The Ecotechnic Future

SUBHEAD: The time of contraction ahead of us well be an opportunity for social evolution. image above: The amusement theater "Waterworld-Hollywood" illustrating the dark side Post Industrialism. From http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waterworld_Hollywood.jpg By John Michael Greer on 19 October 2009 in The Energy Bulletin http://www.energybulletin.net/node/50437

From Chapter 2 of John Michael Greer's new book, The Ecotechnic Future, Envisioning a Post-Peak World (New Society Publishers, $18.95)

...From the standpoint of the far future, in fact, modern industrialism may turn out to be a primitive and vastly inefficient form of the technic society. Like other human ecologies, the technic society can be defined by its energy sources. A hunter-gatherer society uses energy in the form of food, firewood and raw materials taken directly fr.om natural ecosystems.

A nomadic herding society also gets its energy from natural ecosystems, but uses livestock as an energy harvesting technology. A village agricultural society does the same thing using domesticated plants. An urban agrarian society uses energy in the form of food from artificial ecosystems created by human labor and supplements this with modest amounts of nonfood energy in the form of fuels, wind, hydropower and sunlight.

A technic society, by contrast, relies primarily on nonfood energy.

Modern industrial civilization is simply a form of technic society that gets its nonfood energy from fossil fuels and maximizes production of goods and services in the usual R-selected way at the cost of vast inefficiency.

[R-selection: occurring when a population is far below the carrying capacity of an unstable environment. This tends to favor individuals that reproduce early, quickly, and in large numbers so that at least some offspring survive.]

At the other end of the spectrum is the climax community, the ecotechnic society, which gets its nonfood energy from renewable sources and maximizes the efficiency of its energy and resource use in the usual K-selected way at the cost of more restricted access to goods and services.

[K-selection: selection occurring when a population is at or near the carrying capacity of the environment, which is usually stable. This tends to favor individuals that produce few, slowly developing young, and results in a stable population of long-lived individuals.]

If this is correct, our own civilization is pursuing a wholly misguided image of what advanced technology looks like. Since the late 19th century, when science fiction writers such as Jules Verne began to popularize dreams of future technologies, “advanced technology” and “extravagant energy use” have been for all practical purposes synonyms, and Star Trek fantasies still dominate discussions of what a mature technological society might resemble.

If the model just outlined has any validity, though, a truly mature technology may turn out to be something very different from our current R- selected expectations — and this requires a radical rethinking of most ideas about the future.

As the industrial age ends, the vision of the future that grows from this rethinking may exert a powerful appeal. Still, we are nowhere near the ecotechnic age yet, and if the succession model is any guide, trying to leap directly from the rank weeds of industrial society to the verdant forest of an ecotechnic civilization simply won’t work. Even leaving succession aside, we have only the vaguest idea of what a truly sustainable technic society would look like, and history suggests that a long process of trial and error will be needed to develop a technic civilization that can sustain itself for the long term.

In important ways, though, this is simply a restatement of points already made. If human societies replace one another in something akin to ecological succession, the societies that rise from the ruins of industrial civilization will be those best suited to the environment created by their predecessors. These new societies will then be replaced by other societies, until some approximation to a climax community is reached. Only when conditions support the climax community will the ecotechnic future arrive.

The long road to sustainability - The dream of building an ecotechnic society here and now is, of course, widespread. It can be traced in some of the best visionary literature of recent decades, and has been cherished by many people in alternative circles. That dream has become important in some corners of today’s cultural dialogue because it embodies a canny strategy for getting past the less productive assumptions that shape contemporary thinking about social change.

Much of the rhetoric used to justify today’s social arrangements draws an imagined contrast between the benefits of industrial societies and the supposed squalor and misery of preindustrial life.

Many critics of industrialism fall into the trap of accepting the same forced choice while simply reversing the value judgments, as though it’s possible to break out of a dualistic way of thinking by standing the dualism on its head.

The cleverness of the ecotechnic dream is that it splits the difference by proposing a third option that borrows many of the best qualities from each side. The Hobson’s choice between two whole systems, with no alternatives, changes to an open field in which each factor that could make up a future society can be assessed on its own terms. Thus the strategy widens the field of choices, not just to three, but to infinity.

Still, turning this rhetorical strategy into a practical program is harder than it looks. It’s popular to think that social change is driven primarily by deliberate human choice, but this is simply another form of the illusion of independence: it assumes that social technology trumps natural limits.

The science of human ecology and the evidence of history — and history is simply human ecology mapped onto the dimension of time — both paint a different picture. What they show is that people may attempt to build any society they like, but unless their plans take ecological realities into account, they will fail. Even if a society accepts the hard limits of ecological reality, it will still fail if another society competes for the same resource base more effectively.

The industrial economy now lurching toward history’s compost bin, after all, did not achieve global dominance because the people of the world agreed to make that happen. Nor did the squabbling political classes of the world’s societies make that decision; there were industrialists who did their level best to further its spread, but there were also powerful people, many members of the old feudal landowning class among them, who staked everything they had on resisting it and failed.

Industrial civilization had its day in the sun because, in a world where fossil fuel could be had for the digging or drilling, the industrial mode of production was more efficient than its rivals, and enabled the communities that embraced it to prosper at the expense of those that did not. As the industrial system undercuts the environmental conditions that allow it to thrive, new forms better adapted to the new reality will elbow today’s industrialism aside and take its place. We have our preferences, but nature has the final say.

Apply the same measure to the rise of an ecotechnic society and the challenge is clear. The conditions that would make an ecotechnic society the most successful option are roughly those that existed before the industrial revolution broke open the Earth’s fossil fuel reserves and started looting them for short-term advantage.

In a world where the available energy resources are sun, wind, water, muscle and biomass, and all work must be accomplished by those means, societies that evolve efficient and sustainable technologies using those resources have major advantages against rival societies that use them unsustainably.

The problem with building an ecotechnic society here and now is that the conditions just outlined do not yet exist. So far, humanity has used around half the world’s stock of petroleum, and a little less than half its stock of coal and natural gas. These fuels will be available in diminishing amounts for a long time to come.

While modern industrial societies as they exist today probably can’t survive the end of cheap energy, peak oil is already driving the emergence of scarcity industrialism, a new human ecology better adapted to a world of dwindling fuel supplies. While fossil fuels can still be produced in useful amounts, scarcity industrialism will likely produce more wealth and exert more power than any ecotechnic system. Societies with fossil fuels have historically overwhelmed those without them, and nothing suggests this will change soon.

In the longer run, a second new ecology, the salvage society, is likely to replace scarcity industrialism in its turn. Many relics of today’s industrial societies will still exist far into the future. These legacies represent stored energy — they embody the energy that was needed to create them, and to build the material and knowledge base that made them possible — and the additional energy needed to maintain and use them in many cases will be quite small compared to the stored energy contained in them. The energy needed to keep a hydroelectric plant or a computer in working order is fairly small compared to the energy they embody, or the advantages that owning and using them could confer.

It’s quite likely, therefore, that deindustrial societies that can no longer build a hydroelectric plant or a computer could still maintain the less demanding knowledge and resource base needed to keep them running, in the same way that Dark Age societies all over Europe used and repaired Roman aqueducts they could never have built themselves.

The resulting salvage societies will have advantages that purely ecotechnic societies will not, and so these human ecologies will spread wherever the supply of potential salvage allows them to function. Still, their time will pass; many of the legacies of the industrial age will not be renewable, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.

The result is a striking parallel to succession. In the near and middle future, as the deindustrial age unfolds, the societies that will flourish best are those that will be least able to survive over the long term.

In the near term, societies that embrace scarcity industrialism, relying on efficient use of remaining fossil fuels and eking them out with renewable resources and high technology, will likely do better than either the wasteful abundance economies of the present or the more sustainable cultures that will replace them.

In the middle term, salvage societies that combine sustainable subsistence strategies and economies with effective use of the industrial age’s legacy technologies will likely do better than the lingering fossil fuel-using societies they replace, or the ecotechnic societies that will replace them in turn. Only when coal and oil are rare curiosities, and the remaining legacies of the industrial age no longer play a significant economic role, will ecotechnic societies come into their own.

It’s crucial to keep this process in mind when planning for the end of the industrial age. The last years of today’s economy of abundance, the decades of scarcity industrialism built on the last significant supplies of fossil fuels, and the century or two of salvage societies in the middle future, form three hurdles that have to be leapt in order to get to the ecotechnic age.

