The California Highway Patrol say a man stole a car to make a court appearance on a previous auto theft charge.

Patrol investigator Chris Linehan says he arrested Samuel Botchvaroff Tuesday as he sat inside a stolen 2000 Range Rover at the Vallejo courthouse. The 24-year-old Botchvaroff had just left his arraignment on auto theft charges stemming from an Oct. 31 arrest.

Linehan said the Range Rover’s LoJack system helped him locate the vehicle, which had been stolen from Oakland earlier Tuesday morning.

Authorities say Botchvaroff told officers his car had been impounded, and he had no other way to get to his arraignment.

He was booked into Solano County Jail on suspicion of auto theft and possession of stolen property.

Okay it doesn’t have a lot to do with global warming directly, but for some reason, when I first read the story, I immediately thought of this:  “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“

The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized. But I think it’s important to understand that the closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we’ll hear from those whose interest or ideology run counter to the much needed action that we’re engaged in. There are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy — when it’s the system we currently have that endangers our prosperity and prevents us from creating millions of new jobs.

As always, if you want to hear the best progressive messaging on energy and climate — if you want to know the best phrases and framing — look no further than the master messenger in the Oval Office.  This time, Obama spoke at my alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (full text here — I’ll have the YouTube video up soon).

Like no President before him — indeed, like no major U.S. politician since Robert F. Kennedy — he has stated again and again that our current path is unsustainable and doomed to fail, using language very similar to the global economy is a Ponzi scheme metaphor:

• “I want us all to think about new and creative ways to … encourage young people to create and build and invent — to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.” (4/27)
• “The choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy. The choice we face is between prosperity and decline.” (4/22)
• “We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand.”  (4/14)
• “We can let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad, or we can create those jobs right here in America and lay the foundation for our lasting prosperity.” (3/19)

Those in the media and elsewhere who don’t think Obama will use all the power of his office to get a comprehensive climate and clean energy bill on his desk next year are simply not listening to him.

This speech is a good bookend to his UN speech on climate change.  Interestingly, if the Senate does not finish its work in time for a vote this year, the vote would be in late January or early February — so Obama would probably talk about clean energy and global warming in the State of the Union address!

The whole speech is worth reading:

Thank you very much. Please, have a seat. Thank you. Thank you, MIT. (Applause.) I am — I am hugely honored to be here. It’s always been a dream of mine to visit the most prestigious school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Applause.) Hold on a second — certainly the most prestigious school in this part of Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Laughter.) And I’ll probably be here for a while — I understand a bunch of engineering students put my motorcade on top of Building 10. (Laughter.)This tells you something about MIT — everybody hands out periodic tables. (Laughter.) What’s up with that? (Laughter.)

I want I want to thank all of you for the warm welcome and for the work all of you are doing to generate and test new ideas that hold so much promise for our economy and for our lives. And in particular, I want to thank two outstanding MIT professors, Eric Lander, a person you just heard from, Ernie Moniz, for their service on my council of advisors on science and technology. And they have been hugely helpful to us already on looking at, for example, how the federal government can most effectively respond to the threat of the H1N1 virus. So I’m very grateful to them.

We’ve got some other special guests here I just want to acknowledge very briefly. First of all, my great friend and a champion of science and technology here in the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, my friend Deval Patrick is here. (Applause.) Our Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray is here. (Applause.) Attorney General Martha Coakley is here. (Applause.) Auditor of the Commonwealth, Joe DeNucci is here. (Applause.) The Mayor of the great City of Cambridge, Denise Simmons is in the house. (Applause.) The Mayor of Boston, Tom Menino, is not here, but he met me at the airport and he is doing great; he sends best wishes.

Somebody who really has been an all-star in Capitol Hill over the last 20 years, but certainly over the last year, on a whole range of issues — everything from Afghanistan to clean energy — a great friend, John Kerry. Please give John Kerry a round of applause. (Applause.)

And a wonderful member of Congress — I believe this is your district, is that correct, Mike? Mike Capuano. Please give Mike a big round of applause. (Applause.)

Now, Dr. Moniz is also the Director of MIT’s Energy Initiative, called MITEI. And he and President Hockfield just showed me some of the extraordinary energy research being conducted at this institute: windows that generate electricity by directing light to solar cells; light-weight, high-power batteries that aren’t built, but are grown — that was neat stuff; engineering viruses to create — to create batteries; more efficient lighting systems that rely on nanotechnology; innovative engineering that will make it possible for offshore wind power plants to deliver electricity even when the air is still.

And it’s a reminder that all of you are heirs to a legacy of innovation — not just here but across America — that has improved our health and our wellbeing and helped us achieve unparalleled prosperity. I was telling John and Deval on the ride over here, you just get excited being here and seeing these extraordinary young people and the extraordinary leadership of Professor Hockfield because it taps into something essential about America — it’s the legacy of daring men and women who put their talents and their efforts into the pursuit of discovery. And it’s the legacy of a nation that supported those intrepid few willing to take risks on an idea that might fail — but might also change the world.

Even in the darkest of times this nation has seen, it has always sought a brighter horizon. Think about it. In the middle of the Civil War, President Lincoln designated a system of land grant colleges, including MIT, which helped open the doors of higher education to millions of people. A year — a full year before the end of World War II, President Roosevelt signed the GI Bill which helped unleash a wave of strong and broadly shared economic growth. And after the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, the United States went about winning the Space Race by investing in science and technology, leading not only to small steps on the moon but also to tremendous economic benefits here on Earth.

So the truth is, we have always been about innovation, we have always been about discovery. That’s in our DNA. The truth is we also face more complex challenges than generations past. A medical system that holds the promise of unlocking new cures is attached to a health care system that has the potential to bankrupt families and businesses and our government. A global marketplace that links the trader on Wall Street to the homeowner on Main Street to the factory worker in China — an economy in which we all share opportunity is also an economy in which we all share crisis. We face threats to our security that seek — there are threats to our security that are based on those who would seek to exploit the very interconnectedness and openness that’s so essential to our prosperity. The system of energy that powers our economy also undermines our security and endangers our planet.

Now, while the challenges today are different, we have to draw on the same spirit of innovation that’s always been central to our success. And that’s especially true when it comes to energy. There may be plenty of room for debate as to how we transition from fossil fuels to renewable fuels — we all understand there’s no silver bullet to do it. There’s going to be a lot of debate about how we move from an economy that’s importing oil to one that’s exporting clean energy technology; how we harness the innovative potential on display here at MIT to create millions of new jobs; and how we will lead the world to prevent the worst consequences of climate change. There are going to be all sorts of debates, both in the laboratory and on Capitol Hill. But there’s no question that we must do all these things.

Countries on every corner of this Earth now recognize that energy supplies are growing scarcer, energy demands are growing larger, and rising energy use imperils the planet we will leave to future generations. And that’s why the world is now engaged in a peaceful competition to determine the technologies that will power the 21st century. From China to India, from Japan to Germany, nations everywhere are racing to develop new ways to producing and use energy. The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy. I am convinced of that. And I want America to be that nation. It’s that simple. (Applause.)

That’s why the Recovery Act that we passed back in January makes the largest investment in clean energy in history, not just to help end this recession, but to lay a new foundation for lasting prosperity. The Recovery Act includes $80 billion to put tens of thousands of Americans to work developing new battery technologies for hybrid vehicles; modernizing the electric grid; making our homes and businesses more energy efficient; doubling our capacity to generate renewable electricity. These are creating private-sector jobs weatherizing homes; manufacturing cars and trucks; upgrading to smart electric meters; installing solar panels; assembling wind turbines; building new facilities and factories and laboratories all across America. And, by the way, helping to finance extraordinary research.

