Category Archives: Energy

April 23, 2013 · 6:02 am

Energy, Ethics and Civilization by Vaclav Smil

Dr. Smil is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba.

Dr. Smil is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba.

In 1922 Alfred Lotka (1880–1949) formulated his law of maximized energy flows: In every instance considered, natural selection will so operate as to increase the total mass of the organic system, to increase the rate of circulation of matter through the system, and to increase the total energy flux through the system so long as there is present and unutilized residue of matter and available energy.

The greatest possible flux of useful energy, the maximum power output (rather than the highest conversion efficiency) thus governs the growth, reproduction, maintenance, and radiation of species and complexification of ecosystems. The physical expression of this tendency is, for example, the successional progression of vegetation communities toward climax ecosystems that maximize their biomass within the given environmental constraints—although many environmental disturbances may prevent an ecosystem from reaching that ideal goal. In the eastern United States, an unusually powerful hurricane may uproot most of the trees before an old-growth forest can maximize its biomass. Human societies are, fundamentally, complex subsystems of the biosphere and hence their evolution also tends to maximize their biomass, their rate of circulation of matter, and hence the total energy flux through the system.

The trend toward higher energy throughputs has been universal, but the process has been proceeding at a very uneven pace, with affluent countries claiming disproportionate shares of modern energies…..

In order to keep the future global warming (climate disruption) within acceptable limits, concentrations of atmospheric CO2 should be kept below 500 ppm (they surpassed 394 ppm in 2012). That, of course, implies a necessity of limiting the future rate of fossil fuel combustion. Two much-discussed strategies commonly seen as effective solutions are energy conservation and massive harnessing of renewable sources of energy. Unfortunately, neither of these strategies offers a real solution…. Claims that simple and cost-effective biomass approaches could provide 50% of the world’s TPES by 2050 or that 1–2 Gt of crop residues can be burned every year would put the human appropriation of phytomass close to or above 50% of terrestrial photosynthesis. This would further reduce the phytomass available for microbes and wild heterotrophs, eliminate or irreparably weaken many ecosystemic services, and reduce the recycling of organic matter in agriculture. Only an utterly biologically illiterate mind could recommend such action. . . .

These realities make it clear that a society concerned about equity, determined to extend a good quality of life to the largest possible number of its citizens and hence willing to channel its resources into the provision of adequate diets, good health care, and basic schooling could guarantee decent physical well-being with an annual per capita use (converted with today’s prevailing efficiencies) of as little as 50 GJ. (US is about 375 GJ)

Pushing beyond 110 GJ per capita has not brought many fundamental quality-of-life gains. I would argue that pushing beyond 200 GJ per capita has been, on the whole, counterproductive. The only unmistakable outcome is further environmental degradation.

The benefits of high energy use that are enjoyed by affluent countries, that is by less than one-sixth of humanity consuming more than150 GJ per capita, cannot be extended to the rest of the world because fossil fuels cannot be produced at that rate even if their resources were not an issue, and, in any case, the environmental consequences of this expansion would be quite unacceptable. Are not these realities sufficiently compelling to start us thinking about what too many people believe to be unthinkable, about approaching the global energy problem as an ethical challenge, as a moral dilemma? 

We have the technical and economic means to move gradually away from the pursuit of maximized energy throughputs and thus reverse perhaps the greatest imperative of human evolution. The most important first step is to agree that an ever-rising energy and material throughput is not a viable option on a planet that has a naturally limited capacity to absorb the environmental by-products of this ratcheting process. To invert Lotka’s dictum, we must so operate as to stabilize the total mass of the organic system, to limit the rate of circulation of matter through it, and to leave an un-utilized residue of matter and available energy in order to ensure the integrity of the biosphere.

Vaclav Smil received a doctorate in natural sciences from Carolinum University in Prague in 1965. In 1969, after the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, he came to the United States, earning a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 1972. Smil is now a Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba. His interdisciplinary research deals with interactions of energy, environment, food, economy, population and technical advances. He is the author of 30 books on these topics. Source: http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/smil-articles-science-energy-ethics-civilization.pdf  Excerpts from Chapter 35 of Science, Energy, Ethics and Civilization.

