The future is Green

Defining Sustainability

2009-10-23T10:25:00.002-04:00

A recent article in Physics World Magazine by George Crabtree titled, "The Road to Sustainability", addresses the problem of sustainable energy production and sets out three criteria for sustainability. An energy technology must last a long time, do no harm, and leave the environment unchanged. In assessing these criteria the full life cycle of the energy process needs to be considered, including construction and disposal.

This analysis is right on target, but as the author notes, the immediacy of the problems facing us means that;

we do not have the luxury of achieving full sustainability for all of our next-generation energy technologies, we can use these definitions to select our strategic sustainability targets and track our progress toward achieving them.

The article discusses the relative merits of solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels and electric cars. For each of these, Crabtree argues, true sustainability requires significant technological advances. To achieve these, he looks to nanoscience for the answers;

Nanotubes offer versatile and promising opportunities for controlling energy conversion at the nano-scale. TiO2 nanotubes like those pictured above are inexpensive, chemically inert, photostable, provide high surface-to-volume ratio and have band gaps that support sustainable energy technologies like solar water splitting, dye-sensitized solar cells and transparent conducting electrodes. They can be prepared by a variety of electrochemical processes, doped to tune their band gaps and decorated to promote surface catalytic activity.

Crabtree has taken a "technology will save us" approach that promises much even as it relies on unknown and untested technologies. Missing from the article is any discussion of conservation, downsizing or localizing where truly significant savings can be achieved using technology that already exists.

Sustainability, then also requires an acknowledgment of the limits of growth, and that we must design our energy production and usage to fit within those limits.

Resiliant Cities

2009-08-28T10:46:00.002-04:00

Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak oil and Climate Change by Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley and Heather Boyer is an important book for anyone interested in transitioning from unsustainable, car based, suburbs to a lower energy, transit based system.

The authors identify seven key elements of a resilient city.

1. Urban areas will be powered by renewable energy technologies from the region to the building level.
2. Every home, neighborhood, and business will be carbon neutral.
3. Cities will shift from large centralized power, water, and waste systems to small-scale and neighborhood-based systems.
4. The potential to harness renewable energy and provide food and fiber locally will become part of urban green infrastructure.
5. Cities and regions will move from linear to circular of closed-loop systems, where substantial amounts of their energy and material need are provided from waste streams.
6. Cities and regions understand renewable energy more generally as a way to build the local economy and nurture a unique special sense of place.
7. Cities, neighborhoods, and regions will be designed to use energy sparingly by offering walkable, transit-oriented options for all supplemented by electric vehicles.

New Urbanism

New Urbanism has become quite popular among city planners, especially in “environmentally conscious” areas such as Montgomery County. The New Urbanists have promoted high density “walkable” communities as an effort to reduce reliance on automobiles. High density neighborhoods are springing up around every metro stop, and even where there is no easily accessibly metro stop.

But Resilient Cities has a warning for the New Urbanists. A study of New Urbanist developments in Perth, Australia, demonstrated some of the weaknesses of a New Urbanist approach. The study compared eleven New Urbanist developments with forty-six conventional suburbs. The New Urbanist developments had a 9 percent switch from cars to walking for local trips, which also came with a 7 percent reduction in obesity.

However the New Urbanist developments showed no difference in total fuel usage for transportation. Fewer car trips for local travel were balanced out by greater use of cars for longer trips and reduced car occupancy.

The quality of transit available was a significant factor. A typical transit trip to work would have taken over 80 minutes compared with 30 minutes for a car trip. None of the New Urbanist suburbs produced the density and mix of uses in their centers to be self sufficient, leaving them reliant on quality transit services to make any difference.

An analysis of transport fuel use across Australian cities has shown several strong relationships between transit quality and fuel use. The closer the development to the city center, the higher the density, and the higher quality of the transit service, the lower the fuel consumption. Quality transit service was defined as whether an area had a better than 15 minute service.

Highways

All of the available data shows that building more highways creates more traffic while tearing up highways and creating pedestrian and bicycle friendly cities decreases traffic.

Surveys show that the higher the average speed on freeways, the more fuel per capita is used. Cities with higher congestion have lower fuel use while cities with the least congestion use the most fuel. Increasing road capacity will cause car use to increase to fill the newly available space. A study by the Texas transportation Institute of US cities over the past thirty years shows no difference in the levels of congestion between those cities that invested heavily in roads and those that did not.

There is a growing awareness among some traffic engineers of this problem. Andy Wiley-Schwartz, from Project for Public Spaces says, “Road engineers are realizing that they in the community development business and not just in the facilities development business.” This new viewpoint has crystallized in the “slow road movement.”

Some cities are ahead of the curve on this development. For the past thirty years, Copenhagen has removed two percent per year of its parking space from the streets and squares and created pedestrian areas. Each year car use has declined while cycling and pedestrian use has increased.

In the US, the Complete Streets movement is attempting to create a similar shift, creating new public spaces in every community. The Project for Public Spaces has also sponsored many similar projects.

Examining what shape cities take in the future is vitally important to our ability to adapt to a lower energy economy.

Water Wars in the US Southeast

2009-08-16T16:55:00.002-04:00

The semi arid US Southwest has been accustomed to bitter conflicts over water rights, but now years of drought combined with rapid growth have sparked a fight between Georgia, Alabama and Florida over the rights to the use of water from the federal reservoir at Lake Sidney Lanier.

In July, a federal judge ruled that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erred by putting drinking water for Atlanta before Lake Lanier's mandated purposes: hydroelectric power, navigation and flood control.

The judge gave Congress until 2012 to work out a water-sharing deal among Georgia, Alabama and Florida or most of metro Atlanta will have to scale back water withdrawals to 1970s levels.

Although the severe drought conditions that plagued the Southeast in recent years have lifted, Atlanta's rapid growth continues to strain the demand for water. Atlanta grew by roughly 890,000 between 2000 to 2006, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the fastest growth of any metro area in the U.S.

Some in Atlanta believe that the court case was a result of envy of Atlanta's growth. Charles Krautler, the director of the Atlanta Regional Commission, complained that, “The only motivation is political. We don’t have as good of spin doctors as they do. It’s easy to point the finger at big bad Atlanta.”

But Alabama Governor, Bob Riley replied that, “Atlanta has based its growth on the idea that it could take whatever water it wanted, whenever it wanted it, and that the downstream states would simply have to make do with less.”

Congress must now approve Atlanta's use of the Lake Lanier water for drinking water in the next three years, which may be a difficult task given that the Florida and Alabama delegations to Congress outnumber Georgia's

Water wars may continue to spread to other parts of the country. In his 2006 book, The Great Lakes Water Wars, Peter Annin looks at the past and present conflicts over the largest collection of fresh surface water on earth which may also become a battlefield for water for parts of the country straining the limits of their local supplies.

Our aging electric grid

2009-07-22T15:31:00.001-04:00

Electric power generation is biggest source of lost energy in absolute terms. Only 31% of the energy used to generate electricity ends up as distributed energy. When line losses, transfer stations, and the inefficiencies of the appliances and factories that use electricity are added, useable energy can drop as low as 2 percent.

