Capturing Water

SUBHEAD: Everyone should give some serious thought to alternative water sources in the longer term. image above: Small scale backyard water tub with plants and fish. From http://www.ecologicalgardens.com/summer_2009 By Sharon Astyk on 7 August 2008 in Casaubon's Book - http://sharonastyk.com/2008/08/07/capturing-water

I’ve talked before about storing water for emergencies – even the non-TEOTWAKI kind – you know, like the bad storms that contaminate your drinking water for an extended period. But now I want to talk about how to get water off your roof, out of the ground or otherwise when things get difficult.

Why do you need to know this? Isn’t it just crazy talk to imagine us not having *WATER*? Well, how much is your water bill right now? Are you sure you’ll always be able to pay it? Will you be able to pay for all the water you need for irrigating your garden? Or do you have a well?

Are you certain you’ll be able to keep paying the electric bill? If you live in a dry place, are you sure there will always be water coming out of the tap? These are questions worth asking ahead of time, because water matters. Some of us have no choice but to be aware of that already – those who live in very dry places may already be struggling with water issues.

You need water. You will be very unhappy without it. And while we’re a long way from people dying from dehydration, not having it can be very tough on you and your body. So how do you get it if the normal routes get disrupted? The very first step on this is to begin to research your local watershed. Where does your water come from? What are the long term planning issues facing your region or community in regards to water? What impact does climate change seem to be having? What projected impact might it have? What issues are there with contamination? How safe is surface water? Do you have problems with acid rain? Pesticide runoff? PCB contamination? Mercury? What about your well? What about the local reservoirs? What are the legal issues of your water use? Can you collect rain? Can you make use of surface water? These are things you need to know.

Basically, you have three choices – you can get water from under the ground, on top of the ground or the sky. It is worth understanding fully where your water comes from and where you might get it. This essay is necessarily an overview, rather than a complete resource - and if you are concerned about water, I recommend _The Home Water Supply: How to Find, Filter, Store and Conserve It_ by Stu Campbell as the most complete source I’ve seen on this subject.

Most of us can get some water from the sky – how much varies a lot. Some cities do prohibit rainwater capture, and in those places it is worth working on the legal issues – more and more cities are recognizing that keep heavy storm rains from causing problems is a benefit, and more and more areas are seeing strong movements towards permitting rainwater collection.

Rainbarrels can be made http://www.swfwmd.state.fl.us/conservation/rainbarrel/make-a-rain-barrel.html or purchased. Or you can put in either an above ground water tank or a cistern to catch larger quantities of rain. A cistern can a large, premade tank, or you can build it yourself: http://www.dancingrabbit.org/building/cistern.php If you can put your rainwater capture close enough to the house, you may even be able to bring water into the house from the cistern or tank for doing dishes, laundry, etc… I have not yet achieved this, however.

From under the ground depends on where you live – generally water tables are higher in the east than the west. You need to know how deep your well is if you are pumping directly from underground.

If you have a well, and the power goes out, you have several choices. The first is to put a manual pump on your well. This is only feasible if you water table is less than 200 feet down, and it isn’t cheap – usually above $1000. But it is a good system. The following will also work, and work even a bit deeper than 200 feet. http://www.countrysidemag.com/issues/83/83-1/Steve_Belanger.html

If your water table is high enough, you may be able to hand dig a well – the difficulty being that most surface water isn’t that clean. But if you have a good filtration system, you might find this useful – particularly if you have a source of drinking water and primarily need irrigation, laundry and livestock water. Remember, most of the water we use does not need to be drinking quality – using drinking quality water only for drinking, rather than flushing, washing, etc…. and using either less perfect water or greywater for other things is one possible strategy. Conservation is your first tool here, as it almost always is. Here’s information about hand-dug wells: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-53545254.html. Do be careful doing this!

If you have a deep well, and are concerned about losing power to it, solar direct http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_waterpumping.html or windmill pumping http://www.aermotorwindmill.com/ is probably your best bet, but this is not cheap – if you are permitted to capture water from the sky and have sufficient rainfall, you might find the cistern option much less expensive. Or you might not, depending on what you can put together.

If these options are too expensive, well, in much of the world, people rely on community wells. This is something to consider proposing in your town – there have been enough natural disasters around that most towns, even if they are not preparing for peak oil and climate change may see the merit of central water access points – in public parks, at schools and community centers. Consider asking your town to put in manual or solar powered water pumping stations so that community members can have water access in a crisis. Or consider getting together with neighbors and putting in a neighborhood well.

If you are lucky enough to have a spring, you can tap it – we have a bunch of them, and it is on my agenda – we might even be able to pull off gravity fed water eventually here if we put in time and work enough – something we’ve thought about but not done much about. http://www.sungravity.com/bulletin__3.html - many springs can be usefully developed, either for home us, irrigation or grazing.

If you are using surface water, you will need to have an extremely good filtration system – I’m a big fan of my British Berkefeld (which, among other sources, can be purchased from Sustainable Choice, advertising on the sidebar) and Kataydin, but there are other options out there. You want something gravity fed, that doesn’t require electricity, and that handles as many contaminants as possible – since you don’t necessarily know what you will be dealing with. Store filters are not sufficient. You could also distill your water: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Renewable-Energy/1974-09-01/How-To-Build-and-Use-A-Solar-Still.aspx.

Getting water from surface sources is pretty simple – you go there and bring some buckets. If you have to carry a lot a long distance, you may want tanks that strap on your bicycle, or at a minimum a yoke and bucket set up http://www.lehmans.com/jump.jsp?itemType=PRODUCT&itemID=6163 (this is for illustration purposes – I don’t think those buckets are water tight, although you could probably substitute), which is far more comfortable than carrying them in your hands. In the winter, if you have one, you can melt snow, but it takes a lot more snow than you think to make a lot of water.

I hope everyone will at least give some serious thought to water sources in the longer term.

Don't audit Fed! Pull the Rug!

SUBHEAD: Pull the rug from under the Fed by closing down Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, and the FHA.

By Raul Ilargi Meijer on 12 October 2009 in the Automatic Earth - http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2009/10/october-12-2009-dont-audit-fed-pull-rug.html

 
Image above: Painting by Mark Bryan titled "The Tornado Men", 2004 From http://www.artofmarkbryan.com/the%20tornado%20men.html  

You would expect the Obama administration to make a lot of happy green shoot noise if and when one of their economic programs shows signs of success, or can be made to look as if it does. So it’s a bit strange at first glance that it's been pretty much silent in the media regarding the fact that the $75 billion Making Home Affordable Program managed, three weeks earlier than expected, to modify 500,000 mortgages out of a total of 4 million envisioned. But that's only at first glance, though.

A second one reveals why the government and its spin team are not all that eager to shout this particular one from the rooftops. On Friday, one day after the "success" was announced, Elizabeth Warren's Congressional Oversight Panel issued a report that is as polite as it is highly critical about the program and its numbers, and states that the plan won't even be able to slow foreclosures, let alone halt them.. In the words of the New York Times:

• On Thursday, Treasury announced that 500,000 homeowners had since had their payments lowered on a trial basis, celebrating this as a milestone. But the report from the oversight panel directly challenged the administration’s characterizations. Most prominently, the panel had grave uncertainty about whether large numbers of the trial loan modifications — which typically run for three months — would successfully be converted to permanent terms.
  
• As of the beginning of September, only 1.26 percent of trial modifications that had made it through the three-month trial period had become permanent [..]
  
• As of Sept. 1, the Obama plan had produced 1,711 permanent loan modifications.

1711 out of 500,00, and even some of those are guaranteed to re-default. Obviously, there's not much of a success to report. At all. That is, not for the government. The lenders, who have probably already been paid fees for all 500,000 modifications, have more reason for joy.

On the other hand, the homeowners who have allegedly been "helped" have much less to be happy about, though most may have to wait a while before they find that out. The program, like everything other "help" the government is involved in, all the guarantees, the securities purchases and other support programs, depends for the difference between success and failure on one simple assumption. Home prices need to be kept from falling, at least by more a few percentage points. And that is a goal that will not be achieved.

