Will the 2022 election be at the pump?

"Peril and politics in the US following the rightward shift in Sweden"

In the first half of 2022, U.S. exports of petroleum products averaged nearly 6.0 million barrels per day (b/d), the highest first-half-of-year exports in Petroleum Supply Monthly data since 1981. … In our September 2022 Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), we forecast petroleum product net exports (gross exports minus gross imports) will remain above the five-year (2017–21) average through the end of 2023, suggesting gross exports will remain higher than previous years.

—U.S. Energy Information Administration

Prior to the US presidential election in 2008, I researched the trendline of gasoline prices and discovered that every election year a Bush was in the White House the price of gasoline peaked in early July and then declined sharply to Election Day, rebounding gradually after that. Every year a Bush was outside but wanting to get into the White House, the opposite happened. There was one exception to this, which came in 2004 when Bush-II was trying to defeat John Kerry and prices should have come down but did not.

This linkage between politics and price made some sense if you understood that:

• Retail gasoline prices are determined at the oil refinery stage rather than the import price

• The Bush family was deeply embedded into the transnational oil industry

• As CIA chief, George H.W. Bush would have been well aware of the political impact of the pump price.

George H. W. Bush was a congressman, ambassador to the UN and China, then director of the CIA before becoming Ronald Reagan’s vice-president and heir apparent. The 41st US president, who died in 2018 at the age of 94, founded Zapata Petroleum Corporation, which opened Texas's Permian Basin in 1953. Zapata pioneered offshore drilling and branched out internationally to drill in Kuwait for Shell. With 41 as his heir and confidant, Reagan famously deregulated domestic oil and gas, allowing refineries to set prices according to political winds, meanwhile making oil companies the wealthiest industry and their executives the best paid after hedge fund managers.

Pappy Bush’s final legacy was to get the Republican party to abandon science and attack climate change. He made it impossible for any ambitious Republican candidate to acknowledge global warming even existed for the 30 years (and counting) after he lost re-election in 1992.

A commenter on my 2008 post observed:

Increasingly, average Americans will not be able to afford both fuel oil for heating and gasoline for commuting to work (starting to be felt more in November). When unemployment increases in the ever-worsening global recession, a larger and larger percentage of people will not be able to pay for fuel oil to heat their homes. These realities will shock the nation with big increases in home heating bills this winter (starting in November).

If you fast forward 14 years, November 2022 is shaping up along similar lines. It is not a presidential election year but the combination of the war in Ukraine and declining domestic oil production is putting a squeeze on refineries. Petroleum demand in 2020 and 2021 was much lower than levels seen during the same period in 2018-2019 but 2022 has witnessed a reversion to the mean, ie: exponential growth. Putin’s unexpected invasion, NATO boycotts, and the closing of Russian liquid methane gas pipelines into Europe have set up a winter energy crisis in UK and EU. Londoners were just last week advised by their government to buy sweaters and expect to be wearing woolen caps and leggings indoors this Christmas. Swedes have been told the same for some months now. The Biden Administration promised to fill the gap, and true to its word, has drained the Strategic Oil Reserve and accelerated exports.

U.S. crude oil exports to Europe averaged a record of 1.67 million b/d in May as refiners in Europe moved business away from Russia and started drawing on alternative sources. Similarly, U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe increased substantially this year as new sources replaced declining gas supplies from Russia.

—U.S. Energy Information Administration 

 Those moves had the effect, along with jawboning the refineries and yanking regulations from exploration (ie.: continuation of Bush, Obama and Trump policies), of quickly bringing down US retail gasoline prices, which should help Democrats in the fall elections, if only marginally.

As the European Union prepares to implement a ban on Russian seaborne crude in December, the market will have to prepare itself for a loss of 2.4 million bpd, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The ban on Russian crude imports by sea will take 1.4 million bpd of oil off the market, along with 1 million bpd of petroleum products. This is in line with the ban on Russian seaborne crude that goes into effect on December 5th, and the embargo on petroleum products, which goes into effect on February 5, 2023.

—Charles Kennedy, oilprice.com

“Now we will get order in Sweden… It’s time to put Sweden first.”