Electricity represents a growing portion of total energy use. It is expected that electricity will constitute 16 percent of the total energy consumption in 2009 as compared to 9 percent about 20 years ago. While transportation accounts for 20% of our total greenhouse gas emissions, the electrical system accounts for 40%. But our transmission system is badly out of date; its infrastructure will need a huge investment to meet the expected future demand. According to The Brattle Group, a $1.5 trillion investment will be required between 2010 and 2030 to pay for new infrastructure.

The Department of Energy estimates that demand for electricity has increased by around 25 percent since 1990 while construction of transmission facilities dropped 30 percent. The resulting congestion has raised line losses, which have increased from a low as 5 percent of electricity transmitted in 1970 to 9.5 percent by 2001. This represents roughly and additional 3 quadrillion Btus lost to inefficiency.

Our aging electric infrastructure is one major reason why plans for a smart grid have been getting a lot of attention as the most efficient alternative to this problem. A smart grid would require less new capacity by saving more energy.

Smart grid technologies would transform the grid from a centralized, producer controlled network to a less-centralized, more consumer interactive network. Adding digital sensors and remote controls to the transmission and distribution system would improve efficient transmission of electricity. It would be able to cope with new sources of renewable power, allow for coordinated charging of electric cars, provide information to consumers about their usage and allow utilities to monitor and control their networks more effectively.

An important part of the smart grid would be smart meters that would give consumers real time price and usage information and allow them to make better decisions about when they use appliances. Studies have found that people using smart meters reduce their usage by about 7%. With added incentives people curtail their usage during peak demand by 15% or more. Eventually smart meters could automatically start appliances when demand and price are the lowest.

The Department of Energy claims that, while some of the technologies required for a smart grid can be deployed in the near future, a true smart grid is generally considered to be a decade or more away. Still, a few areas have gone ahead with a transition to a smart grid. A DOE demonstration project on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula set up a system that responded to simple instructions set in place by consumers in their preference profiles. Energy was managed on the consumers’ behalf to save money and reduce the impact on the grid. Consumers saved around 10% on their bills while peak load was reduced by 15%.

The European Union has an even more aggressive smart grid agenda, a major component of which includes having buildings function as power plants. However the EU has an advantage that it does not have as large and antiquated a legacy system as the US and therefore upgrading the grid has been easier.

In some cases the most efficient use of energy comes from going off the grid entirely. The USA Today reported that there were around 180,000 families living off-grid, a figure that had grown at a 33% a year rate for a decade. In 2002, Woking Borough Council in England adopted a new Climate Change Strategy that involved replacing the national grid with a local one using combined heat and power, fuel cells, renewable energy, and private wire systems. By 2009, the Council had delivered over 20 different Combined Heat and Power and photovoltaic projects, and was offering the service to private citizens of the Borough. In 2006, CO2 emissions had been reduced by 81% in the Council's property, with a 21% reduction in CO2 emissions achieved Borough-wide. Electricity consumption was down nearly 50% in areas covered by the local grid.

Microgrids are a halfway measure between being total reliance on the grid, and going completely off grid. Micro-grids are self sufficient grids that remain hooked into the larger national grid. Micro-grids can be run using whatever fuels are available and dependable in a local area. If the micro-grids produce more power than they need, they could sell it to the national grid at a profit. They would also be suitable to adopt renewable energy sources because the investment and conversion time would be smaller. Micro-grid networks would be modular, so if one failed others would stay in service, reducing the chance for region-wide outages. If the regional grid failed, each micro-grid could continue to function. Micro-grids would also be well suited to the use of cogeneration systems, adding to their efficiency.

Energy Conservation

2009-06-12T16:12:00.002-04:00

Reducing our use of fossil fuels is an urgent necessity. With ever more dire predictions for global warming over the coming century, reducing our consumption of fossil fuels is a necessity for the preservation of our society. Global warming will put increasing stress on our fresh water supplies, and food production, while threatening ever more severe storms. On the supply side, oil industry experts warn us that we are at or near the peak potential for world wide oil production and are headed for a period of irreversible decline in production. Similarly, estimates of U.S. coal reserves have seen a significant downward revision in recent years, while the energy content of the coal we mine declines as high quality anthracite, bituminous, and sub-bituminous coal reserves become depleted and we become increasingly reliant on low quality lignite reserves.

These two factors highlight how unsustainable our economy has become. We face major changes in the way we produce and consume energy—that much is unavoidable. Renewable energy will be an important part of a conversion to a more sustainable economy. But, perhaps even more important will be conservation.

The Energy Information Agency provides a bi-yearly review of the amount of energy consumed in the U.S. According to the most recent report, the U.S. consumed just under 100 quadrillion Btu’s of energy in 2008. Of this, 6.8% came from renewable sources or biofuels. Nuclear power accounted for 8.2%, and fossil fuels accounted for the remaining 85%.

The EIA projects that renewable energy sources will be the fastest growing energy sector, but that it will not grow enough to replace any existing fossil fuel sources. By 2020, renewables are projected to grow from 6.84 quads to 9.26 quads, nuclear power is projected to grow from 8.21 quads to 8.99 quads, while fossil fuels are projected to grow from 84.73 quads to 87.19 quads. While renewables show the biggest percentage growth, fossil fuels are still projected to grow by a slightly larger absolute amount. Additionally, the EIA projects that CO2 emissions will grow from 5814 million metric tons in 2009 to 5985 million metric tons in 2020.

The Obama administration has called for a 17% reduction in CO2 emission by 2020—a rather modest goal—but this would mean that, rather than the 2.46 quad increase in fossil fuel energy by 2020, that we would have to reduce fossil fuel use by 14.4 quads. Even this modest target is an enormous challenge, representing a more energy production than the EIA projects for all renewables in 2020. This goal can only be reached by increasing efforts to bring renewable energy online and by simultaneously pursuing conservation at every level possible.

Pollution in a crowded, toxic world

2009-05-22T19:37:00.003-04:00

Early gains in curbing pollution made after passage of legislation such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act are being challenged by an ever expanding use of toxic chemicals in all phases of our economy. Ever growing economies, expanding populations, and the waste generated by them are posing more and more health risks.

Recently a Center for Disease Control study found perchlorate, a chemical in rocket fuel, at potentially dangerous levels in powdered infant formula. At too high a level, perchlorate can damage the thyroid and hinder brain development in infants. The problem is magnified by the existence of perchlorate in many of the water systems in the country. Although there is debate over what constitutes a dangerous level of perchlorate, the CDC study estimated that 54% of infants drinking perchlorate contaminated formula would exceed EPA limits with water containing 4 parts per million or more—a level found in at least 26 states.

Another recent study found a group of chemicals used in coatings on food wrappers in human blood. Food wrapper coatings break down inside the human body into a chemical known as C8 which is linked to a variety of adverse health effects.

