Hey, Sailor

2012-1-28 – 9:56 am
NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 16: People walk by Zuc...

OWS Image by Getty Images via @daylife

There is evidence that “the ‘rising tide’ of global economic growth is in fact lifting mostly yachts; meanwhile, a lot of people are getting dumped in the water,” reports Paul O’Brien.

Oxfam recently released new research that shows how people’s incomes are becoming more unequal in the world’s largest economies. Oxfam focused on the G20 countries because they are the self-appointed leaders of the global economy and, indeed, constitute more than 70 percent of the world’s GDP. A survey of the G20 countries shows that only four have made progress since 1990 in reducing inequality; 16 have seen the income gap grow, slowing or stopping progress to reduce poverty. Not only is economic growth in those countries failing to “trickle down” to ordinary people, but the G20 economies are rapidly exhausting the natural resources they need to support our health and prosperity. That ecological burden falls most on the poor, who by and large lack the resources to cope with the resulting environmental degradation, particularly from climate change.

In the past, this inequality and ecological plunder would be seen as part of the cost of supporting economic growth. Conventional wisdom used to be that growth brings inequality; a rising tide lifts all boats, but rich boats rise faster, and that’s the cost of doing business. But this conventional wisdom is being shown to be false in practice; in fact, some of the planet’s fastest-growing economies are growing while reducing inequality, and reducing their ecological impact.

Mexico is a key case in point. Mexico has a history of unequal income and wealth distribution, as well as resource-intensive development. But over the past decade, Mexico has decreased inequality significantly, while reducing its rate of carbon emissions relative to economic growth (though emissions are still growing in Mexico, they are slowing as growth accelerates).

Some other G20 countries (Brazil, Argentina, Korea) are also managing to make growth work to reduce inequality. And several (the U.K., France, Germany) are learning how to grow while using a shrinking share of natural resources in absolute terms. But no industrialized country has yet figured out how to support economic growth in a way that won’t exhaust the planet’s resources. Only two G20 countries (India and Indonesia) are using less than their share of natural resources; if their current growth trends continue, that won’t last long, as their consumption increases along with growth.

But the positive examples — like Mexico’s reduced inequality or Germany’s reduced carbon footprint — show us that inequality and environmental ruin are not inevitable outcomes of economic growth. The world doesn’t need to stop growing in order to avoid inequality and protect the planet. Rather, smart policy choices can mean that more people can reap the benefits of growth, and for the long run. Those policy choices include investment in public goods like health and education, income support programs, and progressive taxation to reduce inequality; and investment in green tech and making the costs of carbon use transparent to reduce dependence on finite natural resources. By implementing these policies, countries can help more people keep their boats upright even as they encourage the tide of growth to roll in.

More Homework

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By jcwinnie | Posted in consequence, culture, ecology, economics, equity, uncertainty, world | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Home Rule Democracy? Whiskey Tango Frack?

2012-1-27 – 9:04 pm

Reprint is from Mother Jones

People get sick wherever gas companies start fracking. It starts with the groundwater.

—By Ellen Cantarow

| Mon Jan. 23, 2012 12:03 PM PST
Toban Black/Flickr

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains. Clean water should be a right: there is no life without it. New York is what you might call a “water state.” Its rivers and their tributaries only start with the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna. The best known of its lakes are Great Lakes Erie and Ontario, Lake George, and the Finger Lakes. Its brooks, creeks, and trout streams are fishermen’s lore.

Far below this rippling wealth there’s a vast, rocky netherworld called the Marcellus Shale. Stretching through southern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, the shale contains bubbles of methane, the remains of life that died 400 million years ago. Gas corporations have lusted for the methane in the Marcellus since at least 1967 when one of them plotted with the Atomic Energy Agency to explode a nuclear bomb to unleash it. That idea died, but it’s been reborn in the form of a technology invented by Halliburton Corporation: high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing—”fracking” for short.

Fracking uses prodigious amounts of water laced with sand and a startling menu of poisonous chemicals to blast the methane out of the shale. At hyperbaric bomb-like pressures, this technology propels five to seven million gallons of sand-and-chemical-laced water a mile or so down a well bore into the shale.

Up comes the methane—along with about a million gallons of wastewater containing the original fracking chemicals and other substances that were also in the shale, among them radioactive elements and carcinogens. There are 400,000 such wells in the United States. Surrounded by rumbling machinery, serviced by tens of thousands of diesel trucks, this nightmare technology for energy release has turned rural areas in 34 US states into toxic industrial zones.Shale gas isn’t the conventional kind that lit your grandmother’s stove. It’s one of those “extreme energy” forms so difficult to produce that merely accessing them poses unprecedented dangers to the planet. In every fracking state but New York, where a moratorium against the process has been in effect since 2010, the gas industry has contaminated ground water, sickened people, poisoned livestock, and killed wildlife.

