Cooling in a warming world, and other stories

Air-con: Cooling a warming world. Air-conditioning's role in the energy demand that leads to climate change is increasing. While the US has long used more air-con than the rest of the world combined (indeed US air-con uses more electricity than the total electricity demand of Africa), rapidly industrialising countries are catching up quickly.

Oz gas hub: Walmadan or James Price Point, a remote headland on the coast of Western Australia, is the proposed site of the second largest natural gas hub in the world, a mega project costing AUD$34-40b. Described by the state premier Colin Barnett as "unremarkable", the piece of coast in question has been recommended by various government agencies for National Park status on no less than six occasions over the last five decades. The environmental impact report for the proposed development has left a lot to be desired. Once again, the impact of dumping hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane pollution into the atmosphere are not even included in the assessment process.

Sea shock: Marine extinction risks. "Life in the world's oceans faces far greater change and risk of large-scale extinctions than at any previous time in human history, a team of the world's leading marine scientists has warned." Original article is here.

Fracking: Sean Lennon summarises the arguments against the US increasingly relying on fracking for natural gas: climate (natural gas is still a fossil fuel), climate (methane leaks make fracking perhaps as bad as coal), water use, water pollution, land seizure and industry spin (from the PR firms that brought you safe cigarettes).

Genetic effects: A new study has found that certain plastics (such as BPA) have effects at a genetic level. Exposure to the BPA begins in the womb and has effects that last generations.

Gaza water: Gaza strip will soon be unliveable (even more than it already is) due to water crisis. On current trends, the aquifer supplying water to the 1.6 million inhabitants will be ruined and undrinkable by 2016. Water drives considerably more of the conflict in Israel/Palestine than is widely recognised and there are huge disparities in access.

Bugs: Twenty percent of invertebrates are at risk of extinction. Invertebrates include 97% of the world's animals.

Pissing in the wind: symbolic actions and the dangers of tokenism

There is some debate whether small symbolic actions are a useful "easy" first step to get people taking a little bit more responsibility for the ecological consequences of their consumption, or a distraction that serves to draw attention away from the true scale of changes called for and inoculate people against genuine repentance.

Now perhaps sometimes we need to take the steps that are currently available, while working towards those that are ultimately desirable. Perhaps for some people, learning to recycle is the start of a journey in which they awaken to the fact that there is no "away" to which we can throw things, and that all our actions take place within a finite planet on which the actions of seven billion (one billion of whom live better than ancient royalty) have serious cumulative effects.

Where there is a tension between the short term tactical victories and long term strategic goals, then it can sometimes be difficult to determine whether immediately obtainable harm minimisation ought to prevail or long term hopes. For instance, should we decriminalise the use (not production) of hard drugs and treat addiction as a medical illness in order to reduce the criminalisation of end users, or would this undermine the message that ultimately we hope for a society in which no one is addicted to dangerous substances? Alternatively, would attempting a too stringent ban on smoking tobacco lead to a long term backlash against such regulation and so undermine the short term gains in smoking it may achieve?

Where I'm currently at is that while on many topics the precise balance between tactical, currently possible steps and strategic currently impossible goals may be difficult to navigate, there are elements of the situation with regards to our ecological predicament that seem somewhat obvious (at least to me). As long as we are mainly talking about plastic bags, recycling and more efficient light bulbs, we've already lost.

The goal is not a society free of plastic bags, or one that recycles assiduously and ensures lightbulbs meet the latest standard. That is far, far too small. The goal is a society that is no longer destroying the conditions of possibility for its own existence (and the existence of the biosphere as we know it and all future human societies). Plastic bags are one relatively tiny piece of that puzzle. And so while it is right to wonder whether premature regulation of, say, plastic bags causes a backlash that is counterproductive, there are bigger fish to fry. To return to the smoking analogy, it's a little as though the entire discussion is whether it would be a good idea to raise the legal age of smoking to 18 years and one month (or some other very marginal action that might slightly alter smoking stats). Whether or not this would provoke a backlash may be a relevant consideration, but given the scale of the problem, the fact that so much energy is spent discussing what is ultimately a relatively tiny piece of the puzzle actually serves to leave the status quo intact.

