The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon January 26th, 2009

Despite our taste for doing so, the world can never be divided into two kinds of people.  Still, were one to try and divvy up climate change activists, one way to do it might be to divide up those who admit that addressing climate change is going to be painful and those who are inclined to minimize the difficulties, perhaps even claim that in our mitigation strategies lies the beginning of a new economy.

Among those who stand on the “this is going to hurt and it is best we prepare people for it” side of the aisle are Bill McKibben, who has discussed the costs of climate change in recent articles in _Foreign Policy_ and _Yale Environment 360_, George Monbiot, whose superb _Heat_ describes his concern that our calls to insufficient action actually reflect our desire to fail, and thus not be forced into austerity, and James Hansen, who has described the methods that must be implicated in the next few years as “draconian.”  Longtime readers will recognize that I fall firmly in this category as well – in fact, one of my proudest achievements was the inclusion of language I wrote (profuse thank to Albert Bates for arranging its inclusion) in a document on climate change presented to Kofi Annan calling for a reconsideration of climate activist’s reluctance to call for sacrifice. 

On the other side of this divide stand, well, I think most major climate activists.  I do not think I am misrepresenting the field to say that the majority opinion is that climate change can probably be addressed without too high a cost, and that hopes are running high among many people that new green jobs will mitigate the current economic crisis.  I certainly don’t blame such writers for their hope, but I think they overstate.  For example, Grist contributor Anna Fahey has argued that the fact that a recent poll puts climate change down as number 20 out of 20 of national concerns really isn’t that bad, because

“The fact is, solutions that will address the top two concerns — the economy and jobs — as well as several other top 10 concerns — energy, terrorism, helping the poor — are all wrapped up in the best solutions for combating climate change.

The fossil-fuel roller coaster has long whiplashed family budgets, and our economy remains shackled to its adrenaline-boosting unpredictability. Any economic recovery we muster in coming months will sputter if we fail to reduce our fossil-fuel dependence. As soon as the economy rebounds, oil prices are sure to shoot up again, negating the economic gains that we’ve made. “

There is some real truth there – but there’s a big missing elephant in this room.  The problem is that if the people don’t actually care about climate change, they are likely to seek solutions, say, to rising oil prices that make the climate situation worse.  For example, in the Northeast, where I live, there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of households burning coal for heat, in response to rising heating oil prices and availability issues.  In order to choose spending thousands on insulation, rather than a thousand dollars on a coal stove, a household will have to actually care about climate change – and convey that concern to their representatives in such a way as to provided economic incentives to choose the more expensive option.  It is not clear to me that the best ways to keep people comfortable in their homes or to get us new jobs are always ones that lead towards the radical shifts in carbon usage that are needed – and my concern is that as long as the message remains “we won’t ask too much of you” people will indeed expect not to be asked.

In this sense, my own feeling is that those who understate the costs of mitigating climate change actually do more harm than good.  I don’t blame them for their preference for the politically palatable – I would prefer that too.  But I would argue that there are two problems – the first is that a more politically palatable strategy is infeasible, particularly given the current economic situation, and that it risks branding climate activists as liars later on, when the bills come due. 

A good example of those who dispute the “this is gonna hurt” strategy is Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope’s recent missive “Moving the US Off Carbon with Less Pain, More Gain.”  He writes,

“But if, as Bill McKibben has said elsewhere, there is no silver bullet for climate change, just lots of silver buckshot, then insisting that sacrifice is the key has the effect of distracting us from the reality that it will take many answers to solve the problem. Often, advocates of inaction or tokenism say the reason we must do too little is that the price of doing more is too extreme. It is not strategically helpful to reinforce this notion.

The assumption that the costs of climate recovery will be prohibitively high simply does not stand up to scrutiny. A study by McKinsey & Company last year documented large opportunities to reduce U.S. emissions by 2030 that could be achieved with a negative cost — meaning that these represent investment opportunities that would increase the productivity of the overall U.S. economy. Less speculatively, experts at the University of California-Berkeley recently documented that more than 1.5 million jobs were created in California by relatively aggressive clean energy policies adopted by the state between 1972 and 2006. And other studies show that in the long run, energy costs are lower under a high efficiency and renewable energy scenario.” I would never presume to speak for Bill McKibben, but my own guess is that the reason that he presents sacrifice as key is that “sacrifice” is not in itself a BB, a bullet or a wedge, but something different – a national relationship to our collective actions, some hard, some not, one that opens up the range of available possibilities.  Were I making the case, my inclination would be to observe that we are more likely to succeed with more ammo to fire against climate change (can I just say that I really hate the BB-Bullet discussion – is there no other terminology we can get to here?) rather than less – a call to sacrifice offers us a range of options not available without that compelling rationale – without, we have fewer BBs to shoot.But is sacrifice really even necessary?  Pope mentions studies that suggest that we might actually make money on the climate, and the possibility of job growth.  But let’s take a closer look here at the studies he cites.  It might first be noted that the McKinsey report mentioned was sponsored by such ecological luminaries as Shell and PG&E – this does not in itself devalue the research, but it does suggest that the research was undertaken by those who would probably like to find necessary energy cuts economically profitable.  But more importantly the essay shows comparatively low cost abatements for limiting emissions to 550 ppm, moderate cost for limiting them to 450ppm (among them Carbon Capture and Storage, often falsely described as “clean” coal –  which does not exist and probably never will – so is irrelevant to any discussion), and then leaves open “higher cost abatements” for stopping at 400ppm.  Moreover, it presumes a fairly stable economic situation – neither of which assumptions deal with the reality.

