Brian Tokar on Global Warming and Climate Justice

My take on peak oil back in 2008. I was right.

Oil peak: A crude ruse?

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero

"We're running out of oil!" We've been hearing this warning at least since the 1970s oil shocks, but recently it has been proclaimed with increasing insistence.

The idea goes back to 1956, when Shell geologist M King Hubbert declared that the world had enough oil for only about 50 more years. This thesis, popularly known as "peak oil'' or "Hubbert's peak", was based on his estimates of petroleum reserves and ever-increasing energy demand.

Were Hubbert right, the productivity of oil wells should be plummeting about now. In fact, my next trip in my Toyota could be my last car ride ever.

So are we running short of oil? Far from it. By 2007, exploitable reserves of oil were well over one trillion barrels. Current world demand, according to the United States-based Energy Information Administration, is 31,4-billion barrels a year.

Since Hubbert's day, technologies for oil exploration have improved at breakneck speed, leading to the discovery of deposits in places nobody imagined decades ago. And new extraction technologies now make it possible to obtain oil from increasingly remote places and geological formations that were previously impenetrable.

High petrol and electricity prices have nothing to do with the alleged scarcity of crude. Rather, the "peak oil" thesis has caused many citizens and consumers to accept high energy prices without protesting. Don't blame Hugo Chávez or the Arabs. When oil prices go up, the ultimate winners are oil company stockholders.

But energy demand does keep increasing. The US government forecasts that energy consumption worldwide will grow by 71% between 2003 and 2030. Is the end of oil only a little bit further off than Hubbert predicted?

Not quite.

Canada's tar sands contain the world's largest petroleum reserves after Saudi Arabia. Some argue that these will never be tapped because it is too costly to extract the oil from a problematic mix of bitumen, sand, clay and water. But as the price of oil hovers around and surpasses the $100-a-barrel mark, which it hit early this month, extracting oil from places where it previously was not a worthwhile investment will become profitable. British Petroleum is already in the Canadian province of Alberta, exploiting a 54 000-square-mile tar sand deposit. This is only the vanguard of a new petroleum rush, this time in the northern latitudes.

Separating oil from tar sands produces four times as much carbon dioxide as conventional oil drilling. Exploiting these deposits could release as much as 100-million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This surely explains the Canadian government's stubborn and obstructionist stance at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali last December. Canada, along with the US and Japan, refused to accept the emissions cuts of 25% to 40% originally proposed by European countries.

Even if the tar sands run out, we have enough coal to burn for centuries. The race is on to develop an economically feasible way to turn it into liquid fuel. South Africa's Sasol is carrying out studies to that end.

In other words, we have plenty of fossil fuels. They will not run out in our lifetime, as many environmentalists hope. The planet will have been cooked several times over before there is a real scarcity of coal or oil.

We cannot afford to sit around and wait for a "peak oil'' crisis that will not come. Only activism and political action can save the planet from global warming. -- IPS

Author and investigative reporter Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero is a fellow at the Oakland Institute

http://mg.co.za/article/2008-01-27-oil-peak-a-crude-ruse

Carmelo Ruiz: Business is not the solution to climate change

N Now that the COP 21 Paris climate talks are on, I share with you this piece I wrote in 2011.

Business Won’t Solve Global Warming »

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero, December 9, 2011

We need civil disobedience and massive non-collaboration with illegitimate authority if we are to reverse course on global climate change.read more

The climate summit in Durban, South Africa, does not appear to be making great strides. The United States is dragging its feet, blocking any binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gases.

Along with Washington, businesses are trying to turn the whole Durban process away from urgent emissions cuts and toward an increasingly perplexing and sophisticated array of non-solutions. These include large-scale biofuel plantations, genetically engineered “supercrops,” synthetic biology, unworkable yet lucrative carbon offset schemes and something called geoengineering, whereby scientists would turn the globe into a giant experiment by injecting newfangled materials into the atmosphere to try to counteract global warming.

Such technological quick fixes all assume that global warming can be tackled without changing entrenched patterns of production and consumption in industrialized societies. Even worse, they assume that the multifaceted ecological and societal crises that we face today can be addressed without confrontation, sacrifice or trade-offs. They assume that the free market can solve the climate change crisis when, in fact, it created the crisis.

The suits who are in Durban and elsewhere trying to sell us these technological fixes and free market fallacies are in the environmental act to make money.

But turning this into a business is simply not right. The Freedom Riders, the 19th century abolitionists, conscientious objectors against wars past and present, and the crusaders who risked life and limb for women's suffrage and workers' rights were not in it for the money. They would have regarded the idea of turning their brave struggles into business opportunities as comically obscene.

The major movements for social change, including the U.S. civil rights movement, well understood that power concedes nothing without a demand, that they could not afford to live in a make-believe “win-win” world in which freedom and progress are attained without a price.

For a way out of the climate crisis, proposals are not enough. We can talk all we want about local sustainable economies, organic city gardening, recycling, solar energy and steady-state post-growth economics, but we need action. We simply cannot continue along the path we’re on. It is literally destroying the planet.

And when it comes to action we should look to the example of activists who have physically obstructed the extraction of oil shale and tar sands and the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

These protesters are politically close relatives of the everyday folks who camped out in the Wisconsin state capitol earlier this year and the anti-Wall Street occupiers who are protesting all over the country right now.

This kind of activism holds out the most promise, as the late historian Howard Zinn taught us.

We need civil disobedience and massive non-collaboration with illegitimate authority if we are to reverse course on global climate change.

To save the environment, the last thing we should do is turn it into a business venture.

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero is a Puerto Rican author, essayist, investigative journalist and environmental educator. He is a research associate of the Institute for Social Ecology.