Nor is all that desirable to start with. Higher real estate prices may be a boon for banks, they are a burden for buyers and, because of government-issues guarantees, for taxpayers. The stake the Federal Reserve and the Treasury now hold in the US housing market means that every American owns a substantial stake in everybody else's home. Now imagine that prices will fall another 25%, and you can start calculating some losses. They will run in the trillions of dollars. The Fed and the feds put another $1.2 trillion into the housing market in FY 2009 alone. The most important point is that none of these exorbitantly expensive initiatives manages to halt the increase in foreclosures; in fact, the rate is still accelerating.

America has an inventory that could satisfy all demand for more than two years, but builders come knocking for government support. Obviously, this madness has to stop somewhere. Fannie and Freddie take their share of the $1.2 trillion (the Fed now buys up their securities as soon as they are issued) and use part of it to sell foreclosed homes under a program that requires a mere 3% downpayment and for which no private mortgage insurance is needed.

The argumentation, for what I understand of it, is that the GSEs own the whole risk already anyway, so why bother with something as petty as prudence? Why indeed, since in the end the ownership of course lies not with Fannie and Freddie, but with you, the citizen and taxpayer. So when will it stop? When the mess has become too large to oversee, when the inventory glut and foreclosure waves cause prices to decrease so much, defying the flood of subsidies, that just about every single mortgage must be modified and over two-thirds are deeply underwater.

Or it could stop now. Congress might decline any additional demands for bail-out funds that are sure to come before the year is over, and wrap up Fannie and Freddie before they can cause any more damage. Or maybe it will stop here:

Writedowns on Mortgage-Collection Servicing Make Even JPMorgan Vulnerable

The four biggest U.S. banks by assets may have to take writedowns on $55 billion of mortgage- collection contracts after marking them up by $11 billion in the second quarter, casting a shadow over earnings. Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. wrote up the value of the contracts, known as mortgage-servicing rights or MSRs, by 26 percent in the quarter as mortgage rates climbed by about 0.35 percentage point. Net gains on the contracts added more than $1 billion to Wells Fargo’s record earnings in the quarter and $1 billion to JPMorgan’s first-quarter profit.

Losses of $55 billion just on mortgage servicing. In just the 4 biggest banks. Sounds promising, doesn't it? But they'll survive, no matter what their losses. Too big to fail and all that. Sorry, Joe Blow, but the peace prize winner deems it necessary that you, who can't afford a home anymore or get a loan to buy one, fork over for those who can.

As for the banks who are not that big, the picture, as it is revealed through the media, is becoming clearer at a pretty rapid clip. 1000 bank failures over the next few years has turned into a widely accepted number, never mind that the FDIC didn't close a single on this week for the first time in months.

The 2009 total stands at 98, and for some reason we can only guess at, the decision was made to go over 100 only next Friday. Nice try, but commercial real estate is bursting at the seams, and scores of smaller banks have no chance of surviving that. Look, the core of America's economic problems lies in real estate. The only answer the government manages to come up with is throwing your money at it. That's the only answer it has for any economic problem it's faced with. The answer is sure to fail, because home prices are still much too high; all you need to do is look at the fast increasing numbers of foreclosures and job losses. And Congress has the key. Obama, Summers, Geithner and Bernanke have made it crystal clear that they have no intention of taking a break in their practice of throwing your money away to keep housing finance fees flowing in order to keep Wall Street satisfied.

Auditing the Fed is a useless initiative that only serves to divert attention away from what is really sinking the economy and putting you into debt faster and deeper than you can say "No Mas". Even if Congress has the legal authority to audit the Fed, which I very much doubt they have, it'll take many years to reach any sort of conclusion or even have any relevant books -fully- opened. What would be useful, however, is for Congress to demand (by refusing provide further funding) that the White House withdraw its support for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the FHA and all other channels that could potentially be used to prop up a dead market. Cutting off all government support for the real estate market can be done in a manner of weeks or months. Yes, the effects will be devastating.

But not nearly as bad as letting this multi-trillion dollar circus continue its mind-boggling contortionist act. Supporting homeowners is of course not a bad thing in itself, But if you pay attention, you can see that's not what the government is doing. It's supporting the banks on Tim Geithner's speed-dial instead, under the guise of homeowner support, and all the losses will be transferred to you, while most owners will lose their property and/or equity regardless. The whole call for that Fed audit is just an ill-guided attempt to make you look the other way, away from what really hurts. You, and your representatives can simply make it impossible for the Fed to keep buying mortgage securities, by making sure none are issued. Don't audit the Fed, pull the rug right from under its feet.

