||| FROM ED SUIJ |||
Richard Heinberg had seven concurrent steps of what we could do. Here are a couple more. If all happened simultaneously we might have a slim chance.
Step 1
It is clear that there is only one way to avert the coming global upheaval, and that is to be of one mind! We have to change the way we govern ourselves. Countries the size of the US are ungovernable, if every 4 years all important decisions are reversed, elections for president almost turn in civil war and billionaires determine who gets in office.
We need smaller units. Tribes? Watersheds? Foodsheds?
Maybe locally we need a Council of Elders and Youngsters (we are deciding about their future), with some continuity, instead of changing horses every 4 years. We have to move in unison. Individualism isn’t gonna cut it. Just like the big flock of starlings or sardines, all moving in unison at unbelievable speeds and precision to avoid predation.
Ignore the the rules that govern ecosystems at your own peril!
Step 2
We are very fine tuned living organisms that need and thrive on clean air, clean water and clean, nutritious food. Without it we get sick, die prematurely and cannot make good decisions. So start a massive effort to clean up all air, water and food pollution. It is one of the best investments we can make.
Health care should be free. Civilized societies take care of their sick people and the costs will drop dramatically when we have cleaned up the environment and have gotten rid of the poisons and harmful chemicals Healthy people make for healthy, happy communities that will make the right decisions. Ignore the rules that govern ecosystems at your own peril!
Step 3
Initiate an immediate steep descent in all energy use. This is the only way to save the natural world from total degradation, to a point where there is no return and human survival becomes unlikely.
Very big gains could be made here. But some solutions would be very unpopular.
For example if we all would stop driving, flying and boating simply for pleasure, (yes, sacrifices will have to be made at some point in the “war effort” on CO2), this would result in an immense drop in fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions.
It would give us maybe an extra 10-20 years to figure out how to proceed.
(And maybe we can even stop fracking Kamala? Let’s think of all our fellow humans living next to a fracking site on our next bucket list trip. 17.6 million people live within a mile of a fracking site.
But you wonder why we need fracking when in Plaquemines, 70 miles south of New Orleans the world’s largest Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) hub is built. It will EXPORT 20 million metric tons of gas annually. There will be 7 of those facilities on the Gulf Coast. Exporting energy and carbon dioxide on a massive scale? Crazy stuff.)
So, do NOT rev the economic engine! Degrow the economy steadily. But that runs totally counter to our sense of individuality, and the “freedom” principle: nobody is gonna tell me what to do. I am doing what I do, because I want to and I can. The pursuit of happiness for a lot of people seems to involve a lot of energy, material and a huge carbon footprint. Find a workaround! Redefine happiness. Ignore the the rules that govern ecosystems at your own peril!
Step 4
We have mentioned before that through the right farming techniques we could turn all our agricultural areas from carbon emitters to carbon sinks. The biggest gains could be made there in the shortest amount of time, probably 1/6 of all annual emissions every year. And that percentage will grow rapidly if we reduce our total output of CO2 dramatically. (step 3)
Grow all food organically. Grow most food close to where it is consumed. (on average most food travels 1200 miles to your table). Stop wasting and throwing away 40% of all food grown. Today, 280 million pounds of toxic glyphosate (Roundup) are sprayed annually on 285 million acres of U.S. farmland—the size of nearly three Californias .
The New York Times reported a couple days ago that 25% of all farmland from Texas through Michigan is contaminated with PFAS chemicals. Contaminated sewage sludge was spread for years as “fertilizer”. Some levels exceed 600.000 times EPA standards, some farms are forbidden to grow food ever again. PFAS are the so-called forever chemicals, they cause cancer, no level is safe for humans and testing is extremely rare and costly. Mistrust all corporate food. PFAS are found in many drinking water wells all over the country. And we could go on about the 50,000 chemicals that are “industry regulated” and were never tested.
Step 5
Mitigation. Protect and preserve all areas with a high biodiversity in all types of ecosystems. Protect species from going extinct. Create forever wild areas and re-create lost habitat. Reintroduce lost species where possible. Start planting trees on a big scale. Encourage re-wilding of many damaged and paved over areas, parking lots, military bases, abandoned farmland, golf courses (3500 square miles).