Instead of trying to make the leap to an ecologically balanced, fully sustainable society all at once, the transition must be made one hurdle at a time, adapting to changes as they happen, and trying to anticipate each serial stage in time to prepare for it, while working out the subsistence strategies and social networks of the future on smaller scales.

This approach is evolutionary rather than revolutionary — that is, it relies on incremental changes and continuous experimentation, rather than trying to impose a rigid break with the past and an ideological pattern that may turn out to be less viable that the one it replaces.

This is necessary because the human ecology that succeeds best under any set of environmental conditions depends much more on those conditions, and the way they interact with available resources and technology, than on choices we make.

Constructive changes are possible in almost any situation, but only within the limits imposed by ecological realities, and societies that try to ignore those realities will face stark handicaps in facing the challenges of survival and competition from other, less burdened societies.

Nobody alive today knows what a truly sustainable ecotechnic society would look like, much less how to build one. The only form of technic society human beings have yet experienced is the industrialism of the last 300 years, and nearly everything that made that system work will be gone once the age of cheap abundant energy ends.

The time of contraction ahead of us is, among other things, an opportunity for social evolution, in which various populations will try out many different forms of technical, economic and social organization, some of which will turn out to be more successful than others.

Out of that process will evolve the successful ecotechnic societies of the far future, perhaps three centuries from now, perhaps more. The journey there, however, will be made more challenging by the impact of today’s choices on the future taking shape around us...

see also: Ea O Ka Aina: Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism 8/2/09 Island Breath: The Age of Industrial Scarcity 10/18/07 Island Breath: The Age of Salvage Societies 10/28/07

Marching Towards Zombieland

SUBHEAD: That Wall Street has pulled off a coup and taken over America is the most powerful meme out there. image above: Detail of movie poster for "Zombieland" now in theaters. From http://www.impawards.com/2009/zombieland.html By James Howard Kunstler on 19 OCtober 2009 in Kunstler.com - http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/10/marching-toward-zombieland.html When sober-minded individuals begin to regard an enterprise within a nation as "an enemy of the people" you can bet that some serious blood is going to flow. This is now essentially the situation for the Goldman Sachs company, which last week announced third-quarter earnings of over $3 billion largely derived from converting zero percent loans from taxpayers into zero risk profits off of anything paying more than zero percent in interest, revenue, or dividends. The "people" across this big country may not have a clue how any of this is done, and there may be much to fault them on from the care-and-feeding of their own bodies to the content of their dreams, but you can't argue with the fact that they are heavily armed to an extreme. And although it may be hard to measure with precision, one might venture to state that they are increasingly pissed off. How else explain popular entertainments like "Zombieland?" The political part of what has to date appeared to be an economic problem is resolving into a crisis of authority and legitimacy. When those in charge of a nation's livelihood prove to be comprehensively false and dishonest, the economic automatically turns political. Nobody believes the bankers anymore, of course, and nobody believes the interlocutors of the bankers - the Federal Reserve chairman, the Secretary of the Treasury, the heads of the SEC and a dozen other regulatory bodies - and increasingly the charming figure in the White House cannot be believed on these issues of the nation's livelihood. The questions lately revolve around whether the nation is destroying itself by inflation or deflation - by the willful destruction of the value of our currency to evade the repayment of debt, or by the hapless destruction of households, companies, and governments by default and bankruptcy. It's a fire-or-ice debate. Either way the nation is going down as a viable enterprise. The fiction that we can return to a Crate-and-Barrel credit card orgy has sustained the false of heart and mind for some months now, but even that pleasant reverie will come to an end as the foreclosures mount. Only remember, men living in their cars who have lost nearly everything else will still have guns. All these tensions beat a path into the holiday season when emotions run high, when blessings are counted and sorrows taste most bitter. So the big question now floating above the sheer data of Goldman Sachs profit announcement is: what kind of year-end bonuses will they dare to pay their executives and minions, and how will the "people" react? It seems to me that conditions are ripening for a bloodbath. The kind of heinous acts that we have feared emanating from foreign "evildoers" since the awful stunt of 9/11/01 are now most likely to come from among our own "people" - a few pounds of Semtex in the lobby of Goldman Sachs's New York headquarters... a few men with market-grade small arms converted to full-automatic outside on the Wall Street sidewalk one evening at holiday time when the suits are leaving work for the day.... It won't take much. President Obama had better strike first. He's about the only figure left in the whole termite mound who has a shred of even potential credibility left because he still has the power to act. He can instruct the people who work for the executive branch to "claw back" any and all ill-gotten bank bonuses; he can direct the Justice Department to investigate everything from the uses of federal bailouts to grand-scale accounting fraud; he can fire people in high places who have failed to act and lost legitimacy. If he doesn't do these things soon then he's finished, too. In the wake of such a failure things will get fractal fast. The sense that Wall Street has pulled off a coup d'etat and taken over the machinery of the United States is the most powerful meme out there now, and its power is growing in magnitude every day among all classes of Americans. I can't say how much it reflects reality. Even if it is a result of sheer happenstance - the tragic evolution of an industrial economy into a financial finagling economy - the citizens will still experience it as a stealing of their future. Whatever else one might say about American culture, it is keenly attuned to a sense of heroes and villains. We take great pride in our ability to blow away the bad guys. And life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde observed. If a zombie virus is on the loose in America, the first infections showed up in the zombie banks, among the zombie bankers. Watch out, Lloyd Blankfein! Woody is on his way.... see also: Ea O Ka Aina: Night of the living deadbeats 10/8/09 Ea O Ka Aina: Bullet sales go ballistic 9/23/09 Ea O Ka Aina: Let it die! 3/22/09

