SSPP Blog

Carbon Free in the USA? It Might Be Closer than You Think

2012-02-21T12:08:00.001-05:00

Ethan Goffman

If every Americanhome improved its household energy performance and installed solar panels, we’dgo a long way toward zero carbon emissions. Solar panels on a majority ofhouses at one time seemed unattainable—it was simply too great an investment,with too long a payback time. But with new financial instruments and plungingprices for solar panels, we’re closer than most Americans realize todrastically shifting our energy usage—at least if we have the collective will. And,while such matters as improved insulation might seem humdrum, they too may beaccelerating toward widespread adoption. From there, it’s not that far a reachto other renewable sources, and a near-zero carbon economy.

One must alwaysbe wary of rebound, the phenomenon that saving energy—and money—may lead tocareless use of energy, or spending the saved money in other ways that areenvironmentally problematic. Yet too much worry about rebound can lead to paralysis—what’simportant is an environmental ethic in combination with a whole suite ofchanges, beginning with individual behavior and ideals regarding consumption. Indeed,the push for renewables and energy efficiency in Europe seems to have avoided amajor rebound effect: “The European Union succeededin reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 15.5% by 2010 from 1990levels, while the economy grew during the same period by 41%, proving that itis possible to decouple emissions and economic growth” (European Report, 2011). The United States needs to follow this path, although in a lesstop-heavy way. Solar panels at the individual level may act as a visible signof the necessity of an environmental lifestyle, while improved insulation is anindicator that a new ethic has spread to more ordinary parts of daily life. Suchchanges are now within easy reach.

The typicalhomeowner can save up to 25% with such measures as insulation, sealing airleaks, and selecting energy efficient appliances, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The best way to get started isto sign up for an energy audit, which includes such items as a blower door testand an infrared thermal scan for energy leakage. However, even with governmentsubsidies, it has been difficult to get consumers to undertake such an auditand make the various improvements recommended. The process can cost severalthousand dollars and the payback time can be five or ten years. Because savingsafter that are 100% and energy prices are likely to rise, it’s still a smartinvestment, but individuals are reluctant to part with that kind of moneyupfront. Psychology is central to why we spend money. Insulation isn’t sexy;you can’t show it off to your friends. Plus, we’re in financially pressedtimes, so some people simply can’t afford it.

Fortunately, thesolution is at hand, as recently touted by none other than Bill Clinton—an innovative finance system in which thecustomer pays zero down. Instead, the cost is amortized through a monthlycharge on the energy bill, which is less than the money saved for that month. Withno cash up front, homeowners have no reason not to implement major energy-savingmeasures. And finance companies are practically guaranteed a profit. Indeed,such a system is already being implemented at the state level in Nebraska andNew York. Jobs are created, and energy use goes down. All that’s needed is forthis system to become more widespread.

Actually, asimilar mechanism is already in place for solar panels. It’s called solarleasing, and again the consumer is not required to pay anything upfront. Theleasing company makes money via a monthly lease payment—less than the consumersaves on her electric bill—as well as through bundling and selling tax incentives.So why not do it? In the long run, the individual who buys the system outrightwill save more money, but the leasing concept enables individuals who can’tafford the upfront costs to go solar, breaking down financial and psychologicalbarriers about the technology’s high initial costs.

Speaking of photovoltaics(PVs), the price of the equipment has plummeted in recent years. The cost perwatt of solar energy has dropped from $22 thirty years ago to under $3 today—andcan be as low as $1.49. Prices are expected to keep dropping, although not asmuch as the whopping 70% reduction that has taken place from 2008 to 2011 (Healing Talks, 2012; RenewableEnergyWorld.com, 2011). Much of this decline isdue to an increase in the manufacture of silicon and the production of inexpensivesolar modules in China. The technology could become a huge part of ourelectrical generation; according to the International Energy Agency, “PV installed on appropriaterooftops, facades, and building envelopes in the United States could meet about55 percent of U.S. electricity demand.” Although this would mean changing the“face” of America, with ubiquitous PV clusters, it’s not as thoughtechnological changes haven’t altered the landscape before; look only at theadvent of the automobile. For PV, the results would only be beneficial.

Although myanalysis so far has applied to individual homes, a similar logic works forbusinesses, public buildings, apartment buildings, and so forth. Such financialmechanisms simply need to be applied at a larger scale to allow buildings to upgradetheir energy efficiency and increase their capacity for generating solar power.If there is money to be made—and there is—the more widespread deploymentbecomes, the more rapidly it will become even more widespread.

Yet energyefficiency and PVs on individual buildings will not solve all our electricityneeds. The big problem with PVs, of course, is intermittency—the sun doesn’tshine all of the time. Still, solar energy mostly coincides with peakelectrical usage, although evenings are a problem (albeit less of a problem ifelectric cars come to be used as local power-storage devices). However, twotypes of renewable energy don’t suffer from intermittency: geothermal andconcentrated solar, the latter of which uses molten salt to store power. Thesecan provide baseload power 24 hours a day. Yet another solution is acomprehensive electrical grid that can switch power over a large geographicarea. Google is among the funders of one such system, a transmission backbonealong the Atlantic coast that will allow energy to be switched among a varietyof wind farms—if it’s not windy in one location, it will be elsewhere. Similarplans are being developed for Europe in the North Sea, while a major solar gridfor North Africa and the Mediterranean is also in the works (Nature,2010).

The point is thetechnology exists, there is money to be made, albeit over a long time period,and investment plans aimed at the individual can provide guideposts for larger-scaleprojects. We can, indeed, obtain a zero carbon electrical system(transportation is more difficult, but still viable, but that’s a topic foranother blog). The Obama administration has already proposed the first step:eliminating $4 billion in tax breaks to the oil and natural gas industries. Weare effectively subsidizing emissions that put our collective future at risk;we simply need to stop. The next step is a tax on carbon; those who endangerour future should pay for the harm they cause. Subsidies for renewables need tocontinue during a transition phase, allowing them to catch up to the existingdirty fuel infrastructure; however, once renewables are competitive with fossilfuels the subventions can be sunsetted. Unfortunately, removal of harmfulsubsidies faces furious opposition by powerful fossil-fuel lobbyists intent onputting their short-term profits before the interests of the planet.

In a true,well-regulated, capitalist system, one in which government sets fair rules,charges polluters for the damage they do, and lets innovative companiesinnovate, renewables will win. Unfortunately, what we’ve got at present iscrony capitalism in which government is often on the wrong side. Until thatchanges, individuals should not fall victim to “what can one person do”syndrome. We can take advantage of new financing mechanisms to begin to build arenewable, energy-efficient economy.

Ethan Goffman is Associate Editor of Sustainability: Science,Practice, & Policy. His publications have appeared in E: TheEnvironmental Magazine, Grist, and elsewhere. He is the authorof Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature(State University of New York Press, 2000) and coeditor of The New YorkPublic Intellectuals and Beyond (Purdue University Press, 2009) and Politicsand the Intellectual: Conversations with Irving Howe (Purdue UniversityPress, 2010). Ethan is a member of the Executive Committee of the MontgomeryCounty (Maryland) Chapter of the Sierra Club.

Business and Sustainable Consumption: Is There a Contradiction?

2012-02-14T07:50:00.000-05:00

Ethan Goffman

To some environmentalists, business and sustainable consumptionmight seem simply at odds. The goal of business is to sell products and makemoney—the more products, and the more expensive and therefore usually larger,the better. The goal of sustainable consumption is to get people to buy less,or at least to buy in such a way that it has less environmental impact. This latter clause does allow room for business to make moneywhile moving toward sustainability, a goal discussed at a forum last month inWashington, DC, The Business Role inSustainable Consumption.

Hosted by the World Wildlife Fund, the forum featured speakersfrom major corporations noted for their sustainability programs, includingWalmart, Coca Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Procter & Gamble. Discussionfocused on all aspects of greening the supply chain, with a major emphasis onlife-cycle assessment (LCA) as a method of quantifying items’ environmentalimpact. As became clear throughout the forum, innumerable ways exist to lessenenvironmental impact while making a profit. PepsiCo, for instance, worked withlocal farmers in Mexico to transition from corn crops to far more sustainablesunflowers. Glidden is saving a scarce raw material ordinarily used to makewhite paint by using biomimicry principles based on a white beetle.

Still, is such greening of the supply chain sustainableconsumption or sustainable production? True, consumers ultimately buy thesegoods, but they are generally ignorant of the overall impact. Certainly, thebusiness case for sustainable production is obvious, as it often includessignificant cost savings.

Indeed, getting consumers to change their habits is difficult,particularly if it costs more. “Consumers want sustainability by stealth,” andoften don’t understand environmental labeling, explained Robert ter Kuile,Senior Director of Environmental Sustainability for PepsiCo. Research showsthat only 15% of consumers actively seek environmentally friendly products,while 75% are “eco-aware, but won’t accept trade offs,” according to LenSauers, Vice-President for Global Sustainability at Procter & Gamble. Thegreat benefit of having major corporations involved in sustainability is toreach this huge market. For companies such as Walmart, with financiallystretched customers, the problem is not one of environmental good will but ofeconomic necessity. Explained Miranda Ballentine, Walmart’s Director ofSustainability, for her customers, who often live paycheck to paycheck, “theproblem skews a little heavier, to [being] unwilling or unable to sacrificeperformance, or especially cost, for more sustainable products.” A Walmartcustomer might buy compact fluorescent lightbulbs just after being paid, butotherwise might purchase cheaper incandescent bulbs.

Much of the marketing strategy is to getconsumers to buy for reasons such as value and quality regardless of theenvironment. Nevertheless, products such as Tide Coldwater and Ariel have greatenvironmental potential. As Sauers explained, “The energy savings would be 33million megawatt hours if all the U.S. washed in cold water.” Culture is key. ForTide Coldwater, the advertising campaign in the United States focused onmonetary savings, while in more ecoconscious Europe, it included the message ofsaving polar bears. Surely, producing and distributing such products, andgetting them to mass markets, is helpful for sustainability; yet, it also seemsthat corporations, by their nature, tend to follow existing trends and beliefsmore than leading (except, perhaps, when introducing new products). Coca Cola,however, did engage in a campaign where the company changed red cans to white toshow support for polar bears. The intention is to “disrupt the marketplace,show people we’re doing something different,” explained Lisa Manley, thecompany’s Director of Sustainability Communications. (The white cans werequickly pulled due to customer complaints.)

It takes commitment for corporations to change their ways and moveinto new areas. Peter Nieuwenhuizen of AkzoNobel explained how companies mustwork with suppliers, as well as retailers, along a complicated chain to get anynew environmental innovation to market. Thoughtful innovations often fall intoa “Valley of Death” due to cost and resistance to change. Only big corporationshave the clout to make systemic changes happen. Walmart, for instance, haspurchased green energy in fifteen year allotments. Despite higher initialcosts, the purchase gives the company secure, stable, long-term prices. Forgreen developers, such an initiative allows entry into a marketplace otherwiselocked up by conventional energy.

Still, mistrust exists between corporations and the environmentalcommunity. Much of this is due to a long history of corporations fightingregulations, for instance against acid rain and chlorofluorocarbons. Althoughreducing these emissions proved far cheaper and easier than expected,corporations continue to battle attempts to regulate their climate-alteringactivities, among other actions. As Rio+20 approaches, many sustainability advocates fear thatcorporations have become too close to the international governance system andwill co-opt needed changes, leading to overreliance on market mechanisms andgreenwashing. Despite such skepticism, it is also true that we cannot solve theunsustainablity crisis without the cooperation of major corporations. They aresimply too powerful, too international, and too involved in every aspect ofproduction and consumption. As Sauers brashly but accurately put it, “Governmentsaren’t global, corporations are.” The answer lies not only in internalcorporate behavior, but in the relationship between business and government.

Corporations need to realize that independent government oversight,along with the proper kind of regulation, is needed to have a chance ofmaintaining any kind of capitalist system and moving toward a sustainablefuture. To some extent—admittedly quite limited—this realization is dawning. “Nestléis calling on governments to require us to pay for recycling,” explainedMichael Washburn, Director of Sustainability for Nestlé Waters North America. Headded, “The role for government is to set the rules, require everybody to playin an equitable way, and then get out of the way and let us solve the problem.”Proper regulation also reduces the influence of free riders; the worstcompanies can no longer gain a competitive advantage through, for instance,recklessly harming the environment or mistreating employees. Rather thanlobbying against regulations, it seems to me, corporations should lobby for theright regulations, ones that force them to make the morally correct moves towardthe environment and other moral issues that cut across the profit motive. Companieswould then be free to fight ferociously for profit within a set of rules that leadto sustainability.

Beyond this, corporations need to move beyond the limited goal of makingmoney as their prime or sole reason for existence. They need to take someresponsibility for their employees, their communities, and the physicalenvironment. Although it’s too often facile PR, the corporate social responsibilitymovement represents the first steps in that direction. Certainly, the men andwomen who spoke at The Business Role inSustainable Consumption are committed and knowledgeable. It’s also likelythat they are often frustrated by the search for the bottom line that pervadestheir firms. Still, they represent the first steps toward a new kind ofcorporate capitalism. Whether it will be different enough remains to be seen.

Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back? Book Review

2012-02-06T08:39:00.000-05:00

The Conundrum: How ScientificInnovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy andClimate Problems Worse by David Owen

Riverhead Books | 2012 | 260 pp. | ISBN: 978-1-59448-561-9

Ethan Goffman

The Conundrum is David Owen'sname for the slippery and multifaceted dilemma faced by environmentalists andsustainability advocates, that change is hard. On one level, the conundrum isthe rebound phenomenon, also known as the Jevons Paradox (which Owens hasrecently written about in The New Yorker), that energyefficiency simply leads to greater energy use elsewhere. On a probably moreprofound level, the conundrum is the human tendency to follow the path of leastresistance, continuing business as usual, or, even worse, acceleratingtrajectories of consumption.

Owen providesnumerous illustrations of the ways in which efforts to conserve and alterconsumption habits can have unexpected consequences. The Jevons Paradox iscentral to these adverse outcomes; William Stanley Jevons was the nineteenth centuryEnglish philosopher/economist, who wrote that the cheaper and more efficientcoal became, the more it would be used, as a host of innovations spread due tothe ready availability of energy. The Jevons Paradox is actually quitecontroversial; studies by some economists show only a slight rebound effect—apercentage of energy savings go into increased energy use, but only a smallpercentage. Owen, however, sides with a number of proponents and argues thatthese studies are too narrow; that people will use the money saved by energyefficiency in myriad ways harmful to the environment, the effects of which are methodologicallyquite difficult to trace. Certainly, as Owen points out, energy output hasincreased over the years along with energy efficiency, although cause andeffect are difficult—if not impossible—to tease out.

A glance at somekey global statistics seems to contradict Owen’s view. According to dataassembled by the World Resources Institute (WRI), North America used 7,942.9kilograms of oil equivalent (kgoe) per person in2005, while the comparable figure for Europe was 3,773.4. Europe, with its higherenergy efficiency and use of renewable energy, seems able to maintainapproximately the same standard of living as the United States with much lessimpact (although such factors as greater density in Europe help explain some ofthis difference). California makes for a strong intra-United States comparison,as the state has long had some of the strongest renewable energy and energy-efficiencymeasures. Along with New York State, it has held per capita energy use constantsince 1980, while in the rest of the country energy use has increased by 50%according to the National Academy of Sciences. (New York City’s population densityand suburb transit might explain that state’s superior performance.)

California alsohas the fifth lowest per capita energy consumption in the United Statesaccording to the U.S. Department of Energy, although such factors as mildclimate in the southern half of the state contribute to this relativelyfavorable result. Nevertheless, it does seem that policy and environmentalawareness make a big difference, and that Owen has overstated the tendencytoward rebound. Yet, returning to global energy comparisons, WRI reports that highincome countries use 4,906.0 kgoe per person in comparison to 431.5 in lowincome countries. The same technological and other development factors thatallow countries to increase energy efficiency and renewable energy use alsoallow profligate consumption that offsets any gains multiple times over. From asatellites-eye view, Owen appears to be right.

Owen is unafraidto take on sacred cows of the environmental movement. He criticizes transit, inthat it’s meant to get people out of cars to increase the free flow of traffic,but free flowing traffic encourages people to get in cars. (One solution hereis to limit parking, or increase the charge for it, in conjunction with newtransit systems to prevent that sort of rebound). He claims that effective high-speedtrains will only cause people to travel more, as when he hopped from London toParis for an afternoon at the Louvre. Of course, this is far better than flyingfrom London to Paris for an afternoon. Owen also neglects the transit-smartgrowth connection. It’s hard to argue that the New York City subway system hasled to more automobile use, when Manhattanites take fewer car trips than anyoneelse in the United States, and transit has enabled density. Furthermore, high-speedtrain networks can be useful for creating dense growth in cities based aroundtrain stations, the exact kind of growth Owen finds most desirable.

What about thetheory that technology, if applied right, will help us to overcome most of our contemporaryenvironmental dilemmas? Owen argues that just about every new technology orsolution has unintended consequences. Cheap, abundant natural gas would divertmoney from true renewables (of course the fracking problem has alreadyundermined that solution). Hydroelectric dams hurt ecosystems. Even solarenergy suffers from the diffusion of sunlight, so that an untenable amount ofland needs to be covered with solar panels, causing environmental and aestheticproblems of their own. Green energy also leads to reckless consumption ofenergy, as people assume no environmental impact and ramp up their use. Owen’sanalysis might be largely correct with any one of these factors, when looked atin isolation. However, most informed sustainability advocates call for acombination of measures: renewable energy as well as increased energyefficiency, smart growth, and laws that encourage or require decreasedconsumption.