Much of the problem lies in shifting assessments of what we have to do – analysis based on older climate estimates of 450 ppm by mid-century simply don’t match up to the new science.  For example, see Gar Lipow’s timely discussion of how fast we have to cut emissions radically.  Generally speaking, those who claim that climate change can be arrested without signficant economic costs are those who still accept the IPCC assumptions about climate sensitivity, many of which were proved false before or shortly after its release.  Williams, I think does a superb job of demonstrating the big gap in our understanding – at this point, we don’t know what precise rate or by what date we need to reduce emissions.  But it seems likely that Pope’s analysis, while better than the IPCC’s, is still understating the scale of emissions reduction.  He says,

“Confronted with the urgent need to reduce our economy’s greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent to 35 percent in the next 12 years, and 80 percent to 95 percent by mid-century, it is difficult to imagine this shift not requiring massive sacrifice.”

The “mid-century” figure is almost certainly far too far in the future.  Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute suggests we have to be down 80% in 11 years.  Most other cutting edge analysis suggest at the latest by 2030.  Nearly all analysts find that the costs of mitigation rise rapidly when we have to do it faster and make deeper cuts. 

The other relevant point, and one that seems to be grasped by few climate activists is this.  In 2006, 80% by 2050 seemed quite radical.  In just 2 years we’ve learned that climate sensitivity is, as Carbon Equity puts it, ”double” what was thought in 2006.  Meanwhile, in two years we’ve seen a dramatic reduction in arctic ice, in the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon and we’ve begun to see signs of substantial increases in methane release – all things that the IPCC had predicted might happen at the end of the century. 

Which means that given the pace at which the acceptable carbon levels are being pushed back, it would be foolhardy not to leave room in our analyses for the reality that the earth’s response to carbon already emitted may push back acceptable levels of carbon still further.  That means, we may have to move even faster than we think.  I realize this is not pleasant to consider, but we have no choice but to allow some leeway.  Pope’s analysis assumes lower targets than the emerging scientific consensus, he assumes a longer period to make the shifts, and most importantly, he leaves no room for further revisions, even though events of the last few years suggest that they are likely to be needed. 

The other difficulty with Pope’s analysis, and with many other climate activists’ assessment that we can count on this to be easy is that their analyses seem to take a given a stable economic situation.  Generally speaking, brief mention is made of the economic downturn, the assumption is that life will shortly return to Business As Usual.  The problem with this assumption is that it leaves out other contributing factors, and views climate change in isolation.  I think it is not accident that among those activists who endorse a call for sacrifice, every single one is on record as believing in peak oil.  Hansen, McKibben, Monbiot – all seem to fully grasp peak oil *and* the fact that peak oil is most likely to manifest itself as an economic difficulty.

 Indeed, I’ve argued that our current financial crisis is, in fact, an expression of both climate change and peak oil, indirectly.  In my essay ”Peeling the Onion: What’s Behind the Financial Mess” I argue that the food crisis, which is both an energy crisis (much of the rise in food prices was driven by the rich world’s misguided rush to biofuels) and to a lesser extent a climate crisis (climate instability has also been a contributing factor in the rising cost of food) drove millions of new consumers in the Global South back into poverty, forcing them to spend more and more of their income on food, and thus cut the flow of growth in the world overall. 

Whether you accept that analysis or not, it is certainly no accident that rising energy prices eventually helped push an fragile bubble into collapse – and quite honestly, there’s little reason to believe that future high energy prices, when they return, won’t also cause another economic crisis (assuming we actually get out of this one), or extend the current one.  In fact, I’ve argued that in the US, most of our truly serious economic crises have lasted a decade or more which suggests that there is a tolerable chance that whatever strategies we will use to deal with climate change must be compatible with a vastly poorer society, with its eyes fixed on its economic difficulties.  Is this inevitable?  No, but just as we need to take into account the possibility that climate sensitivity will be further revised downward in accordance to new realities, it would be imprudent to base any policy on an assumption of wealth for which there is no clear evidence.

In a Global Depression, which is what we seem to be facing at present, the realities of long term economic returns and cost benefits are radically different than all the prior estimates have been based upon.  As far as I know, there is no major economic analysis of the consequences of climate change mitigation in a negative growth Depression.  All of our economic analysis has so far assumed growth, the ability to borrow, and most importantly, a population of reasonable affluence.   The gap in our understanding this lack of research creates is vast.  The reality is that things have changed, and we forgot to allow for those changes.  This is understandable, but the rhetoric of climate change must change now, to reflect the new realities.  Yes, our president is calling for year over year trillion dollar deficits, and some of that money will probably be poured into green development – indeed, it absolutely should be.

But more and more of that money will be needed to simply mitigate economic suffering – states will need it to keep the plows and buses running and basic policing going, unemployment funds will need to be replenished.  Pope’s observation that green growth led to the creation of 1.5 million jobs in California from 1972 to 2006 ignores the fact that that was a 34 year span (I was born in 1972) – that adds up to a job creation rate of about 250K a year – and we lost more than twice that in jobs last month.   Again, do not mistake me – my goal here is not to dismiss the value of investing in environmentally friendly infrastructure, it is to talk about things as they actually are, in the hopes that we might not abandon the project of mitigating climate change altogether.

 In a declining economic situation, where much of our action must be undertaken in a period where people are struggling economically and where their eyes are primarily fixed upon their suffering, climate change risks being driven off the agenda altogether by the economy.  If the current Depression goes on – and there seems no realistic end in sight, and more and more economists are assuring us that there is no quick fix - we will have to cut our emissions hugely while people are also enduring involuntary economic pain.  We may also have to cut those emissions while enduring the early effects of peak oil, which may further cut into the resources we have to adapt.