In fact, in just a few weeks, right here in Boston, workers will break ground on a new Wind Technology Testing Center, a project made possible through a $25 million Recovery Act investment as well as through the support of Massachusetts and its partners. And I want everybody to understand — Governor Patrick’s leadership and vision made this happen. He was bragging about Massachusetts on the way over here — I told him, you don’t have to be a booster, I already love the state. (Applause.) But he helped make this happen.

Hundreds of people will be put to work building this new testing facility, but the benefits will extend far beyond these jobs. For the first time, researchers in the United States will be able to test the world’s newest and largest wind turbine blades — blades roughly the length of a football field — and that in turn will make it possible for American businesses to develop more efficient and effective turbines, and to lead a market estimated at more than $2 trillion over the next two decades.

This grant follows other Recovery Act investments right here in Massachusetts that will help create clean energy jobs in this commonwealth and across the country. And this only builds on the work of your governor, who has endeavored to make Massachusetts a clean energy leader — from increasing the supply of renewable electricity, to quadrupling solar capacity, to tripling the commonwealth’s investment in energy efficiency, all of which helps to draw new jobs and new industries. (Applause.) That’s worth applause.

Now, even as we’re investing in technologies that exist today, we’re also investing in the science that will produce the technologies of tomorrow. The Recovery Act provides the largest single boost in scientific research in history. Let me repeat that: The Recovery Act, the stimulus bill represents the largest single boost in scientific research in history. (Applause.) An increase — that’s an increase in funding that’s already making a difference right here on this campus. And my budget also makes the research and experimentation tax credit permanent — a tax credit that spurs innovation and jobs, adding $2 to the economy for every dollar that it costs.

And all of this must culminate in the passage of comprehensive legislation that will finally make renewable energy the profitable kind of energy in America. John Kerry is working on this legislation right now, and he’s doing a terrific job reaching out across the other side of the aisle because this should not be a partisan issue. Everybody in America should have a stake — (applause) — everybody in America should have a stake in legislation that can transform our energy system into one that’s far more efficient, far cleaner, and provide energy independence for America — making the best use of resources we have in abundance, everything from figuring out how to use the fossil fuels that inevitably we are going to be using for several decades, things like coal and oil and natural gas; figuring out how we use those as cleanly and efficiently as possible; creating safe nuclear power; sustainable — sustainably grown biofuels; and then the energy that we can harness from wind and the waves and the sun. It is a transformation that will be made as swiftly and as carefully as possible, to ensure that we are doing what it takes to grow this economy in the short, medium, and long term. And I do believe that a consensus is growing to achieve exactly that.

The Pentagon has declared our dependence on fossil fuels a security threat. Veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are traveling the country as part of Operation Free, campaigning to end our dependence on oil — (applause) — we have a few of these folks here today, right there. (Applause.) The young people of this country — that I’ve met all across America — they understand that this is the challenge of their generation.

Leaders in the business community are standing with leaders in the environmental community to protect the economy and the planet we leave for our children. The House of Representatives has already passed historic legislation, due in large part to the efforts of Massachusetts’ own Ed Markey, he deserves a big round of applause. (Applause.) We’re now seeing prominent Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham joining forces with long-time leaders John Kerry on this issue, to swiftly pass a bill through the Senate as well. In fact, the Energy Committee, thanks to the work of its Chair, Senator Jeff Bingaman, has already passed key provisions of comprehensive legislation.

So we are seeing a convergence. The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized. But I think it’s important to understand that the closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we’ll hear from those whose interest or ideology run counter to the much needed action that we’re engaged in. There are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy — when it’s the system we currently have that endangers our prosperity and prevents us from creating millions of new jobs. There are going to be those who cynically claim — make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.

So we’re going to have to work on those folks. But understand there’s also another myth that we have to dispel, and this one is far more dangerous because we’re all somewhat complicit in it. It’s far more dangerous than any attack made by those who wish to stand in the way progress — and that’s the idea that there is nothing or little that we can do. It’s pessimism. It’s the pessimistic notion that our politics are too broken and our people too unwilling to make hard choices for us to actually deal with this energy issue that we’re facing. And implicit in this argument is the sense that somehow we’ve lost something important — that fighting American spirit, that willingness to tackle hard challenges, that determination to see those challenges to the end, that we can solve problems, that we can act collectively, that somehow that is something of the past.

I reject that argument. I reject it because of what I’ve seen here at MIT. Because of what I have seen across America. Because of what we know we are capable of achieving when called upon to achieve it. This is the nation that harnessed electricity and the energy contained in the atom, that developed the steamboat and the modern solar cell. This is the nation that pushed westward and looked skyward. We have always sought out new frontiers and this generation is no different.

Today’s frontiers can’t be found on a map. They’re being explored in our classrooms and our laboratories, in our start-ups and our factories. And today’s pioneers are not traveling to some far flung place. These pioneers are all around us — the entrepreneurs and the inventors, the researchers, the engineers — helping to lead us into the future, just as they have in the past. This is the nation that has led the world for two centuries in the pursuit of discovery. This is the nation that will lead the clean energy economy of tomorrow, so long as all of us remember what we have achieved in the past and we use that to inspire us to achieve even more in the future.

I am confident that’s what’s happening right here at this extraordinary institution. And if you will join us in what is sure to be a difficult fight in the months and years ahead, I am confident that all of America is going to be pulling in one direction to make sure that we are the energy leader that we need to be.

Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

Related Post:

• Robert F. Kennedy challenged our Ponzi scheme pursuit of growth for growth’s sake, much as his heir, Barack Obama, does

“They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent…  Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger.  The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close.  In its place we are entering a period of consequences….  We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now…”

Winston Churchill, November 12, 1936

Paul Gilding, former executive director of Greenpeace International, has another piece I’m reposting, “The Parallel Universes of Climate Change. Where do you live?” You may remember Gilding from Tom Friedman’s Ponzi scheme column (see here).

Some days my head hurts, as I shift between what feels like two parallel universes in the climate change debate. First I have these conversations with world-class scientists who calmly lay out the scientific view of the various risks posed by climate change and their relative scale and likelihoods. They tell me the science says it is almost certain the impacts will be serious and destabilising for our society and our economy. The science also describes a lower level of risk – which they find hard to quantify but generally say between 10% and 50% – that the impacts of climate change will be catastrophic, perhaps even civilisation threatening. This could include widespread famine, war and economic collapse. Not certain, but a reasonable possibility.

It is very clear when you listen to these scientists and read their peer-reviewed reports that, on any calm and rational analysis, we should be preparing for a carbon reduction war. Yes, a war – with all that implies about focus, effort and sacrifice. The threat posed is, after all, a “clear and present danger” and the response should be strong, global and immediate. This should be a ‘whatever it takes’ moment.

Then I shift into the parallel universe.

I spend time in corporate boardrooms and listen to the analysis of business executives who explain how we mustn’t damage the economy by “over-reacting”. They explain their concern about protecting jobs and economic growth, how we must not jeopardise “our” (insert India, China, South Africa, USA, Australia etc) national competitiveness by acting “early” because, after all, without a global solution what difference will our actions make anyway? When I engage with policy makers, even those supportive of climate action, I get only a marginally stronger response.

