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The Great Carbon Bubble: Why the Fossil Fuel Industry Fights So Hard
If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet -- as we shall see -- it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.
“The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.” (Photo: Creative Commons / NASA Goddard)
In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology. Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.
It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”
In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history -- 56% of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”
In the face of such data -- statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet -- you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to... deny there’s a problem.
Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”
Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40% over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.
And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.
It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.
Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.
Part of it’s simple enough: the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.
Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology or research and development for the same. As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.
When I talked about a carbon bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is what I meant. Here are some of the relevant numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: we’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a two-degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with.
If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons -- five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.
Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).
If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything -- including fund an endless campaigns of lies -- to avoid coming to terms with its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead. To take just one example, last month the boss of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called for burning all the country’s newly discovered coal, gas, and oil -- believed to be 1,800 gigatons worth of carbon from our nation alone.
What he and the rest of the energy-industrial elite are denying, in other words, is that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain -- pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if you think banks are too big to fail, consider the climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the bailout that would face us when that bubble finally bursts.
Unfortunately, it won’t burst by itself -- not in time, anyway. The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, they’re leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt -- and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion.
Telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing. That’s why the fight is so pitched. That’s why those of us battling for the future need to raise our game. And it’s why that view from the satellites, however beautiful from a distance, is likely to become ever harder to recognize as our home planet.
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97 Comments so far
Show AllAlso, I wonder if he could actually produce a meaningful explanation of how the second law of thermodynamics is relevant (ultimately and practically) to this issue. Whatever I saw so far was just pseudoscientific bullshit. Sadly, a lot of Marxists with a half-assed "philosophical" understanding of basic physics fall into the same trap.
Please try not to denigrate harmless and helpless people's disabilities with your thoughtless use of language. There are other ways of describing bad men's actions without using three truly despicable references to developmental disabilities, as your last sentence does.
"Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics."
That is a wonderful way to describe the level of discourse these days. But it is tragic, not funny.
Another great quote comes from a guy (a Republican) who was running for the Senate in Washington State in 2010. When asked about global warming he said that it was too early to tell if it was happening, because the debate between the scientists and the pseudo-scientists was still going on. Fortunately, he was not elected.
"2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history -- 56% of the country was either in drought or flood" (article)
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From the abstract "Early-warning signals for critical transitions":
"Complex dynamical systems, ranging from ecosystems to financial markets and the climate, can have tipping points at which a sudden shift to a contrasting dynamical regime may occur."
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7260/full/nature08227.html
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I think this may be what we are experiencing - what is called "critical slowing down". Think of a small plane's control responses as stall is approached - that's the idea in a nutshell.
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As far as discussion about Exxon, economies which are not economies but rather wealth concentrators and death machines - well, the path to the immediate future appears set in stone. We will attack Iran - are now in fact attacking Iran - and we will continue exploiting all fossil fuels because we are just not that smart - not most of us - not most of the one percent - not the right - not the left - not the middle.
So for the few who would rather know the situation on the ground, in the natural world, which is the only world, I recommend the article cited above.
This will require some work, or time and expense, to obtain, and there are no hard answers there. But, like the real world, the natural world - there is opportunity for learning more, which must be considered the best we can do.
When abrupt climate change occurs, as it most probably will, it might help to at least be aware of the climate system - of the Earth System, of which we are all a part.
Not understandable except partially - we might "progress" to the point of salvation, wherein we recognize our own limitations, the limitations of our ecosphere, and learn finally to honor and to respect the complexity of the natural world.
This would then lead to respect for ourselves.
Manysummits
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Michael wrote:
"When abrupt climate change occurs, as it most probably will, it might help to at least be aware of the climate system - of the Earth System, of which we are all a part."
There's almost a hope that something will happen which is bad enough to startle humanity awake before we drive off this cliff. How bad does it need to get? What if there were heatwaves which killed tens of thousands? Actually, there have been a few. The 2003 European heatwave and the 2010 Russian heatwave each had over 40,000 fatalities.
