Copenhagen and Colorado

The world’s leaders are gathering for the climate summit in Copenhagen. This is, indeed, a moment of truth for the world… is there a way to turn our path away from disaster?

The prospects for a deal face the hurdle of the vast inequity between rich and poor. Poor countries want to develop in the way of the west, and have the good life that the rich have enjoyed. Rich countries don’t want to give up the wasteful way of life that has been built deep into the infrastructure and philosophy of those countries. The “Greenhouse Development Rights Framework” calculates the responsibility of each country over time… in order to meet its fair share, at some point in the future the United States will have to emit a negative amount of Carbon Dioxide. We’ll have to take the stuff out of the air, or assist other countries in becoming more efficient.

For the future of Earth’s ecosystems, the future survival of our civilization, the gasoline and coal powered path is closed to all. Developed countries, most of all the United States, must rapidly reduce carbon emissions. Fortunately, we are currently so wasteful that it will be easy to make big cuts through efficiency and conservation. For the developing world, an efficient, low carbon path of development must be feasible.

Here, on the edge of the San Luis Valley in Colorado, we are living off the grid and setting an example of how to do this. We get our power from solar, wind, geothermal, and small scale hydroelectric. The power we generate can run electric bikes and scooters, road-worthy golf carts, and plug-in hybrid cars. Imagine… no more electric bill. No more having to stop at a gas pump. Saving money is equally appealing in both the developed and developing world. Cheap solar panels and batteries, mass-produced at third world prices, will allow all of us to grow in sustainability, grow in equality, and finally meet in the middle.

Can world leaders agree to this, and implement it effectively, given human nature and the power of the oil companies? Do we have the will, the courage, to change our ways quickly enough? If your child, or your grandchild, was standing in the path of an oncoming train, you would pull them out of the way—it would be your moral duty to do so. It is our children, our grandchildren, who will face ruin later in the century if we fail to act… not to mention the innocent plants and animals.

The goal of emergency climate reduction calls for an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. This will most likely limit the rise in average global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius. I argue that this is much too slow, and that an 80% reduction can be made much more quickly, in fact, immediately. To show this is possible, I have reduced my personal carbon emissions by over 80% in the space of two months.

I also argue that a 2 degree Celsius increase in temperature is far too much, and would be a tragic disaster for the entire world, its ecosystems, and its people. By limiting our emissions, right now, and beginning to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we can stabilize the level of carbon dioxide at 350 parts per million (1980 levels). We can limit the duration of damaging temperature increase to a few decades.

Scientists are not salespeople—two degrees seems barely noticeable. For Americans, you’ve got to convert to Farenheit—3.6 degrees. Global average temperature includes the oceans, which don’t warm up as much. Areas in the continental interiors warm much more. Drier places, higher altitudes, nighttime, and winter are where the changes will be felt the most. In this scenario, our high, dry, inland place might warm by twice the global average – 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit. On winter nights, it might be triple – 10.8 degrees F. Okay, the difference between –30F and –20F at night is only the difference between damn cold and damn freakin cold… but it’s life and death to a bark beetle. The difference between 30F and 40F is the difference between fine powder and slush.

Huge swaths of lodgepole pine and aspen are suddenly dying off. This has delivered a huge wallop to the economy in northern Colorado. The mountains are like a layer cake, with climate zones one above the other, lower montane to upper montane to sub-alpine to tundra. Global warming means these zones are moving up the mountains year by year—but trees can’t climb up the mountains. They find themselves in the wrong zone, and die of insect or fungus or fire. Increased carbon dioxide and heat will stimulate faster growth… but we will lose our legacy of old forests, and the new, changed forests must adapt to still warmer temperatures before they can even mature. The tundra is the most vulnerable of all, and much may be overrun by trees.

As the oceans warm, evaporation increases, putting more water vapor into the air, which is fuel for the vast engines we call storms. A more active atmosphere drives warm air farther up into the arctic, which in turn drives sudden bursts of cold air far to the south. Thus we see long stretches of unseasonably warm weather, punctuated by insane storms and brutal cold. We see deeper snows that melt off faster, stream flows peaking earlier in the spring. Our glaciers, small as they are, are shrinking and disappearing one by one. Colorado is the “water tower” for much of the west, with snowmelt providing a steady flow. Warmer temperatures means more variable flow in the rivers available to the states downstream.

