By Rob Hopkins, posted May 16, 2012:

What might we learn from the construction, between 1438 and 1448 of the Hospital of St. John in Sherborne (see above) that might shape the way we think about construction in the 21st century? While the bulk of the building was built using local oolitic limestone, it was dressed with Lias stone from Ham Hill, some 12 miles from the building site. However, in those days, without the internal combustion engine, 12 miles was a long way to carry stone (you try it). The meticulous accounts kept of the project at the time show that the cost of transporting the stone by cart cost more than the stone itself. As Alec Clifton-Taylor says in his seminal ‘The Pattern of English Building’, “it was the great difficulty of transporting heavy materials which led all but the most affluent until the end of the eighteenth century to build with the materials that were most readily available near the site, even when not very durable”.

I often use the analogy, in terms of food, of a cake. Until recently, local production provided the cake (the bulk of our needs) and what was imported was the ‘icing’ and cherry on top, nice to have but we didn’t depend on it. What cheap energy and globalisation has created is a situation where now the cake is imported from wherever in the world it can be found cheapest, and local production is just the icing. In the same way that for food we need to urgently reverse this, for many reasons that will be only too familiar to regular readers of this blog, the same can be argued for building materials.

In the case of these alms houses in Sherborne, it literally was the building’s ‘icing’ that caused the difficulties. With about 30% of UK road freight now due to the movement of construction materials, many of which already have a high level of embodied energy, I’d like to argue here that we need to think about construction in the same way we are starting to think about food, specifically in the context of the Atmos Project, a community initiative I am involved in in Totnes.

Historically, as well as being the only option people had, the use of local materials also led to the evolution of vernacular styles of building, so that each region had its own distinct styles of building, rooted in materials, culture and tradition. As John and Jane Penoyre note in ‘Houses in the Landscape’ “in these simple buildings the available materials are the principal dictators of style”. Mark Gorgolewski writes in The Green Building Bible:

“… as materials closer to their natural state will tend to have had less processing, which often means less energy use, less waste and less pollution. Local materials can reduce the need for transport and benefits the local economy and community”.

Christopher Day writes that “local materials minimise transport energy, suit local climate, support local employment and society and reinforce locality identity, anchoring buildings into local culture … so roundwood instead of sawn, adobe or brick instead of concrete”. As well as having far less embodied energy due to requiring so little transportation, they also often have far less embodied energy in their manufacturre, as the graph below showing overall CO2 emissions by weight [kg] released by production of 1 kg of twenty-four common building materials demonstrates (source). Note that those materials on the right hand side actually lock up more carbon than they emit (depending on how far they are transported of course, a strawbale house in the UK built with Turkish bales would clearly not qualify):

Then there’s also the aesthetics. The other day I was in Marlborough in Wiltshire, and took a walk around the town. It is easy to be nostalgic about old buildings, and to assume that they are so characterful and attractive simply because they are old. I would argue that the ambience that comes through in some of the photos below has more to do with the materials than with the age of the building.

The combination of brick, timber and cobbles is far more attractive than just one single material.

Clay wall tiles that were fired in kilns with variable temperatures produced tiles of a range of colours, from black to orange, which gives the tiled surface much more richness.

This timber frame house is a beautiful example of how the materials available locally dictated the design of the building and its character.

There has been a resurgence in interest in the use of natural and local building materials in recent years. Cob building, strawbale, lime plasters, roundwood timber, hemp, clay plasters, have all experienced a renewal of energy, but are still almost only ever used in self build projects, and have yet to cross over into mainstream construction. Yet, as Gill Seyfang points out, they are still very much in a niche and what is needed is “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass production”. She argues for the natural/local building niche “adapting itself to resemble the regime”. Key to that will be scale.

Of course, running alongside the discussions about materials is the need to create truly low carbon buildings, in their construction, their inhabitation and eventual demolition/recycling. The Larch and Lime houses built recently in Ebbw Vale are passivhauses (Larch House right), that is they are built in such a way as to require no space heating. When I talked to the architect behind them, Justin Bere, he told me that most of the materials were local (stone, slate, locally made Rockwool etc) but hadn’t veered too far into the world of very local and natural materials. Part of the reason for that is that for the kind of accurate modelling needed for passivhaus certification, data for many of these materials doesn’t yet exist. I would argue that this is a pressingly urgent area for new research.

Enter the Atmos Project. For the past couple of months, as well as my Transition Network stuff, I have been working a day a week on the Atmos Totnes campaign. Atmos has been running for the past 5 years, since Dairy Crest closed their 8 acre site next to Totnes station, and since when it has sat and become more and more of an eyesore (you can read the story so far here). The Atmos Project, as it became known, due to it being home to a building built to house Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s experimental ‘atmospheric railway’, has sought to bring the site into community ownership to develop it as a catalyst for new businesses in the town and as a demonstration of Transition in action.

The initiative did a lot of work, raised bits of funding to do design work, business planning and so on, but seemed to be getting nowhere due to the site’s owners’ unwillingness to engage seriously with the community. So a couple of months ago we started a campaign, aimed to bring sufficient pressure to bear on the site’s owners. We gathered voices from around the community, got a lot of media exposure, got people in the town out for a big photo opportunity and for a public meeting, and a couple of weeks ago, had a very positive meeting with Dairy Crest, and all of a sudden the project is moving forward with an energy that is a delight to see.

The tagline for the campaign has been ‘the heart of a new economy’, and it is seen as a development that in all that it does is focused on skills, training, the creation of new businesses and the boosting of the local economy. It is of a scale where it can do some very exciting things in terms of construction. One of the founding ideas is that the place that the development starts its very first question, is what are the local materials that we have to hand? In the same way that I always used to teach on permaculture courses that the question should be “I’m going to cook a meal, what’s in the garden”, rather than “what’s in the fridge?”, that same principle could and should apply to building materials.

So, as the first part of the design process, and as part of what will form a key part of the brief for whoever ends up being the project’s architect, will be a list of the local materials available to such a project in Totnes. We have commissioned a specialist in this to draw this up, including the places locally where they would be sourced. My initial list off the top of my head is:

Timber: for construction grade timber, internal studwork, window and door frames, roofing shingles, laths, panelling, flooring, wattles, wood fibre insulation.

Clay: for rammed earth construction, cob walling, daubs, clay plasters, cob bricks, clay paints

Hemp: for use in hemp/lime construction, to make insulation, for hemp/lime or hemp/clay plasters and bricks

Slate: for roofing

Stone: for foundations, walls,

Reed: for thatching roofs, and also to make ‘reedboards’, an alternative to plasterboard

Lime: for plasters, mortars, renders, as well as in construction systems such as hemp/lime

Straw: baled, and used in ‘straw bale building’, chopped as an ingredient in plasters

Sheepswool: insulation

Horse hair/other fibres: used to strengthen plasters

Recycled Materials: newspaper processed as an insulation product, car tyres, recycled bricks

It used to be that when a cathedral was built, a temporary village was built around it, with a stone masons’ quarter, a timber framers’ quarter and so on. On the scale of something like the Atmos project, it may well be possible to do something very similar, processing the timber needed on site, making cob blocks, even hand-making tiles for external cladding. If done skilfully enough, integrating training and apprenticeships, it could be a vitally needed new approach to development, especially when combined with the potential for the community to invest into the development.

Panels at Charing Cross tube station in London showing the various trades associated with the construction of Charing Cross in the late 1200s.

A development that from the outset seeks to source it’s metaphorical cake locally. As the Euro crisis continues to unravel at a pace, as the academics are telling us that the only thing that will halt climate change is a massive economic downturn, or at least a huge rethink about how we make economic activity happen, we need a new approach to development.

Work in progress: Cob walls, hemp plaster on the walls, clay plaster onto lath on the ceiling, local timber window frames…

Could it be that we could create new housing, and new work spaces in such a way that each new development produces houses that lock up a lot of carbon in terms of their materials, generate very little carbon during their inhabitation, which create a diversity of new enterprises and livelihoods, show what deep public consultation in relation to development really looks like, all kinds of trainings, opportunities for people to invest in and benefit from the development, which create a huge sense of excitement and anticipation, invites the local community to get involved at regular stages and which create buildings and developments that feel timeless, rather than bound to a particular short-lived era of architectural fashion? I think so. I think the time is right for that, and that’s what we want to do with Atmos. Watch this space.

Originally published at Transition Culture

With more solar energy piercing the open waters, ice melt also can affect the carbon exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere. With longer and warmer summers, more carbon dioxide can escape into the atmosphere while in the winter the colder open water …

With more solar energy piercing the open waters, ice melt also can affect the carbon exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere. With longer and warmer summers, more carbon dioxide can escape into the atmosphere while in the winter the colder open water …

The proposal envisions a national carbon exchange to launch in January 2015, where companies will buy or sell rights to emit carbon dioxide. It is projected to cover around 60 percent of the country’s carbon pollution by imposing limits on …

The 6,500-home association in Devon and Low Carbon Exchange will offer the model to cash-strapped landlords, ensuring that they can install photovoltaic panels using debt finance and access FITs. In March the government confirmed a cut from 43.3p/kilowatt …

The measure will help Seoul to develop new technologies and to play in an international carbon exchange sector that by 2010 had grown into a $141.9 billion market, the ministry said. South Korea is the third country in the Asia-Pacific region …

By Richard Heinberg, posted May 10, 2012:

Next time you find yourself in traffic, try this nifty thought exercise. Ignore the cars within your field of vision and imagine instead the contents of their fuel tanks. Visualize gasoline flowing up and down the highway.

Image: Freeway traffic via shutterstock

By Tom Whipple, posted May 9, 2012:

While waiting to see how the Iranian nuclear confrontation and the various Eurozone crises sort themselves out, there is time to step back and look at the interaction of the major forces that will shape our future. While the problems of oil depletion are already upon us, shrinking resources are only a part of global dynamics currently.

