Arquivos da Tag: Mudanças climáticas

World Bank turns to hydropower to square development with climate change (Washington Post)

Michael Reynolds/European Photopress Agency - World Bank President Jim Yong Kim attends the Fragility Forum this month in Washington. The forum discussed ways for fragile nations to improve their economies, their infrastructure and the well-being of their citizens.

By , Published: May 8, 2013

The World Bank is making a major push to develop large-scale hydropower projects around the globe, something it had all but abandoned a decade ago but now sees as crucial to resolving the tension between economic development and the drive to tame carbon use.

Major hydropower projects in Congo, Zambia, Nepal and elsewhere — all of a scale dubbed “transformational” to the regions involved — are a focus of the bank’s fundraising drive among wealthy nations. Bank lending for hydropower has scaled up steadily in recent years, and officials expect the trend to continue amid a worldwide boom in water-fueled electricity.

Such projects were shunned in the 1990s, in part because they can be disruptive to communities and ecosystems. But the World Bank is opening the taps for dams, transmission lines and related infrastructure as its president, Jim Yong Kim, tries to resolve a quandary at the bank’s core: how to eliminate poverty while adding as little as possible to carbon emissions.

“Large hydro is a very big part of the solution for Africa and South Asia and Southeast Asia. . . . I fundamentally believe we have to be involved,” said Rachel Kyte, the bank’s vice president for sustainable development and an influential voice among Kim’s top staff members. The earlier move out of hydro “was the wrong message. . . . That was then. This is now. We are back.”

It is a controversial stand. The bank backed out of large-scale hydropower because of the steep trade-offs involved. Big dams produce lots of cheap, clean electricity, but they often uproot villages in dam-flooded areas and destroy the livelihoods of the people the institution is supposed to help. A 2009 World Bank review of hydro­power noted the “overwhelming environmental and social risks” that had to be addressed but also concluded that Africa and Asia’s vast and largely undeveloped hydropower potential was key to providing dependable electricity to the hundreds of millions of people who remain without it.

“What’s the one issue that’s holding back development in the poorest countries? It’s energy. There’s just no question,” Kim said in an interview.

Advocacy groups remain skeptical, arguing that large projects, such as Congo’s long-debated network of dams around Inga Falls, may be of more benefit to mining companies or industries in neighboring countries than poor communities.

“It is the old idea of a silver bullet that can modernize whole economies,” said Peter Bosshard, policy director of International Rivers, a group that has organized opposition to the bank’s evolving hydro policy and argued for smaller projects designed around communities rather than mega-dams meant to export power throughout a region.

“Turning back to hydro is being anything but a progressive climate bank,” said Justin Guay, a Sierra Club spokesman on climate and energy issues. “There needs to be a clear shift from large, centralized projects.”

The major nations that support the World Bank, however, have been pushing it to identify such projects — complex undertakings that might happen only if an international organization is involved in sorting out the financing, overseeing the performance and navigating the politics.

The move toward big hydro comes amid Kim’s stark warning that global warming will leave the next generation with an “unrecognizable planet.” That dire prediction, however, has left him struggling to determine how best to respond and frustrated by some of the bank’s inherent limitations.

In his speeches, Kim talks passionately about the bank’s ability to “catalyze” and “leverage” the world to action by mobilizing money and ideas, and he says he is hunting for ideas “equal to the challenge” of curbing carbon use. He has criticized the “small bore” thinking that he says has hobbled progress on the issue.

However, the bank remains in the business of financing traditional fossil-fuel plants, including those that use the dirtiest form of coal, as well as cleaner but ­carbon-based natural gas infrastructures.

Among the projects likely to cross Kim’s desk in coming months, for example, is a 600-megawatt power plant in Kosovo that would be fired by lignite coal, the bottom of the barrel when it comes to carbon emissions.

The plant has strong backing from the United States, the World Bank’s major shareholder. It also meshes with one of the bank’s other long-standing imperatives: Give countries what they ask for. The institution has 188 members to keep happy and can go only so far in trying to impose its judgment over that of local officials. Kim, who in his younger days demonstrated against World Bank-enforced “orthodoxy” in economic policy, now may be hard-pressed to enforce an energy orthodoxy of his own.

Kosovo’s domestic supplies of lignite are ample enough to free the country from imported fuel. Kim said there is little question that Kosovo needs more electricity, and the new plant will allow an older, more polluting facility to be shut down.

“I would just love to never sign a coal project,” Kim said. “We understand it is much, much dirtier, but . . . we have 188 members. . . . We have to be fair in balancing the needs of poor countries . . . with this other bigger goal of tackling climate change.”

The bank is working on other ideas. Kim said he is considering how it might get involved in creating a more effective world market for carbon, allowing countries that invest in renewable energy or “climate friendly” agriculture to be paid for their carbon savings by industries that need to use fossil fuels. Existing carbon markets have been plagued with volatile pricing — Europe’s cost of carbon has basically collapsed — or rules that prevent carbon trading with developing countries.

“We’ve got to figure out a way to establish a stable price of carbon,” Kim said. “Everybody knows that.”

He has also staked hope for climate progress on developments in agriculture.

Hydropower projects, however, seem notably inside what Kim says is the bank’s sweet spot — complex, high-impact, green and requiring the sort of joint public and private financing Kim says the bank can attract.

The massive hydropower potential of the Congo River, estimated at about 40,000 megawatts, is such a target. Its development is on a list of top world infrastructure priorities prepared by the World Bank and other development agencies for the Group of 20 major economic powers.

Two smaller dams on the river have been plagued by poor performance and are being rehabilitated with World Bank assistance. A third being planned would represent a quantum jump — a 4,800-megawatt, $12 billion giant that would move an entire region off carbon-based electricity.

The African Development Bank has begun negotiations over the financing, and the World Bank is ready to step in with tens of millions of dollars in technical-planning help.

“In an ideal world, we start building in 2016. By 2020, we switch on the lights,” said Hela Cheikhrouhou, energy and environment director for the African Development Bank.

It is the sort of project that the World Bank had stayed away from for many years — not least because of instability in the country. But as the country tries to move beyond its civil war and the region intensifies its quest for the power to fuel economic growth, the bank seems ready to move. Kim will visit Congo this month for a discussion about development in fragile and war-torn states.

Kyte, the World Bank vice president, said the Inga project will be high on the agenda.

“People have been looking at the Inga dam for as long as I have been in the development business,” she said. “The question is: Did the stars align? Did you have a government in place? Did people want to do it? Are there investors interested? Do you have the ability to do the technical work? The stars are aligned now. Let’s go.”

Climate Change Will Cause Widespread Global-Scale Loss of Common Plants and Animals, Researchers Predict (Science Daily)

May 12, 2013 — More than half of common plants and one third of the animals could see a dramatic decline this century due to climate change, according to research from the University of East Anglia.

Frog. Plants, reptiles and particularly amphibians are expected to be at highest risk. (Credit: © Anna Omelchenko / Fotolia)

Research published today in the journal Nature Climate Change looked at 50,000 globally widespread and common species and found that more than one half of the plants and one third of the animals will lose more than half of their climatic range by 2080 if nothing is done to reduce the amount of global warming and slow it down.

This means that geographic ranges of common plants and animals will shrink globally and biodiversity will decline almost everywhere.

Plants, reptiles and particularly amphibians are expected to be at highest risk. Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, Amazonia and Australia would lose the most species of plants and animals. And a major loss of plant species is projected for North Africa, Central Asia and South-eastern Europe.

But acting quickly to mitigate climate change could reduce losses by 60 per cent and buy an additional 40 years for species to adapt. This is because this mitigation would slow and then stop global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial times (1765). Without this mitigation, global temperatures could rise by 4 degrees Celsius by 2100.

The study was led by Dr Rachel Warren from UEA’s school of Environmental Sciences and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Collaborators include Dr.Jeremy VanDerWal at James Cook University in Australia and Dr Jeff Price, also at UEA’s school of Environmental Sciences and the Tyndall Centre. The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Dr Warren said: “While there has been much research on the effect of climate change on rare and endangered species, little has been known about how an increase in global temperature will affect more common species.

“This broader issue of potential range loss in widespread species is a serious concern as even small declines in these species can significantly disrupt ecosystems.

“Our research predicts that climate change will greatly reduce the diversity of even very common species found in most parts of the world. This loss of global-scale biodiversity would significantly impoverish the biosphere and the ecosystem services it provides.

“We looked at the effect of rising global temperatures, but other symptoms of climate change such as extreme weather events, pests, and diseases mean that our estimates are probably conservative. Animals in particular may decline more as our predictions will be compounded by a loss of food from plants.

“There will also be a knock-on effect for humans because these species are important for things like water and air purification, flood control, nutrient cycling, and eco-tourism.

“The good news is that our research provides crucial new evidence of how swift action to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gases can prevent the biodiversity loss by reducing the amount of global warming to 2 degrees Celsius rather than 4 degrees. This would also buy time — up to four decades — for plants and animals to adapt to the remaining 2 degrees of climate change.”

The research team quantified the benefits of acting now to mitigate climate change and found that up to 60 per cent of the projected climatic range loss for biodiversity can be avoided.

Dr Warren said: “Prompt and stringent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally would reduce these biodiversity losses by 60 per cent if global emissions peak in 2016, or by 40 per cent if emissions peak in 2030, showing that early action is very beneficial. This will both reduce the amount of climate change and also slow climate change down, making it easier for species and humans to adapt.”

Information on the current distributions of the species used in this research came from the datasets shared online by hundreds of volunteers, scientists and natural history collections through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

Co-author Dr Jeff Price, also from UEA’s school of Environmental Studies, said: “Without free and open access to massive amounts of data such as those made available online through GBIF, no individual researcher is able to contact every country, every museum, every scientist holding the data and pull it all together. So this research would not be possible without GBIF and its global community of researchers and volunteers who make their data freely available.”

Journal Reference:

  1. R. Warren, J. VanDerWal, J. Price, J. A. Welbergen, I. Atkinson, et al. Quantifying the benefit of early climate change mitigation in avoiding biodiversity loss. Nature Climate Change, 2013 DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1887

European carbon market in trouble (Washington Post)

By , Published: May 5

LONDON — As the centerpiece of Europe’s pledge to lead the global battle against climate change, the region’s market for carbon emissions effectively turned pollution into a commodity that could be traded like gold or oil. But the once-thriving pollution trade here has turned into a carbon bust.Under the system, 31 nations slapped emission limits on more than 11,000 companies and issued carbon credits that could be traded by firms to meet their new pollution caps. More efficient ones could sell excess carbon credits, while less efficient ones were compelled to buy more. By August 2008, the price for carbon emission credits had soared above $40 per ton — high enough to become an added incentive for some companies to increase their use of cleaner fuels, upgrade equipment and take other steps to reduce carbon footprints.

Europe's carbon-trading market

Europe’s carbon-trading market

That system, however, is in deep trouble. A drastic drop in industrial activity has sharply reduced the need for companies to buy emission rights, causing a gradual fall in the price of carbon allowances since the region slipped into a multi-year economic crisis in the latter half of 2008. In recent weeks, however, the price has appeared to have entirely collapsed — falling below $4 as bickering European nations failed to agree on measures to shore up the program.The collapsing price of carbon in Europe is darkening the outlook for a greener future in a part of the world that was long the bright spot in the struggle against climate change. It is also presenting new challenges for those who once saw Europe’s program as the natural anchor for what would eventually be a linked network of cap-and-trade systems worldwide.

Carbon “started as the commodity of the future, but it has now deteriorated,” said Matthew Gray, a trader at Jefferies Bache in London and one of a diminishing breed of carbon dealers in Europe. “Its future is uncertain.”

The problems plaguing Europe’s cap-and-trade system underscore the uphill battle for international cooperation in the global-warming fight. After middling progress at various summits, officials from more than 190 countries have been charged with forging a global accord by 2015 aimed at cutting carbon emissions. But critics point to the inability of even the European Union — a largely progressive region bound by open borders and a shared bureaucracy — to come together on a fix for its cap-and-trade system as evidence of how difficult consensus building on climate change has become.

Negotiations to launch a similar system across the United States collapsed in 2010, replaced with a regional approach in which California, for instance, moved forward with its own program. Aided by a boom in cheaper and cleaner shale gas as well as the spread of more renewable energies, including wind and solar, the United States has — like Europe — nevertheless seen a continuing drop in its overall emission levels.

But there are also signs that years of increasing investment in clean energies are ebbing on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2012, overall clean-energy investment in the United States fell 37 percent,to $35.6 billion, compared with a year earlier, according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts. European countries, including green leaders such as Germany, also saw declines, leading analysts to call the problems with the region’s cap-and-trade system that much more troubling.

“Obviously, what’s happening now is very disheartening for people who have been involved in trying to cut carbon emissions,” said Agustin Silvani, managing director of carbon finance at Conservation International in Arlington, Va. “The European system was at the center of the global fight, and the fact that it is collapsing is definitely a blow. Maybe a moral one more than anything else.”Lost incentive

The cap-and-trade program is based on a system of carbon allowances for large emitters such as utilities and manufacturers, with some bought and others awarded for free. Companies are allowed to draw on global mitigation projects — such as planting trees in tropical rain forests — to offset a small portion of their emissions. But for the most part, they must meet targets through carbon credits issued by European authorities.A number of other factors, including mandates and subsidies for renewable energy, have coaxed European companies to reduce their emissions in recent years. But in the early stages of the cap-and-trade program, “higher carbon prices were a big incentive for companies to take action,” said Marcus Ferdinand, senior market analyst for Thomson Reuters Point Carbon. “Now, they’ve lost that incentive.”

At the core of the problem is a massive oversupply of carbon allowances. Demand for carbon began to fade in the late 2000s as a recession set in and factories across Europe dramatically curbed production. But there were also built-in flaws. Unlike newer cap-and-trade programs such as the one in California, Europe’s system never established a price floor that could have prevented a market collapse. In addition, too many free allowances were given to too many companies. Some, in fact, never had to pay for allowances at all, allowing them to hoard them or even sell their carbon credits at a profit.

On April 16, the European Parliament was on the verge of temporarily tightening the supply of allowances to boost the price of carbon and shore up the ailing market. But opposition by countries led by Poland — a nation strongly dependent on heavy-emitting coal power plants — defeated the measure. The rejection sent the price of carbon plummeting to a historic low of roughly $3.60.

Shoring up prices

A bright future for cap-and-trade systems may yet exist. Promising new programs, for instance, are being rolled out in California, Australia, Quebec and a few provinces in China, with officials in some areas setting a minimum price for carbon credits to prevent the kind of market collapse seen in Europe.

But if Europe is unable to shore up the price for carbon credits here, observers say, it could complicate hopes down the line of linking various programs together. The price per ton in California, for instance, is above $10 — about two and half times the price in Europe.

Large emitters such as the steel industry, however, say the system is working just fine. With a price determined by supply and demand, industry groups say, it is only fitting for the price to be low now. Also, given the region’s weaker economic activity, they note that the European Union is still virtually assured of meeting its pledge to cut carbon emissions — a reduction of 20 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels — even with the cap-and-trade system faltering.

Yet critics argue that the low price of carbon has removed the incentive for European companies to reduce their carbon footprints. They point to a boom in the use of cheap imported American coal in European power plants. In addition, many fear that the lack of an incentive to make more green upgrades will create a boom in emissions if and when European economies recover.

As the regional plan falters, some countries are going it alone on domestic initiatives. This year, for instance, Britain introduced a carbon tax on emissions that British manufacturers say has put them at a competitive disadvantage with their counterparts on the continent. It suggests the potential pitfalls ahead as countries and even smaller jurisdictions such as states, provinces and cities introduce a disparate patchwork of climate-change measures.

Optimists point to hope that the European Parliament will once again vote on a measure to tighten the supply of carbon credits in the coming months, thus shoring up the price. They also note that the European Commission is studying more ambitious proposals for a bigger overhaul of the region’s cap-and-trade system.

But given the growing resistance in some European countries to anything that might drive energy costs up further, others wonder whether Europe’s leaders still have the political will to take aggressive action.

“We’re risking the credibility of European politicians by not fixing this system,” said Johannes Teyssen, chief executive of German energy giant E.ON. “How can they travel to world climate-change conferences claiming others should do more when our own system is on its deathbed and they do nothing?”

Eliza Mackintosh contributed to this report.

*   *   *

In Europe, Paid Permits for Pollution Are Fizzling (N.Y.Times)

Andrew Testa for The International Herald Tribune. The trading floor at CF Partners in West London. The market for carbon permits is more volatile than its founders envisioned.

By STANLEY REED and MARK SCOTT

Published: April 21, 2013

LONDON — On a showery afternoon last week in West London, a ripple of enthusiasm went through the trading floor of CF Partners, a privately owned financial company. The price of carbon allowances, shown in green lights on a board hanging from the ceiling, was creeping up toward three euros.

*The Emissions Trading System began with a test phase that ended in 2007. Note: Data are for the futures contract expiring in mid-December each year. Phase 2 price was initially for the December 2008 futures contract.

That is pretty small change — $3.90, or only about 10 percent of what the price was in 2008. But to the traders it came as a relief after the market had gone into free fall to record lows two days earlier, after the European Parliament spurned an effort to shore up prices by shrinking the number of allowances.

“The market still stands,” said Thomas Rassmuson, a native of Sweden who founded the company with Jonathan Navon, a Briton, in 2006.

Still, Europe’s carbon market, a pioneering effort to use markets to regulate greenhouse gases, is having a hard time staying upright. This year has been stomach-churning for the people who make their living in the arcane world of trading emissions permits. The most recent volatility comes on top of years of uncertainty during which prices have fluctuated from $40 to nearly zero for the right to emit one ton of carbon dioxide.

More important, though, than lost jobs and diminished payouts for traders and bankers, the penny ante price of carbon credits means the market is not doing its job: pushing polluters to reduce carbon emissions, which most climate scientists believe contribute to global warming.

The market for these credits, officially called European Union Allowances, or E.U.A.’s, has been both unstable and under sharp downward pressure this year because of a huge oversupply and a stream of bad political and economic news. On April 16, for instance, after the European Parliament voted down the proposed reduction in the number of credits, prices dropped about 50 percent, to 2.63 euros from nearly 5, in 10 minutes.

“No one was going to buy” on the way down, said Fred Payne, a trader with CF Partners.

Europe’s troubled experience with carbon trading has also discouraged efforts to establish large-scale carbon trading systems in other countries, including the United States, although California and a group of Northeastern states have set up smaller regional markets.

Traders do not mind big price swings in any market — in fact, they can make a lot of money if they play them right.

But over time, the declining prices for the credits have sapped the European market of value, legitimacy and liquidity — the ease with which the allowances can be traded — making it less attractive for financial professionals.

A few years ago, analysts thought world carbon markets were heading for the $2 trillion mark by the end of this decade.

Today, the reality looks much more modest. Total trading last year was 62 billion euros, down from 96 billion in 2011, according to Thomson Reuters Point Carbon, a market research firm based in Oslo. Close to 90 percent of that activity was in Europe, while North American trading represented less than 1 percent of worldwide market value.

Financial institutions that had rushed to increase staff have shrunk their carbon desks. Companies have also laid off other professionals who helped set up greenhouse gas reduction projects in developing countries like China and India.

When the emissions trading system was started in 2005, the goal was to create a global model for raising the costs of emitting greenhouse gases and for prodding industrial polluters to switch from burning fossil fuels to using clean-energy alternatives like wind and solar.

When carbon prices hit their highs of more than 30 euros in 2008 and companies spent billions to invest in renewables, policy makers hailed the market as a success. But then prices began to fall. And at current levels, they are far too low to change companies’ behaviors, analysts say. Emitting a ton of carbon dioxide costs about the same as a hamburger.

“At the moment, the carbon price does not give any signal for investment,” said Hans Bünting, chief executive of RWE, one of the largest utilities in Germany and Europe.

This cap-and-trade system in Europe places a ceiling on emissions. At the end of each year, companies like electric utilities or steel manufacturers must hand over to the national authorities the permits equivalent to the amount gases emitted.

Until the end of 2012, these credits were given to companies free according to their estimated output of greenhouse gases. Policy makers wanted to jump-start the trading market and avoid higher costs for consumers.

Beginning this year, energy companies must buy an increasing proportion of their credits in national auctions. Industrial companies like steel plants will follow later this decade.

Companies and other financial players like banks and hedge funds can also acquire and trade the allowances on exchanges like the IntercontinentalExchange, based in Atlanta. Over time the number of credits is meant to fall gradually, theoretically raising prices and cutting pollution.

The reality has been far different because of serious flaws in the design of the system. To win over companies and skeptical countries like Poland, which burn a lot of coal, far too many credits have been handed out.

At the same time, Europe’s debilitating economic slowdown has sharply curtailed industrial activity and reduced the Continent’s overall carbon emissions.

Steel making in Europe, for instance, has fallen about 30 percent since 2007, while new car registrations were at their lowest level last year since 1995.

