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The train is picking up speed…

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Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere have risen 35% faster than expected since 2000, says a study.

International scientists found that inefficiency in the use of fossil fuels increased levels of CO2 by 17%.

The other 18% came from a decline in the natural ability of land and oceans to soak up CO2 from the atmosphere.

About half of emissions from human activity are absorbed by natural “sinks” but the efficiency of these sinks has fallen, the study suggests.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), was carried out by the Global Carbon Project, the University of East Anglia, UK, and the British Antarctic Survey.

It found that improvements in the carbon intensity of the global economy have stalled since 2000, leading to an unexpected jump in atmospheric CO2.

“In addition to the growth of global population and wealth, we now know that significant contributions to the growth of atmospheric CO2 arise from the slow-down of natural sinks and the halt to improvements in the carbon intensity of wealth production,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project.

More… ➡

– I first read Lester R. Brown’s Plan B – rescuing a planet under stress and a Civilization in Trouble ➡ in 2002 along with four or five other books of a similar ilk.

– A year of two later, I also read his next book, Plan B 2.0 – rescuing a planet under stress and a Civilization in Trouble ➡

– It was the same information in more detail and updated to reflect changing conditions and better data.

– These were sobering books and essentially changed the course of my personal life as they convinced me more than anything else I’d ever read that mankind and our civilization are in deep trouble and that most of humanity hasn’t recognized the gravity of the situation yet.

– Below, is an excerpt from Plan B 2.0 which has been adapted from Chapter 1 of the book.

– Read this and then reflect that this information has been out on the table in plain sight for years – and still we, our civilization, our governments and all of us in aggregate, advance into the future much as we always have. We are bound for a global disaster and largely ignorant or in deep denial of the fact.

– This isn’t just some interesting intellectual stuff, folks. This is your future bearing down on you and those you love. You should begin to think about what you can do about it to (1) get those you love out of harm’s way and (2) join in the efforts many of us are making to wake others up to what’s going on around us.

– What Brown writes about so eloquently, below, is indeed the Perfect Storm I have been describing for some time now. If you have not been persuaded by my description – read his, please.

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Lester R. Brown

We recently entered a new century, but we are also entering a new world, one where the collisions between our demands and the earth’s capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. It may be another crop-withering heat wave, another village abandoned because of invading sand dunes, or another aquifer pumped dry. If we do not act quickly to reverse the trends, these seemingly isolated events will occur more and more frequently, accumulating and combining to determine our future.

Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are being consumed in a single human lifespan. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. These deadlines, determined by nature, are not politically negotiable.

Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late. In our fast-forward world, we learn that we have crossed them only after the fact, leaving little time to adjust. For example, when we exceed the sustainable catch of a fishery, the stocks begin to shrink. Once this threshold is crossed, we have a limited time in which to back off and lighten the catch. If we fail to meet this deadline, breeding populations shrink to where the fishery is no longer viable, and it collapses.

We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of economic decline were environmental, not economic. The trees went first, then the soil, and finally the civilization itself. To archeologists, the sequence is all too familiar.

Our situation today is far more challenging because in addition to shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with falling water tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful storms, disappearing species, and, soon, shrinking oil supplies. Although these ecologically destructive trends have been evident for some time, and some have been reversed at the national level, not one has been reversed at the global level.

The bottom line is that the world is in what ecologists call an “overshoot-and-collapse” mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable yield of natural systems at the local level countless times in the past. Now, for the first time, it is doing so at the global level. Forests are shrinking for the world as a whole. Fishery collapses are widespread. Grasslands are deteriorating on every continent. Water tables are falling in many countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions exceed CO2 sequestration.

In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, who now heads the Global Footprint Network, concluded that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. Their study, published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, estimated that global demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20 percent. The gap, growing by 1 percent or so a year, is now much wider. We are meeting current demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.

In a rather ingenious approach to calculating the human physical presence on the planet, Paul MacCready, the founder and Chairman of AeroVironment and designer of the first solar-powered aircraft, has calculated the weight of all vertebrates on the land and in the air. He notes that when agriculture began, humans, their livestock, and pets together accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the total. Today, he estimates, this group accounts for 98 percent of the earth’s total vertebrate biomass, leaving only 2 percent for the wild portion, the latter including all the deer, wildebeests, elephants, great cats, birds, small mammals, and so forth.