At a time when the International Energy Agency reports that we have five more years of fossil-fuel use at current levels before the planet goes into irreversible climate change, fracking has a greenhouse gas footprint larger than that of coal. And with the greatest water crisis in human history underway, fracking injects mind-numbing quantities of purposely-poisoned fresh water into the Earth. As for the trillions (repeat: trillions) of gallons of wastewater generated by the industry, getting rid of it is its own story. Fracking has also been linked to earthquakes: eleven in Ohio alone (normally not an earthquake zone) over the past year.

But for once, this story isn’t about tragedy. It’s about a resistance movement that has arisen to challenge some of the most powerful corporations in history. Here you will find no handsomely funded national environmental organizations: some of them in fact have had a cozy relationship with the gas industry, embracing the industry’s line that natural gas is a “bridge” to future alternative energies. (In fact, shale gas suppresses the development of renewable energies.)

 

New York’s “Little Revolution”

While most anti-fracking activists have been responding to harms already done, New York State’s resistance has been waging a battle to keep harm at bay. Jack Ossont, a former helicopter pilot, has been active all his life in the state’s environmental and social battles. He calls fracking “the tsunami issue of New York. It washes across the entire landscape.”

Sandra Steingraber, a biologist and scholar-in-residence at Ithaca College, terms the movement “the biggest since abolition and women’s rights in New York.” This past November, when the Heinz Foundation awarded Steingraber $100,000 for her environmental activism, she gave it to the anti-fracking community.

Arriving in the state last October, I discovered a sprawl of loosely connected, grassroots groups whose names announce their counties and their long-term vision: Sustainable Otsego, Committee to Preserve the Finger Lakes, Chenango Community Action for Renewable Energy, Gas-Free Seneca, Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy, Catskill Mountainkeeper. Of these few (there are many more), only the last has a paid staff. All the others are run by volunteers.

“There are so many people working quietly behind the scenes. They’re not in the news, they’re not doing it to get their names in the paper. It’s just the right thing to do,” says Kelly Branigan, co-founder of the group Middlefield Neighbors. Her organization helped spearhead one of the movement’s central campaigns: using local zoning ordinances to ban fracking. “In Middlefield, we’re nothing special. We’re just regular people who got together and learned, and reached in our pockets to go to work on this. It’s inspiring, it’s awesome, and it’s America—its own little revolution.”

Consider this, then, an environmental Occupy Wall Street. It knows no divisions of social class or political affiliation. Everyone, after all, needs clean water. Farmers and professors, journalists and teachers, engineers, doctors, biologists, accountants, librarians, innkeepers, brewery owners. Actors and Catskill residents Mark Ruffalo and Debra Winger have joined the movement. Josh Fox, also of the Catskills, has brought the fracking industry and its victims to international audiences through his award-winning documentary film Gasland. “Fracking is a pretty scary prospect,” says Wes Gillingham, planning director for Catskill Mountainkeeper. “It’s created a community of people that wouldn’t have existed before.”

Around four years ago, sheltered by Patterson’s stay against fracking, little discussion groups began in people’s kitchens, living rooms, and home basements. At that time, only a few activists were advocating outright bans on fracking: the rest of the fledgling movement was more cautiously advocating temporary moratoria.

Since then a veritable ban cascade has washed across the state. And in local elections last November, scores of anti-fracking candidates, many of whom had never before run for office, displaced pro-gas incumbents in positions as town councilors, town supervisors, and county legislators. As the movement has grown in strength and influence, gas corporations like ExxonMobil and Conoco Philips and Marcellus Shale corporations like Chesapeake Energy have spent millions of dollars on advertising, lobbying, and political campaign contributions to counter it.

 

Shale Shock

Autumn Stoscheck, a young organic apple farmer from the village of Van Etten just south of New York’s Finger Lakes, had none of this in mind in 2008 when she invited a group of neighbors to her living room to talk about fracking. She’d simply heard enough about the process to be terrified. Like other informal fracking meetings that were being launched that year, this was a “listening group.” Its ground rules: listen, talk, but don’t criticize. “There was a combination of landowners, farmers like us, and young anarchist-activists with experience in other movements,” she told me. Stoscheck’s neighbors knew nothing about fracking, but “they were really mistrustful of the government and large gas corporations and felt they were in collusion.”

Out of such neighborhood groups came the first grassroots anti-fracking organizations. Stoscheck and her colleagues called theirs Shaleshock. One of its first achievements was a PowerPoint presentation, “Drilling 101,” which introduces viewers to the Marcellus Shale and what hydraulic fracturing does to it.