Owen is not, however,a hopeless cynic. Strangely, he allows great promise for the emergingtechnology of wind energy powered by high-flying kites. Yet, for Owen the keyantidote to various forms of rebound is urbanization and smart growth. Hequestions such organizations as the Sierra Club, with their ethic of visiting,or even living in and near, the great, unspoiled natural places—in providing anetwork of roads and facilities to allow such contact, we are ensuring that thegreat places be unspoiled no longer. Rather, packing people into dense citiesis the key to leaving other spaces pristine. Owen sees the automobile as“Global Environmental Enemy No. 1,” largely because it enables sprawl;conversely he believes that “[d]ense, efficient, intelligently organized citiesare the future of the human race.” Such urban lifestyles are a great draw foryoung people seeking excitement and opportunity, and are also highly amenableto our aging population. It’s the people in the middle, those with youngfamilies who seek suburbia’s large houses, green spaces, and better schools,who are the problem.

Owen useshimself as an example of this version of the conundrum; a confirmedManhattanite, he too was drawn to suburbia when he started a family of his own,due largely to an “irresistable desire to raise our kids the way each of us hadbeen raised: in a big house with a big yard and a driveway full of cars.” Thisanalysis does neglect certain advantages to raising children in cities; theavailability of daycare and other facilities for young children, of publictransportation and social and cultural events for young teenagers. How much ofOwen’s suburban preference is due to his own upbringing and how much to actuallifestyle advantages is another difficult question.

The hardpart—the conundrum within the conundrum—is getting people to agree to thesechanges, to dramatically alter their lifestyles. What we have, Owen explains,is a global version of the tragedy of the commons, in which each personindividually fails to make the substantial changes needed, fails to fight thesocial tide. One might also consider the failure a version of the prisoner’sdilemma, in which least-common-denominator countries and corporations spur badbehavior. Whymake changes if others will simply undercut us? For instance, if the UnitedStates ultimately kills the Keystone Pipeline to prevent Canada from opening upvast new resources of dirty oil, Canada seems likely to simply sell themelsewhere, as a recent Washington Post editorial page argued. As Owen’sconcluding words put it: “What’s proven impossible, at least so far, is tocommit to taking steps that would actually make a large, permanent differenceon a global scale. Do we honestly care? That’s the conundrum.”

Is Techno-optimism Enough?

2012-01-31T17:35:00.000-05:00

Ethan Goffman

Cantechnology solve all of our problems? Amory Lovins, Chair of the Rocky MountainInstitute, expressed such profound techno-optimism in his remarks opening “Environment and Security,” the 2012National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment (discussed here last week). Lovins outlined a humanprogression ushered in by the discovery of fire, with a qualitative leap duringthe fossil-fuel era. He argued that, given the harmful effects of fossil fuels,we need a “new fire,” a renewable energy and efficiency era that will provideall the benefits of fossil fuels without the numerous harmful impacts. Indeed, formuch of the conference the predominant view was that technological programs—togetherwith wise policy—are the main route to solving climate change and otherenvironmental challenges. By contrast, sustainable consumption advocates(myself included) believe that technology alone will not be sufficient, that wealso need to make profound lifestyle and value changes.

Lovins offered a comprehensivetechnological solution that, he claims, will allow $5 trillion in savings, yet support a 158% bigger economy by 2050,using no energy from oil, coal, or nuclear (detailed in his new book Reinventing Fire). He argues that we are on the verge of “one ofmost profound transformations in the history of our species.” How? Vehiclefitness can triple efficiency; streamlined vehicles made of high-tech alloyswill enable electric engines. Lovins also claims we can triple or quadrupleefficiency for air travel, with military innovations leading the way. Smartvehicles can flatten traffic congestion, leading to free-flowing highways. Electricityuse can also be drastically lessened, with buildings three to four times asefficient and industry twice as efficient. For instance, just changing pipes toimprove pumping loops can save 86% in energy. In addition, Lovins asserts, windand solar are rapidly becoming economically competitive, a trend that will onlyimprove over time. Renewables already added half of the world’s new capacity inthe last four years. Diversifying renewables by type and location, along with amore connected, smarter grid can drastically curtail the intermittency problem.To the common environmental “pervasive dread,” Lovins argues for a message of“applied hope—not just optimism, but applied hope.” For Lovins, we must actimmediately and decisively, but if we do so technology will solve our problems.

Analternative argument goes something like this: there are now seven billionpeople on Earth, soon to be 9 billion or even more. We are already in acondition of overshoot, where we need to drastically lower our resource andenergy usage. Furthermore, although it is often agreed that we need to lowergreenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climatechange, the world is heading in the opposite direction. Prior to the Great Recession,trends in the United States and elsewhere were toward ever larger houses andcars. China, India, and Brazil, among other countries, continue to emulate thedeveloped world, for instance in car dependency and in the amount of meat eatenper person, both of which have huge environmental impacts. The United Statesand other developed nations, therefore, have to lead the way in profoundindividual and social changes, including reducing the amount of housing spaceper person, moving toward urban living and smart growth, using more publictransit, repairing and reusing rather than throwing away, and eating morevegetable-based diets. Since material goods, beyond a certain point, don’t makepeople happier, we can make these changes without harming our quality of life.

Inhis forthcoming book entitled The Conundrum(shortly to be reviewed in a future SSPP blog post), David Owen takes issuewith Lovins’ techno-optimism. Much of Owen’s argument is based on of the ideaof rebound—also known as the Jevons Paradox—that energy efficiency and othertechnological improvements inevitably lead to greater use of energy, at timesmore than undoing the good they’ve accomplished. Lovins is skeptical, arguingthat the great majority of energy savings do, in fact, save energy, since, forinstance, once your house reaches a certain temperature you won’t make ithotter simply because it’s cheap to do so. Owen replies that humans will findother environmentally harmful ways to spend the money saved from lower energybills—often in ways difficult to track. To Owen, human nature is such that, asgoods become cheaper and more accessible, we’ll simply use them in greaterabundance. He explains,

Amory Lovins oncewrote that, if Jevons’s argument is correct, “we should mandate inefficientequipment to save energy.” As Lovins intended, this seems laughablyillogical—but is it? If the only motor vehicles available today were 1920 ModelTs, how many miles do you think you’d drive each year. . . No one is going to “mandateinefficient equipment,” but unless we’re willing to do the equivalent—bymandating costlier energy or finding other ways to dramatically reduce ourtotal consumption—increased efficiency. . .can only make our predicament worse.

Technologicalimprovement, by itself, will not be enough. Government intervention is neededto encourage lifestyle changes, such as driving less. Yet deep social transformationis also needed to enable government to make these changes and encouragecitizens to comply.

Thisisn’t to say we can succeed without dramatic technological changes—clearly weneed these as well. Technological and social adjustments can and must abet andmutually reinforce one another. Techno-optimism does, of course, have theadvantage of being an easier sell than lifestyle changes. Unfortunately, it’salso an inadequate solution. Contradicting Lovins’ vision, an early release ofthe Annual Energy Outlook 2012 published by the Energy Information Agency (divisonof the U.S. Department of Energy) projects that “Energy-related carbon dioxide(CO₂) emissions [will] grow by 3 percent from 2010 to 2035,” despitea 42% decline in energy intensity and an increase in renewables from 10 to 16%during that period. I have no doubt that, with a serious program such as thatproposed by Lovins, we can do far better than these projections. Yet, with agrowing population and a fragile environment facing systemic change, we alsoneed to drastically alter our lifestyles. This doesn’t need to be promotedthrough the “pervasive dread” that Lovins decries inenvironmentalists, but through a commitment to an equitable society free ofextreme materialism. Such a philosophy may already be amenable to themillennial generation. Threatened by economic calamity, our youth may very wellembrace a more egalitarian vision in which everyone has enough, but not toomuch.

Ethan Goffman is Associate Editor of Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy. His publications have appeared in E: The Environmental Magazine, Grist, and elsewhere. He is the author of Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature (State University of New York Press, 2000) and coeditor of The New York Public Intellectuals and Beyond (Purdue University Press, 2009) and Politics and the Intellectual: Conversations with Irving Howe (Purdue University Press, 2010). Ethan is a member of the Executive Committee of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Chapter of the Sierra Club.

Securing a Sustainable Future: The Military Takes On a New Mission

2012-01-24T08:53:00.000-05:00

Ethan Goffman

In a time of polarized politics in theUnited States, over the environment and just about everything else, anoverlooked development is how much the military, as well as the national securityapparatus, has taken on climate change and other environmental challenges. “Environmentand Security” was thus a profoundly important choice of theme for the 2012 National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment, held last week in Washington, DC. Withthe early effects of climate change apparently already occurring, notably in anincrease in natural disasters and in a new northwest passage through the Arctic,those responsible for our security can’t afford to sit around and engage inspeculation that climate change is caused by sunspots or isn’t reallyoccurring. It is the military’s job, after all, to take action againstpotential threats rather than getting immersed in domestic politics.

Theconcern with climate change is the next step in a widening of the concept ofsecurity from strict military matters, to include such interrelated strands asfood and water access, public health, and the environment. Much of the militaryhas already acknowledged that armed force alone won’t make us safe. “Energysecurity, economic security, environmental security, and national security areall inextricably linked. Address one and you need to think of the others,”explained Vice-Admiral Dennis McGinn at the conference.

One obvious linkage is the connection ofour oil dependency with security risks that can easily draw us into conflict inpolitically unstable parts of the world. Just how much the recent wars in theMiddle East are about oil, and how much about a clash of civilizations, is amatter of considerable debate, although undoubtedly both factors play a part. TheIranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, choking outgoing oil deliveries,underscores vulnerability on the energy issue. From another angle, in Afghanistan,the military experienced the fragility of supply lines for a force strongly dependenton large quantities of oil. The Air Force, in particular, is working on algaljet fuel to free us from such reliance. And the Navy’s need for moreicebreakers and other capacity shows concern regarding shipping and resourceexploitation enabled by the melting of Arctic ice and the new passage.

That the conference included severalhigh ranking naval officers is a sign of the military’s engagement. Rear-AdmiralNeil Morisetti of the Royal Navy explained, “The military is engaging with manyinstitutions it didn’t in the past.” In today’s world, the military is moreinvolved in conflict prevention, “as a small actor with many others.” We aremoving away from the conventional security paradigm. One part of the new,broader conception is that “poor health can create instability” says HowardFrumkin, Dean of the University of Washington’s School of Public Health. RosamondNaylor, Director of Stanford University’s Center on Food Security andEnvironment, explained how food riots led to the Arab Spring, a vast andunexpected geopolitical shift that we’re still coming to grips with. “That kindof protest over food and basic needs has been seen repeatedly over the past fiveyears,” added Naylor. If the environment, food, water, and public health areall interconnected—and they are—the implications of a change in one sector canbe staggering and radically unpredictable.

Rita Colwell, Distinguished Professor ofPublic Health at the University of Maryland, discussed the epidemiological pieceof the puzzle, using cholera as her example. Cholera is associated with seasurface temperature and with rainfall, among other factors. In Haiti, anearthquake, an unbearably hot summer, and a hurricane along with flooding—thelatter two perhaps associated with climate change—converged to spur a choleraepidemic.¹ As the world changes, disease vectors change;unpredictability makes response difficult. And disease can be linked with conflict,not only through driving refugees and spurring anger, but as a weapon. CatherineWoteki, Chief Scientist and Under Secretary for Research, Education, andEconomics in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, explained how terrorists mightintroduce pathogens into our food or water.

Given such linkages, it’s no wonder thatJohn Muir’s adage “Tug on anything at all and you’ll find it connected toeverything else in the universe” was quoted several times during theconference. Such issues as climate change, water scarcity, rising sea levels,and melting Arctic ice are now core parts of our national security strategy,according to national security analyst Sherri Goodman. She described climatechange as “a threat multiplier in fragile areas of the world,” for instancecreating “breeding grounds for terrorism as people become more desperate.” Floodingin Pakistan, for instance, adds desperation to a nuclear-armed “region alreadya cauldron for instability.”

To answer such challenges requiresforethought and vigilance within our security apparatus, yet, in the long run,it also requires public support. Education is a key part of the equation, andhere the military can play a special role. Given that the United States—stillthe world’s most powerful country—faces a deep disbelief that climate change iseven occurring, responding to the problem is difficult. At an environmental literacypanel, one public official expressed frustration at running intorepresentatives who tell her “I don’t believe in your science;” another describedforums at which she can’t mention the words “climate change.”

One solution is to explain the need foran insurance policy, one of responding to potential environmental threats, sinceplanning for contingencies is the job of the military and security agencies. Yeteducation is needed for a long-term, serious social mobilization. The militaryhas a special status when it comes to explaining the strength of the scientificconsensus and the multiple impacts and threats. Goodman described how militaryeducators “crisscross the country” talking to forums, Rotary Clubs, and localgroups: “People were generally surprised to see the military talking aboutclimate change.” This is particularly important, since climate changeskepticism is deepest among political conservatives, for whom the military is apotent authority able to counteract other sources.

A cultural gap between the military andparts of the sustainability community threatens to inhibit cooperation. Some mighthave doubts about using security as an entry point to sustainability andenvironmental issues, feeling that such an approach is reductive. At the environmentalliteracy forum, one audience member pointed out that the word “justice” was largelyabsent at the 2012 conference. This may be true, and “security” may be only oneapproach to the vast topic of sustainability. However, it’s an approach capableof drawing in new audiences, connecting different constituencies. And it’s astrategy that eventually leads to all aspects of the sustainability labyrinth. True,social justice and environmental justice are keys to a stable society, to asecure society, to removing the kinds of threats that we face, for instance, inthe Middle East with its teetering regimes. However, ultimately justice synchronizeswith the new security emphasis; stable, healthy, democratic societies arerarely a threat. With crucial parts of the military on board, thesustainability movement is that much stronger.

NOTES

¹That the cholera may have been brought in by UnitedNations personnel shows the possible unintended consequences of humanitarianmissions and the new dangers brought about our international society. However,such cholera needed a number of factors, notably poor sanitation, to spread(see http://www.un.org/News/dh/infocus/haiti/UN-cholera-report-final.pdf).

Ethan Goffman is Associate Editor of Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy. His publications have appeared in E: The Environmental Magazine, Grist, and elsewhere. He is the author of Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature (State University of New York Press, 2000) and coeditor of The New York Public Intellectuals and Beyond (Purdue University Press, 2009) and Politics and the Intellectual: Conversations with Irving Howe (Purdue University Press, 2010). Ethan is a member of the Executive Committee of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Chapter of the Sierra Club.

The Future Belongs to Transit

2012-01-17T17:48:00.000-05:00

Ethan Goffman

Public transit is one of the keys tosustainability, not only for getting people out of cars but also to encouragedense growth, the only alternative to environmentally devastating sprawl. Amongmany planners and politicians, two contradictory tendencies exist: to encouragetransit and smart growth policies while at the same time planning future roadexpansion. In Montgomery County, Maryland (near Washington, DC), where I’m theSierra Club Transit Chair, excellent transit programs are moving forwardalongside wildly ambitious road-building schemes, although the money is notthere to do both, nor will it materialize in the foreseeable future. Thereality of both environmental and economic limits is often ignored whenplanners sit down and dream up future projects.

First the bad news. Projects to extend theexisting road system to enable ever more cars and sprawl are in official stateand county plans. Interstate 270, which covers the extremely developed westernpart of Montgomery County, received preliminary approval for a plan to add twolanes in each direction at a cost of some $4 billion. Another road, theMidcounty Highway, is to be extended through the last remaining woodlands andwetlands in the western reaches of the county. These developments wouldencourage even more growth in an already overbuilt area while leaving thepoorer eastern parts of the county stranded, worsening east-west traffic jamsduring morning commutes and the reverse in the evening.

The drive to ever-more roads and increasedtraffic is exemplified by the recently opened six-lane Intercounty Connector(ICC), the beginning of an “outer beltway” around the Washington, DC region. Astransit activist Ben Ross explains, the highway is currently almost empty because it’s plannedfor a future of even more automobile traffic: “The ICC was built to be too big for today's traffic. It wasdesigned for 20 years of future sprawl.” This assumption of future growth isfrankly astonishing, as it assumes an unlimited supply of oil. We already knowthat the Chinese are planning for exponential growth in car use. India, too,wants to grow its highway system. Where will the oil to power all these newcars come from? Even if we assume maximum exploitation of tar sands and deepocean oil, with global use multiplying these new sources will hit peak usesooner rather than later; however much can be exploited, the trend is tomaximize use, ensuring insufficient supply. Even worse, the planet simplycannot take the release of that amount of oil, and the greenhouse gases itrepresents (okay, the planet can take it, but humans and the ecosystems wedepend on can’t). Even assuming our entire automobile fleet is replaced with electriccars, and these cars run on 100% renewable resources (not that the plannersseem to have thought it through to this extent), the environmental impact ofbuilding that many cars, paving that many new miles, and setting upinfrastructure for all the new suburbs and strip malls generated will bedevastating.

The good news is that there’s another path,and it’s already moving forward (although planners seem to see it as anaddition, not an alternative). A number of affordable transit projects in MontgomeryCounty and the Washington, DC region could, along with smart land-use planning,radically transform the area in the next decade or so, leading to altered dailytravel patterns and a far smaller environmental footprint (at least adjustingfor the population growth expected in the county). The Purple Line, a lightrail project that stretches from Bethesda in the south of the county, to NewCarrollton in Prince George’s County, will pull growth in toward the DC regionand link the arms of our excellent, if underfunded, Metrorail system. A plan toadd all-day and weekend service to MARC, Maryland’s commuter rail, was putforward in 2007 but never funded due to the Great Recession. The plan may berevived, though; if so, it would greatly expand the reach of the transitsystem, allowing true smart growth around MARC stations. Finally, a plan to adda bus rapid transit (BRT) network in Montgomery County would greatly expandautomobile-free mobility in areas not already covered by transit, particularlythe outer suburbs.