Another product recently found to be dangerously polluted is drywall imported from China. Studies have found that samples of some Chinese drywall contained sulfur compounds which gave a sulfurous odor when exposed to extreme heat and moisture, creating a corrosive environment in the home. Owners complained of headaches and respiratory problems while copper wiring became corroded. Although most of the drywall went to Florida, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is investigating complaints in , Alabama, Louisiana, Washington and North Carolina as well. Class-action lawsuits are lining up against Chinese manufacturers as well as suppliers and builders.

A significant source of pollution that has gone virtually unrecognized are the 90,000 cargo ships that ship exports around the world. The biggest of these ships have engines which weigh 2,300 tons and use a low grade fuel oil that has up to 20,000 times the sulphur content of diesel fuel used in automobiles. One giant container ship can emit the same amount of cancer and asthma causing chemicals as 50 million cars. The ships account for around 4% of the greenhouse gasses emitted in the world.

The US government only recently set up a 230 mile buffer zone along the entire US coast after research showed that pollution from the cargo ships leads to 60,000 deaths a year in the US alone, driving up health care costs by some $330 billion. The buffer zone will impose air quality standards that will require cutting sulphur in fuel by 98%, partulate matter by 85% and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80%. The UN’s International Maritime Organization and the EU are under pressure to follow suit.

Even efforts to recycle waste material have resulted in toxic effects from chemicals in the waste. In recent years, treated sewage sludge has been used as fertilizer on farms. As early as 2002 studies were showing that exposure to this sludge resulted in burning eyes and lungs, skin rashes and other symptoms. This year a lawsuit in Missouri alleges that sludge from a St. Joseph tannery containing hexavalent chromium, had been used as fertilizer in four counties, causing brain tumors in at least two patients. In Canada, some communities and environmental groups are fighting Ontario’s plan to allow sewage sludge to be spread on farmers’ fields without a waste-disposal permit.

The problems of waste disposal and pollution continue to grow as the amount of waste grows. Industrial chemicals are making their way into our bodies in ever greater amounts. People are very literally choking on the waste created by human society. As the world grows ever smaller, these problems can only continue to multiply.

The Great Transition

2009-04-10T14:28:00.002-04:00

The present economic crisis is widely acknowledged to be the worst since the Great Depression. Some have taken to calling the current downturn the Great Recession. But today’s crisis has important differences, including growing resource pressures, particularly with energy sources, as well as the effects of climate changes brought on by global warming. Unlike previous recessions, this downturn will require fundamental changes—a Great Transition to a more sustainable society.

Today’s recession and the Great Depression share some characteristics: a precipitous decline in the stock market, major bank failures caused by wave of deregulation, and a deflationary market (at least in housing) that worsened the position of debtors. Although today’s crisis has not yet reached the magnitude of the 1930s, millions of people have lost their jobs, millions have fallen into poverty, tent cities have appeared, reminiscent of the Hoovervilles of the 1930s.

Economists and politicians, like generals who prepare for the last war, have been determined not to make the same mistakes that were made 8 decades ago, and are flooding the market with liquidity while spending billions to create new jobs to bolster consumer demand.

Yet there are unique problems today not present in either the Depression, or any of the recessions since. Growing resource pressure played no small part in causing the present downturn. Worldwide production of oil has been flat for four years and is expected to soon roll over into permanent decline. Economist James Hamilton examined last year’s downturn and concluded that nearly all of it could be explained by the oil price shock. The housing boom saw home buyers moving ever farther out into the suburbs to buy cheaper homes. Then high energy prices helped burst the bubble by making these long commute suburbs unaffordable.

Food stockpiles have declined over the past decade causing prices to rise. Growing demand for bio-fuels aggravated the situation by taking acreage away from food production. While rising prices in the U.S. added to recessionary pressures, third world countries faced both price spikes and shortages of food and fuel, throwing people into poverty and sparking riots.

None of these problems will be solved by the economic policies of the 1930s. Energy and food prices have fallen due to the recession, but the underlying problems have not gone away. Long term solutions will require a major move away from fossil fuels; it will be a tremendous task. Our suburban/exurban way of life, with its ever bigger houses and ever more powerful cars, is inextricably bound up with oil. Our agribusinesses rely on fossil fuels for everything from fertilizer and pesticides to gas powered tractors and irrigation pumps. The typical food item is shipped some 1,500 miles or more before it is sold.

Although it would have been better if we had faced these problems before they brought the economy down, the recession has seen hints of a transition to a lower carbon lifestyle. Oil consumption has declined for the first time since the oil shocks of the 1970s. The total number of cars registered in the US is predicted to decline in 2009, the first time since World War II. Less driving and a slower economy have resulted in the first significant reduction in the amount of greenhouse gases emitted.

Another World War II phenomenon, the victory garden, is making a comeback, a small move toward more self sufficiency as well as lower energy use. The number of backyard farmers is increasing at a double digit rate; some seed companies are having difficulty keeping up with demand. Even those icons of suburbia, the McMansion and the big box store, are getting a makeover. Abandoned big box stores are no longer automatically torn down to make way for new development, but are being transformed into charter schools, health centers, a chapel, a library, even a spam museum. At least one developer of McMansions has subdivided the homes into “quartets;” four family homes offering the affordability of a condominium along with a smaller carbon footprint.

Thus far the transition to a lower energy/lower carbon future has been haphazard, in response to higher energy prices and the economic downturn. The cost to those who have been laid off or whose savings has disappeared has been tremendous. The challenge for Greens is to make this incipient transition permanent, and to create a new green economy to replace the old. Instead of bailing out the auto industry, we must transform it for the low carbon future. Instead of saving failed banks so that they can return to business as usual, we must reorient them away from speculative derivative trading toward funding smaller scale, sustainable, local businesses. Green jobs and a zero waste economy must replace our planned

Building a Sustainable Car Culture--Perils and Pitfalls

2009-03-14T21:12:00.001-04:00

Cars and light trucks now account for about 20 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, and more than 40 percent of US oil consumption. This level of pollution comes not only from driving them, but from their construction—including the mining and manufacture of the metals involved which create similar levels of pollution as are created during the the lifetime of their use.

Building hybrid and battery powered cars will not completely solve the problem. There are some 250,000,000 cars in the United States. Replacing even a small portion of them would do very little to reduce the CO2 emissions from the industry. Furthermore, the present generation of hybrid cars are powered by nickel metal hydride batteries. Nickel is particularly energy intensive to mine and refine, adding to the carbon footprint of the hybrid car.

Today’s car culture is inherently inefficient. As a matter of safety, a car’s wheels must hug the road; but this causes a high level of friction that the engine must overcome (this is the reason that trains are more efficient than cars and trucks.) The second problem is the weight of the car. The average car or light truck is around two tons. Even the basic Prius is 2765 pounds—a great deal of weight to carry around one or two people. Cars sold in the U.S. have been getting steadily heavier and more powerful, resulting in lower fuel efficiency. The original Honda Civics build in the 1970s got 40 mpg with a gas engine. Hybrid cars hardly get better mileage today.

Former oil industry analyst, Jan Lunberg, has concluded that we need to “get rid of car dependency.” The present economic downturn has raised questions about whether the auto industry can continue. The $13.4 billion bridge loan given by the federal government to the auto industry in December was to give the industry time to restructure, but the details of that restructuring were not known, although the Obama administration has talked about a “new, hybrid economy.”