When Helen Slottje, a 44-year-old lawyer, saw “Drilling 101″ at a Shaleshock forum in 2009, she was “horrified.” She and her husband David had abandoned their corporate law careers to move to Ithaca in 2000. “We traded corporate law practice in Boston for New York State and less stressful work—or so we thought. New York’s beauty seemed worth it.”

When news reports about fracking started appearing, the Slottjes thought about leaving. “I kept saying, ‘What’ll happen if fracking comes to New York? We’ll have to move.’” “Drilling 101″ made her reconsider. Then she visited Dimock, Pennsylvania, 70 miles southeast of Ithaca and that sealed the deal.

By 2009, Dimock, a picturesque rural village, had become synonymous with fracking hell. Houston-based Cabot Oil & Energy had started drilling there the year before. Shortly after, people started to notice that their drinking water had darkened. Some began experiencing bouts of dizziness and headaches; others developed sores after bathing in what had been their once pure water.

For a while, Cabot trucked water to Dimock’s residents, but stopped in November when a judge declined to order the company to continue deliveries. The Environmental Protection Agency was going to start water service to Dimock in the first week of January, but withdrew the offer, claiming further water tests were needed. Outraged New Yorkers organized water caravans to help their besieged neighbors.

“When I went to Dimock,” says Slottje, “I saw well drilling, huge trucks, muddy crisscrossing pipeline paths cutting through the woods, disposal pits, sites of diesel spills, dusty coatings on plants, noisy compressor stations—you name it. So I decided to put my legal background to work to prevent the same thing from happening where I lived. We’d been corporate lawyers before. We know the sort of resources the energy corporations have. The grassroots people have nothing. And they have this behemoth coming at them.”

In May 2009, the Slottjes became full-time pro bono lawyers for the movement. One of their first services was to reinterpret New York’s constitutional home rule provision, which had allowed local ordinances to trump state laws until 1981. In that year, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation Division of Mineral Resources exempted gas corporations from local restrictions.

“I spent thousands of hours on the research,” says Slottje. “And then last August we were brave enough to go public and say the emperor has no clothes.” The Slottjes’ reinterpretation of the provision was simple enough: the state regulates the gas industry; towns and villages can’t regulate it, but what they can do is keep its operations off their land through the use of zoning ordinances.

 

Zoning Out Fracking

The town of Ulysses is nestled in the heart of the state’s burgeoning wine country in the Finger Lakes region. In 2010, a grassroots group, Concerned Citizens of Ulysses (CCU), asked the Slottjes to speak with members of the town board, which controls Ulysses’s planning and its zoning laws.

The board members opposed fracking, but couldn’t see how to prevent it. While the board talked with the Slottjes, CCU activists drafted a petition. If enough registered Ulysses voters signed on, the board would have the popular backing it needed for declaring a ban. Ann Furman, a retired schoolteacher who helped found CCU and write the document, recalls, “The petition was pretty specific: ‘We the undersigned want to ban hydrofracking in the town of Ulysses.’” A six-month-long door-to-door campaign followed.

“There was a lot of education going on in Ulysses at the town board and at forums, as we were going house to house. Even people who would sign the petition would say, ‘Tell me a little bit more about it.’ And in that next 15 to 20 minutes you would do a whole lot more education.” In the end, 1,500 out of 3,000 registered voters signed. This past summer the Ulysses town board voted to ban fracking.

Middlefield, 119 miles east of Ulysses and home of the grassroots group Middlefield Neighbors, enacted a similar ban. So did Dryden, 22 miles east of Ulysses. An out-of-state gas corporation that leased land for drilling in Dryden is suing to get the zoning ban declared illegal. A Middlefield landowner is suing that town on the same basis. The cases are pending.

Meanwhile bans proliferate. Six upstate New York counties have zoned out fracking, including Binghamton, which declared a ban in December. An organic brewery in Cooperstown, the Ommegang, mobilized 300 other businesses, including Cooperstown’s Chamber of Commerce, to support more bans in the region.

Chefs for the Marcellus, a group headed by Food Network star Mario Batali, has urged Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban fracking at the state level. “Call it home-rule democracy,” says Adrian Kuzminsky, chair of the Cooperstown-based organization Sustainable Otsego. “If local communities can seize control over their destinies, a giant step will have been taken toward a sustainable future.”

This past October, activists were preparing to take on the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). That agency finds itself caught in a perpetual conflict of interest: on the one hand, protecting the environment; on the other, regulating the industries that exploit it. In fact, the 1981 legislation exempting gas corporations from New York’s home rule had been written by Greg Sovas, then head of DEC’s Division of Mineral Resources.

