Monday, August 27, 2018

Even Trump’s EPA Admits His Power Plan Will Kill Thousands of Americans

Zhou Changguo/AP
When President Barack Obama unveiled the Clean Power Plan in the East Room of the White House three years ago, he called it “the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change.” Today, that plan, which would have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 19% in 2030 relative to 2005 levels, will be replaced by the Trump administration’s “Affordable Clean Energy” proposal, which will give states more authority to craft regulations for coal-burning power plants and replaces the “overly prescriptive and burdensome” requirements in the CPP with what they describe as “on-site, heat-rate efficiency improvements.” 
These regulations are expected to only decrease CO2 levels by a fraction of the amount that were anticipated under Obama’s plan. The Environmental Protection Agency has acknowledged this will lead to hundreds of more deaths each year, along with sharp increases in the number of hospital admissions, lost work days, and school absences because of the health impacts of dirtier air. Not to mention the fact that increased emissions of carbon dioxide will further accelerate global warming.
“The ACE Rule would restore the rule of law and empower states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide modern, reliable, and affordable energy for all Americans,” said EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler in a statement. Wheeler and EPA air pollution chief Bill Wehrum are both former lobbyists for coal-producing companies that benefit from the agency’s new rule. 
The Clean Power Plan faced powerful opposition from nearly the moment it was signed. Several coal-producing states, including Texas and West Virginia, led a group of industry stakeholders to ask the Supreme Court to stay the CPP in January 2016 pending an appeals court’s ruling. The Court agreed to temporarily block the plan and it has been suspended ever since. 
Republicans, state environmental officials, and fossil fuel industry titans have urged the Trump administration to replace the Clean Power Plan for the past several months, citing its costs and dubious legality under the Clean Air Act. All 11 Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee wrote to former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt in January asking him to eliminate the rule. “Not only is the CPP bad policy, it is unlawful,” they wrote. “Congress did not give EPA the authority to transform our energy sector.”
Former agency officials blasted the proposal in a call with reporters hours before the EPA unveiled ACE. Gina McCarthy, the EPA administrator who developed the CPP under Obama, called its replacement “galling and appalling.”
This is all about coal at all costs,” she said. “They are continuing to play to their base and following industry’s playbook step by step.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a member of the Environment and Public Works committee, tweeted after the announcement, “Trump is actively destroying the planet in order to enrich his billionaire friends in the fossil fuel industry. We must fight back.”
The savings highlighted in Trump’s proposal—$400 million in annual net benefits with a reduction in CO2 emissions of up to 1.5% by 2030—include a severe human cost, which the agency mentions in the fine print of its 289-page impact analysis
Because of an increase in a tiny air pollutant known as PM 2.5, which contributes to smog and is linked to asthma and heart disease, the EPA predicts between 470 to 1,400 more deaths and thousands more lost days of school. Depending on how aggressively states make efficiency standards for individual power plants, those numbers could decrease. 
“The Clean Power Plan would have reduced particle pollution along with the CO2 benefits by 25% by 2030. And we know reduction in particle exposure means saved lives,” said Janet McCabe, the former head of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. The EPA deferred a request for comment on former agency officials’ criticism of the Trump plan to an agency press release about the proposal.
The United States’ level of CO2 emissions actually decreased in 2017, but experts fear that a weakened regulatory scheme with decentralized goals could hike up rates of pollution nationwide. “Environmental regulation in many cases is one of the leading causes of the decline in emissions that we observed over the past twenty years,” said Reed Walker, an associate professor at UC Berkeley who co-authored a recent study that found regulation to be a key factor in reducing emissions in the manufacturing sector, even with increasing output. Under Wheeler and former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, the federal government has started the process of rolling back at least 76 environmental regulations, according to the New York Times. Many of these rules include protections to wildlife habitats and restrictions aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. 
Trump, who will celebrate the Affordable Clean Energy proposal at a rally in West Virginia, has propped up coal miners with several regulatory decisions. In June, he ordered Energy Secretary Rick Perry to bail out struggling coal-fueled power plants and, last month, the EPA finalized a rule that relaxes the requirements for storing toxic coal ash. He also announced his intention to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement. 
Once the Trump administration’s proposal is formally published, members of the public will have 60 days to comment on it. The EPA also plans to hold a formal hearing. 