Wealth is a System of Concentration

SOURCE: Elie Starbright (elielstarbright@gmail.com) SUBHEAD: Wealth is a verb. It is the act of the hoarding, and is a key pillar of our culture. image above: Peter Guber's 192 acre Tara Plantation on Papaa Bay was for sale om Kauai in 2007 for $46 million. From http://realestalker.blogspot.com/2007/12/peter-gubers-hawaiian-tara-plantation.html The Agricultural Revolution: The Dominion Revolution By Chuck Burr on 17 October 2009 in Culture Change - http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=532&Itemid=1 Wealth is not what we are taught. Wealth is not stuff; it is a fiercely protected system of concentration. Wealth is a verb, not a noun. It is the act of the hoarding, and is a key pillar of our culture. This system was invented by one tribe in the fertile crescent 10,000 years ago during an event called the Agricultural Revolution. This historical event has been grossly misnamed. It should be called the Dominion Revolution. The change had nothing to do with farming. People were farming and eating way before then. It had everything to do with a complete reversal of the story we live by from, "we belong to the earth," to "the world belongs to man." This is the point where our modern Taker culture was born. Until the Agricultural Revolution all of humanity were indigenous Leaver peoples. We were just one of thirty million species -- we were simply part of the fire of life. One universal shared animist spirituality shared across thousands of cultures. Once we saw the world as our own, and that we can take from and apart regardless of the consequences, a whole new set of possibilities opened up. It started with denying our competitors access to food and privatizing the land. If the world belonged to man, not only things but all life including people can be possessed or at least exploited. Every social justice problem directly stems the dominion story that perpetuates our modern mono-culture or civilization. Once you extended the logic of dominion all the way out, you were now allowed to wage war. A lion only takes one gazelle, and the rest of the gazelles go back to grazing because they know the lion follows the peace keeping law of nature or law of limited competition: only take what you need to survive, no more. However, since the world belongs to man, he may take all of the gazelles, or trees; he may wage war on the forest or even his fellow man. Since it is too disruptive to wage war all of the time to get what you want, a lower level system of violence needed to be invented to get what you wanted. The solution was privatization and locking up the food so everyone had to work within the hierarchical, consumptive, Taker system to survive. If you did not work or at least behave within the system you did not get fed. By having everyone living within the hierarchy, you can have dozens or -- with technology -- thousands of people doing the concentrating for you. The way to get rich is to direct your way part of the concentrating flow from as large a network as possible. That is why our system embraces large corporations -- they enable the largest concentration network possible. We don't need a transnational corporation to flip hamburgers, but with 31,000 restaurants, you can concentrate $23.5 billion a year. Wealth is not the $23.5 billion, it is the system that allows something that does not really exist, a corporation, to operate a chain of 31,000 restaurants exploiting 1.5 million employees world wide. Our modern Taker system is fiercely protected. You can't end private property by taking the property of the wealthy. Hierarchies maintain great defenses from attacks from below. McDonalds grows where McDonald-Douglas goes, now Boeing. Government especially exists to enforce the system of private property and wealth, along with the infrastructure and markets that enable concentration. Make no mistake about it: government is not here to feed you, as most naively believe. The regulations, laws, zoning, finances, markets, inspectors, police, and military are here to make sure no one messes with private property or the market. Further, if we want another country's natural resources, first we send in the corporations, then the jackals if necessary, and, if they didn't succeed, the military. No ifs, ands, or buts. They system will try to continue and expand at any cost. This meme is taught to us since childhood by "father culture" that civilization is the end of history and must progress at any cost. This system of protection of the hierarchy is far more than overt force. It includes deep stratification of education, social cliques, and access to capital. Before my awakening I had all three and played within the system. I interned for President Reagan and had seen the inside of several Fortune 100 companies all by the time I was 35. With a little luck, it worked. Now I am trying to give it all back through one of the country's few really sustainable models and education. Restoration Farm builds topsoil, biodiversity, community, and educates. Show me a list of companies that do that. We Need a New Story After being on the inside, and through traveling, I know how it works for the very few, and does not work for everyone else -- human and our non-human relations. I also know now that you cannot reverse the system from within the system. You have to get far enough from it to develop a new story. There in lies the solution. More and more of us want a new story, a new way to live. We want to make a living that does not end in insecurity, a life of bad food, not thinking for oneself, poor health, wage slavery, no retirement, and a death detached from your family. What are those things but civilization? Tribal Solution to Making a Living A tribe or a smaller band is a group of people who want to make a living together. A "community" today may be no more than a grouping of Yuppies in close proximity. These are two very different things. More tribe-like or band-like is a circus -- literally. In a small circus, everyone has decided to throw in their lot, and make a living together. No one is higher or lower. Being the "boss" is still just a job that someone may have to do, but comes with no privileges. Decisions are made by consensus. A tribe is group of people who are land locked and combine what they have, be it land, tools, or skills, and then make a living together. A tribe also has a sense of place in their watershed or bioregion. That is important, but is not the focus of this discussion. The trick is to carve out enough space to be able to detach ourselves from the modern Taker world. The Amish call this avoiding entanglements with our culture. That is why the old order of Amish drive wagons with wood-steel wheels that they can build and maintain instead of rubber wheels they can't. The point of creating some level of autonomy as a group is to gain the freedom to live your own culture and stories such as, "humanity belongs to the earth." If you are married to modern culture you can't live a new story or imagine a new vision. Now, the Amish do and do not live tribally. They live in a grey area in between. Each family still owns its own land, but work together cooperatively in another sense. We have to end private property and hierarchical government, and replace the failed story of dominion. Concentration, wealth, poverty, every global crisis, and social injustice are the end result of the story we tell ourselves about the nature of the world we live in, "the world belongs to man." We will lose a lot of cool stuff in this new world or "earth culture" as I call it, but peak oil is going to do that for us anyway. Natural Wealth and Permaculture Real wealth is the resilience of nature and her ecosystems measured by biodiversity, topsoil, and cooperative connections. Ecosystems cooperate and have synergies that are not about competition. Real human wealth is your community, education, and the cradle-to-grave security that results. Real wealth results from giving security to get security; it does not come from making things to get things. If you are not taught to think, it's hard to think. We teach people in my local community, students, and interns from around he world to see with whole-system eyes. I am finding a huge divide in the education between lay people and those who study permaculture. Permaculture helps people see holistically, something we are not taught in school. Each department is separated in our educational system, very little is taught as a whole system. Your typical economics course does not tell you that for every dollar made, the planet is trashed somewhere and a bunch of people are exploited along the way. It is more important to learn how a whole ecosystem works, than it is to split atoms. The Consumption of Population The final word goes towards the ultimate expression of dominion. The story that Adam chose Eve is misunderstood because the word Eve is mistranslated. Eve means life, it does not mean a person or a woman. Adam, choosing unrestrained life, means he is choosing abandoning Nature's peacekeeping law of limited competition, and accepting unlimited procreating supported by totalitarian agriculture. Taker peoples have always been able to overwhelm Leaver peoples because they had more people from a greater food supply. Again, we return to the misunderstanding of the Agricultural Revolution: Because the Takers decided to take all of the land for human food production and uses, they simultaneously denied their fellow species' access to food, and so built their human population. They made the choice to consume the world, start the food-population race, and literally convert the natural world to human flesh. This all stems from the choice of dominion or taking, which birthed our system of concentration and wealth. Wealth is not wealth, it is the Taker system of dominion.

Locking up carbon with biochar

SUBHEAD: Turning crop wastes and other biomass into charcoal and spreading it on tropical soils can sequester carbon and boost crop productivity. By Duncan Clark on 13 July 2009 in The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/13/manchester-report-biochar

video above: Laurens Rademakers, of the Cameroons explains bio-char theory. Please excuse the advertisement embedded with content. From http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/jul/09/manchester-report-laurens-rademakers-biochar

Biochar is a type of charcoal produced by heating crop wastes, wood or other biomass in a simple kiln designed to limit the presence of oxygen. This process, known as pyrolysis, creates rather than consumes energy, as more combustible gases are released than are needed to heat up the kiln.

Biochar is made largely of carbon, which the crops or trees previously sucked out of the air in the form of CO2. Unlike crop wastes and wood, it's an extremely stable substance, which if mixed into soil will safely lock up its carbon content for hundreds or even thousands of years – a biological form of carbon capture and storage.

If biochar is mixed with poor-quality tropical soils, it has an important added benefit: it can significantly boost crop productivity, reduce nitrous oxide and methane emissions and improve soil structures. These effects are the result of biochar's structure, which is full of microscopic pores that can harbour useful bacteria and fungi.

Biochar advocate Laurens Rademakers arrived in Manchester directly from Cameroon, where his experiments have demonstrated quite how effectively biochar can increase crop yields. In his photos, wheat grown with biochar-enriched soils is almost twice as tall as the same wheat grown in the adjacent plot without biochar.

Rademakers and others believe that if sufficient amounts of biochar were produced – both on the micro and small industrial scale – the world could reduce atmospheric CO2 concentration to a safe level at the same time as increasing food production. The idea is extremely promising – as long as biochar schemes are managed carefully to ensure that wood from virgin forests is never used as the source material. see also: Ea O Ka Aina: Biochar goes industrial 10/19/09 Ea O Ka Aina: Sacres Shrines & Skinny Chickens 8/26/09 Ea O Ka Aina: Searching for Terra Preta 8/7/09 Ea O Ka Aina: Soylent Black 1/11/09 Ea O Ka Aina: Black is the New Green 2/28/09 Island Breath: Rethinking BioChar 10/15/07

Biochar goes industrial

SUBHEAD: Climate expert claims to have developed cleanest way of fixing CO2 in 'biochar' for burial on an industrial scale. image above: Biochar carbon-sink implementation in south Sumatra, Indonesia. http://www.biochar.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46&Itemid=3 By Alok Jha on 13 March 2009 in The Guardian - (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/13/charcoal-carbon)

Giant microwave ovens that can "cook" wood into charcoal could become our best tool in the fight against global warming, according to a leading British climate scientist.

Chris Turney, a professor of geography at the University of Exeter, said that by burying the charcoal produced from microwaved wood, the carbon dioxide absorbed by a tree as it grows can remain safely locked away for thousands of years. The technique could take out billions of tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year.

Fast-growing trees such as pine could be "farmed" to act specifically as carbon traps — microwaved, buried and replaced with a fresh crop to do the same thing again.

Turney has built a 5m-long prototype of his microwave, which produces a tonne of CO₂ for $65. He plans to launch his company, Carbonscape, in the UK this month to build the next generation of the machine, which he hopes will process more wood and cut costs further.

He is not alone in touting the benefits of this type of charcoal, known as biochar or biocharcoal. The Gaia theorist, James Lovelock, and Nasa's James Hansen have both been outspoken about the potential benefits of biochar, arguing that it is one of the most powerful potential solutions to climate change. In a recent paper, Hansen calculated that producing biocharcoal by current methods of burning waste organic materials could reduce global carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by 8ppm (parts per million) over the next 50 years. That is the equivalent of three years of emissions at current levels.