Guidelines for the hydraulic fracturing industry were first issued by the department in late 2009 and rejected in 2010 under withering public criticism. Then-Governor David Paterson declared a moratorium on fracking in the state pending DEC revisions. Revised guidelines appeared this past September in the form of 1,537 mind-numbing pages bearing the title, “Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement,” aka the “SGEIS.”

 

A World of Water

In study groups and online tutorials, activists prepared to write letters of commentary and protest to the Department of Environmental Conservation and Governor Cuomo, and to speak out in public hearings the department was organizing around the state. Thousands attended these. Pro-gas speakers predictably stuck to the twin themes of the jobs fracking would produce and the economic renewal it would bring about.

Opponents included an impressive line up of scientists (among them Robert Howarth, co-author of last year’s landmark Cornell University study, which established the staggering greenhouse-gas footprint of fracking), engineers, lawyers, and other professionals. A letter sent to Cuomo by 250 New York State physicians and medical professionals deplored the DEC’s failure to attend to the public health impacts of fracking.

Part-time Cooperstown resident James “Chip” Northrup, a retired manager for Atlantic Richfield (ARCO, America’s seventh largest oil corporation), in one public agency hearing called the performances of pro-gas speakers “disgraceful” and the SGEIS “junk science.” Citing an industry study that shows 25 percent of frack wells leak after five years and 40 percent after eight, he said, “Everybody in the industry knows that gas drilling pollutes groundwater… It’s not… whether they leak. It’s how much.”

As 2012 began, the movement was demanding that the department withdraw the SGEIS. In mid-January, DEC spokesperson Lisa King said that once all the comments are tallied, “We expect the total to be more than 40,000.” Earlier, agency officials had told the New York Times they didn’t know of any other issue that had received even 1,000 comments. (Ten thousand letters were mailed from the Catskills’ Sullivan County alone on January 11th, just before the commentary deadline.) Gannett’s Albany Bureau has reported that anti-drilling submissions outnumber those of drilling supporters by at least ten to one.

Sustainable Otsego’s website lists 52 serious and fatal flaws in the document. A letter posted at the website of Toxics Targeting, an environmental database service in Ithaca, elaborately details 17 major SGEIS flaws. By January 10th, when the Toxics Targeting letter was sent to the DEC and the Governor, it had more than 22,000 signatures representing government officials, professional and civic organizations, and individuals. (The DEC counts this letter with its signatures as only one of the 40,000 comments.)

At a November 17th rally in Trenton, New Jersey, to celebrate the postponement of a vote on allowing fracking in the Delaware River Basin, Pennsylvania and New York activists pledged future civil disobedience. “The broad coalition of anti-frackers has been operating on multi-levels all at once,” says Sustainable Otsego’s chair, Adrian Kuzminsky. If the governor approves the SGEIS “there will be massive disillusionment with the state government and Cuomo, and from what I’m hearing there will be ‘direct action’ and civil disobedience in some quarters.”

At the moment, in fact, the anti-fracking movement in the state only seems to be ramping up. Should the government approve the SGEIS in its current form, lawsuits are planned against the Department of Environmental Conservation. And a brief “Occupy DEC” event that took place in the state capital, Albany, on January 12th may have set the tone for the future. Meanwhile some activists, turning their backs on established channels, are already working on legislation that would criminalize fracking.

This past November, Sandra Steingraber told a crowd of hundreds of activists why she was donating her $100,000 Heinz Award to the movement. The money, she said, “enables speech, emboldens activism, and recognizes that true security for our children lies in preserving the… ecology of our planet.”

She raised a jar of water. “This is what my kids are made of. They are made of water. They are made of the food that is grown in the county that I live in. And they are made of air. We inhale a pint of atmosphere with every breath we take… And when you poison these things, you poison us. That is a violation of our human rights, and that is why this is the civil rights issue of our day.”

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By jcwinnie | Posted in advocacy, conflict, democracy, energy, human rights, policy, politics, risk, water | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Solar Frontier to supply world’s largest CIGS solar plant

2012-1-26 – 5:44 pm
English: CIGS device structure

Image via Wikipedia

Reuters has an article on what will be the world’s largest thin film solar power plant -Solar Frontier to supply world’s largest CIGS solar plant.

Japan’s Solar Frontier has reached a deal to supply up to 150 megawatts of its solar panels to a California power plant that will one day be the world’s largest solar installation made from an up-and-coming technology know as CIGS.

The company, a unit of Showa Shell Sekiyu KK, called it “a landmark moment” for CIGS technology, or solar panels that use copper indium gallium selenide as their raw material. Once completed, the project with a unit of France’s EDF Energies Nouvelles will supply enough electricity to power 35,000 homes.