Big investments in renewable energy sources like wind and solar also reduced carbon emissions, which have fallen about 10 percent in Europe since 2007.

As a result, there is a vast surplus of permits — about 800 million tons’ worth, according to Point Carbon. That has caused prices to plunge.

The cost of carbon is far too low to force electric utilities in Europe to switch from burning coal, a major polluter, to much cleaner natural gas. Just the opposite: Britain increased coal burning for electricity more than 30 percent last year, while cutting back gas use a similar amount, and other West European nations increased their coal use as well.

“The European energy scene is not a good one,” said Andrew Brown, head of exploration and production at Royal Dutch Shell. “They haven’t got the right balance in terms of promoting gas.”

Fearing that prices might go to zero because of the huge oversupply, the European authorities proposed a short-term solution known as backloading, which would have delayed the scheduled auctioning of a large portion of the credits that were supposed to be sold over the next three years. But the European Parliament in Strasbourg voted the measure down on April 16.

Lawmakers were worried about tampering with the market as well as doing anything that might increase energy costs in the struggling economy.

“It was the worst possible moment to try to implement something like that,” said Francesco Starace, chief executive of Enel Green Power, one of the largest European green-energy companies, which is based in Rome.

The European authorities, led by Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate change, have not given up on fixing the system. But analysts like Stig Scholset, at Point Carbon, say that there is not much the authorities can do in the short term and that prices may slump for months, if not years.

That means more tough times for financial institutions. Particularly troubled is the business of investing in greenhouse gas abatement projects like wind farms orhydroelectric dams in developing countries like China. JPMorgan Chase paid more than $200 million for one of the largest investors in these projects, EcoSecurities, in 2009.

Financiers say these projects used to be gold mines, generating credits that industrial companies could use to offset their emissions elsewhere. But so many credits have been produced by these projects — on top of the existing oversupply of credits in Europe — that they are trading at about a third of a euro.

Market participants say they see many rivals pulling back from world carbon markets. Deutsche Bank, the largest bank in Germany, has cut back its carbon trading. Smaller outfits like Mabanaft, based in Rotterdam, have also left the business.

Anthony Hobley, a lawyer in London and president of the Climate Market and Investors Association, an industry group, estimates that among the traders, analysts and bankers who flocked to the carbon markets in the early days, half may now be gone.

But carbon trading is unlikely to fade completely.

For one thing, European utilities and other companies now must buy the credits to comply with the rules. And they can buy credits to save for later use, when their emissions increase and the price of credits rises.

Despite Europe’s sputters, carbon trading is beginning to gain traction in places like China, Australia and New Zealand.

In London, Mr. Rassmuson concedes that the business has turned out to be more up-and-down than he anticipated when he and his partner set up their firm in a tiny two-man office in 2006.

But he said his firm was benefiting from others’ dropping out. He is also branching out into trading electric power and natural gas.

Like many in the carbon markets, he says what he is doing is not just about money.

“Trying to make the world more sustainable is important to us,” he said. “It is a good business opportunity that makes us proud.”

A version of this article appeared in print on April 22, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Europe, Paid Permits For Pollution Are Fizzling.

Mainstream green is still too white (Color Lines)

By Brentin Mock; Cross-posted from ColorLines

We missing anything here?Last year was the hottest on record for the continental United States, and it wasn’t an outlier. The last 12 years have been the warmest years since 1880, the year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began tracking this information. And climate scientists predict that the devastating blizzards, droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires we’ve been experiencing lately will worsen due to climate change.

In many ways these punishing weather events feel like Mother Nature seeking revenge for our failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the primary cause of global warming. Despite abundant evidence, the U.S. government has yet to pass a law that would force a reduction in these emissions.

During his first term, President Obama did make climate change a priority, both in his campaign and in office. The American Clean Energy and Security Act that Congress produced passed through the House in June 2009 by a narrow margin. Yet the bill never reached a vote in the Senate, and it died quietly.

Environmentalists have been flummoxed ever since. One prominent cause-of-death theory says that large mainstream (and predominantly white) environmental groups failed to mobilize grassroots support and ignored those who bear a disproportionate burden of climate change, namely poor people of color.

With Obama in for a second term and reaffirmed in his environmental commitments, climate legislation has another chance at life. Now, observers are wondering if mainstream environmentalists learned the right lessons from the first climate bill failure and how they’ll work with people of color this time around.

Anatomy of a conflict

To hear some environmental leaders tell it, their defeat wasn’t due to a lack of investment in black and brown people living in poor and working class communities, but to an over-investment in Obama. For example, Dan Lashof, climate and clean air director for Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), has blamed the president for having the audacity to push healthcare reform and he’s pointed the finger at green groups for being too patient with Obama.

Asked what environmental advocates who led the first climate bill effort could have done differently in 2009, Bill McKibben, founder of the online grassroots organizing campaign 350.org, says their game plan was too insular. “There was no chance last time because all the action was in the closed rooms, not in the streets,” he tells Colorlines.com.

Yet that “action” took place behind closed doors for a reason: Major mainstream green groups including the Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy teamed up with oil companies and some of the biggest polluters and emitters in the nation to form the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP). This ad hoc alliance was the driving force behind the failed 2009 bill and there were no environmental justice, civil rights, or people-of-color groups at the USCAP table.

Obama can’t be blamed for the blind spots of major groups. As recent Washington Post and Politico articles have pointed out, their leadership and membership simply don’t reflect the race or socieconomic class of people most vulnerable to climate change’s wrath.

Sarah Hansen, former executive director of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, argued recently that the mainstream has been stingy with funding and resources and inept at engaging environmental justice communities. In a National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) study, “Cultivating the Grassroots: A Winning Approach for Environmental and Climate Funders,” Hansen reported that philanthropies awarded most of their environmental dollars to large, predominantly white groups but received little return in terms of law and policy. Meanwhile, wrote Hansen, too few dollars have been invested in community- and environmental justice-based organizations.

According to the NCRP report, environmental organizations with $5 million-plus budgets made up only 2 percent of green groups in general but in 2009 received half of all grants in the field. The NCRP also found that 15 percent of all green dollars benefited marginalized populations between 2007 and 2009. Only 11 percent went to social justice causes.

In January, Harvard professor Theda Skocpol released a study of the first climate bill campaign’s failure and faulted green groups involved for choosing direct congressional lobbying over grassroots organizing. Some of the major organizations did spend money on field organizers, wrote Skocpol, but only to push public messaging like billboards and advertisements.

“The messaging campaigns would not make it their business to actually shape legislation — or even talk about details with ordinary citizens or grassroots groups,” Skocpol wrote in the report. The public “is seen as a kind of background chorus that, hopefully, will sing on key.”

Take one for the team?

That the environmental movement thought billboards and ads could replace educating and organizing actual people was their biggest flaw, a position shared by Hansen and Skocpol. In comparison, health reform advocates took a lobbying and grassroots approach while the climate-change bill made the rounds and got a law passed.

“If you want to gain the trust of the emerging non-white majority, it’s not just a messaging thing,” explains Ryan Young, legal counsel for the California-based Greenlining Institute, a policy research nonprofit focused on economic, environmental, and racial justice. “It’s a values thing. You must understand the values of these communities and craft policy around that.”

Why does this matter?

Consider how the website of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) recently featured an article on city bird sanctuaries from the group’s print magazine titled “Urban Renewal.”

Having people of color on staff might have helped NWF understand that for some, “urban renewal” signifies a historical legacy of black and Latino neighborhoods being effectively erased by development projects such as sports stadiums. Cultural snafus like this have led to white environmental groups being clowned in influential outlets including The Daily Show.

In an interview about the unintended message of “Urban Renewal,” Jim Lyon, NWF’s vice president for conservation policy, told Colorlines.com that the group doesn’t “always get everything right” and that “he’d take it back to his staff.” (Ironically, one of the harshest critiques of urban renewal came from Jane Jacobs, a white conservationist.) On the topic of staff diversity, Lyon said the organization isn’t where they want it to be, but that they’ve made “good progress.” He would not release staff demographics, but said NWF achieves diversity through partnerships with other groups and programs like Eco-Schools USA, which he says “engages more than 1 million children of color” daily.

Beverly Wright, who heads the New Orleans-based Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, says racial oversights of traditionally white groups are the main reason black and Latino environmentalists have formed their own organizations. The culturally divided camps sometimes use the same words, but they’re often speaking different languages.

Take “cap-and-trade,” a scheme that would commodify greenhouse gas emissions for market-trading as a way to reduce those emissions. The first climate bill centered on cap-and-trade because most major environmental groups supported it. But cap-and-trade was anathema to environmental justice because it did nothing to curb local co-pollutants such as smog and soot, direct threats to communities of color. That’s not to mention that cap-and-trade was the brainchild of C. Boyden Gray, a conservative member of the Federalist Society and leader of FreedomWorks, today a major Tea Party funder.

Wright says major green groups tried to coax environmental justice organizations into supporting cap-and-trade by claiming it was for the “greater good.”

“But that meant white people get all the greater goods and we get the rest,” says Wright. “Until they want to have real discussions around racism, they won’t have our support. That’s what happened last time with the climate bill. It did not move, because they did not have diversity in their voices.”

“Diversity” doesn’t just mean hiring more people of color. As the 30-year-old Center for Health, Environment and Justice stated in March, the diversity conversation “really needs to be about resources and assistance to the front line communities rather than head counting.”

What’s next?

So in the new round of climate bill talks, will large environmental groups meaningfully engage community-based environmental justice groups?

The prognosis is mixed. Look at MomentUs, a mammoth collaborative started in January to ramp up support for new climate legislation. While MomentUs claims to be a game-changer, the strategy behind it seems very similar to that of USCAP’s — the one that failed to deliver a climate-change law the first time around. On its website, MomentUs describes its board of directors as “cultural, environmental, business, and marketing leaders who offer the diversity of viewpoints and keen insight vital to advancing MomentUs’s mission.” At press time, all of the directors are white. So is the staff, except for one office administrator.

Looking at MomentUs partners, it appears that the same traditionally white environmental organizations who teamed up for USCAP are now working with corporations including ALEC funder Duke Energy, predatory subprime mortgage king Wells Fargo, perennial labor union target Sodexho, and Disney. At press time there are no environmental justice or civil rights groups involved.

On the other side of the spectrum, The Sierra Club — one of the nation’s largest and whitest green groups — has had an expansive role in environmental justice and advocacy, particularly in the Gulf Coast. In January it joined the NAACP and labor unions in launching the Democracy Initiative, which will tackle voting rights, environmental justice, and other civil rights concerns.

To be sure, it’s way too early to make a conclusion about MomentUs or the Democracy Initiative, but the latter appears to be a step in the right direction in terms of highlighting the intersection between poor environmental outcomes and racism.

McKibben, the 350.org founder, has helped cultivate a multicultural fight against the Keystone XL pipeline project, but he admits that the overall environmental movement has “tons of work to do” on racial equity and inclusion.

“The sooner [mainstream environmentalists] absorb the message and are led by members of the environmental justice movement, the better,” he says.

In that case, the question is a matter of timing and power, of who decides when and which environmental justice activists get to lead.

Stay tuned.

Brentin Mock is a New Orleans-based journalist who serves as ColorLines’s reporting fellow on voting rights.     

Indigenous rights are the best defence against Canada’s resource rush (Guardian)

First Nations people – and the decision of Canadians to stand alongside them – will determine the fate of the planet

By Martin Lukacs

Friday 26 April 2013 16.12 BST - guardian.co.uk

Canada blog about Aboriginal rights : First Nations protesters in Idle No More demonstration Toronto

First Nations protesters are silhouetted against a flag as the take in a Idle No More demonstration in Toronto, January 16, 2013. Photograph: Mark Blinch/Reuters

In a boardroom in a soaring high-rise on Wall Street, Indigenous activist Arthur Manuel is sitting across from one of the most powerful financial agents in North America.

It’s 2004, and Manuel is on a typical mission. Part of a line of distinguished Indigenous leaders from western Canada, Manuel is what you might call an economic hit-man for the right cause. A brilliant thinker trained in law, he has devoted himself to fighting Canada’s policies toward Indigenous peoples by assailing the government where it hurts most – in its pocketbook.

Which is why he secured a meeting in New York with a top-ranking official at Standard & Poor’s, the influential credit agency that issues Canada’s top-notch AAA rating. That’s what assures investors that the country has its debts covered, that it is a safe and profitable place to do business.

This coveted credit rating is Manuel’s target. His line of attack is to try to lift the veil on Canada’s dirty business secret: that contrary to the myth that Indigenous peoples leech off the state, resources taken from their lands have in fact been subsidizing the Canadian economy. In their haste to get at that wealth, the government has been flouting their own laws, ignoring Supreme Court decisions calling for the respect of Indigenous and treaty rights over large territories. Canada has become very rich, and Indigenous peoples very poor.

In other words, Canada owes big. Some have even begun calculating how much. According to economist Fred Lazar, First Nations in northern Ontario alone are owed $32 billion for the last century of unfulfilled treaty promises to share revenue from resources. Manuel’s argument is that this unpaid debt – a massive liability of trillions of dollars carried by the Canadian state, which it has deliberately failed to report – should be recognized as a risk to the country’s credit rating.

How did the official who could pull the rug under Canada’s economy respond? Unlike Canadian politicians and media who regularly dismiss the significance of Indigenous rights, he took Manuel seriously. It was evident he knew all the jurisprudence. He followed the political developments. He didn’t contradict any of Manuel’s facts.

He no doubt understood what Manuel was remarkably driving at: under threat of a dented credit rating, Canada might finally feel pressure to deal fairly with Indigenous peoples. But here was the hitch: Standard & Poor’s wouldn’t acknowledge the debt, because the official didn’t think Manuel and First Nations could ever collect it. Why? As author Naomi Klein, who accompanied Manuel at the meeting, remembers, his answer amounted to a realpolitik shoulder shrug.

“Who will able to enforce the debt? You and what army?”

This was his brutal but illuminating admission: Indigenous peoples may have the law on their side, but they don’t have the power. Indeed, while Indigenous peoples’ protests have achieved important environmental victories – mining operations stopped here, forest conservation areas set up there – these have remained sporadic and isolated. Canada’s country-wide policies of ignoring Indigenous land rights have rarely been challenged, and never fundamentally.

Until now. If it’s only a social movement that can change the power equation upholding the official’s stance, then the Idle No More uprisingmay be it. Triggered initially in late 2012 by opposition to the Conservative government’s roll-back of decades of environmental protection, this Indigenous movement quickly tapped into long-simmering indignation. Through the chilly winter months, Canada witnessed unprecedented mobilizations, with blockades and round-dances springing up in every corner of the country, demanding a basic resetting of the relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples.

Money is not the main form this justice will take. First Nations desperately need more funding to close the gap that exists between them and Canadians. But if Indigenous peoples hold a key to the Canadian economy, the point is to use this leverage to steer the country in a different direction. “Draw that power back to the people on the land, the grassroots people fighting pipelines and industrial projects,” Manuel says. “That will determine what governments can or cannot do on the land.”

The stakes could not be greater. The movement confronts a Conservative Canadian government aggressively pursuing $600 billion of resource development on or near Indigenous lands. That means the unbridled exploitation of huge hydrocarbon reserves, including the three-fold expansion of one of the world’s most carbon-intensive projects, the Alberta tar sands. Living closest to these lands, Indigenous peoples are the best and last defence against this fossil fuel scramble. In its place, they may yet host the energy alternatives – of wind, water, or solar.

No surprise, then, about the government’s basic approach toward First Nations: “removing obstacles to major economic development.” Hence the movement’s next stage – a call for defiance branded Sovereignty Summer – is to put more obstacles up. The assertion of constitutionally-protected Indigenous and treaty rights – backed up by direct action, legal challenges and massive support from Canadians – is exactly what can create chronic uncertainty for this corporate and government agenda. For those betting on more than a half-trillion in resource investments, that’s a very big warning sign.

Industry has taken notice. A recent report on mining dropped Canada out of the top spot for miners: “while Canadian jurisdictions remain competitive globally, uncertainties with Indigenous consultation and disputed land claims are growing concerns for some.” And if the uncertainty is eventually tagged with a monetary sum, then Canada will, as Manuel warned Standard & Poor’s, face a large and serious credit risk. Trying to ward off such a threat, the government is hoping to lock mainstream Indigenous leaders into endless negotiations, or sway them with promises of a bigger piece of the resource action.

But this bleak outlook intent on a final ransacking of the earth doesn’t stand up to the vision the movement offers Canadians. Implementing Indigenous rights on the ground, starting with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, could tilt the balance of stewardship over a vast geography: giving Indigenous peoples much more control, and corporations much less. Which means that finally honouring Indigenous rights is not simply about paying off Canada’s enormous legal debt to First Nations: it is also our best chance to save entire territories from endless extraction and destruction. In no small way, the actions of Indigenous peoples – and the decision of Canadians to stand alongside them – will determine the fate of the planet.

This new understanding is dawning on more Canadians. Thousands are signing onto educational campaigns to become allies to First Nations. Direct action trainings for young people are in full swing. As Chief Allan Adam from the First Nation in the heart of the Alberta oil patch has suggested, it might be “a long, hot summer.”

Sustained action that puts real clout behind Indigenous claims is what will force a reckoning with the true nature of Canada’s economy – and the possibility of a transformed country. That is the promise of a growing mass protest movement, an army of untold power and numbers.

Ecology Buys Time for Evolution: Climate Change Disrupts Songbird’s Timing Without Impacting Population Size (Yet) (Science Daily)

Apr. 25, 2013 — Songbird populations can handle far more disrupting climate change than expected. Density-dependent processes are buying them time for their battle. But without (slow) evolutionary rescue it will not save them in the end, says an international team of scientists led by the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) in Science this week.

Parus major. Songbird populations can handle far more disrupting climate change than expected. Density-dependent processes are buying them time for their battle. But without (slow) evolutionary rescue it will not save them in the end. (Credit: © hfox / Fotolia)

Yes, spring started late this year in North-western Europe. But the general trend of the four last decades is still a rapidly advancing spring. The seasonal timing of trees and insects advance too, but songbirds like Parus major, or the great tit, lag behind. Yet without an accompanying decline in population numbers, it seems, as the international research team shows for the great tit population in the Dutch National Park the Hoge Veluwe.

“It’s a real paradox,” explain Dr Tom Reed and Prof Marcel Visser of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology. “Due to the changing climate of the past decades the egg laying dates of Parus major have become increasingly mismatched with the timing of the main food source for its chicks: caterpillars. The seasonal timing of the food peak has advanced over twice as fast as that of the birds and the reproductive output is reduced. Still, the population numbers do not go down.” On the short term, that is, as Reed, Visser and colleagues from Norway, the USA, and France have now calculated using almost 40 years of data from this songbird.

The solution to the paradox is that although fewer offspring now fledge due to food shortage, each of these chicks has a higher chance of survival until the next breeding season. “We call this relaxed competition, as there are fewer fledglings to compete with,” first author Reed points out. Out of 10 eggs laid, 9 chicks are born, 7 fledge and on average only one chick survives winter. That last number increases with less competitors around.

This is the first time that density dependence — a widespread phenomenon in nature — and ecological mismatch are linked, and it is a real eye-opener. Reed: “It all seems so obvious once you’ve calculated this, but people were almost sure that mistiming would lead to a direct population decline.”

The great tits that lay eggs earlier in spring are more successful nowadays than late birds, which produce relatively few surviving offspring. This leads to increasing selection for birds to reproduce early. But the total number of birds in the new generation stays the same. “That is the second paradox,” the researchers state. “Why are population numbers hardly affected, despite the stronger selection on timing caused by the mismatch? The answer is that for selection it matters which birds survive, while for population size it only matters how many survive. Visser: “The mortality in one group can be compensated for by the success in another. But this stretching, this flexibility, is not unlimited.”

The mismatch between egg laying period and caterpillar peak in the woods will keep growing, and so will the impact following the temporary rescue, as long as spring temperatures continue to increase. “The density dependence is only buying the birds time, hopefully for evolutionary adaptation to dig in before population numbers are substantially affected,” according to Visser. The new findings can help to predict the impact of future environmental change on other wild populations and to identify relevant measures to take. Even rubber bands stretch only so far before they break.

Journal Reference:

  1. T. E. Reed, V. Grotan, S. Jenouvrier, B.-E. Saether, M. E. Visser. Population Growth in a Wild Bird Is Buffered Against Phenological Mismatch. Science, 2013; 340 (6131): 488 DOI: 10.1126/science.1232870

Earth’s Current Warmth Not Seen in the Last 1,400 Years or More, Says Study (Science Daily)

Apr. 21, 2013 — Fueled by industrial greenhouse gas emissions, Earth’s climate warmed more between 1971 and 2000 than during any other three-decade interval in the last 1,400 years, according to new regional temperature reconstructions covering all seven continents. This period of humanmade global warming, which continues today, reversed a natural cooling trend that lasted several hundred years, according to results published in the journalNature Geoscience by more than 80 scientists from 24 nations analyzing climate data from tree rings, pollen, cave formations, ice cores, lake and ocean sediments, and historical records from around the world.

