Amazon left for dead by biofuels?

Time Magazine has a very good article “The Clean Energy Scam” by Michael Grunwald, on the terrifying connection between biofuels and the viability of the Amazon (and other tropical forests for that matter).

A Texan sets the tone:

“It gives me goose bumps,” says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. “It’s like witnessing a rape.”

The perpetrator of this violence? The article answers:

This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.

The Amazon was once protected for it’s biodiversity, but now it’s survival is paramount for one thing: it’s ability to naturally sequester carbon. And the dynamic is explained thusly:

Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.

Unfortunately:

Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.

UPDATE:
Just want to add this graph to underline the connection to the power of global commodity markets, which appears to have lifted the Amazon’s destruction to a higher level of magnitude.

More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it’s subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It’s the remorseless economics of commodities markets. “The price of soybeans goes up,” laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, “and the forest comes down.”

Translating into a brutal short-term local logic:

The basic problem is that the Amazon is worth more deforested than it is intact. Carter, who fell in love with the region after marrying a Brazilian and taking over her father’s ranch, says the rate of deforestation closely tracks commodity prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. “It’s just exponential right now because the economics are so good,” he says. “Everything tillable or grazeable is gouged out and cleared.”

Which brings us to the global warming phrase dejour, “tipping point”.

This destructive biofuel dynamic is on vivid display in Brazil, where a Rhode Island–size chunk of the Amazon was deforested in the second half of 2007 and even more was degraded by fire. Some scientists believe fires are now altering the local microclimate and could eventually reduce the Amazon to a savanna or even a desert. “It’s approaching a tipping point,” says ecologist Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center.

Dan Nepstad is not just any talking head scientist – he’s one of a handful of the world’s top earth scientists specializing in global warming dynamics. His recent report “Interactions among Amazon land use, forests and climate: prospects for a near-term forest tipping point” describes a terrifying razors edge the Amazon finds itself on.

If the Amazon tips, it goes from a massive carbon sink to a massive carbon emitter – quite likely leaving much more than itself for dead.

The take away on biofuels is a very cautionary note:

The lesson behind the math is that on a warming planet, land is an incredibly precious commodity, and every acre used to generate fuel is an acre that can’t be used to generate the food needed to feed us or the carbon storage needed to save us. Searchinger acknowledges that biofuels can be a godsend if they don’t use arable land. Possible feedstocks include municipal trash, agricultural waste, algae and even carbon dioxide, although none of the technologies are yet economical on a large scale. Tilman even holds out hope for fuel crops–he’s been experimenting with Midwestern prairie grasses–as long as they’re grown on “degraded lands” that can no longer support food crops or cattle.

One step forward on e-waste

A bit of good news to share. The e-waste bill previously stalled in disagreement between the Mayor and City Council has been broken in two – allowing for passage of one part that begins the process of establishing an electronics recycling program with manufacturers. Mandates for manufacturers’ recycling, while ultimately necessary, will have to wait until the second bill is passed. While I’m not holding my breath, every step matters and with new perspective and momentum each new barrier toward lowering our carbon footprints may be more easily breeched. So a small hooray for NYC! May this small step provide momentum for the big fight now underway: CONGESTION PRICING.

Richard Branson / Jim Jones – separated at birth?

So they were drinking pinot grigio, not Kool-Aid. And the locale wasn’t Jonestown Guyana but Necker Island, Branson’s “private getaway” between Tortola and Anegada. The guest list wasn’t social misfits from Frisco but among other luminaries, Tony Blair, William McDonough, Larry Page and Paul Allen.
Richard Branson had invited them. And he would ask: “So, do we really think the world is on fire?” And they would reply: “Yes, the planet is on fire.”

I can find no better example of the mass suicide humanity has now endeavored toward. The decadence, the apparent denial, the gross contradictions and the self-serving platitudes snap me out of my upbeat moments to cry out: “we are doomed!”

Certainly Branson and company have become a grotesque caricature of our society’s elite intersection of destructive wealth, pangs of guilt and utter weakness.

Exhibit A, on a silver platter:

Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal, talked about his latest project, Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley company that makes sexy electric sports cars retailing for $100,000. Page has ordered one.

Or should we worry when informed that Mr. Page jet-pooled to the Caribbean? I mean, how totally carbon conscientious!