It seems likely that the next decade, which James Hansen calls “critical” will be one of collective suffering, and a major shift in economic realities.  Even Pope admits that there will be some hardship.  Those who deny the reality of climate change are already claiming starting to claim that misguided attempts to deal with climate change are already the cause of our suffering – and that will only increase, no matter what carbon cost strategy we adopt.  The climate deniers are already trying to seize the public narrative – and as people get poorer they will be more likely to accept the idea that their poverty is in part caused by our strategies for dealing with climate change – or even to agree with those who believe climate change isn’t a real problem.  We have seen over the last decade and more just how powerful the anti-scientific but rhetorically brilliant climate denier lobby.

Pope’s strategy, which is to reassure people that they will end up better off is doomed to failure.  The reason is that whether climate change has anything to do with it or not, the odds are good that during much of the period in question, people won’t be better off – and they are not foolish enough to accept being told that something is for their benefit when they do not see benefits.  This strategy is likely to enable the denier narrative that says that climate science is false – because they will point out that we promised something we could not and did not deliver.  And we will have.

On the other hand, the rhetoric of sacrifice is potentially powerful here.  Historically speaking, in the US, in Britain, in many nations we’ve seen a willingness to endure privation if we felt we were part of a greater national project, if our sacrifices were needed.  And this is where climate change, overlain upon the economic crisis, offers us a chance to pull together.  That is, poverty due to economic crisis has no inspiring qualities.  But sacrifice for the cause of building a better future for one’s posterity – that has possibilities.  In that narrative, one can ask people to forgo the coal stove, can ask them to bear with cooler temperatures, not just because they can no longer afford to heat their houses as they have been, but as part of a Global and national project that ensures the well-being of the future.  That is, the call to sacrifice makes possible a range of actions impossible without it, and enables an overarching narrative that makes even involuntary sacrifice part of a heroic story.  It is, I think, impossible to underestimate how important the sense of personal heroism can be to shaping one’s understanding of events.

Moreover, I think the public will forgive hardship in ways they will not forgive lies.  Do not mistake me, I think Pope is telling the truth as he sees it, and so are optimistic climate activists.  But there is a solid chance that what he’s saying will become a lie, and be perverted into one by the denier right.  Only by taking command of the story we are being told can we acknowledge necessity and bring (if we must speak in the language of ammunition) as many BBs to the battle as possible.

Sharon

• climate , coal , economy , global warming
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Sharon December 13th, 2008

Are you sleeping too well?  Do you find yourself suffering from symptoms of happiness, a sense of security and contentment that the future will be good?  Well, I’ve got the medicine for that condition: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/552439

“There was a line in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s fourth report that didn’t get the attention it deserved:

‘Dynamic processes related to ice flow not included in present models but suggested by recent observations could increase the vulnerability of the ice sheets to warming, increasing future sea-level rise.’

The media picked up on the projected rise in sea levels of 18 to 59 centimetres by the end of the century, but they didn’t question the models’ limitations.

Many climatologists fear the gradual melting of ice will be replaced by ice break-up, causing a sudden huge rise in sea level. Such a scenario increases the necessity of rescuing our climate.”

Besides giving us all another reason to spend our time clutching our teddy bears and sucking our thumbs, to me this is the final straw.  Right now, one of the great difficulties we face when addressing climate change is simply this – we’re not scared enough.  Climate change commentators regularly observe this – generally speaking, the public gets terrified about something (avian flu, terrorism, etc…) and the experts are generally more moderate, particulary scientific experts.  They’ve been taught to moderate their statements, been taught to include plenty of caveats.  This is not the case in the subject of climate research – those who know most about it are far more frightened than the average American.  They are worried about a world in which our ability to grow food, to live where we have been living, to sustain our population is radically undercut by climate change.

Even before the IPCC report came out, we knew that it suffered from a combination of scientific reticence, excessive consensus building  and political manipulation by governments who didn’t want to be pushed too hard.  And within months or weeks of its release, we knew that the IPCC report had not just understated what *might* happen sometime in the future – it had wildly understated what had happened already.  For example, its emission projections were based on older data – emissions concentration in the early 21st century were dramatically higher than anticipated.  Within months, we saw that the end of Arctic ice might come in 5-10 years, rather than the 100 years projected in the report.  This alone should have been enough to shift the public discussion of climate change – to say that the IPCC report cannot operate as the primary public account of what is needed to address climate change.  Unfortunately, and despite the heroic efforts of people like James Hansen, Joseph Romm, George Monbiot, and the people at Climate Equity, the IPCC report has continued to dominate and misshape discussion of climate efforts.

I do not mean to criticize the IPCC scientists as a group or personally.  I agree that their own efforts have been remarkable. Many of them are also fighting the battle to help people understand exactly what the real situation of our climate is.  But it is not enough – the IPCC report operates a text with Biblical weight – all the rest, as they say, is commentary.  And as long as they IPCC report retains its power, those who do not wish to act, or those whose primary concern is not preserving a really inhabitable planet for the future, will be able to point to the IPCC narrative and say “but your own account of things says that things are not that urgent.”  Right now, this is a strategy being used by conservatives in the US who have been forced to believe in climate change, but who still want to put business first – and it is a strategy that will probably gain more, not less traction as the realities of our economic situation hit us harder.

The next IPCC report will not be released until 2013 – around the time we anticipate all the Arctic ice will be gone, and very close to the end of the narrow window of time that we have to perhaps – and at this point it is only perhaps – address climate change.   Right now, the talks in Poland are struggling – again, we are locked in a global game of chicken, with poor nations refusing to consider making cuts until rich ones do, and every nation terrified of the economic consequences of making moves that address even the IPCC account.

I do not think we will break this impasse while the IPCC report offers a comforting, even if recognizably false narrative in which to leave one’s faith.  As long as the largest portion of the population believes we have until 2050, that sea level rises will not be a problem in our grandkids’ lifetimes and a host of other misconceptions, and can find a document of authority to back them up, they will not be afraid enough. 