This last point is controversial among sometransit advocates, who believe that light rail is far superior to BRT. Yetlight rail is at least twice as expensive, and it isn’t economically feasibleto put it outside core urban areas. And true BRT offers amenities that make itsperformance nearly identical to light rail, such as dedicated lanes, signalpriority, fare prepayment, raised stations spaced every half mile or so, andcustomized buses. Light rail advocates point out that BRT can offer far lessthan promised, which is certainly a risk; however, the answer is not to do awaywith BRT but demand that it be done correctly. Fortunately, the Institute forTransportation and Development Policy has developed a rating systemto evaluate BRT systems (no American BRT has achieved the gold standard yet). Lightrail advocates also point to rail’s permanence, low repair rate, and theadvantages of electric engines. BRT advocates emphasize flexibility and the fargreater speed of installing a BRT system, meaning that BRT can start takingdrivers off of roads quickly. A key issue is whether and how much BRTencourages transit-oriented development that is dense growth and fosters walkabilityaround stations. For North American BRT, there’s not enough data yet to say,but some initial experienceslook good for BRT.

I’m discussing BRT at such length because itthreatens to divide transit activists who should be working together. At times,the debate has been nasty. Beyond the technical argument, there is always apersonal element to such issues. Rail has a certain aesthetic power, appealingto those who remember an American past with trains everywhere, with suburbsbuilt around trolley stations. It combines a sleek technological power with anostalgic vision. Yet BRT also has an aesthetic attraction. Personally, itappeals to my prudent side—I always appreciate the ability to do more withless. If we are to have a sustainable planet, we have to learn to reuse andrepurpose existing infrastructure, to mix old technology with new in thriftyinnovations, not to always be seduced by the lure of the new highway, the lureof the more expensive and elaborate option. The future may be one of technology,but not necessarily of the endlessly accelerating individual speed and power oftwentieth century techno-optimists. The 21st century also calls for a newhumility in at least some aspects of some of our endeavors. It calls for a lessgrandiose vision that mixes old technology with the best of high tech.

Ethan Goffman is Associate Editor of Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy. His publications have appeared in E: The Environmental Magazine, Grist, and elsewhere. He is the author of Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature (State University of New York Press, 2000) and coeditor of The New York Public Intellectuals and Beyond (Purdue University Press, 2009) and Politics and the Intellectual: Conversations with Irving Howe (Purdue University Press, 2010). Ethan is a member of the Executive Committee of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Chapter of the Sierra Club.

Going Greek: On Not-So-New Social and Solidarity-Based Economic Systems

2012-01-09T13:12:00.000-05:00

Marlyne D. Sahakian, SSPP European Blog Correspondent

This week marks theintroduction of a new feature for the SSPP Blog. Regular SSPP blogger EthanGoffman has been doing yeoman’s work for the last several months delivering anew and insightful column each week. In need of some time to catch his breath,Ethan has agreed to surrender one week per month so that we can bring you theperspectives of our new European blog correspondent, Marlyne Sahakian.

Marlyne is based in Switzerland and recently completed a PhD at the Graduate Institute Geneva. She is starting a post-doctoral research position at the University of Lausanne and in the Philippines. Her inaugural postinghighlights how newly imposed austerity policies are encouraging Greeks andothers to meet their basic needs in novel ways while at the same time fosteringnew social relationships. Welcome aboard, Marlyne! --- Maurie J. Cohen,Editor

*** *** ***

It may bethe start of a new year and the end of a holiday season in Europe, but theGrinch is still lurking in a region that remains mostly paralyzed by the economicslowdown. In Greece, while national and European Union representatives continueto negotiate plans for resolving the country’s mind-boggling debt crisis, some enterprisinglocal residents have taken matters into their own hands. As reported ininternational media channels, different community-level activities based onsolidarity and a real need for alternatives to the existing system have emergedafter two years of pay cuts, layoffs and rising taxes.

DuringNovember, the Associated Press reported on the “Citizens of Veria,” a Greek activist group thatillegally reconnects to the grid households that are unable to pay theirelectricity bills—with the full support of the city’s mayor—and claims socialsolidarity toward those in need as the group’s primary mission. In the sameperiod, two United States-based news organizations, National Public Radio (NPR) and The New York Times reported on the establishment of a new barter system inVolos, a fishing village in central Greece.

Under theheadline “Modern Greeks Return to Ancient Systems of Barter,” the NPR storyexplained how this barter system uses a currency called Local Alternative Unitor TEM in Greek, with one TEM equal in value to one euro. The system encouragesthe exchange of goods and services, such as language classes, babysitting, orfresh produce from local markets. Within a year, the TEM system grew from a fewdozen users to more than five hundred members, with many local stores acceptingboth currencies and offering discounts for payments in TEM. This is just one ofscores of similar initiatives that have emerged throughout Greece since thestart of the crisis.

In Patras,a network named after an ancient Greek form of currency, the Ovolos, wasfounded in 2009 to include a barter system that encompasses services including medicalcare. Such efforts have not gone unnoticed: the Greek government passednational legislation late last year to grant nonprofit status to theseentities.

Whilepress coverage claims that such initiatives are based on “ancient” tradingsystems, there seems to be no recognition of how these economic efforts arepart of a larger movement for “social and solidarity-based economies,” morecommonly known by the acronym ESS (économiesociale et solidaire) in French-, Spanish,- and Portuguese-speakingcountries. To better reflect on the emergence of similar alternative economicsystems in Greece, and to best understand their potential, it is worth reviewinghow these efforts have come about in the past.

Mostresearchers agree that solidarity-based economic systems first became popularin Europe during the early days of industrialization. The Welsh social reformerRobert Owen (1771–1859)is credited with founding the cooperative movement and initiating new forms ofbarter among factory workers. In 1832, Owen created a “labor exchange” whereproducts made by cooperatives were traded based on the number of labor hoursthat went into each item. Improvements in living standards championed by laborand women’s rights movements during the first half of the twentieth century prompteda downturn in these worker-driven initiatives after World War II. It was notuntil the Reagan-Thatcher era that neoliberal policies, and more generally a“crisis of values,” prompted a return to these types of social economic systemsin the 1980s and 1990s.

Anexchange system similar to the one implemented by Owen came to light in BritishColumbia in the 1980s, under the label Local Employment and Trade Systems (LETS). In the decades that followed, so-called Systèmes d’échanges locaux (SEL) multiplied across Europe and LatinAmerica, with city and national-level entities created as platforms toaggregate the various community efforts. For example, a group called Réseau Intercontinental de Promotion de L’Économie Sociale Solidaire (RIPESS)has begun to map such initiatives (presenting an inverted map of the worldwith North America and Europe at the bottom) and to connect different groups aspart of this overall movement.

So what are“social and solidarity-based economic” activities? In the first instance, theycan take many legal forms—from cooperatives to associations to mutualcompanies. According to the French researchers Laurent Fraisse, Isabelle Guérin, and Jean-Louis Laville, solidarity in economic systemscan be defined as “all production, exchange, saving and consumption activitiesthat contribute to a democratization of the economy based on the engagement ofcitizens.” What these projects have in common are the core values they promote.

One mainprinciple is that economic activity is not solely for the purpose of generating,or indeed maximizing, profits, but rather for providing some type of benefit tomembers, workers, or society at large. It therefore follows that it is peopleand the social realm that are more important than capital, which results in avariety of innovations such as the redistribution of any profits equally amongall members, the minimization of wage differences across employment categories,or the donation of profits to social causes. This approach also emphasizes theself-management of such initiatives by engaged citizens (as opposed togovernmental services offered by civil servants) so that each member plays aparticipatory role in the democratic management of the program (the principle of “one person, one vote”). An English version of the charter (translated by yours truly), developed by the Chambre de l'économie sociale et solidaire (APRES-GE), Geneva’s social and solidarity-basedeconomic association, is available and provides details on some of these valueswhich include social well-being but also, in the Geneva charter at least, arespect for the natural environment.

This briefoverview of ESS raises a few questions that merit further exploration. First,are such systems being proposed as “alternatives” to the existing economic order?According to Jean-Michel Servet, an expert on social and solidarity economiesat the Graduate Institute in Geneva, they should be seen as complementary: thegoal is not to replace the dominant economic system, but to offer an additionallayer that engages with people from different socioeconomic groups in aninclusive manner. As the currency specialist Bernard Lietaer put it, it wouldbe wiser for economic systems to run on two wheels rather than one, or that twocurrencies—such as the euro and the Greek TEM—would be favorable to just the euro,a point with which the villagers of Volos would no doubt agree. In a recentbook with Stephen Belgin entitled New Money for a New World,Lietaer argues that many of the global issues we are facing today would benefitfrom reconsidering “the monopoly of our centuries old monetary system.”

Second, howcould such systems be maintained as complementary, even in times of economicgrowth? It seems that alternative systems tend to appear during moments of crisisand then fade from view as recovery becomes manifest. During the Argentineeconomic collapse of the late 1990s, several local currencies were created,such as the Argentino, the Patacon and the LECOP. The Crédito, for example, wasa currency that emerged as one of many barter systems (mercados de trueque) during that period. An estimated 2.5 millionpeople used the Crédito between 2001 and 2003, starting with the newlyimpoverished middle classes and spreading over time to all socioeconomic strata,including the least affluent. The system fizzled out, however, once thenational economic emergency passed.

Switzerland, however, provides a counterexample: local exchange systems have existed overseveral decades and, while Geneva has yet to feel the brunt of the Europeaneconomic slowdown, local associations, and indeed politicians, have activelypromoted ESS efforts. The same is true for Luxembourg, whichhas a government minister and official department devoted to “solidarity in economicsystems.” Bringing ESS into policy making is not a challenge when it involvessocial services, such as the reinsertion of the unemployed into the activeworkforce, but local currencies do pose at least one political issue: they arepart of informal economies and therefore circumvent the redistribution of fundsthrough state taxation (for example, one does not contribute to alleviatingpublic debt in Greece by using the TEM). According to Lietaer, the system couldconceivably be organized in ways that enable public treasuries to collect some taxpayments in the alternative currency, as well as the dominant unit of exchange.

Third, cansuch initiatives be scaled up or can they only succeed on a small scale withrelatively few members? There are not many examples of large-scale enterprisesthat function based on social and solidarity-based economic principles.Cooperative banks such as Raiffeisen in Austriaor supermarket chains such as Migrosor Coopin Switzerland started as small operations and continue to promote membershipas a form of participation. Unfortunately, these organizations long ago ceasedto uphold solidarity values, at least in their daily operations. One notableexception is the Mondragón cooperative,founded in 1956 in the Basque region of Spain. This consortium operates overtwo hundred enterprises, many of which are engaged in heavy industrialproduction (as well as finance and retail). At least half of the 83,000employees are also shareholders, and the organization continues to be driven bythe principle of “one person, one vote” under a model called “People and theSovereignty of Labor,” which is designed to promote solidarity among workersand communities. Mondragón is today one of the largest companies in Spain interms of asset turnover. This type of venture is an exception for social andsolidarity-based systems where smaller entities tend to prevail, and the relationships to “sustainable development” in a broader sense, including environmentalconsiderations, is less clear.

Finally, what are the linkages betweenthose concerned with social and solidarity-based economic systems, and thesustainability community at large? One main hurdle appears to be a simplematter of communication: those working in the area of ESS seem to be mostly French-, Spanish-, and Portuguese-speakersand there is very little literature in English about their experiences. Buteven more than the language barrier, some of the main ideas behind theseinitiatives are quite complex and hard to explain. As Christophe Dunand, one ofthe founders of APRES-GE, conveyed to me, “I have yet to meet someone who canexplain how complementary monetary systems function in less than fifteenminutes.” Within the ESS community—and this is perhaps a striking differencewith earlier social movements of the nineteenth century—there are efforts tobridge environmental and social concerns.

The APRES charter, for example, includes asection on “respect for the environment.” Also, the Dictionaire de l’autre économie describes Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen’sconcept of bioeconomics(and discusses the notion of décroissance, or degrowth,which is another debate where French-speaking countries seem to be taking thelead as of late). Social and solidarity-based economic systems do not gain muchcoverage in English-language sustainability conferences and journals, at least interms of what I have seen and read.

More effort certainly could be made to include treatmentof complementary economic systems in “sustainability” debates, particularly inlight of the ongoing and recurring economic crises of recent decades. Examplesfrom Greece are excellent starting points, yet they can only be understood aspart of broader, institutional efforts to place people, and not profits, at theheart of economic activity once more—promoting what the Hungarian politicaleconomist Karl Polanyi famouslycalled the social embededdness of economic systems. Recognizing the biophysicaldimensions of social, and indeed planetary, life is another important step, andone that is also reflected in innumerable efforts to reduce the material andenergy intensity of everyday life in communities around the world. It seemsthat the seeds of solutions to our economic, social, and environmental crisesexist in different forms and are scattered about like so many precious pearls.Stringing them together is a challenge that might require reviving one or twoGreek gods to help guide the way.

MarlyneSahakian received in 2011 a PhD in development studies from the GraduateInstitute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Her research inMetro Manila, the Philippines, was focused on household energy use,using social and cultural approaches to understand consumption. She alsodevotes time to a community-driven effort in Smokey Mountain, a former squattercommunity in Metro Manila, to promote sustainable livelihood opportunities. Herresearch interest is in understanding natural resource consumption patterns anddrivers, in relation to environmental promotion and social equity, andidentifying opportunities for transitions toward more sustainable societies.

Cats, Crickets, Cows, and Pigs

2012-01-03T08:10:00.000-05:00

Ethan Goffman

Over the course of the past three years, my wife and I acquiredtwo cats, which may have led to my shrinking consumption of meat. A cat, after all, is a big fluffy stuffed animal capable of anathletic bolt of speed, delightful at times for petting and hugging, at othertimes for watching its amazing leaps. I would never eat a cat. Highly developedmammals seem close enough to a cat that I wouldn’t want to eat them, either. Soabout a year ago, after a long contraction in consumption, I gave up beef andpork entirely. Of course, recent evidence that meat—and particularly beef—is agreat contributor to climate change also played a big part in my decision. Thehealth benefits are another reason, as is the fact that eating meat in largequantities means consuming more than one’s share of the world’s resources(since vegetables are so much more efficient to produce). All in all, there isno rational reason to eat meat in anywhere near the quantities most Americansdo. But the acquisition of cats was the strongest emotional trigger for mydecision.

I’ve had an aversion to eating cats my whole life, but even moreso now that these amazing creatures come rubbing against me at unexpectedtimes, leaping into my lap and melding themselves there with audible purrs,sharing my bed. Cats are among my best friends and also my relatives, althoughperhaps 1,000th cousins 1,000 times removed. Still, a cat is in many ways madein my image, or I in its image, or at least according to a similar set ofblueprints—eyes, ears, and an acute nose for sensing the world; four limbs;symmetrical; warm blooded; capable of reproducing and nurturing its young. Toalter Shakespeare’s Shylock only a little, “Hath not a cat eyes? Hath not a catorgans, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurtwith the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means,warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a human is? If you prick acat, does it not bleed?”

Of course I would never eat a cat! But isn’t the above quote truealso of pigs, cows, and other animals that we humans consume daily,thoughtlessly, in mass quantities?

One of the multiple ironies embedded in a cat leading to myshrinking meat consumption is that cats are carnivores, showing no sympathywhatsoever for any smaller mammals, birds, or insects they may happen to catch(since our cats are indoor animals, the only such victims have been crickets,whose mangled remains we occasionally find littering the floor). How, then,have these creatures, amoral killers from the viewpoint of a mouse, turned meagainst meat?

One counterargument, already implied, is that animals will harmand consume each other without remorse. Strangely, it is the carnivores, catsand dogs that we feel closest to, adopt into our homes. As Benjamin Franklin inhis memoirs recalled of his 18-year old self:

I considered…the taking every fish as akind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, orever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemedvery reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when thiscame hot out of the frying-pan, it smelled admirably well. I balanced some timebetween principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish wereopened, I saw smaller fish take out of their stomachs; then thought I, “if youeat one another, I don’t see when we mayn’t eat you.”

This might seem a convincing rebuttal, but Franklinconcludes his thoughts: “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonablecreature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one hasa mind to do.” A human, then, can be just as amoral as an amoral animal—indeed,Franklin’s logic may illustrate how humans move from the amoral to the immoral,since we are capable of hypocrisy. As some animal rights advocates will pointout, the fact that we are also capable of morality imposes an obligation uponus that it would be foolish to ascribe to animals.

A common argument for separating humans from animalsis our intelligence. Peter Singer, a formative influence on the animal rightsmovement, makes as his central argument that animals are capable of suffering,and it’s suffering that really makes harming other creatures immoral. And ifhumans have individual personalities, so, too, do animals, at least to anextent. Singer, however, doesn’t consider animals and humans exactly equal; hedoes differentiate the two: “There are many matters in which the superiormental powers of normal adult humans make a difference: anticipation, moredetailed memory, greater knowledge of what is happening, and so on.” I would gobeyond Singer and say that humans, unlike other animals, undergo complexsocial, moral, and artistic development throughout their lives. Animals areunable to, for instance, decide whether to intervene in a genocide, or composea great piece of music. Not that most humans do these things, but we all engagein similar acts, albeit to a much lesser extent—our ability to use language, toplan and compose our lives, to make decisions in how we treat other livingbeings, does separate us from animals, to me not just quantitatively butqualitatively. I use this difference to excuse myself for my continued eatingof chicken and fish—to me lower on the scale, less capable of individualbonding and expression, than pigs, cats, and cows.