More fundamental changes are needed if we are to meet CO2 reduction goals and to reduce our dependency on oil. We will need smaller, less powerful cars, as well as living patterns that bring us closer to work and to shopping. These goals are not receiving serious discussion yet. In all probability they will require further price increases or even shortages before they become politically viable.

Recycling Reconsidered

2009-01-31T14:16:00.002-05:00

Recycling has become a almost unchallenged virtue of the environmental movement. Millions of people sort out their paper, plastics and metals for pickup at their curbside. Countries such as Austria, the Netherlands, and Germany recycle over half of their rubbish. However, recently some reservations have been expressed whether recycling always results in a net benefit.

China is a huge part of the market recycled paper and plastics. Shipping tons of refuse thousands of miles to China to be recycled might produce more CO2 than shipping them to a landfill. The recent economic downturn has lessened China's demand for recycled materials causing some of it to pile up on the docks.

Recently, some have argued that oil based materials such as plastics are more efficiently disposed of by incineration.

Some efforts are being made to process more recycled material locally, saving money and energy. Britain is building three new plastics reprocessing plants that will be able to handle most of the 180,000 tons of recycled plastic bottles recycled each year. An anaerobic digester will soon digest 80,000 tons a year of discarded food from the supermarkets in Sainsbury, England. The process generates a mixture of carbon dioxide and methane that is burnt for heat and power. The new process will save several million pounds a year in disposal costs.

The process of recycling is somewhat more complicated than first thought. Maximizing the benefits of recycling requires planning for how the materials will be used, and ultimately even planning when products are constructed to lessen the time and energy necessary to separate materials when the product is recycled.

The New Land Rush

2009-01-04T14:36:00.004-05:00

Last year's food crisis that saw record food prices and food riots around the world has touched off a rush by wealthy but food reliant nations to purchase farming land in poorer countries in South and Central Asia, Latin America, and East Africa. Countries such as China, Japan, South Korea and India have been buying up fertile farm land in order to secure their own food supplies.

China's serious water problems and creeping deserts led it to lease lands in Laos, Kazakhstan, Tanzania and Brazil. With $1.8 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, China has had ample funds to buy up land. Similar water problems in India led it to lease land in Burma which already supplies a quarter of its lentil imports. South Korea has secured farmland in Indonesia and Madagascar. South Korea is continuing to negotiate with Madagascar for a deal which would encompass half of Madagascar's arable land. Saudi Arabia has given up its efforts to feed itself and has plans to buy 400,000 hectares of land by early 2009 in Australia, Croatia, Egypt, Eritrea, India, Morocco, Pakistan, Philippines, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Ukraine and Vietnam.

The new land rush has sparked controversy in some of the selling countries. Calling the new land deals "neo-colonialism," the UN's top food expert Jaques Diouf has remarked that "Some negotiations [between host countries and the investors] have led to unequal international relations and short-term mercantilist agriculture." In Brazil, the government has become concerned that foreign groups' ownership of land was a "threat to sovereignty."

The possibility of resource wars has concerned many people who foresee growing shortages in coming years, but this new food colonialism has shown that there may be many ways that countries scramble to compete for scarce resources.

Revisiting "The Limits of Growth"

2008-12-13T20:01:00.003-05:00

The 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, was a pioneer in the use of computer modeling to predict the future. It ran a model using population, food production, industrial production, pollution, and consumption of non-renewable natural resources in an attempt to see how they would interact under a variety of different assumptions over the subsequent hundred years. It's essential conclusion was that continued growth in the global economy would lead to planetary limits being exceeded sometime in the 21st century, most likely resulting in the collapse of population and the economic system, though this was not a foregone conclusion if there were changes in behavior, policy or technology.

The book was bombarded with negative reviews, almost all of which seriously mis-characterized the book's argument. Reviews commonly made the false claim that The Limits of Growth had predicted that natural resources would be depleted and the world system collapse by the end of the 20th Century. These criticisms ignored the fact that the book made no specific predictions; it ran its computer model under a variety of different assumptions, some of which did not result in a collapse at all. Furthermore, the three main scenerios all showed the economy continuing to grow at the beginning of the 21st century.

More recently, a growing number of authors have taken a new look at The Limits of Growth and found that it's "business as usual" model, which assumed no major changes in behavior or policy, has been in remarkable agreement with the actual course of events. In 2000, oil industry analyst, Matt Simmons, published a paper asking, "Could the Club of Rome Have Been Correct After All?" in which he stated that the most amazing thing about the book was how accurate the basic trends it outlined were 30 years later. Just recently, Graham Turner published "A Comparison of The Limits of Growth with Thirty Years of Reality," which gives a more detailed comparison of book's "business as usual" scenario and the actual economic and environmental data of the past thirty years.

Why did critics of The Limits of Growth get it so wrong? Former World Bank economist, Herman Daily, sheds light on this by describing his efforts to get the ecosystem included in a World Bank report on sustainable development.

The first draft of its 1992 World Development Report, dedicated to sustainable development, contained a diagram labelled "the relation of the economy to the environment". It showed a rectangle labelled "economy", with an arrow entering it labelled "inputs" and an arrow exiting it labelled "outputs". That was it.

It was my job, as senior economist in the bank's environment department, to review the draft and offer suggestions. I said drawing such a picture was a great idea, but it really had to include the environment. As drawn, the economy was receiving inputs from nowhere and expelling outputs back to nowhere.

I suggested we draw a big circle around the economy and label it "ecosystem". Then it would be clear that the inputs represented resources taken from the ecosystem, and the outputs represented waste returned to it as pollution. This would allow us to raise fundamental questions, such as how big the economy can get before it overwhelms the total system.

When the second draft came back, a large unlabelled rectangle had been drawn around the original figure, like a picture frame. I complained that it changed nothing. In the third draft, the diagram was gone. The idea that economic growth should be constrained by the environment was too much for the World Bank in 1992, and still is today. The bank recognised that something must be wrong with that diagram - but better to omit it than deal with the inconvenient questions it raised.

The possibility that economic growth could end was a blind spot that traditional economics couldn't deal with. Daly writes that there is evidence that the global economy is approaching the limits of what our planet can cope with, and that, "As long as our economic system is based on chasing economic growth above all else, we are heading for environmental, and economic, disaster."

New Scientist magazine devoted its October, 2008 issue to the subject, "How Our Economy is Killing the Earth," arguing that science is telling us that, if we are serious about saving the Earth, we must fundamentally reshape our economy into a steady state economy. But an economic model with no growth heresy; nothing terrifies governments as much as the lack of economic growth.

Today the twin probelms of global warming and peak oil further challenge the idea that economic growth can continue indefinitely, and perhaps only for a very limited amount of time. The result is the rather grim conclusion that, although there are measures for us to take to avoid disaster, the specter of the end of growth still causes too much in denial for us to do the things necessary to change course.