CIGS panels have been slow to penetrate a market dominated by silicon-based equipment, although they have long been seen as a potential challenger to traditional panels because they cost less to manufacture and have the potential to generate nearly as much electricity from the sun’s light.

Solar Frontier is the world’s largest CIGS manufacturer.

Reprint from Peak Energy.

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By jcwinnie | Posted in chemistry, development, energy | Tagged | Comments (0)

World Governments are destroying Life on the Planet for $1.4 billion a day

2012-1-23 – 8:12 pm

Cross-posted from Grist. Originally from Earth Policy Institute.

We distort reality when we omit the health and environmental costs associated with burning fossil fuels from their prices. When governments actually subsidize their use, they take the distortion even further. Worldwide, direct fossil fuel subsidies added up to roughly $500 billion in 2010. Of this, supports on the production side totaled some $100 billion. Supports for consumption exceeded $400 billion, with $193 billion for oil, $91 billion for natural gas, $3 billion for coal, and $122 billion spent subsidizing the use of fossil fuel-generated electricity. All together, governments are shelling out nearly $1.4 billion per day to further destabilize the Earth’s climate.

The government of Iran spent the most on promoting fossil fuel consumption in 2010, doling out $81 billion in subsidies. This equaled more than 20 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Saudi Arabia was a distant second at $44 billion. Rounding out the top five were Russia ($39 billion), India ($22 billion), and China ($21 billion).

Kuwait’s fossil fuel subsidies were highest on a per capita basis, with $2,800 spent per person. The United Arab Emirates and Qatar followed, each spending close to $2,500 per person.

Carbon emissions could be cut in scores of countries by simply eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. Some countries are already doing this. Belgium, France, and Japan have phased out all subsidies for coal, for example. As oil prices have climbed, a number of countries that held fuel prices well below world market prices have greatly reduced or eliminated their motor fuel subsidies because of the heavy fiscal cost. Among those reducing subsidies are China and Indonesia. Even Iran, which was pricing gasoline at one-fifth its market price, dramatically reduced its gasoline subsidies in December 2010 as part of broader energy subsidy reforms.

In contrast to the $500 billion in fossil fuel supports in 2010, renewable energy received just $66 billion in subsidies — two-thirds of that for electricity generation from wind, biomass, and other sources, and one-third for biofuels. Not only do fossil fuel subsidies dwarf those for renewables today, but a long legacy of governments propping up oil, coal, and natural gas has resulted in a very uneven energy playing field.

A world facing economically disruptive climate change can no longer justify subsidies to expand the burning of coal and oil. The International Energy Agency projects that a phaseout of oil consumption subsidies by 2020 would cut oil use by 3.7 million barrels per day in that year. Eliminating all fossil fuel consumption subsidies by 2020 would cut global carbon emissions by nearly 5 percent while reducing government debt. Shifting subsidies to the development of climate-benign energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal power will help stabilize the earth’s climate.

This data highlight is adapted from World on the Edge by Lester R. Brown. For more data and discussion, see the full book at www.earth-policy.org.

Lester R. Brown is founder and president of Earth Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

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By jcwinnie | Posted in climate, ecology, economics, energy, equity, forecast, human rights, policy, politics | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Divided, stressed citizens no match for corporate climate changers

2012-1-6 – 4:31 pm

This difference in inequality explains some of the differences between the U.S. and Europe in greenhouse gas reductions and population health.

Greenhouse gas emissions

U.S. per-capita carbon dioxide (and other GHG) emissions are more than twice (19.4 tons of CO2) those of the European Union (EU) (8.6 tons of CO2).  Far more ambitious than the United States, EU nations have agreed that by 2020 they will:

• cut GHG emissions by at least 20 percent below 1990 levels,

• derive 20 percent of energy consumption from renewable resources, and

• reduce by 20 percent primary energy use compared with projected levels.
The EU Emissions Trading System (cap and trade) plays an important role in achieving these goals.

The U.S. has rejected Kyoto protocol limits on greenhouse gas emissions.  Skepticism, denial, and special interests block congressional adoption of cap and trade or a carbon tax.  Instead, the Obama administration seeks greenhouse gas reductions through the rule making of the Environmental Protection Agency.  The 2010 congressional elections suggest that Congress is likely to delay, block, or defund even this more tortured approach to curb GHG emissions.

 

Population health

The U.S. spends about 16 percent of its GDP for health care; Europe about nine percent. Yet, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2006 the U.S. ranked 39th for infant mortality, 43rd for adult female mortality, 42nd for adult male mortality, and 36th for life expectancy. In a ranking published in 2008 by the journal Health Affairs, the U.S. placed last among 14 industrial democracies for avoiding deaths preventable by health care.

