"By leaves we live"

Ice sheets: A new study confirms with greater accuracy than ever before that world's major ice sheets are melting at an accelerating rate. This is why sea level rise is happening 60% faster than was expected in the most recent IPCC report.

Coal boom: 1200 new coal plants planned. Three quarters of the new plants are to be located in China and India. A breakdown of the countries is available here. Though India's expansion plans need to be taken with a grain or two of salt.

Extinction is forever: Tim Flannery reflects on the challenges facing Australian biodiversity and suggests that the current approach isn't working. With a reply from David Bowman. Perhaps how do we triage conservation priorities?

Coal seam gas: Recent measurements (yet to be peer reviewed) suggest coal seam gas production may have significant "fugitive emissions" of methane that render the claims of the gas industry to be somewhat less bad for the climate questionable. Some have suggested that natural gas is methadone to coal's heroin.

Fracking: Stories from the front line in the US. In the UK, academics have just advised the government that it is "categorically clear" that pursuing a shale gas dominated energy strategy is incompatible with legislated UK climate targets. But it looks like they are going to do it anyway.

Big cats, small space: Only 25% of the original African savannah remains undeveloped, leaving less and less room for the iconic megafauna that call it home. Lion numbers are plummeting and they may soon be listed as endangered.

IPCC: The IPCC has been repeatedly wrong on climate change, frequently underestimating the rate and impacts of change.
Note that the first link makes an embarrassingly obvious mistake in its opening claim, confusing carbon with carbon dioxide and so getting the numbers hopelessly muddled.

Trees: All around the world, ancient trees are dying at an alarming rate.

Twenty Nile rivers, and other stories

Water stress: By 2025, to feed growing populations, the world will need to find extra fresh water equivalent to the flow of twenty Nile rivers.

Extreme weather: Bill McKibben ponders just how strange this year has been.

Junk food: George Monbiot concludes that a possible link between Alzheimer's and poor diet might be more than sensationalist media spin.

Heat: 2013 tipped to break more records. With a good chance of an El Niño forming in the coming months, combined with the ongoing warming trend from greenhouse gases, next year could be one for the record books. At least until the next El Niño...

Mangroves: Per hectare lost, mangrove destruction is three times worse for greenhouse gas emissions than deforestation.

NB The following articles are eighteen months out of date, but I neglected to post them earlier and they are interesting.
Malthusians beware: Blame the World Bank and IMF (amongst others) for famine in the Horn of Africa, but don't blame overpopulation.

Deep sea fishing: Is any deep-sea fishing sustainable? The short answer is "almost none". Deep-sea fisheries tend to regenerate very slowly, given the small amounts of energy entering the system. Many of the creatures down there are older than your grandmother.

Organic farming: It can be more profitable than conventional farming over the long term, even if organic premiums drop by 50%.

Climate panic: What we can all be doing about climate change. The Onion nearly always hits the key issue on the nose.

Technology and the church: an analogy

Following the reflections on technology vs. technologism I posted a week ago, I thought I'd offer an extended analogy to tease out what I think are some of the implications for the church of rejecting such technologism in relation to our ecological predicament.

The AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa is a large and wicked* social problem. Its causes are complex and involve (amongst others) both individual lifestyle choices and broader cultural assumptions. It is a slow-burn problem, with cases multiplying in largely invisible ways (that is, infection is not an experience that a subject is usually aware of at the time) and symptoms only really becoming manifest years later. It is also a problem where the accumulation of individual cases generates further complex social realities (AIDS orphans, child-headed households, a culture of stigmatism and so on). In South Africa, for quite some time, the government held a position of officially denying the link between HIV and AIDS, holding back implementation of various policies that, while being very unlikely to "solve" the problem, nonetheless could have significantly reduced the spread of the disease and hence the resulting human suffering.
*Wicked in the technical sense, that is, a complex and multifaceted problem without a single "solution".