Ideally, the IPCC participants themselves would speak out – and some of them, to their enormous credit have done so.  But we need a concerted narrative pointing towards the real information – the idea, for example, that an appropriate target must be 350 ppm, rather than the 450 or 550 ppm numbers that are more politically expedient, but less real.  And we need to say over and over again – the IPCC was wrong.  It understated things.  Our metrics must be based on cutting edge knowledge, and cannot be undercut by scientific reticence.

Who knows, maybe the IPCC should hire me – I’m no scientist, but those they have – what they need is the Stephen King of climate change narration .  There is no way that an IPCC report written by me would describe the danger of sudden sea ice break-off causing rapid sea level rise in terms that no would notice, right ?

Sharon

• climate , future , global warming
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Sharon October 23rd, 2008

Just for one moment, I’m going to pretend that instead of a silly article diagnosing a pretend disease in the New York Times, I was given a chance to speak on the Op Ed Pages of the Times, that this is my one shot at the huge audience that the Sunday Times has.  Ignoring, for a moment, how unlikely that is, here’s what I would have said.

Last weekend my family and I appeared in the New York Times as victims (or perhaps purveyors) of a new mental illness, “carborexia.”  Apparently this is the pathological inability to produce sufficicient carbon, an environmental mania so extreme that it transforms ordinary lives into obsessive madness.  

The article began with the fact that my son Simon is deprived of the great American pasttime because it is a half-hour drive to a league that doesn’t have games on the Jewish Sabbath (poor kid, he has to play catch with his parents and pick up games with his friends and brothers – in fact, he and one of his friends actually broke one of our front windows yesterday with a particularly nice hit).  The language of the article included the term “huddle together for warmth” to describe the fact that my young kids sleep together in both warm and cold weather.  All of this operated to implicitly imply that I’m abusing my kids in my pursuit of a lower energy life.  And since even implied accusations of child abuse and mental illness are a potent weapon in this society, I wouldn’t be shocked if you did think I was crazy and a bad Mom.

My first inclination was to fire back with the accusation that instead, most Americans may be suffering from a pathology called “carbulimia” in which they gorge themselves on energy – twice as much as Europeans, who often have a similar or higher standard of living and level of happiness – and then effectively vomit up the excess, deriving no benefit and often actual harm to their health and hope for the future.  But this doesn’t quite get at the issue either – it just continues the Times’s trivializing of real eating disorders and their sufferers, and adds another dumb and uneuphonious faux-disease to the cultural lexicon.  Definitely not what is most needed.  Moreover, most of us don’t take in huge quantities of energy for its own sake, we use it because that’s how our society is structured, and how we’ve been taught to meet our needs.  We use most of our energy because we’re not sure how to do anything else.

Debating which extreme is pathological doesn’t help us find a functional way of life.  And that is what is desperately needed.  And quickly.  NASA’s chief climate scientist James Hansen has argued that we need to reach 350ppm very rapidly – within a decade.  We’re already past at nearly 390ppm - the arctic ice is already in the danger zone, Greenland is showing increasing melting signs and most disturbing, methane is being released from upper levels of arctic permafrost.  Meanwhile, there are signs that we may have passed the world peak in crude oil production, and the volatile price of energy has helped drive us into a recession.

Meanwhile, the governments of China, India and Russia have all announced that they have no intention of taking major steps to reduce their climate impact while wealthy Americans, Canadians and Australians consume all they want.  They argue that they are trying to bring their populace out of poverty, and that we who produce the largest per capita emissions need to make our reductions first.  We argue with them that we won’t reduce our standard of living, that “the American way of life is non-negotiable,” in part because we are frightened by the idea of changing our way of life into something unfamiliar.  And thus we enter a global game of chicken – they won’t change until we do, and we won’t change because we don’t want to be like poorer people.  Never mind that we are condemning our own children – and theirs - to greater poverty as larger and larger parts of their income will be required to mitigate unfettered climate change.  This is known as “cutting off your nose to spite your face” and it is pretty much our climate policy.

The only hope we have to make rapid changes, on the scale necessary to achieve the 350 goal, is to put every tool we have on the table.  We need to invest as much as we can in things like massive reinsulation, renewable energy and public resources.  We need to use sustainable agriculture, reforestation and the preservation of existing rainforests forests to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.  But these will not be enough – we cannot make this sort of shift in 8-10 years on renewable energy development alone.  It would be nice if we could – or if we had 50 years to do this, but we don’t have the time and resources, and there is no point in mourning the time we wasted.  We have better things to do.

What is going to be needed is a rapid shift in the American dream and the American way of life.  Without that shift, there is no hope that China, India and Russia will forswear coal or make other changes.  Unless we can look poorer nations in the eye and say we’ve met our targets, we’ll all pay the price together.  Without a model for a good, sustainable and happy American life that produces 50-90% less carbon, not from costly technologies that simply can’t be put in place in time, but from ordinary practices of daily life that can – we’re doomed.  If we believe that living a sustainable life makes us crazy, or forces us to live in misery and poverty, we face misery and poverty for future generations all over the world.

The good thing is that the good American life isn’t so very far away.  In 1945 we used 80% less energy per household than we do now.  Your parents and grandparents lived that way – they heated the rooms they used most often and closed off the other ones, wore sweaters and walked more than they drove.  They took the bus.  They ate less meat.  They grew Victory gardens and ate food grown near them.  They shared with their neighbors more and they worked together on what was then the greatest challenge facing the world – the rise of fascism.  What is most needed isn’t a move to the third world – it is a return to a familiar past.