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The Metastasis of Money

SUBHEAD: The decoupling of money from wealth is even more extreme than it was at the height of the real estate bubble. image above: Street cleaner sweeps up paper money during time of European hyperinflation. From http://moneytipcentral.com/inflation-in-america-what-will-hyperinflation-look-like&usg=__nIyWVCblvlcTUHXbejJkuN6YcmU=&h=3 By John Michael Greer on 07 October 2009 in The Archdruid Report http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/10/metastasis-of-money.html The confusion between money and wealth, the theme of last week’s Archdruid Report post, has become almost impossible to avoid these days. Perhaps the most important reason is the extent to which money has metastasized so deeply into our economic life that it’s nearly impossible to do much of anything without it. The economic textbooks you did your best not to read in school justify that ubiquity by a neat rhetorical trick. If you remember anything at all about the economics textbook you did your level best not to read back in your school days, it’s probably that bit of rhetoric; it can be found in the canned explanation for why we use money, somewhere around page 6. It runs something like this: There’s a plumber and a pig farmer who want to do business with one another, see, but the plumber’s Jewish and the pig farmer has nothing to trade but pork. Add money, and voila! The farmer sells his pork to other people and uses the proceeds to pay the plumber, who uses it to buy gefilte fish and matzoh meal. Everyone’s happy except, presumably, the pigs. It all seems very logical until you think about it for ten seconds. Notice, to start with, how the explanation assumes that the plumber, the pig farmer, the purchasers of pork, the kosher deli, and everyone else are restricted to the specific kind of economic relationships that exist in, and only in, a money economy. The plumber doesn’t, as most people did as little as a hundred and fifty years ago, benefit from a household economy that provides a great deal of his food, including small livestock in the back garden. The pig farmer doesn’t, as most people did until as little as fifty years ago, do essentially all of his household repairs himself. Both of them are defined by a single function: the pig farmer can only produce pork, the plumber only plumbing. Nor do the farmer, the plumber, or anyone else have access to any of the immense variety of nonmonetary systems of exchange human beings have used throughout history. • !Kung hunter-gatherers sharing out a wildebeest among band members according to traditional rules. • Haida chiefs distributing blankets and salmon to all comers at a potlatch • Medieval peasants working a baron’s demesne lands for a set number of days each year to maintain their feudal right to their own cottages and fields. All participated in flexible and effective systems of exchange that had nothing to do with money. Urban societies as complex as ancient Egypt got by entirely without money, and still managed to keep plumbers, pig farmers, and a great many other occupational specialties gainfully employed for millennia. All that the textbook explanation proves, in other words, is that if you have a money economy, it does probably need some kind of money to make it work. They leap from their canned example of the plumber and the pig farmer to the claim that money must be essential to any economy worth the name. The the rest of the textbook proceeds to focus on theories about the behavior of money under the false impression that those theories deal with the behavior of wealth. The mistaken metaphysics discussed in last week’s post plays a large role in fostering this misunderstanding, but the sheer pervasiveness of money in today’s industrial economy has an even larger role. For most people in the modern industrial world, the only way to get access to any kind of wealth – that is, any good or service – is to get access to money first, and exchange the money for the wealth. This makes it all too easy to confuse money with wealth, and it also fosters the habit of thought that treats money as the driving force in economic life, and thinks of wealth as a product of money, rather than seeing money as an arbitrary measure of wealth. The thought experiment of placing a hundred economists on a desert island with $1 million each but no food or water is a good corrective to this delusion. Unfortunately this same experiment is being tried on a much vaster scale by the world’s industrial economies right now. We have seven billion people on a planet with a finite and dwindling supply of the concentrated energy resources that are keeping most of them alive, and governments and businesses alike are acting as though the only possible difficulty in this situation is coming up with enough money to pay for investments in the energy industry. It should be obvious that no amount of money can overcome the thermodynamic and statistical laws that have placed hard limits on the amount of highly concentrated energy resources that happen to exist on our planet. This is not obvious to most people nowadays, however, because the metastasis of money throughout the economy has trained nearly all of us to think that if you have enough money you can get whatever you want. The fact that the richest people in the world can put their entire fortunes into health care and still get old and die is one of the few persistent reminders that money cannot overcome the laws of nature, or provide access to goods and services that don’t exist. So how did money get transformed from a convenient yardstick for real wealth to the be-all-end-all of contemporary economic life? At least three factors were involved, two of them common to complex urban societies throughout history, and one unique to ours. First, despite the drastic oversimplifications of the textbook example cited earlier, it reflects a reality: A complex society can gain significant advantages from a medium of exchange that can be traded for any form of wealth. Even in societies where most goods and services are distributed by way of social networks, a social consensus tends to establish certain trade goods – wampum shell strings among the First Nations of eastern North America, for instance – as a common measure for those goods and services that are exchanged in other ways. As a society becomes more complex and the division of labor among different crafts expands, some standard measure of wealth becomes more useful. While money itself was invented around 700 BCE by the ancient Greeks, other ways of measuring wealth for the sake of easy exchange had been in use in Old World urban societies for millennia before then. It’s not inaccurate to include money or some equivalent system is part of the basic toolkit that makes complex urban societies possible. Second, whenever common measures of wealth are controlled by institutions, those who manage those institutions become powerful, and can be counted on to maintain and expand their power whenever possible. • In ancient Egypt, for example, grain in temple warehouses provided the basic measure of wealth; as a result the priests who controlled the stockpiled grain became a potent political force. • In medieval Europe, when land was the basic measure of wealth – there’s a reason we still call it “real estate,” as though all other wealth is unreal – the power of the feudal nobility derived directly from their control of land. • Today the governments that claim exclusive power to print and regulate money, and the banks and financial corporations that manage most of society’s money, derive much of their effective power from their control over the medium of economic exchange, and can be counted on to encourage the rest of society to rely ever more completely on the thing that gives them power. These two factors can be traced in the history of most of the complex urban societies of the past. What makes our civilization something of an extreme case is a third factor... The extreme complexity of an economic system that has temporarily replaced the limited energy resources of other human societies with a torrent of cheap and abundant energy from fossil fuels. Ilya Prigogine, one of the most innovative physicists of recent years, showed via a series of dizzyingly complex equations that the flow of energy through a system increases the complexity of the system. If there was ever any doubt of the accuracy of his claim, it was settled by the economic history of the western world from 1700 to the present. The societies over which the tsunami of the Industrial Revolution broke in the early 18th century were not unusually complex by the standards of past civilizations; their own contemporaries in the Chinese and Ottoman Empires considered western Europeans, and not without reason, to be grunting, smelly barbarians with few of the arts and graces of civilization. Fossil fuels may not have done anything about the gracelessness and the smell, but it certainly made up for any shortage in complexity. Until the dawn of the industrial age, as a general rule of thumb, some 90% of the inhabitants of any complex society worked in agriculture, providing the food and raw materials that supported themselves as well as the 10% who could be spared for all other economic roles. By 1900, at the zenith of the age of coal, many nations in the industrial world had dropped the percentage of their work force in agriculture below 50%, and shifted the workers thus freed up into a broad assortment of new economic roles. By 2000, buoyed by the much higher concentration and efficiency of petroleum, many industrial nations had dropped the percentage of their work force in agriculture below 5%, with the other 95% filling newly invented roles in the most complex economies in the history of the planet. One consequence of this swift and unprecedented surge in complexity was the triumph of money over all other systems of exchange. When the vast majority of workers at every income level labored at tasks so specialized that their efforts only produced value when combined with those of hundreds or thousands of other workers, money provided the only way they could receive a return on their labor. When most of the customers for any given product had money and nothing else to exchange for it, buying products for money became standard. Social networks of exchange – household economies, customary local exchanges, church and fraternal networks – shattered under the strain, and were replaced by purely economic relationships – wage labor, shopping, public assistance – that could be denominated entirely in cash. The last three centuries of social and economic history are largely a chronicle of the results. If economists took a wider view of the history of their discipline than they generally do, they might have noticed that what most of them consider a fundamental feature of all economies worth studying – the centrality of money – is actually a unique feature of an economic era defined by cheap abundant energy. Since the fossil fuels that made that era possible are being extracted at a pace many times the rate at which new supplies are being discovered, current assumptions about the role of money in society may be in for a series of unexpected revisions. In an ironic way, this process of revision may be fostered by the antics of the world’s industrial nations as they try to forestall the Great Recession by spending money they don’t have. The economic crisis that gripped the world in 2008 was primarily driven by a drastic mismatch between money and wealth. When the price of a rundown suburban house zoomed from $75,000 to $575,000, for example, the change marked a distortion in the yardstick rather than any actual increase in the wealth being measured. That distortion caused every economic decision based on it – for example, a buyer’s willingness to go over his head into debt to buy the house, or a bank’s willingness to lend money on the basis of imaginary equity – to suffer similar distortions. Now that the yardsticks have snapped back to something like their proper length, the results of the distortion have to be cleared out of the economy if the amount of money in the system is once again to reflect the actual amount of wealth. Yet this is exactly what governments and businesses are doing their level best to forestall. Governments are scrambling to prop up economic activity at a pace the real wealth of their societies can no longer support; banks and businesses are doing everything in their power to divert attention from the fact that a great many of the financial assets propping up their balance sheets were never worth anything in the first place and now, if possible, are worth even less. Both are doing so by the simple expedient of spending money they don’t have. As government deficits worldwide spin out of control and the total notional value of the world’s derivatives market climbs steadily above one quadrillion dollars, the decoupling of money from wealth is even more extreme than it was at the height of the real estate bubble. This is another context in which a wider view of history than economists usually allow themselves to take could offer a useful warning. The dominance of money in complex societies has a distinctive trajectory over time, and next week’s post will discuss some of the ways in which that trajectory might unfold in the decades immediately before us. see also: Ea O Ka Aina: Metaphysics of Money 10/2/09 Ea O Ka Aina: The Trouble with Money 10/3/09

CO2 of 15 Million Years Ago

SUBHEAD: Carbon dioxide has varied throughout history but last time it was this high was 15 million years ago.


image above: Artist's conception of Antarctic forest from a few millions of years ago.
From http://www.the-peoples-forum.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=3674

By Stuart Wolpert on 09 October 2009 in Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.htm
"The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland," said the paper's lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.
"Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas, and geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth's history," she said.

By analyzing the chemistry of bubbles of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists have been able to determine the composition of Earth's atmosphere going back as far as 800,000 years, and they have developed a good understanding of how carbon dioxide levels have varied in the atmosphere since that time. But there has been little agreement before this study on how to reconstruct carbon dioxide levels prior to 800,000 years ago.

Tripati, before joining UCLA's faculty, was part of a research team at England’s University of Cambridge that developed a new technique to assess carbon dioxide levels in the much more distant past — by studying the ratio of the chemical element boron to calcium in the shells of ancient single-celled marine algae. Tripati has now used this method to determine the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere as far back as 20 million years ago.

"We are able, for the first time, to accurately reproduce the ice-core record for the last 800,000 years — the record of atmospheric C02 based on measurements of carbon dioxide in gas bubbles in ice," Tripati said. "This suggests that the technique we are using is valid.

"We then applied this technique to study the history of carbon dioxide from 800,000 years ago to 20 million years ago," she said. "We report evidence for a very close coupling between carbon dioxide levels and climate. When there is evidence for the growth of a large ice sheet on Antarctica or on Greenland or the growth of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, we see evidence for a dramatic change in carbon dioxide levels over the last 20 million years.

"A slightly shocking finding," Tripati said, "is that the only time in the last 20 million years that we find evidence for carbon dioxide levels similar to the modern level of 387 parts per million was 15 to 20 million years ago, when the planet was dramatically different."

