Surface mining, road and pipeline construction are destructive

From an Article by Brett Israel, UC Berkeley News, March 29, 2018

Photo: Land degradation, caused by human activities like natural resource extraction and pipeline construction, is a global threat to humans and animals

More than 100 experts from 45 countries have published a three-year study of the Earth’s land degradation, calling the problem “critical” and saying that worsening land conditions undermine the well-being of 3.2 billion people.

The report was published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) on March 26. Providing the best-available evidence for the dangers of land degradation for policymakers, the report draws on more than 3,000 scientific, government, indigenous and local knowledge sources.

Rapid expansion and unsustainable management of croplands and grazing lands is the most extensive cause of land degradation, creating significant loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, which include food security, water purification, energy sources and other contributions essential to people, the report says. The problem is so critical that a co-chair of the report said, “The degradation of the Earth’s land surface through human activities is pushing the planet towards a sixth mass species extinction.”

Land degradation is also an underappreciated factor contributing to global conflict and migration, among other problems, according to study co-author Matthew Potts, UC Berkeley associate professor in forest economics in the College of Natural Resources.

“Land degradation presents unique and persistence challenges to humanity,” Potts said. “This assessment shows that we are at a crossroads and must take urgent action to combat land degradation and restore degraded land if we want to create a happy and healthy planet for all humanity.”

A View from the Future (2393)

Some 14 concepts that will be obsolete after catastrophic climate change

From an Article by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Authors of Book, Washington Post, July 25, 2014

Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Erik Conway is a historian of science and technology at the California Institute of Technology. They are the co-authors of “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future” (Columbia University Press), from which this article is excerpted.

It’s 2393. A historian is recounting the collapse of Western civilization due to catastrophic climate change. In her anniversary lecture, she explains how the carbon-combustion complex and blind faith in free markets during the late 20th and early 21st centuries conspired to prevent action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, until it was too late to prevent the Mass Migration of 2093 and the inundation of the world’s great coastal cities. But first, she has to introduce a few old concepts and terms that may no longer be familiar to her audience:

Bridge to renewables

The logical fallacy, popular in the first decades of the 21st century, that the problem of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil-fuel combustion could be solved by burning more fossil fuels, particularly natural gas. The fallacy rested on an incomplete analysis, which considered only the physical byproducts of combustion, particularly in electricity generation, and not the other factors that controlled overall energy use and net release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Cryosphere

The portions of the Earth’s surface, including glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice and permafrost on land, that used to be frozen.

Environment

The archaic concept which, separating humans from the rest of the world, identified the nonhuman component as something that carried particular aesthetic, recreational or biological value (see environmental protection). Sometimes the “natural” environment was distinguished from the “built” environment, contributing to the difficulty that 20th-century humans had in recognizing and admitting the pervasive and global extent of their impact. Radical thinkers, such as Paul Ehrlich as well as Dennis and Donella Meadows (a 20th-century husband-and-wife team), recognized that humans are part of their environment and dependent upon it, and that its value was more than aesthetic and recreational; that the natural world was essential for human employment, growth, prosperity and health. These arguments were commonly disparaged, but the idea of environmental protection contained at least partial recognition of this point.

Environmental protection

The archaic late-20th-century concept that singled out the nonhuman environment (see environment) for legal protection, typically in response to damaging economic activity (see external costs).

External costs

In capitalist economic systems (see capitalism; invisible hand), prices for goods and services were based upon what the market “would bear” (i.e., what consumers were willing and able to pay), without regard to social, biological or physical costs associated with manufacture, transport and marketing. These additional costs, not reflected in prices, were referred to as “external” because they were seen as being external to markets and therefore external to the economic system in which those markets operated (see market failure). Economists of this era found it difficult to accept that one could not have an economy without the resources provided by this “external” environment.

