Recently a four-minute video titled No Pressure, written by the writer of Notting Hill, bombed worse than Ishtar because it bombed innocents. No Pressure promotes the 10:10 movement’s goal to lower carbon emissions by ten percent. The video went viral in an ebola sort of way.
Because banners and billboards are so déclassé, the 10:10 UK organizers decided that they needed to raise awareness for the prevention of the imagined catastrophic consequences of global warming with a YouTube video. The video certainly raised awareness—or, at least, eyebrows. In it, schoolteachers and bosses “lightheartedly” explode—complete with bucketsful of fake blood—anyone who chose not to do their part to lower their carbon dioxide emissions by ten percent starting October 10 (hence,10:10).
About fifty actors volunteered to work in the British video. Said one smiling child actor, and nascent eco-crusader, drenched in fake blood, “I think it is vital that children should be exploded in a good cause.” (video here) Call me old fashioned but this chills me to the bone. I don’t think it’s okay to blow anyone up for merely holding a different opinion from your own.
Before the release of No Pressure, Britain’s Guardian newspaper (a sponsor of the video) called it “edgy.” Since its release, and its nearly instantaneous removal, the 10:10 UK folks have issued an apology. And, by way of explanation they wrote, “We were therefore delighted when Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis – writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny…”
You should judge for yourself.
The video starts in a classroom. A teacher asks if their families will be lowering their carbon emissions. All students except two raise their hands. She says that it is fine if they do not wish to participate. “No pressure,” she says, and then announces the weekend’s homework and “one more thing.” She presses a large red button and the two non-compliant students explode. She smiles, wipes the blood from her glasses, and repeats the homework for everyone, “except Phillip and Tracy, of course.” Since they now resemble mashed tomatoes, they will not have to do, hee-hee, the assignment.
The next scene is in a business. The boss asks his twenty or so employees, after the preliminaries and “no pressure,” if they will be participating. All but four raise their hands and out comes the box with the large red button. Four more explosions. Four fewer dissenters.
The last scene is of Gillian Anderson doing the voice-over saying she thought that her doing the voice-over was contribution enough. The producer pushes the big red button. Blood thumps against the sound room’s glass and as a bloody mess dribbles down the window, a message comes on screen: “1010global.org. Cut your carbon by 10%. No pressure.”
Now I could call 10:10’s video a number of things. “Edgy” is not among them: sick, ghastly, horrid, appalling, disgusting, revolting, and other adjectives come to mind. “Extremely funny”? On what planet? You are scaring us by taking on the trappings of a crusade, a holy war for the earth where only the “just” deserve to live; infidels must die. Apocalyptic fear mongering quivers throughout much of the rhetoric of global warming crusaders. Like the amplifier for the ersatz band, Spinal Tap, the rhetoric has been pushed to eleven.
Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org (a group advocating lowering CO2 to 350 parts per billion in the atmosphere, and is organizing work parties for 10/10/10) wrote of the 10:10 video, “It’s the kind of stupidity that hurts our side, reinforcing in people’s minds a series of preconceived notions, not the least of which is that we’re out-of-control and out of touch…” Gee, Bill, given that the Guardian called it “edgy,” screeners of it found it “extremely funny,” a lad says it’s okay to explode other kids for the cause, a NASA scientist says oil and coal company “CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature,” and commenters to your posts call for the lynching of corporate executives, (I could go on), where could we have picked up that idea?
I think Brendan O’Neil’s essay on the new enviro-asceticism is brilliant. I especially liked:
Eating, drinking, playing, procreating – everything is carbon-calculated, everything is carbonised. These carbon-calculations really represent a moral judgement on our lives. They [today’s environmentalists] make everything into a potential sin, a crime against the planet. They send the very powerful message that to live, to travel, to breed, to immerse yourself in every human experience is bad – whereas to stay still, to stay put, to be meek, to be quiet, to grow your own is good. Experimentation and experience are potentially polluting; restraint is pure.
What do you think? Was learning to cook with fire where humans went wrong?
