Signs From Earth

Population Trends: Magic Number is 2.1: Go forth and multiply a lot less (via @TheEconomist)

Live chart here: http://tinyurl.com/yf75sko

Gapminder chart of children per woman as GDP per person increases (2007) 

Large Blue circle is India, large red is China, large yellow at right is United States.

Economist: "Fertility and living standards: Lower fertility is changing the world for the better"

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14743589

"Sometime in the next few years (if it hasn’t happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below..."

Economist Opinion: Demography, growth, and the environment: 

Falling Fertility: Astonishing falls in fertility are bringing with them big benefits

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14744915

Study estimates challenge in shifting world to "100% clean energy" by 2030 (via @eurekalert & @sciam)

Lillgrund wind farm with 48-turbines off coast of Sweden. Photo by Vattenfall/flickr 

Cover story of November 2009 issue of Scientific American, a preview now online.)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

"Shifting the world to 100 percent clean, renewable energy as early as 2030 -- here are the numbers"

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/su-stw101909.php

Eurekalert: "Wind, water and solar energy resources are sufficiently available to provide all the world's energy. Converting to electricity and hydrogen powered by these sources would reduce world power demand by 30 percent, thereby avoiding 13,000 coal power plants. Materials and costs are not limitations to these conversions, but politics may be, say Stanford and U.C. researchers who have mapped out a blueprint for powering the world..."

"...Most of the technology needed to shift the world from fossil fuel to clean, renewable energy already exists. Implementing that technology requires overcoming obstacles in planning and politics, but doing so could result in a 30 percent decrease in global power demand, say Stanford civil and environmental engineering Professor Mark Z. Jacobson and University of California-Davis researcher Mark Delucchi.

"To make clear the extent of those hurdles - and how they could be overcome - they have written an article that is the cover story in the November issue of Scientific American. In it, they present new research mapping out and evaluating a quantitative plan for powering the entire world on wind, water and solar energy, including an assessment of the materials needed and costs. And it will ultimately be cheaper than sticking with fossil fuel or going nuclear, they say..."

PDF of paper: Mark Z. Jacobson: Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security†

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/PDF%20files/ReviewSolGW09.pdf

also at: http://www.rsc.org/ej/EE/2009/b809990c.pdf

"This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition..."

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The Price We Pay for Energy is Not the Price We Pay: Report Tallies Hidden Energy Costs (via @jarsciencenews)

Coal Fired Power Plant at Cheshire Ohio, Photo by "Picture Taking Fool,"/flickr  

http://www.sciencenews.org/index/generic/activity/view/id/48586/title/Report_tallies_hidden_energy_costs

Janet Raloff: "The average retail cost of U.S. coal-fired electricity was 9 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2007 (the most recent year for which data are available). But there are health and environmental costs of that power that consumers don't pay, at least as part of their electric bill. According to a new report, accounting for those costs would double the true cost of shooting some electrons through the nation's power grid.

"As long as such costs remain hidden, they risk skewing policy and purchasing decisions. A new report released today by the National Research Council now attempts to compute and tally those hidden health and environmental costs associated with energy..." 

National Academies Press: 

Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12794

Link to FREE PDF of Executive Summary: 

http://www.nap.edu/nap-cgi/report.cgi?record_id=12794&type=pdfxsum

"Modern civilization is heavily dependent on energy from sources such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Yet, despite energy's many benefits, most of which are reflected in energy market prices, the production, distribution, and use of energy also cause negative effects. Beneficial or negative effects that are not reflected in energy market prices are termed "external effects" by economists. In the absence of government intervention, external effects associated with energy production and use are generally not taken into account in decision making..."

National Research Council: http://sites.nationalacademies.org/NRC/index.htm

Dept. of Energy EIA: Electric Power Industry in Review 2007 

NYT: Fossil Fuels' Hidden Costs s in Billions, Report Says 

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Map: McDonald's Golden Glow in the United States

Stephen Von Worley has produced a golden glowing map (no arches visible) of McDonald's restaurants in the lower 48 United States. He has called this "The Contiguous United States, Visualized by Distance to the Nearest McDonald's," and writes about his inspiration at his blog Weather Sealed, under the heading "Where the Buffalo Roamed." 

"To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s – ubiquitous fast food chain and inaugural megacorporate colonizer of small towns nationwide," he writes.

Based on numbers from aggdata, Von Worley says more than 13,000 McDonald's are spread across the land, and 107 miles is the greatest distance or "McFarthest Spot" to a McD's. (I guess that means somewhere in the west a pair of McDonald's is 214 miles apart?) If you live in central Nevada, southeast Oregon, Idaho's Salmon River Wilderness, or northwestern South Dakota it will be a long ride for that burger fix.

