Signs From Earth

Energy Sprawl: Renewables' Achilles Heel

Corn ethanol and wind are two renewable energy sources being pursued in the United States. A research paper on "Energy Sprawl" released in August 2009 indicates that energy efficiency is as important a strategy in energy policy as pursuing land-intensive renewable energy sources like biofuels. Photo: brooklyn/flickr

A key challenge for renewable energy like biofuels, solar, and wind becomes the large amount of land needed to produce electricity and liquid fuels at large scale.

Fossil fuels coal, oil, and natural gas are energy dense because they contain concentrated ancient sunlight. Created from carbon-rich plant residues laid down millions of years ago, fossil fuels carry via those plants the energy of millions of years of sunlight densely packed into energy-rich rocks, liquid, and gas. 

On the other hand, renewables depend on current sunlight -- today’s sun and wind, this year’s growing season -- to produce their power. Consequently the energy density of renewables is much lower than fossil fuels.

Millennium Island, Kiribati

Millennium Island was photographed on July 1, 2009 by astronauts in the International Space Station. Formerly named Caroline, this uninhabited island in the South Pacific at the end of the Line Island chain is part of the Republic of Kiribati.

After Kiribati moved the International Dateline in 1995, Caroline became the first land outpost where the sun would rise on the new millennium on January 1, 2000. The island was renamed to mark the occasion, and celebrants arrived to party and celebrate the arrival of the new year, century, and millennium. 

Whether the current Millennium began on January 1, 2000, or January 1, 2001 is another matter.

NASA Earth Observatory: Image of the Day, Millennium Island, Kiribati

Mapping 44 Hazardous Coal Ash Waste Ponds

 

A ruptured coal ash storage pond near Kingston, Tennessee in late 2008. The EPA has released a list of vulnerable coal ash storage ponds around the U.S. Most are in Appalachian states. EPA Photo.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has finally released a list of 44 vulnerable "coal ash" ponds in the United States. Two weeks ago the agency tried to keep the list secret, claiming these hazardous toxic waste ponds could be terrorist targets. 

Bill Kovarik of Radford University has mapped the locations of these 44 hazardous sites, most of them in Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, North Carolina and Arizona.

These sludge ponds store the toxic waste remaining after coal is burned to produce electricity. Coal produces about 50 percent of the electricity in the United States, and also creates large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) when it is burned. Rising levels of CO2 are widely seen by scientists as the leading reason earth's temperatures are rising. 

If you live near one of these 44 toxic waste ponds, the EPA has said they have "high hazard potential." EPA verbiage accompanying the list says this means a failure of a dam holding back these coal ash wastes "will probably cause loss of human life."

Public interest has been high in these hazardous toxic waste ponds ever since one of them ruptured last December (picture above) at the TVA Kingston coal-fired power plant in Tennessee. That toxic sludge is still being cleaned up, and a recent report in the Knoxville News-Sentinel said the Tennessee Valley Authority expects cleanup costs will be about $1 billion. 

A TVA-commissioned study of the causes of that disaster said an "unstable" layer of ash in the failed pond caused the dam to break. The 1,400-page study released in late June, called "Root Cause Analysis," is a compendium of obscure and virtually inscrutable technical language. What is called the "Executive Summary" can be found here.

Suffice to say the price of coal for producing electricity keeps rising. When we turn on a light we subsidize the creation of devastated and polluted landscapes, whether they be mountaintop removal coal mines, or the toxic waste sites created by these hazardous coal ash ponds. And as we burn ever more coal (and oil) to power our modern 24/7/365 society, we keep heating up the planet.

Resources:

Rising Odds for a Hotter World

 

MIT Greenhouse Gamble: No-Policy Case (left) where emissions are not limited, and Policy Case (right) where carbon emissions are limited, indicate likelihood of future temperature increases. The size of a pie slice indicates likelihood.

Scientists at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change have updated their odds for future temperature increases. 

Called The Greenhouse Gamble, the project calculates the odds of temperature increases by 2100 based on what we do, or don't do, to limit carbon emissions. The project began in 2003, and updated projections released this year see significantly warmer temperatures for earth in the absence of stringent emissions reductions.

If we do nothing, odds are 1 in 11 (9 percent) that average temperatures will rise by 7 degrees C. by 2100. (That's 12.6 degrees F.) So far, we are doing less than nothing as global carbon emissions keep rising at record rates beyond any previous expectation. As we keep on this path the chance is less than 1 in 100 (1 percent) that temperatures will rise less than 3 degrees C. (5.4 degrees F.) Is it getting warm in here?

