Jack A. Smith : Climate Change Confab Brings Too Little Too Late

Climate change activists in Warsaw, Friday, November 22, 2013, portray, from right, French President Francois Hollande, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, President Obama, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Photo by Czarek Sokolowski, / AP.

Climate Change meeting in
Warsaw brings too little too late


Given the number of drastic reports about climate change... the accomplishments at COP19 are useful but hugely disproportionate to what is needed.

By Jack A. Smith / The Rag Blog / December 23, 2013

The sharply increasing scientific indicators of impending disastrous global climate change have failed to motivate the principal developed countries, led by the U.S., to accelerate the lackluster pace of their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This was the principal conclusion of several key environmental groups attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC) November 11-23 in Warsaw, Poland. The meeting lasted a day and a half longer than scheduled to resolve a dispute about new greenhouse emission targets. About 10,000 people attended the 19th annual meeting of the so-called Conference of Parties (COP19) that drew nearly all the UN’s 193 member states.

About 800 attendees associated with environmental groups walked out of the conference November 21, protesting the lack of progress. In a joint statement on the day of the walkout, the World Wildlife Federation, OxFam, Friends of the Earth, Action Aid, and the International Trade Union Federation declared:

Organizations and movements representing people from every corner of the Earth have decided that the best use of our time is to voluntarily withdraw from the Warsaw climate talks. The conference, which should have been an important step in the just transition to a sustainable future, is on track to deliver virtually nothing.

According to Professor Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics and a leading British expert on climate change: “The actions that have been agreed are simply inadequate when compared with the scale and urgency of the risks that the world faces from rising levels of greenhouse gases.”

There were also street protests and marches in Warsaw composed largely of younger conference attendees and local youth. One slogan, referring to climate disasters, was “The Philippines, Pakistan, New Orleans: Change the System, not the climate.”

On November 18, delegates from 133 developing countries -- under the umbrella of the G77 group plus China -- walked out temporarily “because we do not see a clear-cut commitment by developed countries to reach an agreement” to financially help poor countries suffering the effects of climate change for which they are not responsible. The U.S., for instance, was reluctant to help developing countries adapt to sea level rise, droughts, powerful storms and other adverse impacts, even though it is historically the greatest emitter of greenhouse gases.

By the end of the conference, perhaps encouraged by the walkout, the world body agreed to set up a “Loss and Damage” process for “the most vulnerable countries” experiencing losses from global warming. The details remain vague.

A distressing aspect of the conference came when four major developed countries took actions in contradiction to fighting global warming.

• Japan -- the fifth largest carbon polluter -- announced it was breaking its pledge to reduce greenhouse gases by 25% of 1990 levels by the year 2020, blaming the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.
• Canada and Australia recently declared they would not support the Green Climate Fund -- the UNCCC program to transfer money from the developed to the developing countries to assist them in dealing with climate change.
• Conference host Poland, a major coal producer, worked with the World Coal Association to simultaneously host the International Coal and Climate Summit in Warsaw. (Greenpeace and others protested outside the coal meeting.)

COP19 was permeated with corporate lobbyists from “fossil fuels, big business groups, carbon market and financial players, agribusiness and agrofuels, as well as some of the big polluting industries,” according to the oppositional “COP19 Guide to Corporate Lobbying.” Corporations appeared at previous COP meetings but, witnesses say, never in such large number.

Obviously, one of the most important issues confronting the world community is reducing greenhouse carbon emissions to impede global warming. This is a perennial UNCCC goal but hardly sufficient so far to prevent substantial increases in carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere, now exceeding 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in at least 3 million years since the Pliocene era.

Greenhouse reductions hark back to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which obligated developed countries to specific -- and in the main incongruously low -- emissions reduction targets while developing countries were encouraged to reduce emissions without a binding requirement.

Since 1997, despite Kyoto, emissions have increased substantially. According to a new report from research teams coordinated by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, “The gap between where emissions are and where emissions would need to be in order to keep climate targets within reach is getting bigger and bigger.”

Kyoto, which the U.S. refused to join because of its so-called “bias” toward developing countries, has in effect been extended from 2013 to 2020 when new emissions targets will go into effect. Unless these new targets are far greater than the old, CO2 ppm will jump much higher.

At issue during COP19 was a proposal by the EU, U.S., and a number of developed countries to eliminate Kyoto’s nonbinding reductions for developing countries. Under this plan, each and all countries would set specific targets over next year. These targets would then be inspected by the other countries to assure they are adequate for the mission at hand. The final targets would be published in early 2015 and presumably approved by that year’s COP, and implemented in five years.

An intense 36-hour struggle between a group of developing countries and most developed countries over this proposal went into an extra session lasting throughout Nov. 22 and into the early hours of the 23rd. Opposing removal of the distinction between developed and developing countries was a group called the “Like-Minded Developing Countries on Climate Change” (LMDC), including such countries as China, India, Venezuela, Bolivia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Thailand.

According to an account in the mass circulation Indian newspaper The Hindu:

India, China and other countries in the LMDC group take the position that the new climate agreement must not force developing countries to review their volunteered emission reduction targets. Setting themselves up in a direct confrontation with the developed countries, the LMDC opposes doing away with the current differentiation between developing and developed countries when it came to taking responsibility for climate action.

In other words, the developing countries will do what they can to reduce emissions, but the principal task by far belongs to the developed countries. They argue that developed industrial countries have been spewing fossil fuel-created greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for 100 to 200 years or more, and most of these pollutants have yet to dissipate. The carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere could warm the planet for hundreds of years.

The richer countries reject this argument, pointing to the increasing industrialization taking place in the developing world. Writing in the Guardian November 25, Graham Readfearn points out: “Rich countries are desperate to avoid taking the blame for the impacts of climate change.... The developed countries won't let any statements slip into any UN climate document that could be used against them in the future” in terms of financing mitigation, adaptation, and compensation costs.

Most developing countries are very poor and have contributed miniscule emissions, but a few of them -- China, India, and Brazil, among others -- have become major industrialized powers in relatively recent years. China, now the largest annual contributor to global warming, has been seriously industrialized for less than 30 years and also functions as a global factory for many nations, including the U.S.

These recently industrializing developing states, most of which are former exploited colonies of the rich countries, argue that the developed states became major powers based on burning fossil fuels and thus have the major responsibility to take the lead in reducing emissions.

China points out that while it has recently displaced the U.S. as leading producer of Greenhouse gas emissions, its population is three times greater. On a per capita basis, Beijing notes, the average American in 2011 produced 17.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide; the average Chinese, just 6.5 tons. (A metric ton is 205 pounds heavier than a 2,000 pound ton.) The U.S. rejects these arguments.

Climate activists in downtown Warsaw, Poland, Saturday, November 16, 2013. Photo from AP.

The developed-developing conflict over emissions was finally resolved when China and India withdrew demands for including Kyoto’s exception for developing countries, in return for which “commitments” to a specific target were changed to “contributions.” Clearly this is a vague stopgap measure that will eventually change. The important matter is the total of emissions reductions to be agreed upon in 2015.

The U.S., as the most influential developed country, has taken hardly any action at all to significantly reduce CO2 emissions when it was the number one emitter of carbon in the atmosphere or now when it is number two, tut-tutting about China’s smokestacks while President Obama boasts about expanding drilling for oil and fracking for gas.

Ironically, though China is a mass polluter today it is investing far more heavily than the U.S. in renewable resources such as solar and wind energy. This may eventually pay off, but not before an unacceptable level of CO2 continues.


Given the number of drastic reports about climate change from the scientific community in the last several months, the accomplishments at COP19 are useful but hugely disproportionate to what is needed. In addition to the agreement on contributions to lower greenhouse emissions this also happened: The countries agreed on a multi-billion dollar program to combat global deforestation. The Loss and Damage project was passed, and developed states were urged to increase levels of aid to poorer countries. A plan was hammered out to monitor emissions reductions.

A few of those recent drastic reports include these facts:

• Greenhouse gas emissions are set to be 8-12 billion tons higher in 2020 than the level needed to keep global warming below 3.6 Fahrenheit, the UN Environment Program said. (Above 3.6 F, the world’s people will begin to experience extreme effects)...
• According to the American Meteorological Society, there is a 90% probability that global temperatures will rise 6.3 to 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit in less than 100 years...
• According to the Associated Press, a leaked report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change means that “Many of the ills of the modern world -- starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war and disease -- are likely to worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change”...
• The U.S. is likely to become the world’s top producer of crude oil and natural gas by the end of 2013 due to increased oil drilling and fracking for gas...
• The U.S. is pumping 50% more methane into the atmosphere than the government has estimated, reports Science News...
• In a new study, the team of researchers reports a global loss of 888,000 square miles of forest between 2000 and 2012 and a gain of only 309,000 square miles of new forest.