—Jimmie Akesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, on Facebook

European sanctions adopted in June 2022 that prohibit imports of crude oil and certain petroleum products from Russia, including distillate fuel oil, will take effect in December for crude oil and in February 2023 for petroleum products. While Europeans are already paying much higher gas prices, that is just the first hull scratch of a huge iceberg. It may be that the September 14 election in Sweden is a forerunner of a larger European political shift to the right.

… [T]he outcome will mean a change of direction for the country, analysts predicted, and it showcased the extent to which the party of the Sweden Democrats, which has worked to rebrand itself from its origins in Nazi ideology, had upended politics in the country.

— The New York Times

Democrats do not want to see that political shift play out here. As of mid-September, Biden had been able to drop retail unleaded gas prices to about $3.69 per gallon ($3.12 on the Gulf Coast and $4.82 on the West Coast), down about a buck and a half from the 4th of July to about where prices were before the Ukraine invasion. These prices are still fifty cents higher than a year earlier, however, when Covid was creating an artificial market glut, but for Democrats, the steep decline is good news. Republicans are running on inflation and the stolen 2020 election. Democrats are just trying to dodge the Swedish sledgehammer.

That may come down to prices at the pump.

The trouble is, you can only drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve once. After that, you’ve nothing left in reserve no matter what your strategy may be.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine news, we should remember that just a week before the invasion, Vladimir Putin visited the Beijing Olympics and took a private meeting with Uncle Xi. Once upon a time, it would be Putin calling the shots in that relationship. Now it was his turn to ask permission. Xi was ambiguous but affirmed the strength of the new Sino-Russia "no limits" partnership. Vlad took that as a symbolic okay, reminiscent of when U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam Hussein, “[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”

This week Vlad flew to Samarkand to meet once more with Uncle Xi. Backed against the wall in Ukraine, Vlad has to decide whether to cut a deal with NATO (perhaps keeping Crimea in exchange for exiting Luhansk and Donetsk) or escalate, hopefully with “no-limits” ChiCom forces to reinforce his beleaguered battalions.

Xi frowned.

Vlad blinked.

With public opposition in Moscow and other cities rising, the end of the Ukraine conflict may be in sight, or at least we can hope. But probably not before US midterm elections and Europe’s coldest Christmas. 

 ______________________

 Towns, villages and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery and seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

---

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

The Great Change is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Can trees beat machines?

"Forests are the largest terrestrial carbon sink for the planet, both from the production of tree biomass and soil carbon storage"

Treebeard, some call me. 
Pippin: And whose side are you on?
Treebeard: Side? I am on nobody’s side, because nobody is on my side, little Orc.

— Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

The first ‘World Scientists Warning to Humanity’ dates back to 1992, when more than 1700 scientists, including most living Nobel laureates, called on humankind to halt environmental destruction and make fundamental changes to the relationship with the natural world. On August 31, 2022, these scientists issued another urgent “warning to humanity,” this time about the global impact of tree extinctions.

A third of the world’s tree species are currently threatened with extinction. That scale extinction will lead to major biodiversity losses in other species and alter the cycling of carbon, water and nutrients in the world’s ecosystems. Tree extinction will also undermine the livelihoods of the billions of people who depend on trees and their benefits. There are over 15,000 species of trees in the Amazon alone that are threatened, many yet to be named.

Last week I paid a call on an old tree friend I had planted here at The Farm 20 years ago. Ginkgo biloba is the last living species in the order Ginkgoales, over 290 million years old. Lately, Ginkgo is experiencing something of a comeback, thanks to its value in medicine, known to the Chinese since at least the 11th century. Ginkgo seeds, leaves, and nuts are traditionally used as cognitive enhancers and to treat dementia, asthma, bronchitis, and kidney and bladder disorders. I planted two of them but one was too close to our public campground and succumbed to abuse while still a juvenile. The other has now become an esteemed elder of the forest community, even while only 20.

When I explain my natural climate solutions strategy to audiences I often get pushback, particularly from those who think machines will save us and have little appreciation for biophysical economics. The common arguments are:

• Tree planting is all well and good, and forest conservation is even better, but at best it is carbon neutral, once the forests are well established;
• Forested areas produce less food than cleared space and therefore exacerbate world hunger;
• The amount of land required to be planted to remove the gigatons of annual human greenhouse gas emissions, expressed as carbon-dioxide equivalents (40 GtCO2e/y), is well beyond the available land surface area of the planet, and because of sea level rise, that area is shrinking;
• Climate change will threaten any forests you plant — by wildfire, droughts, floods, pests and pathogens; and
• There is no guarantee future people won’t just cut all those forests down to make space for producing food, fuel, timber, and human habitat.