- See more at: http://progressive.org/global_warming.html#sthash.HhqrodC0.dpuf

Exxon knew all along, Carmelo was right all along

Exxon Knew Everything There Was to Know About Climate Change by the Mid-1980s—and Denied It →

 A few weeks before the last great international climate conference—2009, in Copenhagen—the e-mail accounts of a few climate scientists were hacked and reviewed for incriminating evidence suggesting that global warming was a charade. Eight separate investigations later concluded that there was literally nothing to “Climategate,” save a few sentences taken completely out of context—but by that time, endless, breathless media accounts about the “scandal” had damaged the prospects for any progress at the conference.

Now, on the eve of the next global gathering in Paris this December, there’s a new scandal. But this one doesn’t come from an anonymous hacker taking a few sentences out of context. This one comes from months of careful reporting by two separate teams, one at the Pulitzer Prize–winning website Inside Climate News, and other at the Los Angeles Times (with an assist from the Columbia Journalism School). Following separate lines of evidence and document trails, they’ve reached the same bombshell conclusion: ExxonMobil, the world’s largest and most powerful oil company, knew everything there was to know about climate change by the mid-1980s, and then spent the next few decades systematically funding climate denial and lying about the state of the science.

Rising Currents

 

Rising Currents: Looking Back and Next Steps

Text by Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design

The Rising Currents exhibition at MoMA closed on October 11, and as we have worked on the de-installation of the show in the intervening weeks, I have had a chance to reflect on the exhibition and the project as a whole. As I’ve noted here previously, the workshop and exhibition were precedent-setting in many ways—for myself as a curator, for MoMA as an institution, and, in some ways, for the New York architecture and landscape design community.

Unlike many exhibitions where the show itself is the end destination and ultimate distillation of researched concepts, the Rising Currents exhibition was always intended to be the “second act” in a three-part production, as it were. We wanted the exhibition to jump-start a dialogue on the urgency of climate change and rising sea levels among public officials, policy-makers, and the general public. Possible “third acts” could be to have some of the solutions proposed by the architects in the exhibition actually implemented, or to replicate theRising Currents workshop and exhibition model in other locales that face similar challenges with sea level rise. In my recent article, “The Activist Exhibition: In the Wake of Rising Currents,” published in Log 20 (a print journal for writing and criticism on architecture), I expand further on how Rising Currents embodies the theme of Log 20: “curating as advocacy.”

It has been interesting to note that even though the exhibition is over, I continue to get research inquiries and requests for speaking engagements on the show from a wide range of people and organizations both here in the U.S. and abroad. I am actually delivering a talk next month on the exhibition at The Laboratory for Research and Innovation in Architecture, Design, Urban Planning and Advanced Tourism in Tenerife, one of the islands in the seven Canary Islands, Spain. The diversity of these requests and the continued interest in the topic indicates to me that the exhibition was successful in catalyzing debate, raising the awareness of the issues of climate change and rising sea levels, and, perhaps most importantly, elevating the role of design in tackling issues of climate change.

We held a closing panel discussion here at MoMA one week before the exhibition ended. The presentations and discussion focused on reactions to the exhibition and possible next steps. We recorded the discussion and wanted to share it here for those that couldn’t attend the event.

TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE:
http://grist.org/climate-energy/get-ready-for-record-temperatures-for-the-rest-of-your-life/

Get ready for record temperatures … for the rest of your life

By Maggie Severns

Within 35 years, even a cold year will be warmer than the hottest year on record, according to research published in Nature on Wednesday. The study, which used 39 climate models to make a single temperature index for places all over the world, estimates when major U.S. cities’ average temps will never again dip below that of the hottest year in the past century and a half. As the above chart shows, that’s as early as 2043 for Phoenix and Honolulu, 2049 for San Francisco, and 2071 for Anchorage, Alaska.

Wrong on peak oil (?)

I hate to be right about this subject. Here is the column I wrote about peak oil back in January 2008: http://mg.co.za/article/2008-01-27-oil-peak-a-crude-ruse

Here is George Monbiot's new column on peak oil:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/02/peak-oil-we-we-wrong?CMP=twt_fd

 

We were wrong on peak oil. There's enough to fry us all

A boom in oil production has made a mockery of our predictions. Good news for capitalists – but a disaster for humanity

IPCC chair interview on Treehugger Radio

http://www.treehugger.com/treehugger-radio/rajendra-pachauri-chairman-of-the-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change-treehugger-radio.html

© Ed Wray/AP
For all the scientists and researchers studying how humans sway the climate, there is one group whose job it is to compile, aggregate, and synthesize these thousands of findings. Sitting at the prow of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is Rajendra Pachauri, a man who frequently finds himself under fire from “climate deniers," and even those who would otherwise be his allies. In our interview, Pachauri previews some of the findings of the Panel’s upcoming 5th assessment, speaks to the lopsided nature of climate coverage in the news, and responds to the often-heard criticism that his personal views too often show through.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, download the MP3, or click play below.

GRAIN: Food and Climate Change

http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4357-food-and-climate-change-the-forgotten-link

Food and climate change: The forgotten link

GRAIN | 28 September 2011 | Against the grain

Climate change endangers food security in Himalayan communities such as Dunche, in Nepal’s Rasuwa District. In this photo Tamang women pound and sift wheat. (Photo credit: Minority Rights Group/Jared Ferrie)

Food is a key driver of climate change. How our food gets produced and how it ends up on our tables accounts for around half of all human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Chemical fertilizers, heavy machinery and other petroleum-dependant farm technologies contribute significantly. The impact of the food industry as a whole is even greater: destroying forests and savannahs to produce animal feed and generating climate-damaging waste through excess packaging, processing, refrigeration and the transport of food over long distances, despite leaving millions of people hungry.

A new food system could be a key driver of solutions to climate change. People around the world are involved in struggles to defend or create ways of growing and sharing food that are healthier for their communities and for the planet. If measures are taken to restructure agriculture and the larger food system around food sovereignty, small scale farming, agro-ecology and local markets, we could cut global emissions in half within a few decades. We don’t need carbon markets or techno-fixes. We need the right policies and programmes to dump the current industrial food system and create a sustainable, equitable and truly productive one instead.