Ecologists are intimately familiar with the overshoot-and-collapse phenomenon. One of their favorite examples began in 1944, when the Coast Guard introduced 29 reindeer on remote St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea to serve as the backup food source for the 19 men operating a station there. After World War II ended a year later, the base was closed and the men left the island. When U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist David Kline visited St. Matthew in 1957, he discovered a thriving population of 1,350 reindeer feeding on the thick mat of lichen that covered the 332-square-kilometer (128-square-mile) island. In the absence of any predators, the population was exploding. By 1963, it had reached 6,000. He returned to St. Matthew in 1966 and discovered an island strewn with reindeer skeletons and not much lichen. Only 42 of the reindeer survived: 41 females and 1 not entirely healthy male. There were no fawns. By 1980 or so, the remaining reindeer had died off.

Like the deer on St. Matthew Island, we too are overconsuming our natural resources. Overshoot leads sometimes to decline and sometimes to a complete collapse. It is not always clear which it will be. In the former, a remnant of the population or economic activity survives in a resource-depleted environment. For example, as the environmental resource base of Easter Island in the South Pacific deteriorated, its population declined from a peak of 20,000 several centuries ago to today’s population of fewer than 4,000. In contrast, the 500-year-old Norse settlement in Greenland collapsed during the 1400s, disappearing entirely in the face of environmental adversity.

Even as the global population is climbing and the economy’s environmental support systems are deteriorating, the world is pumping oil with reckless abandon. Leading geologists now think oil production may soon peak and turn downward. Although no one knows exactly when oil production will peak, supply is already lagging behind demand, driving prices upward.

Faced with a seemingly insatiable demand for automotive fuel, farmers will want to clear more and more of the remaining tropical forests to produce sugarcane, oil palms, and other high-yielding biofuel crops. Already, billions of dollars of private capital are moving into this effort. In effect, the rising price of oil is generating a massive new threat to the earth’s biological diversity.

As the demand for farm commodities climbs, it is shifting the focus of international trade concerns from the traditional goal of assured access to markets to one of assured access to supplies. Countries heavily dependent on imported grain for food are beginning to worry that buyers for fuel distilleries may outbid them for supplies. As oil security deteriorates, so, too, will food security.

As the role of oil recedes, the process of globalization will be reversed in fundamental ways. As the world turned to oil during the last century, the energy economy became increasingly globalized, with the world depending heavily on a handful of countries in the Middle East for energy supplies. Now as the world turns to wind, solar cells, and geothermal energy in this century, we are witnessing the localization of the world energy economy.

The world is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcity, which is already highly visible in the efforts by China, India, and other developing countries to ensure their access to oil supplies. In the future, the issue will be who gets access to not only Middle Eastern oil but also Brazilian ethanol and North American grain. Pressures on land and water resources, already excessive in most of the world, will intensify further as the demand for biofuels climbs. This geopolitics of scarcity is an early manifestation of civilization in an overshoot-and-collapse mode, much like the one that emerged among the Mayan cities competing for food in that civilization’s waning years.

You do not need to be an ecologist to see that if recent environmental trends continue, the global economy eventually will come crashing down. It is not knowledge that we lack. At issue is whether national governments can stabilize population and restructure the economy before time runs out.

# # # # #

Adapted from Chapter 1, “Entering a New World,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB2/index.htm

Additional information at www.earthpolicy.org

Media & Permissions to Reprint Contact:
Reah Janise Kauffman
Tel: (202) 496-9290 x 12
E-mail: rjk (at) earthpolicy.org

Research Contact:
Janet Larsen
Tel: (202) 496-9290 x 14
E-mail: jlarsen (at) earthpolicy.org

Earth Policy Institute
1350 Connecticut Ave. NW, Suite 403
Washington, DC 20036
Web: www.earthpolicy.org

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– As an interesting and indicative postscript: I bought 25 copies of Brown’s second book, Plan B 2.0, and handed them out to our Mayor, to everyone on our city’s City Council, to everyone on the City’s Planning Commission and to several of the city’s senior planning staff. In the end, I think I got a ‘thank you;’ from two or three of these folks. As for the rest, I might as well have thrown a stone into a lake on a moonless night. My wife said that most folks don’t really like to have ideas pushed at them in the form of books. Apparently, that’s true – and unfortunate. Because these ideas are far bigger than any of our small egos and preconceptions.