I will try to address each of these points in summary, although any one of them could merit its own essay.

Treebeard: “You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.”

Tree planting is all well and good… but at best carbon neutral

This canard is the closest to being true. Forests are the largest terrestrial carbon sink for the planet, both from the production of tree biomass and soil carbon storage. Tree biomass carbon storage occurs fastest among juvenile trees and then levels out for old growth, while soil storage is greatest for old growth and less for juvenile trees. Naturally, the deeper the roots of a tree, the farther down carbon exudates are excreted to feed the soil food web, and while some will make their way to the surface and thence to the atmosphere on shorter time scales, more will be deep sequestered for centuries to millennia. In the present climate emergency, timescales matter. The leaf and branch — or dead trunk at end of life — biomass that litter the forest floor, unless converted to recalcitrant carbon molecules (biochar), will return to the atmospheric/oceanic carbon cycle by microbial digestion and excretion or fire. But, established forests are not carbon neutral. They continuously bank deposits of carbon underground. The duration or “permanence” of carbon sequestration can also be enlarged by incorporating more durable wood products and biochar into the built environment and industrial economy.

Forested areas produce less food than cleared space

The Scientists’ Warning says, “All trees can be considered as ecosystem engineers, providing a food resource, shelter, refuge and microclimate for many other species and their associated interactions.” It goes on to say, “Consequently, the loss of trees and the resulting extinction cascades are significant factors in the declines of insect abundance and diversity…” ie: global food supply. Trees are also an important source of essential foods in the form of nutrient-dense fruits, vegetables and nuts. Approximately 53% of the fruit and 100% of the nuts available for consumption globally are produced by trees. Have you been drinking almond or cashew milk lately? As we phase out climate-damaging beef and dairy, expect to see much more of these products on your grocery shelves. Consider also that some forest mushrooms (shiitake) have protein of equal quality to milk, eggs, or meat, with fewer negative health impacts.

The amount of land required to be planted is well beyond the available land surface area … and shrinking

In 2015, Frank Michael and I published a paper called Climate Ecoforestry that looked at the requirements of drawing down either 40 GtCO2e/y or the legacy 2.5 TtCO2e using only forestry. We determined that you would need to plant 200 Mha/yr (equivalent to 4 Spains) to get a net drawdown of 11 GtCO2/y initially and 50 GtCO2/y by year 24. Assuming a reasonable curtailment of man-made emissions over the coming century, we concluded that a pre-industrial atmospheric stasis was recoverable before 2100 solely by tree planting. Is there enough space? Yes. Don’t forget that prior to human influence, forests covered an order of magnitude more land than they do today. Urban forests are all the rage, and for good reason. Silvopasture, agroforestry, conservation easements, and rewilding are all growth practices. They can expand even faster with the appropriate incentives. Our extensive calculations can be downloaded, modeled and vetted to your heart’s delight.

Climate change will threaten any forests you plant…

Yes. It will. This is why forests cannot be viewed as something apart from human ecosystems. Humans will always have a role in planting, cultivating, and regeneratively managing forests.

There is no guarantee future people won’t just cut all those forests down…

The Scientists’ Warning says:

Worldwide, more than 1.6 billion people live within 5 km of a forest, a figure that includes approximately 250 million (40%) of the world’s most extreme poor (Miller et al., 2020; Newton et al., 2020). Many of these people depend on products and services provided by trees to support their livelihoods. The 60 million indigenous people who live in forest areas are especially dependent on trees and the condition of forest ecosystems (SCBD, 2010). Trees can contribute to meeting energy, health, housing, income and nutritional needs, as well as nonmaterial aspects of livelihoods such as community relations, culture and spirituality (Miller et al., 2020). For example, in India, more than a quarter of the population (i.e. 275 million people) are dependent on forest resources for subsistence and income generation (Milne, 2006).