By Bill McKibben, posted May 3, 2012:

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

Originally published at Tom Dispatch

By Tom Whipple, posted May 3, 2012:

Last week we talked about the possibility that researchers have found a second and potentially useful and inexpensive way of converting hydrogen into helium accompanied by a release of significant quantities of energy. 

By Richard Heinberg, posted May 2, 2012:

I’ve been giving lectures on Peak Oil for over a decade now, and always look forward to the question period after the main show. It’s an opportunity to interact with the audience, and to see where my presentation may need tweaking or where my thinking may be shallow or incorrect.

FAQ board image via shutterstock

With more solar energy piercing the open waters, ice melt also can affect the carbon exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere. With longer and warmer summers, more carbon dioxide can escape into the atmosphere while in the winter the colder open water …

Some of the damage is not straightforward, the study said. As the sun’s heat reaches newly opened waters, the resulting ice melt is affecting the carbon exchange between ocean and atmosphere, the study researchers said. Longer, warmer summers …

CME Group Inc. (CME), which competes with IntercontinentalExchange, recently acquired GreenX Holdings LLC, the second largest carbon exchange globally. The company is also venturing into the OTC market and its portfolio margining of over-the-counter (OTC …

CME Group Inc. (NasdaqGS:CME – News) recently announced the acquisition of US-based second-largest carbon exchange – GreenX Holdings LLC. This is a significant step toward achieving new scale in the energy market products. However, the terms …

ICE Futures is Europe’s most liquid carbon exchange market and reported a 23 per cent increase in annual volumes in futures and options products in 2011, to 7.6m contracts.

By Simone, posted Apr 27, 2012:

A group of scholars at the University of Wisconsin recently counted nearly 30,000 cooperatives in the United States operating at 73,000 locations. The vast majority are consumer cooperatives, with 343 million memberships (many people belong to multiple co-ops, hence the number of memberships exceeds the U.S. population). Another 7 million memberships can be found in producer and purchasing cooperatives. Credit unions, which are essentially banking cooperatives, have 92 million members. Electrical utility co-ops reach 42 million Americans. Agricultural cooperatives have three million members.

By Rob Hopkins, posted Apr 24, 2012:

Jonny Gordon-Farleigh from STIR interviews Rob Hopkins

To mark the release of In Transition 2.0 — an inspirational film about communities printing their own money, growing food, localising their economies and setting up community power stations — I spoke to the Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network and Transition Totnes, about energy ownership, cooperative finance strategies, and how storytelling can change our expectations of ourselves and our communities.

STIR: For those unfamiliar with The Transition Network, could you talk about the reasons it was started?

Rob Hopkins: It was started because at the time, in terms of what a response to peak oil might look like, the only responses you could really find anything about were head for the hills with a shotgun and four years worth of toilet roll and those sort of responses. There wasn’t anything that looked like a compassionate response that was about bringing people closer together rather than shattering them apart.

It also emerged out of permaculture, which is a bottom-up, grassroots and solution-led approach. It questions the idea that you need to spend three years studying soil science to get the soil in your garden right for growing, or that you need to spend fours years studying horticulture to grow salad. Well, you obviously don’t and permaculture is about distilling out the things that we need.

And so, I was teaching permaculture and found out about peak oil. In the green movement you often find that the ideas that need to be scaled-up very quickly across society for it to be ready for something like peak oil — and in order for it to be contributing responsibly to the climate crisis — are actually niche and fringe and quite happy being to be niche and fringe. Permaculture was often quite happy to be down a misty little lane off a smallholding in Wales, and it felt to me that we needed something to coaxed all that out and scale it up really quickly.

Transition, then, was originally designed as a Trojan horse that you could chuck permaculture in. It would also act as a detox for the more affluent West, but that also didn’t start out with a blame culture. We deliberately didn’t start out with saying whose fault it was that we are in this mess, but rather that we are all in a mess, what are we going to do about it? And where do we go from here?

S: Paul Piper of Wind-Works in Germany has recently written, “51 percent of all alternative energy in Germany is owned by citizens and farms”. This energy transition is also an increasingly dramatic power shift from traditional markets and its big players into small-scale and community-owned projects.

Is this change in energy ownership as essential to Transition’s vision as the switch in energy source?

RH: Yes! Transition is about community resilience as economic development and it’s about the opportunities to create even more resilience. For example, we need a certain amount of Gigawatts put in place. At the moment in this part of the country we spend millions and millions of pounds every year paying our energy bills. That all leaks out, but we could pay that money to huge energy companies to put in place new energy infrastructure that we need — and we do need some of that because even if the communities pooled every penny that they had, there is no way they would come anywhere close to what is needed to invest for the energy transition. But at the same time, if we can get some of the communities to invest and own some of that energy infrastructure, we estimate 25 percent could be owned by communities and benefit those communities.

What that does is it starts to build the economic resilience of the place. It means more money cycles locally, and that can create more jobs, more training, and more livelihoods in the area. It starts to become a kind of positive loop in the area. And the same goes with food — we can feed everybody through supermarkets, or we can try and do a lot of that through local food systems which make our communities a lot more economically, socially and culturally resilient.

It’s about plugging the leaks in the leaky bucket. You can achieve the kind of renewable energy infrastructure that we need in such a way that it does that, or you can achieve it in such a way that it doesn’t do that. I think certainly it’s going to be much easier to get a lot of the renewables through if they are owned by the communities, in terms of planning and so on. But why not try and go for the win-win-win rather than just the win?

S: One of the major difficulties in starting up these community initiatives — in energy, farming — is the fact that they are usually capital intensive. Are schemes such as the community shares beginning to fill what is called ‘the capital gap’? And what other fundraising strategies have you seen within the Transition Network that have worked well?

RH: Here in Totnes we have the Totnes Renewable Energy Society, which is about to put in a planning application for two 2.3 megawatt wind turbines on the edge of town. That now has 500 members who bought shares in the community. Then you’ve got smaller things, like in Slathwaite in Yorkshire where the community invested £15,000 to take over the old grocery and turn it in to a community-run cooperative village shop, which is going really well. It’s called the Green Valley Grocer, and what it’s done is acted as a kind of catalyst for all kinds of other things in the area.

Then on the bigger end of it, you’ve got Bath and West Community Energy, which is a different model again, which emerged out of Transition Bath. They got one million pounds of investment from Scottish and Southern Energy, which meant they were able to take a very different model. So something like TRESOC (the Totnes Renewal Energy Society) or the Lewes solar power station and other community energy companies say, invest in us and we will give you a return on your investment sometime, probably in three or four years, we don’t know yet. What it meant with the Bath model, they were able to put up lots of solar PV up around in Bath, in the local schools, and then were able to design and launch their share option and say from the outset you’ll get four percent a year on your investment. This meant people felt sufficiently confident and could start moving their pensions into it — which is kind of the Holy Grail really: Once you are able to start getting that kind of really meaningful investment into these projects.

On the smaller scale you have things like crowdfunding or pledge bank and these kinds of things are really useful. Also Transition initiatives often tend to do quite well in terms of more conventional funding. For example, for the recent energy share thing that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall at River Cottage did with British Gas, four of the five winners out of that were Transition projects. There is a whole mixture of different ways to fundraise, but certainly in the Transition Network, we increasingly encourage transition groups rather than think of themselves as a kind of traditional volunteer community NGO that does cakes sales and stuff to raise funding, to think of themselves from the very beginning as a social enterprise and how they can design their awareness raising as a social enterprise.

Totnes is a great example. TTT now is starting to catalyse a number of businesses ideas and social enterprises in the area. We just had an event called the Local Entrepenuers Forum, which brought together people with ideas, with potential investors and mentors. The idea is as those businesses emerge, they’ll start to tithe back to the centre, and start to create this kind of loop of new businesses and a new economy for Totnes.

S: This reminds me of one of the original principles of the Rochdale Pioneers where the condition of being a cooperative would be to support other cooperatives. When Transition initiatives become economically sound do you envision them supporting each other in the same way?

RH: I don’t think we are quite at that stage yet but it is a great aspiration, absolutely. The Rochdale Pioneers have always been a big inspiration for the Transition Network. You have to remember that Transition has only been around for a few years and in some places it is only a few people, but the time when the Rochdale Pioneers became widely relevant was because they were creating work for people. Once they became a significant employer through the shops or through the farm, the tedious discussions about whether cooperatives are a good idea or ‘why do cooperatives?’ really went into the background because this is where the new economy was based.

I hope this will be the case for Transition Totnes in the next five to ten years, where people will come to Totnes, for example, and not even call it Transition but instead they will come and see micro-enterprises and bigger enterprises connected.

S: Local currencies, global bartering systems and moving money from the big banks into credit unions have all returned as viable alternatives.

How important do you think these initiatives are in supporting Transition? And do you think that we could have the desired transition with the current financial institutions in place?

RH: Well, I have just finished reading Nicholas Shaxton’s Treasure Island about offshore banking. It is hard to imagine quite how you could do it with a system like that in place, where half of all the money in the world is in offshore banks. So, the beauty of local currencies is that you can’t do that. A local currency like the Brixton Pound, or say the Bristol Pound — which will be the first city-wide currency — is that they’re designed to lock-up the sterling so that it can’t leave and they turn it into another currency that has a denomination that has no value in an offshore bank.

So, yes, it is difficult to imagine a successful transition on the scale that is required with the offshore banking system still in place. Before I read Treasure Island I was ignorant of the extent of offshore banking and was horrified by every page. We do need new financial institutions and new ways such as local currencies for creating strong local economies. The great thing about local currencies is that they focus the mind on local concerns.