Memo to environmental groups: if you’re serious, stop having physical conferences that forces participants to fly across continents. Make them virtual and set and example with your actions not just your speeches. ( I suppose it’s too late to cancel the Aspen Institute’s Environmental Forum just underway?)

As Jim Jones mesmerized members of the Peoples Temple while he plotted their demise, so Mr. Branson celebrates, with a P.T. Barnum gusto, our most decadent aspirations, reaching its apotheosis with Virgin Galactic. But something is amiss. Mr. Branson still appears to recognize the abyss toward which the rocket ships are carrying us.

Given this Mount Rushmore like split personality, one is left asking what does Mr. Branson really believe? Does he, like his friend and customer, James Lovelock believe we are all doomed, so no matter, enjoy life to the fullest. (read most decadently – haven’t you noticed? It’s our birthright to fly anywhere in the world we desire and eat and drink anything we can stomach.) Let the next generation sort it all out! Or does he believe, ostensibly anyway, Mr. Blair, who proclaims the imperative to fight it?

Which is it Mr. Branson? You can’t have it both ways. Either you are a brother of Jim Jones and our Pied Piper, or you really will transcend the P.T. Barnum caricature and help lead the way toward a salvation of sorts. Jones or Moses? Actions speak louder than words….I’m not optimistic.

I must add, the only thing that could make me more depressed about the whole thing is to look into myself. For while the Richard Bransons of the world have a disproportionate destructive influence on our future, the fact is, our middle class American lifestyle is THE destructive force. I made the Checklist Toward Zero Carbon as a guide for myself, my neighbors and my friends so we might lessen our middle class environmental destruction.

Let’s work to be different – let’s all fight. Download the checklist. Edit it for your local conditions, make it your own, and pass it on.

Second Chance Saturdays…time’s running out

Haven’t gotten around to donating unused clothing, coats, shoes boots, hats, jackets, towels, bedding or linens lately?

Bring your unwanted textiles (no matter the condition) to the Goodwill van at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket this Saturday and the following Saturday, March 29th – the last two days of a program started January 5th – from 8am to 4pm.

Turns out textile waste makes-up almost 6% of New York City’s residential waste.   More low hanging fruit! 

The Uncertainties of The New York Times

Andrew Revkin, NY Times go to climate guy is speaking this Tuesday evening at the University of Vermont’s Campus Center Theater. For a preview Joshua Brown of UVM spoke with Revkin on February 27th. I’ve been going back and forth whether to post about this but I just need to know, does anyone else out there find this exchange peculiar?

UVM: As a reporter, you talk to a lot of experts and researchers. What do you see as the most important unanswered questions about the science of climate change?

Revkin: The big one remains the sensitivity of the climate system to greenhouse gas build-up. We still don’t know if doubling carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will lead to a one-and-a-half-degree or four-and-half-degree warming. That’s a huge range with hugely different consequences.

And it’s about the same range it was thirty years ago. There are many uncertainties, like what clouds do and what vapor does. It’s not game over in terms of the science by any means.

UPDATE: Joshua Brown let me know that there was a formatting issue in his original post and this below was a separate question and answer. Which negates the text below now shown with strikeouts. (Thankfully Mr. Revkin isn’t entertaining the ice is growing argument!)

UVM: I saw papers in Science, one in 2005, one in 2006, and then one recently in Nature Geosciences, that seemed to be pointing in all sorts of directions about the Antarctic ice sheet. Is it growing or shrinking?

Revkin: In a warming world, Greenland and Antarctica will lose ice. In Greenland, sea levels were four to six meters higher 130,000 years ago during the last warm interval between ice ages, so we know warmer times had less ice and higher seas, but we don’t know how quickly that will happen. And that’s where, again, you get into very high levels of uncertainty in the science.

There’s been some attempt by some activists out there to portray everything as a closed case: “we’re in a disaster zone and it’s unfolding a clear way.” That really doesn’t hold up to the data. But climate change is real.

It left me saying yeah, okay….but, but, something’s wrong with this picture. It felt like he answered the question in a straight-up way but maybe the way our President would – somehow emphasizing the obvious, or the “unknowns” (that’s Rumsfeld, sorry) and throwing in a straw man. It left me unsettled. Maybe this was a little “throw away” interview. Maybe it’s transcribed wrong. Maybe Revkin misspoke. But something’s up.