***

Close linkages between human well-being and tree resources also create the possibility of abrupt decline or collapse occurring simultaneously in both social and ecological systems (Barrett et al., 2011). Effective conservation of trees can reduce such risks to human livelihoods and can help people to avoid increased impoverishment. This can be achieved through the role of trees in furnishing food, fodder, fuel and other products when alternatives are not available, providing a form of ‘safety net’ to livelihoods (Marshall et al., 2006). This is especially important to the rural poor because they often do not have access to other forms of insurance, and they often rely on other livelihood activities that are vulnerable to external shocks such as drought (Noack et al., 2019).

Conversely, investment in tree resources through approaches such as forest protection, sustainable use and domestication can provide potential routes out of poverty (Marshall et al., 2006). This can be achieved directly through the sale of tree products and indirectly by enhancing soil fertility, water regulation and the provision of other ecosystem services that support food production and other livelihood requirements (Miller et al., 2020). For example in Mexico and Bolivia, Marshall et al. (2006) showed that nontimber forest products can provide cash income in subsistence communities where families may have no other cash-generating opportunities. Accumulation of cash savings, through the commercialization of tree products, can provide a vital ‘stepping stone’ to a nonpoor life.

Perhaps even more important as we enter an ever-warming Anthropocene is the psychological impact. This summer, drought and a string of heat waves hit Europe, China and the US. This heat in turn caused psychiatric hospitalizations, increased rates of suicide, and domestic violence, according to validating research. Using artificial intelligence to identify about 75 million hate messages on Twitter, scientists analyzed how the number of hate tweets spiked when local temperatures increased. Aggressive behavior online made for violence offline, including mass shootings, lynchings, and ethnic cleansing, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The reason urban forests are being replanted now is because they have been proven to cool cities. But they also cool tempers.

 

Human origins trace back to trees. As we descended and stood upright, and cut down forests to build golf courses or attempted to assuage our primal urges to look out over the savannah by putting balconies on high-rise apartments, we lost an essential connection to our own nature. As we return to being forested civilizations — essential now to climate survival — we’ll regain more than atmospheric equilibrium.

We’ll regain our humanity.

---

Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

---

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

The Great Change is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Reversing the Curve

"There is no economic metric that can completely describe the current scale of change"

Consider this: In 2022 Texas saw the average daily maximum statewide top 100 degrees F for the entire month of July. In the coming decades, parts of the South will see 100 degrees for 70 or more consecutive days. Those will be the average years, not the heat wave ones. As Scientific American put it: “This Hot Summer Is One of the Coolest of the Rest of Our Lives.

Lahore, Pakistan, and India’s Delhi are among the most polluted cities in the world. When Pakistan was created in 1947, 33 percent of its total area was covered by forests; now that area is only 5 percent. A 2022 United Nations report estimated that Pakistan’s annual economic loss to climate change will soon be $26 billion, or 9.1 percent of its gross domestic product.

Sufficient expenditure could solve many of these problems at a stroke — but Pakistan is struggling to run up a descending escalator, with energy import dependence, weak agricultural productivity, and lack of external investment contributing to a vicious cycle of underdevelopment.

— The Washington Post

It took only a few months to become obvious to everyone how low those estimates were. As monsoon rains coupled with 120-degree heat stretched on week after week, month after month, some 50 million people became displaced. Eagles fell dead from the sky, landing on houses, monuments, shops. Then came the rain. A million houses washed away, some carried off by new rivers that had never existed before. Due to extreme saturation, water is likely to cover fields for months and large regions may be unfarmable for up to 2 years. The humanitarian crisis is just beginning. There is no economic metric that can completely describe that scale of suffering.

Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate change minister, called the flooding a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster” of “epic proportions.”

We are at the moment at the ground zero of the front line of extreme weather events, in an unrelenting cascade of heatwaves, forest fires, flash floods, multiple glacial lake outbursts, flood events and now the monster monsoon of the decade is wreaking non-stop havoc throughout the country.

Bill McKibben wrote: “And there’s no doubt that the people of Pakistan are not to blame for their tragedy: on average each Pakistani is responsible for about one fifteenth as much carbon dioxide as each American….

I beg to differ. At UN climate meetings, Sherry Rehman is just the latest spokesperson for Pakistan’s God-given right to attain the affluence of Sweden before agreeing to strong climate measures. That is why Pakistan is building eight more large coal-fired power stations, four of them in Sindh Province where rainfall is now five times the past century’s average. Those coal plants are 20% more expensive to build and operate than solar photovoltaic farms. In a land where air conditioning is the only way to survive catastrophic temperatures, Pakistan’s rate of coal consumption has a doubling rate of two years. In spite of this, Sherry Rehman told PBS:

We would love to switch to renewables just for our own import bills to be reduced and to be cleaner, to have cleaner fuel. But just that transition, I have had it calculated, would cost us $101 billion without the transmission line changes. Climate resilience costs money. And, right now, all the money basically is going into relief.

