Dear All, I've just posted the very first blog on our brand new website www.GlobalClimateSolutions.org <http://www.globalclimatesolutions.org/>. Please take a to visit the website and to provide feedback.
I think you'll find we're looking at the most cutting-edge solutions to global climate change and peak oil. We welcome any and all thinking about these incredibly important matters to share their ideas on our blog by becoming a guest contributor. Respectfully, Ryan D. Hottle Extreme Carbon Negativity: 280 ppm by 2050 by Ryan D. Hottle One could argue that climate change awareness has thus far progressed through four distinct phases. A mere twenty years climate change was the obscure work of academics. Phase one. Phase two was the fiery argument over the merits and uncertainty of the science by a fairly small crowd of researchers (and industry-funded naysayers)–most of the people, however, remained unattached and undecided as far as the debate went. As of two or three years ago–roughly corresponding with Al Gore's release of "An Inconvenient Truth"–we entered a new level of widespread public recognition. That was phase three. Now we seem to be entering a fourth phase: serious solutions. The past several months have given witness to an incredible burgeoning of studies, action plans, and public announcements which commonly suggest the gravity of the situation we are in is a hell of a lot worse than we originally imagined. The upshot of this conclusion is that the proposed solutions to climate change are going to have to be of a much higher caliber than those of the past have been. No longer are we talking about the business-as-usual plans to reduce emissions levels 50% by 2050 or to cap CO2 levels at 650 parts per million. We need serious, comprehensive, highly-effective, and timely strategies to combat climate change. The science has set the bar far higher and now the leaders of the climate movement are rising to the challenge: · Dr. James Hansen of NASA and his fellow colleagues have released a groundbreaking paper arguing that the safe upper limit of CO2 in the atmosphere is 310 to 350 parts per million (ppm) while offering a compelling plan to deal with the threat. · Lester Brown and The Earth Policy Institute have just released an ambitious plan to reduce global emissions levels 80% by 2020. · Al Gore and "The We Campaign" have just launched a bold plan to generate 100% of U.S. energy from clean, carbon-free sources by 2020. · Bill McKibben and fellow activists of the "Step It Up Campaign" have created a new platform for advocating serious carbon reductions to 350 ppm of CO2 which is, appropriately enough, called 350.org. · Dr. Johannes Lehmann and colleagues from around the world will be gathering this September at the International Biochar Initiative to discuss the powerful new strategy to reverse climate change: carbon-negative energy. · Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, president of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has recently revealed his belief that humanity has a mere 7 years to put into action a robust plan to combat climate change. The authority and magnitude of these voices cannot be underestimated. After a hundred years of massive exploitation of the world's resources, population growth and the pumping of carbon reserves into the atmosphere, scientists are now realizing that (a) global climate change is quite easily the greatest threat that has ever faced humanity, and (b) that it is happening much more rapidly than they originally thought. Suffice to say, we've pissed Mother Nature off royally. Many within the climate change community are calling for reductions down to 350 parts per million according to Hansen's aforementioned study. Personally (without being a climatologist), I believe we should shoot for 100% emissions reductions by 2025 and to lower atmospheric CO2 levels a full 30% by 2050 back to pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm. Lowering atmospheric carbon dioxide levels down to 280 ppm is the sensible thing to do because 280 ppm represents the level of CO2 in the atmosphere that the Earth system has been self-regulating at for the past 10,000 years. 280 ppm also corresponds to the climatic system under which all of our agricultural systems and species have evolved under. It should be noted that the 310 to 350 ppm of atmospheric CO2 that Hansen is suggesting we shoot for is the safe upper-limit of atmospheric carbon–not the ideal atmospheric carbon level. In terms of the precautionary principle, adding a 10 to 20% buffer to Hansen and McKibben's target of 350 ppm makes sense because being off by even a little bit could have catastrophic consequences. So how is it that we get to this target of 280 ppm, particularly when we are adding 2 ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere each year? The difficulty to describing how exactly we transform a society, infrastructure, and worldview from one that is inherently unsustainable to one that will be prepared to weather the storms of climate change, peak oil, food and water scarcity, and the multitude of other threats that will be pounding us from all sides is that we need far-reaching, evolutionary change at all levels simultaneously. Pointing to renewable energy production and green jobs as a solution to our current dilemma–while popular among many organizations and individuals within the climate change community–is a drastic and potentially disastrous oversimplification of the situation in which we find ourselves. Alex Steffen, of www.Worldchanging.com <http://www.worldchanging.com/>, has rightly accurately critiqued Gore's speech writing that: "The problem with Gore's speech is its single-answer clarity, it's attempt to boil down our problems into their most important part. Renewables may or may not be "the lynchpin" of a sustainable society, but they are clearly far from the only answer. "We need to make a big, massive, one-off investment to transform our energy infrastructure," Gore told a reporter. That's true. "But it's only part of the truth: that we need a series of parallel "big, massive, one-off investments." The problems we face will not be solved with one big effort, even a big effort on the scale of the lunar landings