The paradox is that the same capacities that makehumans capable of great good or great evil—or more often of slothful moralindifference—also make us capable of blithely eating animals or deciding notto. A more nuanced view would give animals some rights, certainly more than athing or commodity, but fewer than humans, and gives higher order animals—say,dolphins—more rights than medium order—chickens—which in turn have more rightsthan lower order—insects and worms. (An animal rights activist might say thisisn’t a more nuanced view, but a more sophisticated scheme for excusing theeating of some animals, another version of Ben Franklin’s hypocrisy.) Yet bothSinger and another writer on animal rights, Jonathan Safran Foer, argue thatthe move toward complete vegetarianism isn’t for everyone, that incrementalchange away from meat is a good thing.

Change is hard, in large part because, like dogs andcows, humans are social creatures, oriented toward what the pack or herd isdoing. We may think we are rational, we may think we are moral, but we arefirst of all products of our society. So George Washington and Thomas Jeffersoncould declaim eloquently and fight bravely for the rights of man whilecontinuing to own slaves. And so many sustainability advocates can arguefiercely for the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions while flying around theglobe to a network of international conferences. And so is it difficult, in asociety where meat is everywhere, to reduce or end our consumption. As Foerputs it, “food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity.” Welargely define ourselves by our attachments to our traditions, both culturaland family. Altering these only admits that our deepest sentiments and memoriesmay not be as ideal as we had hoped. And the move away from a culture ofmassive, thoughtless consumption of animals is a slow evolution.

References

Foer, J.S. 2009. EatingAnimals. New York: Little Brown. Kindle.

Franklin, B. 1869. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Ed. John Bigelow.Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott. Googlebooks.

Singer,P. 1975, 1990. Animal Liberation. 2^ndEdition. New York: Random House.

Ethan Goffman is Associate Editor of Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy. His publications have appeared in E: The Environmental Magazine, Grist, and elsewhere. He is the author of Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature (State University of New York Press, 2000) and coeditor of The New York Public Intellectuals and Beyond (Purdue University Press, 2009) and Politics and the Intellectual: Conversations with Irving Howe (Purdue University Press, 2010). Ethan is a member of the Executive Committee of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Chapter of the Sierra Club.

How about an Environmental Value Added Tax?

2011-12-20T08:17:00.000-05:00

Theidea of the United States adopting a value added tax (VAT), a federal tax thatcharges consumers as they buy items, originated under President Nixon and hasbeen briefly discussed by the Obama administration. Meanwhile,environmentalists have been calling for a price on carbon and other greenhousegas emissions (GHGs), either in the form of cap and trade or a tax. Why notcombine the two (and possibly break a political logjam)? Consumers would paybased upon the total GHGs embodied in the goods they purchase. If such a taxstarted at an extremely low rate, but moved up at predetermined intervals overthe course of a decade or two, it would cause minimal harm to a falteringeconomy on its way to recovery. It would also give businesses time andpredictability for an orderly transition to an economy with greatly reducedfossil fuel use.

Arecent Brookings Institution report by William G. Gale andBenjamin H. Harris explains that a VAT “can raise substantial revenue, isadministrable, and minimally harmful to economic growth. Additionally...aproperly-designed VAT might help the states deal with their own fiscal issues,and a pre-announced, phased-in VAT might be able to accelerate the pace ofeconomic recovery.” Indeed, a VAT has already been used successfully in some150 countries.

A conventionalVAT is based on the value added at every stage of production. An EnvironmentalVAT, or EVAT, by contrast, would charge based on GHGs emitted at every stage ofproduction. Such a tax would have the advantage of lowering consumption andincreasing savings, which the United States needs to do in any event. This isparticularly true given our current global trade imbalance, in which the Chinesemake and the Americans take; a world that depends upon the United Statesspending beyond its means is not economically sustainable in the long run, asrecent events have vividly demonstrated. For environmental sustainabilityadvocates, there is the added bonus of encouraging sustainable consumption, asan EVAT would encourage reduction in use of material goods. Finally, an EVATneeds to be environmental on the consumption side only; the funds raised bysuch a tax could be used to ease the fiscal challenges the country currentlyfaces, not applied to “green” projects. This has the advantage of simplicityand political viability.

Inour contentious political climate, could an EVAT be passed? In the UnitedStates, a more conventional consumption tax has over the years received supportfrom both sides of the political spectrum, although also some trepidation,particularly from conservatives. From the left, the worry is that the VAT isregressive, that it hits low income people too hard. The right, meanwhile, isconcerned that the VAT is “invisible,” that people don’t notice it as much asother forms of taxation, and that it will become a mechanism enabling untenablegovernment expansion. Larry Summers explains it succinctly: “[T]he U.S. has noVAT because liberals think it’s regressive and conservatives think it’s a moneymachine. We’ll get a VAT...when they reverse their positions.” Actually, we’remost likely to get such a tax when all other options have failed and wedesperately need to raise money (we’re not that far away!). While attempts at a“grand compromise,” in which Democrats agree to trim social security andMedicaid and Republicans agree to new taxes, have so far failed, an EVAT couldbe part of a solution, particularly after the 2012 elections.

Worriesfrom both sides of the political spectrum can be mollified. The Brookingsreport suggests offsetting the VAT’s regressive nature. This could be done, forinstance, by reducing income or social security taxes on the lowest incomes asthe EVAT is phased in, which would fit nicely into the sustainabilitymovement’s equity pillar. The conservative side might be harder to satisfy, butit shouldn’t be. Gale and Harris explain that a transparent VAT that reported“payments on receipts just like sales taxes are reported today” would helpneutralize the “invisible money machine” argument. Bruce Bartlett, a formereconomic policy official, argues that conservatives should support a VAT morethan other tax schemes, since it’s a broad-based, efficient mechanism thatcreates relatively little economic distortion.

A European plan for an EVAT already exists, but it’s bulkyand would be unworkable in the United States. This is because it takes anexisting VAT system and reduces taxes on environmentally friendly items. Itinvolves the government picking environmental winners and losers, for instance renewableenergy or household insulation, which makes it prone to distortion, politicalinfluence, and misjudgment. The United States has the advantage of being avirgin when it comes to a VAT, and therefore can easily adopt the simplestsystem possible, with a single charge for each unit of GHG emissions. Such anOccam’s Razor approach might seem anathema to our current system, in which lawsare passed by piling on goodies for special interests; however, the need tomove beyond that approach should be obvious. Not only is our tax code overly complex,but the similarly tortuous 2009 cap and trade bill did not pass. An EVAT mightoffer an opportunity to attack several problems at once: streamlinelegislation, raise needed revenue, lower consumption, and reduce GHG emissions.

China, India, and the United States: Will the Real Environmental Rogue Please Stand Up?

2011-12-13T08:51:00.000-05:00

The climate talks in Durban have ended inparalyzing inadequacy. The failure stems largely from the interplay betweenthree giants: the United States, China, and India. How to balance theresponsibilities of those who actually caused the crisis and poorer nationsseeking to develop has long been a delicate issue, and the Kyoto Protocol gavedeveloping nations a pass on cap and trade. The United States, which never signedthe treaty, has long been the planetary leader in carbon emissions, but China—whichdid sign Kyoto but has no obligations under it—has surpassed us ingreenhouse-gas emissions, while India is now number three. China and India havethus become keys to the climate crisis: there will be no solution without theirparticipation, even without their leadership. The long-time argument advancedby China and India is that they weren’t responsible for the problem is nolonger tenable. However, the United States is also not credible in its claimthat it need not act unless China and India are held accountable (A key reasonit refused to sign the Kyoto agreement. See, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=29409).

As the Durban talks were seizing up, a lecture on the economic andenvironmental impact of China and India, held at the WoodrowWilson Center, revealed much about the underlying dynamics. Economist CarlJ. Dahlman led the discussion, based on his just-released book entitled The World Under Pressure (Stanford University Press, 2011).The presentation began in some ways as a standard economic analysis, full oftalk of gross domestic product (GDP), China’s astounding economic growth, and thecountry’s domination of exports globally. The analysis, however, was broad andwide ranging. China has been the biggest winner of neoliberalism, the global freemarket system that was fully in place by the end of the twentieth century. Dahlmanexplains much of this success through such policies as currency manipulation tokeep the price of exports low. China, says Dahlman, “has been freeriding theglobal system, and will continue to freeride,” a situation that has led to adangerous global imbalance. By contrast, corruption and governmentalfragmentation have kept India’s growth rate, while still impressive, behindChina’s.

Near the end of the talk, when the subject turnedto carbon emissions, the tone became even more sober. Dahlman cited a WorldWildlife Foundation report that China in 2007 had a deficit of 14% inbiocapacity versus ecological footprint, while the United States had a 10.5%deficit. Citing the planet’s ecological overshoot and our political paralysis, Dahlmancalled for a massive educational effort. These ideas most engrossed theaudience, and the ensuing discussion focused on the environment,sustainability, and the idea of limits to growth. If concepts standard insustainability circles, such as a steady state economy and the need to minimizeor retire the whole idea of GDP, were not mentioned, they were present innascent form; change may be coming in the thinking of many economists. The keyis how to grapple with the contradiction between the need to grow economically—importantfor the West given our debt problems and for the developing world to alleviatepoverty—and the need to drastically lower emissions.

Dahlman sees such factors as efficiency andrecycling as lessening the impacts of growth; however, for him the real problemis that “CO₂ absorption is not being priced.” While the destructionof habitat and biodiversity was not mentioned, Dahlman did discuss theimpending water shortage threatening Asia—including its potential to bringconflict, notably over the Himalayan glaciers, from which China is divertingwater.

For Dahlman, a revamped global system is needed todeal with the twin problems of fiscal paralysis and the environment. “It’s clearwhat has to be done,” he explained. “Rebalancing. Do we have an integratedglobal economic system, or a fragmented one? Do we deal with the environment ornot?” Certain countries are failing at both. In describing how politicalgridlock and corruption in India’s democracy makes governance difficult, Dahlmansuggested a revealing parallel between the United States and India. In itsburgeoning dysfunctionality, the United States is becoming more like theworld’s largest democracy. Dahlman suggested a problem with democracies thatcycle through a “two to four year window,” after which “politicians are bootedout.” He describes a steep price on carbon as politically untenable “toxicelement.” Dahlman did point out, however, that tough choices are possible in ademocracy, that Europe has shown leadership “that we’re ignoring. The UnitedStates has gotten fat and lazy.”

Overall, democracies do not come out particularlywell in the vision Dahlman sketched out. China does, at least in its ability togrow. Particularly stunning is China’s increased growth—up to 9%, or some 50%of world GDP growth—during the ongoing global financial crisis, which should bethe envy of growth-oriented, Keynesian economists (although Dahlman did notactually use the word “Keynesian”). An impossible dream for economists; anightmare for environmentalists. Nevertheless, Dahlman believes that we might getmore initiative from China on global warming in the next few years, as thecountry is “very aware of what's at stake, how serious the implications are. I wouldn'tbe surprised if in the next few years China takes the lead.”

Does this signify the passing of the United Statesfrom being the world’s leading power? Is it being replaced by China? Or are wein for another Great Power competition? None of these possibilities leads tothe kind of global governance system—to match our global economic system—thatDahlman advocates. To me, the chaos of the European system seems a harbinger ofa global system out of whack, where economic openness is not matched bygovernance. Different players thus easily game the system for their short-termadvantage, heedless of long-term equity issues and environmental needs, exactlythe opposite of the sustainability movement’s triple bottom line. We can’tcount on India, and far less China, to reform our broken global system. Yet,with a gaping hole in leadership from the United States, praying for China toshow more foresight might be all that’s left.

Can We Consume Less While Growing the Economy?

2011-12-06T09:28:00.001-05:00

Does growthin Gross Domestic Product (GDP) necessarily mean a rise in consumption ofphysical resources? Among certain environmentalists and sustainabilityadvocates, this connection has come to be treated almost as gospel. Yet arecent study by climate expert Chris Goodall suggeststhat the United Kingdom may have reached peak consumption early in the twentiethcentury, even as GDP continued to rise, up to the onset of the global financialcrisis (at which time both consumption and GDP declined). This result, shouldit hold up, means “that economic growth in a mature economy does not necessarilyincrease the pressure on the world’s reserves of natural resources and on itsphysical environment.” Might technology and lifestyle changes actually allowGDP to increase while physical consumption decreases?

Goodall’sconclusion is that by 2007 measures of physical consumption in the UK “hadfallen to 96-97% of their 2001 figure,” and that “material use in the UK, andindirectly through its imports, was falling in absolute terms during the half decadeprior to the economic downturn.” Guardian columnist George Monbiot, initiallyskeptical, admits that Goodall’s methodology appears sound and must be takenseriously. Goodall examines water use, caloric intake, meat consumption, paperand board use, clothing, fertilizer, cement, car registrations, primary energy,travel, and waste. He includes measures that show internal use of materials,countering the hypotheses that the UK has merely “exported” its environmentalimpact to China and other developing countries (which now produce goods—andpollution—that once would have been generated within the UK).

Still,these results must be approached with great caution. As Goodall admits, the UKaccounts for only 2% of global consumption, so studies elsewhere are needed. Themethodology must be checked and rechecked and compared against other analyticapproaches. These results could prove either just plain wrong or an anomaly dueto an unusual set of circumstances. Monbiot asks what may turn out to be thekey question: “Why is there a sharp disparity between resource use–includingprimary energy production–and greenhouse gas emissions? While primary energyproduction peaked in 2001, the UK's greenhouse gas emissions rose across theuninterrupted growth years of the last decade (2000-2006).” Goodall’s resultsseem to contradict the continuing increase in greenhouse gas emissions, adiscrepancy that must be accounted for.

Nevetheless,should Goodall’s results be substantiated, it could lead to the return of thenow discredited environmental Kuznets curve. This is the conceptual model thatenvironmental destruction continues as societies industrialize, but, once theybecome sufficiently affluent, enhanced technology and adjusted goals spur environmentalimprovement. Personally, I don’t put much stock in the Kuznets curve, but neitherdo I believe in its ostensible opposite , the notion that GDP and environmentaldestruction always rise together. I think both models are simplistic, that avariety of social and technological factors besides GDP cause physicalconsumption to rise or decline. A rising middle class demands far more,increasing strains on the environment, although this is often accompanied bydemands for a cleaner environment—a conflict now being played out in China. Incontrast, with new technology developing countries could avoid many of thestresses of earlier development paths—witness Brazil’s use of biofuel. And thecultural/social path of a developing society could also be quite different, apossibility that Wangari Maathai’s green belt movement attests to. A simplecorrelation between GDP and consumption, while compelling, is not necessarilyaccurate.

Theproblem, really, is with the awesome power that we have given to the term“GDP.” Like “IQ,” GDP has the compelling power of being a single, simplestatistic that can be easily cited. As with IQ or other standardized tests ofintelligence or achievement, GDP attempts to reduce a large number of often difficultor impossible-to-quantify variables, with ambiguous interactions, to a single number.When economist Simon Kuznets originally introduced the system of nationalaccounts that feed into determination of “GDP” in 1934, he presciently warnedthat the figure shouldn’t be used as a proxy for social well-being or theoverall state of the economy. Among recent criticisms of GDP isthat it counts, for instance, environmental destruction, jails, heart surgery,and diabetes treatment as positive contributions and doesn’t consider fiscalinequity or the costs of ameliorating growth. Indeed, since GDP refers to thetotal value of all goods and services, one wonders how much the “undergroundeconomy,” as well as voluntary non-paid arrangements, are or should be counted.And many services have little environmental impact, such as live theater or amassage, while some goods have highly variable environmental impact. Can onesay that local, organically grown vegetables have the same impact per unit ofmonetary value as factory farmed chickens? How about energy derived from coalversus energy derived from wind? For the GDP-environmental impact correlationto mean much of anything, it would have to remain stable across differentlocations and times, say the United States in the 1900s versus the UnitedStates in 2011 versus China in a variety of time periods.

Haveenvironmentalists who declaim against GDP been seduced into giving the termmore meaning than they should? And is GDP an accurate way to measure “growth”? Ifnot, are there any better quantitative measures? Anti-growth partisans mightargue that “growth” is a convenient way to express what we’re against. However,it’s also an excellent way for critics to discredit environmentalists as“anti-growth.” A better strategy—and more accurate description of the world—mightbe to vigorously question the use of the terms “GDP” and “growth” altogether,and argue instead that we need to improve quality of life while decreasingvulgar materialism and lowering consumption of physical goods.

Sowhere does this leave Goodall’s study? It still might be good news thatdeveloped societies can lower their overall consumption. The converse is that thestudy could be used by analysts who argue for the easy technological fix—all weneed to do is to invest in the best new technology and it will solve ourproblems. The truth is, given the dire environmental situation, we need both massiveinvestment in sustainable technology and massive change in cultural attitudestoward what constitutes the “good life.” For me, Goodall’s study—should it besubstantiated—is good news, since it implies that technological fixes can playa role in helping to address the challenges that we face. Yet the work beingdone on the cultural/social side of sustainability is also crucial. To attain asustainable future, we need all pieces of the puzzle to fit together.

Sustainable Consumption and Austerity

2011-11-28T12:35:00.001-05:00

Guest Blogger: Maurie J. Cohen

Consumption first became an articulated element ofsustainability policy in Agenda 21 that was prepared for the 1992 Rio EarthSummit. During the intervening years, the environmental (and to some degree thesocial) implications of consumer society have been considered by institutions likethe United Nations Environment Programme and the Organization for EconomicCooperation and Development. Several countries and supranational bodies—mostnotably the European Commission—have formulated sustainable consumption plansand scholars have built an extensive body of academic literature. Despite recognitionof the centrality of consumer practices for sustainability, explicitinitiatives to foster more sustainable consumption have been largely confinedto enhancing product labeling and expanding consumer education.

