The Map is not the Road

"Growth is something we really need to get past." 

 

We knew there would be unknown unknowns when we started passing tipping elements. We had seen firenadoes—where a fire has such intensity that it generates an actual tornado—in the Canberra bushfire in 2003. Those are not new. A firenado killed 38,000 people in 15 minutes in Tokyo in 1923. They can reach up to 2,000°F (1,090 °C), hot enough to melt heavily alloyed steels and cast iron. Before the Los Angeles fires of the past week we had not seen a fire-a-cane—a wildfire with hurricane winds—battering a coastline for days, its steady gale in excess of 70 mph, gusting to 120 (200 kph), casting embers for miles in advance of its march. The LA fire-a-cane uprooted 50-foot trees and cast them aside like used matches.

I began this series of posts last week by saying that climate disintegration—witnessed in Western North Carolina with Hurricane Helene and now felt in Southern California—is only the most obvious and pressing symptom of a deeper, underlying malaise. Another symptom is looking for someone to blame or some simple explanation that can make it all go away.

Contrary to rumors being generated by the President-elect and fanned to the hundreds of millions of followers of billionaire owners of social media platforms, the fires were not started by lesbian fire chiefs, space lasers, or endangered fish.

I am not one to advocate techno-fixes or evacuating the planet to colonies on Mars. If we neglect the root causes of our present crises, our Mars colonies will merely become crime-ridden urban ghettoes with race wars and rats.

The present crash of confidence will take more than a system reboot. We need an entirely new paradigm. Call it Civilization 2.0.

In Burn: Igniting a New Carbon Economy to End the Climate Crisis (Chelsea Green 2018), Kathleen Draper and I argued that Civilization 2.0 will be carbon-centric: “We have to reverse the flow of greenhouse gases and send them in exactly the opposite direction: down, not up. We have to flip the carbon cycle and run it backward.”

We reviewed a host of new products and entire industrial sectors that are in their birth pangs now. While government subsidies like carbon credits are problematic, temporary incentives speed the transition. At a bare minimum, taxpayers should stop subsidizing the wealthiest and least ethical companies on the planet to the tune of 6 or 7 trillion dollars per year.

When one studies how systems change and what might bring about such a change now, at the 11th hour and 59th minute, or even perhaps past that, there are a few realities we have to concede. Each climate change solution presents unique advantages and challenges. A comprehensive strategy that combines approaches while considering local contexts is likely the most politically viable. Balancing immediate actions—living in the present degenerative system—with long-term sustainability—shifting to a regenerative system—is merely pragmatic. Yet, there are a few criteria that it will help to observe.

• First, do no harm.

• Favor passive systems that once set in motion no longer require human action

• Favor resilience, recognizing that we are in uncharted territory and there will be shocks.

• Favor intrinsically regenerative systems that are part of, and contribute to, larger ecosystems.

• Protect the seventh generation.

  
  
  

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

The Immediate Losers

Stacking the house of cards higher as we sense the wind picking up and the ground trembling is never a smart move. These techno-fixes go into the dustbin:

Nuclear Energy. While nuclear energy has a lower carbon footprint during operation compared to fossil fuels or biomass burning, a standard reactor will release one million tons of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases (1 MtCO2e) over its normal operational life of 40 years and possibly that much or more during retirement, depending on the level of care it must be provided. If you consider what it took to build it, fuel it and manage its waste, a nuke’s carbon footprint just in its first half century lies somewhere between fracked methane and bunker fuel. (Pomponi & Hart 2021).

More significantly, nuclear power—whether fission or fusion, uranium or thorium, gigawatt or SMR—is a public health nightmare, bringing into creation the most toxic substances ever known to man, which cycle through the environment, secretly killing people and will continue doing so for millions of years to come. When they escape routinized commerce and enter the black market, as they already have done, these nefarious substances allow any reasonably clever 14-year-old to build his own atomic weapon.

