Here's One You Might Not Have Heard Of - the "Technosphere"

Think of it as everything man has built on Earth that's still standing. That includes the pyramids and everything older provided it's still around.

Now I'm going to throw out a number that's pretty hard to digest - thirty - trillion - tons. That's the estimated weight of the stuff we've built. Those pyramids, sure, but also the Trump Tower, all our roads and houses and bridges and airports, your car, your kid's bike, everything manmade.

But how is one to make sense of 30 trillion tons. This might help. 30 trillion tons represents 50 kilograms of stuff for each square metre of the Earth's surface.

Technosphere is a new term and according to the study published in journal The Anthropocene Review, it comprises of all the human-made structures including houses, factories and farms to airplanes, rockets, computer systems, tablets, smartphones and CDs, to the waste in landfills and spoil heaps that have been built to keep humans alive.

Humans have been having a huge impact on the planet through their activities and that’s where the Anthropocene concept has its roots in. It is an epoch that highlights the impact humans have made to the planet and it provides an understanding of how we have greatly changed the planet ever since our species started dominating.

Technosphere has its roots in the biosphere, but over the years it has gained so much of ‘weight’ and development that it has become a phenomenon of its own. Further, it is having a parasitic effect on the biosphere – like all human activities have on our planet.

Professor Mark Williams at the University of Leicester says “Compared with the biosphere, though, it is remarkably poor at recycling its own materials, as our burgeoning landfill sites show. This might be a barrier to its further success — or halt it altogether.”

According to Wiki, the average human body weight is just over 80 kilos which adds an extra 600-billion kilos of insatiable, voracious consumers all on its own. Maybe Elon Musk is right. Maybe we should get ourselves a new planet.

Alberta's Hundred Billion Dollar Hangover Cure

There's these two guys, see? Regan Boychuk and Brent O'Neill. Two Albertans. They want to revive Alberta's collapsed labour market while, at the same time, cleaning up the mess "up north." And they figure a hundred billion dollars should just about cover it.

First, however, they'll have to get the Alberta government to face the problem it's spent decades ignoring - the environmental catastrophe sometimes called the Tar Sands.

Their proposal, "is built on several premises. The first is that the time for fossil fuel extraction has ended in Alberta. The low fruit has been picked and nobody saved anything for the future.

"The second is that climate change has become a clear and present danger. “We need to start making a real reduction in man-made emissions so our future generations have the same opportunities we once did” says the RAFT proposal.

"The best way to respond to this emergency — as well as increasing oil price volatility — is to wind down the industry and re-employ people in a massive environmental clean-up, RAFT proposes. While industry has a legal obligation to clean up its inactive wells and abandoned pipelines, it probably won’t spend the money unless government tackles some surprising legal obstacles.

"Cleaning up has many economic benefits. It puts oil service companies back to work and would employ thousands throughout the province. The clean-up would last decades and fixing leaking wells would reduce methane pollution into the atmosphere."

"Current liabilities for the conventional sector, the plan notes, include 444,000 oil and gas wells (only 200,000 are actually pumping liquids), 430,000 kilometres of pipelines (the distance to the moon is 384,000 kilometres), 30,000 oil and gas facilities, 900 square kilometres of oil sands development, 220 square kilometres of tailing ponds and “a 11.2 million ton sulfur pile that dwarfs the great pyramids of Egypt.” (The sulphur is another waste stream from bitumen upgrading.)

"No one has argued about the environmental necessity of a clean-up.

"Consider the size of the environmental burden. Last month the Alberta Energy Regulator reported that the forecast cost of reclaiming inactive oil and gas wells and abandoned facilities now totalled more than $30.6 billion. (When I first reported on these liabilities nearly a decade ago they amounted to $9 billion.)"

But there's a snag.

"Incredibly, the regulator holds only $240 million in its clean-up fund. That potentially leaves taxpayers on the hook for a $29-billion clean-up bill if laws and policies don’t radically change in the province and country.

"It’s widely agreed the industry-funded regulator, directed by a former oil patch lobbyist, has failed to grasp the gravity of the situation or the inadequacy of its current policies.

"That means the final bill for just for 75,000 [conventional oil] wells (not including 60,000 wells that pump less than 10 barrels of oil a day and are no longer economic) could be as high as $82 billion.

"The oil sands add to these growing environmental liabilities.

"Alberta’s auditor general has already warned that the province’s clean-up fund of $1.6 billion is grossly inadequate to cover an estimated $21-billion clean-up liability for just eight oil sands mining sites and 19 coal mines. Treating the toxic water in the tailing ponds might cost another $24 billion.

"Industry and the Alberta government have known about these liabilities for years. And the principle that industry is responsible for cleaning up its polluted sites is widely accepted.

And what would theft be without an Artful Dodger?

"...part of the problem results from small changes made to the federal Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act that effectively made it legal for oil and gas companies to declare bankruptcy and walk away from unreclaimed wells. The changes basically ensured that other creditors got paid while the public got stiffed with the environmental bills."

"In an article in University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review, Alexander Clarkson proposed changing federal law to declare well reclamation a “super priority.”

"That would give clean-up costs priority over creditors who extended risky loans to the company.