In addition, we also need a lot more planning protection for communities in terms of multinational supermarkets muscling in and trying to take them over. This has been the experience of a few Transition Initiatives where they are locked into struggles with big corporations who are compromising their local economy.

Ironically, some of the things that will benefit us in the Transition Network are being pushed through the localism agenda by the government. These developments are quite useful to Transitioners and I am not sure the government appreciates the implications of this. For example, the right to buy, the right to try, and neighbourhood-led planning measures are useful tools. Here in Totnes, we have a campaign called Atmos, which is working to take on a derelict site near the railway station and develop it as a catalyst for a new economy — as an incubator space for various kinds of businesses. The owners of the site seem very reluctant because they are conventional in terms of development.

However, measures like neighbourhood-led planning will allow us to cut them off round the back and close down their options. We didn’t have these tools three or four years ago, and some of the tools have emerged almost by accident and there are some we still need to invent.

I still think, though, that the key obstacle to this happening is our belief that we can do it. Generally, the obstacles we put in our way to convince ourselves that we can’t do things can be shifted if you put enough energy into it. For example, when we started the Transition Network, people said to us ‘that’ll never work because…’. In the first Transition book there is a list of seven buts — which were all the reasons people will give to why it will not work. And here we are!

S: The strategy group Smartmeme say if we are to change the world, we have to change the story. How do those working within the Transition Network change the story from competition and growth to cooperation and sustainability?

RH: I think that Transition, in the main part, is about storytelling. When people come to visit Transition they say ‘It’s amazing what you’re doing with the Brixton Pound’. We don’t actually do any of those things! We basically put out an idea and invitation, and when people pick it up they do amazing things. Our role is gathering in those stories and retelling them — and there are some amazing stories coming out of the network.

When we started Transition Totnes, I initially thought of it as an environmental process but I think it has become a cultural process. It is changing the story a place tells about itself and the story here, in Totnes, has really begun to shift in the last five years. Only five years ago it was the wacky la-la land and hippy-dippy capital of the South West. Then about a year-and-a-half ago the Western Morning News, who had previously taken great joy at sniggering down their sleeves at wacky Totnes for the last forty years, ran an editorial Hippy Town Comes of Age. This basically said, ‘Well, maybe they’re right, and maybe we should stop taking the piss because they might be on to something’.

Even local politicians who do not have any serious interest in Transition go out for events in other places and people say, ‘Oh, you’re from Totnes – Transition Town Totnes!’ There is one lady here whose daughter went to Canada and was kayaking in the Great Lakes and saw another boat and thought she would go over and say hello. While they were introducing each other, the other person said ‘Totnes! Transition Town Totnes!’ So telling these stories helps to change the expectations people have, change the conversation, and change what people believe is possible.

Also, Transition has changed the story of the end of oil, from the vision where we will all be eating cats out of dustbins to actually believing that we could do something amazing. We actually have a few different stories that we tell ourselves as a society. Firstly, everything goes wrong and collapses and we end up like the The Road; or, we have a Star Wars techno-fantasy story where we will be flying around on our own hover boards, eating algae, and visiting the moon for holiday; or, we have the business-as-usual approach that believes the future will be just like today but with a few solar panels on the roof. What Transition has done is introduce another story about how it could be and has already started to make it happen.

So, we overlook storytelling at our peril!

S: You have just premiered in Transition 2.0. In the global communities that make up the Transition Network, what inspiring examples and developments have you seen since the last film?

RH: Well, the first film was a wiki-production: we invited people to record their activities, send us the tapes — which we panned for gold — and then made it into a film. This was in the really early stages and while there were a few good stories, there were also projects filming the fact that they had just installed an energy meter! The new film is much stronger and it tells a story: it begins with small projects like the starting group and then it grows and grows.

One of the great stories is of a guy growing food in a neglected, deprived neighbourhood in Pittsburgh. A moving story is about a community in Japan that was affected by the Tsunami and whose response to the crisis was to set up an energy company in Fujimi. There is also the story of the community growing food at Kilburn underground station.

What we are really pleased about is that we are able to include sixteen stories from seven different countries and no one got on a plane. We crowdfunded to raise money to pay local professional filmmakers in each location to do the work.

The film concludes by asking the question: When things become difficult in a community, through economic crisis or natural disasters, to what extent has Transition thinking seeped into the drinking water as a way to inform the response? There are two stories, which close the film, from New Zealand and Japan. After the disasters in these countries, the situation was obviously really tough and it was transitional thinking that got them through.

Originally published at STIR

By Michael Shuman, posted Apr 23, 2012:

For nearly a century local investing has been essentially illegal, and Wall Street has monopolized all the investment options for the average investor. Thanks to the JOBS Act that President Barack Obama recently signed into law, local investing in job-creating small businesses is now legal.

Unfortunately, there has been a tremendous amount of misinformation spread about this Act, much of it by liberals I usually admire. They should be the people most eagerly embracing this bill for what it does — giving people a chance to revive Main Street economies across America.

Jim Hightower, for example, condemns the bill for "deregulating Wall Street." In fact, the bill spells the end of Wall Street as we know it. It allows the 99% of us who are not wealthy ("unaccredited investors") to put our money in the local businesses we love by removing what were once impossibly difficult and expensive legal hurdles. Those barriers were so targeted against small business and small investors that they resulted in almost none of our long-term savings — now totaling $30 trillion — being invested into the local half of our economy. The JOBS Act ends this misallocation of capital for good.

To me it’s ironic, and disappointing, that folks like Hightower, Robert Kuttner, and Eliot Spitzer were committed to the status quo and to maintaining Wall Street’s monopoly on capital. How could such great thinkers get this issue so wrong? Here are my top five reasons:

First, the critics misunderstand who promoted this bill. Kuttner, for example, blames Obama for being "always eager to curry favor with Wall Street donors…" Wall Street lobbyists played, at most a peripheral role, it was small business owners and "makers" like Woody Neiss and Paul Spinrad who led the charge. Innovative thinkers in the White House, like Doug Rand at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, played a pivotal role in shaping the president’s views about entrepreneurship. Non-Wall Street insiders like IndieGogo, a crowdfunding web site, and the nonprofit Sustainable Economies Law Center, pushed hard as well.

Second, the critics, who are justifiably skeptical of wholesale deregulation, don’t like to concede that any form of regulation has been a failure. But any honest assessment of the history of securities law would observe that we essentially regulated local finance out of existence while permitting Bernie Madoffs to operate freely. For decades, the SEC has held annual meetings where small business owners have urged reforms — modest deregulations that could open up capital to small companies, such as allowing small-dollar, local investments to be exempted from securities filings. The SEC never implemented any of those suggestions — even a recommendation that $100 investments be exempted.

Third, the critics have tremendously exagerrated the dangers of fraud. The casual reader of the liberal critiques might conclude that the sale of fraudulent securities is now legal, and that "boiler room" operations will be set up to bilk grandma of her life savings. Yet state and federal laws against securities fraud remain in effect. In fact, the JOBS Act adds a number of new provisions for preventing fraud, by requiring that crowdfunding offerings only be made through registered intermediaries.

Why, moreover, should anyone be banned from spending, investing, or donating a couple of hundred dollars any damn way they please? Every American, irrespective of income, is allowed to lose their life’s fortune on lotteries and casinos. Why not allow more reasonable risk tasking on building community economies? If grandma is not wealthy, the JOBS act limits her risk in any one business to the lesser of $2,000 or 5% her assets.

Fourth, the critics do not appreciate that there are other approaches to preventing fraud. E- bay has all but eliminated fraud through consumer and business evaluations of one another. So have other crowdfunding sites in the United Kingdom. In other words, the SEC’s premise — that the only way to prevent fraud is by banning unaccredited investors from making their own judgments — is flat out wrong.

Perhaps the critics’ most appalling misunderstanding is the fraudulence of the status quo. Every day the SEC allows investment advisers on AM radio to hawk the stock market, promising 10-20% annual returns, when in fact the returns — once inflation and compounding are taken out — are closer to 3%. These misrepresentations have convinced Americans that putting 100% of their savings into Fortune 500 companies is safer and provides a better return than investing in local business. In reality, the stock market is becoming an increasingly dangerous and unregulated casino where trades are done by computers that cause flash crashes when they malfunction. The JOBS Act will allow local businesses to begin to compete for a fair market share of investment dollars and provide returns that are equal to, if not slightly greater than, the true returns provided by Wall Street.

I agree, the bill is imperfect. I’m not thrilled with the deregulations of larger companies. And the bill legalizes all kinds of crowdfunding, local and nonlocal. But we can make it better. We should start educating the public about the importance of favoring local investment over abstract ones hundreds or thousands of miles away. Knowing the business in which one invests — knowing the products, the entrepreneur, the workforce, etc. — is the best way to prevent fraud.

It’s worth adding that after the bill was signed, 25 of the people who were most instrumental in passing the bill — none from Wall Street, by the way — got together to discuss ways we could create internal checks and balances on the marketplace, to improve quality control and help identify hucksters. I hope similar groups form in every community to create an honor roll of local businesses they know and trust — perhaps businesses that embrace open-book accounting — and that they then encourage residents to prioritize their crowdfunding.

Like it or not, Wall Street’s stranglehold on investment is over. We now have a new legal landscape that we can play a pivotal role in shaping. Everyone who cares about the vitality of Main Street needs to step up, not out.

Michael Shuman is the author of Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012) . He is a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. He attended the Rose Garden bill signing ceremony.

Image – Coins with seedling via Shutterstock

By Sandra Postel, posted Apr 19, 2012:

One of the more transformative technologies ever developed for the world’s poor farmers is a water-lifting device called a treadle pump.