or the War on Poverty. The problems we face will only be solved by a wholesale transformation of many interlocking systems at once — a transformation that aims to overcome many problems at once. "Do we need wind farms and solar arrays? Yes! But we also need to redesign our cities, so that we're able to grow green, dense, walkable communities that let us change our transportation systems, redefine our architectural practices and recreate our infrastructure. "We need revolutions in farming, fishing and forestry, one that makes sure that the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the materials we use are healthy and sustainable — and we need better stewardship of the public lands and waters we all rely on. "We need a new relationship to water, water supplies and water consumption. We need transformed product designs, new industrial processes, green metals systems, green chemistry and zero waste solutions to the garbage we create. "We need a massive wave of innovation, right now, in every single part of America's material civilization." Steffen is right. What is really need is comprehensive model for solving climate change that incorporates a diversity of interconnected solutions that work in synergy with one another. We need a bold reshaping of lifestyles and thought-patterns. We desperately need a plan that can be rapidly implemented that will suck CO2 out of the atmosphere as fast as we possibly can. We need a roadmap to lead us from collision course we are headed on into a new and better world of environmental sustainability and social equity. To the groundswell of bold thinking around solutions to climate change I would like to dedicate the very first blog posting at our new website ( www.GlobalClimateSolutions.org <http://www.globalclimatesolutions.org/>) to the unveiling of the "Earth Rebirth Model" for Solving Climate Change. The Earth Rebirth Model (ERM) proposes a systems approach based on permaculture principles to mitigating and adapting to climate change as well as dealing with the interconnected threats of peak oil, food and water scarcity, economic depression, and ecological destruction. As the name suggests, the ultimate goal of ERM is to simultaneously solve the climate change crisis while creating a more sustainable, equitable, beautiful, and, ultimately, more meaningful planet for present and future generations to come. Here let me briefly introduce the reader to ERM by considering four critical aspects of the model. Though these four pieces of the solution certainly are not all the solutions ERM considers, these are four solutions which I believe are absolutely critical to getting right right away: First, is placing a price on carbon. Without accurately applying the true cost of releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, business-as-usual will continue unabated, leading us down the path of inevitable destruction. In his book, "Climate Solutions: A Citizen's Guide," Peter Barnes presents a sensible and equitable model for applying a Cap-and-Trade scheme. Likewise, James Hansen has presented a very similar model albeit using a Carbon Tax-and-Dividend scheme: "Carbon Tax and 100% Dividend –No Alligator Shoes!" Both of these systems operate on a national level by placing an increasing cost on carbon that is than equally redistributed to the citizenry. While both of these are good models, I am personally drawn to the global "Contraction and Convergence" model or the updated Cap and Share model but with unique built-in mechanisms to decrease global population (voluntarily, of course), increase social equity across the planet, provide a "Global Climate Emergency Fund," and to promote rapid development of carbon negative energy technologies by paying people to sequester carbon. Perhaps most importantly, any scheme that we adapt will have to have aggressive political teeth that give countries a solemn choice between tasty carrots or extremely painful sticks in order to ensure global compliance. (More on the details on this scheme in upcoming blog.) The second is producing clean, renewable energy with net-zero or net-negative CO2 emissions. Upon Gore's proclamation that we reduce emissions 100% by 2020, Jerome a Paris of the Daily Kos performed some useful napkin-level sketches on whether this would be possible simply with our available wind generating capacity in the United States. What he found was that 100% carbon free energy by 2020 may not be possible but 50-90% would be. What neither Jerome a Paris, Al Gore, Lester Brown, Bill McKibben nor many other of the "climate all-stars" seem to be aware of, however, is our ability to couple and modulate intermittent wind and solar capacity with Combined Heat and Power (CHP) Pyrolysis Systems that can produce carbon-negative energy from agricultural debris and other biomass waste streams. In addition to sequestering carbon and producing energy the byproduct of pyrolysis is a powerful soil amendment known as "biochar" which can improve water retention in soil, provide homes to microorganisms, reduce need for nitrogen fertilizers by decreasing nutrient leaching, decrease the "dead zone" phenomenon, and improve overall soil health. Dr. Johannes Lehmann, professor of Soil Science at Cornell University, has suggested that we could be sequestering upwards of 5.5 to 9.5 Petra grams (Pg) of carbon per year by 2100. To put this in perspective, consider that we are presently emitting 5.4 Pg of carbon per year from fossil fuels. Thus, we can clearly intuit that the potential of carbon negative energy (and carbon negative farming practices) is absolutely stupendous even if it were only 1/10 this effective. Questions remain over whether the addition of charcoal to soils will increase microbial activity, thereby, speeding decomposition of soil organic matter. Clearly more research is needed, but this should not be an excuse to stall the implementation of widespread trials within the very near-short term. Governments everywhere should be investing as much money as possible into biochar, carbon-negative energy. If we find it is as promising as current research suggests, we may choose to simply mandate that the coal companies either capture and store 100 percent of their carbon emissions by 2025 or