Turney said biochar was the closest thing scientists had to a silver-bullet solution to climate change. Processing facilities could be built right next to forests grown specifically to soak up CO2. "You can cut trees down, carbonise them, then plant more trees. The forest could act on an industrial scale to suck carbon out of the atmosphere."

The biochar could be placed in disused coal mines or tilled into the ground to make soil more fertile. Its porous structure is ideal for trapping nutrients and beneficial micro-organisms that help plants grow. It also improves drainage and can prevent up to 80% of greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxides and methane from escaping from the soil.

In a recent analysis of geo-engineering techniques published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry, Tim Lenton, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, rated producing charcoal as the best technological solution to reducing CO₂ levels. He compared it to other geo-engineering techniques such as dumping iron in oceans or seeding clouds to reflect the sun's radiation and calculated that by 2100 a quarter of the effect of human-induced emissions of CO₂ could be sequestered with biochar production from waste organic matter, giving a net reduction of 40ppm in CO2 concentration.

Johannes Lehmann of Cornell university has calculated that it is realistically possible to fix 9.5bn tonnes of carbon per year using biochar. The global production of carbon from fossil fuels stands at 8.5bn tonnes.

Charcoal is usually produced by burning wood in high-temperature ovens but this process is dirty and only locks around 20-30% of the mass of the wood into charcoal. Turney's idea to use a microwave, which he found could lock away up to 50% of the wood's mass, came from a cooking accident when he was a teenager, in which he mistakenly microwaved a potato for 40 minutes and found that the vegetable had turned into charcoal. "Years later when we were talking about carbon sequestration I thought maybe charcoal was the way to go," he said.

A number of governments are investing their hopes for sequestering CO₂ from the atmosphere in large-scale carbon capture and storage projects. But Turney said this would not provide a full solution. "It's only for large single sources of emissions like large power stations and that accounts for about 60% of emissions. It doesn't deal with anything up in the atmosphere already which is driving the changes we see today."

Chris Goodall, writer of the Carbon Commentary blog, proposed biochar as a solution to climate change in his recent book, Ten Technologies to Save the Planet. "The only big problem is organising it on a large enough scale," he said. "Organising it so that farmers get paid and put the charcoal in the ground rather than burning it for their own food is a big problem to organise on a global scale."

This could be done if biochar were incorporated into the carbon markets making it more profitable to bury rather than burn. There is an emerging campaign, he said, to get

governments to recognise biochar in the post-Kyoto agreement on climate change that will be negotiated in Copenhagen later this year.

See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Sacres Shrines & Skinny Chickens 8/26/09 Ea O Ka Aina: Searching for Terra Preta 8/7/09 Ea O Ka Aina: Soylent Black 1/11/09 Ea O Ka Aina: Black is the New Green 2/28/09 Island Breath: Rethinking BioChar 10/15/07

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The Oceans are Coming

SUBHEAD: Ocean levels will continue to rise far into the future, until they are 20 to 36 metres higher than today.

Part I: The Global Mistake

image above: Lighthouse at Issla de Moura, Spain on Sundsy, December 9, 1007. From http://www.wunderground.com/wximage/viewsingleimage.html?mode=singleimage&handle=lunada&number=2498 By Keith Farnish and Dmitry Orlov on 18 October 2009 in ClubOrlov - http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/10/oceans-are-coming.html

