Towards A Positive Future on the North Coast

Volunteers assemble a small section of a much larger array

Here on the North Coast of California, the future became tangible with the launch of a community-scale solar array micro-grid by the Blue Lake Rancheria, a 91 acre federally recognized and sovereign tribal nation.

“This is our piece of Earth that we’re not going to leave," said Arla Ramsey, vice-chairperson of the tribe, as quoted by Lost Coast Outpost. You can’t pick a reservation up and move it. So if we’re going to live here, and our children are going to live here, or seven generations from now, we have to keep it healthy and clean, and that’s our goal.”

According to  "decentralized energy" website reporter Diarmaid Williams:

Funded in part through a $5 million grant from the California Energy Commission's Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) program, the system allows the reservation to operate independently of the power grid in coordination with local utility Pacific Gas & Electric. This project incorporates the largest solar array in currently in operation in Humboldt County... is estimated to save the Tribe over $200,000 in annual energy costs, will reduce at least 150 tons of carbon per year and will grow Tribal clean energy jobs by 10 per cent.

The Lost Coast Outpost story continues:

The rancheria worked with an array of technology experts, national labs, local businesses, the state and PG&E. Plus, for almost a decade, the rancheria has developed a close relationship with Humboldt State University and its Schatz Energy Research Center, which played a key role in making the microgrid a success.

“The kinds of technology we’re installing and integrating together, it hasn’t been done before,” said SERC founder Peter Lehman. “So this project and the knowledge we gain from doing this, the lessons we learn from doing this, are going to be applicable in many situations in this country and around the world. So that’s how progress occurs — there are pioneers, and we’re the pioneers in this project, and people follow on after the pioneers.”

The Eureka Times-Standard added this:

California Energy Commission commissioner Karen Douglas said Californians across the state are stepping up to address the affects of climate change. “This is a real example of how we can help meet our greenhouse gas goals,” she said. “ ... There’s a community resource here as a result of this project.”

Not Going Quietly

He may go gentle, but he's not going quietly.  In his last weeks in the White House, President Obama has taken important action, and has made important statements.  That process may climax Tuesday night with his farewell address, but even then, he has 9 days more.

The NYTimes listed some of those actions:

He has banned oil drilling off the Atlantic coast, established new environmental monuments, protected funding for Planned Parenthood clinics, ordered the transfer of detainees from Guantánamo Bay, criticized Israeli settlements and punished Russia for interfering in the recent elections through cyberattacks.

Mr. Obama is continuing to fill the ranks of the government with his own appointees; since Election Day, he has named 103 people to senior Civil Service jobs, boards, key commissions and oversight panels, including the National Council on Disability, the Amtrak board of directors, the Holocaust Memorial Council and the boards of visitors at military academies.

Probably the most important--and lasting--was banning offshore drilling in the Arctic and much of the Atlantic seaboard.  As Time Magazine reported: "The White House maneuver relies on a little-used 1953 law that gives the President authority to block indefinitely oil and gas drilling in some waters controlled by the U.S. federal government. The move may be impossible to undo—at least in the short term. The law does not include a provision for a future president to undo the decision and no president has ever tried such a move. But energy interests could challenge that in courts or a Republican-dominated Congress could revise the original law."

In designating "two new national monuments in the desert landscapes of southeastern Utah and southern Nevada to protect some of our country’s most important cultural treasures,"  President Obama also protected not only physical but spiritual resources for Native peoples in the area.  Russell Begaye, President of the Navajo Nation, wrote:

"Today, President Barack Obama has signed a proclamation to protect this land as a national monument for future generations of Navajo people and for all Americans. Thanks to his action, this land will be finally given the legal reverence and protection it deserves.

This action reflects the President’s profound record on conservation: He has done more than any other president in history to set aside more land and water for the future."

Other actions may be ones that Rs will want to reverse, but it won't always be easy.  It will likely be politically difficult to reverse all of President Obama's measures to punish Russia for its (successful) efforts to control the US presidential election, which he announced in late December.

Probably the boldest foreign policy action was the US abstaining from the UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements as a substantial and aggressive barrier to a two state solution in Palestine.

Meanwhile President Obama has publicly and--meeting with members of Congress--privately talked about healthcare.  Publicly he's challenged Rs attempting to repeal Obamacare to say what their plan is and begin the process of improving the healthcare system, instead of undermining it and taking away coverage from millions of Americans.  He also urged those Americans who have benefited from Obamacare to tell their stories in public, especially in their own communities.   His long meeting with congressional Democrats reportedly got more political, as he urged them not to not help Rs devise a new health care law, and make them own any changes.

After all that, President Obama has been doing a series of interviews, including a personal one with David Axelrod, but also cogent policy statements such as the Vox interview on healthcare.  He also became the first sitting President to write a feature for Science magazine, in which he argues that the shift to clean energy is irreversible.  Whatever politicians might do, industries and the market are already committed.  There are twice as many people employed in clean energy than in jobs related to fossil fuels.  The US economy has grown in direct proportion to the drop in greenhouse gases emissions.

The Science article is here.  By including seed funds for clean energy in the 2009 Recovery Act to get the country out of the Great Recession, President Obama jump-started these industries. White House support for them continued throughout the Obama administration. They have their problems, but this move may turn out to be his greatest accomplishment.

We Met the Moment: "One of the Great Triumphs in History" (Updated)

It's never been "the top story" for long, and already what was accomplished on the day that future generations may well remember among a handful of significant dates in human history is gone from the headlines, supplanted as usual by shootings and partisan politics.

But in the immediate aftermath, there were many stories related to the Paris climate agreement.  The Guardian was among those with stories on how the agreement was reached.  The Atlantic was among those that analyzed and evaluated what's in the deal in easy to digest nuggets.  PBS Newshour interviewed an expert on the deal in specific relation to the US.