The 2008 financial collapse triggered a reversal offortunes throughout much of the world and contributed to emergence of amacroeconomic outlook on sustainable consumption that transcends the materialflows associated with production, distribution, use, and disposal of particularproducts. Motivating development of these new perspectives has been recognitionthat revivifying economic growth by ramping up consumptive throughput offers,at best, a partial and transitory solution to the conjoined problems of economicstagnation, resource depletion, climate change, population growth, and global inequity.Could it be that the austerity policies of governments and central banks arecontributing to a “new normal” characterized by lower volumes of energy andmaterials utilization? In other words, might rising bond rates, tighteningcredit, currency uncertainty, and general economic volatility be inducing akind of sustainable consumption? Let us approach these questions from the differentvantage points afforded by Europe, the United States, and Japan.

First from the European perspective, Ireland,Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy are under extreme fiscal strain. The costsfor these countries to finance new public debt have been steadily climbing inrecent months as investors have demanded higher returns to offset the risk ofdefault. Italy represents a particularly dramatic case: the interest rate onsix-month government bonds rose by three percentage points just during themonth of November. Startling many analysts, the most recent round of the crisisis beginning to pull the entire arc of northern Europe into its grip, with buyerseven casting a gimlet eye toward German bunds.Attempts to encourage the European Central Bank to adopt a more charitablestance have thus far come to naught. Meanwhile, the future of the euro has beenthrown into doubt and the movement of bank deposits to presumptive safe havensin Switzerland and elsewhere is exacerbating extant conditions. No European governmentseems prepared to mobilize the kind of intervention required to stem thedownward spiral of confidence. Unsurprisingly, consumption is declining acrossthe continent (a similar situation has been occurring in the UK for more than ayear) as households hunker down for what is likely to be a protracted period ofeconomic instability. Residents of the most hard-pressed countries have alreadystarted to turn toward barter and other more traditional forms of exchange tomeet daily needs.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the UnitedStates is mired in its own debacle arising from decades of outsized living and unremittingpolitical paralysis. The international role of the dollar, the continued purchaseof American treasury bills by China and others, and the infusion of funds bythe Federal Reserve have buffered some of the discomfort, but the country facesmassive challenges caused by a huge public budget deficit, a cumulatinggovernment debt burden, a large overhang of consumer liabilities, anunrelenting wave of home foreclosures, an irrepressible trade deficit, and a disquietingchasm of income inequality. The so-called Congressional Supercommittee convenedto bridge the partisan divide on the federal budget shortfall collapsed earlierthis month in ignoble failure, triggering a forthcoming wave of across-the-boardreductions in public expenditures. Unable to pay their bills or countenancefurther personnel layoffs, a growing number of cash-strapped local governments aredeclaring bankruptcy.

Compounding the difficulties is that the UnitedStates over the last thirty years has become ever-more economically reliant onfinancial services and consumer expenditures and both of these economic driversare now losing steam: the first due to a hubristic combination of overreach andfraud; the latter from a mixture of exhaustion and disillusionment. With theerosion of its middle class, the country is coming to resemble less the archetypalAmerica of the 1950s and more the deeply class-stratified Europe of the 1850s. Thewealthiest consumers in the United States partake in a wide assortment ofever-changing luxury goods while the rest of the population scavenges theshelves of discount stores in search of cut-price goods. From the abjecthucksterism surrounding the holiday shopping season to the shrill calls ofspecial interests clamoring for regulatory relief, one cannot help but get thefeeling that the country’s consumption-impelled economic growth model is notonly faltering, but perhaps moving toward its demise. The dilemma is compoundedby the fact that few Americans fully appreciate their truly dire financial condition.As historian NiallFerguson provocatively observed a few years ago, the fiscal status of theUnited States is like that of a nation fighting a world war without the war. Inother words, the country has incurred debt as if subjected to an existentialthreat when in fact the aim of the borrowing has been to perpetuate much moremundane public and private spending.

Finally, Japan represents an especially interestingcase, and the one that may hold more widely generalizable insights. For morethan two decades, the former East Asian powerhouse has been portrayed as the chronicand tragic underperformer of the global economy. Its government has beenlambasted for weakness in the face of prolonged economic stagnation. Its bankshave been scorned for taking far too long to clear nonperforming assets fromtheir balance sheets. And the country’s consumers have been derided for failingto exercise sufficient fervor. Two or three years ago, it was rare to find ananalyst with the temerity to hold up the struggling Japanese as the forwardedge of a post-growth transition, but such comparisons are becomingincreasingly commonplace (The New York Times, 2011). In short,the demographic and socioeconomic transformations that have slowed economicgrowth in Japan are now becoming more evident in other high-consumption countries.

The disjointed and often frantic austerity-drivenpolicies being implemented today justifiably prompt despair. We are, alas, experiencinga chaotic and panicked wind-down of a decades-long binge of debt-fueledconsumption. This process could have been managed in a more coordinated way andwith less trauma and dislocation. In particular, a much more assertive effortcould—indeed should—be made to progressively spread the costs of downwardadjustment. Nonetheless, it would be fallacious to disregard altogether thecurrent course of austerity as incompatible with a sustainability transition. Inaddition to the more apparent financial dimensions of the process, prolificacyis losing its cultural appeal and new lifestyle modes are being creativelyconstructed. Once the dust settles, we may find that we have progressed aconsiderable way down the road toward lower aggregate levels of resource utilization.

The current challenge calls for activeconsideration of how we might lock in the improvements engendered by theongoing process of material downsizing. This will entail comprehensive ecologicaltaxation, reductions in work time, limits on advertising, alternative forms ofbusiness ownership, prohibitions on the accumulation of illusory wealth, andmore. We might begin to usefully think about how these various pieces could fittogether to establish “sustainable consumption systems.”¹

¹ I am grateful to Inge Røpke for helping to conceive of thisconcept.

MaurieJ. Cohen is the editor of Sustainability: Science, Practice, &Policy. He is also Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistryand Environmental Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology andDirector of both the Graduate Program in Environmental Policy Studies and theScience, Technology, and Society Program. Dr. Cohen has held prior positions atthe University of Leeds, Binghamton University (State University of New York),Mansfield College (Oxford University), and Indiana University. His booksinclude Exploring Sustainable Consumption: Environmental Policy and theSocial Sciences (with Joseph Murphy), Risk in the Modern Age: Science,Social Theory, and Environmental Decision Making, and The Exxon ValdezDisaster: Readings on a Modern Social Problem (with J. Steven Picou andDuane Gill).

Coming Soon to a Planet Near You: Will Rio+20 Change the Fate of the Earth?

2011-11-22T13:11:00.001-05:00

EarthSummit II may be coming, should the Rio+20 conference be successful enough toearn that title. Scheduled for June 20-22, 2012,Rio+20 will build on the achievements—andstrive to overcome the failures—of the Earth Summit twenty years ago, whichbriefly caught the world’s imagination and fashioned the sustainability ideal. Theupcoming conference is, so far, attracting little attention; many are moreexcited by the World Cup due to take place in Brazil in 2014. Rio+20, however,has larger implications. Perhaps, as the event approaches, excitement willcrest around the globe, as happened two decades ago.

Foradvocates of a sustainable consumption approach that moves beyond growth—whichincludes many SSPP readers—the conference presents a huge opportunity, and ahuge challenge. The opportunity comes through a rethinking of the three pillarsof sustainability: environmental, social, and economic (I prefer to think ofthem as strands, as, unlike pillars, they are inextricably intertwined). Thechallenge regards the extremely controversial issue of growth—whether it isnecessary, whether better technology and conservation alone can get us out ofour environmental dilemma.

AmbassadorLuis Alberto Figueredo Machado of Brazil spoke at a recent Woodrow Wilson Center forum, “Managing the Planet: The Roadto Rio+20.” He identified two major issues: the green economy and governance. Regardingthe first, he explained that there is “no accepted international definition” ofa green economy and “maybe we don't need one.” As the Supreme Court said aboutpornography, maybe we know a green economy when we see one? Machado certainlyallows a tremendous amount of diplomatic wiggle room that will make it fareasier to achieve international agreement. He described a green economy as abody of practices to move toward sustainable development. Machado’s definitionis painless: “I don't see that evolution of a green economy would imply costs;it implies investments—in the way economies are always in a new phase, alwaysmoving forward.” It’s true that economies—and all of human society—are alwayschanging, but does Machado’s phrasing imply continued growth? How much will theterm “green economy,” in practice, mean business as usual with some newtechnology and conservation elements added to a basic philosophy of ever-increasinggross domestic product (GDP)?

Refusingto define a “green economy” may make life easier for diplomats, but would seemto make real long-term progress less likely. A preparatory document pertainingto the conference does not give much hope here (United Nations, 2010). It defines a green economy asseeking “in principle, to unite under a single banner the entire suite ofeconomic policies and modes of economic analyses of relevance to sustainabledevelopment.” While this encompasses such aspects as sustainable consumptionand poverty eradication, a good chunk of the definition includes continuedgrowth while maximizing energy and ecological efficiency. How far does thismove us beyond the first Rio conference? The “development” part of “sustainabledevelopment” seems, in this document, synonymous with growth, as in theanalysis that, in Europe, “a gradual introduction of ecological taxes did not significantlydampen growth in gross domestic product.” Whether one believes that growth canoccur simultaneously with a reduction in environmental destruction, given thedire global situation, we must move past the idea of constantly raising GDP. Themoral dilemma is great here, as it means asking developing nations to foregothe path that the developed world has already taken; nevertheless, it’s clearthat not only can’t the whole population of the planet live like Americans,they can’t even live like Scandinavians. How can those of us from the UnitedStates ask the Brazilians to maintain a level of energy use far below ours andpreserve the Amazon forest while we increase our greenhouse gas emissions? Unfortunately,it’s probably impossible for the organizers of Rio+20 to ask for a curtailmentof GDP without causing a tumultuous backlash and derailing the whole event.

Machado’ssecond major issue on the agenda is governance, again crucial, and again anissue in which the kind of global coordination really needed seems impossible. Theambassador mentioned the possibility of either strengthening the United NationsEnvironment Programme (UNEP) or creating a new, stronger agency, both excellentideas. He suggested that Rio+20 should produce Sustainable Development Goals witha stronger sustainability/environmental component than the current MillenniumDevelopment Goals. Machado also discussed the major role expected of civilsociety at Rio+20, where representatives of various organizations—Nobel Prizewinners, scientists, and CEOs—will make recommendations directly to globalleaders. This, he said, will “finally take the voice of civil society to thosewho can take action.” Some very important connections are likely to be made; ideasmay coalesce into projects. Still, systematic global governance seems unlikelyas the global structure is simply too underdeveloped and the primacy of nationstates seeking their own interests still too powerful.

Themany useful, even exciting, developments planned for Rio+20, then, may provetoo little too late. “We don’t have 20, 30, 40 years,” remarked Jacob Scherr ofthe Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the respondents to Machado. Scherrreferred to an InternationalEnergy Agency report that we areonly five or six years away from locking in an unacceptable climate changepath.

Thequestion of the relationship between equity and environmental sustainability alsoremains vexing. Another respondent, Richenda Van Leeuwnen of the United NationsFoundation, pointed out the need to address energy poverty, the fact that 1.4billion people have no electricity while another billion have only rudimentary accessto household electric power. A new initiative, Sustainable Energy for All, aimsto provide universal access to electricity, double energy efficiency, anddouble the renewable energy mix by 2030. This initiative bears on theinteraction of the environmental and social pillars—or strands—ofsustainability. With the population continuing to rise and demand for energyand material goods also trending higher, how will the math work out? Even withdoubled energy efficiency and doubled renewable energy (starting from a verysmall base), will we be able to fulfill the mission of the social equitystrand? Fortunately, the project has considered this problem; Van Leeuwnenresponded to a follow-up question from the audience, that providing electricityto 1.4 billion more people is estimated to raise global emissions by only 0.7%.However, the rest of us will still have to drastically decrease energy use, andthe rising middle classes in China, India, and Brazil will have to manage theirnewfound prosperity on an extremely tight energy diet. The question oftenunvoiced is whether the social and environmental strands of sustainabilitymight conflict.

Thedangers are great. We have fallen behind in addressing both biodiversity andclimate change, two of three critical issues outlined in the original Rioconference (the third is land degradation) according to Thomas Lovejoy of theHeinz Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment. Nevertheless, Lovejoyis optimistic. He pointed out that six months before the original Rioconference, there were similar doubts. He also lauded the potential of the SustainableDevelopment Goals and the growing awareness and involvement of the corporatesector. He finished with a discussion of Brazil’s “very special leadership role”as a county on the cusp of economic success. Indeed, with its sugar-cane basedbiofuel and social democratic government, Brazil does seem to offer at leastsome hope of an alternative development path, more so than India or, certainly,China.

I have ahard time being as optimistic as Lovejoy, but there may be no choice. Thealternative is despair. If meeting the development aspirations of the 3.5billion people under age 25 who inhabit today’s Earth seems a dauntingchallenge, they are also a wellspring of activity and hope. The world is wired,and, to expand upon the thought of Julian Simon—that arch-foe ofenvironmentalists—3.5 billion human brains, communicating in ways Simon couldscarcely have imagined, is an amazing resource (SSPP Blog, 2011). Of course 3.5billion new bodies, 3.5 billion entities anxious to consume, is also a hugeburden. Youth will need to be environmentally aware in an unprecedented way,and outreach is a major part of Rio+20, including social media around the globe.As Ambassador Machado pointed out, that represents “a lot of pathways, millionsof actions.” I’m afraid that the older generation might have already failedthese youth. But some of us are trying, and perhaps Rio+20 will, indeed, provea landmark event on the path to sustainability, a true Earth Summit, Part II.

The True Cost of Automobiles

2011-11-15T11:17:00.001-05:00

Theautomobile is rarely subject to a full cost-benefit analysis. While themobility afforded by the private car is unique in history, the financial,social, and environmental costs are many. Perhaps the primary myth is that theautomobile is personal, when it takes the cooperation of all aspects ofplanning to afford the mobility it currently provides. Automobiles, roads, andparking enact a heavy cost upon us all.

“Do Roads Pay for Themselves?,” a recent report by the U.S.Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), critiques one myth of automobility, thatgas taxes amount to a user fee. The document’s main point is simple: “Theamount of money a particular driver pays in gasoline taxes bears littlerelationship to his or her use of roads.” Not only are local roads notaccounted for, but a one-to-one correspondence between the road a driveractually uses and the amount she pays in gas taxes has never existed. Indeed,since 1947 the amount spent on roads of all sorts has exceeded that raised bythe gas tax and other fees by $600 billion. Furthermore, the amount covered byroad users has been shrinking and is currently paying for only about half theroad network.

Forsustainability advocates, though, the question of whether roads pay forthemselves is a relatively minor one. The main point is a corollary in the PIRGreport: “[T]he many costs imposed by highway construction on non-users of thesystem, including damage to the environment and public health and encouragementof sprawling forms of development that impose major costs on the environment.” Hiddendeeper within “Do Roads Pay for Themselves?” is a more complete list of themany costs imposed by automobile dependence and an ever-growing road network:air pollution (both local and global), water pollution from runoff, wildernessfragmentation, accidents, infrastructure expenses of sprawl, time costs of diffusesettlement patterns, geopolitical implications of securing fuel, impaired qualityof life due to diminished walking and biking, and neglect of other transportmodes. This last factor immobilizes those who cannot drive, such as childrenand the elderly, as well as those who cannot afford an automobile (indeed, theneed to buy automobiles amounts to an enormous “tax” in itself).

This amounts to a devastatingcritique of our automobile culture. Yet it gets worse. The PIRG report barelymentions another huge cost of automobile dependence: parking. Because citiesrequire large numbers of parking spaces, this amounts to another huge “tax” onconsumers, paid by drivers and nondrivers alike. A 2010 Universityof California, Berkely study numbers parking spaces as between 105 millionand 2 billion in the United States, as many as eight spaces per vehicle. Thisamounts to an amazing grab of land, much of it in prime locations. The cost forconstruction alone is quite high, some US$15,000 (in 2008 figures) per space ina structured parking lot, according to one estimate. Yetthe environmental cost is also great. The Berkely study shows how constructionof parking uses energy and materials, entailing emissions of greenhouse gases, carbonmonoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrous oxides. Stormwater runoff, which affectsour waterways, is an additional, ongoing impact. All of this must be added tothe costs of automobile society.

Donald Shoup has writtenextensively on the costs of parking; in a recent Cato Institute article he explains how governmental parkingrequirements have distorted the market and altered our public spaces. As heexplains, “Free curb parking in a congested city gives a small, temporarybenefit to a few drivers who happen to be lucky on a particular day, but itcreates large social costs for everyone else every day.” Studies show that, incongested areas, 30 percent of cars are cruising for parking. Setting a truemarket price for parking would greatly reduce the number of cars, leading toincreased use of car pooling and transit. Still, most parking spaces wouldremain full, as the market would not set prices higher than demand allows.Parking fees could then be used to improve public areas (good for business).Shoup goes further, and explains that ending parking requirements will create aradical change in the way we structure our cities: “Removing the parkingrequirements for both housing and offices can produce a cascade of benefits:shorter commutes, less traffic, a healthier economy, a cleaner environment, andmore affordable housing.” In short, the primacy of the automobile has configuredour cities, our land use, our society, in unhealthy ways, but this can bechanged.