During Europe’s 2003 heat wave, July temperatures in France were as much as 18 degrees F hotter than in 2001. (Credit: NASA)

“This paper tells us what we already knew, except in a better, more comprehensive fashion,” said study co-author Edward Cook, a tree-ring scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who led the Asia reconstruction.

The study also found that Europe’s 2003 heat wave and drought, which killed an estimated 70,000 people, happened during Europe’s hottest summer of the last 2,000 years. “Summer temperatures were intense that year and accompanied by a lack of rain and very dry soil conditions over much of Europe,” said study co-author Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at Lamont-Doherty and one of the lead contributors to the Europe reconstruction. Though summer 2003 set a record for Europe, global warming was only one of the factors that contributed to the temperature conditions that summer, he said.

The study is the latest to show that the Medieval Warm Period, from about 950 to 1250, may not have been global, and may not have happened at the same time in places that did grow warmer. While parts of Europe and North America were fairly warm between 950 and 1250, South America stayed relatively cold, the study says. Some people have argued that the natural warming that occurred during the medieval ages is happening today, and that humans are not responsible for modern day global warming. Scientists are nearly unanimous in their disagreement “If we went into another Medieval Warm Period again that extra warmth would be added on top of warming from greenhouse gases,” said Cook.

Temperatures varied less between continents in the same hemisphere than between hemispheres. “Distinctive periods, such as the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age stand out, but do not show a globally uniform pattern,” said co-author Heinz Wanner, a scientist at the University of Bern. By 1500, temperatures dropped below the long-term average everywhere, though colder temperatures emerged several decades earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia.

The most consistent trend across all regions in the last 2,000 years was a long-term cooling, likely caused by a rise in volcanic activity, decrease in solar irradiance, changes in land-surface vegetation, and slow variations in Earth’s orbit. With the exception of Antarctica, cooling tapered off at the end of the 19th century, with the onset of industrialization. Cooler 30-year periods between 830 and 1910 were particularly pronounced during weak solar activity and strong tropical volcanic eruptions. Both phenomena often occurred simultaneously and led to a drop in the average temperature during five distinct 30- to 90-year intervals between 1251 and 1820. Warming in the 20th century was on average twice as large in the northern continents as it was in the Southern Hemisphere. During the past 2000 years, some regions experienced warmer 30-year intervals than during the late 20th century. For example, in Europe the years between 21 and 80 AD were likely warmer than the period 1971-2000.

SunEdison e Petrobras firmam acordo para planta de energia solar no Brasil (Yahoo! Notícias)

Reuters – qui, 18 de abr de 2013

18 Abr (Reuters) – A SunEdison, provedora global de serviços de energia solar e subsidiária da MEMC Electronic Materials assinou um acordo com a Petrobras para construir uma das maiores plantas de energia solar no Brasil, informou a empresa norte-americana em um comunicado nesta quinta-feira.

A planta, que será localizada em Alto do Rodrigues, no Rio Grande do Norte, terá uma capacidade instalada de 1,1 megawatt.

Leia o comunicado original, em inglês, em: http://pdf.reuters.com/pdfnews/pdfnews.asp?i=43059c3bf0e37541&u=urn:newsml:reuters.com:20130418:nPnNY97027

(Por Laiz de Souza)

Carbon bubble will plunge the world into another financial crisis – report (The Guardian)

Trillions of dollars at risk as stock markets inflate value of fossil fuels that may have to remain buried forever, experts warn

Damian Carrington - The Guardian, Friday 19 April 2013

Carbon bubble : carbon dioxide polluting power plant : coal-fired Bruce Mansfield Power Plant

Global stock markets are betting on countries failing to adhere to legally binding carbon emission targets. Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

The world could be heading for a major economic crisis as stock marketsinflate an investment bubble in fossil fuels to the tune of trillions of dollars, according to leading economists.

“The financial crisis has shown what happens when risks accumulate unnoticed,” said Lord (Nicholas) Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics. He said the risk was “very big indeed” and that almost all investors and regulators were failing to address it.

The so-called “carbon bubble” is the result of an over-valuation of oil,coal and gas reserves held by fossil fuel companies. According to a report published on Friday, at least two-thirds of these reserves will have to remain underground if the world is to meet existing internationally agreed targets to avoid the threshold for “dangerous” climate change. If the agreements hold, these reserves will be in effect unburnable and so worthless – leading to massive market losses. But the stock markets are betting on countries’ inaction on climate change.

The stark report is by Stern and the thinktank Carbon Tracker. Their warning is supported by organisations including HSBC, Citi, Standard and Poor’s and the International Energy Agency. The Bank of England has also recognised that a collapse in the value of oil, gas and coal assets as nations tackle global warming is a potential systemic risk to the economy, with London being particularly at risk owing to its huge listings of coal.

Stern said that far from reducing efforts to develop fossil fuels, the top 200 companies spent $674bn (£441bn) in 2012 to find and exploit even more new resources, a sum equivalent to 1% of global GDP, which could end up as “stranded” or valueless assets. Stern’s landmark 2006 reporton the economic impact of climate change – commissioned by the then chancellor, Gordon Brown – concluded that spending 1% of GDP would pay for a transition to a clean and sustainable economy.

The world’s governments have agreed to restrict the global temperature rise to 2C, beyond which the impacts become severe and unpredictable. But Stern said the investors clearly did not believe action to curb climate change was going to be taken. “They can’t believe that and also believe that the markets are sensibly valued now.”

“They only believe environmental regulation when they see it,” said James Leaton, from Carbon Tracker and a former PwC consultant. He said short-termism in financial markets was the other major reason for the carbon bubble. “Analysts say you should ride the train until just before it goes off the cliff. Each thinks they are smart enough to get off in time, but not everyone can get out of the door at the same time. That is why you get bubbles and crashes.”

Paul Spedding, an oil and gas analyst at HSBC, said: “The scale of ‘listed’ unburnable carbon revealed in this report is astonishing. This report makes it clear that ‘business as usual’ is not a viable option for the fossil fuel industry in the long term. [The market] is assuming it will get early warning, but my worry is that things often happen suddenly in the oil and gas sector.”

HSBC warned that 40-60% of the market capitalisation of oil and gas companies was at risk from the carbon bubble, with the top 200 fossil fuel companies alone having a current value of $4tn, along with $1.5tn debt.

Lord McFall, who chaired the Commons Treasury select committee for a decade, said: “Despite its devastating scale, the banking crisis was at its heart an avoidable crisis: the threat of significant carbon writedown has the unmistakable characteristics of the same endemic problems.”

The report calculates that the world’s currently indicated fossil fuel reserves equate to 2,860bn tonnes of carbon dioxide, but that just 31% could be burned for an 80% chance of keeping below a 2C temperature rise. For a 50% chance of 2C or less, just 38% could be burned.

Carbon capture and storage technology, which buries emissions underground, can play a role in the future, but even an optimistic scenario which sees 3,800 commercial projects worldwide would allow only an extra 4% of fossil fuel reserves to be burned. There are currently no commercial projects up and running. The normally conservativeInternational Energy Agency has also concluded that a major part of fossil fuel reserves is unburnable.

Citi bank warned investors in Australia’s vast coal industry that little could be done to avoid the future loss of value in the face of action on climate change. “If the unburnable carbon scenario does occur, it is difficult to see how the value of fossil fuel reserves can be maintained, so we see few options for risk mitigation.”

Ratings agencies have expressed concerns, with Standard and Poor’s concluding that the risk could lead to the downgrading of the credit ratings of oil companies within a few years.

Steven Oman, senior vice-president at Moody’s, said: “It behoves us as investors and as a society to know the true cost of something so that intelligent and constructive policy and investment decisions can be made. Too often the true costs are treated as unquantifiable or even ignored.”

Jens Peers, who manages €4bn (£3bn) for Mirova, part of €300bn asset managers Natixis, said: “It is shocking to see the report’s numbers, as they are worse than people realise. The risk is massive, but a lot of asset managers think they have a lot of time. I think they are wrong.” He said a key moment will come in 2015, the date when the world’s governments have pledged to strike a global deal to limit carbon emissions. But he said that fund managers need to move now. If they wait till 2015, “it will be too late for them to take action.”

Pension funds are also concerned. “Every pension fund manager needs to ask themselves have we incorporated climate change and carbon risk into our investment strategy? If the answer is no, they need to start to now,” said Howard Pearce, head of pension fund management at the Environment Agency, which holds £2bn in assets.

Stern and Leaton both point to China as evidence that carbon cuts are likely to be delivered. China’s leaders have said its coal use will peak in the next five years, said Leaton, but this has not been priced in. “I don’t know why the market does not believe China,” he said. “When it says it is going to do something, it usually does.” He said the US and Australia were banking on selling coal to China but that this “doesn’t add up”.

Jeremy Grantham, a billionaire fund manager who oversees $106bn of assets, said his company was on the verge of pulling out of all coal and unconventional fossil fuels, such as oil from tar sands. “The probability of them running into trouble is too high for me to take that risk as an investor.” He said: “If we mean to burn all the coal and any appreciable percentage of the tar sands, or other unconventional oil and gas then we’re cooked. [There are] terrible consequences that we will lay at the door of our grandchildren.”

Ocean’s Future Not So Bleak? Resilience Found in Shelled Plants Exposed to Ocean Acidification (Science Daily)

Apr. 12, 2013 — Marine scientists have long understood the detrimental effect of fossil fuel emissions on marine ecosystems. But a group led by a UC Santa Barbara professor has found a point of resilience in a microscopic shelled plant with a massive environmental impact, which suggests the future of ocean life may not be so bleak.

This shows cells of the coccolithophore species Emiliania huxleyi strain NZEH under present-day, left, and future high, right, carbon dioxide conditions. (Credit: UCSB)

As fossil fuel emissions increase, so does the amount of carbon dioxide oceans absorb and dissolve, lowering their pH levels. “As pH declines, there is this concern that marine species that have shells may start dissolving or may have more difficulty making calcium carbonate, the chalky substance that they use to build shells,” said Debora Iglesias-Rodriguez, a professor in UCSB’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology.

Iglesias-Rodriguez and postdoctoral researcher Bethan Jones, who is now at Rutgers University, led a large-scale study on the effects of ocean acidification on these tiny plants that can only be seen under the microscope. Their research, funded by the European Project on Ocean Acidification, is published in the journal PLoS ONE and breaks with traditional notions about the vitality of calcifiers, or creatures that make shells, in future ocean conditions.

“The story years ago was that ocean acidification was going to be bad, really bad for calcifiers,” said Iglesias-Rodriguez, whose team discovered that one species of the tiny single celled marine coccolithophore, Emiliania huxleyi, actually had bigger shells in high carbon dioxide seawater conditions. While the team acknowledges that calcification tends to decline with acidification, “we now know that there are variable responses in sea corals, in sea urchins, in all shelled organisms that we find in the sea.”

These E. huxleyi are a large army of ocean-regulating shell producers that create oxygen as they process carbon by photosynthesis and fortify the ocean food chain. As one of Earth’s main vaults for environmentally harmful carbon emissions, their survival affects organisms inside and outside the marine system. However, as increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide causes seawater to slide down the pH scale toward acidic levels, this environment could become less hospitable.

The UCSB study incorporated an approach known as shotgun proteomics to uncover how E. huxleyi‘s biochemistry could change in future high carbon dioxide conditions, which were set at four times the current levels for the study. This approach casts a wider investigative net that looks at all changes and influences in the environment as opposed to looking at individual processes like photosynthesis.

Shotgun proteomics examines the type, abundance, and alterations in proteins to understand how a cell’s machinery is conditioned by ocean acidification. “There is no perfect approach,” said Iglesias-Rodriguez. “They all have their caveats, but we think that this is a way of extracting a lot of information from this system.”

To mirror natural ocean conditions, the team used over half a ton of seawater to grow the E. huxleyi and bubbled in carbon dioxide to recreate both present day and high future carbon levels. It took more than six months for the team to grow enough plants to accumulate and analyze sufficient proteins.

The team found that E. huxleyi cells exposed to higher carbon dioxide conditions were larger and contained more shell than those grown in current conditions. However, they also found that these larger cells grow slower than those under current carbon dioxide conditions. Aside from slower growth, the higher carbon dioxide levels did not seem to affect the cells even at the biochemical level, as measured by the shotgun proteomic approach.

“The E. huxleyi increased the amount of calcite they had because they kept calcifying but slowed down division rates,” said Iglesias-Rodriguez. “You get fewer cells but they look as healthy as those under current ocean conditions, so the shells are not simply dissolving away.”

The team stresses that while representatives of this species seem to have biochemical mechanisms to tolerate even very high levels of carbon dioxide, slower growth could become problematic. If other species grow faster, E. huxleyi could be outnumbered in some areas.

“The cells in this experiment seemed to tolerate future ocean conditions,” said Jones. “However, what will happen to this species in the future is still an open question. Perhaps the grow-slow outcome may end up being their downfall as other species could simply outgrow and replace them.”

Journal Reference:

  1. Bethan M. Jones, M. Debora Iglesias-Rodriguez, Paul J. Skipp, Richard J. Edwards, Mervyn J. Greaves, Jeremy R. Young, Henry Elderfield, C. David O’Connor. Responses of the Emiliania huxleyi Proteome to Ocean Acidification. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (4): e61868 DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0061868

Carbon Dioxide Removal Can Lower Costs of Climate Protection (Science Daily)

Apr. 12, 2013 — Directly removing CO2 from the air has the potential to alter the costs of climate change mitigation. It could allow prolonging greenhouse-gas emissions from sectors like transport that are difficult, thus expensive, to turn away from using fossil fuels. And it may help to constrain the financial burden on future generations, a study now published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) shows. It focuses on the use of biomass for energy generation, combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS). According to the analysis, carbon dioxide removal could be used under certain requirements to alleviate the most costly components of mitigation, but it would not replace the bulk of actual emissions reductions. 

Directly removing CO2 from the air has the potential to alter the costs of climate change mitigation. It could allow prolonging greenhouse-gas emissions from sectors like transport that are difficult, thus expensive, to turn away from using fossil fuels. And it may help to constrain the financial burden on future generations, a new study shows. It focuses on the use of biomass for energy generation, combined with carbon capture and storage. (Credit: © Jürgen Fälchle / Fotolia)

“Carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere allows to separate emissions control from the time and location of the actual emissions. This flexibility can be important for climate protection,” says lead-author Elmar Kriegler. “You don’t have to prevent emissions in every factory or truck, but could for instance plant grasses that suck CO2 out of the air to grow — and later get processed in bioenergy plants where the CO2 gets stored underground.”

In economic terms, this flexibility allows to lower costs by compensating for emissions which would be most costly to eliminate. “This means that a phase-out of global emissions by the end of the century — that we would need to hold the 2 degree line adopted by the international community — does not necessarily require to eliminate each and every source of emissions,” says Kriegler. “Decisions whether and how to protect future generations from the risks of climate change have to be made today, but the burden of achieving these targets will increase over time. The costs for future generations can be substantially reduced if carbon dioxide removal technologies become available in the long run.”

Balancing the financial burden across generations

The study now published is the first to quantify this. If bioenergy plus CCS is available, aggregate mitigation costs over the 21st century might be halved. In the absence of such a carbon dioxide removal strategy, costs for future generations rise significantly, up to a quadrupling of mitigation costs in the period of 2070 to 2090. The calculation was carried out using a computer simulation of the economic system, energy markets, and climate, covering a range of scenarios.

Options for carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere include afforestation and chemical approaches like direct air capture of CO2 from the atmosphere or reactions of CO2 with minerals to form carbonates. But the use of biomass for energy generation combined with carbon capture and storage is less costly than chemical options, as long as sufficient biomass feedstock is available, the scientists point out.

Serious concerns about large-scale biomass use combined with CCS

“Of course, there are serious concerns about the sustainability of large-scale biomass use for energy,” says co-author Ottmar Edenhofer, chief-economist of PIK. “We therefore considered the bioenergy with CCS option only as an example of the role that carbon dioxide removal could play for climate change mitigation.” The exploitation of bioenergy can conflict with land-use for food production or ecosystem protection. To account for sustainability concerns, the study restricts the bioenergy production to a medium level, that may be realized mostly on abandoned agricultural land.

Still, global population growth and changing dietary habits, associated with an increased demand for land, as well as improvements of agricultural productivity, associated with a decreased demand for land, are important uncertainties here. Furthermore, CCS technology is not yet available for industrial-scale use and, due to environmental concerns, is controversial in countries like Germany. Yet in this study it is assumed that it will become available in the near future.

“CO2 removal from the atmosphere could enable humankind to keep the window of opportunity open for low-stabilization targets despite of a likely delay in international cooperation, but only under certain requirements,” says Edenhofer. “The risks of scaling up bioenergy use need to be better understood, and safety concerns about CCS have to be thoroughly investigated. Still, carbon dioxide removal technologies are no science fiction and need to be further explored.” In no way should they be seen as a pretext to neglect emissions reductions now, notes Edenhofer. “By far the biggest share of climate change mitigation has to come from a large effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions globally.”

Journal Reference:

  1. Elmar Kriegler, Ottmar Edenhofer, Lena Reuster, Gunnar Luderer, David Klein. Is atmospheric carbon dioxide removal a game changer for climate change mitigation? Climatic Change, 2013; DOI: 10.1007/s10584-012-0681-4

Environmental Change Triggers Rapid Evolution (Science Daily)

Apr. 8, 2013 — Environmental change can drive hard-wired evolutionary changes in animal species in a matter of generations. A University of Leeds-led study, published in the journal Ecology Letters, overturns the common assumption that evolution only occurs gradually over hundreds or thousands of years.

Female soil mite. (Credit: Umeå universitet.)

Instead, researchers found significant genetically transmitted changes in laboratory populations of soil mites in just 15 generations, leading to a doubling of the age at which the mites reached adulthood and large changes in population size. The results have important implications in areas such as disease and pest control, conservation and fisheries management because they demonstrate that evolution can be a game-changer even in the short-term.

Professor Tim Benton, of the University of Leeds’ Faculty of Biological Sciences, said: “This demonstrates that short-term ecological change and evolution are completely intertwined and cannot reasonably be considered separate. We found that populations evolve rapidly in response to environmental change and population management. This can have major consequences such as reducing harvesting yields or saving a population heading for extinction.”

Although previous research has implied a link between short-term changes in animal species’ physical characteristics and evolution, the Leeds-led study is the first to prove a causal relationship between rapid genetic evolution and animal population dynamics in a controlled experimental setting.

The researchers worked with soil mites that were collected from the wild and then raised in 18 glass tubes. Forty percent of adult mites were removed every week from six of the glass tubes. A similar proportion of juveniles were removed each week in a further six tubes, while no “harvesting” was conducted in the remaining third of the tubes.

Lead author Dr Tom Cameron, a postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Biological Sciences at Leeds at the time of the research and now based in Umeå University, Sweden, said: “We saw significant evolutionary changes relatively quickly. The age of maturity of the mites in the tubes doubled over about 15 generations, because they were competing in a different way than they would in the wild. Removing the adults caused them to remain as juveniles even longer because the genetics were responding to the high chance that they were going to die as soon as they matured. When they did eventually mature, they were so enormous they could lay all of their eggs very quickly.”

The initial change in the mites’ environment — from the wild into the laboratory — had a disastrous effect on the population, putting the mites on an extinction trajectory. However, in every population, including those subjected to the removal of adults or juveniles, the trajectory switched after only five generations of evolution and the population sizes began to increase.

The researchers found that the laboratory environment was selecting for those mites that grew more slowly. Under the competitive conditions in the tubes, the slow growing mites were more fertile when they matured, meaning they could have more babies.

Dr Cameron said: “The genetic evolution that resulted in an investment in egg production at the expense of individual growth rates led to population growth, rescuing the populations from extinction. This is evolutionary rescue in action and suggests that rapid evolution can help populations respond to rapid environmental change.”

Short-term ecological responses to the environment — for instance, a reduction in the size of adults because of a lack of food — and hard-wired evolutionary changes were separated by placing mites from different treatments into a similar environment for several generations and seeing whether differences persisted.

Professor Benton said: “The traditional idea would be that if you put animals in a new environment they stay basically the same but the way they grow changes because of variables like the amount of food. However, our study proves that the evolutionary effect — the change in the underlying biology in response to the environment — can happen at the same time as the ecological response. Ecology and evolution are intertwined,” he said.

Unpicking evolutionary change from ecological responses is particularly important in areas such as the management of fisheries, where human decisions can result in major changes to an entire population’s environment and life histories. The size at which cod in the North Sea mature is about half that of 50 years ago and this change has been linked to a collapse in the cod population because adult fish today are less fertile than their ancestors.