Articles in the Washington Post and New York Times focused on President Obama's role.  The Times:

"Six years ago, President Obama came away from a round of global climate talks bitter and frustrated, having been reduced to personally chasing other world leaders around a Copenhagen conference center and bursting uninvited into a meeting with them to salvage a pact that left many disappointed.

On Saturday, Mr. Obama strode triumphantly into the Cabinet Room of the White House to declare victory in his quest for an ambitious climate agreement, after 195 nations reached an accord in a Paris suburb that commits them to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“We met the moment,” Mr. Obama said. “Together, we’ve shown what’s possible when the world stands as one.”

For Mr. Obama, the agreement represents a legacy-shaping success, destined to join his health care law in the annals of his most lasting achievements."

The story quotes an unnamed senior administration official who said that after Copenhagen, the President “deliberately and ambitiously pushed the envelope on climate.” And on Saturday, Mr. Obama said the Paris agreement had been possible in large part because he had done so.

Former White House official David Axlerod was quoted in the Washington Post to the same effect: Obama “felt a moral obligation to do something about” climate change, Axelrod said. “This is not just a cosmetic item on his list. This is core stuff for him.”

The Post lists the many ways that President Obama seeded this moment, beginning with substantial money in the Recovery Act for clean energy, and getting higher fuel efficiency standards in return for bailing out the US auto industry.

The moral obligation is to the future.  The President made that specific (though perhaps overselling the time frame a bit) in his remarks announcing the agreement (the video above), in words quoted in the Post piece as well: The president also said that he imagined walking with his grandchildren watching a “quiet sunset” and “knowing . . . that our work here and now gave future generations cleaner air and cleaner water and a more sustainable planet. And what can be more important than that?”

The Post summarizes:

Although the international agreement reached in Paris on Saturday still leaves the world perilously vulnerable to global warming and rising seas, Obama has significantly advanced the global climate agenda and has established a mechanism that would enable countries to exploit new technology to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and, if possible, tighten existing pledges to reduce those emissions...

The completed agreement, the Post said, owed much of its success to the willingness of the U.S. president to take on both congressional Republicans and fossil-fuel-industry executives on an issue that consistently ranks among the lowest priorities for American voters."

It is because of these efforts begun by President Obama that USA Today could conclude that the deal will not mean any radical changes for US citizens: "Americans need not brace for a raft of new onerous regulations, laws and restrictions imposed as a result, environmental activists say."  Goals of the agreement will necessitate further steps in years to come, that other administrations will face.  But President Obama has set the course and moved America onto it.

This analysis says that Republicans can be obstructive but they've lost the argument, partly because they're tilting against an international consensus and a set of programs that (like Obamacare) will be difficult or impossible to reverse.  But partly because they've lost their best arguments--that other countries won't address the climate crisis and put the US at a disadvantage, and that it will cost US jobs.

I wouldn't underestimate the GOPers ability to be destructive and self-destructive, but the USA Today piece says:

Such Republican opposition is unlikely to touch many of the initiatives already going on, Stavins says. "Even if that happens, I don't see them rolling any of these (initiatives) back."

That's partly because Americans are discovering there's little trade off between protecting the environment and creating jobs, says Alden Meyer, strategy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists. The drive toward reducing greenhouse gases has created new technologies and industries to support them.

The Paris agreement "sends a powerful message (that the) smart money ought to be betting on the clean-energy future," Meyer says.

Update: Jonathan Chiat's Monday essay: "Climate Deal is Obama's Biggest Accomplishment." Chiat's conclusion: "It is hard to find any important accomplishment in history that completely solved a problem. The Emancipation Proclamation only temporarily and partially ended slavery; the 13th Amendment was required to abolish it permanently, and even that left many former slaves in a state of terrorized peonage closely resembling their former bondage. The Lend-Lease Act alone did not ensure Great Britain would survive against Nazi Germany; the Normandy invasion did not ensure the liberation of Europe. Victories are hardly ever immediate or complete. The fight continues and history marches on. The climate agreement in Paris should take its place as one of the great triumphs in history."

New York Magazine also collected some skeptical analysis. (Yes, Bill McKibben, activism played a part but Obama did not "forget" about the climate crisis after his Inauguration. Your colorful marches probably weren't as important to this agreement as his efforts over the years.) And the Guardian has a fascinating piece on how the Obama negotiators and cooperating world leaders (including Raul Castro) made the agreement Republican-proof.  Official White House photo below was taken just after President Obama's announcement of the agreement.

Think They'll Go Back to Alberta

Electoral politics is a mug's game.  Maybe it never made much sense but these days it seems all about money and whim.  I have no idea what just happened in the UK and apparently the experts there don't either.  There was a surprise earlier this week in the province of Alberta, Canada, when the iron grip of a conservative party very friendly to fossil fuel industries was defeated for the first time since Caesar.

David Suzuki has an analysis at the Guardian full of green hopefulness.  Another analysis suggests the electorate just didn't like the snobbish conservative candidate.  But one thing from Suzuki stands out: though the province has been and is being literally carved up (forests downed, as in the photo above) and polluted by immense tar sands oil projects, the provincial government didn't get much of a cut from the immense revenues.  So very friendly to the companies; I assume the suddenly unemployed leaders responsible will find cushy jobs there.  But the province is unable to handle a drop in oil prices, because it was operating too close to the margins to support its services in bad times.

So maybe a motivation among the electorate was regret.  I'm betting that in future years in the US, regret is going to be very big.  

Holy Grail of Sun Power

Elon Musk of Tesla, with headquarters on his native planet of Vulcan, has announced what every techie outfit craves and hires p.r. people to crow they've got: a potential "game-changer."

