Towards a movement of green Reds.

Hey folks,

Sorry for my long hiatus! I've been AWOL around here for the last six months or so, but not because I've grown discouraged with activism surrounding the Long Emergency. Far from it! In addition to my usual rabbling with my trade union, I've been working on a new project, which is now reaching a level where I can go public with it. And you heard it here first!

 If you've read much of my writing here on Seldon's Gate, you know that my biggest concerns about peak oil and climate change are a lack of community activism addressing both, and the complete absence of serious conversation about EITHER in political circles. So, as fall descended into an unseasonably warm winter here in Oregon, I discovered a leftist organization of old standing, with great organizing resources and enthusiasm, concerned with the plight of the working class and long a proponent of sensible environmental policy. An organization with a history of embracing ideas before their time, even when they are unpopular, their proponents labeled crazy or worse. An organization with resources and activists to throw into the fight to help our communities prepare for the coming storms, if someone is willing to make an effort to bring it to their attention.

That's right, folks, I joined the Communist Party. And I've spent the last six months yelling about peak oil and climate change at the top of my lungs. And comrades are listening.

Over the next few months, I'll be talking more about efforts to get peak oil and climate change into the broader conversation, through coalition building between the political chops of the Party and the knowledge and experience of community resilience activists. For now, here's a link* to a video that my activist club has put together over the past couple of months, a video version of a talk I gave to some fellow Communists back in January, which was the genesis of the broader project I'm working on now.

It's about an hour long, but in it I make an effort to completely and succinctly summarize the findings of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in a format accessible to to as many people as possible. My hope is that anyone, after watching the video, will have a strong basic understanding of the science behind climate change projections, because scientific literacy is the only weapon we have against the lies and half-truths told by our corporate masters. I also introduce Peak Oil to an audience that probably hasn't heard about it, perhaps even OF it, and lay out in the broadest possible terms some of the concerns my co-bloggers, especially Kir'Shara, have dissected with such precision since the founding of this blog.

This is still a work in progress; there's still some polishing to do, and the IPCC recently released another report that I have yet to get a gander at. I'd also really appreciate some technical input on the peak oil side of things; climate change is definitely more my area, and I hope to eventually be able to devote as much time to peak oil. I've got a microphone, folks, and it's getting louder all the time; I could really use some help with knowing what to say!

*(There was a slight mix-up with the headings of the videos, so start with part 2/7; hopefully we'll have that fixed as soon as I can get in touch with our editor and webmistress!)

The deadline for climate change action

Excerpts from David Roberts, "The Brutal Logic of Climate Change," Grist, December 6, 2011.

For today’s inconvenient truths (ahem), we turn to Kevin Anderson, a professor of energy and climate change who was, until recently, director of the U.K.’s leading climate research institution, the Tyndall Energy Program.

This year, with his colleague Alice Bows, he published a paper called “Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world” [PDF].

Let’s walk through Anderson’s logic.

[I]f we delay the global emissions peak until 2025, we pretty much have to drop off a cliff afterwards to avoid 2 degrees C. Short of a meteor strike that shuts down industrial civilization, that’s unlikely.

How about 2020? Of the available scenarios for peaking in 2020, says Anderson, 13 of 18 show hitting 2 degrees C to be technically impossible. (D’oh!) The others involve on the order of 10 percent reductions a year after 2020, leading to total decarbonization by 2035-45.

This, then, is the brutal logic of climate change: With immediate, concerted action at global scale, we have a slim chance to halt climate change at the extremely dangerous level of 2 degrees C. If we delay even a decade — waiting for better technology or a more amenable political situation or whatever — we will have no chance.

It might seem that, given the extraordinary difficulty of hitting 2 degrees C, we ought to lower our sights a bit and accept that we’re going to hit 4 degrees C. It won’t be ideal, but hitting anything lower than that is just too difficult and expensive.

The thing is, if 2 degrees C is extremely dangerous, 4 degrees C is absolutely catastrophic. In fact, according to the latest science, says Anderson, “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.”

The illusory value of fossil fuels

"Why Fossil Fuel Abundance Is An Illusion,"
by Jonathan Koomey
Consulting Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University

Even with estimates of the fossil fuel resource base at the low end of what the literature says, the amount of carbon embodied in just the conventional sources of these fuels is vastly larger than the amount of fuel assumed to be burned in...our “business-as-usual” future, assuming no major efforts to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels...