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Going to War on Climate Change

by John Halle, Common Dreams: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/08/21/going-war-climate-change

"Those who heard Roosevelt’s speech were aware that confronting fascism would result in dramatic changes to their lives within months if not weeks." (Photo: Wikicommons)
"Those who heard Roosevelt’s speech were aware that confronting fascism would result in dramatic changes to their lives within months if not weeks." (Photo: Wikicommons)

With the federal government currently flooring the accelerator on the road toward the climate precipice, it is somewhat comforting to know that a likely majority believes in “avoid(ing) the apocalyptic future” by requiring a shift to renewable energy sources. At least, that is what Kate Aronoff, writing in The Intercept, suggests is the case.

Also contained in Aronoff's piece is an equally obvious though perhaps more controversial assertion from climate scientist Will Steffen: the only way that we will get there ”is to “shift to a 'wartime footing.'” Only a fundamental change in attitudes will allow us to "roll out renewable energy and dramatically reimagine sectors like transportation and agriculture . . . at very fast rates,” necessary to address the scale of the problem.

Steffen's view has, of course, few friends on a political right who, even if they do not view climate change as a hoax are philosophically committed to limited government. Somewhat surprisingly, it also has not circulated widely on the political left. A likely reason has to do with the militaristic imagery which has in the past functioned as a bludgeon to repress political dissent and to pre-empt questions about elites' fitness to rule.

But, as Aronoff notes, a war footing can also point in a very different direction. In particular, producing weapons of war requires that "the government play a heavy hand in industry, essentially shifting . . . to a centrally planned economy”-- anathema to the right which has always been at least rhetorically hostile to government intervention in the economy. Also, as Aronoff observes, insofar as these “interventions" have been permitted, they have "tend(ed) to be on behalf of corporations.” 

Our history shows that it doesn’t have to be that way: fighting Hitler wasn't a service to private corporations, it served a public united in its revulsion for fascism. Furthermore, doing so required a massive, centrally planned effort. No one raised questions about the cost of protecting ourselves when President Roosevelt appeared before congress on December 8, 1941. The same should apply to the massive investment which fighting climate change requires now.

Those who heard Roosevelt’s speech were aware that confronting fascism would result in dramatic changes to their lives within months if not weeks. Similarly, most of us are aware that equally dramatic changes will be required by our response to global warming. What these are are not yet clear, however the rough outlines are apparent to anyone who has thought about what needs to be accomplished.

In particular, many of these will be centered around the broad objective of achieving massively higher levels of energy efficiency, one component of which will be to meet strict zero emissions building standards

Doing so will involve millions of workers installing insulation, efficient heating and cooling systems, and where necessary, effecting structural and architectural alterations to support a sustainable lifestyle. Others will be involved in the procurement, production and distribution of necessary materials with many thousands of others involved in site assessments, planning and scheduling of work crews and associated logistics. 

Another component would achieve similar efficiencies in the transportation sector. This would likely have at its center rail electrification  targeting commercial freight currently powered by diesel fueled locomotives. Raw materials and product shipments will be shifted to rail with fossil fuel intensive trucking industry limited to short routes in electrified vehicles. 

Once in place, an electrified rail system would function as well as a conduit for excess electricity provided by intermittent renewable sources whose full incorporation will require a thoroughly  redesigned and reconstructed electrical grid, itself requiring the investment of many millions of man hours. 

On a roughly similar order of magnitude will be required investments in infrastructure improvements to address the effects of climate change, most notably in the protection of low lying areas vulnerable to floods and sea surges. 