Can you imagine the furor if a terrorist strike killed 40,000 people? But when human-caused warming kills that many it passes unnoticed, or is quickly forgotten. Perhaps if fatalities reached the hundreds of thousands...
The discussion gets more and more macabre as one attempts to comprehend the deadly implications of this carbon blight. As for some abrupt fiasco startling humanity awake, it's more likely result would be further disastrous choices - now our survival depends on geoengineering, people would say. People already say so.
But the most thermally relevant feature of Earth's climate system is its huge, deep ocean - which warms at one-tenth the pace of surface warming. Because of the ocean, even rapid forcings such as human carbon emissions tend to have gradual effects. A more likely predicament than the abrupt climate disaster, just as lethal, is that of the frog which will not jump.
Hi Aleph:
Neither scenario appeals - abrupt climate change nor the "frog which will not jump."
That Lieutenant Colonel Davis article, while not actually about climate change, is key I think. Unless we can somehow drastically alter our politics - we are just whistling in the dark.
Many of us are relatively new to geopolitics and what passes for economics - but I have made the "leap" - not wishing to be the frog that didn't.
Mistakes and confusion are inevitable in this new field - but that's OK - that's a sign of growth, according to the Mandarin in the movie ??
Mike
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PS: That's Julie's monicker on top, my wife having decided to join Common Dreams, and obviously having not signed out.
To see and treat the fossil fuels business as economic drug dealers is spot on. Like any crack slinger, their interest is to keep their customers alive enough to keep buying. Like any addict, the majority of fossil fuels consumers know deep down that their habit is ultimately harmful, but will put off the vastly unpleasant task of detox until they hit bottom; and some addicts never hit bottom and die of an overdose. Like drug rehab, weaning the Earth off of the fossil fuel tit will be a painful, but necessary process where basic assumptions will be altered forever. Unfortunately, rehab only really works when the patient is ready, and is in a state to honestly address the causes of their addiction. That is still quite in doubt.
Ianista wrote:
"Anyone that says that there is no doubt at all about AGW, that is an irrefutable fact is not being honest with themselves or anyone else."
All scientific knowledge is contingent - any theory is refutable once a better theory comes around to refute it. But there is no model or theory of climate which can explain global warming since the 70s without taking into account the effect of human-caused atmospheric CO2.
Svante Arrhenius explained the greenhouse effect in 1896. We can measure the amount of sunlight hitting Venus, Earth, and Mars, and we can measure the surface temperatures of these planets. From a very simple equation*, we know that if these planets had no atmospheres, they'd be much cooler - that they have all warmed up because of the greenhouse effect of atmospheric CO2.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law
"Anyone that says that there is no doubt at all about AGW, that is an irrefutable fact is not being honest with themselves or anyone else."
Of course, this is the straw man argument of the corporate shill denialists and of the scientifically ignorant.
There are no "irrefutable facts" in science - only in dogmatic religion. But there is currently a better than 97% consensus in the scientific community about anthropogenic global warming. If you want to bet on the <3%, you'd better not bet your next month's rent.
Your ability at math is as poor as your understanding of science. Read Steven Wilde at
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=9085&linkbox=true&position=1
For those who will not bother to look this up, his conclusion is "The radiative Greenhouse Effect is a flea on the back of an oceanic elephant and the influence of CO2 but a microbe on the back of the flea and the influence of anthropogenic CO2 but a molecule on the back of the microbe."
While there are no scientifically-determined facts, there are historical facts and one of them is that the world of climatology is in extraordinary agreement about the anthropogenic basis of global climate change.
Your playing dumb and linking to climate denialists does nothing to advance your credibility. Just as a clever lawyer can always find an "expert witness" who will testify in support of whomever is paying their tab, any fool can locate the tiny minority of scientists who choose to be shills for the petroleum industry (often the very same ones who shilled for the tobacco industry).
These are the same people who wrote the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal which was thoroughly discredited by the real climatology community.
