Burner Trouble- global warming and climate change from a personal perspective

I’ve been looking at the hot button issues for blogs like this one for the coming year- not predictions but rather the stories that are unfolding right now, at the beginning of the year. When I started this blog a few years ago there was some debate about warming but the effects and proposed solutions were not totally clear. Now we’re seeing direct effects almost daily around the globe and starting to understand that dealing with this disaster is a global economic challenge rather than a political one. This hodgepodge of stories supports this contention:

• Switchgrass ethanol study shows that this source returns 540% of the energy required to grow and refine it. Corn returns something like 50%. Corn ethanol is not viable.
• The introduction of the $2500 Nano car in India and other emerging economies is going to have a profoundly negative effect of energy prices and generate enormous new emissions as the number of cars on the planet explodes.
• We’re using 2.9 million barrels of oil per day more than 6 years ago, globally. If you think oil at $100 is a story, think about oil at $200. When demand goes up and supply goes down, prices skyrocket.
• Automotive technology is poised for an explosion of innovation this year with the Tesla electric sports car, fuel cells, new biological hydrogen extraction techniques, highly efficient hybrids and plug-in hybrids and more. What does this tell us? That the conspiracy theories of the past that said oil and car companies were killing and/or stifling innovation were true- this stuff didn’t just appear out of thin air.
• Greenland Ice Sheet Scares the Crap Out of Climate Scientists. We’ll be watching the ice globally this year, especially in Grenland where the volume of water held in stasis by the ice sheet is equivalent to the entire Gulf of Mexico (!). Estimates for ocean rise by 2050 due to rapidly accelerating melting and calving of the ice sheet range from 2-6 meters. Goodbye virtually every coastal city worldwide including our nation’s capitol (anyone remember the flooded national Mall last year, New York’s subway floods and the ongoing national shame of Katrina?)
• The weather. It’s impossible to describe how big this story is. Here in Rochester, NY, the famously chilly winter upstate area was 70 degrees earlier this week, breaking all records. Killer tornados in the midwest in January, winter storms with CAT 4 winds (140 mph+) in the Pacific Northwest. Droughts in the southwest and southeast with no reserve water supplies. That’s just this week, folks.
• Water, water, nowhere. Only 1 in 500 Chinese have free access to potable drinking water. In much of the world it is worse. Yes, they have to buy drinking water and it’s not cheap. Repercussions of water issues cross all geographic and economic boundaries.
• Carbon costs. We’re going to have to start measuring the carbon costs of virtually all of our activities and products if we’re going to startle people into awareness of how their own actions are worsening the problem of climate change. I’m not buying organic milk that is shipped across the country when I can get local milk for half the price, dollars and carbon-wise. Look at what you buy and how far it came to get to you. And don’t forget the packaging.
• Freegan culture and the Chinese product backlash. Because of the Chinese toy scandals a lot of parents who don’t have time to worry about environmental issues are questioning the provenance of the products they buy and the immediate response is ‘I’m not buying Chinese’. A secondary response is the rise of freegan culture that says ‘I’m not buying things I don’t need and when I do need something I’m going to look for used or free stuff’. You don’t have to dumpster dive, there’s a huge thrift shop culture out there. Do you really need a new blender when your neighborhood Goodwill probably has ten perfectly good ones for a buck or two?
• Home and automotive energy costs crush economy by limiting disposable income. We’re paying five times as much as ten years ago for heat/AC and gas, yet incomes have not risen much. When you take $300-400 more out of a typical family’s monthly budget because of energy costs that money does not flow into the economy.

These stories are just the ones at the top of my awareness today. There are dozens more, so many in fact, that it is daunting to even write a quirky blog about climate change- it is overwhelming in the reach and impact it already has. Nevertheless I’ll be at it again in 2008.

“Water rationing has hit the capital. Car washing and lawn watering are prohibited within city limits. Harvests in the region have dropped by 15-30%. By the end of summer, local reservoirs and dams were holding 5% of their capacity.

Oops, that’s not Atlanta, or even the southeastern U.S. That’s Ankara, Turkey, hit by a fierce drought and high temperatures that also have had southern and southwestern Europe in their grip.”

“Based on the record of the last seven years, we can take it for granted that the Bush administration hasn’t the slightest desire to glance down; that no one in FEMA who matters has given the situation the thought it deserves; and that, on this subject, as on so many others, top administration officials are just hoping to make it to January 2009 without too many more scar marks. But, if not the federal government, shouldn’t somebody be asking? Shouldn’t somebody check out what’s actually down there?”

“To find even tentative answers to such questions you have to leave the mainstream. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, for example, interviewed paleontologist and author of The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change, Tim Flannery recently on the topic of a “world on fire.” Flannery offered the following observation:

“It’s not just the Southeast of the United States. Europe has had its great droughts and water shortages. Australia is in the grip of a drought that’s almost unbelievable in its ferocity. Again, this is a global picture. We’re just getting much less usable water than we did a decade or two or three decades ago. It’s a sort of thing again that the climate models are predicting. In terms of the floods, again we see the same thing. You know, a warmer atmosphere is just a more energetic atmosphere. So if you ask me about a single flood event or a single fire event, it’s really hard to make the connection, but take the bigger picture and you can see very clearly what’s happening.”

Great comprehensive post from Tom Engelhardt on the reality of water issues. These are just a few of the many quotable facts in his post.

Sonny Perdue, Governor of Georgia, finally takes decisive action, calling on God to deliver a rainstorm. This after he:

“…allowed an outdoor theme park to build a million-gallon mountain of artificial snow while the Southeast was running dry; it was Governor Perdue and his fellow elected officials. They also allowed the wasteful irrigation of Georgia’s cotton farms and the rampant overbuilding and overslurping of metropolitan Atlanta.”

They won’t get it until the taps are opened and nothing comes out. God is not going to deliver us from climate change- we created it and we’re the ones who have to deal with it.

It has started. Arizona governor Bill Richardson opened the first salvo by suggesting that the Northeast should ’share’ their water with the Southwest. Apparently we’re ‘awash’ in it and they desperately need it to justify building more golf courses , growing more lawns in desert lands and building more McMansions. Now that the Colorado is running dry and their aquifers are empty, they are looking north and covetously eyeing the Great Lakes.

Only one problem. Richardson is running for President and he can’t win without the Northeast so he quickly backed off from his comments. This kind of thing only reinforces that we need a comprehensive water rights policy that is national and international. Alabama and Florida are fighting over watershed rights that transcend state and national boundaries. California and the Southwestern states are doing the same and Mexico can only look on as less and less water flows downstream to them.

No one is advocating the real changes that must be made:

• Immediately put a moratorium on any new construction that cannot show rights to at least 50 years worth of water supplies not currently claimed by others
• Drought areas must impose permanent mandatory water conservation plans on all sectors including businesses
• Long term water reclamation, storage, transportation and generation strategies must be developed and funded
• Rates for water use must immediately be raised two-fold to put the nation on an emergency notice that is a looming national problem
• Raised taxes on excess water use should be funneled into long term water conservation and reclamation strategies

This is a real time problem. And no one, especially the politicians, is doing anything about it.