There are plenty of Americans living right now who grew up like my kids do – instead of being driven to ball practice, they played baseball with other kids in their yard, and helped their parents weed the Victory garden.  They wore warm clothes in the winter and slept outside in the yard in a tent when it got too hot inside instead of clicking on the a/c.  Many grew up like my kids on farms, or spent their afternoons playing outside on the sidewalk or among the trees, rather than inside watching tv or playing video games.  They walked or biked places.  They mostly ate food from their family gardens or from local truck farms near their homes rather than processed foods and take out.  Maybe a few of you even remember that kind of childhood.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a perfect Mom, and my kids don’t live in fairy land.  We too struggle to find balance between the good in our energy use and the things we can afford to discard without doing harm.  We don’t always get everything right.  But we’re trying.  The reason I agreed to allow a photographer to come to our farm was that I believe that the very first step to going forward to a sustainable life is being able to imagine ways of getting there without the fear that this means unimaginable hardship.  I hoped that they might even show that we’re having fun – and we are.

We’ve come so far away from our lower energy life that we now think that the past is uninhabitable, that we can’t go home again.  And it certainly isn’t as simple as flipping on the way-back machine.  It requires thought and practice and time, small steps and failures, experiments and discussions with friends who care about the same things.  It requires an investment of time and energy.  But the past isn’t so very far way, either.  It would be a mistake to think that a life with less energy is so distant, so unimaginable that we cannot conceive of inhabiting that space.  Instead, it is something we can get to with a bit of commitment ane energy, with allies and imagination and creativity. 

Maybe my way isn’t right, I don’t know.  I know doing it exactly my way isn’t for everyone- we need city models of the sustainable life, and suburban ons as much as we need me and my garden and our goats.  We need versions that adapted to different ethnicities, faiths and cultures.  But we need all of these, and we need them badly.  Because as much of our future depends on our creating renewable energies or reinsulating homes, it depends at least as much on ordinary people transforming their lives into something that the whole world can live with.  It is a pity that we’ve heard so much about one half of the equation (the electric cars and renewable grid) and so little about this very basic question – how will we live?  How will we go on in a way that sustains us and creates a sustainable future for our posterity?  How will we find a way home to our past and our future simultaneously?  How will we (and here I mean all of us, across the world) find an equitable way out of our terrible dilemma?

 I don’t claim to have all the answers – heck maybe I am crazy, because I truly think that this could be accomplished, and I’m enjoying the process of making it happen. I do think that there are some available here for those (and I think there are many out there) who care enough to try: www.riot4austerity.org and www.350.org.

Shalom,

Sharon

• future , global warming
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Sharon September 9th, 2008

“More than at any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

Woody Allen

By now we know that bailing out the mortgage mess to the tune of…we don’t know how much but it will most likely be measured in trillions…is our lot in life.  While I hope we have been complaining about this to our representatives (if only for pro forma’s sake so that we can tell our grandkids “yes, I complained when they sold you and your future down the river”) it looks like it won’t do us much good. 

If you want to know why we aren’t going to be doing a massive build out of wind generators and solar panels so that we can all keep our cars going, our houses heated, etc… this is a good part of why (ok, we weren’t going to do it anyway, but now we’ve decided what stupidity we’ll allot the money to).  Instead, we’ve chosen to hook taxpayers to bail out companies.  Meanwhile, this is unlikely to stop the fact that we’re losing the equivalent of China’s GDP annually in real estate values - or the financial collapse we are rapidly sinking into.  And in a sense, it almost doesn’t seem to matter whether the US ends up defaulting on the enormous promises it is making, or whether it pays them – we’re hosed either way.  Because our ability to adapt in the future depends on not just real dollars, but credit – either way, we’ve mortgaged our future past redemption.   We are likely to drop into a period of severe Depression and financial instability, and on the other side is a life with less energy, less wealth and a whole host of other “lesses” that make up our new normal.

We talked here quite a bit recently about what we might do to make money after our new normal begins to emerge, and John Michael Greer, whose new book _The Long Descent_ was one of the best books I’ve read this year, has offered his own take on the future job market.  I agree with nearly everything he says – nearly everything. And churlish as it is to disagree with someone on the smallest point, who you agree with on every large particular, I’m going to take the time to meditate on at least one of his observations that I don’t quite agree with, because it is something that I think quite does matter in our future.  Greer writes,

Prophecy is a risky business at the best of times, but it’s worth hazarding some guesses about the jobs that will fill the post-petroleum job ads here in America over the next generation or so, through the years of the Great Recession and the disintegration of America’s overseas empire. Farmers are among the most likely candidates for the top of the list. By this I don’t mean subsistence farmers in rural ecovillages – their time is much further in the future, if it ever comes at all. Rather, market farmers tilling what is now suburban acreage to feed the dwindling cities, and rural farmers producing grains and other bulk crops for foreign exchange, will likely be in high demand, along with support professions such as agronomists.

Those who know me well can perhaps guess the bit I’m going to argue with – the observation that subsistence farmers will probably not be needed in this future, or not for a long time yet.  Now it is quite possible that the emphasis here should, in fact, be on the rural “ecovillages” and that I’m misunderstanding Greer’s point.  I’m actually in complete agreement with Greer’s many statements that ecovillages are extremely unlikely to be the dominant – or even a significantly useful – component of future community modelling.  I say this not to criticize those who live in ecovillages, but because as Greer himself has observed, they are simply expensive, involving a lot of economic self-sorting that is increasingly unlikely (if you prefer, you may say that we just spent the money we might have spent on ecovillage infrastructure instead of wind turbines ), and a model unavailable to all but the rich.  Ecovillages also involve discarding the enormous build-out of housing we have just used our wealth for (many, many millions of units more than a society that doesn’t require so much personal space and doesn’t have so much money) and demand lots of credit, which is unlikely to be available.  It simply isn’t going to happen.