In the summer, warmer temperatures on land relative to the ocean drive the monsoons. Warming over the land is increasing this effect—some computer models show the monsoon doubling as temperatures get warmer. High winds, hail, and tornadoes will impact the plains. Higher rainfall, and a higher variability of rainfall, harder to predict, harder to catch and hold.

Higher temperatures mean increased evaporation over land, which could lead to the paradox of higher rainfall overall, but more droughts. During the dust bowl of the 1930s, temperatures were one degree Fahrenheit warmer than recently. We are talking about several times that, five or six or seven degrees Fahrenheit. Along with western Nebraska and Kansas, eastern Colorado is a land of sand hills, a Sahara-like sea of dunes covered, for now, in grass. A few thousand years ago, when the temperature was a few degrees warmer, these dunes were active, on the move. We are looking at a larger increase by the middle of the century.

We are talking right now about the “safe” global limit of 2 degrees celcius, or 450 parts per million carbon dioxide. This is considered a very optimistic scenario, and only if we agree on what are considered very stringent limits. “Business as usual,” with no controls, would send us to 550, then 750, then a thousand parts per million, hotter than we’ve seen in 55 million years since the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum. We are talking about crocodiles in Canada, tropical forest in Wyoming.

The greenhouse effect, like a transparent blanket, warms the poles more than anywhere else. 450 ppm will wipe out polar sea ice, and send big chunks of Greenland and Antarctica sliding into the sea. Whole island nations could be submerged, along with many coastal cities.

Sudden melting of the arctic could lead to rapid changes in weather patterns and ocean currents, which could make climate unrecognizable throughout the world. These “flips” in climate might flop back and forth. Climate over the last few thousand years has been unusually stable, but it might not stay that way anymore after we give it a kick in the pants. Melting glaciers at the end of the last ice age sent the climate haywire. It could lead to a sudden drop in temperatures over North America and Europe while the rest of the world fries… long enough for us to forget to control our emissions. Last August was the hottest on record for the world as a whole, but the United States was unusually cold. When it flips back, very hot very fast.

A question for the reader… has the weather seemed strange lately?

There is an even worse possibility, the one that keeps scientists awake at night. This is the risk of positive feedbacks, otherwise known as a runaway greenhouse effect. Get some water from the tap and set it in a warm place… notice the bubbles? Warmer water holds less gas. As the oceans gradually warm, they’ll have less and less ability to absorb our pollution, which will warm things more. After a certain point, the oceans start to bubble and become sources of carbon dioxide, along with hydrogen sulfide and methane. Yuck.

As ice and snow melts, land and sea can absorb more sunlight, warming yet more. But the real wild card is the Siberian permafrost and the methane it holds. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and is locked up in great quantities in the permafrost. Siberia is warming fast, and methane is bubbling up in lakes all over the place. In the last few years, scientists have been finding an increased amount of methane entering the atmosphere. If we can get back to 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we can defuse this time bomb before it is too late.

If there’s a chance you are about to drive off a cliff, you slam on the brakes. You don’t discuss how steep the cliff is, or whether you can slow down 20% over the next ten miles. Yet we have right now got a brick on the accelerator.

The good news is that we have all the technology we need to make big changes, right away. This means finding ways to meet our needs that don’t emit carbon, or emit much less. The old 80/20 rule suggests that 20% of our energy use provides 80% of the benefit. The first step is to know how much we are emitting, because it shows where our efforts would be of the most benefit. This isn’t straightforward, especially in America where we are handicapped by having to convert back and forth from Metric. There are no labels on the products we buy to tell us how much carbon is being emitted through the whole supply chain.

Three means of saving energy include conservation, efficiency, and renewable sources of energy. The mathematical magic is that they multiply… if you save half your carbon emissions on conservation, half again on efficiency, and once again half on renewables, you are saving 87.5%. The number I calculated for my own quick reduction was very close to that – 86%.