 

Inequality 

One measure of inequality is the Gini coefficient.  “G” would be zero if everyone’s income in a country were equal, 100 if all income went to just one person.  According to the 2010 CIA World Factbook, Sweden’s G is 23, Denmark’s 24, Norway’s 25, Germany’s 27, and the Netherlands 31.  For the entire European Union the G is 31.  Compare these with a G of 34 for the UK, a 39 for Israel, 42 for Russia, 43 for China, and 45 for the U.S.

Within the U.S., inequality has grown since the mid-1970s.  In 1974, only 8 percent of all income went to the top 1 percent. In 2007, more than 24 percent did.  The net worth of the wealthiest 1 percent now exceeds that of the bottom 90 percent. In 1980, executive pay in large U.S. corporations was 40 times that of the average worker. In 2007, it was 350 times.

In terms of intergenerational social mobility, the U.S. ranks well below Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany and Spain.

 

Health and inequality

In The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett report that more equal countries such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Japan have longer life expectancies, lower infant mortality, and lower prevalence of obesity than do less equal countries such as the U.K., Portugal,  Australia, or the U.S.

Linking health with inequality is the stress hormone cortisol. In lower status positions, primates, rodents, and humans experience higher chronic stress than do their higher status counterparts. Higher chronic stress releases more cortisol that, in turn, triggers a cascade of pathological effects that include chronic constriction of blood vessels, raised levels of blood-clotting factors leading to hypertension, heart disease, obesity, and a suppressed immune system.

 

Climate change and inequality

Socioeconomic inequality generates status anxiety—one judges one’s “worth” primarily in relation to others.  As others in one’s comparative status group acquire more material “symbols” of achievement, one feels compelled to do the same to maintain relative standing. Sophisticated marketing conditions us to believe that consumption restores relative status and thus relieves anxiety. Until, of course, someone else in our comparative status group upsets that ephemeral equilibrium with a newer car, a higher tech TV or tablet computer, or a bigger house in a more upscale neighborhood. In the race for status, as in the arms race, there are no permanent winners, only permanent players. Yale’s Henry Wallich has observed,  “So long as there is growth, there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable.”

Inequality undermines trust and community. It renders government vulnerable to special interests seeking to maximize short-term profit.  Inequality, especially rising inequality, promotes status competition, social divisiveness, and weakens the will of the many to organize to defend common interests against the specialized interests of the few.  Inequality corrodes social bonds, erodes friendship, diminishes civic participation, and attenuates trust in government.

Seeking  refuge from the uncertainty of potential social malaise, the privileged retreat to gated communities where their wealth and membership fees provide police and fire protection, secure recreation, and access to private education.  Because the gated privileged finance such “public goods” with their “own” money, they tend to oppose the taxes necessary to ensure that citizens beyond the gate enjoy a “civilized life” made possible only by adequate public goods and services.

Increased public alienation, diminished civic participation, and a weakened will to organize create an atomized electorate and a government vulnerable to special interest influence, particularly to the influence of organized special interests.
In the context of a public neutered and neutralized by growing inequality, special corporate interests prevail to ensure Congress takes no action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Notable among these special interests are corporations such as Exxon Mobil and “think tanks” that amplify climate change deniers and skeptics such as The Heartland Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Marshall Institute.

Thus, greater socioeconomic inequality provides a cogent reason why the U.S. lags Europe in both health and in greenhouse gas reductions. Having observed these differences upon return from Europe, the truly thoughtful Sierra traveler pauses to consider the words of the futurist Buckminster Fuller:  “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Richard A. Rehberg, Ph.D., a member of the Susquehanna Group Atlantic Chapter, Sierra Club, is a professor emeritus of public policy at Binghamton University.

Postscript: I doubt Dick will ever see a post of his 2009 Sierra Club article, then again, you never know. A long time ago at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Binghamton, of which at the time we were both members, he gave a lecture / sermon. He told about his years of study about global warming and the threat of climate change.

I had forgotten his name and the Chairman of the Department of Physics helped me recall. I told him, and I tell you now, if you ever do read this Professor Rehberg, your talk opened my eyes. Then Jim Hansen caught my heart. And, Jo-Jo tickled my fancy. Those are other stories.

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By jcwinnie | Posted in advocacy, climate, economics, education, emotion, equity, policy | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Ecological (And Not Republican or Exxon Mobil) Sensitivity

2011-12-28 – 7:09 pm

NASA’s Rolf Schuttenhelm advises that climate change may “flip” 40% of Earth’s major ecosystems in this century. Jo-Jo probably had permission to cross-post this post from Bits of Science. (Catastrophe data, get it?) Since it definitely is worth re-posting, somehow it found its way into my weblog, too.