"More importantly, it would force bankers and other creditors to factor in environmental risks when lending to the highly indebted oil patch."

The Scam - Three Card Monte

"Cenovus, for example, paid only $3 million in royalties on bitumen sales worth $1.1 billion in the first six months of 2016. That’s less than a one per cent royalty.

"CNRL Resources paid $6 million on sales of $1.9 billion worth of bitumen.

"Suncor paid $48 million in royalties on $4.7 billion worth of gross bitumen sales. And on it goes.

"Many of the oil sands companies making money tend to own refineries and are what industry calls “integrated producers.” They include big oil sands players such as Suncor, Imperial, Husky and Cenovus.

"Even when oil prices are low these integrated players make huge profits by buying low-priced bitumen, upgrading and refining it and then selling high-priced refinery products in the North American market. Oil prices might be low but gasoline prices remain surprisingly high."

In other words, the screwing of the province and people of Alberta is nearly complete and, as usual for someone screwed over, they're left with a parting gift - environmental devastation and an enormous clean up bill. That's what they get from decades of utter neglect by Conservative governments (and now Notley's to boot).

Ralph Klein instilled the Mardi Gras mentality in Alberta's legislature and no one's been able to shake it since. Oh there was wealth, vast wealth supposedly but, oddly enough, there's nothing to show for it today except for that cesspool in the backyard. Shoulda listened to Peter Lougheed ...but, no.

No, It's the Environment, Stupid.

David Suzuki once observed that we cannot have a healthy economy without a healthy environment.  It shouldn't require a PhD to grasp that yet it's astonishing how so many well-educated people, including our political leadership, simply don't get it.

In his year-end column, Gwynne Dyer concludes that climate change isn't a major problem.  It's the problem, the threat that supercedes all the rest.  It's the Alpha and Omega, the Big Enchilada, the Sword of Damocles.

...imagine that we are a panel of high-priced medicos reviewing the health status of our most important client, the human race.

The first thing to note is that the client is still piling on weight at an alarming rate—up from two billion units to seven billion in the past 75 years—but continues to thrive, for the most part. And most of the ailments that it worries about are mere hypochondria.

Take, for example, the widespread concern (at least in the media and among what Bob Fisk calls the “think-tank mountebanks”) that the emergence of the so-called Islamic State in the no-man’s land between Iraq and Syria will lead to catastrophe. There will allegedly be a surge in terrorist attacks around the world, a Sunni-Shia religious war spanning the entire Middle East, or even a global religious war between Muslims and everybody else.

...The whole “Islamic State” panic is a tempest in a fairly small teacup. The casualties are small, and the entire region matters little economically or strategically except to its own inhabitants. Even in the unlikely event that a Sunni-Shia religious war should engulf the whole of the Middle East, it would have no more effect on the rest of the planet than the European wars of religion four centuries ago had on the Middle East. That is to say, hardly any.

So in terms of the global system’s health, the rise of radical Islamism is not a life-threatening disease. It’s a local infection that will probably have to run its course. If it really gets bad, some quarantine measures may be needed, but this is not Ebola.

The other great shock of 2014 was a war in Europe. The Ukrainian revolution of last February was a messy and complicated business, but it need not have ended in Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and in a Russian-backed separatist war in Ukraine’s two easternmost provinces. 

...Western European governments are so divided and introspective that they could not come up with a credible plan to boil an egg, and they care very little about the parts of Eastern Europe beyond the European Union’s borders. The only section of the American population that sees President Obama’s administration as capable of hatching a plot is the extreme right, and they think he’s a foreign-born Communist plotting the overthrow of the United States.

...So far the patient’s health is looking pretty good. There is the usual clutter of minor ailments—a mini-civil war here (Libya, South Sudan), civil-rights protesters under attack there (Hong Kong, Missouri)—and there is a significant possibility that next year will bring another recession. That’s as inevitable as catching a cold once in a while. But there has been nothing really out of the ordinary this year, nothing that sets off alarm bells.

The only big worry the doctors have is the same one that has bothered them for the past 25 years: the patient simply won’t stop smoking. Their increasingly grave warnings are met with empty promises to cut back or quit entirely, but not right now, just some time far in the future. Maybe.

...Climate change is the spectre at every feast, the unstoppable rot that undermines every positive development. The failure at Copenhagen in 2009 bleeds indistinguishably into the fudge at Durban in 2011 and on into the feeble compromise in Lima in 2014, which sets us up for the bigger disappointment of Paris in 2015. And even if by some miracle we get a useful agreement in Paris next year, nothing will actually be done until 2020.

The patient thinks there’s still plenty of time to quit. There isn’t.

2015 is poised to be our "make it or break it" year and, unfortunately, "break it" has a solid lead.  Even if we somehow do achieve a meaningful, effective climate change deal in Paris, one that actually leads to the rapid decarbonization of our economies and our societies, it will only be a first step on our path to find ways that will allow 9-billion humans to live in some rough balance with our environment and what remains of our non-human lifeforms.  

We're in it now, in it up to our necks, and "the economy" isn't going to get us out of this one.  

