The Optimistic Environmentalist

As a child of the 1960’s On April 22, 1970, I, along with 20 million others that day, attended one of the first Earth Day celebrations. We had heard the predictions and we were duly frightened. In those days, most of us in the environmental movement worried about air pollution causing another ice age through global cooling. Many doomsayers proclaimed Malthus—an eighteenth century economist who argued that human population which grew exponentially would quickly outstrip crop yields which grew arithmetically—was a Pollyanna. We stood on the brink of drought and mass starvation; no oil, forests reduced to stumps, foul air, frozen and polluted water. None of that has happened in the past 40 years, perhaps because we made the necessary changes.

It’s because of this looking back that I’m an optimistic environmentalist. The lake is half-full. Though problems do exist, we have hope. We mustn’t squander resources. Yet, I side with Julian Simon. “First, humanity’s condition will improve in just about every material way,” the late economist said. “Second, humans will continue to sit around complaining about everything getting worse.” Such thinking that everything is worsening elicits a siege mentality where we either shut down because we want no more bad news or we feel imperiled.

Those who feel imperiled bang pans, beseeching us to repent and turn away from our profligate ways; Lester Brown—the rightly-renown environmentalist and founder of Worldwatch Institute and Earth Policy Institute—is one. He writes of climate change, “Researchers…believe that global warming is accelerating and may be approaching a tipping point…” Brothers and sisters the end is near and we stand upon banana peels between vipers and the abyss. We stand on the brink of droughts and mass starvation; forests reduced to stumps, no oil, foul air, frozen and polluted water.

Let’s recap for those keeping score at home, it’s “The Pollyannas”-7, “Malthus and the Prophets of Doom”-0.

Well Malthus and the prophets of doom will continue to say as Bullwinkle J. Moose used to say, “This time for sure.”

The Top 13 Environmental Stories of the Aughts

Here is my olio list of profound and profane environmental news of the past decade–the aughts.

  1. Hurricane Katrina From the toxic sludge left behind on the land to removal of the vegetative buffers by encroaching civilization, hurricane Katrina exposed so many of our environmental shortcomings, all in one storm.

  2. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Nobel Peace PrizeI voted for Gore in 2000 and thought he was a reasonable man. His Saturday Night Live sketch indicated he had some sense of humor. Yet, his dourness shines through in both his book “Earth in the Balance” and his PowerPoint cum film “An Inconvenient Truth,” a film filled with numerous inconvenient falsehoods. What was the Nobel Committee smoking?

  3. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen ConsensusThe Copenhagen Consensus commissions “research that analyzes the optimal ways to combat the biggest problems facing the world. “In doing so, it gores a number of Sacred Calves. Like a buyer for WalMart, the Copenhagen Consensus looks for where we humans can get the most bang for our buck. It turns out anthropogenic (a fancy way to say something caused by people) global warming wound up at #30, a fact that fries most greens and climatologists.  I think the failure of Kyoto and Copenhagen (and sites in between) underscore this fact that investing $1 and getting a 1cent return is not what we should do. You would think more politicians would get behind the Consensus’s recommendation to go after the low hanging fruit first. I guess they figure the low hanging fruit is sour grapes.By the way, if you have not yet read Lomborg’s “Skeptical Environmentalist,” published in 2001, you need to–now. Lomborg started out by trying to debunk the late Julian Simon who said, “First, humanity’s condition will improve in just about every material way. Second, humans will continue to sit around complaining about everything getting worse.” Professor Lomborg, one of the top 100 public intellectuals, according to Foreign Policy & Prospect Magazine, took a statistician’s view of the arguments used by the Environmental Lobby (and Al Gore) and found hyperbole that focused on the minuses and never the pluses. Lomborg’s book contains thousands of footnoted sources, something that’s missing from many others.

  4. TVA coal ash dam break/spillOne year after the coal ash spill near Knoxville, the Tennessee Valley Authority still has no plan of what to do with a billion gallons toxic goo from their Kingston Fossil Plant. Dredgers have been running 24 hours a day, 6 days a week (on the day 7 the oil is changed), since the spill to clean out the Emory river. The dam break indicates the extent of our life-style’s “externalities“–those obligations and costs we all bear–from abandoned cyanide pits from mining to air pollution from power plants and automobiles.

  5. Climategate–Scientists Behaving BadlyThe leaking of emails and files from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit shined the light of public scrutiny into the marble towers of academia and provides a glimpse of how science gets done. Turns out that scientists are just as tribal and not above pettiness any more than the rest of us, reminding me of the squabbling politics of a homeowners’ association. Climategate defines schadenfreude.