Suffice to say: articles that intend to overturn AGW-science by overturning the greenhouse effect have a tough row to hoe. "Every molecule in an atmosphere contributes to the greenhouse effect of the entire atmosphere. " Nope.
It shouldn't be hard to understand. To remain in radiative balance with incoming sunshine, Earths surface must radiate to space at a certain temperature. Place something in the atmosphere which blocks that radiation partially, and to remain in radiative balance, Earths surface must radiate at a higher temperature:
Fewer but more powerful rays (due to a higher radiating temperature) = radiative balance.
Hence, Earths temperature goes up. This is not AGW-science: this is the greenhouse effect, which your paper says is minor to the point of trivial ("a flea on the back of an oceanic elephant"). Fine. Its like saying you believe the Earth is flat, but go ahead. The greenhouse effect is established science since 1820.
Its something you can easily measure in the lab with a source of CO2, a tube, quartz windows (quartz=infrared transparent), to go over the tubes ends. Place a candle at one end of the tube, and an infrared camera at the other. What you'll find is that Earth's normal atmospheric constituents, N2 and O2, don't absorb infrared radiation, so you can see the candle with the camera. Replaced with CO2, however, you can't see the candle anymore: CO2 absorbed the infrared energy. However, you could still see the candle with the camera, if you could make the candle brighter, i.e. make it burn at a higher temperature, high enough so that some of its rays penetrated through the CO2 to make it to your camera. However, to do that, you have to raise its temperature. Now imagine that the Earth is where the candle is. Walla: the greenhouse effect and AGW just confirmed.
Big Oil owns vast reserves of oil, gas, and even uranium. If the world moves away from carbon based fuels not only will their profits decline, but their holdings will become less valuable.
And the Russian science of abiotic oil has proven that oil is not a fossil fuel resource, but is created by abiotic formation from elements within the earth. Peak oil is yet another delusion created by the oil industry to justify higher prices for an abundant resource.
The real problem is that there are more carbon based fuels within the earth than our atmosphere could ever absorb and maintain life on earth as we know it today.
Gonzo is the right attribution for anyone who spouts this nonsense.
Fossil fuels are not fossil residue at all, perpetual motion machines are just around the corner, and Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK.
The great carbon bubble and the housing bubble, like all bubbles blown with citizen endorsement in a democracy, must eventually burst and then be blamed on some minority such as the rich.
Government has long been under a directive to subsidize housing and has responded beginning with cheap money from the Federal Reserve, guaranteed mortgages through various government agencies, and federal tax expenditures that you do not touch if you are a politician–on pain of not being reelected.
Likewise, the bursting of the carbon bubble will put seashores under water as surely as the bursting of the housing bubble put over-indebted housing under water. Again, government is carrying out the wishes of citizens in making sure that fossil fuel users are limited to paying paltry pennies at the pump and then race away on a joyous free ride to the beaches that will soon be under water.
"Ernest" - hardly.
The US government has not followed the wishes of the majority of its citizens for decades. It obeys its corporate masters and no one else - a direct result of the 1971 Powell memo to the US Chamber of Commerce and the 40-year strategic campaign to turn our democracy over to the corporate elite.
Sorry Robert, your corporate elite simply does not have the vote to overrule the voting majority in a democracy. Somehow your corporate master is buying your vote. What is it that the corporate state is giving you that makes you vote for the lesser of two evils?
"the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year"
Disasters are good for the ekonomy, but only when taxpayers pay for them. The paralysis of Merkans, preventing revolt against such ekonomic oppression, is the boomerang agenda item that destroyed Merkan liberalism. And we're pleased to replace it.
McKibbens is careful not to connect the dots of cause and effect. That's ok as far as it goes to illuminate the problems. But sooner or later we have to turn toward the cause. And at that point, where is McKibbens?
Identifying fossil fuel as the cause of global warming isn't good enough. Fossil fuel, like war, slavery, monopoly, domination, is simply another inevitable outcome of a defunct philosophy - liberalism - the autocratic rule of greed itself, as opposed to the autocratic rule of royal families, etc.
