Four Months til Copenhagen - Wind Power Cancelling Itself Out?

In a strange twist of email fate, I received two completely opposed messages one after the other in my inbox yesterday.

The first one was: "Wind-generated electricity finally feeds BC's power grid" (BC stands for British Columbia, the Canadian province in which I live). I felt some momentary pride (with a large splash of What took us so long?), until I read this next one:

"A wind farm is not the answer," in which all pro-renewable energy environmentalists are lumped together into a category of people who only care about "gigawatt hours, parts per million of carbon, peer-reviewed papers and 'sustainable development.'"

Talk about deflation.

This article from The Guardian by Paul Kingsnorth has some excellent points in it — only it's all too late. He says of a huge wind farm in Shetland, UK:

Does this sound very "green" to you? To me it sounds like a society fixated on growth and material progress going about its destructive business in much the same way as ever, only without the carbon. It sounds like a society whose answer to everything is more and bigger technology; a society so cut off from nature that it believes industrialising a mountain is a "sustainable" thing to do.

It also sounds like an environmental movement in danger of losing its way. The support for industrial wind developments in wild places seems to me a symbol of a lack of connectedness to an actual, physical environment. A development like that of Shetland is not an example of sustainable energy: it is the next phase in the endless human advance upon the non-human world - the very thing that the environmental movement came into being to resist.

Dear Mr. Kingsnorth: We have tried. We have failed. You're right, it's not nice that we have to mar the landscape with huge wind turbines. But remember that old saying, If you can't beat them, join them? Well, we can't beat them, but we might be able to steer them into a zero-carbon future.

If giant industrial windfarms will save the future of our species and innumerable others, then I'm not going to stand in the way. Where were all the wind farm protesters all these years when we were trying to fight Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Money? It's too late to fight "Big Wind" because we MUST get to zero carbon and we MUST invest in renewable energy to do it.

It appears that there aren't too many of us willing to make sacrifices or change our lifestyles for the sake of the children. So, we'd better give people what they want. With a twist of lime, but without the carbon please.

121 to Go - The "Other" CO2 Problem: Ocean Acidification (Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid)

From a Macleans.ca article by Nancy Macdonald.

Scientists ... say the oceans are facing a terrifying new threat that will affect the entire marine food chain: the water is slowly but surely becoming more acidic.

More than 80 per cent of the heat generated by climate change and a third of all carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere winds up in the ocean. That carbon dioxide - a whopping 118 billion tons - is not innocuous, as scientists once thought. When it dissolves in briny seawater, it produces an acidic molecule known as carbonic acid (the same substance used in soft drinks). Seawater pH is now between eight and 8.3 in most areas, 30 per cent lower than in pre-industrial times....

In 1998, before the issue had hit even the scientific radar, oceanographer Joanie Kleypas was at a Boston conference with top U.S. biologists. With access to early experimental data, she was doing "back-of-envelope" carbon calculations relating to ocean pH when, "all of a sudden," she realized the math was spelling a potential marine disaster. She was so shocked by the magnitude of the problem that she ran from the boardroom and threw up in a nearby bathroom. 

The geological record is "terrifying," she says from her Boulder, Colo., office at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The last time the ocean's pH changed anywhere nearly as rapidly was 55 million years ago in an event oceanographers call the "Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum," or PETM, and there was a mass extinction of calcareous organisms. Now "we seem on track to do in about 300 years what PETM did over 3,000 years," says Debby Ianson, a climate modeller with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans [in Canada].

While sea grasses and jellyfish will thrive in a more acidic environment, marine organisms with calcium carbonate shells likely will not. Indeed, shells and mollusks start to dissolve within 48 hours in seawater as acidic as the oceans are projected to be by the end of the century. So does coral - which is already suffering the impacts of global warming, local pollution, overfishing and habitat destruction.

Battered by so many stressors, coral reefs, which are home to 25 per cent of all marine life, will almost certainly disappear, robbing fish of the crevasses and critical refuge from the awaiting "wall of mouths," says Simon Fraser University biologist Nick Dulvy. Some 20 per cent of all coral reefs have already been destroyed, including a full 80 per cent of all Caribbean reefs, while another 50 per cent teeter on the brink....

