buckminster Fuller. When alone, the couple retired after dinner to ... and more » Interview with Rajendra Pachauri: Amid Mounting Pessimism A Voice of Hope for Copenhagen
Few people have as much stake in the outcome of the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen as Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yet despite growing pessimism that a substantive treaty can be forged in Copenhagen, Pachauri believes a flurry of eleventh-hour negotiations may lead to an agreement, although the United States may not initially be a part of it. or get the Flash Player. var so = new SWFObject('http://e360.yale.edu/common/mediaplayer.swf','mpl','200','20','8'); so.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always'); so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true'); so.addVariable('height','20'); so.addVariable('width','200'); so.addVariable('file','http://e360.yale.edu/audio/pachauri-2.mp3'); so.addVariable('backcolor','0x112200'); so.addVariable('frontcolor','0xffffff'); so.addVariable('lightcolor','0x88BB00'); so.addVariable('searchbar','false'); so.write('player'); Yale Environment 360: I wanted to start by asking you about the obvious thing that’s on everybody’s mind, the upcoming conference in Copenhagen in December. It’s obviously a key conference and there’s been a great deal of pessimism in recent weeks about the chance for really substantive action in Copenhagen on climate change. What do you see as the picture for heading into Copenhagen at this point, and what do you think can realistically be accomplished there? Pachauri: I think there are three things that’ll have to be part of an agreement. Firstly, commitment to reduce emissions by the developed countries, through 2020. I think that’s essential. And that also accords with what the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] has brought out in the Fourth Assessment Report, where we clearly said that if you want to limit temperature increase to 2 to 2.4 degrees Celsius, then 2015 is the year when global emissions will have to peak, and then decline thereafter. Now that clearly implies that you ought to have very clear targets for 2020 at the latest. So I think that’s one important element of an agreement. The second would be some commitment to provide money on the table to help the developing countries, both in adaptation as well as mitigation actions. And the third would be to provide some facilitation for access to technologies that are required in the rest of the world. So I think if these three things are there, then perhaps the majority of the countries that are part of COP will agree to a deal. e360: You attracted widespread attention some months ago when you said, as an individual, not as chairman of the IPCC, you supported calls to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations at a level of below 350 parts per million. What led you to take that position, and knowing that it would be controversial, why did you choose to go public with that? This piece originally appeared in Yale e360 Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Politics at 11:44 AM) New Study: Changes to Economic Policy Neccessary for Switch to Low-Carbon Economy
by Bill Becker In case we need more evidence that an urgent economic transformation is required to avoid catastrophic climate change, it can be found in a new study commissioned by World Wildlife Fund International. Conducted by Climate Risk Pty. Ltd. of Great Britain and Australia, the study concludes: Runaway climate change is almost inevitable without specific action to implement low-carbon re-industrialization over the next five years [emphasis added]… World governments have a window that will close between now and 2014. In that time they must establish fully operational, low-carbon industrial architecture. This must drive a low-carbon re-industrialization that will be faster than any previous economic and industry transformation…Today, only three out of 20 industries are moving sufficiently fast enough.By “low carbon re-industrialization”, the authors mean energy efficiency and clean generation technologies, low-carbon agriculture, and sustainable forestry. They have identified 24 critical resources and industries the world will need to develop quickly to avoid climate catastrophe. Among their conclusions:
“Starting with the least-cost mitigation solutions and working our way forward to higher-cost solutions as carbon prices rise – that approach will take too long,” says Sean Kidney, Climate Risk’s manager in Europe. “We need to tackle all solutions at the same time.”
“We can harvest these enormous future savings now to create an income stream that funds the capital expenditures we need,” Kidney says. How? Kidney and his colleagues are working on a number of ideas for new bonding mechanisms designed specifically to finance low-carbon investments. What is government’s role? The Presidential Climate Action Project has submitted several re-industrialization proposals to the Obama Administration and Congress. Among them:
We will not avoid climate catastrophe merely by tinkering around the edges of industrial society or by counting on a slow evolution of technologies and markets. As businessman and environmentalist Paul Hawken puts it, “There isn’t one single thing that we make that doesn’t require a complete remake.” Alex Steffen, the executive editor of worldchanging.com, says: “The magnitude of the crises we face, the speed with which they are unfolding…mean that the solutions we need to embrace are not going to be the same sort of solutions we’re used to thinking of now…Faced with the need to reinvent the material basis of our civilization, we argue paper or plastic." Can we reinvent world industry in only five years? The rapid redirection of U.S. industry during World War II suggests that it may be possible – but not without intense collaboration between governments and industries. There must be a third party in the deal, too: the citizen-consumer. In my next post, I’ll suggest how government, industry and consumers can collaborate in a new social contract for economic transformation. [JR: I would note that if this statement is true -- "To achieve an 80 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century, the world will have to invest $400 billion annually in green industries by 2025" -- the U.S. share is about $100 billion a year, which is just about what the climate and clean energy bill would result in (see "The only way to win the clean energy race is to pass the clean energy bill"). I actually think we'll need a bigger investment, maybe twice as big by 2025.] This piece originally appeared on Climate Progress. Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! The Future of Environmental Law Mapping
By Laurent Granier Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and mapping offer great opportunities for the transfer of legal data from books to maps. GIS applications have been evolving in many directions, well beyond geography. Many fields such as environmental economics, social science, health science and administration are now aggregated with scientific representations. The methods for environmental and social mapping are now participatory too. Together, these tools offer new, integrated visions of our territories (or anthromes) and could greatly assist environmental lawyers and policy makers. Maps and plans have been considered legal tools in urban and planning law for a long time here in France. The "Plan Local d'Urbanismes" (formerly "POS" ) with its "graphical documents" are both legally binding. Sectoral environmental legislation also offers legally binding spatial representations, such as boundaries in protected areas, water catchments or industrial zones. In international law, the Counsil of Europe developed guidelines on coastal management that include "legal mapping" as a relevant tool (art. 26). Part of our environmental legislation is made of data, standards and zones that make sense horizontally. Another strong tendency that should lead us to more legal mapping is the need to aggregate more and more rules and multiple statuses (of land). This applies both in developing and rich countries. There is, for example, no real understanding of the future of a protected area (PA) without looking to the diverse rules applying to its surrounding lands, forests, concessions, villages, etc. In the case of participatory PAs mapping (in the Gabonese legislation for example), legal data in mapping can include: - Representations of general laws and regulations, for example health rules on malaria applying to the entire country, the ban on fishing after 3 miles, general building rule, roads, etc. - Specific laws and regulations. In the case of protected areas, rules are plenty. They include boundaries (usually through a law or decree creating limits, rules), the internal zoning with different affectations, the buffer zone, the zoning of local communities activities, the customary zones, corridors, etc. More interesting is the zoning of what surrounds PAs, such as clear identification of forest concessions, mining, industries, cities, private land, etc. - Contractual rules can be represented too, such as local participation tools (local conventions, charters, bylaws) and international transboundary agreements.
