An Obituary for a Planet? "Climate Change Has Run Its Course" - WSJ

Has the plutocracy outwaited the climate change issue? According to the Wall Street Journal the global political caste has lost interest in the whole carbon emissions cutting thing. That's over.

Climate change is over. No, I’m not saying the climate will not change in the future, or that human influence on the climate is negligible. I mean simply that climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.

Judged by deeds rather than words, most national governments are backing away from forced-marched decarbonization. You can date the arc of climate change as a policy priority from 1988, when highly publicized congressional hearings first elevated the issue, to 2018. President Trump’s ostentatious withdrawal from the Paris Agreement merely ratified a trend long becoming evident. 

This outcome was predictable. Political scientist Anthony Downs described the downward trajectory of many political movements in an article for the Public Interest, “Up and Down With Ecology: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle,’ ” published in 1972, long before the climate-change campaign began. Observing the movements that had arisen to address issues like crime, poverty and even the U.S.-Soviet space race, Mr. Downs discerned a five-stage cycle through which political issues pass regularly. 

The first stage involves groups of experts and activists calling attention to a public problem, which leads quickly to the second stage, wherein the alarmed media and political class discover the issue. The second stage typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call it the “dopamine” stage—as activists conceive the issue in terms of global peril and salvation. This tendency explains the fanaticism with which divinity-school dropouts Al Gore and Jerry Brown have warned of climate change. 

Then comes the third stage: the hinge. As Mr. Downs explains, there soon comes “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.” That’s where we’ve been since the United Nations’ traveling climate circus committed itself to the fanatical mission of massive near-term reductions in fossil fuel consumption, codified in unrealistic proposals like the Kyoto Protocol. This third stage, Mr. Downs continues, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem.”

...Americans have consistently ranked climate change the 19th or 20th of 20 leading issues on the annual Pew Research Center poll, while Gallup’s yearly survey of environmental issues typically ranks climate change far behind air and water pollution. 

“In the final stage,” Mr. Downs concludes, “an issue that has been replaced at the center of public concern moves into a prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest.” Mr. Downs predicted correctly that environmental issues would suffer this decline, because solving such issues involves painful trade-offs that committed climate activists would rather not make. 

The article, written by Steven Hayward of the Department of Governmental Studies at Berkley, may sound cynical but it's fairly accurate. You would find few environmentalists of the Dark Mountain community who would dispute Hayward's central argument.

Government, certainly the Canadian government, is not going to rapidly decarbonize our society or our economy. That much should be obvious from the childish and gestural responses of the current government which, as we know, at least pays lip service to climate change as the greatest single threat facing our nation. What we're getting from Ottawa is not the way any nation facing a great, existential threat responds to that looming danger.

I have for years argued that fighting climate change as a standalone threat is futile. That will simply not work because climate change is just one component of a much larger and infinitely more lethal peril. It is responding to a house engulfed in flames and deciding you'll fight the fire in the diningroom while the rest of the house is consumed.

Speaking of which, the Global Footprint Network, has announced that Earth Overshoot Day 2018 will fall on August 1st. That's the day on which mankind - us, you and me - consumes an entire year's worth of the planet's renewable resources - water, air, biomass. It is the day on which we exhaust Earth's annual ecological carrying capacity. We manage to survive, some of us thrive, for the remaining five months by "eating our seed corn." That's a term for unsustainable consumption, raiding the already dwindling planetary reserves of life-giving resources.

To illustrate our predicament, we're currently devouring the Earth's resources at 1.7 times our biosphere's carrying capacity. To be in balance we would need Earth plus a donor planet 70 per cent as large as our own. And that's only because so much of humanity is impoverished and unable to rapaciously consume resources as we do. If all 7.5 billion of us had the same ecological footprint as Americans and Canadians, we would need at least four planet Earths to break even. Here's a neat graphic that illustrates this dilemma, nation by nation.

Ya see? If only everybody on the planet was a Canadian, we'd consume a whole year's worth of resources by March 18. That's still better than those damned Americans at March 15. August, are you kidding? That's for Third World punks.

If you really want to get your "guilt on" you can even work out your very own, personal, individual ecological footprint here. Sinners, repent.

The point is that Potemkin environmentalism of the sort practiced by our governments doesn't just look gestural, it is gestural. It's strictly for show.

Justin Trudeau, like every prime minister before him, is still obsessed with the pursuit of perpetual, exponential growth. The global economy is already 70 per cent bigger than the environment. We have gone beyond the breathable atmosphere. It's like being on a space walk and removing your helmet. You simply cannot live out there - not for very long.

