Economic Reality

53 nations gather to plan a fossil fuel phaseout  (The Conversation)

 

US President Donald Trump is a longtime climate denier and oil industry ally, who sums up his own energy policy as “drill, baby, drill”. Yet he is doing more than almost anyone to speed up the global shift from fossil fuels to clean energy and electric vehicles (EVs)...

What Is Coming?

 Albuquerque is experiencing mid-70s temperatures in the last week of February.  That is unprecedented in my experience.  One has to be apprehensive about what the summer will bring.  What are the chances the issues will be rationally explored in tonight’s State of the Union?

I am going to try to  watch the event on PBS along with the Democrats’ response.  I’m not optimistic.

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Update

From The Nation:

The Planet-Sized Hole in Trump’s State of the Union Address

 

On Solving the Wrong Problem

 I've long been opposed to the huge amounts of time, money an talent which are being proposed in support of the quest to take people to Mars.  It has always seemed to me that an equivalent amount of resources devoted to combating human-induced climate change might actually have a chance of success.

It is indisputable that space-directed technology has produced useful results in the fields of earth and climate sciences.  If science wants to lob some instruments at the moon or further that is likely also to produce something of value to humanity.  Such projects, however, get dicey when the rockets are loaded with weaponry or when humans are included in the cargo, which vastly complicates things and results in astronomical budgets, along with clear threats of the extinction of life on earth.  

The men-to-Mars proposal as envisioned by billionaires like Musk will result in more billions flowing into their accounts, but is unlikely to yield anything of value to all the rest of us.  All of this is explained at length in an excellent article at Defector by Albert Burneko, Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars.

Rainforest Ghosts

 My little Amazon diorama has reappeared on my desk.  The big fishbowl I found in Las Cruces sat there empty for a long time.  I liked the vessel's clarity and shape.  Then, recently, I saw a small fern I liked and soon afterward a miniature African Violet. I made a quick trip into the Sandia foothills for some moss; that and a bit of potting soil brought the terrarium back to life.

 Last night's PBS news included an interview with a Norwegian human rights investigator about the currently dreadful state of life in the Northwest Amazon where the tropical forest is being destroyed by timber harvesters, oil exploitation and agricultural clear cutting.  Drug cartels reign there now over vast areas with little effective resistance offered by national government forces.

Such a contrast to the time I was there when Colombia's perpetual violence was at a low level. At that point rubber harvesting had receded in importance, and the wisdom of indigenous tradition allowed the region's peoples to regain some degree of dignity and independence. 

Priorities

 Some NASA bureaucrat recently promoted the idea of a China/US race to gain control of the moon.  Firing that guy would be a good first step toward a rational Space program that actually supports the survival of life on Earth.  The next good step would be to divert all funds currently allocated for lofting humans into Space to funding climate change monitoring and amelioration.

Fantasy vs. Reality

 In 1969 I was living in a third-floor walkup apartment in New York's Lower East Side.   The apartment building dated from the Civil War era; the bathtub was in the kitchen.  On July 20th of that year I hosted a Moon Landing party for a group of friends.  It seemed to me at the time to be quite a unique opportunity to witness a remarkable event in human history.  I was surprised that the noisy socializing in my two-room apartment showed that no one other than me had much interest in the tv images showing the first steps on the Moon.

By 1970 we were in San Francisco where both our daughters were born.  We were living in the Outer Mission in a second-floor railroad flat in a building that was likely built not long after the 1906 earthquake.  I recall enjoying the Star Trek series which I think was by then already in rerun.  In those early days of the often-reborn series the sets were pretty primitive and the depictions of imagined extraterrestrial life were really corny.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed the upbeat, adventurous plots and their depiction of a human society that had evolved beyond the petty prejudices of the present.

Fifty years down the road I have lost track of how many versions of Star Trek have appeared, and the rockets have gotten a lot bigger.  Astronauts regularly shuttle between Earth and the orbiting space station.  It looks like humans will again set foot on the Moon within a short time, and there are plans to send people to join the robots already on Mars.  I find myself now less than enthusiastic about the prospects of sending humans beyond Earth's gravitational embrace.

