The aesthetics of clean energy

My old employer, Maine Audubon, is a fairly conservative and patrician organization. It's not a strong leader on climate issues: its conservation programs are a lot more preoccupied with piping plovers (cute birds that just happen to live on the same beaches as the organization's plutocrat "major donors") than with ending Maine's self-destructive addiction to fossil fuels.

So I was encouraged and a little surprised to see, on a recent visit a few months ago, a large new array of solar panels planted in the meadows of Maine Audubon's headquarters.

Knowing what I know of Maine Audubon's constituency and its neighbors in the blue-blooded suburb of Falmouth,  I presume that this new addition to the meadows of Gilsland Farm didn't come without some controversy. Lots of Maine Audubon's members (and a number of its staff) frankly express opinions that wind farms and solar installations are ugly. They wouldn't disagree that climate change exists, or that we need to do something about it – they'd just prefer that clean energy be built someplace else, where they don't have to look at it.

Maine's community of environmentalists is strongly aligned with the back-to-the-land movement. And in the back-to-the-land narrative, rural Maine was a new frontier where a new, sustainable and allegedly self-sufficient society could be built far away from the problems of the cities.

There's a fatal flaw in this narrative, though. Rural back-to-the-landers were, and still are, cripplingly addicted to oil and private automobiles. As a rule, they don't like to be reminded of this contradiction.

I think that this is the key to what so many rural "environmentalists" find distasteful about wind farms and large-scale solar installations. What upsets them is the reminder, amidst pastoral landscapes, that we are living through a climate catastrophe.

But for those of us who will live with the consequences of that catastrophe, the reminder is overdue – and these small token efforts to avert it are welcome. 


Related: Exporting pollution to Dixie

There it is, take it.

Out in Los Angeles they've been celebrating the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the audacious engineering project that drained the Owens Valley and transformed the San Fernando Valley from a landscape of orchards into a landscape of tract homes and gas stations.

It just so happens that this week I've also been plowing through the final chapters of John McPhee's Annals of the Former World, his consolidated narrative of a lifetime's worth of writing on North American geology. So far, my favorite part of that book has been the section on Wyoming, in which McPhee tails USGS geologist John Love on field excursions across the state. The chapters weave the sixty-million-year history of the Rocky Mountains with the hundred-year timescale of Love's family, from his mother's arrival, via stagecoach, in a gunslinging Old West of the early twentieth century to Love's atomic age discovery of uranium in the Rocky Mountain foothills.

"Love said that a part of his job was to find anything from oil to agates, and then, in effect, say 'Fly at it, folks,' to the people of the United States."

The geologic history of Wyoming spans relatively little time in the grand scheme of Earth's history. In the last sixty million years or so, roughly one percent of Earth's lifetime, the Rocky Mountains rose up, then sank under accumulations of sand and volcanic debris tens of thousands of feet deep, then, relatively recently, rose up again and shook off the sand in freshets of new mountain streams.

And then a new geological force arrives. Ranchers arrive in Wyoming, and their sons help open up its landscapes to strip mines and oil wells. The state digs beneath the ranchers'  thin Holocene topsoil to get at the more lucrative geology of the Mesozoic era. Open-pit uranium mines, oil and gas wells, and mountain-eating coal draglines rearrange the Rocky Mountain landscape and usher in the new Anthropocene era.

Photo: Jim Bridger coal mine, from the Casper Star-Tribune.

"Fly at it, folks." Love was talking about the bounty of Wyoming's mineral resources, but it's exactly the same sentiment expressed by William Mulholland, chief of the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works, when he opened the sluice gates of the new Aqueduct a hundred years ago and famously said, "there it is. Take it."

In the same momentous twentieth century of human history that rearranged Wyoming, Mulholland's power broker friends find cheap oil under Venice and the Baldwin Hills, and then they give the growing city a reason to burn it by moving the Owens River over mountains and irrigating the massive suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. Gravel erosion from the Santa Monica Mountains, which had washed out into the Pacific for millennia and built the vast coastal plain of the Los Angeles basin, suddenly gets trapped behind foothill dams and begins to bury the mountain canyons. The basin itself acquires new sedimentary layers of asphalt and concrete. The sooty remnants of Carboniferous swamps fly into the troposphere through millions of exhaust pipes.

Geologic time and human history converge here, in the spectacular landscapes of the American west. But remember: geologic history is full of cataclysms.