Levels of carbon dioxide have varied only between 180 and 300 parts per million over the last 800,000 years — until recent decades, said Tripati, who is also a member of UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. It has been known that modern-day levels of carbon dioxide are unprecedented over the last 800,000 years, but the finding that modern levels have not been reached in the last 15 million years is new.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the carbon dioxide level was about 280 parts per million, Tripati said. That figure had changed very little over the previous 1,000 years. But since the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide level has been rising and is likely to soar unless action is taken to reverse the trend, Tripati said.

"During the Middle Miocene (the time period approximately 14 to 20 million years ago), carbon dioxide levels were sustained at about 400 parts per million, which is about where we are today," Tripati said. "Globally, temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, a huge amount."

Tripati's new chemical technique has an average uncertainty rate of only 14 parts per million.

"We can now have confidence in making statements about how carbon dioxide has varied throughout history," Tripati said.

In the last 20 million years, key features of the climate record include the sudden appearance of ice on Antarctica about 14 million years ago and a rise in sea level of approximately 75 to 120 feet.

"We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in carbon dioxide levels of about 100 parts per million, a huge change," Tripati said. "This record is the first evidence that carbon dioxide may be linked with environmental changes, such as changes in the terrestrial ecosystem, distribution of ice, sea level and monsoon intensity."

Today, the Arctic Ocean is covered with frozen ice all year long, an ice cap that has been there for about 14 million years.

"Prior to that, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic," Tripati said.
Some projections show carbon dioxide levels rising as high as 600 or even 900 parts per million in the next century if no action is taken to reduce carbon dioxide, Tripati said. Such levels may have been reached on Earth 50 million years ago or earlier, said Tripati, who is working to push her data back much farther than 20 million years and to study the last 20 million years in detail.
More than 50 million years ago, there were no ice sheets on Earth, and there were expanded deserts in the subtropics, Tripati noted. The planet was radically different.

Co-authors on the Science paper are Christopher Roberts, a Ph.D. student in the department of Earth sciences at the University of Cambridge, and Robert Eagle, a postdoctoral scholar in the division of geological and planetary sciences at the California Institute of Technology.

The research was funded by UCLA's Division of Physical Sciences and the United Kingdom's National Environmental Research Council.

Tripati's research focuses on the development and application of chemical tools to study climate change throughout history. She studies the evolution of climate and seawater chemistry through time.

"I'm interested in understanding how the carbon cycle and climate have been coupled, and why they have been coupled, over a range of time-scales, from hundreds of years to tens of millions of years," Tripati said.

In addition to being published on the Science Express website, the paper will be published in the print edition of Science at a later date.

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Adapted from materials provided by University of California - Los Angeles. Original article written by Stuart Wolpert.

see also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Arctic seas turning acid 10/4/09
Ea O Ka Aina: A Breakthrough Moment (350.org) 8/26/09

New extraction of natural gas

SUBHEAD: Gas reserve estimates are rising sharply as technology unlocks unconventional resources. By Clifford Krauss on 10 October 2009 in The New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/business/energy-environment/10gas.html image above: Horizontal drilling in shale for natural gas in Marcellus fields of Pennsylvania. From http://www.choosenepa.com/2009/07/16/marcellus-shale-opportunities-and-challenges-for-pennsylvania A new technique that tapped previously inaccessible supplies of natural gas in the United States is spreading to the rest of the world, raising hopes of a huge expansion in global reserves of the cleanest fossil fuel.

Italian and Norwegian oil engineers and geologists have arrived in Texas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania to learn how to extract gas from layers of a black rock called shale. Companies are leasing huge tracts of land across Europe for exploration. And oil executives are gathering rocks and scrutinizing Asian and North African geological maps in search of other fields.

The global drilling rush is still in its early stages. But energy analysts are already predicting that shale could reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas. They said they believed that gas reserves in many countries could increase over the next two decades, comparable with the 40 percent increase in the United States in recent years.

“It’s a breakout play that is going to identify gigantic resources around the world,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy expert at Rice University. “That will change the geopolitics of natural gas.”

More extensive use of natural gas could aid in reducing global warming, because gas produces fewer emissions of greenhouse gases than either oil or coal. China and India, which have growing economies that rely heavily on coal for electricity, appear to have large potential for production of shale gas. Larger gas reserves would encourage developing countries to convert more of their transportation fleets to use natural gas rather than gasoline.

Shale is a sedimentary rock rich in organic material that is found in many parts of the world. It was of little use as a source of gas until about a decade ago, when American companies developed new techniques to fracture the rock and drill horizontally.

Because so little drilling has been done in shale fields outside of the United States and Canada, gas analysts have made a wide array of estimates for how much shale gas could be tapped globally. Even the most conservative estimates are enormous, projecting at least a 20 percent increase in the world’s known reserves of natural gas.

One recent study by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting group, calculated that the recoverable shale gas outside of North America could turn out to be equivalent to 211 years’ worth of natural gas consumption in the United States at the present level of demand, and maybe as much as 690 years. The low figure would represent a 50 percent increase in the world’s known gas reserves, and the high figure, a 160 percent increase.

The projections suggest that the new method of producing gas “is the biggest energy innovation of the decade,” said Daniel Yergin, chairman of the Cambridge consulting group. “And the amazing thing is there was no grand opening ceremony for it. It just snuck up.”

Over the last five years, production of gas from shale has spread across wide swaths of Texas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. All the new production has produced a glut of gas in the United States, helping to drive down gas prices and utility costs.

Now American companies are looking abroad for lucrative shale fields in countries hungry for more energy. They are focusing particularly on Europe, where gas prices are sometimes twice what they are in the United States, and large shale beds are located close to some cities.

Exxon Mobil has drilled a few exploratory wells in Germany in recent months. Devon Energy is teaming up with Total, the French oil company, seeking approval to drill in France. ConocoPhillips announced recently that it had signed an agreement with a subsidiary of a small British firm to explore a million acres in the Baltic Basin of Poland.

Early estimates of recoverable European shale gas resources range up to 400 trillion cubic feet, less than half the industry’s estimates of what is recoverable in the United States. But European energy executives say they are excited about the prospects because the Continent’s conventional gas reserves are too small to meet demand.

“It is obvious to everybody that it has huge potential,” said Oivind Reinertsen, president of StatoilHydro USA and Mexico, a Norwegian company with growing shale interests. “You see a lot of land-grabbing by different companies in Europe, potentially spreading to the Far East, China and India.”

Donald I. Hertzmark, a consultant who advises multinational oil companies on gas projects, said that in a decade or so, the new shale gas resources would improve Europe’s ability to withstand any future reduction in Russian pipeline shipments. In 2006 and again last winter, Russia cut off natural gas deliveries shipped through Ukraine because of disputes between the two countries, causing shortages around Europe.

European companies are buying large interests in shale fields in the United States, partly to supply the American market, but also to learn the specialized mapping and drilling techniques required for shale gas.

Several of the European companies have entered into partnerships with smaller American companies. ENI of Italy paid $280 million in May for a stake in a 13,000-acre gas field north of Fort Worth operated by Quicksilver Resources. ENI has a crew of four engineers, a geologist and a geophysicist in Texas to learn from Quicksilver personnel.

One of the biggest marriages is between Chesapeake Energy of Oklahoma City and its strategic partner StatoilHydro.

Seeking cash, Chesapeake agreed to sell Statoil a large stake in its Marcellus shale holdings, centered in Pennsylvania, for $3.9 billion last November. The two companies are looking at shale fields in China, India, Australia and other countries. Seven Statoil employees are working in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania learning to map and fracture shale, and calculate shale gas pressures, and more are coming.

“We know the shale is out there,” said Lars Erik Oino, a Statoil geologist working at Chesapeake headquarters here, as he rubbed hydrochloric acid on a shale sample to test its mineral makeup. “This could have a huge impact on the European energy situation.”

Time capsule from dead planet

SUBHEAD: In December world leaders will gather in Copenhagen to try to reach a global deal to tackle climate change. By Margaret Atwood on 26 September 2009 in Guardian.co.uk - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/26/margaret-atwood-mini-science-fiction image above: Artist rendering of fictional desert planet. From http://www.freewebs.com/palatium/worldsgroups.htm

1. In the first age, we created gods. We carved them out of wood; there was still such a thing as wood, then. We forged them from shining metals and painted them on temple walls. They were gods of many kinds, and goddesses as well. Sometimes they were cruel and drank our blood, but also they gave us rain and sunshine, favorable winds, good harvests, fertile animals, many children. A million birds flew over us then, a million fish swam in our seas.