It's infinitely easier to target a royal family oppressing us, than to target greed itself, a component of human nature. This is the brilliance of the kapitalist strategy. And the foolishness of fragmented focus on each of the many destructive outcomes, firefighting, instead of targeting the philosophy driving the arsonists, the philosophy of greed. McKibbens may continue creating despair on the left by sending us into firefights, only to leave the arsonist philosophy safe and well. We on the far left are making progress, however, with out McKibbens' help. One facet of our comprehensive strategy is social isolation of those tempted to jump on the greed bandwagon. Not a liberal strategy at all is it? It's kind of like how the eskimos dealt with renegade members of the tribe - it was necessary for survival. We intent to survive too, without pretenses/delusions.
Thank God that good conservatives like Perry, Santorum, Gingrich, Bachmann, Romney and the entire Republican Congress are going to save us from them evil libruls.
Well, you touch upon a salient point; when every possible presidential candidate except one in one of the two major parties, representing fully half of the American population, publicly affirms their disbelief in evolution, the fact that AGW theory isn't making huge inroads into the public consciousness kind of follows as an unavoidable logical consequence.
I'm sure whoever is the next Republican president will get us out of AGW by organizing a national day of prayer and repentance, probably for allowing gay people to marry and use contraceptives.
Liberalism is fundamentally about human freedom and human rights, nothing at all to do with greed. In fact, according to John Kenneth Galbraith "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
But you place yourself light years off the mark, and support the ideology you claim to oppose, when you make the fundamental free-market economic claim that "greed itself [is] a component of human nature". Once that is accepted, it's a small step to "and we just need the invisible hand of the market to turn it into a social good" - or "we just need a benevolent dictator to contain our worst qualities and channel our better side".
If that were the case, then the genus homo would not have survived for 2.4 million years on this planet in relative harmony with the Web of Life. Even the modern human, homo sapiens, has walked this earth for at least 200,000 years in balance. If greed were our nature, we would have gone extinct long, long ago.
And that may be our only salvation - to return to our essential nature as humble creatures within a vast Web. Spouting mindless anti-kapitalist dogma will simply keep us trapped in the current dog-eat-dog paradigm which you pretend to abhor.
Who finances Bill McKibben directly or indirectly?
Exxon Mobil/JPMorgan Chase
Enjoy you 30 pieces of silver Bill.
Is it too much to ask that a charge like this should be substantiated somehow? Otherwise, it can be easily dismissed as rumor mongering.
I heard a rumor that aesops dog was hired by Exxon to spread rumors.
Nope. I bet you a million that is not the case. Bill took credit for work done by someone else and that work is what I personally followed up on. This goes back to the deregulatory efforts that took place in 1997-2000.
We have another big problem when it comes to fighting global warming: most people and groups, including McKibben and his otherwise wonderful 350.org, totally ignore or seriously downplay the role of livestock, even though it's the #1 cause of global warming.
check out www.51percent.org
or go directly to
http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf
The industrial production of domesticated animals, and the associated deforestation, water wasteage and desertification, is also part of the anthropogenic root of global climate change, and it's an industry entirely dependent on fossil fuels - so this is hardly a separate issue, though it makes easy fodder (pun intended) for the animal rights and vegetarian diet activists.
As with almost every problem in modern human culture, it is more about scale and control than anything else. The small, family farm is one of the keys to a sustainable culture, so we must be careful to differentiate between constructive applications and mega-destructive ones.
If only we could unite and respect each others' solutions might the fossil fuel industries be forced to spend more money or just give it up. Too bad they can count on us to fight amongst ourselves while they make a clean sweep.
Maxpayne - Great point. Instead of taking the time and energy to attack paticularities of Bill McKibben, we should get to work overcoming the fossil fuel industry's propaganda and explaining the situation to others. This issue will take all kinds of activism and has room for many approaches, many of which come up over and over again in the discussions here. Choose the one you like, and be encouraging to others who are trying.