The results of studies that try to quantify the effects of climate change on biodiversity loss — which include damage to the micro scale level of subspecies and genetic variation — are perhaps most shocking.

When, however, you focus on the response to climate change at the macro level, the ecosystem level, you get a better understanding of what is one of the major drivers of that biodiversity loss: forced migrations. And even here, the numbers may be larger than one would expect, as a new assessment by NASA and Caltech published in the journal Climatic Change shows that by 2100 some 40 percent of “major ecological community types” – that is biomes like forest, grassland, tundra – will have switched to a different such state.

According to the same study most of the land on Earth that is not currently desert or under an icecap will undergo at least a 30 percent change in vegetation cover.

Ecological damage is the real climate problem

Based on IPCC temperature projections for 2100 [which are probably on the conservative side] of 2-4 degrees Celsius warming scientists of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology ran special computer models to calculate the most probable ecosystem responses across the planet. This average temperature rise is of similar magnitude to the warming that occurred between the Last Glacial Maximum and the onset of the (milder) Holocene – with the big exception that the current warming is happening about 100 times faster – and for ecology that makes a huge difference, the authors stress.

“While warnings of melting glaciers, rising sea levels and other environmental changes are illustrative and important, ultimately, it’s the ecological consequences that matter most,” says John Bergengren from Caltech, who led the study.

It is not just species that have slowly evolved around specific climatic values, the same goes for ecosystems. As another study, recently published in Science, shows tropical biomes like rainforest, savanna and desert are tied to specific climate tipping points. When certain climatic thresholds are crossed the one ecosystem can suddenly switch to the other, as intermediate states somehow prove to be non-existent.

Migrations will crisscross

As ecosystems shift on a timescale of centuries or less, species cannot adapt [because the required structural evolution takes millions of years] so they have to start moving to find other suited habitat, resembling their original climate and vegetation zones. For most species this requires migration towards the poles – but of course our planet’s many features, from mountain ranges, rivers and coastlines, to areas with high human population density and anything from agricultural plains to highways, industries and parking lots, greatly increases the extinction risk for individual species.

Perhaps somewhat harder to envision for us is that [as other new research shows] under continued climate change marine species face similar migratory distances – as the complexity of that blue world below the waterline is not limited to the presence of salty water, and finding replacement ecosystems may be equally challenging for a coral fish as it is for an orangutan.

The fact that some species are much better capable of migrating than others will likely only increase ecological imbalances and the risk of dangerous ecosystem plague damage.

Most sensitive climate hotspots

The new study by NASA and Caltech defines as ecologically sensitive hotspots – areas projected to undergo the greatest degree of species turnover – regions in the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau [as this ‘third pole’ is in fact to be considered a climatic island], eastern equatorial Africa [which has an unstable drought-sensitive climate], Madagascar, the Mediterranean region, southern South America, and North America’s Great Lakes and Great Plains areas. The largest areas of ecological sensitivity and biome changes predicted for this century are found in areas with the most dramatic climate change: in the Northern Hemisphere high latitudes, particularly along the northern and southern boundaries of taiga or boreal forests.

–Rolf Schuttenhelm is a climate analyst at MeteoVista and a Science Writer for Bits of Science, where this piece was originally published.

Related Posts:

Great Grand Child

And my comment to another catastrophe post by Joe Romm also fits here:

I tell older people (older than my 62 years) that they should warn their great grandchildren about what to expect in terms of consequences from climate change. Such advice is not well received. That’s O.K. The catastrophes those living in the future will face will be much harder to face than my smart-ass advice.

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By jcwinnie | Posted in advocacy, agriculture, climate, compassion, disasters, ecology, economics, environment, equity, ethics, family, fear, forecast, human rights, peace, survival, violence, war, world | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Seeing As How It’s SOPA Time

2011-12-26 – 10:23 am
English: The Merck Manual - Home Health Handbook

Image of Merck Home Manual via Wikipedia. It lies by my bedside.

STATE COLLEGE, PA - NOVEMBER 11: Penn State ...
Kenny Frazier Image by Getty Images via @daylife

I thought that I would copy my readers on a letter. (And since my Mom died in October, I have to assume that someone else reads my blogging.)

December 18, 2011

Kenneth C. Frazier

Chairman of the Board, President and CEO

Merck & Co., Inc.

P.O. Box 100

Whitehouse Station, NJ 08889-0100

Re: Merck Patient Assistance Program

Dear Sir,

I am writing to you without much hope for action that would show me responsibility for the values you advertise. Why? Because I see from your profile that you also are part of Exxon Mobil, a company that is taking a lead in destroying life on the Planet as we know it. The profile also advertises Cornerstone Christian Academy. Not only am I writing this letter when I should be in church, but also, while I believe in Christ, a lot of Christians might not think so.