How Did It Ever Get to This? China's Economic Miracle Lashes Back

China, the People's Republic Whereof, is in for some tough sledding.  From quickly mounting threats from its freshwater crisis to air pollution, warming, sea level rise, food insecurity, overpopulation it seems that China is getting overtaken by events.  Environmentally, China is a ticking time bomb.

A recent tragedy, an 8-year old girl living near a highway in the coastal province of Jiangsu diagnosed with lung cancer,  has stirred up unrest.   Once again the central government has vowed to wage war on air pollution but that's a promise that has been heard before.

Here are a few photographs of the latest Airpocalypse from a spread in The Guardian that speak louder than can any words.

Police checkpoint halts highway traffic

 

 

 

 

Green or Brown, Makes No Difference, Bullshit Stinks.

Caught in a massive wedgie administered today by Canada's environment commissioner, Harper's part-time EnviroMin, John "Gaping Maw" Baird wasted no time covering his tracks with green bullshit.

Commissioner Scott Vaughan blasted the Tories for not even having the basic information they would need to begin dealing with the impacts of global warming already spreading through Canada.

Lard arse Baird replied that the Harpies are working furiously to address Mr. Vaughan's concerns.

Environment Canada, Mr. Baird added, has spent more than $140-million on water-related programs and science in the past year. And the government has invested $85.9-million to better understand the impacts of climate change on our health, infrastructure and northern communities, he said.

“For example,” the minister said, “Environment Canada's climate science research program is tightly integrated with global efforts to ensure that our country has the best available climate change and climate variability information available.”

Anybody who will take John Baird on his word on this is an idiot or else simply likes the taste of bullshit.  Three years ago Harper acknowledged global warming as the greatest threat facing mankind and then promptly turned his back on the issue.

The Harpies were also slammed for an utter lack of preparedness to deal with oil spills on our coasts.   Baird danced around this one by claiming "when emergencies occur the National Marine Oil Spill Preparedness and Response Regime provides the capacity for an effective response to oil spills in Canadian waters."   He's going to fight an oil spill with a "regime"?   No, no, no, you loudmouth jerk, you fight oil spills with ready ships and pre-deployed, very expensive equipment.   So where are these ships, where are their crews, where is all that equipment?   Oh what was I thinking?  I forgot, we've got a "regime" instead.

Meanwhile CBC News  reports that Climate Action Network Europe and Germanwatch have ranked Canada as the fourth worst out of 57 nations in helping to halt climate change.   The only countries worse are Saudi Arabia in dead last, Kazakhstan at 56th, Australia 55th followed by Canada with an impressive 54th place.  If you need proof that Baird is just flinging green bullshit, there it is.

Perils at Sea

This sounds hard to believe but a study claims that the world's 15-largest ships emit as much pollution as the planet's 760-million cars. From The Guardian:

Pressure is mounting on the UN's International Maritime Organisation and the EU to tighten laws governing ship emissions following the decision by the US government last week to impose a strict 230-mile buffer zone along the entire US coast, a move that is expected to be followed by Canada.

The setting up of a low emission shipping zone follows US academic research which showed that pollution from the world's 90,000 cargo ships leads to 60,000 deaths a year in the US alone and costs up to $330bn per year in health costs from lung and heart diseases. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates the buffer zone, which could be in place by next year, will save more than 8,000 lives a year with new air quality standards cutting sulphur in fuel by 98%, particulate matter by 85% and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80%.

Shipping emissions have escalated in the past 15 years as China has emerged as the world's manufacturing capital. A new breed of intercontinental container ship has been developed which is extremely cost-efficient. However, it uses diesel engines as powerful as land-based power stations but with the lowest quality fuel.

The calculations of ship and car pollution are based on the world's largest 85,790KW ships' diesel engines which operate about 280 days a year generating roughly 5,200 tonnes of SOx a year, compared with diesel and petrol cars which drive 15,000km a year and emit approximately 101gm of SO2/SoX a year.

So, why is the global shipping industry using, and even today building, fleets of such lethally polluting vessels? Simple. They do it because we let them do it. Besides it probably shaves a few pennies off every item on those Wal-Mart shelves jam packed with crap from China that you pick up when you feel like shopping yourself out of a job.

(Photo caption. The granddaddy of them all, the Knock Nevis, which began life as the Viking Jahre. Just over 1,500 feet long, 650,000 tonnes fully loaded. Stood on end, it would be taller than the Sears Tower (sans antennae).

Our Global Ecological Ponzi Scheme

Physicist Joe Romm, of climateprogress.org, argues that, when it comes to the earth's climate and future generations, we're all Bernie Madoffs:

In our case, investors (i.e. current generations) are paying themselves (i.e. you and me) by taking the nonrenewable resources and livable climate from future generations. To perpetuate the high returns the rich countries in particular have been achieving in recent decades, we have been taking an ever greater fraction of nonrenewable energy resources (especially hydrocarbons) and natural capital (fresh water, arable land, forests, fisheries), and, the most important nonrenewable natural capital of all — a livable climate.

We aren’t all Madoffs in the sense of people who have knowingly created a fraudulent Ponzi scheme for humanity. But given all of the warnings from scientists and international governments over the past quarter-century (most recently two years ago with “Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly“) — it has gotten harder and harder for any of us to pretend that we are innocent victims, that we aren’t just hoping we can maintain our own personal wealth and well-being for a few more decades before the day of reckoning.