A great French online public tool allows users combine personalized maps with protected area status information (including biosphere reserves, bird nesting zones, EU birds and special conservation zones, and of course all the "classical" protected areas). Addwijzer is another innovative program. It is an EU eContent project that succeeded in demonstrating how planning laws could be integrated into maps in the Netherlands. According to Dr. David R. Newman, Queen's University Belfast, a Member of the PGIS network, Framfab used the IMRO codes that a Dutch project had created to add laws to maps of the district plans, and added rules that you could use to quickly find areas where a particular kind of development is legal. The tool is still under development. For more examples with lots of potential for environmental education, see this compilation of online mapping data about protected areas in Southeast Asia, or the Google Earth apps on marine protected areas. Law and policy makers may promote these legal mapping tools to a greater extent in the future. They give a big, clear picture of the numerous rules now applying to any zone, they can be made democratically, by involving stakeholders (from international to local - participatory mapping), they help administrators taking more sound land management decisions and also allow us to better plan for the future (particularly in adaptation to climate change perspectives). Hopefully environmental maps and plans will become more and more legally binding. Laurent Granier is the director of ecocy, an environmental law and policy consultancy assisting leading organizations and companies who want to develop integrated and dynamic solutions. His work includes breakthrough protected areas legislations in Africa where he worked 6 year with UNEP and IUCN before founding ecocy in 2008. This piece originally appeared on Ecocy. Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by WorldChanging Team in Emerging Technologies at 11:17 AM) Smart, Cheap Stormwater Fixes
Stormwater -- the rainwater that streams off roofs, parking lots, roads, and yards, carrying with it toxic pollutants -- poses a costly, intractable problem for governments and businesses. In Washington, efforts to control stormwater have cost its cities hundreds of millions of dollars. The problem with stormwater comes from its massive volume, which floods homes and blasts through streams, flushing salmon eggs, gravel, and everything else out to sea. And it comes from the pollutants that are picked up by the torrents of rain along the way, including copper, oil and grease, and pesticides. Stormwater presents a daunting challenge considering the Northwest's rapid pace of development, and the fact that residential areas have three-times the rate of runoff compared to forests and fields (see page 12). Polluted stormwater kills salmon returning to urban streams to spawn before they can lay their eggs. It forces the closure of acres of shellfish beds made unsafe for human consumption. The rush of water causes erosion and fills basements with muddy water. The good news is we already know some of the best, cheapest solutions for controlling runoff. The bad news is the solutions aren't being widely used. A few governments are wisely putting a value on trees in the name of stormwater controls to encourage developers to protect them. Portland offers tree credits as a way for landowners to meet part of their stormwater mitigation obligation. Seattle is for the first time including credits for trees in its stormwater manual update (see section 4.4.6), which is expected to be approved by the end of the month. But clearly even with incentives to keep trees, stormwater will be created in the Northwest by the barrel-full. So the next best strategy is to keep pollutants out of the runoff. Otherwise the stormwater has to be captured and treated, and many of the pollutants are difficult and costly to remove. One of the bad actors that's been getting a lot of attention in recent years is seemingly innocuous copper. You can hold a penny in your hand with no harm done, but when the dissolved metal gets into streams it can wreak havoc on a salmon's sense of smell -- and they use their noses to find food, mates, their spawning streams, and to avoid predators. Scientists at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle find that super low levels of copper -- levels that match what is found in nature -- deadens coho's response to an alarm pheromone that warns schoolmates that a predator is near. So where does the copper come from? Research in the San Francisco Bay area found that the top two sources of human-caused copper pollution come from pesticides (42 percent) and brake pads on cars and trucks (36 percent). Some of the pesticides' copper gets trapped in the soil and plants, putting more of a focus on the brake pads copper that travels from roadways and the air to waterways. Now California's Brake Pad Partnership, a nonprofit coalition of environmentalists, engineers, and auto reps, is working to get legislation passed that will get copper-containing brake pads off their roads. Their Q & A sheet gives a great explanation of how the copper is scraped off the pads when a car brakes, why it's used, and what the substitutes are (they include steel and iron). Here's the most important piece: Stormwater flooding photo courtesy of Flickr user technokitten under the Creative Commons license. This piece originally appeared in Sightline.org Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by WorldChanging Team in Urban Design and Planning at 11:16 AM) CFCM Show and Tell: Making Change