“The big debate has been over whether this is an evolutionary response to the way they are fished or whether this is, for instance, just the amount of food in the sea having a short-term ecological effect. Our study underlined that evolution can happen on a short timescale and even small 1 to 2 per cent evolutionary changes in the underlying biology caused by your harvesting strategy can have major consequences on population growth and yields. You can’t just try to bring the environment back to what it was before and expect everything to return to normal,” Professor Benton said.

The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and involved researchers from the University of Leeds and Professor Stuart Piertney of the University of Aberdeen’s School of Biological Sciences.

Journal Reference:

  1. Tom C. Cameron, Daniel O’Sullivan, Alan Reynolds, Stuart B. Piertney, Tim G. Benton. Eco-evolutionary dynamics in response to selection on life-history. Ecology Letters, 2013; DOI: 10.1111/ele.12107

Segue o Seco (Rolling Stone)

Edição 77 – Fevereiro de 2013

Enquanto a Bahia sofre com “a pior seca dos últimos 50 anos”, os habitantes do sertão se desdobram para superar os percalços. A esperança persiste, mas é minguada como a água da chuva

Segue o SecoFoto: Flavio Forner

Por MAÍRA KUBÍK MANO

“Para o carro! para o carro! olha ali, em cima das pedras! Tá vendo?” Não, eu não via nada. A paisagem parecia exatamente a mesma da última meia hora. Toda cor de terra, com uma ou outra catingueira no horizonte e os mandacarus, sempre em maior número, acompanhando o traçado da estrada de chão. “Lembra da cena em que o Fabiano vai tentar pegar um preá? Olha ali!”, o interlocutor insiste, apontando. Vidro abaixado, olhos a postos. Dois bichos pequenos, amarronzados e amendoados, de focinho pontudo, se mexem e se fazem notar. Pronto, lá estão os preás. Júlio César Santos fica satisfeito. Afinal, ele fora parar no sertão justamente depois de ler Vidas Secas.

“Eu sou da Zona da Mata, mas quando li Graciliano Ramos quis vir para cá”, conta Santos, um engenheiro agrônomo que se encantou pela caatinga quando ainda era estudante da Universidade Federal do Recôncavo Baiano (UFRB). Hoje, é chefe do escritório da EBDA (Empresa Baiana de Desenvolvimento Agrícola) em Ipirá, um dos 258 municípios da Bahia em situação de emergência por causa da seca. Junto com outros 17 órgãos e secretarias do governo de Jaques Wagner (PT), a EDBA faz parte do Comitê Estadual de Ações de Convivência com a Seca.

Estamos a caminho da cidade vizinha, Pintadas, onde a estiagem é ainda mais crítica. No percurso, cruzamos quatro rios. Três deles, secos. O céu nublado ao longe parece o prenúncio da mudança. Um chuvisco havia caído naquela madrugada, algo que não acontecia há muito tempo. As marcas ainda estavam na terra, em alguns sulcos rasos que provavelmente abrigaram fios de água corrente. Santos parece aliviado. “Agora precisa chover mais”, diz.

Em uma curva à esquerda surge a casa de Messias e Ginalva Jesus Pereira. A plantação de palmas logo se destaca da monocromia – é verde-escura, com nenhum tom de marrom. Na seca, o vegetal tem sido fonte de alimento imprescindível para garantir a sobrevivência dos animais, que já não têm mais pasto. “O povo vem, visita, admira. Outros ficam com usura”, fala Ginalva, sobrancelhas levantadas, há cerca de 20 anos vivendo naquele roçado.

Como era de se esperar, a conversa envereda para o clima e as gotas que caíram à noite. “Choveu em Ipirá, foi? Ah, aqui foi só uma neblina”, rebate o pequeno Matheus, filho do meio de Ginalva. “Aqui não chove mesmo há três anos. Perdemos dois bezerros e dois umbuzeiros para a seca. Painho está pedindo a Deus para esse resto de palma pegar”, diz, referindo-se a uma área mais distante da casa, plantada há pouco, onde o verde já está quase desbotando.

O cálculo de Matheus não é exagerado. Geralmente, chove na caatinga entre janeiro e maio, justamente a época do plantio. Em 2012, porém, a água não caiu e um período de estiagem emendou no outro, fazendo desta a maior seca dos últimos 50 anos, segundo a Coordenação de Defesa Civil da Bahia (Cordec). A previsão é que ela se estenda por mais um ou dois anos. “Agora, com a chuva, vai ser outra coisa. Vai mudar tudo”, avalia uma experiente Ginalva. Assim como o protagonista Fabiano da obra de Graciliano Ramos, ela sabe que a caatinga ressuscita.

Na casa dela, canos estrategicamente posicionados aguardam a próxima precipitação para recolher a água em cisternas. Enquanto isso não ocorre, Ginalva mantém, por meio de irrigação artificial, a produção – que inclui também feijão de corda, cebolinha, coentro, mamão, batata-doce e quiabo, além da criação de ovinos, caprinos e bovinos. O poço, recém-construído, foi financiado via Pronaf (Programa Nacional de Fortalecimento da Agricultura Familiar) Emergencial.

Assim como Ginalva, outros 6 mil agricultores da região apresentaram projetos para acessar o Programa. Segundo o Banco do Nordeste do Brasil (BNB), foram liberados R$ 10 milhões do Pronaf Emergencial até janeiro de 2013 para os 17 municípios do entorno de Feira de Santana, entre eles Pintadas e Ipirá. “São pequenos agricultores que você vê aqui, solicitando financiamento para plantar palmas ou fazer aguada para recuperar o pasto”, diz José Wilson Junqueira Queiroz, gerente de negócios do BNB. Em todo o Brasil, entre maio e dezembro de 2012, o governo federal autorizou R$ 656,2 milhões em linhas de crédito emergenciais para atender os atingidos pela seca.

“São essas políticas públicas que estão segurando as famílias no campo”, avalia Jeane de Almeida Santiago. Agrônoma que trabalha em uma ONG chamada Fundação Apaeba, ela presta assistência técnica para os produtores de Pintadas, Ipirá, Riachão do Jacuípe, Pé de Serra, Baixa Grande e Nova Fátima, todas na Bahia. “Antes, tinha muito mais gente que ia para São Paulo e outros estados para fazer migração.”

O relato é de alguém que conhece de perto a situação. Jeane nasceu em Pintadas. Estudou na escola agrícola e saiu para fazer curso técnico em Juazeiro e faculdade no Recôncavo Baiano. Voltou quando se formou, querendo transmitir os conhecimentos aprendidos. Olhos vivos e atentos, ela muda o tom e reavalia sua afirmação: “É, mas este ano muitos jovens estão indo. Com a seca, a rentabilidade das propriedades está zero. E as pessoas não vão ficar aqui sem ter dinheiro. Infelizmente, são obrigadas a sair, de coração partido, para São Paulo em busca de trabalho, ver se conseguem mandar dinheiro para a família que ficou aqui manter o rebanho vivo”.

De fato, o ponto de ônibus de Pintadas estava cheio naquela manhã. A cidade ainda não tem rodoviária e o asfalto que a conecta com o resto do mundo foi inaugurado há apenas um ano, como avisam as placas do governo do estado logo na entrada. Todos aguardavam na calçada o próximo transporte para a capital paulista, malas e parentes em pé, sol a pino. Há cerca de três semanas, Ginalva se despedia ali mesmo do filho mais velho, de 18 anos, que decidiu tentar a vida fora dali. “Me ligou ontem dizendo que já arrumou um emprego numa fábrica. É temporário, mas é um emprego”, ela conta. É a famosa ponte aérea Pintadas-São Paulo.

“O pior é que não temos previsão boa para este ano”, lamenta Jeane. Ela conta que até a palma e o mandacaru, também usados para alimentar o rebanho, começaram a desaparecer, e que a maioria das terras da região está na mão de pequenos agricultores de subsistência ou pecuaristas. “Já faz mais de um ano que o município está dando ração aos animais porque não tem mais pasto. Mas agora a ração esgotou. Você procura e não acha. Quando acha, é um valor que não dá para colocar no orçamento.”

Jeane preocupa-se: “Tem produtores que estão pagando três ou quatro projetos. Vai chegar uma hora que ninguém vai conseguir pegar mais [crédito], de tanto que devem. E aí, não sei como vai ser. Porque a propriedade não está tendo rentabilidade para pagar os empréstimos que já deve. Sem crédito, eu acredito que na zona rural fica impossível.”

“A causa desta seca é a destruição do meio ambiente”, ela sentencia, citando uma pesquisa recente que constata que 90% da mata nativa da região havia desaparecido. “A natureza está respondendo. O território está descoberto. E a partir daí vêm as queimadas. Muitos solos já se perderam ou estão enfraquecidos. O pessoal não tem a cultura de adubar e vão explorando e explorando. Os rios que tínhamos morreram. As nascentes estão desmatadas.”

Em Ipirá, logo ao lado, a realidade é semelhante. No lugar da caatinga, estão os bois. A cena mais comum é ver o gado ou os cavalos amontoados embaixo das poucas árvores que restam para escapar do sol escaldante – cabeça na sombra, lombo de fora. “Ipirá era um município cheio de minifúndios”, explica Orlando Cintra, gerente de Agricultura e Cooperativismo da Prefeitura. “Os grandes criadores começaram a chegar nos anos 1960. Este pessoal comprou a terra barata e empurrou o homem que produzia a batata, a mandioca e a mamona para a periferia daqui ou para São Paulo, Mato Grosso e Paraná.” Outros tantos foram trabalhar no corte da cana-de-açúcar. “Aqui não tinha boi e os pequenos produtores não desmatavam”, continua. “O que criávamos mais era o bode. Foi com a chegada dos grandes fazendeiros que o clima em Ipirá começou a mudar mais rapidamente. Desmataram para plantar capim.”

“A caatinga não é uma área para agropecuária. É para criação de caprinos, ovinos, animais de médio porte. Trouxeram a cultura do Sul, de pecuarista, e todo mundo quis ter fazenda de boi aqui”, completa Meire Oliveira, assessora da Secretaria de Agricultura e Meio Ambiente de Ipirá.

Meire passou a infância na zona rural do município e ainda se lembra do cheiro dessa mata. Conta que, quando criança, fazia burros a partir de umbus: enfiava quatro pedaços de galhinhos na fruta, representando as quatro patas. “Pena que, muitas vezes, quando eu digo para não desmatar, nem meu pai me ouve”, lamenta. Ela parece conhecer todas as plantas da caatinga. Quando encontra um cacto coroa-de-frade, mostra que é possível comer seu fruto, pequenino e vermelho. Caminhando pelas propriedades da região, cruza as cercas de arame farpado com desenvoltura. Pega um punhado de maxixe ainda verde e explica como cozinhá-lo. “Igualzinho a quiabo, sabe?” No sertão, tudo pode ser aproveitado. “A caatinga tem um poder de regeneração incrível”, explica. “A solução seria deixá-la descansar. Algumas áreas no entorno do Rio do Peixe já estão em processo de desertificação.”

Um exemplo de preservação ambiental é o assentamento D. Mathias, que completou sete anos de existência. Ali, a caatinga aos poucos renasce entre bodes, cabras e ovelhas. As árvores são podadas apenas o suficiente para não machucarem os animais, que circulam livremente pelas aroeiras, xique-xiques e umbuzeiros. Organizado pelo Movimento Luta Camponesa (MLC), o símbolo do assentamento é uma família de retirantes desenhada em preto e vermelho. A fila é puxada por uma mulher com uma foice nas mãos. Em seguida vem um homem, com uma enxada nos ombros. Dois filhos, um menino e uma menina seguem-nos de mãos dadas. Por último, um cachorro que, quiçá, se chama Baleia.

Júlio César Santos, dirigente da EBDA, presta assistência aos assentados e explica que os camponeses estão muito atentos às políticas públicas e linhas de crédito oferecidas pelos governos estadual e federal. Com isso, já conseguiram construir casas, comprar uma resfriadeira de leite e ampliar a criação de ovelhas. Entre as últimas iniciativas no local está a plantação adensada de palmas, mais rentável do que a tradicional. Em um primeiro momento, os agricultores não confiaram na técnica e continuaram plantando os cactos distantes uns dos outros, como sempre fizeram. Para contornar as dificuldades, Santos utilizou o “método de Paulo Freire”. Plantou dois roçados: de um lado, as palmas, adensadas; de outro, as tradicionais. Agora, as duas estão crescendo e ele espera, em breve, provar sua teoria. “Tomara que a falta de chuva não queime elas”, diz.

O sucesso do assentamento motivou, há 11 meses, um acampamento no latifúndio vizinho. Leidinaura Souza Santana, ou simplesmente Leila, é uma das moradoras do acampamento Elenaldo Teixeira. “O problema maior aqui é a água para beber e cozinhar. Ficamos quase 15 dias sem água. O caminhão-pipa chegou só ontem”, reclama. “A Embasa [Empresa Baiana de Águas e Saneamento] suspendeu o pipa por causa do rio, que já estava muito baixo, e também porque deu um problema na bomba”, explica Meire, que acompanha a visita. “Tivemos que tomar uma água que não é boa para beber”, murmura Leila.

Leila nasceu em Coração de Maria, ao norte de Feira de Santana. O marido trabalhava como vaqueiro em Malhador, povoado no município de Ipirá, quando souberam dos boatos da ocupação. Vieram logo participar. “Estamos esperando chegar a hora para entrar dentro da fazenda e acabar com o sofrimento. A área já foi atestada como improdutiva. O assentamento aqui do lado é uma maravilha. Me animei de ver que esse pessoal era acampado como a gente. Não desisto, não”, afirma. Meire aproveita para dar uma injeção de ânimo: “Eu acompanhei o outro acampamento desde o começo e era igualzinho. Acho que era até mais quente que este. Este é mais fresco. E olha como estão hoje”.

A conversa acontece na escola do acampamento, onde jovens e adultos são alfabetizados. A pequena construção de palha e madeira da escola fica no início daquela que foi batizada de “Avenida Brasil”, uma sequência bem aprumada de cerca de 15 barracos de lona. Leila acabou de passar para a 4a série do ensino fundamental e soletra o nome para mim. “L-E-I-D-I-N-A-U-R-A.” “Não é com ‘l’, não?”, pergunta Meire. “Não, é com ‘u’ mesmo”, Leila responde.

Em Tamanduá, povoado do entorno de Ipirá, motos e jegues passam com gente e baldes na garupa. Tudo lembra a estiagem. Egecivaldo Oliveira Nunes está à beira da estrada, ao volante do caminhão-pipa estacionado em frente à casa azul e branca. “Só trabalho particular, não trabalho com Exército nem Prefeitura. Pegamos água das barragens porque os açudes estavam secos”, ele conta, afirmando que nos piores dias da seca não “acha tempo” para as entregas solicitadas. O pagamento é por distância, e a cada quilômetro rodado muda o valor: 5 quilômetros são equivalentes a 9 mil litros e custam R$ 80. Quem não puder pagar (como os acampados) pode esperar pela Defesa Civil estadual – que afirma ter investido R$ 4 milhões em caminhões-pipa – ou pelo Exército, que mensalmente abastece de água 137 municípios.

“A cada ano, a seca vem mais intensa e a tendência é sempre durar mais”, lamenta Orlando Cintra, gerente de Agricultura e Cooperativismo de Ipirá. “A perspectiva é a de que em cinco ou seis anos ninguém vá produzir mais nada aqui, na área da agricultura. O clima vem se transformando. A cada ano piora.”

“Já tivemos tantas previsões, e nada”, diz Jeane Santiago. “Passa a previsão de chuva no jornal e as pessoas dizem: ‘Não tenho mais fé, só acredito se eu vir’. O pessoal da zona rural tem simpatias, como ‘se a flor do mandacaru desabrochar é sinal de que vai chover’. Mas todas deram errado até agora. A fé está acabando.” Os mandacarus já florearam. O vermelho-forte chama atenção. Agora é esperar.

Everybody Knows. Climate Denialism has peaked. Now what are we going to do? (EcoEquity)

– Tom Athanasiou (toma@ecoequity.org).  April 2, 2013.

It was never going to be easy to face the ecological crisis.  Even back in the 1970s, before climate took center stage, it was clear that we the prosperous were walking far too heavily.  And that “environmentalism,” as it was called, was only going to be a small beginning.  But it was only when the climate crisis pushed fossil energy into the spotlight that the real stakes were widely recognized.  Fossil fuels are the meat and potatoes of industrial civilization, and the need to rapidly and radically reduce their emissions cut right through to the heart of the great American dream.  And the European dream.  And, inevitably, the Chinese dream as well.

Decades later, 81% of global energy is still supplied by the fossil fuels: coal, gas, and oil.[1]  And though the solar revolution is finally beginning, the day is late.  The Arctic is melting, and, soon, as each year the northern ocean lies bare beneath the summer sun, the warming will accelerate.  Moreover, our plight is becoming visible.  We have discovered, to our considerable astonishment, that most of the fossil fuel on the books of our largest corporations is “unburnable” – in the precise sense that, if we burn it, we are doomed.[2]  Not that we know what to do with this rather strange knowledge.  Also, even as China rises, it’s obvious that it’s not the last in line for the promised land.  Billions of people, all around the world, watch the wealthy on TV, and most all of them want a drink from the well of modern prosperity.  Why wouldn’t they?  Life belongs to us all, as does the Earth.

The challenge, in short, is rather daunting.

The denial of the challenge, on the other hand, always came ready-made.  As Francis Bacon said so long ago, “what a man would rather were true, he more readily believes.”  And we really did want to believe that ours was still a boundless world.  The alternative – an honest reckoning – was just too challenging.  For one thing, there was no obvious way to reconcile the Earth’s finitude with the relentless expansion of the capitalist market.  And as long as we believed in a world without limits, there was no need to see that economic stratification would again become a fatal issue.  Sure, our world was bitterly riven between haves and have-nots, but this problem, too, would fade in time.  With enough growth – the universal balm – redistribution would never be necessary.  In time, every man would be a king.

The denial had many cheerleaders.  The chemical-company flacks who derided Rachel Carson as a “hysterical woman” couldn’t have known that they were pioneering a massive trend.  Also, and of course, big money always has plenty of mouthpieces.  But it’s no secret that, during the 20th Century, the “engineering of consent” reached new levels of sophistication.  The composed image of benign scientific competence became one of its favorite tools, and somewhere along the way tobacco-industry science became a founding prototype of anti-environmental denialism.  On this front, I’m happy to say that the long and instructive history of today’s denialist pseudo-science has already been expertly deconstructed.[3]  Given this, I can safely focus on the new world, the post-Sandy world of manifest climatic disruption in which the denialists have lost any residual aura of scientific legitimacy, and have ceased to be a decisive political force.  A world in which climate denialism is increasingly seen, and increasingly ridiculed, as the jibbering of trolls.

To be clear, I’m not claiming that the denialists are going to shut up anytime soon.  Or that they’ll call off their suicidal, demoralizing campaigns.  Or that their fogs and poisons are not useful to the fossil-fuel cartel.  But the battle of the science is over, at least as far as the scientists are concerned.  And even on the street, hard denialism is looking pretty ridiculous.  To be sure, the core partisans of the right will fight on, for the win and, of course, for the money.[4]  And they’ll continue to have real weight too, for just as long as people do not believe that life beyond carbon is possible.  But for all this, their influence has peaked, and their position is vulnerable.  They are – and visibly now – agents of a mad and dangerous ideology.  They are knaves, and often they are fools.[5]

As for the rest of us, we can at least draw conclusions, and make plans.

As bad as the human prospect may be – and it is quite bad – this is not “game over.”  We have the technology we need to save ourselves, or most of it in any case; and much of it is ready to go.  Moreover, the “clean tech” revolution is going to be disruptive indeed.  There will be cascades of innovation, delivering opportunities of all kinds, all around the world.  Also, our powers of research and development are strong.  Also, and contrary to today’s vogue for austerity and “we’re broke” political posturing, we have the money to rebuild, quickly and on a global scale.  Also, we know how to cooperate, at least when we have to.  All of which is to say that we still have options.  We are not doomed.

But we are in extremely serious danger, and it is too late to pretend otherwise.  So allow me to tip my hand by noting Jorgen Randers’ new book, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years.[6]  Randers is a Norwegian modeler, futurist, professor, executive, and consultant who made his name as co-author of 1972’s landmark The Limits to Growth.  Limits, of course, was a global blockbuster; it remains the best-selling environmental title of all times.  Also, Limits has been relentlessly ridiculed (the early denialists cut their teeth by distorting it[7]) so it must be said that – very much contrary to the mass-produced opinions of the denialist age – its central, climate-related projections are holding up depressingly well.[8]

By 2012 (when he published 2052) Randers had decided to step away from the detached exploration of multiple scenarios that was the methodological core of Limits, and to make actual predictions.  After a lifetime of frustrated efforts, these predictions are vivid, pessimistic and bitter.  In a nutshell, Randers doesn’t expect anything beyond what he calls “progress as usual,” and while he expects it to yield a “light green” buildout (e.g., solar on a large scale) he doesn’t think it will suffice to stabilize the climate system.  Such stabilization, he grants, is still possible, but it would require concerted global action on a scale that neither he nor Dennis Meadows, the leader of the old Limits team, see on today’s horizon.  Let’s call that kind of action global emergency mobilization.  Meadows, when he peers forwards, sees instead “many decades of uncontrolled climatic disruption and extremely difficult decline.”[9]  Randers is more precise, and predicts that we will by 2052 wake to find ourselves on a dark and frightening shore, knowing full well that our planet is irrevocably “on its way towards runaway climate change in the last third of the twenty-first century.”