Trudeau and his predecessors are and have been blind to the idea of a global economy shrunk so that it once again is within the safety margins of our environment, our one and only biosphere. They can't picture what that would mean, how it might be achieved.

Whether Steve Hayward is being unduly cynical really doesn't matter.

If you find this all too vague and theoretical but you did manage to handle grade school math, David Suzuki will explain our predicament in the most basic, easy to understand, manner.



So whether it's climate change or over-consumption of life-sustaining resources or overpopulation, you can go to bed at night knowing that your government hasn't got a fucking clue how to deal with any of it. They are stuck in a "don't worry, be happy" mentality. Trump is the worst, okay, fair enough, but the rest aren't far behind him.

Big Day Tomorrow - It's Earth Overshoot Day - August 13, 2015.

Tomorrow is Earth Overshoot Day, the date on which mankind has gobbled up a full year's worth of renewable resources - biomass, water and such.

The date falls a couple of days earlier every year as we increase our consumption levels beyond our planet's carrying capacity.  Each year brings us ever closer to our ecological breaking point, the point of civilizational collapse.

It's sort of like spending $150 for every $100 you earn. You can get away with it for a while but not forever. Eventually the bills come in and there's no money left to go out.

As I've written many times before, the evidence of Overshoot is all around us. It's tangible, palpable even visible to the naked eye. It appears in the form of ecological degradation. From the International Space Station crew members can gaze down and see glaciers retreating, dried up lakes, rivers that no longer reach the sea. They can see dust clouds that rise over China and cross the Pacific to North America. They can see algae blooms, oceanic dead zones, that show up along our coasts.  NASA's Grace satellites record the surface subsidence caused by the rapid draining of our aquifers for irrigation.  We see it on our docks in the collapse of global fisheries made good only by "fishing down the food chain." It is manifested in the accumulation of pollution in excess of nature's cleansing capacity.

From tomorrow, August 13, until December 31 we're left with eating our seed corn. For more than a third of the year we'll go into ecological deficit, consuming nature's ever dwindling resource reserves. Those reserves are dwindling, some of them faster than we imagine if we think about such things at all.

Here's the thing. It's not just that we're consuming more resources than Earth can supply. It's that we're dependent on that. We're on a path that, for a good portion of mankind, must be terminal.  Too many mouths at the table and all of them wanting a second helping of the apple pie.

You don't have to be brilliant to understand this. You just have to be sane.  The trick is to understand this and remain sane. That's too much for a lot of people so they take the default option and just try to forget about it.  Psychologists call that a "defence mechanism" only in this case it's just the opposite.

And the Band Played On

It's generally accepted in the scientific community that it takes one to several centuries, on average, for species to truly adapt to a 1 degree Celsius shift in temperature, up or down.

Look around today and you'll see species "running" for their lives, continually migrating ever further away from the equatorial zone.  Some species, particularly those that swim or fly, have a big advantage when it comes to migration.  Plants aren't quite so lucky yet it's calculated that, in totality, they too are migrating at about 8-inches every year.

From my perch out here on the Pacific we see lots of signs of this migration out of the south.  Humpbacks have returned to our waters in big numbers.  Large schools of white sided dolphins have arrived bringing pods of transient orca with them.  California has lost its once abundant anchovies which might be the same populations that have recently shown up here.  Victoria now even has a resident flock of brown pelicans that have taken up residence between the provincial capital and Race Rocks.

This may be a case where the race goes to the swiftest in which event there'll be plenty of losers.

One of the most prominent experts in this area is the University of Hawaii's Camilo Mora, whose specialties include biogeography, geology and climate data modeling.  Mora and his fellow researchers made headlines a couple of years ago when they produced a study that forecasts 2047 as the year by which every year that follows - every year - will be hotter than the hottest year that area has experienced over the previous century and a half, a phenomenon called "climate departure."  Some places will reach that point long before then:

Mora forecasts that the unprecedented heat starts in 2020 with Manokwari, Indonesia. Then Kingston, Jamaica. Within the next two decades, 59 cities will be living in what is essentially a new climate, including Singapore, Havana, Kuala Lumpur and Mexico City.

In an interview last year with Yale University's e360 Project, Mora touched on the frustration caused researchers by the public's and their leaders' reluctance to respond to the plain science.

You don’t see any action on these things. And the problem is that these things die away pretty quickly. The press coverage of this paper lasted two days. We were in the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN. And next week, people were talking about something else. So as scientists, we are struggling to figure out how we can increase public awareness on this issue.