Brazil’s Petrobas raises $70b
Brazil’s oil company, Petrobas, raised $70 billion in a sale of it’s stock.
According to a report on the Economist website, “The share issue is an important element in Brazil’s plan to exploit the sizeable oilfields it discovered off its coasts in 2007. These ‘pre-salt’ fields (so called because they are under a thick layer of salt, deep below the seabed) are thought to contain enough oil to make
Brazil a significant energy exporter, albeit not quite on the scale of
Saudi Arabia.”
According to the South Atlantic News Agency, MercoPress, “Petrobras forecasts that by 2014 it will produce the energy equivalent of 3.9 billion barrels of oil per day when natural gas output is included. That’s equal to what Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company produces today.”
California’s Prop 23 AGW initiative in dead heat
The Los Angeles Times’ Greenspace blog says, opinion polls on Proposition 23 “shows a dead heat among California voters.”
Ugandan national parks see surge in animal populations
(H/T GNN)
The number of animals in Uganda’s national parks and game reserves has soared over the past decade, the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) says.
The latest figures show that the population of some species has doubled since 1999, spokeswoman Lillian Nsubuga said.
Wildlife had benefited from improved monitoring and the expulsion of rebels from the country, she added.
The animals on the rise include buffalos, giraffes and elephants.
New statistics show that the population with the biggest increase is that of the Impala, a grazing antelope.
The number of Impala in Uganda has surged to more than 35,000, from around 1,600 at the time of the last census in 1999.
Hippopotamuses, waterbucks, and zebras are also on the increase.
James Hansen arrested at White House over mountain top mining
According to treehugger.com (a Discovery Company) among the number of mountaintop removal protesters arrested was Dr. James Hansen.He believes the practice of strip-mining is destroying a historic mountain range and poison water systems.
“The science is clear,” said the handcuffed Dr Hansen, “mountaintop removal destroys historic mountain ranges, poisons water supplies and pollutes the air with coal and rock dust. Mountaintop removal, providing only a small fraction of our energy, can and should be abolished. The time for half measures and caving in to polluting industries must end.”
Dr. Hansen (whose degrees include a BA in Physics and mathematics, an MS in Astronomy, and a PD in Physics) is known to be an outspoken critic of the country’s use of fossil fuels, contends there is a conspiracy of special interests preventing the transition to renewable energy.
Special interests have blocked transition to our renewable energy future. Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link. Methods are sophisticated, including disguised funding to shape school textbook discussions.
CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature. [emphasis mine]
Last year a Huffington Postpost conjectured that the loss of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro was another sign of global warming. A team observed that Kilimanjaro’s glaciers were receding and “The increase of Earth’s near surface temperatures, coupled with even greater increases in the mid- to upper-tropical troposphere, as documented in recent decades, would at least partially explain” the observations.
I and others pointed out that the more likely reason for the receding glaciers could be explained by deforestation. Now, nearly a year later, New Scientist has a post that more data point to deforestation. “Nicholas Pepin from the University of Portsmouth, UK, and colleagues say deforestation could be an important part of the puzzle,” because transpiration from trees plays a role in humidity and temperature. “Pepin suggests that extensive local deforestation in recent decades has likely reduced this flow of moisture, depleting the mountain’s icy hood.” Professor Pepin is no denier of climate change and has been studying global warming for two decades. According to his biography on the University’s site, his “main research interest is in assessing evidence for climate change in the mountainous areas of the globe, specifically how the high elevation signal of global warming may be different to that at sea-level.”
Deforestation’s causes are many but in Africa cooking and heating with wood is much of the problem.
Would better stoves help slow the loss of snow from Kilimanjaro?
“When scientists align themselves with anti-science political movements, like Rifkin’s anti-biotechnology crowd, what are we to think? When scientists lend their names and credibility to unscientific propositions, what are we to think? Is it any wonder that science is losing its constituency?” – Dr. Norman Borlaug, Feeding a World of 10 Billion People: The Miracle Ahead, May 6, 1997
Last week we looked at the locavore movement (called Not livin’ la vida locavore). My conclusion was that while local is tasty, food-miles are less than half the energy of storage and prep. Transport accounts for only 14 percent of the energy of a product in the food system.
