Heat Waves, Smog Warnings & No Man's Lands

In the evolutionary, historical sense, human beings really aren't that different from other animals. The human species emerged as a result of optimal environmental conditions. There are lots of places on Earth that human hands had never touched up until the last few hundred years, and although they've nearly all been explored save a few, at most of these hostile locales it just doesn't make any sense for people to stay.

The interior of Alaska comes to mind. The Rub' Al-Khali might be another. Maybe that god-forsaken Black Rock City. You won't find any permanent encampments or signs of civilization there, because the climate is just too forbidding, too harsh for humanity to exist in any substantial way.

With some exceptions, you can mostly trace the spread of human civilization as it developed, and along the way you can pick out the places people broke ground with some accuracy. Follow the water. Look where the climate is most palatable. Catal Huyuk didn't spring up from the empty quarter of the Arabian Desert, it emerged from a place where an agricultural life could be easy for people. As humanity transitioned from a pastoral lifestyle to a sedentary, urban one, it assembled into organized enclaves in places that were most conducive to life.

The oral traditions of humanity are rife with stories of cataclysmic change leaving cities unlivable. Plato describes an unrecorded, prehistoric civilization that is undone by all-too-human hubris and swallowed by the ocean. Western mythology, especially the mythology of the fertile crescent, all share the common thread of a great flood that covers the whole world. And in more recent times, fanciful Romantic authors and 19th century Spiritualists described the lost continents of Mu and Lemuria sinking and leaving a diaspora of people in their wakes.

But there's no need to look to sandaled philosophers of great antiquity or tarot-reading occult-book-store crystal-wavers for the truth about what it looks like when a place becomes unlivable. The truth is, it might happen so slowly and so imperceptibly that you wouldn't notice it, and you one day wake up and realize you can't leave your house.

This summer has been the hottest on record for the Pacific Northwest. It had a late start, and I recall often opining that if it stayed as mild as it had been, it might not get very hot at all this year. Then, in late July, the thermometers broke, and Seattle's previous record temperature was shattered by a 103°F afternoon. Lucky for us, Seattle's topography contribute to a weather pattern that keeps the air quality here pretty decent. It's almost always clear enough to see Mt. Rainier from the I5 bridge in the University District. We've got it pretty good here.

Not so for Vancouver BC. Wildfires in Lillooet, record breaking heat and an urban population that owns 2.3 cars per household despite a vast mass transit system, along with geographic features surrounding the city that trap smog in to boot, all coalesced as factors in a perfect storm to send the air quality index in the Metro Vancouver area hurtling to level 6, the highest in memory for the bourgeois business-class yuppies who make their living there. Asthmatics and people suffering from respiratory diseases were recommended to stay indoors, and though it would dissipate in a matter of days, the effect of the air quality warning was troubling. How could a place with such strict emissions controls and an incomparably responsible society, bent on being green, be so thick with pollution?

But Vancouver's air pollution problem pales in comparison to Beijing's. Following the failure of Mao's Great Leap Forward, Deng Xiaoping led the Communist Party of China to adopt what it termed "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", a pastiche of both ideological Marxism and, with a certain grudging acknowledgement to pragmatism, contrarian Capitalist concepts as well. With barely a sliver of an opening to the absurd vastness of the Chinese consumer markets, virtually overnight the country became solvent, and within a decade the poverty rate had been slashed from more than half of the country's 1 billion during the Mao era to a shrinking 12% in 1981 and single-digits more recently.

The Beijing of 2009 is just under 3 times as large as it was prior to the economic reforms, and duplicate success stories raise metropolises across the country at a rapid clip. With the new-found prosperity came all the trappings of modern first-world nations: cars, skyscrapers, airports, luxury apartments, corporate identities, advertisements and, at the heart of it all, manufacturing plants making the export goods that fuels China's economic breakthrough.

Beijing has arrived, and by 2009 China has become the reigning economic power in the world, but rapid modernization brought the unintended consequence of unchecked, unchallenged release of greenhouse gases the likes of which the world has never seen. Forbes Magazine estimates that the 10 most polluted cities in the world are all in China, and the Chinese government claims nearly one and a half million premature deaths occur as a result of poor air quality every year. Where Vancouver's air quality might be dangerous for people already at risk, Beijing is consistently shrouded in a dark grey porridge that chokes healthy people to death and reduces visibility to less than the length of a city block.