Fugitive emissions

Leakage from wellheads, pipelines, refineries, etc. Considered “fugitive” because the releases were supposedly unintentional, at least some of them (e.g., methane venting at oil wells) were in fact deliberate. While widely acknowledged by engineers to exist, the impacts of fugitive emissions were minimized by the carbon-combustion complex and its defenders, and thus went largely unaccounted (see bridge to renewables; capitalism; external costs). Some went so far as to insist that because methane was a commercially valuable gas, it was impossible that corporations would allow it to “escape.”

Human adaptive optimism

(1) The belief that there are no limits to human adaptability — that we can either adapt to any circumstances or change them to suit ourselves. Belief in geoengineering as a climate “solution” was a subset of HAO. (2) The capacity of humans to remain optimistic and adapt to changed circumstances, even in the face of daunting difficulties, and even if the form of “adaptation” required is suffering.

Invisible hand

A form of magical thinking, popularized in the 18th century, which held that economic markets in a capitalist system were “balanced” by the actions of an unseen, immaterial power, which ensured both that markets functioned efficiently and that they would address human needs.

Market failure

The social, personal and environmental costs that market economies imposed on individuals and societies were referred to as “market failures.” The concept of market failure was an early recognition of the limits of capitalist theory.

Physical scientists

The practitioners in a network of scientific disciplines derived from the 18th-century natural philosophy movement. Overwhelmingly male, they emphasized study of the world’s physical constituents and processes — the elements and compounds; atomic, magnetic and gravitational forces; chemical reactions; flows of air and water — to the neglect of biological and social realms, and focused on reductionist methodologies that impeded understanding of the crucial interactions between the physical, biological and social realms.

Sink

A place where wastes accumulated, either deliberately or not. Industrial powers of the 20th century treated the atmosphere and oceans as sinks, wrongly believing them capable of absorbing all the wastes humans produced, in perpetuity.

Statistical significance

The archaic concept that an observed phenomenon could be accepted as true only if the odds of it happening by chance were very small, typically taken to be no more than 1 in 20.

Type I error

The conceptual mistake of accepting as true something that is false.

Type II error

The conceptual mistake of rejecting as false something that is true. In the 20th century it was believed that a Type I error was worse than a Type II error. The rejection of climate change proved the fallacy of that belief.

Presentation on the Future

FACE THE FACTS AND SAY IT LIKE IT IS

Commentary by Paul B. Brown, August 9, 2013

We may have the technical means to reverse global warming, mass extinction, and overpopulation, but I don’t think we have the societal means. Commonly proposed solutions are far too little, too late.

For perspective, here are just a few stories from one day in my free daily esamizdat newslink service (contact me to subscribe): Oregon Fires To Burn Half-Million Acres, 5 Months; Climate change pushing marine life towards the poles; Powerful California water district backs tunnel plan; ‘Drip, Jordan’: water supply as a focal point of occupation; Monsanto and Big Food Pull Out the Big Guns; Bagram: Torture, Detention Without End at US Military’s ‘Other Guantanamo’; What It’s Like to Spend Years in Solitary Confinement; Why ALEC Fabricated Public School Failures; Cache of spent fuel rods grows at Comanche Peak; German and US Spy Agencies Share Vast Metadata Trove; Is U.S. Exaggerating Threat to Embassies to Silence Critics of NSA Domestic Surveillance?; A way of life on the brink of extinction in the Louisiana bayous; EPA Fracking Study Rebukes Agency’s Own Safety Claims; Fracking Gas Flares Double In Bakken Oil Fields of North Dakota; Oil companies frack in coastal waters off California.

These are all related: can you see the connections?

Hint: the one percent are consolidating their power over the 99 percent so they can continue business as usual in the military-corporate state, at the cost of other humans’ lives, the environment, and perhaps our very species.