Unconventional Natural Gas Sources Bring More Environmental Problems

2008-11-15T11:05:00.001-05:00

In 2004 and 2005 U.S. natural gas production went into decline as production at new wells could not keep up with depletion at older fields. Prices spiked causing plans for new gas fired power plants to be scrapped. Many observers thought that we had reach peak gas production in the U.S.

In the years since then, production has rebounded as more unconventional sources of gas have been exploited such as coal bed methane, and shale gas. According to the Energy Information Agency, unconventional gas sources have accounted for all of this growth.

But, while these new sources have allowed the supply of natural gas to grow, they have brought new problems of pollution with them. Another potential source of natural gas, methane hydrates, promises an even larger supply--if the technology can be mastered--but brings with it even larger dangers.

Coal bed methane requires pumping water from underground to release the methane. The process results in water high in salinity and sodium that is often dumped into nearby streams, where it can damage soil, crops and wildlife. In states such as Montana, coal bed methane production has caused controversy among farmers and ranchers who have their lands damaged by this water runoff.

Shale gas operations have caused even more problems because they require a process of hydraulic fracturing where large quantities of water, sand and chemicals are injected into the shale to break the rock up and release the gas. Serious episodes of water contamination near drilling sites has been documented in Alabama, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and Wyoming, which has resulted in a conflict between gas companies and government regulators trying to find out what chemicals are being used in the process.

Even graver risks may result from exploiting methane hydrates which are frozen water molecules that trap methane gas molecules. Enormous amounts of gas could potentially be recovered from methane hydrates trapped in reservoirs beneath the sea floor. The danger lies in the potential for the methane to be thawed and released into the atmosphere. Since methane is also a global warming gas, many times more potent than CO2, such an inadvertant release could result in disastrous climate change. One of the largest extinctions in Earth's history came some 50 million years ago when undersea landslides resulted in the release of methane gas, contributing to global warming that lasted tens of thousands of years.

All of these new sources of energy demonstrate another aspect of resource depletion; it's not only about running out of raw materials, its also about shifting to dirtier, harder to get, and more dangerous resources. With energy sources, in particular, it may seem as though we are continuing to meet demand while the hidden costs continually mount. These costs need to be addressed if we are to find a path to a more sustainable economy.

Water Problems Worsten

2008-11-07T17:33:00.001-05:00

Water shortages around the world continue to worsen, compounded by growing demand and increasing ecological damage that is lessening supply.

An estimated one billion people lack enough clean water to drink, and at least two billion lack the water to drink, clean and eat. Lack of water is a one cause of the millions of deaths each year from disease and malnutrition, chronic hunger.

So far, many countries have held the problem at bay by overusing fresh water from lakes or aquifers, and by importing virtual water in the form of food imports.

Industrialized countries are also starting to experience tight water supplies. The most dramatic example of this has been Australia where a six year drought has decimated its rice production--once a major source of supply for Asia. Drought has plagued other areas from California to Spain.

Water is becoming a critical issue for industries that once took its availability for granted. Scott Noesen, director of sustainability and business integration at Dow Chemical, claims that, "Everyone shares this water model where it's cheap, cheap, cheap—then unavailable. It's huge because we're trying to grow around the world, and where we want to grow often has issues of fresh water."

In the U.S. power generation is a major consumer of using almost as much water as agriculture which uses almost 40% of the 345 billion gallons of fresh water used per day.

In South Asia, water has become weapon that India has used against Pakistan. With as many as twelve dams either built or projected for the Chenab River, a vital lifeline for Pakistan. Pakistanis charge that India is using water as a strategic weapon against Pakistan, a country already reeling from hyper inflation, critical shortages of basic food and the ever worsening energy crisis.

Water will continue to be a serious health problem for the poor, while at the same time being a geopolitical weapon between countries, and possibly--like oil-- becoming the focal point for future wars

Urban mining

2008-08-22T16:23:00.001-04:00

A tonne of cell phones contains more gold than a tonne of ore from a typical gold mine. An average gold mine produces 5 grams of gold per tonne of rock whereas cell phones contain 150 grams or more per tonne. In addition a tonne of cell phones contains 100 kg of copper and 3 kg of silver, as well as other valuable metals—all of which have been soaring in price.

The quantity of precious metals to be found in discarded electric devices has led to a new phenomenon—urban mining—which seeks to recover these increasingly valuable resources before they are sent to a landfill. The company Eco-Systems in Japan—which has few natural resources—is trying to recover these precious metals from the tens of millions of cell phones and other electronic gadgets that are thrown away every year. Says Nozumo Yamanaka, manager of Eco-Systems, “To some it’s a mountain of garbage, but for others it’s a gold mine.”

Hazel Prichard, a geologist at the University of Cardiff, is working on ways to collect platinum—which comes off of catalytic converters in cars—from the dust that is collected by street sweepers. "I get excited every time I see a street cleaner," she says. Platinum is a vital component not only of catalytic converters but also of fuel cells - and
supplies are running out. It has been estimated that if all the 500 million vehicles in use today were re-equipped with fuel cells, all the world's sources of platinum would be exhausted within 15 years.

The same goes for many other rare metals such as indium, which is being consumed in unprecedented quantities for making LCDs for flat-screen TVs, and the tantalum needed to make compact electronic devices like cell phones.

The metal gallium, which along with indium is used to make indium gallium arsenide, is the semi-conducting material at the heart of a new generation of solar cells that promise to be up to twice as efficient as conventional designs.

That is why the efforts of people like Hazel Prichard to find ways to urban mine these precious metals is of vital importance to any technological fix for the looming problems of peak oil and global warming.

Perennial Polyculture Farming

2008-07-01T20:44:00.000-04:00

For three decades, the Land Institute has been working to create a sustainable system of agriculture that is patterned after nature itself, that is, in the words of Director Wes Jackson, “more resilient to human folly.”

In Jackson’s eyes, modern agriculture wages war on nature. Every year erosion eats away 5.5 tons of soil for every acre of farmland in the U.S. Petrochemical based fertilizers and pesticides kill the soils fertility.

The land Institute’s Kansas farm is working to reverse this damage by developing cropping systems that mimic the prairie. Rather than planting annual crops, Jackson and the Institute are developing perennial crops that need no plowing or planting. A farm that looked like the prairie would require fewer inputs by farmers, allowing them to keep more of the profit. It would feature a mixture of crops that could be harvested from the early spring to late fall; and perhaps most importantly, it would regenerate the soil into a thriving ecosystem.

The main problem farming with perennials is that they must devote more energy into building a larger root system and have less energy for growing seeds, thus have a lower food yield. Researchers at the Land Institute and several universities are searching for varieties of perennials whose yields can compete with annual crops. The Land Institute has had some success with wheat, sorghum, and sunflowers by cross breeding perennial strains with annual strains. Some lines of wheat have been developed that yield 70% of the best annual varieties.

Perennials are hardier than annuals and more resistant to weeds once they are established. In addition they contain stronger resistance to disease. A polycrop field, imitating the prairie, further increases resistance to disease since each type of plant is further separated making the spread of disease more difficult.