Summing up the Warsaw conference, an observer for Christian Aid, Mohamed Adow, declares:

In agreeing to establish a loss and damage mechanism, countries have accepted the reality that the world is already dealing with the extensive damage caused by climate impacts, and requires a formal process to assess and deal with it, but they seem unwilling to take concrete actions to reduce the severity of these impacts.

“We did not achieve a meaningful outcome,” said Naderev Sano, the head of the Philippines delegation who had been fasting throughout the meeting in solidarity with the victims of Typhoon Haiyan.

Samantha Smith, representing the World Wildlife Fund at COP19 declared:

Negotiators in Warsaw should have used this meeting to take a big and critical step towards global, just action on climate change. That didn't happen. This has placed the negotiations towards a global agreement [on emissions] at risk.

The next major UNCCC conference, COP20, will take place in Lima, Peru, in December 2014. The extremely important 2015 meeting, when the countries will decide on new emissions targets, will be in Paris.

There is positive news as well as the negative.

• A majority of the American people now seek to limit global warming, according to a recent report from Grist Environmental News. Stanford University Professor Jon Krosnick led an analysis of more than a decade’s worth of poll results for 46 states. The results show that the majority of residents of all of those states, whether red or blue, are united in their worries about the climate. At least three-quarters of residents are aware that the climate is changing. Two-thirds want the government to limit greenhouse gas emissions from businesses. At least 62% want regulations that cut carbon pollution from power plants. At least half want the U.S. to take action to fight climate change, even if other countries do not.


• The walkout by environmental NGOs is highly significant. They are clearly “mad as hell” and presumably are “not going to take this anymore!" to evoke the famous line from the film Network. Their unprecedented action in Warsaw undoubtedly reflects the views of millions of people back in the United States who have been following the scientific reports and want Washington to finally take dramatic action.


• At issue is mobilizing these people to take action in concert with others to force the political system to put climate sanity and ecological sustainability on the immediate national agenda. Two things are required: 1. A mass education program is called for because the broader and deeper implications of reforms must be understood and acted upon. 2. Unity in action is necessary to bring together many constituencies to fight for climate sanity and justice with a view toward protecting future generations from the excesses of the industrial era.


• There are up to a score of major environmental organizations in the U.S. Some, like Greenpeace and 350.org are willing to offer civil disobedience; some are important education and pressure groups; and some -- far fewer -- are too cautious and compromising, such as those advocating for nuclear power or natural gas. There must be many hundreds and more small and medium size environmental groups throughout our country, with anywhere from five to 50 or even 100 local followers. And then there are the numerous progressive and left organizations that basically agree with the environmental cause. None have to give up their individual identities, but they can come together around specific global warming and ecological issues and fight the power of the 1% to 5% who essentially rule America.


• The actions of the developing societies at COP19 were important, too, particularly their brief walkout. The majority of these countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are not only vulnerable to the consequences of climate change but rarely possess the economic wherewithal to adequately survive. They will struggle for their demands in future global conferences.


• Despite the foot-dragging of many developed countries, all of them contain environmental and progressive/left organizations. They, too, are “mad as hell” and will grow stronger.


• Time may not be on sanity’s side, but as the CO2 ppm rises and the hopes for significant reductions in greenhouse gases fall in the next few years, conditions will be ripe for a global climate justice uprising.

At this point it seems that only a mass mobilization of the U.S. and world’s peoples will be able to provide the strength to stand up to the fossil fuel interests, the corporations, big business, banks, financiers, and the weak or corrupt politicians who impede the way to build an equal and ecologically sustainable society including rational conservation of resources and reduction of excess consumption.

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian -- for decades the nation's preeminent leftist newsweekly -- that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter. Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Bruce Melton on Global Warming and Climate Change Denial

Environmental activist Bruce Melton at the studios of KOOP radio in Austin, Texas, September 20, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Environmental researcher and
climate change activist Bruce Melton

Austin environmentalist and Rag Blog contributor talks about global warming, climate change denial, and Austin's 'Dry Lake Blues.'

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / October 2, 2013

Environmental researcher and climate change activist Bruce Melton was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 20, 2013.

Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download the podcast of our September 20 interview with Bruce Melton here:


Melton, an Austin-based civil engineer and a student of climate science, discussed global warming, climate change denial, the Texas drought, and Austin's "Dry Lake Blues" on Rag Radio.

Bruce Melton is an environmental researcher and activist, a green builder, an environmental filmmaker, an author, and front man for the band, Climate Change. Bruce is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and Truthout on issues of climate change and global warming. He is the author of Climate Discovery Chronicles and his new book is Dry Lake Blues. He blogs at ClimateDiscovery.com .

Bruce Melton was one of eight Austinites named as a "Hero of Climate Change" by Good Life Magazine. He has been translating and interpreting scholarly science publications for two decades. His Climate Change Now initiative has applied for nonprofit 501(c)(3) status. This is his fourth time to appear on Rag Radio. The Rag Blog's Roger Baker also participated in the discussion.

Listen to the podcasts of Bruce Melton's earlier appearances on Rag Radio and read Bruce's articles at The Rag Blog.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is now also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, October 4, 2013: Novelist Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross, set in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Friday, October 11, 2013: Medical and Cultural Anthropologist Seth Holmes, author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States.

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Bruce Melton : Kick the Climate Deniers off the Island

The Greenwood Acres fishing pier on Lake Buchanan, west of Burnet, Texas. Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.

The climate science is certain:
Time to kick the deniers off the island

In just eight years, permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest (including Austin) will be comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years.

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / August 15, 2013

AUSTIN, Texas -- The science is certain, but the deniers are just as certain that their pseudo science is certain. Getting the last few deniers to agree with 97 percent of climate scientists though -- is that a good use of resources? We have the vast majority of the public on our side -- isn't that enough votes?

We can kick the deniers off the island. This is not a mean-spirited thing -- far from it. It's about the optimal path for resource-deprived situations.

The denier crowd is no longer a viable voting block. We need to be focusing on the rest of us. Very few understand the extreme nature of the most recent findings in climate science and the relative ease with which our climate pollution problem can be solved. Environmentally aware voices today advocate for Kyoto Era policies. But Kyoto Era policies were created in the early 1990s.

The psychology of denial is a tricky thing to overcome. It's not about what we think it is about. It's not about "their science" being as good as ours in their eyes. It’s deeper than that and involves social upbringing, false intuition, authority figures, geography, gender, and religion. Because "believers" control the voting block it no longer matters why deniers disbelieve. We no longer need to change their minds.

Because of the dwindling number of deniers, their opinions are no longer relevant. The only thing that has a chance of changing their minds is time or personal experience -- so says the global warming psychology literature. We can influence neither of those, so why waste valuable time and resources? In just eight years, permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest (including Austin) will be comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years. (1)

This megadrought has now begun. In Austin we are suffering from a devastating long-term drought, but only four of the last eight years in Austin have seen significantly below normal rainfall (less than 0.5 inches below average). In the Highland Lakes watershed at San Angelo, where the water comes from to fill our lakes that are at 36 percent of capacity, only three of the last eight years saw significantly below normal rainfall. Yet inflows to the lakes have fallen below the 1950s Drought of Record levels four times in the last eight years. How can this be?

A longer growing season soaks up more soil moisture and leaves less for the springs to create inflows into the lakes. More numerous bigger rainfall events and fewer smaller rainfall events happening already mean that dry periods are longer. When it does rain, more soaks in and less runs off.

Winters are warm enough now that many species do not go dormant any longer (in Central Texas). They keep using groundwater through the winter and leave less to create inflows into the lakes. Evaporation is disproportional to warmth. A little warmth equals a lot more evaporation; more evaporation creates a drier atmosphere allowing it to get warmer creating a feedback loop.

Inflows to the Highland Lakes during the drought of record were 14 percent more than what we have seen today. They were more during the Drought of Record.

• 1947 to 1956: 10,333,493 acre feet
• 2003 to 2112: 9,070,919 acre feet

(This does not include the drought buster year of 1957 with 4.4 million acre feet of inflow.)

Plus, during the Drought of Record, LCRA was releasing 460,000 acre feet of water annually above what they release today because of hydroelectric generation. If hydroelectric releases similar to LCRA’s hydroelectric generation era were made today, in 2011 lake levels would have been far lower than they were in the 1950s and today the lakes would be completely dry. LCRA quit making hydroelectric releases in the late 1970s and early 80s as coal- and natural gas-fired power plants came on line.

But the biggest surprise is that rainfall in Austin is 7 percent more than it was in 1990. Yet, inflows to the lakes are far, far below the average of the previous 50 years. Drought can be perpetuated even with greater rainfall.