One implication of these results is that the current estimated value of fossil fuel reserves (as capitalized in the stock prices of fossil fuel companies) is an illusion, as Dave Roberts of Grist points out.  We quite literally can’t burn it all and continue the orderly development of human civilization, so the trillions of dollars of “value” in those reserves is a mirage (and a major impediment to progress on this problem, given how hard the fossil fuel industry is fighting to preserve its profits).

Ecological causes of the chaos in Greece

Athens, Greece. February 2012. From http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/world/europe/greeks-pessimistic-in-anti-austerity-protests.html?_r=1

From Dan Bednarz, a policy analyst specializing in energy issues related to health care and public health, this interesting bit about underlying forces driving the social upheaval in Greece:

From the limits to growth perspective Greece is a harbinger of economic contraction and debt deleveraging that is a logical outcome of net energy decline –or the arrival of unaffordable energy prices- in industrial societies.  The energy status of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy, all deep in debt, shows that each nation produces little or no domestic oil. Bluntly put: they have been borrowing to buy increasingly expensive oil; and the cost (oil was $10 a barrel in 1998, now it fluctuates around  $100 per barrel –and it can crash with further economic decline) now exceeds the potential for wealth and value generated by using the oil to manufacture goods and deliver services.  Greece, as one of the world’s energy poorest nations, is the canary of forced energy decline and, it follows, reaching the limits to growth.

In other words, the shrinking global supply of net energy, plus loan-sharking practices by European banks, drove Greece into the abyss. It wasn't lazy people sucking the tit of big government. Now, with Greece's systems for health care, commerce, and much else disintegrating, most of the population is being strangled by poverty, hunger, crime, and other symptoms of social and ecological collapse. Hence the explosion of violence in Greece this week, after the country's parliament passed another "austerity" plan that will leave the elite financial managers comfortably well off as the emaciated populace withers away.

In Greece, we are probably witnessing a preview of America later this decade or sometime next.

We the people, and the river: a possible future for environmental law

Loja Province, Ecuador. From http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monta%C3%B1as_en_Macar%C3%A1.JPG

The river won in the end.

Consider the name of the court case in which it happened: Vilcabamba River v. Provincial Government of Loja, Ecuador.

In this case, a river was granted legal standing in court to sue a local government for harm suffered by the river. This was possible under article 71 of the 2008 constitution of Ecuador, which explicitly grants nature and its ecosystems certain constitutional rights. These include "the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution."

Thus, when the local provincial government began dumping broken concrete and rubbish from road construction into the Vilcabamba river, the river sued. Represented in court, as any non-human entity would be (like a government or corporation), by human lawyers.

The river won. The provincial court of Loja ruled in 2011 that the provincial government had violated the constitutional rights of the river. It issued an injunction ordering the government to make restitution to the injured party, by repairing the damage.

It all sounds so remote, doesn't it? Surely nothing like this could happen in the United States. Under the Constitution of the United States, nature is considered property. Nothing more. Just like women and black people once were as well. Surely the property status of nature will never change. Just as the property status of women and black people, viewed from the days of Jefferson and Madison, would never change.

Surely.

Since 2006, more than two dozen municipal governments in the United States have passed laws recognizing nature and its ecosystems as entities entitled to inherent legal rights. One of the communities to pass such a law is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

You can read more about this at the website of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

Last night, I attended a talk by the executive director of this organization, Thomas Linzey. His group advised the assembly that drafted Ecuador's constitutional provisions on the rights of nature. The CELDF works with U.S. towns and cities to give similar aid, helping them draft ordinances and conduct lawsuits against environmental abuses by transnational corporations.

The long-term aim of such work is to mobilize a coalition of U.S. city governments favoring fundamental revision of state constitutions. The goal of those revisions would be to end various legal powers corporations wield to destroy local environmental protections.

In his talk last night, Linzey was extremely blunt about the extreme hardship (political, legal, personal) that his organization's strategy entails, both for his group and for the local communities seeking its aid. Nevertheless, Linzey makes a convincing case that the conventional legal and policy approach to environmental protection has failed. The condition of planetary ecosystems, he points out (echoing this blog's obsession on the subject), is deteriorating ever more rapidly. Local communities around the world are beginning to feel the effects. And, in many cases, to connect those effects to a basic, underlying cause: the political and legal power of transnational corporations.

Linzey admits that his strategy for constitutional change will take decades to bear fruit, if it ever does. But he believes there is no realistic alternative. National and international legal and political approaches are essentially pointless, given the power of the existing corporate-dominated structure of government. And the ecological situation grows ever more desperate, although many policy-makers and advocates are not yet able to see this.

It will become clearer as the vice begins to tighten, Linzey believes. As do I.