The locavore movement also touts organically grown food, saying it’s better for our, and the earth’s, health.
Here’s a list of the previous week’s stories that were interesting (to me at least). Are there any others that you think should be on the list? Leave a comment.
Japan releases Chinese fishing boat captain
Japan released the last member arrested, the boat’s captain, of a Chinese fishing boat the government of Japan accused of ramming a Japanese naval vessel in disputed territorial waters. China had responded to the arrests with threatening to cut its rare-earth mineral exports to Japan. Rare-minerals are used in the electronic manufacturing industry; Toyota needs such minerals for its battery in the Prius hybrid. (More at the Economist)
“The well is dead. Long live the well!”
The Deepwater Horizon Incident Joint Information Center’s Admiral Thad Allen released this statement:
“After months of extensive operations planning and execution under the direction and authority of the U.S. government science and engineering teams, BP has successfully completed the relief well by intersecting and cementing the well nearly 18,000 feet below the surface. With this development, which has been confirmed by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, we can finally announce that the Macondo 252 well is effectively dead. Additional regulatory steps will be undertaken but we can now state, definitively, that the Macondo well poses no continuing threat to the Gulf of Mexico. From the beginning, this response has been driven by the best science and engineering available. We insisted that BP develop robust redundancy measures to ensure that each step was part of a deliberate plan, driven by science, minimizing risk to ensure we did not inflict additional harm in our efforts to kill the well. I commend the response personnel, both from the government and private sectors, for seeing this vital procedure through to the end. And although the well is now dead, we remain committed to continue aggressive efforts to clean up any additional oil we may see going forward.”
The well was apparently talked to death.
NOAA Reopens Nearly 8,000 Square Miles in the Gulf of Mexico to Fishing
On Tuesday, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration (NOAA) reopened 7,970 square miles of Gulf waters to commercial and recreational fishing. The total area reopened today is about 20 percent of the current closed area, as last modified on September 3. At its closest point, the area to be reopened is about 50 statute miles south of the Deepwater/BP wellhead. No oil or sheen has been documented in the area since July 21.
“This area is significant to commercial and recreational fishermen who target tunas and billfish that migrate far and wide and provide an important source of income and sport. We’ll continue to work with our partners at FDA and the Gulf states to ensure our Gulf seafood is safe, so we can reopen more areas to fishing,” said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator longwindedly in the media release.
According to NOAA, the remaining closed area still covers nearly 32,000 square miles. To date, NOAA has re-opened over 44,000 square miles of oil-impacted federal waters under this protocol and sampling regime. With this latest opening, 87 percent of federal waters are now open.
FDA panel ponders recommending FDA approval for fast growing Salmon
At a public meeting held last Monday held by an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration, proponents and opponents voiced their thoughts on whether to allow the sale of genetically engineered salmon. The genetically engineered salmon received a gene from the Chinook salmon, allowing the fish to grow to market size in half the time of conventional salmon. AquaBounty Technologies, the petitioner says, “In all other respects, AquAdvantage® Salmon are identical to other Atlantic salmon.”
A New York Times article reported that committee member Kevin Wells (who is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri) doubted the fish would be harmful, “The salmon contains nothing that isn’t in the human diet.”
Secretary Clinton Announces Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves
According to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced today [21 September 2010] the formation of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a more than $60 million dollar public-private partnership to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women and combat climate change by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. Exposure to smoke from traditional stoves and open fires – the primary means of cooking and heating for 3 billion people in developing countries – causes almost 2 million deaths annually, with women and young children affected most. That is a life lost every 16 seconds.
“Today we can finally envision a future in which open fires and dirty stoves are replaced by clean, efficient and affordable stoves and fuels all over the world — stoves that still cost as little as $25,” said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “By upgrading these dirty stoves, millions of lives could be saved and improved. Clean stoves could be as transformative as bed nets or vaccines.”