No, not the electric car.  Old news.  Not even Space-X.  The announcement today concerned the alternative energy holy grail: a battery capable of storing solar energy.  And he's got a fleet of them.

And Tesla isn't the only company going in this direction.  When energy storage via battery gets cheap, big and reliable enough, it becomes the missing link in clean energy, further enabling everybody--from individuals to individual households on up--to liberate themselves from dirty grids and fossil fuel billionaires--and even future clean energy megacompanies and billionaires.

The Week in Not Bad News

From the New York Times

"For the solar and wind industries in the United States, it has been a long-held dream: to produce energy at a cost equal to conventional sources like coal and natural gas.

That day appears to be dawning.

The cost of providing electricity from wind and solar power plants has plummeted over the last five years, so much so that in some markets renewable generation is now cheaper than coal or natural gas."

A different perspective to the 2014 elections by a Republican whose analysis is that because the wrong GOPers won, the Democrats are in a position to dominate beginning in 2016:

In a careful analysis, Ladd builds a case: The Midterms of 2014 demonstrate the continuation of a 20 year old trend. Republicans are disappearing from the competitive landscape at the national level where the population is the largest utilizing a declining electoral base of waging, white, and rural voters. As a result no GOP candidate on the horizon has a chance at the White House in 2016 and the chance of holding the Senate beyond 2016 is vanishingly small.

 And on ballot questions, the results were more sweeping than I knew:

Every major Democratic ballot initiative was successful, including every minimum wage increase, even in the red states. AND every personhood amendment failed.

His conclusion:

“It is almost too late for Republicans to participate in shaping the next wave of our economic and political transformation. The opportunities we inherited coming out of the Reagan Era are blinking out of existence one by one while we chase so-called “issues” so stupid, so blindingly disconnected from our emerging needs that our grandchildren will look back on our performance in much the same way that we see the failures of the generation that fought desegregation. Something, some force, some gathering of sane, rational, authentically concerned human beings generally at peace with reality must emerge in the next four to six years from the right, or our opportunity will be lost for a long generation. Needless to say, Greg Abbott and Jodi Ernst are not that force. ‘Winning’ this election did not help that force emerge.”

This is the Daily Kos diary that summarizes it, with a link to the original article in the Houston Chronicle and a followup.

And shhhh, don't tell anybody but the House of Crazy Reps admitted in its own report that everything GOPers have been screaming about Benghazi!  Benghazi! was utter fantasy.  The Associated Press:

A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, intelligence about who carried it out and why was contradictory, the report found. That led Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to inaccurately assert that the attack had evolved from a protest, when in fact there had been no protest. But it was intelligence analysts, not political appointees, who made the wrong call, the committee found. The report did not conclude that Rice or any other government official acted in bad faith or intentionally misled the American people.

So how did Faux News react to its hysteria being trashed by facts?  By telling a completely different story.

Climate Action

From the New York Times:

"President Obama announced a series of climate change initiatives on Wednesday aimed at guarding the electricity supply; improving local planning for flooding, coastal erosion and storm surges; and better predicting landslide risks as sea levels rise and storms and droughts intensify.

The actions, involving a variety of federal agencies, were among the recommendations of the president’s State, Local and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience, a group of 26 officials who have worked since November to develop the proposals.

One of the projects involves shoring up the power supply during climate catastrophes, and the Department of Agriculture on Wednesday awarded a total of $236.3 million to eight states to improve electricity infrastructure in rural areas. A government study released in May concluded that climate change would strain utility companies’ ability to deliver power as extreme weather damaged power lines and hotter temperatures drove surges in demand."

Here's the White House story on this conference and these announcements. What's significant about this task force apart from its topic is that it includes tribal leaders, and they've made substantial commitments to address these problems on Indian lands.

 Thanks I'm sure in great measure to climate adviser and White House counselor John Podesta, the Obama administration is proceeding on real efforts to deal with the effects of climate disruptions already underway and in the pipeline, and to deal with the causes of future global heating by reducing carbon pollution and advancing carbon capture technologies as well as clean energy for the future.

The need for both becomes evident every day.  On Wednesday a typhoon that's killed at least 38 in the Philippines is headed for China.  So it makes sense that the US and China have signed eight new agreements on various matters relating to climate.  The emphasis is on sharing technology, research and expertise on a range of technologies, including "clean coal."

The New Divestiture Movement

When a few months ago Stanford University announced that it was divesting from coal companies, the industry all but laughed in public.  But the divestiture movement that was so effective in pushing South Africa to end apartheid  started slowly and with much more controversy.

Now the climate crisis divestiture movement got a very big and significant participant--the World Council of Churches that represents half a billion Christians announced it is ceasing investments in fossil fuels.

“The World Council of Churches reminds us that morality demands thinking as much about the future as about ourselves — and that there’s no threat to the future greater than the unchecked burning of fossil fuels,” Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, said in a statement. “This is a remarkable moment for the 590 million Christians in its member denominations: a huge percentage of humanity says today ‘this far and no further.’”

 These may not have immediate major economic impact, but the writing is on the wall.

Eye of the Storm

As we've noted here, El Nino and the climate crisis itself are phenomena of nature that take a long time and particular circumstances to develop, but once they take hold, there's nothing that can be done to stop them until they've played themselves out.  The best that can be done is to blunt their effects, and (in the case of the climate crisis) take steps to see it doesn't get worse or ever happen again.

We may be part of a similar political phenomenon, though politics is only its location and not totally its cause.  It may be so powerful that it can't be stopped until it plays itself out.  Though it's not clear where it will end up, it is obvious where it is going.

Right now we might call it the revolt of the reactionary right, a kind of apocalyptic extremism pushing the US into political crisis, and perhaps constitutional crisis.