But “subsistence farmers” and “rural ecovillages” don’t really necessarily go together anyway, except in a small corner of peak oil rhetoric. If I have any difference with Greer’s overarching analysis, it is simply that I don’t see one thing that Greer describes in his book - communities of people discussing peak oil and climate change who are starkly divided between pure techno-optimist, and flat apocalyptic absolutist, with Greer as one of the lone voices in the middle speaking for the balanced perspective.  Variations on Greer’s perspective seem to me to be the norm in the peak oil and climate change communities – or at least the ones that I hang around in, and have been hanging around in for the last five years.  There is a largish minority (but definitively a minority) of people who imagine a blinding apocalypse, including in this subset a smallish minority who imagine the apocalypse leading to all of us in our ecovillage, and a worldwide majority of people who are mostly too ignorant of the realities to be anything other than techno-optimists while a small minority of these actually know something about peak oil and climate change but retain that perspective.   But the mainsteam of those who are peak oil and climate change  aware seem neither to assume the ecovillage outcome nor the apocalypse, but that they will go on at some varying lower level.  So while it may be a tiny bit unfair, I’m going to call “ecovillage” the least important part of his sentence, and move on to the question of whether the future will involve a lot of us working as subsistence farmers.

Greer is certainly right that market farmers and grain farmers, particularly those growing for export will be a major factor in the US.  As we all know, the US is tremendously energy dependent on a host of nations – and we are economically dependent on them too.  The bailout of Fannie and Freddie to a large degree served to reassure our foreign asset holders that they will be paid (well, maybe…eventually…maybe).  Many of the nations we depend upon economically and for energy supplies are nations that are quite vulnerable to food insecurity for a host of reasons – and in many cases, are seeing that vulnerability exposed, and experiencing internal conflict over it.

Most of the Mid-East oil producing nations, especially Saudi Arabia, are in extremely poor food producing situations – ones that will only worsen with climate change.  Readers of this blog (or the news) will recall that Saudi Arabia has determined to stop producing staple grains entirely, because of the demands upon their desalinated water, and the projections of climate change.  In addition, many of the oil producing regions of Africa are now already experiencing difficulty feeding themselves due to climate change, while China depends heavily on imported food, and holds a good bit of America’s bad paper.

And the US, whatever else its limitations, remains the single largest food exporter in the world.  While it is a mistake to believe the old saw “America feeds the world” – most of America’s grains go to feed not the world’s people, but livestock in affluent countries, it is true that American grain production will be essential to its future economy.  Canada and Russia, exporters of both food and energy, are potentially better positioned for the future, but America’s ability to trade grain for some measure of energy will almost certainly be essential to our future economy.  It may well be the case that often, Americans will not be able to afford their own grain, an irony entirely recognizable to many, many of the nations upon whom globalization was thrust upon.  We shall have to see if the new globalization appeals to us.  With the dismantling of our manufacturing base and the petering out of many of our natural resources, we can expect grain farming for export (or potentially, but much less likely, for biofuel production – more on this in a later post) to be a major feature of the future. 

It was unlikely that I would disagree much with Greer’s vision of market farms created in the suburbs to feed the surrounding cities.  But I do disagree a little bit. It is certainly true that there will be some of this, and that in sprawled out cities that cover a large land base, it is quite possible that urban and suburban farming may provide a large portion of vegetables and livestock for the cities.   In cities that experience a rapid decline, the result may be similar – indeed, urban Detroit is already seeing houses torn down the resurgence of the prairie inside the city – a city that can feed itself with internal resources and a small amount of nearby ones is likely potentially promising.  

In much more densely packed area, near large cities in the US, however, I think even with Greer’s projected “dwindling” (which I think is likely), the suburbs will be quite hard put to feed themselves.  Market gardening in these suburbs and many others (which, as I’ve observed before, in many places have population densities similar to large towns and smaller cities of a century ago) will likely focus on feeding themselves, and perhaps a few market gardens feeding the affluent.  But Westchester County and Long Island and Northern New Jersey  are likely to have enough difficulty supporting their own present populations without being able to support New York City as well, at least until major population shifts have occurred.  In other areas of the country, water is likely to be a determining factor for the ability of external suburbs to support large cities – Los Angeles, Tucson/Pheonix and some other cities are likely to find it difficult to find the water to irrigate crops on individual lots.  And while research keeps showing that well designed and efficient small scale production uses water much, much more efficiently than industrial agriculture, even inefficient agriculture in places where there is adequate rain is likely to be more successful than place mired in chronic drought.  Again, the simple project of feeding oneself and one’s neighbors is likely to take up what water can be found.  There will be some suburban market gardeners near every city, particularly those able to own or claim right to larger chunks of land.  But I suspect subsistence agriculture may well be the dominant feature of our future.

But by subsistence agriculture I do not mean “a household where everyone works as a full-time peasant.”  Worldwide, most farmers either have a second job or a resident or non-resident family member who brings in income.  Most American full-time farmers either have a second job or a spouse or other primary family member who brings in income another way.  In Mexico, it has long be common to send one or two male members of the household to America to produce enough income to support the family farm.  In poor nations around the world, daughters or sons (but often daughters) are sent off to the factories to subsidize the same.  And so it was in the US 100 years ago, when my great-great grandfather taught school during the winter terms, and 130 years ago when American homesteaders worked the railroads and took in laundry and other ventures to support their farm, and 160 years ago when girls from Maine and New Hampshire were sent down to the woolen mills in Lowell, MA.  That is, while not true of every period in history, in the industrial age, it has generally been necessary to have an industrial income or two in order to support the subsistence farm.  Like Greer, I think we are in the process of a gradual transition to a post-industrial age, and I think because that is true, the industrial economy model of agriculture (as distinct from industrial agriculture itself) will probably not go gently into that good night.