This article is the first part of a three-part series, which considers the effect of global warming on ocean level rise, and examines life with constantly advancing seas from two perspectives: that of the landlubber and that of the seafarer. In September 2009 the latest global temperature rise projections released by the Hadley Centre, part of the British Meteorological Office, indicated an average rise of 4 degrees Celsius (that’s a balmy 7.2°F) by 2055 given a business as usual scenario. Some places will be a bit more stable, but the places that particularly matter – the ice caps, the methane-rich permafrosts in northern Canada and Siberia, and the Amazon rainforest – will be melting, off-gassing, and burning, respectively. The report offers some detail on what that would feel like: In a 4°C world, climate change, deforestation and fires spreading from degraded land into pristine forest will conspire to destroy over 83 per cent of the Amazon rainforest by 2100... in a 4°C world there will be a mix of extremely wet monsoon seasons and extremely dry ones, making it hard for farmers to plan what to grow. Worse, the fine aerosol particles released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels could put a complete stop to the monsoon rains in central southern China and northern India... the people most vulnerable to a 4°C rise are also least able to escape it. At 4°C, the poor will struggle to survive, let alone escape. And what of that lodestone, global sea level? This happens to be a very interesting question, because ocean levels are set to rise dramatically. According to UCLA scientists, the last time carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are today was 15 million years ago. At that time, the sea level was between 20 and 36 metres higher (75 to 120 feet), there was no permanent ice cap in the arctic, and very little ice in Antarctica or Greenland. That is where we are headed. The only remaining question is, How long will it take us to get there? The authors of the Hadley Centre report predict a rise of just 1.4 metres by 2100. The IPCC in their 2007 4th Assessment Report predicted something like half a metre by 2100 based on a combination of the fattening of the oceanic envelope caused by thermal expansion and the increased runoff from glaciers and minor ice sheets. None of this sounds particularly catastrophic just yet, but then it turns out that these predictions are not based on anything particularly relevant: the British Antarctic Survey, in 2008, made it clear that the IPCC had not included the source of nearly 100% of the world’s potential ice melt – the major ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland – simply because they had little idea of how the ice caps would behave in a heating world: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted the issue by suggesting that current knowledge is inadequate to estimate confidently the contribution that ice sheets might make to sea-level rise in coming centuries. While technology makes sea-level rise easier to observe, and we can predict some contributions to future sea-level rise with increasing certainty, we cannot yet fully predict the ice sheets’ contribution. There is thus a risk that sea-level rise could be higher than the (incomplete) estimates provided by the IPCC. Thus, the most peer-reviewed piece of climate science ever written turns out to be completely inadequate when it comes to estimating the level of disruption associated with a very important aspect of climate change: the rising seas. If Antarctica contains 90% of the world’s land ice (sea ice, like that in the Arctic, does not directly cause the oceans to rise when it melts) and Greenland contains most of the rest, then what’s going to happen when they start to melt with a vengeance, and when are they going to start melting? Official science is mute on the subject. What Do We Know? There are some things that we do know. Based on the volume of ice lying upon the landmass of Greenland, it is quite possible to estimate how far the oceans would rise, should all of it melt away: something in the region of 7.2 metres. That may not seem like a lot, but, as you will see in Part 2 of this series, it will be enough to have devastating consequences for the lower lying parts of the world, which, not coincidentally, are the locations of some of the world’s largest cities. In fact, there is something you can do to make reading this article more exciting: find out how high above sea level you live, and, as you read along, keep checking to see if your head is still above water. Rapid, dramatic change beggars the imagination. The Greenland Ice Sheet is massive, having formed during the first cycle of the most recent major glacial period, and our instinct tells us that it should remain stable in all but the most extreme conditions. It is disconcerting to know that the onset of an ice age can take as little as two decades, implying that an equally sudden melt cannot be ruled out. It is also disconcerting to know that the conditions required for a sudden melt are pretty much guaranteed to occur, and that, in fact, the ice sheet is already melting. We don't have to imagine it. All we have to do is observe: For the first time since measurements were started [in 2002], the extremely warm summer of 2007 saw a decrease in the ice mass at high altitudes (above 2,000 metres). It also became clear that the ice loss is advancing towards the North of Greenland, particularly on the west coast. The areas around Greenland, particularly Iceland, Spitsbergen and the northern islands of Canada, seem to be particularly badly affected. This analysis, by the team controlling the GRACE satellite system, is essentially saying that conditions like those in 2007 are able to counteract the damping effect of even the thickest parts of Greenland’s ice sheet. So, when will all the ice melt? There are two schools of thought, but they basically come down to when the temperature of Greenland increases by either 4°C or 8°C above the mean global average of the last 100 years. Four degrees... haven’t we seen that first figure before? In fact, a global rise of 4 degrees corresponds to a considerably larger rise of Arctic temperatures: conventionally this is between 5 and 6 degrees, but if you look at the 2009 Hadley Centre forecasts, a global rise of 4 degrees actually corresponds to an 8 degree rise across much of Greenland. Pick any number you like, but Greenland is melting. WAIS To Go? We can take some comfort in the thought that the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet would take at least 100 years once it reached that temperature. But it accounts for just 10% of the global ice volume, the other 90% being locked away in the seemingly impermeable heart of Antarctica. Or not: the East Antarctic ice sheet (that’s the big blob that surrounds the South Pole just off-centre) seems to be quite stable, and should remain that way for the next few centuries, but West Antarctica (the peninsula that reaches north toward South America) is not stable at all. The WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet) is largely below sea level, having over several million years pushed down and scoured out the bedrock beneath it, but because of its huge area, the part of it that is above water still manages to comprise around 10% of the total Antarctic ice volume. If this were to melt then the oceans would rise by another 5 metres, in addition to the thermal expansion of 1.4 metres, plus whatever has been sloughed off the Greenland ice sheet, giving us 13.6 metres, or close to 45 feet. (Is your head still above water? Please check again now.) Icebergs and glaciers have been calving from West Antarctica at an accelerating rate over the last decade, which groups such as the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) have been carefully monitoring, with increasing alarm. In 2002, to most glaciologists’ horror, the entire Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated. It consisted largely of floating ice, and so despite the immense size of the shelf, this development had no effect on sea levels. But it did presage a new era of rapid ice movement, never before recorded in the modern era. It also had another, even more sinister side-effect on West Antarctica: An ice bridge connecting the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula to Charcot Island has disintegrated. The event continues a series of breakups that began in March 2008 on the ice shelf, and highlights the effect that climate change is having on the region. Images from the NASA Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors on the Terra and Aqua satellites showed the shattering of the ice bridge between March 31, 2009 and April 6, 2009. The loss of the ice bridge, which was bracing the remaining portions of the Wilkins ice shelf, will now allow a mass of broken ice and icebergs to drift into the Southern Ocean. The Wilkins is following a pattern of instability and rapid collapse that many Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves have experienced in recent years. Scientists think that the dramatic loss of these ice shelves, which have existed for hundreds to thousands of years, is an important sign of climate change in the Southern Hemisphere. The loss of an ice shelf can also allow the glaciers that feed into it to start flowing ice into the ocean at an accelerated rate, contributing to a rise in global sea levels. The last phrase is the most important one; at the moment there is no major concern about the status of most of the WAIS, and the temperature seems to be holding, but if the ice shelves are no longer able to hold back the progress of the glaciers, then they will accelerate towards the sea, themselves causing further instability within the WAIS. Going back to the Hadley Centre article again, it was thought that Greenland was invulnerable to change not so many years ago, but the map produced by the Centre shows warming of between 4 and 10 degrees by 2055. This would still keep the vast majority of Antarctica well below freezing; but ice under extreme pressure can exhibit unusual patterns of behaviour, including increasing internal temperature and self-lubrication. This is what often happens at the bases of deep glaciers, allowing them to slide even when temperatures are well below freezing. The results may continue to confound and horrify glaciologists for years to come while sending the rest of us scampering for higher ground. A Storm Surge of Forecasts 2001 was the first year we were able to say with any scientific certainty what was likely to happen to global sea level. It seems strange that it should take so long to provide forecasts, but until a consensus on global temperature rise had been achieved, via the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (TAR), then the (supposedly) largest element of the sea level rise equation – the aforementioned thermal expansion – could not be included. So what did the IPCC say back in 2001? If you read their report, you will discover that of the absolute maximum 0.5 metre rise by 2090, predicted by this august group of scientists, a whopping 74% was due to thermal expansion, with 11cm (22%) dependent on glacier and ice cap melting (mountaintops, essentially), and a miserly 2cm attributable to the possible melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But then in this report the absolute worst case “business as usual” model shows a 2°C rise by 2050, which we now know to have been a bit shy of the mark. Then, in 2007, the landmark 4th Assessment Report raised the bar in both possible temperature rise (from 5.6°C to 6.4°C by 2100) and global sea level rise, to... wait for it... 0.57 metres! Of this new figure, which hardly seems to reflect the immense strides made in feedback loop analysis in the intervening six years, 38 cm or 67% of the rise is attributable to thermal expansion. With this in mind, it would pay to reflect on the types of changes described in this essay, and consider what the IPCC would have predicted had ice sheet melt been included in the final version. Forward to 2009, and two papers jump out. The first, from the relatively conservative Dr Mark Siddall at the University of Bristol is now talking about a possible rise of 0.82 metres by the end of this century, which is based on the IPCC 4AR maximum temperature of 6.4°C. The second paper, by Grinsted, Moore and Jevrejeva, again based on the IPCC maximum, suggests that a 1.3 metre rise by 2100 is not out of the question. How much of this can be attributed to Greenland and Antarctica is uncertain, but predicting the future based on thermal expansion plus a paleological record of a few thousand years, during which both ice sheets remained fully intact and temperatures never rose above 1.5°C seems a pretty poor basis upon which to predict future tipping points! If we are to take the two papers at face value and strike a mean of 1.06 metres, by overlaying the latest predictions of temperature rise – which are double the IPCC predictions – we get at least 2 metres globally. That’s just thermal expansion plus a few hundred glaciers and mountaintop ice caps. Now consider what happens when you include the following: • Tipping point effects above 8°C in Greenland • Unknown effects of similar temperature increases on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet • Increases in storm surge height and storm intensity caused by a rise in oceanic and atmospheric energy levels due to temperature rise • Increases in inland flooding due to convectional storms upon hardpan (parched clay soils) and more energetic rainstorms from temperature increases The last two are the inevitable effects of increasing atmospheric energy due to higher temperatures, and are critical because most coastal flooding is the result of either coastal storm surges and high winds, inland flooding inundating river catchments, or a combination of the two. The flooding of eastern England and the Netherlands in 1953, which resulted in the deaths of around 2,500 people, was a combination of a low pressure storm surge, an intense North Sea storm and a high spring tide. Without any inference of global sea level rise, the water rose along the North Sea coast by 4.5 metres. Via Denmark and the German curve, the storm got closer to the Dutch coast. On the night of the 31st of January, the storm over the North Sea got even stronger, reaching gales of force 11. The Dutch coast was being hit with force 10 winds. The storm continued, and in the south-western Netherlands, wind speeds of force 9 were measured for 20 consecutive hours. The power of the storm drove the water so high that the water was unable to retreat away sufficiently. There was no ebb tide. Shortly after midnight, the maximum whip up of the water was measured - the wind drove the water up to 3.1 metres. Three hours later, there was a spring tide. Through the combination of this spring tide, and the huge whipping up of the water, at 3hr24, the highest recorded water level was reached - 4.55 metres above NAP (Normal Amsterdam Water Level). The dikes were not designed to hold such high water levels, and [at] around 3 o’clock that night, the first dikes broke through... And so there we have it. A few degrees warmer, a few metres higher, and a couple of decades later, and there we will be, floating about, holding on to other things that float, perching in tree limbs and on rooftops, and hoping to be rescued. We know where we are going to end up eventually: at least 20 metres (65 feet) higher. The one thing we still do not know is how long it will take for us to get there. We could keep waiting for the scientific community to settle on a consensus forecast, but this may take so long that it will have to be delivered through a snorkel. However, we can already observe that the doubling period of scientific climate forecasts is uncomfortably short, and, to provide for a margin of safety, we should at least double the latest estimates. If the latest forecast is for 2 metres this century, let us assume that we will see at least 4, and plan accordingly. But do the exact forecasts even matter? We already know enough to say that there is a high probability that ocean levels will rise, significantly, within the lifetimes of most of the people alive today, disrupting the patterns of daily life for much of the world's population, which tends to be clustered along the coastlines and the navigable waterways. We also know that ocean levels will continue to rise far into the future, until they are 20 to 36 metres higher than they are today. We know that continuous coastal erosion and salt water inundation, coastal flooding and displacement of coastal populations, which number in the billions, toward higher ground, will be normal and expected. We also know that there is a high chance these changes will occur based on present carbon dioxide levels, regardless of what is being currently proposed by the governments of the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, what we do not know is perhaps most important of all if you are in the middle of all this. We have not considered what ways of inhabiting the changing coastal landscape will remain viable. How will we have to adapt if any of us are to avoid being swept up in a continuous, endless surge of refugees feeling for higher ground, abandoning all they own and all they know? These are the questions that the next two parts of this series of articles will examine. Keith Farnish is author of "Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis" (http://www.timesupbook.com) and also writes The Earth Blog and The Unsuitablog. He enjoys being a husband and dad, walking around and growing things. see also: Ea O Ka Aina: CO2 of 15 Million Years Ago 10/11/09