The industrial food system is responsible for 44 to 57% of all global GHG emissions

Bill McKibben tells it like it is

http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175399/

Three Strikes and You’re Hot
Time for Obama to Say No to the Fossil Fuel Wish List
By Bill McKibben

In our globalized world, old-fashioned geography is not supposed to count for much: mountain ranges, deep-water ports, railroad grades -- those seem so nineteenth century. The earth is flat, or so I remember somebody saying.

But those nostalgic for an earlier day, take heart. The Obama administration is making its biggest decisions yet on our energy future and those decisions are intimately tied to this continent’s geography. Remember those old maps from your high-school textbooks that showed each state and province’s prime economic activities? A sheaf of wheat for farm country? A little steel mill for manufacturing? These days in North America what you want to look for are the pickaxes that mean mining, and the derricks that stand for oil.

There’s a pickaxe in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, one of the world’s richest deposits of coal. If we’re going to have any hope of slowing climate change, that coal -- and so all that future carbon dioxide -- needs to stay in the ground. In precisely the way we hope Brazil guards the Amazon rainforest, that massive sponge for carbon dioxide absorption, we need to stand sentinel over all that coal.

Doing so, however, would cost someone some money. At current prices the value of that coal may be in the trillions, and that kind of money creates immense pressure. Earlier this year, President Obama signed off on the project, opening a huge chunk of federal land to coal mining. It holds an estimated 750 million tons worth of burnable coal. That’s the equivalent of opening 300 new coal-fired power plants. In other words, we’re talking about staggering amounts of new CO2 heading into the atmosphere to further heat the planet.

As Eric de Place of the Sightline Institute put it, “That’s more carbon pollution than all the energy -- from planes, factories, cars, power plants, etc. -- used in an entire year by all 44 nations in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean combined.” Not what you’d expect from a president who came to office promising that his policies would cause the oceans to slow their rise.

But if Obama has admittedly opened the mine gate, it's geography to the rescue. You still have to get that coal to market, and “market” in this case means Asia, where the demand for coal is growing fastest. The easiest and cheapest way to do that -- maybe the only way at current prices -- is to take it west to the Pacific where, at the moment, there’s no port capable of handling the huge increase in traffic it would represent.

And so a mighty struggle is beginning, with regional groups rising to the occasion. Climate Solutions and other environmentalists of the northwest are moving to block port-expansion plans in Longview and Bellingham, Washington, as well as in Vancouver, British Columbia. Since there are only so many possible harbors that could accommodate the giant freighters needed to move the coal, this might prove a winnable battle, though the power of money that moves the White House is now being brought to bear on county commissions and state houses. Count on this: it will be a titanic fight.

Strike two against the Obama administration was the permission it granted early in the president’s term to build a pipeline into Minnesota and Wisconsin to handle oil pouring out of the tar sands of Alberta. (It came on the heels of a Bush administration decision to permit an earlier pipeline from those tar sands deposits through North Dakota to Oklahoma). The vast region of boreal Canada where the tar sands are found is an even bigger carbon bomb than the Powder River coal. By some calculations, the tar sands contain the equivalent of about 200 parts per million CO2 -- or roughly half the current atmospheric concentration. Put another way, if we burn it, there’s no way we can control climate change.

Fortunately, that sludge is stuck so far in the northern wilds of Canada that getting it to a refinery is no easy task. It’s not even easy to get the equipment needed to do the mining to the extraction zone, a fact that noble activists in the northern Rockies are exploiting with a campaign to block the trucks hauling the giant gear north. (Exxon has been cutting trees along wild and scenic corridors just to widen the roads in the region, that’s how big their “megaloads” are.)

Unfortunately, the administration’s decision to permit that Minnesota pipeline has made the job of sending the tar sand sludge south considerably easier. And now the administration is getting ready to double down, with a strike three that would ensure forever Obama’s legacy as a full-on Carbon President.

The huge oil interests that control the tar sands aren’t content with a landlocked pipeline to the Midwest. They want another, dubbed Keystone XL, that stretches from Canada straight to Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. It would take the bitumen from the tar sands and pipe it across the heart of America. Imagine a video game where your goal is to do the most environmental damage possible: to the Cree and their ancestral lands in Canada, to Nebraska farmers trying to guard the Ogallala aquifer that irrigates their land, and of course to the atmosphere.

But the process is apparently politically wired and in a beautifully bipartisan Washington way. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton must approve the plan for Keystone XL because it crosses our borders. Last year, before she’d even looked at the relevant data, she said she was “inclined” to do so. And why not? I mean, the company spearheading the Keystone project, TransCanada, has helpfully hired her former deputy national campaign director as its principal lobbyist.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political aisle, those oil barons the Koch Brothers and that fossil fuel front group the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are pushing for early approval. Michigan Republican Congressman Fred Upton, chair of the House Energy Committee, is already demanding that the project be fast-tracked, with a final approval decision by November, on the grounds that it would create jobs. This despite the fact that even the project’s sponsors concede it won’t reduce gas prices. In fact, as Jeremy Symons of the National Wildlife Federation pointed out in testimony to Congress last month, their own documents show that the pipeline will probably cause the price at the pump to rise across the Midwest.

When the smaller pipeline was approved in 2009, we got a taste of the arguments that the administration will use this time around, all masterpieces of legal obfuscation. Don’t delay the pipeline over mere carbon worries will be the essence of it.

Global warming concerns, said Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg then, would be "best addressed in the context of the overall set of domestic policies that Canada and the United States will take to address their respective greenhouse gas emissions." In other words, let’s confine the environmental argument over the pipeline to questions like: How much oil will leak? In the meantime, we’ll pretend to deal with climate change somewhere else.

It’s the kind of thinking that warms the hearts of establishments everywhere. Michael Levi, author of a Council on Foreign Relations study of the Canadian oil sands, told the Washington Post that, with the decision, “the Obama administration made clear that it's not going to go about its climate policy in a crude, blunt way." No, it’s going about it in a smooth and… oily way.