Climate scientists have been telling us these things will happen for decades, and now they are happening. It shouldn't be counterintuitive, but the denier and delayer crowd has effectively killed discussion about anything except whether or not global warming exists from a high school greenhouse effect point of view.

We need to be focusing on the level of "belief" of the "believers." It's a business decision. We can fire the deniers. It might not be the "right" thing to do, but we do not have time to be so kind. As a bonus however, we can preserve our relationships with deniers by ignoring the topic like they do. It's ok, we have enough votes.

The amount of resources needed to convince the denier and delayer gang is disproportionally large compared to the fine-tuning of the message that needs to be delivered to "believers." Time is short. We are likely too far gone to forego major tipping points like the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, desertification of the interior of continents, and a 50 GT methane outburst from clathrates. Now we need to prevent our climate from crossing even more severe thresholds.

Solution requirements are much larger today than in the Kyoto Era. We were supposed to have reduced our emissions to 1987 levels by 2012 to prevent dangerous climate change. Instead we have increased emissions by 57 percent. Since 1987 we have emitted 81 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted from the beginning of mankind's emissions until 1987.

Greater than 100 percent emissions reductions are now needed to prevent "extremely dangerous climate change." (2) Spending all of our time trying to convince a few deniers that climate change is real is not a good use of limited time or resources.

The public needs to know the ease with which we can "treat" climate pollution. The 2 percent global gross domestic product cost of dealing with climate pollution advocated by most economists over the last decade is the same as we spend on advertising every year; or the annual U.S. military budget not counting wars; or the yearly costs of the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act; or the costs of normal weather losses every year in the U.S. alone not counting climate enhanced events. It is one quarter the annual cost of health care in the U.S. averaged from 2000 to 2009 -- before Obamacare went into effect.

But the latest research leaves the science of the mid-2000s in its dust. The Stanford/Cornell Plan for a fossil fuel-free New York State suggests that New York build a new alternative energy infrastructure at a cost of a bit more than $500 billion by 2030. Beginning in 2030, the savings and profits -- above a fossil fuel economy in New York State -- are $114 billion per year. This pays off the investment in less than five years. Savings and profits then only increase with time relative to the ever-increasing costs of a fossil fuel infrastructure.(3)

[Bruce Melton, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, as well as more climate change writing, climate science outreach, and critical environmental issue documentary films can be found on his website and at climatediscovery.com. Melton’s Climate Change Now Initiative has applied for nonprofit 501(c)(3) status. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]

References:

(1) In just eight years, permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest will be comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years -- Evaluation of work from NOAA and Columbia Earth Institute (Seager 2012) for Truthout.org. Melton, Worst Drought in 1,000 Years Could Begin in Eight Years, Truthout.org, Feb. 21, 2013.
 http://truth-out.org/news/item/14655-worse-drought-in-1000-years-could-begin-in-eight-years
Seager et al., Projections of declining surface water availability for the southwestern United States, Nature Climate Change, December 2012, page 5, last paragraph.
Abstract: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1787.html
NOAA: 
 http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/glodech/research11%20SW%20water%20surface.html
Earth Institute press release: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/12/23/smaller-colorado-river-projected-for-coming-decades-study-says/
 
(2) Extremely dangerous climate change, two degrees C: 550, 450, 350 and 300 ppm CO2 -- Morrigan, Target Atmospheric GHG Concentrations Why Humanity Should Aim for 350 ppm CO2e, University of California Santa Barbara, 2010.
http://www.global.ucsb.edu/climateproject/papers/
Ramanthan, On avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system: Formidable challenges ahead, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, 2008.
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14245.full.pdf+html
Hansen et al., Target Atmospheric CO2, Where Should Humanity Aim, Open Atmospheric Science Journal, NASA, November 2008.  
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Hansen_etal.html
IPCC 2007, Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,, B. Metz, O.R. Davidson, P.R. Bosch, R. Dave, L.A. Meyer (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, Chapter 13, Policies, Instruments and Co-operative Arrangements.
IPCC 2001, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Third Assessment Report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Technical Summary.  
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/
 
(3)A Fossil Fuel Free New York State -- Melton, A Fossil Fuel Free New York State by 2050: An in-depth look at Stanford and Cornell's 100 percent alternative energy road map for New York state, Truthout.org, May 26, 2013.  
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16540-a-fossil-fuel-free-new-york-state-by-2050
Jacobson et al., Examining the feasibility of converting New York State's all-purpose energy infrastructure to one using wind, water, and sunlight, Energy Policy 57 (2013) 585-601.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/NewYorkWWSEnPolicy.pdf

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Bruce Melton : Calling all Earthlings

Alien beings emerge from “What Was Once Lake Buchanan” as the water level falls. Photos by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.

Calling all earthlings:
Climate change communications
may as well be from aliens

Relative to most of the 20th century, Austin’s January highs and lows were not 2.9 and 1.4 degrees above normal, but 9.9 and 10.4 degrees above normal!

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2013

AUSTIN -- Average temperatures have risen rapidly at the Austin reporting station since the turn of the century but the National Weather Service’s 30-year average “normal” temperatures show little of this change yet. Average April highs and lows have risen 3.5 and 5 degrees respectively. The average August temperature has risen 5 degrees and the average January high and low has risen 6 and 9 degrees respectively.

Because the National Weather Service’s 30-year averaging procedures mask this recent rapid warming, a valuable tool in climate change communications lies unused.

We Earthlings who are not climate scientists do not have the telepathic powers necessary to understand how our climate is truly changing. Someone must tell us directly. Local temperature change is a prime example. We've heard a lot of “warmer than normal” since about the turn of the century, but when the details get broken down, accuracy falls behind.

Climate change is so far different from what most of us think that a change in communication tactics must happen very soon; otherwise we will continue on this business as usual path of denial and delay until we have a global climate catastrophe that cripples the world’s economy.

The challenge is akin to that frog in a pot on the stove. This is a terribly cruel “cooked alive” analogy, but is it any more cruel than what we are doing to our future society because of delay on climate pollution action? As the analogy goes, the water in the pot gradually heats, the frog does not notice until it is too hot and he is dinner.

Climate change is insidious. The definition of insidious fits the process well. Insidious: proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects; working in a subtle or apparently innocuous way, but nevertheless deadly. It has snuck up on us because it only changes a little bit every year. It is already creating dangerous impacts to our society on a planetary scale, yet we as that society know very little of these impacts.

The way the weather is presented to us is one of the major reasons for our ignorance. There are many things that our media weather presenters could do that would help us Earthlings understand climate a truckload better than we do, but one stands atop the heap. Every 10 years the National Weather Service (NWS) refigures their “normal temperatures” that we hear on the weather report every day. They look back to the previous 30 years for these calculations. So every ten years, the averages change a little bit. In 2010, the averages were refigured for the period 1980 to 2010. In 2000 they were refigured for 1970 to 2000, etc.

This is fine and dandy when our climate is stable. Our climate has changed a lot lately and this technique masks the changes. The process is designed on purpose to mask relatively short term weather changes (less than 30 years) because traditional meteorology acknowledges that short term chaos in weather does not reflect “climate.”

But in our carbon-saturated 21st century new rules have arrived. Climate scientists warned us for decades that their models said an abrupt climate change would occur if we did not begin to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases. Instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we ignored this counsel and almost doubled our emissions. Not surprisingly, this abrupt change is now happening and 20th century meteorology is hiding the abrupt change in its 30-year temperature averages.


Urban heat island

Before I go further, let me address the urban heat island because the temperature records I am talking about could be influenced by the heat island. This is one of the biggest of the perceived controversies in the so-called debate, and rightly so. Anyone who has driven into or out of the city on a cool night has experienced the extra heat that is absorbed by concrete and buildings in urban areas.

Climate scientists (not meteorologists) correct for the heat island by looking at rural weather stations surrounding urban areas and applying a correction factor to the urban records. The corrected global average temperature change, what is presented to us by the media as the effects of climate change, are corrected for the urban heat island. But the everyday weather stats presented to us on teevee are not.

In the last several years climate scientists have even begun to use satellite images of night lights to help locate those truly rural weather stations that they use for their corrections. Time goes on. Science moves ahead. We get more accurate information as a result (most of the time).

NASA brings us night vision satellites for a deeper look at our planet. Climate scientists use these “nightlight” images to help correct for the urban heat island effect in their average global temperature records. Shown is a crop of the Texas coast. Houston, Corpus, Brownsville, San Antonio, and Austin are the largest masses of lights. New in the last several years however is an odd crescent of lights that run from southwest of San Antonio to the northeast. These lights are all oil rigs drilling the Eagle Ford Shale in the latest oil fracking boom. The white spots in the Gulf are oil platforms.