But that doesn’t mean that most households won’t need to subsistence farm, in addition to the other things they do.  And the reason I’m focusing on this is because I think that thinking carefully and correctly about this issue will be essential as we prepare ourselves for the future – what we prepare for will shape how well we adapt.  Recognizing that home-scale food production, probably as a generalist, producing easily grown staples, vegetables and any animal products we require is part of our future, rather than (for most of us, I am generalizing and there will be markets for larger scale market gardeners – many of them) specialized niche production helps us plan for our future.

There are two reasons I think that most of us will be doing subsistence agriculture.  The first is that the future is one that I suspect will be more or less contiguous with the one we live in now – the ability of ordinary people to afford to meet basic needs will be steadily and seriously eroded.  Even at the level of simple functional necessity, all of us have a large number of basic needs that require large quantities of energy and money to fulfill at this point.  Property taxes may well be reduced by reassessment, but they won’t go away.  Many of us may be able to make some move towards not needing supplemental heat, but we’re still going to need some, and we won’t be getting all the energy locally.  Medicine is likely to remain costly even if we reduce to an absolute minimum our usage of most pharmaceuticals.  As we struggle to replace our energy and cost intensive educational infrastructure, many people will want to try and keep the internet going, if only so our kids can have some form of schooling not provided by parents working long hours.  And some money is going to be wanted for things like beer, cigarettes, cosmetics, escapist video games and books – the things that make difficult times marginally tolerable for many people.

Of all the basic needs that we currently fill with cash, the easiest and quickest one to replace may well be food.  Most of America is built in a way that makes use (note, not “good” use) of America’s huge size – we divide up land with a generous hand compared to Europe or much of Asia.  And we have spent the last 60 years subdividing our land into private lots, with moderately useful buildings still 20-50 years from their projected natural demise.  Now some of them may become derelict or be abandoned, some may be bulldozed and turned back to farmland – but this too is energy intensive.  While the selling off of our previous buildout may be a lucrative business, the rule about driving the car off the lot applies – there is a significant amount of depreciation involved, and while as Greer argues, junkyarding and scavenging will almost certainly expand vastly, it is also extremely likely that as the crisis creeps up on us, we may realize that much of what we have quite literally cannot be replaced, and find that it is necessary to make use of it.  But what we have created is mostly homes on fairly small lots by the standards of many farms – that is, large market gardening, of the sort that produces enough income to fully support a family, will be tough in many of the suburbs closest to cities - 1/8 acre lots probably aren’t big enough to bring in a lot of money – but they are big enough to reduce outgoing costs. Some people will specialize in high value crops, but for most people, growing your own tomatoes in a cash-poor society is probably worth more than growing at truckload of them and bringing them into a cash poor city – unless cities remain the province of the affluent.  Larger lot homes tend to be in the exurbs, and while 1-5 acre lots are perfect for market gardening, they have the problem of transport costs to contend with – and there are plenty of consumers in the inner suburbs happy to take their potatoes, without payint to ship them all the way into the city.  My suspicion is that most near-city gardeners will probably be subsistence gardeners. 

Trees take a long time to mature to firewood size, and it is tough to dig coal out of your backyard.  Home electric generation is pricey, and while some of us can grow our own medicinal herbs, we may still want tetanus shots and antibiotics at times. Few of us will be weaving our own cloth on any scale for a long time, if ever – while we may need to produce small items that wear out easily, industrial cloth production long preceeded fossil fuels. 

 Food, on the other hand, is pretty doable to produce.  And given that one of the hallmarks of an economic collapse or even Depression is widespread unemployment – while the growth, energy intensive economy wants as many employees as possible - it seems likely that with only minor familial reorganizations beyond what is forced upon us by the economy, the opportunity to produce food will be there.  As houses are foreclosed upon, I’m already seeing reports that squatters simply move back in – often the previous residents.  And if they don’t do that, well, they newly evicted go consolidate with their extended family, meaning that a household that once consisted of an overworked couple and their child may now consist of the same overworked couple, their child, their overworked brother and his boyfriend, and her mother.  The odds of everyone achieving – or needing – full employment are small.  And the subsistence economy means that steady employment of everyone is not desirable.

 The other reason that subsistence farming is a corrollary of a point I mentioned above – because food for export or perhaps biofuel production is likely to be so economically valuable in the coming years, much of the food we’ve relied upon in the past is likely to be quite expensive.  Artificial fertility is likely to be very costly – and a worldwide conversion to organic agriculture, while necessary, is likely to be staggered and messy in actuality and to come with costs of its own.  Climate change is unlikely to help worldwide total grain yields - the net seems to be an overarching decline.  Energy costs for fuel and other inputs are likely to continue to rise – and most of all, demand for grains and other foods is likely to remain high.  The large class of new American poor may well find itself unable to buy much food in a society where most food is marked for export.  And while I suspect the US government may continue subsidies to quell unrest, that doesn’t necessarily mean most people will be eating the food they want or are used to.  Meat and fresh fruits and vegetables during off seasons may be well outside most people’s means.

Which means powerful incentives to use existing land to produce one’s own – while currently home grown often means spending a lot, the techniques used by poor people around the world for home food production, plus the incentive of higher prices, mean that homegrown rabbits fed on weeds, chickens fed mostly on kitchen scraps and grass, with some grain fed on the side, and grass fed small grazers like sheep or browsers like small goats may well be cheaper to produce at home than to purchase.  Using free urine and composted marginal road wastes to produce food at home may well be cheaper than buying it at the store.