Designing farms in the image of nature would be a second agricultural revolution. Wes Jackson believes that the first agricultural revolution was the beginning of our estrangement from nature, and claims that, “It is fitting then that the healing of our culture begin with agriculture."

A good write up on the Land Institute can be found in Biomimicry.

Water Footprints and Virtual Water

2008-06-02T21:58:00.000-04:00

Between increasing agricultural demand and changing climate patterns, water resources are increasingly coming under stress. Countries such as India and China pump more water for agriculture than is replenished. China has effectively run out of water. The Yellow River rarely reaches to the sea anymore, while hundreds of villages have had to relocate because their water supply disappeared. Indian farmers pump 250 cubic kilometers of water a year for irrigation while only 150 cubic kilometers is replaced by rainfall. In Australia, six years of drought have eliminated most of that countries ability to export foods. In the U.S. Southwest, a rapidly growing population combined with decreasing rainfalls has created great stress over the distribution of water supplies.

In order to get a better idea of the world’s water use, the concept of the water footprint was introduced in 2002 as a way of measuring the total volume of fresh water used to produce the goods and services consumed by a nation. The water footprint includes the water content of goods imported into the country minus goods exported. Water used to produced goods for export is called virtual water. Major water exporters include The United States, Canada, Austria, Argentina, and Thailand. Major importers of virtual water include Japan, Sri Lanka, Italy, South Korea, and the Netherlands. Trade in virtual water is estimated to be around a thousand cubic kilometers a year—the equivalent of 20 river Niles. Much of this trade is going to the wealthy nations from countries that are over pumping their ground water.

India and China and the U.S. have the largest water footprints, consuming 13%, 12%, and 9% respectively of the world total. The U.S. has the largest per capita footprint, at 2480 cubic meters of water per person per year, more than three times that of India and China. A major factor contributing to the U.S.’s high per capita foot print is its high level of meat consumption. One hamburger, for example, requires 2400 liters of water to produce. A pair of leather shoes uses 8000 liters. On the other hand, a slice of bread only requires 40 liters.

Climate change and overuse of ground water are impacting the water footprints of some countries. The amount of the earth’s surface that is suffering drought has more than doubled in the past 30 years, partially the result of rising temperatures. Severe droughts have plagued both in China and Australia. Before its six year drought began, Australia was a major rice exporter. Now its rice crop has declined by 90%. India, China and Pakistan pump an estimated 400 kilometers of water a year from the ground, about twice the amount that is replenished by rainfall. Even as India depletes its aquifers, it remains a major exporter of water, through its food exports.

At the same time, fresh-water consumption worldwide has more than doubled since World War II to nearly 4,000 cubic kilometers annually and set to rise another 25 percent by 2030, says a 2007 report by the Zurich-based Sustainable Asset Management group investment firm. Up to triple that is available for human use, so there should be plenty, the report says. But waste, climate change, and pollution have left clean water supplies running short.

India, which faces some of the worst water shortages, and which is still a net exporter of virtual water, has adopted some of the most innovative ways to increase its water supply by harvesting rainwater. India’s monsoon weather results in large amounts of evaporation and runoff so India has returned to an age old practice of harvesting the rainwater. By adopting the very simple technology of harnessing rainwater, some villages have solved the perennial problem of drought.

The village of Rajsamadhiya has used rainwater harvesting to turn a near-desert landscape with empty wells into a land of trees and ponds, full wells and abundant crops. While other nearby villages rely on government water tankers to provide drinking water, Rajsamadhiya has been self sufficient for more than 10 years.

Rajsamadhiya is an example for the rest of the world which will have to face the consequences of resource exhaustion. They have found their salvation in simple, energy efficient technologies, resurrected from older times and implemented on a community level. Less and local has rewarded them with a new abundance of food and prosperity.

The Food Crisis

2008-04-18T16:59:00.005-04:00

Reports of food shortages, food riots, and dwindling stockpiles have burst into the media in recent weeks, though warnings have been around for some time that diminishing farmland, climate change, and more recently the diversion of cropland to biofuels, would inevitably collide with growing populations, growing wealth, and the growth of grain intensive meat eating.

With consumption outstripping growth for six of the past seven years, grain stockpiles have fallen to their lowest levels since world wide record keeping began in 1960. In the United States, wheat stockpiles are at 60 year lows.

Rice has been particularly hard hit. Two years of severe drought in Australia, formerly a major rice exporter, have virtually eliminated the country's rice crop, while a plant disease has cut production in Vietnam. Since rice is the major source of food for many of the world's poor, these losses have had serious consequences.

Food riots have already toppled the government of Haiti. Shortages and price increases have caused unrest in India, Egypt, Indonesia, Peru, Haiti, Pakistan, Thailand, Burkino Faso, and Mauritania. The World Bank estimates that 33 countries face possible social unrest because of increasing food and energy prices. The U.N. proclaims that we are entering a new era of hunger.

The food and energy crises are unfolding in very similar ways; prices are rising in the world's richer countries while the poorer countries are experiencing shortages. Part of the problem comes from growing control over world food production by a handful of multinational corporations which is magnifying the problems in poorer countries. These corporations have chased indigenous peoples off their lands in South America, Indonesia and parts of the Far East, using tactics that range all the way up to murder. Jungle and rain forest land has been slashed and burned to make way for new plantations.

People in richer nations spend a smaller portion of their income on food so they are not as impacted by price rises. However they will not be immune from the problem indefinitely. The U.S. food supply is vulnerable in the event of disaster. Most of the nation's grain supply is shipped around the country on only two railroads, while little is stored in the event of disaster.

In both the cases of food and energy, the country has been asleep to the serious problems that loom ahead.

Peak Minerals

2008-03-23T19:59:00.000-04:00

Peak oil is slowly seeping into the public consciousness, although it hasn't yet gotten the recognition that global warming has. Dramatic increases in food prices have brought the issues of food scarcity and trade offs between food and biofuels to the fore. But the production capacity for other minerals has not been studied extensively.

Now an Australian study by Dr Gavin Mudd in conjunction with the Mineral Policy Institute has taken an exhaustive look at Australain mining data and given some hard statistical evidence for peak production of minerals.

The report, the first to ever compile quantitative evidence on various mining trends, shows that ore grades continue to decline, solid wastes are increasing exponentially, and economic resources for many key strategic minerals such as coal and iron ore appear to have plateaued; some minerals such as gold and copper have gradually increased over time but this is proving harder to maintain as ore grades decline and deposits move deeper.

Another study by Ugo Bardi and Marco Pagani of the University of Florence, Italy, examined the world production of 57 minerals reported in the database of the United States Geological Survey. Of these, eleven has clearly reached peak production and are now declining. Several more may be peaking or be close to peaking. Furthermore the Hubbert model for peak oil seemed to fit these other minerals as well.

U.S. imports of these minerals continue to grow. Some alternative energy technologies such as fuel cells require rare minerals. Any planning for the future that does consider resource limitations is certain to fail. Conservation and recycling of these minerals--efforts that will need to be planned in to any future use--are the only ways around an otherwise disastrous collapse.