If we value the one planet we’ve got, it’s going to be up to the rest of us to be crude and blunt. And happily that planet is pitching in. The geography of this beautiful North American continent is on our side: it’s crude and blunt, full of mountains and canyons. Its weather runs to extremes. It’s no easy thing to build a pipeline across it, or to figure out how to run an endless parade of train cars to the Pacific.

Tough terrain aids the insurgent; it slows the powerful. Though we’re fighting a political campaign and not a military one, we need to take full advantage.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of 350.org, and a TomDispatch regular. His most recent book, just out in paperback, is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

Copyright 2011 Bill McKibben

Naomi Klein joning 350.org

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2011/04/joining-350-org-next-phase

Joining 350.Org: The Next Phase

By Naomi Klein - April 7th, 2011

Today I joined the newly formed Board of Directors of 350.org, coinciding with a range of exciting new changes at the organization. I have been a supporter of 350.org since I first heard about the wacky plan to turn a wonky scientific target into a global people’s movement, and I’m thrilled and honored to be officially joining the team.

In the past three years, we have all watched the number “350” morph into a beautiful and urgent S.O.S., rising up from every corner of the globe, from Iceland to the Maldives, Ethiopia to Alaska. In the process, 350.org helped to decisively shift the climate conversation from polar bears to people – the people whose island nations, cultures and livelihoods will disappear unless those of us who live in the high emitting countries embrace a different economic path.

******

If there is one thing that the failure of cap-and-trade has taught us, it is that trying to win this battle by lobbying elites behind closed doors is a disastrously losing strategy. Not only did it fail to deliver even weak climate legislation in the U.S., it made climate action look like just another opportunity for cronyism, helping to alienate a large sector of the public.

Astroturf for Hire, Climate Change Denial

Two items from the Center for Media and Democracy's "The Spin" online newsletter:

Astroturf for Hire
Source: National Public Radio

Bank lobbyists have descended en masse to influence new regulations and some firms seem to think their advocacy would be more effective if it came from grassroots groups and not corporations. Some have even forged letters in the hopes of influencing regulators. Find out more about the astroturfing and forgeries.

The Kochs' Climate Change Denial Media Machine
Source: Mother Jones, February 4, 2011

Billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, the second largest privately-held energy company in America, have poured millions of dollars into creating a web of media influence to increase their power to sow doubt aboclimate change. Learn more about the groups they are funding to spin public opinion.

A message from the Organic Consumers Association

1800 Days: Organic Solutions to the Global Crisis

Beyond the deliberate disinformation and gloom and doom of the daily news, we must take decisive action to save ourselves and the future generations. A growing corps of scientists and climatologists have delivered the final warning: we are within 1,800 days – or five years - of passing the atmospheric point of no return, whereby increasing greenhouse gas pollution and global warming will take us over the cliff of climate catastrophe. On the other hand, the grassroots-practical, ready-to-be-scaled-up, healthy and climate-friendly solutions that we need to move away from the precipice are everyday more evident: organic food and farming, green buildings, smart transportation, renewable energy, sustainable living. We are fortunate to have five years or 1800 days to turn things around, to put an end to business as usual, to slash fossil fuel use, to phase-out the coal industry, to retool the electrical grid, to retrofit residential and commercial buildings, and to sequester as much CO2 in the soil as possible through organic farming, ranching, and land management. We have 1800 productive days to reverse the global suicide economy and supercharge a Great Transition toward organic and sustainable ways of living, governance, and commerce. The hour is late. But the power of the people is greater than Fossil Fuel and Food Inc.'s out-of-control technology. Please join us. Please support our efforts.