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April 16, 2013 · 5:48 am

The Great Transition: Building a Wind-Centered Economy by Lester R. Brown

As fossil fuel prices rise, as oil insecurity deepens, and as concerns about pollution and climate instability cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new world energy economy is emerging.

As fossil fuel prices rise, as oil insecurity deepens, and as concerns about pollution and climate instability cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new world energy economy is emerging.

The great energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy is under way. As fossil fuel prices rise, as oil insecurity deepens, and as concerns about pollution and climate instability cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new world energy economy is emerging. The old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced with an economy powered by wind, solar, and geothermal energy.

The Earth’s renewable energy resources are vast and available to be tapped through visionary initiatives. Our civilization needs to embrace renewable energy on a scale and at a pace we’ve never seen before.

We inherited our current fossil fuel-based world energy economy from another era. The 19th century was the century of coal, and oil took the lead during the 20th century. Today, global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2)—the principal climate-altering greenhouse gas—come largely from burning coal, oil, and natural gas. Coal, mainly used for electricity generation, accounts for 44% of global fossil-fuel CO2 emissions. Oil, used primarily for transportation, accounts for 36%. Natural gas, used for electricity and heating, accounts for the remaining 20%. It is time to design a carbon- and pollution-free energy economy for the 21st century.

Some trends are already moving in the right direction. The burning of coal, for example, is declining in many countries. In the United States (the #2 coal consumer after China) coal use dropped 14% from 2007 to 2011 as dozens of coal plants were closed. This trend is expected to continue, due in part to widespread opposition to coal now being organized by the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.

Oil is used to produce just 5% of the world’s electricity generation and is becoming ever more costly. Because oil is used mainly for transport, we can phase it out by electrifying the transport system. Plug-in hybrid and all-electric cars can run largely on clean electricity. Wind-generated electricity to operate cars could cost the equivalent of 80-cent-per gallon gasoline.

As oil reserves are being depleted, the world has been turning its attention to plant-based energy sources. Their potential use is limited, though, because plants typically convert less than 1% of solar energy into biomass.

Crops can be used to produce automotive fuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel. Investments in U.S. corn-based ethanol distilleries became hugely profitable when oil prices jumped above $60 a barrel following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The investment frenzy that followed was also fueled by government mandates and subsidies. In 2011, the world produced 23 billion gallons of fuel ethanol and nearly 6 billion gallons of biodiesel.

But the more research that’s done on liquid biofuels, the less attractive they become. Every acre planted in corn for ethanol means pressure for another acre to be cleared elsewhere for crop production. Clearing land in the tropics for biofuel crops can increase greenhouse gas emissions instead of reducing them. Energy crops cannot compete with land-efficient wind power.

The scientific community is challenging the natural gas industry’s claim that its product is fairly climate-benign. Natural gas produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking (a much-touted key to expanding production) is even more climate-disruptive than coal because of methane gas leakage. (Methane is a potent contributor to climate change.)

The last half of the twentieth century brought us nuclear power, once widely touted as the electricity source of the future. Although nuclear reactors supply 13% of the world’s electricity, nuclear power’s limited role in our future has been clear for some time. It is simply too expensive.

Countries around the world are richly endowed with renewable energy, in some cases enough to easily double their current electrical generating capacities. A revamped clean energy economy will harness more energy from the wind and sun, and from within the Earth itself. Climate-disrupting fossil fuels will fade into the past as countries turn to clean, climate-stabilizing, non-depletable sources of energy. The growth in the use of solar cells that convert sunlight into electricity can only be described as explosive, expanding by 74% in 2011. Early photovoltaic (PV) installations were all small-scale—mostly on residential rooftops. That’s changing as more utility-scale PV projects are being launched. The United States, for example, has under construction and development more than 100 utility scale projects. Solar-generated electricity is particularly attractive in desert regions such as the U.S. Southwest because peak generation meshes nicely with peak air conditioning use.