Read more here:

http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/08/ponzi-scheme-madoff-friedman-natural-capital-renewable-resources/

(photo - Charles Ponzi, father of all pyramid schemes)

Memo to Iggy - Get Back to the Environment

An Ipsos Reid poll finds 57% of Canadians want serious action on climate change now, even if it means higher deficits. From the G&M:

“With the economic recession, it's expected that concern for the environment versus the economy would drop off. Canadians are saying, ‘No, it's still important, the government should still be focusing on the environment even though it has to stabilize the economy,'” said Sean Simpson, research manager at Ipsos Reid.

Across the country, support for environmental policies tends to increase the further one gets from Alberta. The oil-rich province, which has been hurt by the recent fall in commodity prices, is about 10 per cent out of step with the rest of the country on every environmental question, Mr. Simpson said.

Overall, 64 per cent of Canadians say development of Alberta's oil sands should be halted until a clean method can be found, as do 47 per cent of Albertans.

“They're saying maybe we can have the best of both worlds,” Mr. Simpson said. “Maybe instead of creating jobs in the tar sands we can create them in the environmental sector.”

Iggy would do well to remember his own words, "You've got to work with the grain of Canadians and not against them." That applies even when they don't agree with you, Mikey.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090227.wclimate28/BNStory/National/home?cid=al_gam_mostview

Tories Move To Protect West Coast Orca?

Word has it that the Harper government is going to order the protection of the "critical habitat" required for the recovery of two endangered killer whale pods in British Columbia.

We'll have to wait for another week or so to learn just what Jim Prentice and Fisheries minister Gail Shea are really prepared to do but it's encouraging to hear they've come to realize the problem. From the Victoria Times Colonist:

Ecojustice lawyer Lara Tessaro said she expects the March 4 publication to include a regulatory impact analysis statement, including costs and benefits of the order, from which the public “can glean DFO’s commitment to enforcing this order.”
Environmentalists note the whales are threatened by declining salmon stocks, increased boat traffic, toxic contamination, and acoustic impacts from activities such as dredging, seismic testing, and military sonar.

“Obviously whales need salmon, whales need clean water, and they also need quiet,” Barlee said. “That’s part of critical habitat. We need a comprehensive approach.”

Ottawa is scheduled to release an action plan within the next four years. That’s where negotiations involving various levels of government and stakeholders, including scientists and commercial fishermen, will face some tough decisions to allow for recovery of the whales.

The situation is complicated by the fact a whale’s habitat is the water column, not a stand of trees necessary, say, for the survival of a bird or mammal.

I hope, in a week or so, I can actually congratulate a Tory for finally doing something right. Until then I'm not going to get my hopes up.

Harper's "Real, Measurable & Verifiable" Environmentalism a Load of Hooey!

Canada's new Environment Commissioner Scott Vaughn has slammed the Harper cabal's laughable programmes to combat global warming. From The Globe & Mail:

Adjectives such as weak, poor, negligible and disappointing pepper the scathing review of two central and costly pillars of the Conservative climate-change plan.

As a division of the Auditor-General's office, the commissioner examined two of the marquee programs aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the Harper government's Turning the Corner plan.

“Environment Canada has made a claim of expected results even though it is very unlikely that it will be able to claim real, measurable and verifiable results,” Mr. Vaughan writes in his report. “Trying to manage the environment without a coherent measurement system is like trying to guide Canada's economy in the absence of indicators like the gross domestic product, inflation, interest rates and unemployment data.”

But wait, there's more! Auditor General Sheila Fraser has announced she'll be auditing the Harper-Ignatieff stimulus budget, keeping her eye on just how those Deficit Bucks are squandered.

Steve Harper. Not serious about the environment? Say it ain't so!

The Environment Commissioner's audit report, released simultaneously Thursday with an Auditor-General's report, found there is no evidence to support the government's emission reduction claims associated with the $1.5-billion Clean Air and Climate Change Trust Fund and the $365-million Public Transit Tax Credit.

Auditors found the original estimates of success for these programs were flawed. For instance, the government claims its $1.5-billion trust fund transfer to the provinces will eliminate 80 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

“The department conducted almost no analysis to support that figure, and did not perform key types of analysis,” states the commissioner's report.

As for the claim that handing out tax credits to bus users would reduce Canada's annual emissions by 220,000 tonnes, that estimate has now been reduced to 35,000 tonnes, a mere 16 per cent of what Ottawa originally claimed would be accomplished.

“Given the lowered figure, the Tax Credit will have a negligible impact on Canada's greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states.

Well, it's a good thing that Michael Ignatieff has placed Harper "on probation." That should get us back on track in no time. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090205.wPOLag_enviro0205/BNStory/politics/home

Keeping Down With The Jonses - California Style

Every now and then a really good, delightfully simple idea comes along - one of those "why didn't I think of that?" moments.