Science Fiction is the New Realism

Earlier this summer, the New Yorker published its first-ever "Sci-Fi" special issue, with a cover image of a spaceman, a robot, and an alien crashing through the wall of a stodgy literary party.

Inside, there were non-fiction essays by people like Ray Bradbury and Ursula Le Guin. But my favorite parts were the sci-fi stories by putatively "non-genre" writers like Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, and Junot Diaz. Diaz's story, "Monstro," was my favorite — set in a near-future, globally-heated, income-stratified Dominican Republic, where a creepy zombie infection across the border in Haiti is just getting started (apparently Diaz is working on extending the story into a novel).

But the thing that struck me most about the "sci-fi" stories was how grounded and plausible they seemed — in spite of their use of sci-fi tropes like cyborgs and zombie infections. Another story by Jennifer Egan tells of a beautiful woman spy with cybernetic implants that relay her senses to the CIA (in a demonstration of "the medium is the message," the story was published in 144-character segments on Twitter). Though it was set in the near future, and in spite of the Twitter gimmick, the story seemed completely plausible — we already have robot agents fighting overseas, while Google is building cyborg prototypes for networked, computer-enhanced vision.

And my favorite thing about "Monstro" were the details — not quite apocalyptic, but getting there — that made it feel like our everyday discomfort amidst income stratification and constant disaster. The story's horror builds in the background noise of a world in crisis with heat waves and third-world epidemics. Problems whose distance and relentlessness just don't merit that much attention (at first) from the protagonist narrator — not while he's chasing girls in the air-conditioned neighborhoods where the upper class lives.

All of which — the background static of freakish disasters on the 24-hour news cycle, combined with first-world indifference — feels a bit too familiar to call it "sci-fi," doesn't it?

I've also recently started reading the novels and essays of William Gibson, who's also has an essay in this same issue of the New Yorker. His books get shelved in the sci-fi section, even though most of them are pretty solidly rooted in contemporary Internet culture. It's not that Gibson is writing in a fantasy genre; the problem is that most contemporary literature feels like a genre that's stuck in the past, in a world without internet forums or cellphones. As critic Choire Sicha bitingly observes in Slate:

"The literary novel is, make no mistake, as much a pileup of inherited conventions as the worst werewolf cash-in. There are now thousands of young, MFA-toting writers, so many of them aping the weak generation of literary male novelists now in their 50s: pallid and insufferable teachers and idols, in light of the strong and inventive generation before them."
– from Choire Sicha's review of The Unreal and the Real, a new two-volume collection of stories by Ursula Le Guin

Gibson's on Twitter as @greatdismal, which is where I first learned of him over a year ago. Appropriately enough, he's inspired at least one fake imitator account — a fictional cyberpunk  version of the cyberpunk fiction author. I mention it here because that fake account recently summed up (admittedly with some out-of-character exaggeration) how science-fictional the reality of the last few days have been:

Unclassifiable mega-storm decimates swaths of Boston-Atlanta Metro. Axis. NJ residents vote by fax. World transfixed by S. Korean pop video.
— Authentic Wm. Gibson (@AuthenticWmGibs) November 5, 2012

The world we live in — with rich-world obesity epidemics, prefabricated cities rising in Asia, global heating, social media and its attendant transformation of our identities, financial crises, and everything else — has turned out to be far stranger than the old sci-fi stories of white Texan mavericks who landed rockets on Mars.

The weirdness of the future isn't a genre anymore: it's real life.


Recommendations from authors mentioned in this post:
Distrust That Particular Flavor, essays by William Gibson (2012)

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)

The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume One: Where on Earth by Ursula Le Guin (2012).

The Whole Earth 2012: Snowless and Drought-Ridden

Yesterday, NASA released a composite photo of the "Whole Earth" as seen from space, like the ones taken by Apollo astronauts of the 1970s. This one was taken on January 4, 2012 (around 4 pm Eastern time, by the looks of it - you can just barely see New England in the upper right corner passing the horizon into the winter nighttime).



Source: NASA (click for the large version)

It's a stunning image, without a doubt. And it got lots of attention yesterday on Twitter and on various blogs.

But the most relevant insights, I think, came from Dr. Jeff Masters at the Weather Underground blog:

The image is very interesting meteorologically, and extremely strange. It is obvious that it is a winter image, as revealed by the large area of stratocumulus clouds off the U.S. East Coast all the way to South Florida, caused by cold Canadian air blowing offshore. However, the U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.

