natural capital

Here’s a slightly novel take on natural capital, as a charged battery.

Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind

Earth is a chemical battery where, over evolutionary time with a trickle-charge of photosynthesis using solar energy, billions of tons of living biomass were stored in forests and other ecosystems and in vast reserves of fossil fuels. In just the last few hundred years, humans extracted exploitable energy from these living and fossilized biomass fuels to build the modern industrial-technological-informational economy, to grow our population to more than 7 billion, and to transform the biogeochemical cycles and biodiversity of the earth. This rapid discharge of the earth’s store of organic energy fuels the human domination of the biosphere, including conversion of natural habitats to agricultural fields and the resulting loss of native species, emission of carbon dioxide and the resulting climate and sea level change, and use of supplemental nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar energy sources. The laws of thermodynamics governing the trickle-charge and rapid discharge of the earth’s battery are universal and absolute; the earth is only temporarily poised a quantifiable distance from the thermodynamic equilibrium of outer space. Although this distance from equilibrium is comprised of all energy types, most critical for humans is the store of living biomass. With the rapid depletion of this chemical energy, the earth is shifting back toward the inhospitable equilibrium of outer space with fundamental ramifications for the biosphere and humanity. Because there is no substitute or replacement energy for living biomass, the remaining distance from equilibrium that will be required to support human life is unknown.

 

Obama

Somehow Obama came and went within a block of my office today and I never noticed. Now I know why they call it the “Secret” Service. Anyway, while he was here he made a case for reducing the prison population and providing free college, among other things. Free college – it sounds like a utopian goal, right? I found one article that estimates how much that would cost the federal government – about $63 billion dollars a year, on top of what state and local governments are already spending. That sounds like a lot, except that according to this article the government is currently spending about $69 billion on higher education grants, work-study programs, and tax breaks. This is pretty astonishing if true – we might be able to spend less and get more. The only losers would be private and for-profit colleges. The obvious beneficiaries would be a more educated, skilled, and hopefully creative and innovative work force that we need for the coming decades and beyond.

Which left me thinking about Obama’s legacy. I think history may judge him kindly for many reasons, although there have also been some really bad things that have happened on his watch. Part of how history judges him will depend on whether the really bad things get worse from here, whether or not that is beyond his control.

First, the good stuff:

  • The economy did not fall apart completely after the financial crisis. I think history will eventually judge that he made some tough decisions that seemed unfair and unpopular at the time, but ultimately quelled the panic that could have otherwise threatened the viability of the system itself.
  • He got better financial regulation and limits on irresponsible risk taking in place compared to what we had before the crisis. As long as there isn’t another major crisis in the near future, I think history will say he made progress against tough odds and did the most he could possibly do politically. If there is another severe crisis, history will rightly point out that the reforms weren’t enough, and they were on his watch.
  • He helped us take a big step toward universal health care. Advanced, industrialized, civilized countries have universal health care. We do not, but now we are closer. It was a huge fight against incredible odds, and I think history will judge it kindly as finally breaking a decades-old deadlock and putting us on the right path.
  • He ended, at least kinda sorta more or less, major American involvement in two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These were bloody, expensive, unpopular, and achieving nothing. I think history will judge this kindly.
  • I’ll put killing Osama bin Laden in the win column. It was justice. Although I found the euphoric response to his death a little sad.
  • Incredibly, he has defused both the Cuba situation and the Iran situation, two decades-old Cold War conflicts that have persisted until now for no obvious reason. History will tell us whether the Iran deal is a momentary pause in the Middle Eastern nuclear arms race, or the beginning of the end of it.
  • He’s taken some steps toward climate change regulation, nothing even close to sufficient but probably the most that was possible politically.

The bad stuff:

  • Riots in metro St. Louis and Baltimore.
  • The greater Middle East has turned into a massive blood bath, from North Africa to Afghanistan and Pakistan. History will tell us whether these conflicts spread, spawn international terrorism, or even go nuclear.
  • Relations with Russia and China have both soured considerably, to the point where a major war, or even a nuclear war, seems possible where it would have been almost unthinkable eight years ago.