What are the real problems that are no longer scientifically debatable? The planet is heating up from insufficient reflection of solar energy due to lost reflectivity (caused by loss of ice cover, caused by global warming) and trapping of more heat by greenhouse gases (caused mostly by burning fossil fuels). Positive feedbacks such as loss of reflectivity, desertification, increased forest fires, and emission of methane from warming tundra and the ocean floor, are speeding up this process. Destructive weather events are increasing, sea level is rising and oceans are becoming acidic as a result of these processes. As a result of these processes and loss of habitat, pollution and over-killing of life forms, species we depend on are going extinct at least as fast as they did in the largest recent extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs. The planet is on its way to becoming uninhabitable for human beings.

The underlying cause of these trends is undeniably clear: Humans are consuming resources unsustainably, that is faster than they can be replenished by natural processes. Many resources, such as rare elements, can’t ever be restored. The equation describing this defines our total consumption as the product of number of people times per capita consumption, and both are skyrocketing.

That’s all established fact. The following are my personal opinions, largely shared by experts.
    
Consider tax schemes proposed to use market forces to reduce CO2 emissions. None would work because they would be too little, too late, especially because market solutions provide little incentives for the one percent, who do the most harm. The best tax scheme I’ve seen for reduction of CO2 emissions is one that’s rarely discussed. Everyone would be taxed for carbon combustion in any form, from fossil fuels to “renewable” fuels, for any purpose including the transport of food (an average of about 1500 miles). At the end of the tax year, everyone gets an equal share of the revenues as a tax credit. Those who used the most carbon would have a net loss, those who used the least would have a net gain.

But we are out of time for such a slow method to work, if it would work at all. The one percent would still have little incentive, although we could expect major changes such as the rebirth of small farms for local food consumption. We have to stop making carbon available for combustion by ending fossil fuel wars and using the money previously devoted to military support of oil supply lines to re-employ military personnel to rebuild infrastructure for carbon-free electric energy supply and storage; divert all carbon waste to biochar (inactive elemental carbon) which we would use for farming, construction, and sealing of coal mines and gas and oil wells; and convert all vehicles (including trucks, rail, ships, airplanes) to renewable electricity with swappable batteries.

With current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases, the planet would continue to heat up for centuries, species will continue going extinct at record speed, and we would be fried, especially in the case of runaway warming caused by positive feedbacks – even if we stopped burning carbon today. Therefore we need to do much more: increase albedo by painting manmade surfaces white; pull carbon out of the air as fast as we can with rapid-growth trees, algae, whatever will do it fastest (and converting that biomass to biochar); reduce forest fires with better management of forests and more aggressive fire fighting; reverse desertification and return as much land to forest as possible; and neutralize acidification of oceans.


None of this will be adequate unless we reverse the mass extinction. We have to reduce our footprint to restore habitat for endangered species, and perhaps use genetic engineering techniques to restore important extinct ones; reduce fertility to one child or fewer per woman; and reduce heroic efforts to prolong the lives of those very elderly and terminally ill who are capable of informed consent. That’s how bad things are. A sustainable population might be four billion very modest consumers on a healthy planet. A recovery-mode population is undoubtedly less than a billion, and quickly, on a badly wounded planet that needs all our efforts to heal.

The longer we wait, the lower that number will get. In order to reduce our footprint, we also need a tax scheme to reduce all forms of consumption, similar to the one for carbon combustion, and to encourage home production of energy and food. It will take more than a tax scheme to achieve this, however (think one percent again). Money saved can be used to increase energy efficiency and go to all-electric energy use (e.g., to heat homes).
    

This can’t happen in our current society. The one percent won’t allow it. I don’t know how to overcome them, because only an informed citizenry can do that and implement the changes I suggest. Information itself is controlled by the one percent, so our citizens aren’t informed. I don’t think there is enough time left for, and our government may be unresponsive to, civil disobedience or other forms of non-violent action. Insurrection is unlikely to succeed in our militarized surveillance state. 
    

Maybe there are adequate societal changes that are possible, but they need to be based on facing reality and saying it like it is. People will die just for doing that, but people will die anyway. Here we go-o-o.




Paul B. Brown, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Physiology, WVU, Morgantown, WV.
EMAIL: pbrown4348@comcast.net