It’s About Making Babies!

Sharon writes on Casaubon’s Book about “Our Tails Get In the Way: The Problems and Principles of Energy Descent”

Item 5 of her ‘problems blocking change’ list bothers me. “The sheer cowardice of most of us. ”

This perspective seems overly prejudicial, an attitude that has caused the term ‘tree hugger’ to become a derogatory catch-all phrase to label those concerned about the environment.

Change or growth is measured in pain. People tend not to change because change is a ‘little death’, a clearing away of the life that went before to make way for a new life. Since we can’t know what a changed life will be, in terms of comfort and security, or in terms of what we treasure in our current life, we have less trust in change than in working to preserve our current life.

Volcanoes happen, and earthquakes and floods and tornadoes. Much of the real devastation is to the survivors. They have to rebuild their lives, to persist from hour to hour until their lives settle into a pattern, and they learn to trust and treasure their new life.

What is being demanded to stabilize the environment is no less traumatic than asking people to step in front of a drunk driver. Only the suicidal is willing. For the rest of us the demands for change sound like encouraging suicice - to throw our old way of life away without understanding what lays on ‘the other side’ for us.

Cowardice is fear of facing danger. Calling fear of suicide ‘cowardice’ makes you sound weird, and untrustworthy. And to achieve real change you need to be trusted, your facts need to be trusted, and your solutions need to be trusted. Using the word ‘Cowardice’ throws all what you are concerned about into doubt.

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I have reservations about the whole greenhouse gas problem, and whether it is affected by what we do as a community of mankind.

That is, either carbon emissions are bad, or only bad for those that poor nations can thumb their noses at. If it is accepted that we need to accomplish something in the next 5-20 years, then trees make a really good way to capture carbon, short term. But the thousand square miles of rain forest Brazil (the ethanol-fueled tree-hugger hero) proudly reports burning last year, or the expected denuding of the Asian Continent in the next few years for China’s construction boom and charcoal for basic home heat and cooking are all A-OK. I guess poor-people carbon doesn’t count as much as non-poor people carbon.

The have been reports that cows belch methane as they digest their food, mainly grasses and some grains, depending on how they are raised and fed. What I haven’t seen is whether the land they grazed, or the crops that produced the grain, would have produced more or less carbon and greenhouse gases, averaged over the years, with cow grazing or without. That short-sightedness is akin to the Ethanol Blunder. That is, it takes more energy (read: Greenhouse Gas Emissions) to produce and consume ethanol than the energy ethanol provides. Yes, burning ethanol actually increases the amount of greenhouse gas, when you account for all the transportation and processing. Doesn’t that make Brazil look like real paragons?! Shouldn’t we be that great!

Only - ethanol does accomplish one goal. It keeps fuel on hand for war machines. We are seeing food riots around the world. That cannot get better before the next crops are harvested - which will be a while. Increase oil a bit more, or keep the prices this high much longer, and the urge to conquer and blow away the bad guys raising the price so high will become irresistible. Wars have always been fought over money. The amount of money at stake keeps going up - and support for war to secure energy resources will grow. We could be at war again before the next election.

Last year NASA reported an increase in global temperature, not a big surprise hear on Earth - or is it? The report claimed an increase on every planet in the solar system. Whether the increase is due to a change in the Sun’s energy or gravitational tides (if there are tides to gravity) or other energy transfer mechanism, what we do with our carbon emissions is not affecting Mars. But gravitational effects could well be triggering the recent major earthquakes and volcano eruptions. But the Kyoto Protocol doesn’t address changes that affect the whole solar system - only enhances careers of activists and ‘underdeveloped’ country developers.

Speaking of volcanoes. Notice how many thousands of times the total industrial pollution of the world gets dumped into the atmosphere by one good volcano eruption? Cubic miles of dust, thousands and thousands of tons of ozone-depleting compounds similar to Freon, radioactives, etc. And all outside the careful ‘tax the rich guy’ policy of the Kyoto Protocol.

So I have my doubts about global warming, or whether we are beginning the next ice age (global temps over the last 12 months average lower than the last 100 years - wiping out the increase the Global Warming crowd are so unhappy about).

I do know that there is less seed available, and less variety, for farm use in the US. Seed companies got their ‘genetic patent’ to outlaw planting harvested seed. Now the only seed available in a given season is what the seed companies deign to produce (if they under-supply seed, they get to raise their prices, see?).

I do know that current prices for fuel and metals are raising costs for equipment and operations to the point that farms and businesses are failing, or postponing a crop for a year (won’t that make us look good while people are rioting for food?). Farming is a skill, and agribusiness is equipment-intensive. It takes years to replace each farm operation that shuts down - and when neighbors expand to farm the affected ground, it makes the cost in ability to produce that much more susceptible to individual farmers getting hurt or ill. Or going broke.

I kind of resent the ‘cowardice’ label, when the story for change hasn’t convinced me that the coward-callers aren’t mistaken.

Matthew Power writes for Wired.com about Peak Water: Aquifers and Rivers are Running Dry. How Three Regions Are Coping.

This seven-page article includes some impressive charts and maps. The three regions are the US Southwest (Phoenix, AZ region), London, UK, and southeastern Australia (the one ‘down under’, not the one with the European mountains. The European country is Austria, where actor and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to be president).

