steve austin

This is a great real time climate update by Bill McKibben for The New Yorker:  read the whole thing here

“The melting of ice caps and glaciers and the rising levels of our oceans and seas, initially predicted for the end of the century, have occurred decades early. “I’ve never been at . . . a climate conference where people say ‘that happened slower than I thought it would,’ ” Christina Hulbe, a New Zealand climatologist, told a reporter for Grist last year. This past May, a team of scientists from the University of Illinois reported that there was a thirty-five-per-cent chance that, because of unexpectedly high economic growth rates, the U.N.’s “worst-case scenario” for global warming was too optimistic. “We are now truly in uncharted territory,” David Carlson, the former director of the World Meteorological Organization’s climate-research division, said in the spring of 2017, after data showed that the previous year had broken global heat records.”

 

SA:  This is a complicated but important explanation of how to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.  The upshot is that right now, Direct Air Capture of CO2 is still a niche idea that might gain traction later in the century, but even then it will not be a substitute for ending the use of fossil fuels.

By Dave Roberts, Vox

Climate change is caused by putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What if, instead, we took it out?

The idea of pulling carbon dioxide directly out of the air has been bouncing around climate change policy circles for well over a decade, but it’s only been in the past few years that the technology itself — “direct air capture,” or DAC — has been tested in the real world.

In June, we got the first solid engineering and cost numbers on DAC, courtesy of a company called Carbon Engineering out of Calgary, Canada.

In a paper in the new energy journal Joule, the company (led by its founder, Harvard’s David Keith) reports its experience over the past three years running a DAC demonstration plant in Squamish, British Columbia. It’s the clearest look yet at how DAC might actually work, not just as a technology but as a business. “I’m impressed with the degree of transparency, detail, and clarity in the Joule paper,” Dr. Julio Friedmann, a former Obama appointee at the Department of Energy and a distinguished associate at the Energy Futures Initiative, told me. “It sets the standard for future players.”

The headline news from the paper is that the cost of capturing a ton of CO2 — estimated at around $600 in 2011 — has fallen to between $94 and $232. Almost any source of renewable energy can prevent a ton of carbon for cheaper than that, but still, down at the lower end, beneath $100, DAC starts to look viable in a low-carbon world.

Something about the idea of pulling carbon out of the air really struck a nerve. The study Continue reading “Sucking carbon out of the air won’t solve climate change”

By Rebecca Solnit, originally published in The Guardian.

If you took your history lessons from the street names and the names of bridges and buildings, rivers and towns, you would believe men, mostly white Protestants, did nearly everything that ever mattered. But that is slowly changing: our public landscape is undergoing a deep transformation. And it reflects the shift that is under way in our society, from Alaska to Florida. It’s not enough or comprehensive or complete – but it’s a beautiful start and a powerful foundation for more change to come. Continue reading “A New Public Landscape in the USA”

By Samuel Alexander, Joshua Floyd, originally published by The Ecologist

The transition to renewable energy will entail a period of economic deintensification or ‘degrowth’ that could benefit wellbeing. The present age of globalised industrial societies organised by market capitalism is historically unique.

While there are many indicators that mark this time as particularly unusual, the scale of energy use stands out as an especially significant anomaly. Stripped back to its essentials, energy is what does the ‘work’ of physical transformations – changes in form and movement of matter.

On that basis it should be clear that energy availability has both enabled and constrained the types of societies that have arisen throughout history.

Fossil fuels

The world as we know it is shaped in the image of fossil fuels. Indeed, the extent of this influence extends further still, encompassing even individual and cultural identities.

Fossil sources account for around 85 percent of global primary energy supply, but more importantly, the institutions and infrastructures, the plant and equipment, the ways of organising human relations, all have oil, coal and gas embedded at their core.

When everything with which we’re familiar is so fundamentally steeped in fossil fuels, climbing out of the valley of established expectation to envisage life beyond them poses a formidable challenge. It is hardly surprising then that post-carbon futures are overwhelmingly portrayed with levels of energy abundance that have arisen only with carbon civilisation itself.

But we must climb beyond this default assumption of abundance. As a matter of Continue reading “The Energy Descent Future”

Note: This is the introduction to Carbon Civilization and the Energy Descent Future by Samuel Alexander and Josh Floyd. You can find out more about the book here.