By Bill Bigelow and Bill McKibben , posted Apr 18, 2012:

By Bill Bigelow and Bill McKibben
Maybe you’ve heard. We are facing a climate crisis that threatens life on our planet. Climate scientists are unequivocal: We are changing the world in deep, measurable, dangerous ways — and the pace of this change will accelerate dramatically in the decades to come.

Then again, if you’ve been a middle school or high school student recently, you may not know this.

That’s because the gap between our climate emergency and the attention paid to climate change in the school curriculum is immense. Individual teachers around the country are doing outstanding work, but the educational establishment is not. Look at our textbooks. The widely used Pearson/Prentice Hall text, Physical Science: Concepts in Action, waits until page 782 to tell high school students about climate change, but then only in four oh-by-the-way paragraphs. A photo of a bustling city includes the caption: "Carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles, power plants, and other sources may contribute to global warming." Or they may not, the book seems to suggest.

IAT’s Coordinated Science: Physical, Earth and Space Science devotes several pages late in the book to climate change, and concludes with this doubt-soaked passage:

Some people take the position that the increase in carbon dioxide should be reversed. They believe this is necessary even though the size of the contribution to global warming is not certain. It is their belief that the consequences would be very difficult to handle. Other people take a different position. They consider that it would be unwise to disrupt the world’s present economy. They consider the future danger to be questionable. The big problem is that no one is certain that rapid global warming will take place. If it does, it may be too late to do anything about it!

The danger of climate change as "questionable"? ExxonMobil itself could not have produced a more skeptical approach.

These textbooks are not mere egregious outliers; they are typical of commercially produced science and social studies teaching materials. In fact, a partnership between the American Coal Foundation and Scholastic to create a propagandistic 4th grade curriculum was ended only last year, when educators and environmentalists exposed the lessons’ absurd pro-industry biases. Scholastic’s curriculum, The United States of Energy, was distributed free to tens of thousands of elementary teachers. It showed gleaming piles of coal, along with many of its alleged benefits. Students didn’t learn of a single problem, including coal’s huge contribution to climate change.

"…the enormity of the climate crisis demands that educators, scientists, environmental activists, parents, and students join together to pull down the barriers between disciplines, and to rethink the curriculum. The cost of continuing with business as usual is too steep."

But as state legislatures get into the business of writing school curricula, things may go from awful to worse. Take Tennessee. It just became the fourth state — following Louisiana, Texas, and South Dakota — to pass a law that requires global warming to be taught as one of a number of "scientific controversies."

The fact that Tennessee is home of the infamous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial makes the new law ironic, but not funny. As the American Association for the Advancement of Science explains, "Asserting that there are significant scientific controversies about the overall nature of these concepts when there are none will only confuse students, not enlighten them."

If you happen to be a member of the one percent that owns a coal company, oil wells, or a pipeline, young people’s confusion is a good thing. For the rest of humanity, the passivity generated by this confusion is tragic.

Of course, educators cannot simply blame the lack of climate education on greedy corporations and the legislators they buy. In high schools, too often teachers regard the walls between disciplines as fixed and legitimate. Most social studies teachers thus far seem willing to leave discussion of carbon dioxide, the mechanics of the greenhouse effect, and "feedback loops" to the science department. And science teachers, overwhelmed by the requirements of their own discipline, are reluctant to trespass into the social causes and consequences of climate change. Teachers of other disciplines — drama, language arts, math — may wonder about the relevance of the climate for their subjects. And elementary teachers may think that climate change is too depressing or too complicated for their children.

But the enormity of the climate crisis demands that educators, scientists, environmental activists, parents, and students join together to pull down the barriers between disciplines, and to rethink the curriculum. The cost of continuing with business as usual is too steep.

The good news is that addressing this crisis with the urgency that it deserves offers the possibility of revitalizing schools as young people develop the consciousness and commitment that the earth desperately needs.

And this work needn’t be grim, as some educators have already discovered. For instance, a workgroup of teachers in Portland, Ore.,wrote a role-play on the impact of climate change on indigenous peoples throughout the world — from island nations like Kiribati to the Yup’ik of Alaska — in which students assume the personas of indigenous activists and propose global solutions.

And of course there’s always straight-up physics and chemistry — understanding the mechanics of climate change is classic science education.

A curricular full-court press on the climate offers a compelling renunciation of the numbing test-preparation that passes for education in so many schools these days. As Rethinking Schools editors wrote recently, "This endeavor demands that young people exercise their utopian imaginations to consider alternatives of all kinds. And it invites them to ‘talk back’ to those interests that promote and benefit from endless consumption — including the publishers of their own textbooks."

This is our chance to develop a generation for whom climate awareness is as natural as logging onto Facebook.

By Chris Martenson, posted Apr 17, 2012:

A Broken Narrative

Recently I was asked by a high school teacher if I had any ideas about why students today seem so apathetic when it comes to engaging with the world around them. I waggishly responded, "Probably because they’re smart."

In my opinion, we’re asking our young adults to step into a story that doesn’t make any sense.

Sure, we can grow the earth’s population to 9 billion (and probably will), and sure, we can extract our natural gas and oil resources as fast as possible, and sure, we can continue to pile on official debts at a staggering pace — but why are we doing all this? Even more troubling, what do we say to our youth when they ask what role they should play in this story — a story with a plot line they didn’t get to write?

So far, the narrative we’re asking them to step into sounds a lot like this: Study hard, go to college, maybe graduate school. And when you get out, not only will you be indebted to your education loans and your mortgage, but you’ll be asked to help pay back trillions and trillions of debt to cover the decisions of those who came before you. All while operating within a crumbling, substandard infrastructure. Oh, and by the way, the government and corporate sector appear to have no real interest in your long-term future; you’re on your own there.

Yeah, I happen to think apathy is a perfectly sane response to that story. Thanks, but no thanks.

To understand how our national narrative evolved (or, more accurately, devolved) to become so unappealing, we have to take an honest look at money.

Money is Not Wealth

Money is just a marker for real things. As long as you can exchange your money for real things, your money represents value. Because we tend to conduct all of our most meaningful transactions using money, our perspective can become warped to the point that we think it is the money itself that has value.

The economy is measured in these units, these markers, which we call "money." But money is not the same thing as the economy. Far from it. And money has no value on its own, but only in relation to the things we can exchange it for.

The economy consists of real needs and wants being fulfilled. On one end of the spectrum, we have the basics like food, water, shelter, medical care, and other necessities. On the other end of the spectrum, we have 15-minute neck massages at the airport. Everything else lies in between 

Money, on the other hand, is simply a facilitator of exchanges.

When we reduce the economy to its simplest form, it really consists of a growing number of people trying to meet their needs and wants. More people (~80 million more each year) simply translate into increasingly greater demand for the earth’s limited and ever-limiting resources.

Since our human desire to consume is virtually limitless, a key role of money is to provide the scarcity necessary to divvy up a limited amount of goods and services among the population. There has to be a balance between money and the things that humans can produce and distribute, or else prices get out of whack.

So now let’s imagine a world where real things are in limited (and limiting) supply, and then compare this idea to our money supply in order to get a sense of where things are headed.

This is a chart of Money of Zero Maturity (MZM), which is the largest and most comprehensive accounting of money in the Federal Reserve system and has been ever since M3 was abandoned.

If that looks like an exponential chart to you, you are correct. Sure, there are a few wiggles and jiggles along the way, but the system of money we’ve been living under and setting our expectations around is an exponential money system. For it to remain in balance with resources that come from the earth, we need those to expand exponentially, too.  If they don’t — and they can’t forever — things will get out of whack. And it’s probably no surprise to hear my view that money is what is increasingly out of whack in this story, not the earth’s resources.

One feature of exponential systems is that the amount of accumulation of whatever it is that is being measured increases over time. If we draw a few arrows on the above chart, we can see that money is accumulating in our system at a faster and faster pace:

"Stage 3" in this chart shows what has been happening since 2008. Aside from the little hump there in 2008, MZM is accumulating at the fastest pace in history. Isn’t that interesting? Even as employment is historically very weak, income growth is stagnant, the economy is limping along, and inflation is (allegedly) quite low, the US is manufacturing money at the briskest nominal pace in the series.

The reason that we’ve not experienced massive inflation (yet) is that the money that is being injected into the system is basically just piling up and not really doing anything. It’s just sitting there. One measure of this is the so-called ‘velocity’ of money, which is not actually a measured value but an inferred one, derived by dividing the stock of money into GDP. The higher the resulting number, the faster each unit of money is racing around in the economy trying to do something (which usually means to spend itself before inflation steals its value).

In fact, the velocity of money is at an all-time low and seems to be headed lower. When this money all finally decides to go out and spend itself while it still has some value, it will be quite a process to observe. Just think of stored-up money like potential energy, the same as a massive snow cornice hanging precariously over a steep gully. It’s not a question of if, but when it will finally release and cause the value of money to plunge.

And the point I am trying to make is that there are two sources adding to the pressure here. One is the amount of money being piled up, and the other is the dwindling quality of oil. Adding more and more snow to the situation (as the Fed and other central banks are busily doing) is not really helping anything, and neither is a decrease in the net energy returns of new oil discoveries.

Just for kicks, here’s a chart of money in circulation (including cold, hard cash and coin) stretching back through time to around the creation of the Fed.

Is that a picture-perfect exponential chart or what?

Now the other side of the money situation is, of course, debt. Here we see something quite remarkable, which is that somehow the Fed has managed to achieve a new all-time high in total credit market debt.

I say "remarkable" because what really should be happening here is de-leveraging, not re-leveraging. We should be seeking to decrease the total amount of debt, not increase it. But of course, that is not the business of the Fed. Its business is strictly to keep the exponential money and credit systems growing exponentially.

Well, that and assuring that the big banks never have to have an unprofitable quarter.  But that’s another story for another day.