The world’s current 70,000 megawatts of photovoltaic installations can, when operating at peak power, match the output of 70 nuclear power plants. With PV installations climbing and with costs continuing to fall, cumulative PV generating capacity could surpass 1 million megawatts in 2020. (Current world electricity generating capacity from all sources is 5 million megawatts.) Installing solar panels for individual homes in the villages of developing countries is now often cheaper than it is to supply them with electricity by building a central power plant and a grid.

The heat that comes from within the Earth—geothermal energy—can be used for heating or converted into steam to generate electricity. Many countries have enough harnessable geothermal energy to satisfy all of their electricity needs. Despite this abundance, the geothermal energy capacity installed as of 2012 is only enough to provide electricity for some 10 million homes worldwide.

Roughly half of the world’s 11,000 megawatts of installed geothermal generating capacity is concentrated in the United States and the Philippines. Altogether, 24 countries now convert geothermal energy into electricity. The United States, with 130 confirmed geothermal plants under construction or in development, will be bringing at least 1,000 megawatts of generating capacity online in the near term. Worldwide, this accelerating pace could yield 200,000 megawatts of generating capacity by 2020.

Each alternative energy source—whether solar, geothermal, or wind—has a major role to play, but it is wind that is on its way to becoming the foundation of the new energy economy.

In the race to transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy and avoid runaway climate change, wind has opened a wide lead on both solar and geothermal energy. Solar panels, with a capacity totaling 70,000 megawatts, and geothermal power plants, with a capacity of some 11,000 megawatts, are generating electricity around the world. The total capacity for the world’s wind farms, now generating power in about 80 countries, is near 240,000 megawatts. China and the United States are in the lead.

In the race to transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy and avoidrunaway climate change, wind has opened a wide lead on both solar and geothermal energy.

In the race to transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy and avoid
runaway climate change, wind has opened a wide lead on both solar and geothermal energy.

Over the past decade, world wind electric generating capacity grew at nearly 30% per year, its increase driven by its many attractive features and by public policies supporting its expansion. Wind is abundant, carbon-free and nondepletable. It uses no water, no fuel, and little land. Wind is also locally available, scales up easily, and can be brought online quickly. No other energy source can match this combination of features.

One reason wind power is so popular is that it has a small footprint. Although a wind farm can cover many square miles, turbines occupy only 1% of that area. Compared with other renewable sources of energy, wind energy yield per acre is off the charts. For example, a farmer in northern Iowa could plant an acre in corn that yields enough grain to produce roughly $1,000 worth of fuel-grade ethanol per year, or he could use that same acre to site a turbine producing $300,000 worth of electricity each year.

Because turbines take up only 1% of the land covered by a wind farm, ranchers and farmers can, in effect, double-crop their land, simultaneously harvesting electricity while producing cattle, wheat or corn. With no investment on their part, farmers and ranchers can receive $3,000 to $10,000 a year in royalties for each wind turbine on their land. For thousands of ranchers on the U.S. Great Plains, wind royalties will one day dwarf their earnings from cattle sales.

Wind is also abundant. In the United States, three wind-rich states—North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas—have enough harnessable wind energy to easily satisfy national electricity needs. Another attraction of wind energy is that it is not depletable. The amount of wind energy used today has no effect on the amount available tomorrow.

Unlike coal, gas, and nuclear power plants, wind farms do not require water for cooling. As wind backs out coal and natural gas in power generation, water will be freed up for irrigation and other needs.

Perhaps wind’s strongest attraction is that there is no fuel cost. After the wind farm is completed, the electricity flows with no monthly fuel bill. And while it may take a decade to build a nuclear power plant, the construction time for the typical wind farm is one year.

Future wind complexes in the Great Plains, in the North Sea, off the coast of China or the eastern coast of the United States may have generating capacity measured in the tens of thousands of megawatts. Planning and investment in wind projects is occurring on a scale not previously seen in the traditional energy sector.