Just as the bird’s nest, the badger’s lodge and the bees’ hive require investments of energy for their construction and maintenance, so too with human settlements. Taken to the extremes of scale and intricacy, settlements in the form of cities constitute humanity’s most energy-intensive creations. In fact, cities might be viewed as meta-creations that enable the emergence and development of other expressions of human creativity, and this creativity, as with all life, depends on energy, in requisite forms and quantities, for its sustenance and development.

A hunger for energy is woven particularly deeply into the nature and condition of modern humanity. We fell the forests and mine the landscapes to construct our dwellings and build our roads. In much of the world, heating of houses and water relies on combustion of wood, gas, oil or coal. Electricity, like a god, gives us light and it powers our abundance of convenient appliances and machines.

Oil takes us where we desire to be and back again without effort.

The expansion of energy harvesting and use that allows large-scale societies to grow inevitably generates new problems that these societies must then deal with. In turn, responses to such problems typically drive further energy demand. The processes by which large-scale societies take form and evolve are both enabled and constrained by their energetic foundations.

Throughout history the over-use of energy has not been a prevailing problem—more often, the existential challenges that humans have faced can be viewed in terms of energy scarcity. Had ready access to new energy sources been available, many past societies may have overcome (or at least delayed) crises that precipitated their demise. Even so, the provision and use of energy in previous eras caused problems too. Deforestation is not a purely modern phenomenon. The harm caused by airborne particulates from burning wood and coal has a long history. As horses became a dominant mode of urban transport, their manure in the streets became a hazard. That human exploitation of energy resources should drive environmental change is not new. This is as old as the mastery of fire, and our energy use always has and always will have consequences beyond the benefits it brings.

Nevertheless, it seems that we have now entered an age in which problems that can be characterised in terms of the under-use of energy are being eclipsed by dilemmas in which over-use is central. Granted, humans enjoy vastly disparate access to energy, with Continue reading “Carbon Civilization and the Energy Descent Future”

@13:00 “We are at a very dangerous moment in human history. We have weapons of mass destruction, we are in the process of inadvertently altering our climate, exhaustion of fossil fuels, all kinds of problems come with technology. We are not certain that we will survive this period of what I like to call technological adolescence.”

Great words from a smart man in public life so long ago.  And we didn’t listen.

“Well, imagine what happens if water dries up and you cannot produce food in northern Africa. Imagine what happens if Nigeria hits its alleged 500 million people by the middle of the century … you are going to have hordes of people in the northern part of the Mediterranean knocking on the door. I am telling you. If you don’t believe me, just go read the literature.”

Read here

M.V. RamanaRobert Jensen, YES Magazine

“The underlying cause here is ‘technological fundamentalism,’ the belief that the increasing use of evermore sophisticated, high-energy, advanced technology can solve any problem, including those caused by the unintended consequences of earlier technologies. This Panglossian approach allows modelers to state the climate problem can be contained without giving up a social and political system that is founded on continued and endless economic growth.

This belief also allows for the idea that the business-as-usual approach can continue, and the solution is replacing coal, gas, and nuclear plants with solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries or other storage technologies. As supporters of the fossil fuel and nuclear industries like to point out, even these technologies have environmental and social impacts. To live sustainably on this planet—and despite what folks such as Elon Musk might promise, this is the only planet available for the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants—even these more benign technologies have to be limited in scale.

The alternative is obvious. The starting point of any serious discussion of climate change must be to recognize that it is not possible to limit global warming to either 1.5 or 2°C in any “resource- and energy-intensive scenario” where economic growth continues in the usual fashion. To put it more bluntly, one cannot resolve the climate problem under capitalism, which cannot survive without endless growth.

Arguments against capitalism are at least as old as capitalism itself. If one is honest about the implications of the latest report, climate change is providing another compelling argument for fundamental economic change.”

Read here

“The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5m years ago, when the temperature was 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than now,” said the WMO secretary general, Petteri Taalas.

“The science is clear. Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gases, climate change will have increasingly destructive and irreversible impacts on life on Earth. The window of opportunity for action is almost closed.”

Read here

Climate refugees in the USA – From Climate Progress