Such is the Earth in 2012: baked and drought-ridden.

Up In Smoke

This is the Salem Harbor Power Station, a coal- and oil-fired power plant that's capable of generating 745 megawatts of dirty energy. That's more electricity than could be produced by all of New England's wind turbines, combined, on the windiest day.

The plant occupies a 65-acre site in the middle of historic Salem, Massachusetts. In fact, the plant's mountainous coal supplies - on a typical day, the plant burns over 700 tons - occupy a quay just a couple of blocks away from Nathaniel Hawthorne's birthplace.

Salem Harbor Power Station. CC-licensed photo by dsearls on Flickr.

According to New England's Conservation Law Foundation, Dominion Energy, the plant's owner, has filed documents to shut down the power plant in the near future. The combination of cheap power from wind turbines and cleaner-burning natural gas plants, combined with increasingly stringent Clean Air Act requirements, seems to be taking its toll on the 60 year-old plant.

This is good news. But New England still has work to do - there are still massive coal-burning power plants operating in our region, in places like Merrimack and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Together, they send tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gas pollutants into the atmosphere on an annual basis, and these other plants have no closure plans in the works. The massive Brayton Point station in Fall River, Massachusetts, for instance, burns over 2 million tons of coal annually, and sent 148 pounds of neurotoxic mercury into the atmosphere in 2005 alone.

If the progressive and wealthy New England states can't shut down their climate-burning coal power stations, how can we possibly expect the rest of the world to do the same?

"Environmentalism" fiddles while the planet burns

In case you missed it, the United States Senate has given up on trying to pass a law that would slow down the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. Even after the nation's worst oil spill in history and scorching heat waves worldwide, Democrats failed to gain any Republican support for their proposals.

So we'll just have to let the planet stew in its own juices and wait until the next time progressive lawmakers with a 60-vote majority in Washington might be compelled by a massive environmental emergency to do something. But who wants to bet that can happen before our modern society and political institutions melt away in the heat?

In the last few days, there's been a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing from pundits and politicians. But I think that one of the best responses came from David Roberts at Grist, in a post headlined 'Environmentalism' Can Never Address Climate Change.

Roberts writes:

Environmentalism has a well-defined socioeconomic niche in American life. There are distinct cultural markers; familiar tropes and debates; particular groups designated to lobby for change and economic interests accustomed to fighting it; conventional methods of litigation, regulation, and legislation. Environmental issues take a very specific shape.

The thing is, that shape doesn't fit climate change. Climate change -- or rather, the larger problem of which climate change is a symptom -- isn't like the issues that American environmentalism evolved to address.

He goes on to make the point that the environmental establishment had its genesis in, and grew from, its battles against industry. Early environmental activists shut down factories that were dumping sludge into rivers and lakes and rammed their boats against whaling ships. Later environmental activists took industry to court over more abstract environmental problems like mercury emissions and underground groundwater contamination.

Those big problems have been largely addressed: by most measures (if you leave out greenhouse gas pollution), our American physical environment has less pollution to deal with now than we've had since the industrial revolution took hold.

So: can the same environmental establishment that gave us the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts save us from global warming? The recent failure in Washington does not inspire confidence, and Roberts makes a compelling case for why that is:

The entry of the problem [climate change] into American politics via environmentalism has set it on a certain cultural and political trajectory that is both inadequate and extremely difficult to escape.

Addressing the climate challenge will crucially involve restraining industry emissions (the vaunted "cap"). But that is only one of myriad strategies and changes that will be necessary. The environmental advocacy community has tried, of late, to reshape itself to the contours of the problem before it. It has tried to act with a more singular focus, in a more unified way, and to bring other interest groups (military, religious, etc.) into the fold. It has tried to reorient around a more forward-thinking, positive agenda ("clean energy"). Contrary to a lot of the sniping you hear these days, the efforts of those involved have been heroic.

But it's an impossible task. There is no siloed progressive interest group that can engineer the wholesale reindustrialization of the United States. Period. No amount of clever framing or thoughtful policy proposals can overcome the basic limitations of interest group politics.

Many green leaders are now saying that what's missing is a climate movement. That's obviously true in some sense; this will be the work of generations. But the question is whether "the environmental movement" can catalyze a big enough movement to be effective on this problem.