Yet even with the heroic efforts of the Fed to push, badger, cajole, and horse-whip the aggregate amount of debt higher, its efforts are falling short. Note that we are still many, many trillions away from the trend line, which is what we’d need to get back to in order for things to return to ‘normal,’ as abnormal as those times really were.

Recall my other main point about debt, which is that it must double slightly faster than once every decade if we want the future to mirror the past four decades. This means that from 2008 to 2018, credit market debt will need to expand from $52 trillion to $104 trillion, or a bit more than $5 trillion per year, to keep us on the same "normal" trajectory.

Part of my skepticism about the odds of things returning to "normal" rests with the difficulty I have conceiving of what exactly it is that the US might find to suddenly go another $50 trillion into debt for.

If the US cannot find a way to go that much further into debt, then all of the many fine and subtle, overt and gross ways that we’ve come to expect the economy and financial markets to work will no longer apply. Many things will change and will simply operate very differently if no other reason than credit growth has slowed to a relative crawl.

As we are now four years past the 2008 crisis and we’ve only just managed to eke out a nominal new high in total credit market debt, this means that we are roughly $20 trillion behind the curve. You could do worse than this for an explanation as to why the national budget is such a wreck, why incomes are not keeping pace, and why the nation’s infrastructure and capital investment are in such poor shape.

The bottom line is that, as expected and predicted here many times over the years, money creation with an eye towards keeping the credit markets expanding is the name of the game.

And the problem is that money is not wealth. It’s only a marker for wealth.  Simply increasing the money supply without understanding where we are in the energy story is an incredibly risky, if not foolish, thing to do. 

That’s the trouble with money.

Change Is Coming

Look, I hate to be the bearer of what many will consider to be bad news, but things are not ever going to go back to "normal" if we define normal as the period from 1950 to 2000 during which relatively constant economic growth and slightly-faster-than-that debt growth went hand in hand.

Everyone currently in a position of power honed their skill sets during a period of time when the pie was reliably growing and the skirmishes centered around how best to lay claim to one’s own portion of the expansion.

Unfortunately for those with these skill sets, we have entered a brand new epoch, where, for a variety of inter-related reasons, old-style economic growth is no longer possible. These reasons are partly demographic, partly related to reaching the mathematical limit of growing one’s debts faster than one’s income (or GDP, in this story), and partly related to the end of cheap (and easy) oil.

It is this last part, the oil story, which has almost entirely eluded the intellectual grasp of our monetary and fiscal masters. I don’t blame them, as mastery of the physical sciences is not a requirement of any classical economics departments in any of the universities that churn out our PhD economists.

This is very strange, when you think about it, because economics is entirely rooted in the process of extracting and converting natural wealth into material wealth. Without the primary inputs of the earth, there would be NO secondary or tertiary wealth for us to divvy up (via a money-driven rationing process) or develop exotic derivative products around.  Economics should be the study of energy and resource flows as well as money.

Imagine if medical scientists did not have to learn about digestion and nutrition as a part of their training. After such a course of study, they might come across an emaciated patient complaining of low energy and prescribe exercise because that’s been proven to boost energy in most people. Of course, they would then be mystified by why the patient deteriorated and did not recover.

Today we find the world’s central banks mystified as to why trillions and trillions of freshly-printed fiat units, be they dollars or euros or yen, are not resuscitating the world economic system. The answer might just be grounded in the observation that we are out of cheap and easy oil. The very food of the economy is no longer as packed with calories as it once was, and the patient is losing weight.

What I am describing here is nothing less than a complete and utter paradigm shift that is so profound and so large that it will, paradoxically, escape detection by most people. That’s just how gigantic shifts seem to happen: They go largely unnoticed, perhaps because they are too big to internalize.

If an ever-decreasing net energy return is slowly starving our patient, which we might detect each and every time we spend $80 to $200 to fill our gas tanks (depending on whether we live in the US or Europe), then how should we position ourselves for this very different future?

What sorts of things will change whether we wish them to or not? And what is actually under our personal control?

A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Times of great upheaval offer a gift — the chance to really sit down and rethink things. Certain fundamental questions can arise, such as Do I have the right job? and What should my kids study in college? and Should we really have increased total derivatives by $100 trillion after the financial crisis erupted in 2008?

When faced with the sort of predicament we currently find ourselves in, even more existential questions might dominate our thinking, such as Is there more to life than working hard, buying stuff, taking on debt, and getting older? or even What’s the meaning of life? The primary narrative telling us that we are supposed to work hard, consume harder, and keep ourselves centered on the treadmill that we seem to have been born upon is beginning to unravel.

It’s a mark of maturity to use a moment of crisis as an opportunity to engage in introspection and as a springboard for personal (or societal) growth and development. Unfortunately, there are virtually no signs that either our dominant culture or our leadership is that mature.

So our opportunity here is to really question ourselves and our actions, hold them up to the bright light of day, and decide what needs to change, what we should keep, and what new things we might start doing.

In Part II: True Prosperity, we explore what constitutes real wealth, both material and intangible, as well as what alternative aspirations we can consider as individuals and as a society if we find the courage to change (or at least step out of) our broken narrative .

With the certain change discussed above headed our way, how do you personally want to enter that future? What will your work be? What will your relationship be to those around you and the place where you live? Where will your happiness come from?

Is your strategy simply to do more of the same and hope for the best? Or do you plan to use the time we still have to reposition your priorities, your behavior, and your resources to meet that new future with as much resiliency as possible?

Click here to access Part II of this report (free executive summary; enrollment required for full access).

Originally published at chrismartenson.com

Image: American dollar bills from the U.S. via shutterstock

By Sandra Postel, posted Apr 10, 2012:

Darell Duppa, a late nineteenth century pioneer of the American Southwest, may barely warrant a historical footnote, but he left one memorable legacy: he named the capital city of the state of Arizona.

Crossing the dry Gila River en route to Casa Grande. photo by Sandra Postel

By Warren Karlenzig, posted Apr 10, 2012:

Originally posted at Common Current.

The United States has reached an historic moment. The exurban development explosion that defined national growth during the past two decades has come to a screeching halt, according to the latest US Census figures. Only 1 of the 100 highest-growth US communities of 2006—all of them in sprawled areas—reported a significant population gain in 2011, prompting Yale economist Robert Shiller to predict suburbs overall may not see growth “during our lifetimes.”

We are simultaneously witnessing the decline of the economic sectors enabled by hypergrowth development: strip malls and massive shopping centers, SUVs and McMansions.  The end of exurban population growth has been accompanied by steep economic decline in real estate value, triggering a loss of spending not only in construction, but also home improvement (Home Depot, Best Buy) and numerous associated retail sectors that were banking on the long-term rising fortunes of “Boomburbs.”

The fate of these communities has been so dire that for the first time in the United States suburbs now have greater poverty than cities.

In 2009, I attributed the financial crash in these car-based communities to economic factors perpetrated by the higher gas prices that had first started showing impacts in late 2006 and peaked in 2008. Others including The Brookings Institution’s Christopher Leinberger, and William Frey, along with NRDC’s Kaid Benfield have pointed to longer term demographic shifts and societal desires toward renting in denser mixed-use neighborhoods. The looming specter of excess greenhouse gases may also be playing a role in the marked reduction of driving among younger Americans (16-39 year olds), who increasingly prefer to live where they can walk or bike to their local store, school or café.

The “Death of Sprawl” chapter I wrote that was published by the Post Carbon Institute in 2009 (and in the Post Carbon Reader in 2010) provided a case study on Victorville, California. Located 75 miles outside Los Angeles, Victorville’s rise and crash epitomized the hangover of the go-go sprawl era.

During the financial system’s Derivative Daze, Victorville grew from 64,000 in 2000 to more than 108,000 by 2005: no-money-down-housing developments and “liar loans” fueled speculative investments that pumped up the desert city’s average home value to almost $350,000. The large numbers of workers that moved to Victorville had to commute long hours before dawn and after dark to get to work in Los Angeles, without the benefit of local public transit. There are still few options for those who wish to walk or bicycle to stores, jobs, schools or local amenities, and the average near 100 degree summer temperatures make such endeavors foolhardy.

When gas prices began to go up in 2006, real estate sales in the region began to dry up as people ran for the exits. As the doors slammed shut, foreclosures in California’s Inland Empire (Victorville and other parts of California’s sprawling San Bernardino and Riverside counties), Las Vegas and Florida began to trigger a nationwide real estate meltdown. To stick with our illustration, Victorville houses plummeted from an average of nearly $350,000 in 2006 to $125,000 by late 2009. Likewise, new home permits in Victorville went from 7964 in 2004-06 down to 739 in 2008-10: a drop of more than tenfold! The average home sale now brings around $110,000, less than a third of 2005-2006 prices.

Institutional investors and homebuyers alike have avoided for the past five years the nation’s scores of Victorvilles; the new data and pronouncements by experts such as Shiller, author of The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, likely put the last nails in the coffin of speculative, auto-dependant sprawl.

Recent US Census data confirms that the future of the United States is no longer about an economy based on the false and dangerous pretenses of unfettered greenfield development, with its unhealthy and climate-destructive sprawl-scape of fast food, big box retail and freeway-bred exurbs. National policies and investments should strengthen and improve existing cities and suburbs, including transit infrastructure, building retrofitting, clean energy, walkability, bicycle networks and neighborhood redesign–all areas where quality local job and community engagement opportunities can flourish.

We’ve known for some time that planning for more sustainable metros, both cities and suburbs, makes better sense in terms of protecting local food, water and land resources, as well as in reducing pollution and carbon emissions. Now we know that such actions have been proven to make much better short-term economic sense, while acting as tangible investments for the long term.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, a global consultancy for sustainable urban planning and development.

