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08 Dec 09

Green Guru Gone Wrong: William McDonough - vantagepoint - green architecture | Fast Company

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Climate-Change environment architecture design

Copenhagen climate change conference: 'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation' | Comment is free | The Guardian

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Climate-Change environment manifesto

19 Oct 09

Deadlines loom for creating new economy to avoid climate catastrophe -- WWF-Australia

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climate-change environmentalism study

The way forward, according to the report, is simultaneous action on all greenhouse gas emissions from all sectors, with market measures backed with a full range of other policies including energy efficiency standards, feed-in tariffs for renewable energy and an end to "perverse " subsidies for fossil fuel use.

General Electric's Ecomagination Campaign - SourceWatch

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greenwash environment corpwatch general-electric climate-change sourcewatch ecomagination

CorpWatch : Climate Change Debate Fuels Greenwash Boom

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greenwash environment corpwatch general-electric climate-change

Some environmental groups charge that Neste's claims are "greenwash": misleading public relations masking unsustainable practices. Greenpeace, for example, explains that the new plant in Singapore is likely to cause more environmental problems, not fewer, by increasing demand for new palm oil plantations that displace environmentally sensitive forests or wetland areas.
The clash between Neste and Greenpeace highlights one of the key ideological debates over climate change: Business and politicians believe that a "technological" fix such as alternative fuels can solve the problem and also generate profits; many environmental groups believe the real solution to global warming lies in reducing consumption.
3 more annotations...
- The new green boom in biofuels has accelerated the demand for plantations, which in turn has led to widespread forest and peatland clearing. Indeed, a 2007 United Nations Environment Program report earlier this year, found that oil palm plantations are now the leading cause of forest destruction in Indonesia and Malaysia.
- A British government report estimated that clearing land for agro-fuel cultivation creates two to nine times more greenhouse gases than the cleaner-burning fuel saves.
- Warning: Greenwash Ahead
  
  The cases of TXU’s non-binding concessions in Texas, GE’s amorphous “clean coal” promises, and Neste’s palm oil strategy in South Asia illustrate a widening trend: As the climate change issue becomes mainstream, more and more companies are jumping on the public relations bandwagon. If these examples serve as models, they will try to win endorsements for agreeing to do nothing, promise things that they cannot guarantee, and take advantage of the debate to profit from environmentally unfriendly technologies.
  
  Activists attending the Bali gathering say that the real answer to climate change will not be generated by profit-motivated corporations, but by the concrete commitments of political leaders backed by the force of law. Raman of Friends of the Earth International, puts it simply: "We need Northern countries to develop stringent policies to reduce their energy consumption and attempt to find solutions to their energy needs locally."

20 Aug 09

Bjorn Lomborg - SourceWatch

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climate-change activism

In the wake of the decision the conservative Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, requested a review of the work of the Institute for Environmental Valuation (IEV) which Lomborg had been appointed to head in February 2002. [10]
In the wake of the decision the conservative Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, requested a review of the work of the Institute for Environmental Valuation (IEV) which Lomborg had been appointed to head in February 2002.

08 Nov 08

GEOENGINEERING - Superstruct

massive intervention in the earth's envrionment to solve very large-scale problems, like global climate change

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GEOENGINEERING superstruct climate-change futurism

02 Nov 08

Wired 14.07: POSTS

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al-gore climate-change LAWRENCE-LESSIG

06 Oct 07

"The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq" by Richard Manning (Harper's Magazine)

www.harpers.org/...0079915 - Preview

agriculture climate-change environmentalism food-business food-chain global-warming green-revolution nutrition scientific-paper