Republicans in Congress, in some states and in the rabid right media are converging on one point: the presidency.  Over the past weekend, House Speaker John Banal repeated his demand that House Republicans sue President Obama over still unspecified actions in violation of his legal mandates.  On Tuesday it was reported that the House will make a circus out of this for the next three weeks, scheduling a vote perhaps hours before the House goes on one of its frequent recesses.

A GOPer Senate candidate in Iowa upped the ante by accusing President Obama of being a dictator.  And for some the lawsuit is not enough--they want Congress to impeach President Obama.  That demand was connected to a kind of political threat not so viciously made since the days of Joe McCarthy when Sarah Palin said
"we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment."

Jonathan Bernstein wrote a perceptive post that outlines the growing pressure within the Republican party to push for impeachment, the unprecedented nature of this proposal, and the likely bad outcome for Republicans and the country.

In a comment on that post, I wondered if Banal's lawsuit was to short-circuit the calls for impeachment, though some observers thought it was to be a kind of warm-up for impeachment.  On Wednesday Banal  said he "disagreed" with the calls for impeachment so far.  On Thursday the lawsuit (itself unprecedented) was unveiled--it focuses on President Obama's "failure to enforce the Affordable Care Act" as passed by Congress--the same act that Republicans have voted a zillion times to repeal.  And a law that (on the same day) is proving to be working.

Update: The commentary on Friday had to do with whether the courts would find that Congress has the "standing" to even sue.  Here's Jonathan Bernstein on that. There's also the likelihood that this could go on for more years than President Obama has in office.  BUT (and this is just my conjecture), an early decision by a court that the House of Representatives does not have standing and therefore the suit is thrown out, and the only remedy available is impeachment: this could lead to a renewed and even more frenzied impeachment push. 

For her fiery call, Sarah Palin received a certain amount of ridicule (including Borowitz: Americans Unhappy To Be Reminded That Sarah Palin Still Exists.) But it is not really clear that this is over.  Some Republicans may feel President Obama's tepid poll numbers, and the ongoing if premature debate over the success or failure of his presidency, create a political context sympathetic to their actions.  But the poll numbers are changeable (when the polls aren't bogus) and the debate has two sides.

For example there's the position that Obama did what any Democrat would have done as President (Bernstein has proposed this.)  Jonathan Chiat disagrees.  He notes how only President Obama's steadfastness in sticking with the comprehensive Affordable Care Act when others in his administration were ready to cave and accept an increment or two, kept the bill together long enough for passage.

I would add another example.  Both Bernstein and Chiat agree that any Dem would have proposed a big stimulus package.  But the difference may be in what was in that package.  I'm not sure all other Dems would have insisted that a chunk of spending be devoted to embryonic clean energy projects.  Yet that seeding was important and possibly crucial to the tremendous growth in clean energy we see today, to the point that it is a real economic as well as ecologic force.

Here Comes the Sun (continued)

Revisiting the Al Gore article in Rolling Stone and its section on solar energy: after noting the faster than anyone expected progress in technology (including battery storage) he described the response by the Koch Brothers and others whose investment in the fossil fuel grid is threatened by decentralized clean energy.  They're pouring money into the states--and into their made men in office--to impose extra taxes on solar panels, for instance.  They've had some success in their puppet state legislatures.  But according to Gore, not so much with voters:

But here is more good news: The Koch brothers are losing rather badly. In Kansas, their home state, a poll by North Star Opinion Research reported that 91 percent of registered voters support solar and wind. Three-quarters supported stronger policy encouragement of renewable energy, even if such policies raised their electricity bills.

In Georgia, the Atlanta Tea Party joined forces with the Sierra Club to form a new organization called – wait for it – the Green Tea Coalition, which promptly defeated a Koch-funded scheme to tax rooftop solar panels.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, after the state's largest utility, an ALEC member, asked the public-utility commission for a tax of up to $150 per month for solar households, the opposition was fierce and well-organized. A compromise was worked out – those households would be charged just $5 per month – but Barry Goldwater Jr., the leader of a newly formed organization called TUSK (Tell Utilities Solar won't be Killed), is fighting a new attempt to discourage rooftop solar in Arizona. Characteristically, the Koch brothers and their allies have been using secretive and deceptive funding in Arizona to run television advertisements attacking "greedy" owners of rooftop solar panels – but their effort has thus far backfired, as local journalists have exposed the funding scam."

Clean energy has already spurred innovation, and as Gore and President Obama keep insisting, clean energy is the global industry of the future.  It can no longer be strangled in the cradle as for years it seemed it was going to be.  It's too far along all over the world, and all across North America.  It's going to look like computer tech does now--unimaginable a few decades ago, now unimaginable to be without it.  Economic as well as moral leadership are at stake right now.

Enough raw energy reaches the Earth from the sun in one hour to equal all of the energy used by the entire world in a full year, Gore writes, and I just heard something similar on Cosmos.  If we recover just a fraction of that energy for use, civilization can have all the energy it could ever need without polluting the atmosphere.

Update: News of a "breakthrough in solar panel manufacture that could promise cheap energy within a decade."  Another story about it here.

Getting to that point--producing abundant energy without greenhouse gas pollution--while pursuing innovative solutions to the problems resulting from the effects of the climate crisis, and ramping up even more ways to address the causes of the climate crisis with clean energy tech, maybe carbon capture etc.--will drive the economy of the future, starting now.

Those who claim that addressing the causes and effects of the climate crisis are only economic burdens and drains on the economy, are merely repeating truisms that are no longer true.  Even relatively conservative changes that would result in lower greenhouse gases pollution would grow the world economy, according to a new report by the World Bank.  Not exactly a far left organization.  