Ryan Toole is designing a platform called Red Ink, a tool designed to enable secure, collective financial action. He points out that there are existing tools – wesabe, mint.com, yodlee – which unify your online financial information. The bleeding edge in this field is financial tools for collective action – carrotmob, groupon, merry miser, buy it like you mean it. Red Ink fits into this latter category. It’s a “social financial platform” designed to let you visualize spending at regional levels, in different industries. This is useful information for organizing a boycott – you can show the effectiveness of a collective action by asking everyone to report their purchasing behavior. Similarly, you could get a constituency of people to report on local spending, or just try to negotiate a discount on your local beer spending. The goal for the platform is to be highly private and anonymous, maximizing communications and minimizing private data leakage. This vision could be very important for activists, allowing them to spread information person to person. It might also matter to people off the grid, allowing communication in an otherwise unwired village. And for general users, there could be services allowing communication and discovery. Some of the projects that have emerged from this work are: With this information, we can consider the carbon impacts and social impacts of our products through supply chain transparency. A demonstration shows the inputs into an Ikea Alsarp bed, including the origins of the wood and steel – this report is published and becomes a resource for anyone looking at purchasing the bed in the future. Hockenberry’s strongest example is a map of breweries in Scotland, all of which are currently bottled in northern England. By mapping their supply chains, he was able to make an argument for a transition to a central Scottish bottling plant, which might transform the local brewing industry. ExtrAct focuses on energy extraction and its impact on communities in North Texas and Colorado, specifically the impacts of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas. This process is very chemically intensive and is unregulated by federal law. Chris tells us that it’s causing such severe health and environmental damage that we’re seeing communities organize to fight fracturing. The ExtrAct project started with extensive ethnographic studies in these communities. That study pointed to the landman – a representative of the energy companies sent to purchase mineral rights from homeowners – as a pivotal piece of the extraction system. ExtrAct functions as a “Landman review site, like Rotten Tomatoes or Yelp.com”, trying to address the problems of accountability in the process of acquiring land for mineral extraction. This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum. The piece originally appeared on My heart's in Accra. Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Communications and Networking at 10:58 AM) A new way to explore New York in the digital age - CU Columbia SpectatorA new way to explore New York in the digital age CU Columbia Spectator These “speculative proposals” run the gamut from Beach's 1868 pneumatic subway (a short piece of which was in fact built downtown) to Buckminster Fuller's ... Credit: Too Important to Be Left to Private Banks - Seeking Alpha (blog)Credit: Too Important to Be Left to Private Banks Seeking Alpha (blog) But remember - as Buckminster Fuller pointed out - building a new model is often easier than fighting the existing one. The time is right for a new model. ... The Art of Architecture: Foster + Partners - Dallas Art NewsThe Art of Architecture: Foster + Partners Dallas Art News Foster + Partners' philosophy was born out of early experimental projects undertaken with R. Buckminster Fuller in the 1970s that attempted to align the ... Buffett's Bet on Rail: What Does It Mean for Transport and Energy?
by Elana Schor The financial world was riveted this morning by billionaire investor Warren Buffett's move to take full ownership of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad, a $34 billion deal that ranks as the largest ever executed by Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway. But what does Buffett's purchase mean for the nation's energy future? The so-called "Oracle of Omaha" told CNBC today that his decision was "a bet on the country" as well as a bet on the viability of cleaner transportation: BNSF last year... moved a ton of goods 470 miles on one gallon of diesel. It releases far fewer pollutants into the atmosphere. It saves enormously on energy consumption and...it diminishes highway congestion. Rails last year moved 40 percent, more than 40 percent, over the country. They moved more than all those trucks, just the four big railroads. It's a very effective way of moving goods. I basically believe this country will prosper and you'll have more people moving more goods 10 and 20 and 30 years from now, and the rails should benefit. As coal-hauling railroads go, however, BNSF has made an attempt to distinguish itself on the energy efficiency end. The railroad is developing an emissions-free hydrogen-powered locomotive, and in May started to test-run a group of GE locomotives that cuts emissions by 40 percent over previous, dirtier models. BNSF also has gotten on board the California High Speed Rail Authority's plans for an initial route connecting Merced to Fresno, and its CEO has advocated for a national focus on one initial high-speed project, rather than spreading around the Obama administration's $8 billion investment "like peanut butter." When putting Buffett's bet into context, however, the corporate identity of BNSF may matter less than the impact of one powerful investor's foray into transportation. At a time when the job-creation potential of infrastructure spending is increasingly propelling the political debate, Buffett's interest in the transport sector could be a harbinger of greater private-sector involvement to come -- thus bolstering Democratic lawmakers as they make the case for more transit, bridge, and road repair money to hasten the nation's economic recovery. This piece originally appeared in streetblog.org Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by WorldChanging Team in Business at 11:00 AM) Gaming Cap and Trade: Should We Worry?