What needs to happen is for concern over earth's biophysical limitations to transcend the environmental movement -- and movement politics, as handed down from the '60s, generally. It needs to take its place alongside the economy and national security as a priority concern of American elites across ideological and organizational lines. It needs to become a shared concern of every American citizen regardless of ideological orientation or level of political engagement. That is the only way we can ever hope to bring about the urgent necessary changes.

To put it another way: this can not be a traditional environmentalist battle against industry, because nearly everyone agrees that industry - and the entire economy - is what needs to be reinvented in order to stop burning fossil fuels and start finding more innovative, efficient forms of energy.

I have worked for years inside and in league with a number of old-line environmental groups, and from that perspective, I unfortunately have to agree with Roberts's diagnosis. "Environmentalism" carries too much baggage from the baby-boom generation whose suburban-back-to-the-land, materialist lifestyle has done so much climate damage.

For many people my age, it's extremely frustrating to see dominant "environmental" organizations behave as though the most productive thing we can do is to buy up lots of land for conservation reserves. Or worse, when we pour thousands of dollars' worth of nonprofit resources to file injunctions against the "scenic impacts" of clean energy projects.

Sure, these things satisfy the comfortable baby-boomers who want to have a nice view outside the picture windows of their ski condos.

But these kinds of actions, and their funders, are calcifying the environmental establishment into something that's demographically old and elite, and politically out-of-touch and ineffective.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned; the environmental establishment fiddles while the entire planet burns.

It's been warm where I am, and where you are, too

This Guardian summary of the latest record-breaking temperature data from NOAA is chockablock full of staggering and depressing facts. Among them:

• Last month was the hottest June ever recorded worldwide and the fourth consecutive month that the combined global land and sea temperature records have been broken.
  
  
• According to NOAA, June was the 304th consecutive month with a combined global land and surface temperature above the 20th-century average. The last month with below-average temperatures was February 1985.
  
  
• Separate satellite data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado shows that the extent of sea ice in the Arctic was at its lowest for any June since satellite records started in 1979.

I found this report via Wired writer Bruce Sterling's Twitter feed, where he made the powerful observation that we'll spend the rest of our lives "dolefully watching physical realities like 'hottest month ever recorded.'"

Future heat waves will break records of the less-distant future, which themselves will outdo these heat extremes of the present day. Struggling journalism institutions like the Guardian will cut costs by recycling the same report, tweaking the details as necessary, and someday soon getting rid of the reference to Arctic sea ice when Arctic sea ice disappears altogether.

But at some point, the reports will cease. When agriculture fails and as more and more nations collapse over water shortages and economic turmoil, organizations like NOAA will either lose their capacity to collect and analyze global climate data, or cease to exist altogether. At that point in our lives, if our lives haven't gone the way of our political and economic institutions, we'll no longer be burdened by these reports and their staggering statistics.

We'll merely be burdened by the staggering reality of a broken world.

Foreshadowing from 1962

Grist uncovered this ironic ad for Humble Oil (motto: "Happy motoring!") in a 1962 back-issue of Life Magazine on Google Books. Incidentally, Humble was one of several companies that would merge to become ExxonMobil.

Baggers

PBS has recently been broadcasting a long documentary series called National Parks: America's Best Idea. I haven't seen it, but apparently one of the co-producers, a fellow named Dayton Duncan, took it upon himself to visit every one of the nation's 58 national parks as a lifelong project. This effort was chronicled in an article headlined Collect 'Em All, published in the July-August edition of the Sierra Club's magazine.

"Collect 'Em All"?

In response, Utne Reader published a good critique by its senior environmental editor, Keith Goetzman. "Park bagging," the act of collecting visits to every park, requires a lot of gasoline and a lot of vacation time, he points out, which makes it an elite and environmentally-unfriendly pursuit.

But his last point is his best one: "The “collect ’em all” mentality goes against a better, nobler impulse, which is to get to know the land intimately," he writes.

When Jess and I worked in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, we encountered hundreds of "peak baggers" trying to collect all 46 of the state's 4000-foot mountains. Most of them were total douchebags, although, for the sake of full disclosure, I have to admit that I myself climbed the 46 peaks through the course of high school. But back then, I also thought that Ayn Rand was a good writer, so there you go.

Grand Canyon National Park, from Wikimedia Commons.

Anyhow, I have lots of stories about New Hampshire peak baggers. Like the crowd of 20 people that showed up at Zealand Falls Hut one bitterly cold and windy Saturday in January, dead-set on finishing a 20-mile loop to "bag" Guyot and Bondcliff mountains with their huge newfoundland dog, Brutus.

