Faster

“A report published in Nature on the last day of May concluded that we have already exceeded seven of eight “safe and just Earth system boundaries” that it studied—from groundwater supplies and fertilizer overuse to temperature. “We are moving in the wrong direction on basically all of these,” Johan Rockström, the paper’s lead author and the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told reporters.”

The date was 1972 and the report was published by the Club of Rome with the title, “Limits to Growth”. A year ago there was a 50th year anniversary gathering called “Beyond Growth” with very low attendance - but for one this year, thousands packed the EU meeting rooms. We are starting to accept the reality that that we have already exceeded seven of eight “safe and just Earth system boundaries” and we are moving in the wrong direction without knowing how to stop.

We hear often that the solution is Green Energy - forgetting that the creation of new systems takes energy to produce the required minerals. Hello Mining. Bill McKibbon suggests that maybe we have to slow down, returning to the lifestyle of the 60s “consume less, travel less, build less, eat less wastefully.” He has also been a fan of Green Energy, realizing that its growth creates local problems. Clean energy does not mean clean production, and those who produce it usually live closest to the environmental degradation it causes. Those of us who live well are the ones that are going to have to learn to live more simply - and that means a different ethic than the one of More - Now.

To stabilize the earth’s temperature:

• Reduce passenger car transport by 81%.

• Limit per-person air travel to one trip per year.

• Decrease living space per person by 25%.

• Decrease meat consumption in rich countries by 60%.

Sounds rather like my life in the 60’s - and a happy one it was. Slowing down might be more attractive if it would lessen the world from heating up - which it is.

The Time has Come

Strong words from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, about the latest document from the International Panel on Climate Change. “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” and he added that “the world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.” 

 Bill McKibben’s latest essay in the New Yorker contends that the time to act is NOW.

 · There is a relation to the war in Ukraine.  Fossil fuel has given Putin the money to finance this atrocious invasion.

· John Kerry called the Glasgow climate talks our last best hope to which Greta Thumberg responded, “blah blah blah”.

·  If the US bans Russian oil – that’s just the beginning. We have to ban oil everywhere.

·  Our species has learned to depend on combustion. Now we have to unlearn it. We’ve focused on the pandemic, but we didn’t note this fact. In 2020, fossil-fuel pollution killed three times as many people as covid-19 did.

·  What we have forgotten is the fire that we can access from elsewhere without drilling for it – the sun.

·  We have the resources to replace burning fossil fuels. Early predictions of production of wind and solar energy production were pessimistic, but that is changing.  McKibben notes that Iceland, Costa Rica, Namibia, and Norway—are already producing more than ninety per cent of their electricity from clean sources.

·  Cost matters.  Here is another quote from McKibben. “ By  2013, the cost of a kilowatt-hour of solar energy had fallen by more than ninety-nine per cent since it was first used on the Vanguard I. Meanwhile, the price of coal has remained about the same. It was cheap to start, but it hasn’t gotten cheaper.”

·  People have believed for a long time that the cost of changing from coal is prohibitive.  Since that is no longer the case, it is beliefs and attitudes that have to change.

·  There are huge implications for Canada, according to McKibben. “A third of Canada’s natural gas is used to heat the oil trapped in the soil sufficiently to get it to flow to the surface and separate it from the sand. Just extracting the oil would put Canada over its share of the carbon budget set in Paris, and actually burning it would heat the planet nearly half a degree Celsius and use up about a third of the total remaining budget. (And Canadians account for only about one half of one per cent of the world’s population.)”

·  But we have a huge potential for renewable energy from the sky. Do we want to leave that in the air rather than thinking about what we can take from the ground?

·  Much of the world is an importer of coal – and the ships that carry it there do so over and over with fuel to transport it. Wind blades have to be transported too – but one shipment of them lasts for fifty years.

·  We are going to need more electricians.  That’s a retraining decision that has to be made by governments. They will ultimately be well paying jobs.

·  We’re still up against those who want to keep burning things – including one member of the US senate who holds the power to do so while benefiting from coal production. We pretend that natural gas is cleaner, while forgetting that it still involves burning something. Natural gas, McKibben says, is a bridge fuel to nowhere.

·  Wood burning is also seen as an alternative. But wood takes years to replace and all the tree planting in the world can’t keep up.

·  Carbon capture is raised as a possibility – but it costs more than solar power.

·  Utilities will fight hard – charging huge rates for changing systems to discourage changes. Governments need to regulate.

·  After pointing out that those who cause the least energy damage are the ones to suffer most, McKibben quotes Naomi Klein on inequities and the need for environmental organizations to think beyond themselves: “ Winning will take sweeping alliances beyond the self-identified green bubble—with trade unions, housing-rights advocates, racial-justice organizers, teachers, transit workers, nurses, artists, and more. But, to build that kind of coalition, climate action needs to hold out the promise of making daily life better for the people who are most neglected right away—not far off in the future. “

·  The haves of the world have to pay more to the fifty five have-not countries to help them pay for transfers to renewable energy.  So far, these have been empty promises.

·  We need to learn from our indigenous cousins who know the value of using small fires to prevent larger conflagrations – something that they have known for hundreds of years.

Breaking silence

Billl McKibben recently gave up his climate report for the New Yorker, but as he did so he reminded us that those of the silent generation have a voice - as a large proportion of the population, as well as controlling a lot of financial assets and being known for voting. We may become more small “c” conservative as we age but that does not mean that we are unaware of the effect of climate change on our children and grandchildren.

He’s about to form a new organization to add to existing ones such as such as Elders Climate Action and Great Old Broads for Wilderness. He says he doesn’t particularly look forward to the task at hand - after all he was the founder of 350.org - but he knows that the best way to counter the organized money of the big corporations is with organized people.

So if you want to help - you can go here and sign up. I did. And there are Canadian options too.

Pro and Con

We live in interesting times. Who knew that ethical issues are now mainstream? Should vaccinations be mandatory when one side insists on individual freedom while another thinks that responsibility for public health concerns come first? Should news media give equal space to two sides of any argument whether they contain true or false information? If more people get their news from social media, should it be monitored by the platforms that own it?

But another interesting one concerns lobbying. The government of the Canadian province of Alberta has recently spent $3.5 million to explore perceived lobbying by others to work against extracting oil from its oil sands - which used to be called tar sands before that sounded like an unpleasant black thick substance. Among those caught in the net is respected environmentalist Bill McKibben. He is apparently mentioned several times in the soon to be published report and is given a chance to respond. He does so in a New Yorker article titled, No, Alberta, Don’t Be Sad. We Love You. Really.

He wants to make it clear that he is not against Alberta itself - which the study seems to insinuate. What he is concerned about is the burning of the large amount of fossil fuel that the province still has in the ground - about 173 billion barrels, he says. That would create 112 billion tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - 28% of the world’s remaining carbon budget set by the Paris accord. We live in a country with less than 1% of the world’s population and McKibben stresses the unfairness of that use by a single province of it. The world has gradually become aware of the situation and the potential damage.

McKibben is quick to point out that he has been part of the process of questioning the ethics of this use, but that Alberta has not been the only place on the radar of 350.org the company he founded. Its name was named after 350 parts per million — the safe concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In June 2021 were already at 418.94 parts per million, up from 416.60 in June 2020. Since 2009, 350.0rg has advocated for a reduction of fossil fuel use all over the world - not just for Alberta.

And Alberta itself is starting to see the perils of climate change within its own borders. It’s normal to feel resentment when it has taken us so long to see the impact and understand the cause. but what if that same $3.5 million had been allocated to new possibilities rather than trying to live in the past?