I have some great friends that I correspond with privately via E-mail. We have great raging discussions about all of the same stuff that I frequently post about here on Samadhisoft.

But I’ve noticed that these private conversations are qualitatively different that what I and other bloggers post.

I think when we post as Bloggers, we’re trying to muster our points while speaking into a silence that probably won’t reply. And, we’re also aware that what ever we post will be out there for a long time unless we go and pull it down. I think it causes a kind of formality and stiffness in what we put out there.

Our private conversations, however, are much more nuanced and subtle. We know what our readers can deal with, we know what’s been discussed previously, we know that a response is highly likely and we know that the half-life of what we say can probably be measured in hours. Conversations like this, even when slowed by E-mail exchange speeds, still flow and ebb organically.

Most of the time, my private correspondents prefer to keep our conversations private so that no one has to worry about doing themselves harm through and excess of candor. But, recently my friend and correspondent, LA Heberlein (www.heberlein.net), wrote a fine and thoughtful review and reaction to a new movie called The 11th Hour and he’s agreed to my sharing it here.

Personally, I wish that more of what we do in our on-line Blogging was of this quality.

Here’s LA:

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Every now and again I reflect back on something Dennis talked about one day at lunch after watching the David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago. The emotional experience of identifying with those characters was so profoundly moving, he wondered why our writers haven’t been able to create a similar experience which would wake everyone up to the emergencies in our biosphere. If everyone could go to the movies on Friday night and walk out feeling as strongly for the fate of humanity on earth as we feel for Lara, Dennis postulated, maybe they’d go out and do something.

(Lord knows I’ve tried. And failed. I haven’t even been able to get my 1996 ecological novel published, let alone see it transform America’s consciousness.)

I find myself restive at NPR’s series “This I Believe.” I imagine submitting a testimonial in response: Believing is easy. Anybody can believe. The human mind is way too hardwired to believe. The average American probably has 42,000 palpably erroneous beliefs about the operation of common household appliances. Don’t let’s even get started on metaphysics. What we need isn’t more list of things people believe. What we need is people willing to suspend their belief-making apparatus and say, “I don’t know, let’s see if we can frame a testable hypothesis.” Belief is what got us here, it won’t get us out. Still, one does tend after a few years on the planet to accumulate a bag of heuristics which one doesn’t subject to daily testing, just “believing” that because you’ve seen it work that way enough, this time it will probably come out the same way again. In that way, if I did have to list some set of “beliefs,” way high on the list would be the heuristic that for any human problem, education is a main part of the answer. I know you can list counterexamples. But, even in cases where education by itself is insufficient, it’s certainly a necessary part of anything that is sufficient.

So I watched with interest to see what effect Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth would have. And I think we’d have to say that it nudged the consciousness. X percent of Americans knew what was in the movie and weren’t affected. Y percent rejected the message entirely, preferring to see it as a political ploy on behalf of those whose politics they do not favor. But Z percent took in the message, heard things they hadn’t heard, internalized the concepts, and were more attentive thereafter to other information whose significance they might previously have missed, more open thereafter to arguments for action. And Z was not a small number.

I anticipated the arrival in theaters of The 11th Hour, an environmental wake-up movie produced by and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, partly in hopes that, since it was not associated with a partisan politician, perhaps Y would be a smaller number. But my guess is that, even though it’s not a terrible movie, its Z will approximate 0. One reason for this is that, even though Gore was tainted with the stain of a political party, he has more gravitas than a Hollywood pretty boy. And even though DiCaprio has been turning into a really pretty interesting actor (c.f. Blood Diamonds), he’s still associated with youth, and in any event lacks any standing to bring serious issues before us. A second reason is that the film tries to do too much. Admittedly, the crises in the biosphere are many, and if you start pulling on any thread, you find it related to all the other threads, but in order to tell a convincing story, you would have to artificially isolate one thread. The 11th Hour tries to summarize everything, so it’s a 10,000-foot flyover, breathless, like the Monty Python 30-second “Summarize Proust” contest. The biggest reason for the failure, though, especially by comparison with Gore’s movie, is the lack of focused intention. Gore has given his slide lecture hundreds of times. He has learned what works, what questions audiences will have at what point in the presentation. So at that point in the presentation, he stops and addresses that question. This movie is a one-shot which has not had the chance to benefit from a similar refinement toward a goal.