Our gods had horns on their heads, or moons, or sealy fins, or the beaks of eagles. We called them All-Knowing, we called them Shining One. We knew we were not orphans. We smelled the earth and rolled in it; its juices ran down our chins. 2. In the second age we created money. This money was also made of shining metals. It had two faces: on one side was a severed head, that of a king or some other noteworthy person, on the other face was something else, something that would give us comfort: a bird, a fish, a fur-bearing animal. This was all that remained of our former gods. The money was small in size, and each of us would carry some of it with him every day, as close to the skin as possible. We could not eat this money, wear it or burn it for warmth; but as if by magic it could be changed into such things. The money was mysterious, and we were in awe of it. If you had enough of it, it was said, you would be able to fly. 3. In the third age, money became a god. It was all-powerful, and out of control. It began to talk. It began to create on its own. It created feasts and famines, songs of joy, lamentations. It created greed and hunger, which were its two faces. Towers of glass rose at its name, were destroyed and rose again. It began to eat things. It ate whole forests, croplands and the lives of children. It ate armies, ships and cities. No one could stop it. To have it was a sign of grace. 4. In the fourth age we created deserts. Our deserts were of several kinds, but they had one thing in common: nothing grew there. Some were made of cement, some were made of various poisons, some of baked earth. We made these deserts from the desire for more money and from despair at the lack of it. Wars, plagues and famines visited us, but we did not stop in our industrious creation of deserts. At last all wells were poisoned, all rivers ran with filth, all seas were dead; there was no land left to grow food.

Some of our wise men turned to the contemplation of deserts. A stone in the sand in the setting sun could be very beautiful, they said. Deserts were tidy, because there were no weeds in them, nothing that crawled. Stay in the desert long enough, and you could apprehend the absolute. The number zero was holy. 5. You who have come here from some distant world, to this dry lakeshore and this cairn, and to this cylinder of brass, in which on the last day of all our recorded days I place our final words:

Pray for us, who once, too, thought we could fly.

Farmland ADU Extension

SUBHEAD: Furfaro's giveaway to residential non “farm dwelling” homeowners bill 2322 comes up 10/14/09. image above: Farm? What farm? Housing example at Kealia Kai agricultural subdivision on Kauai's eastside. "Secluded on a private oceanfront setting... with only 34 home sites ranging from 5 to 10 acres, residents enjoy unsurpassed privacy." From http://www.cstoneholdings.com/currentDevelopments.html By Andy Parx on 9 October 2009 in Parx News Daily - http://parxnewsdaily.blogspot.com/2009/10/cheese-demands-loan.html If you thought the two bills still bottled-up in Councilperson Jay Furfaro’s Kaua`i County Council Planning Committee- the “farm workers” and “vacation rentals on ag land” measures- were not just stomach turning but illegal, you ain’t seen nothin' yet. The giveaway to residential non “farm dwelling” homeowners (those gentleman farmers who have ravaged the viability of agricultural in the islands by “condominiumizing” ag-zoned lands, jacking up prices way beyond the affordability by legitimate farmers) continued at a public hearing Wednesday on Bill 2322 that would again extend the deadline for building “additional dwelling units” (ADUs) The original measure was designed to provide family members displaced by the end of the pineapple industry a chance to build an additional house and was supposed to end in five years. But that sunset date has been extended by the council at least five times over the past 25 years according to a planning department staff report on the bill. Yes the boo-hoo, poor-little-rich-turd, fake-farm crowd once again turned up en masse to ask that the council give them at least five more years- most asking for 10 or 15 or no limit at all- to build these doubly or triply illegal houses because of the “hard times” and difficulty in getting financing. Most of them bemoaned how their speculatory investment they “locked in” last year will go down the drain if the are forced to immediately build what many admitted were rental units, as a “final” sunset bill passed last year required. For those who haven’t heard about this bit of multi-compounded decades-old blunder, in the early 80’s when the legislature required the counties to grant these “ohana dwellings”- as ADUs were euphemistically called- on certain larger residential lots, then-Councilperson Jimmy Tehada and the development-wild council had the brilliant idea of granting them on ag land even though state law required (and still requires) that all those who build residences on ag land build “farm dwellings” as part of a legitimate farming operation. But instead of enforcing the state law the council falsely claimed that the “ag condo” problem was a state issue upon which their hands were tied all the while compounding the problem by allowing twice the already finagled “density”. That density is granted by the council under the county’s comprehensive zoning ordinance (CZO) which gives density to open zoned lands and allows that to be combined with ag land to permit residences on otherwise density-free ag land. The original ag land ADU law was supposed to “sunset” after five years but every time the deadline came near the council extended it until last year when they finally made all those who wanted to build ADUs on ag land file certain paperwork with the planning department and build the house post haste in the hopes of finally ending the idiocy. But Furfaro seems hell bent lately on ignoring the requirements for “farm dwellings” and has introduced this third bill to increase density, further driving up ag land prices allowing those non-farmers who have gotten in their paperwork to have five more years to build... or sell it to someone who will before the entitlement disappears. Yet for many of those who testified, five years weren’t enough- they wanted to lift the time restriction entirely, something the council seemed reticent to do... although who knows. We’ve seen these clowns pander to the moneyed classes in last minute giveaways way to often to trust their mealy-mouthed assertions early in the process. Unbelievably the stream of owners- all admitting they had bought as an investment or for retirement or for any number of non-farm related reasons- ended with real estate agent Phil Fudge who shed his crocodile tears over losing this absurd little entitlement giveaway and the profits he would make selling it. Only one person who testified said she wanted to build an additional house for her brother so they could both live and work on their organic farm. The words “farm dwelling”– in fact, other than her, the word “farm”- were not uttered at the hearing. Meanwhile the farm worker housing bill- a developer’s wet dream with so many loopholes that it could well double the density of ag land- is still in the planning committee awaiting some “tightening up” of the restrictions despite the push by ag condo owner Councilperson Tim Bynum to ram it through and ignore provisions that would allow fake farmers to build who knows how many extra houses on their ag land. And of course there’s still the almost-impossible-to-count-how-many-ways-it’s-illegal “transient vacation rental on ag land” bill instructing the planning department not to enforce the state law (HRS 205) that clearly mandates that “no overnight accommodations shall be permitted” as part of any “ag tourism plan”- a plan the council has failed to enact. Furfaro stated that he hopes to rush through the bill with a one-off committee meeting next Wednesday Oct. 14 and final passage the following week on Wed. Oct 21. And unless people show up and denounce this ugly giveaway that’s most likely exactly what he’s going to do. see also: Island Breath: Chemlawns NO! Organic Farms YES! 3/13/07 Island Breath: Agland Development Moratorium Bill 2/12/08 Ea O Ka Aina: Let Moloaa Farmers Farm 4/2/09 Ea O Ka Aina: Farm Housing Crisis 3/28/09

Kauai Water Security

SUBHEAD: We must change the infrastructure now to address future water security on Kauai.


image above: The Lua Reservoir in Kokee in the Kaulaula Ahupuaha of Kauai. From http://www.dailyventure.com/photo.php?name=kauai_helicopter_reservoir
 
By David Ward on 10 October 2009 - The Garden Island, known for it's ample rainfall and verdant tropical landscape, is home to one of the wettest spots on earth. Why then, would we possibly ask our community to focus on our water supply when there are so many other critical energy issues to be addressed?

Volatile electricity costs, a crippled economy, food security, the list goes on. Simply put; in most Island homes, our water supply is completely oil dependent. Without petroleum to generate electricity, we simply cannot deliver water to a majority of Island residents on Kauai. And although some of our State and County leaders have recognized and begun acting on the real potential for oil supply disruptions and continued price volatility, as well as the general economic liability of severe dependence on tourism, few have asked; What about our water?

Kauai relies almost exclusively on pumped groundwater for its residents. Because of its purity groundwater has been preferred for municipal use. Pumping groundwater is one of the most expensive and energy-intensive ways of delivering water to consumers. This energetic dynamic needs reevaluation. The Department of Water (DOW) must now start to make our water system as resilient as possible and maximize energy efficiency and minimize our carbon foot print.