Cultural change does often come in small steps under sustained and creative social pressure, but the long term goals need to be clear from the outset. We don't want to be pissing in the wind.

People and Planet: a new report and other stories

Royal Society report (Summary and recommendations) calls for both population stabilisation and big cuts in consumption to avoid "a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills". This is a significant contribution to the discussion of the relationship between population and consumption (which I discussed back here). I haven't had a chance to read the full report yet, but the conclusions seem to be broadly consistent with the points I made: that both population and consumption need to be addressed, but the latter can be addressed faster, further and with fewer ethical conundrums and so ought to be the primary immediate focus.

Guardian: IEA warns of 6ºC rise. It is hard to get a handle on just how catastrophic 6ºC would be. Let's just say that if we get to 6ºC, I don't think we'll be doing cost-benefit analyses anymore. David Roberts reflects on whether 6ºC is alarmist or realistic and points out that science alone can't tell us how bad climate change will be - because the most important unknown is just how we are all going to act and react over the next couple of decades. Those who think that 6ºC by 2100 is entirely unrealistic implicitly assume either (a) massive global co-ordinated action to mitigate through aggressive emissions reductions across the board or (b) global and long term economic collapse arriving sooner rather than later.

Mongabay: Organic agriculture has lower yields than industrial farming, according to a new study in Nature, especially for grains, though that is not the whole story, since there are various downstream costs of industrial agriculture that reduce yields elsewhere (and elsewhen).

ScienceDaily: Plastic in ocean underestimated by at least a factor of 2.5 due to the effects of wind pushing pollution beneath the surface, rendering measurements and calculations based on skimming the surface inaccurate.

SMH: India's border fence. Not with Pakistan or China, but the 4,000 km militarised fence on the border with Bangladesh, in the face of a rising tide of people fleeing, amongst other things, a rising tide. Though speaking of that rising tide...
H/T Donna.

ABC: Australasia at hottest for (at least) 1,000 years (also in the Guardian and the original study is here). This is a significant finding since most temperature reconstructions have focused on the northern hemisphere, where a greater number of proxy records mean more data is available.

Science: Some good news from Greenland. A review of ten years of satellite data appears to indicate that we are not on track for the "worst case" (i.e. 2 metre) sea level rise by 2100. Of course, "good" is relative; even a rise of a few feet will lead to massive headaches, but multi-metre rises probably mean infrastructure vulnerabilities worth trillions. Sea level rise is one of the most serious long term effects of climate change, though I suspect that over the next few decades it is not going to dominate in comparison with, for example, concerns over food security.

Grist: What would it look like for media to take climate seriously? A very interesting conversation between two journalists about media coverage of the climate threat.

The death of the oceans?

Sir David Attenborough has narrated a new BBC documentary titled "The death of the oceans?" which is currently on BBC iPlayer. It is worth watching as it addresses many of the various threats facing marine ecosystems: overfishing, ocean acidification, ocean warming (mentioned only briefly) and noise pollution. No mention of other kinds of pollution (especially plastics: did you know that one in three albatross chicks, hatched in the middle of the Pacific 3000 miles from both the US and Japan, die from being fed too much plastic waste?), but it's a step forward, and having Attenborough narrate it will give it more exposure.

I've seen some other pieces that address one or two of these, but this is the first popular piece to put more of the puzzle together. The End of the Line was really worth seeing on overfishing, but doesn't really touch anything else.

The documentary is also of interest as it introduces the Census of Marine Life, a massive ten year international research project to establish a baseline against which future measurements can be made. More information on the census here, which gives some sense of the size of this project:

"The Census cost $650 million, and involved 2,700 scientists from more than 80 nations and territories working at 670 institutions. They mounted more than 540 expeditions, comprising about 9,000 days at sea, where they studied organisms from the surface all the way down to more than six miles down and in environments that ranged from freezing cold to above the boiling point of water (at the great pressures at the bottom of the sea, water can become superheated near volcanic vents) and ultimately produced about 2,600 scientific papers.