It's early days yet, but the acidification process is happening 10 times faster than previously believed, according to the latest science....

Ocean acidification is "essentially irreversible" during periods measured in mere decades, according to Britain's Royal Society.... In geologic terms, a quick change occurs over 10,000 years, but the acidification of the oceans appears to be happening over a period of 50 to 100 years.

122 Days Left Until Copenhagen - Transforming Our Worldview Is Not Part of APA Report on Climate Change

Just read about the report from the APA Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change, presented this week (August 2009) at the American Psychological Association meeting being held in Toronto.

From the press release:

Scientific evidence shows the main influences of climate change are behavioral —population growth and energy consumption. "What is unique about current global climate change is the role of human behavior," said task force chair Janet Swim, PhD, of Pennsylvania State University. "We must look at the reasons people are not acting in order to understand how to get people to act."

Despite warnings from scientists and environmental experts that limiting the effects of climate change means humans need to make some severe changes now, people don't feel a sense of urgency. The task force said numerous psychological barriers are to blame, including:

• Uncertainty - Research has shown that uncertainty over climate change reduces the frequency of "green" behavior.
• 
  
• Mistrust - Evidence shows that most people don't believe the risk messages of scientists or government officials.
• Denial - A substantial minority of people believe climate change is not occurring or that human activity has little or nothing to do with it, according to various polls.
• Undervaluing Risks - A study of more than 3,000 people in 18 countries showed that many people believe environmental conditions will worsen in 25 years. While this may be true, this thinking could lead people to believe that changes can be made later.
• Lack of Control - People believe their actions would be too small to make a difference and choose to do nothing.
• Habit - Ingrained behaviors are extremely resistant to permanent change while others change slowly. Habit is the most important obstacle to pro-environment behavior, according to the report.

First, it strikes me that this report is proof that Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Money and all their climate change denying minions have employed the services of some pretty hot psychologists, who did all this research years before the APA subcommittee did theirs. The denialist movement has done an excellent job of planting and propagating uncertainty, mistrust, denial, complacency toward risk, a lack of belief in the power of one, and an increasing sense of entitlement to burn as many fossil fuels as we damn well want to burn (which is habit-forming).

However, this report does not touch on the most important barrier to change: we do not see ourselves as connected to the Earth and the rest of Nature. Indeed, we do not see ourselves as part of Nature at all. 

If we're going to safeguard the future, we must transform our worldview, reconnecting ourselves to that which gives us life — the Earth's biosphere.

Visit GreenHeart's Barriers to Sustainability and Environmental Learning and Action for more information on this major barrier.

123 Days to Go and I'm Getting Depressed - Why Are Climate Bullies So Ignorant?

I know I shouldn't do it, but sometimes I just can't help myself. I go online and look up a recommended article on climate change, and then I read the comments.

I should not read the comments. Please, do not let me read the comments anymore!

The comments are almost always posted by ignorant climate bullies who spew lies and age-old denier "sound bytes," and almost always get away with it.

Tonight, I and all the people who care about the Earth and the future and the children were called "crazy zealot left wing enviro-Nazis." 

The anonymity of the web has created an ugliness that is really starting to sadden me. I am going to have to stop reading these things in order not to lose total faith in my species. 

The worst of it is their sheer numbers. If the bullies commenting on just this one article are any indication, we are well and truly doomed.

There's none so blind as those who cannot see from behind their huge egos. 

And how did we become so dichotomized? And why are "they" so loud and ever-present and crude and nasty and heartless, while the people who care are so few and so quiet? 

I suppose it's because my allies have learned not to read the comments sections of online articles about climate change!

Now, since this is a blog about compassionate climate action, I am going to try my very best to send out some compassion to these people — may they learn that the threat to fear is the one hanging over their children's future, not the people who are trying their best to do something about it. 

Hugs all around. It's scary times.