The existing thirteen (13) unconnected systems pump water from 48 underground wells, uphill to 43 tanks. The pipes leak so much that 25% of the water and energy are lost and un-metered (www.kauaiwater.org). This system evolved during a time when there was abundant water and before the current concern about the future of fossil fuels and global climate change.
Kauai depends almost entirely on foreign sources of fuel for its energy needs. High global demand for oil is linked with Kauai's electricity pricing, which is more that three time the national average. The island is vulnerable to fluctuations in the world oil market and sends millions of dollar each year out of the local economy. Every barrel of fossil fuel we use now is subtracted from the total available to our descendants; no other resource can provide anything approaching the glut of cheap abundant energy on which our lifestyles of relative privilege depend.

Energy transitions happen and we are in one now and we need to aggressively look to the future. What is going to happen after petroleum. Modest as the energy outputs from alternative sources are, they are all we well have to work with when the fossil fuel is gone. Oil production will likely drop a lot faster than our co-op, KIUC ability to invest in and bring on alternatives. It is an unprecedented discontinuity of historic proportions, as never before has a resources as critical as oil become scarce without sight of a better substitute. To replace the oil we are losing by depletion, investment in renewables would have to be an order of magnitude higher than current spending.

On average throughout the islands, one-third of rainfall runs into streams, one-third evaporates and transpire (after being taken up by plants), and one-third recharges the underground water.

Because of kauai's comparatively advanced age its original form has been greatly modified by erosion and the island has evolved a more complex geologic structure and stratigraphy than any of the other Hawaiian islands.

The Hawaiian Islands are formed by shield volcanoes, so called because of a resemblance in profile to round shields of early warriors. Their eruptions were relatively gentle, spreading thousands of thin layers of lava as the land was built up. Each flow averages 12 to 15 feet in thickness and are highly permeable.
As the shields of lava poured out and cooled, cracks would form in the shields. Subsequient flows would sometimes erupt below the shields and these subterranean flows would extrude their way upward through the cracks. Because these later flows were under pressure from the weight of the old lava beds above, they are dense and impervious to water. The result is an intermingling of large deposits of porous basalt, saturated with percolating rainwater, restricted in there lateral flows by hundreds of dikes.

Groundwater can occur at high elevations because of the presence of these dikes. The vertically confined water rises until it leaks through the dikes and reach equilibrium with the rate of recharge from the rain above. These dike-impounded, high elevation ground waters can result in columns of water hundreds feet high on the windward side of the island, where the moisture-laden trade winds bump up against cliffs several thousand feet high and disgorge their moisture as rain.


Cap rock consisting of a bed of dense lava, volcanic ash, or alluvium can and does occur at high elevations on Kauai. Where the dense layers of packed sediment cover the freshwater-saturated basalt, rainwater collects over this cap rock, forming reservoirs of water, or perched groundwater.

Freshwater springs flow through breaks in the impervious rock. Similar breaks connect the aquifers, sometimes so much that withdrawals from one also significantly drains the other. In these cases, although different aquifers are involved, they act as one "hydrologic unit". I think David Craddick, manager and chief engineer of the Department of Water, is right, it is all the same
water only the location of the tap is changed.

Down near sea level, highly permeable basalt is a repository for reservoirs of fresh water. Because of this permeability sea water moves laterally through the rock. Fresh water is lighter than saltwater and floats on the saltwater. The fresh water that sits on the saltwater is known as basal groundwater.This freshwater takes the shape of a biconvex lens, with both the top and bottom bulging outward.

Saltwater encroaches on the fresh water aquifer at or near the seashore, and springs of fresh water may discharge at or near the seashore or even offshore.
Where the water table intersects the ground surface, ground water may discharge at springs and along streambeds. This discharge maintains a base flow in the streams even when there is no direct runoff from rain.

If withdrawal from wells is excessive, saltwater may rise and intrude the wells. Saltwater intrusion is a major limitation to well yields in oceanic island aquifers. Well withdrawal has the eventual effect of lowering the water table and reducing stream flow and ocean discharge.

The ahupua'a system of traditional Hawaiian communities (running from the mountain to the sea) contained all the resources necessary for sustainability.
The success of traditional Hawaiian civilization depended significantly on the orderly allocation of the water supply, especially for the cultivation of taro. This staple of the Hawaiian diet requires large volumes of cool running water for efficient production. Perennial streams originating in rugged mountains and springs that inundated wetlands were the primary sources of taro irrigation. The Hawaiians built elaborate hydraulic systems, and the rules governing their use evolved as society progressed.

Ancient Hawaiians developed a number of perennial streams with diversions and ditches to irrigate and grow taro. Later, sugar growers copied the ancient Hawaiians with their own elaborate and extensive plantation irrigation systems. The use of intake structures to divert perennial low flows and high storm flows, and the use of water-development tunnels to intercept the high-level ground water associated with perennial streams, ultimately gave rise in the late 1800s to the construction of large scale irrigation systems by sugar plantations.

Miles of ditches, tunnels, flumes, and siphons were constructed to transport water primarily to irrigate sugarcane grown on distant arable lands. This transport was all done without the use of fossil fuel pumping. The Wailua network carried an average 150 million gallons per day without any pumping. Most of these irrigation systems are no longer in use for sugarcane farming. The book Sugar Water, Hawaii's Plantation Ditches by Carol Wilcox covers this history well.

The natural movement of flowing water contains an amount of kinetic energy that can be converted to electrical energy. this is emission and by-product free, sustainable, predictable, and indigenously sourced energy. New turbine technologies are enabling effective energy recovery from natural flows of streams and rivers. Hydrokinetic (in-stream) power generation offers the opportunity to utilize generating resources without the need to construct dams or other impounds. The capture of the hydrokinetic energy in the old plantation ditches, flumes and tunnels has not been attempted on a utility scale.

Water conservation by consumers eliminates all of the “upstream” energy required to bring the water to the point of end use, as well as all of the “downstream” energy that would otherwise be spent to treat and dispose of this water. The best way for increasing water efficiency is to reduce the use of drinkable water for non-consumption purposes. There are two ways to do this: collect rainwater and reuse indoor wash water. The rain that falls on the roof should, if used innovatively, be sufficient for the majority of home uses, including gardening. Rainwater harvesting can be supplemented by treatment of gray water (wash water from the bathroom, laundry, and kitchen) e.g., through gravel reed beds for subsequent use in the garden.

Even backwater (from the toilet) can be treated and re-used on site in some circumstances, or a waterless composting toilet can be installed to ensure water goes to more productive uses. Closing the nutrient cycle, from human waste to fertile, food-producing soil is, in the long term, one of the most critical factors in the sustainability of our population. Our food supply is a vulnerable link between the environment and the economy. While the use of oil dominates the production end of the food system, electricity dominates the consumption end. The oil-intensive modern food system that evolved when oil was cheap will not survive as it is now structured with higher energy prices. We will not be able to continue to import 90% of our food. Most of us will have to grow at least some of our own food.

Among the principal adjustments will be movement down the food chain as we react to rising food prices by buying fewer high-cost imported foods and livestock products. The economic benefits of expanding urban agriculture will become much more obvious. The Water Department’s policy of not supporting agriculture must be changed. If we are to feed ourselves we must expand our water use with “victory gardens” in every yard, park, school, and diversified agriculture on all prime land. The irrigation systems associated with the now closed plantations are available for conversion into supplying irrigation water for diversified agriculture farming.

The Water Department must take a leadership position in working with DLNR and the Department of Agriculture to insure both our water and our food. I sincerely believe that we should be using the still affordable fossil energy that we have, to invest in infrastructure that requires very low energy to run (e.g. gravity flow). We need to rapidly reduce our dependence on off-island sources.

We need to replace systems that are inherently limited by available imported energy (e.g. groundwater pumping). Aggressive restructuring of the system for resiliency and energy efficiency and purchases of renewable energy systems are powerful steps that can be taken to improve our water security while combating global warming. We could all learn from how the Hawaiians and the early plantations operated. These necessary steps to save finite fossil fuel resources and finite biosphere must be done soon.