As this article in the Guardian notes, there are plenty of studies showing how economically devastating it would be to NOT address the climate crisis, or to significantly delay addressing it.  Now studies are emerging that make a positive case for economic growth from addressing it.  This is even before the true economic costs and benefits are added to the conventional and unreal assumptions of economics that never figures in the costs in health or environmental degradation and hence the future support for human life and civilization.

We Are In It Now

"After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends."
Wallace Stevens
"The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"

Al Gore quotes this poem, probably not for the first time, in his new Rolling Stone article on the climate crisis.  It helps make his point that he believes chances are getting better than the climate crisis will be significantly addressed, specifically in the international meetings of 2015, but also more generally.

I'm glad he's no longer using the unfortunate "solve the climate crisis" formulation.  If it's a crisis, you can address it, you can confront it.  If it's a problem, you can try to solve it.  The difference is meaningful.  The climate crisis involves lots and lots of problems, many of which have no likely solution as such.  Sometimes it will be a matter of limiting the damage.

Anyway it's a very good article, very up to the moment, yet in useful context, and worth reading through.  Though much of what's happened--ice melts, drought, storms, etc.--has been reported as events (here at Dreaming Up Daily for example,) sometimes as events related to the climate crisis (here again), Gore provides a context of meaning and response, notably on the impact of the two studies on polar ice melts.

Likewise various efforts on various levels to directly address the climate crisis that were at least referred to here are placed in greater context, with a sense of where things are going.  Gore counts himself among those who believe President Obama's recent policies and speeches, particularly the EPA regs on power plants (a power again affirmed by the Supreme Court today), have suddenly returned international leadership to the US on confronting the climate crisis, prompting his optimism on a 2015 global deal: "...it is abundantly evident that he has taken hold of the challenge with determination and seriousness of purpose."

Most interesting to me are the early sections of this piece about the startling advances in clean energy, both in terms of technology and economics.  The best news is on solar power. "The cost of electricity from photovoltaic, or PV, solar cells is now equal to or less than the cost of electricity from other sources powering electric grids in at least 79 countries. By 2020 – as the scale of deployments grows and the costs continue to decline – more than 80 percent of the world's people will live in regions where solar will be competitive with electricity from other sources."

The positive trend includes developing countries which are doing what has long been hoped for--bypassing fossil fuel and going directly to clean energy as they develop.  And there's good news in general on "distributed generation" of power, primarily solar.  This section on energy is really worth checking out.

So it's clear that many areas--tech, a number of businesses (including insurance companies), the military, economists etc.--are out ahead of US national and some states' politics on the realities of the climate crisis, and they'll just have to catch up. Over the weekend yet another Republican, former treasury sec Henry Paulsen, called for a carbon tax to head off economic disaster caused by the climate crisis.  (Paul Krugman evaluates his ideas.)  Paulsen called for Republicans to confront the issue.

That's unlikely to happen soon in Washington.  As Gore notes, the Defense department warned that the climate crisis was not only likely to contribute to conflicts (as the drought in Syria is) but will likely be a major cause of conflicts.  The Navy was warned that due to sea level rise its Norfolk base--the biggest naval base in the world--will be underwater.  "And how did the Republican-dominated House of Representatives respond to these grim warnings? By passing legislation seeking to prohibit the Department of Defense from taking any action to prepare for the effects of climate disruption."

So the implacable no has not yet turned to yes.  But while there has to be a 'turning point' (as Gore titles his article) in some sense, the future may well be closer to Krugman's:" In policy terms, climate action — if it happens at all — will probably look like health reform. That is, it will be an awkward compromise dictated in part by the need to appease special interests, not the clean, simple solution you would have implemented if you could have started from scratch. It will be the subject of intense partisanship, relying overwhelmingly on support from just one party, and will be the subject of constant, hysterical attacks. And it will, if we’re lucky, nonetheless do the job. Did I mention that health reform is clearly working, despite its flaws?"

Still, the time is upon us because the climate crisis is here.  Gore constructs another interesting quote from a speech by Winston Churchill in 1936, talking about the gathering storm of World War II:  "Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. . . . The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences. . . . We cannot avoid this period; we are in it now."

Clouds of Unknowing

Cloud computing, sold to a tech-drunk citizenry as the latest heavenly benefit of the corporate gods of cyberspace, is perhaps the biggest environmental blind spot left. Because, as this NPR report points out, these clouds aren't puffy white spirits smiling from the sky.  They're acres of machines on earth, needing and ravenously eating power in rapidly increasing quantities.

Right now, Greenpeace estimates that if the cloud were a country it would rank sixth in the world in power consumption, just before the actual country of Germany.  The New York Times figures it would take 30 nuclear power plants to supply it.  It also needs constant air conditioning and enormous amounts of water to keep all those fevered machines cool.

And the cloud is getting bigger all the time.  For now, most of the electricity is generated by clean energy methods, mostly wind and water power.  But how long can that last?  It may even be that so much clean energy is being soaked up by servers that a lot less is being used for the normal grid than otherwise might be the case.

Apart from the ramifications for the environment and the climate crisis, there's the issue of vulnerability.  Consumers are only too eager to cede control to corporations that store an increasing proportion of what we've learned to call information.   So photos, music and reading material as well as important documents are increasingly being stored nowhere but in some cloud somewhere.  And it takes electricity all along the way from there to you in order for it to, well, exist.

So what happens when the cloud blows up or the power goes off long enough to erase everything in the cloud? Or you lose your electricity and therefore your access for part or all of the time?  And you look around to find no photo albums, no recorded music, not even CDs or DVDs, let alone magazines or books.  Just your multiple "platforms" now connecting you to nothing.