“Over the next two years, WFP [UN World Food Program] aims to reach 6 million people, providing safe stoves and other initiatives that help to protect the environment and reduce the risk of violence to women who would otherwise have to go in search of firewood,” said Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the WFP. The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves will help us to reach millions more.”
A BBC film crew has documented the existence of a population of tigers living in the Himalayan mountains of Bhutan between 3,000 (~9,800 feet) and 4,100 meters (~13,500 feet). According to the BBC report, “The discovery has stunned experts, as the tigers are living at a higher altitude than any others known and appear to be successfully breeding”
Japan complains to WTO on Canada’s renewable energy law
Columbia Law School’s Climate Law blog, reports that on September 13, Japan submitted “a complaint to the World Trade Organization alleging that a Canadian renewable energy law violates WTO non-discrimination rules.”
[1] At issue are a set of domestic content requirements built into Ontario’s landmark green energy law,
[2] which are designed to guarantee that local producers – and local jobs –supply a minimum percentage of the technology used to meet the province’s ambitious goals for renewable energy generation.
[3] While Japan’s “Request for Consultation” with Canada does not formally initiate a case before the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), it nevertheless sets the stage for a high-stakes showdown between the two countries, with potentially global repercussions for energy and industrial policy linking renewable power to high tech employment opportunities.
California Energy Commission approves world’s largest solar thermal power plant
The California Energy Commission (CEC) unanimously approved the construction and operation by Solar Millennium of four solar-thermal power plants with a planned overall capacity of nearly 1,000 megawatts (MW) at the Blythe location in California last Wednesday. If built, it will be the largest solar thermal plant in the world. Solar Millennium hopes to begin the initial construction on two of four plants overall in 2010 the US Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) approval to site the plants on federal lands. Since California’s electric utility companies are required to generate 20 percent of their power via renewable energy by 2010 and 33 percent by 2020, the CEC notes, “BLM has received right-of-way requests encompassing more than 300,000 acres for the development of approximately 34 large solar thermal power plants totaling approximately 24,000 megawatts.”
According to the story in the New York Times, “[The project] will cover 9.3 square miles in Riverside County in Southern California with long rows of parabolic troughs. The solar reflectors focus the sun on liquid-filled tubes suspended over the mirrors to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine housed in a central power block.”
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said he was excited to see such solar projects move forward, “I applaud the California Energy Commission’s decision…and am excited to see other solar projects move forward. Projects like this need our immediate attention, as solar and renewable power are the future of the California economy.”
Solar thermal power generation needs about half the area as photovoltaic (see graphic).
I like local produce: local pears, local wines, local ripe tomatoes. I like the taste of stuff grown around here. It’s tasty. It’s fresh. And, I know the folks who made it. So far, so good. I imagine that you’re not saying, “Nah. Give me a tomato shipped half-way around the world. Ya just can’t beat the taste of a tomato bred for easy shipping with their tough skins and bland flavor. Makes my mouth water just thinkin’ about ‘em!”
Buying local produce means a relationship with the vendor and freshness. It may mean some other things too like being in touch with the season and the joys that each time brings. Good things all. Buying local produce does not imbue the transaction with anything, in the environmental sense of the word, green. And, local organic, even less so.
I know a lot of people such as Bill McKibben and Alice Waters (who author Anthony Bourdain once called Pol Pot in a muumuu though he doesn’t let her completely off the hook, “With Waters’s fondness for buzzwords like ‘purity’ and ‘wholesomeness’ there is a whiff of the jackboot, isn’t there?”) proclaim that local and organic equates to less pollution and a lower carbon footprint. I have been looking at the numbers, which are interesting, but no, local and organic hardly means it’s “better” for the earth. (I suspect the earth doesn’t give a rip, either way, but you get my drift.)