"What was in those papers? Glad you asked: the scientists collectively made 30 million observations of some 120,000 species, found more than 6,000 new ones, tracked the migratory patterns of thousands, and extrapolated from what they saw that the 250,000 known marine species (excluding microbes) are probably only a quarter of what's really out there. If you want to talk microbes, they say, there may be as many as a billion different kinds in the world's oceans."

"The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope"

"From an oceanic perspective, 450 [ppm of CO₂] is way too high. [...] The prospect of ocean acidification is potentially the most serious of all predicted outcomes of anthropogenic CO₂ release."

This video brings together sea level rises, ocean warming and ocean acidification. It doesn't mention plastic pollution, overfishing or oil spills. We are fighting a war against the oceans and we are winning. If Cousteau is correct, we are lost at sea.

"The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat."

- Jacques Yves Cousteau

Shades of green: why is ecological degradation wrong?

Not all attempts to be ecologically responsible are the same. There are some huge differences between groups and individuals that are often simply lumped together as "environmentalists".

Sometimes these differences are discussed in terms of focus. For instance, Michael Northcott's The Environment and Christian Ethics identifies three broad approaches. Those who emphasise the intrinsic value of the non-human world and regret its destruction or transformation by humans he calls ecocentric. Those who emphasise the damage to human society represented by ecological degradation he calls humanocentric (others use the term anthropocentric, which keeps the Greek etymological theme). Those who emphasise God's glory and delight in the created order such that destructiveness is an affront to divine purposes he calls theocentric. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive and particular thinkers may draw upon multiple lines of thought. Each will lead in somewhat different directions at certain points, but the main difference lies in how they analyse the problem of ecological degradation. Why is it wrong for us to be clearing the rainforests, to be emptying the oceans of fish or to be dumping over 100 million tonnes of plastic each year? Is it because we lose species and damage ecosystems that are beautiful, unique and irreplaceable? Or because we're undermining our ability to feed and clothe ourselves, because the cost of replacing the lost ecosystem services is a drain on human society, because we're running up an ecological debt we can't possibly repay and so driving off a cliff? Or are they wrong because they represent a human attempt to uncreate, a perverse parody of God's original work?

Personally, I think any answer that doesn't draw on all three strands is likely to be deficient and lead to a poor response. Pure theocentrism could give the impression that as long as our hearts are in the right place, it doesn't matter if our actions are any benefit to our neighbour (human or non-human). Pure ecocentrism might imply that humanity itself is the problem and that any human modification of the "natural" order is wrong. Pure anthropocentrism risks becoming instrumentalist, and ignores the fact that God pronounces the created order "good" prior to the creation of humanity. These are caricatures, but all three reasons can find a place in an account that is attentive to the holy scriptures.

"And the sea was no more"

Deepwater Horizon: overview of a catastrophe
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on 20th April, killing eleven workers and injuring seventeen more. The well which it had been drilling was in water over 1.5km deep and descended another few kilometres into the sea floor into an oil field estimated to contain about 50 million barrels of oil (enough to supply the world's needs for less than a day, by the way). After the explosion, oil started gushing from the well into the deep waters of the Gulf and has continued to do so until today, over one month later.

After initially claiming that the oil slick on the surface was just from the sunken rig and not from the well, BP then offered an first estimate that about 1,000 barrels a day were leaking. This was revised up to 5,000 barrels a few days later by NOAA (National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration) and has remained the official government estimate. Scientists analysing the size of the visible spill on the surface put the figure at around 20-25,000 barrels a day, though this ignored the significant amounts of dispersant that BP was pumping into the oil as it exited the well (causing much of the oil to never make it to the surface) and the enormous oil slicks, some 10 km long, floating well below the surface.