  6. Failure of the Doha talksDoha in Qatar is the place where members of the WTO (World Trade Organization) discuss treaties for freer trade. Globalization is often a bugbear for people wanting to keep the status quo. The United States has its farm and biofuel subsidies that prove to be sticking points. But history shows when standards of living increase, birth rates decline and the quality of life increases. Economists agree that unencumbered trade raises the standard of living for for countries with the most open markets. (for more see “If words were food, nobody would go hungry” in the Economist). The Copenhagen Consensus puts implementation of the “Doha development agenda” at #2 behind combating malnutrition with Micronutrient supplements for children (vitamin A and zinc).

  7. Willie Smits and Samboja LestariIf you have never heard of Willie Smits or Samboja Lestari, you are not alone, but you should have. Smits has literally changed the climate in the district of East Kalimantan, Indonesia where he and his group have renewed the rainforest that had been cut down to make palm-oil biodiesel, all the while providing food and 3000 jobs for the locals and returning the land to them in the bargain. He gets my nomination for the Nobel Prize.

  8. 2008 Global Economic Meltdown“Prosperity,” the American philosopher Mark Twain said, “ is the best protector of principle.” And the opposite is true. Alligators look like the makings of a hearty meal and not an endangered species when you need to put food on the table or starve. (For more see Gallup’s “Americans: Economy Takes Precedence Over Environment”.

  9. Cell phonesCell phones have been around for more than a couple decades but texting and GPS (Global Positioning System) has catapulted them above mere phones. Cell sourcing–using cell phone to gather and disseminate information rapidly–will change everything. Farmers will get information on crop diseases and other concerns with the result being greater yields on less land and freeing up land for other (one hopes environmentally friendly) uses. People will be able to provide information to aggregators on environmental concerns and pinpoint their locations instantly.

  10. The United Nations’ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment“When we try to pick out anything by itself,” John Muir said, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” The MEA was the attempt by the United Nations to quantify how much of the ecosystem was hitched to us. It turns out everything is.

  11. 2004 TsunamiThe tsunami of December 26, 2004 was especially memorable to me because my firstborn (who was living in Japan at the time) had decided NOT to go to Phuket, Thailand that Christmas. He opted instead to have the North Koreans point their weapons across Korea’s DMZ at him and his friends. Had he not, he might have ended up as a statistic with the other 230,000 who died under a 100 foot wave.

  12. Anthropogenic Global Warming

    I predict AGW will be the “coming ice age” of predictions.

    In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During [this past year] record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries.” — Time Magazine, 1972, Science: Another Ice Age?

    Conserve energy for conservation’s sake.

  13. Credit Card Reform Act of 2009 How does credit card reform qualify as an environmental story? File this one under “only in America.” It was in the CCRA of 2008, that Republicans, tacked on a rider allowing people to take concealed weapons into our nation’s parks and wildlife refuges. Where else but in America can we get squeezed at a 30% annual interest rate AND carry a concealed loaded firearm the wilderness? Look out Smoky Bear, I’m packing heat.

Happy New Year everyone.

Major Cuts in Carbon Emissions Are Not Worth The Cost

That’s the motion debated (Oxford-style) January 2009 on National Public Radio’s Intelligence Squared. The program runs about 45 minutes and was well worth my time.

FOR THE MOTION:

Peter Huber, co-author of The Bottomless Well and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Bjorn Lomborg, creator of the Copenhagen Consensus

Philip Stott, biogeographer and the editor of the Journal of Biogeography for 18 years.

AGAINST THE MOTION

L. Hunter Lovins, president of Natural Capitalism Solutions

Oliver Tickell, author of Kyoto2

Adam Werbach, global chief executive officer at Saatchi & Saatchi. He is the youngest president ever elected for the Sierra Club.

You can hear the debate on this media player:

A Green Recovery

This was written by Bill Keye, Government Affairs Specialist for the California Licensed Foresters Association.

On a scale not seen since the Great Depression, unemployment and underemployment continue to grind away at California and the United States.  27 years ago, in November, 1982, the unemployment rate in the Golden State hit 11.0%.  It hung around that level for several months, and then began to drop.  It never touched those heights again, until 2009.

This year, we’ve already hit 12.2% and may well exceed 13% in 2010.  California is worse off than most states this time around, a couple of points above the national level.