By Richard Heinberg, posted Apr 5, 2012:

I’m writing this on a plane, on my way home from four conferences on the “new economy.” Clearly there is rapidly growing interest in this subject, due in no small degree to the ongoing disintegration, and worsening dysfunction, of our present economic system. All four conferences (one in Berkeley; one in Tarrytown, New York; one at Harvard, organized by students; and one at the United Nations) were interesting and important, but the UN conference on “High Level Meeting on Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm,” organized by the nation of Bhutan, was especially noteworthy.

CHICAGO (AP) — Futures and derivatives exchange CME Group Inc. has purchased carbon exchange GreenX Holdings LLC, adding to its energy market products. Financial terms were not disclosed. CME said that GreenX is the world’s No. 2 carbon …

which billed itself Tuesday as the world’s second-largest carbon exchange. The Green Exchange reported that its overall volumes more than quadrupled last year, with more than 450,000 contracts traded in all. Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., Deutsche …

CME Group (NYSE:CME) bought GreenX Holdings LLC, the second largest carbon exchange in the world with more than 450,000 contracts traded last year. CME Chief Operating Officer Bryan Durkin said, “Since its launch in 2008, GreenX has increased its market …

By Elizabeth Kolbert, posted Apr 2, 2012:

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Bill McKibben is a patient man. Twenty-three years ago, he published The End of Nature, one of the first books written for a general audience that laid out the issue of global warming. Nearly two decades later, after the U.S. and the international community continued to fail to take action, he moved from journalist to activist, founding 350.org, which has grown into a global movement to solve the challenge of climate change. In January, he and 350.org won a surprising — if short-term — victory when President Obama put the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline on hold pending further review.

Last week, McKibben sat down with Yale Environment 360 contributing writer Elizabeth Kolbert to talk about the Keystone project and about what the pipeline battle has taught him about how Washington, D.C., operates. In a wide-ranging discussion, he explained why he believes environmentalists only win temporary victories, why activists must keep up pressure on the Obama administration, and why he’s concerned about the president’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy. One thing he was unprepared for, McKibben said, was the true extent of the influence the fossil fuel industry’s campaign money has on Congress and how difficult it will be to end federal oil and gas subsidies.

“It’s as if the politicians are sort of pillows in front of the fossil fuel industry,” he told Kolbert. “And you spend all your time going after them and don’t get at the guys behind them.”

Elizabeth Kolbert: You led the fight against the Keystone XL pipelinethis summer and fall and the Obama Administration rejected the application for construction of the northern leg of the pipeline. But just a few days ago the president announced that he was expediting the permitting process for the southern leg. So what’s going on?

Bill McKibben: Well, part of it is just a little bit of the rooster taking credit for the dawn — you know, they didn’t need a permit from the president for the southern leg, unfortunately. It’s a great shame, and we’re working hard with our friends in Texas and Oklahoma to try and block it. And it was also a great shame to see the way in which the president did it. It has to make one have some foreboding. If he’s really as completely into pipelines as he was saying, that increases the odds that eventually he’ll approve the [Canadian] border crossing.

Kolbert: Back in November when the administration turned down the application for the pipeline you wrote to opponents of the pipeline, “Big news we won, you won.” Now was it a win or was it just a temporary reprieve?

McKibben: Well, as I said in that letter, and as I’ve said probably 5,000 times since, all environmentalists ever win is temporary victories. That’s the only kind we get. And this one may be more temporary even than most. We’ll see. We’ll see some time before or after the election. I mean, clearly, if Mitt Romney wins the election, then definitely they get to build a pipeline. And if Barack Obama wins they may get to build it. He says he’ll make a decision in 2013. And the Senate may push him to do it sooner. Who knows? We barely won the fight we had in the Senate a few weeks ago, a couple of votes. But we sent 800,000 messages to the Senate. It was the biggest burst of concentrated environmental activism in many years.

Kolbert: You did get out an extraordinary number of signatures, and you got out an extraordinary number of bodies, and you got an extraordinary number of people who got arrested. And yet we still see this.

McKibben: Well, yes. So this is the thing, and it’s instructive. It has been for me. I mean we’ve had hundreds of thousands, millions of people engaged in this fight, and yet it’s still almost impossible even to win small temporary victories. And what it demonstrates is the unbelievable power of the fossil fuel industry.

I mean, I’m not used to Washington so it almost — it didn’t shock me, I’m not that naïve — but it startled me that they took a vote in the House of Representatives to speed up construction of this thing. And 234 people voted 

Even if we manage to stop this pipeline, it doesn’t stop global warming – not even anywhere close.”

for it. And they’ve taken $42 million from the fossil fuel industry. And you can predict exactly how people are going to vote by how much money they took. The first Democrat in the Senate to vote for it, to demand Keystone, was Joe Manchin from West Virginia. He’s taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than any other Democrat. I mean, it’s almost mathematical, you know. It’s elegant in its mathematical precision. And I hadn’t quite understood that.

Kolbert: Journalists are not known for their romantic view of American politics. But in the last few years, you’ve sort of made this transition from journalist to activist that, as you’ve pointed out, you didn’t even expect yourself to make. What have you learned in the process about politics?

McKibben: Well, it’s money-soaked, and so without enormous effort nothing happens. It’s not clear to me that we aren’t kind of, when we take on these political fights, aren’t kind of punching ourselves out. It’s as if the politicians are sort of pillows in front of the fossil fuel industry. And you spend all your time going after them and don’t get at the guys behind them. And I think more and more we’re going to have to try and engage the fossil fuel industry itself. So beginning this year we need to really go after the subsidies that they get paid. It’s not going to end the fossil fuel industry. Even without them, they’re still by far the richest industry on Earth, whatever. But at least it’s a way to start challenging them head on. Because they’re very much definitely not used to losing. And the most interesting thing with the Keystone stuff, in a way, was that they lost temporarily anyway. And it just drove them nuts. I mean, they’re “take no prisoners.”

Kolbert: So is that the next step for opponents of the pipeline? What is the next step?

McKibben: It’s not clear, at least not clear to me, what the next political stage of it is. But opponents of the pipeline are mostly people who are engaged in this larger fight about climate. And so one of the things that’s next for us is just remembering that even if we manage to stop this pipeline, it doesn’t really stop global warming. Not even anywhere close. It’s one skirmish in a huge, huge war. I guess what’s next, in a sense, is trying to figure out how you go from playing defense to playing offense. And this fight about subsidies is one way to do that.

Kolbert: I read an online debate you did on the Huffington Post with Ezra Levant, who had made this argument, which I’ve actually had people tell me, that getting oil from the Canadian tar sands is the ethical alternative to buying oil from the OPEC dictators. And one of the charges that he made, and I just quote, is “if the anti oil sands lobbyists who pressured Barack Obama to reject the Keystone pipeline proposal really cared about carbon emissions they’d have directed all their energy to campaign against coal power instead.” 

McKibben: The point is we have to somehow manage to beat all this stuff. There’s too much carbon — way too much carbon in those oil sands, and there’s even more carbon in the coal fields. Which is why we’re deeply engaged in this fight to prevent these coal ports from being built on the West Coast. I was just out in Bellingham [in Washington state] working on that. It’s why, in Kosovo, we’re in the middle of this big fight to stop this huge coal-fired power plant they want to build. And in South Africa. And it’s why we’re taking on subsidy stuff all over the world. So in that sense, he’s completely right. But it’s an absurd defense of the tar sands. It’s like, well, there’s a lot of other carbon somewhere else. Yes there is. And we’ll fight that, too.

Kolbert: Obama and his team are calling his energy strategy “all of the above.” There’s a piece in the [New York] Times today about how the Republicans are indigant because they point out that was their energy strategy.

McKibben: I said some place the other day, you know, “all of the above” doesn’t strike me as a particularly intellectually serious strategy. What if someone running for president says, “I have an all of the above foreign policy? I like all countries equally.” Everyone would say, “You do? Really? North Korea and England are sort of the same, in the same category?” So saying we’re going to do a lot of oil drilling, and open up every coal seam we can find, and we’ll have some solar panels, doesn’t engage really with the physics and chemistry of climate change.

Kolbert: I mean does Obama even have an energy strategy at this point?

McKibben: Well, at the moment, like all presidents, he has one — his entire being is focused on re-election… And to this degree one has to sympathize: 

Everyone, me included, made the mistake of relaxing after 2008.”

The oil industry, these guys are pouring everything they have at him. The Koch brothers the other day said, “We’re going to spend $200 million on the election.” if you’re Barack Obama’s campaign guys, that’s terrifying to hear. And to that degree, one understands I suppose the fix he’s in.

But it is sad, in part because in the last campaign, when Hillary Clinton and others said, “We have to have a gas tax holiday to deal with rising gas prices,” Barack Obama was the one guy who said, “You know what, that’s a stupid idea, let’s don’t do it.” And he actually benefited politically from it. Because he talked to Americans as if they were adults on all of this. And I think we’re capable of having that conversation.

Kolbert: When I heard about the decision the other day that [the administration was] going to expedite those permits whether or not they actually needed them, I thought it sounded like a classic move of a politician who was taking the environmental vote for granted, that these people don’t have anywhere to go. I mean, is he right?

McKibben: Well, you know, it’s going to be hard to gin up the “Environmentalists for Romney” campaign… The calculations they were making in the fall, I’m sure, when they were responsive on Keystone, was, “We need people to be enthusiastic.” It’s a different stage now, and he’s campaigning. And the true ugliness of the GOP guys is clearer probably than it was on these issues. The thing that we all have to get out of the habit of is thinking, “Elect the right guy and we’re OK.” But if you elect the right guy then the definition of the right guy is, “He might listen to you if you put enough pressure on him,” OK? You could put endless pressure on Rick Santorum and nothing would happen. This is a guy who is campaigning with a piece of shale rock as his prop.