“Physics rules against such hyperbole.”

— James Hansen, Sophies Planet

Studies of paleoclimate have seen flood events before — flood management of the Indus dates to 4000 years ago — but never like present times. Today China spends $144 billion per year on water management, including flood control, more than it spends on health care. With $255 billion in IMF debt, Pakistan spends next to nothing. Pakistan’s floods cost it at least $10 billion in 2022 alone, but thanks to years of underinvestment in maintenance, corruption, and disputes between Pakistan’s four provinces over borrowed money, the system of dams and canals that control the Indus River are in a poor state of repair.

Earth has been several degrees warmer, but it took tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years to make that transition. We are accomplishing it now, as we all watch, in under a century. That is less surprising when we consider that following Colonel Drake’s discovery of “coal oil” mid-19th century, we converted 500 million years of sunlight landing on Earth’s surface in the short space of 150 years — releasing more energy and smoke than all the volcanoes in human history.

Tipping Elements

Climate scientists have long emphasized the importance of climate tipping points like thawing permafrost, ocean methane, ice sheet disintegration, deforestation of the Amazon, and changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation. Collectively, climate tipping points increase social costs and global economic risks. Tipping point interactions have not been well examined so far. So, for instance:

• The permafrost carbon feedback results in additional CO2 and CH4 emissions, which flow back into the CO2 and CH4 cycles.
• Dissociation of ocean methane hydrates results in additional CH4 emissions, which flow back into the CH4 cycle.
• Arctic sea ice loss (also known as the SAF) results in changes in radiative forcing (albedo), which directly affects warming, ocean stratification, AMOC, and Rossby waves in the polar vortex.
• Disintegration of the GIS and WAIS increases Sea Level Rise.
• Dieback of the Amazon rainforest releases both biomass and soil CO2 , which flows back into the CO2 cycle and also changes albedo.
• Variability of the Asian summer monsoon directly affects food security per capita which may accelerate deforestation.

New work builds on theories dating back to 2008 when a group of researchers (Lenton et al.) first identified tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system. More real-world data and more powerful computers now expand the list of threatened systems from nine to 16, with seven additional impacts that would manifest regionally rather than globally (such as the West African monsoon and coral reefs around the Equator).

Current global warming of ~1.1°C above preindustrial temperatures already lies within the lower end of some tipping point uncertainty ranges. Several tipping points may be triggered in the Paris Agreement range of 1.5 to <2°C global warming, with many more likely at the 2 to 3°C of warming expected on current policy trajectories.

— McKay, et al., Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points, Science 377:6611 (9 Sep 2022).

 

The location of climate tipping elements in the cryosphere (blue), biosphere (green), and ocean/atmosphere (orange), and global warming levels at which their tipping points will likely be triggered.

Standing on the bottom third of an exponential curve and looking back, one sees a gentle slope disappearing off below the horizon. Turning around and looking the other way — into the future — one sees a gradually rising foothill backed by a sheer mountain wall. The summit is lost somewhere in the clouds.

In the first two decades of this century, we moved up to perhaps the halfway point where the curve has begun more noticeably to ascend. The doubling rate is the same, but each doubling is more than all the warming and disruption that came before. So far, the 21st century has had more chaotic weather effects than the entire 20th century. The next decade or two will likely more than double that, and double again in the decades following, with each doubling coming at closer intervals to the preceding. At what point will we collectively grasp the significance of the exponential function?

“I would sooner expect a goat to succeed as a gardener as expect humans to become stewards of the Earth.” 

— James Lovelock

At two degrees of warming, around 2040 at the latest, the Indian Subcontinent will reach 60 degrees C in summer (140°F). Spain and Europe hit 50. At three degrees? Equatorial regions hit 70 degrees Celsius (158°F) or more. Spain and Europe hit 60. By then, life as we know it will have come to an end.