Of course, each of these arguments has its narrow appeal. There’s always a bit of truth and rationality, and that’s why people use them. But the collective consequence of these arguments is the real story here – the story that historians will tell. We have had the risk thoroughly analysed and explained to us and we are choosing, with endlessly shifting reasons for prevarication and delay, not to act commensurate to the level of risk.

I wonder what it was like in the lead up to WWII, the last time we had a serious and clear global threat. When Hitler invaded Poland, did Winston Churchill order an economic modelling exercise to understand the implications of spending over a quarter of GDP on the war effort? When Pearl Harbour was bombed, did US industry argue we shouldn’t over-react, that America shouldn’t respond until there was a global agreement to act so as to avoid a disproportionate share of the cost?

No, fortunately for us, that wasn’t their response. In fact, just four days after Pearl Harbour was bombed, the auto industry was ordered to cease all civilian production in order to focus on the war effort. Such actions soon spread across the economy. I imagine US political leaders thoughts were something like this: “Well damn the objectors, this is a threat to our freedom and to our way of life. In fact, this is such a profound threat we will throw everything we have at it and make it work, even though we don’t know whether we will succeed nor the costs of trying.”

They would have said: “We will have to do this because if we don’t, our children will curse our lack of courage and our selfishness. If we act we may fail. But if we don’t act, we won’t be able to live with ourselves for not trying.”

In our present day to day lives, when the weather is a bit warmer than normal but often rather pleasant, and our economy is showing signs of improving, it is hard for most of us to think like this. The business leaders I talk to about this topic are not bad people. Nor are the policy makers grappling with the complexities of transforming an economy and the uncertainty of the outcomes. They are normal people with children and friends – they go to church, they volunteer in their communities and they care about the world. (OK, there are a few exceptions, but not many!)

But they still fall for the easy way out, the path of denial and avoidance. Not because they’re bad people, but because they’re not thinking clearly and courageously.

My message on this topic is clear and direct. We are at a crucial moment in human history. 2009 is to climate change what 1939 was to WWII. Poland has been invaded – the Arctic is melting, the bushfires are burning, the droughts are strengthening and the floods are sweeping away communities. There is only one question you have to ask yourself: “what will I tell my children?”

So now, imagine yourself in 2030. The world is teetering on the edge of geopolitical and economic chaos (this is not a certainty, but it is certainly a reasonable risk). You are talking to your children (add 20 years to their current age) and explaining what it was like in 2009 – what the scientific consensus was and how you personally responded, then and there, when the reality became clear. What did you do in 2009 and why?

In 2030, the parallel universes will have closed and there will only be one left. It will be called reality and you and your children will be living in it. Imagine the conversation. Do it now, then decide what to do.

• Anti-science conservatives are stuck in denial but for climate science activists, the reverse is true
• Antarctica’s Pine Island glacier and its implications for business strategy and the Great Disruption
• NPR has Paul Gilding on The Great Disruption, Romm on The Great Ponzi Scheme

Perhaps the talk title should be “What Color is Your Parachute?  It better be some shade of green.”

I’d welcome your thoughts, since this is a tricky issue.  For instance, will we be desperate for more marine biologists — or will that job be an oxymoron in a few decades (see “Imagine a World without Fish“)?

One clear piece of advice — don’t plan on being part of the U.S. airline industry.  It has never been profitable and has no business model for oil at $150 a barrel, let alone $200 or higher, which is what we face in 2020 and beyond (see World’s top energy economist warns “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us”).  On the other hand, the clean energy and water efficiency business will boom.  True, doctors specializing in diabetes and obesity will be in demand, but let’s keep the focus to job market changes driven by energy and climate.

Air conditioning repair, yes, ski instructor, no.  Forest fire fighter, yes, gardener in the desert Dust Bowl Southwest, not so much.

To help imagine Labor Day 20 years from now, let me revise my earlier piece, “When the global Ponzi scheme collapses (circa 2030), the only jobs left will be green.”

In my March 19 post, “Why the United States REQUIRES a strong climate bill to remain competitive,” I reprised the thesis first documented by Harvard’s Michael Porter — strong, leading edge, pro-innovation regulations promote national competitiveness. As President Obama said in March:

We can let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad, or we can create those jobs right here in America and lay the foundation for our lasting prosperity.

It is Obama’s final point — “lasting prosperity” — that is the focus of this post. Obama is hinting at a point I tried to make explicit in my interview with NYT’s Tom Friedman and subsequent post (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme“):

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm.

To perpetuate the high returns the rich countries in particular have been achieving in recent decades, we have been taking an ever greater fraction of nonrenewable energy resources (especially hydrocarbons) and natural capital (fresh water, arable land, forests, fisheries), and, the most important nonrenewable natural capital of all — a livable climate.

In short, we have failed to designed a system capable of lasting prosperity. Quite the reverse.

Like all Ponzi schemes, the system must collapse. When it does, the only jobs left standing will be those that are “green” — which can be defined as those jobs that do not plunder nonrenewable energy resources and natural capital and/or do not to destroy a livable climate.

Strong climate legislation and a strong clean energy bill are not the only measures needed to avert the collapse, but they are an essential first start. Absent such action, the collapse is inevitable.

When will be collapse begin and what will it look like? I expect most opinion makers and the majority of the public to get desperate about reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the 2020s. But desperation is not collapse. I have tended to think that the inflection point is around 2030.

Now it just so happens that the UK government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, laid out something very close to the collapse scenario in his speech yesterday to the government’s Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster. He warned that by 2030, “A ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions,” as the UK’s Guardian put it.

You can see a five-minute BBC interview with Beddington here. The speech is now online.  Here are some excerpts:

We saw the food spike last year; prices going up by something in the order of 300%, rice went up by 400%, we saw food riots, we saw major issues for the poorest in the world, in the sense that the organisations like the World Food Programme did not have sufficient money to buy food on the open market and actually use it to feed the poorest of the poor.

So this is a major problem. You can see the catastrophic decline in those reserves, over the last five years or so, indicates that we actually have a problem; we’re not growing enough food, we’re not able to put stuff into the reserves….

So, what are the drivers? I am going to go through them now very briefly.

First of all, population growth. World population grows by six million every month — greater than the size of the UK population every year. Between now and… I am going to focus on the year 2030 and the reason I am going to focus on 2030 is that I feel that some of the climate change discussions focusing on 2100 don’t actually grip…. I am going to look at 2030 because that’s when a whole series of events come together.

By 2030, looking at population terms, you are looking at the global population increasing from a little over six billion at the moment to about eight billion….

… you are going to see major changes but particularly in the demand for livestock — meat and dairy….

… By 2030, the demand for food is going to be increased by about 50%. Can we do it? One of the questions. There is a major food security issue by 2030. We’ve got to somehow produce 50% more by that time.The second issue I want to focus on is the availability of fresh water….  The fresh water available per head of the world population is around 25% of what it was in 1960. To give you some idea of this; there are enormous potential shortages in certain parts of the world… China has something like 23% of the world’s population and 11% of the world’s water.

… the massive use of water is in agriculture and particularly in developing world agriculture. Something of the order of 70% of that. One in three people are already facing water shortages and the total world demand for water is predicted to increase by 30% by 2030.

So, we’ve got food — expectation of demand increase of 50% by 2030, we’ve got water — expectation of demand increase of 30% by 2030. And in terms of what it looks like, we have real issues of global water security.