UPDATE: I was pointed to an excellent post by Joe Romm on this very sort of thing – but in a larger frame. Which leaves me to ask why does Mr. Revkin keep making the same mistake? Which leads me to sarcastically note that the UVM interview was the week before the denier’s convention in NY – so maybe Mr. Revkin was just warming up? Anyway….

Then I started at the end and worked backward.

There’s been some attempt by some activists out there to portray everything as a closed case: “we’re in a disaster zone and it’s unfolding a clear way.” That really doesn’t hold up to the data. But climate change is real.

I realize we’re supposed to be talking about the uncertainties here given the question, but isn’t this a straw man argument? I’m not aware of anyone outside of James Lovelock that is saying this is a closed case toward apocalypse – do you? There are parts of the science that are debatable and parts that are not. Given what we know now, it would be interesting to ask Mr. Revkin to draw the line between the two.

-And let’s draw a line in the ice:-

-I- -saw- -papers- -in Science,- -one in 2005, one in 2006,- -and then one recently in Nature Geosciences, – -that seemed to be pointing in all sorts of directions about the Antarctic ice sheet.- -Is it growing or shrinking? In a warming world, Greenland and Antarctica will lose ice.- -In Greenland, sea levels were four to six meters higher 130,000 years ago during the last warm interval between ice ages, so we know warmer times had less ice and higher seas, but we don’t know how quickly that will happen.- -And that’s where, again, you get into very high levels of uncertainty in the science.-

-Again, this was a question about uncertainty I admit – -but…is Mr. Revkin implying there is a legitimate debate now about whether the ice sheets are losing mass due to global warming?-

Then the sensitivity unknowns:

The big one remains the sensitivity of the climate system to greenhouse gas build-up. We still don’t know if doubling carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will lead to a one-and-a-half-degree or four-and-half-degree warming. That’s a huge range with hugely different consequences.

And it’s about the same range it was thirty years ago. There are many uncertainties, like what clouds do and what vapor does. It’s not game over in terms of the science by any means.

Let me start with the clouds. Like much of climate science unfortunately, when there are options to resolve a question it seems more often than not it is turning out to be the worse one. It’s true clouds are still an uncertainty but the uncertainty is being lessened – in an unfortunate direction. As bluntly summarized in a February article in Science:

Greenhouse gases can directly reduce cloud cover and magnify warming.

Finally on climate sensitivity. I’m not sure if Mr. Revkin misspoke or not. But it’s my understanding that a doubling of CO2 to approximately 450ppm is generally believed to give us a 3 degree (celsius) rise. I’m not sure where the 1.5 number is coming from as it is generally understood that we are locked into at least that much right now. So it seems to me like another set of straw men. But why? Yes, he’s been prompted to talk about uncertainty, but why then throw out there that there is “a huge range of consequences.” ? It seems like another throw away line. Yes there is debate about climate sensitivity. But again the uncertainty is getting better defined, and again in the worst possible way. Jim Hansen last December revised his estimate to 350ppm as the tipping point of CO2 from 400 earlier in the year and from this mythic 450ppm number Mr. Revkin offhandedly speaks of. But there’s no context of this trending in Mr. Revkin’s analysis.

Which brings me to my overall discomfort with Mr. Revkin’s answers and why I feel compelled to post on this incidental interview. Because it betrays to me a detached gentlemanly game that is being played in the media regarding climate change. It’s like Mr. Revkin put on his Tim Russert hat and decides the best way to speak to the public is in a “he said, she said”. News flash: “he said, she said” does not inherently make uncertainty. Ironically it’s my sense that the scientists don’t share this detachment or overgeneralized uncertainty but unfortunately are constitutionally built to be reticent. Asked to expound on the primary uncertainties of climate change, the preeminent authority of the NY Times leaves one wondering if there’s any there there at all – despite his disclaimer at the end that it does really exist. If I want to have a New York Times writer treat me like he thinks I’m dim I’ll read John Tierney. Mr. Revkin, please don’t do this.