The longer we wait to cut back carbon emissions the higher future temperatures are likely to get. The 2002 gamble showed that 5 degrees C. was the previous ceiling if emissions continued unabated. 

So now the 2009 gamble tells us the future is going to be warmer than we thought it might be.

Climatologist Stephen Schneider of Stanford uses a fire insurance analogy to help people understand the risk from rising temperatures: Most people have fire insurance on their homes even though few have ever had fires. Reduced carbon emissions would be the equivalent of fire insurance for the earth.

We are looking at odds of 1 in 11 (nine percent) that earth (our house) is going to heat up more than 12 degrees F. by 2100. Essentially the earth we know is going to burn down, we're doing nothing to insure ourselves against this, and at the rate carbon emissions are rising we are in effect throwing gasoline on the fire.

Rebuilding America From City to Farm

 

Map from The Atlantic showing "Top 30" city population across the United States in 2007. A related article contemplates which cities and regions will benefit or wither once, if, the country pulls out of this current economic tailspin.

What will America's inhabited landscape look like, where and how will people live and move about, which cities and surrounding regions will thrive or wither after the clouds clear from our housing and economic collapse? (If they clear?)

Some ponder this post-crisis reshaped landscape, while others like small farmers already invent an emerging future that differs from the recent past.

In an Atlantic article How the Crash Will Reshape America, Richard Florida assesses regions and cities that will likely "win or lose." He thinks that some "mega-regions" with educated and creative classes will prosper, but old-line manufacturing and sunbelt regions that built false prosperity on debt-laden housing "booms" will implode. Suburbia and its housing bubble spawn, exurbia, likely will shrink.

An accompanying interactive map The Shaping of America examines trends in patent, income, and population across America to give a geographical sense of our stocks of past and current intellectual and human capital. In a related Q&A Florida ponders whether the recent "stimulus" package will just throw money after places doomed to collapse instead of focusing on building forward-looking infrastructure like intracity passenger railways that can create regional strength. 

Earlier this month the U.S. Department of Agriculture released the 2007 census of agriculture, and within the data are harbingers that the "get big or get out" conventional wisdom espoused by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz in the 1970s is being challenged by new farmers on the ground.

The number of farms is up, and the face of farming grows diverse as the number of women running farms has risen about 30 percent. For sure very big farms dominate in terms of overall production, and mid-size farms are being sucked up by the very big. But within we see a boom in very small farms, where people also hold down a day job. 

Map from NYT, Farm Living 

People are moving back to the land and reclaiming a connection to the food in their lives. Perhaps what goes around comes around, and as the bloom is off suburbia we will see a reshaping of the suburban landscape and continued growth in "subfarmia," more small-scale farms near cities that grow the food city people eat. 

In the interim perhaps it is time to grow your own garden, if you have not already started.

Farm Bill: Taking the Long View

Wes Jackson of The Land Institute and Kentucky essayist Wendell Berry propose a different approach to farm bills that transcends the commodity, lobbyist, and subsidy driven approach we have now. 

They propose an approach that addresses the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

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New York Times Op-Ed: A 50-Year Farm Bill

"The extraordinary rainstorms last June caused catastrophic soil erosion in the grain lands of Iowa, where there were gullies 200 feet wide. But even worse damage is done over the long term under normal rainfall — by the little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland, and by various degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.

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"Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government...

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Hot Planet: Our Path Ahead

As we debate reducing carbon emissions, we set records for producing them. Projections for a hot future keep rising.

This fall the UK's Met Office released updated projections showing global temperature scenarios for 2100 as we continue pumping planet-warming carbon dioxide, CO2, into the atmosphere. 

About the same time the Global Carbon Project reported the world's record rate of CO2 production: we are burning ever more fossil carbon coal, oil, and gas to produce energy, and we keep cutting down our forests. 

Our activities drive rising atmospheric CO2 levels, which alter the natural carbon cycle that gives us oxygen to breathe, soaks up CO2, and serves as our climate's thermostat. These recently reported CO2 emission rates are beyond the highest 2007 IPCC projections for climate warming carbon emissions.

A Rising Heat Path

The top arrow on the graphic here shows our temperature pathway unless we radically change our ways. 

Changing our ways means reducing our use of fossil fuels, finding alternative energy sources on a massive scale, capturing and storing the carbon pollution from coal burning, and using energy much more efficiently than we do now.

Even if we change how we use energy, a hot future awaits. We will also need to adapt, change how and where we live.

10 Degrees Warmer

According to the Met Office scenario, at current emission rates (emissions rising by 132 percent) temperature increases by the end of this century will range between 5.5 and 7.1 degrees C. (9.9 to 12.7 degrees F.) 