Brutus, they told me, was going to be the first dog to "bag" the 46 peaks in the winter season. This was very important to them. I responded that there were 60 mile an hour winds above treeline, which meant that their planned itinerary would leave them exposed to negative-50 degree windchills for several miles on the ridge. "Don't be stupid," to paraphrase.

They opted to be stupid, of course. They were too late coming back to stop by the hut again, but I heard later through the grapevine that they'd had a miserable trip, and they'd come quite close to leaving a big dog's frozen corpse on the ridge.

Safety and common sense aside, what's really problematic about the baggers' attitude is how it reduces these places - mountain peaks or national parks - to petty consumption items, things to be ticked off on a list, like beanie babies.

This is entirely antithetical to environmentalism, which requires a nuanced and thoughtful understanding of the natural resources and landscapes that surround us.

The National Parks themselves are fetish objects for most environmentalists. Sure, I like them too. Their spectacular landscapes really do inspire a lot of people, including a lot of legendary environmental thinkers like John Muir.

But the National Parks are a lousy place to understand our modern society's real relationship with nature. They don't really offer any lessons about where we get our electricity, or our drinking water, or the raw materials that the Chinese use to forge our consumer goods. Instead, the National Parks offer us an unrealistic vision of the way environmentalists wish things were - a pretty backdrop without any people in it. At their worst (as when the federal army forcefully exiled native tribes like the Blackfoot from parks like Yellowstone and Glacier), the parks themselves could be thought of as costly consumption items tailor-made for "environmentalists."

Organizations like the Nature Conservancy are focused on acquiring land for the cause of environmentalism; hikers acquire mountain climbs; RVers acquire National Park passport stamps. But an environmentalist ethic that's focused on acquisition is an ethic that can not and will not address the fundamental environmental crises of our times.

Oil Companies Get Weird

Climate change is doing strange things in Texas.

In the panhandle town of Sunray, Valero Energy Corporation operates an oil refinery that dates to the 1930s and is capable of processing up to 170,000 barrels of oil a day into gasoline, asphalt, and other petroleum products. The refinery is a large industrial operation that uses a lot of electricity: a typical monthly bill runs to about $1.4 million.

Strange neighbors: photo by Michael Schumacher of the Amarillo Globe News.

So Valero recently decided to upgrade the refinery with a $115 million investment that will cut its energy costs dramatically. This month, Valero began operating six wind turbines on the site, which is now also the company's first wind farm. Unlike other wind farms that sell their power into the regional power grid, this one will be primarily devoted to powering the large refinery right next door. By the end of next year, Valero plans to add another 27 turbines, which would make the wind farm capable of powering the entire refinery whenever the wind is strong (the company expects this to be the case 40-45 percent of the time).

Unlike prior efforts from Big Oil (remember the "green" gas station?), this one seems to be a legitimate business effort, not a greenwashing public relations stunt. The company's publicity for the project amounts to a no-frills corporate press release buried in the depths of Valero's web site, and little else. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, the refinery's manager dismisses warm and fuzzy motives for the project: "We didn't build the wind farm so we could get into the wind-energy business. We built the wind farm so we could support the refinery and run it more economically."

Of course, the wind farm is still being used to produce gasoline, and the combustion of refined oil for transportation accounts for nearly a third of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. But the wind farm replaces energy that Valero had previously bought from Wyoming coal-fired power plants and had delivered over hundreds of miles of transmission lines (along with significant energy loss along the way). So, even though Valero is still manufacturing atmospheric poisons, at least they'll be burning a lot fewer atmospheric poisons in the process.

And here's another story of weird behavior from an oil company: ExxonMobil, the fossil fuel giant that's historically been the most outspoken denier of global warming (the company continues to fund global-warming-is-a-hoax conspiracy theorists at places like the Heritage Foundation) last month announced a partnership with an electric car company to make a fleet of rent-by-the-hour battery-powered cars available to the public in Baltimore.

ExxonMobil has invested $500,000 in the project, which is roughly how much money the company takes in every 45 seconds. Still, it's strange to see them investing in technology and a business model (carsharing) that are designed to reduce demand in their primary product. ExxonMobil is making a very small hedge against the risk that they'll turn into the next Chrysler or Kodak.

It's probably too soon to say for certain, but all of this seems to me to be another indicator of an unsteady climate: when even corporate oilmen from Texas start taking renewable energy technology seriously, could it mean that Hell is freezing over?