Change may be coming. Demographicand social transformations are making the automobile less seductive; we may bemoving toward “peak car,” as Sustainability: Science,Practice, & Policy (SSPP) journal editor Maurie Cohen discusses in arecent paper (Cohen, 2011). Trends in Japan and, to a lesser extent, the UnitedStates, point in this direction. Our aging society is less capable of drivingsafely, while young people are less intrigued by the automobile. If the carused to be youth’s rite of passage, shiny technology, exemplified by the iPad,is replacing it. We may be moving toward the kind of dematerialized societydiscussed so often in the (electronic) pages of SSPP.

The elephant in the room, is, ofcourse, rapidly developing countries, particularly China but also India andBrazil. The news that, despite the global recession, carbon emissions were up6% in 2010—largely due to China and India—is disturbing (Los Angeles Times, 2011).Should societies encompassing well over two billion people follow the roads-and-carspath of the United States, the planet will be in even more trouble. For Chinain particular, already facing environmental protests, the social costs will begreat. A warning to take a different road might be hypocritical coming from thecenter of automobile society, but the admonition to “do as we say, not as wedo” has never been more relevant. The automobile’s central role intransportation planning must end.

Reference

Cohen, M. 2011. Wither automobilesociety: a sociotechnical perspective. Paper submitted for publication inTechnology Analysis and Strategic Management (copy available from author uponrequest).

So You Say You Wanna Grow, Buster? New Film Questions Consumption Assumptions

2011-11-08T08:18:00.000-05:00

In asociety barraged with advertisements to buy, buy, buy, and media headlines thatgrowth is good, all you need is growth, growth makes the world go ‘round, howis the message of sustainable consumption to get through? Dave Gardner decidedthat one way is to fight media with media (albeit small media) and he wrote anddirected the just-released film Growthbusters:Hooked on Growth. To counteract the perception (and probably the reality)that sustainability advocates are a gloomy bunch, he uses humor, depictinghimself as a prototypical “growthbuster,” barging into government planningmeetings wielding his “growthbuster” ray gun and questioning basic assumptions.The humor comes through the contrast between his low-key, deadpan delivery—aWoody Allen-ish character, the little guy remarking that the emperor has noclothes—and the grandiose ambitions of halting the labyrinthian spread of roadsand construction ever deeper into what’s left of nature.

As along-time crusader against development in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Gardnerhas earned the growthbuster moniker. His efforts culminated in a 2009 challengeto a powerful city council member, and the story of that race acts as a narrativeframing device to keep viewers interested. Growthbustersalso includes fast-paced juxtapositions of roads and construction with theremnants of nature (including a brief shot of the prototypical dead animal on ahighway) and a flurry of headlines celebrating the need for such growth (thatmany of these are computer-screen shots gives away the film’s lowbudget—perhaps its growth-busting budget?). At its heart, though, the film is atraditional documentary, featuring interviews with key thinkers on sustainableconsumption: Bill McKibben, Juliet Schor, Paul Ehrlich, and Dennis Meadows,among others. They systematically lay out the dilemma created by humanity’sburgeoning consumption habits in conjunction with population growth, by thegrowing stress on water, energy, and other resources.

Particularlyeffective is a sequence where physics professor Al Bartlett (augmented bygraphics) explains the danger emanating from the human inability to understandexponential growth (even if we understand it theoretically, its practicaleffects still come as a shock). If a bacteria is put in a jar at 11 o’clock anddoubles every minute until at noon the jar is completely full, at what point isthe glass half full? Our first reaction might be 11:30 or even 11:50, but ofcourse it’s a minute before noon; similarly, the human race is closer than wethink to consuming our planet to death.

Growthbusters, then, effectivelyconveys the gravity of our situation, though some of it may be old news forthose of us steeped in sustainability. The worry is that this is the audience whowill actually see the film and it will end up preaching to the converted. I hada chance to interview Gardner after the screening, and he admitted that “a lotof the audience that needs to see the film probably won’t.” His marketing strategy,beyond encouraging house parties, is to be “provocative enough, interestingenough, in your face enough to get the pundits talking.” While this is probablythe only strategy possible, it seems unlikely that the film will garner a massaudience.

Thosewho do see the film will probably largely be, like those interviewed in thefilm, like me, like most of the readers of SSPP, white, middle class, and with acollege education or above. They—we—will probably be among those responsiblefor overconsumption, but not those who most suffer from its effects. During aquestion period before the film was screened, an Indian woman brought up this issue,asking if the film would focus on population without similarly addressing thosewho continue to consume beyond the Earth’s means.

Thefilm does balance the issues of consumption—particularly the growth imperative—andpopulation; however, it is quite strident about the latter without explicitlydiscussing the moral dilemma of the developed world preaching to the lessaffluent. Gardner explains that “the film could not be all things to allpeople,” and adds, “I am definitely guilty of aiming at people I know. I didn’thave the resources to make this as global a film as I’d like to make.” Growthbusters does deride the notionthat we need to continue to build bigger houses in order to fill them with morestuff, and Gardner discusses his own personal journey away from materialism. Still,when it portrays people who made changes, went local, grow their own food, usealternative energy, and so forth, they appear to be maintaining an affluent,suburban lifestyle, albeit in a different, healthier setting. When the filmportrays advocates for a sustainable Albemarle County, Virginia, who say thattheir region now has enough people, I appreciate their concern for limitinggrowth but wonder how much this translates to walling out the less fortunate ina world where population continues to grow too fast. Personally—and this reflectsmy own agenda—I’d like to see more about urban revitalization, smart growth,public transit, and the need to limit the amount of house per person and tohave more shared housing.

It isquite unfair of me to expect all this from a single movie that already makes soaccessible the crucial point of the need to limit growth. And, to turn thecritique around, isn’t it up people from developing nations to voice their ownperspective, to avoid simply blaming their problems on the West? As a member ofthe Sierra Club, I might be disturbed that the meetings are attendedpredominantly by aging white liberals, but that’s who shows up. It’sencouraging that we have a Van Jones pushing environmental justice in theUnited States and a Wangari Maathai (or had her) building sustainability inAfrica, and I’m sure that there are many less publicized figures. My notknowing who they are may just be a sign of my own ignorance. However, if I challengethe affluent world to be more sensitive to the developing world, I should alsochallenge those in the developing world not to copy us, to do as we say not aswe do. As Gardner told me, “the only hope is for the developing world to skipright over this phase,” to avoid the epidemic of overconsumption that has usall at the edge of catastrophe.

The End of Modernity? The End of Postmodernity? The Post-Affluent State? Japan as Global Role Model? Are We Moving into a New Paradigm and What Might It Look Like?

2011-11-01T09:15:00.000-04:00

The planet seems on the edge of a new paradigm, but nobody knows whatit is. Will it be a steady state economy? A technological utopia? Areconciliation between capitalism and democratic socialism? A global plutocracyin which a luxuriant economic elite jet around an otherwise impoverished world?Will it be a global society? Or will it spin into ever more local decisionmaking? Will war continue to diminish, as it has (erratically) since the closeof World War II? Or will there be new outbreaks of conflict over scarce resourcesand increased poverty and hunger?

Only one thing is (or seems to be) certain: In the nexus between suddeneconomic meltdown and gradual environmental catastrophe, the old paradigm ismelting away.

Since its inception, Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy (SSPP) has grappled with the globalenvironmental crisis and the need for a new paradigm, albeit in a fragmentedway, rather like the proverbial blind men groping at the elephant. A recenteditorial and book review forum in the journal approach the issue somewhat moredirectly.

In “Turning Japanese” our journal editor, Maurie Cohen,envisions Japan as a tacit model for the emerging paradigm. As the concluding actto a twentieth century of military imperialism followed by economic expansion,Japan was blindsided in the 1990s by a financial crisis from which it has neverreally recovered. Yet, as Cohen points out, Japan’s woes are only relative; itseconomy is still robust enough to be third largest in the world. Nevertheless,the country’s psychology has altered dramatically; its youth appear to be farless materialistic, less interested in conventional ideas of success, perhapsmore philosophical, more interested in relationships than in things. As Cohen argues,“Japan is arguably at the head of the pack in demonstrating that the era ofconsumer-led economic growth is coming to an end, and other wealthy countrieswill likely follow.” Along with its drive for growth, Japan’s greenhouse-gasemissions are also diminishing. Is this the start of the steadystate/sustainable consumption utopia that much of SSPP’s writing points toward?

One key question is whether the United States, wracked by its ownfinancial crisis from which it seems unable to escape, will follow in Japan’slead. Of necessity, Americans are consuming less, but does that point to along-term change in psychology? As in Japan, youth are becoming less car-oriented,though perhaps this is only due to a passion for higher-tech goodies such asthe iPod. Whether the United States’ long superpower status and capitalistethos will forestall a change similar to Japan’s (if, indeed, Japan’s is morethan a temporary phenomenon) remains unanswered.

Even post-financial crisis, Japan and the United States remaindifferent in many ways. One is America’s greater economic inequality; whileJapan has an ethic of relative equality, U.S. society has been marked by awinner-take-all attitude. Will this lead to greater strife in the UnitedStates, as the Occupy Wall Street movement seems to foreshadow? Another hugedifference is Japan’s ethnic homogeneity versus America’s eclecticmulticulturalism. Is homogeneity a strength, or does it make a society brittleand slow to adapt to change, particularly with an aging population such asJapan’s? For instance, rather than allowing in foreigners to take care of theaged, Japan is relying on robots, which may point to a technological advantagebut is a disadvantage in human capital (Mori& Scearce, 2010). The United States, by contrast, has long relied onwaves of immigrants to renew itself, and will likely do so again. Yetincreasing hostility to new arrivals might forestall this (as it seems to bedoing in Europe). And ethnic hostility has the potential to fracture society,particularly in a time of increasing scarcity. So, while the United Statescould very well turn toward a low-consumption, sustainable future, it may alsoend up with social discord and breakdown.

Where does this leave our shifting paradigm? SSPP’s current BookReview Perspective on Stuart Sim’s TheEnd of Modernity tackles this question in a sweeping way. Cohen begins bysketching out our perilous situation, in which endless consumerism, along witha widening deficit in financial resources, has walked us off a cliff, while awidening deficit in environmental resources has us stranded on the edge of aneven larger precipice. Paradoxically, the financial collapse might actually bemoving us a step or two back from environmental catastrophe, as we can nolonger afford our excessive consumption habits (although China and India arepicking up much of the slack).

Sim, as the reviews of his book make clear, is in accord with thesustainability community’s picture of overconsumption and financial collapse. Sim,too, describes a vision of modernity that assumes endless progress, endlessacquisition. This critique of modernist will to domination has long been asubject of postmodern discourse, though whether postmodernity offers actualsolutions is debatable. Sim calls for a “real postmodernity” that takes itscritique of modernity seriously and retreats from the ethic of consumption. However,Sim’s new postmodernity would have a stronger role for internationalgovernance, one warranted by the need for systemic regulation of capitalism ina globalized economy, as well as stewardship of an environment underunprecedented stress, an environment of interlinked ecosystems for whichinternational boundaries are meaningless. Yet such a vision is anathema to postmodernistcalls for “decentering.” So what is one to make of the term “realpostmodernity”?

I agree with Sim about the need for more global structure, although onemust be extremely careful in the balance between international and localgovernance. A global command economy would fail to account for localconditions, yet local governance is incapable of accounting for multiplelinkages. Furthermore, today’s United Nations, with its lack of true democracy,is an unwieldy instrument of international governance; financial institutionssuch as the World Bank might be far more efficient but have, so far, proventhemselves myopic, governed by a neoliberal paradigm that extends the ethic ofendless growth but with little governmental oversight.

It remains strange that Sim rejects postmodernity as it’s beenpracticed and calls for a “real postmodernity.” The call for internationalgovernance is 180 degrees from postmodern thought. I would, rather, say, thatthe term “real postmodernity” is an evasion, a denial of the fact that wereally don’t know if a new paradigm is emerging or what it looks like; we onlyknow that change is desperately needed. The term “postmodern” seems, itself,problematic, a rhetorical red herring. For the new paradigm that we believe tobe emerging in Japan and elsewhere among the young, we have as yet no name. Perhaps“sustainability” will do, but that seems broad and amorphous, perhaps“sustainable consumption,” but that’s rather long-winded. Clearly, the newparadigm means a rejection of the ethic of endless growth in consumeristappetite. It must be social, then, as well as political and technological. PerhapsSim, with his postmodern aversion to grand narratives, would reject the needfor a paradigm? And here we’re left with a paradox, a need for narrative, forideology, for a vision to aim for, yet an awareness that such ideology can alltoo easily box us in.

Railvolution Hits Washington, DC

2011-10-25T00:18:00.000-04:00

Wecan build a better transit network, serving city cores, connecting suburbs, andencouraging dense growth that combats sprawl and preserves the environment. Thiswas a key theme emerging out of Railvolution 2011, a yearly conference that began inPortland in 1989 dedicated to transit and the communities it serves. Theknow-how is there for a revitalized, transit- oriented society, the thinking inplanning circles is there, changing demographics and social expectations areripe for it. One element, though, is too often lacking: governance. Part ofthis is political will, part a conflict of interests; yet a large part of theproblem is simply the cumbersome machinery of local, state, and federalgovernment. (Indeed, this could be said to mirror international response toenvironmental issues, which is hindered by individual countries and powerfulinterests and a weak, dysfunctional system of global governance.)

TheWashington, DC region—where this year’s Railvolution took place—could serve asa paradigm for how fragmented governance undercuts transit and growth policy. (Fulldisclosure: I am Transit Chair of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Sierra Club,and therefore an extremely interested party.) A forum titled “The Jobs-Housing Balance in Metropolitan DC: Undividing aRegion” revealed the area’s dysfunctionality. Home to an array of experts, theDC region would seem ideal for effective planning. The region introduced one ofAmerica’s premier metro rail systems in the 1970s and began to lay thegroundwork for compact, environmentally friendly development. It has also been thesite of some of the most innovative plans to promote dense growth aroundtransit networks and prevent sprawl, notably in Arlington, Virginia and inMontgomery County, Maryland (for further discussion, see the recently publishedSSPP article, “Afunctional integrated land use-transportation model for analyzingtransportation impacts in the Maryland-Washington, DC Region“ part of theforthcoming Forum on Transportation andLand Use in the Maryland Suburbs of Washington, DC (Fall2011)).

Yetsprawl has tumbled outward to the far suburbs and the region is home to some ofthe country’s worst traffic. Why? My provisional answer is poor and fragmentedgovernance. The region is home to one of the most dysfunctional governancesystems imaginable, divided between two states, Maryland and Virginia, as wellas the District of Columbia. No strong central authority is available to makeor carry out plans. The closest is the Metropolitan Washington Council ofGovernments (MWCOG), which acts as a planning forum for the region. Unfortunately,it has no actually governing power, relying on the good faith of the states andlocalities to implement its plans.

InDC, then, as much as anywhere on the planet, local, corporate, state, andnational authorities make decisions based on their own perceived needs. At theforum, Stewart Schwartz of the Coalition for Smarter Growth spelled out some recentbad decisions. The giant corporation Northrop Grumman chose a beltway location—transithell—for its new headquarters when it could easily have picked far friendlierArlington County—transit heaven. Montgomery County, in conjunction with JohnsHopkins University, is developing a giant science complex away from the Metro,on the already overcrowded I-270 corridor in the west, rather than picking a anunderdeveloped Metro station to the east, where jobs are needed. The region isalso subject to the whims of the federal government: the Department of Defenseis in the process of moving bases and hospitals away from transit-friendly core-citylocations into sprawling parts of Virginia and Maryland, a process Schwartzcharacterizes as “the worst land-use decision our government has ever made.”

Besidessprawling outward, the region is also divided economically, with the majorityof jobs in Fairfax County and western Montgomery County and housing, especiallyaffordable housing, to the east, in Prince George’s County, and in DC itselfsouth of the Anacostia River. The division creates long, congested commutes. Yetlittle has been done to alleviate the situation despite its documentation asfar back as 1999 by the Brookings Institution in a report entitled “A Region Divided: The State of Growth in Greater Washington,D.C.” Aubrey Thagard, a development official for Prince George’s County,describes the area as “abundant in transit resources,” including fifteen Metrostations and two commuter rail lines which remain severely underdeveloped. Densedevelopment around these transit centers is an obvious way to combat sprawl andmake way for the influx of people that continue to arrive in the region. Ithasn’t happened, due to a combination of racial and economic fears regardingthe primarily African-American county, as well as corruption at the county level.Fortunately, Prince George’s has just elected new officials who seem to promisefar cleaner governance and better decision making. Thagard describes thedevelopment of New Carrollton, a key intersection of transit options includinga Metro and commuter rail line, as “probably oneof the largest transit-oriented developments on the eastern seaboard.”

In addition, the entire region has developed aplan to integrate growth, as explained by long-time smart growth advocate HarrietTregoning of the Washington, DC Office of Planning. Called Region Forward, theplan provides goals and targets for land use, housing, energy, the environment,health, education, and, of course, transportation. Tregoning describes theparadigm of drivers versus bikes versus transit as “so twentieth century”; thetwenty-first-century region needs to do it all, with frequent modal shifts formost citizens. Unfortunately, she explains, “not everyone has a choice,” since growthhasn’t accommodated these different modes, adding that land-use planning in theregion ranges from “excellent to awful.” In other words, planning has occurredtoo often on a local basis, resulting in an unwieldy patchwork, a situationthat Region Forward aims to change.