…. where there is genuine water stress [in 2025 is] China and also parts of India, but look at parts of southern Europe where by 2025 we are looking at serious issues of water stress….

So, water is really enormously important. I am going to get onto the climate change interactions with it a little bit later but water is the one area that I feel is seriously threatening. It is so important because a shortage of water obviously interacts with a shortage of food, there are real potentials for driving significant international problems — what do you do if you have no water and you have no food? You migrate. So one can have a reasonable expectation that international migration will occur as these shortages come in.

Now, the third one I want to focus on is energy and, driven by the population increase that I talked about, the urbanisation I talked about and indeed the movement out of poverty….  For the first time, the demand of the rest of the world exceeded the demand of energy of the OECD…..  Energy demand is actually increasing and going to hit something of the order of a 50% increase, again by 2030.

Now, if that were not enough… those are three things that are coming together. What will the world be like when that happens? But we also have, of course, the issue of climate change. Now, this is a very familiar slide to you all but we are shooting for a target of two degrees centigrade, a perfectly sensible target. There is enormous uncertainty in the climate change models about that particular target. It is perfectly reasonable to say ’shouldn’t we be shooting for one degrees centigrade or, oddly enough, it is perfectly reasonable to say ’shouldn’t we be shooting for three degrees centigrade’, the only information we have is really enormously uncertain in terms of the climate change model.

Shooting for two seems a perfectly sensible and legitimate objective but there are enormous problems. You are talking about serious problems in tropical glaciers — the Chinese government has recognised this and has actually announced about 10 days ago that it is going to build 59 new reservoirs to take the glacial melt in the Xinjiang province. 59 reservoirs. It is actually contemplating putting many of them underground. This is a recognition that water, which has hitherto been stored in glaciers, is going to be very scarce. We have to think about water in a major way….

The other area that really worries me in terms of climate change and the potential for positive feedbacks and also for interactions with food is ocean acidification….

As I say, it’s as acid today as it has been for 25 million years. When this occurred some 25 million years ago, this level of acidification in the ocean, you had major problems with it, problems of extinctions of large numbers of species in the ocean community. The areas which are going to be hit most severely by this are the coral reefs of the world and that is already starting to show. Coral reefs provide significant protein supplies to about a billion people. So it is not just that you can’t go snorkelling and see lots of pretty fish, it is that there are a billion people dependent on coral reefs for a very substantial portion of their high protein diet.

… we have got to deal with increased demand for energy, increased demand for food, increased demand for water, and we’ve got to do that while mitigating and adapting to climate change. And we have but 21 years to do it….

I will leave you with some key questions. Can nine billion people be fed? Can we cope with the demands in the future on water? Can we provide enough energy? Can we do it, all that, while mitigating and adapting to climate change? And can we do all that in 21 years time? That’s when these things are going to start hitting in a really big way. We need to act now. We need investment in science and technology, and all the other ways of treating very seriously these major problems. 2030 is not very far away.

Some of this can be avoid or minimized if we act now. Some of it can’t. But if we don’t act strongly now, then by 2030 we will be in the midst of this “perfect storm” of catastrophes — and everyone in the world will know we face much, much worse probably for hundreds and hundreds of years to come.

That is the inflection point, “Planetary Purgatory” — and you’ll want to make sure you and your children have a sustainable job by then.

Have you personally seen evidence of permanent behavior shifts or is this is just a small speed bump on the Autobahn to oblivion.

On Friday, a NYT piece, “Reluctance to Spend May Be Legacy of Recession,” made some similar points:

The Great Depression imbued American life with an enduring spirit of thrift. The current recession has perhaps proven wrenching enough to alter consumer tastes, putting value in vogue.

“It’s simply less fun pulling up to the stoplight in a Hummer than it used to be,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the research and trading firm ITG. “It’s a change in norms.”

Of course, it’s a long way from Hummers to John Stuart Mill’s “Stationary State.”  Also, the “the savings rate dipped to 4.2% from 4.5% in June and from 6.0% in May,” and even the 6.0% was only a blip to the 50-year average (the figure below is the 3-month centered average of the personal savings rate).

Still, the NYT notes:

On Friday, the Commerce Department said spending rose 0.2 percent in July from the previous month. But most economists see this activity as short-lived, pointing out that incomes did not rise. Some suggest the recession has endured so long and spread pain so broadly that it has seeped into the culture, downgrading expectations, clouding assumptions about the future and eroding the impulse to buy.

And the piece offers this interesting factoid about gardening:

At a mall devoted to home furnishings, many storefronts were vacant, and survivors were draped in the banners of desperation: “Inventory Clearance,” “50% Off,” “It’s All On Sale.”

But at the Natural Gardener — a lush assemblage of demonstration plots that sells seeds, plants and tools for organic gardening — business has never been better.

Sales of vegetable plants swelled fivefold in March over past years. The company added a public address system and bleachers to accommodate hordes showing up for vegetable-growing classes.

Part of the embrace of gardening stems from concerns about the environment and food safety, says the company’s president, John Dromgoole. Momentum also reflects desire to save on food costs.

“People are very interested in shoring up against losing their jobs,” he said.

You tell me where we are on the binge-purge scale of 1 to 100, with the 100 (binge) being a Hummer in the garage of every 5,000-square-foot home and 1 (purge) being total collapse of the global Ponzi scheme and embrace of The Transition Handbook.

Andy Revkin at DotEarth has the comments of some economists at two posts, “An Upside to the Consumption Chill?” and “Are You On a ‘Hedonic Treadmill’?”  Let me end with an excerpt (via Revkin) of one of my favorite thinkers, John Sterman, Director, MIT System Dynamics Group, Sloan School of Management, who lays out his own version of the global Ponzi scheme:

We have been consuming natural capital far faster than it regenerates, whether it’s fossil fuels, fish, forests, wetlands, or the capacity of the oceans and other sinks to take up greenhouse gases.  Wackernagel et al. (originally in PNAS; see updates at  footprintnetwork.org) document these dynamics, arguing that we have already overshot the global carrying capacity.  Of course, carrying capacity is dynamic, partly endogenous, affected by technology as well as consumption, and a notoriously slippery notion to nail down. Nevertheless, a number of new studies are consistent with these results.  In particular, the new “Planetary Boundaries” paper, forthcoming in Nature, makes the case that humanity has overshot the global carrying capacity in a variety of key areas, including GHGs [greenhouse gases], nitrogen, phosphorus, fresh water, land use, and biodiversity.Material consumption is critical to easing down below these limits and building a more sustainable society.  And there’s tremendous scope for greater efficiency and de-materialization in our consumption.  Through technological and organizational change, supported by proper pricing (internalizing the currently externalized costs and environmental risks of material consumption and waste production), we can almost certainly provide for the needs of the projected population, at a good standard of living.  But of course that’s not enough.  As long as the dominant ethos is the drive for more consumption per capita — ever greater accumulation and consumption of material goods, energy, etc., then no amount of efficiency will suffice.  For example, improvements in the efficiency of water or energy use just let water- and energy-constrained regions grow further until some other limit is reached, or water and energy once again becomes the constraint.  And so on.  As long as everyone wants more — a bigger home, a bigger TV, a fancier vacation, more stuff, more consumption, more than they consumed last year, more than their neighbors — there can be no technological solution to the problem.  As Herman [Daly] has long pointed out, there is an essential moral character to the dilemma in which we find ourselves.