Critics of BP started to point out numerous problems in their response, including their use of inferior and more toxic dispersants purchased from a company linked to BP (they have recently been ordered to find a less toxic alternative, having already employed 3 million litres of the stuff) and perhaps of greater concern, a pattern of trying to hide or minimise the extent of the problem. Under pressure, BP finally released some video footage of the underwater oil eruption, from which independent scientists estimated the flow rate at up to 70,000 barrels per day. More pressure from Senators lead to BP posting more videos, from which it has been estimated that it may be closer to 100,000 barrels per day, of which BP have now managed to siphon off up to about 5,000 barrels per day via a pipe they have managed to thread down the gushing hole. That is, it appears that the disaster is one hundred times greater than they first admitted. It is already the largest oil contamination in US waters and is moving up the charts towards the largest in the world. About one fifth of the waters in the Gulf are now off-limits to fishing and some of the oil has been caught in the Loop Current, pulling it towards Florida and the lower eastern states.

Tony Hayward, CEO of BP has been quoted calling the 38,000 square kilometres of visible surface spill "a drop in the ocean" when compared to the enormous volume of water in the Gulf. Despite numerous apparent serious breaches of safety protocol and a history of pollution infractions from the rig, he has called the disaster "unforseeable" and "inconceivable" and assured people that the environmental damage is likely to be "very, very modest".

This is not an oil leak, which sounds slow, nor an oil spill, which implies that the oil is pouring from a tank of a given size. This is an ongoing underwater oil gusher, filling an olympic swimming pool every four hours or so. Although efforts to stem the flow are ongoing, ultimately, it may not be stopped until a relief well is drilled, which is likely take a few months. Many commentators are beginning to suggest this may turn out to be the largest environmental catastrophe in US history.

Our dying oceans
However, this is just one of a number of deeply troubling problems facing the world's oceans, and despite potentially affecting the Gulf of Mexico for years to come, its effects are dwarfed in both scale and long term impact by a range of other threats to ocean life: acidification (from carbon dioxide), plastic pollution - including a floating garbage patch possibly larger than Australia, dead zones from agricultural run-off (the oil pollution is likely to exacerbate this problem in the Gulf of Mexico), warming causing coral bleaching, thermal stratification and other changes in marine life, indiscriminately destructive fishing techniques (trawling and dredging) and overfishing, global fish catch peaked in the 1980's and on current trends all commercial fish stocks will likely be depleted (unprofitable or extinct) in the next few decades.

For the authors of holy scripture, the ocean was a terrifying chaos, filled with monsters and a symbol of destruction. The vision of the new heavens and new earth in Revelation 21 includes the telling phrase "and the sea was no more", indicating an end to chaos and destruction.

But today, the picture is reversed. Our oceans are threatened and dying. It is we who are the chaotic (or perhaps all too systematic) destroyer.

New every morning: novelty, imperialism and cataclysm

Continuous Cities • 1
The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-wrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio.

On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, and their task of removing the residue of yesterday's existence is surrounded by a respectful silence, like a ritual that inspires devotion, perhaps only because once things have been cast off nobody wants to have to think about them further.

Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse. Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back. The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter. Besides, the more Leonia's talent for making new materials excels, the more the rubbish improves in quality, resists time, the elements, fermentations, combustions. A fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains.

This is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed. As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday's sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and of all its days and years and decades.

Leonia's rubbish little by little would invade the world, if, from beyond the final crests of its boundless rubbish heap, the street cleaners of other cities were not pressing, also pushing mountains of refuse in front of themselves. Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia's boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption. The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle.

The greater its height grows, the more the danger of a landslide looms: a tin can, an old tyre, an unravelled wine flask, if it rolls towards Leonia, is enough to bring with it an avalanche of unmated shoes, calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging the city in its own past, which it had tried in vain to reject, mingling with the past of the neighbouring cities, finally clean. A cataclysm will flatten the sordid mountain range, cancelling every trace of the metropolis always dressed in new clothes. In the nearby cities they are all ready, waiting with bulldozers to flatten the terrain, to push into the new territory, expand, and drive the new street cleaners still farther out.