Food for Thought

SUBHEAD: People will come to Kauai just to see how we created a self-sufficient, and sustainable island. image above: Illustration of ancient Hawaiian system of permaculture. From http://permaculture.org.au/2008/11/23/hawaiian-homeland-security By Don Heacock on 17 October 2009 - [Editor's Note: This is a letter to Kauai Mayor Bernard Carvalho from Don Heacock, the Hawaii State DLNR aquatic biologist for Kauai.] Agriculture is human culture, and I agree that we need to put Hawaiian culture back in agriculture. My 5 acres of organically farmed and integrated fishponds- taro loi in Niumalu represent only about 2% of all the taro loi that once existed in the Lihue area (from Huleia to Hanamaulu, which had over 200 acres of loi). My fishponds fertilize my taro loi, the taro recovers/recyles the fish "wastes" into taro ("waste = food"), my sheep "weed-eat" all the grass and weeds on the taro berms, and abundant fruit, nut and hardwood trees grow all around the edges of the farm. I neither need, nor want to poison my soil, water, crops or my family with toxic chemicals known to cause human health problems----why would I? The answer to that question is ignorance; Will Rogers once said, "There is always an answer that is simple, takes no thought, and is dead wrong." That answer is biocides (herbicides, insecticides, pesticides, etc.) because they damage or kill many more plants and/or animals than just the targeted "weeds". Finally, the answer to sustainable farming on Kauai, and globally, is integrated systems. The aquaculture-agriculture systems; systems invented by Hawaiians over 500 years ago used nature (biomimicry) to do most of their field work. For example, on our land my sheep convert weeds into rack of lamb and fertilizer. They spread their own manure for me; I no longer have to mow or weed-eat around my taro loi, as the sheep do it for free and burn no fossil fuels). We need to restore our ahupua'a/watershed communities to be self-sufficient in the production of food, fiber (building materials) and renewable energy - WITHOUT THE HOT AIR AND CO2 of burning fuel. Kauai could be 100% energy self-sufficient on wind and solar (and appropriate small-scale hydro); when we burn biomass to produce energy we are adding to global warming, and exacerbating the second largest problem on planet earth: climate change and sea level rise, and their impacts on coastal communities. But the largest problem is going to be the inability to feed our people, both on Kauai and globally. So it is vital to identify prime agricultural lands, such as lands with gravity-flow non-potable water. These lands need to be protected for future agricultural use - primarily for food production. It is one minute before midnight, let's move forward to make Kauai a sustainable and thriving island community that is food, fiber and energy self-sufficient and sustainable. A place where everyone is gainfully employed in a job they love, where we no longer export our children because of lack of meaningful jobs, and were we become a global model for designing and building sustainable communities. When this happens, you will no longer have to spend a million dollars to promote tourism, because people will come here from all over the world just to see how we created a self-sufficient, independent, island community. Bernard, we can do this, let's move forward, I mua!

Oil Headlines

SUBHEAD: Are we ready for the future contemplated in these headline stories? image above: Illustration from source article. From http://i419.photobucket.com/albums/pp278/lost_guitar/EnergyCrisis.png

By Steve from Virginia on 18 October 2009 in The Oil Drum - http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/5874#more

Saudi Ministry Explains Cuts (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) Saudi petroleum Minister Ali al-Naimi announced an 11% cut in crude production for export beginning next month and continuing for the next twelve months; adjustment in the total produced for export averaged over the year amount to a total reduction of 9% from the previous year. al- Naimi admitted that Arabian crude reserves have been overstated 'for years' and that current output reduction of six% from last year's production reflects the, "New reality on the ground".

"We have pumped over 60% of our reserves," he stated.

Al- Naimi remarked the Ghawar oilfield was "watered out" and that output from the Khurais field is unable to match the lost production. He also blamed the new law giving Saudi women the right to drive cars for the first time, "This has cut the amount available for export".

"The amount we will export after one year's time will be a further 6% less than will be made available in the announced plan," he said. "We are in a depletion situation, there will be no increase in production from now on, regardless of what we do."

Obama Seeks To Calm Jittery Nation (Washington, DC) The President addressed the nation today asking Americans to remain calm and not rush to gasoline stations to top up gas tanks. The President spoke on television from the Oval Office after the Saudi Arabian government and the Saudi national oil company ARAMCO announced export cuts of crude oil.

"Against a backdrop of shrinking exports from Mexico, Kuwait and other Middle East suppliers and the decline of domestic production, the United States has become much more dependent upon Saudi Arabian crude. Currently, the Saudis are experiencing a short- term, cyclical downturn in production that experts here have assured me is temporary. Our government has offered to provide whatever technical and financial assistance as necessary to allow the Saudis to increase their oil production."

"We ask that in the meantime, that you act and drive normally and not make daily stops to top up your gas tanks. There is currently sufficient gasoline in distribution, and the government is taking steps to release oil from the strategic reserve."

The President looked unusually somber, and did not refer to the prompter or read from notes as he spoke to the American public. Gas Lines Block Highways, Some States Completely Out Of Gas (Washington, DC) Motorists from South Carolina to Oregon lined up for hours at gas stations waiting for gas and diesel fuel. Reports from cities such as Nashville, Charleston, Omaha and Dallas show most gas stations out of gas, with distributors struggling to keep pace with panic calls from retailers for new supplies.

The energy offices of West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania report that demand by individual drivers 'topping up' their tanks have left gasoline stations in those states without any gas to sell at all.

Pipeline operators are reporting difficulty in supplying refined products other than gasoline and diesel. "When the storage at refiners runs out, that's it," admitted a spokesperson for Colonial Pipeline Company. When the refiners are at the end of production, we have to shut down, there will be no more available." When asked how long the pipeline shutdowns might last, the spokesperson replied, "It could be weeks or months. We have to transport a certain minimum quantity, not less, and we cannot obviously transport more than the capacity of the system, although this would be the time to do so."

Police Presence At Retailers (Chicago, IL) Violence has been reported in some areas and police have been sent, some in riot gear, to keep order at stations where waits for gas have been longest. In cities where there is no gas available and no immediate prospect for deliveries, police have been requested to watch for siphoning from parked vehicles and to add patrols to gas stations where owners fear vandalism and theft.

Stocks Plummet (New York, NY) Stocks on the New York Stock Exchange fell today after word that oil supplies in the United States will be sharply reduced. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 680 points to 8412 and the S&P dropped to 725. Oil prices were higher on the futures exchanges, rising the exchange limit in the days trading to $115 a barrel.

"A trader remarked, "We are going from a depression to the Greatest Depression. It's been armageddon down here. The Dow will go all the way to zero. Peak oil ... it's real. What can I tell you?"

Matt Simmons on Peak Oil (Houston TX) Peak Oil theorist Matt Simmons explained to reporters on a conference call that, "Peak Oil is real, it's happening, it has been happening, I've been telling everyone about this for years and nobody has been paying attention ..."

Army Commanders Look To Strike Iran (Kabul, Afganistan) American military commanders in Afghanistan have forwarded a strategic option to the Pentagon that includes a rapid strike into Iran to gain control of Iranian weapons of mass destruction. A copy of this exercise report was leaked to the Washington Post, yesterday.

Highlights of the plan include a sweep of areas that contain Iranian nuclear assembly and processing facilities. An aside to this option suggests that support for actions would be 'self supporting' taking command and control of infrastructure needed, including energy producing assets. Commanders have stated that as many as 100,000 US military personnel are in place on the Afghan- Iran frontier with 1,000 tanks and other vehicles, "ready to rock and roll."

Woman Shoots Motorist In Gas Line (Fairfield, OH) A stranded Cincinnati woman waiting for 'several days' for gas at a Fairfield service station was shot to death today by another woman during an altercation. The shooter fled the scene but was apprehended a short distance away by other motorists also waiting in line for gas. Violence and 'line rage' has erupted as gas customers panic nationwide. So far 30 people have been shot to death in gas lines, with dozens wounded.