But the point is Election Day is no more important a political day than any other day on the calendar. It’s important, but so is every other day when you’ve got to get up and push whoever it is as hard as you can. And on

Natural gas was going to a bridge fuel… It turns out that the math doesn’t work.”

Election Day I think the main thing is trying to find someone who might be pushable. Everybody made the mistake, me included, of relaxing after 2008. Which at least in the case of energy was a mistake. Because, trust me on this, the oil industry and the coal industry didn’t relax for a minute. They were there every moment of every day. With the ever-present and extremely powerful profit motive to keep them focused and concentrated on their business.

Kolbert: Another big issue which I’m sure you get asked about all the time in the energy climate realm nowadays is fracking. And you hear a lot of talk about how natural gas could be a bridge fuel that’s going to lead us away from coal and toward renewable. What are your thoughts?

McKibben: Three or four years ago there was a certain part of me that was hopeful that we were going to find a lot of natural gas, and it was going to be a bridge fuel. It just turns out that the math doesn’t work. You’ve got this problem — a big problem, it looks like — with these fugitive methane emissions. We don’t know exactly how much. But even if you just converted the whole world to natural gas… The IEA [International Energy Agency] ran what they called a “Golden Age of Gas” scenario, and it had all of us off coal or something by 2025 and we’re all on gas… I can’t remember all the details, but it was a gas-run world. And the atmosphere then was still 660 parts per million C02. What we actually need is a bridge away from fossil fuels, or maybe we should dispense with the “bridge” metaphor and just nerve ourselves up to take the jump across the chasm into the new world.

Kolbert: I certainly don’t need to tell you, we just had a winter, in the Northeast at least, without snow, and now we’ve had this really weird June-in-March heat wave. And I saw on the 350.org website that you’re planning an event in May on the theme, “Time to connect the dots.” Do you think people are starting to connect the dots?

McKibben: I do. The polling shows that by six or seven percent increase this year in Americans who believe in and take climate change seriously. It’s back up near two-thirds or something. And the biggest reason that people cite is extreme weather, which we’ve had a lot of. Last year had more multi- 

We can’t get anywhere near [a global agreement] as long as the fossil fuel industry exerts the power it does.”

billion dollar weather disasters than any year in American history. So this last week it’s been just insane. If you’re looking at the numbers instead of just kind of enjoying the heat, it’s not just creepy. It’s wild. I mean there’s no way that you should be breaking old temperature records by 30 degrees? There’s no way that places should be, you know, the record low for the day is higher than the record high previously for the date? There’s never been numbers anything like this… And this “connect the dots” day is important because our tendency is to think of these things as a one-off. It’s just how our psychology is.

Kolbert: In a couple months, there’s going to be another UN summit in Rio. But it seems like people have basically given up at this point on international agreements. Have you?

McKibben: The same problem as in this country. We do need an international framework because this is a global problem and eventually we’re going to have to solve it with a global agreement. But we can’t get anywhere near it as long as the fossil-fuel industry exerts the power it does in one national capital after another. That’s what happens. I mean you get to Copenhagen and just everybody, every leader who’s there knows, “I can’t get this deal through, you know, whatever system I have — my politburo, my parliament, my congress — even if I want to do it because there’s too much power in the fossil fuel industry.” So all we can try to do is just kind of keep this creaking thing alive in case we make some real political progress… 

The thing we can’t let it do is be a distraction from the actual work of movement building. We can’t go to these things expecting that that’s where the problems will be solved… I mean I remember being at Kyoto and at the end of it the lobbyist for the oil industry — they’d actually done something in Kyoto, they actually agreed to some actual agreement — and this lobbyist said, “I can’t wait to get back to the Congress where we have these things under control.” I thought he was blowing smoke, but he was absolutely right. That’s how it works.

Kolbert: Wow, that’s a great line. The failure of the U.S., in particular, to confront climate change is sometimes cited as an indictment of the country’s major environmental groups. And your own turn to activism could also be interpreted as an indictment of those groups. Do you think that that’s fair? Do they deserve some of the blame?

McKibben: Who knows? I’m not a good enough historian. But I know that when we had this Keystone fight, everybody joined in. And it was really fun to watch and fun to work with. And everybody did the parts that they were

If you were a betting person, I’m afraid you’d be wise to bet we might not pull this out.”

good at. So we get to the Senate and then people from NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council] and LCV [League of Conservation Voters] and the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation — man, they’re good at getting into senator’s offices and giving them briefings and showing them PowerPoints. And, I mean, not only am I not good at that, I’d be terrible at it. I am not good at kind of pretending to respect people I really don’t – [laugh] all kinds of skills that I’m afraid it requires.

Kolbert: So it’s been more than 20 years since George Bush Sr. signed the “Framework Convention on Climate Change.” And by that point already your own book, The End of Nature, which had really introduced climate change to a lot of people, was already a couple years old. But as you put it recently, we’re no closer to dealing with climate change than we were in the late 1980s. So 23 years after the publication of The End of Nature, what gives you any reason, any optimism at this point, that it is going to get dealt with?

McKibben: Well, I’m not all convinced it is going to get dealt with. You know, you wrote that we seem to be on kind of a suicide mission as a civilization. And that case is easier to make than the case that we’re going to figure out how to deal with it. So I don’t know. I’m very hopeful that in the last few years we’ve finally built a big global movement that gets bigger all the time that didn’t exist before. And I’m hopeful that we’re getting closer to the nub of the problem.

We spent 20 years basically working on the model — let’s have our great scientists go talk to political leaders and tell them the problem, and then we’ll do something. This was a perfectly good model for what to do, but what it didn’t reckon with was the fact that while they were talking, the fossil fuel industry would be bellowing in the other ear — just bellowing this toxic mix of threats and promises and whatever else. I think we’re at the point where we kind of understand what the problem is in a way that we didn’t. And we’ll see if we can take it on… Mother Nature provides an almost endless series now of teachable moments. We’ll see if we can take advantage of them.

If you were a betting person, I’m afraid you’d be wise to bet that we might not pull this out. But I just don’t think it’s a bet you’re allowed to make. I think the only thing that a morally awake person can do when the worst thing that ever happened is happening is try and figure out how to change the odds — with not any guarantee that it’s all going to come out OK. Because it may not. I mean it clearly isn’t going to come out 100 percent OK. We’ve already had big losses and they will get worse. Whether or not we can stop short of complete catastrophe, we’ll find out. And we won’t find out in a hundred years, we’ll find out rather more quickly than that. Our lifetimes will be more than long enough to see whether or not we actually grabbed hold of this problem or not.

I guess the only other thing is just that this, what’s the alternative? [laugh] Existential despair just seems like a kind of poor strategy in many ways.

Originally published at Yale Environment 360.

to determine the physical watershed properties that are the strongest predictors of dissolved organic carbon fluxes and to provide a rough estimate of continental-scale carbon exchange. They find that runoff volumes, tree cover, watershed slope …

By Tom Whipple, posted Mar 29, 2012:

With global warming driving down the demand for natural gas as a home heating fuel and natural gas drillers producing record amounts, an oversupply situation has developed quickly. Stocks of natural gas are rising. As a result natural gas prices have fallen way below profitability and drillers are scrambling to cut back production.

Image via shutterstock

The research is hoped to provide a greater understanding of the biological clocks of trees and whether this knowledge could improve the accuracy of carbon exchange models in the future.

The research is hoped to provide a greater understanding of the biological clocks of trees and whether this knowledge could improve the accuracy of carbon exchange models in the future. (ANI) Even now Haneef is willing to pursue his medical …

By Bill McKibben, posted Mar 26, 2012:

Across the planet now we see ever more flooding, ever more drought, ever more storms. People are dying, communities are being wrecked — the impacts we’re already witnessing from climate change are unlike anything we have seen before.

But because the globe is so big, it’s hard for most people to see that it’s all connected. That’s why, on May 5, all over the earth, we will Connect the Dots.

In places from drought-stricken Mongolia to flood-stricken Thailand, from fire-ravaged Australia to Himalayan communities threatened by glacial melt, we will hold rallies reminding everyone what has happened in our neighborhoods. And at each of those rallies, from Kenya to Canada, from Vietnam to Vermont, someone will be holding a…dot. A huge black dot on a white banner, a “dot” of people holding hands, encircling a field where crops have dried up, a dot made of fabric and the picture taken from above – you get the idea. We’ll share the images from around the world and give climate change a human face – we’ll hold up a mirror to the planet and force people to come face to face with the ravages of climate change.

Anyone and everyone can participate in this day.

Many of us do not live in Texas, the Philippines, or Ethiopia – places deeply affected by climate impacts. For those of us not in directly-impacted communities, there are countless ways to stand in solidarity with those on the front-lines of the climate crisis: some people will be giving presentations in their communities about how to connect the dots. Others will do projects to demonstrate what sorts of climate impacts we can expect if the crisis is left unchecked. And still others of us will express our indignation to local media and politicians for failing to connect the dots in their coverage of “natural disasters.”

However you choose to participate, your voice is needed in this fight — and you can sign up to host a local event here: www.climatedots.org/start

(For more general info about the day, check out our new website here: www.climatedots.org)

350.org has done giant global days of action before (over the last three years we’ve helped coordinate over 15,000 events in 188 countries) and they’re always beautiful moments when our movement stands together. This year we’ll use that same captivating tactic to draw attention to the struggles of our friends around the world – the communities already feeling the harsh impacts of climate change.

These will be beautiful events, we’re sure. But they will also have an edge.

It’s right that we get a little angry at those forces causing this problem. The fossil fuel industry is at fault, and we have to make that clear. Our crew at350.org will work hard to connect all these dots – literally – and weave them together to create a potent call to action, and we will channel that call directly to the people who need to hear it most.