A look at the evidence - and a path forward. Worries about “gaming” or market manipulation sometimes crop up as an objection to cap and trade, often with reference to recent shenanigans in the financial markets. Some fear that a cap-and-trade system could be manipulated to artificially raise—or lower—permit prices to generate profits for a few at the expense of consumers. While distrust and concerns about scamming a carbon market are understandable, they’re not warranted. To put some of these fears to rest, it’s informative to look at existing cap-and-trade programs. Neither of the two programs regulating greenhouse gases nor a third controlling acid rain pollutants has been corrupted by gaming or market manipulation. The European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) was the world’s first cap-and-trade program restricting carbon dioxide releases when it started in 2005. The system has succeeded in creating a Europe-wide carbon market and trading program. There have been hiccups in the ETS, including an initial overallocation of allowances to polluters and some price volatility. Yet the problems are fixable and are already being addressed as the program evolves. The challenges are not attributable to a fundamental flaw in the policy or to lack of regulatory oversight. And the market has grown more robust as the number of traders has increased, making price manipulation difficult. Partly thanks to the ETS, the EU is on track to meet its emissions reduction obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), with a membership of 10 Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, held its first auctions in September 2008. Additional auctions are scheduled. While still in its early days, RGGI appears to be off to a good start, with low permit prices and no evidence of gaming. The US Acid Rain Program has a track record dating to 1995. The program regulating power plants has exceeded expectations, beating the SO2 emissions cap years ahead of schedule and costing only one-fourth of what was expected. After more than a decade, analysts have concluded that the SO2 cap-and-trade program has also been free of gaming. In short, cap-and-trade programs are already up and running with no evidence of sinister manipulation. That’s no surprise to specialists who study markets. The very nature of carbon permit markets makes them hard to game, unlike California’s “spot” electricity market, and not terribly prone to speculative bubbles, unlike real estate and subprime mortgages. Mortgages and pollution permits are very different commodities; a mortgage is a promise to pay a debt—a promise that a mortgage holder may not be able to keep—while a carbon permit is an allowance to emit fixed quantities of pollution. Carbon markets are not like “spot” power markets either, in part because electricity must be supplied immediately to consumers, while firms need permits to cover their emissions at most only once a year, eliminating the urgency to acquire them at any particular time. In a poorly designed cap-and-trade program, traders might try to hoard permits and manipulate prices to harm consumers. Yet commonsense rules of the road can address the gravest concerns. To minimize price volatility, authorities can ensure transparency about prices and the number of permits available, both at auction and on secondary markets where permits are traded. Authorities can also restrict the share of permits that any single entity can hold, to perhaps a few percent of the total permits in circulation for any year. Other particulars of market design also help. The larger the permit-trading market and the more linked it is with other cap-and-trade systems, the more stable prices will be. Making permits perpetually bankable also stabilizes prices. For example, a hydro-dependent utility can use banking to accumulate a cushion of permits for use in an unexpected December cold snap during a “low-water” year, when the utility must generate (or import) more coal-fired power. Opening auctions to all bidders with adequate financial reserves, conducting auctions frequently and early, and limiting the number of permits any one actor may hold—all these things will keep prices stable and prevent market manipulation. There are also built-in disincentives for manipulation. The public doesn’t want it because it could raise power bills, and the market participants themselves, the polluting firms, don’t want to pay more to pollute. Both provide strong motivations for keeping the system honest. As with any policy, a cap-and-trade system’s success will ultimately depend on oversight and vigorous public institutions. But there is every reason to believe that a well-crafted and -regulated system for auctioning and trading carbon permits can function smoothly and cost-effectively. This piece originally appeared on Sightline Daily. Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by Eric De Place in Transforming Business at 10:40 AM) Population control is not what makes climate change a feminist issue
Women contribute less to global warming yet will be hit harder by its effects. Reproductive justice is a separate issue Last week Mary Fitzgerald argued that climate change is a feminist issue on the basis that population control is a way to prevent the situation spiralling out of control. And, she posited, this could be achieved by giving more women more autonomy over their own bodies, through improved access to contraception and abortion. I'm not going to get into the arguments around whether population control is a good solution to climate change. Others have already done so; George Monbiot's piece barely more than a month ago, for this newspaper, is a great place to start. Ensuring all women have full reproductive freedom and reproductive justice is a necessary goal in its own right moving towards a more equal and just world. I get that it might be tempting to hitch this issue to climate change, which has so much political capital. But, as Betsy Hartmann said recently in On the Issues magazine, "A world of difference exists between services that treat women as population targets and those based on a feminist model of respectful, holistic, high-quality care." Although Fitzgerald does say that rich countries as well as poor countries need to look at population control, in reality this is not on the political agenda, as countries such as Germany are already incentivising women to have more children. The resource consumption of a German resident is considerably higher than the resource consumption of a child born in countries likely to be targeted – any population control efforts are realistically likely to target mostly poor women and mostly women of colour. But Fitzgerald is completely right that climate change is a feminist issue. Everyone stands to suffer if climate change is allowed to spiral out of control, of course, but a gender analysis of both the impacts and causes of climate change shows that globally women contribute less to the problem and yet are likely to be hit especially hard. Poor people are likely to bear the brunt as the climate changes and 70% of the world's poor are women. According to one estimate, 85% of the victims of climate disasters are women. Another study found 75% of environmental refugees are women. (Statistics from the Women's Manifesto on Climate Change). Last month, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, recognised this with a message to a women's leadership conference, in which he acknowledged that women are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change – and called for women to be given a greater say in tackling the problem. Of course, as this demonstrates, men are capable of recognising and acting on the gendered impacts of climate change, but the fact that out of 146 delegates at recent climate talks, only seven were women nevertheless speaks to a significant shortfall in political representation of women in this process. Gender CC, a network of activists and academics working on this issue has a compendium of research on this area, with case studies and materials, all of which paint a clear picture that ignoring gender in tackling climate change risks both failing to get the job done and perpetuating – or even worsening – gender inequality. And this is not just relevant in the developing world either; a study by the Swedish government found "significant differences" in women's and men's energy consumption in four European countries, both in terms of total energy consumed and what that energy is spent on. The picture varied by country, however – for example carbon dioxide emissions from Swedish single households were 10,700 kg/year for men and 8,500 kg/year for women. So, yes, climate change is a feminist issue; women are on the front lines of climate change impact and need to be part of creating solutions. And women all over the world are in dire need of access to full and real reproductive justice. But linking the two by advocating population control as a solution to climate change isn't the way to achieve either of these aims. This piece originally appeared in The Guardian Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by WorldChanging Team in Empowering Women at 10:26 AM) Straight Talk for the Planetary Era: A Trio of Book Reviewsby Edward Wolf
Three recent books say that it’s all about thinking. In The End of the Long Summer, Dianne Dumanoski tells how our thinking got us in planet-scale hot water; in Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand advocates heresy to get us out; in Thinking in Systems, the late Donella Meadows teaches a different way of thinking altogether. While the subject matter of this trio of titles may sound familiar to Worldchanging readers, all three books deserve a careful read. Each of these authors is an elder with wisdom to impart. It’s up to the generation building a bright green future to match that wisdom to new challenges.