The journalist's rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as
even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We'll follow the energy
All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This
is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates,
the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to
plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden
as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.
25 more annotations...
- Both conclude that we
  humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth's primary productivity, 40 percent of all there
  is.
- Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated.
- If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and
  industry. Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity's cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds
  of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains,
  their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable
  bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside
  from hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of true wealth—sun energy—to be found on the planet.
- As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture
  is a recent human experiment.
- Domestication was also a radical change in the distribution of wealth within the plant world.
- Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an
  annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American
  farm. Iowa's fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.
- When we say the soil is rich, it is not a metaphor. It is as rich in energy as an oil well. A prairie converts that energy
  to flowers and roots and stems, which in turn pass back into the ground as dead organic matter. The layers of topsoil build
  up into a rich repository of energy, a bank. A farm field appropriates that energy, puts it into seeds we can eat. Much of
  the energy moves from the earth to the rings of fat around our necks and waists. And much of the energy is simply wasted,
  a trail of dollars billowing from the burglar's satchel.
- Today we do the same, only now when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers.
  Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. On
  average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year's worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land—in 1997
  we burned through more than 400 years' worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else. Even as the
  earth beneath Iowa shrinks, it is being globalized.
- Anthropologists call them the wheat-beef
  people, a name that better connects those ancients along the Danube to my fellow Montanans on the Upper Missouri River. These
  proto-Europeans had a full set of domesticated plants and animals, but wheat and beef dominated.
- Two other types of catastrophic agriculture evolved at roughly the same time, one centered on rice in what is now China and
  India and one centered on corn and potatoes in Central and South America. Rice, though, is tropical and its expansion depends
  on water, so it developed only in floodplains, estuaries, and swamps. Corn agriculture was every bit as voracious as wheat;
  the Aztecs could be as brutal and imperialistic as Romans or Brits, but the corn cultures collapsed with the onslaught of
  Spanish conquest. Corn itself simply joined the wheat-beef people's coalition. Wheat was the empire builder; its bare botanical
  facts dictated the motion and violence that we know as imperialism.
- The Basque people are probably the lone remnant descendants of Cro-Magnons, the only trace.
- Wheat is temperate and prefers plowed-up grasslands. The globe has a limited stock of temperate grasslands, just as it has
  a limited stock of all other biomes. On average, about 10 percent of all other biomes remain in something like their native
  state today. Only 1 percent of temperate grasslands remains undestroyed. Wheat takes what it needs.
- In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. There
  >
  
  was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.
  >
- The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled the amber
  revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain—wheat, rice, and corn.
- In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. There
  was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.
- With the possible
  exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.
- It marks off a class
  >
  
  of about 1.3 billion people, the hard core of the larger group of 2 billion chronically malnourished people—that is, one third
  >
  
  of humanity. We may forget about them, as most Americans do.
  >
- America's biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes.
  >
  
  Likewise, you can't eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can't eat hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don't.
  >
  
  These four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food; it's about commodities
  >
  
  that require the outlay of still more energy to
  >
  become
  >
  food.
  >
- Ever
  >
  
  since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like
  >
  
  ten.
  >
- There is another energy matter to consider here, though. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast
  >
  
  cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal
  >
  
  burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States
  >
  
  uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.
  >
- According to one set of calculations,
  >
  
  we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The Department of Agriculture says the ratio
  >
  
  is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest.
  >
- Green eaters, especially vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food chain, a simple matter of energy flow. Eating a carrot
  >
  
  gives the diner all that carrot's energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by
  >
  
  a factor of ten.
  >
- Animal rights aside, vegetarians can lose the edge in the energy argument by eating processed food, with its ten calories
  >
  
  of fossil energy for every calorie of food energy produced.
  >
- Eighty percent of the grain the United States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight
  >
  
  percent of all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain, mostly corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs
  >
  
  and chickens. The cattle spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their bodies,
  >
  
  up to their knees in shit, being stuffed with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort
  >
  
  of confinement invariably engenders.
  >
- It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way;
  >
  
  sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork.
  >

03 Oct 07

Ozone Man: The New Yorker

www.newyorker.com/...060424ta_talk_remnick - Preview

al-gore climate-change environmentalism politics

03 Sep 07

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 11

www.edge.org/...q06_11.html - Preview

climate-change edge environmentalism politics thinkers

In every case, weak or decentralised government,
>

but strong free trade led to surges in prosperity for all,
>

whereas strong, central government led to parasitic, tax-fed
>

officialdom, a stifling of innovation, relative economic
>

decline and usually war.
>
David Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage: even
>