The film has some big-budget footage, some beautiful landscape photography, and some Koyaanisqatsi moments that try to show the crazed frantic out-of-balance effect of human activity on the landscape. But the most interesting parts for me were talking heads. The writer/directors have assembled a group of people I loved listening to: Sylvia Earle, Mikhail Gorbachev, Paul Hawken, Stephen Hawking, Bill McKibben, David Suzuki, Andrew Weil, James Woolsey. But again, I would have preferred a movie that gave me one of these people, and let them reason and explain at length.

The favorite discovery for me was Thom Hartmann. Alan, I’m sure that you’re quite familiar with his work. Hartmann would peg the meter on the quality I was ascribing above to Gore. He has explained this so many times that he knows exactly the words to bring it across. “Here, let me show you,” he seems to say, in a calm voice you instantly trust. For tens of thousands of years, humans had to live on an annual solar budget. They couldn’t spend more energy in a year than the energy they harvested from the sun that year. Then about a hundred years ago, we found a way to tap a huge reserve of stored solar energy. We spent that ancient sunlight in a quick, brilliant burst, and it allowed us to do a million things, it was what made all of our amazing technological and economic progress possible. Now we’ve used up the ancient sunlight and we need to learn how to go back to living on an annual solar budget.

My evolutionary psychologist friends frequently point out that I trust too highly in the power of reason. “You think, L.A., that if people just come to understand it, they can change the way they behave. But in fact, changing behavior is really hard. We have hugely strong evolutionary imperatives, and doing otherwise than they drive us to is incredibly difficult.” Yes, but it does happen. If you look at recorded history, you’ll see many ways in which human behavior has changed dramatically, and some of these changes were caused by changes in awareness. Slavery was once a near-universal phenomenon. Now it has been largely stamped out in most of the developed world. This change was made directly into the wind of evolutionary imperatives, confronting property, wealth, and power head-on.

So call me naive, but I think if everybody could have Thom Hartmann sit down and explain it to them, it would make a difference.

(I also really liked Woolsey. Partly for Z-cred. Hey, I’m not some tree-hugging hippy. I used to run the CIA. And I’m here to tell you some hard facts about what we need to do to make business keep working the way we like it to work.)

If you tried to imagine the shape of this movie before seeing it, you’d probably be about right. After 80 minutes of trying as hard as it can to scare you, it would have to end with fifteen minutes of hope, right? No one wants a downer. Got to end positive. So, along with some exhortations to change ourselves spiritually as well as ecologically, we basically have to rely on technological hope. “The technology exists now to have our present lifestyle while spending 10% of the energy budget on it.” If you had us all move to different corners of the room based on our affinities, I’d probably sort myself out with the techno-hopers myself, but I thought “The 11th Hour” presented a particularly facile and thin version. (Again, what would have been much more interesting to me would have been a whole movie just on the techno hopes.) The result here was to weaken the effect of what had gone before, to leave the movie without drive. “This is an emergency! It’s not the eleventh hour, it’s 11:59 and 59 seconds! Oh, but we’ll just design some cool new airplanes and everything will be okay again.”

The New York Times just ran a long article about pollution in China. I had an interesting conversation with one of my daughter’s friends who just came back from a year in China. “It’s not just the cities,” she said. “It’s everywhere in the country. They’re burning so much coal everywhere, that even in little villages, you can’t see all the way down main street.” The stats in the NYT piece were ugly, ugly, ugly. If the Legion of EcoSuperHeroes showed up today and volunteered to go to work, you’d send all of them to China. Anything you can do over here on this side of the pond would make a fraction of the difference of helping China find a sustainable way to develop.