Conservation is about finding simple ways of doing more with less. It includes things like drying the laundry on a line, living in a smaller house or sharing a larger one, sharing rides and driving less, riding a bike, eating locally and organically. The advantage here is that it saves money. It can add up to thousands of dollars a year. Take that money and invest in efficiency.

Efficiency starts by getting the most bang for the buck—putting in compact fluorescent or LED lights, more efficient appliances starting with the fridge and water heater. Efficiency applies to cars as well… using a hybrid, or replacing trips with an electric bike or golf cart. Efficiency saves big money… thousands of dollars a year. Take that money and invest in renewable sources of energy.

Renewable energy is wind, solar, and small-scale hydroelectric. What’s best to invest in depends on where you are. Outside of the Great Plains (wind) and the Pacific Northwest (hydro), the best bet is going to be solar. Since solar power doesn’t enjoy the enormous hidden subsidies given to coal and oil, it appears to cost more per kilowatt-hour. But consider you are already saving 75% of your kilowatt hours through conservation and efficiency. This means your solar panel needs to be only one quarter the area. Or, you can get a bigger one, tie into the grid, and get a check from the power company every month. Once your electricity is renewable, using an electric bike, golf cart, or plug-in hybrid makes even more sense… it has zero carbon impact.

Up here in this neck of the woods, we’ve been doing all this stuff anyway, since it would cost a fortune to bring in the grid. Just imagine that all those high-carbon things that constitute our old way of life just weren’t available. Suppose there were a war, and no gasoline or electric power were available, what would you do? You’d probably team up with your neighbors to find a way to grow food, generate power, and get around. In the long run, the greenhouse effect is bigger than any war short of a nuclear holocaust. It is not so much ourselves at risk as our children, our grandchildren. Think about them, their faces. They deserve a livable world. This is an emergency, the polar ice caps are melting fast, and we have to get moving on the challenge of a generation.

It makes sense for banks to offer loans for solar power systems combined with efficient appliances and lighting, in such a way that the loan payment can be lower than a monthly electric bill. Right now this is opening the floodgates to change.

A New Kind of Growth

The emerging science of happiness tells us that money and possessions do not make people happier, unless this lifts them out of extreme poverty. Some generations ago, our forbears lifted themselves out of poverty… that growth was needed, as it is today for billions. For so long, we’ve measured growth as simply having and doing more stuff. But now we’ve come so far along that having too much and doing too much can stress people out, leaving them less happy.

Let’s find a way of measuring the kind of growth that actually makes life better. We’ll need to decide what it is that we value, what truly makes us happy, to find the smaller, more fulfilling life. Friends close by, gardens all around, summer’s first peaches on our lips. Let us remember the sacredness of place and community across generations and vast ages.

Let’s make things of great quality that we keep for generations, and find a way to recycle and return everything so we produce no trash at all. We can make our world more beautiful and joyful, our work and our cities more efficient, and say “this is growth.” And most of all we can grow in our ability to preserve what is left, and clean up the damn mess we have made of the world.

Mother Earth is very strong—she will survive a brief pulse of carbon dioxide, as she has in the past. But our civilizations are fragile, and a change of a degree can send noble empires down to ruins. And worst of all, our children and grandchildren must pay the highest price. We face an extra-ordinary challenge that will last a century or more. To avoid catastrophe, we need to make a steep reduction in our emissions right now. And we can, this very year, reduce our emissions by quite a bit.

Americans have the biggest changes to make, the biggest debt of past emissions. It’s a huge challenge, but if there’s anything Americans love, it’s a challenge. Even if we don’t want to admit we were wrong in the first place, we can still lead the world in cleaning up our past mistakes—since we’re the most wasteful, we can make the biggest reduction. Go U.S.A.! Fixing the mess left by the 20th century is one of the biggest economic opportunities for the 21st.

If you feel like 80% is overwhelming, how about half? I bet you can reduce your carbon emissions by half, right away, without giving up too much. I believe in you, and the world is counting on you. It’s necessary, it’s your patriotic duty, it’s the right thing to do.