The combination of people having access to subdivided small parcels of land, under employment and high food costs means that subsistence food production will make sense in a way it has not in many years.  It has been a long time since Americans have fully understood that there is a distinction between “poor but we never felt poor” and “poor.”  But in the last Depression, and through much of history before that, and through much of the world at present, this is an enormously meaningful distinction – and the distinction is based primarily on the level of self-sufficiency of the people in question.  Those with access to land and food and shelter and heat tend to be of the “poor but we barely knew it” sort – those without access to those things tend to suffer the indignities and misery of being truly poor.  As more and more of us become poor, and are stripped of our formal economy incomes, the distinction between deep suffering and a little suffering will likely be one’s participation in the subsistence economy – not in ecovillages, but in the villages – and towns and cities and suburbs and what-have-you that we have now.

Sharon

• economy , food , global warming , peak oil
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Sharon June 20th, 2008

John Feffer has a really, really good article over at Asia Times Online.  It points out the deep danger we’re in – how teetery both the world and America’s food and energy systems are.  It is well worth a read, particularly because of its clear articulation of the bind we’re in – the strategies we’ve used in the past to get out of disaster will only accellerate collapse in the very slightly longer term. 

 The analogy that I’ve been using for some time is to the seawater used to extract oil in the Ghawar and other aging giant oilfields.  Matt Simmons, the world’s expert on this subject, argues that you can make the oil production levels look good for a while – but the seawater you pump in only accellerates the day that disaster strikes.  And that’s true of our agriculture – at this point, we’re in a losing race between expanding food production and climate change – all the conventional strategies for growing more food push us faster and faster towards the day that the planet can produce much, much less food.  Every bite of food we eat now through conventional means takes food out of the mouths of our children.

I think many people, deep in their hearts, think that ecological disasters apply mostly to other people.  But, of course, as Midwesterners are finding out right now, that’s not true. And it isn’t over – every image of floodwaters we see is brown – washing precious topsoil away, and pushing artificial fertilizers into water tables.  And the rest of us will be thoroughly schooled in that lesson as well, most likely. 

So how do we avoid becoming North Korea – are there personal or policy approaches that can fix this?  Could you have guessed that I have some suggestions, some obvious, some perhaps not.

The first one is obvious – we need to get the oil and gas out of agriculture – and rapidly.  Farmers are already struggling to afford the fossil fueled inputs that are required for conventional agriculture, and industrial organic agriculture is almost as dependent on fossil fuels as conventional.  And all the fossil fuels, especially artificial nitrogen,  that we use are preventing future generations from eating.  Heck, it won’t take until future generations grow up – most of us under 50 will probably live to see it.

We’re seeing now just how oil and natural gas costs reverbate through the food system, and while it is possible to use wise forms of management to reduce those reverbations, the only possible way to stabilize the food supply and seperate it from volatile energy prices is to end the dependency of the food supply on fossil fuels.  We know that this is possible – besides the study mentioned in the paper above, other studies, including one last year at University of Michigan and a host of others have shown that organic agriculture can match and exceed yields.  Moreover, organic practices that match yields in optimal seasons often exceed conventional yields in times of plant stress – that is organic soils rich in matter hold up better to drought, heavy rains and other difficult conditions.  It isn’t a panacea, but in a world where drought and flooding are inevitable, we need the best cultural practices possible.

 But doing this involves replacing the oil and gas with *people* – that is, when Cuba moved to organic agriculture, it matched and exceeded agricultural yields on small farms.  But the large collective farms owned by the state never could match up yields – one of the agronomists concluded that “farms of this scale are not easily compatible with organic production.”  And that’s the problem – we can get our need for fossil fuels in agriculture down quite low, but we can’t do it without paying more people a living wage to grow food.  And no, this isn’t just me, the UNESCO report made essentially the same claims.

Which brings me to the second conclusion – gardens are even more essential in the fossil transition than they may be overall.  Think about it – food prices are already high – a shift in our economy towards more agricultural labor, and paying farmers better will keep food prices reasonably high, and involve large scale economic changes. That means the cheapest food out there is going to be food grown by those who are not depending on it to make a living – who grow food for subsistence or for very small scale sales on their own land or on community land.  And because they are less dependent on either hired labor or fossil fuels, gardens are the future of affordable food in the US.  Will they meet every need?  No.  But they can make the difference between getting by and widespread hunger. 

The next point is perhaps a bit less obvious.  A few years ago, in my paper “The Ethics of Biofuels” almost no one noticed that one of my principles was that we had to shift our “biofuel’ priorities from corn and soybeans for ethanol and biodiesel to…trees.  For wood.  And perhaps even more importantly, for climate stabilization and for erosion control and soil repair. The home heating crisis I’ve been discussing for years is beginning.  And there is the real danger that the US will deforest itself nearly as badly trying to keep warm as North Korea did trying to grow food.  The long term consequences of that would be horrifying. 

Thus, instead of pushing to grow food on marginal land, moving Crop Protected soils into production (which we’re seeing now), we need to use hilly and marginal lands to grow forests, ideally forests at least partly composed of edible protein, oil and other crops.   We will need the wood, as home heating moves back to biofuels. We will also need the erosion control – midwestern fields once had hedgerows, that could stop the flow of soil, provide space for wildlife, and wood for stoves.  Bringing back the hedgerows might be a beginning strategy.

In already forested areas, the struggle is going to be for management.  And that’s going to have to be a big, big focus of our energies.  The thing is, it gets bloody cold up here ,and most of us have gotten used to “room temperature” being a heck of a lot warmer than it was in any other period of human history during northern winters.  The temptation to burn just a little more is going to be vast.  But we can’t – the pollution will be a disaster, and the deforestation worse.

So we’re going to have to strictly self-regulate our forests – and plant new ones as fast as we can.  And since this is not likely to make it on to the public agenda anytime soon, we’re going to have to do it on our own, on the small pieces of soil we tend.

It wouldn’t be easy for us to turn into North Korea – it would take a lot of bad management.  But it wouldn’t be so hard we couldn’t do it, either.  We’ve got to do better.

 Sharon

• agriculture , global warming , peak oil
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