I'm just sketching a little and I'm going to assume that the parallels to a number of ecological problems are more or less obvious to those paying attention to such matters.

The point I'd like to make concerns the role and limitations of technology. In this case, I have in view both the very low tech option of condoms and the considerably higher tech option of antiretroviral drugs. Widespread adoption of safer sex practices would very significantly slow down the spread of the disease. Therefore, government and NGO programmes that promote such harm minimisation are, to my mind, basically a no-brainer. The widespread provision of antiretroviral drugs is slightly more complex, involving various economic implications and calculations, though still clearly a good idea on balance. These do not cure the disease, but they do slow its progression in an infected individual, and so increase his/her life expectancy. Now, in this situation, technology serves to provide real social and personal goods, and any responsible government ought to be implementing such actions amongst their many priorities.

Nonetheless, such provisions, while reducing the pace and severity of the crisis, do not by themselves decisively solve it. Huge damage has already been sustained and more is in the pipeline in the form of millions of carriers whose lives are likely to be shorter than they would otherwise be, and whose future sexual activities will be conducted under a shadow. Grief remains a healthy and appropriate response, not as a replacement for these policies, but simply out of emotional honesty.

Furthermore, implementing these policies doesn't remove the moral evaluation (at both personal and cultural levels) of the failures that enabled the problem to spiral to such magnitude. It would be easy to indulge in cheap and simplistic condemnation of the lax sexual ethics of many of those who end up infected (though of course, many spouses and children may contract the condition entirely innocently), and this would be reductionist if that were the extent of one's response. Conversely, not to comment on the sexual sins as a spiritual problem manifest in grave social harms would also be to miss an important component of the situation.

Now the analogy is not perfect and I'm sure there are all kinds of important differences between AIDS and ecological crises, but perhaps this example may illustrate the possibility that technological responses of real social benefit do not render the problem less wicked (in the technical sense) and do not sidestep the need for careful moral evaluation of the situation.

Now, consider the position of a Christian church facing an AIDS epidemic amongst the congregation. There are all kinds of possible responses, and a healthy one will include many facets: caring for the sick and orphaned; seeking honesty and reconciliation in relationships damaged by sexual misdeeds; helping the congregation understand the nature of the disease including causes and its likely effects; calling on governments to implement responsible social policies; planning for a future in which more families are broken and child-headed households increase. Amidst this, I presume that it would be a good idea to lay out sensitively the good news of sexually committed exclusive covenant relationships (within a full-orbed proclamation of the gospel of grace, repentance, forgiveness, freedom and reconciliation). Now, to speak of the goodness of sexual relationships as they were intended may not "cut it" as a social policy, and nor need this proclamation imply ecclesial support is restricted purely to abstinence/chastity programmes. But if the church does not recognise that one of the significant contributing factors to this epidemic is the eclipse of scriptural sexual ethics, then it would only be doing part of its job. Ultimately, the church will be praying and working towards becoming a community within which healthy sexual relationships of trust and commitment are the norm, where failures are handled sensitively and graciously, where reconciliation and stronger relationships are the goal. And even if to some observers it appears foolish, naïve or old-fashioned, it will hold onto the possibility of the partial and provisional healing of desire amidst a sinful world that at times shows little evidence of such a message being effective. It will hold onto the hope of eschatological healing, yet without confusing this with any sort of divine guarantee for miraculous deliverance from the consequence of our actions today.