California is the home of a lot of leading-edge ideas, most, but not all, of them good and this is a good one. To get homeowners to conserve electricity, utilities are experimenting with monthly statements that compare the customer's energy usage with the average in that neighbourhood and then with what their really efficient neighbours use. From The New York Times:

The district had been trying for years to prod customers into using less energy with tactics like rebates for energy-saving appliances. But the traditional approaches were not meeting the energy reduction goals set by the nonprofit utility’s board.

So, in a move that has proved surprisingly effective, the [Sacramento] district decided to tap into a time-honored American passion: keeping up with the neighbors.

Last April, it began sending out statements to 35,000 randomly selected customers, rating them on their energy use compared with that of neighbors in 100 homes of similar size that used the same heating fuel.
The customers were also compared with the 20 neighbors who were especially efficient in saving energy.

When the Sacramento utility conducted its first assessment of the program after six months, it found that customers who received the personalized report reduced energy use by 2 percent more than those who got standard statements — an improvement that Alexandra Crawford, a spokeswoman for the utility, said was very encouraging.

The approach has now been picked up by utilities in 10 major metropolitan areas eager to reap rewards through increased efficiencies, including Chicago and Seattle, according to Positive Energy, the software company that conceived of the reports and contracts to produce them. Following Sacramento’s lead, they award smiley faces only.

Two per cent doesn't sound like much but it's a good start and it supports research showing that, when trying to motivate behaviour of consumers, few techniques are as effective as comparing individuals to their peers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/science/earth/31compete.html?_r=1&hp

Kudos to Drake Landing

North America's first, solar-powered community is up and running and, surprise, surprise, it's in Alberta.

The Drake Landing Solar Community is a complex of 52 houses all powered by solar energy. DLSC lies within the town of Okotoks, Alberta. From the Environmental News Network and Global Warming is Real:

The system that links the community together is ingenious. It stores the summer months’ excess energy underground for it to be put to use in the extremely cold winter months that Alberta is notorious for. A total of 800 solar panels located on garage roofs throughout the community generate 1.5 megawatts of thermal power during a typical summer day, the project’s organizers say.

DLSC's underground energ7y storage system is unique in the world. Dubbed the Borehole Thermal Electrical Storage (BTES), the unit links all the newly built, single detached homes together. The rest of the building efforts have been as green as possible and the entire community has been awarded gold-certified status under the Built Green Alberta program. That program in turn is modeled on NRCan’s EnerGuide for New Houses Program. All of them have rear garages separated from the houses via a breezeway. The best news is of course the low carbon footprint of the people that occupy the houses. A typical household will generate only 1 to 2 tonnes of greenhouse gas annually, compared to an average Canadian footprint of around 6 to 7 tonnes per home a year, according to a report on YellowsandBlues.com.

Find out more at the Drake Landing Solar Community website:

http://www.dlsc.ca/borehole.htm

They've Even Coined a Word for It - "Ecoflation"

The premise behind this is that you - yes I mean you - and the six and a half billion other humans, have been running the world on an ecological deficit.

In other words, we're consuming our planet's renewable resources faster than they can be, well, renewed and we've been deluding ourselves by relying on the stockpiles of these resources, in effect eating our seed corn.

We're all, collectively, a bit like Mike Tyson. The guy made a lot of money, oodles of money, and he lived like a king. He even had lions on his estate. Mike's problem is that he became accustomed to spending enormous amounts of money as though he could always just refill the vaults by the purse from the next fight and the one after that and so on. Mike developed a lifestyle that could only be maintained if he could hold on to his boxing world championship until he died. The day arrived when Mike suddenly wasn't winning any more and had all those other problems and the cash dried up but the expenses kept on mounting and, suddenly, he was broke and all his toys were taken away.

Even here in affluent North America we've been playing this very same game. Take my favourite object lesson, groundwater. Especially in the corn belt and wheat belt of the US, agriculture took hold and grew enormously. But growing stuff takes water, a lot of it, for irrigation. There was never enough surface water so the growers came to rely on subsurface water, aquifers.

Aquifers are like underground lakes that have been filled up by surface water trickling down for centuries, even millenia. Some of the water that gets pumped up to irrigate the fields may have fallen well before Columbus supposedly discovered America. So agriculture takes hold and along come highways and towns and, before you know it, WalMart and a lot of businesses and people and they all need water.

Now Mike Tyson would be doing just fine today if he'd taken his winnings, put the money in a bank of government bonds, and simply lived off the interest. Those people in the grain belt would be in the same position if they had figured out that they needed to limit their dependence on the aquifers to the recharge rates. But we didn't and so, instead of relying on the interest, we've been voraciously eating into the capital, unknowingly emptying the water vaults deep underground.

So just as Mike Tyson found himself put out on the sidewalk, people living in areas that find themselves dependent on water supplies that disappear are going to have a real problem. They'll either have to find water somewhere else or leave, simple as that. And that is where "Ecoflation" sets in.

A lot of these agribusinesses and communities have been built around an abundant supply of cheap water. For them to function, water has to be both abundant and cheap. When you can lay claim to the stuff beneath your feet that's a doable proposition but it goes all to hell when you have to rely on someone else's water from some other place.