The ironic thing is that the pursuit of more, so stunningly successful so far, has not increased our happiness.  Again, this is a contentious arena, and the science of subjective well-being is still emerging.  But many studies, including the great work Danny Kahneman and colleagues have done, show that, for the developed economies at least, greater consumption per capita is only weakly associated with greater well-being (happiness, utility, life satisfaction).  Consumption per capita in the developed economies has increased dramatically over the past half century, yet reported life-satisfaction is no higher.  People tend to base their “needs” on habitual consumption, and on the consumption of those they observe around them through their social networks, in their neighborhoods, and in the media, feeling greater satisfaction when they have bigger houses and more expensive cars than those around them, and feeling deprived when they have relatively less.  Economic theory used to suggest that as people got richer, the marginal utility of income would fall, so people would naturally shift their energies away from material consumption and towards higher pursuits.  This doesn’t seem to be happening, as Keynes long ago feared.  Instead, through habituation and social comparison, we find ourselves in a no-win situation in which no level of income or consumption remains satisfying for long — the hedonic treadmill. The more people seek to boost consumption, the more income they require and the harder and longer they must work, undermining those activities that are actually fulfilling and satisfying:  for example, Juliet’s work, and that of Kahneman, Krueger and Schkade (I hope I’m not overinterpreting) shows people spend far more time working, commuting, and doing other aversive, unpleasant tasks, while the time spent in satisfying activities such as building friendships and intimate relationships, athletics, spirituality, self-improvement, etc. is small.  People move to distant suburbs far from their jobs so they can afford a larger house, thinking this will make them happier, but don’t adequately account for extra hours they must work to pay off the mortgage and the way their long commute erodes their happiness by stealing time they could be spending with their spouse and children, friends and community.  Thus even if there were no environmental constraints to endless growth, even if the capacity of the planet to support material consumption where infinite, growth in material consumption, the never-ending quest for more stuff, is not taking us where we want to go.

During this economic crisis we have heard a lot about people getting back to basics.  From gardening, to carpooling and bicycling, to swap meets and barter, to mending clothes and appliances instead of throwing them out and buying new, people are rediscovering traditional values of frugality and community.  The unanswered question is how much of this will stick once the economy recovers and people find themselves feeling a bit flush.  Will people keep riding the bus once they can afford gas again?  Will they trade that Ford Focus they bought under Cash for Clunkers for a big new SUV?  A cynical view suggests that all the talk about the recession fostering frugality, living within one’s means, and the virtues of helping and being helped by one’s community is just talk, and that what’s actually happening is that people are building up a deep well of perceived deprivation, a backlog of buying, such that when the economy recovers we’ll see another binge of overconsumption, carrying us farther still from a satisfying life and speeding the collapse of planetary life support systems.  I don’t believe this is inevitable, but it will take a lot of work to shift our lives from the self-defeating path we are on to a more satisfying, sustainable path.

Related Posts:

• Robert F. Kennedy challenged our Ponzi scheme pursuit of growth for growth’s sake, much as his heir, Barack Obama, does
• Revkin has leading system dynamics expert Sterman on NOAA’s 1,000-years-of-hell paper
• MIT Part 2: Tackling the biggest source of climate confusion
• MIT’s systems thinking on climate, Part I: SOTU
• Ponzi redux: Scientific American asks “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”

The Appalachian region has been supplying American with cheap energy for generations, a duty it has performed with a sense of pride and patriotism. But while electricity from the region’s coal has been cheap for the rest of us, the price has been extraordinarily high for the people of the mountains.

That price took on a new dimension this week in a peer-reviewed study (subs. req’d) from the Health Policy Institute at West Virginia University. Researcher Michael Hendryx reports that coal mining costs the region five times more in early deaths than it provides in economic benefits.

Hendryx’s sobering calculation is that the coal industry provides about $8 billion annually in jobs, taxes and other economic benefits — but premature deaths attributed to coal mining and its impacts, including local air and water pollution, cost the region $42 billion.

Hendryx qualifies this estimate, saying it’s impossible to calculate these numbers with absolute certainty. But even a cursory look at how coal is extracted in Appalachia – largely now through the incredibly destructive practice of mountain top removal – leads reasonable people to conclude that Hendryx is on the right track.

I’ll write a great deal about the ongoing Appalachian tragedy in the future, but in this post I’ll focus on the ecology of decision-making in Washington D.C. that allows national energy policy to be so destructive, even deadly.

The great lesson of global climate change is that everything is connected. The emissions from a coal plant in Iowa, for example, may produce floods in Bangladesh. Or the folks in Iowa may someday suffer bigger floods because of all those new cars about to populate the streets of India.

But if the world is connected, you wouldn’t know it by watching the political process in Washington. It is the Capitol of Compartmentalization, the City of Stovepipes and the Land of a Thousand Fiefdoms. Every topic seems to have its own congressional committee, its own federal agency and its own legislation.

The stovepipes are especially evident right now as Congress moves toward its August recess and President Obama tries to accomplish as much as he can before his honeymoon is over. We are in the Summer of Big Issues before the new congressional and presidential election cycles initiate another long drought on political courage.

For example, in separate legislation, committees, hearings and processes, Congress is considering a climate change bill, a health care bill and an energy bill. It just finished work on a military spending bill and will soon begin work on a major transportation bill.
Leaders are trying to prevent gridlock in this traffic jam of separate issues competing for their time and attention, each important in its own right with its constituents begging for action.

Trouble is, all of these issues are connected. In a rational world, they could not and would not be considered in isolation from one another. There is no more obvious example than Appalachia where the adverse impacts of outdated energy policy have impacts from every home to every nation. In Appalachia, we see global climate change at its roots while national energy policy sabotages public health and environmental quality for the people living there.

It’s easy for the rest of us to ignore what’s happening in Appalachia – until we realize how connected we really are with the region. Every mountaintop that’s blown up is connected to every fetus poisoned by mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, every child who suffers from asthma related to air pollution, and every family victimized by fire, flood or disease attributed to global warming.

Our continuing reliance on coal has an effect on national defense, too. We have just been warned by a group of retired admirals and generals that our use of fossil energy, in whatever form and from whatever source, is a threat to national security and military effectiveness. (Go here to see newly released video interviews with the flag officers who issued this warning.) Energy policies that continue subsidizing or promoting fossil energy consumption produce a less safe nation, driving up defense spending, which in turn takes resources from other public needs.

Meantime, scientists have connected energy policy with global climate change, and both of them with impacts on the economy, on agriculture and other key aspects of life in the United States. The new report on climate impacts from the federal Global Change Research Program makes clear that those consequences already are underway, impacting public health in ways that raise medical costs and will drive them higher in the future. As the report says:

Climate change poses unique challenges to human health. Unlike health threats caused by a particular toxin or disease pathogen, there are many ways that climate change can lead to potentially harmful health effects. There are direct health impacts from heat waves and severe storms, ailments caused or exacerbated by air pollution and airborne allergens and many climate-sensitive infectious diseases.

Heat already is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States, according to the report, and climate change will bring more. Chicago could see heat-related deaths quadruple under a high-emissions scenario; deaths in Los Angeles could be five to seven times higher than they were in the 1990s. Warmer weather, meanwhile, contributes to poor air quality, a problem that already threatens the health of half of all Americans – some 158 million people.

The transportation stovepipe, meanwhile, is connected to the climate, energy, health and national security stovepipes. Vehicles are a major source of unhealthy air pollutants as well as greenhouse gases. Cities designed to promote safe walking and biking can reduce childhood obesity and produce healthier citizens. So, if we’re really concerned about controlling health care costs, the top priority of national transportation policy should be mass transit and walkable communities, not highways.