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 114-16.

Imagine...

Imagine a world in which public transport was almost free, in which it produced almost no carbon emissions or other environmental nasties, and in which it didn't rely heavily on oil and so was not substantially contributing to a society vulnerable to the dangers of peak oil. However, in this world, running a car still sets you back hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, still produces huge amounts of carbon dioxide and is still dependent upon cheap oil. The disparity between them is so great that one trip in a car costs about as much as using public transport regularly (multiple times a day) for a year. Furthermore, imagine that this idyllic public transport system was directly connected to every house and building in the city, so that using it was only ever metres away. Sounds nice?

Imagine your shock to find that in this world private car use continues to grow by 10% each year and that car manufacturers are making huge profits. How can this industry possibly be flourishing? Perhaps they have run scare campaigns spreading misinformation about the dangers of public transport (when in fact, it poses the same or fewer dangers than regular use of a private automobile). Perhaps they have successfully branded car use with a variety of attractive identities - healthy, natural, convenient - despite the actual facts about the situation.

I imagine you might be worried. Not only are your fellow citizens being duped out of their money and helping to unnecessarily destroy the environment, but if more and more people switch to their own (far more expensive, far more polluting, far more oil-dependent) car, the government will have less reason to maintain the excellent public transport system at its present standard. What of those who can't afford a car and rely on the public system?

Oh, and imagine that in this world, using public transport actually improved your teeth.

Now stop imagining, because in Sydney, this is world in which we live. Except rather than transport, I'm talking about drinking water.

Bottled water makes no sense. Tap water is just as safe (if not safer), comes in at about 1/2400th of the price, uses very little energy and produces very little pollution. Bottled water costs about as much for a bottle as you spend on drinking tap water for a year: one tonne of tap water costs about $1.20, while the same amount of bottled water costs around $3,000. Water is heavy (and thus energy-intensive) to transport (and refrigerate) in bottles, compared with Sydney's tap water, which is largely gravity-fed, or occasionally pumped, through an amazing pipe system that connects to almost every building in the city. The bottles themselves are energy-intensive to produce (being plastic, an oil-based synthetic product), and in Australia only about one third are recycled (with the exception of South Australia, whose enlightened policies manage to get a recycling rate around 70%), while the rest make their way into landfill, where they take hundreds or thousands of years to decompose. The production of a plastic bottle ironically uses about seven times more water than will ever be able to fit into it, and results in about one hundred times more carbon emissions than the production of a glass bottle.

And all this is entirely unnecessary, yet sales of bottled water continue their astonishing growth (180 billion litres sold last year and growing at 10% p.a.): a testimony to the victory of consumerism over common sense.

A friend of mine has done the logical thing and started a Facebook 'cause': Reject Plastic Drink Bottles.

Having been cynical about The Daily Telegraph in my previous post, I applaud them for running a story the SMH seems to have missed on this topic.

This site summarises the pros of tap water and the cons of bottled water, encouraging us to "think global, drink local".

Bottled water

Do you drink bottled water? If so, why?

As an environmental issue, bottled water has not received as much attention as deforestation, climate change or mass extinction, but it did score a mention in today's SMH. I hadn't thought about it until I read a paper from Frank Emanuel outlining some of the problems it causes, such as:

• higher levels of bacteria than quality tap water;
• transfer of toxins from the plastic bottle to the water;
• the production of a plastic bottle creates 100 times more carbon emissions than making a glass bottle;
• 1.5 million tonnes of plastic water bottles are created each year, only a fraction of which are subsequently recycled;
• bottled water costs about 10,000 times as much as tap water;
• and perhaps worst of all, the privitisation of water amongst the rich removes the incentive for ensuring high quality tap water for all.

Speaking of Frank, here is another rant worth reading.