The 80 Percent Solution

The Eighty Percent Solution

Is it ambitious to set a goal to reduce our carbon emissions 80% by 2050, or even 2020 as some have proposed? I have reduced my own carbon emissions 86% in the space of two months, and in the process will be saving $5000 a year. It’s better for my health and brings me closer to the community around me. I’ll describe the steps I am taking to do this, including electricity, heat, transportation, and food.

An old adage called the 80/20 rule suggests that twenty percent of any effort will provide eighty percent of the benefit. Our energy production, homes, and personal habits all work to make it easy to use lots of juice, and emit lots of carbon. 20% of that energy use, it seems, is providing 80% of the benefit. Our very wastefulness here in the west is our biggest hope, because we have lots of room for improvement. It actually saves quite a bit of money to use less energy overall, and get the energy we use from lower impact sources.

In order to avoid waste, and discover where investments can have the most impact, we must be able to measure the carbon we’re emitting. Running the numbers for my own usage, estimating kilowatt hours, gallons of gasoline, cords of wood, and so forth took a lot of googling, a lot of care to distinguish tons of carbon from tons of carbon dioxide, a lot of converting from “standard” units to metric. Since many of us don’t have degrees in engineering, we can all just have apps on our phones that tell us how much we are using in real time, and over the course of the day and year.

I’ve reduced my carbon emissions over 80%, and I want everyone else to do the same right now. I now get my electricity from solar panels. Some of my friends are tied into the grid, and get a check in the mail each month instead of an electric bill. Others run windmills, or small scale hydroelectric systems. Conservation is the key to making solar work. Solar costs more per kilowatt hour, but I’m using 80% fewer kilowatt hours.

Buildings can be retrofitted quickly, if we have the will to do so. Some foreclosed houses in the distant suburbs might have to be recycled, and monster-mega homes broken into smaller units. PV panels, solar hot water, extra insulation, and edible landscaping will dominate the list of changes, along with much more efficient appliances. Solar panels will make your house worth a lot more money, and lots easier to sell.

The fleet of cars can also be replaced quickly, with a plug-in hybrid version of cash for clunkers, car sharing, walkable cities, public transit, electric bikes and mini-cars. The point is, once we dig in and get going with this, we’ll make big changes, fast. The Big Retrofit will be big business, because it will save people big bucks.

I cut the wire, and what was that wire connected to? A mountaintop blasted apart in West Virginia, valleys filled with toxic rubble, generations removed from the land. Neutrons flying around, doing strange things to matter, waste to last a million years, candy for a terrorist. A towering dam, flooding a sacred, beautiful, and historic canyon. I cut the wire. I reduced my consumption of coal, nuclear, and big hydro by 100%.

In my new place, I’m completely off the grid, and enjoy free electricity from the sun. But at my old house, electricity comprised only 14% of my carbon emissions. Heating the house with wood and propane counted more than double that. I had a gorgeous house, with definitely more space than I needed, impossible to keep warm in the depth of a Colorado winter. Shutting off half of the rooms helped. The wood was standing dead or down aspen, gathered from the forest floor. Now this could be considered “renewable”, but I was indeed mining the forest’s carbon store, which could take decades or longer to replace. Each cord of firewood contains just over half a ton of carbon, which when burned becomes over two tons of carbon dioxide. I burned four cords of wood last winter. I am no longer burning wood for heat, which in itself has reduced my carbon emissions by 25%.

Propane has three atoms of hydrogen for each atom of carbon, which works out to almost half the energy coming from burning hydrogen. It’s still a fossil fuel, not ideal. I’d rather have a solar hot water and space heater, perhaps supplemented by a super efficient pellet stove burning beetle-killed tress-- but until then I must sit content in my smaller, super-insulated cabin, having reduced my carbon emissions from heating by about 80%.

Crunching the numbers revealed the true carbon beast in my life—the SUV. The Jeep was a gift, and a wonderful in how it could get me all over Colorado’s four wheel roads, and over the snow in the winter. But by itself it ate more carbon than the entire house, 53% of the total! Even when I subtracted for carpooling, it took up over four tons of carbon a year.