But even without an electric Armageddon, none of this stuff (which is no longer "stuff" but digits) is actually yours anymore.  It belongs to the company that holds the cloud.  You're only renting access to it, if you accept the terms and conditions and how the hell could you not?

Though several people in my life have tried to buy me a Kindle or similar device, I've resisted.  At first it was until the devices were improved and more versatile.  And maybe until prices of books etc. came down (which is never going to happen now that so many people are hooked on the devices.)

Then this weekend I saw at TPM that subscribers (i.e. paid subscribers) were going to be discussing "the transformation from reading paper books to digital books," and proprietor Josh Marshall admitted that he switched to digital three years ago, and is now unable to read paper books anymore.  

That scared me straight.  No digital drugs for me.  When I buy a book, or borrow one from a library, it's mine.  I can hold it, carry it wherever, but most of all, it's mine.  It doesn't sit in some cloud where Amazon is always watching, and sending me emails asking me how I like it.  Or more to the point, where Amazon can always take it away from me.  Amazon, the cloud, or the grid.

Moving Climate

There was a lot of news  bearing on climate crisis matters in the past week or so. The second part of the UN report was issued, characterized every which way in media headlines. Climate Change Adjustments Must Be Fast And Major, U.N. Panel Says, according to NPR. IPCC climate change report: averting catastrophe is eminently affordable says the Guardian.  The points stressed in the latter are that clean energy conversion is pretty cheap, plus it has other benefits (ultimately economic) besides reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Another new thing on the climate block is a television series about the climate crisis, Years of Living Dangerously, which began on the Showtime pay cable channel Sunday but also is viewable for free here on the Internet.  It has Hollywood stars interviewing and investigating pertinent events and issues.  There's a kind of paid advertising blog on it at TPM, starting with this one.

 I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but I will note that I proposed something like this in probably the first thing I wrote specifically for a web site more than a decade ago, and reposted at Kowincidence: "Use Hollywood faces and voices, send them places where something can be shown that indicates the effects of global heating. Send Julia Roberts to interview an Inuit elder on camera about the change in Arctic ice and weather patterns, and the effects on the animals and plants. Take an action hero to high altitudes, take Mariel Hemingway up to Mt. Kilimanjaro and measure the snow, and some swimsuit models to an island that will disappear under the water because of global heating."

A TV broadcast network--NBC News-- also reportedly did a decent special report.)

I also pleaded for making the climate crisis a moral issue, and another step was taken in this direction by one of my favorite writers writing, Rebecca Solnit, in  her Guardian piece "Call climate change what it is: violence."

That wasn't the only tell-it-like-it-is pronouncement.  A Boston Globe column came right out and said that climate crisis skeptics don't deserve a veto.  Probably one of the more positive moves this week in the media was the full-throated cry in what must be the definition of a middle American newspaper, USA Today: On climate change, expect the worst.

A very public gauntlet was thrown down by a U.S. Senator (Sheldon Whitehead) and prominent senior House member (Henry Waxman)--both Democrats--who made a very strong case that the Obama administration has all the facts it needs to deny the Keystone pipeline because of how much worse it could make the climate crisis.  And they made it in a very public place, on the CNN site. Update 4/18: The State Department postponed final decisions until after a Nebraska court case settles the route the pipeline can take, which affects environmental impact.

As the UN report notes and the Guardian emphasized, the economy of change is positive, and basically unreported progress is being rapidly made on efficiency and cost of clean energy. A big step was taken last week in legitimizing the business future of clean energy when IKEA made a big investment in an Illinois wind farm, its first in the U.S. and second in North America.

 But there's even a cheaper way to cut emissions, though it seldom gets mentioned: conservation and energy efficiency.  This Think Progress piece  uses the information that when Japan closed its nuclear power plants after the catastrophe of Fukushima, half of the energy those plants produced was saved in the next several years by conservation, mostly by ordinary people.  Energy efficiency helped maintain that savings over 3 years now.  Studies show that the U.S. could cut 20% of its energy use by these means.  It would take a deliberate commitment so that the savings wouldn't disappear with new uses, but it's not something that has been tried.

All of this happened as other scientists made their case that the previously mysterious First Extinction--the worst known--some 250 million years ago, was caused by microbes that over a very long time excreted enough methane into the atmosphere to heat the planet and change the climate. "I would say that the end-Permian extinction is the closest animal life has ever come to being totally wiped out, and it may have come pretty close," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Greg Fournier, one of the researchers.

What it took tens of thousands of years for these microbes to do, humans are well on the way to doing in a comparative split second.  In the first week of April 2014, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Earth hit the highest level in at least 800,000 years.

Constitution Days

Two significant U.S. court cases, for the good for a change:

A U.S. District Court in Utah struck down that state's ban on same sex marriage as federally unconstitutional discrimination.  The judge's decision made prominent use of a Supreme Court dissent by Antonin Scalia.  Apart from instantly permitting same sex marriages in Utah, this decision is significant because it is based on the U.S. Constitution rather than a state constitution or other laws.

Getting much less press but possibly of great significance as well:  the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down major portions of the law that enables drilling for natural gas anywhere in the state.  This law, practically fascist in several of its provisions and its overall spirit, overrode the power of individual municipality to zone. Under the state law, drilling could be forced anywhere--in neighborhoods, near schools, anywhere.  The law enabled corporations to exploit the Marcellus shale formation for natural gas.  

 The Court  specifically cited the PA constitution's Environmental Rights Amendment. According to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette: "By any responsible account," Chief Justice Castille wrote, "the exploitation of the Marcellus Shale Formation will produce a detrimental effect on the environment, on the people, their children, and the future generations, and potentially on the public purse, perhaps rivaling the environmental effects of coal extraction." He goes on to say that although the state's regulatory powers are broad, they are "limited by constitutional demands, including the Environmental Rights Amendment."