One of the obvious downsides of wind is its variability. But as wind farms multiply, this becomes less of an issue. Because no two farms have identical wind profiles, each farm added to a grid reduces variability. A Stanford University research team has pointed out that with thousands of wind farms and a national grid in a country such as the United States, wind becomes a remarkably stable source of electricity.

In more densely populated areas, there is often local opposition to wind power— the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) response. But in the vast ranching and farming regions of the United States, wind is immensely popular for economic reasons. For ranchers in the Great Plains, farmers in the Midwest or dairy farmers in upstate New York, there is a PIMBY (“put it in my backyard”) response.

Farmers and ranchers welcome the additional income from having wind turbines on their land. Rural communities compete for wind farm investments and the additional tax revenue to support their schools and roads.

One of the keys to developing wind resources is building the transmission lines to link wind-rich regions with population centers. Perhaps the most exciting grid project under consideration is the ‘Tres Amigas’ electricity hub, a grid interconnection center to be built in eastern New Mexico. It will link the three U.S. electricity grids—the Eastern, Western, and Texas grids. ‘Tres Amigas’ is a landmark in the evolution of the new energy economy. With high-voltage lines linking the three grids where they are close to each other, electricity can be moved from one part of the United States to another as conditions warrant. By matching surpluses with deficits over a broader area, electricity wastage and consumer rates can both be reduced. Other long distance transmission lines are under construction or in the planning stages.

We know that rapid growth in wind generation is possible. U.S. wind generating capacity expanded by 45% in 2007 and 50% in 2008. If we expanded world wind generation during this decade at 40% per year, the 238,000 megawatts of generating capacity at the end of 2011 would expand to nearly 5 million megawatts in 2020. Combined with an ambitious solar and geothermal expansion, along with new hydro projects in the pipeline, this would total 7.5 million megawatts of renewable generating capacity, enabling us to back out all of the coal and oil and most of the natural gas now used to generate electricity.

In addition to the shift to renewable sources of energy, there are two other critical components of this climate stabilization plan: rapidly increasing the energy efficiency of industry, appliances, and lighting, and restructuring the transportation sector, electrifying it as much as possible while ramping up public transit, biking and walking. (With this latter component, we would be able to back out much of the oil used for transportation.)

This energy restructuring would require roughly 300,000 wind turbines per year over the next decade. Can we produce those? For sure. Keep in mind that the world today is producing some 70 million cars, trucks, and buses each year. Many of the wind turbines needed to back out fossil fuels in electricity generation worldwide could be produced in currently idled automobile assembly plants in the United States alone. The plants would, of course, need to be modified to shift from automobiles to wind turbines, but it is entirely doable. In World War II, Chrysler went from making cars to tanks in a matter of months. If we could do that then, we and the rest of the world can certainly build the 300,000 wind turbines per year we now need to build the new energy economy and stabilize the climate.

For the first time since the Industrial Revolution began, we have an opportunity to invest in alternative sources of energy that can last as long as the Earth itself. The choice is ours. We can stay with business as usual, or we can move the world onto a path of sustained progress. The choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on Earth for all generations to come.

The Washington Post has called Lester R. Brown “one of the world’s most influential thinkers.” He started his career as a farmer, growing tomatoes in New Jersey with his brother. After earning a degree in Agricultural Science from Rutgers University, he spent six months in rural India, an experience that changed his life and career. Brown founded the WorldWatch Institute and then the Earth Policy Institute, where he now serves as President. The purpose of the Earth Policy Institute is to provide a vision of an environmentally sustainable economy, a roadmap of how to get from here to there—as well as an ongoing assessment of progress. Brown has authored many books. His most recent is Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity. It is available online at www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep  and at booksellers. Supporting data, endnotes, and additional resources are available for free downloading.

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April 2, 2013 · 6:00 am

What is the Limiting Factor by Herman Daly

"Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal." ~ David Suzuki

“Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal.” ~ David Suzuki

Problems can be solved, but first they have to be recognized and then recognized as urgent. Then comes the more difficult process of changing our mindset and our expectations.