The riots are just a little embarrassing, but you can probably say that racial and inequality issues in the U.S. were more on the surface and openly talked about during Obama’s presidency than during the previous couple decades, and you need to acknowledge and define problems before you can solve them. I don’t think history will blame him for creating these problems or making them worse.

The potential for serious geopolitical conflict and even nuclear war is a horrifying development that doesn’t bode well for our civilization, especially when we need to be coming together to deal with serious global emergencies like pollution, food, and climate change. Can we blame Obama for his response to any of this? I’ll admit he hasn’t been as good as his predecessors at brinksmanship. Leaders from Kennedy to Reagan to Bush were willing to play a massive game of chicken, convincing potential enemies that we would not hesitate to go to war at the smallest provocation, and that we were willing to accept the consequences however dire. You can argue they gambled recklessly and were lucky enough to win. Our enemies were generally terrified and backed down. Obama was less of a cowboy, and never even played one on TV. He has been more risk averse, weighing the consequences of military conflict vs. diplomatic and economic measures, and generally choosing the latter. These are tough decisions that take courage either way. Here again, I think his legacy depends on whether things calm down, or whether there are serious conflicts down the road with roots that can be traced back to decisions he made.

My summary: If there is not a major financial crisis or war in the next 10-20 years, I think we will look back at him as a good president who avoided those things and made a major course correction in the health care system. If major crises or wars happen, they will overshadow his accomplishments and he may ultimately get a share of the blame. It was a tough moment in history to be president, and I for one think he was a courageous and mature leader who did the most anyone could do within our constraining political system.

Asian water sensitive urban design

Here are a couple examples of water-sensitive urban design. First, Bangkok is not doing it right. The city is sinking a shocking 3 to 4 inches per year. The article conflates urban flash flooding with river and coastal flooding, but either way getting lower can’t be good.

Meanwhile, China supposedly is doing it right, building “sponge cities” with political and financial support from the central government. I’m a little skeptical of the public relations campaign after my time in Asia. Still, political and financial support for urban water management are in short supply here in the United States, so I can’t exactly take the moral high ground.

 

turn your lawn into a food forest

Mother Earth News tells us how to turn our lawns into food forests. Let’s do it!

Saturdays that could be spent harvesting berries and fresh greens are instead consumed in the toil of pushing a machine. Unless you are an avid yogi, baseball player or picnicker, lawns are a bit passé. And yet, we as a nation spend over $26 billion per year on lawns. How might we redesign our spaces to create edible abundance? …

A food forest has multiple layers which are able to coexist. Rather than have just the main fruit tree crop, a food forest is designed to have an upper story (large fruit trees), and secondary upper-story (dwarf fruit trees) a shrub layer (berry bushes) an herb layer (leafy greens and veggies) and a ground cover layer (strawberries and low herbs). In this way, one creates a dynamic polyculture that has diverse crops in production. This makes sense if our intention is to grow for our own community.

A food forest also plants the fringes. The gaps between production plants are great areas for nitrogen fixing beans and peas. These plants feed the soil and create a living mulch. The marginal areas can be planted in flowers and pollinator attracting native plants, serving as magnates that attract beneficial insects into the garden.

Joel Kotkin

Joel Kotkin has penned a transparently political anti-urban piece, so transparently political that it’s in Real Clear Politics rather than a major newspaper. He creates a picture of “forced densification” – I imagine people being marched into cities at gunpoint and into Soviet-style high-rise apartment blocks.

Roughly four in five home buyers prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently… it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. Density is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost.

Of course, people who actually choose to live in cities know this is absurd. Sure, there are high rise apartment blocks and some people choose to live in them. But many people choose to live in row homes, town homes, brownstones, etc. These are single family homes, Joel. Let’s think about land use for a minute. Density is defined by residents per square mile. Density allows infrastructure, open space, and economically productive space to be shared more efficiently by more people. It also allows more people to get around under their own muscle power, i.e. by walking and bicycling. This promotes physical health and mental health, social activity, creativity and innovation. Time spent “commuting” to work on foot or by bicycle is not empty, useless, or wasted time.