May 5 is coming soon; we need to work rapidly. Because climate change is bearing down on us, and we simply can’t wait.

The world needs to understand what’s happening, and you’re the people who can tell them.

Please join us – on May 5th, we need you to send the most important alarm humanity has ever heard.

By Sandra Postel, posted Mar 26, 2012:

The Mahanadi River in Orissa, India, ebbs to a trickle during the dry season. Photo credit: James P. Blair.

Water, I have learned, means different things to different people.

• First, provide incentives to farmers to double water productivity – that is, to get more crop per drop.  A host of measures – from more efficient irrigation systems to conserving soil moisture to growing crops more appropriate to the local climate – can help do this.

• Second, motivate the top billion consumers to eat less meat. We’re now feeding 35 percent of the global grain harvest to livestock.  Instead of three meat servings a day, maybe try one a day.

• Third, restore degraded rangelands through managed intensive grazing, which can increase both carbon and water storage in soils.  Move from grain-fed to grass-fed beef, saving croplands to feed people and using rangelands for sustainable meat production.

• Fourth, expand access to affordable, small-scale irrigation in the hunger zones of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.  Along with harvesting local rainwater and storing moisture in the soil, affordable irrigation systems designed for the dollar-a-day farmer can boost food security and incomes among the poorest farm families.

• And fifth, reduce food waste.  From farm fields to dinner plates, about one-third of the global food supply is wasted – which means the water consumed to produce that food is wasted, too.

By Tom Whipple, posted Mar 22, 2012:

There is a lot of talk recently that "tight oil" as found in North Dakota’s Bakken and other shales in the Southwest will save America from stagnant global oil production and increasing gasoline prices. The current glut of natural gas which has brought prices to a 10-year low has forced companies drilling for gas to curtail their activity and move the crews and rigs to North Dakota and Texas where money can still be made in drilling for shale oil. New well completions in North Dakota are expected to surge again this year.

Earlier in the year a delegation from China had visited Dundee to learn about the project. Alistair Macleod, community carbon exchange coordinator at Dundee Solar Cities, said: ”We only heard last week that we were unsuccessful with our funding bid so don …

REDLANDS, Calif., March 5, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) is using Esri’s ArcGIS Online to make its new carbon stock datasets available to scientists and environmental experts throughout the world. Decision …

This will make available wood fuel products as trees are thinned and trimmed. There is the opportunity to get carbon credit money from the carbon exchange program. That is money that can start coming in almost immediately. As the property value …

By Richard Heinberg, posted Mar 19, 2012:

If current population trends continue . . .   

• The population of the United States will increase to over 600 million by 2080, and in 2150 it will equal China’s present size.
• World population will achieve 14 billion by the year 2075 and 30 billion by 2150.

• By 2015 China will be importing more oil than the United States does that year.
• By 2030 China will be absorbing all available global oil exports, leaving none for the US or Europe.
• In just 8 years China will be burning as much coal as the entire world uses today.
• Natural gas will be virtually free in the US by 2015.
• Officially assessed US natural gas reserves will be exhausted by 2025.

• China’s economy will be 8 times as big as it is today by 2040.
• China’s economy will surpass the size of the present global economy before 2050.
• The US federal debt will double—from $14 trillion to $28 trillion—by 2022.
• In 2072, the federal debt will amount to $896 trillion, or $1,629,091 for each American (assuming a US population then of 550 million).
• By the end of the century, each American will “owe” over a billion dollars.
• Thanks to the doubling of US households living on less than $2 per person per day between 1996 and 2011, in 150 years there will be about 1.5 billion Americans living on practically no income.
• The number of billionaires in the world (having grown from 793 to 1210 in just two years, from 2009 to 2011) will equal the world population in only 70 years. (Given the previous trend, this is especially gratifying news: since the rate of growth in the number of billionaires in the world exceeds the rate of growth in extreme poverty in the US, this means each American will become a billionaire before his or her grandchildren plunge into desperate poverty).

• Thanks to Moore’s Law (whereby the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years), within 20 years transistors will be the size of an atom, and after another generation or so, “transistors” (if they can be called such, at that point) they will be the size of an electron.
• It will eventually be possible to download into a computer all the memories and even the personality of a human individual.

• Due to the decades-long decline in male sperm counts, apparently caused by a proliferation of environmental hydrocarbon-based, estrogen-mimicking pollutants, the human species will go extinct sometime within the next two centuries.
• With China’s coal consumption climbing at 8 percent per year, annual global greenhouse gas emissions will skyrocket, setting off multiple strong self-reinforcing environmental feedbacks that will ensure the melting of all polar ice, the death of the oceans, and the collapse of most agricultural production on the planet.

By Ken White, posted Mar 15, 2012:

News flash: The culture at Goldman Sachs is “toxic and destructive,” and “purely about how [Goldman Sachs] can make the most possible money off of [clients].”

By Simone, posted Mar 15, 2012:

With the EU’s debt crisis and the Iranian confrontation relatively quiescent, attention has turned to the incessant increase in U.S. gasoline prices. The Capitol Hill gas station, where at least some members of Congress fill up, is currently selling regular for $4.49 a gallon. If you prefer to do business at the Watergate Exxon it will set you back $5.39 for regular. For a real taste of the future, then be sure to come in a full-sized SUV with a big V-8 and a 33 gallon gas tank – a fill-up will only be $188 for premium.

Image credit: Images_of_Money/flickr

By Rob Hopkins, posted Mar 14, 2012:

I seem to have done rather a lot of talks in schools recently.  I did one last week which included showing clips from the film ‘In Transition 2.0’ and talking about all kinds of stories from Transition initiatives around the world.  It was also the first one I have done yet where no-one was texting at the back of the room, which was a nice change (might one assured way to raise educational standards in schools be to make sure none of them have a mobile phone signal?  Bit radical.)  One of the questions I was asked was about how Transition got started, a question I am asked with alarming regularity still).  It got me thinking about the whole question of getting things started.

• Being deeply driven by the scale of the challenge and wanting to do something about it now
• A dash of old punk ‘do it yourself’ spirit (for me, anyway)
• A naive belief that the bits we didn’t know how to do someone else would come along and add into the mix
• A reckless lack of self-consciousness about admitting that there were large parts of this that we hadn’t figured out yet but which we trusted would emerge in time
• Some deeply wonderful and patient co-creators who arrived very early on
• An instinctive sense that it needed to be a response underpinned by compassion rather than survivalism
• A vision underpinned not by abstract ideas but things I had already seen in practice on people’s farms, in their gardens, in their homes
• Being prepared for the possibility that it going completely wrong wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, combined with
• A passionate belief that this was what we wanted to give our time, creativity and passion to, and that we were prepared to give it large chunks of our lives, our energy, our hearts to it

Image detail from the front cover of ‘The Underground’ fanzine, No. 3. 1985.

It hoped the developed countries – as well as global financial institutions which trade on the carbon exchange – would fund the BLY to stock up on credits. What it overlooked was that the scheme was slated to end in December 2012, as a result of which …

REDLANDS, Calif., March 5, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) is using Esri’s ArcGIS Online to make its new carbon stock datasets available to scientists and environmental experts throughout the world. Decision makers will be …

By Richard Heinberg, posted Mar 8, 2012:

World coal production and consumption data for 2011 are not yet compiled and published, but one key number is in. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reports that the country’s coal output rose 8.7 percent from 2010 to reach 3.88 billion short tons last year. For comparison, US consumption in 2010 was just over 1 billion tons—and holding steady (mostly due to cheap natural gas prices). If the current trend continues, China will burn well over 4 billion tons of coal in 2012, four times as much as the US. 

By Simone, posted Mar 8, 2012:

[Excerpt]: In one sense, the analysts who forecast that “peak oil”—i.e., the point at which the rate of global petroleum extraction will begin to decline—would be reached over the last few years were correct. The planet is running short of the easy stuff, where you stick a drill in the ground and crude comes bubbling to the surface. The great oil fields of Saudi Arabia and Mexico have begun to dwindle; one result has been a rising price for energy.

We could, as a civilization, have taken that dwindling supply and rising price as a signal to convert to sun, wind, and other noncarbon forms of energy—it would have made eminent sense, most of all because it would have aided in the fight against global warming, the most difficult challenge the planet faces. Instead, we’ve taken it as a signal to scour the world for more hydrocarbons. And it turns out that they’re there—vast quantities of coal and oil and gas, buried deep or trapped in tight rock formations or mixed with other minerals.

Getting at them requires ripping apart the earth: for instance, by heating up the ground so that the oil in the tar sands formation of Canada can flow to the surface. Or by tearing holes in the crust a mile beneath the surface of the sea, as BP was doing in the Gulf of Mexico when the Deepwater Horizon well exploded. Or by literally removing mountaintops to get at coal, as has become commonplace across the southern Appalachians…

Read full article

Originally published March 2012 at the New York Review of Books. This is a review of ‘End of Country’ by Seamus McGraw, ‘Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes, and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale’ by Tom Wilber and ‘Gasland’ a documentary film by Josh Fox.

Image credit: Al Granberg/ProPublica

Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) is using Esri’s ArcGIS Online to make its new carbon stock datasets available to scientists and environmental experts throughout the world. Decision makers will be able to easily access this data and use GIS to study …

By Tom Whipple, posted Mar 7, 2012:

It has been six weeks since we last discussed the problems that could be in store for the U.S.’s East Coast due to closing of refineries in the Philadelphia area.

Estimate the amount of carbon stored in the vegetation of the world’s pantropic forests See how aboveground carbon is distributed across land-cover types both locally and regionally Estimate CO2 emissions from tropical deforestation Calculate carbon units …