ACES: American Clean Energy and Security Act

There's a climate change and renewable energy bill being debated right now in DC, and it might even have a fighting chance.

Do yourself a favor and call your representatives to help it win. Think of it as a sort of retirement plan: a small insurance policy against famine, drought, and failed states to go along with your 401(k).

1Sky has the phone numbers.

Making C02 Visible

This morning, a huge new billboard went up near Penn Station in New York, devoted to keeping track of how many metric tons of greenhouse gases are in our atmosphere at any given moment. The clock started this morning at 3.64 trillion metric tons, based on estimates and reports from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

You can track the clock online here, at the Deutsche Bank's website. As I write this, another 1,000 tons are being added into the atmosphere every second. The billboard doesn't say so, but the survival of civilization and most life on earth relies on stopping this clock and beginning to turn it backwards in the next ten to twenty years.

Anyhow, as I've said before, one of the biggest hazards of climate change is the fact that it's hard to perceive: unlike other pollutants we've dealt with, CO2 is invisible and odorless, and you can't feel the effects of a multi-trillion-ton blanket in the atmosphere until a category four hurricane is at your doorstep.

The carbon counter helps with that problem. I'm also encouraged by the fact that the billboard's being paid for by a major global bank: as Mindy Lubber wrote today in the Huffington Post, the costs of greenhouse gas emissions aren't on anyone's balance sheet, which makes them a huge financial loophole in the global economy. Tallying greenhouse gases on a huge billboard in the world's financial capital is a step in the right direction (and it gives Deutsche Bank a measure of credence in the carbon accounting and trading businesses that are expected to emerge once the United States passes a climate bill).

This is just a couple of blocks away from the well-known "debt clock," which hasn't been successful enough to forestall the addition of another digit when the debt went over $10 trillion last fall. This counter will never need another digit: if our atmosphere accumulates that much carbon, there won't be anyone around to keep the lights on.

Climate Change: a Monroe Doctrine for the Arctic

From Der Spiegel:

Ironically, while the world worries about climate change, global warming is triggering great hopes in Greenland. If the Arctic waters were truly ice-free in the summer in five to 10 years, which would be significantly sooner than previously feared, this could be good for Greenland -- at least economically.

The port of Qaqortoq in southern Greenland. From Der Spiegel.

Almost 200 years after the Monroe Doctrine, climate change is making the relationship between the Kingdom of Denmark and its arctic colony about as substantial as the melting pack ice. Geographically, Greenland (technically a "semi-autonomous republic") is the largest remaining European colony in North America. Its predominantly Inuit population drives a hardscrabble economy: Greenland exports lots of fish, and it imports lots of alcohol.

But with melting ice and increasing global demand for natural resources, Greenland looks set to storm into the global economy. The island stands to become a sort of Arctic Dubai by exploiting tremendous offshore oil reserves, which, in turn, will help accelerate the disappearance of the ice that's holding it back.

Galveston

As a deadly hurricane bears down on the Texas gulf coast, I thought I'd write a requiem post for the 8,000 souls who died in the 1900 storm that devastated Galveston, which was then the fourth-largest city in Texas.

The 1900 storm hit with no advance warning - it was long before satellite tracking, radar, or reliable forecasts (in the absence of professional meteorology, the storm also had no name). Five days after the storm, a Galveston Daily News reporter wrote,

The story of Galveston's tragedy can never be written as it is... But in the realm of finity, the weak and staggered senses of mankind may gather fragments of the disaster, and may strive with inevitable incompleteness to convey the merest impression of the saddest story which ever engaged the efforts of a reporter.

The quote and photograph come from a Galveston Daily News website dedicated to memorializing the 1900 storm.

After the storm, the city participated in a massive effort to raise the elevation of the island's most flood-prone areas, by as much as 16 feet. To me, the raising of Galveston exemplifies Texas's incredible capacity for revival and growth. It was an incredible feat of civic effort and engineering, executed with turn-of-the-century technology.

Entire structures were jacked up into the air and put on stilts:

St. Patrick's Church, Galveston: from the Texas State Library and Archives.

Avenue O residence, Galveston. Note the front stairway suspended in midair. From the Texas State Library and Archives.

Then, massive pipes were laid in the streets, and dredges began to flood the ground beneath the stilts with mud...

Pipelines discharging dredged fountains of muddy fill. From the Texas State Library and Archives.