Once density drops to a suburban level, most people have to make most trips by car. Cars require enormous amounts of space, for driving but especially for parking. This space is wasted – it is not available for housing or for recreation. It is not economically productive. The infrastructure cost in the suburbs has to be much higher per person, and the economic production and tax revenue has to be much lower per square mile. The enormous amounts of time spent commuting by car are just wasted time – they are not economically productive, supportive of physical health, mental health, or families. Add air pollution and civilization-crushing greenhouse gas emissions on top of all this.

So what does all this add up to? Resources are being sucked out of the efficient denser areas, where they are generated, and used to subsidize the time-, land-, money-, and health-wasting lifestyle in the suburbs. And yet, contrary to what Joel would have you believe, not only are people not being forced into walkable, bikable, communities, but these choices are not available to most Americans.

Forcibly marching people into high-rise apartment blocks wouldn’t be American. Some people really want privacy and large private open spaces to themselves, and certainly those choices should not be taken away. But many people would love to live in truly walkable, bikable communities, and those choices have been denied most citizens of the United States. Giving people true equal opportunity and a free choice of lifestyles, and letting them choose to pay the true cost of their choices, would be very American. Don’t fall for the deceptive double-talk people are throwing out there to try to convince you to support having your choices taken away.

“global renaissance of coal”

This article from the National Academy of Sciences says that although coal use is dropping in some developed countries and China, it is exploding in many developing countries.

Coal was central to the industrial revolution, but in the 20th century it increasingly was superseded by oil and gas. However, in recent years coal again has become the predominant source of global carbon emissions. We show that this trend of rapidly increasing coal-based emissions is not restricted to a few individual countries such as China. Rather, we are witnessing a global renaissance of coal majorly driven by poor, fast-growing countries that increasingly rely on coal to satisfy their growing energy demand. The low price of coal relative to gas and oil has played an important role in accelerating coal consumption since the end of the 1990s. In this article, we show that in the increasingly integrated global coal market the availability of a domestic coal resource does not have a statistically significant impact on the use of coal and related emissions. These findings have important implications for climate change mitigation: If future economic growth of poor countries is fueled mainly by coal, ambitious mitigation targets very likely will become infeasible. Building new coal power plant capacities will lead to lock-in effects for the next few decades. If that lock-in is to be avoided, international climate policy must find ways to offer viable alternatives to coal for developing countries.

 

The Cold War Resumes?

I for one have really been enjoying the thaw in the Cold War over the last 25 years. From NPR:

Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., speaking at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: “Russia presents the greatest threat to our national security. … If you look at their behavior, it’s nothing short of alarming.”

Dunford, 59, said it would be “reasonable” to send lethal weapons to Ukraine to help it battle Russian-backed rebels. “Frankly, without that kind of support, they are not going to be able to defend themselves against Russian aggression,” he said.

“[If] you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia,” he told senators.

bumblebees

Science says bumblebees are being “crushed” by climate change. Apparently their fur coats are too hot at the southern edge of their range, and they aren’t expanding north because so far there is not the kind of vegetation they need to the north.

…climate change could further strain species already struggling with dwindling habitat and other pressures, Kerr says. “We’re hitting these animals with everything,” he says. “There’s no way you can nail a bee with neonicotinoids, invasive pathogens, and climate change and come out with a happy bee.”

The loss of bee species could carry consequences for ecosystems and people. For instance, “plants that like their pollinators to be pretty loyal” could see declines in reproduction, says ecologist Laura Burkle of Montana State University, Bozeman. And given that wild bees help pollinate many crops, “we play with these things at our peril,” Kerr says. “The human enterprise is the top floor in a really big scaffold. What we’re doing is reaching out and knocking out the supports.”

The Pope vs. the Unabomber

Which of these quotes are from the pope’s encyclical, and which are from the Unabomber?Answers at the bottom.

I. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected
human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.

II. There is also the fact that people no longer seem to believe in a happy future; they no longer have blind trust in a better tomorrow based on the present state of the world and our technical abilities. There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere. This is not to reject the possibilities which technology continues to offer us. But humanity has changed profoundly, and the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything. Otherwise we would simply legitimate the present situation and need new forms of escapism to help us endure the emptiness.

