||| EARTHRISE BY JAY KIMBALL |||
The Chinese spy balloon entered North America on January 28th. Eight days later, it was shot down off the coast of South Carolina. During those eight days, the spy balloon had traveled over 5,000 miles, making its wind-powered way eastward at an average speed of about 30 miles per hour.
The spy balloon can help us understand how burning fossil fuels affects every corner of the planet, putting humans and millions of other species at risk.
In the video below, we have overlayed the 8-day passage of the spy balloon onto a NASA visualization of how CO2 emissions move around the world with the circulation of the wind. Start on Day 1, and track how emissions move east, across the US, and then onward, to Europe and beyond. Notice how the emissions become incredibly intense (red) as winter approaches, as fossil fuels are burned at extreme levels, to heat our homes and businesses. The time of year is displayed in the lower left corner.
There’s a lot to take in here.
- Asia and Russia’s CO2 emissions flow to the US. That represents about 45% of global emissions, and it’s coming at us.
- North American emissions flow to Europe. That’s about 15% of global emissions.
- European Union (27 countries) emissions flow to eastern Europe and Russia. That’s about 8% of global emissions.
- Note the fires burning in the Amazon and Africa. A forest fire is like burning coal. For example, in 2020, California wildfires emitted the equivalent of 25% of the state’s annual emissions from fossil fuels.
- The emissions data is from 2006 when CO2 emissions peaked in the US, though global emissions continue to soar.
Another big takeaway from the video above is that pollution from one place eventually moves everywhere. Over the course of a month, pollution from one spot has gone around the world, mixing and spreading throughout the hemisphere. Hence the need for global climate action. Climate action for one, requires climate action for all.
Clouds and Interdependence
Thích Nhất Hạnh, a Buddhist monk, poet, and teacher, helps us see the larger picture. In his seminal writing on interdependence and being, Clouds In Each Paper, he writes:
“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper.”
When China burns its coal, its toxins (CO2, Methane, SO2, NOx, mercury, etc.) enter the atmosphere, then the water and land, permeating the food web on land and sea, affecting millions of animal and plant species. In our industrialized world, if a cloud is in Thích Nhất Hạnh’s paper, then so is coal.
Though China has expressed a desire to transition to clean renewable energy quickly, they just approved the construction of another 106 gigawatts of coal-fired power capacity last year, four times higher than a year earlier, and the highest since 2015.
The US is quickly quitting king coal, but US mining companies are now sending their coal to China, India, and beyond. Each day, we are sourcing the poisons that come back to pollute our precious air, water, and land. We are sourcing the fossil fuels that heat our ecosystem to the near extinction of more living things than we can ever know. For humans, air pollution is responsible for 6.7 million premature deaths each year – about equal to all the global Covid-19 deaths in the past three years of the pandemic.
A National Academy of Sciences study projects that one-third of all plant and animal species could be extinct in the next 50 years from global warming. Glaciers on Olympic Peninsula are projected to largely disappear by 2070. Hence the burning need for climate action now.
The next few Earthrise posts will explore specific things San Juan County and other island communities are doing to stop burning fossil fuels.
Earthrise: A Climate Action Journal
This climate action journal offers information and actions we can take together, locally and globally, as we care for this precious Earth.
“The best way to heal a living system, is to connect it with more parts of itself.” ~ Margaret Wheatley
If you like what you read here, pass it forward to a few friends and ask them to do the same. Like a pebble tossed in a pond, the rings emanate outward, reflecting and growing exponentially. “Going exponential” is what it will take to reverse the climate extremes that are accelerating around us.
Thank you…
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• First Light • Robert Dash – photographer, educator, environmentalist • Extreme Rain • A Poem for the Snow Leopard •
Notes
Clouds In Each Paper ~ Thích Nhất Hạnh
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.
“Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter” with the verb “to be”, we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.
Paradise – The protest song by John Prine
Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel and they tortured the timber and stripped all the land.
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken, then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County, down by the Green River where paradise lay?
Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking, Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.
China’s new coal plant approvals surge in 2022, highest since 2015
China Climate Action Tracker Rating – Highly Insufficient
Air contaminants, such as mercury and PCBs, undermine the health of Puget Sound
Mercury, Food Webs, and Marine Mammals: Implications of Diet and Climate Change for Human Health
Climate change fuels accumulation of pollutants in Chinook salmon, killer whales
Glaciers on Olympic Peninsula projected to largely disappear by 2070
Health and Environmental Effects of Particulate Matter (PM)
Air pollution is responsible for 6.7 million premature deaths every year
Particulate Matter (PM) Basics
Here’s a view of CO2 in 3D, giving us a feel for how high up the pollution reaches
Looking forward to the next installment(s) on what we can do here and now.