To bring the heat island effect into perspective for the historic average temperature records that I want to discuss for the Austin Mabry station, we need to understand how the heat island has historically impacted the weather recording station in Austin. To do this is easy enough in a generalized way. Simplistically, all we have to do is compare the historic average temperature in Austin to population growth. If the urban heat island is impacting the weather station, the temperature should rise as does the population.

Average Temperature and Population for Austin Texas 1900 to 2012. All weather stations are different. Some respond more adversely to the urban heat island effect than others. Austin’s is one that does not show a lock-step similarity in the urbanization/heat island effect. If it did, it is quite likely that the local average temperature would have continued to rise in the late 1950s as Austin’s local population began to soar.

This is by no means a scientific evaluation, but it does shed light on the issue of the heat island, at least relative to the official temperature record for Austin. The red line shows our rapid population growth and the blue is the average annual temperature. I will not deny that the heat island effect is strong in Austin, but to say that the heat island effect is strong “at the weather station” in Austin is a different animal altogether.

Weather stations are set up by design to minimize the influence of the surrounding geography on the temperature measured at the weather station. It can be blisteringly hot in the middle of a giant asphalt parking lot but just a couple of hundred feet away in the middle of a grass covered ball field, or in a forested area for sure, the temperature can be much cooler.

The techniques used to assure that weather station thermometers record an accurate temperature have been refined for over 200 years. Some places still need to be adjusted though, so these techniques are being ever-more refined as is the case with the nightlight satellite imagery.

What the numbers are telling us about the average temperature for April (1948 through 2012) at the Austin Mabry Station are:

• The NWS 30-year average high and low April temperatures have warmed 2 and 2.5 degrees respectively since the 1980s, but
• The 10-year high and low April temperatures have warmed 3.5 and 5.5 degrees respectively.

The 2 to 2.5 degrees of warming in 30 years may just be normal climate fluctuations (probably not), but the 10-year changes are likely what climate scientists have been warning us would happen. This is the abrupt climate change that their models have been predicting for a generation. As we continue to use the 30-year averages without effectively communicating our current temperatures relative to the normal temps of the last century, our frog is being cooked without our realizing it.

The warnings have been that at some point the “lag” in climate change would catch up to greenhouse gas concentrations and we would begin to see a rapid rise in temperature. This “lag” is generally considered to be two to several or more decades. In other words, today’s temperatures are what they are because of greenhouse gas levels in our sky from the 1980s, not greenhouse gas levels in the sky today.

Since 1980, the carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere has increased from about 335 ppm to about 397 ppm. Between the mid-1800s and 1980 the CO2 concentration increased from about 280 ppm to 335 ppm. So we have doubled the amount of greenhouse gases in our sky since the 1980s.

Because of the climate lag, we have another 4 degrees F or more of warming already built into our climate -- even if we were to stop emitting all greenhouse gasses this instant. This “lag” is caused mainly by the cooling effect of the oceans. Who in Texas hasn’t enjoyed a wonderfully cool summer day at the beach when just a few dozen miles away it was a sizzling 100 degrees?


Flattening temperature myth

Let me address another huge myth now. This is the “Flattening Temperature Myth.” Some would have us believe that Earth stopped warming about the turn of the century, and if we look at the temperature record it looks like this is a valid statement -- but we must understand the context. This flattening is simply a product of the massive high temperature record set with the Super El Niño of 1998. Erase that 1998 Super El Niño record and global temperature has not “flattened” at all.

The thermometer record has experienced two major flattening trends: from the late 1800s (end of the Little Ice Age) to the 1920s and then from the 1940s to about 1980. The current flattening is a product of the great Super El Niño of 1998. If we remove the Super El Niño from the record, the flattening trend that remains is similar to many more “flat” periods in the thermometer record other than just the two mentioned.

Austin’s average temperature record does not have a giant high temperature spike in 1998 so this myth does not float in this boat. And for Austin’s record to be different from the global record is quite normal. Some places will warm more than others and some places (a very few) will even cool a bit, at least for a while.

Abrupt climate change is here, it has caught up with the lag, and from here on it’s toast or be toasted. The models have been quite accurate so far and they tell us that things continue to get worse even faster. It's the 10-year averages that are important now because climate changes like we are now undergoing -- abrupt climate changes -- happen far faster than 30-year time frames. It is time that we recognize this not only in the media, but in the science as well. Things change, we live, we learn and then apply that new knowledge to life. If we don’t, we is frog legs.

In the last 100,000 years, based on highly accurate temperature records from Greenland ice two miles deep, we have seen 23 abrupt climate changes where global temperature changed up to a dozen degrees F in as little as several decades or less. The ice shows the biggest of these changes, that happened when climate was being forced the fastest, happened (in Greenland at least) in several years or less. Remember two things now: warming over land is twice or more what it is over water and we are changing our carbon dioxide concentration 14,000 times faster than anytime normal in the climate record in the last 610,000 years.

So, because climate change impacts have skyrocketed since the turn of the century (Greenland melt, Arctic melt, Antarctic melt, increasing sea level rise, forest impacts, and here in Austin, record drought and wildfires) we need to be looking at non-traditional climate averages, not the 30-year averages of 20th century climate. This is no longer our old climate. It has changed and is rapidly changing further.

Greenwood acres Pier on Lake Buchanan.

The new normal

January’s averages are even more astounding. Climate scientists have been telling us their models show more warming in winter and more warming at night in winter. Since the 1980s, the 30-year NWS highs and lows at Austin Mabry have warmed 4 and 2.5 degrees respectively but the 10-year highs and lows have warmed 6 and 9 degrees! Do you remember hearing any of this on the nightly weather report?

When the weather person says the weather today should be exactly normal, there's a large inaccuracy in his or her statement. In January in Austin, the NWS normal low today is almost 10 degrees warmer than what it was in the 1980s! But J.Q. Citizen goes about his business thinking that the weather is as normal as normal is normal.

The NWS tells us that January’s (2013 average) high was 2.9 degrees above normal and the low was 1.4 degrees above normal. But this is the NWS 30-year average. Relative to most of the 20th century, Austin’s January highs and lows were not 2.9 and 1.4 degrees above normal, but 9.9 and 10.4 degrees above normal!

This is one of the simplest and likely most effective techniques to educate the public about climate change. Our media weather presenters simply need to talk about it. They need to talk about it all the time. This information is endlessly available to the meteorologists who give us the forecast every night, but ferretting out these statistics and reporting them is not something they are accustomed to doing.

Almost everything of importance in the weather is based on long-term averages. With abrupt climate change, these averages need to be seriously reconsidered. Our climate is no longer stable. Why should we be using statistics that are based on a stable climate?

Please try and talk with your local weather information source and tell them that it is their responsibility to inform the public of this kind of information. It’s time to kick the delayers off the island and get along with the solutions to climate pollution.

It’s OK to start talking about climate change. It’s important that we get this moving. The delayers are now among the minority. The number of people offended by actively discussing climate issues is diminishing rapidly. And besides, we the “believers” now have a majority of votes -- even in Texas.

[Bruce Melton, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, as well as more climate change writing, climate science outreach, and critical environmental issue documentary films can be found on his website and at climatediscovery.com. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]

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Tom Hayden : Earth Night

Is 'Earth Night' coming? Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Earth Night

Al Gore wrote in 1992, 'the maximum that is politically feasible still falls short of the minimum that is truly effective.' Making it 'politically feasible' to tackle extreme climate change remains the task two frustrating decades later.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog/ April 25, 2013

Monday, April 22, 2013, marked the 43rd celebration of Earth Day. Founded in 1970, the event is observed each year in nearly 200 countries.

After 43 years of Earth Days, it is past time to contemplate the possible coming of Earth Night.

There is little promise, so far, of a coming “reverse polarization” or evolutionary leap that might prevent the piracy of our life support -- clean air, water, soil, and healthy eco-systems -- nor much sign that our institutions will heed the warnings of climate scientists, and even the CIA, about the deepening eco-crisis.

There is no indication among the dominant think tanks of re-thinking beyond the models of market or state capitalism, which mindlessly measure “growth” by stealing natural resources from future generations. Nor is there evidence that the power grab by corporations over democracy will soon diminish.

This is the dire context in which many, like NASA’s Dr. James Hansen, assert that excavating the Alberta Tar Sands for the Keystone XL pipeline will be a “game over” for the climate, propelling humanity into a terminal and irreversible crisis. With Canada’s liberal hope, Justine Trudeau, endorsing XL last week, with the growing appetite by the Chinese for Tar Sands takeout, with an apparent U.S. Senate majority favoring the XL project, the options before President Barack Obama are dwindling.

The “game over” concept means Earth Night. Its troubling implication for many is that we all give up on saving the planet or ourselves. That encourages suicidal depression, or perhaps a new wave of Beat existentialism, as the earth’s energy systems wane.