In yesteryear’s empty world, capital was the limiting factor in economic growth. But we now live in a full world.

Consider: What limits the annual fish catch—fishing boats (capital) or remaining fish in the sea (natural resources)? Clearly the latter. What limits barrels of crude oil extracted—drilling rigs and pumps (capital), or remaining accessible deposits of petroleum—or capacity of the atmosphere to absorb the CO2 from burning petroleum (both natural resources)? What limits production of cut timber—number of chain saws and lumber mills, or standing forests and their rate of growth? What limits irrigated agriculture—pumps and sprinklers, or aquifer recharge rates and river flow volumes? That should be enough to at least suggest that we live in a natural resource-constrained world, not a capital-constrained world.

Economic logic says to invest in and economize on the limiting factor. Economic logic has not changed; what has changed is the limiting factor. It is now natural resources, not capital, that we must economize on and invest in. Economists have not recognized this fundamental shift in the pattern of scarcity. Nobel Laureate in chemistry and underground economist, Frederick Soddy, predicted the shift eighty years ago. He argued that mankind ultimately lives on current sunshine, captured with the aid of plants, soil, and water. This fundamental permanent basis for life is temporarily supplemented by the release of trapped sunshine of Paleozoic summers that is being rapidly depleted to fuel what he called “the flamboyant age.” So addicted are we to this short-run subsidy that our technocrats advocate shutting out some of the incoming solar energy to make more thermal room for burning fossil fuels! These educated cretins are also busy chemically degrading the topsoil and polluting the water, while tinkering with the genetic basis of plants, all toward the purpose of maximizing short-run growth. As Wes Jackson says, agricultural plants now have genes selected by the Chicago Board of Trade, not by fitness to the ecosystem of surrounding organisms and geography.

What has kept economists from recognizing Soddy’s insight? An animus against dependence on nature, and a devotion to dominance. This basic attitude has been served by a theoretical commitment to substitutability and a neglect of complementarity by today’s neoclassical economists. In the absence of complementarity there can be no limiting factor—if capital and natural resources are substitutes in production then neither can be limiting—if one is in short supply you just substitute the other and continue producing. If they are complements both are necessary and the one in short supply is limiting.

Economists used to believe that capital was the limiting factor. Therefore they implicitly must have believed in complementarity between capital and natural resources back in the empty-world economy. But when resources became limiting in the new full-world economy, rather than recognizing the shift in the pattern of scarcity and the new limiting factor, they abandoned the whole idea of limiting factor by emphasizing substitutability to the exclusion of complementarity. The new reason for emphasizing capital over natural resources is the claim that capital is a near perfect substitute for resources.

William Nordhaus and James Tobin were quite explicit (“Is Growth Obsolete?,” 1972, NBER, Economic Growth, New York: Columbia University Press): “The prevailing standard model of growth assumes that there are no limits on the feasibility of expanding the supplies of nonhuman agents of production. It is basically a two-factor model in which production depends only on labor and reproducible capital.  Land and resources, the third member of the classical triad, have generally been dropped… the tacit justification has been that reproducible capital is a near perfect substitute for land and other exhaustible resources.”

The claim that capital is a near perfect substitute for natural resources is absurd. For one thing substitution is reversible. If capital is a near perfect substitute for resources, then resources are a near perfect substitute for capital—so why then did we ever bother to accumulate capital in the first place if nature already endowed us with a near perfect substitute?

It is not for nothing that our system is called “capitalism” rather than “natural resource-ism.” It is ideologically inconvenient for capitalism if capital is no longer the limiting factor. But that inconvenience has been met by claiming that capital is a good substitute for natural resources. Ever true to its basic animus of denying any fundamental dependence on nature, neoclassical economics saw only two alternatives—either nature is not scarce and capital is limiting, or nature’s scarcity doesn’t matter because manmade capital is a near perfect substitute for natural resources. In either case man is in control of nature, thanks to capital, and that is the main thing. Never mind that manmade capital is itself made from natural resources.