...until the ground rose up to meet the bottoms of the raised buildings, and the stilts were buried.

Before and after. This photo comes from Pruned.

In the century since, rising seas and geological subsidence have brought Galveston's elevation as much as 2.5 feet closer to sea level. That also brings the city 2.5 critical feet closer to disaster as Hurricane Ike bears down on the barrier island tonight. Worse still, the past few decades have brought intense development of new homes and businesses to the western end of the island, areas unprotected by the city of Galveston's raised grade or seawall.

This storm could be really ugly for southeastern Texas. Let's hope for the best.

What does "carbon footprint" mean, exactly?

NY Times editorial writer Verlyn Klinkenborg takes the term "carbon footprint" to task in today's Editorial Observer:

"What makes me uneasy is simply knowing how quickly humans adopt new phrases and how readily we confuse them with the reality - or the unreality - of our actions. The two things we seem to do most instinctively are manipulate language and create markets, and those two instincts converge when it comes to carbon footprints. Creating a market in moral carbon - offsets that counter our energy-rich lifestyle - feels a little like Rotisserie baseball, more illusion than reality...

"There is nothing trivial about grasping the idea that lies behind carbon footprints, trying to understand the scale of our consumption and its widespread environmental costs. Think about it properly, and it leads you to a profound critique of who we are and how we behave. Act on it, and you immediately see how carbonaceous our lives have become."

The Anthropocene Era

Millions of years from now, geologists of some different species may find a thin stratum of plastic in the sedimentary rock of ancient seabeds and speculate that maybe it was a strange sort of petrochemical asteroid that caused the giant mass extinction at the end of the holocene epoch.

A growing number of present-day geologists are now arguing that the holocene epoch is effectively over, and that it's time to call our times by a new name: the anthropocene epoch, named for the dominant geological force of the period. Let's look at our credentials: we've relocated billions of tons of carboniferous-era rocks out of the ground and into the atmosphere; we've accelerated erosion in rivers worldwide, we're melting away ice caps that are hundreds of thousands of years old, and we've precipitated one of the largest mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth.

The Holocene Epoch began about 10,000 years ago. It is, by two orders of magnitude, the shortest geological epoch, and we may have just ended it. Whatever - it's an arbitrary division of time, a scientific invention. But what impresses me most about this is the fact that the geological record is almost four billion years old - and in a few thousand years, humans have already managed to leave a permanent mark.



Some geologists even say that the entire quaternary period, a scant 1.8 million years young, may be extinct. The quaternary period is defined geologically by periodic ice ages, which seem increasingly unlikely, but it's still entirely within the realm of possibility that something like The Day After Tomorrow might happen someday. Or, as the geologists put it, "Given the large uncertainties in the future trajectory of climate and biodiversity, and the large and currently unpredictable action of feedbacks in the earth system, we prefer to remain conservative. Thus, while there is strong evidence to suggest that we are no longer living in the Holocene (as regards the processes affecting the production and character of contemporary strata), it is too early to state whether or not the Quaternary has come to an end" (source: GSA Today, February 2008).

On the one hand, I'm encouraged by the fact that geologists are heeding the fact that humans are a part and a force of nature. Kind of puts the environmental movement in perspective: Ted Turner and the Nature Conservancy can buy as many Montanan ranches as they want, but they won't be doing squat in the grand scheme of geological time.

Raise cain about greenhouse gases and move our society towards leaving carbon in the ground, though, and that's an accomplishment that will be scribed in the rocks for billions of years to come.

"The American people are called upon to not sacrifice."

With ethanol, "we can break our addiction to fossil fuels without sacrificing our dependence on fossil fuels."

The City trumps the Prius

Image: Foster and Partners' planned carbon-neutral Masdar City, under construction in Dubai

Hey, all you granolas. Sell your Prius, sign over the homestead to the lumber company, and move to town - it's the new frontier in honest environmentalism.

As America's unmoored energy policy flails about for some kind of "sustainable" solution to keep us moving between our American Dream wilderness retreats and the closest Wal-Mart (turns out the biofuels that won the jackpot in Washington's latest energy bill are are only going to make matters worse - oops), it's becoming increasingly clear that there isn't any sustainable way to maintain the massive amounts of energy and highway infrastructure that suburbs require.

That's the gist of a new essay-in-progress by WorldChanging editor Alex Steffen: My Other Car is a Bright Green City.