The Limits of Biofuels

2008-02-12T20:06:00.000-05:00

The use of biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels has exploded in the last few years, as oil production has plateaued. In the past six years the amount of land devoted to biofuels has risen from 12 million hectares to 80 million hectares.

At the same time world population continues to grow by 70 million a year while countries like India and China are increasingly switching to a higher protein, meat diet that requires more grain. The result has been soaring commodity prices, threatening more vulnerable regions of the world with the risk of food shortages.

Demand for biofuels has also resulted in charges of human rights abuses. A report by Friends of the Earth and indigenous rights groups claims that millions of hectares of Indonesian forests have been cleared to meet the growing demand for palm oil. As many as 90 million indigenous peoples who rely on the forests are losing their land to the palm oil companies. The report charges that the companies often use violent tactics to force natives off their land.

The push for biofuels began with a laudable desire to decrease use of oil and reduce carbon emissions, but the results show that present methods of producing biofuels soon run into serious human and environmental costs. This alternative to oil is already reaching its limits.

Coal Supply Squeeze

2008-01-25T13:00:00.000-05:00

Recent cold weather around the world has put a squeeze on coal supplies, sending prices upward. The rare snowfall in Baghdad reflected a bitter cold snap across much of Asia and Europe. As a result, coal stocks in China have dwindled to emergency levels, possibly a foretaste of things to come. In spite of having massive coal reserves, China became a net importer of coal in 2007. China and India are expected to need 170 million metric tonnes of imports by 2030.

Power shortages in recently shut production at coal mines in South Africa, supplier of a quarter of Europe's energy coal, while rains disrupted mining in Australia, the world's biggest coal exporter, sending prices soaring. In addition, U.S. coal shipments were cut in the beginning of January when a pier in the Port of Baltimore partially collapsed.

These developments only highlight the limits of coal supply, which until recently had been expected to last for centuries. Estimates of global coal resources have been downgraded from 10 trillion tons in 1980 to around 4.5 trillion tons in 2005. In Germany and the U.K., estimates of coal reserves have been revised downward by 90%.

A paper by the Energy Watch Group earlier this year concluded that supply data was of poor quality, pointing to the regular downgrading of reserve estimates. In the United States, declining production of the highest quality coal has meant that, in terms of energy production, U.S. coal is already in decline. Production worldwide is expected to grow for another 10 to 15 years before going into permanent decline.

Rail Revival?

2007-12-21T16:24:00.000-05:00

Railroads are posed to stage a comeback. U.S. railroad miles peaked at 380,000 in 1920s, then went into decline as the interstate highway system and the motor carrier industry provided competition. By 2006, railroads had abandoned nearly 70% of its track, with only 120,000 miles of track left.

Recently, however, rail transport has been making something of a comeback, as rising fuel prices, concern over global warming and fuel supplies, and traffic congestion, have brought energy efficiency to the fore. A 2000 study by the Oak Ridge national Laboratory found that intercity rail was the second most efficient mode of passenger traffic, surpassed only by intercity bus service.

This month, the national Surface transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission recommended a $357.2 billion investment in rail by 2050 to significantly expand intercity passenger rail service by 2050, citing safety, energy efficiency, and as an alternative to driving.

At the same time, other countries are exploring even more energy efficient forms of rail travel. Earlier this year Japan unveiled a clean energy hybrid prototype that uses a battery powered motor at low speeds. Japan has plans to run a hybrid tram in Tokyo, although they are still trying to modify and improve the hybrid train's performance.

In the U.S., a popular program in recent years has been the rails-to-trails movement that has converted abandoned railway right of ways into bicycle and hiking trails. But with the resurgence of interest in rail traffic, rails-to-trails has come into conflict with possible future rail development. In California, a long planned coastal hiking a and biking trail, envisioned as an alternative to auto traffic, has run into a roadblock as the state transportation agency--trying to balance the demands on the rail corridor--waits for rail plans that could include a high speed train system reaching from Sacramento to San Diego.

Although these developments are largely under the radar now, rail transportation is very likely to become increasingly important in the future as an efficient alternative to highway traffic.

Rainwater Management and Harvesting

2007-11-23T10:31:00.000-05:00

With the increasing frequency and severity of droughts, compounded by growing population and urbanization, the issue of water management and rainwater harvesting are receiving more attention. Projections that two thirds of the world's population will be affected by water scarcity in coming decades make the issue particularly urgent.

A paper by the Stockholm International Water Institute divides water scarcity into three categories; demand driven (use to availability), population driven (water crowding), or temporary scarcity (drought).

Demand driven scarcity can be mitigated by reducing wasteful water use—cutting leaks in supply systems, losses in irrigation, reducing excessive household use, and cleaning up pollution.

Population driven scarcity requires reallocation, raw water transfers from other basins, water desalination, the use of groundwater through pipelines, and bulk water imports.

Temporary scarcity can be mitigated by water storage, resource allocation, rainwater harvesting, and the use of terracing in irrigated agriculture.

Water shortages around the world today tend to involve a combination of these factors as population increase, industrial development and climate change combine to stress existing water systems. Paved surface areas in growing urban areas increase the amount of water that flows directing into streams, reducing the amount refreshing aquifers. Demand increases while local supplies are stressed.

The situation in the U.S. Southeast and Southwest are slightly different. The Southeast, accustomed to plentiful rainwater, now finds itself in a record drought, having to cut back on traditionally higher levels of water usage. The Southwest, with fewer water resources, began with lower water usage per capita, but population growth and a stubborn drought, also finds its water resources strained. Urbanization aggravates the problem in both areas.

Urban runoff problems can be reduced through the use of raingardens and green roofs which reduce rainwater runoff by collecting and storing stormwater so that it can infiltrate the soil. These methods also reduce the amount of pollutants that are washed into rivers and lakes.

Rainwater harvesting collects rainwater in containers of various sizes, from rain barrels attached to gutter downspouts, to much larger containers geared toward supplying landscape irrigation needs.

In the southwest, rangelands of scrub brush, grasslands, marsh areas and deserts are common environments. Here, around forty percent of all rainwater evaporates directly back into the atmosphere, while only a little over one percent recharges aquifers. Proper management of the rangelands can have a major impact on the amount of water available for human use.

Worldwide, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), best known for its programs to help cities reduce their global warming emissions, launched a water campaign in June, 2000, to work with local governments to reduce water consumption, pollution, and systems loss. The campaign has been particularly successful in Australia, in response to the record droughts of recent years. Some localities now have extensive rainwater harvesting programs, expanding the use of collected water to toilets and other uses.

More public education is needed as water stresses continue to grow in coming years.

Resource exhaustion--the human price

2007-11-04T09:59:00.000-05:00

Richard Heinberg's new book, Peak Everything, expands on the widely discussed possibility that we are reaching the world's peak potential for oil production, suggesting that other critical metals are approaching peak as well, including copper, platinum, silver, gold, and zinc. At the same time, the U.S. has become ever more dependent on mineral imports, with the value of mineral imports increasing from $4 billion in 1993 to $29 billion in 2000.

Constant exploitation has exhausted the richest ore deposits. Just as one example, U.S. copper mines in the 1920s worked with copper ores as rich as 20 to 30%. By 2000, copper ores of 0.3% to 1% were being mined.