This is an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence.[10]  Such evidence, unfortunately, is readily available, but for the moment let me simply state the public secret of this whole discussion.  To wit: we (and I use this pronoun advisedly) can still avoid a global catastrophe, but it’s not at all obvious that we will do so.  What is obvious is that stabilizing the global climate is going to be very, very hard.  Which is a real problem, because we don’t do hard anymore.  Rather, when confronted with a serious problem, we just do what we can, hoping that it will be enough and trying our best not to offend the rich.  In truth, and particularly in America, we count ourselves lucky if we can manage governance at all.

This essay is about climate politics after legitimate skepticism.  Climate politics in a world where, as Leonard Cohen put it, “everybody knows.”  What does this mean?  In the first place, it means that we’ve reached the end of what might be called “environmentalism-as-usual.”  This point is widely understood and routinely granted, as when people say something like “climate is not a merely environmental problem,” but my concern is a more particular one.  As left-green writer Eddie Yuen astutely noted in a recent book on “catastrophism,” the problems of the environmental movement are to a very large degree rooted in “the pairing of overwhelmingly bleak analysis with inadequate solutions.”[11]  This is exactly right.

The climate crisis demands a “new environmentalism,” and such a thing does seem to be emerging.  It’s final shape is unknowable, but one thing is certain – the environmentalism that we need will only exist when its solutions and strategies stand up to its own analyses.  The problem is that this requires us to take our “overwhelmingly bleak” analyses straight, rather than soft-pedaling them so that our “inadequate solutions” might look good.  Pessimism, after all, is closely related to realism.  It cannot just be wished away.

Soft-pedaling, alas, has long been standard practice, on both the scientific and the political sides of the climate movement.  Examples abound, but the best would have to be the IPCC itself, the U.N’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The world’s premier climate-science clearinghouse, the IPCC is often attacked from the right, and has developed a shy and reticent culture.  Even more importantly, though, and far more rarely noted, is that the IPCC is conservative by definition and by design.[12]  It almost has to be conservative to do its job, which is to herd the planet’s decision makers towards scientific realism.  The wrinkle is that, at this point, this isn’t even close to being good enough, not at least in the larger scheme.  At this point, we need strategic realism as well as baseline scientific realism, and it demands a brutal honesty in which underlying scientific and political truths are clearly drawn and publicly expressed.

Yet when it comes to strategic realism, we balk.  The first impulse of the “messaging” experts is always to repeat their perennial caution that sharp portraits of the danger can be frightening, and disempowering, and thus lead to despair and passivity.  This is an excellent point, but it’s only the beginning of the truth, not the end.  The deeper problem is that the physical impacts of climate disruption – the destruction and the suffering – will continue to escalate.  “Superstorm Sandy” was bad, but the future will be much worse.  Moreover, the most severe suffering will be far away, and easy for the good citizens of the wealthy world to ignore.  Imagine, for example, a major failure of the Indian Monsoon, and a subsequent South Asian famine.  Imagine it against a drumbeat background in which food is becoming progressively more expensive.  Imagine the permanence of such droughts, and increasing evidence of tipping points on the horizon, and a world in which ever more scientists take it upon themselves to deliver desperate warnings.  The bottom line will not be the importance of communications strategies, but rather the manifest reality, no longer distant and abstract, and the certain knowledge that we are in deep trouble.  And this is where the dangers of soft-pedaling lie.  For as people come to see the scale of the danger, and then to look about for commensurate strategies and responses, the question will be if such strategies are available, and if they are known, and if they are plausible.  If they’re not, then we’ll all going, together, down the road “from aware to despair.”

Absent the public sense of a future in which human resourcefulness and cooperation can make a decisive difference, we assuredly face an even more difficult future in which denial fades into a sense of pervasive hopelessness.  The last third of the century (when Randers is predicting “runaway climate change”) is not so very far away.  Which is to say that, as denialism collapses – and it will – the challenge of working out a large and plausible response to the climate crisis will become overwhelmingly important.  If we cannot imagine such a response, and explain how it would actually work, then people will draw their own conclusions.  And, so far, it seems that we cannot.  Even those of us who are now climate full-timers don’t have a shared vision, not in any meaningful detail, nor do we have a common sense of the strategic initiatives that could make such a vision cohere.

The larger landscape is even worse.  For though many scientists are steeling themselves to speak, the elites themselves are still stiff and timid, and show few signs of rising to the occasion.  Each month, it seems, there’s another major report on the approaching crisis – the World Bank, the National Intelligence Council, and the International Energy Agency have all recently made hair-raising contributions – but they never quite get around to the really important questions.  How should we contrive the necessary global mobilization?  What conditions are needed to absolutely maximize the speed of the clean-tech revolution?  By what strategy will we actually manage to keep the fossil-fuels in the ground?  What kind of international treaties are necessary, and how shall we establish them?  What would a fast-enough global transition cost, and how shall we pay for it?  What about all those who are forced to retreat from rising waters and drying lands?  How shall they live, and where?  How shall we talk about rights and responsibilities in the Greenhouse Century?  And what about the poor?  How shall they find futures in a climate-constrained world?  Can we even imagine a world in which they do?

In the face of such questions, you have a choice.  You can conclude that we’ll just have to do the best we can, and then you can have a drink.  Or maybe two.  Or you can conclude that, despite all evidence to the contrary, enough of us will soon awaken to reality.  What’s certain is that, all around us, there is a vast potentiality – for reinvention, for resistance, for redistribution, and for renewal of all kinds – and that it could at any time snap into solidity.  And into action.

Forget about “hope.”  What we need now is intention.

***

About a decade ago, in San Francisco, I was on a PBS talk show with, among others, Myron Ebell, chief of climate propaganda at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  Ebell is an aggressive professional, and given the host’s commitment to phony balance he was easily able to frame the conversation.[13]  The result was a travesty, but not an entirely wasted time, at least not for me.  It was instructive to speak, tentatively, of the need for global climate justice, and to hear, in response, that I was a non-governmental fraud that was only in it for the money.  Moreover, as the hour wore on, I came to appreciate the brutal simplicity of the denialist strategy.  The whole point is to suck the oxygen out of the room, to weave such a tangle of confusionism and pseudo-debate that the Really Big Question – What is to be done? – becomes impossible to even ask, let alone discuss.

When Superstorm Sandy slammed into the New York City region, Ebell’s style of hard denialism took a body blow, though obviously it has not dropped finally to the mat.  Had it done do, the Big Question, in all its many forms, would be buzzing constantly around us.  Clearly, that great day has not yet come.  Still, back in November of 2012, when Bloomberg’s Business Week blared “It’s Global Warming, Stupid” from its front cover, this was widely welcomed as a overdue milestone.  It may even be that Michael Tobis, the editor of the excellent Planet 3.0, will prove correct in his long-standing, half-facetious prediction that 2015 will be the date when “the Wall Street Journal will acknowledge the indisputable and apparent fact of anthropogenic climate change; the year in which it will simply be ridiculous to deny it.”[14]  Or maybe not.  Maybe that day will never come.  Maybe Ebell’s style of well-funded, front-group denialism will live on, zombie-like, forever.  Or maybe (and this is my personal prediction) hard climate denialism will soon go the way of creationism and far-right Christianity, becoming a kind of political lifestyle choice, one that’s dangerous but contained.  One that’s ultimately more dangerous to the right than it is to the reality-based community.

If so, then at some point we’re going to have to ask ourselves if we’ve been so long distracted by the hard denialists that we’ve missed the parallel danger of a “soft denialism.”  By which I mean the denialism of a world in which, though the dangers of climate change are simply too ridiculous to deny, they still – somehow – are not taken to imply courage, and reckoning, and large-scale mobilization.  This is a long story, but the point is that, now that the Big Question is finally on the table, we’re going to have to answer it.  Which is to say that we’re going to have to face the many ways in which political timidity and small-bore realism have trained us to calibrate our sense of what must be done by our sense of what can be done, which these days is inadequate by definition.

And not just because of the denialists.

George Orwell once said that “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”[15]  As we hurtle forward, this struggle will rage as never before.  The Big Question, after all, changes everything.  Another way of saying this is that our futures will be shaped by the effort to avoid a full-on global climate catastrophe.  Despite all the rest of the geo-political and geo-economic commotion that will mark the 21st Century (and there’ll be plenty) it will be most fundamentally the Greenhouse Century.  We know this now, if we care to, though still only in preliminary outline.  The details, inevitably, will surprise us all.

The core problem, of course, will be “ambition” – action on the scale that’s actually necessary, rather than the scale that is or appears to be possible.  And here, the legacies of the denialist age – the long-ingrained habits of soft-pedaling and strained optimism – will weigh heavily.  Consider the quasi-official global goal (codified, for example, in the Copenhagen Accord) to hold total planetary warming to 2°C (Earth surface average) above pre-industrial levels.  This is the so-called “2°C target.”  What are we to do with it in the post-denialist age?  Let me count the complications: One, all sorts of Very Important People are now telling us it’s going to all but impossible to avoid overshooting 2°C.[16]  Two, in so doing, they are making a political and not a scientific judgment, though they’re not always clear on this point.  (It’s probably still technically possible to hold the 2°C line – if we’re not too unlucky – though it wouldn’t be easy under the best of circumstances.)[17]  Three, the 2°C line, which was once taken to be reasonably safe, is now widely seen (at least among the scientists) to mark the approximate point of transition from “dangerous” to “extremely dangerous,” and possibly to altogether unmanageable levels of warming.[18]  Four, and finally, it’s now widely recognized that any future in which we approach the 2°C line (which we will do) is one in which we also have a real possibility of pushing the average global temperature up by 3°C, and if this were to come to pass we’d be playing a very high-stakes game indeed, one in which uncontrolled positive feedbacks and worst-case scenarios were surrounding us on every side.

The bottom line is today as it was decades ago.  Greenhouse-gas emissions were increasing then, and they are increasing now.  In late 2012, the authoritative Global Carbon Project reported that, since 1990, they had risen by an astonishing 58 percent.[19]  The climate system has unsurprisingly responded with storms, droughts, ice-melt, conflagrations and floods.  The weather has become “extreme,” and may finally be getting our attention.  In Australia, according to the acute Mark Thomson of the Institute for Backyard Studies in Adelaide, the crushing heatwave of early 2013 even pushed aside “the idiot commentariat” and cleared the path for a bit of 11th-hour optimism: “Another year of this trend will shift public opinion wholesale.  We’re used to this sort of that temperature now and then and even take a perverse pride in dealing with it, but there seems to be a subtle shift in mood that ‘This Could Be Serious.’”  Let’s hope he’s right.  Let’s hope, too, that the mood shift that swept through America after Sandy also lasts, and leads us, too, to conclude that ‘This Could Be Serious.’  Not that this alone would be enough to support a real mobilization – the “moral equivalent of war” that we need – but it would be something.  It might even lead us to wonder about our future, and about the influence of money and power on our lives, and to ask how serious things will have to get before it becomes possible to imagine a meaningful change of direction.

The wrinkle is that, before we can advocate for a meaningful change of direction, we have to have one we believe in, one that we’re willing to explain in global terms that actually scale to the problem.  None of which is going to be easy, given that we’re fast approaching a point where only tales of existential danger ring true.  (cf the zombie apocalypse).  The Arctic ice, as noted above, offers an excellent marker.  In fact, the first famous photos of Earth from space – the “blue marble” photos taken in 1972 by the crew of the Apollo 17 – allow us to anchor our predicament in time and in memory.  For these are photos of an old Earth now passed away; they must be, because they show great expanses of ice that are nowhere to be found.  By August of 2012 the Arctic Sea’s ice cover had declined by 40%,[20] a melt that’s easily large enough to be visible from space.  Moreover, beneath the surface, ice volume is dropping even more precipitously.  The polar researchers who are now feverishly evaluating the great melting haven’t yet pushed the entire scientific community to the edge of despair, though they have managed to inspire a great deal of dark muttering about positive feedbacks and tipping points.  Soon, it seems, that muttering will become louder.  Perhaps as early as 2015, the Arctic Ocean will become virtually ice free for the first time in recorded history.[21]  When it does, the solar absorptivity of the Arctic waters will increase, and shift the planetary heat balance by a surprisingly large amount, and by so doing increase the rate of  planetary warming.  And this, of course, will not be end of it.  The feedbacks will continue.  The cycles will go on.

Should we remain silent about such matters, for risk of inflaming the “idiot commentariat?”  It’s absurd to even ask.  The suffering is already high, and if you know the science, you also know that the real surprise would be an absence of positive feedbacks.  The ice melt, the methane plumes, the drying of the rainforests – they’re all real.  Which is to say that there are obviously tipping points before us, though we do not and can not know how much time will pass before they force themselves upon our attention.  The real question is what we must do if we would talk of them in good earnest, while at the same time speaking, without despair and effectively, about the human future.

[1] Jorgen Randers, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, Chelsea Green, 2012, page 99.

[2] Begin at the Carbon Track Initiative’s website.  http://www.carbontracker.org/

[3] Two excellent examples: Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Bloomsbury Press, 2011,  Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science, Basic Books, 2006.

[4] See, for example, Suzanne Goldenberg, “Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks,” February 14, 2013, The Guardian.

[5] “Lord Monckton,” in particular, is fantastic.  See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w833cAs9EN0

[6] Randers, 2012.  See also Randers’ essay and video at the University of Cambridge 2013 “State of Sustainability Leadership,” athttp://www.cpsl.cam.ac.uk/About-Us/What-is-Sustainability-Leadership/The-State-of-Sustainability-Leadership.aspx

[7] Ugo Bardi, in The Limits to Growth Revisited (Springer Briefs, 2011) offers this summary:

“If, at the beginning, the debate on LTG had seemed to be balanced, gradually the general attitude on the study became more negative. It tilted decisively against the study when, in 1989, Ronald Bailey published a paper in “Forbes” where he accused the authors of having predicted that the world’s economy should have already run out of some vital mineral commodities whereas that had not, obviously, occurred.

Bailey’s statement was only the result of a flawed reading of the data in a single table of the 1972 edition of LTG. In reality, none of the several scenarios presented in the book showed that the world would be running out of any important commodity before the end of the twentieth century and not even of the twenty-first. However, the concept of the “mistakes of the Club of Rome” caught on. With the 1990s, it became commonplace to state that LTG had been a mistake if not a joke designed to tease the public, or even an attempt to force humankind into a planet-wide dictatorship, as it had been claimed in some earlier appraisals (Golub and Townsend 1977; Larouche 1983). By the end of the twentieth century, the victory of the critics of LTG seemed to be complete. But the debate was far from being settled.”

[8] See, for example, Graham Turner, “A Comparison of The Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality.” Global Environmental Change, Volume 18, Issue 3, August 2008, Pages 397–411.  An unprotected copy (without the graphics) can be downloaded at www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf.  Also

[9] In late 2012, Dennis Meadows said that “In the early 1970s, it was possible to believe that maybe we could make the necessary changes.  But now it is too late.  We are entering a period of many decades of uncontrolled climatic disruption and extremely difficult decline.”  See Christian Parenti, “The Limits to Growth’: A Book That Launched a Movement,” The Nation, December 24, 2012.

[11] Eddie Yuen, “The Politics of Failure Have Failed: The Environmental Movement and Catastrophism,” in Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen, James Davis, with a foreword by Doug Henwood. PM Press 2012.  Yuen’s whole line is “the main reasons that [it] has not led to more dynamic social movements; these include catastrophe fatigue, the paralyzing effects of fear; the pairing of overwhelmingly bleak analysis with inadequate solutions, and a misunderstanding of the process of politicization.” 

[12] See Glenn Scherer, “Special Report: IPCC, assessing climate risks, consistently underestimates,” The Daily Climate, December 6, 2012.   More formally (and more interestingly) see Brysse, Oreskes, O’Reilly, and Oppenheimer, “Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?,” Global Environmental Change 23 (2013), 327-337.

[13] KQED-FM, Forum, July 22, 2003.

[14] Michael Tobis, editor of Planet 3.0, is amusing on this point.  He notes that “many data-driven climate skeptics are reassessing the issue,” that “In 1996 I defined the turning point of the discussion about climate science (the point where we could actually start talking about policy) as the date when theWall Street Journal would acknowledge the indisputable and apparent fact of anthropogenic climate change; the year in which it would simply be ridiculous to deny it.  My prediction was that this would happen around 2015… I’m not sure the WSJ has actually accepted reality yet.  It’s just starting to squint in its general direction.  2015 still looks like a good bet.”  See http://planet3.org/2012/08/07/is-the-tide-turning/

[15] The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Editors / Paperback / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968, p. 125.

[16] See for example, Fatih Birol and Nicholas Stern, “Urgent steps to stop the climate door closing,” The Financial Times, March 9, 2011.  And see Sir Robert Watson’s Union Frontiers of Geophysics Lecture at the 2012 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, athttp://fallmeeting.agu.org/2012/events/union-frontiers-of-geophysics-lecture-professor-sir-bob-watson-cmg-frs-chief-scientific-adviser-to-defra/

[17] I just wrote “probably still technically possible.”  I could have written “Excluding the small probability of a very bad case, and the even smaller probability of a very good case, it’s probably still technically possible to hold the 2°C line, though it wouldn’t be easy.”  This, however, is a pretty ugly sentence.  I could also have written “Unless we’re unlucky, and the climate sensitivity turns out be on the high side of the expected range, it’s still technically possible to hold the 2°C line, though it wouldn’t be easy, unless we’re very lucky, and the climate sensitivity turns out to be on the low side.”  Saying something like this, though, kind of puts the cart before the horse, since I haven’t said anything about “climate sensitivity,” or about how the scientists think about probability – and of course it’s even uglier.  The point, at least for now, is that climate projections are probabilistic by nature, which does not mean that they are merely “uncertain.”  We know a lot about the probabilities.

[18] See Kevin Anderson, a former director of Britain’s Tyndall Center, who has been unusually frank on this point.  His views are clearly laid out in a (non-peer-reviewed) essay published by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation in Sweden.  See “Climate change going beyond dangerous – Brutal numbers and tenuous hope” in Development Dialog #61, September 2012, available at http://www.dhf.uu.se/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/dd61_art2.pdf.  For a peer-reviewed paper, see Anderson and Bows, “Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world.”  Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society, (2011) 369, 20-44 and for a lecture, see “Are climate scientists the most dangerous climate skeptics?” a Tyndall Centre video lecture (September 2010) at http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/audio/are-climate-scientist-most-dangerous-climate-sceptics.

[19] “The challenge to keep global warming below 2°C,” Glen P. Peters, et. al., Nature Climate Change (2012) 3, 4–6 (2013) doi:10.1038/nclimate1783.  December 2, 2012.  This figure might actually be revised upward, as 2012 saw the second-largest annual  concentration increase on record (http://climatedesk.org/2013/03/large-rise-in-co2-emissions-sounds-climate-change-alarm/)

[20] The story of the photos is on Wikipedia – see “blue marble.”  For the latest on the Arctic ice, see the “Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis” page that the National Snow and Ice Data Center — http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

[21] Climate Progress is covering the “Arctic Death Spiral” in detail.  See for example Joe Romm, “NOAA: Climate Change Driving Arctic Into A ‘New State’ With Rapid Ice Loss And Record Permafrost Warming,” Climate Progress, Dec 6, 2012.  Give yourself a few hours and follow the links.

Climate Maverick to Retire From NASA (N.Y.Times)

Michael Nagle for The New York Times. James E. Hansen of NASA, retiring this week, reflected in a window at his farm in Pennsylvania.

By 

Published: April 1, 2013

His departure, after a 46-year career at the space agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, will deprive federally sponsored climate research of its best-known public figure.

At the same time, retirement will allow Dr. Hansen to press his cause in court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a particularly dirty form of oil extracted from tar sands.

“As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,” he said in an interview.

Dr. Hansen had already become an activist in recent years, taking vacation time from NASA to appear at climate protests and allowing himself to be arrested or cited a half-dozen times.

But those activities, going well beyond the usual role of government scientists, had raised eyebrows at NASA headquarters in Washington. “It was becoming clear that there were people in NASA who would be much happier if the ‘sideshow’ would exit,” Dr. Hansen said in an e-mail.

At 72, he said, he feels a moral obligation to step up his activism in his remaining years.

“If we burn even a substantial fraction of the fossil fuels, we guarantee there’s going to be unstoppable changes” in the climate of the earth, he said. “We’re going to leave a situation for young people and future generations that they may have no way to deal with.”