The absurdity of the claim that capital and natural resources are good substitutes has been further demonstrated by Georgescu-Roegen in his fund-flow theory of production. It recognizes that factors of production are of two qualitatively different kinds: (1) resource flows that are physically transformed into flows of product and waste; and (2) capital and labor funds, the agents or instruments of transformation that are not themselves physically embodied in the product. If one finds a machine screw or a piece of a worker’s finger in one’s can of soup, that is reason for a lawsuit, not confirmation of the metaphysical notion that capital and labor are somehow “embodied” in the product!

Further, capital is current surplus production exchanged for a lien against future production—physically it is made from natural resources. It is not easy to substitute away from natural resources when the presumed substitute is itself made from natural resources.

Curing Poverty?

It is now generally recognized, even by economists, that there is far too much debt worldwide, both public and private. The reason so much debt was incurred is that we have had absurdly unrealistic expectations about the efficacy of capital to produce the real growth needed to redeem the debt that is “capital” by another name. In other words the debt that piled up in failed attempts to make wealth grow as fast as debt is evidence of the reality of limits to growth. But instead of being seen as such, it is taken as the main reason to attempt still more growth by issuing more debt, and by shifting bad debts from the balance sheet of private banks to that of the public treasury, in effect monetizing them.

The wishful thought leading to such unfounded growth expectations was the belief that by growth we would cure poverty without the need to share. As the poor got richer, the rich could get still richer! Few expected that aggregate growth itself would become uneconomic, would begin to cost us more than it was worth at the margin, making us collectively poorer, not richer. But it did. In spite of that, our economists, bankers, and politicians still have unrealistic expectations about growth. Like the losing gambler they try to get even by betting double or nothing on more growth.

The Steady-State Economy

Could we not take a short time-out from growth roulette to reconsider the steady-state economy? After all, the idea is deeply rooted in classical economics, as well as in physics and biology. Perpetual motion and infinite growth are not reasonable premises on which to base economic policy.

At some level many people surely know this. Why then do we keep growth as the top national priority?

First, we are misled because our measure of growth, GDP, counts all “economic activity” thereby conflating costs and benefits, rather than comparing them at the margin.

Second, the cumulative net benefit of past growth is a maximum at precisely the point where further growth becomes uneconomic (where declining marginal benefit equals increasing marginal cost), and past experience ceases to be a good guide to the future in this respect.

Third, because even though the benefits of further growth are now less than the costs, our decision-making elites have figured out how to keep the dwindling extra benefits for themselves, while “sharing” the exploding extra costs with the poor, the future, and other species. The elite-owned media, the corporate-funded think tanks, the kept economists of high academia, and the World Bank—not to mention Goldman Sacks and Wall Street—all sing hymns to growth in perfect unison, and bamboozle average citizens.

What is going to happen?

Herman E. Daly is one of the world’s foremost ecological economists. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of Maryland, School of Public Policy. From 1988 to 1994 he was Senior Economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank. His interest in economic development, population, resources, and environment has resulted in over a hundred articles in professional journals and anthologies, as well as numerous books, including Toward a Steady-State Economy. He is co-author with theologian John B. Cobb, Jr. of For the Common Good  which received the 1991 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order. Over his career, Herman has taken a courageous stance, swimming upstream against the currents of conventional economic thought. Source: Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) < http://steadystate.org/what-is-the-limiting-factor/>

“Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal.”

~ David Suzuki

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March 26, 2013 · 9:33 am

2012: The Hottest Year In USA History by the Center for Biological Diversity

"The blazing temperatures that scorched America in 2012 are a bitter taste of the climate chaos ahead."

“The blazing temperatures that scorched America in 2012 are a bitter taste of the climate chaos ahead.”

The National Climatic Data Center reported that 2012 was the hottest in recorded U.S. history (i.e., since 1895). “The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree,” read an item in The New York Times, “but last year blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit.” The news confirms the need for rapid, ambitious action on climate, starting with full implementation of the Clean Air Act.


