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Closed (Collision) Course

How close do you have to get to being a doomsayer to get the point across about resource depletion without seeming like a kook and therefore being easily marginalized? It seems like we are on a collision course with finding out. The idea filters down (or up, depending on your orient) to every sort of green advertising, book selling, and opinion writing you can find by opening your iLid. To even get in the door to policy discussions, the apocalyptic ends must be sufficiently trimmed to keep the discussions civilized (i.e. potentially profitable) to the corporate nervous Nellies who control everything. But any serious steps to alter the trajectory of planetary ruination will be absolutely predicated on a series of disasters, sufficiently devastating as to be impossible to iSleep through. It’s an indelicate path between catastrophe and optimism. Joe Romm quotes little Tommy Friedman, channeling Paul Gilding:

This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out of water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity.

The need for crises; the will to avert them.

Closed (collision) course. Amateur driver.

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State of the Environment

The local environment, in China. You’ve heard about the smog, but just how bad is it?

  • Surface water pollution is “relatively grave,” with 16.7% of rivers failing to meet any sort of grade standard–meaning the water is completely unfit for use (including in agricultural irrigation). And 42.3% of rivers are affected by eutrophication, a process where phytoplankton deplete oxygen from the water.
  • Approximately one in five cities doesn’t meet China’s urban air quality standards, which are lower than those recommended by the World Health Organization. Acid rain was observed in over 50% of the country’s cities.
  • 22% of the country’s 2,588 nature reserves are damaged in some way, mainly because as “economic development and industrialisation have gained momentum, unreasonable activities have weakened the function and value of those reserves.” In other words, the country is just too crowded.
  • Heavy metal pollution is a growing (but still small) problem, with 14 reported cases last year and seven this year.

Something to remember in between all the talk about China being our biggest competitor. Point being: competitor for what?

Another thing, all this is from a report released by the Chinese government. It’s not like they’re being coy about it. Maybe we shouldn’t be, either.

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Green Quiz

Which is the more eco enviro? No fair if you recognize your ‘hood.

1. Paris3rd

2. allemagne

3. alpharhetta

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Shades of Purple

Now this is the kind of Iraqi issue I, for one, am glad to fret over:

Baghdad has weathered invasion, occupation, sectarian warfare and suicide bombers. But the latest scourge, tastelessness, may prove the toughest to overcome.

Iraqi artists and architecture critics who shudder at each new pastel building blame a range of factors for Baghdad’s slide into tackiness: including corruption and government ineptitude, as well as everyday Iraqis who are trying to banish their grim past and are unaccustomed to having the freedom to choose any color they want.

God bless ’em. Welcome to the modern world, Iraqis. But for my money, this is the pull quote:

“Right now, when I have an exhibition at my gallery nobody comes from the government, only the art students and other artists,” Mr. Sabti said. “Taking care of the look of the city has stopped because the people who have come to power were living in villages with animals. So how did they develop their taste?”

If you guys figure anything out, do tell.

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Flooded Threads

0503-mississippi-river-flooding-memphis_full_600

This is a good example of why the green issue is so complex, viz our modern ways and means, and corrections to it so complicated.

An emergency procedure intended to prevent the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers from flooding several river towns appears to be working Tuesday, as river levels have fallen more than a foot. However, water levels are rising as far south as Memphis, Tenn., where heavy rainfall could contribute to a river crest of 48 feet next Tuesday.

Late Monday, the US Army Corps of Engineers blasted a two-mile hole in a Mississippi River levee to relieve water pressure that, at its height Monday night, stood at a record-breaking 61.72 feet in Cairo, Ill. The historic river town is located at the bottommost tip of Illinois, where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers meet.

But that’s only part of it. Originally, before it was straightened at any many points and levees built to protect settlements, town and cities the alluvial plain of the Mississippi Delta was about 300 miles wide. As much as it was a pain and a danger, its regular flooding by the sediment-rich river produced extraordinarily fertile croplands throughout the Delta region – not to be confused with the Mississippi River Delta at the mouth of the river, which is different.

The delta regularly flooded, so we set about changing its course and building levees to protect people and property from the flooding. In an alluvial plain. I certainly do not wish any of these residents any harm or ill-will at this time of hardship. These are the ramifications of our own attempts to master the largest river system in North America. When we made it impossible for the river to periodically dump sediments onto the land through flooding, we made it possible for the river to carry the same same sediment out into the river delta, where it creates massive biological dead zones, aka hypoxia zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s weird and not much salve to see try to this in context of a longer time continuum. But as Fred said, we need more weird.

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Woodshed

If you missed Krugman today… well, you shouldn’t miss Krugman today:

These days Americans get constant lectures about the need to reduce the budget deficit. That focus in itself represents distorted priorities, since our immediate concern should be job creation. But suppose we restrict ourselves to talking about the deficit, and ask: What happened to the budget surplus the federal government had in 2000?

The answer is, three main things. First, there were the Bush tax cuts, which added roughly $2 trillion to the national debt over the last decade. Second, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which added an additional $1.1 trillion or so. And third was the Great Recession, which led both to a collapse in revenue and to a sharp rise in spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs.

Sure we can talk about and quote long passages from books about the French Revolution, as I’m so fond of doing about any kinds of books, and draw comparisons between now and the run-up to that ghastly epoch. But I’m not sure how much good it will do (though I think a film about Saint Just would be great right about now).