His departure, on Wednesday, will end a career of nearly half a century working not just for a single agency but also in a single building, on the edge of the Columbia University campus.

From that perch, seven floors above the diner made famous by “Seinfeld,” Dr. Hansen battled the White House, testified dozens of times in Congress, commanded some of the world’s most powerful computers and pleaded with ordinary citizens to grasp the basics of a complex science.

His warnings and his scientific papers have drawn frequent attack from climate-change skeptics, to whom he gives no quarter. But Dr. Hansen is a maverick, just as likely to vex his allies in the environmental movement. He supports nuclear power and has taken stands that sometimes undercut their political strategy in Washington.

In the interview and in subsequent e-mails, Dr. Hansen made it clear that his new independence would allow him to take steps he could not have taken as a government employee. He plans to lobby European leaders — who are among the most concerned about climate change — to impose a tax on oil derived from tar sands. Its extraction results in greater greenhouse emissions than conventional oil.

Dr. Hansen’s activism of recent years dismayed some of his scientific colleagues, who felt that it backfired by allowing climate skeptics to question his objectivity. But others expressed admiration for his willingness to risk his career for his convictions.

Initially, Dr. Hansen plans to work out of a converted barn on his farm in Pennsylvania. He has not ruled out setting up a small institute or taking an academic appointment.

He said he would continue publishing scientific papers, but he will no longer command the computer time and other NASA resources that allowed him to track the earth’s rising temperatures and forecast the long-run implications.

Dr. Hansen, raised in small-town Iowa, began his career studying Venus, not the earth. But as concern arose in the 1970s about the effects of human emissions of greenhouse gases, he switched gears, publishing pioneering scientific papers.

His initial estimate of the earth’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases was somewhat on the high side, later work showed. But he was among the first scientists to identify the many ways the planet is likely to respond to rising temperatures and to show how those effects would reinforce one another to produce immense changes in the climate and environment, including a sea level rise that could ultimately flood many of the world’s major cities.

“He’s done the most important science on the most important question that there ever was,” said Bill McKibben, a climate activist who has worked closely with Dr. Hansen.

Around the time Dr. Hansen switched his research focus, in the 1970s, a sharp rise in global temperatures began. He labored in obscurity over the next decade, but on a blistering June day in 1988 he was called before a Congressional committee and testifiedthat human-induced global warming had begun.

Speaking to reporters afterward in his flat Midwestern accent, he uttered a sentence that would appear in news reports across the land: “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

Given the natural variability of climate, it was a bold claim to make after only a decade of rising temperatures, and to this day some of his colleagues do not think he had the evidence.

Yet subsequent events bore him out. Since the day he spoke, not a single month’s temperatures have fallen below the 20th-century average for that month. Half the world’s population is now too young to have lived through the last colder-than-average month, February 1985.

In worldwide temperature records going back to 1880, the 19 hottest years have all occurred since his testimony.

Again and again, Dr. Hansen made predictions that were ahead of the rest of the scientific community and, arguably, a bit ahead of the evidence.

“Jim has a real track record of being right before you can actually prove he’s right with statistics,” said Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a planetary scientist at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Hansen’s record has by no means been spotless. Even some of his allies consider him prone to rhetorical excess and to occasional scientific error.

He has repeatedly called for trying the most vociferous climate-change deniers for “crimes against humanity.” And in recent years, he stated that excessive carbon dioxide emissions might eventually lead to a runaway greenhouse effect that would boil the oceans and render earth uninhabitable, much like Venus.

His colleagues pointed out that this had not happened even during exceedingly warm episodes in the earth’s ancient past. “I have huge respect for Jim, but in this particular case, he overstated the risk,” said Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist and the head of Harvard’s Center for the Environment, who is nonetheless deeply worried about climate change.

Climate skeptics have routinely accused Dr. Hansen of alarmism. “He consistently exaggerates all the dangers,” Freeman Dyson, the famed physicist and climate contrarian,told The New York Times Magazine in 2009.

Perhaps the biggest fight of Dr. Hansen’s career broke out in late 2005, when a young political appointee in the administration of George W. Bush began exercising control over Dr. Hansen’s statements and his access to journalists. Dr. Hansen took the fight public and the administration backed down.

For all his battles with conservatives, however, he has also been hard on environmentalists. He was a harsh critic of a failed climate bill they supported in 2009, on the grounds that it would have sent billions into the federal government’s coffers without limiting emissions effectively.

Dr. Hansen agrees that a price is needed on carbon dioxide emissions, but he wants the money returned to the public in the form of rebates on tax bills. “It needs to be done on the basis of conservative principles — not one dime to make the government bigger,” said Dr. Hansen, who is registered as a political independent.

In the absence of such a broad policy, Dr. Hansen has been lending his support to fights against individual fossil fuel projects. Students lured him to a coal protest in 2009, and he was arrested for the first time. That fall he was cited again after sleeping overnight in a tent on the Boston Common with students trying to pressure Massachusetts into passingclimate legislation.

“It was just humbling to have that solidarity and support from this leader, this lion among men,” said Craig S. Altemose, an organizer of the Boston protest.

Dr. Hansen says he senses the beginnings of a mass movement on climate change, led by young people. Once he finishes his final papers as a NASA employee, he intends to give it his full support.

“At my age,” he said, “I am not worried about having an arrest record.”

Secretário da ONU pede urgência na criação de metas globais para o clima (G1/Globo Natureza)

JC e-mail 4699, de 05 de Abril de 2013.

Ban Ki-moon disse que será tarde demais se nada for feito até 2015. Data é limite para criar acordo global que reduza emissão de gases-estufa

O secretário-geral da ONU, Ban Ki-moon, declarou nesta quarta-feira (3) em Mônaco que será “tarde demais” para salvar o meio ambiente, se não forem adotadas medidas vinculantes até 2015 para o clima.

“As palavras não foram seguidas por ações. Logo será tarde demais. Nossos padrões de consumo são incompatíveis com a saúde do planeta”, indicou Ban Ki-moon, diante de uma plateia de personalidades. “Devemos agir agora, se quisermos que em 2050 o planeta continue a ser habitável para os seus nove bilhões de pessoas”, argumentou.

Ele se refere à criação de um novo tratado (ou protocolo) previsto para ser assinado em 2015 e entrar em vigor a partir de 2020, quando o Protocolo de Kyoto perder sua validade. Assim, todos países pretendem terão que cumprir metas para reduzir os gases de efeito estufa e conter a elevação da temperatura do planeta.

Dos noventa objetivos adotados pela comunidade internacional relacionados a questões ambientais nos últimos 20 anos, apenas quatro registraram progressos significativos, lamentou o secretário das Nações Unidas.

Problemas ambientais

Segundo a agência de notícias France Presse, ele destacou como problemas atuais a diminuição da biodiversidade, a redução dos recursos pesqueiros, a maior acidez dos oceanos e o aumento das emissões de gases do efeito estufa. “Temos que acelerar nossa dinâmica. Precisamos desenvolver o que estamos testando em tubos de ensaio há 40 anos. Para isso, devemos adotar medidas de incentivos eficazes, e principalmente colocar um preço sobre as emissões de carbono”, declarou.

“Também devemos adotar, até 2015, um instrumento universal e jurídico vinculante relativo ao clima, de modo que todos os países adotem medidas adicionais para reduzir os efeitos da mudança climática”, instou o secretário-geral das Nações Unidas.

Homenagens em Mônaco

Ban também prestou homenagem à Fundação Prince Albert II de Mônaco, que “é respeitada em todo o mundo pelo trabalho que faz nas áreas da biodiversidade, da água e na luta contra as mudanças climáticas”.

“No momento em que a terra e os oceanos sofrem pressões sem precedentes, em particular devido ao crescimento da população global e às mudanças climáticas, é nossa responsabilidade agir de forma decisiva para preparar para o futuro”, declarou por sua vez o príncipe Albert de Mônaco.

Para o pequeno principado, a visita oficial de Ban Ki-moon marca o 20º aniversário da entrada do Mônaco na Organização das Nações Unidas, em 28 de maio de 1993. “Eu lembro com carinho o orgulho que ele sentiu por esse reconhecimento”, disse o soberano em referência a seu pai, o príncipe Rainier III.

Ban Ki-moon, que iniciou nesta semana um giro europeu com uma visita aos pequenos principados de San Marino e Andorra, também visitará a Espanha e a Holanda. Ele se reunirá na quinta-feira (4) em Mônaco com o chefe de governo.

Survey Shows Many Republicans Feel America Should Take Steps to Address Climate Change (Science Daily)

Apr. 2, 2013 — In a recent survey of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents conducted by the Center for Climate Change Communication (4C) at George Mason University, a majority of respondents (62 percent) said they feel America should take steps to address climate change. More than three out of four survey respondents (77 percent) said the United States should use more renewable energy sources, and of those, most believe that this change should begin immediately.

The national survey, conducted in January 2013, asked more than 700 people who self-identified as Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents about energy and climate change.

“Over the past few years, our surveys have shown that a growing number of Republicans want to see Congress do more to address climate change,” said Mason professor Edward Maibach, director of 4C. “In this survey, we asked a broader set of questions to see if we could better understand how Republicans, and Independents who have a tendency to vote Republican, think about America’s energy and climate change situation.”

Other highlights from the survey include the following:

  • Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents prefer clean energy as the basis of America’s energy future and say the benefits of clean energy, such as energy independence (66 percent) saving resources for our children and grandchildren (57 percent), and providing a better life for our children and grandchildren (56 percent) outweigh the costs, such as more government regulation (42 percent) or higher energy prices (31 percent).
  • By a margin of 2 to 1, respondents say America should take action to reduce its fossil fuel use.
  • Only one third of respondents agree with the Republican Party’s position on climate change, while about half agree with the party’s position on how to meet America’s energy needs.
  • A large majority of respondents say their elected representatives are unresponsive to their views about climate change.

“The findings from this survey suggest there is considerable support among conservatives for accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels and toward clean renewable forms of energy, and for taking steps to address climate change,” said Maibach. “Perhaps the most surprising finding, however, is how few of our survey respondents agreed with the Republican Party’s current position on climate change.”

The report can be downloaded at: http://climatechangecommunication.org

The report is based on findings from a nationally representative survey conducted by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. A total of 726 adults (18+) were interviewed between January 12th and January 27th, 2013. The average margin of error for the survey +/- 4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

The Tar Sands Disaster (N.Y.Times)

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON

Published: March 31, 2013

WATERLOO, Ontario

Rick Froberg

IF President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll do Canada a favor.

Canada’s tar sands formations, landlocked in northern Alberta, are a giant reserve of carbon-saturated energy — a mixture of sand, clay and a viscous low-grade petroleum called bitumen. Pipelines are the best way to get this resource to market, but existing pipelines to the United States are almost full. So tar sands companies, and the Alberta and Canadian governments, are desperately searching for export routes via new pipelines.

Canadians don’t universally support construction of the pipeline. A poll by Nanos Research in February 2012 found that nearly 42 percent of Canadians were opposed. Many of us, in fact, want to see the tar sands industry wound down and eventually stopped, even though it pumps tens of billions of dollars annually into our economy.

The most obvious reason is that tar sands production is one of the world’s most environmentally damaging activities. It wrecks vast areas of boreal forest through surface mining and subsurface production. It sucks up huge quantities of water from local rivers, turns it into toxic waste and dumps the contaminated water into tailing ponds that now cover nearly 70 square miles.

Also, bitumen is junk energy. A joule, or unit of energy, invested in extracting and processing bitumen returns only four to six joules in the form of crude oil. In contrast, conventional oil production in North America returns about 15 joules. Because almost all of the input energy in tar sands production comes from fossil fuels, the process generates significantly more carbon dioxide than conventional oil production.

There is a less obvious but no less important reason many Canadians want the industry stopped: it is relentlessly twisting our society into something we don’t like. Canada is beginning to exhibit the economic and political characteristics of a petro-state.

Countries with huge reserves of valuable natural resources often suffer from economic imbalances and boom-bust cycles. They also tend to have low-innovation economies, because lucrative resource extraction makes them fat and happy, at least when resource prices are high.

Canada is true to type. When demand for tar sands energy was strong in recent years, investment in Alberta surged. But that demand also lifted the Canadian dollar, which hurt export-oriented manufacturing in Ontario, Canada’s industrial heartland. Then, as the export price of Canadian heavy crude softened in late 2012 and early 2013, the country’s economy stalled.

Canada’s record on technical innovation, except in resource extraction, is notoriously poor. Capital and talent flow to the tar sands, while investments in manufacturing productivity and high technology elsewhere languish.

But more alarming is the way the tar sands industry is undermining Canadian democracy. By suggesting that anyone who questions the industry is unpatriotic, tar sands interest groups have made the industry the third rail of Canadian politics.

The current Conservative government holds a large majority of seats in Parliament but was elected in 2011 with only 40 percent of the vote, because three other parties split the center and left vote. The Conservative base is Alberta, the province from which Prime Minister Stephen Harper and many of his allies hail. As a result, Alberta has extraordinary clout in federal politics, and tar sands influence reaches deep into the federal cabinet.

Both the cabinet and the Conservative parliamentary caucus are heavily populated by politicians who deny mainstream climate science. The Conservatives have slashed financing for climate science, closed facilities that do research on climate change, told federal government climate scientists not to speak publicly about their work without approval and tried, unsuccessfully, to portray the tar sands industry as environmentally benign.

The federal minister of natural resources, Joe Oliver, has attacked “environmental and other radical groups” working to stop tar sands exports. He has focused particular ire on groups getting money from outside Canada, implying that they’re acting as a fifth column for left-wing foreign interests. At a time of widespread federal budget cuts, the Conservatives have given Canada’s tax agency extra resources to audit registered charities. It’s widely assumed that environmental groups opposing the tar sands are a main target.

This coercive climate prevents Canadians from having an open conversation about the tar sands. Instead, our nation behaves like a gambler deep in the hole, repeatedly doubling down on our commitment to the industry.

President Obama rejected the pipeline last year but now must decide whether to approve a new proposal from TransCanada, the pipeline company. Saying no won’t stop tar sands development by itself, because producers are busy looking for other export routes — west across the Rockies to the Pacific Coast, east to Quebec, or south by rail to the United States. Each alternative faces political, technical or economic challenges as opponents fight to make the industry unviable.

Mr. Obama must do what’s best for America. But stopping Keystone XL would be a major step toward stopping large-scale environmental destruction, the distortion of Canada’s economy and the erosion of its democracy.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, who teaches global governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”

New Models For Clean Energy Funding Offer Hope (Earth Techling)

by Institute For Local Self-Reliance

March 23rd, 2013

Three years ago, the prospects for Americans to own their energy future seemed relatively bleak. There were almost no replicable models for doing community-based energy projects or investment, despite falling costs and technology – solar and wind – that lend themselves to local development.

But thanks to recent opportunities in community solar and crowdfunding, we may see a renewable energy market in America where everyone wins.

Let’s start with solar. It’s the ultimate decentralized renewable energy – sunshine falls everywhere – and its cost is falling so fast that, within a decade, 300 gigawatts of unsubsidized solar will be competitive with local electricity prices in communities across the country. In 2010, just one model for developing community solar had proved readily replicable and there was no practical way to pool a community’s collective capital to invest in local energy (except perhaps a municipal utility, a story for another time). Since nearly three-quarters of residential rooftops are not suitable for solar, it was hard to see how most Americans could use the sun to brighten their energy future.

But in 2013, community solar is rising fast. Colorado’s community solar gardens program – selling out its 9 megawatt limit in a half hour – illustrates a powerful model for letting people pool their money to go solar, even if their own roof isn’t theirs or isn’t sunny. Some companies in Colorado have already brought their model to other states, like the Clean Energy Collective‘s community solar project with the Wright-Hennepin Electric Cooperative in Minnesota, and other states (like Minnesota) are considering legislation to expand the opportunity.

mosaic solar crowdfunding kickstarter

image via Mosaic

The year 2013 may also be remembered for opening the crowdfunding floodgates.

In late 2012, California-based (Solar) Mosaic launched their first community solar investment project, allowing 51 California investors earn 6.38% returns for investing in a 47 kilowatt (kW) solar array on the roof of the Youth Employment Partnership in Oakland. Their subsequent 235 kW project ups the ante, and was open to regular folks in California and New York (and accredited investors in all 50 states). It sold out in just 24 hours to over 400 investors with an average stake of just $700. The investment uses a common securities law exemption (Rule 506 of Regulation D), and investors will earn a 4.5% annual return (net of fees) over 9 years, greening the economy and their pocketbooks.

The key advantage of Solar Mosaic is the investment. Previous community solar projects have relied on shared electricity savings for participants, sometimes called virtual net metering. This limits prospective investors to the same utility service territory, and the savings can’t be taken to a property outside that area. The Mosaic model turns community solar into a simple investment, letting prospective investors select a particular Mosaic project to invest in, with significantly higher returns than parking money in a U.S. Treasury or savings account. For now, it’s limited to broad participation in just two states, New York and California, but Mosaic is “working hard” to expand the opportunity.

Mosaic may be just the first salvo in a firestorm of community renewable energy investment. The federal JOBS Act of 2012 intends to create a new segment of investment security with much lower upfront and legal costs that would let crowds pool up to $1 million for solar and other renewable energy projects.The only “drawback” in the Mosaic model is that it doesn’t explicitly connect geography with investment. A New York City resident, for example, can invest in a project in California, but not in Manhattan or the Bronx. If this model continues to be successful, however, it’s likely that will change.

Crowdfunding doesn’t have to be limited to renewable energy, either. People could pool their resources to invest in block-by-block residential energy efficiency retrofits, reducing their own and their neighbors’ energy bills and sharing the energy savings with other local investors. Crowdfunding for energy efficiency could be combined with commercial building energy ratings (just enacted in Minneapolis, MN, for example) to target the least efficient buildings with the most potential for savings. Local shared investment wouldn’t just tap and share more energy savings, but would boost the local economy by putting idled laborers to work making buildings more cost-effective and less climate harming.

Both community solar and crowdfunding are in their infancy, but they represent two powerful tools for Americans to take charge of their energy future.

Mudanças climáticas afetam previsões astrológicas dos índios amazônicos (UOL Notícias)

Carlos A. Moreno

Da EFE, no Rio de Janeiro

31/03/201311h59

Crianças da aldeia ticuna brincam no Rio Solimões, no Amazonas; os ticunas são uma das tribos afetadas pelas mudanças climáticasCrianças da aldeia ticuna brincam no Rio Solimões, no Amazonas; os ticunas são uma das tribos afetadas pelas mudanças climáticas. Patrícia Santos – 30.nov.1999/Folhapress

As previsões que os índios da Amazônia brasileira fazem com a ajuda dos astros para determinar o melhor momento para plantar ou pescar, entre outras atividades, se veem afetadas pelas mudanças climáticas, segundo constatou um estudo realizado com diferentes etnias indígenas no Brasil.

“Os xamãs passaram a se queixar que suas previsões estavam perdendo a exatidão e, a partir dessas indagações, descobrimos que alguns fenômenos provocados pelas mudanças climáticas afetavam seus cálculos”, explicou à Agência Efe o astrônomo Germano Afonso, coordenador do estudo.

Segundo o especialista, que é doutor em Astronomia e Mecânica Celeste pela francesa Universidade Pierre et Marie Curie, os índios da Amazônia ainda utilizam o conhecimento astrológico ancestral para determinar seu calendário e programar, entre outras coisas, a melhor data para plantar, colher, caçar, pescar e, até mesmo, realizar seus rituais religiosos.

Afonso, que construiu e opera – com ajuda dos índios – um observatório solar na Amazônia, explicou que a observação ou não de diferentes constelações, assim como o deslocamento das mesmas, fazem com que os xamãs prevejam os momentos de chuva e seca, das cheias dos rios, da fertilidade da terra e da procriação dos peixes.

“No entanto, nas tribos com as quais trabalhamos, os próprios xamãs admitem que suas previsões não estavam sendo exatas, já que as chuvas se antecipavam ou se atrasavam e os rios secavam antes do tempo previsto. O curioso é que eles mesmos culpavam às mudanças climáticas”, declarou o astrônomo, que é professor da Universidade do Estado do Paraná e autor de diferentes obras sobre o assunto, como “O Céu dos Índios Tembé”.

A equipe coordenada por Afonso e contratada pela Fundação de Apoio à pesquisa no Estado do Amazonas (Fapeam) para estudar o assunto decidiu contrastar o conhecimento indígena de diferentes etnias – Tukano, Tupé, Dessana, Baré, Tuyuka, Baniwa e Tikuna – com as medições meteorológicas da região para tentar identificar as falhas nas previsões.

“Com essa análise percebemos que alguns fenômenos provocados pelas mudanças climáticas estavam desvirtuando as previsões, tendo em vista que a chuva se atrasava ou se antecipava por fenômenos como El Niño e o desmatamento”, apontou o especialista, que passou a morar em São Gabriel da Cachoeira, uma cidade amazônica na qual confluem várias etnias e onde construiu o Observatório Solar Indígena.