Earth Policy Institute: Future at Risk on a Hotter Planet

Future at Risk on a Hotter Planet www.earth-policy.org/book_bytes/2010/pb4ch03_ss2 By Lester R. Brown			Earth Policy Release Plan B 4.0 Book Byte December 1, 2010
We are entering a new era, one of rapid and often unpredictable climate change. In fact, the new climate norm is change. The 25 warmest years on record have come since 1980. And the 10 warmest years since global recordkeeping began in 1880 have come since 1998. The effects of rising temperature are pervasive. Higher temperatures diminish crop yields, melt the mountain glaciers that feed rivers, generate more-destructive storms, increase the severity of flooding, intensify drought, cause more-frequent and destructive wildfires, and alter ecosystems everywhere. We are altering the earth's climate, setting in motion trends we do not always understand with consequences we cannot anticipate. Crop-withering heat waves have lowered grain harvests in key food-producing regions in recent years. One with a profoundly direct human impact was the searing heat wave that broke temperature records across Europe in 2003. The intense heat, which contributed to the world grain harvest falling short of consumption by 90 million tons, also claimed more than 52,000 lives. There has also been a dramatic increase in the land area affected by drought in recent decades. A team of scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that the area of the globe experiencing very dry conditions expanded from less than 15 percent in the 1970s to roughly 30 percent by 2002. The scientists attribute part of the change to a rise in temperature and part to reduced precipitation, with high temperatures becoming progressively more important during the latter part of the period. A 2009 report published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reinforces these findings. It concludes that if atmospheric CO2 climbs to 450-600 ppm, the world will face irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions of the world. The study likened the conditions to those of the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. The warming is caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases and other pollutants in the atmosphere. Of the greenhouse gases, CO2 accounts for 63 percent of the recent warming trend, methane 18 percent, and nitrous oxide 6 percent, with several lesser gases accounting for the remaining 13 percent. Carbon dioxide comes mostly from electricity generation, heating, transportation, and industry. In contrast, human-caused methane and nitrous oxide emissions come largely from agriculture—methane from rice paddies and cattle and nitrous oxide from the use of nitrogenous fertilizer. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the principal driver of climate change, have climbed from nearly 280 parts per million (ppm) when the Industrial Revolution began around 1760 to 387 ppm in 2009. The annual rise in atmospheric CO2 level, now one of the world's most predictable environmental trends, results from emissions on a scale that is overwhelming nature's capacity to absorb carbon. In 2008, some 7.9 billion tons of carbon were emitted from the burning of fossil fuels and 1.5 billion tons were emitted from deforestation, for a total of 9.4 billion tons. But since nature has been absorbing only about 5 billion tons per year in oceans, soils, and vegetation, nearly half of those emissions stay in the atmosphere, pushing up CO2 levels. Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is produced when organic matter is broken down under anaerobic conditions, including the decomposition of plant material in bogs, organic materials in landfills, or forage in a cow's stomach. Methane can also be released with the thawing of permafrost, the frozen ground underlying the tundra that covers nearly 9 million square miles in the northern latitudes. All together, Arctic soils contain more carbon than currently resides in the atmosphere, which is a worry considering that permafrost is now melting in Alaska, northern Canada, and Siberia, creating lakes and releasing methane. Once they get under way, permafrost melting, the release of methane and CO2, and rising temperature create a self-reinforcing trend, what scientists call a "positive feedback loop." The risk is that the release of a massive amount of methane into the atmosphere from melting permafrost could simply overwhelm efforts to stabilize climate. Another unsettling development is the effect of atmospheric brown clouds (ABCs) consisting of soot particles from burning coal, diesel fuel, or wood. These particles affect climate in three ways. First, by intercepting sunlight, they heat the upper atmosphere. Second, because they also reflect sunlight, they have a dimming effect, lowering the earth's surface temperature. And third, if particles from these brown clouds are deposited on snow and ice, they darken the surface and accelerate melting. These effects are of particular concern in India and China, where a large ABC over the Tibetan Plateau is contributing to the melting of glaciers that supply the major rivers of Asia. Soot deposition causes earlier seasonal melting of mountain snow in ranges as different as the Himalayas of Asia and the Sierra Nevada of California, and it is also believed to be accelerating the melting of Arctic sea ice. In contrast to CO2, which may remain in the atmosphere for a century or more, soot particles in ABCs are typically airborne for only a matter of weeks. Thus, once coal-fired power plants are closed or wood cooking stoves are replaced with solar cookers, atmospheric soot disappears rapidly. If we continue with business as usual, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC's) projected rise in the earth's average temperature of 1.1-6.4 degrees Celsius (2-11 degrees Fahrenheit) during this century seems all too possible. Unfortunately, during the several years since the IPCC study was released, both global CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentrations have exceeded those in its worst-case scenario. With each passing year the chorus of urgency from the scientific community intensifies. Each new report indicates that we are running out of time. For instance, a landmark 2009 study by a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that the effects of climate change will be twice as severe as those they projected as recently as six years prior. Instead of a likely global temperature rise of 2.4 degrees Celsius, they now see a rise exceeding 5 degrees. Another report, this one prepared independently as a background document for the December 2009 international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, indicated that every effort should be made to hold the temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Beyond this, dangerous climate change is considered inevitable. To hold the temperature rise to 2 degrees, the scientists note that CO2 emissions should be reduced by 60-80 percent immediately, but since this is not possible, they note that, "To limit the extent of the overshoot, emissions should peak in the near future." The Pew Center on Global Climate Change sponsored an analysis of some 40 scientific studies that link rising temperature with changes in ecosystems. Among the many changes reported are spring arriving nearly two weeks earlier in the United States, tree swallows nesting nine days earlier than they did 40 years ago, and a northward shift of red fox habitat that has it encroaching on the Arctic fox's range. Inuits have been surprised by the appearance of robins, a bird they have never seen before. Indeed, there is no word in Inuit for "robin." Douglas Inkley, National Wildlife Federation senior science advisor, notes, "We face the prospect that the world of wildlife that we now know—and many of the places we have invested decades of work in conserving as refuges and habitats for wildlife—will cease to exist as we know them, unless we change this forecast." Unfortunately, this observation holds true for humans as well. If we cannot quickly reduce carbon emissions, it is civilization itself that is at risk.

DANGER: Carbon capitalism

October 8, 2010...11:42 am

Carbon Trading: Capitalism of the Air

Conflicts with Indigenous Knowledge

Trading of Hot Air – Privatization of the Sky

“The modalities and procedures for activities under the Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM) do not respect and guarantee our right to lands, territories, and self-determination. CDM and Sinks projects do not contribute to climate change mitigation and sustainable development” – Paragraph, Tiohtiá:ke Declaration, Indigenous Declaration, UNFCCC, COP11/MOP1, Montreal, Canada 2005

The adoption of mechanisms that allow for carbon pollution trading in the Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol has turned the potential threat of climate change into an opportunity for profit. The trading of carbon and greenhouse gases is a new form of colonialism. It creates CO2lonialism.

Carbon trading enables corporations and governments to avoid reducing greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing carbon credits. These carbon credits can come either from carbon offsetting projects like tree plantations, which are established under the guise of “development” in poor countries.

Many Indigenous peoples reject the claim that carbon trading will halt the climate crisis. This crisis has been caused more than anything else by the mining of fossil fuels and the release of their carbon to the oceans, air, soil and living things. This excessive burning of fossil fuels is now jeopardizing Earth’s ability to maintain a livable climate.

Governments, export credit agencies, corporations and international financial institutions continue to support and finance fossil fuel exploration, extraction and other activities that worsen global warming, such as forest degradation and destruction on a massive scale, while dedicating only token sums to renewable energy. It is particularly disturbing that the World Bank has recently defied the recommendation of its own Extractive Industries Review which calls for the phasing out of World Bank financing for coal, oil and gas extraction. In contradiction, the World Bank facilitates these false, market-based approaches to climate change through its Prototype Carbon Fund, the BioCarbon Fund and the Community Development Carbon Fund at the same time it is promoting, on a far greater scale, the continued exploration for, and extraction and burning of fossil fuels – which will only ensure more of the same failed policies of the North.

Many Indigenous peoples and organizations denounce the further delays in ending fossil fuel extraction that are being caused by corporate, government and United Nations’ attempts to construct a “carbon market”, including a market trading in “carbon sinks”.