I'm not good at picking a solution and sticking with it on this issue since there are too many good ones to choose from. Even amongst the best of solutions, some minuses exist. I used to try to deny it myself but eventually learned that it's not worth trying to walk around. Still, I'll try my best.
Seldom mentioned: Oil is a precious resource. This is the only oil this planet will ever have. IF civ makes it through whatever is coming, those people will look back and curse us---the ones who burned the oil.
We are all just yeast with a divine forgiveness complex!
Burn a barrel of oil for Jesus.
OR, we could shut down the interstates and lay railroad tracks on top of them. All of the difficult engineering has been done. Laying the tracks would be a piece of cake. Voila!! Efficiency replaces inefficiency.
OR, we could just burn a barrel of oil for Jesus.
I would love to develop my reinvented transit system. Yes I have one. It's amazing. Even if I was the only inventor out here (and I'm not), you might decide that getting me going is one important step to inhibiting and eventually reversing climate change.
You want to do the right thing. The trick is you convincing someone else with a bit of power, or your state government, that they want to do the right thing. Well, God's work must be our own.
To me, rerplacing millions of cars and trucks on the interstates with railroad tracks nd trains is a no brainer. It creates millions of jobs and massively decreased CO2 output, but I'd really like to hear more about your reinvented transit system.
The fossil fuel industry fights so hard because it works and it doesn't ever backfire on them.
Corporate titans and Wall Street traders reportedly score high on psychosis tests. They only do things either because they consistently work or sometimes because their dog told them to do it.
It would help the movement if the ones who fight back the hardest, fall the hardest.
Climate change is very much a burn now, pay later phenomenon. The ocean soaks up vast amounts of heat so that climate change weather effects are maybe 30 years behind the curve. We're experiencing climate change caused 30 years ago, when word of a steady CO2 rise was just getting around the tiny climatology scientific community.
P.S. we have crocuses blooming right now, on February 8. It's really unseasonal.
Luke 16:22-23 -- "The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus was in his bosom."
Hello to the low-paid climate change-denying boiler room bloggers, hired by Exxon and the Koch Brothers. Their job here is to curse Bill McKibben. Maybe God will look a bit more kindly at Bill because of them.
Enlightening article!
David Mamet in "The Secret Knowledge" spews the Conservatives' thinking: "How can a country grow rich through 'redistributing' the wealth, by driving production overseas, by a refusal to exploit natural resources? This could only be imagined by those willing to suspend their understanding of the laws of cause and effect--the audience at a magic show." "Liberal sentiment endorses the abrogation of law to ensure that no one suffers; but the most important task in a democracy is not to right individual wrongs but to ensure that no one suffers because of the STATE." In other words "ambition" is good (he refuses to call it "greed." And, if we don't take our resources and what our founding fathers built (wealth), someone else will come in and take if from us.
I ask, has Mamet ever studied science in his life? Or is he overwhelmed by the money that Hollywood gave him for his facility with words? And, if we use our resources, will there be anything for our mortal enemies to take if or when they conquer us? Mamet seems caught in the middle of one of his plays in which he asks the audience to suspend beliefs and give in to the illusion he has created.
David Mamet is over-rated as a writer and has "no clue" as a scientist.
We're at a point where exploiting certain of our natural resources (fossil fuels) will negatively impact our ability to exploit certain OTHER of our natural resources (farm and ranchlands, coastal properties, water resources). The concern over AGW is this concern. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.
A Carbon-Based Religion
Carl Sagan's human connection to stardust leaves out a critical stage. We are stardust, bu only stardust transformed by life. Every time I look at a SEM of BioChar, it strikes me, the perfect preservation of the base structures of life, a fractal vision, how life creates the greatest surface area with the least amount of material. The preservation of this structure, for return to the lowest order of life, seems almost a religious act. A perfect cradle to cradle recycling, biotic carbon should never be combusted and destroyed, but revered, as life is revered, for return to the cradle of terrestrial life, the Soil
Soil Carbon Dream
I have a dream that one day we live in a nation where progress will not be judged by the production yields of our fields, but by the color of their soils and by the Carbon content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day, a suite of earth sensing satellites will level the playing field, giving every farmer a full account of carbon he sequesters. That Soil Carbon is given as the final arbiter, the common currency, accountant and Judge of Stewardship on our lands.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made forest, the rough soils will be made fertile, and the crooked Carbon Marketeers will be made straight, and the glory of Soil Sequestration shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see a Mutually assured Sustainability.