Afonso esclareceu que esse problema não pode ser atribuído diretamente ao aquecimento global, mas também aos fenômenos que causam o efeito estufa e os que são provocados pelo mesmo, como o desmatamento da Amazônia, a poluição ambiental e a construção de represas na floresta.

Tais fenômenos, segundo os especialistas, alteram os períodos de chuva e de cheia dos rios na Amazônia, que já não podem ser previstos a partir do conhecimento astronômico acumulado por séculos e transmitido oralmente entre os índios.

Após a constatação do problema, os pesquisadores responsáveis pelo estudo iniciaram um projeto para transmitir aos xamãs alguns conhecimentos científicos e, com isso, ajudá-los a corrigir suas previsões.

“Estamos usando cálculos astronômicos modernos e as informações recolhidas pelas estações meteorológicas da região para ajudá-los a aperfeiçoar seus cálculos”, explicou Afonso.

“Recuperamos o conhecimento astrológico que eles transmitem oralmente e comparamos com dados científicos para fazer alguns ajustes e permitir que as previsões sejam mais precisas”, completou.

De acordo com Afonso, com previsões mais exatas, os índios seguirão confiando em sua capacidade de interpretar os astros e na precisão de seus conhecimentos – o melhor, sem se afastarem de sua cultura.

“Mas só transmitimos os dados que podem ajudá-los. Não nos introduzimos mais. Não queremos invadir, deslegitimar e nem modificar nada de sua cultura. O projeto tem dois objetivos claros: recuperar o conhecimento astrológico dos índios e ajudá-los a melhorar suas previsões. Trata-se de uma troca”, exaltou o pesquisador.

Segundo o astrônomo, essa troca teve uma boa recepção devido ao fato de que a maioria de seus colaboradores no projeto são universitários e indígenas, alguns filhos ou netos de caciques e xamãs das tribos onde nasceram.

Latour: “No estaba escrito que la ecología fuera un partido” (El País)

ENTREVISTA

“No estaba escrito que la ecología fuera un partido”

Sociólogo, antropólogo, filósofo y director científico del Instituto de Estudios Políticos de París.

Bruno Latour tiene una mirada ácida y provocadora de la sociedad y el medio ambiente.

MIGUEL MORA 25 MAR 2013 – 11:52 CET19

Bruno Latour. / MANUEL BRAUN

¿Ha servido para algo el activismo ecológico? ¿Han forjado los verdes una política común? ¿Escuchan los políticos a los científicos cuando alertan sobre el cambio climático? ¿Puede la Tierra soportar más agresiones? El sociólogo, antropólogo y filósofo francés Bruno Latour(Beaune, 1947) lleva más de 20 años reflexionando sobre estos asuntos, y su pronóstico es desolador. A su juicio, la llegada de los ecologistas a la política ha sido un fracaso porque los verdes han renunciado al debate inteligente, los políticos se limitan a aplicar viejas recetas sin darse cuenta de que la revolución se ha producido ya y fue “una catástrofe”: ocurrió en 1947, cuando la población mundial superó el número que garantizaba el acceso a los recursos. Según Latour, es urgente poner en marcha una nueva forma de hacer ecología política, basada en una constitución que comprometa a gobernantes, científicos y ciudadanos a garantizar el futuro de la Tierra. Esta idea es una de las propuestas de su libro Políticas de la naturaleza. Por una democracia de las ciencias, publicado en Francia en 1999 y que ahora edita en español RBA.

Latour, aire de sabio despistado, recibe a El País Semanal en su caótico y enorme despacho del Instituto de Estudios Políticos de París, del que es director científico y director adjunto desde 2007.

PREGUNTA: Este libro se publicó en Francia hace ya 14 años. ¿Sigue suscribiendo lo que escribió?

RESPUESTA: Casi todo, sí. Pero las cosas no han mejorado. He seguido trabajando en lo mismo, pero con otro tono. Hoy debo de ser el único que se ocupa de estas cuestiones, de una filosofía política que exige una verdadera política ecologista. Lo que no ha funcionado es que pensé que iba a ser un libro fundador para los ecologistas. ¡Y ha sido un fracaso total! Los ecologistas han desaparecido.

P: En Francia al menos hay verdes en el Gobierno.

R: Sí, pero tienen una visión muy estrecha de la ecología, no reflexionan ni sobre la economía ni sobre la sociedad. La ecología está limitada a las cuestiones de la naturaleza, cuando en realidad no tiene nada que ver con eso. Hay que elegir entre naturaleza y política. Desgraciadamente, se ha intentado hacer una política ecologista que no ha producido nada bueno porque se ha basado en la lucha tradicional, que tenía como objetivo torpedear la política o, mejor, someterla; en cierto modo, los verdes actúan como un tribunal que trata de definir una especie de soberanía.

P: ¿De superioridad moral o natural?

R: Sí, pero sobre todo de estupidez. Evidentemente, el tomar la naturaleza como un fin no ha hecho más que debilitar la posición de los ecologistas, que nunca han sido capaces de hacer política; en fin, auténtica política en el sentido de la tradición socialista, en la que se hubieran debido inspirar. No han hecho el trabajo que el socialismo primero, el marxismo después y luego la socialdemocracia hicieron. No ha habido, para nada, un trabajo de invención intelectual, de exploración; han preferido “el escaparate”. Puede que no hubiera otra solución, pues no estaba escrito que la ecología se fuera a convertir en un partido.

“Hay una ecología profunda con un gran papel en EE UU y alemania”

P: ¿Entonces el ecologismo es hoy una especie de ac­­tivismo sin conexión científica?

R: Ha habido movimientos interesantes gracias a una casuística muy concreta, importante en lo que concierne a los animales, las plantas, los dientes de los elefantes, el agua, los ríos, etcétera. Han mostrado además gran energía en las cuestiones locales, pero sin afrontar las cuestiones de la política, de la vida en común. Por eso el ecologismo sigue siendo marginal, justo en un momento en que las cuestiones ecológicas se han convertido en un asunto de todos. Y se da una paradoja: la ecología se ocupa de temas minúsculos relacionados con la naturaleza y la sociedad mientras que la cuestión de la Tierra, la presencia de la Tierra en la política, se hace cada vez más apremiante. Esa urgencia, que ya era acuciante hace 10 o 15 años, lo es mucho más ahora.

P: ¿Quizá ha faltado formar una Internacional Verde?

R: No se ha hecho porque los ecologistas pensaban que la Tierra iba a unificar todos estos movimientos. Han surgido un montón de redes, basadas en casos concretos, como Greenpeace. Hay asociaciones, pero nada a nivel político. La internacional sigue siendo la geopolítica clásica de los Estados nación. No ha habido reflexión sobre la nueva situación. Existe una ecología profunda, deep ecology, en Francia prácticamente inexistente, que ha tenido un papel importante en Alemania, en los países escandinavos y en Norteamérica. Pero está muy poco politizada.

P: Estamos ante un fracaso político y ante una mayor conciencia de los científicos. ¿Y los ciudadanos?

R: Paradójicamente, esa dolorosa pelea sobre el clima nos ha permitido progresar. En cierto modo, la querella ha tenido un papel importante en una “comprensión renovada” por parte del público de la realidad científica. El problema es que intentamos insertar las cuestiones ecológicas en el viejo modelo “ciencia y política”. Desde este punto de vista, incluso los científicos más avanzados siguen intentando poner estas cuestiones dentro del marco de esa situación superada que intento criticar. Este es el tema del libro, y en ese sentido sigue de actualidad.

P: En Francia hay una identificación entre ecologismo y territorio. José Bové, por ejemplo, es un proteccionista a ultranza. Es rara esta evolución de la ecología hacia el nacionalismo, ¿no?

R: Sí, pero al mismo tiempo es útil e interesante replantearse lo que es el territorio, el terruño, por usar la palabra francesa. Los ecologistas siempre se han mostrado indecisos sobre el carácter progresista o reaccionario de su apego a la tierra, porque la expresión en francés puede significar cosas muy distintas. Pero es importante, porque es una de las dimensiones de la cuestión ecológica, tanto de la progresista como de la arcaica. Ese era uno de los objetivos fundamentales del libro, saber si hemos sido realmente modernos alguna vez. Hay aspectos regresivos en el apego al terruño, y a la vez hay otros muy importantes sobre la definición de los límites, de los entornos en los cuales vivimos, que son decisivos para el porvenir. Una vez más, los verdes han omitido trabajar esa cuestión. Pero el problema de la orientación, de la diferencia entre el apego reaccionario o progresista a la tierra, es fundamental. Si vemos movimientos como Slow Food, nos preguntamos si están adelantados o retrasados, porque tienen aspectos regresivos. Pero si se piensa en el tema de los circuitos de distribución, ¿por qué las lasañas inglesas tendrían que estar hechas con caballo rumano y transitar por 25 intermediarios? No es una tontería: si tomamos caballo francés, rumano o turco, las cuestiones de pertenencia y de límites se convierten en cuestiones progresistas.

El antropólogo iconoclasta

Bruno Latour nació en la Borgoña, donde surgen los vinos más caros del planeta. Su padre era viticultor. De ahí sus pecualiares análisis sobre el terruño y la tradición. Cursó Antropología y Sociología. Su formación es tan variopinta como los centros donde ha impartido clase, desde la Escuela de Minas de París hasta la London School of Economics y la cátedra de Historia de Harvard.

Escritor incansable, es autor de una treintena de libros de ensayo, todos los últimos editados por Harvard, por los que circulan la tierra, la sociedad, la guerra, la energía, la ciencia, la tecnología, la modernidad y los medios de comunicación.

Su último proyecto está conectado con el llamado medialab, un espacio donde desarrollar conexiones entre las tecnologías digitales, la sociología y los estudios científicos.

P: Su libro llama a superar los esquemas de izquierda y derecha. Pero no parece que eso haya cambiado mucho.

R: El debate afronta un gran problema. Hay una inversión de las relaciones entre el marco geográfico y la política: el marco ha cambiado mucho más que la política. Las grandes negociaciones internacionales manifiestan esa inercia de la organización económica, legal y política, mientras que el marco, lo que antes llamábamos la Tierra, la geografía, cambia a velocidad asombrosa. Esa mutación es difícil de comprender por la gente acostumbrada a la historia de antes, en la cual había humanos que se peleaban, como en el siglo XX: hombres haciéndose la guerra dentro de un marco geográfico estable desde la última glaciación. Es una razón demasiado filosófica. Así que preferimos pensar que tenemos tiempo, que todo está en su sitio, que la economía es así, que el derecho internacional es así, etcétera. Pero incluso los términos para señalar las aceleraciones rápidas han cambiado, volcándose hacia la naturaleza y los glaciares. El tiempo que vivimos es el del antropoceno, y las cosas ya no son como antes. Lo que ha cambiado desde que escribí el libro es que en aquel momento no teníamos la noción del antropoceno. Fue una invención muy útil de Crutzen, un climatólogo, pero no existía entonces, me habría ayudado mucho.

P: ¿Y qué fue de su propuesta de aprobar una constitución ecológica?

R: Intenté construir una asociación de parlamentarios y lanzar una constitución para que las cuestiones de la energía empezaran a ser tratadas de otro modo. Intentaba abrir un debate, que naturalmente no ha tenido lugar. El debate sobre la Constitución empezó bien, se consideró una gran invención de la democracia europea. El problema es que ya no se trata de la cuestión de la representación de los humanos, sino que ese debate atañe a los innumerables seres que viven en la Tierra. Me parecía necesario en aquel momento, y ahora más incluso, hacer un debate constitucional. ¿Cómo sería un Parlamento dedicado a la política ecológica? Tendrá que crearse, pero no reflexionamos lo suficiente sobre las cuestiones de fondo.

P: ¿Las grandes conferencias medioambientales resuelven algo?

R: El problema es que la geopolítica organizada en torno a una nación, con sus propios intereses y nivel de agregación, está mal adaptada a las cuestiones ecológicas, que son transnacionales. Todo el mundo sabe eso, los avances no pueden plasmarse ya a base de mapas, no jugamos en territorios clásicos. Así, desde Copenhague 2009 hay una desafección por las grandes cumbres, no solo porque no se consigue decidir nada, sino también porque nos damos cuenta de que el nivel de decisión y agregación política no es el correcto. De hecho, las ciudades, las regiones, las naciones, las provincias, toman a menudo más iniciativas que los Estados.

P: Francia es uno de los países más nuclearizados del mundo. Los ecologistas braman. ¿Le parece bien?

R: Los ecologistas se han obstinado en la cuestión nuclear, pero nadie ha venido a explicarnos por qué lo nuclear es antiecológico, mientras mucha gente seria considera que el átomo es una de las soluciones, a largo plazo no, pero a corto plazo sí. De nuevo estamos ante la ausencia total de reflexión política por parte de los ecologistas, que militan contra lo nuclear sin explicar por qué. Por consiguiente, no hemos avanzado un centímetro. De hecho, en este momento hay un gran debate público sobre la transición energética, y los verdes siguen siendo incapaces de comprender nada, incluso de discutir, porque han moralizado la cuestión nuclear. Cuando se hace ética, no hay que hacer política, hay que hacer religión.

P: ¿Está realmente en cuestión la supervivencia de la especie?

R: La especie humana se las apañará. Nadie piensa que vaya a desaparecer, ¿pero la civilización? No se sabe lo que es una Tierra a seis u ocho grados, no lo hemos conocido. Hay que remontarse centenares de millones de años. El problema no se abordaba con la misma urgencia cuando escribí el libro en 1999, se hablaba aún de las generaciones futuras. Ahora hablamos de nuestros hijos. No hay una sola empresa que haga un cálculo más allá de 2050, es el horizonte más corto que ha habido nunca. La mutación de la historia es increíblemente rápida. Ahora se trata de acontecimientos naturales, mucho más rápidos que los humanos. Es inimaginable para la gente formada en el siglo XX, una novedad total.

P: ¿Es la globalización? ¿O más que eso?

R: Tiene relación con la globalización, pero no por la extensión de las conexiones entre los humanos. Se trata de la llegada de un mundo desagradable que impide la globalización real: es un conflicto entre globos. Nos hemos globalizado, y eso resulta tranquilizador porque todo está conectado y hace de la Tierra un planeta pequeño. Pero que un gran pueblo sea aplastado al chocar con otra cosa tranquiliza menos.

La especie humana se las apañará. nadie piensa que va a desaparecer”

P: ¿Y el malestar que sentimos, la indignación, tiene que ver con ese miedo?

R: Ese catastrofismo siempre ha existido; siempre ha habido momentos de apocalipsis, de literatura de la catástrofe; pero al mismo tiempo existe un sentimiento nuevo: no se trata del apocalipsis de los humanos, sino del final de recursos, en un sentido, creo, literal.

P: ¿Nos hemos zampado el planeta?

R: La gente que analiza el antropoceno dibuja esquemas de este tipo (muestra un famoso gráfico de población y recursos). Esto se llama “la gran aceleración”, ocurrió en 1947. La revolución ya ha tenido lugar, y es una de las causas de esa nueva ansiedad. La gente sigue hablando de la revolución, desesperándose porque no llega, pero ya está aquí. Es un acontecimiento pasado y de consecuencias catastróficas. Eso también nubla la mente de progresistas y reaccionarios. ¿Qué significa vivir en una época en la cual la revolución ha ocurrido ya y cuyos resultados son catastróficos?

P: ¿No querrá decir que la austeridad es la solución?

R: Ya existe el concepto del decrecimiento feliz, no sé si la tienen en España… ¡Sí! Ustedes están muy adelantados sobre decrecimiento.

P: Estamos en plena vanguardia, pero del infeliz.

R: Es uno de los grandes temas del momento, la crisis económica es decrecimiento no deseado, desigualmente repartido; y hay algo más: austeridad no es necesariamente la palabra, sino ascetismo. Sería la visión religiosa, o espiritual, de la austeridad. Eso se mezcla con las nuevas visiones geológicas de los límites que debemos imponernos…

P: ¿Habla del regreso al campo o de reconstruir el planeta?

R: No me refiero a volver al campo, sino a otra Tierra.

P: ¿La tecnología es la única brújula?

R: La tecnología se encuentra en esa misma situación. Existe una solución muy importante de la geoingeniería, que considera que la situación es reversible, que se pueden recrear artificialmente unas condiciones favorables tras haberlas destruido sin saberlo. Así ha surgido un inmenso movimiento de geoingeniería en todas partes. Ya que es la energía de la Tierra, podemos mandar naves espaciales, modificar la acidez de las aguas del mar, etcétera. Hacer algo que contrarreste lo que se hizo mal. Si hemos podido modificar la Tierra, podemos modificarla en el otro sentido, lo que es un argumento peligroso, porque la podemos destrozar por segunda vez.

P: ¿No se regenerará sola?

R: Sí, ¡pero sin humanos! Se regenerará sola mientras no haya humanos. Puede deshacerse de nosotros, es una de las hipótesis, volviéndose invivible, pero eso no sería muy positivo. La era de los límites puede llegar hasta la extinción.

P: ¿Acabaremos fatal?

R: La historia no está repleta de ejemplos favorables. No se sabe. No hay nada en la naturaleza humana que favorezca la reflexión, por lo cual la solución solo puede ser mala.

P: Algunos temen que acabaremos devorados por los chinos.

R: Los chinos tienen más problemas que nosotros y corren el peligro de comerse a sí mismos por el suelo, el agua y el aire. No nos amenazan, desaparecerán antes que nosotros.

P: Žižek dice que nuestros problemas provienen de la mediocridad intelectual de Alemania y Francia, que esa es la razón principal de la decadencia actual. ¿Qué piensa?

R: Es una estupidez. Ocurren muchas más cosas intelectualmente en Europa que en América, infinitamente más. Por ejemplo, en arte, en filosofía, en ciencias, en urbanismo. Es insensato decir cosas así, pero es que Žižek es un viejo cretino, una especie de cosa de extrema izquierda, fruto del agotamiento de la extrema izquierda, de su decadencia final, de la cual es el síntoma. Por otra parte, es un chico muy majo. La extrema izquierda se ha equivocado tanto sobre el mundo que al final todos estos viejos de extrema izquierda no tienen otra cosa que hacer salvo vomitar sobre el mundo, como hace Alain Badiou en Francia.

P: ¿Prefiere a Marine Le Pen?

R: No soy político, no puedo responder a esta pregunta, no me interesa.

P: ¿No le gusta hablar de política?

R: Sí hablo de política, he escrito un libro sobre política, ¡que yo sepa!,Las políticas de la naturaleza.

P: ¿No le interesa la política de todos los días?

R: La de todos los días sí, pero no la de los partidos, son agitaciones superficiales, sobre todo en Francia, donde ya no hay verdaderamente política.

P: Critica a la extrema izquierda, ¿y nada a la extrema derecha?

R: Se agita, intenta agarrarse a un clavo ardiendo, pero no tiene mucha importancia. No es ahí donde las cosas están en juego.

P: ¿Cree que es residual?

R: No, no es residual, puede desarrollarse y provocar daños, tanto como la extrema izquierda; el no pensar siempre provoca daños, pero no es eso lo que va a solucionar los problemas de la Tierra, la economía, las ciudades, el transporte y la tecnología.

P: ¿Qué escenario prevé para 2050? ¿Qué Tierra, qué humanidad?

R: Ese no es mi trabajo, mi trabajo consiste en prepararnos para las guerras. Las guerras ecológicas van a ser muy importantes y tenemos que preparar nuestros ejércitos de un modo intelectual y humano. Ese es mi trabajo.

P: ¿Habrá guerras violentas por el clima?

R: La definición misma de guerra va a cambiar, estamos en una situación en la cual no podemos ganar contra la Tierra, es una guerra asimétrica: si ganamos, perdemos, y si perdemos, ganamos. Así pues, esta situación crea obligaciones a multitud de gente y antes que nada a los intelectuales.

P: ¿La batalla principal es esa?

R: Si no tenemos mundo, no podemos hacer gran cosa, ni siquiera la revolución. Cuando se lee a Marx, uno se queda impresionado por lo que dice sobre los humanos. En esta época, la cuestión de la ciencia y del margen geográfico, más la presencia de miles de millones de personas, conforma un escenario crucial. Antes teníamos otros problemas, pero este no.

P: ¿Así que se trata de ser o no ser?

R: En cada informe científico, las previsiones son peores, el plan más pesimista siempre aparece. Hay que tener en cuenta eso. Son previsiones extremas, pero de momento son las únicas válidas. No se trata de una guerra mundial, sino de una acumulación de guerras mundiales. Es parecido al invierno nuclear de la guerra fría, una situación de cataclismo, pero con algunas ventajas: es más radical, pero más lento, tenemos mucha capacidad de invención, 9.000 millones de personas y muchas mentes inteligentes. Pero también es un reto. Por tanto, es una cuestión de alta política y no de naturaleza. La política viene primero.

P: ¿Tiene la sensación de estar solo?