Pope Francis stirred up a lot of reaction last week to his papal encyclical on climate change in which he focused on climate change and over-consumption, especially by the advantaged countries, that were wrecking the environment. The pope, however, disingenuously gave overpopulation a pass.  Mora disagrees.  To him our population loading is already excessive.

Well, it’s paramount because people need food. And the planet is limited in the amount of resources that it can produce. We already have calculated that the planet has on the order of 11 billion hectares that can be harvested in a sustainable manner. Of course we can increase the number by increasing technology, but that’s been happening for the last three decades. The worldwide population is 7 billion people, and we know that to sustain a human being you need on the order of two hectares per person. That means that the world human population every year consumes on the order of 14 billion hectares. The planet only has eleven to give to us.

This doesn't take into account the more recent research about global soil degradation and the mounting threat to food security.  In March, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization released a report on the ongoing degradation of our stocks of arable land, warning that a lot of our topsoil over the next 60-years will be ruined by intensive agriculture and the use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.  Like Mora's research and the Living Planet Report, 2014 finding that we have lost half our wildlife over the past 30 years, the UNFAO study was almost immediately flushed straight down the memory hole, completely forgotten.

Much of Mora's claims about overpopulation is borne out by research conducted by the NGO, Global Footprint Network, which tracks the biomass deficit that has set in around the world (only a handful of countries, Canada being one, remain in a biomass surplus).  From this the GFN issues an annual release to mark "Earth Overshoot Day," the date on which we exhaust a full year's supply of the planet's renewable resources.  Just a few years ago, Overshoot fell in mid October.  Now it has advanced to August.  For the balance of the year we deplete Earth's resource reserves and the rate at which our over-consumption is accelerating is a warning that we're depleting those reserves rapidly too.

In 2014, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 19.  This year it will arrive on August 15.  For more on that and GFN's take on the papal encyclical, you can go here.  

Professor Mora faults the environmental community, including the Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for deliberately ducking the overpopulation issue.

Mora: It’s pure fear. It seems amazing, but friends of mine recommended to me not to publish that paper. They said, “This paper is going to be damaging to you. You don’t get it. You don’t need it.” What is remarkable, though, is that after the paper got published, I had multiple people calling me to endorse it.

e360: Did they endorse it publicly?

Mora: No, just to me. This is really the problem. But why we don’t take it on? I have no clue. Because the data are very clear. I guess the problem is that it can backfire. We have seen, historically, situations in which a scientist has taken on an issue and there are people who have been fired, or attacked by interest groups. So I guess the problem is fear of retaliation.

If he's right, if the scientific community is already too intimidated to address the issue of overpopulation, then we're genuinely screwed.  The pope hit two of three - climate change and over-consumption - but if you can't address overpopulation, you have almost completely undermined your chances of effective action on the other two.

We're already seeing the impacts of climate change but doing little to prepare for what those early impacts tell us is coming.  For now we're forestalling the consequences of ever increasing over-consumption by raiding the Earth's diminishing resource reserves. We have no collective will to even begin tackling overpopulation. 

We comfort ourselves by talking in terms of what might happen by 2100.  Oh hell, we'll all be gone by then anyway so, no big deal.  But, if Mora's research is accurate, "climate departure" begins to set in by 2020 and then spreads across the world until every country is hit by 2047.   

When Overshoot Meets Inequality

Tuesday marked Earth Overshoot Day, 2014.  August 19th was the day by which humankind had consumed an entire year's production of renewable resources. Overall that means we're using resources more than 1.5 times the rate at which the Earth can replace them.  EOD is a moving target that, unfortunately, keeps moving in the wrong direction.

Overshoot Day got me thinking of a study that came out in March that found abrupt societal collapse was and will be triggered by two factors - overconsumption and inequality.  The researchers concluded that today's global civilization is in the throes of these very forces.

Among the findings, an egalitarian society that limits consumption to less than the natural carrying capacity of its environment can achieve an equilibrium.  Failure to live within our environment's limitations (see Overshoot above) inevitably leads to collapse.  Likewise, inequality, if not held in check, grows exponentially, also leading to collapse.  The rapid rise in inequality over the past three decades suggests we're also in the end-game phase envisioned in this research.

And so the question is, now that we've got the data and this research, what are we going to do about it?  Steady State or Full Earth economics specifically addresses what we need to restore our society to a state of equilibrium but we're saddled with a political class (in Canada, all three major parties) that are absolutely obsessed with perpetual, exponential growth.  There are two locomotives racing toward each other headlong on the same track.  One is being driven by our political class. The other is being driven by reality.  How do you think this ends?  Abruptly?