“This puts the heat on President Barack Obama to take immediate action against carbon pollution,” said Shaye Wolf, the Center for Biological Diversity’s climate science director. “The blazing temperatures that scorched America in 2012 are a bitter taste of the climate chaos ahead. Science tells us that our rapidly warming planet will endure more heat waves, droughts and extreme weather. The president needs to start making full use of the Clean Air Act to fight greenhouse gas emissions, before it’s too late.”

So far more than 40 communities around the country agree — Broward County, Fla., just joined the Center’s Clean Air Cities campaign. Will your city be next?

To learn more about the Clean Air Cities campaign, and how your city can join, go to the Center for Biological Diversity’s website: <http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/climate_law_institute/clean_air_cities/index.html>

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September 7, 2012 · 3:57 am

Connecting the Dots by Susan Finsen

Burning Oil, Rising Water. Artwork by J. Schweitzer/Flickr/cc.

Climate change is a reality we can no longer ignore, and we need to start connecting the dots: Record-breaking heat, natural disasters, rising sea levels and melting glaciers are not isolated anomalies. Rather, such events are the “new normal” as the Earth warms in response to increases in greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. The National Academies of Science of all the major industrialized nations conducting research on climate change have all issued statements that climate change is a real and serious problem which must be addressed soon in order to avert much more serious disasters.

The Pentagon, too, has issued several plans to deal with the civil and international unrest caused by climate-induced food and water shortages and the influx of environmental refugees.

In the U.S., the public has not regarded climate change as a high priority, likely in part due to a vast public relations campaign bankrolled by the fossil fuels industry, designed to cast doubt on climate science. (The Koch Brothers alone have spent nearly sixty million on climate denial front groups, for example.) But a new poll conducted at Yale University shows a sharp increase in the number of Americans who are concerned about climate change. It seems that recent weather extremes have caught the public’s attention: Temperatures in the U.S. in March were 8.6 degrees above normal according to NASA, far exceeding all records since 1895 when records were first kept. More than 15,000 temperature records were broken in March nationally, and for the first three months of the year temperatures were 6 degrees above average.  

No one heat wave or natural disaster can be linked directly to climate change, but such events do raise awareness that something is different now. And on Saturday, May 5, environmentalists all over the world created events designed to raise public awareness and lead more people to “connect the dots”. The organization responsible for this, and other, global days of action is 350.org.

WHY 350?

The number 350 (CO2 parts per million) stands for the amount of C02 that climate scientists tell us is compatible with human civilization as we know it. The atmosphere is currently at 396 ppm (parts per million). The events are designed to call attention not only to the facts of climate change, but to the many solutions already available to cut greenhouse gas emissions. For more information about these events, and what you can do, visit <www.350.org>.

It is wise for us to educate ourselves about the probable impacts of climate change in our area and to do what we can to prepare for them. One prediction of the climate models is for more weather extremes—more precipitation as well as more drought. Also more precipitation will fall as rain rather than snow. Therefore for regions dependent upon the mountain snowpack for water, there may well be shortages in hot summer months.

Developing methods to conserve in many ways now will help to avoid shortages and the restrictive measures that can go along with them later.

Susan Finsen is a professor of philosophy at California State University, San Bernardino, CA, with a special emphasis in philosophy of biology, applied ethics and experimental psychology. She co-authored the book, The Animal Rights Movement in America. Prof. Finsen is also an animal rights activist and director of ‘Californians for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’.

 

350 MEANS SAFETY from the CLIMATE CRISIS

350.org is building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. Our online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions are led from the bottom up by thousands of volunteers in over 188 countries.

350 means climate safety. To preserve our planet, scientists tell us we must reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from its current level of 392 parts per million (ppm) to below 350 ppm. But 350 is more than a number—it’s a symbol of where we need to head as a planet.