Repeating History

Umair Haque writes:

It’s true, trivially so, that “some people have never had abundance!!” Duh. Tell it to the poor guy picking cotton in those Pakistani fields, in 120 degree heat. The point is that that economics — built on exploitation of the planet, each other, nature, creation — is now coming to an end, a disastrous one, because it was never built to last. The idea that we could exploit our way to infinite prosperity — at least for the 20% of the world lucky enough to powerful and wealthy — was always a kind of delusion.

Now we have to do the hard work of reinventing everything. Or step by step, scarcity will take us to places we don’t want to go, the dark nightmares and abysses of history.

What does scarcity do, sudden plunges into it? It sparks everything from theocracy to fascism to authoritarianism. It triggers the panic and fear that strongmen and demagogues feed on, it ignites an atavistic craving for the security and stability of ultra hierarchical order, it sparks the search for scapegoats. Sudden plunges into scarcity are what unleashes the demons of history — and humanity.

This is where we are.

A recent peer-review journal contained this comment:

Rather than legitimizing the status quo by appealing to existing political elites, scientists should actively collaborate with those groups in society that push for and prefigure sustainable ways of living.

— Commentary: Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future, Frontiers of Science, doi: 10.3389/fcosc.2021.666910

There is a way forward out of this exponential spiral. It is similar to when a plane goes into a death spiral toward the ground. How do you get out of the spiral? You feed it power. In this case the power lies with people, eight billion of them, planting trees, reseeding mangroves, making biochar, rebuilding biodiversity.

Pakistan has held some notable records of its own. Most trees planted in a single day (847,275, held from 2013 to 2017); most ambitious mangrove goal (10 billion trees by 2023); most trees planted in one minute (50,000, in 2021). They know what to do. They just have to keep doing it, even as rivers rise and temperatures soar.

Haque concludes:

The 21st century is here. But we’re still living in the 20th, in the 1930s, to be precise — and if we don’t change, wise up, mature, evolve, grow, we are going to find ourselves back in the 19th, and then the 15th, and right back to the Stone Age, faster than we yet imagine.

 

---

 

Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

---

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

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Compound Disinterest

"In the first two decades of this century, we moved up to perhaps the halfway point where the curve of climate chaos has begun more noticeably to ascend."

 

The capital of Mississippi has no drinking water. This is not a freak occurrence. This is not the latest disaster porn movie out of Hollywood. Welcome to the new normal. 

The late Albert Bartlett, professor of mathematics at the Univ. of Colorado, gave a standard lecture several hundred times. In its late iterations, it was called “Arithmetic, Population and Energy.” You can find it on YouTube.

 

Bartlett liked to say, “The greatest failing of the human species is its inability to understand the exponential function.”

He gave many examples, from rice grains on a checkerboard, to real estate in Boulder, to peak oil, but suffice it to say that any element that doubles over time while growing in a closed system follows a reverse L-curve or J-curve and will at some point en route to blissed-out singularity smack hard into the wall of that closed system.

Those of us who understand the exponential function see it when we turn the tap in Jackson and nothing comes out. We see it in the dry tea leaves at the muddy bottom of the Yangtze River. We see it in the buddha statuary that disappeared there in the Sixth Century only to re-emerge last week, in the Spanish Stonehenge rising out of one corner of the Valdecanas reservoir, or in 20 German warships sunk during World War II now sunning in a dry Danube riverbed. We see it in the thousands dead and millions displaced in Pakistan or in the Greater Horn of Africa’s longest drought in 40 years, Israel’s, India’s and London’s(!) >40°C heat (105°F), or Siberia losing 3 million hectares to wildfire this year.

The circle of dozens of megalithic stones is believed to date back to 5000 BC. 

Susana Vera/Reuters

 

At this writing, droughts and drying rivers are simultaneously devastating all continents. The intensity of North Atlantic hurricanes, as well as the frequency of the strongest (Category 4 and 5) hurricanes, have all doubled since the early 1980s. In 1980, one might live comfortably on the Gulf or Atlantic coast of the US without particularly fearing hurricanes. Extreme heat events that used to occur only once in 20 years are expected to occur every year. Something similar, albeit less predictable, is affecting extreme cold events in winter, such as ice storms and thunderblizzards.