Even if you've never studied economics you probably understand the basic theory of supply and demand. The notionally ideal price of a product is where the supply and demand lines intersect. A decrease in supply or an increase in demand sends prices up and there you have the theory of Ecoflation. A dependence created on the over-consumption of renewable resources results in a sudden decline in supply which sends the value of that resource steadily upward.

A recent World Resources Institute report (http://www.wri.org/stories/2008/12/ecoflation-set-rattle-supply-chains) notes the Ecoflation factor behind the increase, between 2006 and 2008, of 136% in wheat and 217% in rice prices. Now, if we use the Economics 101 model, this skyrocketing price should sharply depress demand but that's where the wild card, dependency, kicks in. We can't stop eating and, apparently, we can't stop breeding more mouths to feed either. This throws freshman economics right out the window because you have dwindling supply, increasing prices and steadily increasing demand.

So, what's the answer? The report comes up with recommendations for corporations in the resource "value chain." That's good, as far as it goes, but there isn't all that much business can do address the larger problems that are societal, national and global.

The larger question, as I see it, is how do we - all six and a half billion of us - deal with our dependence on resources that our planet simply cannot supply? Where are we to find the enormous trust and willingness to sacrifice that will be the foundation of any serious global effort to address what is in every respect a global threat of an existential dimension? How do we overcome human nature and societal attitudes that have evolved in a bubble of delusion?

China's Environmental Nightmare

The biggest obstacle in the path of China's economic ascendancy is China or, to be more specific, the inability of the central government to effectively manage the country.

It's one scandal after another. Lead in kids' toys, melamine in the food and a lot more. However it's a series of environmental issues, and China's inability to come to grips with them, that pose the greatest threat to the country's future prosperity.

China already has a serious problem with desertification, the degradation that transforms arable farmland into useless desert. A new report says that China is losing approximately 4.5-billion tonnes of topsoil annually to erosion. From Reuters:

Over a third of China's land is being scoured by serious erosion that is putting its crops and water supply a risk, a three-year nationwide survey has found.

Soil is being washed and blown away not only in remote rural areas, but near mines, factories and even in cities, the official Xinhua agency cited the country's bio-environment security research team saying.

If the loss continues at this rate, harvests in China's northeastern breadbasket could fall 40 percent in 50 years, adding to erosion costs estimated at 200 billion yuan ($29 billion) in this decade alone.

http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/38697

Cannibalizing Earth

Another report today on the state of man's ecological deficit. What's that? It's the rate at which we're depleting our planet's renewable resources faster than they can be replenished. That doesn't sound possible, does it? Well it is.

We have an ecological deficit. It's everywhere. You can see it from space. It comes in the form of deforestation, the rapid loss of our planet's forests. It comes in the form of desertification, the transformation of once arable (farmable) land into desert wasteland. It comes in our rapidly emptying seas where we've exhausted fish stocks. It even comes underground in the ancient freshwater aquifers we've been voraciously draining.

If you've got a cow you rely upon for milk, you're not doing yourself any favours if you begin chewing the flesh off its bones. You're going to kill the cow, aren't you? Once it's dead and you've finished off the meat, you're not going to have meat or milk, are you?

A new report out today, the Living Planet study of just how well we're doing with earth's renewables. Full points if you guessed "not good." The report is the joint effort of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) based in Geneva, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network based in Oakland, Calif. From CBC News:

Demands on natural resources overreach what the Earth can sustain by almost a third, the report says, adding that people are drawing — and often overdrawing — on the agricultural land, forests, seas and resources of other countries to sustain them, it adds.

"If our demands on the planet continue to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles," said James Leape, international director general of the WWF.

Now here's a little something to chew on. It was only a few years ago that we figured we had until 2050 to reach the point of consuming two planets-worth of resources. That's just been moved up by about 15-years.

The report claims that three-quarters of mankind live in countries where consumption is outstripping environmental renewal. Let's see, that'd be just shy of five billion people. And it's not just the poor countries that make the list.

Even the United States is facing a looming freshwater crisis. Normally arid parts of the U.S. have been transformed into agricultural powerhouses thanks to acquifer irrigation - that is pumping groundwater to the surface. Think about places that used to be arid, prairie grassland like Kansas. The problem is they've been pumping ground water at rates up to ten times their acquifers' recharge rates. That means pumping out ten barrels of water for every barrel of rainwater that makes its way back in. Do the math, it's a suckers' bet. And yet they're still filling artificial lakes around Las Vegas casinos. Mind-boggling.

There's the great Colorado River that supplies water to much of the southwest. So important is the Colorado that decades ago the neighbours signed a treaty defining which state got how much. Something like 20% was supposed to be left for the Mexicans. Guess what? The Colorado no longer flows into Mexico and the US states are at each others' throats over what remains.

Madness? Of course it is. Sheer madness and it's a mental infirmity that's rapidly becoming the norm around the world.

Tired of Wet Weekend Weather?

Have you ever wondered why the weather so often turns lousy just in time for the weekend? It's a great annoyance to the Monday to Friday crowd who see blue skies while they're on the job and rain clouds when they're not.

Here in the south coastal area of British Columbia, last summer seemed to be a steady pattern of rainy weekends. It was more than just noticeable.