The DOGE billionaire crowd imagines that merely lifting regulations will generate a nuclear renaissance, but they have not run the numbers or the time required. There is no business case for nuclear at any scale. Expected “accidents” in the near term will hopefully quash this myth and let these idiots move on to something more satisfying, like stealing elections.

 

Coal Scrubbers. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a technology designed to capture CO2 from electricity generation and industrial processes, preventing it from entering the atmosphere. Since renewables are already cheaper than fossil everywhere, doubling or tripling the financial cost of fossil plants makes no business sense, which is why every large CCS prototype over the past 30 years has been scrapped and jamming these technologies down the throats of companies with regulations only bankrupts them. We need to transition away from burning stuff, period.

Burning Man take note.

Thanks for reading The Great Change! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Direct Air Capture and Carbon Storage (DACCS). These are devices I have been calling “artificial trees.” Like nuclear power, they fulfill the goals of national laboratories and high-tech contractors—full employment for engineers and trillions of dollars transferred from taxpayers to the already obscenely wealthy. If DACCS can’t break even in Iceland, where hydro and geothermal energy is practically free, ambient CO2 concentrations are fed by volcanoes, and the basaltic rock sink lies close to the surface, what hope is there in dotting these all over the planet in a vain attempt to scrub 10 or 20 parts per million out of 420 parts per million and do what? Pipe it through cities? Make seltzer water? Like CCS, transporting and storing large volumes of CO2 underground poses risks, including possible contamination of groundwater, induced seismicity (earthquakes), and leaks that make the climate problem worse.

Scrap this whole enterprise and use the power and water it is consuming for something better, such as growing duckweed.

Wolffia, also known as duckweed, is the fastest-growing green-leaf plant. Most species of duckweed will double every 2 to 3 days. They replace their biomass 100 times per year. They grow as fast or faster overnight as during the day (absorbing carbon from water). If all global plant biomass (495 GtC) were duckweed, the sequestration potential would be 49,500 GtC/y or 181,500 GtCO2 (182 trillion tons of carbon dioxide). Converting that much duckweed to biochar would return the climate to its pre-industrial 280 ppm in 11 hours. Of course, we are never going to do that, it’s only hypothetical. But now substitute for duckweed all of the useful plants that can be withheld from decay — trees, bamboo, kelp, etc — and not only can we recover the preindustrial atmosphere rapidly but we can provide good livelihoods in the process.

—The Great Change, Tree versus Tree (February 19, 2023)

 

Solar Radiation Management (SRM). This is a geoengineering approach that reflects sunlight away from Earth to reduce global temperatures. It has many iterations. Some are better, some are hypothetical. The least likely to happen, for political reasons, are satellites in space acting like mirrors to shade the Earth. A more practical, low-cost SRM is simply doing as Greek Islanders have been doing for generations and painting everything—roads, buildings, rooftops, cars, clothing—white.

Medium controversial but likely to be seen in coming years is regional cloud generation or wake bubbling in zones like the Arctic to retard ice loss and avert blue ocean events that cause rapid high latitude warming and nasty polar vortex extreme weather. There are unpredictable side effects of safe SRM, such as termination shock, that will need to be studied before it can scale. Still, we are already heating the planet by human-induced Solar Radiation Management in the form of jet contrails, black soot from flared wells, steel mills and municipal incinerators, and low-sulfur shipping fuels, so this is not exactly an untried technology.

The Immediate Winners

Renewable Energy. This is a favorite of many and is unstoppable merely from its business case now. Renewables made up 48% of the EU’s power generation mix in 2024, compared to a shrinking 28% fossil contribution. But switching to renewables cannot and will not go the whole distance. Had this started when Jimmy Carter was President, as many of us were advocating at the time, maybe we could have made it without further ado. But back then the concentration of greenhouse gases was 30% lower than it is today. At this point we have to take carbon out of the atmosphere and get it back into the ground if we are to survive. That said, we should continue making the green energy transition as rapidly as possible and yea!—present-day economic conditions favor that.