Similarly, while technology may offer certain paths that reduce the pace and severity of ecological harms, and while governments may well be wise to consider various options carefully and responsibly (rather than the present mix of short term opportunism, denial and misguided or cynical tokenism), nonetheless, the church cannot but notice that behind our ecological woes are certain assumptions and patterns of behaviour: a reckless indifference to the consequences of our pursuit of ever higher levels of consumption; an insatiable acquisitiveness that desperately tries to find meaning in stuff; a foolish arrogance that claims to wield ultimate mastery over matter; a short-sighted willingness to sell our children's inheritance for a quick thrill today coupled with an inordinate unwillingness to let go of luxuries; and an ignorant inattentiveness to the plight of our fellow creatures. Noting these roots needn't remove the possibility that the church will support responsible technological mitigation of our crises, but the church will continue to hold out - despite the apathy and scorn of the surrounding culture - a picture of human communities not based primarily on acquisition, of a good life that is not built primarily around consumption or material wealth, of a heart that is content and generous and which desires neither poverty nor riches. It will speak out against the personal and systemic greed whose manifestation is a destabilised and scarred planet. It will grieve over the damage already done, and the more that is in the pipeline. It will speak of grace, forgiveness, repentance, reconciliation - and of a divine eschatological healing of a groaning world, yet without assuming that this implies we will not face the more or less predictable consequences of our present failures and so not at all neglecting the task of both caring for victims and advocating on behalf of those without a voice in the matter: the global poor, future generations and other species.

In short, the church is not unmindful of the potential benefits of technology, but it is called to be free from the slavish fascination that treats it as our saviour. A world in peril needs more than a renewable clean source of power; it needs a renewed and cleansed heart.

Test tube hamburgers, and other stories

Artificial meat: closer than you think? Would you eat meat grown in a test tube? If not (and you eat meat), are you satisfied with your knowledge of how your meat is produced?

Air Con: As the world warms, we'll just crank up the air con, right? Wrong. Since 1987, new air conditioners are no longer a threat to stratospheric ozone, but the replacement for ozone-destroying CFCs have been a range of climate-disrupting alternatives, each far worse than CO₂ molecule for molecule: "The leading scientists in the field have just calculated that if all the equipment entering the world market uses the newest gases currently employed in air-conditioners, up to 27 percent of all global warming will be attributable to those gases by 2050."

Land grab: An area of agricultural land larger than Texas in developing nations (80% in Africa) has been bought up by foreign governments and corporations over the last few years, according to a new study from the Worldwatch Institute. Some of this has been European corporations keen to make a profit from biofuels regulations, some has been from large nations with serious and growing domestic food security issues, such as China and Saudi Arabia.

Flatter highlands: At least in biodiversity terms. Climate change is flattening the biodiversity found in the Scottish highlands.

China: The fastest growing economy in the history of humanity is not making a happy nation.

House sizes: Australians have some of the largest houses per occupant in the world. This is a significant part of the reason why we have the highest per capita carbon footprint in the OECD.* Large houses not only require more energy-intensive building materials (concrete and steel are both associated with very high emissions), but - all other things being equal - have larger energy needs than smaller dwellings. It doesn't help that we have one of the most coal-reliant electricity systems in the world.
*And that's even before we consider our imported manufactured goods or our exported coal. We export more coal than any other nation.

Solved: Four significant ecological issues have been adequately addressed since 1992. Only another eighty-six to go.

Fracking: the real danger. I wholeheartedly agree and am glad to finally see someone in the mainstream press pick up on this. There are all kinds of legitimate questions about the safety of fracking shale for non-conventional gas, but the biggest one is most rarely addressed, namely, tapping into this resource massive expands the available pool of fossil carbon we will be moving from safely underground and into the active carbon cycle where it can mess with ocean pH and the climate.

Endangered species: The International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List is widely regarded as the most authoritative attempt to account for the level of extinction threat faced by the world's species. Species are categorised according to the degree of severity - Least Concern, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, Extinct - yet of all the world's species, the IUCN estimates it has only assessed 4% so far. Of the dangers faced by the other 96% we have as yet little clear idea.

When the water ends: Africa's climate conflicts

Here is short (16 min) video from Yale Environment 360 highlighting the ways that climate change and water stress are already leading to increased conflict in parts of Africa. Similar stories can be told for parts of South America. These may not yet be climate wars, but they are climate skirmishes, a picture of what is to come.

Unfortunately, it does not seem possible to embed this video.