The combination of increasing demand with declining yields has resulted in an ever growing pressure on developing countries to open up potential mining areas to access by western companies--many of which are located in indigenous or tribal areas. Anthropologist John Bodley, quoted in Resource Rebels, bluntly states that;

The disappearance of tribal cultures over much of the world in the past 150 years can be seen as the direct result of government policies designed to facilitate the exploitation of tribal resources for the health of industrial civilization.

Last week, I visited a gold mine site in Honduras that exemplifies many of the problems resulting from the pressures to produce more ore from poorer deposits. The San Martin Mine in the Siria Valley, operated by the Canadian company, Goldcorp, has been producing around one gram of gold ore per metric tonne of rock mined. Achieving this requires blasting half of a mountain into rubble, grinding the rock into finer pieces and then pouring a solution of water and cyanide over the resulting piles to leach the gold from the rock.

Cyanide leach mining has a history of disastrous accidents. A spill in Romania in 2000 resulted in dead rivers and polluted lands. In 1995, a tailings pond at the Omai mine in Guyana, gave way, spilling more than 800 million gallons of wastewater laced with cyanide and heavy metals into Guyana's biggest river, resulting in a major environmental disaster. Accidents such as these have lead the state of Montana to outlaw cyanide leach mining, with other state and national governments attempting to follow suit.

None of this has stopped mining companies from pursuing new ventures, such as the San Martin Mine mine. The mine began production in 2000. Indigenous villages in the area were moved to other land owned by the company and given fake land titles. Health problems soon appeared due to the blasting which spread dust contaminated with heavy metals into nearby villages. Over the years the mine has been in operation, nearby inhabitants have experienced a variety of skin and bronchial ailments. The incidence of miscarriage and birth defects has risen.

On top of medical problems, the mine's tremendous demand for water has dried up streams in the area, forcing the natives to rely on drilled wells, many of which have proven to be contaminated by heavy metal residues from the mine.

Honduran activists who have worked for mining reforms have had their lives threatened and their investigations blocked. In January 2005, the Honduran Office of the Special Prosecutor on the Environment called for a judicial investigation of the company for environmental crimes, forest crimes and water usurpation, but nothing has come of this.

The Honduran mine is scheduled to be closed in a few years, however Goldcorp has opened a new mine in Guatemala that is already showing some of the same problems experienced by the San Martin Mine.

I think it is important for people in developed countries to put a human face on the sacrifices made by indigenous peoples in the mad scramble to feed the ever growing appetite for raw materials. It presents yet another reason to work for a more sustainable, less wasteful economy.

Climate Change and Drought in the U.S.

2007-10-23T13:31:00.000-04:00

Over the past five years the entire southern half of the United States has had to deal with record droughts, though the circumstances have varied by region. The Southwest has experienced a nearly continuous dry spell. Texas went through one of its worst droughts on record in 2005 and 2006 only to be inundated this year; and the Southeast, which was drenched by a record hurricane season in 2005, is now experiencing an exceptional drought that has left many areas with only a few months of water supply on hand. All of these droughts are aggravated by the population growth that the sunbelt has experienced in recent decades.

Unlike the Southwest, which where a desert conditions have always required water planning, the Southeast now finds itself with dangerously low water supplies and no backup plan should the drought continue. Only Florida has passed a water plan. Atlanta's population has tripled since 1960; Georgia's water use increased by 30 percent between 1990 and 2000 alone--but its response to the worst drought on record has been surprisingly slow, typified by the plans at one outdoor theme park to build a 1.2 million gallon mountain of snow on a day when temperatures reached 81 degrees.

The American Southwest, more accustomed to dry conditions, has a better track record of water management; but this region finds changing weather patterns rendering their old assumptions obsolete.

The great dam and reservoir projects of the twentieth century gave the region a half century of surplus capacity, allowing agriculture to flourish and cities to expand. Now that surplus is gone--every drop is already allocated--and a persistent drought is threatening to deplete existing supplies. At the same time global warming is melting the mountain snow packs that provide a major source of fresh water.

Cities in the Southwest are now scrambling to find ways to conserve and reuse water supplies. The city of Aurora, Colorado has pioneered a method of installing wells downstream from their wastewater plants to retrieve the water, purify it and reuse it the first such closed loop in the U.S.

In the long run, however, there is little that can be done to support ever increasing populations in the U.S. South especially when one considers that the South lies astride the 30th parallel, where many of the Earth's deserts exist, due to air currents that rise at the equator and descend at the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Climate models project that these areas will get even dryer. What we are seeing now may be the leading edge of that trend. In any event, the rapid population growth of the sunbelt states is likely to hit a roadblock in the imminent future.

Localization: Some Success Stories

2007-10-02T09:51:00.000-04:00

There are a number of important examples of economies going local, either out of necessity or desire. Most of these are in lesser developed countries but even in the U.S., quality local foods are making headway against the long distance food chains.

Perhaps the best known of these efforts was the adoption of urban agriculture in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union cut off most of that country's oil and food imports. As seen in the movie The Power of Community, Cuba turned to urban farming, cleaning up idle land in the cities to use as gardens. Helped by Australian permaculturists, who set up the Foundation for Nature and Humanity, urban gardening quickly spread to rooftops, patios and raised garden beds on parking lots. The loss of oil forced them to turn to bio-pesticides and bio-fertilizers. Now Havana produces half of all the vegetables it consumes within the city limits, while other towns and cities produce all that they need. This produce is sold in newly allowed private markets that provide a thriving, year round business.

India has several examples of communal businesses that have spread across the country. Vanda Shiva describes an organization of women who make the Indian snack Lijjat Papad. Growing out of a small group of women in Gurgaum looking for a source of income, the organization now has 63 branches around the country, and 3 billion rupees in yearly sales. What is most remarkable is that the organization has no hierarchy or leadership, but rather considers itself a family and even a place of worship, built around the principles of common ownership, non-discrimination, voluntarism, autonomy, and ethical business practices.

Another self-organized business, the Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association, delivers 175,000 lunch boxes each day over 28 miles of public transportation. Raghunath Maharaj, its president, claims that, "No one in the association is an employee or employer, all are partners and all are co-owners." The delivery network consists of decentralized units of 15 to 25 individuals, which rely on a coding system that tells where each tiffin box was picked up, the originating and destination stations, and the address to which it is delivered. Once a month, the association holds a meeting to resolve disputes and problems.

In the U.S. the beginnings of a relocalization can be seen in the recent growth in the number of farmers markets, consumer supported agriculture, and in campaigns such as the "100 Mile Diet." While especially strong in California--the bay area alone has some 90 farmers markets--the growth of these markets is a nationwide phenomena. Nationwide, the number of markets has tripled in the last decade to nearly 4,500 with over a billion dollars in yearly sales.

The pressure of necessity has forces dramatic moves toward local, environmentally sustainable economies in some parts of the world. Even iU.S., where necessity is still a haunting future reality, a growing awareness of our limits is bringing the beginnings of a return to local economic organization.