For a reality check, see the film Food, Inc. If it hasn't played your town yet, already has, or (likely) never will, this important film will be out on DVD Nov. 3. See it to understand how the American food and farm landscape has been transformed by more than the ubiquitous presence of hamburger shops. Show Food Inc. to your friends. You may want to find that spot 107 miles away and stay there.

What Prospect to Limit Carbon Emissions?

Global Carbon Emissions by Country in 2000: With about four percent of world population, the United States produces a quarter of the planet's heat-trapping carbon emissions. All land areas in map equal 100 percent. In this cartogram larger country size means more carbon emissions as a percentage of total emissions. From worldmapper.org  

Reports this week in Politico and the New York Times indicate prospects are dimming that climate legislation will come out of the U.S. Congress this year. If so, what chance for global agreement in December when negotiators and thousands of climate groupies burn all that carbon to fly to Copenhagen for the big international climate meeting? After all, this COP-15 summit is being billed as the crucial conference to cooperate and agree on common goals to limit planet-warming carbon pollution.

The United States produces the most carbon pollution per person, and until recently led the world in total carbon emissions. So unless the US arrives in Copenhagen with a firm commitment to lead by example, why would other nations, especially China and India, bother to change their ways? After all we burned all that coal, oil, and natural gas to develop our materially rich and highly mobile way of life, who are we to tell developing nations they can't aspire to the same living standards?

Human Footprint: Carajás Iron Mine, Brazil

I've been a fan of satellite pictures ever since seeing Landsat images of deserts worldwide when working on a book about deserts of the world 28 years ago. This picture of an iron mine in Brazil is one of the latest images from satellites that look at our earth.

NASA Earth Observatory and other sources regularly post pictures showing the visible hand of man on the land, and this picture initiates an ongoing irregular series of images called "Human Footprint," showing the visible effects we are having on our home planet.

Taken July 26, 2009, this picture from NASA Earth Observatory shows the Carajas Iron Mine in Brazil. The mine exists today because some steel company officials stopped their helicopter on a mountaintop to refuel and saw iron ore on the ground. Four decades later this is what remains.

Costa Rica Said to Be Happiest Place

The place to be these days is Costa Rica, if you seek a spot on earth where happiness abounds, or at least is in measurably greater quantities than the alternative. This according to the Happy Planet Index 2.0, which gave runner-up status to the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Nine of the top ten nations in the index are in Latin America.

Apparently happiness is not in great surplus globally, as the New Economics Foundation, patron and host of the survey, has renamed the index website "The (Un)Happy Planet Index 2.0." 

So if you are looking for a hangout with more happiness potential than your current outpost, here is the resource to locate that new address. To produce its rankings, the unhappy planet index adds up measures such as life expectancy, life satisfaction, and ecological footprint.

In case you are interested, the United States ranks 114th of 143. Apparently our huge cars, mega-mortgage starter mansions, and endless credit card debt aren't always tickets to happiness. Perhaps, among other things, our ecological footprint is working against us.

Below: A map of the world, color coded by the Happy Planet Index. Countries in red are said by the index to rank poorly in at least two of the three measures.

 

National Security Equals Natural Security

 

The New Security Beat reports on a conference, new blog, and paper out this week from the Center for a New American Security, highlighting the intertwined relationship between national security and natural resources security.

Abstract of Paper, Natural Security: "In the 21st century, the security of nations will increasingly depend on the security of natural resources, or “natural security.”  This concept paper outlines a new program of study at the Center for a New American Security to look at emerging natural resources challenges in six key areas of consumption and consequences – energy, minerals, water, land, climate change, and biodiversity – as well as the ways in which these challenges are linked together. Any solution to the country’s energy insecurity is likely to involve water, non-fuel minerals, and land-use issues; climate change and biodiversity cut across all concerns, with broad effects on resource vulnerability. Without an integrated, national-level approach that links together natural security challenges, the United States runs the risk of trading one dependency for another and exacerbating the consequences."

PDF of CNAS Working Paper: Natural Security

Natural and Economic Disasters in Parallel

McKinsey and Co. has posted a short essay by Michele Zanini that begins exploring similarity in behavior between man-made and natural systems. She discusses correlative frequency and magnitude of failure in man-made systems and of similarly complex natural ones, and says we should pay greater attention to behavior of natural systems to help us understand vulnerability and instability in the systems we create, like the economy:

'Power Curves' What natural and economic disasters have in common (registration required).

"...the parallels between the dynamics and failures of man-made systems, such as the economy or the electricity grid, and similarly complex natural ones are bringing new ideas to economic forecasting, strategic planning, and risk management. This trend may have profound implications for policy makers, economists, and corporate strategists alike."