The “game over” concept is inflexible, leaving no space for resurgence, much less mundane efforts to strengthen everyday life. What are idealists to do if it is really “game over”? Or are we supposed to accept a global Jonestown? These are terrible questions to ponder, much less share with our children.

Yes, life will go on even after the game is over, but life will be more miserable and traumatic. Daily decisions will have to be made to mitigate the disaster, feed, educate and provide medical care for whole populations. The important missions will resemble that of the health teams in Albert Camus’ The Plague. Dreams of utopia or environmental restoration will become unattainable, obsolete.

To date, the environmental movement’s symbols have been polar bears, seals, butterflies, and salmon -- all visible species tottering on the brink of extinction (we even had a charismatic tree-sitting advocate named Julia Butterfly). Environmentalists during Earth Night, on the other hand, may find the earthworm, the nightcrawler, more suitable. Like community organizers, they enrich the soil, toiling in darkness, avoiding the spotlight. If the earth is in decline, they simply work harder until there is nothing left to do.

If the nightcrawler is too distasteful an image, consider an alternative, courtesy an aged Buddhist monk I once interviewed in Kyoto. I wanted to know how the Buddhist philosophy could support social action. He stirred our green tea for a long time before answering in two succinct sentences. “The earth is slowly dying. In the face of death, we must act with compassion.”

So even in the worst-case scenario, there is work to do, either to mitigate the effects of extreme climate change or simply to express compassion and solidarity. Since it is hard to precisely define “game over” -- how quickly, how pervasively, in what order, etc. --  it is also possible that “the game” might extend indefinitely, into overtime, so to speak.

The “game” is not over with a State Department pipeline permit being issued; what Hansen must mean is that it is over if all the bituminous muck in Alberta is excavated, transported and used -- which suggests a more gradual timetable toward the unsustainable Night.

A comparison with the threat of nuclear war is perhaps appropriate here. For my generation, the expectation of a nuclear apocalypse was the equivalent of today’s predictions of collapsing ecosystems. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the fear of immanent extinction was bone deep; the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned that the Doomsday Clock was mere minutes to midnight.

While some might argue that we are learning to manage the danger, the threat we face now is just as real. We are fast approaching midnight, even though the tragic realization of the consequences may be deferred. How will we forever manage to live on the brink of extinction?


The possibility of change

“Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps.” -- Charles Darwin

Assuming that we may have indefinite time before game over, let us consider the possibilities for action. Thought unlikely by most environmentalists, what if Obama surprises us by rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline in a historic pivot toward a different energy future?

Obama’s recent standing up to the Gun Lobby could be the model for a bold change in direction. Conventional wisdom, however, says he will issue a limited approval for the pipeline, guaranteeing a prolonged fight in the years ahead, while around the same time announcing new executive orders on pollution and energy efficiency that will make it impossible for new coal plants to be licensed, while winding down the lifetimes of those that exist. We can be sure that Obama’s new appointees at EPA and Energy are preparing the options.

It is only speculation, but a connecting political link for Obama between gun control and climate control is New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is pumping millions into “common sense gun control” campaigns, and who gave the Sierra Club $50 million for its grassroots campaigns against coal. The Democrats have reason to worry about an independent Bloomberg-financed presidential campaign in 2016.

It is even possible that Obama, the Democrats, and some Republicans will endorse a carbon tax -- a regressive market approach to reducing emissions, though one which could make a difference with tightened energy efficiency regulations. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, often scorned on the left as a Pied Piper of corporate globalization, has been an insistent voice favoring carbon taxes as essential to battling global warming.

Friedman favors what he calls a "radical grand bargain” -- carbon taxes, corporate and individual tax cuts, public investments in education, and deficit reduction. Republican heavyweights like George Schultz favor the revenue-neutral option, with direct rebates of the revenue back to citizens and businesses. A tax of $20-25 per ton would generate some one trillion dollars over10 years and be an incentive for conservation.

Another option could be combining Obama’s tougher federal regulations with green infrastructure investments in states like California and New York. That was the model in the 1970s when the automobile industry was saved by fuel-efficiency regulations they opposed.

At the very least, Obama “has made a huge down payment on a greener economy,” according to Michael Grunwald’s counterintuitive book, The New New Deal. Just 10 years after Bill Clinton proposed a five-year clean energy initiative that was considered “hopelessly unrealistic,” Obama spent $90 billion on clean energy, and leveraged $110 billion in private capital with a one-year stimulus.

The U.S. solar industry was on “the brink of death” before Obama’s stimulus legislation, but it then grew six-fold in three years, along with a doubling of renewable electricity. By the end of 201l, the federal government financed the weatherization of 680,000 low-income homes and retrofitted 110,000 buildings. Whatever initiatives next come to pass, the measure for progressives might be how many new jobs -- and for whom -- will be created by a rapid transition to a Green New Deal.

While the crisis worsens and Obama’s green stimulus suggests significant gains, those seem paltry in the face of the challenge, however.


Roots and new growth 

Al Gore wrote in 1992, “the maximum that is politically feasible still falls short of the minimum that is truly effective.” Making it “politically feasible” to tackle extreme climate change remains the task two frustrating decades later. Though the environmental movement has long since approached critical mass, it has been foiled time and again.

Will someone like Gore arise from the present crisis? Could it be Gore again, beginning a campaign in 2015? Perhaps the younger Andrew Cuomo, who has been calling loudly and consistently for action on climate change? Or might Hillary Clinton awaken from her midlife centrism to lead such a campaign? Might there be a candidate as unknown today as Barack Obama was in 2007?

There must be a push from a national campaign to shift the center of gravity of political decision-making. Even if 57,000 Americans are arrested following a potential XL pipeline approval, a vacuum will exist the following day, which could attract a serious presidential candidate for 2016. The very threat of such a candidacy will loosen the hammerlock of the fossil fuel industry on the two parties.

The factor of presidential politics, beyond pressuring Obama, is hardly mentioned in the present discussions on the theme of “what happened to Earth Day?” The most vibrant environmental movement in America today, 350.org, contains a healthy disrespect for electoral processes; the 350 movement counts on direct action and divestment strategies to move the world off fossil fuel addiction.

In the tradition of past campaigns to save redwood forests and stop nuclear power plants, their success at movement building has been admirable. On the other hand, the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters have little to show for their millions spent on electoral politics, except the worthy achievement of slowing the rate at which conditions worsen.


The time of the nightcrawler?

My own experience has been along two tracks, outside and inside. The first, rooted in deep ecological understandings and expressed in civil disobedience, is a broad renewable river in American history and global culture, the fountain of many great achievements. The second, arising from the first, is more like a climactic rapids that reconfigures the institutional barriers that stand in the way.

The first Earth Day and the 1970s anti-nuclear movements were examples of the former. Indicators of the latter are Jerry Brown, Al Gore, and the UN Earth Summits.

The theft of the presidency from Al Gore in 2000 destroyed the emergence of a genuine environmental presidency. Until then, the environmental movement was following the trajectory of many other social movements, from a spectacular birth to a march through mainstream institutions. Earth Day was an extraordinary expression of a new consciousness, at a time when photos from space first revealed the beauty -- rapturous to millions -- of our fragile home in the universe.

Yes, Earth Day required organizers, people like Denis Hayes and Senator Gaylord Nelson among the committed few, but it was self-organized in its very nature. The roots of the 2000 Gore candidacy lay in the original Earth Day, a movement co-opted early and successfully by the Nixon administration and conservatives fearing its radical threat.

The Nixon administration and corporate America took charge of managing the politics that followed Earth Day. They accepted a reformist model of stewardship -- far better than plunder, but far less than the rising spirit of kinship that millions were feeling toward their earth home. They engineered significant legislation: the Clear Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Endangered Species Act. Though isolating themselves quite well, radicals were institutionally isolated from leadership of the movement.

The first hope for a radical political shift in politics from Earth Day came in the successful California gubernatorial campaign of Jerry Brown (1974). He immediately opened his doors to Earth Day visionaries, blocked the expansion of nuclear plants and an LNG terminal, and launched an unprecedented push toward energy efficiency and renewables.

Brown was ahead of his times nationally, however, representing constituencies of the future against the dinosaur lobbies of the present. He was too “weird” for the national elites, including the Clinton Democrats. Jimmy Carter took up Brown’s conservation themes during his one-term presidency (perhaps to block Brown’s possible campaign against him). But Carter, like Brown, was frowned upon for being outside the national corporate-labor consensus favoring growth.

Both leaders eventually fell to the countermovement symbolized by Ronald Reagan, and the Democratic Party slipped back into its familiar model of political economy, in which environmental costs were treated as mere “externalities," and failed.