I guess for me it’s a matter of emphasis. What if the same sort of items were discussed like this:

Make Believe Revkin: Well yes, climate sensitivity is a big question at this time. We once thought it might be possible to safely double the CO2 levels but now it appears that we’ve already passed the tipping point. Once we have more precise knowledge of the sensitivity we’ll know whether it’ll be possible to stop just short of 2 degrees temperature rise and face “just” widespread drought, tens of millions of lives at risk and 20% to 30% species die-back; or whether it will approach 3 degrees rise (a more likely scenario given our lack of will to reduce emissions) where we’ll face hundreds of millions of lives at risk, accelerated ocean rise and “major” species extinctions around the world. Or who knows it could go to 4 degrees and the world basically stops being recognizable.

Yes there certainly are uncertainties.

I suggest that it would help a great deal if we could edit down to the truly meaningful uncertainties and place them in a trending context.

It’s the Planet Stupid!

Iraq, health care, the economy – all important issues.

And all are a diversion from the one true crisis we face. For if we don’t solve the global warming crisis all other important issues will cease to be, period.

An article by Joseph Romm, “Obama and Clinton plan to cool it” takes a look at Hillary and Barack and climate change.

Mr. Romm starts strong with a clear-eyed description of what’s at stake:

The gravest threat to the American way of life is posed by unrestricted greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Global warming threatens to put the Southwest into a permanent drought, raise sea levels by 6 or more inches a decade, generate hundreds of millions of environmental refugees at home and abroad, wipe out half the planet’s species, and increase average temperatures in the nation’s interior 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit. And these impacts would likely get steadily worse for hundreds of years or longer.

Unfortunately, Mr. Romm then goes on to talk about the crisis as if it’s about to happen rather than saying it’s happening.

Humanity’s great challenge is to stop the warming before we cross key thresholds or tipping points, in which amplifying feedbacks in the carbon cycle start to seriously kick in and overwhelm human efforts to reduce emissions. A typical feedback would be the melting of the permafrost or tundra, which currently has locked away some 1,000 gigatons of carbon — more carbon than the atmosphere is holding today.

If the permafrost stops being perma…

I feel compelled to impolitely clarify:
Tipping points are being crossed now.
The permafrost is melting now.
The acidification of the ocean is happening now.

We don’t have 40 years to reduce emissions 80% nor 100 years to get to zero – we must drop 90%, and damn fast. (We must really be shooting for zero in the very near term.)

Mr. Romm rightly notes that both Obama and Clinton have relatively strong and detailed positions (if inadequate) on global warming. While supporting McCain at this point is best described (by me, not Mr. Romm) as a suicide pact.

We know we must elect a Democrat – not for the healthcare plan, not the Iraq withdrawal timeline, not the economic packages – although all important – it is to save the planet we know for our children so that we might worry about these other things again. (Or I may qualify slightly and say these other issues are important now in as far as the help or hurt climate change. Climate change is the driver.)

We also know that the Democratic plans are inadequate. They can only be seen as a first baby step in an effort that must rapidly accelerate. Given this fact while trying to find some reason to pick Barack or Hillary on this issue, Mr. Romm’s article has a tantalizing description:

Obama said in early February he would start working on a global climate effort as soon as he becomes the Democratic nominee (which at the time he probably thought would have happened already): “I’ve been in conversations with former Vice President (Al) Gore repeatedly, and his recommendation, which I think is sound, is that you can’t wait until you are sworn into office to get started … I think we need to start reaching out to other countries ahead of time, not because I’m presumptuous, but because there’s such a sense of urgency about this.”

May I tip my hand here, and say that, while a narrow and fleeting look at the candidate regarding this issue, it’s stuff like this that gives me some confidence there’s “can do” substance backing up Obama’s rhetoric – and that perhaps he appreciates the climate crisis is much, much worse than most of us realize.

If we’re to take a serious shot at saving the planet we inhabit, it’ll take leadership that’s willing to leapfrog ahead and change the game.

And lastly (and not completely unrelated), may I suggest downloading the Checklist Toward Zero Carbon. While our leaders leapfrog, so must we.

Another nail in the coffin? China gone wild edition…

It’s generally agreed – despite the fact that America is, by far, historically the number one contributor to global warming – that the ultimate hurdle to climate stabilization will be China.

Alarmingly, the word on the street is that China’s emissions are not just growing at a furious pace, they are growing more than twice as fast as feared.