There are similiarities in this discussion with the work of Nicholas Taleb vis a vis societal and economic effects of low frequency, high impact disruptive events he calls "Black Swans." 

Signs From Earth: Tips to Avoid "Black Swan" Events

Signs From Earth: Turbulence in Our Midst

More Heat, Less Money

Andrew Leonard at Salon notes research indicating that national per capita income drops 8.5 percent for each degree Celsius increase in temperature. This by Melissa Dell, Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken and summarized at VoxEu: Does Climate Change Affect Economic Growth?

"Hot countries tend to be poorer, but debate continues over whether the temperature-income relationship is simply a happenstance association. This column uses within-country estimates to show that higher temperatures have large, negative effects on economic growth – but only in poor countries. The findings are big news for future global inequality."

Dell, Jones and Olken: Climate Change and Economic Growth over the Last Half Century

Krugman: Empire of Carbon

Paul Krugman in the New York Times on China's rapid run up in carbon emissions as it builds its economy (and all those things that we buy):

..."It is unfair to expect China to live within constraints that we didn’t have to face when our own economy was on its way up. But that unfairness doesn’t change the fact that letting China match the West’s past profligacy would doom the Earth as we know it...."

Tips to Avoid "Black Swan" Events

A few days ago Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the book "The Blacks Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable," penned a piece for The Financial Times on avoiding "black swan" events. 

Black swans in this context are very infrequent extreme events that have wide implication. (9/11, financial collapse, power grid failure, the internet, rapid climate change.) 

Taleb has posted the article on his website and it can be downloaded here as a PDF:  Ten Principles for a Black Swan-proof World. 

A few of the ten principles: don't let anything get "too big to fail," stop the socialization of losses and the privatization of gain, and do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if it comes with a warning. (In this context the "dynamite" is complex financial derivatives that no one understands.)

The term "black swan" comes from the mistaken assumption that all swans are white. In this context a "black swan" is a metaphor for something that cannot exist. Black swans were discovered in Australia in the 18th century, thereby proving false the assumption that all swans are white. In Taleb's context "black swans" are rare events beyond the realm of normal exprectation. Photo: Big Gray Mare/flickr

Signs From Earth: Turbulence in Our Midst

Recycling the Suburbs

10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now: Emerging trends highlighted this week in TIME as the world economy evolves to something new. Besides suburban recycling, others include rent-a-country and ecological intelligence.

Friedman Channels Jim Kunstler, Wendell Berry

Apparently Thomas Friedman has come to the realization that the rapacious, energy-intensive living arrangements we created the past half century aren't working so well. It's about time.

Friedman's column in Sunday's New York Times makes me wonder if he has secretly been reading James Howard Kunstler and Wendell Berry. If he has, he doesn't admit it.

Kunstler for years has said we have been living way beyond our means (and will pay for this excess) via his book The Long Emergency and his weekly column:

(March 2, 2009: What Next?)..."The collapse of complex systems is actually predicated on the idea that the systems would mutually reinforce each other's failures. This is now plain to see as the collapse of banking (that is, of both lending and debt service), has led to the collapse of commerce and manufacturing. The next systems to go will probably be farming, transportation, and the oil markets themselves (which constitute the system for allocating and distributing world energy resources). As these things seize up, the final system to go will be governance, at least at the highest levels.

"If we're really lucky, human affairs will eventually reorganize at a lower scale of activity, governance, civility, and economy. Every week, the failure to recognize the nature of our predicament thrusts us further into the uncharted territory of hardship. The task of government right now is not to prop up doomed systems at their current scales of failure, but to prepare the public to rebuild our systems at smaller scales..."

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Wendell Berry laid this all out last May in Harpers' Magazine: Faustian Economics--Hell Hath No Limits:

"The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such “biofuels” as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that “science will find an answer.” The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves...."

Friedman's March 8 New York Times piece, "The Inflection is Near?:

"...What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

Who Doesn't Work Where

Geography of a Recession: The New York Times offers an interactive map showing unemployment across the United States by county (above,) metropolitan area, those areas with housing bubbles, rural areas, and manufacturing centers. The map was based on a nationwide average unemployment rate of 7.1 percent. Most severe job losses are in housing boom and manufacturing areas, and those with previously high unemployment rates. 

The map accompanies an article by David Leonhardt, "Job Losses Show Breadth of Recession":

"What does the worst recession in a generation look like?

"It is both deep and broad. Every state in the country, with the exception of a band stretching from the Dakotas down to Texas, is now shedding jobs at a rapid pace. And even that band has recently begun to suffer, because of the sharp fall in both oil and crop prices..."