Doubling Times

• Sea Level Rise: Ten Years (now 101.2 mm/y)

• Global Wave Power: Ten Years (now 1.5-2.5 10E5 kw/m)

• Loss of Ice Mass in Antarctica: Eight Years (now 3 Teratonnes)

• Loss of Ice Mass in Greenland: Five Years (now 5 Teratonnes)

• People facing acute food insecurity (day-to-day insecurity): One year (now 345 million)

Because of lag factors after a greenhouse gas leaves the tailpipe and climate effects appear, there is already more warming in the pipeline than what has occurred, as Hansen, Sato and Ruedy will presently describe in a paper, “Global Warming in the Pipeline,” nearing completion. So, even if we stopped all emissions suddenly, such as by the occurrence of a global pandemic that wipes out the economies of all overdeveloped countries, or a nuclear war between overheated India and Pakistan that annihilates China, Korea, and Japan with its fallout, warming trends would continue, only slowly tapering to a new, warmer equilibrium. By that point, many additional tipping elements may have been triggered, with cascading consequences for centuries to millennia.

Already set in motion are massive ice losses that can’t be halted even if the world stopped fossil emissions today, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change on Monday. That study says it is now inevitable Greenland’s melt will trigger a foot of global sea-level rise, possibly as soon as 2050. Another paper by NOAA says that partly because of sea level rise, the most destructive floods will take place five times as often, and moderate floods will become 10 times as frequent.

 

When the Washington Post published a piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chris Mooney on the rate of Greenland melt, saying 3.3% was already locked in, a nameless Liberal Arts Professor commented online, “Wow! A whole 3%?” His opinion, which is not uncommon, illustrates the incapacity of most people to understand the exponential function. That small percentage of an ice sheet as large as Alaska represents 110 trillion tons of ice whose melting is still in the low incline phase of the curve.

Greenland is the world’s largest island and is covered with a sheet of ice that, if it melted entirely, could raise sea levels by more than 20 feet.

—Washington Post

Beating the Curve

Now that we are in an exponential curve of climate change can we do anything about it? Economist Steve Keen says,

If we started this 50 years ago when Limits to Growth—which is a far superior piece of research to anything done by economists subsequently—if they were taken seriously and we'd done as they suggested—changing our trajectory from 1975 on—we could have done it gradually using things like carbon taxes and so on. But because economists have delayed it by another half century we're putting as a species three to four times the pressure on the biosphere. We're not going to do it through market mechanisms. I think the only way we can actually do this is effectively a war-level footing of massive mobilization to reverse the amount of carbon we've put into the atmosphere and to drastically reduce our consumption now. That's the mindset we need and unfortunately, economists are encouraging the mindset instead that says let's take advantage of these new transport routes through the arctic, yeah?

Keen argues we need to fundamentally rethink classical economics. The alternative vision is one of ecosystem restoration. Walking through the ecologically restored Loess Plateau, John D. Liu explained to a Dutch film crew flabbergasted by the lack of any trace of China’s current heatwave and drought, why 20 million Chinese now had food security even in the worst of times:

The source of wealth is functional ecosystems. The products and services that we derive from those are derivatives. It is impossible for the derivatives to be more valuable than the source, and yet, in our economy now as it stands, the products and services have monetary values but the source—the functional ecosystems—are [valued at] zero. So, this cannot be true. It is false. We’ve created a global institution of economics—an economic theory—based on a flaw in logic. If we carry that flaw in logic from generation to generation we compound the mistake.

 

Inflation is only another symptom of the exponential function smashing into the wall of a closed system. The price of food, water, energy, and shelter—these all have doubling rates that are shrinking with time. Inflation reflects greater demand (population) and stressed supply (war, pandemic, soil depletion, disappearance of pollinators, climate chaos) combining to put a pinch on the wealthy and starve out the poor. But it is an entirely artificial problem. Good land management, as Liu has shown in China, Jordan, Ethiopia, and elsewhere, erases the deficit and returns abundance. The cure for stress is harmony.

The only prayer we have is to bend the exponential curve to our favor. We need an exponential increase in carbon dioxide removal, clean energy, and degrowth, including both in population and per capita consumption/production (footprint). We need an exponential increase in ecosystem restoration, forests, mangroves, and biodiversity. We haven’t done any of that yet, and we may not, in which case near-term human extinction is assured.

It is not physically impossible to change our wicked ways and do the right thing, but is it behaviorally possible? The answer to that question will determine our fate.

113 million-year-old dinosaur tracks first revealed in August 2022

 

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