Award-winning science journalist Dianne Dumanoski considered her 1985 story on the science of the Antarctic ozone hole, published on the front page of the Boston Globe, “the most important story I had ever written.” Humanity had narrowly escaped full-scale disruption of a stratospheric chemical shield essential to our survival. Faulty assumptions and outright mistakes brought us – and all higher life – to the brink of calamity. How, Dumanoski wondered, could a banal, supposedly inert synthetic compound have triggered global jeopardy? How could its chemistry have been so thoroughly misunderstood, mis-measured, and misjudged? Later, puzzling over the story’s meaning, she came to see it signaling “a new and ominous epoch when human activity began to disrupt the essential but invisible planetary systems that sustain a dynamic, living Earth.” Dumanoski was among the first journalists to break the news to general readers: Disrupting the planet’s metabolism was no longer a theoretical possibility. It was a fact. The ozone story called for new institutions, new economic arrangements, and a new understanding of the Earth. In The End of the Long Summer, Dumanoski applies the lessons of the ozone story to the challenge she calls “a planetary emergency . . . that involves far more than the pressing problem of climate change.” She examines evolutionary and modern history for clues about our capacity – as a species and as a civilization – to act. Dumanoski’s criterion for success in the coming century is not prosperity, but survival. If she is right, success will boil down to our ability to “shockproof” societies to withstand changes unlike any confronted during the 10,000-year run of the civilization project. Her storyline is not for the faint of heart. Human activities have destabilized several fundamental flows of the Earth system. The comparative climate stability experienced during the “long summer” of the last 10,700 years is the exception in Earth’s history. Big changes in climate are underway, no matter what actions societies take to control emissions. Abrupt climate changes are possible and growing more likely as carbon emissions rise. The thinking that built a globalized civilization capable of disrupting planetary systems also makes that civilization more vulnerable to the consequences of instability. Against this sobering backdrop, Dumanoski embarks on a “search for honest hope.” She finds grounds for hope in three places: the fruits of science, the legacy of our species’ evolutionary past, and the creative gift of culture. Dumanoski is well versed in the Earth system sciences. Reporting the ozone hole and other big picture stories, she’s acquainted with many prominent chemists, biologists, and climate scientists responsible for the emerging understanding of the Earth. She is especially sympathetic to the views of James Lovelock, originator of the theory that life in the aggregate is a creative partner in the planetary cycles that maintain conditions conducive to life. She reminds us that Lovelock invented the electron capture device first used to detect trace quantities of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere, a discovery that helped solve the mystery of the ozone hole. In Lovelock’s Gaia theory, Dumanoski sees contours on a new conceptual map for the planetary era. She examines the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens during the chaotic Pleistocene climate swings that preceded recent millennia of stability. She notes three distinctive adaptations – large brains, skillful environmental manipulation, and cooking – that helped the species survive turbulent times. In the shifting climates and habitats of the Pleistocene, humankind became a “stormworthy species” with a smart generalist’s flexibility rather than the fine-tuned fitness of a specialist. Finally, she considers the creative gift of culture, the means humankind forged to escape the constraints of purely biological evolution and to accelerate adjustment to changing circumstances. Brains and cultures evolved in tandem, bootstrapping change and setting the stage for civilization. But culture is a paradox, both adaptive and maladaptive. Cultures have inertial tendencies that create dangerous inflexibility. Certain of those tendencies, designed to protect the integrity of distinct groups but exaggerated in the arrangements of a globalized economy, lock humanity into conflict with the planet. It’s a battle humanity cannot win. “Through most of our history, the human species has sailed into the storm in many boats,” Dumanoski writes. “Today, through globalization, we are all becoming passengers on one Titanic.” Against this backdrop, Dumanoski surveys our options. A lengthy chapter devoted to geoengineering finds little merit in leading proposals to shade the Earth, boost biological absorption of carbon dioxide, or capture and sequester carbon where fuel is burned. She finds such proposals dangerous but alluring distractions from the work that must be done, products of the linear logic that put humankind afoul of nonlinear systems. Instead, Dumanoski urges a strategy of survivability: deliberate steps to reduce our disruption of planetary systems coupled with efforts to reconfigure patterns in human systems that make our civilization dangerously vulnerable to shocks. In a nutshell, she counsels steps to reverse the “hypercoherence” of globalization, to pursue resilience, and to apply design features from natural systems to human arrangements. Through such adjustments she sees the best chance for shepherding the achievements of civilization through a disruptive century she expects to shake human arrangements to their foundations. In the end, Dumanoski’s “honest hope” feels anemic. She doesn’t tell readers how to draw on the adaptive capacity she considers our species’ birthright, the hard-wired abilities that once made us “stormworthy.” Perhaps no one can tell us that. But the challenges of guiding a globalized civilization of 7 billion souls through global climate disruption are in any case hardly comparable to the challenges that faced migratory hominin bands enduring the whip-saw climates of the Pleistocene. Yet like Rachel Carson before her, Dumanoski presents a compelling case. Her honesty is stark: “Bitter truths serve better than sweet lies.” As for hope, she quotes systems scientist C.S. “Buzz” Holling, who urges readers “to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living.”