Spanish researchers claim to have found evidence that, in some parts of Europe at least, the weather really does follow a weekly pattern which they claim may be man-made. The team studied Spanish data from 1961 to 2004. Their analysis suggests that weekday work activity generates far more air pollution that drops sharply on weekends. This, in turn, causes changes in air circulation that result in rainier weekends. Or at least that's the theory.

Out here we know a thing or three about rain. We get to study it steadily from November to May, year in and year out. We know there are a lot of sources of rain. El Nino, La Nina, and the Pineapple Express come to mind. Still, an urban link to weekly precipitation patters would be pretty interesting.

China Dirties Up - Coal Liquefaction Underway

It's possible to extract a form of ersatz oil out of coal. It's an old technique but one that's fallen out of favour due to the large amounts of greenhouse gases created in the production process.

China's willingness to trash the global environment is a question of deeds, not words. The Chinese talk a good game but they're launching a major CTL, or coal-to-liquid, plant in Inner Mongolia.

The first plant will only produce about 20,000 barrels of oil a day, a drop in the bucket compared to China's 7.2 million barrel a day consumption. To reach this level of production, China will process 3.5 million tonnes of coal per year into 1 million tonnes of oil products such as diesel for cars.

But wait, there's more.

China is targeting on transforming half of Mongolia's coal production into oil by 2010. That would involve processing 135-million tonnes of coal per year.

And China may soon be joined by the United States which is believed to have the largest reserves of coal in the world. From ENN:

"DRKW Advanced Fuels plans to start construction on a plant in Wyoming next year in partnership with Arch Coal Inc and with technologies licensed by General Electric and Exxon Mobil. The defense department is experimenting with CTL in an effort to cut reliance on fuel from countries unfriendly to the United States.

But CTL is highly controversial. Experts say the whole lifecycle releases about twice as much carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas,

as fossil fuel. Liquefying coal also requires large amounts of energy and drains water supplies.
The fuel produced through this method has a shelf life of up to 15 years, unlike other motor fuels which is attractive to the military and to governments keen to ensure fuel security.

Though CTL technology was developed about 100 years ago, it has been little used, except in Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, which had difficulty accessing then-inexpensive oil.
Oil prices, which have more than quadrupled this decade to above $130 a barrel, have reignited interest in CTL.

The Oil and Gas Journal in April suggested it costs $67 to $82 a barrel to produce CTL fuel, based on the experiences of South Africa's Sansol. Exact prices would depend on a range of factors including coal and water prices and of course it is very expensive to build CTL plants.
Shenhua will be the first to use direct CTL technology on a large scale. It is different from indirect CTL, proven in Nazi Germany and by South Africa's Sasol, and converts coal directly into liquid fuel, skipping gasifying coal into syngas.

"CTL happened only twice in world history, and both times it's been in nations facing some kind of state of emergency with respect to energy. It should sound an alarm bell," said Gary Kendall, from the WWF conservation group."

Think the supposedly green yet lobbyist plagued John McCain will shut this down? Think again.

A Government of Liars

I sympathize with the American people for, while they've made some stupid mistakes these past eight years, I can't think of a time in the last six decades when the population of a Western nation has been so overwhelmed by such a malevolent pack of liars in office.

Word of caution here. I am NOT suggesting the Bush regime is on some sort of par with the Hitler administration, not at all, nothing of the sort. That said, I don't think that state propaganda has been brought to bear on a populace so powerfully and effectively as by the Bushies since Joseph Goebbels and, even then, he openly called himself a propagandist.

It's easy for us to judge and heap scorn on the American people but when have we ever been subjected to such a subversive onslaught of deceit, fear mongering and hate mongering from our own government? We haven't. Not to say there aren't those north of the 49th who wouldn't try but we haven't experienced the traumatic underpinning the Americans suffered on 9/11 to let them get away with it.

They lied their way into wars without end. They lied about their tax cuts and the prosperity it would bring to all. They lied about the danger of environmentalism. It's been one lie atop the next until lie has become indistinguishable from truth.

Now we learn - surprise, surprise - that political appointees (commissars) in NASA's public affairs office, "worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general's office said yesterday."

From the Washington Post:

"James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has campaigned publicly for more stringent limits on greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, told The Post and the New York Times in September 2006 that he had been censored by NASA press officers, and several other agency climate scientists reported similar experiences. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are two of the government's lead agencies on climate change issues.

From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."

Lest we yield to the temptation to get smug about this, remember this is pretty much exactly what Harpo has done by gagging Environment Canada scientists and requiring their communications with the outside world to be subjected to his political commissar's censorship from the PMO.

"Kristin Scuderi, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in an e-mail that director John H. Marburger III "would not comment until he's reviewed the report, and he has not yet done so yet. Therefore, OSTP has no comment at this time."

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), one of the senators who pressed for the investigation, said in a statement that the report showed that citizens had been denied access to critical scientific information that should inform public policy.

"Global warming is the most serious environmental threat we face - but this report is more evidence that the Bush Administration's appointees have put political ideology ahead of science," Lautenberg said. "Our government's response to global warming must be based on science, and the Bush Administration's manipulation of that information violates the public trust."