Steffen argues that even if Detroit were able to pull a 135 mile-per-gallon-equivalent hybrid out of its ass and into mass production tomorrow, the age of happy motoring would still be doomed (although any efforts that Detroit might invest to that end would be very much appreciated). Modest efforts to increase transit infrastructure and support density in existing towns and cities will have much bigger effects on our total greenhouse gas emissions than the most ambitious gas-mileage standards. Besides that, city-dwellers on average spend less energy on electricity, heating, and cooling as well.

So pack up your geodesic dome and reserve your spot at the community garden - there are still plenty of vacant lots left over from the slums they bulldozed while you were dancing away at Woodstock. The future of environmentalism is in our cities: as Steffen writes, "we might just awaken on the other side of this fight to find ourselves prosperously at home in the sort of communities we thought lost forever, leading more creative, connected and carefree lives."

The next manifest destiny

Photo by Vincent Laforet, National Geographic Magazine

It's beginning to look as though the spectacular economic boom in America's arid west - the golf courses in the desert, the huge dams, the miles and miles of tract housing, the strip malls with palm-and-lawn landscaping - coincided with the wettest century of the past millennium, according to an article by Robert Kunzig in the latest National Geographic Magazine.

So now things are getting back to normal, which is way too dry for the West's new arrivals: Lake Powell is half empty and wildfires in suburban subdivisions have become an annual event. The alfalfa farmers in the desert are getting militant. Your southwestern country clubs are getting nervous.

The West's recovery from the past century's bout of relative dampness is actually likely to go speeding right past "normal" and enter into a few centuries' worth of mega-drought, thanks to effects of global climate change that are already taking hold. The warming globe is baking the moisture out of the air in the world's desert regions and making their climates even drier, even as it relocates that moisture north to wallop more temperate latitudes with increased precipitation and more powerful storms.

In Western mountains, which typically attract enough moisture to sustain forests, increased heat and drought and decreasing snowpack are exposing forests to more and more wildfires, while the trees that don't burn are left to contend with exploding infestations of pine beetles and other pests. The West's sky islands, isolated remnants of ice-age ecosystems that survive high up in desert mountains, are retreating further uphill every year as their forests seek the cooler air they need to survive. Like spruce-fir forests in New England, most of these ecosystems will shrink to nothing when they reach the summits of their mountains.

A landscape ecologist for a federal land agency says that "the projections are that Joshua trees may not survive in Joshua Tree National Park. Sequoias may not survive in Sequoia National Park. What do you do? Do you irrigate these things? Or do you let a 2,000-year-old tree die?"

The People's Car

"That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest."
- Henry David Thoreau, 1856

Environmentalists worldwide have been wringing their hands this week with the introduction of the new Tata Nano, a $2500 "people's car" intended to make car ownership affordable to India's burgeoning middle class.

So will 1 billion new motorists in India push the world's carbon-soaked atmosphere over the brink? How could those third-world nations be so inconsiderate?

I'm actually not that concerned about the Nano. I do think that this car is going to cause big problems in India: as thousands of new and inexperienced drivers take to streets that are already congested to the point of uselessness, and as those thousands of newly-minted members of the middle class sink a huge portion of their incomes into cars - a depreciating asset - instead of into their homes, education, medicine, or even safe drinking water.

But who are we to say that India shouldn't drive? Their middle class is merely following the lousy example we've set. We should actually be heartened by the fact that the Nano is remarkably fuel-efficient, and its engine will generate less pollution than most of the three-wheeled rickshaws and two-stroke motor scooters it's intended to replace.

In fact, as this NY Times article attests, the Nano is actually a model of automotive efficiency and frugality: no power steering, no power windows, no air bags or antilock brakes, one windshield wiper instead of two. Stripping out everything they didn't need allowed Tata's engineers to reduce material costs and build a car light enough to run on a tiny 35 horsepower engine (by comparison, this American couch-potato lawnmower runs on a 25 horsepower engine). This is almost the platonic ideal of an automobile: a car stripped down to its barest essence.

So as world environmental crises go, the Nano has got nothing on the hundreds of new coal power plants that China is building to keep our Wal-Mart shelves full of cheap plastic crap. Even if millions of people do embrace the Nano, India will have to respond with even tighter pollution rules (in fact, new auto regulations are already on their way), congestion charges for crowded city streets, and other measures to reduce driving.

Plus, like their Chinese counterparts, new Indian motorists are likely to drive up the global price of gasoline even further - and that should help the developed world trade in our own autos for something a little more frugal.