This is our hope.
My apologies to Dr. King, but I think he would understand my passion
Erich
If Big Oil goes belly up, because of the development of alternative energies, not just in the US, but also elsewhere, wouldn't this greatly reduce the current high level of international trade in dollars? Wouldn't this demotion of dollar trade then seriously weaken the dollar as the world's reserve currency? Wouldn't the US government then be forced much more to balance the budget and to not run deficits? Wouldn't this seriously hamper the US government from printing money? Wouldn't this greatly reduce US bank income? Doesn't this mean that the banks are also behind the current push to pump up the carbon bubble?
So, Bill McKibben, now we understand why the carbon industry fights so hard. But, what we really need to know is; What’ll they do to us, and when? Quick answers; “They’ll buy our Government on 11/6/12.” -- Consider this; Exon Mobile, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips were numbers 2,3,and 4 on the Fortune 500’s profitability list for 2011. Together their 2011 profits totaled in excess of $60 billion. Yeah, Bill, MORE THAN 60 BILLION DOLLARS. Now, if you had that kind of money, what would you do? I say they’ll “invest” maybe 5% (just a nickel per $) in the next election. That’s just a lousy little $3BILLION – but that alone, would almost triple the total cost of the federal election in 2008 when Obama was elected! They, together with a few others of the Fortunate 500, can (I say will), buy our whole f’n Government, including the Presidency, (Obviously, they already own our silly supreme court!)
…So, Bill, THIS is the real problem we need to address. Constitutional Amendment? Nah that requires approval of two thirds of both houses of our congress – (the folks who can’t agree on the time of day!) Disclosure requirements? Nah, that’s an easily avoided charade. State intervention? Unlikely, and probably impossible. But a desperate outrageous, alternative, one that just might work can be found at the web site “pleasethink.net” Check it out. Be among the first to endorse and push this effort to confront those actually responsible. I’d join your striped shirt folks at weekly meetings on the steps of our beloved supreme court building, - where you could condemn the worst fouls ever committed.
We owe that much to the 1.4 million American G.I.s who gave their lives to obtain and defend our Democracy – that which the SC now gives away to the huge corporations. Regards, fredsez
WHEN IN A HOLE--STOP DIGGING.
President Obama's current approvals of environmental damaging projects, such as a pipeline from the Canadian Oil Shales (the most destructive means obtaining fossil fuels) and coal mining in the Powder River Basin, eclipse his feeble efforts toward vital environmental reforms such as renewable energy and conservation.
PP The links between carbon pollution and the rising frequency of severe meteorological disturbances, marine life destruction from ocean acidification, coastal inundation , and increasing tropical diseases --are now as certain as science can be. As the worlds greatest contributor to carbon pollution, our leadership in its mitigation is essential.
PP President Carter understood this, and pursued meaningful programs for mitigating the environmental and related economic problems that now threaten us. For this he was rewarded with vilified by special interests who successfully replaced him by an administration willing to eradicate his reforms.
PP If Mr Obama seizes this opportunity to pursue the Carter reforms before the tipping point, history will treat him well--even if it also costs him re-election. Otherwise he will be remembered as the president who allowed the special interests to continue their destruction of our planet, while increasing the rift between those most responsible for pollution and those most affected by it.
We write from the Northwest Coast of Canada, in the path of the proposed Enbridge Pipeline that would deliver Oil Sands Oil to China by Tankers.