Business-as-usual will can only lead to there being no water in the pipes and most people unable to live in their homes. You have a choice, support David Craddick's efforts to restructure the water system to gravity flow or plan on moving.
see also:
Water - The Uncertain Resource - Part One http://www.minnpost.com/stories/2009/10/07/12268/noted_lecturers_grapple_with_water_the_uncertain_resource

Water - The Uncertain Resource - Part Two http://www.minnpost.com/craigbowron/2009/10/08/12314/uncertain_resource_do_we_have_a_water_crisis_or_a_crisis_of_water_management

Ea O Ka Aina: Our Water Footprint 8/27/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Water, Water, Everywhere 2/10/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Kauai Water & Power 1/4/09

Night of the Living Deadbeats

SUBHEAD: So, what’s with all the zombies lately?  

By David Sirota on 08 October 2009 in Truthdig -
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091008_night_of_the_living_deadbeats

 
Image above: A CitiBank zombie done for the day. From http://www.risingtidenorthamerica.org/wordpress/2008/11/04/zombies-tell-bank-of-america-coal-is-killing-us

That could be a question about one of the hippest retro fads that pop culture has going these days. Inspired by horror genres of the past, zombies have lurched back to pre-eminence in books like “World War Z", video games like “Left 4 Dead” and blockbuster films like “Zombieland”. Even the highbrow producers at National Public Radio recently devoted a segment to a University of Ottawa study entitled “Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection”.

Indeed, the undead have become so popular, they’ve spurred “zombie walks” in cities and spawned Weird Al-ish parodies through Jane Austen knockoffs like “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and bands such as the Zombeatles (with their hit “Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead”).

Frighteningly enough, though, that question about zombies could also be asked of America’s political culture. It was only a year ago that “zombie” first entered the colloquial economic lexicon during the collapse of the financial institutions that were cannibalizing the economy. From a balance-sheet perspective, many of these firms were dead.

But they were quickly reanimated as zombie banks with trillions of taxpayer dollars. Like a typical zombie outbreak, the initial plague spread. On Wall Street, we have zombie executives—those who destroyed the economy but nonetheless kept their jobs and now continue paying themselves huge bonuses.

At the White House, President Barack Obama hired zombie advisers whose zombie economic ideologies and records in manufacturing recession conditions should have killed their careers, but who now sit in high government office letting out moans in support of the zombie banks. On Capitol Hill, the scene this Halloween season looks like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

Decrepit zombie politicians with the funk of 40,000 years stalk Congress alongside the very zombie lobbyists that the election was said to disempower. Lately, they are working in tandem to construct zombie health insurance companies—for-profit corporations eternalized by public subsidies, customer mandates and almost no regulation or competition.

 At the same time, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that should have already concluded keep plodding on with an unchanging zombie strategy—all while media zombies push zombie myths about death panels and birth certificates, effectively feasting on the last functioning lobes of the American brain.

Call me a zombie pundit, but I agree with “World War Z” author Max Brooks’ suggestion that the concurrent rise of zombie pop and political cultures is no coincidence.

 “Zombies are an apocalyptic threat, we are living in times of apocalyptic anxiety [and] we need a vessel in which to coalesce those anxieties,” he says. In fact, I’ll go out on a severed limb and take it further: If zombies specifically represent the apocalyptic downsides of immortalized mindlessness, then today’s zombie zeitgeist is not merely a result of scary quandaries created by stupidity. It is a reaction to both those problems and the sense that they can never be thwarted.

 Here we are, a year after a financial implosion that should have driven a stake into the heart of free market fundamentalism. Here we are, a year after an election that was supposed to pour holy water on Wall Street vampires, exorcise the economy’s demons and challenge the ancient mummies of neoconservative foreign policy.

Yet here we are, with virtually nothing changed, watching the same zombie crises indomitably stumble forward. And so what do we do? We flee to entertainment venues that let us enjoy the campy thrill of confronting the undead—even though we’ve lost the ability to do that in real life.

“The zombie is a way for us to explore massive disasters in a safe way,” Brooks says. “You can’t shoot the financial meltdown in the head, but you can do that with a zombie.”

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Let it Die! 3/22/09

Dilemma and Denial

SUBHEAD: Our predicament or dilemma is a situation that we face, which cannot be solved and its denial is not adaptive.

By Richard Heinberg on 8 October 2009 in Post Carbon Institute -
http://postcarbon.org/article/dilemma_and_denial

[IB Publisher's Note: As of 10/12/09 two events are scheduled for 350.org on Kauai. For details visit http://www.350.org/map#/map/22.205278/-159.502778/9]  


 
Image above: Lapel sticker graphic designed for www.350.org action set for October 24th. From http://www.cafepress.com/Project350.369017439

A couple of weeks ago Jerry Mander and I were discussing the best word to use in the heading for the back-cover text of a new short book being co-published by International Forum on Globalization and Post Carbon Institute, "Searching for a Miracle: 'Net Energy' and the Fate of Industrial Societies". I wrote the main text, and Jerry wrote the Foreword. Jerry liked the word "conundrum," while I argued for "dilemma."

We were in basic agreement, though, about a word we didn't want: "problem." Problems can be solved; humanity's energy and environmental crises will not be "solved," in the sense that there is no realistic strategy that will enable us to continue, as we have for the past few decades, to enjoy continuous growth in population and in consumption of resources and use of energy. If we are to survive, we will have to accept profound and fundamental changes to our economies and lifestyles.

The word "dilemma" characterizes a situation in which one must choose between two disagreeable options. This is a good description of the human condition in the early 21st century. Had our species foreseen and begun to adapt to resource limits back in the 1950s or even the '70s, the transition to non-growing, sustainable levels of population and consumption might have been fairly painless. But now there really are no easy paths from here to a workable future.

This is not how we would like things to be. We want "problems" with solutions.

Problem: climate change. Solution: renewable energy.  

Problem: poverty. Solution: more economic growth (a rising tide will lift all boats, we are told).  

Problem: slow economic growth. Solution: more cheap energy (i.e., coal, nuclear).

As should already be evident, the "problem" mindset can be maintained, in the current instance, only by narrowing our focus to just one variable. As soon as we begin to take multiple variables into account—population, economic instability and inequality, climate change, resource depletion, limits to capital investment—it quickly becomes apparent that some "solutions" just exacerbate other "problems."

So it's powerfully tempting just to ignore some of the limitations and trade-offs we face. Many environmentalists, viewing the human predicament almost solely through the lens of climate change, see our choice as follows:

Scenario A: 1) Dead planet and dead fossil-fueled economy  
versus 2) Living planet and thriving renewables-based economy

Framed this way, the correct choice is obvious - choice 2. But economists who see continued growth as the key to ending poverty, and who understand that the build-out of renewable energy sources is currently constrained by practical limits, might frame the scenario this way:

Scenario B: 1) Dead energy-constrained economy (One that is incapable of solving its problems) 
verus 2) Thriving, problem-solving economy weaning itself from fossil fuels 
  (But only as quickly as alternative energy sources pick up the slack.)
 

Well, when you put it that way . . . naturally, option still 2 looks better. But in both scenarios the preferable second option is unrealistic, because factors that have been omitted from the framing of the problem preclude that option's realization. A more comprehensive statement of our choice might be this:

Scenario C: 1) Dead planet and dead economy  
(If insufficient efforts are made in reducing carbon emissions, population, and consumption.)

versus  
Crippled planet with sharply downsized economy 
(So much climate change, and so many species extinctions are already in the pipeline and cannot now be averted, that a healthy planet is just no longer a real possibility, for at least the next many decades. Even if we do reduce carbon emissions, population, and consumption, that will constitute a form of economic contraction that will mean the end of prosperity as we have come to think of it.)

That, friends, is a dilemma. Yes, the second option in the third scenario is still mightily preferable, as it is our only realistic survival option; but it's a very tough sell for policy makers at every level, and for the general public as well. Ugh. Let's pretend there's a third option. It's far more palatable simply to ignore a few factors, assume we have only a "problem," and then set out to "solve" it.

Now, it is true that within our overall dilemma there exist many problems (the relatively high cost of commercial solar panels is a problem that probably can be addressed with further research, as is bird and bat mortality from wind turbines). But we shouldn't let the existence of these "trees" distract us from the necessity of dealing with the "forest" in which they grow.