In forestry, we’ve seen mills shut, colleagues (or ourselves) laid off, Main Street businesses wither away.

The Board of Equalization (BOE) reports that in 2008, timber harvest in California was only 1.37 billion board-feet, very likely the lowest since – you already know – the Great Depression.  Actually, timber harvest levels may even have been higher during the Depression because California’s current habit of importing most of our wood is a recent phenomenon.

When the BOE updates their state harvest stats next year, it seems predictable that the figures for 2009 will be even more depressing.

So we’re slogging through unsettling darkness, the grinding all around us.  A chewing up and rearranging of economic tectonic plates, communities and human lives.

Still the trees grow.  It’s helpful for me to remind myself that even during the Great Depression, when bitter hardship and dislocation were rife, very few Americans starved to death.

This puts things into perspective.  We’re still a wealthy country and an especially wealthy state despite our self-inflicted difficulties.

Ever present is the challenge of using our vast forest resources for something closer to Gifford Pinchot’s “greatest good.”  This year, our California legislature actually passed a bill that does something nice for California forestry:  AB 1066 (Mendoza).  That, in itself, is pretty amazing.

High unemployment has a profound effect on policy makers, even in eco-arrogant California.

AB 1066, although not a major bill, is still symbolic.  It means more than just the resurrection of a few expired THPs.  AB 1066’s legislative success may portend something bigger, a growing recognition of the full importance of our renewable natural resources, including extractive uses that physically sustain people.

Sustainable forestry, of course, could employ many thousands more people in California than it currently does, helping to spur economic recovery.  We can sequester more carbon, spark more electricity, support more families and cut pollution by importing less wood and curbing wildfires.

We can also plant more trees, fix roads and build trails, improve habitat and so forth.  Actually touch the land and feel its goodness.  And still revel in California’s Golden beauty.

In our current darkness, there is light.  Foresters have solutions.

Reprinted by permission from the California Licensed Foresters Association Update newsletter, November, 2009

Tree Planting Tips

A while ago I asked, “What’s wrong with this picture of two women planting a tree?”

The tree planting is part of an Odwalla promotion. Odwalla is donating $1 per click toward the purchase of trees for planting in a state parks in one of eleven states (including California). I’d like to see them expand their horizons, still it’s a noble effort.

However, if the trees are planted as shown in the picture I would guess that no trees will survive a year.

Why? Because, they’re planting in dry soil on a warm day. Seedlings like cool and moist. A drizzly day in early spring with snow still in places is nearly ideal.

The Green Loss Effect

Policymakers must address the influence of global deforestation and urbanization on climate change, in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, according to Georgia Tech’s City and Regional Planning Professor Brian Stone in an upcoming paper to be published in the December edition of Environmental Science and Technology.

“The role of land use in global warming is the most important climate-related story that has not been widely covered in the media. ”… “Across the U.S. as a whole, approximately 50 percent of the warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes (usually in the form of clearing forest for crops or cities) rather than to the emission of greenhouse gases,” said Stone.  “Most large U.S. cities, including Atlanta, are warming at more than twice the rate of the planet as a whole – a rate that is mostly attributable to land use change.  As a result, emissions reduction programs – like the cap and trade program under consideration by the U.S. Congress – may not sufficiently slow climate change in large cities where most people live and where land use change is the dominant driver of warming.”

According to Stone’s research, slowing the rate of forest loss around the world, and regenerating forests where lost, could significantly slow the pace of global warming.

Stone recommends slowing what he terms the “green loss effect” through the planting of millions of trees in urbanized areas and through the protection and regeneration of global forests outside of urbanized regions.  Forested areas provide the combined benefits of directly cooling the atmosphere and of absorbing greenhouse gases, leading to additional cooling.  Green architecture in cities, including green roofs and more highly reflective construction materials, would further contribute to a slowing of warming rates.  Stone envisions local and state governments taking the lead in addressing the land use drivers of climate change, while the federal government takes the lead in implementing carbon reduction initiatives, like cap and trade programs.

“As we look to address the climate change issue from a land use perspective, there is a huge opportunity for local and state governments,” said Stone.  “Presently, local government capacity is largely unharnessed in climate management structures under consideration by the U.S. Congress.  Yet local governments possess extensive powers to manage the land use activities in both the urban and rural areas.”

For More Information Contact David Terraso with Georgia Tech Communications and Marketing (404-385-2966)

My thanks to Watts Up With That.