History has seen attempts to commodify land, food, labor, forests, water, genes and ideas. Carbon trading follows in the footsteps of this history and turns the earth’s carbon-cycling capacity into property to be bought or sold in a global market. Through this process of creating a new commodity – carbon – the Earth’s ability and capacity to support a climate conducive to life and human societies is now passing into the same corporate hands that are destroying the climate.

Carbon trading will not contribute to achieving protection of the Earth’s climate. It is a false solution which entrenches and magnifies social inequalities in many ways.

• The carbon reductions claimed through the CDM are not real. They rely upon hypothetical baselines that can be manipulated to produce credits for imaginary reductions. CDM projects routinely fail to demonstrate that they are not giving credit for projects that would have occurred anyway, and there is no methodology that can truly show that the projects are additional.

• The CDM shifts the responsibility to act from those who have contributed most to the climate problem to those who have contributed least.

• Using the CDM, timber plantations, for example, are being planted under the guise of sustainable development. These projects are neither “clean” nor “sustainable” nor a means of “development.” This applies not only for CDM sinks projects, but also for most other CDM (carbon trading) projects.

• Sinks are particularly troubling. Confusing fossil carbon with biological carbon results in sinks being phantom reductions which do not actually address the problem of climate change.

Experts advise against carbon trading

Experts Warn UN Climate Delegates Against Use of Carbon Markets

Expanded carbon markets endanger food security, forests, the broader economy, and the climate

TIANJIN, CHINA - October 8 - Experts on the dangers posed by carbon markets warned delegates at the UN climate talks here today against including carbon trading and offsets in any global climate agreement.

The experts also urged members of the UN High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Finance (known as the AGF) to focus on options other than carbon markets to deliver financial support to developing countries as they respond to the climate crisis. AGF members are expected to meet in Addis Ababa on October 10 to finalize their report evaluating climate finance mechanisms.

A letter from civil society groups delivered to the AGF today can be found at http://www.foe.org/civil- society-groups-deliver-letter-un-climate-finance-body.

“Including carbon as a commodity in the same poorly regulated global markets that so recently tore apart developing country economies and pushed a hundred million more people into hunger is highly irresponsible,” said Jim Harkness, President of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “The UNFCCC and AGF should consider alternative approaches to climate finance that promote sustainable agriculture and protect food security.”

You can find out more about IATP’s concerns with carbon markets at: www.iatp.org

“There is a proposal here at the UNFCCC to introduce carbon credits from forests into carbon markets, but in reality, they do nothing to reduce emissions and should not be counted as offsets,” said Kate Dooley, Forests and Climate Campaigner at FERN. “Turning forests into tradable commodities is often devastating to the people who live in and depend on them. Forest protection is crucial for solving the climate crisis, but alternative sources of finance must be found instead of trading carbon.”

View http://www.fern.org/tradingcarbon to learn more about carbon trading and why it is controversial.

“Carbon markets are prone to fraud, speculation, and instability–and they lack environmental integrity,” said Nick Berning, Director of Public Advocacy at Friends of the Earth U.S. “Wall Street traders collapsed the global economy. Now they want to gamble with our climate. Allowing them to do so would be extraordinarily irresponsible.”

The Friends of the Earth U.S. reports “Subprime Carbon?” and “Ten Ways to Game the Carbon Market” can be found at: http://foe.org/global-warming/carbon-markets.

• Industrial Agriculture and Human Survival: The Road Beyond 10/10/10
  By Ronnie Cummins
  Organic Consumers Association, October 7, 2010
  Straight to the Source
  
  

Note: Climate and food activists are organizing thousands of “work parties” in 170 nations on October 10, 2010 (10/10/10). These work parties are designed to both highlight local projects that can help reverse global warming, and to force politicians to take decisive action - before it’s too late. http://www.350.org

Despite decades of deception and mystification, a critical mass at the grassroots is waking up. A new generation of food and climate activists understands that greenhouse gas-belching fossil fuels, industrial food and farming, and our entire global economy pose a mortal threat, not just to our present health and well being, but also to human survival. Given the severity of the Crisis, we have little choice but to step up our efforts. As 35,000 climate activists at the historic global climate summit in April of 2010 in Cochabamba, Bolivia shouted, “We must change the System, not the climate.”

“Changing the System,” means defending our selves, the future generations, and the biological carrying capacity of the planet from the ravages of “profit at any cost” capitalism. “Changing the System,” means safeguarding our delicately balanced climate, soils, oceans, and atmosphere from the fatal consequences of fossil fuel-induced climate change. “Changing the System” means exposing, dismantling, and replacing, not just individual out-of-control corporations like Monsanto, Halliburton, and British Petroleum, and out-of-control technologies like gene-altered crops and mountaintop removal; but our entire chemical and energy-intensive industrial economy, starting, at least for many of us, with Food Inc.’s destructive system of industrial food and farming. “Changing the system,” means going on the offensive and dismantling the most controversial and vulnerable flanks of our suicide economy: coal plants, gas guzzlers, the military-industrial complex, and industrial agriculture’s Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and factory farms.

******

Industrial Food and Farming: A Deadly Root of Global Warming

Although transportation, industry, and energy producers are obviously major fossil fuel users and greenhouse gas polluters, not enough people understand that the worst U.S. and global greenhouse gas emitter is “Food Incorporated,” transnational industrial food and farming, of which Monsanto and GMOs constitute a major part. Industrial farming, including 173 million acres of GE soybeans, corn, cotton, canola, and sugar beets, accounts for at least 35% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (EPA’s ridiculously low estimates range from 7% to 12%, while some climate scientists feel the figure could be as high as 50% or more).

Industrial agriculture, biofuels, and non-sustainable cattle grazing - including cutting down the last remaining tropical rainforests in Latin America and Asia for GMO and chemical-intensive animal feed and biofuels - are also the main driving forces in global deforestation and wetlands destruction, which generate an additional 20% of all climate destabilizing GHGs.