Let's just say 10 degrees F. warmer for discussion sake.

Even if we reduce our mid-century emissions to levels of 20 years ago, we can still expect to see temperature rises at century's end of 2.9 to 3.8 degrees C. (5.2 to 6.8 degrees F.) But our emissions are way higher than 1990 levels now. Can we actually lower emissions, let alone flatten them?

My children's children will be alive in 2100. What kind of world will they live in when when temperatures are 10 degrees (F.) higher? 

Barring some radical shift in the way we acquire and use energy, our world is on track to become a different place for people, plants, animals, and the ecosystems we inhabit and need for survival.

Food, Water, People?

A 10-degree rise, arriving so quickly, will make it virtually impossible to dependably grow cereal grain crops in the places where we grow them now. A 10-degree temperature rise will, according to the IPCC, cause crop yield declines in all regions, and increasingly rain will fall in deluges, not at all, or at the wrong time. 

We count on reliable rain to fill our rivers and lakes and to make our crops grow. 

World population is now about 6.8 billion people, and by mid-century projections have us between nine and 10 billion. Given these temperature scenarios, one wonders where the food and water will come from to keep us all alive.

We already see signs and harbingers in places like slowly-flooding Bangladesh, dessicated southeast Australia, and our own drying Southwest. Ice caps are melting, mountain glaciers and snowpacks are shrinking, and coral reefs are dying as ocean waters warm and acidify. The rising number of accompanying floods, droughts, and fires becomes just so much background noise on a changing planet.

CO2 Needs a Face

In December 2008 policymakers gathered in Poland to again try setting standards for limiting future carbon emissions. They tried, they talked, they set no standards. Setting policy for limiting emissions is an excruciatingly hard challenge, like herding cats. 

Global warming is a creeping, invisible change that wraps itself around us so slowly and incrementally we don't notice the world has changed before our eyes. If only CO2 had a face, and was something we could see and recognize, perhaps progress could result. We could see what we are aiming at.

 

Though we cannot see it, it surrounds us, lasts for many decades, and we see only its effects. Trying to reduce the presence of something we cannot see or smell presents frustration, and the effects of our work may not be seen until long after we are gone. 

CO2 becomes a legacy challenge. We add it to the atmosphere today as a sort of perverse gift to future generations. If we try now to reduce its presence, the effects of our work likely will be seen only by those who come after us, our children and theirs.

Andy Revkin at dot.earth ponders: What if CO2 were pink? 

If we could see it would it matter? Pink or not, as each year passes and we fail to change our ways, our emissions path, we lose time to act. 

Ten degrees warmer could produce a world we don't recognize. 

The road ahead is long, and steep. We may not stabilize emissions in my life, or in my children's. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. 

What we try now will help us realize what work remains, and what kind of world our heirs inherit.

-DD

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Feds: Rapid Climate Change Coming Sooner

The U.S. government, which during the past eight years has spent much energy denying the existence of global warming, muzzling its environmental scientists who study the issue, or suppressing publication of scientific studies about it, appears to be clearing out the shelves in its waning days.

One report just out this week addresses abrupt climate change. This being defined as changes that occur over a period of decades (or less) and lasting for at least that long, and causing "substantial disruptions in human and natural systems." 

Editors say that these changes would pose  "clear risks to society in terms of our ability to adapt," but they say the report does not "focus on specific effects on these systems as a result of climate change." 

We are left to wonder. I guess that means impacts like rising seas that drown coastlines or droughts that cause crop failures and water shortages. For example.

Areas discussed include the increased likelihood of severe drought in the U.S. southwest, increased release of methane from wetlands and permafrost (which would further drive atmospheric warming), a greater rate of sea level rise caused by melting ice sheets and glaciers, and the likely decline of the Gulf Stream, the ocean current that moves warm water from the equator towards the poles. This could mean a decline in temperatures in places such as Europe.

All of these concerns have previously been discussed elsewhere, and this report says it is assessing existing published science. 

It may be that considering the source, the most significant aspect of the report is that it exists at all.

Cliff Notes Version: Summary and Findings and Executive Summary

Columbia University PR via Eurekalert: Abrupt climate shifts may move faster than thought

Mass Migration as Climate Adaptation

Nature Reports Climate Change: 

Here Comes the Flood

Janos Bogardi & Koko Warner: 

"Policymakers must start to view mass migration as a form of adaptation so that the global response to climate-induced migration is one of facilitation rather than neglect.