The bravest among us are those who conserve, recycle and make conscious and wise choices, knowing full well that many others will gladly consume the margin they create, just as we, in spite of our choices and care, consume the margins created by lesser developed societies.
Scary and effective, Jay.
Thank-you for these posts.
You are awesome!
Remember that a large coalition of environmental groups — including the Sierra Club, Friends of the San Juans and tiny Orcas NoCOALition, plus the Lummi Nation — managed to block the export of 50 million tons of coal annually to Asia, which would have emitted over 100 million tons of CO2 when burned there. This is FAR greater than the impact islanders can have by all imaginable conservation efforts.
Michael, Yes! Cherry Point, and Longview were targeted for coal shipments. I believe there is currently no coal terminal in Washington or Oregon. Not sure where Powder River is moving their coal through. Any thoughts on that? I was speaking at an Eco Conference in Norfolk a few years ago, and the port town had the stench of coal. I followed my nose and found barges of coal being filled for export. The US exported about 77 million tons of coal in 2021. Here’s one take on the west coast coal terminal situation, from 2020. https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-02-26/interior-states-are-using-lawsuits-against-the-west-coast-to-prop-up-the-dying-coal-industry
Thank you for another thoughtful post, Jay! I especially like the quote by Thích Nhất Hạnh.
It’s all connected
An Earthrise reader and leader in environmental health sciences was kind enough to email the following thoughts:
“Kudos for having the courage to call out the Chinese dramatic expansion of coal use, which has profound implications for global GHG emissions. Few if any MSM outlets have been willing to do that. Unfortunately, India, Pakistan and other Asian countries are following that policy as well and collectively, with China, will dominate coal burning and CO2 emissions going forward.”
“Note, major cities in India already have the worst air quality in the world from photochemical smog and particulate pollution. A massive expansion of coal burning will only make that worse but China, Pakistan (who recently announced a quadrupling of coal production and use!) and India are opting for energy security above all other considerations.”
The US still burns about half the coal it did in 2007 at its peak use in electricity production. It also uses a lot of coal in steel production (both domestically and imported) and concrete production. For electricity production, the reduction in coal has largely been replaced with natural gas. A study in 2022 showed that methane leaks from natural gas production in the U.S. is “several times greater than the federal government estimates”.
Huge reductions in development and energy use would help tremendously, but big houses and big cars are the American way and the words “reduce” and “degrowth” are anathema to our national ethos, so it seems likely we’ll continue digging up and paving over nature at a fast pace. Per capita energy use in the US is 17th in the world, 2.5x per capita in the UK, and 20x per capita in African countries.
On a related note, regarding coal-burning power plants in the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) yesterday announced “the final Good Neighbor Plan, a rule that will significantly cut smog-forming nitrogen oxide pollution from power plants and other industrial facilities in 23 states. The final rule will improve air quality for millions of people living in downwind communities, saving thousands of lives, keeping people out of the hospital, preventing asthma attacks, and reducing sick days.”
In 2026 alone, EPA projects that the final rule will result in significant public health benefits:
• preventing approximately 1,300 premature deaths,
• avoiding more than 2,300 hospital and emergency room visits,
• cutting asthma symptoms by 1.3 million cases,
• avoiding 430,000 school absence days,
• avoiding 25,000 lost work days.
Reducing smog also has economic benefits. Estimated annual net benefits, after taking costs into account, would be $13 billion each year over the period from 2023 to 2042. Reducing smog also will improve visibility in national and state parks and increase protection for sensitive ecosystems, coastal waters, estuaries, and forests.
https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-announces-final-good-neighbor-plan-cut-harmful-smog-protecting-health-millions
Eliminating coal consumption and especially coal fired power plants is the obvious first step in confronting climate change. As Jay notes above there are many more harmful effects of burning coal than just CO2 emissions — as bad as they are. Getting rid of coal is a no-brainer.
If one wanted to focus on the emissions of other countries and regions, a relevant measure of comparison would be per capita emissions data. China’s per capita emissions are roughly en par with Germany and roughly two thirds of US per capita emissions. Another informative measure of comparison is the percentage of renewable energy (Germany 46%, China 24%, US 15%). To achieve 1.5C by 2050, the global per capita emissions would need to be 2 tons/year per person by 2030 (US currently: 18 tons per person). Given our own nation’s significant obligations, focusing on the Other is not courageous, it’s just an empty silly pat on our own shoulder at best and at worst contributes to more complacency.