Cue Stewart Brand, self-described “ecologist by training, futurist by profession, and hacker (lazy engineer) at heart.” Brand founded and published The Whole Earth Catalog, edited CoEvolution Quarterly (later Whole Earth Review), and has founded organizations including The Long Now Foundation and the Global Business Network, where he works part-time. Brand is a playful, inquisitive gadfly who wears a heretic’s robes with relish, challenging readers to reexamine assumptions and to change their minds. Framed as a challenge to environmentalists, his new book Whole Earth Discipline presents four heresies: Cities are Green! Nukes are Green! Gene modification is Green! Geoengineering is Probably Necessary! At first glance, Brand would seem to personify Dumanoski’s nightmare. His motto, “We are as gods, and HAVE to get good at it!” positively drips with the hubris that Dumanoski detects at the heart of the planet’s emergency. But there is much the two authors agree on, beginning with their assessment of the climate crisis; in a TED Talk outlining the four heresies, Brand calls climate change “worse than we think, and coming faster than we think.” The two share heroes. Brand, like Dumanoski, is close to Gaia originator James Lovelock, and he is on friendly terms with prominent scientists including climatologist Paul Crutzen, biologists E.O. Wilson and Peter Raven, restoration ecologist Dan Janzen, genome decoder Craig Venter. When it comes to assessment of the planetary challenge and the people who understand it best, Dumanoski and Brand are on the same page. Where Brand differs, and what makes Whole Earth Discipline a provocative companion to The End of the Long Summer, is his orientation. Brand admits to the “engineer’s bias”: the world is a set of design problems. Framed this way, the world’s problems a priori have solutions; the solutions must simply be found and applied. If his tone seems unusually chipper given the weight of those problems, it’s because Brand is at heart a gadget guy, eager to choose the right tool and get on with the job. Brand claims that he is not out to convince anyone. He states flatly: “My opinion is not important, it’s just a tool.” He is out to force readers to examine their assumptions, a desirable talent in a world shifting at its foundations. Thus in his chapter titled “New Nukes,” Brand spars cheerfully with his friend Amory Lovins over the economic viability of nuclear power. Brand is unlikely to win this particular debate with Lovins, who has been engaged with nuclear issues about as long as the country’s oldest nuclear reactor (Oyster Creek in New Jersey) has been generating power, but if he has even dented the armor of reflexive opponents of nuclear expansion, then he has achieved his purpose. Solar and renewable power appeal to Brand, and he contends “energy efficiency and conservation come first, last, and always.” He just doesn’t believe that clean, non-nuclear power sources can scale fast enough to meet the baseload demand of growing megacities or shut down coal fast enough to avoid climate disaster. He bases his views in part on the work of Saul Griffith, who has calculated the physical scale of renewable and nuclear power expansion needed to supply 17.5 terawatts of global power demand within 25 years. It’s an area the size of the United States – “Call it Renewistan,” Griffith says – and Brand thinks we’re unlikely to do that, but might go nuclear if we consider it Green. “Science is the only news,” Brand proclaims with relish, brandishing headlines from Nature, Science, and specialized journals. His footnotes and annotations (available here online) are a treasure trove, and most readers will discover “hidden in plain sight” surprises from new research in his chapters on cities, genetic science, and the large-scale ecosystem restoration strategies he likes the term “megagardening” to describe. Sometimes, however, Brand’s enthusiasm for data blinds him to context. Brand sees “a ray of hope” in news that the abundant phytoplankton Emiliana huxleyi increases its rate of calcification at higher carbon dioxide concentrations – a finding that would portend increasing carbon capture by the oceans as climate change advanced. But he fails to mention reasons this laboratory result may not pertain under natural conditions in the ocean (where acidification puts other, larger shellfish at risk). His wish for an elegant negative feedback mechanism reaches farther than available data can support. Brand attempts to push “ecopragmatism” on a green movement he considers overly prone to sentiment and ideology. The critique rings true to me, and there is much to learn from Brand’s eclectic appetite for solutions. Doom fills the book, but not gloom; his favorite adjective is “thrilling.” Seeing vitality where others see only chaos and decay, Brand is a sort of countercultural Tom Friedman. One senses that his first response to disastrous news like a “methane burp” from the melting permafrost of Siberia would be “Wow! Cool! What are we gonna do now?” Echoing Pogo’s famous line, Brand points out that “the key positive feedback in the current earth system is us.” To understand feedbacks and their influence on the structures, stocks, and flows of systems of all kinds is a central aim of Donella Meadows’s posthumous Thinking in Systems. Trained as a biophysicist, Meadows was lead author of The Limits to Growth (1973) and achieved distinction as a professor, author, syndicated columnist, and organic farmer. Though she died unexpectedly after a short illness in 2001, her work remains timely and exceptionally relevant to challenges of the scale and urgency laid out by Dumanoski and Brand.