Your analysis of the increasing danger to life that is presented by the Corporate model of culture is a timely call for deep change in Human consciousness. The threat, however, is deeper than the apparent issues arising out of the economic and ecological theories now popular and familiar to people. Your study misses the mark by limiting itself the Geographical and Political and the Sociological framework of the United States. We encourage you to elevate your analysis to a world wide scale of reference.
The Province of Alberta is rapidly developing the most damaging Oil extraction process in the world and to succeed they must market the product. The southern option is being closed by ecological concerns about water quality. So Canada hopes to succeed by transporting the Oil to Asia.
Your argument that corporations enjoy more rights than individuals is coming into play in this matter. We suggest that the mercantile Lobby is most vulnerable to it's own strategy when Individuals themselves decide to form larger and more comprehensive Corporate Institutions able to compete with and overpower the Limited Company within their chosen field. Companies seek to design themselves according to criteria which offers the least resistance to their activity while returning the most profit to their 'individual shareholders.'
Take into account that the United States of America is itself a corporation. You refer to the law of your State in framing your essay even though most Corporations resist being limited to operating within any one State. It is not a fair competition if individuals can only function as Citizens when trying to fend off the harm done by a global corporate Institution.
A final point to encourage people that the impending decline of the West prefigures a fresh new world arising.
Western Civilization is built on the story of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Cross. This one true fact guides individuals toward a level of personal freedom and power that remains above and beyond the now depleted international state order.
We can safely abandon modern economics and politics provided we cling to the law of mutual respect and honor. The next phase of the completion of the Kingdom of Heaven takes us toward a completely global community.
The flaw I see in Bill's logic about Big oils interest is what I hear from the executives of Nano-Material companies. They have been trying to convince Big Oil of how they will always be in the economic catbird's seat. How Oil interest must come to see the overwhelming value of their carbon as the primary feedstock for the manufacture ( via carbon nanotubes, fullerines, DNA programed nano self assembly, etc.) of virtually all things in the near future.
Ultimately we must leave the combustion age behind. Charcoal to the soil is a bridging first step as other energy conversion technologies bloom from Nano and bio research. Thankfully we can do Pyrolitic Biofuels now.
The Agricultural Soil Carbon Sequestration Standard is in final review by the AMS-ARC branch at USDA, which allows Farmers account for their good work, as Australia has done this year.
My read of the agronomic history of civilization shows that the Kayopo Amazon Indians and the Egyptians were the only ones to maintain fertility for the long haul, millennium scales. Egypt has now forsaken their geologic advantage by building the Aswan dam, and are stuck, with the rest of us, in the soil Carbon mining, NPK rat race, to the bottom.
In E. O. Wilson's "The Future of Life" he opens the book with a letter to Thoreau updating him on our current understanding of the nature of the ecology of the soils at Walden Pond.
Arthropods present in dozens-hundreds, then barely visible to the naked eye, the numbers jump to thousands; Nematode and enchytraied pot worms, mites, springtails, pauropods, diplurans, symphylans, and tardigrades seethe in the underground. Their home is a labyrinth of miniature caves and walls of rotting vegetable debris cross-strung with ten yards of fungal threads. Penetrate microscopic water films on grains of sand, and find ten billion bacteria in a thimble full.
and Wilson concludes;
"Now it is up to us to summon a more Encompassing Wisdom."
This convergence of different technologies will end the Combustion age.
All political persuasions agree, building soil carbon is GOOD.
To me, in the long run, the final arbiter / accountancy / measure of sustainability will be soil carbon content and then the truth of proper land-management and Biochar systems will be self-evident.
Short a nano material PV / thermoelectrical / ultracapasitating Black swan,
What we can do now with "off the shelf" technology, what I proposed at the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, to the EPA chiefs of North America. The most cited soil scientist in the world, Dr. Rattan Lal at OSU, was impressed with this talk, commending me on conceptualizing & articulating the concept.
Titled;
The Establishment of Soil Carbon as the Universal Measure of Sustainability
A Report on my talk at CEC, and complete text & links are here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/biochar-policy/message/3233