R: Lo que era complicado en este libro era crear el vínculo entre ciencia y política, y no puedo decir que haya convencido a mucha gente. Si además se hace el vínculo entre la religión y las artes, es más difícil. Gente como Sloterdijk sería muy capaz de comprenderlo. Sin embargo, muchos intelectuales siguen en el siglo XX, como Žižek. Permanecen en un contexto, en un ideal revolucionario, de decepción. Están decepcionados con los humanos.

P: ¿Cree que los humanos se dejarán ayudar?

R: Primero hay que ayudar a la Tierra. En el antropoceno ya no se puede hacer la distinción entre los humanos y la Tierra.

P: ¿Y sus estudiantes están listos para la lucha?

R: En mi escuela soy el único en dar clases sobre cuestiones donde no entra la política en el sentido clásico. Hay un curso o dos sobre cuestiones ecológicas. Es culpa mía, no he trabajado lo suficiente como para cambiar las cosas. Llevamos mucho retraso.

Security Risks of Extreme Weather and Climate Change (Science Daily)

Feb. 11, 2013 — A Harvard researcher is pointing toward a new reason to worry about the effects of climate change — national security.

Hurricane Katrina. Predicted changes in extremes include more record high temperatures; fewer but stronger tropical cyclones; wider areas of drought and increases in precipitation; increased climate variability; Arctic warming and attendant impacts; and continued sea level rise as greenhouse warming continues and even accelerates. (Credit: NOAA)

A new report co-authored by Michael McElroy, the Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies, and D. James Baker, a former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, connects global climate change, extreme weather, and national security. During the next decade, the report concludes, climate change could have wide-reaching effects on everything from food, water, and energy supplies to critical infrastructure and economic security.

“Over the last century, the trend has been toward urbanization — to concentrate people in smaller areas,” McElroy said. “We’ve built an infrastructure — whether it’s where we build our homes or where we put our roads and bridges — that fits with that trend. If the weather pattern suddenly changes in a serious way, it could create very large problems. Bridges may be in the wrong place, or sea walls may not be high enough.”

Possible effects on critical infrastructure, however, only scratch the surface of the security concerns.

On an international scale, the report points to recent events, such as flooding in Pakistan and sustained drought in eastern Africa, that may be tied to changing weather patterns. How the United States responds to such disasters — whether by delivering humanitarian aid or through technical support — could affect security.

“By recognizing the immediacy of these risks, the U.S. can enhance its own security and help other countries do a better job of preparing for and coping with near-term climate extremes,” Baker said.

The report suggests that climate changes could even have long-reaching political effects.

It’s possible, McElroy said, that climate changes may have contributed to the uprisings of the Arab Spring by causing a rise in food prices, or that the extended drought in northern Mexico has contributed to political instability and a rise in drug trafficking in the region.

“We don’t have definitive answers, but our report raises these questions, because what we are saying is that these conditions are likely to be more normal than they were in the past,” McElroy said. “There are also questions related to sea-level rise. The conventional wisdom is that sea level is rising by a small amount, but observations show it’s rising about twice as fast as the models suggested. Could it actually go up by a large amount in a short period? I don’t think you can rule that out.”

Other potential effects, McElroy said, are tied to changes in an atmospheric circulation pattern called the Hadley circulation, in which warm tropical air rises, resulting in tropical rains. As the air moves to higher latitudes, it descends, causing the now-dry air to heat up. Regions where the hot, dry air returns to the surface are typically dominated by desert.

The problem, he said, is that evidence shows those arid regions are expanding.

“The observational data suggest that the Hadley circulation has expanded by several degrees in latitude,” McElroy said. “That’s a big deal, because if you shift where deserts are by just a few degrees, you’re talking about moving the southwestern desert into the grain-producing region of the country, or moving the Sahara into southern Europe.”

The report is the result of the authors’ involvement with Medea, a group of scientists who support the U.S. government by examining declassified national security data useful for scientific inquiry. In recent decades, the group has worked with officials in the United States and Russia to declassify data on climatic conditions in the Arctic and thousands of spy satellite images. Those images have been used to study ancient settlement patterns in the Middle East and changes in Arctic ice.

“I would be reluctant to say that our report is the last word on short-term climate change,” McElroy said. “Climate change is a moving target. We’ve done an honest, useful assessment of the state of play today, but we will need more information and more hard work to get it right. One of the recommendations in our report is the need for a serious investment in measurement and observation. It’s really important to keep doing that, otherwise we’re going to be flying blind.”

The study was conducted with funds provided by the Central Intelligence Agency. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the CIA or the U.S. government.

Report: Climate Extremes: Recent Trends with Implications for National Security at www.environment.harvard.edu/climate-extremes

Na avaliação de especialistas, pré-sal deve trazer benefícios econômicos e científicos para o Brasil (Jornal da Ciência)

JC e-mail 4665, de 15 de Fevereiro de 2013.

Viviane Monteiro

O país não pode perder a oportunidade de utilizar os royalties do petróleo para investir em educação e em pesquisas científicas

Apesar dos riscos ambientais, a exploração do petróleo da camada pré-sal deve assegurar ao país, em longo prazo, novos patamares de desenvolvimento, tanto econômico quanto cientifico e tecnológico. Essa é a opinião que prevalece entre especialistas e pesquisadores da área de petróleo do Instituto Alberto Luiz Coimbra de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa de Engenharia da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Coppe-UFRJ), da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES) e da Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo (Poli-USP).

Para eles, o Brasil não pode perder a oportunidade de explorar o pré-sal e nem de utilizar os royalties do petróleo extraído dessa camada profunda para investir em educação e em pesquisas científicas e tecnológicas. Um dos objetivos desses investimentos deve ser produzir energias limpas e renováveis, que devem substituir o combustível fóssil no período “pós-petróleo”, o que deve ocorrer nas próximas cinco décadas, aproximadamente.

Diante da exploração do pré-sal, o diretor de tecnologia e inovação da Coppe/UFRJ, Segen Estefen, diz que o Brasil deve se tornar um dos líderes mundiais na produção de tecnologias de ponta tanto para a exploração de petróleo quanto para o desenvolvimento de energias limpas e renováveis. A exploração do pré-sal, segundo ele acredita, representa uma janela de oportunidades para o Brasil figurar entre os maiores produtores de petróleo do mundo, tornando-se um dos “pelotões” de frente da Organização dos Países Exportadores de Petróleo (OPEP).

Nos últimos dois anos, o país passou da 18ª para a 13ª posição no ranking dos produtores de petróleo, conforme o relatório “Statistical Review of World Energy 2011″, da empresa britânica British Petroleum (BP). Com as descobertas das jazidas do pré-sal, as estimativas para as reservas nacionais de petróleo cresceram de 8 bilhões de barris, por volta de 2006, para algo entre 60 bilhões e 70 bilhões, atualmente. Ao colocar esses números na ponta do lápis, Segen calcula que tais cifras representariam uma receita de US$ 4 trilhões para o país, levando-se em conta o preço atual (US$ 100) do barril de petróleo. Ou seja, é um montante similar ao valor corrente do Produto Interno Bruto (PIB) nacional de R$ 4,143 trilhões, em 2011.

Em termos de reservas de petróleo, o pesquisador e professor Eustáquio Vinícius de Castro, do Laboratório de Petróleo da UFES, concorda que o pré-sal colocará o Brasil entre os cinco maiores produtores do petróleo do mundo, como Arábia Saudita, Estados Unidos e Venezuela. “A tecnologia a ser desenvolvida para atender à exploração do pré-sal deve ser estendida, também, para outras áreas, sobretudo as indústrias metal-mecânica e a de química ambiental”, diz.

Como exemplo, Castro cita equipamentos de perfuração de áreas ultraprofundas capazes de suportar fortes pressões, que podem ser utilizados pela construção civil; e agentes químicos (aditivos) que devem estar presente nos aparelhos para remoção de impurezas e purificação do óleo do pré-sal. “Esses aditivos, inclusive, podem ser utilizados na purificação de água residual, gerada por empresas fabricantes de tinta, na despoluição de rios ou de esgotos urbanos”, acrescenta.

Modelo norueguês – Também defensor da exploração do pré-sal, o professor Ricardo Cabral de Azevedo, do Departamento de Engenharia de Minas e de Petróleo da Poli/USP, aconselha o Brasil a adotar o modelo da Noruega na extração do petróleo da camada pré-sal e evitar a chamada “doença holandesa”. “Outros países que tiveram grandes reservas a explorar e produzir são exemplos do que devemos ou não fazer no Brasil”, explica. “A Holanda, por exemplo, sofreu o que ficou sendo conhecido como ‘doença holandesa’, porque sua economia se tornou excessivamente dependente do petróleo. Já a Noruega se transformou radicalmente e hoje é um dos países com maior IDH [Índice de Desenvolvimento Humano] do mundo”, lembra.

Até então, a Noruega era um dos países mais pobres da Europa, cujas finanças dependiam principalmente de exportações de commodities, como minérios e peixes enlatados. A virada da economia norueguesa ocorreu a partir de 1969, quando foram descobertas grandes reservas de petróleo no Mar do Norte e a receita foi dirigida principalmente para saúde e educação. Hoje, esse país europeu detém a terceira maior renda per capita do mundo (US$ 59,3 mil) e o IDH mais alto do planeta.

Royalties para educação e CT&I – Assim, para fazer frente aos desafios que se apresentam na extração do petróleo na camada pré-sal no Brasil, os especialistas reforçam a necessidade de destinar parte significativa da receita dessa atividade para educação, ciência, tecnologia e inovação, seguindo o modelo norueguês. Aliás, essa é uma bandeira levantada pela comunidade científica, representada pela Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência (SBPC).

Os especialistas são unânimes em afirmar que o país precisa aproveitar as riquezas do pré-sal a fim de conquistar novos patamares de desenvolvimento, dar um salto na qualidade na educação e melhorar o capital humano – lembrando que um dia as reservas do petróleo acabarão. “Lembramos que são reservas muito grandes, mas finitas”, alerta Azevedo. “Cabe a nós transformá-las em um legado permanente, investindo na educação e no desenvolvimento do nosso país”, defende.

Já o diretor de tecnologia e inovação da Coppe/UFRJ, Estefen, acrescenta que o país precisa preparar o terreno, na área de pesquisas científicas e tecnológicas, para o período pós-petróleo. Nesse caso, ele considera fundamental assegurar investimentos para ampliar consideravelmente as pesquisas e estudos científicos para o desenvolvimento de tecnologias para produção de energias limpas e renováveis, lembrando que há um esforço de vários países em prol da redução de emissões em médio prazo. Vale destacar que o petróleo é um combustível fóssil que contribui significativamente para o aumento do efeito estufa.

Para o pesquisador da UFES, Castro, que considera positiva a proposta de criação do fundo do pré-sal (fundo soberano) – para o qual deve ser destinada metade da receita do óleo a ser extraído de águas ultraprofundas para educação – a exploração do pré-sal precisa ser inteligente, com responsabilidade ambiental e investimento em educação. “O petróleo traz muita riqueza, mas pode trazer, também, muita pobreza e muito dano ambiental”, lembra. “Por isso, a exploração tem de ser de forma inteligente, com responsabilidade ambiental e investimento em educação.” Hoje as riquezas do petróleo são distribuídas a estados, municípios e União por intermédio de royalties. Pela lei em vigor, os recursos devem ser investidos na parte social do país, “mas as prefeituras fazem mau uso dos recursos”, avalia.

Explorar o pré-sal requer esforços científicos e tecnológicos, considerando que os reservatórios estão a quase sete mil metros de profundidade a partir do nível do mar, com destaque para as Bacias de Santos (SP) e de Campos (RJ). Para fazer frente a esses desafios, Estefen diz que o país precisa mobilizar a comunidade científica nacional, seu conhecimento disponível, criar novos laboratórios, formar capital humano e gerar empregos de qualidade. “Extrair o petróleo do pré-sal vai demandar grande esforço tecnológico, esforços que vão ajudar o Brasil a conquistar novos patamares de desenvolvimento, futuramente”, diz. “Isto é, se usarmos bem os recursos do pré-sal, vamos educar as crianças, desenvolver a indústria, a ciência e a tecnologia. Se seguir tal receituário, o Brasil deverá se destacar no cenário internacional como um dos líderes tecnológicos, dentre os quais figuram Estados Unidos, Japão e países europeus”, conclui.

Pesquisadores analisam os custos ambientais da exploração profunda
Ao colocar na balança os benefícios que as riquezas do pré-sal podem proporcionar ao país e os eventuais custos ambientais, pesquisadores avaliam que o Brasil não pode renunciar à exploração do petróleo em águas profundas, unilateralmente, mesmo reconhecendo que a queima do petróleo contribui para o aquecimento global. Isso não significa que o processo de exploração do pré-sal desconsidere os danos ambientais.

O diretor de tecnologia e inovação da Coppe/UFRJ, Segen Estefen, insiste em dizer que todas as pesquisas em andamento vislumbram a proteção do meio ambiente, em uma tentativa de dar mais segurança às operações. “Não faz sentido o Brasil se beneficiar do petróleo por três ou quatro décadas, mas deixar o país em uma situação ruim para o meio ambiente”, explica.

Hoje os pesquisadores da Coppe, por exemplo, trabalham, simultaneamente, com assuntos ligados tanto à produção de petróleo, nos dias atuais, quanto a outras tecnologias que podem ser usadas na era “pós-petróleo”. Estudam, entre outros aspectos, a produção de eletricidade pelas ondas do mar – uma energia limpa e renovável – aproveitando a mesma estrutura montada e financiada pela indústria do petróleo para desenvolver conhecimento para o período pós-petróleo.

Para o especialista da Coppe/UFRJ, o Brasil não pode renunciar ao óleo do pré-sal porque essa “é uma riqueza importante para o Brasil” por ser uma fonte de energia competitiva. Dessa forma, ele acrescenta, a extração do pré-sal deverá render frutos positivos ao país. “No Brasil, ainda com tanta desigualdade, não podemos abdicar dessas riquezas”, diz. “Se não forem exploradas, talvez, daqui a 50 anos o preço do petróleo não valha metade dos valores atuais.” Por enquanto, Estefen acrescenta, não existe nenhum combustível capaz de substituir o petróleo e nem previsões para os próximos 20 anos, aproximadamente. Além disso, a demanda por essa energia tende a aumentar muito em função do aumento da população e da demanda de países, principalmente nos países asiáticos.

Demonstrando a mesma opinião, o professor Ricardo Cabral de Azevedo, do Departamento de Engenharia de Minas e de Petróleo da Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo (Poli/USP), considera ideal o país investir no conhecimento para substituir o uso do combustível fóssil, paulatinamente, em uma tentativa de minimizar os impactos ambientais. “O fato é que sempre haverá riscos, nessa ou em qualquer outra atividade, mas o ser humano ainda precisa do petróleo”, lembra. “Desse modo, o fundamental é procurarmos reduzi-los ao máximo. Aí também as experiências do passado são fundamentais, para aprendermos com os erros já cometidos.”

O eventual retorno socioeconômico proporcionado pela exploração de petróleo na camada pré-sal compensam os riscos ambientais, na observação do pesquisador e professor Eustáquio Vinícius de Castro, do Laboratório de Petróleo da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES). “Compensam desde que as coisas aconteçam de forma inteligente e sustentável e com racionalidade no processo de produção”, diz. ” Hoje, as empresas petrolíferas, que no passado foram mais poluentes, adotam mais segurança no processo de extração do petróleo, mesmo que alguns problemas aconteçam de vez em quando”.

Dimensão – O petróleo na camada pré-sal ocupa, aproximadamente, uma área de 800 km de comprimento por 200 km de largura, acompanhando a linha do litoral sudeste brasileiro. Segundo dados da Petrobras, desde 2006, foram perfurados mais de 80 poços, tanto na Bacia de Santos quanto na de Campos, com índice “de sucesso exploratório” acima de 80%. A estimativa é de que outras 19 novas plataformas entrem em operação até 2016; e outras 19 entrem em atividade até 2020. Segundo dados de suas assessoria de imprensa, a companhia petrolífera, líder na exploração do pré-sal, encomendou ainda 21 plataformas de produção e 28 sondas de exploração marítima a serem construídas até 2020 no País, além de 49 navios-tanque e centenas de barcos de apoio e serviços offshore.

Statistical Physics Offers a New Way to Look at Climate (Science Daily)

Mar. 5, 2013 — Statistical physics offers an approach to studying climate change that could dramatically reduce the time and brute-force computing that current simulation techniques require. The new approach focuses on fundamental forces that drive climate rather than on “following every little swirl” of water or air.

Two views, two approaches to simulation. Computer-generated images of a planet’s “zonal velocity” (the west-to-east component of wind) use direct numerical simulation (the traditional approach, left) and direct statistical simulation. The latter has limits, but its development is at a very early stage. (Credit: Marston lab/Brown University)

Scientists are using ever more complex models running on ever more powerful computers to simulate Earth’s climate. But new research suggests that basic physics could offer a simpler and more meaningful way to model key elements of climate.

The research, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, shows that a technique called direct statistical simulation does a good job of modeling fluid jets, fast-moving flows that form naturally in oceans and in the atmosphere. Brad Marston, professor of physics at Brown University and one of the authors of the paper, says the findings are a key step toward bringing powerful statistical models rooted in basic physics to bear on climate science.

In addition to the Physical Review Letters paper, Marston will report on the work at a meeting of the American Physical Society to be held in Baltimore this later month.

The method of simulation used in climate science now is useful but cumbersome, Marston said. The method, known as direct numerical simulation, amounts to taking a modified weather model and running it through long periods of time. Moment-to-moment weather — rainfall, temperatures, wind speeds at a given moment, and other variables — is averaged over time to arrive at the climate statistics of interest. Because the simulations need to account for every weather event along the way, they are mind-bogglingly complex, take a long time run, and require the world’s most powerful computers.

One practical advantage of the new approach: the ability to model climate conditions from millions of years ago without having to reconstruct the world’s entire weather history.Direct statistical simulation, on the other hand, is a new way of looking at climate. “The approach we’re investigating,” Marston said, “is the idea that one can directly find the statistics without having to do these lengthy time integrations.”

It’s a bit like the approach physicists use to describe the behavior of gases.

“Say you wanted to describe the air in a room,” Marston said. “One way to do it would be to run a giant supercomputer simulation of all the positions of all of the molecules bouncing off of each other. But another way would be to develop statistical mechanics and find that the gas actually obeys simple laws you can write down on a piece of paper: PV=nRT, the gas equation. That’s a much more useful description, and that’s the approach we’re trying to take with the climate.”

Conceptually, the technique focuses attention on fundamental forces driving climate, instead of “following every little swirl,” Marston said. A practical advantage would be the ability to model climate conditions from millions of years ago without having to reconstruct the world’s entire weather history in the process.

The theoretical basis for direct statistical simulation has been around for nearly 50 years. The problem, however, is that the mathematical and computational tools to apply the idea to climate systems aren’t fully developed. That is what Marston and his collaborators have been working on for the last few years, and the results in this new paper show their techniques have good potential.

The paper, which Marston wrote with University of Leeds mathematician Steve Tobias, investigates whether direct statistical simulation is useful in describing the formation and characteristics of fluid jets, narrow bands of fast-moving fluid that move in one direction. Jets form naturally in all kinds of moving fluids, including atmospheres and oceans. On Earth, atmospheric jet streams are major drivers of storm tracks.

For their study, Marston and Tobias simulated the jets that form as a fluid moves on a hypothetical spinning sphere. They modeled the fluid using both the traditional numerical technique and their statistical technique, and then compared the output of the two models. They found that the models generally arrived at similar values for the number of jets that would form and the strength of the airflow, demonstrating that statistical simulation can indeed be used to model jets.

There were limits, however, to what the statistical model could do. The study found that as pace of adding and removing energy to the fluid system increased, the statistical model started to break down. Marston and Tobias are currently working on an expansion of their technique to deal with that problem.

Despite the limitation, Marston is upbeat about the potential for the technique. “We’re very pleased that it works as well as it did here,” he said.

Since completing the study, Marston has integrated the method into a computer program called “GCM” that he has made easily available via Apple’s Mac App Store for other researchers to download. The program allows users to build their own simulations, comparing numerical and statistical models. Marston expects that researchers who are interested in this field will download it and play with the technique on their own, providing new insights along the way. “I’m hoping that citizen-scientists will also explore climate modeling with it as well, and perhaps make a discovery or two,” he said.

There’s much more work to be done on this, Marston stresses, both in solving the energy problem and in scaling the technique to model more realistic climate systems. At this point, the simulations have only been applied to hypothetical atmospheres with one or two layers. Earth’s atmosphere is a bit more complex than that.

“The research is at a very early stage,” Marston said, “but it’s picking up steam.”

Related app:http://www.brown.edu/Research/Environmental_Physics/Environmental_Physics/Code.html

Journal Reference:

  1. S. M. Tobias, J. B. Marston. Direct Statistical Simulation of Out-of-Equilibrium Jets. Physical Review Letters, 2013 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.104502