The point I'm trying to make here, is that humanity is turning the places it makes it's bed unlivable. The non-stop, uninterrupted release of not just the greenhouse gases that feed into self-perpetuating feedback loops and precipitate global climate change, but also the real nasty stuff that comes out of your exhaust pipe and your chimney and every coal power plant you use when you charge up your iPhone, is slowly but surely making those archetypal myths of cataclysmic change seem prophetic at best and at worst like observations that self-similarity in man's inhumanity to man scales up and will eventually kill us. There's no sense in this. We're committing suicide on a global scale, and we're doing it in a really weak, wimpy, cowardly way that betrays our imprinted consumerist apathy.

That's why offsetting your personal carbon footprint is so important. If everyone in Seattle, Vancouver and Beijing paid for their yearly carbon output, we would solve the global ecology crisis in less time than it took for China to awaken from it's ideologically-lullabied slumber. All it takes is pointing your browser at http://www.offsetcarbonfootprint.org/. All the links are there, they'll help you calculate your carbon footprint and give you all the tools you need to decide how you'd like to offset your carbon. They make it easy! They'll accept all major payment methods and will even offer you a certified guarantee. All you've got to do is make the choice to take responsibility for your share of climate change.

Are you ready to do the right thing? Time is of the essence, so don't delay. Do it today.

What Are Greenhouse Gases?

Carbon is the fourth most prevalent element in the solar system. It's the bedrock of all known organic life. Carbon dioxide is recycled into oxygen by all plants and animals. It's in a sort of dynamo between animals and plants exchanging CO2 for oxygen, filtering out the natural clear background noise of the environment and providing a relatively nice planet to live on. It evolved this way. This is why life is possible on Earth.

The planet has come to this fragile state by a delicate balancing act perfected over 4.6 billion years. It arose out of nature, like a flower from concrete. One could spend a lifetime covering what the philosophers say about that! But science shows that Earth is fundamentally unguarded and vulnerable to changes that may be imperceptible to us.

By the late 18th century, the Enlightenment had brought not only revolutions of the mind and state, but also technological revolutions, and the mechanical amusements of the ultrarich landed aristocrats became affordable to a new class of merchant, who presided over factories and smokestacks to become captains of industry and railroad barons. Tall, brick exhaust towers emerged on the horizon, and a malaise of thick haze spread over the land.

Fast forward 150 years. In the 1950's, America returns from World War II flush with triumph and economic prosperity, and so began another technological revolution, where a new class of postwar successes slid smoothly into the prefab suburbs, all in gleaming chrome Cadillacs, streaming down the 16 lane highways full of cars, smiling in averaged-off numbers like 3.6, Mom & Dad & Buddy & Sis and even the family dog. Now, that same dream of owning some kind of great guzzling machine became not only feasible for the factory owner -- now it was affordable to the workers, too. The ubiquity of cars duplicated the effect of the paper mills and smokestacks of the industrial age, and the murky soup hanging over cities started getting thicker.

What people don't realize when they witness air pollution firsthand, is that it accumulates. The carbon that humanity is releasing right now is adding to a mass that contains the same carbon that was released when the first factory switched on. Greenhouse gases don't just go away. They accumulate.

Environmentalism and the broader tradition of conservationism have always existed in some form or another, but the modern Green movement is an unprecedented break with that most august and austere tradition. The effects of unchallenged emission of greenhouse gases are self-evident, and so even the factory owner has to stroke his chin and wonder aloud if the businesses of ruining the Earth and poisoning the seas are going to effect his bottom line. The U.S. military increasingly relies on solar power as it's primary source of electricity, since operational security demands an uninterrupted source of power. They're betting on the long-term viability of oil, or rather a lack thereof.

This is why buying offsets is so important. Whether you're a commuter paying off the 4 tons of carbon you produce per year, or a CEO of a Fortune 500 infrastructure company with an international fleet of cargo jets and supertankers, you can cancel out your carbon production by purchasing offsets and contributing to the global effort to change the world. It doesn't cost much, and it's for everybody! It's easy, and OffsetCarbonFootprint.org does everything for you and makes it easier than anyone else. Do the right thing for the environment. Now's a great time.

Clean Coal Can't Get A Break In City Hall

Call it a strange twist of fate or just a failure of the democratic process to resolve a crisis. Call it a case of NIMBYism, or, perhaps in this case, NUMBYism. Call it whatever you want, but the cat's out of the bag and the truth is out; the famous German coal capture and storage (CCS) project, which proposed to produce electricity through traditional coal-powered means but then capture the carbon emissions and bury them underground, has been releasing CO2 gas into the atmosphere all along.