How bad is it? Conservatively estimated, China will have added between 2000 and 2010, 600m tons of CO2. For perspective, Kyoto was only seeking 116m tons of reductions worldwide by 2012. Death spiral anyone? The numbers are staggering – and conservative!

“A notable shift occurred in China around the year 2000, around the time when hope for an agreement with the U.S. on the Kyoto Protocol began to diminish along with external pressure for China to reduce its emissions,” said Carson. “Energy use started to grow faster than income, and much of the energy that was used wasn’t efficient.”

How do we stop China’s race into oblivion? I think we must start with radical reductions here in the United States. Then with the Europeans we’ll be in a position to exert political and economic pressure to slow and then turn around China’s runaway train (and our own in the process). To get started now – I humbly suggest – download this checklist, and get busy.

Electronics Waste Action Items

Email a reluctant Mayor Bloomberg, urging him to sign into law the “e-waste” bill.

And Brooklynites, while we await passage of this important legislation, put May 18th in your calender.    

It’s the day you can finally clean out all those dust covered computing dinosaurs stacked in closets and on shelves.   From 8am to 2pm at Prospect Park next to the Carousel near Flatbush and Empire.   For more information regarding this event or other city recyling events in other boroughs go to www.nyc.gov/wasteless.   

Denier Frederick Seitz dead at 96

Mr. Seitz’s obituary was notable to me not for his role as a denier per se, but his work for big tobacco and reminded me yet again of tobacco’s role in the whole “denial industry”. And why John Tierney isn’t really a serious journalist, or perhaps he just thinks we’re all a bit slow.

First, from the obituary:

Seitz, a physicist, headed the National Academy of Sciences from 1962 to 1969 and led Rockefeller University, a New York-based research institution, from 1969 to 1978.

Seitz won the 1973 National Medal of Science for his earlier contributions to the modern quantum theory of the solid state of matter. He also wrote a number of books, including “The Modern Theory of Solids” (1940), an influential text on the development of solid-state physics and of transistors.

Sounds okay so far, but then:

Seitz became known later in life for his skepticism about the existence of global warming. In 1998 he solicited thousands of scientists to sign a petition against the Kyoto protocol on global warming.

From 1978 to 1988, Seitz was a member of the medical research committee of the tobacco company R.J. Reynolds.

Global warming deniers and tobacco deniers not-so-seperated-at-birth? As goes the tobacco debate, so goes the climate change debate? Clearly not a coincidence. You see, in fact, it’s big tobacco that started the damn world of global warming denial. For a great blow-by-blow read Chapter 2, in the book Heat, How to Stop the Planet From Burning by George Monbiot, 2006.

The germination went something like this: In 1993, Philip Morris, getting hammered in public opinion over second-hand smoke after the release of an EPA report, hired the PR firm APCO. APCO designed a campaign to fight a ban on passive smoking by creating the impression of a grassroots movement to fight over-regulation and to portray tobacco fears as just one of many unfounded fears. What are some of the other unfounded fears you may ask? According to big tobacco, one is global warming. Interesting.

Then big tobacco forms the Advancement for Sound Science Coalition, TASSC and among other things finances www.junkscience.com. The tobacco companies and ExxonMobil dance the same dance again and again, in dim light perhaps, where few care to look.

A Brown and Williamson memo sounds like a recurring nightmare:

Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.

Does Mr. Tierney address tobacco money? Of course not. Mr. Tierney, perhaps some reporting is in order?

Neighborhood Sustainability Event Tonight

The event that set the checklist in motion -

Tonight,Thursday, March 6th, the Park Slope Civic Council is hosting a community forum on sustainability entitled “PlanPS2008: How You Can Start Fighting Climate Change Today.”

The forum will feature sessions on the ins and outs of solar panels and green roofs, along with lots of easy-to-implement, eco-friendly tips. Whether you’re a renter or a homeowner, the forum’s expert panelists will provide you with the know-how to start making Park Slope a greener community today.

The panelists include the Director of the Mayor’s Office on Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, Rohit Aggarwala, solar-power expert Anthony Pereira, green-roof guru Rob Crauderueff and Garbage Land author Elizabeth Royte.

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

Old First Reformed Church

7th Avenue and Carroll Street

The forum is free, and free on-site child care will be provided by Old First’s trained childcare staff. 

It should be a great event, and I’m delighted to report that, of course, a version of the checklist will be distributed to those attending.