     
     
Source:LiveScience
 

August 19, 2014 - Earth Overshoot Day

Relax, it's not a holiday.  It's not something to celebrate.  It is however a day of observance.

For 2014, August 19th represents the day on which mankind has consumed a full year's worth of renewable, natural resources.  That also means that, for the rest of the year, we'll be dipping into nature's resource reserves, "eating our seed corn" if you will.   That ensures that Earth Overshoot Day, 2015 will fall well prior to August 19.

Just a few years ago Earth Overshoot Day fell in October, the ninth month.  Now it's arriving in the seventh month.  You can do the math and see where this is headed.  Here's a chart tracing the advance of Earth Overshoot Day.

Overshoot impacts take several forms.  Deforestation is one, desertification (the exhaustion of farmland and its transformation into barren desert) is another.  The emptying of aquifers is a manifestation of overshoot.  So too is the collapse of global fisheries through overfishing.  Another form of overshoot is the accumulation of pollution and other contaminants in our air, soil and water which reflects that we're outpacing nature's capacity to clean our environment.

Here's another way to visualize overshoot in the context of the planet's maximum carrying capacity and our excess consumption.  Overshoot causes carrying capacity to decline so that the ecological deficit steadily grows.

It's Here - Earth Overshoot Day, This Year 20 August, 2013

Tuesday, August 20, marks Earth Overshoot Day for 2013.  This is not a record to celebrate.  It tells us that, in under eight months, mankind exhausts an entire annual supply of renewable resources.  After that, we're eating our seed corn.   Another way of looking at it is that, at current rates of biomass consumption we need 1.5 planet Earths.

Now you might be asking yourself how mankind could possibly be using up more renewable resources than the Earth can provide?  The answer is we're very good at it or very bad at it.

Biomass provides us the stuff we consume.  It also absorbs and cleans the contaminants we create.   On both counts we're running a rather huge environmental deficit.   This can be seen to the naked eye from the space station in forms such as desertification, the exhaustion of arable land and its transformation into sterile desert, and deforestation or the growing problem of agricultural runoff spilling from coastal estuaries causing ocean dead zones.  Satellites can detect surface subsidence caused by our rapacious depletion of groundwater resources - aquifers.  It's also manifested in collapsed global fisheries.   Less visible are the increasingly contaminated land, air and water resources.

There are just a few countries, a bare handful, that haven't yet crossed into ecological deficit.   Canada, thanks only to our relatively small population, is one of the few.  We have a chance to keep it that way but it will take a conscious decision, planning and perhaps some sacrifice to make that happen.  Time is not on our side.

If you want a clear idea of where Canada and the rest of the world stand on overshoot, go to the Global Footprint Network website.  While they're a scientific think tank, their research is presented for lay visitors.  Their goal isn't to scare you senseless.  That would be self-defeating.  What they seek is to make our planet's finite limits central to our planning and thereby regain our ability to live within those limits.  It's a laudable mission statement but it's an even bigger reach than the goal of decarbonizing our global economy. Still it's not "pie in the sky" to use this research to realize where Canada stands, what we stand amidst, and how we need to plan our future.

Overshoot is the harbinger of ecological collapse.   As the graph above depicts, consumption (the red line) continues to increase even as the Earth's carrying capacity, it's ability to replenish renewable resources, falls into decline.  Eventually consumption peaks due to the exhaustion of renewables and it plummets while overtaking even the diminished available carrying capacity.

Consumption today continues to increase.  The Earth's carrying capacity, signified by the advancing arrival of Overshoot Day, is already heavily in decline.   Just five or six years ago, Overshoot Day fell in October.   Now it's well within August.  With the expansion of middle class consumerism in India and China, where will Overshoot be five years from now?

Earth Overshoot Day - August 22, 2012

In 2006 when I first wrote of it, it happened on October 9th.   Just six years later it has crept up to August 22, almost seven weeks earlier.

"It" is Earth Overshoot Day, the benchmark of our planet's day of ecological reckoning.   It's the day on which mankind is determined to have consumed a full year's worth of renewable resources.

What that means is that, for 2012, for the balance of the year after the 22nd day of the 8th month, we'll be "eating our seed corn."   We'll be dependent on the Earth's reserves, consuming them at an ever increasing pace.