Food storage/prep accounts for twice the energy used than does transport
While the locavore movement touts tasty local produce, they have begun taking on the trappings of a cult, using food miles as a litmus test for lower impact. However, transport accounts for under 14 percent of fossil fuel used in the “food system” (from seed to table). Food storage and preparation account for nearly one-third of the fossil fuel used. Local and organically grown food tastes great, but, as with everything we need for life, comes at a cost. “Organic agriculture is incapable of feeding the world’s current population,” wrote the Nobel winning Norman Borlaug, “much less providing for future population growth.”
Organic agriculture proponents dispute this saying that combining nature has ways to produce yields with less pollution. The Rodale Institute has conducted a Farming Systems Trial® (FST) comparing three farming methods: “one conventional (five-year corn/soybean rotation), one livestock-based organic (five-year rotation corn/soybean/corn silage/wheat/red clover/alfalfa hay with aged cattle-manure applied in the two corn years), and one legume-based organic (three 3-year rotation of hairy vetch/corn, rye/soybeans, and wheat).” According to Rodale, “corn and soybean yields are the same across the three systems.” The way I read this, the organic methods need other crops to produce the nutrients, which could mean that only the time that corn or soybeans are planted do they get the same yield. Meanwhile, the organic fields need to recover through nitrogen-fixing plants and/or the application of manure. In other words, it takes more land to grow organic. I have emailed the Rodale Institute for clarification.
Organic farming costs more because, as the former Washington editor of the scientific journal Nature, Stephen Budianskywrites the choice becomes a little fossil fuel for energy and fertilizer or a lot of land for the necessary soil amendments, “By spending not much energy to make fertilizer and run machinery — and trivial amounts of energy to ship the stuff we grow from the places it grows best — we have spared and conserved hundreds of millions of acres of land that otherwise would have had to be brought into agricultural production. That’s land that protects wildlife, that adds scenic beauty.”
This echoes what Norman Borlaug, the father of the green revolution, wrote at the turn of this century: “Had the cereal yields of 1950 still prevailed in 1999, we would have needed 1.8 billion hectares (4.4 billion acres)…instead of the 600 million that was used.” In other words, we would need an additional area roughly half the size of North America to grow our needed food. Borlaug cited fossil fuel based fertilizer (e.g., nitrogen from the Haber-Bosch process) and weed control for the increased cereal yields.
“[A]ntiscience and technology groups are slowing the application of new technology whether it be developed from biotechnology or more conventional methods of agricultural science. I am particularly alarmed by those who seek to deny small-scale farmers in the developing countries–and especially those in sub-Saharan Africa–access to the improved seed, fertilizers, and crop protection chemicals that have allowed the affluent nations the luxury of plentiful and inexpensive foodstuffs…While the affluent nations can certainly afford to pay more for food produced by the so-called organic methods, the 1 billion chronically undernourished people of the low-income, food-deficit nations cannot.” – Norman Borlaug
When we measure our greenness by how many miles our food has traveled, we are only looking at one small step of the seed-to-table journey. By all means, patronize the local Farmers’ Markets until they close for the season, but I think we can stop fretting about food we buy from the grocery store. Odd as it may seem at first blush, because developing nations are overwhelmingly agrarian, you are often supporting people in the developing world when you buy food from the grocery store rather than the Farmers’ Market.
Wednesday, 22 September 2010, is world carfree day or as it’s known here in Lake County, “The judge took away my driver’s license day” or “My car won’t start day.” Or–as it’s known throughout the rest of the world–Wednesday. If you are interested in joining they have a World Carfree Day Facebook page.
World carfree day should not be confused with “My car’s been impounded day,” which, everyone knows, is the 2nd of January.
What do you think? Is it worthwhile or just another Earth Hour?
Now I could call 10:10’s video a number of things. “Edgy” is not among them: sick, ghastly, horrid, appalling, disgusting, revolting, and other adjectives come to mind. “Extremely funny”? On what planet? You are scaring us by taking on the trappings of a crusade, a holy war for the earth where only the “just” deserve to live; infidels must die. Apocalyptic fear mongering quivers throughout much of the rhetoric of global warming crusaders. Like the amplifier for the ersatz band, Spinal Tap, the rhetoric has been pushed to eleven.
Last year a 
Nullius in Verba 