Posted by Michael Haran on Jan 30, 2014
Healdsburg Tribune
1/23/2014
By Michael Haran
In December I went to a Regional Climate Protection Authority presentation at the Healdsburg City Council chambers. The RCPA was created in 2009 to improve coordination on climate change issues and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as was mandated by the ten county government’s partnership with the Climate Protection Campaign in 2005.
I was expecting a sit-down presentation on RCPA’s progress but instead there were only charts ringing the room and index cards for suggestions. When I asked one of the RCPA staff members why there wasn’t a formal presentation she said that they decided to forgo one because of the disruptions they had encountered at the Windsor presentation.
It seems that there is a group of climate deniers in the county who attend these meeting as concerned citizens. They pretend not to know each other and then disrupt and dispute anything the RCPA’s staff has to say. I was told that these people are not polite and their sole purpose is to take over the meeting for their own agenda.
Regardless of the fact that the deniers tend to be rather obnoxious and since none of us have done the science ourselves who’s really right about climate change, the deniers or the believers?
On the deniers side the earth warms and cools about every ten thousand years. Eventually we will once again have glaciers in the middle of North America. In pre-historic times we had forest fires that burned from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains and at one time the earth was covered in volcanos spewing tons of magma gases into the atmosphere. Humans have only been spewing for about a hundred years and affecting the climate for even less than that.
Research published in the journal “Science” on September 8, 2013 stated “Abrupt climate change has been a systemic feature of Earth’s climate for hundreds of thousands of years and may play an active role in longer term climate variability through its influence on ice age terminations.”
On the believers’ side, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950’s, many of the climate changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years.
During those “hundreds of thousands of years” climate anthropologists have been able to identify six major species die-offs most likely caused by CO2. This is probably what killed off the dinosaurs some 60 million years ago and let’s hope that we’re not the next with the amount of CO2 humans are currently releasing into the atmosphere.
No matter whether climate warming is real or not, oil is a foul, dirty energy source that pollutes our streets, water-ways and air so we should just ban it as soon as we can. Most products that are petroleum based can be made with synthetic alternatives and that $5 billion a year we give to the oil industry, for whatever reason, would go a long way in feeding the children of the working poor.
So once we get rid of oil what should we do with all the oil and coal slurry pipelines crisscrossing the country? I say fill them with water. Now I don’t know the feasibility or the cost of such an undertaking but with the Great Lakes being the world’s largest deposit of fresh water it stirs the imagination. Drought in the Midwest? No problem. Drought in the West? No problem. Water for oil – pump, baby, pump!
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Posted by Michael Haran on Sep 18, 2013
Press Democrat 9/16/2013
Wow! Talk about organic and close to home. I have just finished reading a book entitled “The Great Disruption” by Paul Gilding who was CEO of Greenpeace for 20 years and is now a sustainability consultant to multinational companies.
In Sunday’s PD there were four articles: “Contrarians’ Viewpoint” states that in the worst case scenario there will be “jarring financial chaos” and a steady decline in global living standards caused by unsustainable debt and the end of cheap oil; a “Close to Home” article by Jane Vosburg pointed out that to avoid global catastrophe and preserve the planet we need to stop the fossil-fuel companies from spewing CO2 into the atmosphere and convert to sustainable energy sources; a Paul Krugman article “Failed policy wrought years of tragic waste” on how a lack of government stimulation caused a slowdown in economic growth and unnecessary unemployment; and an article “Vote near on energy zoning changes” on Sonoma County renewable energy development.
All of these articles touch on points covered in the book. Global warming caused by CO2 is real and it will eventually make our planet uninhabitable; “Peak oil” will make fossil fuels so expensive it will collapse the world economy; the world’s growth economy is fast using up the planet’s resources; we need a new system that will provide for near full employment; we have to build communities
that can function in an era of limits; and it will take geopolitical action to convert to sustainable energy sources.
Gilding argues that what we have to do is change from a growth economy to a steady-state economy which is not predicated on retail shopping. The reasoning goes that by converting from a consumption growth economy we will stop chasing our tails in the pursuit of more and more stuff and spend the extra time we will have giving back to the community thus creating a better quality of life. He states that studies show that this type of life style will make us happier since we will have to work less and our creative free time will promote the positive evolution of mankind. Taggart feels the best place to be when this social upheaval happens is in Sebastopol.
A steady-state economy would convert a majority of jobs from growth oriented companies to cooperatives. Cooperatives now employ one hundred million people worldwide 20 percent more that multinational companies.
As Taggart, Martenson and Vosburg point out “peak oil” and continued CO2 emissions will collapse the global economy and destroy our planet as we know it. If we let this ecological and economic collapse happen Gilding says it will take an effort as massive as America’s entrance into WWII to save the planet. Fossil fuel companies will have to be wiped out and replaced with an enormous investment in sustainable fuel sources.
The alternative, as all sources point out, is to start the conversion off fossil fuel and change our life styles now. We need to divest ourselves from non-sustainable energy companies and invest in companies that could produce innovative solutions. For example, Freecycle Network’s seven million members give away unwanted useful goods to each other which reduces landfill waste and the need to buy new stuff. In Australia, the 1 Million Women Campaign was founded with the idea that since women make 70 percent of the consumer decisions they should take the lead in reducing carbon emission by taking simple easy steps.
In planning for local renewable energy development Sonoma County supervisors and city councilpersons seem to be providing the stated leadership that will be necessary to survive and transcend The Great Disruption.
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No matter whether climate warming is real or not, oil is a foul, dirty energy source that pollutes our streets, water-ways and air so we should just ban it as soon as we can. Most products that are petroleum based can be made with synthetic alternatives and that $5 billion a year we give to the oil industry, for whatever reason, would go a long way in feeding the children of the working poor.