In effect, discounting limiting factors (ignoring the "forest" while focusing only on one or two "trees") constitutes by far the most popular and acceptable form of denial. Very few people would actually deny the notion that there is something wrong in the world, but framing the situation as a problem rather than a dilemma enables us to avoid harsh reality while appearing not to do so. Indeed, the energetic pursuit of problem solving enables one to strike a heroic pose.

Science and Politics Denial can sometimes take blatant and irrational forms—especially here in the politically polarized and increasingly bonkers U.S. of A. Here's a recent example

Author's Note: Caution! Rant ahead! A few days ago my wife Janet and I attended a talk by author Bill McKibben here in Santa Rosa. Bill has been on a more-or-less perpetual lecture tour for the past few months promoting his ad-hoc organization www.350.org, which is mounting a world-wide effort to persuade the international community to adopt 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 as its official target in emissions reduction efforts.

The number comes from analyses by climate scientist James Hansen of NASA, who has concluded that this is the highest number that will enable us to continue to enjoy "a planet similar to the one on which civilization developed."

Bill's lecture was informative and compelling, and Janet and I came away inspired to take the 350.org message into our community however we can.

The next day Janet happened to be volunteering as a Master Gardener. For those who don't know, the Master Gardener program is a Cooperative Extension program of the University of California system, offering free science-based advice to the general public on nearly all aspects of home gardening.
Janet mentioned to a female senior volunteer that it might be good for the program to give more attention to promoting ways that gardeners can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The woman replied that Master Gardeners aren't allowed to engage in "political" activities while acting in their official capacity, and that anthropogenic climate change is "politics" rather than science; she then went on to make a few comments about how some parts of the world are actually cooling, and how scientists disagree on what's really going on.

Janet was dumbfounded (as was I when she related the story to me). Yet the senior Master Gardener's attitude reflects the majority opinion in the U.S., according to many polls. Janet immediately emailed her a few choice articles from www.realclimate.org—a website run by climate scientists.

Of course, in reality the situation is nearly the opposite of "climate change is politics": indeed, the scientific consensus that humans' combustion of fossil fuels is driving the great majority of observed climate change is overwhelming. Even Jim Hansen's suggestion that 350 ppm must be the highest permissible number for atmospheric CO2 concentrations if we want to avert catastrophic impacts is entirely science-based, and the evidence and reasoning behind the number were published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Instead, it is the well-funded effort to doubt and question climate science that is political—an example of denial that happens to suit the purposes of the fossil fuel industry and its friends on the political right.

Yes, I know: there is politics in science too (for examples, read Thomas Kuhn's classic 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Scientists do sometimes let herd instincts overwhelm critical thinking abilities. And absolute certainty regarding the degree of anthropogenic contribution to climate change is impossible to achieve: We can't run repeated controlled experiments with the entire planet, changing one variable at a time.

But the accumulating evidence that the bulk of observed climate instability is due to human action is overwhelmingly persuasive—and the vast majority of scientists accept it as such. As far as I have been able to tell, the objections of skeptics have been satisfactorily addressed. Spend an hour or so at www.realclimate.org, then spend an equivalent amount of time exploring a representative climate skeptic website (for example, www.climate-skeptic.com), then go back and forth matching assertions with evidence. Which one smells more like science, which more like polemics?

Come on, people. Surely as a society we can get beyond this "debate." If we don't do so soon, it will be too late in the gravest possible sense of that phrase. End of rant! 

Dilemma Adaptation
The hard fact is, denial is part of our human repertoire of responses. It's adaptive, up to a point. We all want and need to avoid pitfalls, but doing so takes effort, so we need some sort of filter to help us sort real threats from spurious or inconsequential ones. Denial is also an understandable response to information that is so profoundly unsettling that it would be psychologically damaging to us if we were to deal with it head on. But what's adaptive in one situation can be fatal in another.

I'm thinking a lot about adaptation these days as I read Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: A Breaktrough Moment (350ppm) 8/26/09

Ohia ai - Mountain Apple

SUBHEAD: This fruit was one of the original canoe plants brought by Polynesians to Hawaii.

 By Linda Pascatore on 8 October 2009 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2009/10/ohia-ai-mountain-apple.html)

 
Image above: Sliced Mountain (Malay) Apple showing pit. From http://www.pbase.com/selvin/image/43609292

Since coming to Hawaii, I have often enjoyed mountain apples. They are a red, elongated pear shaped fruit, juicy and slightly crunchy, with a soft skin and delicate flavor. I have purchased these at the farmer’s market, or been given surplus fruit by neighbors.

Recently, a friend gave me a mountain apple tree to plant. So I began to research this species. I always thought this fruit, which is also called the Malay Apple, was brought here from Asia, after Western Contact.

 I was surprised to discover that it is a canoe plant, with a Hawaiian name, Ohia ai. Canoe plants were brought by ancient Polynesians who traveled by canoe to settle in the large Polynesian Triangle that spans from New Zealand to Hawaii to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). These travelers brought a package of food plants and animals to sustain them in their new homes. The scientific name for the Mountain Apple or Malay Apple is Syzygium malaccense.

It is native to Malaysia, and spread through Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. It was brought to the Americas from Polynesia by Captain Bligh. The tree is of the Myrtaceae family, and is related to the Java Plum, Guava, Eucalyptus and Surinam Cherry trees.


 Image above: View up at Ohia ai (Mountain Apple) tree with hanging fruit. From http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/kBnp3xZpat-mJGuFvf0pGg

The Ohia ai or Mountain Apple tree can grow to 50 feet. The tree begins to fruit after 7 years. The bark is mottled gray and smooth, and the leaves are shiny dark green ovals. Blossoms come in the spring, and are bright pinkish red tufts that look like pompoms, with nectar that attracts birds and insects. The fruit forms all along the branches and trunk, rather than from the ends of branches. It ripens in about 3 months, in late summer or early autumn.

The fruit is red or can be pinkish, with white flesh and a brown seed. The Ohia ai is a tropical tree, and can be found growing wild in mesic lowland forest, shady mountain valleys up to 1800 feet, or the humid windward areas of the Hawaiian islands. Hawaiians traditionally used all parts of the Ohia ai. The wood of the trunk was used for house rafters and posts, and for carving statutes.

A dye from the roots and bark were used for coloring tapa cloth. Parts of the tree were used medicinally. A tonic from the leaves and bark was used by new mothers to help expell the placenta after giving birth. The bark was also used in tonics for lacerations, mouth lesions, and thrush. Bark was chewed to help a sore throat, and leaves chewed for treating bronchitis. Eating large amounts of the fruit can cause diarreha.

There is a Hawaiian saying, “O Hinaia‘ele‘ele ka malama, ‘aluka ka pala a ka ‘ohi‘a”, meaning Hinaia‘ele‘ele is the month when the mountain apples ripen everywhere. Hinaia’eleele is the month that falls during July or August, when the rains begin to return after the hot dry summer. Another reference to this time is “Olelo Noeau, Pukui: Ka ua ho‘opala ‘ohi‘a”, the rain that ripens the mountain apples. This refers to the rain that comes just as the mountain apple is beginning to ripen.

The ripe ohia ai was also a metaphor for human beauty: “ ‘Ohi‘a noho malu”, Mountain apple in the shade. Said of a beautiful or handsome person, who is compared to a mountain apple that ripens to perfection in the shade. Another reference to beauty is one to the moon goddess Hina, “Nawele ka maka o Hinaulu‘ohi‘a”. Pale is the face of Hinaulu‘ohi‘a.

 Said of the pink rim around the blossom end of the white mountain apple. The red fruit of the Ohia ai is associated with Pele, Fire Goddess of the Volcano. The fruit is often used to decorate hula altars, and is used ceremonially in Tahiti.

 
Image above: Flower blossom of the Syzygium malaccense (Mountain Apple). From http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/forestry/trees/Samanea_Syzygium.html

We will be planting our Ohia ai tree soon. While waiting the seven years for it to bear fruit, I will continue to look for Mountain Apples at our local weekly Sunshine Markets during the late summer season here on Kauai, to experience a refreshing taste of Ohai ai.

 See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Hawaiian Nature Listing