The Court also addressed another totalitarian provision:

The court's decision, on a 4-2 vote, also sent back to Commonwealth Court for review and disposition challenges by a physician to the Act 13 provisions that would have prevented doctors from telling patients about health impacts related to shale gas development, and a constitutional challenge that the law benefits a single industry.

Drilling and fracking under draconian laws passed by corrupt state legislatures and governors has been virtually unrestrained across the country.  This is a single state decision but its basis is important: health and environment.  That opens to the door to arguments on those issues everywhere.

The Good, the Bad and the Climate

There is good news, or at least hopeful news, in the struggle to address the climate crisis.

After months of obstruction, Senate Republicans finally relented and consented to President Obama's appointment of the new Environmental Protection Agency director, Gina McCarthy, who has climate crisis cred and considers addressing it as her main mission--as does President Obama.  According to the New York Times, "The president told Ms. McCarthy that his environmental and presidential legacy would be incomplete without a serious effort to address climate change. 'I’m so glad he said that, because if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have wanted this job,” she said. “It’s an issue I’ve worked on for so many years, and it just can’t wait.”

In the NYTimes interview cited in the last post, President Obama not only affirmed that his decision on the Keystone Pipeline will be "based on whether or not this is going to significantly contribute to carbon in our atmosphere. And there is no doubt that Canada at the source in those tar sands could potentially be doing more to mitigate carbon release."  He also countered arguments that the Pipeline will lower gas prices (it may even increase them in the Midwest, he said) or that it is a job creator (a maximum of 2,000 temporary construction jobs, and maybe 50 permanent jobs.)  He awaits a recommendation from Sec. of State John Kerry, who is also a strong advocate for action on the climate crisis.

Good news continues on progress in clean energy, especially in the key area of energy storage and reliable flow.  Progress has been made in solar, and now in a new generation of wind turbines.  This makes wind power more available to electrical grids.  Though it is also important to note that one of the great advantages of wind but especially solar is its future as decentralized technology, not requiring all energy needs to be met by an immense grid.


But of course, the bad news also continues--as more evidence supports what many have been warning for years.  And sometimes the news is even worse.

In the department of duh (studies supporting common sense),  a study confirms that crime and violence increase with the heat, and throws in a provocative prediction: global heating will add 30,000 murders and 200,000 rapes to the expected US total by 2099.  A survey shows that in the western US, intense heat means increased damage to infrastructure: everything from sidewalks and bridges to railroads and airport tarmacs.  And the hotter temps for more of the year in more places is bringing disease-bearing insects to people and places without recent experience of them, or even any experience at all--such as a blood-sucking insect from Asia that may transmit dengue virus, or West Nile.

The worse news involves--no big surprise--the Arctic.  There's of course ongoing concern about the general heating and melting of the ice.  But there's also a lot of methane buried under the permafrost, and the damage it could cause if released is beginning to be quantified. A new study published in Nature concludes: "The release of methane from thawing permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea, off northern Russia, alone comes with an average global price tag of $60 trillion in the absence of mitigating action — a figure comparable to the size of the world economy in 2012 (about $70 trillion). The total cost of Arctic change will be much higher."

Let me clarify what "mitigating action" means in current envirospeak.  It means addressing the cause, not just the effects. At least one assumes that's what it means in this context.  And that doubt is one reason I find this mitigation/adaptation vocabulary so pitiful.

The study notes that while some businesses and business writers have been touting the economic benefits of a warmer Arctic, this effect is a far, far greater economic negative.

According to Prof Peter Wadhams from the University of Cambridge, there's increasing evidence that methane is now being released into the atmosphere. "When you look at satellite imagery, for instance the Metop satellite, that's gone up significantly in the last three years and the place where the increase is happening most is over the Arctic," he said.  

On It

For the first couple of years of the Obama administration, the complexities of ongoing policy, administrative and legislative efforts to turn this ship of state around from the Bush years and to respond to the Great Recession sometimes meant that issues that arose suddenly didn't get addressed before they mushroomed into bigger problems.  But that's not happening anymore.

President Obama directly and forcefully addressed the question of gasoline prices on Thursday.  This I expect will be just the opening salvo in a spirited counter-offensive to the disingenuous efforts of GOPers to make political hay.  Gas prices are literally where the rubber meets the road for many people, and one of the few topics that gets discussed by people who don't like to talk politics.  Where I think GOPers misread the situation is in regards to alternative energy. My touchstone here is western PA, where a local supermarket chain literally saved itself from possible bankruptcy by offering an incentive of free gas indexed to the grocery bill.  I visited there during the last gas price jump--during the Bush administration--and was surprised to hear people talking about alternative fuels.  People are interested in what works, and despite emotions they are aware of larger problems that don't have simplistic solutions, and are likely caused by international politics, financial manipulations and the agendas of oil companies. 

The McCain campaign made fun of candidate Obama's suggestion that properly inflated tires help gas mileage, yet that's precisely what people want to hear: solutions they can implement.  It can be a delicate dance--it didn't work so well for Jimmy Carter--but especially when U.S. oil production is significantly higher than under Bush (and when the government has approved more drilling than oil companies are willing to do),  the simplistic "bumper sticker" solution of drill more may not wash anymore.  And people are even more suspicious of oil companies than the government.  GOPer politicians lie just as outrageously about Obama administration policies and actions on energy as they do on--well, everything else.  So the pushback has to continue, with the facts.

For a perhaps different constituency, the Obama administration is addressing the hot topic of privacy on the Internet with a privacy Bill of Rights that the major players have signed on to.  This comes as there's more controversy among users, and concern from state attorneys-general.