In other words, you can’t accurately talk about global climate change or national energy policy or national transportation policy without talking about the rising costs of health care or national security. But in Congress, they do.

Trying to describe all of this connectedness is like trying to track the synapses in the brain. All of those polls that ask us to pick our highest priorities force false choices by making us decide between the economy, health care, national security and climate change. In realty, they’re conjoined issues. We must become a holistic worriers.

I don’t know how to change Stovepipe City into a place that recognizes the web of life or the warp and woof of the socioeconomic fabric, or that stops making whack-a-mole public policies that pound down one problem in ways that make others pop up. How do we change the fact that the Law of Unattended Consequences so often makes the Law of Unintended Consequences the supreme law of the land? Should Congress meet each day as a Committee of the Whole? Should President Obama create a Department of Connections?

More seriously, it wouldn’t hurt if Congress required each new piece of legislation to carry a whole-cost analysis, assessing net impacts on energy, water, climate, public health, national security, the economy, and ecosystem services.. The President could require the same analysis from each agency when it submits its annual budget request. The calculations may not be as complicated as they seem. Bob Costanza and his colleagues at the University of Vermont are among several experts working on full-cost calculators to support policy-making at the federal and local levels.

What we can’t do is continue assuming that because an issue has its own congressional committee, its own budget and its own lobbyists, it can be addressed in a stovepipe. Government may be organized that way, but the universe is not. Ask the good people of Appalachia.

– Bill Becker

Obama is one of the few major politicians who constantly challenges our unsustainable economic worldview today (see “Obama gets the Ponzi scheme“).  Let’s listen to RFK’s remarkable words and then Obama’s:

Here is the transcript:

We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the Gross National Product. For the Gross National Product includes air pollution, and ambulances to clear our highways from carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads…. It includes… the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.

And if the Gross National Product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials…  The Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America — except whether we are proud to be Americans.

Now here’s what Obama has been saying, again and again, on a bigger stage to a bigger audience:

• “I want us all to think about new and creative ways to … encourage young people to create and build and invent — to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.” (4/27)
• “The choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy. The choice we face is between prosperity and decline.” (4/22)
• “We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand.”  (4/14)
• “We can let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad, or we can create those jobs right here in America and lay the foundation for our lasting prosperity.” (3/19)

After praising RFK’s speech, Obama goes on to discuss sustainability with the NYT reporter:

The second point Obama wanted to make was about sustainability. The current concerns about the state of the planet, he said, required something of a paradigm shift for economics. If we don’t make serious changes soon, probably in the next 10 or 15 years, we may find that it’s too late.

Precisely.

The NYT profile, “Obamanomics,” ends:

Based on the collective wisdom of scientists, global warming really does seem to be different from any previous environmental crisis. For the first time on record, meanwhile, economic growth has not translated into better living standards for most Americans. These are two enormous challenges that are part of the legacy of the Reagan Age.

Unsustainable pursuit of short-term “wealth” at the expense of sustainable prosperity — growth for the sake of growth — is both the cause of our current economic collapse and the underlying principle of the conservative movement for decades now:

• Gingrich sums up GOP ethos: “I am not a citizen of the world! I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous.”
• Hill conservatives reject all 3 climate strategies and embrace Rush Limbaugh — what does that radicalism mean for Obama, progressives, and humanity?
• “Drill baby, drill”:  The moment the Republic died

H/t People and Place.

We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children.  That means avoiding centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change.  That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source — if not the source — of two of our biggest recent wars.  I reported in back September:

An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.

The world beyond 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the world that crosses carbon cycle tipping points that quickly take us to 1000 ppm, is a world not merely of endless regional resource wars around the globe. It is a world with dozens of Darfurs. It is a world of a hundred Katrinas, of countless environmental refugees — hundreds of millions by the second half of this century — all clamoring to occupy the parts of the developed world that aren’t flooded or desertified.

In such a world, everyone will ultimately become a veteran, and Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day will fade into obscurity, as people forget about a time when wars were the exception, a time when soldiers were but a small minority of the population.

So when does this happen?

Thomas Fingar, “the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst,” sees it happening by the mid-2020s:

By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.

For poorer countries, climate change “could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Fingar said, while the United States will face “Dust Bowl” conditions in the parched Southwest….

[Glad to see somebody serious understands what is coming (see "Sorry, delayers & enablers, Part 2: Climate change means worse droughts for SW and world")]

He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.

Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world.

Significantly, the UK government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, laid out a similar scenario in a March speech to the government’s Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster. He warned that by 2030, “A ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions,” as the UK’s Guardian put it.

You can see a five-minute BBC interview with Beddington here. The speech is now online.  Here are some excerpts:

We saw the food spike last year; prices going up by something in the order of 300%, rice went up by 400%, we saw food riots, we saw major issues for the poorest in the world, in the sense that the organisations like the World Food Programme did not have sufficient money to buy food on the open market and actually use it to feed the poorest of the poor.

So this is a major problem. You can see the catastrophic decline in those reserves, over the last five years or so, indicates that we actually have a problem; we’re not growing enough food, we’re not able to put stuff into the reserves….

So, what are the drivers? I am going to go through them now very briefly.

First of all, population growth. World population grows by six million every month — greater than the size of the UK population every year. Between now and… I am going to focus on the year 2030 and the reason I am going to focus on 2030 is that I feel that some of the climate change discussions focusing on 2100 don’t actually grip…. I am going to look at 2030 because that’s when a whole series of events come together.

By 2030, looking at population terms, you are looking at the global population increasing from a little over six billion at the moment to about eight billion….

… you are going to see major changes but particularly in the demand for livestock — meat and dairy….

… By 2030, the demand for food is going to be increased by about 50%. Can we do it? One of the questions. There is a major food security issue by 2030. We’ve got to somehow produce 50% more by that time.The second issue I want to focus on is the availability of fresh water….  The fresh water available per head of the world population is around 25% of what it was in 1960. To give you some idea of this; there are enormous potential shortages in certain parts of the world… China has something like 23% of the world’s population and 11% of the world’s water.

… the massive use of water is in agriculture and particularly in developing world agriculture. Something of the order of 70% of that. One in three people are already facing water shortages and the total world demand for water is predicted to increase by 30% by 2030.

So, we’ve got food — expectation of demand increase of 50% by 2030, we’ve got water — expectation of demand increase of 30% by 2030. And in terms of what it looks like, we have real issues of global water security.

…. where there is genuine water stress [in 2025 is] China and also parts of India, but look at parts of southern Europe where by 2025 we are looking at serious issues of water stress….

So, water is really enormously important. I am going to get onto the climate change interactions with it a little bit later but water is the one area that I feel is seriously threatening. It is so important because a shortage of water obviously interacts with a shortage of food, there are real potentials for driving significant international problems — what do you do if you have no water and you have no food? You migrate. So one can have a reasonable expectation that international migration will occur as these shortages come in.

Now, the third one I want to focus on is energy and, driven by the population increase that I talked about, the urbanisation I talked about and indeed the movement out of poverty….  For the first time, the demand of the rest of the world exceeded the demand of energy of the OECD…..  Energy demand is actually increasing and going to hit something of the order of a 50% increase, again by 2030.

