Category: Environment

Debate on climate change has been shifting from one on whether humans are responsible for global warming to one on whether there’s anything we can do about it. The Washington Post:

Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend. … There are three specific events that these scientists describe as especially worrisome and potentially imminent: … widespread coral bleaching that could damage the world’s fisheries within three decades; dramatic sea level rise by the end of the century that would take tens of thousands of years to reverse; and, within 200 years, a shutdown of the ocean current that moderates temperatures in northern Europe. The debate has been intensifying because Earth is warming much faster than some researchers had predicted.

Meanwhile, one of the few things that could force us to significantly decrease our oil dependence — scarcity of the stuff — is being rapidly nullified by the increasing feasibility of mining Canadian oil sands. The politics of oil may change from U.S.-Middle East to U.S.-Canada. The “keep driving!” message sent by the push to move oil extraction from Iraq to Canada isn’t going to do the world’s oceans any good. And when the oceans fail, we all fall down.

The other meanwhile: Environmentalists are having a hard time convincing American consumers that maybe they don’t need to be wiping their noses (and booties) with virgin timber. This one has always baffled me — why would anyone even consider buying non-recycled personal tissue? But not only do people consider it, they insist on it (except for Germans, who are for some reason driven by common sense).

Once damaged, coral reefs take well over a century to grow back – and they’re being damaged at an alarming rate, both by natural phenomena such as tsunamis and by humans. Coral reefs (aka “the rainforests of the sea”) worldwide are among the world’s most endangered ecosystems.

The years prior to 1991 saw a lot of bad mojo at work around Bunaken and Manado Tua. For decades, fishermen bombed the reefs with dynamite, or squirted them with sodium cyanide, to net large harvests of fish that surfaced. Low tides forced local boats to anchor amid the fragile corals, and dive boats (not to mention clumsy divers) wrought havoc as well. Storms reduced already weakened corals to rubble.

If the regrowth of natural reefs can’t be accelerated, the ecosystems surrounding them can. Berkeley-based Seacology is installing ceramic EcoReefs reef replacement systems — ceramic “snowflake” modules “that are designed to mimic branching corals.”

Pix here.

The demand for biodiesel is up so sharply that world-wide industries are ramping up non-petro oil production. Soy bean oil predominates in the U.S., but palm oil is cheaper to produce. So the last remaining vestiges of rain forests in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia are being razed to make way for palm oil production. Salon:

Biodiesel activists have responded to the latest depressing news by calling for biodiesel labeling. For those of us in Berkeley, already carefully distinguishing between farm-raised and wild salmon, and searching for our free-range chickens certified to have passed away happily in their sleep, it will be one more thing to pay attention to. Biodiesel from used French fry oil: good. Biodiesel from Thailand: bad.

Better way: Use less oil.

We’ve always bought free-range poultry and eggs, both for ethical/environmental reasons, and because it tastes better (set me loose with a grill and a pile of Rocky Range legs and thighs and your belly will be a happy place by night’s end). But the cover story in this week’s East Bay Express casts a shadow on the growing movement to get battery-caged poultry and eggs out of stores. Turns out the best way to encourage the spread of avian flu is to let birds wander around outside as nature intended. Containing a potential avian flu epidemic means keeping birds strictly confined.

Factory farming may be cruel to animals and environmentally ugly, but weighed against the prospect of millions of human deaths, the free-range farming movement suddenly faces a painful dilemma. Frickin’ reality.

Of course, one can imagine ways to confine chickens indoors without cooping them up in battery cages. It’s harder to imagine factory farmers making that happen without financial incentives.

If global warming is at least partly a function of global deforestation, we’re left with the problem of how to replace the de-carbonizing power of the billions of trees we’ve collectively disappeared in the blink of an historical eye. Dr Klaus Lackner has an idea: Deploy vast farms of synthetic trees, each with 1,000 times the carbon-sucking power of a real tree. You wouldn’t exactly want to picnic under one (“It looks like a goal post with Venetian blinds,” said the Columbia University physicist…”), but it’s an interesting idea.

While real trees properly dispose of (i.e. utilize) the carbon they trap, the problem with synthetic trees is that we’d have to manually reclaim the carbon they absorb. And what are we going to do with mountains of recycled carbon? “Make pencils!,” Amy suggests.

Triplepundit:

People have proposed two scenerios for the growth of China. The first is that it continues to grow at a massive rate, consuming everything in its path, and producing an ecological catastrophe that will be its demise, and possibly ours too. The second is that China wises up and becomes an unprecidented (sic) leader in “green growth” balancing its economic needs with good health for its people and a clean, healthy environment. This article (WBCSD) gives great hope for the second scenerio.

The conventional wisdom in the U.S. is that “green” and “economy” are two forces in opposition. One goal of environmentalists is to prove that green industry can actually be good for business. The question is whether a free market will reach this conclusion without encouragement from government. I’d like to think it can, but have a feeling that, if it puts its mind to it, China’s monolithic government could bring “green” and “economy” together faster than the free market can do in this country. Free market forces are exactly what have led us into this environmental quagmire in the first place.

Nice to see a shred of environmental good news amidst the morass of disasters both man-made and natural: According to a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research, the Ozone layer has stopped shrinking, thanks to 20 years of international efforts to reduce CFCs, proving that attention and cooperation can make a difference. But don’t get too excited — we’re not out of the woods just yet:

“Chemicals pumped into Earth’s atmosphere decades ago still are affecting ozone levels today,” said Sherwood Roland of the University of California Irvine. “This problem was a long time in the making, and because of the persistence of these chlorine compounds, there is no short-term fix.” The ozone layer remains so thin that cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation is still getting through.

Still, it’s progress.

Thanks Jim