The plant was opened in September of 2008, and was immediately heralded as a solution to the developing world's growing demand and sharp cost margins. With CCS systems, countries like India and China, which have both relied heavily on coal power plants to fuel their explosive economic growth over the past decade, could retain their existing infrastructure while curbing the wanton release of CO2 into the atmosphere. In other words, coal capture and storage was going to let the developing world have their cake and eat it too.

At least in theory. In a stunning admission, Staffan Gortz, a sort of PR figure for the project, said at a recent conference that the plants have been releasing CO2 gas directly into the atmosphere all along, citing resistance from the public as the main reason that the CCS systems haven't yet come online. "It was supposed to begin injecting by March or April of this year, but we don't have a permit. This is a result of the local public having questions about the safety of the project."

The prospect of a public backlash against clean coal is troubling, and potentially chilling. While numerous environmental profiling teams have shown time and time over that there would be very minimal consequence if any to public health in storing CO2 underground, the grave consequences of recklessly releasing carbon into the atmosphere are all around us, evident at every level of the natural world, and throw the very future of humanity into question. With Vattenfall (the Swedish company that has invested €70m to build the plants) meeting resistance at every turn from an uninformed public armed with veto power to forbid the project from moving forward, the danger is that the quasi-populist meme of perceived undesirability for CCS projects among town councils and city halls might gain a foothold and become a more broadly held position, permanently stunting the spread and adoption of CCS technology and prolonging our planetary nightmare. Unfortunately for us, only time will tell.

(Source: http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gmg/op/sr9W_6zSGd03e3RtcOrYA_w/view.m?id=137163&tid=120787&chk_my-text=t,1;c,1&cat=Climate_change)

India Balks At Carbon-Caps While Bengali Tigers Dwindle

A meeting today in India between American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Indian Minister of Environment and Forests began innocently enough. It was meant to be just another dull photo op, one more chance for the venerable state figures to shake hands, mug gleaming, straight aristocratic grins for the cameras and have their pictures snapped by hordes of press photographers, this time in the ITC Green Centre, corporate headquarters of the ITC hotel chain and a "platinum certified green building", to punctuate the message that India is committed to limiting it's carbon footprint.

But then, everything went wrong.

“There is simply no case for the pressure” the U.S. is exerting, considering India produces among the lowest per capita emissions in the world, Minister Jairam Ramesh told Clinton during an unexpected discussion of climate negotiations during an event intended to showcase U.S.-Indian cooperation on clean energy at a “green” office building outside New Delhi.

“As if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours,” Ramesh said, referring to a climate-change bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on June 26 that imposes tariffs on exports from countries that refuse to adopt greenhouse gas controls by 2020.

[ . . . ]

“We look upon you suspiciously because you have not fulfilled” the commitments made by developed countries in earlier climate treaties, Ramesh told Clinton and Stern, adding there’s a “credibility crisis” that industrialised nations will have to overcome in their demands of poor nations.

This is, of course, problematic for the Obama administration, which has been pushing for emissions caps on the developing world since the G8 summit earlier this summer, likely to ramp up worldwide support for a binding cap-and-trade initiative come December at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Thus far the response from those developing nations has been tepid at best and at worst hostile -- witness China's visible absence from the G8 summit this year, along with their stated intention to increase emissions in response to demand.

The signs of ecological decay aren't far from the ITC Green Centre. You need only travel to one of India's largest swaths of protected wilderness, Panna Tiger Preserve, to see for yourself the end result of our impact on the environment.

The park, in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, was part of the country's efforts to save the famous Royal Bengal Tiger from extinction.

State Minister of Forests Rajendra Shukla said that the reserve, which three years ago had 24 tigers, no longer had any.

A special census was conducted in the park by a premier wildlife institute, after the forest authorities reported no sightings of the animals for a long time.

[ . . . ]

While this controversy rages, there have been reports that another national park in Madhya Pradesh, Sanjay National Park, which was included in the tiger project three years ago, also has no tigers left.

One is lead to wonder if the iconic Bengali Tiger, symbolic of the exotic and mysterious character of India, will become another statistic, another miscalculated sacrifice for the creeping lurch toward unipolar regional dominance.

(Sources:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601091&sid=aLjVkAtjjyr0
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8150382.stm)