Energy Chief Calls Peak Danger To Civilization Washington, DC) Queried by reporters why peak oil had not been addressed by his office, Energy chief Stephen Chu replied, "Administration policy, admitting peak oil would have caused the stock market to crash". Chu suggested the solution is, "new technology and more electric cars."

Rolling Blackouts, Riots and Empty Grocery Stores (Tampa, FL) The announcement that US energy supplies will shrink has resulted in panic buying of food and other basic necessities. Rumors of diesel shortages threaten the suppliers to grocery stores.

Home Depot and Walmart outlets across the country are reporting 'Mobs' ransacking shelves taking away all goods considered 'necessities' such as plywood, baby food, toilet paper, bottled water and nails. Police have been called to maintain order, but the police in many areas are being diverted to gas stations and strategic facilities such as reservoirs and pumping stations. Ironically, luxury items such as flat screen televisions and jewelry have been ignored by the throngs of panicked shoppers.

"It was insane, they cleaned us out in about an hour, as soon as the news hit," said a Winn- Dixie store manager in Tampa, Florida. "I just opened the registers, I don't suppose it will matter much ... I've got mine, though."

see also: Ea O Ka Aina: Speech Obama needs to give 10/11/09

Monsanto Lies, Again and Again

SUBHEAD: Two labs conducting glyphosate safety studies for Monsanto were cited for “routine falsification of data”. image above: Monsanto introduces "branding platform" Genuity to promote chemicals that increase herbicide protection, insect protection, weather protection and crop yield. From http://www.buckeyeag.com/article.php?aid=20090226065416457

By C. Margulis on 17 October 2009 on Corporate Crime - http://corporatecrime.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/monsanto-lies-again-and-again-and-again

Earlier this week, Monsanto was found guilty by France’s highest court of false advertising, for claims that Roundup, its toxic weed killer, is biodegradable and leaves “the soil clean.” Environmental and consumer rights campaigners brought the French case in 2001, shortly after Monsanto announced its new ethics “Pledge.” The advocates noted that glyphosate, Roundup’s main ingredient, is classified in Europe as “dangerous for the environment” and “toxic for aquatic organisms.”

Monsanto has a long history of fraudulent statements about the safety of Roundup. In 1996, the New York Attorney General fined the company $50,000 for claims that Roundup was, you guessed it, biodegradable and good for the environment.

Glyphosate has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and human embryonic cell death. Far from “biodegradable,” Monsanto’s own studies found residues of glyphosate on food crops up to five months after the chemical was sprayed, and the World Health Organization found “significant residues” of glyphosate after pre-harvest use of the chemical on wheat. This September, the advocacy group Beyond Pesticides and 32 other groups and individuals called on EPA to withdraw approval of glyphosate, citing the growing evidence of health and environmental risks from the pesticide.

The French and New York false advertising cases are far from unique for Monsanto. In 1999, the British Advertising Standards Authority found the company lied about safety testing and environmental benefits in ads about its genetically modified (GMO) crops. The company’s history of using fakery, dirty tricks, bogus public relations campaigns, and outright lies is too lengthy to fully outline here. But a few examples are worth noting:

• Two labs conducting glyphosate safety studies for Monsanto were cited for “routine falsification of data” and other offenses. One lab study claimed it used “specimens from the uteri of male rabbits….”
• An EPA scientist found Monsanto doctored studies and covered-up the dioxin contamination of a wide range of its products. She concluded that the company’s behavior constituted “a long pattern of fraud.”
• In response to the publication of Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking indictment of the pesticide industry, Silent Spring, Monsanto and other chemical companies launched a major p.r. offensive. The industry sponsored public forums with purported “independent” experts speaking on the benefits of pesticides; the company’s propaganda tools included publication of a pamphlet called The Desolate Years, which posited a world of massive food shortages resulting from over regulation of pesticides (the company continues to repeat this lie to this day, in countless ads and public statements suggesting that food shortages will result unless the world unquestionably accepts its genetic food experiments).
• For decades, Monsanto dumped highly toxic PCBs in Anniston Alabama, then spent years covering up the dumping and the attendant health hazards to residents. As the Washington Post reported,

…for nearly 40 years, while producing the now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of pages of Monsanto documents — many emblazoned with warnings such as “CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy” — show that for decades, the corporate giant concealed what it did and what it knew.

Amazingly, following the article, Monsanto lied again: the company told the Post it held no responsibility for its past operations, claiming that the “new” Monsanto was not associated with prior operations of a subsidiary. Monsanto demanded a correction, and the Post did initially publish a “clarification.” But after activists who knew that Monsanto was indeed legally liable, the paper printed a correction of its clarification! When confronted about the lie, Monsanto officials lied again, stating they did not recall discussing the issue of liability with the Post.

• In 1999, the New York Times exposed that Monsanto hired public relations giant Burson Marsteller to pay fake protesters who posed as “pro-GMO” food demonstrators outside a Washington, DC FDA meeting. The Biotech Industry Organization, a Monsanto-supported trade group, similarly was charged with arranging for bringing African and Asian pro-GMO speakers to the 2002 Earth Summit and posing them as poor farmers. In 2003, EU environmentalists charged Monsanto with arranging another “fake parade” of purported African “farm experts” to a European Parliament meeting.
• A Monsanto-hired public relations firm, the Bivings Group, conducted an email campaign to pressure the science journal Nature to retract a paper showing that GMO corn had contaminated natural corn varieties in Mexico. The paper’s findings of contamination were later confirmed by at least two other studies.

ASPO Peak Oil Conference

SUBHEAD: U.S. Peak Oil Conference members conflicted amidst the oil price based recession. image above: Logo and illustration for ASPO-USA "Peak Oil Pioneers". From http://www.aspo-usa.com/peak_oil_pioneers.cfm By Jan Lundberg on 14 October 2009 in Culture Change - http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=531&Itemid=1 Upon the first global recession influenced by the peaking of oil extraction and record high prices, the question for "peak oilers" arises: does peak oil and energy decline mean great profits for modernizing industry, or is peak oil the beginning of huge changes in lifestyle toward sustainability after societal collapse?

Those were the two main concerns at play at the fifth annual meeting of the U.S. chapter of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO-USA), in Denver, October 11-13, 2009. Culture Change and other ecologically oriented nonprofits that were present are aware that the above concerns are somewhat present in society at large, in a different fashion. Widespread perception by the average person is that high gasoline prices and financial corruption at the top have caused the recession and made life very difficult. Society at large has minimal awareness of peak oil, as well as the need to change our way of life.

To demonstrate this, paid protesters in Chicken Little suits besieged the conference- entrance of the downtown Denver Sheraton Hotel without a break. They passed out a New York Times op-ed denying the reality of peak oil. They also missed a great conference and a chance to learn some tough truths.

There is no single message on peak oil, so the movement is a mixed bag. Most of the technocratic optimists and industry players assume a continuation of the global economy, yet expect the global peak to change business substantially. The opposing viewpoint in the movement is that much deeper changes can and should come about, such as the disappearance of most global trade and even of centralized authority. However, all adherents of this position may not voice it so strongly, in order to avoid controversy. Instead, their emphasis is on changing the world for the better via permaculture, for example, which is also in contrast with peak-oil opportunists in energy and finance.

The four hundred conference attendees were at times shocked by the blind optimism of certain speakers. A Brazilian official claimed there are massive oil reserves in the tropics. Similarly, hopes for great success in U.S. natural gas extraction from shale were aired, but severely discounted by others. Retired BP geologist Jerry Gilbert explained that exploration geologists are salesmen and story-tellers for their corporate bosses and the public, convincing them that projects have great promise. The validity of any claim that a major field has been discovered is subject to 20-30 years' passing in order to evaluate with any precision the amount of oil to be extracted according to expectations.

The daily Denver Post heralded the ASPO-USA meeting with an article titled "'Peak oil'" theorists: World running out". This irritated the conference organizers, not just over the idea that their findings are just "theory," but over the idea that peak oil means running out of oil reserves. Peak oil "theory" points out that the big fields have been discovered and are starting to decline, while replacement fields are small though numerous, offering generally heavier, more toxic crude oil. Mature fields are declining in output by 6.7% on average annually. Nevertheless, some conference speakers and attendees hold out for the possibility of a peak oil arrival of 2020, for example.