One key element of Region Forward is the numerousmetrics that provide for monitoring, measurement, and feedback to local andregional governments. The need for metrics, and the amazing ability oftwenty-first century technology to provide them, was a recurring theme ofRailvolution 2011. Countering these new technologies, however, is the lack ofenforcement mechanisms for Region Forward. Although all 21 county and municipalgovernments signed on to these plans, there’s no guaranteethat they’ll actually follow through. The metaphor of herding cats springs tomind, although that metaphor assumes an actual cat herder, which is lackinghere. Still, given the stated regional commitment, the recent dominance of atleast the rhetoric of smart growth, and (perhaps most important) the lack ofmoney to provide the roads and infrastructure that characterize sprawl, thereis reason for hope.

Zooming back to a more global perspective(something that should be easy for users of Google Earth), the DC region mightbe a test case for international coordination. We need better governance andintegrated planning. Regarding the environmental crisis, the know-how andtechnology exist for a true international response, but the governance is insufficient,to be generous. Instead, numerous actors—both countries and multinationalcorporations—look out for their own interests. Of course, in the long run thecommon interest trumps the individual interest, but it’s hard to get the actorsto realize this unfortunate outcome. Still, some governments of some countries,many nongovernmental organizations, and even some individuals and departmentswithin big corporations do keep an eye on the larger picture, on the commongood. We will see if, in its haphazard, zig-zagging manner and spurred by anongoing economic and environmental crisis, the DC region actually follows theRegion Forward map to create a better future. If so, perhaps there is hope thatthe planet can do so?

Climate Engineering: Not Mature, Not Viable, But Might It Have a Future?

2011-10-18T08:13:00.000-04:00

Giant mirrors in space,reflecting the sun’s rays away from earth. Huge vacuum cleaners that suckcarbon from the atmosphere. Plants genetically engineered to reflect light. Ironpellets “fertilizing” the ocean to draw in carbon dioxide. These are only a fewscenarios for climate engineering (also known as geoengineering) to counteractclimate change. Many sustainability proponents shudder at such schemes, fearingthe unexpected consequences they may bring. An ounce of prevention, after all,is better than a pound of cure. Stopping climate change from occurring in thefirst place is far superior to rolling the cosmic-ecological dice and hopingfor a lucky outcome. Yet, with no end in sight for greenhouse-gas emissions,might we be better off preparing for such eventualities?

A recent report exploresthis question; “ClimateEngineering: Technical Status, Future Direction, and Potential Responses” wasreleased in July by the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO). TimothyPersons, GAO Chief Scientist, discussed the report’s conclusions at a forumlast week at the Woodrow Wilson Institute in Washington, DC. He echoed many environmentalwarnings. “Engineering the global climate system is no small undertaking,”Persons stated several times, stressing the complex, global nature of thechallenge. He described the technology as not mature, not yet viable, lackingthe needed engineering base. Because it is impossible to do trial runs on avariety of Earths, we need far better computer models than we yet possess.

There are two kinds ofclimate engineering: carbon-dioxide removal (CDR), which would pull carbon outof the atmosphere and solar-radiation management (SRM), which would deflectsunlight from Earth in the upper atmosphere, in the clouds, or at ground level.Possible consequences from such schemes include changed weather patterns, andother atmospheric, land use, and ecological effects. Persons described CDR astotally immature and SRM as only slightly more mature. Such schemes would haveto be carried out systematically, after much research and discussion, by theglobal community, and with public support. Climate engineering is not just ascientific problem, but a political and social one as well, and the reportincludes a discussion of potential public response.

I had a chance todiscuss climate-engineering methods with Dr. Frederick K. Childers, SeniorPhysical Scientist at GAO, who described cloud brightening as the mostpromising technique. However, he warned that SRM schemes could cause unintendedconsequences, such as changes in precipitation. Furthermore, he pointed outthat such a program would have to continue in perpetuity; were it to stop, theEarth would quickly alter to where it would have been had no such interventiontaken place. Species would have insufficient time to adapt to such a rapid change,and would be better off had no such program occurred.

Persons, too, warned ofunexpected consequences to climate engineering schemes. Even advocates, heexplained, are wary, but think we need an insurance plan. It’s unfortunate thatwe even have to discuss climate engineering, it’s risky, but we’re already atrisk. Opponents of climate engineering argue against even doing research, thatit puts us at moral hazard, that it’s a slippery slope, that if these optionsare on the table leaders will go for the cheap technological fix instead ofdoing what it takes to slow and reverse climate change.

Yet Persons’ report and thesubsequent discussion convinced me that researching climate engineering mightbe worth the effort and expense, although I’ve previously opposed it (see, SSPPBlog Post, 3/22/11). Two factorsled to this mind change. The first was the sober, thoughtful nature of thegovernment scientists and bureaucrats at the forum. There was not a DoctorStrangelove in the bunch, dreaming up mad technological schemes to try on ourpoor planet. Quite the opposite, the GAO staff were painfully aware of thedangers of climate engineering, and unlikely to recommend any scheme that hadnot been investigated as thoroughly as possible.

The second reason thatstudying climate-engineering techniques might not spur reckless behavior is Person’sdescription of public reaction. Although most of the public is uninformed aboutclimate engineering, when it is explained they catch on quickly, and areconcerned about potential harm, understanding it as a last ditch effort. Thepublic also has a high trust level regarding scientists (far higher than forpoliticians, higher even than for journalists and bloggers!). A hysterical rush,then, seems unlikely, with a methodical process employing climate engineeringonly as a last resort more probable. With no possibility in sight of stoppinggreenhouse-gas emissions, perhaps we do need to study climate engineering as aform of insurance?

Of course, this stillleaves the problem of ocean acidification, which poses a severe risk to marinefood chains should fossil fuels continue to be burned. Who knows what the widerconsequences of that might be? Perhaps we need to begin work on ocean engineering?Or maybe rapidly decreasing our carbon emissions is the only solution, afterall.

Pipeline to a Dystopian Future? Activists Rally to Stop Keystone XL

2011-10-11T09:06:00.000-04:00

October 7 was theday of the final hearing on the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would bring tarsands oil from Alberta, Canada, through the American heartland to the GulfCoast. After months of protests, activists testified against the pipeline inWashington, DC, then held a final rally—pictured here—in a last-ditch effort tostop the project.

The problem isn’tjust that tar sands oil generates more greenhouse gas emissions thanconventional oil or that the extraction process devastates the surroundingenvironment. It’s not just that the pipeline, should it leak—which has happenedrepeatedly with similar projects—could pollute the Ogallala Aquifer, theprimary source of clean water for the Great Plains states. Even worse, buildingthe Keystone XL Pipeline would signal a commitment to using every last drop ofoil we can extract from the Earth, no matter how dirty the source. It willactivate, in the words of climate activist Bill McKibben, pictured speaking tothe rally, “the second largest pool of carbon on Earth, after the oil fields ofSaudi Arabia” (PBS NewsHour, 2011). Given that climate change may alreadybe causing extreme weather, and that the pace of change is only going toaccelerate, it would be reckless to continue to add carbon to the atmosphere. Ifthe Obama administration decides to approve the pipeline, it will signal ableak future.

See also, Sept 13 SSPP Blog Post “Game Over on Climate Change?”

Competing for the Future: Solar Decathlon Inspires Students (Photo Tour/Essay)

2011-10-04T09:53:00.000-04:00

We need thoughtful, energized young people working hard to solve our environmentalproblems. Nothing inspires this more than the Solar Decathlon, a biannual competitionwhich mobilizes teams of students from universities from across the UnitedStates and around the world designing and building environmentally friendlyhouses with a goal of net zero energy use. The twenty plans judged best arebuilt and assembled on the National Mall for the final competition, which endedthis past weekend.

All ofthe houses feature a photovoltaic array. And each has many or all of thefollowing: natural lighting (such as a large south facing, glare-free window),solar thermal panels (to heat water), thermal mass (to regulate temperature),computer monitoring of energy use, superior insulation, energy efficientappliances, natural materials, and native landscaping. The fun is in how thesefeatures are combined, and in the unique characteristics of the various houses.

Thereare a few ground rules. Houses must be under 1,000 square feet—itself anextremely green feature, since it requires less in the way of materials and ofenergy. The house must be attached to the grid, since battery storage ofelectricity is still expensive; energy is then fed into the grid when sunshineis abundant and taken from the grid when it’s not. Houses are usually builtappropriate to the surrounding environment, using local materials andlandscaping. They are prefabricated, which is green because they can beassembled with minimal material use and disturbance of the immediateenvironment. Many houses are also modular, and can be assembled in waysappropriate to different family’s needs.

TheUniversity of Maryland—representing my current home state—won this year’s SolarDecathlon with their Watershedhouse, which harvests and recycles water. Alas, the line of people waitingto see their house was so long that I couldn’t get near it. Purdue University—representingIndiana, my original home state—placed second. New Zealand’s VictoriaUniversity of Wellington came in third (could it be that I’m fated to end mylife in New Zealand?).

Fulldisclosure: Prior to this year’s decathlon, my sister called from WestLafayette, Indiana. She had seen the Purdue entry and exclaimed how wonderfulit was and that seeing all these enthusiastic students gives her hope thefuture. Shortly after, the SSPP journal editor contacted me and asked me to keep an eyeout for the entry from the New Jersey Institute, where he is a professor. So Ihave a conflict of interest here, which I solved by including photos of both houses—which,I’m sure you’ll agree, are both beautiful, unique, and well worth including.

A Dam Difficult Problem

2011-09-27T09:19:00.000-04:00

Dams are the big, unheralded renewable energy success story. Hydropower accounts for6.8% of electrical energy generated in the United States, compared to 3.6% for allother renewables (EIA,2011). Without dams, we would become that much more reliant, at least inthe short term, on coal or gas for electrical power, increasing climate-changeemissions.

Damsare also an ecological calamity. They alter a region’s hydrology, trapsediment, and harm ecosystems; they also hurt aquatic species and make itdifficult or impossible for many fish species to spawn.

Theecological harm done by dams is behind an ongoing, and increasingly successful,drive to shut them down. The largest dam removal project in American history,the 108-foot Elwha River Dam in Washington State, is occurring right now, partof an effort to, among other objectives, restore the region’s decimated salmonpopulation (The Washington Post,2011). This is only the latest in a trend; the number of dams removed hasincreased some 40% over the last five years. Dam removal also generatesconstruction and tourism jobs and often is supported by indigenous people. However,in the absence of reductions in demand, electricity lost from dams must bereplaced. Ideally, this should be by conservation or by clean energy, but it’shard to see why removing dams would accelerate the pace of these alternatives. Inreality, dam removal seems likely to spur energy generation that produces greenhousegases.

Acaveat is that many older dams produce relatively little electricity; losingthat power may be worth the restoration benefits caused by their removal. Yetdeciding which dams to eliminate is devilish business. How does one measuresalmon spawning now against long-term damage to the food chains that supportthem? How does one measure local ecosystem benefits against global changes thatoccur in twenty years? To make matters worse, we now know that carbon-dioxideemissions contribute to ocean acidification, which will harm some of the very specieswhose spawning grounds are restored by dam removal. This is the kind of thornyproblem, requiring long-term, asymmetrical cost-benefit analysis that theenvironmental community does not always face effectively. In the urge to solveone problem, to help one or a few species or a specific ecosystem, we may losesight of other consequences.

Totake one major example, a planned removal of four dams on the lower Snake River,located in the northwest United States, is estimated to increase greenhousegases by 3 million tons a year as more gas power plants are built to replacethe lost electricity (6^th Northwest Power Plan, 2010). Nevertheless, manyenvironmental groups support removal of these dams (The Oregonian, 2011). Yetmoney and effort are more effectively engaged in activities that decreasegreenhouse gases. I believe that the environmental community needs to thinkmore about how to prioritize actions. My own quick, sketchy priority list wouldput conservation measures first; then wind and solar; accompanied by a smart,expanded grid; as well as geothermal. There is plenty of room for discussion,but a tangible priority list using cost-benefit analysis seems warranted.

Asanother caveat, such an analysis is subject to numerous methodologicalchallenges due to difficulties capturing and monetizing the flow of benefits. Beyondthis difficulty, a strictly prioritized list based on cost-benefit analysis maybe counter to the way politics and human nature work. We tend to look atprojects one at a time, to value those close to us physically and close to ourinterests. Always, there is a need for political support. And, certainly,improvisation at the local and regional level is important. Still, suchconcerns can lead us in the wrong direction. Creating a priority list, even ifnecessarily provisional, will channel efforts to where they are most needed.

Human Rights and the Environment: What’s the Connection?

2011-09-20T08:31:00.000-04:00

The quest to protect human rightsgathered momentum as an international movement after World War II in responseto what came to be perceived as crimes against humanity. These rights have beenextended, for instance, to civil, development, and health rights, and codified,crystallizing in the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, created in2006. An intriguing twist has been a recent movement to extend human-rightsconcepts to the environment. This was the topic engaged by a robust group ofscholars and policy makers last week at the Woodrow Wilson International Forum for Scholars.

What does this connection between humanrights and the environment mean? And how can international law solidify anysuch connection? Andrew Clapham, Director of the Geneva Academy of HumanRights, illustrated through specific cases how individuals and groups can havetheir right to a clean environment violated, and how the Human Rights Councilhas intervened. Health is a key aspect. The dumping of toxic waste in Côte d’Ivoirewas seen as infringing on the right to a healthy environment and resulted in asettlement of $1,500 for each affected person. In Spain, Italy, Russia, andTurkey, a variety of cases have occurred regarding, for instance, a toxicfertilizer plant and a steel mill. An intriguing case involved the noise fromEngland’s Heathrow airport, criticized as a health hazard to those living nearit. Here, however, the court ruled against the plaintiffs, arguing that largerpublic rights to access were at stake. Clapham explained that the Human RightsCouncil must weigh competing interests (which may assuage those who worry aboutheavy-handed intervention). Many of these cases are complex and involve balancinga variety of rights and needs.

Clean drinking water is another right thatmany of us take for granted. Laurence Boisson de Chazournes of the AdvisoryCommittee of the Human Rights Council spoke of recent efforts to define accessto clean water as a human right. She explained that both developing anddeveloped nations agree on this, and on the related right to sanitation,although large portions of the globe lack both. Environmental protection is acorollary of the right to clean water since without, for instance, wetlands,these rights cease to exist. Boisson de Chazournes added that while these rightshave been formalized through an anthropomorphic perspective, they also shouldbe linked to the environment. Unspoken here is the implication that animals,and perhaps plants and ecosystems, might have some kind of separate rights (animplication that can, perhaps, be traced to the animal-rights movement). Boissonde Chazournes also discussed the rights of indigenous peoples to their land andintact ecosystems; in Brazil, for instance, native people have had to live withan enormous dam for which they were never consulted. The right of access to dueprocess, to democracy and transparency, is thus basic to human rights, a pointalso stressed by Clapham.

China has been violating the rights todue process, to some control over one’s own destiny and access to environmentalgoods, in moving massive quantities of water from the Mekong Delta in the southto the country’s water-impoverished north, explained Ruth Greenspan Bell of theWorld Resources Institute. This availability of water for some at the expense ofothers has not been subject to review. As with the Heathrow situation, abalancing of rights and interests is called for; do the water needs of thenorth outweigh the physical location of water in the south? Greenspan Bell alsodiscussed the rapidly melting Himalayan glaciers, a key water source for manycountries, including three with nuclear arms: China, India, and Pakistan. Chinais working to divert these waters for its own use. This is a paradigmaticsituation illustrating the explosive potential of environmental issues in thetwenty-first century. Bell hopes the issue can be solved through negotiationrather than violence. The question of how to apply principles of human andenvironmental rights in such a complex, volatile situation has only begun to bediscussed.

The melting glaciers touch on my ownconcern with climate change and the difficulty of pinning down who isresponsible for what effects over both spatial and temporal distances. CanAmerican behavior in the 1980s, for instance, be held responsible for theflooding of a small island in the Pacific in 2011?

The emerging meaning of human rights forthe environment was the subject of a healthy debate during thequestion-and-answer period. Should environmental issues be reframed in terms ofhuman rights, or should we merely look for overlapping areas where the conceptscan be applied in conjunction? Subsequent discussion inclined toward thelatter. Daniel Baer of the U.S. State Department wondered whether some cases thatresulted in small individual judgments were lessening the concept of humanrights. Clapham replied that if the system doesn’t recognize a wrong, humanrights can be invoked to bring it to an international level, but admitted thatmany problems are best approached through more local democratic processes.

The question of whether and how to applyhuman rights to the environment is far from academic. An international rule oflaw has begun to emerge, if intermittently and painfully, over the lastcentury. More recently, environmental destruction has become an internationalissue, most prominently regarding climate change but also regarding air andwater pollution crossing boundaries, toxic substances shipped around the world,and biodiversity shrinkage. Indeed, there is something of a race going onbetween international instruments to preserve the environment (for the sake ofhumanity, if not for the ecosystems themselves) and the tide of environmentaldegradation. In this race, degradation is ahead and widening its lead. TheUnited Nations is a frail, contentious institution with power allocatedasymmetrically, but it’s all we’ve got. The emerging concept that all humanshave rights to a safe, clean, healthy, supportive environment may be one key inthe quest for sustainability.

Game Over on Climate Change?

2011-09-13T08:42:00.000-04:00

“If the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentiallygame over,” warns Jim Hansen, the esteemed NASA scientist and climate activist.He argues that this source of oil will take climate change to an irreversiblelevel far higher than 400 parts per million (Hansen,2011). Hansen was one of numerous scientists,celebrities, activists, and politicians recently arrested in front of the WhiteHouse protesting the Keystone Pipeline, a 1,700 mile project to move oilderived from tar sands in Alberta, Canada to the United States. Unfortunately, theAmerican media is largely neglecting the dangers of our turn to dirtier sourcesof oil.