Meadows’s long-time associate Diana Wright has edited an unfinished 1993 manuscript into humane, pertinent, and delightful book. Thinking in Systems reflects Meadows’s lifelong effort to understand systems at all scales – their resilience, their pathologies, their response to perturbations, their capacity to defy prediction. A reader seeking to understand the anomalies of our time and to prepare mentally for the likelihood of disruptive change needs this book. “A system,” Meadows writes, “is a set of things – people, cells, molecules, or whatever – interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.” Systems thinking can reveal interconnections, explain behavior, and anticipate outcomes. Changing outcomes – slowing climate disruption, spreading new crop varieties, containing an epidemic – requires action to change a system’s elements, the interconnections among them, or (more likely) both. Much of the book is devoted to introducing and illustrating systems concepts. Early chapters combine taut explanation with well-chosen examples to make a palatable primer. The book’s final section, “Creating Change – in Systems and in our Philosophy,” sheds welcome light on topics covered in The End of the Long Summer and Whole Earth Discipline. Chapter 6, “Leverage Points – Places to Intervene in a System” (first published in essay form in Brand’s Whole Earth Review) outlines twelve points of influence over the behavior of complex systems. Chapter 7, “Living in a World of Systems,” takes a step toward an ethics for a new human story, offering a humble acknowledgment that the systems view entails new responsibilities exercised in unfamiliar ways. Dianne Dumanoski is afraid a stable earth can’t live with us; Stewart Brand is pretty sure it can’t live without us. Do systems thinkers have the chops to guide us through the treacherous straits that separate those views? Can a systems-savvy ecopragmatism yield honest hope? Dana Meadows counsels that “systems thinking by itself cannot bridge that gap (between understanding and action), but it can lead us to the edge of what analysis can do and then point beyond – to what can and must be done by the human spirit.” Just past that edge is where the activism, politics, diplomacy – and innovation – of this century really begins. Edward Wolf was a contributing author of Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the Twenty-First Century. A board member of Focus the Nation, he lives in Portland, Oregon. Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 10:23 AM) U.S. Comes Under Pressure in Final Session Before Copenhagen Summit
by Keith Schneider This piece originally appeared in Yale e360 Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Politics at 10:14 AM) Threatened Voices: An Interactive Map
My friend and colleage Sami Ben Gharbia just launched a fascinating and useful new site: Threatened Voices. It’s an interactive map of bloggers under arrest and under threat around the world, with an accompanying timeline that makes it possible to track the phenomenon of arresting bloggers over the past several years. It’s an uncomfortable fact that, as blogs become a more influential public space, the technique of arresting bloggers to silence online speech becomes increasingly common. The Threatened Voices map complements another map that Sami maintains on Global Voices Advocacy, the Access Denied Map. That map is an overview of government efforts to block online publishing platforms, like Blogger or YouTube. I continue to believe that censorship of these types of sites is one of the most serious problems the web faces today. When a government blocks a website, it blocks the voice of one person or one group – when they block a tool like Wordpress or Twitter, they block all the voices that wanted to use that tool, which might represent hundreds or thousands of alternative perspectives. While I believe we should combat all online censorship (or, more to the point, I believe that any filtering should be done at the edge of the network, by parents, schools or businesses that pay for internet access, not by governments or ISPs), I think there’s a special importance in calling attention to these blocked platforms. But the blocking of a platform for speech is an abstract idea. Threatened Voices helps personalize the idea of internet censorship, making it clear that it’s a technique that doesn’t just involve blocking packets – it can involve harrassing and arresting individuals, sometimes detaining them for months or years. The goal was to provide a complement to organizations like Committee to Protect Bloggers and Reporters without Borders, who do a great job of leading campaigns to call attention to the imprisonment of individual bloggers. Threatened Voices isn’t campaigning for any of these individual bloggers – it’s trying to present a picture of how vast the phenomenon of imprisoning and threatening bloggers has become. There’s no way a map like the one Sami is building will ever be complete. We don’t know about every blogger who’s been arrested. And it’s a difficult question whether someone has been arrested for their blogging or for other alleged offenses – is Hossein Derakhshan still in prison because he’s alleged to be an Israeli spy (an absurd accusation) or because he’s an influential blogger? Sami’s trying to broaden the information available, asking people to contribute reports of bloggers under threat to the map. Knowing what countries are harrassing and arresting bloggers is a first step. What’s the most useful next step is an extremely difficult question. Not all countries respond well to external pressure, or to direct lobbying. It’s possible to harness a great deal of energy around the cause of releasing an individual blogger, but it’s not as clear how that energy should be productively channelled. My hope is that efforts to map this problem will help build solidarity between organizations that have a long track record of protecting journalists, or protecting human rights more generally, and the emerging movements to protect bloggers and the tools of online speech. This piece originally appeared on My heart's in Accra. Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Transparency and Human Rights at 9:25 AM) Climate Prosperity: Building a Worldwide Clean EconomyAs world leaders begin to pack their bags for the Climate Summit in Copenhagen next month, feelings of anxiety may accompany the pressure to hammer out an international agreement to cap carbon emissions to keep our planet from entering a period of climate crisis. A group of people involved in the Climate Prosperity Alliance are working to shift the debate to a more positive and productive goal. Instead of focusing on carbon-reduction strategies and schemes like cap and trade, “clean coal”, or carbon sequestration, the Climate Prosperity Alliance believes the Copenhagen Summit should be the entryway that leads the world into a global green economy. While some analysts are already predicting a dismal outcome for the conference, citing the inability of major players such as the United States, India, and China to come to agreements on limiting the amount of greenhouse gas emissions they produce, Hazel Henderson of the Climate Prosperity Alliance sees another opportunity for victory. “The real win”, says Henderson, “would be to get all the countries in the North and South to agree that the best thing to do is invest in the developing world, building the infrastructure that would allow it to leapfrog the fossil fuel economy. Everyone is in favor of investing in low-emissions energy”. The Climate Prosperity Alliance proposes that investing in a global infrastructure of renewable energy sources such as solar, geothermal, wind, and biofuel from algae, can not only prevent the creation of more greenhouse gases, but can foster