All of these components of the climate initiative would require personnel with appropriate training in relevant fields provided at trade schools, junior colleges and colleges extending to the university level. Federal funding would encourage matriculation into these programs while discouraging the growth of academic majors (such as financial engineering) which channel technical talent away from where it is most needed. 

Similar priorities will also inform a major shift in goverment funding of basic and applied science research, a large fraction of which is presently consumed by weapons reserach undertaken at Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Oak Ridge and other national laboratories  These investments would be shifted to research institutions modelled on the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories which have gave rise to energy efficient technologies now in common use. The funding would underwrite a Manhattan project devoted to basic research in new energy sources and also in energy storage systems as well as atmospheric carbon capture and sequestration technologies. 

We are in a race against time to achieve scientific breakthroughs but also to apply existing technologies which are able to drastically reduce our carbon footprint.

Asking the question whether we can afford these is a waste of time-a distraction from investing ourselves both intellectually and emotionally in what will be required.

The right question is exactly that which Alexandria Ocasio Cortez famously asked a couple of weeks ago. 

“Why is it our pockets are only empty when it comes to education and healthcare for our kids and 100 percent renewable energy that is going to save this planet? We only have empty pockets when it comes to the morally right things to do, but when it comes to tax cuts for billionaires and unlimited war, we seem to be able to invent that money fairly easily.”

We did not ask “can we afford it” when we invested a full one quarter of our economy into producing the infrastructure which was required to beat back the axis powers.

Adopting a war footing to confront the even more dire spectre of climate catastrophe would seem to be the rhetorical framework which allow us to move forward in doing what needs to be done.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