The process for extracting tar-sands oil is harmful onmultiple levels. The amount of carbon dioxide released has been estimated to be82% more per barrel than for conventionally extracted oil (TheNew York Times,2011). In Alberta, some 50 square miles ofland so far have been stripped of forest and topsoil in a violent process that killsanimals and likely sickens humans (NationalGeographic, 2009). Our existingpipelines have been subject to multiple spills that harm drinking water anddamage ecosystems (The New York Times, 2011). Insum, building the pipeline accelerates an approach in which we extract everylast drop of oil from the planet regardless of consequences.

The Environmental Protection Agency has warned about theimpact of the Keystone Pipeline (UPI.com,2011); however, it’s the State Departmentthat has jurisdiction over the project, and it’s passed their environmentalreview process. A final decision is pending.

With so much at stake we should expect a vigorous debate. Certainly,the claims of the Keystone protestors shouldn’t be accepted uncritically, buttheir stature and willingness to be arrested means they should be taken veryseriously. But where’s the issue in our national media? They seem part of whatamounts to a conspiracy of denial, in this case through silence or trivialization.Major media simply isn’t taking the unique environmental challenges of the 21stcentury seriously enough.

Take The WashingtonPost, the newspaper that I follow most closely. A search of the past fewmonths shows four editorials on the issue, and a paucity of news articles. Unfortunately,only one of the editorials is by an environmentalist—Bill McKibben (Washington Post, 2011);the others utterly fail to engage with the environmental reality of tar sandsoil. One makes light of Daryl Hannah, the actress arrested at the protest (Washington Post, 2011). Thethird editorial, by economist Robert J. Samuelson, supports the pipeline as criticalto the American economy (Washington Post, 2011). Andthe editorial board contributes a piece that makes the same argument asSamuelson (Washington Post, 2011).

The heart of this argument is, in Samuelson’s words, that notbuilding the pipeline would be futile, since “Canada has made clear that itwill proceed with oil-sands development regardless of the American decision. Ifthe United States doesn’t want the oil, China and other Asian countries do.” Environmentalistsdispute how easy it would be to build an alternative pipeline to Canada’s westcoast for shipment to Asia. Yet this isn’t really the main issue. Samuelson—alongwith The Washington Post editorialboard—is effectively urging the United States to sacrifice the future for ashort-term economic boost, giving up any moral and diplomatic leadership regardingthe march toward climate disaster. Unless ThePost can refute Hansen’s claims about the tar sands pushing climate changeto an irrevocable level, their argument amounts to “Drop dead, futuregenerations—we need that oil now.”

The situation is a kind of combined tragedy of the commonsand prisoner’s dilemma, in which the actions and potential actions of othersjustify doing the wrong thing. Every country is in a rush to extractever-dirtier energy before others do so; the needs of the planet, and the ecosystemsthat support us, always take second place. A more intellectually honestargument would acknowledge the inevitable conclusion, that we need strongerinternational action against climate change.

What we have instead is a race to exploit oil resources asthey become more distant and more difficult to get to. We see this also in themove to drill in Alaskan and Arctic waters, symptomatic of the economy-first,economy-only attitude. Similarly, as a portent of our future, the melting ofsea ice allowing passage through the Arctic was greeted with delight by anumber of companies in a scramble for advantage (The Christian Science Monitor, 2009).

A regular editorialist for The Washington Post, Samuelson has a pattern—common to manymainstream economists—of prioritizing economic growth over the environment. Thefield of economics has long relegated the environment to an “externality,” yetSamuelson takes this to extremes; in his worldview, the environment is soexternal that it seems not even to exist. It’s easier to simply ignore changesthat are taking place now, will get worse in our own lifetimes, and far worsein the lives of our children. But climate change doesn’t fit the standardeconomic models, and Samuelson’s column regularly takes shots at environmentalconcerns. The occasional editorial by a figure such as McKibben is not a faircounterweight.

Although The WashingtonPost has improved over the past few years in acknowledging climate change,actual experts on the topic are sparse on the editorial pages. Fortunately, The New York Times is better, opposingthe Keystone Pipeline in two recent editorials, but this stance seems to be theexception. Although I don’t have a comprehensive survey of the media at mydisposal, it’s my impression that they are much closer to The Washington Post, doing a certain amount of good environmentalreportage, paying lip service to “green” issues, but overall neglecting ortrivializing climate change and sustainability. Where’s the attention to theeminent protestors in Washington, DC? If the Freedom Rides and the March onWashington had gotten such little coverage during the 1960s, perhaps the CivilRights laws would never have been passed. Our major media are entrusted topresent the salient issues of the day and to give the best experts full voice. Theyare not doing their job.

If Life in the Ocean Perishes . . . .

2011-09-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

Guest Blogger: Alanna Mitchell

Recently,I’ve become obsessed with our planet’s five mass extinctions, those rare eventswhen three-quarters of the planet’s species vanish in a geological heartbeat.

Theone that comes most readily to mind is the most recent, the Cretaceous, whichended 65 million years ago and took out the dinosaurs. But there were fourbefore that–the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, and Triassic–that did as muchdamage to the tree of life, or, in some cases even more, than the one thatended the reign of the Tyrannosaurus rex and his ilk.

I’mthinking about them for two reasons. The first is a preliminary report thatcame out in June from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean. This isa group of the planet’s top marine scientists who are compiling a comprehensivereport on ocean health to be finished in 2012. Their initial findings, widelypicked up by news organizations around the world, were grim.

Theocean’s health is in a “critical” state, the scientists found, the directresult of human activities. It’s so dire that we’ve actually begun to alter thebasic chemistry of the ocean. That matters, the scientists said, because theocean is one of the “key operating systems” of the planet. When we start todamage it, we’re hurting the planet’s ability to support life as it exists now.Put more starkly, if all life on land were to die tomorrow, life in the oceanwould be fine. But if life in the ocean perished, so would life on land.Terrestrial species, including you and me, are dependent on life in the oceanfor our own survival. Marine plankton produce every second breath of oxygen youbreathe, to give just one example of the reasons we need to pay attention towhat’s going on in the ocean.

Thescientists pointed the finger at several human activities, each of which isgetting far worse far more quickly than scientists had predicted. Some areobvious. We take out too many fish. We trawl across the ocean floor with heavyrigs leaving a wake of destruction, and then we pollute the waters when we takeoil and gas out of the seabed. We dump sewage and industrial wastes into thewaters creating dead zones with little or no oxygen, and introduce toxic newspecies to parts of the ocean that have no defenses against them.

Oneof the big threats they identify isn’t so obvious. That’s the phenomenon knownas ocean acidification, a result of the high-carbon world we’ve created here onEarth. As we burn the fossilized remains of plants and animals that livedmillions of years ago–coal, oil and gas–we’re releasing the ancient carbonstored in their bodies into today’s atmosphere in the form of carbon-dioxidegas. That’s why the concentration of CO₂ has risen from 280 partsper million (ppm) (just under 0.03%) before the industrial revolution to 392ppm today (just under 0.04%).

Alevel that high is unusual. We know it hasn’t been above 300 ppm for 20 millionyears.

Andit would be far higher except that the ocean is absorbing a great deal of thatancient carbon, roughly a third of what’s been emitted since we started burningfossil fuels for industry about a quarter of a millennium ago. But while thegas is inert (if heat-trapping) in the atmosphere, it is chemically reactive inthe ocean, making carbonic acid. We’ve put so much ancient carbon into theatmosphere, and therefore into the ocean, that we’ve altered the pH of theglobal ocean. Today, it’s 30% more acidic than it was before industrialization,and more acidic than it’s been in about 55 million years.

Thisbasket of threats means that if we do nothing to reverse these trends, the world’socean “is at a high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine speciesunprecedented in human history,” the scientists conclude.

Andthat’s where the second piece of my obsession comes in. I’ve been reading apaper recently published in Nature: “Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction alreadyarrived?” by Anthony Barnosky and several collaborators.

Theauthors have a handy table on the paper’s first page, describing the five massextinctions, when they happened, how long the die-offs took, how many specieswere winked out. Opposite these descriptions is a list of the reasonsscientists have been able to reconstruct for the extinction spasms.

Ineach case, changes to ocean chemistry were thought to be key factors. And what’sthe answer to the question the paper poses? The authors conclude that anothercatastrophic mass extinction is imminent within just a few centuries “ifcurrent threats to many species are not alleviated.”

“Itmay be of particular concern that this extinction trajectory would play outunder conditions that resemble the ‘perfect storm’ that coincided with pastmass extinctions,” the authors write.

Thedifference between now and the past extinctions, is, of course, that our handis on this trigger. Unlike in the past, when brutal planetary change came aboutas continents shifted, mountain ranges emerged, tectonic plates moved around,and asteroids hit, today, the change is simply the cumulative effect of humanactivity.

Thelogical next step is to stop the activity that is putting life on theplanet–undoubtedly including billions of humans–at risk. It seems to me thatthis is a policy-maker’s dreamtime, with the biggest stakes of any phase of ourspecies’ short span on the planet.

AlannaMitchell is the author of the international bestseller Seasick: Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth,University of Chicago Press, 2009. It won the Grantham Prize for Excellence inEnvironmental Reporting in 2010.

Good Night Irene!

2011-08-30T08:47:00.000-04:00

And the angel taketh the censer; and he filled it with the fire of the altar, and cast it upon the earth: and there followed thunders, and voices, and lightnings, and an earthquake.

Revelations 8:5

Having experienced an earthquake a week ago and Hurricane Irene two days ago puts me in an apocalyptic mood. The apocalypse can be biblical, but it can also be environmental—or both at the same time. In this case it was, perhaps, only a little foretaste of what may be to come, nature reminding us that it is far more powerful, that, we in fact, are only alive as a part of nature, are utterly dependent on it, that it can destroy us as if on a whim, though really nature is indifferent.

The earthquake, it seems, was just a fluke, an unusual 5.9 on the Richter scale in a region that rarely experiences such things. As I was preparing to go shopping, I sensed a rumbling in the background, the cats started leaping crazily, and Thelma, the tabby, hid under the bed. Then the house shook, I could hear the lights overhead shaking, I tried to decide whether it was an earthquake or perhaps a terrorist attack, it went on longer than expected then it stopped. A natural force scaring me, scaring the cats.

But wait, weren’t the cats part of nature? No, for they have a separate agency and consciousness. But yes, for clearly animals are part of the natural world—as are people. Nature, it seems, is complicated, made unitary only through human abstraction, “Nature.”

The earthquake, though, clearly was separate from humanity, not caused by us, indifferent to us. What about the hurricane? It, too, might seem independent of human action. Yet such “natural” disasters are occurring more frequently, intensifying, and may be a result of climate change (The New York Times, 2011). Some scientists are calling this the “new normal,” a period of intensifying extremes, with more floods, monster snow storms, larger hurricanes, withering droughts, and other unpredictable events. A normal that’s ever changing, but slowly enough that we can’t quite be sure, so that a hundred-year flood becomes a fifty-year flood, perhaps becomes a twenty-year flood? It’s difficult, though, to connect any specific event to climate change, as we don’t know what the weather would have been like otherwise. Irene, for instance, may have been unusual in its size, but not in its strength. Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, was the culmination of a deadly series of hurricanes. Yet it was followed by years of calm on the U.S. Gulf Coast and East Coast. The connection of climate change to natural disasters is hard to pin down, the pattern of escalation zig-zagging and uncertain.

Yet such events to seem to increasing. If Hurricane Irene does at least $1 billion of damage it will make 2011 a record year for such large-scale natural disasters in the United States (LiveScience.com, 2011). In the opposite extreme, Texas is in the midst of its worst ever drought, drying up rivers, killing cattle, and devastating ecosystems (Business Insider, 2011). In a biblical touch, bodies of water have turned red due to bacteria that thrive in such conditions. Ants and roaches are invading homes. (As a side note, my niece’s house in Nashville was badly damaged a year ago by a tree branch from a particularly violent storm; then a month ago my brother’s house in Chicago was burnt to the ground by a lightning strike)

Again, though, climate change is not necessarily the villain here, or at least not the only villain, as a La Niña seems largely to blame. Still, the cause, as of any weather related event, is an inextricable web of factors probably intensified by climate change.

Here in Rockville, Maryland, Irene was a bit of a fizzle, just some heavy rain and wind for far less than the 24 hours predicted. I slept through most of it. During a break in my sleep, I wandered into the living room to pet our calico, perched defiantly near our big picture window, not in the least afraid of Irene. Although our electric utility is something of a joke, ranked one of the worst in the nation, we didn’t lose electricity, not even for a second. All the canned food and water we stocked up on is something of a waste—most likely we’ll snack on it over the next weeks, adding empty calories, although saving it for a possible future disaster would be smarter.

As I fell back to sleep on the morning of the hurricane, I was thankful that Irene was such a disappointment. Who wants flying branches, lightning strikes, and electrical outages? And I realized that I wanted nothing more than for climate change to be a hoax. I’ll gladly eat all the apocalyptic words of warning I’ve been dispensing over the last few years for continued safety and comfort. The apocalypse is exciting to watch in science fiction movies; God forbid it should happen in real life.

The Failure of Energy Policy (Book Review and Discussion)

2011-08-23T08:01:00.003-04:00

Nearly forty years after the first energy crisis, the United States is more dependent on foreign oil than ever: we now import 3.5 billion barrels of oil per year versus less than half a billion in 1970. This is the case despite grand pronouncements from a succession of presidents about our need for energy independence. Why? Michael Graetz summarized it succinctly at a recent Center for American Progress forum: “Solving energy problems requires long time horizons, but our politics are horribly short term.”

This captures it, although there are more details: a variety of interests have sabotaged our politics. An aversion to spending has limited our programs. Carbon taxes and cap and trade are anathema, leading to less efficient policies. We’ve never had to pay the true costs of energy, and indeed have subsidized inefficient and environmentally destructive production.

Our failure to enact rational energy policy is the subject of Graetz’s The End of Energy: The Unmaking of America's Environment, Security, and Independence (MIT Press, 2011), which tells the story of our failures in vivid detail. Opening with the energy crises of the 1970s, the book proceeds through oil, nuclear, coal, natural gas, and alternative energy. It explains how special interests have made energy legislation far more complex than necessary, as in the recent federal cap-and-trade bill, with its numerous goodies to placate various lobbies, which passed the House but failed in the Senate. (Graetz doesn’t say so, but it brings to mind the process for passing healthcare, in which satisfying numerous interests makes for an absurdly complicated bill of thousands of pages.) Graetz prefers the far simpler Cantwell-Collins bill, essentially a carbon tax with most of the money returned to the taxpayers, which got nowhere in the legislative process. The failures of the Obama period recapitulate those of Jimmy Carter (who did get a major, if insufficient, energy bill passed). With higher stakes, the more recent failure is grander, illustrating the disaster our political process has become.

Looked at in political terms, The End of Energy presents a coherent narrative of missed opportunities and increasing dysfunction. In terms of energy, however, the careful reader might notice some changes in the narrative, as our goals are contested and modified. The 1970s crises were largely due to shut-offs of oil from the Middle East. One means of fighting this, which we’ve successfully done, was to shut down oil-based electricity generation; however, this still leaves us dependent on faraway governments for transportation fuel. Carter also suggested creating synthetic fuel out of coal to power our automobiles. All of this makes perfect sense if the crisis is just about oil and its availability; coal is a cheap, abundant, domestic power source. In the 1970s, climate change was merely an esoteric theory, so why not move to coal (other than its rather horrendous local environmental effects)?

Graetz soon alters the story, however, with a discussion of the 1970s environmental movement. It quickly becomes apparent that the book’s author considers many environmentalists soft-headed utopians (although he avoids such rhetoric), whose visions of a locally based economy and opposition to every form of energy aside from local renewable are out of step with the modern world: “American environmentalism, after all, had always been about limits, having originated in isolated acts of resistance to unbridled growth.” Graetz decries the environmental movement’s faith in local solar and wind: “The goal to replace oil, coal, and nuclear power with solar power residence by residence and business by business is hopelessly utopian.” As a tale of our failure, however, The End of Energy does not discuss the potential large-scale renewable projects, such as giant solar thermal and geothermal plants connected to a rebuilt national smart grid, that might provide another model for solving our energy problems.

Graetz, however, is in total agreement with environmentalists regarding climate change, which he calls a “game changer.” Our energy policy now must be based on limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. So, for instance, he laments our failure to develop nuclear energy—a source long opposed by much of the environmental movement (with some important exceptions, such as Stewart Brand and George Monbiot). And it’s undeniable that, had we built more nuclear plants, we would have emitted fewer greenhouse gases. It would be interesting to see Graetz’s reaction to the Fukushima disaster, which apparently happened after the book was completed. The problem is that, while nuclear plants have extremely few accidents, not all circumstances can be anticipated—a meteor strike, a terrorist attack, a tsunami, for instance. In the extremely rare event that nuclear plants do fail, the results can be devastating.

As a proponent of large energy projects and centralized policy, Graetz presents a challenge to those who place their stock in small-scale energy and sustainable consumption. Local renewables do have the advantage of functioning during blackouts and put some power in the hands of individuals. However, they can never achieve the economies of scale of larger projects. Unlike some advocates of sustainable consumption, Graetz argues that economic growth and reduced energy use can occur simultaneously. For instance, “in the period following the 1973 oil embargo, using 10 percent less energy had no adverse effect on U.S. economic growth.” However, given the entry of the Chinese and Indian middle classes onto the world scene, and the need to drastically cut carbon emissions, it seems impossible to continue our current assumptions about growth. True, we need the large-scale renewable projects and the increased energy efficiency that Graetz calls for, but we also need local renewables and a drastic pruning of the more lavish aspects of our lifestyle. We need it all—more of less, more renewables, more local changes, more national and international action. In this sense, both Graetz and the environmentalists are right.