But the more people with megaphones like Krugman take-on and takedown nonsense like the gospel of Greenspan and all of the other Randian balderdash that has so permeated the air waves, sunk most of the newspapers and razed the public squares, replacing them with parking lots for multi-aisle wish fulfillment, the harder the Greenspans et al will have to fight to maintain the BS level that now floats so effortlessly over us all.

Though there is no one like Krugman, there are plenty of others. I heard Stiglitz on NPR this morning and when Steve Inskeep (?) tried to question him about weren’t the stimulus and tax cuts strategies all just the same anyway and the debt was the most important blah blah blah, Joe was having none of it. And called him on the nonsense right away. Can’t believe they had him on. Listen here.

Anyway, these are important steps out of the cow field and here’s to sustaining them. But… no way around the woodshed.

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More from Less

Nice catch from Klein via Yglesias:

Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell University, is one of the more innovative tax thinkers I know. In particular, I’ve always been partial to his proposal for a progressive consumption tax (pdf). So I ran the plan by him, as well. “The progressive budget proposal is of course an enormous improvement over the bizarre Ryan budget,” he said, “which for all its chest thumping about facing up to the hard choices, does nothing — absolutely nothing — to reduce long-run deficits.” But like Gale and Burman, Frank wanted to see more simplification and reform. In particular, he wanted more attention given to what we tax with an eye toward two-fers: raising more money off of things we want less of. “When we enter congested roadways, or buy heavy vehicles, or drink to excess, or emit CO2 into the air, we impose costs on others,” he says. “Taxing such activities kills two birds with one stone: It generates much needed revenue, and it curtails activities that cause more harm than good. Because these taxes make the economic pie bigger, it makes no sense to object that we can’t afford them.” He recommended this piece (pdf) for more on those ideas.

Emphases from the link. But the key: raising more money off of things we want less of. The whole idea of a two-fer has only yet manifested itself in the heads and hearts of those who want to keep their tax money and penalize the poor, children and the elderly by teaching them some kind of lesson.

But Frank’s is the real way to get to the things that matter, one that also has many corollaries, among them: make sure more people finish school and can go to college, wherever they are from, so that they can get jobs and spend a long productive life of at least intermittent happiness paying taxes. Hello?

Banning certain kids from college is stupid. Not taxing the externalities of energy production, ditto.

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Gasoline Monoculture

Could you get to work if gas became unaffordable? To get groceries? Get the kids to school?

What is obvious is that the kind of monocultural economy that we have, based on gasoline, is unsustainable and vulnerable to price increases not to mention availability.

So many of the “controversies” we have in planning really come down to building a land use and transportation paradigm that is resilient, one that is less dependent on external inputs.

Hello? The extraordinarily limited (~1) diversity of options is not something we can suddenly retro-fit to our society in the face of skyrocketing transportation costs. And so we’ll be left to simply not go to school and work, and spend our days trekking from suburban enclaves to the grocery store and back. Well, what? Why not consider it that way? Do you actually have a perception of how far two miles is? Five? We rigidly ignore any possibility that our way o’ life will ever be interrupted. People have internalized the idea that transportation alternatives are some kind of antagonistic socialism meant for depraved urban scum or hippies or the poor (commutative property could be in order here). Now what?

link via.

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Now this is… cool(ing)

Sorry, no pun intended. But, via IC, just to show how much they are not really Americans, the good people of Honolulu are going to use sea water for air conditioning.

Sea water with a temperature of 45 degrees Fahrenheit would be pumped to a cooling station makai of Ala Moana Boulevard along Keawe Street, where it would undergo a heat exchange with fresh water circulating in a network of pipes to various buildings.

…

Company Senior Vice President Michael Ahern said the proj ect, whose investors are mainly from Hawaii, Sweden and Minnesota, is scheduled to start construction late this year and begin providing serv ice to customers in 2013.

He said a similar system has been designed in Sweden by engineers with his company.

Ahern said the system will reduce Hawaii’s consumption of oil by some 178,000 barrels a year and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 84,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Meanwhile in other news, the good people of South Carolina bombarded Fort Sumter and Charleston Harbor with millions of dollars worth of live fake ordnance on Tuesday in an epic demonstration of solidarity with our Imperial past.

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Clean Energy Race?

No, it’s not newly discovered caste of green humans.

But actually, a pathetic tale.

Our research shows that the clean energy sector around the world has roared back from flat recessionary levels, increasing 30 percent from 2009 to achieve a record $243 billion2 worth of finance and investment in 2010. More than 90 percent of all clean energy investments were directed to companies and projects in the G-20. Excluding research and development funding, clean energy finance and investment in the G-20 countries totaled $198 billion, 33 percent more than was invested in 2009.

That’s from the Pew Charitable Trusts report, “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?” You can guess the nature of part the next:

The Americas region is a distant third in the race for clean energy investment, attracting $65.8 billion overall in 2010. Investments in the United States rebounded 51 percent over 2009 levels to reach $34 billion, but the United States continued to slide down the top 10 list, falling from second to third. Given uncertainties surrounding key policies and incentives, the United States’ competitive position in the clean energy sector is at risk. Growth is sharper in Latin America, where private clean energy investment in Argentina increased by 568 percent and in Mexico by 273 percent, the highest growth rates among G-20 members.

That’s right. Growth is sharper in Latin America. I mean, God bless ’em and all, but this is actually too serious to be an embarrassment. Our competitive position in the clean energy sector, such that it is, is at risk in the toilet because of a failure to face up to the facts. Instead we just want to debate them. Opportunity knocking a plenty, but only others answering.

Godspeed you clean energy racers.