In other words the direct (food, fiber, and biofuels production, food processing, food distribution) and indirect damage (deforestation and destruction of wetlands) of industrial agriculture, GMOs, and the food industry are the major cause of global warming. Unless we take down Monsanto and Food Inc. and make the Great Transition to a relocalized system of organic food and farming, we and our children are doomed to reside in Climate Hell.

Overall 78% of climate destabilizing greenhouse gases come from CO2, while the remainder come from methane, nitrous oxide, and black carbon or soot. To stabilize the climate we will need to drastically reduce all of these greenhouse gas emissions, not just CO2, and sequester twice as much carbon matter in the soil (through organic farming and ranching, and forest and wetlands restoration) as we are doing presently.

Currently GMO and industrial/factory farms (energy and chemical-intensive) farms emit at least 25% of the carbon dioxide (mostly from tractors, trucks, combines, transportation, cooling, freezing, and heating); 40% of the methane (mostly from massive herds of animals belching and farting, and manure ponds); and 96% of nitrous oxide (mostly from synthetic fertilizer manufacture and use, the millions of tons of animal manure from factory-farmed cattle herds, pig and poultry flocks, and millions of tons of sewage sludge spread on farms). Black carbon or soot comes primarily from older diesel engines, slash and burn agriculture, and wood cook stoves.

Per ton, methane is 21 times more damaging, and nitrous oxide 310 times more damaging, as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, when measured over a one hundred year period. Damage is even worse if you look at the impact on global warming over the next crucial 20-year period. Many climate scientists admit that they have previously drastically underestimated the dangers of the non-CO2 GHGs, including methane, soot, and nitrous oxide, which are responsible for at least 22% of global warming.

Almost all U.S. food and farm-derived methane comes from factory farms, huge herds of confined cows, hogs, and poultry operations, in turn made possible by heavily subsidized ($15 billion per year) GMO soybeans, corn, cottonseed, and canola; as well as rotting food waste thrown into landfills instead of being separated out of the solid waste stream and properly composted. To drastically reduce C02, methane, and nitrous oxide releases we need an immediate consumer boycott, followed by a government ban on factory farms, dairies, and feedlots. To reduce black carbon or soot emissions we will need to upgrade old diesel engines, and provide farmers and rural villagers in the developing world with alternatives to slash and burn agriculture (compost, compost tea, biochar) and non-polluting cook stoves and home heating.

We also need to implement mandatory separation and recycling of food wastes and “green garbage” (yard waste, tree branches, etc.) at the municipal level, so that that we can reduce methane emissions from landfills. Mandatory composting will also enable us to produce large quantities of high quality organic compost to replace the billions of pounds of chemical fertilizer and sewage sludge, which are releasing GHGs, destroying soil fertility, polluting our waters, and undermining public health.

Nearly all nitrous oxide pollution comes from dumping billions of pounds of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and sewage sludge on farmland (chemical fertilizers and sludge are banned on organic farms and ranches), mainly to grow GMO crops and animal feed. Since about 80% of U.S. agriculture is devoted to producing non-organic, non-grass fed meat, dairy, and animal products, reducing agriculture GHGs means eliminating the overproduction and over-consumption of GMO crops, factory-farmed meat, and animal products. It also means creating massive consumer demand for organic foods, including pasture-raised, grass-fed animal products.

The fact that climate change is now metastasizing into climate chaos is indisputable: massive flooding in Pakistan, unprecedented forest fires in Russia and the Amazon, melting of the glaciers that supply water for crops and drinking water of a billion people in Asia and South America, crop failures in regions all over the globe, record heat waves in the U.S. and Europe, methane leaking from the Arctic tundra and coastlines, killer hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and Central America, and steadily spreading pestilence, crop failures, and disease. The realization that every time we eat non-organic processed food, we are ingesting unlabeled, hazardous GMO foods and pesticides is indeed alarming. But the impending threat of industrial food and farming detonating runaway climate change (i.e. moving from our current .8 degree Centigrade average global rise in temperature to 2-6 degrees) is terrifying. Either we rein in industrial food and farming and GMOs, out-of-control politicians and corporations, and make the transition to an organic and green economy or we will perish.

The hour is late. Leading climate scientists such as Dr. James Hansen of NASA and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have delivered the final warning. “Business as usual” equals unimaginable disaster.

Leading greenhouse gas polluters (namely the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia, India, and China) must slash CO2, methane, soot, and nitrous oxide emissions by 20-40% as soon as possible, 50% by 2010, and 80-90% by the year 2050. Continued business as usual, especially in the strategic GM and industrial food and farming sector, means we will inevitably burn up the Amazon and remaining tropical forests; acidify and kill the oceans; generate mega-drought, violent floods, crop failures, endless resource wars, melt the polar icecaps, precipitate a disastrous rise in ocean levels, and finally bring about the coup de grace that will kill us all, releasing massive amount of methane from the frozen tundra and shallow ocean floors of the Arctic.

Of course dismantling industrial agriculture and transitioning our food and farming system to one which is local and organic is not the only thing global civil society must do (since this will only take care of 50% of global greenhouse gas pollution), but it is the most crucial and effective measure we can take as food consumers and farmers. While we retool industrial food and farming, the global grassroots must also step-up our struggles in the other energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) sectors: stopping the construction of coal plants; stopping the deforestation in the Amazon, Indonesia, and Malaysia; changing the electrical grid from being powered predominately by coal to solar, wind, and geothermal; drastically reducing oil consumption in the transportation and housing sectors; and last but not least, dismantling the trillion dollar military-industrial complex. Let me repeat this last point. Until the U.S. and EU get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and drastically slash U.S. and world military spending, we will never be able to free up sufficient resources to build an organic and green economy.

Either we radically reduce CO2, as well as methane, nitrous oxide, and soot pollution (the so-called C02e--carbon dioxide equivalents) to 350 ppm (currently at 390 parts per million and rising 2 ppm per year) or there is no future. As scientists warned at the Copenhagen Climate Summit, “business as usual” and a corresponding 2-6 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures means that the carrying capacity of the Earth in 2100 will collapse to one billion people. Under these conditions, billions will die of thirst, cold, heat, disease, war, and starvation. Those who don’t die may wish that they had.