Now, if that were not enough… those are three things that are coming together. What will the world be like when that happens? But we also have, of course, the issue of climate change. Now, this is a very familiar slide to you all but we are shooting for a target of two degrees centigrade, a perfectly sensible target. There is enormous uncertainty in the climate change models about that particular target. It is perfectly reasonable to say ’shouldn’t we be shooting for one degrees centigrade or, oddly enough, it is perfectly reasonable to say ’shouldn’t we be shooting for three degrees centigrade’, the only information we have is really enormously uncertain in terms of the climate change model.

Shooting for two seems a perfectly sensible and legitimate objective but there are enormous problems. You are talking about serious problems in tropical glaciers — the Chinese government has recognised this and has actually announced about 10 days ago that it is going to build 59 new reservoirs to take the glacial melt in the Xinjiang province. 59 reservoirs. It is actually contemplating putting many of them underground. This is a recognition that water, which has hitherto been stored in glaciers, is going to be very scarce. We have to think about water in a major way….

The other area that really worries me in terms of climate change and the potential for positive feedbacks and also for interactions with food is ocean acidification….

As I say, it’s as acid today as it has been for 25 million years. When this occurred some 25 million years ago, this level of acidification in the ocean, you had major problems with it, problems of extinctions of large numbers of species in the ocean community. The areas which are going to be hit most severely by this are the coral reefs of the world and that is already starting to show. Coral reefs provide significant protein supplies to about a billion people. So it is not just that you can’t go snorkelling and see lots of pretty fish, it is that there are a billion people dependent on coral reefs for a very substantial portion of their high protein diet.

… we have got to deal with increased demand for energy, increased demand for food, increased demand for water, and we’ve got to do that while mitigating and adapting to climate change. And we have but 21 years to do it….

I will leave you with some key questions. Can nine billion people be fed? Can we cope with the demands in the future on water? Can we provide enough energy? Can we do it, all that, while mitigating and adapting to climate change? And can we do all that in 21 years time? That’s when these things are going to start hitting in a really big way. We need to act now. We need investment in science and technology, and all the other ways of treating very seriously these major problems. 2030 is not very far away.

Some of this can be avoid or minimized if we act now. Some of it can’t. But if we don’t act strongly now, then by Memorial Day 2029, many of the global conflicts will either be resource wars or wars driven by environmental degradation and dislocation (see “Warming Will Worsen Water Wars). Indeed that may already have started to happen (see “Report: Climate Change and Environmental Degradation Trigger Darfur Crisis).

For one discussion of the kind of wars we might be seeing, albeit for the year 2046, here is a three-part radio series on Climate Wars.

Those are memories — and memorials — we must avoid creating at all cost.

Related Posts:

• Scientific American asks “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”
• Must have PPT #1: The narrow temperature window that gave us modern human civilization
• Global Warning: The Security Challenges of Climate Change
• More on Climate Change and National Security
• Steven Chu on climate change: “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California”
• “Australia faces collapse as climate change kicks in”:

I’m very interested in what you are seeing and hearing from your friends and neighbors as well as what you think at the macro level.

The economic downturn is forcing a return to a culture of thrift that many economists say could last well beyond the inevitable recovery.

So began a front-page NYT story this week.  With the huge recent devaluation of two key retirement assets — houses and 401ks — thrift is the word of the day and the year and maybe much longer:

I expect that the savings rate will end up at the end of this recession higher than it was going into it,” said Jonathan A. Parker, a finance professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “It’s hard to see how it wouldn’t.”

But this isn’t just about spending less and saving more.

This is about a shift to a form of consumption that is based on renewable resources, that doesn’t destroy the planet’s livability — a sustainable economy, not a Ponzi scheme.

Here is where Obama comes in.  His stimulus package and first 100 days were the biggest push away from dirty energy in U.S. history, accelerating a massive transition to clean, safe sources of energy that never run out!  It is a key reason CO2 emissions have probably peaked.

In his big speech on science and R&D last month — “Our future on this planet depends on our willingness to address the challenge posed by carbon pollution,” vows “we will exceed [R&D] level achieved at the height of the space race.” — Obama took direct aim at a purely consumption-based economy:

So I want to persuade you to spend time in the classroom, talking and showing young people what it is that your work can mean, and what it means to you. I want to encourage you to participate in programs to allow students to get a degree in science fields and a teaching certificate at the same time. I want us all to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, whether it’s science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent — to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.

Indeed, Obama used the word “create” 12 times in the speech, which suggest he and his speechwriters are sending a message.  Indeed that’s why Obama says things like:

“The choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy. The choice we face is between prosperity and decline.” (4/22)

“We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand.”  (4/14)

“We can let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad, or we can create those jobs right here in America and lay the foundation for our lasting prosperity.” (3/19)

Obama gets it.

If anything like the Waxman-Markey bill in its current form becomes law, then this country will begin a major transition toward making unsustainable energy more expensive while strongly encouraging efficiency and sustainable, clean energy jobs.

Oregon governor Ted Kulongoski began a national conversation when he said recently:

“Other than taxes,” Mr. Kulongoski said, “the hardest thing I find to talk with my constituents and my citizens about is about changing lifestyles.”

It was a wide-ranging critique, but the gist of it was this: Combating climate change and making the transition to renewable energy sources will be expensive, and Americans need to acknowledge and accept that….

Americans, he said, are acculturated to believing that “more is best.” It’s built into the economy, Mr. Kulongoski said. “It’s about the Joneses next door: if they’ve got it, I want it — and a bigger one.”

“But at some point,” he said, “you have to be candid with the public and say ‘Why do two people need a 3,000-square-foot house?”

Not everyone in the sustainable community liked what Kulongoski said:

David Roberts, a staff writer at Grist.org, took the governor to task [see here]. Lifestyles, he said, are always evolving — gradually — with changes in technology, new modes of communication and so forth. Intimating that climate change will require abrupt and perhaps distressing lifestyle adjustments among Americans is, he said, counterproductive.

“People fear losing what they’ve got,” he wrote. “It’s fine to acknowledge that shifting to a low-carbon economy will involve big changes, but there’s no reason to feed the fear that those changes will be disruptive and unpleasant. They needn’t be.”

I don’t entirely disagree with Roberts, but I look at the matter differently, as readers know.

Humanity has only two paths forward at this point, as Obama said — “prosperity and decline”:  We voluntarily switch to a low-carbon, low-oil, low-net-water use, low-net-material use economy over the next two decades or the post-Ponzi-scheme-collapse forces us to do so circa 2030.  The only difference between the two paths is that the the first one spares our children and grandchildren and the next 50 generations untold misery aka Hell and High Water.

The ultimate change will be very significant, though I agree with Kulongoski, who said, “but it will end up making your life, and your children’s lives, and your grandchildren’s lives, better” and I agree with Roberts, who wrote, “Changing to a low-carbon economy could increase our quality of life” — especially compared to the alternative!

The combination of Obama’s policies and leadership (especially if he’s a two-termer) and peak oil (which will rear its pointy head as soon as the global recession is over) and the increasingly obvious and painful reality of global warming will bring about a lot of change.

The title of this post should really be “Is the U.S. unsustainble consumption binge over?”

Well, is it?

We desperately need a new way of thinking, a new mind-set. The thinking that got us into this bind will not get us out. When Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for the New Yorker, asked energy guru Amory Lovins about thinking outside the box, Lovins responded: “There is no box.”

There is no box. That is the mind-set we need if civilization is to survive.

It’s not news that Lester Brown is warning about our unsustainable approach to feeding the planet.  But it is news that Scientific American has run a major article by him on how “The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse.”