Step 6
Price all goods and services according to their carbon footprint. Redouble all recycling efforts. Develop a circular economy by 2050, in which all goods that we need are made from recycled material and can be recycled again. All products should be easy to fix and taken apart again. Stop all plastic food packaging. Make degradable alternatives mandatory. Stop making profit from externalizing costs by polluting air, water and soil and exploiting humans.
Do we really need 40-50 different electric car brands and models with parts and batteries not interchangeable? And that is just in the US. Really, if you decide to go electric as a society, make about 7 types. A two person car with cargo space. A family sedan. A small bus, a big bus. A small truck and big truck. All parts and batteries would be interchangeable. In stead of driving to a gas station, you go to a battery station. Pull up, open the trap door and automatically a hydraulic arm takes out empty battery, puts in a full one. You pay, get credited for remaining charge and off you go. Simple. And not hard to do.
Step 7
Stop all wars. All wars are about resources. Find a way to redistribute the accumulated wealth on the planet fairly, which would prevent most wars.
Create a Department of Peace
The US military is the single biggest emitter of CO2 in the US. Annual budget around 841 billion in 2024. Take a big chunk of this money for disaster relief for the people suffering from climate calamities, caused for a good part by US emissions.
Take another big chunk (there are lots of big chunks in that budget!) for mitigation ( for example moving Pacific Islanders to higher ground) and disaster preparedness.
Another chunk to at least try to end all hunger (40% of all corn grown is turned into ethanol) and preventable diseases.
Annually 2.5 trillion dollars is spent globally on creating armies and weapons of mass destruction. Yes, that is 2500 billion. Staggering numbers. Just think what we could do. Divide that by 8 billion and you end up with $3000 and change for every person on the planet. A princely sum for a good part of the world population. A universal basic income?
Step 8
Increase spending on education. All education should be free. A civilized society educates their youngsters without saddling them up with a huge debt. It is the next generation that will have to pull the wagon. They have to be healthy, well informed and motivated. Humanity’s future is in their hands. Twenty elementary schools are closing in Seattle, because 100 million dollars in Covid assistance disappeared. ( A mere decimal point in the 841.4 billion 2024 military budget). A shame.
FYI
Twenty grams of carbon dioxide were produced in doing about 100 internet searches.
A typical hardwood tree can absorb as much as 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. This means it will sequester approximately 1 ton of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 40 years old.
Add a couple more grams for the paper copy (digital copy will be obsolete in 20 years) of this article that I will place in a box of papers for the next generations. As no doubt they will ask: why didn’t you see the flashing lights, or hear the alarm bells ringing. A senior moment maybe?
Thank you for reading and your patience. It is later than you think.
SEE ALSO:
Energy transition, the bigger picture, Part 1 of 3
Energy transition, the bigger picture, Part 2 of 3
Thank you for this extremely enlightening and interesting series Ed. It IS later than we think. But then, as the articles you submitted well point out… we’re not thinking.
As William Reese has outlined in his “Ecological Overshoot is Driving Humanity Toward Collapse,” a step in the right direction locally would be to convene a citizens group, (remember, as citizens we are all stakeholders in this event), this being an advisory group that would measure everything we are doing now, and everything that we propose to do in the future in scale to the relationship of how it affects our environment.
Thank you, Ed, for the recommendation to Richard Heinberg’s excellent article, and for thinking through and suggesting what must be done. It seems to me that in San Juan County, the central problem is the “divide and conquer” approach. The individual organizations making decisions that impact use of our ecosystems are apparently not capable or adequately incentivized to think and act holistically about the situation we are in, and are not structured to require that they work together and use all the intelligence and resources of the county’s citizens.
The decision-making structure appears to me to be the central problem in any attempt to alter the energy direction we are headed as a county. Too many groups are comprised of “stakeholders” who stand to personally gain or lose, and are thus not incentivized to enact sensible long term holistic planning for the county.