August 10, 2010

Rising Temperatures Raise Food Prices – Heat, Drought, and a Failed Harvest in Russia

Lester R. Brown

Around midnight on Wednesday, August 11th, a group of commodity analysts will gather at a meeting site in the massive South Building of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Washington, D.C. Once they are assembled, the door will be locked. Cell phones will be collected. Phone and Internet lines will be disconnected. Short of a medical emergency, no one will be permitted to leave before 8:30 am.

USDA produces an estimate of world grain production, consumption, and trade by the 12th of each month. The gathered analysts will consult reports from a worldwide network of agricultural attachés, satellite images of crop vegetation, and the latest weather reports. The widely respected World Agricultural Outlook Board’s report, though little known to the public, is of incalculable value to commodity traders, agribusinesses, and farmers—some of whom stand to gain or lose fortunes on the data it contains.

At 7:00 am on Thursday, shortly after the assembled team has completed its latest monthly estimate of this year’s world grain harvest, a handful of accredited agricultural reporters will be admitted and given access to the data so they can write their stories. At precisely 8:30 am the lockup will end, and phone and Internet lines will be reconnected.

All eyes will be on USDA’s new grain numbers. When the last report was released on July 9th, it showed that the previously estimated 2.2 billion ton world grain harvest had dropped by 18 million tons—a fall of nearly one percent. This month’s report will incorporate the effects of a continuing record heat wave and drought on the grain harvests of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, countries that account for one fourth of world wheat exports. The crop losses from the searing temperatures prompted Vladimir Putin’s early August announcement that Russia would ban grain exports at least through December, further raising concerns about the adequacy of this year’s global harvest.

During the two month span between June 9th and August 9th, the world price of wheat jumped by 66 percent. The USDA’s August estimate will show the world harvest shrinking further. But by how much? And how will it affect world grain prices?

Russia’s grain harvest, which was 94 million tons last year, could drop to 65 million tons or even less. West of the Ural Mountains, where most of its grain is grown, Russia is parched beyond belief. An estimated one fifth of its grainland is not worth harvesting. In addition, Ukraine’s harvest could be down 20 percent from last year. And Kazakhstan anticipates a harvest 34 percent below that of 2009. (See data.)

This seven-week crop-withering heat wave is unprecedented for western Russia. July in Moscow was the hottest month in 130 years of recordkeeping. Wildfires are consuming hundreds of thousands of acres of forest, grassland, and ripe wheat fields that have been dried to a crisp in the relentless heat. By early August, hundreds of new fires were breaking out each day. The army was mobilized to assist local fire control units in trying to quell more than 550 fires raging across more than 430,000 acres.

The heat and drought that are shrinking the grain harvest are also reducing grass and hay growth. With less grass for grazing and less hay to carry Russia’s 21 million cattle through the long winter, farmers will have to feed more grain. In late July, Moscow released 3 million tons of grain from government stocks for use by livestock producers and millers. Supplementing hay with grain in cattle rations is costly, but the alternative is to reduce herd size by slaughtering livestock. This would, however, lead to higher milk and meat prices.

Russia and Ukraine together account for nearly half of world exports of barley, a widely used feedgrain in Europe and the Middle East. This year importers will have to look elsewhere. Russia itself could become a grain importer. Indeed, it is hoping to get exportable supplies from Kazakhstan and Belarus, fellow members of a new customs union.

The Russian ban on grain exports and possible restrictions on exports from Ukraine and Kazakhstan could cause panic in food-importing countries, leading to a run on exportable grain supplies. Beyond this year, there could be some drought spillover into next year if there is not enough soil moisture by late August to plant Russia’s new winter wheat crop.

Even as the grain export supply is shrinking, China—essentially self-sufficient in grain for several years—has in recent months turned quietly to Canada and Australia for over half a million tons of wheat from each and to the United States for a million tons of corn. A Chinese consulting firm projects China’s corn imports climbing to 15 million tons in 2015. China’s potential role as an importer could put additional pressure on exportable supplies of grain.

The bottom line indicator of food security is the amount of grain in the bin when the new harvest begins. When world carryover stocks of grain dropped to 62 days of consumption in 2006 and 64 days in 2007, it set the stage for the 2007–08 price run-up. World grain carryover stocks at the end of the current crop year have been estimated at 76 days of consumption, somewhat above the widely recommended 70-day minimum. But how much will carryover stocks drop in the new USDA crop estimate?

No one knows how far grain prices will rise in the months ahead. What we do know, however, is that the prices of wheat, corn, and soybeans are actually somewhat higher in early August 2010 than they were in early August 2007, when the record-breaking 2007–08 run-up in grain prices began. Whether prices will reach the 2008 peak again remains to be seen.

Are this record heat wave and the associated crop shortfall the result of climate change? Not necessarily. No single heat wave, however extreme, can be attributed to global warming. What we can say is that heat and drought similar to that experienced in Russia are projected to occur more frequently as the earth’s temperature continues to rise in the decades ahead. This Russian heat wave lets us see just how brutal future climate change can be.

That intense heat waves shrink harvests is not surprising. The rule of thumb used by crop ecologists is that for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum we can expect a reduction in grain yields of 10 percent. With global temperature projected to rise by up to 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) during this century, this effect on yields is an obvious matter of concern.

Each year the world demand for grain climbs. Each year the world’s farmers must feed 80 million more people. In addition, some 3 billion people are trying to move up the food chain and consume more grain-intensive livestock products. And this year some 120 million tons of the 415-million-ton U.S. grain harvest will go to ethanol distilleries to produce fuel for cars.

Surging annual growth in grain demand at a time when the earth is heating up, when climate events are becoming more extreme, and when water shortages are spreading makes it difficult for the world’s farmers to keep up. This situation underlines the urgency of cutting carbon emissions quickly—before climate change spins out of control.

Lester R. Brown is the president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of "Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization."

Copyright © 2010 Earth Policy Institute