Energy Efficiency Improvements. Recovering careless energy losses from buildings, transportation, and industrial processes should be a no-brainer. These are what Amory Lovins long ago coined, “negawatts” and they are a lot easier to mine than BitCoin. This is just common sense. Not so commonly sensed is Jevons’ Paradox—the "rebound effect” where increased efficiency leads to higher overall consumption. Efficiency—the conservation ethic—must be partnered with a graceful glide from overconsumerism into steady-state, or a “sufficiency” ethic. Start reading Hermann Daly, Robert Costanza, and that whole school of economics.

Nature-Based Solutions (NbS). Biomimicking natural systems takes advantage of a billion-year learning curve without having to reinvent everything and worry about unforeseen blowback. Natural solutions address climate change while providing other benefits— protecting, managing, and restoring natural ecosystems, for instance. NbS are usually cost-effective compared to technological solutions, can meet Paris Agreement targets by 2030, and provide social benefits like the UN’s 17 SDGs.

It is sometimes argued that nature-based solutions conflict with agricultural output, or growth, but as a permaculturist, I dispute that. Land repurposed for conservation may indeed displace communities and alter production models, but it’s for the better in the long run. And growth is something we really need to get past.

I’m reminded of the story of the frantic mother who visits her family doctor and says, “Doctor, doctor, something is wrong with my 20-year-old son. He’s stopped growing.” We are now past our juvenile phase as a species. This is the ordeal of initiation into adulthood that we are presently experiencing. Post-growth, we must become adults.

Adults are planetary citizens.

 

Next week: In the third installment we will take a dive into the most promising, fastest, and least cost path into the new carbon economy. Please join us then, won’t you?

References

Bates, A. and K. Draper (2019). Burn: Igniting a New Carbon Drawdown Economy to End the Climate Crisis. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Buck, H. J. Prospects of Climate-Engineering in a Post-Truth Era. Has it Come to This? The Promises and Perils of Geoengineering on the Brink, 231-40.

Caesar, L., et al. (2024). Planetary Health Check Report 2024. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany.

Debele, S. E., et al. (2023). Nature-based solutions can help reduce the impact of natural hazards: A global analysis of NBS case studies. Science of the Total Environment, 902, 165824.

Esper, J., Torbenson, M., & Büntgen, U. (2024). 2023 summer warmth unparalleled over the past 2,000 years. Nature, 1-2.

Griscom, B. W., wt al. (2017). Natural climate solutions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(44), 11645-11650.

Guterres A. 2024. Following three hottest days on record, secretary-general launches global action call to care for most vulnerable, protect workers, boost resilience using data, science. United Nations (25 July 2024). .

Kemp, L., et al. (2022). Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(34), e2108146119.

Lenton, T. M., et al. (2008). Tipping elements in the Earth's climate system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(6), 1786-1793.

Mann, Michael E. Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis. Hachette UK, 2023.

Pomponi, F., & Hart, J. (2021). The greenhouse gas emissions of nuclear energy–Life cycle assessment of a European pressurised reactor. Applied Energy, 290, 116743.

Ripple, W.J., et al., 2023. Many risky feedback loops amplify the need for climate action. One Earth, 6(2), pp.86-91.

Ripple, W. J., et al. (2024). The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth. BioScience, 74(12), 812-824.

Roser M. 2020. Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? Our World in Data. (6 June 2024).

Steffen, W., et al. (2018). Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. 115(33), 8252-8259.

 

Angelinos paid for this.

 

Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to bring an immediate cessation to the war. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years and will continue to do so, with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read all about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). Thank you for your support.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger, Substack and Medium subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions can be 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.

#RestorationGeneration.

當人類被關在籠内，地球持續美好，所以，給我們的教訓是:
人類毫不重要，空氣，土壤，天空和流水没有你們依然美好。
所以當你們走出籠子的時候，請記得你們是地球的客人，不是主人。

When humans are locked in a cage, the earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is: Human beings are not important. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the great old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. It is not too late. All of these great works are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.