How can man be using more resources than the Earth can provide?   Quite easily.   The signs are everywhere.   They're tangible, they're measurable, some are even visible to the naked eye from space.   Among these many signs are deforestation, the logging off of essential forestlands.  That's easily spotted from space.   Then there's desertification.   That occurs largely through the exhaustion of once arable farmland and its transformation into barren desert.   Farmers overwork the land, supercharging it with heavy applications of fertilizer and intensive irrigation, until the soil itself gives up the ghost.   Other farmland is being lost due to irrigation with water containing trace amounts of salt that, over time, accumulates in the soil and turns it sterile.

Another form of overshoot is our widespread depletion of global fisheries through overharvesting and destruction of marine environments.   We have become so accustomed to it that many don't bat an eye at the introduction of new fish species in their shops.   It's the result of "fishing down the food chain," a process that refers to moving to a new, less desirable fish after exhausting the better option.

Then there's the destruction of renewable resources through contamination.   It's been reported in China that up to 40% of the country's farmland has been contaminated by arsenic and heavy metals released from industrial smokestacks.  Last year it was revealed that 12-billion kgs. of Chinese foodstocks were ruined by heavy metals contamination and there's no word on how much actually reached Chinese markets.   And an astonishing percentage of that country's lakes and rivers are also so contaminated by industrial discharge as to be unfit for human consumption.   The loss of renewable resources from man-made contamination is also factored into Earth Overshoot Day.

A critical form of Overshoot that is finally coming to widespread attention is the depletion of groundwater stocks, aquifers, that are drained to exhaustion for agricultural irrigation.   This is a serious threat to India which has relied on its groundwater stocks to implement the country's Green Revolution and which now faces the double whammy of groundwater depletion compounded by the newly unpredictable monsoon rains.   Even the United States isn't exempt.   There the mighty Ogallala aquifer that underlies eight states that comprise America's "bread basket" is becoming seriously depleted.

We can see Overshoot.    We can measure it.   We find its presence in our grocery stores and our wallets.   Yet it's not on the agenda of our political leadership except for piecemeal initiatives of marginal effectiveness.   And we can measure their indifference also.   It can be calculated by the annual movement of World Overshoot Day.   Six years ago, October 9.    This year, August 22.  The spread, the number of days that Overshoot has advanced, is the measure of global political neglect.

Overshoot is about excessive consumption and contamination of the Earth's renewable resources.   It is not the result of global warming although climate change does impact the speed by which Overshoot advances.   Unfortunately, any serious discussion of Overshoot introduces issues many politicians, especially our corporatist political classes in the West, would be loathe to consider.

Do we seek, somehow, to hold China and India accountable for their contribution to overpopulation?   Can we scrutinize them and endure being scrutinized ourselves?  We are, after all, the industrialized world that has bolstered atmospheric greenhouse gas accumulations sufficient to already warm the atmosphere enough to warp the planet's hydrological cycle, altering essential precipitation patterns and leaving flooding and drought in their stead.   And at whom do we point accusatory fingers for the rapacious pillaging of world fisheries stocks?   What of our gluttonous ravaging of our groundwater resources?

It's not finger pointing, however, that has global leadership terrified.   It's what must inevitably follow that playground diversion - an assessment of what lies in store if we continue to overexploit our planet's renewable resources and just what we're going to have to do to avoid that "worst scenario" outcome.

There are several reforms that could make a big difference, even if not nearly big enough to actually reverse Overshoot.   One, the source of angry controversy, is to "price" nature.   At the moment industry and industrial agriculture consume enormous amounts of essentially free, natural resources, particularly water.    If these resources were treated as a public trust and given a realistic market value to be levied against those who exploit them industrially it would be a game changer.  

Opponents rush to claim it would simply be turned into an additional cost to the consumer, a simplistic and only partly true retort.   Those consumers, through their governments, would have the offsetting benefit of the industrial levies.   Industrial behaviour would also be powerfully reshaped.   When resources are free, you treat them as though they're free.   When they have a meaningful value, you treat them as any other cost of production - very astutely and frugally.   Those who squander properly valued resources incur uncompetitive costs and suffer in the marketplace.   Those who don't, who find ways to reduce their consumption and waste, reap competitive advantages.

But, until our leaders are prepared to acknowledge the problem of Overshoot, we'll never have the essential discussions, consensus and reforms to even slow much less arrest or reverse Overshoot.  And so we'll be left to live in increasing imbalance with our ecosystem, something that is manifestly unsustainable.

We can't live this way.   Why do we pretend we can?

Update -

Here is an excellent discussion of the problem and what it means to all of us.  It's really worth a look.