"Two leviathans are about to collide on the world stage of science and politics — climate change and migration. Their combination brings us to a tipping-point that could spawn a phenomenon of a scale and scope not experienced in human history. 

"Beyond reducing the greenhouse gases that drive global warming, we are now faced with the task of finding ways to deal with the impact of climate change. Next in line, or perhaps even ahead of mitigation, adaptation is the new game in town....

..."With increasing numbers of the world's population living in areas exposed to the negative consequences of climate change, we need urgent action to identify adaptation pathways that prevent or at least reduce environmental migration flows. A rapid and collaborative effort is needed to discuss options, including resettlement, and to further understand the implications of climate change-related migration for affected countries and regions. Fundamentally this requires dialogue about things we know already, as well as vigorous imagination, to find alternatives that will keep this planet a home for all of us, rather than for just the fortunate few."

Also See: Global Farm Land Grabs

The New Colonialism: Buying Foreign Farmland

New Scientist:
Rich countries carry out '21st century land grab'

HISTORY may be repeating itself. Until the mid-20th century, many European countries grew rich on the resources of their colonies. Now, countries including China, Kuwait and Sweden are snapping up vast tracts of agricultural land in poorer nations, especially in Africa, to grow biofuels and food for themselves.

The land grabs have sparked accusations of neocolonialism and fears that the practice could worsen poverty. Yet some organisations think this could be a chance for poor countries to trade land and labour for the technology and investment vital for developing their own food and energy production....

Carbon Trading's Murky Markets

The fool’s gold of carbon trading: A huge new market designed to solve global warming seems doomed to failure

Sunday Times of London, Nov. 30, 2008: ..."We are witnessing the birth of the greatest and most complex commodity market the world has seen. Last year alone, permits worth more than £55 billion were traded on the world’s carbon markets – but future trading volumes, if all goes global according to plan, will dwarf these.

"Carbon trading schemes originate from the Kyoto protocol on climate change agreed under the auspices of the United Nations in 1997. Governments adhering to Kyoto accept limits on the CO2 their countries can emit. To meet their pledges, they put caps on the carbon outputs of domestic companies, which have to buy annual permits to exceed them.

"Permits are bought from governments or from carbon traders, who, naturally, charge a commission. For the City the arrival of carbon trading is a bonanza. The sector already employs about 3,000 people and has created a few dozen new millionaires.

"Several such schemes are up and running around the world: Europe’s Emissions Trading Scheme, founded in 2005, is the biggest, but others are following in Australia, the US and even China.

"It sounds good news for everyone: governments, taxpayers, City boys and the environment. The reality is a great deal less rosy – indeed some of those closest to the carbon markets say openly that the system is doomed to failure...."

Victory Gardens?

James Howard Kunstler, purveyor of views not many want to hear in "buy now, pay never" America, speaks today in his weekly column on a modest return to agriculture:

"In my view -- and I know this is controversial -- a much larger proportion of the US population will have to be employed in growing the food we eat. There are many ways of arranging this, some more fair than others, and I hope the better angels of our nature steer us in the direction of fairness and justice.

"The prospects of a devalued dollar imply that we very shortly will not be able to get the all the oil-and-gas based "inputs" that have made petro-agriculture possible the past century. The consequences of this are so unthinkable that we have not been thinking about it...."

For details on implementing self-sufficiency in suburbia, check out Jeff Vail's discussion at The Oil Drum.

Perhaps the first move towards more "home-grown" food can be to plow up the south lawn of the White House and turn it into a "Victory Garden", as proposed by Michael Pollan in his October 12 letter to the President-Elect:

The Brits Know All About The End of Empire

BBC: US global dominance 'set to wane' US economic, military and political dominance is likely to decline over the next two decades, according to a new US intelligence report on global trends.

The National Intelligence Council (NIC) predicts China, India and Russia will increasingly challenge US influence. It also says the dollar will no longer be the world's major currency, and food and water shortages will fuel conflict. However, the report concedes that these outcomes are not inevitable and will depend on the actions of world leaders. It will make sombre reading for President-elect Barack Obama, the BBC's Jonathan Beale in Washington says, as it paints a bleak picture of the future of US influence and power....

Undisclosed Location Disclosed...

Government Secrets Pried Open!

Discover what others have unearthed from government archives via FOIA request.

From the home page of governmentattic.org: "governmentattic.org provides electronic copies of hundreds of interesting Federal Government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Fascinating historical documents, reports on items in the news, oddities and fun stuff and government bloopers, they're all here. Think of browsing this site as rummaging through the Government's Attic -- hence our name."

Perhaps you will find out the location of the undisclosed location.