Findings presented at the conference, such as by Matthew Simmons (petroleum investment banker), showed that world oil extraction peaked in 2005. He showed that counter-claims of a 2008 peak depend on Saudi Arabian production being over a million barrels a day higher than what he believes occurred. Simmons has warned of a panic-driven "run on the energy bank" by the public seeking fuel in tight supply and rapidly escalating in price. This would cause major social disruption such as severe food shortage, he warns.

Generally absent from the conference and many peak oilers' thinking is much analysis of the role of the oil market in a severe shortage. Culture Change warns of the likelihood of an historic societal disruption stemming from oil dependence: petrocollapse. This may reshape society enough to eliminate oil as a common commodity; in effect "running out" of oil. This scenario falls into the category of "doom and gloom," despite possible positive outcomes of collapse such as the nonviolent end of the present industrialized, corporate, centralized system.

The ASPO-USA conference seemed to ignore a commonly recommended change in diet affecting energy use, when non-animal meals were not an option for the conferees. Additionally, permaculture ought to be a featured topic as a key tool for post-petroleum survival. On the other hand, some speakers calling for major cultural change were able to get their message across regarding agriculture, low-consumption living, and slashing energy use. Pat Murphy of Community Solutions, Jason Bradford of Vital Farmland LC, and David Wann of the book/movie Affluenza all envisioned with clarity the kinds of changes U.S. society can embrace painlessly for greater efficiency in building residences, growing local organic food, and nurturing community connection.

This trio of speakers at one of the sessions of the conference were criticized for not addressing the "C" word: collapse. Nor did they go into the population issue, as Albert Bartlett, the dean of exponential-growth bubble-bursting, criticized. As for collapse, brought up by questioner Andre Angelantoni, the response he got from the panel was a dodge, he felt. A negative, unpleasant depiction of peak oil's effects (as well as the effects of climate change and financial meltdown) are best unmentioned, according to such speakers as well as the ASPO-USA leadership. Murphy says that discussing collapse "keeps us from taking action." And speaker Wann, like others, went further by denying collapse can or will happen. Unexplored are the effects of the "run on the energy bank" and a crash in food supplies. Likewise, the beneficial aspects of collapse -- closer community, local economics as the rule, the end of corporate dominance -- are not part of a thorough sharing of ideas.

Culture Change was able to display, thanks to Post Carbon Institute's ASPO-USA sponsorship, the new Community Resilience Toolkit created by Bay Localize, a San Francisco-area group. A portion of the toolkit is "Our Post-Peak Oil Future," a primer that compares collapse scenarios, on hand in quantity. To further the discussion of collapse in a more advocacy-stance was the flyer announcing my book, Petrocollapse: the Basis of Crash and Culture Change, which was ordered in advance by some attendees. If not as a speaker or sponsor some day at an ASPO-USA conference, I hope my book will make clear that after we fall off "Hubbert's Cliff" after peak, a "new" sustainable and just culture is in store.

Economic concerns are half of what the conference was about, if one is in business in energy or investments. A threshold of $70 per barrel or a little higher was identified as the minimum for oil industry profit and investment, while not breaking the back of consumers. Price and availability of oil, it was said, might be determined greatly by "emerging markets" bidding away the oil. China has "latent demand" that advanced economies won't be able to match, thus reducing oil consumption in the latter countries via price rationing.

Speakers such as conservative writer Kevin Phillips and The Oil Drum editor Nate Hagens were superb in driving home the role of debt and deficit spending in the U.S. over the decades. The behavior of the nation regarding spending and borrowing looms even larger than peak oil in contributing to the present financial crisis, Phillips and Hagens believe. Attendees are not of one mind regarding "recovery" and resumption of "growth."

As to unexpected crash, a Homeland Security official presented a scenario of just the power grid going down. He reported that the Dept. of Defense and the nation are considered by the government to be more vulnerable to grid disruption through easy sabotage than sudden, severe oil shortage. One problem is that spare transformers are few and massive, so as to present a logistics challenge. The official, Scott Pugh, was the first executive director of ASPO-USA, and before that he commanded a nuclear-attack submarine.

Tom Petrie, a major energy investment banker, claimed at a lunch speech: "If rules were different, we could overcome recent peak, but still, large increases of extraction are a pipe dream." He sees a national motor-fuel switch for many of the U.S.'s 235 million motor vehicles as a major mitigation for peak oil. Culture Change has for two decades pointed out that this flies in the face of society's financial health, realistic infrastructure expectations (for any vehicle fleet), appropriate land use, and ecological sensitivity. But as a major player endorsing peak oil, Petrie can propound views that either don't make sense or disappoint critics of the status quo. Chris Skrebowski from London is an oil analyst tracking peak oil, who found that cheap oil peaked in 2004. His similarity to Petrie and other technofixers is in expecting "key solutions" to oil depletion via electrification of vehicles and biofuels.

Culture Changers

A vastly different kind of investment advocate is Jason Bradford, known for the Willits, California localization project. He has graduated to forming an investment model for maximizing conversion of farms to organic, local orientation. His presentation showed the overwhelming consolidation of organic brands into very few entities, just as the petrochemical/genetically modified seed/pharmaceutical sector is dominated by three corporations. Pat Murphy, author of Plan C, wonderfully complemented Bradford, pointing out that a cultural change cannot be facilitated by the market or bailouts that do not generate jobs in the urgent sectors of food security. At least, Murphy maintains, some of us are "building up a cadre" of people with the skills and plans for post-oil living.

A middle-ground ASPO-USA spokesman is Randy Udall, of the famed political family. His balanced concerns over peak oil and climate were well received, except (for some of us) his view that developing countries will be taking their "rightful share" of oil after the industrialized nations' phase of oil maximization. The idea of "a right" to oil may imply that the petrolization of modern society was not a bad thing.

ASPO-USA craves mainstream corporate acceptance, made clear from most speakers and the policies for attendance. Large media outlets were welcome free of charge, while small publishers and free-lance reporters paid full registration cost which included three days of lunches. The conference proceedings and PowerPoints are on-line, but a thoroughly modern approach would have included Wi-Fi for Twittering by the audience during outrageous or exciting statements from the podium.

The final panel explored public and individual consciousness about peak oil and quality of life. Chris Martenson (of Crash Course fame), Ken Eklund (game fame for "World Without Oil"), and Robert Hirsch (peak oil mitigation-failure fame) discussed challenges in building one's awareness and modifying one's expectations posed by peak oil and economic stress. Martenson said "it's really about a change in culture." Eklund complemented Martenson's concerns about the extreme disparity in wealth today, by stating "Civilization without caring deserves a revolution."

Governor Bill Ritter addressed the crowd forcefully about the "new energy economy" in Colorado that he claims is leading the nation. Why? For the sake of climate protection, he repeatedly assured us. Afterward I introduced him to the concept of petrocollapse. He then found himself defending Colorado against the claims of another activist who accosted him regarding across-the-board road building being pursued despite the constraints of peak oil.

The conferees remained on hand for the final evening speaker of the third day: Nate Hagens of The Oil Drum. He regaled his many admirers with anthropological, biological and psychological observations that helped them understand their place in the world. His faith in policy-makers hinges upon their receiving models showing where we are headed. He also stands for the global system to stick together, via an energy-backed currency. His overall prescription for action is to educate people so that U.S. leadership can aid in the world's gradual energy descent. He received the only standing ovation of the conference.

A significant divide between attendees is regarding action: Endless analysis and discussion should end now, stated Connecticut's Terry Backer, a peak-oil advocate member of that state's legislature. His perspective on what the politicians need to be told about peak oil excludes discussing worst-case scenarios. Backer's message is that in government warnings about peak oil, the need for food security and heating for schools should be guaranteed.

Differences in the diverse peak oil movement are major, but our cause is a unifying force useful for a broad spectrum of society. Even so, the meaning of peak oil and energy dependence are constantly diluted for the public by "distractions" such as financial meltdown, climate failure, and more war. For today's limited peak oil movement, most of its adherents can visualize new conditions and innovations, such as Sail Transport Network (praised by Matt Simmons in concept). The final disagreements surrounding peak oil are about what kind of a life -- post die-off or economic shakeout -- the survivors will have. The feeling almost all of us at the conference shared was that all will be made clear in the near future.

see also: The Oil Drum: ASPO-USA 2009 Conference Report 10/11/09