by Ben Goldfarb, Daily Good:  http://www.dailygood.org/story/2068/eager-the-surprising-secret-life-of-beavers-and-why-they-matter-ben-goldfarb/
This excerpt is from Ben Goldfarb’s new book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher www.chelseagreen.com
Close your eyes. Picture, if you will, a healthy stream. What comes to mind? Perhaps you’ve conjured a crystalline, fast-moving creek, bounding merrily over rocks, its course narrow and shallow enough that you could leap or wade across the channel. If, like me, you are a fly fisherman, you might add a cheerful, knee-deep angler, casting for trout in a limpid riffle.
It’s a lovely picture, fit for an Orvis catalog. It’s also wrong.
Let’s try again. This time, I want you to perform a more difficult imaginative feat. Instead of envisioning a present-day stream, I want you to reach into the past—before the mountain men, before the Pilgrims, before Hudson and Champlain and the other horsemen of the furpocalypse, all the way back to the 1500s. I want you to imagine the streams that existed before global capitalism purged a continent of its dam-building, water-storing, wetland-creating engineers. I want you to imagine a landscape with its full complement of beavers.
What do you see this time? No longer is our stream a pellucid, narrow, racing trickle. Instead it’s a sluggish, murky swamp, backed up several acres by a messy concatenation of woody dams. Gnawed stumps ring the marsh like punji sticks; dead and dying trees stand aslant in the chest-deep pond. When you step into the water, you feel not rocks underfoot but sludge. The musty stink of decomposition wafts into your nostrils. If there’s a fisherman here, he’s thrashing angrily in the willows, his fly caught in a tree.
Although this beavery tableau isn’t going to appear in any Field & Stream spreads, it’s in many cases a more historically accurate picture—and, in crucial ways, a much healthier one. In the intermountain West, wetlands, though they make up just 2 percent of total land area, support 80 percent of biodiversity; you may not hear the tinkle of running water in our swamp, but listen closely for the songs of warblers and flycatchers perched in creek-side willows. Wood frogs croak along the pond’s marshy aprons; otters chase trout through the submerged branches of downed trees, a forest inverted. The deep water and the close vegetation make the fishing tough, sure, but abundant trout shelter in the meandering side channels and cold depths. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean captured the trials and ecstasies of angling in beaver country when he wrote of one character, “So off he went happily to wade in ooze and to get throttled by brush and to fall through loose piles of sticks called beaver dams and to end up with a wreath of seaweed round his neck and a basket full of fish”(1).
And it’s not just fishermen and wildlife who benefit. The weight of the pond presses water deep into the ground, recharging aquifers for use by downstream farms and ranches. Sediment and pollutants filter out in the slackwaters, cleansing flows. Floods dissipate in the ponds; wildfires hiss out in wet meadows. Wetlands capture and store spring rain and snowmelt, releasing water in delayed pulses that sustain crops through the dry summer. A report released by a consulting firm in 2011 estimated that restoring beavers to a single river basin, Utah’s Escalante, would provide tens of millions of dollars in benefits each year (2). Although you can argue with the wisdom of slapping a dollar value on nature, there’s no denying that these are some seriously important critters.
To society, though, beavers still appear more menacing than munificent. In 2013 I lived with my partner, Elise, in a farming town called Paonia, set high in the mesas of Colorado’s Western Slope. Our neighbors’ farms and orchards were watered by labyrinthine irrigation ditches, each one paralleled by a trail along which the ditch rider—the worker who maintained the system—drove his ATV during inspections. In the evenings we strolled the ditches, our soundtrack the faint gurgle of water through headgates, our backdrop the rosy sunset on Mount Lamborn. One dusk we spotted a black head drifting down the canal like a piece of floating timber. The beaver let us approach within a few feet before slapping his tail explosively and submarining off into the crepuscule. On subsequent walks we saw our ditch beaver again, and again, perhaps half a dozen times altogether. We came to expect him, and though it was probably our imaginations, he seemed to grow less skittish with each encounter.
Like many torrid romances, our relationship acquired a certain frisson from the certain knowledge that it was doomed. Although our beaver showed no inclination to dam the canal—and indeed, beavers often elect not to dam at all—we knew the ditch rider would not tolerate the possibility of sabotage. The next time the rider passed us on his ATV, a shotgun lay across his knees. The grapevine gave us unhappy tidings a few days later: Our ditch beaver was no more.