For instance, it takes, on average, 11 gallons of water to make a slice of bread, counting the farming of the ingredients, building and operating the roads, equipment, fuel, baking, packaging, etc. Make that 2866 gallons of water to make the average pair of jeans. About 20 gallons for a glass of beer (I guess that is 12 oz glass), 36 gallons for an egg, 634 gallons to make a hamburger, and 2113 gallons to make a leather shoe.

There is also a water-energy nexus. It takes lots of energy to make water available, and often takes lots and lots of energy to reduce wasting water. Only, it takes lots of water to make energy. The article cites Palo Verde nuclear power station in Arizona as consuming 20 billion gallons of water a year, much going up in water vapor to rain down elsewhere. Palo Verde, according to a tour I took some years ago, has contracted with Phoenix and local communities to purchase, and pipe to the plant, storm sewer and sewage treatment plant outflow. While this reduces the plant’s strain on water resources in the low desert, it depletes the ability of the selling communities to re-use that water or return it to the environment for themselves.

Globally reservoirs are coming up low - as in, 1/4th capacity, and Australia’s Murray Reservoir may run down to 1%, just the Murray River. It has been a couple of years now that much of the food growing capacity of Australia’s prolific farming region has been without irrigation water, and 25% of normal (but inadequate for crops) rainfall. And they look for the worst drought in 115 years of records to keep getting worse. Already the millions of tons of rice that should have been produced this year are causing hording and price increases globally, even affecting Ponca City here in North Central Oklahoma, USA.

Farming is a skilled occupation, often requiring a lifetime to learn to use the equipment, to get the best yields of various field, to use various crops for best return, to manage the quality of the soil for best long term use and immediate crop production. A farmer markets much of his produce, maintains his equipment, sends his kids to school. A drought can destroy a farm, the grain elevators that purchase, clean, and resell the produce, the merchants that sell equipment, sell clothes and food for the family, etc. It can take a lifetime, once the rains come back, to restore a region to productive use. Expect this kind of catastraphe across Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia, according to projections. Much of the damage is already in progress. Whether due to global warming or rain forest depletion, it won’t be stopped this year, or next. Food riots may continue to destablize governments - tantalizing the moneyed power brokers that see profit in war. Some countries may resort to war to obtain resources of oil and water to stay in power. Conflicts overseas may not remain local, and there may be local unrest here in the US, too.

The article mentions ‘Peak Water’ in the title. This is a reference to recent concerns about ‘Peak Oil’ - an anticipated crippling of civilization on the planet, as demand and consumption for oil surpasses and depletes the supply. Peak Oil is expected to drive the agriculture community back to near-subsistence living - small farms with little mechanical equipment or fuel consumption, and corresponding limitation to supplying local needs. And, yes, I believe that does kind of project massive starvation in cities, here and abroad. Run out of oil, and diesel generators, vehicle use in general, and many high energy users - such as water districts, large business building, etc., will be limited in the available energy. Until the military gets their tanks and planes and ships running on wood-fired steam, we will be choosing to fuel our military or risk being over-run by countries with less water - like countries in Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and Australia. And, yes, the projection, according to Mr. Power’s article maps, is indeed dire. The regions where catastrophic loss of water resources are expected become extremely widespread.

Local conservation is critical in the short term. But globally things come together, too. For instance, the Gulf Stream that powers warm water from the Gulf of Mexico across the Atlantic Ocean to the North Sea. Okay, so it isn’t all that warm when it gets there, but it is warmer than when the stream stops. For the most part the Gulf Stream makes the weather milder in Europe, especially the British Isles. The warm rains, drizzles, and mild climates of Ireland and England are *supposed* to be due to the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Only, it seems the stream stops. One theory is that increasing spring runoff from Finland and Norway have diluted the North Sea just a bit. But that interferes with what happens to the Gulf Stream when it arrives. Normally the warm waters are lower in salt than the waters of the North Sea. So the heavier, lower-salt waters sink, settle toward the bottom of the North Sea. And join a river flowing west across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, where they replace the now-warmed waters streaming toward Europe across the surface of the Atlantic - the Gulf Stream. This massive, slow motion pump is surprisingly delicate. Slight changes in salinity in the North Sea, perhaps due to melting ice in the Polar region, have dammed the start of this slow-moving river, that takes the chilled waters down the 100-year-long rush to Mexico.

How much of the world’s drought is due to burning fossil fuels? How much is due to burning the thousand square miles per year of Amazon rain forest that Brazil is so busily engaged in? Brazil, you might recall, has boasted converting almost exclusively to biofuels. Which, contrary to what tree huggers have been telling us, is wasteful of resources, energy, and only partially reduces carbon emissions. What Brazil has accomplished is to achieve military and economic security - freedom from manipulation by foreign oil suppliers. They retain the ability to go to war anywhere they wish. They can also defend themselves - something they may need as Argentina runs low on water. In the mean time, they continue to destroy the world’s environment along with their rain forest.

Rationing and regulating water is already increasing. Ask any builder that has to have a water-use certificate that water will be available for 100 years before building in Phoenix, AZ. New Mexico has long regulated how much water could be pumped from any given well in the state. As more scrutiny is paid to who uses water and for what purpose, perhaps our local communities should be replacing community swimming pools with youth rifle ranges and militia training centers. “An armed society is a polite society.”

And we should wait to replace jeans until they get a bit more wear on them.