switch their generating capacity to pyrolysis based systems. It's that simple: If you're not carbon neutral or carbon negative by 2025, you're out of work. Period. Third is "Relocalizing" our communities and economies. The visionary leaders who have been promoting and actively working to address the largely-unrecognized and misunderstood threat of global peak oil and gas production have been promoting relocalization for a number of years. Unfortunately the overwhelming majority of people don't understand peak oil, the media isn't informing them about it, and practically all the leaders and politicians either don't have the intelligence or backbone to talk about the situation. Relocalization is the process of creating more sustainable and self-reliant communities by growing food, producing essential goods, and deriving a sustainable and fulfilling life locally. It is the opposite of the fossil-fuel economy and provides a compelling model for "decarbonizing" our energy infrastructure, agricultural production systems, economies, and lifestyles. See the work of Richard Heinberg, Julian Darley, The Post Carbon Institute, and The Relocalization Network. Fourth is integration. In Permaculture one of the chief principles is to "Never just do one thing." Another is to "Utilize the yields of each element to meet the needs of other elements in the system." In other words, our solutions cannot exist by themselves—we must design solutions that integrate together in a synergistic fashion. Let's look at prevention of catastrophic forest fires as a case-in-point. As temperatures rise and hardiness zones continue their upward creep, there is likely to be significant negative effects on many species and ecosystems. Some species and ecosystems will be faced with widespread die-off, collapse, and extinction. As the following maps from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's "Forestry Climate Change Atlas" ( http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/atlas/) indicate, we are going to see potentially drastic increases in average annual temperatures within the next several decades. The first image is of current mean temperatures. The second of a low-impact scenario of climate change, while the third is the high-impact scenario in 2100. One of the prone ecosystems in my area of the country is the Maple-Beech-Birch forest types in U.S. Northeast. As they die-off there will be an enormous accumulation of biomass that could potentially provide fodder for massive fires. In order to prevent these fires, it would behoove us to reduce the quantity of biomass on forest floors. This presents the opportunity for turning a portion of the biomass into energy and biochar through pyrolysis. We are faced with a single problem. We approach it with creativity and science and we create a positive solution to the problem. But we don't stop there… The biochar could then be added to soils to enhance soil productivity. "Food Forest" systems that produce fruit, nut, berry, mushroom and other perennial crops could be planted in the (See Dave Jacke's work at www.EdibleForestGardens.com <http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/>); woodland coppicing management systems; and low-input, high-diversity polyculture biomass production systems (See David Tillman's article "Carbon-Negative Biofuels from Low-Input High-Diversity Grassland Biomass") are being planted. The sustainably managed forest ecosystems could provide the raw material to rebuild significant portions of our housing infrastructure to become passive solar buildings (locking up carbon in the process.) The Forest Gardens would provide fruits, nuts, berries, mushrooms and other perennial crops for local consumption. The coppiced woodland area could provide material for home heat and small-to-medium scale pyrolysis plants as well as for locally manufactured tools. The grassland biomass would provide us with additional sources of energy for either cellulosic ethanol production or pyrolysis. Intelligent and sustainable management of wilderness could involve opening up "South-to-North Wilderness Corridors" enable migration paths for species on the run from rising temperatures. This is but one example of how a comprehensive and synergistic model would work in a single place, though the principles can be applied universally. Instead of trying to apply the common, isolated solution to the problem, we find that we can accomplish a multitude of important processes simultaneously with an intelligent, integrated approach. 280 ppm by 2050 is indeed possible, though I would argue that the comprehensive and integrated approach that The Earth Rebirth Model suggests is going to be the essential to reduce atmospheric levels down to sustainable levels fast enough. The first phase of climate obscurity passed 20 years ago with Hansen in front of the U.S. Congress. The second phase of climate debate has been all but won by the climatologists–the climate skeptics, few in number and lacking in any real credibility, are licking their wounds over in the corner and posting dubious propaganda on YouTube. The third phase of climate recognition is quickly moving to the fourth phase of real climate solutions. This phase will be vital to how well and how quickly we move to the fifth phase: climate action. The fate of this precious planet and the future of our children and grandchildren hangs in the precipitously in the balance. What we choose to do–or not to do–in the next five to ten years will make all the difference. Be prepared to work hard together–that's the only way we're going to win. -- GLOBAL CLIMATE SOLUTIONS www.GlobalClimateSolutions.org <http://www.globalclimatesolutions.org/> serious, sustainable solutions to climate change including carbon-negative energy submit your ideas and articles on-line at: www.GlobalClimateSolutions.org <http://www.globalclimatesolutions.org/> _______________________________________________ For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please visit: http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/ RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information for: [email protected] http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins free hosting by http://www.mutualaid.org