My strategy to at least get you to read my complaint is to focus on what is really most important: money. Your profile reflects a conservative orientation and one recent Republican response to concern about government support of health plans is: “Die quickly.” Well, with my diagnosis the average life span is 14 months and the range is 6 months to 2 years. Don’t know whether that is what the Republican speakers define as quickly or not. Meanwhile, I am taking Temodar.

This chemotherapy prescribed for the glioblastoma that I have cost me $2384 for a 42 day supply. My financial position is just outside the range to qualify for Medicaid (poverty line). So that was a shocker after my new diagnosis, and I look around for financial help. The first one was the Merck Patient Assistance Program, specifically the A.C.T. program because it covered inquiries about help getting Temodar.

Tabitha called me back to tell me the status, but I was in a home health visit, so I had to call A.C.T. back. I spoke with Beatrice. While not explaining the rejection (I have yet to get anything in writing) she advised me to go after my pharmacist because of avoiding processing the claim through Medicare Part B (B as in boy) and not Part D (D as in dog) (And, no, she didn’t explain it that way, which could have lessened my confusion with her explanation. B and D sound a lot alike over the telephone.) Anyway, after contacting my pharmacy (Wegman’s Pharmacy, Johnson City) and my insurance carrier (Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield), I learned that the $2384 is my co-pay and that Excellus paid over $7000.

$10K for 42 days is the kind of thing someone rich can afford. It is less affordable to someone just over the poverty line. Anyway, I can understand that Merck wants to avoid cutting into profits, and it costs a lot to develop a drug that interferes with DNA in a known way and there is some reported success in treating my diagnosis with it. And, you may want to oppose the Republican advocacy of “Die quickly”, since it also will cut into your profits.

Thanks to whoever it was that read this.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Smith

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By jcwinnie | Posted in abuse, death, economics, health, Internet, leadership, negotiation, organizations, policy, politics | Tagged , , | Comments (9)

LFTR in 5 Minutes – THORIUM REMIX 2011

2011-12-24 – 6:48 pm

One reason that I still accept nuclear power as an alternative to coal, oil and gas.

The video’s speaker fails to acknowledge that the rich / military control the uranium industry.

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By jcwinnie | Posted in advocacy, climate, complexity, control, energy | Comments (1)

Environmental World Review 2011

2011-12-24 – 1:41 pm
The Keeling Curve of atmospheric CO 2 concentr...

World CO2 Chart via Wikipedia -- Look to the top of right sidebar for the current month's CO2 level

Via Climate Himalaya, The Guardian reports on the record greenhouse gas emissions, melting Arctic sea ice, natural disasters and extreme weather – and the world’s second worst nuclear disaster.

The year 2011 was another ecologically tumultuous year with greenhouse gases rise to record levels, Arctic sea ice nearly equalling 2007?s record melt, and temperatures the 11th highest ever recorded.

It was marked on the ground by unparalleled extremes of heat and cold in the US, droughts and heatwaves in Europe and Africa and record numbers of weather-related natural disasters.

In addition, 2011 saw the world population reach 7 billion, the second worst nuclear disaster and record investments in renewable energy.

The 41 sea, land and air indicators used by the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to measure sea and land temperatures showed unequivocally that the world continued to warm throughout 2011. In July, NOAA reported that the last 300 months had all been above average temperature and that the 13 warmest years had all occurred in the 15 years since 1997. 2011 was additionally remarkable, it said, because a “La Niña” event was taking place, a naturally occurring oceanic cooling phenomenon that would normally bring temperatures down.

Despite stagnation or economic recession in many industrialised countries, concentrations of CO2, measured at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, peaked at more than 394 parts per million in May and are now 39% above where they were at the start of the industrial era and approaching the point when some scientists say it will be nearly impossible to contain global warming.

In greenie-weenie talk, we simply describe it as the start of the Anthropocene.

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By jcwinnie | Posted in climate, environment, world | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Double-Layered Silicon-Germanium Nanotube Array

2011-12-21 – 5:25 pm
English: Nokia Li-ion Battery.

Nokia Li-ion Battery Image via Wikipedia

Yi Cui’s Stanford team is not the only one to report progress in development of better anodes. Green Car Congress relays a report that a ”team from Hanyang University (S. Korea), Northwestern University, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign has developed a double-layered silicon-germanium nanotube array as an anode material for high-capacity lithium-ion batteries.”

This electrode technology also creates opportunities in the development of group IVA (carbon, silicon, germanium, tin and lead) nanotube heterostructures for next generation lithium-ion batteries

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By jcwinnie | Posted in chemistry, design, development, energy | Tagged , , | Comments (2)
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