For a time, both parties opened safe channels inside the institutions for a growing culture of non-government organizations that specialized in advocacy before judges and regulators, and lobbying politicians whose staffs they sometimes joined. They adopted wherever possible a “win-win” model of partnerships between environmental advocates and companies like Duke Energy, BP, and General Electric. They raised funds from wealthy liberals for candidates to their liking. Their budgets rose to the tens of millions.

From these organizational roots came the draft climate bill -- the “US Climate Action Partnership” -- which passed the House on a partisan vote in 2009, but stalled to death in the Senate, never to be raised in Congress in the subsequent years.

A recent New Yorker article by Nicholas Lemann, based on two in-depth studies of the environmental movement, blames “the inside game” played by environmental organizations “at the expense of broad-based organizing” for the failure to much advance the movement against global warming since Obama’s election in 2008 and, by implication, for decades since the Nixon legislation four decades prior.

As evidence, Lemann points to an inability to pressure Senate Pro Tem Harry Reid to bring the House bill to a 2010 vote on the Senate floor, which Reid agreed to do in the recent case of the gun control package.

Having repeated what many others have said about the DC-based environmental bureaucracies, Lemann does not offer much new in the way of solutions. He cites the study by Harvard globalization expert Dr. Theda Scokpol, who argues, “reformers will have to build organizational networks across the country, and they will need to orchestrate sustained political efforts that stretch far beyond friendly Congressional offices, comfy board rooms, and posh retreats.”

Scokpol’s is a withering intellectual critique, unfair in some ways to the environmental NGOs. She says the environmentalists should build “federated” chapter-based national networks starting at local and state levels, which sounds like a neat version of what many environmental groups have already attempted to do.

She opposes the obsession with market-based cap-and-trade, and instead suggests a “cap and dividend,” another market model but one based on consumers pocketing the revenue from low-carbon products, thereby creating a bottom-up market that might win favor with Republicans.

But none of these analyses suggest an alternative to the two pathways already carved by history: a radical awakening expressed through civil disobedience and boycott campaigns, or a complementary political awakening like the one that carried Al Gore to an majority of votes for an environment-centered presidency, only to be snatched away by the Supreme Court.

This is not 1992, nor 2000. Awareness of the climate crisis is both broader and deeper; its connection to our economic recession still requires further public explanation and coalition building. A new environmentally aware generation has risen to influence globally. Where my generation was compelled to overthrow apathy toward the scandal of racism and impending threat of nuclear war, the challenges before this new generation are arguably worse: entrenched inequality, disappearing jobs and economic opportunities, and widespread helplessness at reports of the end of a habitable planet.

What happened to Earth Day? It accomplished great things, then receded and was folded into the labyrinths of its success. We lost the chance to experience and test our first -- and the world’s first -- environmental presidency. We lost a generation’s greatest opportunity.

But movements and leaders always rise again, if only because of the creative and adaptive intelligence of evolution itself. We are the agents of natural selection and, even as we imagine apocalypse, we should heed Darwin’s careful words: that we act only by ”accumulating slight successive favorable variations”; that we can produce “no great or sudden modification”; that change is achieved only “by very short steps.”

If Darwin is misunderstood, it may be the interpretation that natural selection is an objective force outside human nature, rather than one acting through human agency. It is natural then that we try and fail; natural, too, that we breed mutations; natural that we struggle and compete for life.

According to Aldo Leopold, we are evolving toward an Evolutionary Ethic, a more cooperative one. We will see. The darkest hour is before the dawn. We may still end the Night.

This article was also published at TomHayden.com.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Roger Baker : Is Capitalism in Deep Trouble?

Illustration by Latuff / Marxist.com.

Before the fall?
Terminal Capitalism / Part 2

We take a closer look at the role natural resource limits in combination with the excesses of unregulated finance capital are playing in blocking a global economic recovery.

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / April 12, 2013

In the first part of this series about "terminal capitalism," we saw a collection of evidence that the global system of capitalism, the organized basis for most world trade, is in deep trouble. The situation has become so serious and the problems so self-evident that the polls show many average American citizens are questioning the viability of capitalism itself.

A U.S. economic recovery now seems little closer than when the current economic crisis hit hard about five years ago, with U.S. unemployment still at a near-depression level. The BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China have done better than the U.S., but recently slower growth has affected these countries too. In "Terminal Capitalism / Part 2" we will take a closer look at the role natural resource limits in combination with the excesses of unregulated finance capital are playing in blocking a global economic recovery.


The capitalist imperative: 
Grow or die

Richard Heinberg, director of the Post Carbon Institute, begins his book, The End of Growth, as follows: "The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling: Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with." He then presents over 300 pages of various kinds of supportive evidence backing up this conclusion. I will touch on some evidence in this essay, while saying that since the book was published in 2011, the evidence in support of this conclusion seems stronger than ever.

If that is indeed the case, the end of growth is very bad news for capitalism itself, since capitalism is based on an inherently expanding economy that needs to keep growing or it dies. The way the capitalist system works is basically that bankers or finance capitalists extend credit; they lend money that is invested in the production of goods that are then sold to pay off the loans plus make a profit sufficient to pay back the lenders, with enough left over to reward the lenders with interest.

If and when such a system starts contracting, profits suffer or may disappear entirely and there is an economic crisis until confidence in the system is restored and growth resumes. It is in the nature of the capitalist system to be subject to periodic booms and busts that comprise the capitalist business cycle. Most economists including Marx have been well aware of this fact. The remedy proposed by Keynes was to stimulate a contracting economy with government-sanctioned deficit spending, as I described in "Terminal Capitalism / Part 1."

However, if the contracting global economy is unable to grow in real material terms due to some deeply rooted physical constraint or resource limit, then no governmental policy can revive the growth on which the system depends.

Governments can print money and inject it into the economy to try to revive spending, but If there is not enough cheap energy to permit a real economic expansion in terms of marketable goods, then the money will be spent sooner or later. Then the deception will be revealed by inflation due to a surplus of money and a shortage of goods.

There is a factor called the velocity of circulation of money, which is really psychological in nature amounting to a shift in consumer spending behavior from saving to spending. That leads easily to inflation or hyperinflation initiated when the public finally understands that there is more money than goods like food available for purchase. Governments can revive spending behavior by printing sufficient money, but they can't restore genuine prosperity without more real goods being produced and made available for purchase.

The remainder of this essay will attempt to explain the physical factors which are working in opposition to a real revival of the global economy in terms of its ability to expand the production of material goods. If that can't happen, then capitalists can no longer earn interest on their investments. Whenever a dollar invested or deposited in a bank is seen to buy less than before it was invested or banked, the incentive to invest, on which capitalism depends, disappears and the urge to buy commodities like gold that preserve their exchange value increases.

Growth may have already reached its limits and stopped forever! The global economy as a whole has not expanded since the energy and economic crisis hit in 2008. The numbers tell the tale. Stuart Staniford's excellent blog, Early Warning, tracks many interesting and important trends, including in this case the volume of world trade as measured by the WTO.

The following is Staniford's description of the situation about six months ago, featuring a seasonally corrected chart which shows that the volume of global trade seems to have stalled at about the same level that it had reached in mid-2008. Since the BRIC group has done a little better than most, it follows that the USA, Europe, and Japan have lost ground.

"...after the 2008 financial crisis, global trade collapsed and then recovered strongly till early 2011. For the last eighteen months, however, it's been basically stagnant. This likely reflects a combination of a sluggish U.S. recovery, a double-dip recession in Europe, and the slowdown in China. The global economy continues to act like an engine firing on only three cylinders."

Grounds for denial

Anyone familiar with world history knows that both the global economy and human population have been growing, at least fitfully, for thousands of years, and that the rate of growth accelerated greatly following the industrial revolution in England hundreds of years ago, with the advent of steam power and vast factories and improved machines to produce ever cheaper marketplace goods..

We like to tell ourselves that continual progress in science and technology will keep paying off by creating the new energy sources and the improved technology that we need to maintain ourselves and solve our problems, especially when we take care to grow in a smart way with sensible restraints.

When there were few factories, there was little need to regulate toxic discharges into lakes and rivers. Now with many more people and factories, most of us are willing to accept that stronger regulation is needed for the benefit of the general public. Increasingly we can see there are limits imposed by nature. Expansion of industry in China using coal for power is becoming a major health threat.

Few economists in the day of Adam Smith or Marx, with the notable exception of Malthus, could foresee a day that there would be any important limits to economic expansion that could not be overcome by human ingenuity and continually improving technology. If there were such limits, it was presumed that these were local limits that could be dealt with rather easily. If natural resources such as metal mines were exhausted in one area, one could always move to a fresh area, and use the advantages of continually improving technology to keep production expanding, ad infinitum.