Meanwhile, I expect President Obama is having urgent if off the radar meetings on Syria, where the situation is worsening, especially in the area where three journalists were killed, including a Syrian and an American who both pleaded for the outside world to pay attention to what is happening there.  Now the survivors are surrounded, and government tanks and troops are going in for the total kill.  Secretary of State Clinton is currently involved in meetings seeking international action.

Sunshine Today

Update: The postponment of the pipeline approval is official now, and attacks have already begun from GOPers on the issues of jobs and energy.  They are also asserting that this was a decision based on electoral politics.  With his crowing of victory, McKibben is playing into that perception.  It's worth mentioning that though the President made the final decision, the recommendation to postpone came from the State Department.  They want to consider all the factors.  From their statement: "After obtaining the additional information, the Department would determine, in consultation with the eight other agencies identified in the Executive Order, whether the proposed pipeline was in the national interest, considering all of the relevant issues together. Among the relevant issues that would be considered are environmental concerns (including climate change), energy security, economic impacts, and foreign policy."

While I've joined in the call to stop the pipeline, I recognize--as apparently environmentalists who seem capable of congratulating only themselves do not--the other considerations, and the questions that have not been answered.  One of these has to do with the impact on the Climate Crisis, if Canada decides to exploit their resource anyway and sell the energy to China.  I'd like to hear that addressed.  And it would be nice if the Obama administration got a little credit for taking the political heat for pulling back from a project that at least looked like it could generate jobs in hard times.  



Several news outlets are reporting that the Obama administration will postpone a decision on the tar sands pipeline from Canada for at least a year, which means among other things until after the election.  It will still probably emerge as a campaign issue but not as prominently, and perhaps a better final decision can be made outside the heat of that kind of politics.

Meanwhile, progress towards ending such dependence on fossil fuels continues.  California has passed a milestone in solar energy--one gigawatt installed, joining five entire countries in solar capacity.   Paul Krugman has added his economically inclined voice to, well, mine, in championing solar energy as the energy source of the present-becoming-future:

"We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power. If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives."

Which of course the Koch Brothers are all about, and the GOP, which is a mostly owned subsidiary of fossil fuel industries.  Krugman points out that one of the fossils with a new look--fracking--violates the principles that GOPers chant incessantly:

"So it’s worth pointing out that special treatment for fracking makes a mockery of free-market principles. Pro-fracking politicians claim to be against subsidies, yet letting an industry impose costs without paying compensation is in effect a huge subsidy. They say they oppose having the government “pick winners,” yet they demand special treatment for this industry precisely because they claim it will be a winner."

But despite the fossils who prevent the scale of investment in solar energy that a sane nation would insist on, the cost of solar energy is dropping rapidly and Krugman writes that it won't be long before electricity generated by the sun will be as cheap as that generated by coal.  That of course won't stop the fossils from pouring their billions into disinformation and worse, but it will persuade the 99%.

I'll Follow the Sun

Just a few days past the famous Bloomsday and of course Captain Picard Day, today is International Solar Day!   

Seriously though folks, of all the green power/clean energy forms out there in various stages of practicability and promise, solar power always has seemed to me to be the most sensible form, with the most potential.

 The sun after all is the ultimate source of all our energy, so why not go right to the source?  Plus--and this to me is the best argument and solar's greatest advantage: its technologies are theoretically and practically the most diversified and scalable.  Unlike wind farms that have to be huge, or wave power that has to be in the ocean, solar power can be generated by very big devices for a lot of people, or by very small devices for a few.  And these days, solar power can be just about anywhere.

I think that's the future: a system that provides redundancy and autonomy, where you have enough power to run your house or even individual devices as well as your city and region.  Solar devices can eventually be made so small that we can wear them, or string them on the outside of vehicles to run them.

With almost no one noticing, solar power has been dropping in price for decades, and new breakthroughs may well be on the horizon to drive the costs down further--the Obama administration is betting on at least one of these.

I'll leave it to the experts to make the range of technical and economic arguments.  But regarding the whole climate crisis/energy crisis future, this is one of the few things I've got a good feeling about.  Other technologies, including some pretty exotic bio-based ones, should also be explored, but as for me, I'll follow the sun.     

On 10/10/10

On Sunday, which is this portentous date--a very powerful one, if I remember my basic numerology--Bill McKibben's 350 organization is holding a Climate Crisis Global Work Party, which McKibben explains:

"On 10/10/10 we'll show that we the people can do this--but we need bold energy policies from our political leaders to do it on a scale that truly matters. The goal of the day is not to solve the climate crisis one project at a time, but to send a pointed political message: if we can get to work, you can get to work too--on the legislation and the treaties that will make all our work easier in the long run."

The event has been announced and in the process of being organized for months, and I hope that come Sunday the participation is high and the media notices. And maybe by Saturday all the progressive and enviro blogs will be reminding everyone that it's happening. But as of today, the online silence is eerie. I was about to say that it isn't even on the homepage of 350.org, but between the time I started this post and now, it has appeared!

But in a quick click-through of the relevant sites on my "Climate Crisis Future" bloglist, it's prominently mentioned only on Climate Crisis Coalition , the Environmental News Wire, Environment at change.org, Grist and World Changing, which is not nothing, but still... Let's hope that the rest of the sites get to this Saturday, along with the social media tools.

For this is a test not only of participation but of the environmental movement's ability to work together effectively. There are a lot of organizations--some very large ones--with their own agendas, who don't seem to work together much. And there are a lot of sites with smaller organizations clustered around a key figure and his/her (actually, almost always his) books and speaking engagements.

But if this is a transcendent moral issue, a crisis that threatens civilization and portends hardships that some are already suffering and many more will in a few short years, then it is long past time for everyone to transcend their agendas and egos and make one big voice.