That zero-tolerance mentality remains more rule than exception: Beavers are still rodenta non grata across much of the United States. They are creative in their mischief. In 2013 residents of Taos, New Mexico, lost cell phone and internet service for twenty hours when a beaver gnawed through a fiber-optic cable (3). They have been accused of dropping trees atop cars on Prince Edward Island (4), sabotaging weddings in Saskatchewan (5) and ruining golf courses in Alabama—where, gruesomely, they were slaughtered with pitchforks, a massacre one local reporter called a “dystopian Caddyshack” (6). Sometimes they’re framed for crimes they did not commit: Beavers were accused of, and exonerated for, flooding a film set in Wales (7) (the actual culprits were the only organisms more heedless of property than beavers: teenagers). Often, though, they’re guilty as charged. In 2016 a rogue beaver was apprehended by authorities in Charlotte Hall, Maryland, after barging into a department store and rifling through its plastic-wrapped Christmas trees (8). The vandal was shipped off to a wildlife rehab center, but his comrades tend not to be so lucky.
Although our hostility toward beavers is most obviously predicated on their penchant for property damage, I suspect there’s also a deeper aversion at work. We humans are fanatical, orderly micromanagers of the natural world: We like our crops planted in parallel furrows, our dams poured with smooth concrete, our rivers straitjacketed and obedient. Beavers, meanwhile, create apparent chaos: jumbles of downed trees, riotous streamside vegetation, creeks that jump their banks with abandon. What looks to us like disorder, though, is more properly described as complexity, a profusion of life-supporting habitats that benefit nearly everything that crawls, walks, flies, and swims in North America and Europe. “A beaver pond is more than a body of water supporting the needs of a group of beavers,” wrote James B. Trefethen in 1975, “but the epicenter of a whole dynamic ecosystem” (9).
Beavers are also at the center of our own story. Practically since humans first dispersed across North America via the Bering Land Bridge—replicating a journey that beavers made repeatedly millions of years prior—the rodents have featured in the religions, cultures, and diets of indigenous peoples from the nations of the Iroquois to the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest. More recently, and destructively, it was the pursuit of beaver pelts that helped lure white people to the New World and westward across it. The fur trade sustained the Pilgrims, dragged Lewis and Clark up the Missouri, and exposed tens of thousands of native people to smallpox. The saga of beavers isn’t just the tale of a charismatic mammal—it’s the story of modern civilization, in all its grandeur and folly.
Despite the fur trade’s ravages, beavers today face no danger of extinction: Somewhere around fifteen million survive in North America, though no one knows the number for certain. In fact, they’re one of our most triumphant wildlife success stories. Beavers have rebounded more than a hundredfold since trappers reduced their numbers to around one hundred thousand by the turn of the twentieth century. The comeback has been even more dramatic across the Atlantic, where populations of a close cousin, the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber), have skyrocketed from just one thousand to around one million (10). Not only have beavers benefited from conservation laws, they’ve helped author them. It was the collapse of the beaver—along with the disappearance of other persecuted animals, like the bison and the passenger pigeon—that sparked the modern conservation movement.
But let’s not pat ourselves on the backs too heartily. As far as we’ve come, beaver restoration has many miles farther to go. When Europeans arrived in North America, the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton guessed that anywhere from sixty million to four hundred million beavers swam its rivers and ponds (11). Although Seton’s appraisal was more than a bit arbitrary, there’s no doubt that North American beaver populations remain a fraction of their historic levels. Will Harling, director of the Mid Klamath Fisheries Council, told me that some California watersheds host just one one-thousandth as many beavers as existed before trappers pursued them to the brink of oblivion.
That story, of course, isn’t unique to California, or to beavers. Europeans began despoiling North American ecosystems the moment they set boots on the stony shore of the New World. You’re probably familiar with most of the colonists’ original environmental sins: They wielded an ax against every tree, lowered a net to catch every fish, turned livestock onto every pasture, churned the prairie to dust. In California’s Sierra Nevada, nineteenth-century gold miners displaced so much sediment that the sludge could have filled the Panama Canal eight times (12). We are not accustomed to discussing the fur trade in the same breath as those earth-changing industries, but perhaps we should. The disappearance of beavers dried up wetlands and meadows, hastened erosion, altered the course of countless streams, and imperiled water-loving fish, fowl, and amphibians—an aquatic Dust Bowl. Centuries before the Glen Canyon Dam plugged up the Colorado and the Cuyahoga burst into flame, fur trappers were razing stream ecosystems. “[Beavers’] systematic and widespread removal,” wrote Sharon Brown and Suzanne Fouty in 2011, “represents the first large-scale Euro-American alteration of watersheds” (13).
If trapping out beavers ranked among humanity’s earliest crimes against nature, bringing them back is a way to pay reparations. Beavers, the animal that doubles as an ecosystem, are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront. Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfire? Take two families of beaver and check back in a year.