Brown’s “Key Concepts”:

• Food scarcity and the resulting higher food prices are pushing poor countries into chaos.
• Such “failed states” can export disease, terrorism, illicit drugs, weapons and refugees.
• Water shortages, soil losses and rising temperatures from global warming are placing severe limits on food production.
• Without massive and rapid intervention to address these three environmental factors, the author argues, a series of government collapses could threaten the world order.

Brown’s warnings, ignored for too long, are now being repeated at the highest levels.  For instance, I previously blogged on the UK government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, who laid out something very close to this collapse scenario in his speech yesterday to the government’s Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster (see “When the global Ponzi scheme collapses (circa 2030), the only jobs left will be green“):

You can see the catastrophic decline in those [food] reserves, over the last five years or so, indicates that we actually have a problem; we’re not growing enough food, we’re not able to put stuff into the reserves….

I am going to look at 2030 because that’s when a whole series of events come together….

I will leave you with some key questions. Can nine billion people be fed? Can we cope with the demands in the future on water? Can we provide enough energy? Can we do it, all that, while mitigating and adapting to climate change? And can we do all that in 21 years time? That’s when these things are going to start hitting in a really big way. We need to act now. We need investment in science and technology, and all the other ways of treating very seriously these major problems. 2030 is not very far away.

Brown’s whole piece is worth reading.  I’ll excerpt the key points, trends and quotable facts here:

Failing states are of international concern because they are a source of terrorists, drugs, weapons and refugees, threatening political stability everywhere. Somalia, number one on the 2008 list of failing states, has become a base for piracy. Iraq, number five, is a hotbed for terrorist training. Afghanistan, number seven, is the world’s leading supplier of heroin. Following the massive genocide of 1994 in Rwanda, refugees from that troubled state, thousands of armed soldiers among them, helped to destabilize neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (number six).

Here is the full list of 20 countries in the world that are closest to collapse, from worst to better, ranked in 2007 by the Fund for Peace and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based on “12 social, economic, political and military indicators of national well-being.”

Somalia
Sudan
Zimbabwe
Chad
Iraq
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Afghanistan
Ivory Coast
Pakistan
Central African Republic
Guinea
Bangladesh
Burma (Myanmar)
Haiti
North Korea
Ethiopia
Uganda
Lebanon
Nigeria
Sri Lanka

Brown continues:

… the recent surge in world grain prices is trend-driven, making it unlikely to reverse without a reversal in the trends themselves. On the demand side, those trends include the ongoing addition of more than 70 million people a year; a growing number of people wanting to move up the food chain to consume highly grain-intensive livestock products; and the massive diversion of U.S. grain to ethanol-fuel distilleries.

The extra demand for grain associated with rising affluence varies widely among countries. People in low-income countries where grain supplies 60 percent of calories, such as India, directly consume a bit more than a pound of grain a day. In affluent countries such as the U.S. and Canada, grain consumption per person is nearly four times that much, though perhaps 90 percent of it is consumed indirectly as meat, milk and eggs from grain-fed animals.

The potential for further grain consumption as incomes rise among low-income consumers is huge. But that potential pales beside the insatiable demand for crop-based automotive fuels. A fourth of this year’s U.S. grain harvest—enough to feed 125 million Americans or half a billion Indians at current consumption levels—will go to fuel cars.

And then there’s water:

… the spread of water shortages poses the most immediate threat. The biggest challenge here is irrigation, which consumes 70 percent of the world’s freshwater. Millions of irrigation wells in many countries are now pumping water out of underground sources faster than rainfall can recharge them. The result is falling water tables in countries populated by half the world’s people, including the three big grain producers—China, India and the U.S….

In China the water table under the North China Plain, an area that produces more than half of the country’s wheat and a third of its corn, is falling fast. Overpumping has used up most of the water in a shallow aquifer there, forcing well drillers to turn to the region’s deep aquifer, which is not replenishable. A report by the World Bank foresees “catastrophic consequences for future generations” unless water use and supply can quickly be brought back into balance.

As water tables have fallen and irrigation wells have gone dry, China’s wheat crop, the world’s largest, has declined by 8 percent since it peaked at 123 million tons in 1997. In that same period China’s rice production dropped 4 percent. The world’s most populous nation may soon be importing massive quantities of grain.

But water shortages are even more worrying in India. There the margin between food consumption and survival is more precarious. Millions of irrigation wells have dropped water tables in almost every state. As Fred Pearce reported in New Scientist:

Half of India’s traditional hand-dug wells and millions of shallower tube wells have already dried up, bringing a spate of suicides among those who rely on them. Electricity blackouts are reaching epidemic proportions in states where half of the electricity is used to pump water from depths of up to a kilometer [3,300 feet].

A World Bank study reports that 15 percent of India’s food supply is produced by mining groundwater. Stated otherwise, 175 million.

Finally, there’s global warming:

The third and perhaps most pervasive environmental threat to food security—rising surface temperature—can affect crop yields everywhere. In many countries crops are grown at or near their thermal optimum, so even a minor temperature rise during the growing season can shrink the harvest. A study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has confirmed a rule of thumb among crop ecologists: for every rise of one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above the norm, wheat, rice and corn yields fall by 10 percent.

That’s an especially chilling statistic when you consider that we are facing warming of 4°C to 5°C or more this century on the business as usual emissions path.

Is there another techno-fix to the global food problem?  Brown says, not likely.

In the past, most famously when the innovations in the use of fertilizer, irrigation and high-yield varieties of wheat and rice created the “green revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, the response to the growing demand for food was the successful application of scientific agriculture: the technological fix. This time, regrettably, many of the most productive advances in agricultural technology have already been put into practice, and so the long-term rise in land productivity is slowing down. Between 1950 and 1990 the world’s farmers increased the grain yield per acre by more than 2 percent a year, exceeding the growth of population. But since then, the annual growth in yield has slowed to slightly more than 1 percent. In some countries the yields appear to be near their practical limits, including rice yields in Japan and China.

Some commentators point to genetically modified crop strains as a way out of our predicament. Unfortunately, however, no genetically modified crops have led to dramatically higher yields, comparable to the doubling or tripling of wheat and rice yields that took place during the green revolution. Nor do they seem likely to do so, simply because conventional plant-breeding techniques have already tapped most of the potential for raising crop yields.

You can get Brown’s detailed solution, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/.  I’ve discussed at length the energy and climate strategies in this blog.  Here is his short discussion of some other key measures:

The fourth component, restoring the earth’s natural systems and resources, incorporates a worldwide initiative to arrest the fall in water tables by raising water productivity: the useful activity that can be wrung from each drop. That implies shifting to more efficient irrigation systems and to more water-efficient crops. In some countries, it implies growing (and eating) more wheat and less rice, a water-intensive crop. And for industries and cities, it implies doing what some are doing already, namely, continuously recycling water.

At the same time, we must launch a worldwide effort to conserve soil, similar to the U.S. response to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Terracing the ground, planting trees as shelterbelts against windblown soil erosion, and practicing minimum tillage—in which the soil is not plowed and crop residues are left on the field—are among the most important soil-conservation measures.

But as always, the first step is to realize that there is no silver bullet and there is no quick escape from the Ponzi scheme.  Brown ends with a terrific quote about thinking outside the box from my old boss Amory, which bears repeating, :

Lovins responded: “There is no box.”

There is no box. That is the mind-set we need if civilization is to survive.