if China is better at making everything than France, there
>

will still be a million things it pays China to buy from France
>

rather than make itself. Why? Because rather than invent, say,
>

luxury goods or insurance services itself, China will find
>

it pays to make more T shirts and use the proceeds to import
>

luxury goods and insurance.
>
3 more annotations...
- Sure,
  >
  
  it is possible to have too little government. Only, that
  >
  
  has not been the world's problem for millennia. After the
  >
  
  century of Mao, Hitler and Stalin, can anybody really say
  >
  
  that the risk of too little government is greater than the
  >
  
  risk of too much? The dangerous idea we all need to learn
  >
  
  is that the more we limit the growth of government, the better
  >
  
  off we will all be.
  >
- But
  >
  
  none of this is to say that we as people should not worry about
  >
  
  global change; we should worry a lot. This is because climate
  >
  
  change may not hurt the planet, but it hurts people. In particular,
  >
  
  it will hurt people who are too poor to adapt. Significant
  >
  
  climate change will change rainfall patterns, and probably
  >
  
  patterns of extreme events as well, in ways that could easily
  >
  
  threaten the food security of hundreds of millions of people
  >
  
  supporting themselves through subsistence agriculture or pastoralism.
  >
  
  It will have a massive effect on the lives of the relatively
  >
  
  small number of people in places where sea ice is an important
  >
  
  part of the environment (and it seems unlikely that anything
  >
  
  we do now can change that). In other, more densely populated
  >
  
  places local environmental and biotic change may have similarly
  >
  
  sweeping effects.
  >
- It will have a massive effect on the lives of the relatively
  small number of people in places where sea ice is an important
  part of the environment (and it seems unlikely that anything
  we do now can change that). In other, more densely populated
  places local environmental and biotic change may have similarly
  sweeping effects.

04 Apr 07

LiveScience.com - Report Details Global Biological Change

www.livescience.com/...070401_ap_climate_report.html - Preview

climate-change environmentalism global-warming report

31 Mar 07

Findings of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change Science
the full IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, which includes the input of more than 1,200 authors and 2,500 scientific expert reviewers from more than 130 countries.
15 more annotations...
- Human Responsibility for Climate Change
  The report finds that it is “very likely” that emissions of heat-trapping gases from human activities have caused “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century.”
- Warming Is Unequivocal
  The report concludes that it is “unequivocal” that Earth’s climate is warming, “as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level.”
- Additional IPCC Findings on Recent Climate Change
  Rising Temperatures
  • Eleven of the last 12 years rank among the 12 hottest years on record (since 1850
- Increasingly Severe Weather
  (storms, precipitation, drought)
  • The intensity of tropical cyclones (hurricanes) in the North Atlantic has increased over the past 30 years, which correlates with increases in tropical sea surface temperatures.
- • Droughts have become longer and more intense, and have affected larger areas since the 1970s, especially in the tropics and subtropics.
- Rising Sea Levels
  • Since 1961, the world’s oceans have been absorbing more than 80 percent of the heat added to the climate, causing ocean water to expand and contributing to rising sea levels. Between 1993 and 2003 ocean expansion was the largest contributor to sealevel rise.
- Even if we act today to reduce our emissions from cars, power plants, land use, and other sources, we will see some degree of continued warming because past emissions will stay in the atmosphere for decades or more. If we take no action to reduce emissions, the IPCC concludes that there will be twice as much warming over the next two decades than if we had stabilized heat-trapping gases and other climate relevant pollutants in the atmosphere at their year 2000 levels.
- Increasingly Severe Weather
  (storms, precipitation, drought)
  • Tropical cyclones (hurricanes and typhoons) are likely to become more intense, with higher peak wind speeds and heavier precipitation associated with warmer tropical seas.
- • Extreme heat, heat waves, and heavy precipitation are very likely to continue becoming more frequent.
- Melting Ice
  • Sea ice is projected to shrink in both the Arctic and Antarctic under all model simulations. Some projections show that by the latter part of the century, late-summer Arctic sea ice will disappear almost entirely.
- The IPCC states that it is very likely that the Atlantic Ocean MOC will be 25 percent slower on average by 2100
- • “Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will lead to increasing acidification of the ocean,” with negative repercussions for all shell-forming species and their ecosystems.[5]
- The models used by the IPCC project that by the end of this century, the global average sea-level will rise between 7 and 23 inches (0.18 and 0.59 meters) above the 1980–1999 average.
- 3. The Third Assessment Report (TAR 2001) concluded that “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentration.”
- Melting and Thawing
  • Since 1900 the Northern Hemisphere has lost seven percent of the maximum area covered by seasonally frozen ground.
  • Mountain glaciers and snow cover have declined worldwide.
  • Satellite data since 1978 show that the extent of Arctic sea ice during the summer has shrunk by more than 20 percent.

30 Mar 07

Ten Personal Solutions to Global Warming - by the union of concerned scientists

www.ucsusa.org/...ten-personal-solutions.html - Preview

advice authoritative climate-change environmentalism global-warming howto

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