Excerpted from Ben Goldfarb's book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018). Reprinted with permission from  Chelsea Green Publishing, publishers of renewable energy, sustainable living, organic gardening, and progressive books since 1984.
Ben Goldfarb is an award-winning environmental journalist who covers wildlife management and conservation biology. His work has been featured in Science, Mother Jones, The Guardian, High Country News, VICE, Audubon Magazine, Orion, Scientific American, and many other publications. He holds a master of environmental management degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and is the author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018). Follow him on Twitter @ben_a_goldfarb.

Monday, August 6, 2018

Eternity, Nature, Society and the Absurd Fantasies of the Rich

The wealthier they are, the more they fear that others will try to take their wealth. No wonder the super-rich are building bunkers to escape the apocalypse.
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. This article is reprinted, with permission, from his excellent blog, Resource Insights.

by Kurt Cobb
Professor and author Douglas Rushkoff recently wrote about a group of wealthy individuals who paid him to answer questions about how to manage their lives after what they believe will be the collapse of society. He only knew at the time he was engaged that the group wanted to talk about the future of technology.
Rushkoff afterwards explained that the group assumed they would need armed guards after this collapse to defend themselves. But they rightly wondered: in a collapsed society how they could even control such guards. What would they pay those guards with when the normal forms of payment ceased to mean anything? Would the guards organize against them?
Rushkoff provides a compelling analysis of a group of frightened wealthy men trying to escape the troubles of this world while alive and wishing to leave a decaying body behind when the time comes and transfer their consciousness digitally into a computer. (I’ve written about consciousness and computers previously.)
Here I want to focus on what I see as the failure of these people to understand the single most salient fact about their situations: their wealth and their identities are social constructs that depend on thousands if not millions of people who are employees; customers; employees of vendors; government workers who maintain and run the law courts, the police force, the public physical infrastructure, legislative bodies, the administrative agencies and the educational institutions — and who thereby maintain public order, public health and public support for our current systems.
Those wealthy men aren’t taking all this with them when they die. And, while they are alive, their identities will shift radically if the intellectual, social, economic and governmental infrastructure degrades to the point where their safety is no longer guaranteed by at least minimal well-being among others in society. If the hunt for diminishing food and other resources comes to their doors, no army of guards will ultimately protect them against the masses who want to survive just as badly but lack the means.
One would think that pondering this, the rich who are capable of pondering it would have an epiphany: Since their security and well-being ultimately hinges on the security and well-being of all, they ought to get started helping to create a society that provides that in the face of the immense challenges we face such as climate change, resource depletion, possible epidemics, growing inequality and other devils waiting in the wings of the modern world. (In fairness, some do understand this.)
At least one reason for the failure of this epiphany to occur is described by author and student of risk Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb describes how the lives the rich become increasingly detached from the rest of society as arbiters of taste for the wealthy convince them that this detachment is the reward of wealth. The rich visit restaurants that include only people like themselves. They purchase larger and larger homes with fewer and fewer people in them until they can spend whole days without seeing another person. For the wealthiest, neighbors are a nuisance. Better to surround oneself with a depopulated forest than people next door.
The rich are convinced by this experience that they are lone heroes and at the same time lone victims, pilloried by the media as out of touch and heartless. These self-proclaimed victims may give to the Cato Institute to reinforce the idea that the individual can go it alone and should. They themselves have done it (or at least think they have). Why can’t everyone else?
The wealthier they are, the more their fear and paranoia mounts that others not so wealthy will try to take their wealth; or that impersonal forces in the marketplace will destroy it or at least diminish it significantly; or that government will be taken over by the mob and expropriate their wealth through high taxes or outright seizure. And, of course, there are the natural disasters of uncontrolled climate change and plague, just to name two.
It’s no wonder some of the super rich are buying luxury bunkers to ride out the apocalypse. These bunkers come with an array of amenities  that include a cinema, indoor pool and spa, medical first aid center, bar, rock climbing wall, gym, and library. High-speed internet is included though one wonders how it will work after the apocalypse.
But strangely, even in these luxury bunkers built in former missile silos, dependence on and trust in others cannot be avoided. The units are actually condominiums. And while they contain supplies and ammunition said to be enough for five years, it will be incumbent on the owners, whether they like it not, to become intimately acquainted with their neighbors in order to coordinate a defense of the compound should that need arise.
The irony, of course, is that this is precisely the kind of communal entanglement which their wealth is supposed to allow them to avoid. Society, it seems, is everywhere you go. You cannot avoid it even when eternity is advancing on your door. And, you cannot escape with your consciousness into a computer (assuming that will one day be possible) if there’s no stable technical society to tend to computer maintenance and no power to keep the computer on.
It turns out that we are here for a limited time and that trusting and reciprocal relationships with others are ultimately the most important possessions we have — unless we are too rich or too frightened to realize it.