In reality it is found that technology tends to harvest the low hanging fruit in terms of available resources first and then moves on. While there was an abundance of cheap energy available, this exhaustion of resources and a simultaneous increase in unwelcome consequences could be concealed for a time. In the USA, there has been a well-funded, right-wing corporate disinformation campaign to lead the public to deny that burning fossil fuel is changing the climate for the worse. Now people are beginning to realize the unhappy truth.

According to a growing number of skeptics, including Heinberg, the fatal flaw of economics, as traditionally practiced, is that it is an abstract discipline, oblivious to the limits of the finite world that it claims to study and to model. Since economics is a system that assumes exponential growth, it is apparent that at some point an expanding economy has to run into natural resource limits on our finite planet. Most people have assumed that most such limits were far in the future.

As individuals, the human participants in the growth process have been unlikely to be very conscious of global limits; they were mostly concerned with the everyday challenges of surviving, or raising and feeding a family. However, now, when there are more than 7 billion people collectively involved in an effort to keep the global economy growing to satisfy their own needs, limits are starting to crop up everywhere.

Illustration from India Resists.

Scientists have been warning us, 
but are we ready to listen yet?

The end of growth is not a far-fetched possibility. In fact, there have been a number of credible predictions that this is bound to happen sooner or later because of the increasingly serious side effects of growth itself. The 1972 book The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome used a computer model to arrive at the conclusion that there are limits to the expansion of the global economy imposed by nature that are likely to lead to overshoot and collapse within the lifetimes of many now living .

The conclusions were updated in a sequel 30 years later. "Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change" is another classic work that pointed out the radical implications of an expanding human population overshooting the resources of a finite planet, followed by collapse.

There has been no shortage of warnings from the scientific community that continuing economic growth would lead to disaster. It has now been more than 20 years since a majority of the world's then-living Nobel Prize-winning scientists issued the "1992 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity". This is taken from the introduction:

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.

One might imagine that when the world's most eminent scientists warn humans that they had better shift course to avoid a looming environmental disaster, their warning would get a lot of media attention. That didn't happen. The World Scientists' warning was mostly ignored because it interfered with the nearest thing most humans have to a global religion; a belief in endless progress based on the blessings of modern science in combination with expanding world trade.

New investment based on improvement in technology has always brought benefits like easy communication and an improved standard of living. The fact that the few capitalists who maintain control of the investment and economic expansion process tend to be the major beneficiaries has tended to be overlooked.

Global warming by itself probably has the potential to cripple the global economy, as does human population overshooting food supply. With a global population of 7.5 billion, we see natural limits of one kind or another cropping up everywhere and interacting to create converging crises. More and more, solving one growth-related problem tends to create other problems. Trying to deal with any one limit tends to reveal other limits.

These include such factors as a limit on arable land for farming, potable water availability, increasing soil erosion and depletion, air and water pollution, the fertilizer needed to maintain high crop yield, and the list goes on. "Convergent Crises and Why We Deny Them" discusses the fact that these limits tend to interact.

An excellent and easily accessible explanation of the natural limits to growth by Charles Hall (see below) and John Day is here.

If we are very lucky, the global economic expansion forces will be forced into an orderly retreat before they overshoot the resource base. If not, humans everywhere are likely to face an abrupt economic collapse in which the decline is a lot steeper than the preceding economic expansion. This tendency for decline to be faster than growth has been called the Seneca Effect.


Why expansionist economics can't deal with a
falling energy return on energy investment (EROI) 

Rising energy cost, and oil in particular, is the factor that has the greatest ability to interfere with business as usual. The historical rate of global growth has fallen sharply in the last decade, and an important factor is the economic burden of rising energy costs. In Terminal Capitalism / Part 1, I cited the January 26, 2012, article in the distinguished science journal Nature by James Murray and David King, titled "Oil's tipping point has passed." This paper points out that the global economy seems to have permanently shifted to slower growth after the world supply of cheap conventional oil peaked in 2005, when we started to use much higher priced oil, like the oil we get by drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The International Energy Agency has made it very clear that the global economy is at risk when oil prices are greater than $100 per barrel -- as they have been in recent years, and will surely continue to be, given the inelastic response of global production. Historically, there has been a tight link between oil production and global economic growth. If oil production can’t grow, the implication is that the economy can’t grow either. This is such a frightening prospect that many have simply avoided considering it.

Domestic oil used to be very abundant and cheap to produce in the United States; however U.S. oil production peaked in 1970, so the U.S. turned to cheaper imported oil. Now the cost of imported oil has risen sharply too, especially after the cheap conventional oil production hit its global peak.

The cost of oil or any other traded commodity is generally determined by the amount of work that it takes to produce that commodity. The concept of "energy return on investment" or EROI essentially means the payback ratio, or the amount of energy you need to put in in order to get even more energy back out.

The EROI concept is important from an economic standpoint whether it is applied to drilling for oil, or for the work expended in building a dam to generate hydroelectric power, or when building and using a wind turbine, or any other means of generating power. The April 2013 issue of Scientific American has an article by Mason Inman, "The True Cost of Fossil Fuels," which explains the EROI concept and its important implications for our existing economy. The same EROI concept has important implications for any human economy, whether ancient or modern, capitalist or socialist.

The EROI concept was developed by environmental scientist Charles Hall, who says of oil and gas, "Everywhere you look, the EROI is declining."

The Scientific American article is accompanied by an interview with Hall where he explains that different EROIs support different kinds of economic organization, and the mostly unwelcome economic implications of the currently falling EROI in the USA. As Hall says in this interview,

We know that the middle class has not increased its income now for 20 years. Behind that -- not always the immediate cause, but looking over the shoulder of the causes -- I find the decline in the availability of energy. It's terrifying to people -- politicians and economists -- who base everything on growth. I think they won't talk about it because the concept is terrifying.

Most people have little idea of how rapidly the EROI has been falling, and what this steep rate of decline implies for the U.S. economy, and indeed for the global economy. Richard Heinberg's book The End of Growth, in Chapter 3, gives some numbers and EROI estimates by Hall (pages 118-119). It is estimated that circa 1930 we could get back as much as 100 barrels of oil for every barrel we expended through drilling, giving an EROI of 100.

Photo by Albert Bridge / Geograph / Earth Times.

By 1970, this had fallen to about a 30-to-one payback or EROI. By 2005, the EROI had fallen domestically to about 15, A fairly recent paper by Hall, et al, indicates a current U.S. oil and gas EROI below 11. However the EROI for imported oil produced where the fields are less depleted has stayed higher and is now estimated by the Scientific American article to globally be about 16.

Meanwhile, the EROI from coal is still about 20, as is the payback ratio from wind in a good location. Photovoltaic solar EROI is much lower at about six. These numbers are rough averages and of course vary with location. Chinese coal payback economics is different from that in the USA, but these numbers give a rough idea, and indicate a steady EROI decline.

A falling EROI tends to show up as a price increase for everything. There is no way to avoid using increasingly costly liquid fuels to transport coal and in the course of producing and transporting all other commodities.

The steady decline in EROI for liquid fuels is particularly worrisome because almost all global transportation is powered by liquid fuels. That is why an economic peak to the global oil supply can cripple the world economy. Even a nation that uses a lot of coal for power like China is in trouble if it tries to convert its coal energy into liquid fuel energy. It can be done, but this results in a much lower EROI for the coal-based liquid. Liquid fuel energy, electric power energy, and thermal energy each have their own EROI economics.

It is estimated that a modern industrial economy needs an EROI of at least five or greater to function properly. If global oil supplies have already fallen to only 16, and are still falling pretty fast, it is apparent that some economies, and especially an oil-addictive economy like the USA, is in trouble no matter what kind of leadership it has. This is true until the economy has the time needed to make a transition which, as the "Hirsch report" indicates, necessarily requires several decades of serious effort.

There is a theory of maximum possible complexity of a society related to the EROI level at its economic base. Without economic growth, the whole system, what was once termed the "political economy" runs into political trouble too. You can't have a very technically sophisticated and centralized economy based on a low EROI. Nor can you maintain a complex legal and military support structure for global finance capital investment. Without cheap energy you cannot have a global system of finance capital that maintains an orderly system of global trade with its highly sophisticated and centralized production of complex goods.

American anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter has written an important book, Collapse of Complex Societies in which he analyzes why civilizations like ancient Rome probably rose and fell in accord with a changing EROI, just as much as because of the abilities of their leaders. Ancient civilizations can't control the far reaches of an empire if they can't afford to feed the armies that maintain their central control.

There are analogies to be found today when the United States attempts to project its military power globally without the advantage of cheap oil. Similar limits apply when investment bankers attempt to organize complex global production systems which depend on complex global supply networks.