a clean economy capable of competing with, and eventually overtaking traditional oil-dependent industrial practices. Though the money necessary to fund this “re-industrialization” is considerable, investors are already showing interest in the project. In fact, the Climate Prosperity Alliance will arrive in Copenhagen with very good news – the announcement of the first $1 trillion in investments raised to build the global green economy. Henderson and the Climate Prosperity Alliance suggest that if the world focuses on investing $1 trillion per year from 2010 to 2020 in renewable projects in the developing world, the foundation will be laid for a clean energy economy capable of competing with, and eventually overpowering power sources dependent on oil. This statement is supported by a report made by Climate Risk to the World Wildlife Fund using a computer model called CRISTAL (Climate Risk Industry Sector Technology Allocation) to calculate the speed required to re-industrialize the energy sectors to create a low-carbon economy and avoid catastrophic climate tipping points. “Government, industry and institutional investors can expect to see the benefits of their investment in transforming the energy sector from 2013. This is the point when the first of the renewable energy technologies starts to outperform the current fossil fuel, business-as-usual model.” Climate Risk also indicates that a secure, long-term investment environment will be necessary to fund the global green economy. An innovative solution proposed by the Climate Prosperity Alliance is the issue of Climate Bonds whose proceeds go towards re-industrialization projects in the developing world. Buyers of these bonds are literally investing in the future, promoting clean energy and feeling secure about a positive return in more ways than just financial. The Alliance is also speaking to managers of pension funds, whose investments are generally stable and long-term, to divert their investments from hedge funds and oil-dependent companies into Climate Prosperity funds for the future. Henderson added that in the fight against climate change, the obstacle is not a lack of money, but a lack of time. Every year of delay will increase the level of growth required and increase costs. If the Alliance’s advice is taken to heart by world leaders in Copenhagen, we may yet succeed in moving the global economy by 2020 from its current system of resource-wasting industrialism to a new economically and environmentally sustainable resource-saving industrialism. “By itself,” states the Climate Risk report, “an emissions trading scheme will not promote the growth of important but initially higher-cost technologies. A comprehensive plan for low-carbon industrial development is an integral part of the solution. “
Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by Agnes Mazur in Features at 9:00 AM) Olafur Eliasson: Playing with space and light - Talkitect.comOlafur Eliasson: Playing with space and light Talkitect.com "Many of his best-known works explore architecture and the mechanics of perception, almost as if the fantastical imaginings of Buckminster Fuller were ... Take the Power to Create Credit Away from the Giant Banks and Give It Back to ... - Prison Planet.comTake the Power to Create Credit Away from the Giant Banks and Give It Back to ... Prison Planet.com But remember – as Buckminster Fuller pointed out – building a new model is often easier than fighting the existing one. The time is right for a new model. ... and more » When Green Isn't Green Enough: UC Observer Interviews Alex on the State of the Movement
In their most recent issue, The UC Observer put Lisa Van de Ven's article exploring the state of the environmental movement on the cover. Her piece When Green Isn't Green Enough poses this question to readers: 'Think you’re doing your bit for the environment? Here’s the deal: you’re just getting started.' Van de Ven interviewed our own Alex Steffen for the article. Although the entire thing is worth a read, here is some of what Alex had to say: By making small changes like buying better light bulbs or low-flow showerheads, individuals are reducing their impact by maybe three to five percent, Steffen says. Armed with the illusion that we’re doing our part, we stop there. In fact, many of us are fooling ourselves into thinking we’re doing more than we actually are; a July study by Quebec-based research and communications firm Cossette and Summerhill showed that gaps of up to 40 percent exist between what Canadians think they’re doing for the environment and what they actually do. ... “You see Al Gore’s movie [An Inconvenient Truth], with a giant civilization-ending problem, and the solutions at the very end are little things you can do at home,” Steffen says. “I think that is problematic because it ignores the whole idea that democracy is based on, which is that regular people can understand complex problems and come to a decision together to meet those challenges. And certainly we’ve seen situations in the past where people have done those things — whether it’s about individual liberties or group rights or suffrage for women.”... It’s not that the tips aren’t a step in the right direction, Steffen adds; if millions of people change all of their light bulbs or refuse plastic water bottles, there will be an effect. It’s just that, given the urgency of the situation, change might not be happening quickly enough, he says.... It’s going to take individual action, too, but not the kind that comes in a shopping cart. What Steffen advocates is good old-fashioned activism. “The problem is not that we are not each doing enough in our lives, but that we’re not doing the right things,” he says. “The more people who can move up that ladder of engagement, the better our odds get.” It might be as easy as starting a green committee at church or at work.
Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 2:42 PM) Nearly 200 Organizations and Companies Urge Senate to Adopt Key Energy-Efficiency Provision in Climate Bill
A diverse coalition of nearly 200 business, labor, civil rights, and environmental groups have sent a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) urging her to support an important energy-efficiency provision that would:
What is this magical provision? As the letter explains: We are writing to request that the climate bill require an investment in energy efficiency equivalent to at least 1/3 of the value of the total allowance allocation given to electric utilities. Such an efficiency investment will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs retrofitting millions of buildings nationwide, and benefit consumers by lowering electricity costs by billions of dollars, as residential, commercial, and industrial consumers typically save in the range of $2 to $4 for every $1 invested in energy efficiency. It would also help decrease greenhouse gas emissions and thus reduce the market clearing price of carbon.Following is a joint statement from the broad-based coalition: “We believe that the adoption of an additional electric utility, energy-efficiency measure in the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act will reap tremendous benefits for our economy and consumers.Energy efficiency is the fastest, cheapest and cleanest way to reduce our carbon pollution. We urge the Environment and Public Works Committee to act now by adopting this provision to create jobs, reduce pollution, and save consumers and businesses money.” For more on benefits of efficiency in the climate bill, see:
This piece originally appeared on Climate Progress. Image Credit: Campus Progress via Flickr, Creative Commons License Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by Joe Romm in Politics at 12:52 PM) |
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