We have County Council, the Visitors Bureau, OPALCO, Public Works, Community Development, Environmental Stewardship, advisory commissions and committees, KWIAHT, Friends of the San Juans, SeaDoc, OPAL, Senior Centers, Chambers of Commerce, public and private schools, political organizations, water associations, sewer systems, fire & EMS, neighborhood and homeowner associations, agricultural groups, arts organizations, loads of individual property owners, individual and groups of business owners, (some of both groups investors and developers who don’t live here,) state and federal officials… Every one of them seems to be working in its own silo to serve the perceived needs of its constituencies and the personal interests of self-perpetuation (keeping one’s job, being elected, making money, fulfilling the organization’s mission, keeping an organization or business solvent, etc.)
OPALCO’s board and staff are not engaging in this conversation. They are off fulfilling what County Council approved in the last Comp Plan: attempting to create energy independence (which they’ve plainly said will require a huge commitment of land and waters,) and downplaying and justifying any ecological harm by the fact that federal grants are available and OPALCO “must” meet the growing and unlimited demand for electricity–regardless of what appears to me to be an illogical goal considering the small size and fragility of our landmass and marine ecosystem.
The Visitors Bureau and associated tourist-dependent businesses clamor for continued growth of tourism, which inevitably results in increased resident human population pushing out wild island residents.
OPAL and those who need staff and those who serve the segment of our citizenry with fewer financial resources, and those citizens and would-be citizens, push endlessly for more affordable housing, which means more wild habitat converted to housing for humans.
Public Works focuses on safe roads that meet modern federal standards so we qualify for federal grants, which means more trees and understory removed, more land paved.
Most islanders clamor for a more functional ferry system, which means more tourists, more residents, and more ecosystem damage.
Environmental stewardship and the Land Bank push for being “fire-wise,” which means more removal of wild habitat to protect the homes of humans.
County Council members, required to create a balanced budget while satisfying as many islanders as possible, can’t afford financially or politically to stifle tourism or development.
State and federal officials, even more sensitive to getting elected and re-elected, can’t seem to embrace and manage the problem, which results in laws that interfere with our own local planning.
On and on it goes. No system exists for effective, coordinated, sensible long term planning in our county.
And in every case, the billions (trillions?) of unrepresented wild islanders lose–their lives, their homes, their food sources, their privacy and safety, their freedom to roam, the peace and quiet they need to communicate with one another and reproduce and care for their young, and simply to rest and sleep– all in order for politicians to create “compromise” among the humans with all their competing demands.
And eventually, the humans lose too.
As I see it, the more islanders understand Ed’s articles here, Richard’s article, the Ecological Overshoot information, and connect the dots between these issues and decisions made by all these separate organizations and individuals, the more able we are to push each of these decisions in the required direction to save us all.
You’ve missed the party if you haven’t read Ernest Callenbach’s book, “Ecotopia” published in 1975. This thinking is done over and over again, the effect of which we can see today. For anyone under 65 or 70, this is new thinking, when in fact people have struggled with the Gordian Knot of human desire for ease and wealth (which I will not call “greed” as moral judgment is spectacularly damaging to free and frank discussion) on the one side, and concern for the future of the planet and human race (one of many species that have bloomed and failed under changing conditions) on the other .These two factors may eventually be driven to cooperate, but not now, not until it is the only choice left. At that point, governments will be large and draconian to match a challenge that is not in climate change but in human nature.
A healthy biosphere functions with a mix of cooperation and competition amongst it’s members. Alexandra’s cogent comment above was a good reminder that there are a lot of “species” in the cultural ecosystem of Orcas island and that all these individuals and groups have differing, sometimes competing, sometimes compatible, desires. Identifying the myriad issues that we can agree upon might remind us that we really do agree much more than we disagree! Ed’s article succinctly points out that the health of our ecosystem MUST be our collective priority; all other issues are moot without a healthy planet!
If we can agree upon that primacy, then we can attempt to define what we mean by “health” and how to steer ourselves in that direction. I like the use of HEALTH as a metric because it is, to some degree at least, amenable to quantification, which our current materialistic viewpoint seems to require. For too long we have used the too vague goal of the “GOOD” as a guideline: “The greatest good for the greatest number.” for example. Which sounds like a worthy goal but is actually so ill-defined as to be whatever you want it to mean in the moment. HEALTH on the other hand, while still a wide definition or goal, really is pretty easy to agree upon.
What if we subjected our collective decision-making to the metric of HEALTH?
Great points all.
Long-term health, and well-being go hand-in-hand (in my book).