The satellites allowing vastly enhanced understanding of weather and climate patterns are of undeniable value, and the pictures brought a million miles back from the Webb telescope are breathtaking.  Lofting humans into Space, however, seems to me to be an irrational distortion of priorities.  Space travel enthusiasts tout the advantages of human perception, performance and flexibility, but those traits' long-term value seems questionable in the face of the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and robotics.

More importantly, given the current trajectory of Humankind, it seems doubtful that a human society with the resources to support something like interplanetary travel will be viable long enough to make that happen.  The odds of avoiding catastrophic, irreversible climate change seem no better than 50/50.  Given the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the the present state of international relations, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists puts the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight.

Those billions aimed at carrying a few humans into Space would be better invested now in giving  us a chance for a real future.

Going Dark

Two of my neighbors asked me if my electricity was out. "Yes", I said, "There are some big storms down south and maybe some lines are down." One of those neighbors is vision impaired.  She said her phone was just about out of battery. I looked at mine and saw that it was at 45%; probably enough to get through the day. I remembered that we had a portable lamp that has a phone charging port, so I connected my cellphone to that.  The batteries in the lamp were too low to charge the phone.

I got dressed and took the dog for a walk. I noticed then that the traffic light two blocks up the street was working  -- a good sign that the power outage was local.  Just to be on the safe side I drove to the nearby grocery store to get the six new batteries that the lantern/charger would need.

I was pleased to find that the lights were on in the store, but the batteries were behind the service counter where a sign said that the service counter was temporarily closed.  No problem; I walked through the swinging gate and took three packs of C batteries off the shelf.  I was immediately confronted by two store staff informing me that the area was out of bounds for customers.  "Yes, I know", I said, and walked to the auto-teller to check out.  I scanned the batteries' bar code -- $25 for six C batteries! 

While I waited for the phone to charge I wondered about how power outages affect people with disabilities or the homeless.  Then, I got to thinking about the thousands of people in New Mexico who faced catastrophic displacement just a couple months ago because of wildfires, and who are now experiencing massive flooding in the burn scar areas due to summer monsoon rains of unusual intensity. It is all a good reminder about how dependent all of us are on massive, complicated and vulnerable infrastructures, and how unready we are for what is coming.

The Rio Grande

 This is the first time in the fourteen years we have lived here that I have seen the river run dry at Albuquerque.

Nobel candidate?

wikipedia

She has already received many honors for her environmental leadership, and it would be hard to dispute the impact on world opinion of Greta Thunberg.  That this young woman can consistently demonstrate such an astounding ability to articulate her advocacy for action on climate change along with great courage seems to make the choice for the Nobel obvious.
 
    I'll freely admit some bias in favor of Thunberg due in part to memories of my own cluelessness at her present age.  Of course I was not alone in that affliction.  I don't recall any of my teenage 1950s peers having any concerns beyond that generated by exaggerated self-absorbtion. The Vietnam war woke me up, but it was still a long struggle that extended well past the 1960s before my consciousness of social and political issues took on any coherent form.

Greening the Debate

The Blue Marble—Earth seen by Apollo 17 in 1972

How nice it would be if the 11/14 debate participants would offer up some clear ideas about what can and must be done to combat climate change.  Here is one possibility from the economist, Robert Pollin, layed out in a Boston Review forum article about a year ago:

"Federal building efficiency program. In 2007 Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act, which mandates that 75 percent of the more than 300,000 buildings owned by the federal government undergo efficiency retrofits. The goal is to reduce energy usage by 30 percent by 2015, relative to 2003 levels. But even though the bill passed with bipartisan support, there has been little progress in bringing the project to scale. By May of this year, only 1,702 buildings had been retrofitted, about 0.3 percent of the number targeted. Yet the government reports that even this modest level of implementation produced $840 million in annual energy savings for taxpayers. Advancing the project would easily save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars per year. It would also demonstrate to private building owners how much they can save through retrofitting."

You would think that the possibility to "...easily save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars per year" would catch to eye of just about any politician, and as Pollin notes the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 did have bipartisan support.  Realistically, though, in view of the vacumn of ideas among the Republican candidates, my expectation would be that all of them would suggest that simply down-sizing government would achieve the same objectives as retrofitting federal buildings.  Of course, the first target on their government hit list would be the Environmental Protection Agency, leaving us no objective way to measure climate damage, or to map out and enforce mitigation efforts.