Why alternative energy probably
can't keep our economy growing

Since the cheap energy that built the U.S. economy is rapidly being depleted and is being replaced by more expensive energy, there is a natural desire to try to replace our energy with renewable energy, especially with wind and solar power as an alternative. How hard that would be, what it would cost, and how long it would take are the key issues.

In 2009 the Post Carbon Institute did a study of this question and put out a report, "Searching for a Miracle: Net Energy Limits and the Fate of Industrial Societies," which can be downloaded at this link. The abstract of this report concludes as follows:

Perhaps the most significant limit to future energy supplies is the “net energy” factor -- the requirement that energy systems yield more energy than is invested in their construction and operation. There is a strong likelihood that future energy systems, both conventional and alternative, will have higher energy input costs than those that powered industrial societies during the last century. We will come back to this point repeatedly.

The report explores some of the presently proposed energy transition scenarios, showing why, up to this time, most are overly optimistic, as they do not address all of the relevant limiting factors to the expansion of alternative energy sources. Finally, it shows why energy conservation (using less energy, and also less resource materials) combined with humane, gradual population decline must become primary strategies for achieving sustainability.

Currently the degree of alternative energy market penetration is low and is likely to stay that way. It is possible to cover our roofs with solar panels now, but if it were not difficult and expensive to get off the grid, it would probably already be common. President Obama started advocating wind and solar alternatives when he first came into office, yet these numbers are not increasing at nearly the rate that would be needed to replace fossil fuel energy before a declining EROI interferes.

Both Germany and China have industrial polices in place that mandate switching to alternative energy as soon as possible. Germany is running into limits caused by the need for backup power when the alternative energy level reaches about 10-20%. In China, about 70% of their power now comes from coal, with imported oil used as a supplement for transportation.

Making the switch from black to green energy is creating severe air pollution from the coal used for the transition. It is true that photovoltaic solar energy has gotten a lot cheaper in the last several years, due to a big push by China to expand its alternative energy industry. China has the advantage of a command economy to promote alternative energy which the USA lacks except for sporadic and controversial attempts like Solyndra.

Since the EROI for U.S. fossil fuel energy has been falling, it is becoming more and more costly to make the transition to wind and solar power alternatives. The average U.S. family is still in debt, and without real economic growth, those who can find jobs must now often work at the minimum wage. The economy is sending the message that alternative energy is becoming less affordable, even with much less expensive silicon photo-voltaic panels made in China.

Both wind and solar energy have the disadvantage of requiring high up-front capital costs. By contrast, gas turbines are an inexpensive way to generate electric power, and the natural gas produced by hydrofracturing or "fracking," is cheap for now. However this low cost is probably unsustainable, both because of rapid horizontal well depletion and because we are drilling and depleting the best locations first.

Besides a falling EROI to power the transition to alternative energy, there are other problems. Intermittent power sources require storage or backup when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. Texas has had a policy of subsidizing the power grid to deliver power from West Texas where wind energy is cheapest, but the grid itself is expensive and the state is strapped for cash.

At certain times of the day when the sun is shining, PV energy can already cost less than fossil fuel energy, but most people demand power when they need it. Rooftop power requires very expensive battery storage (lead acid batteries are expensive and only last about five years whereas nickel-iron batteries are durable but expensive). If the energy comes from a public power grid, a backup source of fossil fuel power is still needed due to the intermittent generation factor.

Certain types of solar energy, like home water heating and solar ovens for cooking, are already cost-effective, and will likely come into common use when people are obliged to conserve energy because of its rising cost. Better thermal insulation is likewise very cost-effective.

Illustration from Theprisma.

Capitalism has become a global Ponzi scheme

A global peak in oil production is likely to be fatal for capitalism soon thereafter, as the globally prevailing economic institution, as the author has argued here. Given the choice, it seems better to face economic crisis sooner rather than later, both in terms of the lesser total damage done and the better chances for eventual recovery. Of course such an outlook is not apt to be well received, or to be adopted as policy, but the argument seems valid.

Recently Gail Tverberg's excellent blog, Our Finite World, has done a good job of explaining and updating the problems facing an economy based on lending and credit; to generate a real return on invested capital it must necessarily face a decline in growth. The situation is outlined in her recent post, "How Resource Limits Lead to Financial Collapse." As Tverberg says; "Many from the 'peak oil' community say that what we should worry about is a decline in the world oil supply. In my view, the danger is quite different: The real danger is financial collapse coming much earlier than a decline in oil supply."

In theory, the world of banking, of finance capitalism, is supposed to be closely in tune with the physical world, since it controls and impacts the real world through investments like mines and factories that produce goods for markets and consumers with money to spend.

A close link between the world of banking and money and the real physical world was once maintained and enforced by declaring that dollars could be redeemed on demand for gold or silver. There is now nothing to link the dollars created by the Federal Reserve to the physical world. Nowadays the dollar is a fiat currency, backed up by nothing except its prevalence as the standard reserve currency used for most global trade, and the fact that it has little competition in this regard. The worth of a dollar is only to be judged by what it will buy. This has changed over time, and nearly always for the worse.

Since the availability of oil for transportation is arguably the single factor that currently limits the growth of the global economy, the real worth of a dollar might as well be judged by the fact that it will now buy about a quart and a half of Brent crude oil on the global marketplace. Since there is a long-standing agreement in place to price globally traded oil solely in dollars, and since all countries need oil, this has tended to preserve the status of the dollar as the one currency needed to buy the oil which every country needs.

In effect, this means that all dollars should really be seen as petrodollars. The dollar lacks any plausible value except for its current purchasing power in oil or other liquid fuel, which has declined sharply over the last decade.

With all this in mind, lets try to put our current global situation in perspective. The system of capitalism, which is the foundation of the global economy and world trade, needs to keep expanding to maintain its health and avoid sinking into a deflationary world depression. A handful of giant investment banks indirectly control the entire U.S. economy, because they function as the board of directors for the Federal Reserve. The unelected Fed sets the prime interest rate and regulates the creation of dollars, by allowing the banks to loan dollars into existence.

In the absence of effective banking regulation to maintain discipline, the system has become strongly biased toward permitting the infinite exponential expansion of fiat currency and investment in defiance of our finite world. In other words, the global economy has become a vast Ponzi scheme. The distinctions between investment bankers, finance capitalists, and global corporations have become blurred.

Strip away the smoke and mirrors and bankers are revealed as respectable, well-paid gamblers who risk public money on investments that are likely to fail because of a constantly falling energy return on energy investment. With the end of meaningful banking regulation, the giant investment banks have been free to place bets on practically anything that involves money, with the wagers insured by the federal government.

The biggest investment bankers and their banks are regarded as too big to fail, and so they are essentially permitted to gamble without risk. The elimination of risk has, over time, actually led them to gamble on the riskiest ventures. These tend to pay the best returns, exactly because of the high risk. This interview -- "Our System is so Flawed that Fraud is Mathematically Guaranteed" -- features Chris Martenson interviewing banking expert Professor Bill Black. It paints an appalling picture of investment banking as a racket and a confidence game, where capital investment has shifted to the areas of greatest risk.

The biggest banks now hold hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of paper agreements, pledges to pay off a huge accumulation of speculations and hedges amounting to gambling debts still on the books. These speculative paper banking agreements dwarf the entire global economy, which is only about $70 trillion a year.

Bank of America’s holding company -- the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit -- held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades. That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.

This being the case, it becomes apparent that the American dollar is at the center of a vast global Ponzi scheme which can never pay back its lenders in terms of the anticipated buying power, simply because there is no longer enough cheap fossil fuel remaining for the global economy to recover after a severe crisis.

Nobody can accurately predict how long the current situation can be maintained but, given the facts of the matter, we can see that there is certainly going to be a global economic crisis. Only the timing, which is based on investor psychology and the Federal Reserve's ability to keep the game going, is uncertain.

To sum up the situation we face, the scientists are warning us that even at best, a well-managed global economy can only avoid a severe environmental crisis for perhaps three more decades, because of the fundamental limits of nature. However, the chances of our poorly managed system of global capitalism lasting even that long are slight. Given the time typically needed to recover from a severe economic crisis like the Great Depression, this suggests that a severe global economic crisis or collapse must put an end to capitalism as we know it in the not very distant future.

James Howard Kunstler has outlined some of the social response scenarios in his books The Long Emergency and Too Much Magic. The potential for transition communities to help us through the hard times to come are a topic of frequent discussion on Resilience.org, sponsored by the Post Carbon Institute, a think tank devoted to coping with these sorts of problems.

Local economies centered around local agriculture and local production of the goods needed for survival are likely to be an important part of our future. We cannot start planning soon enough.

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association in Austin. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Roger Baker on The Rag Blog.]

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