III. You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts. Take modern medicine, for example. Progress in medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and other fields. Advanced medical treatments require expensive, high-tech equipment that can be made available only by a technologically progressive, economically rich society. Clearly you can’t have much progress in medicine without the whole technological system and everything that goes with it.

IV. Yet it must also be recognized that nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our DNA, and many other abilities which we have acquired, have given us tremendous power. More precisely, they have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world. Never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely, particularly when we consider how it is currently being used. We need but think of the nuclear bombs dropped in the middle of the twentieth century, or the array of technology which Nazism, Communism and other totalitarian regimes have employed to kill millions of people, to say nothing of the increasingly deadly arsenal of weapons available for modern warfare. In whose hands does all this power lie, or will it eventually end up? It is extremely risky for a small part of humanity to have it…There is a tendency to believe that every increase in power means “an increase of ‘progress’ itself”, an advance in “security, usefulness, welfare and vigour; …an assimilation of new values into the stream of culture”,[83] as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such. The fact is that “contemporary man has not been trained to use power well”,[84] because our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience. Each age tends to have only a meagre awareness of its own limitations. It is possible that we do not grasp the gravity of the challenges now before us. “The risk is growing day by day that man will not use his power as he should”; in effect, “power is never considered in terms of the responsibility of choice which is inherent in freedom” since its “only norms are taken from alleged necessity, from either utility or security”.[85] But human beings are not completely autonomous. Our freedom fades when it is handed over to the blind forces of the unconscious, of immediate needs, of self-interest, and of violence. In this sense, we stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint.

Answer: I. The Unabomber. II. The Pope. III. The Unabomber. IV. The Pope

Okay, maybe that was sort of obvious. To be fair to the Pope, I picked a couple of the least crazy paragraphs from the Unabomber. This was just meant as a fun, light-hearted exercise. And no, I am not suggesting the Pope is the real Unabomber.

El Nino

Eric Holthaus continues his entertaining El Nino coverage in Slate:

El Niño means the tropical Pacific is warmer than normal, which improves the chances that typhoons will form. This week, a series of typhoons on both sides of the equator are helping to reinforce a big burst of westerly winds along the equator. These westerly wind bursts are a hallmark of El Niño, and help push subsurface warm water toward the coast of South America. If enough warm water butts up against Peru, the normal cold water ocean current there can get shut off, exacerbating the pattern.

Exactly how this all gets kicked off is an area of active research, but it’s clear that big El Niños need deviant trade winds to maintain the feedback loop. During especially strong El Niños, like this year’s promises to be, the trade winds can sometimes reverse direction—and this week’s off-the-charts wind surge is at record-strengthfor so early in an El Niño event. Since all this takes place in the tropical Pacific Ocean—the planet’s biggest bathtub—a fully mature El Niño has the power to shift rainfall odds worldwide and boost global temperatures. That’s exactly what’s happening this year.

Don’t worry, says Michelle L’Heureux at NOAA:

xWe are now nearing 1.5 degrees Celsius in the Niño-3.4 index for a 7-day or weekly average. Among the post-college age crowd who can remember it (yes, this officially means you’re old), the level of warmth in sea surface temperatures this time of year harkens back to 1997-98 El Niño, which ended up becoming a record strength event.

Are these weekly numbers impressive? Yes. But when a weekly value hits 1.5°C is El Niño instantly considered strong? I’d argue no. While a short-term (daily or weekly) number might be striking, it shouldn’t be used as an indicator of El Niño strength unless it is carefully placed into a larger context…

Weekly averages bounce around because… you know, weather. It is not unusual to see jumps of several tenths of a degree from week-to-week. This is because there are shorter-term changes in the ocean and atmospheric circulation that can be related to faster, non-ENSO phenomena, such as the Madden Julian Oscillation, which happens to be currently in place and isinfluencing the tropical Pacific. With short-term changes, we cannot be sure they reflect El Niño, which evolves more slowly.