Climate Nation: why conservatives can love climate action

Here's a new film that is trying to bridge the abyss of the US culture wars. Focussed on the fringe benefits of climate change mitigation, it speaks in the voices of a CIA director, an army colonel, an airline executive, a Christian minister, a Texan farmer and a wild Alaskan: patriotic, God-loving, gun-toting, meat-eating, small town, red state Republican neoconservatives. It claims to be a "climate change solutions movie that doesn't even care if you believe in climate change". Rather than showing us how climate change is already fuelling conflict in Africa or projecting the extinction of millions of species in coming decades, this effort simply highlights the various advantages of taking actions that also happen to mitigate climate change.

Rather than saying climate action is a painful duty we cannot avoid, this film presents it as an opportunity to save money, reduce pollution, increase national security and reduce military casualties. One approach focuses on push - avoid this stick - and the other on pull - chase this carrot. Perhaps elements of both are necessary and different approaches will speak to different audiences.

Watching the trailer led me to ponder again how divisive this issue is, particularly in the US. Much has been written about the various causes of this: historical, psychological, political, cultural and economic (and I would add, theological). Some are put off by the commonly proposed responses, which clash with their ideological commitments. This film seems to be particularly addressing such people.

However, amongst all the other reasons, I think there is a very personal reason that some people resist the scientific understanding of the issue. For many people, acknowledging the existence and severity of the threat of anthropogenic climate change involves a reassessment of significant parts of our life story. It can mean realising that some of our most cherished experiences and dreams have a terrible cost associated with them. For those who have earned a livelihood from carbon intensive activities, it can threaten the virtue of some major life achievements and raise the question of whether one's life may have done more harm than good. To put it in Christian terms, acknowledging the reality and significance of anthropogenic climate change can require repentance. And that is too high a bar for some, who would rather reject the science than reassess their lives.

That is why it is important that grace precedes repentance. We don't repent in order for God to be gracious to us; we repent because when we were still far off, he has already seen us, run to us and embraced us.
H/T Sylvia Rowley.

The cost of cars

"According to the World Health Organisation, road deaths in Africa could double between 2008 and 2030. Road traffic crashes already account for more deaths than from malaria, and by 2030 road death is expected to exceed AIDS as a cause of death world-wide. [...] Road traffic crashes are estimated to cost developing countries [US]$53 billion per year, which is more than they receive in development aid."

- Ian Roberts with Phil Edwards, The Energy Glut: Climate Change
and the Politics of Fatness (Zed: London, 2010), 107.

This is an interesting little book. Although it has relatively little to say about climate change, which is largely taken for granted in the discussion despite the title, it effectively explores the many other costs of our globally growing reliance on fossil fuel driven transport. The primary angle is public health, and apart from a series of eyebrow-raising statistics about traffic mortalities, the main thrust is drawing a strong and quite convincing social link between the obesity epidemic and automobile use.

In short (and with various caveats and nuances), the book argues that obesity is not a problem of the obese. We are not faced with a sudden widespread loss of dietary self-control. We are collectively getting fatter (even the thin people), as measured in global and national BMI statistics, and as a result, a rapidly rising percentage of the population now fall into the medical category of obese (BMI ≥ 30). This isn't because we're eating more (we're not: calorie intake is actually declining) but because we're less physically active. And at a broad scale the strongest statistical correlation with physical inactivity is automobile use. Our reliance on the cheap energy of fossil fuels is the root of both climate change and obesity (hence the book's subtitle).