I suppose it must be some comfort to the White House to know that, even if John McCain loses in November, there'll still be an administration nearby to keep alive the Bush legacy of secrecy and deceit. That is until we send them packing and restore democracy to Canada.

I remember the day when we used to mock and ridicule the Soviet Union for just this sort of thing.

Finally - a Good Deficit

The federal government is running in the red and it should bring cheers from all of us.

Transport Canada's "clean car" rebate programme is running far over budget. The government earmarked $160-million for the two year programme. The department now expects to spend up to $145-million of that in the first year alone.

So, will the Harper Cons build on this success, one of the few they can boast about? Not likely.
Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon says the Reformatories have no intention of expanding the programme because it "served its purpose."

Way to go, you clowns.

Water - Mine and Yours

It appears that Canada has scuppered a United Nations effort to have water, or at least access to it, recognized as a basic human right. It seems we acted out of fear; fear that not obstructing this effort could land Canada in a situation where other nations could claim entitlement to our freshwater resources in the name of upholding basic human rights.

This is a tough question that's deeply rooted in the larger environmental crisis and, as so typical in these matters, there are no good answers.

What are basic human rights and who is responsible for ensuring access to them? I suppose it would be hard to argue that access to clean air is a basic, as in the sense of fundamental, human right. No one has a right to foul another person's air. But wait a minute. What do you tell the people of Toronto or Hong Kong or so many other places where residents have to be warned to stay indoors lest they be exposed to the air?

You see, once you recognize something as a basic right, those who interfere with or impair that right must bear some moral, if not outright legal, responsibility to those adversely affected. I won't get into cases like Rylands v. Fletcher but let's say you and I live beside each other on a hill. My property slopes down to yours. You have a lovely back yard with a patio and swimming pool, the whole deal. I decide I want to really get my lawn looking great so I have a truckload of manure delivered to my backyard. A massive rainstorm hits, loosening the manure pile and sending it sliding across into your yard and your swimming pool. How would you feel about that?

Do you have a basic right not to have my manure slide into your swimming pool? Of course you do and I'd have to pay to have everything made right and, even then, you'd still be furious with me for a long time to come.

So why then do we feel entitled to release other forms of contamination into our most essential, common property - the air? We don't keep that pollution on our side of the fence, we don't even attempt it. Why not? Because we wouldn't want to live or breathe in such a place. Just to keep going we'd have to spend a lot of money to clean up our mess and that, in turn, would eat into our profits, our prosperity. So therefore our very prosperity is directly linked into having most of that pollution released to be carried elsewhere.

Now, if we were going to recognize access to safe, clean water as a basic human right, how could we resist the argument that access to safe, clean air is an even more fundamental human right? You see, if we let that one slip past us, we could be held to account for the garbage we spew into mankind's air.

And who would be howling the loudest? Why those poor folks who, while they contribute almost nothing to greenhouse gas emissions, just happen to live where its effects are most strongly felt. We get the prosperity bonus of releasing this contamination into the atmosphere and they get to pay the real price of that. Sounds fair, doesn't it? Isn't that sort of like telling your neighbour that as soon as that manure slid across the lot line it became his and therefore he can clean up his own damned yard? Of course it is.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that we can't treat water and air and resources (renewable and non) on a problem by problem basis. All that will ensure is that we don't succeed on anything because even meaningful success on one front can be rendered meaningless by failures on others. What good is it if I ensure you have an abundant supply of clean, freshwater yet, at the same time, you can't breathe the air? What good is it if you have clean air and adequate drinking water but nothing to eat? Sustaining life demands that we deal with all of these issues comprehensively and we're nowhere near acknowledging that yet even as the clock ticks down.

We need to be really clear-headed on these challenges. There are no Goody Two Shoes solutions. Overpopulation has to be addressed. It's one thing for an agrarian China to have 1.3-billion people. It's another thing altogether for an industrialized China to impose on the world the burden of that population. China, like India, is still just getting into second gear but it's on the accelerator and wants to get into fourth or fifth just as soon as it can and that, friends, spells disaster if we haven't dealt with these challenges comprehensively. We have to find a workable balance and that's probably going to mean some measures to curb overpopulation.

I think what we're most afraid of and yet won't mention is that, if we're going to call upon others to make concessions, we're going to have to be willing to give ground ourselves. We have reached the point where our consumption exceeds our planet's finite resources. We have hit the wall. Now if these wealthy newcomers decide they want the same sorts of things we Westerners enjoy, somebody is going to have to give up something and all eyes are going to be on those guys who have the most.

The thing is we don't even have to wait for this to happen. It's already begun. Look at the food riots in Africa and as close to home as Mexico. Look at our collapsing fisheries. 70% of our food fish species are endangered and we're switching over to the put the remaining species in the same position. A lot of the world's poorest people are dependent on fish for their survival. At the same time they're facing the disappearance of their fisheries, global warming is bringing them freshwater disruptions and desertification.

Here's something you need to understand, something you have to remember. These people look at their misery and misfortune and they see your face. If you check out any Third World papers there are plenty of reports about just who has brought this devastation to them. We're not talking about horseshit in a swimming pool, we're talking about people struggling and failing to find food and water for their kids. Can you see what's coming?