There simply isn’t an electric vehicle that will replace a Jeep. But I can replace most of the Jeep’s capabilities. I live in a fairly remote area, so to get around to nearby towns I’ve got an electric bike. Since I’ll charge it off of the solar power, it will let me get around with no carbon impact. Riding together automatically reduces each individual’s impact by half- or more if there’s more than two people. Ride-sharing, plus bus and train, must be my means of long distance travel for now. These comprise the bulk of my new carbon budget, but I’ve reduced my total carbon footprint from transportation—by about 80%.

A Jeep can go lots of places… how do I replace this capability? A horse can go even more places, deep into the nearby wilderness. Methane emissions are about half that of a cow, and with proper composting horse poop can help build the soil. Emissions from seven horses produce the same amount of global warming as a ton of carbon, so a single horse would raise my new carbon budget about 12%, and still keep me above an 80% reduction overall.

A bigger realizable dream is to pool resources with my local community to set up a car-sharing cooperative, with an electric car or van. We can use the internet to schedule its use, with a big carpool down to the farmer’s market each week. This is quite do-able anywhere, so now we will have car-mates, who may or may not be the same people as our housemates. This is already happening in places like Portland, Oregon with something called the Flexcar. There’s a pool of cars, and you can check one out for as long as you need it. Since you only pay for what you use, there’s a good reason to use less.

Not having a car in the driveway all the time reduces impulsive or non-necessary travel. This increases walking and biking, decreases impulse shopping, saves money, reduces traffic and air pollution… oh, yes, and slows the increase of the greenhouse effect. You get to meet your neighbors and ride places with them.

I cut the gas hose. What was on the other end of that gas hose? Nasty refineries, the stink of a gas station, square miles of asphalt, lost in a parking garage. Cars designed to wear out, breakdowns that seem to sense whenever you have a few bucks to spare, crooked mechanics, overpriced parts. Miles and miles of brake lights, giant trucks belching diesel smoke swerving too close, trash everywhere by the side of the road. Dead animals and deadly crashes on the side of the road every day, never knowing when you will be next. The beauty of Prince William Sound forever polluted, tar balls on the beach, rainbows in the gutter. The horrors of Nigeria’s oil fields, villages poisoned, activists killed. The empire of oil, armies on the move, missiles flying, towers falling in revenge. Politicians in a headlock, bills weakened in congress, elections stolen… I cut the gas hose.

The carbon impact of food is the hardest to measure. I wasn’t able to include it in my numbers. Organic agriculture, done properly, can build the soil… but how many miles must it travel to get here? Living as I do in a remote place, it’s of great importance to grow as much food as I can in windowsill, greenhouse, and garden, eat local meats and wild game, and gather what food the forest has to offer. Last year I harvested 70 pounds of pine nuts! Here in Colorado’s Altiplano, our farmers grow quinoa and potatoes, and you can get a respectable crop of veggies even in the short growing season. Even though I can’t cut my rations the way I cut the size of my house, the goal is to be able to measure the carbon emissions of my diet, and reduce them by at least half.

Mother Earth is very strong—she will survive a brief pulse of carbon dioxide, as she has in the past. But our civilizations are fragile, and a change of a degree can send noble empires down to ruins. And worst of all, our children and grandchildren must pay the highest price. We face an extra-ordinary challenge that will last a century or more. To avoid catastrophe, we need to make a steep reduction in our emissions right now. And we can, this very year, reduce our emissions by quite a bit.

Americans have the biggest changes to make, the biggest debt of past emissions. It’s a huge challenge, but if there’s anything Americans love, it’s a challenge. Even if we don’t want to admit we were wrong in the first place, we can still lead the world in cleaning up our past mistakes—since we’re the most wasteful, we can make the biggest reduction. Go U.S.A.! Fixing the mess left by the 20th century is one of the biggest economic opportunities for the 21st.

If you feel like 80% is overwhelming, how about half? I bet you can reduce your carbon emissions by half, right away, without giving up too much. I believe in you, and the world is counting on you. It’s necessary, it’s your patriotic duty, it’s the right thing to do.