And this is where traffic mortalities and injuries make this trend self-perpetuating. The more cars on the road, the more dangerous the road becomes to pedestrians and cyclists, and the greater incentive there is to participate in a transportation arms race by purchasing a vehicle for oneself. In a given society, after a certain point of automobile use is reached, traffic mortality figures start to decline. The author, whose background is in public health associated with motor vehicle accident trauma, argues that this has relatively little to do public safety campaigns and much more to do with the fact that pedestrians and cyclists, having lost the battle, largely quit the field (or road in this case). A road thus dominated by lumps of steel and iron each hurtling along with more kinetic energy than a speeding bullet becomes a barrier to cyclists and pedestrians, and a powerful motoring lobby* ensures that "accidents" are blamed on the individuals rather than the system as a whole (in a move parallel to the gun lobby: "cars don't kill people, bad drivers and erratic pedestrians do").
*The text notes that eight of the ten largest global corporations (based on the Fortune 500 in 2008) are either oil companies or car manufacturers. And the largest is a supermarket chain, which has its own links to both fossil fuel transport and cheap food energy.

Those excluded, of course, include all children, who are then conditioned into a sedentary lifestyle from a young age.

Ironically, obesity is actually a greater health threat than cycling on dangerous roads dominated by cars and trucks.

"The overall risk of death for adults who cycle to work on a regular basis is between 10 and 30 per cent lower than for those who drive to work (Woodcock et al., 2009). This survival benefit persists after controlling for a range of factors that might differ between cyclists and motorists. In other words, even taking into account road danger, the balance of health risks and benefits is strongly in favour of cycling. Cycling in traffic may be dangerous but not cycling is more dangerous. There are consistently fewer deaths than expected from heart attacks, strokes and cancer among cycle commuters. [...] There is also evidence that the injury risks for cyclists decrease as more people take up cycling. Per kilometre, cycling is safer when there are a lots of other cyclists around. It has been estimated that a doubling in the percentage of the population that cycle results in a 34 per cent reduction in the death rate per kilometre cycled (Jacobsen, 2003). By cycling, you will improve your own health and you will help to make cycling safer for others, encouraging more to join the growing movement."

- The Energy Glut, 108.

Cycling is revolutionary in more ways than one. Get on your bike.
Image by JKS.

Things are worse than you thought: links to brighten your day

Why things are worse than you thought: Peak oil might not be a slope, but a cliff.
H/T Sam.

Guardian: the next food crisis?

BP gives 148 of its Alaskan pipelines an "F", meaning that they there are in critical danger of rupture.

CP: “There are very strong indications that the current rate of species extinctions far exceeds anything in the fossil record”.

Lake Chad down 90% since 1960.

Pacific fisheries face collapse by 2035: study.

Reuters: First generation biofuels worse for the climate than fossil fuels.

Michael Hudson: The end of the US dollar as reserve currency.

Independent: Climate disruption to bite into China's food supply over the coming decades.

Guardian: Tobacco companies put in charge of UK smoking policy. No, that would be silly. Instead, let's allow McDonalds, KFC and PepsiCo to help write government policy on obesity.

And for a laugh: Why we have nothing to fear from melting Arctic sea ice.

The Onion: Report: Global Warming Issue from 2 or 3 Years Ago Could Still Be a Problem.

This storm is what we call progress

By the end of the century, ocean acidification will have passed a biological tipping point.

SMH: Australian native mammals in sharp decline. On current trends, many are likely to be extinct in twenty years.

Twenty one percent of Africa's freshwater plants and animals are threatened with extinction.

Land grab: we're turning forests into food (see also here for another take on the same story).

Ocean dead zones on the rise.

Trouble ahead for developed world: "Pretty soon the U.S. will be spending more on debt service than national security. ... That's a tipping point for any global power."

BBC: Don't let the bed bugs bite: "we are on the threshold of a bed-bug pandemic."

Hot Topic: Widespread sacrifices amongst developed nations for ecological stability will never happen. Or will they?

CP: Why healthcare is less important than climate and energy policy.

The title of this post comes from this quote.

Atheist: what Africa needs is more Christianity

This Times Online article by Matthew Parris is worth a look. He argues that Africa's biggest problem is a traditional belief system that encourages passivity and is forced to admit, despite his own atheist beliefs, that Christianity makes a difference.