At 350.org, we’re building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis and push for policies that will put the world on track to get to 350 ppm. To join us, go to: http://www.350.org/

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July 24, 2012 · 8:38 pm

Redefining Security for the 21st Century by Lester R. Brown

One of our legacies from the last century, which was dominated by two world wars and the cold war, is a sense of security that is defined almost exclusively in military terms. It so dominates Washington thinking that the U.S. foreign affairs budget of $701 billion in 2009 consisted of $661 billion for military purposes and $40 billion for foreign assistance and diplomatic programs.

But the situation in which we find ourselves pushes us to redefine security in twenty-first century terms. The time when military forces were the prime threat to security has faded into the past. The threats now are climate volatility, spreading water shortages, continuing population growth, spreading hunger, and failing states. The challenge is to devise new fiscal priorities that match these new security threats.

Douglas Alexander, former U.K. Secretary of State for International Development, put it well in 2007: “In the 20th century a country’s might was too often measured in what they could destroy. In the 21st century strength should be measured by what we can build together.”

The good news is that in the United States the concept of redefining security is now permeating not only various independent think tanks but also the Pentagon itself. A number of studies have looked at threats to U.S. interests posed by climate change, population growth, water shortages, and food shortages—key trends that contribute to political instability and lead to social collapse. 

Although security is starting to be redefined in a conceptual sense, we have not redefined it in fiscal terms. The United States still has a huge military budget, committed to developing and manufacturing technologically sophisticated and costly weapon systems. Since there is no other heavily armed superpower, the United States is essentially in an arms race with itself.

What if the next war is fought in cyberspace or with terrorist insurgents? Vast investments in conventional weapons systems will be of limited use. 

The far-flung U.S. military establishment, including hundreds of military bases scattered around the world, will not save civilization. It belongs to another era. We can most effectively achieve our security goals by:

• filling the family planning gap,

• building wind farms and solar power plants, and by

• building schools and clinics.

We can calculate roughly the costs of the changes needed to move our twenty-first century civilization off the decline-and-collapse path and onto a path that will sustain civilization. This is what we call “Plan B.” What we cannot calculate is the cost of not adopting Plan B.  How do you put a price tag on social collapse and the massive die-off that it invariably brings?

When we crunch the numbers, the external funding needed to eradicate poverty and stabilize population requires $75 billion per year beyond what countries around the world are already spending. These measures will also help prevent state failure by alleviating its root social causes. 

Meanwhile, efforts to eradicate poverty and rescue failing states that are not accompanied by an Earth restoration effort are doomed to fail. Protecting topsoil, reforesting the Earth, restoring oceanic fisheries, and other needed measures will cost an estimated $110 billion in additional expenditures per year.

Combining both social goals and Earth restoration goals into a Plan B budget yields an additional annual expenditure of $185 billion. This is the new defense budget, the one that addresses the most serious threats to both national and global security. It is equal to 12% of global military expenditures and only 28% of U.S. military expenditures. Given the enormity of the antiquated military budget, no one can argue that we do not have the resources to rescue civilization. (For more details on the required spending see Chapters 10 and 11 in World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse.)

Unfortunately, the United States continues to focus its fiscal resources on building an ever-stronger military, largely ignoring the threats posed by continuing environmental deterioration, poverty, and population growth. Its 2009 military expenditures accounted for 43% of the global total of $1,522 billion. Other leading spenders included China ($100 billion), France ($64 billion), the United Kingdom ($58 billion), and Russia ($53 billion). 



For less than $200 billion of additional funding per year worldwide, we can move a long way toward eliminating hunger, illiteracy, disease, and poverty, and we can restore the Earth’s soils, forests, and fisheries. We can stabilize human population. We can build a global community where the basic needs of all people are satisfied—a world that will allow us to think of ourselves as civilized.

Adapted from World on the Edge by Lester R. Brown. Full book available online at www.earth-policy.org/books/wote. Reprinted with permission.

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June 22, 2012 · 3:25 am

Civilization Faces Perfect Storm of Ecological and Social Problems by John Vidal

Abuse of the environment has created an absolutely unprecedented emergency, say Blue Planet prizewinners

Celebrated scientists and development thinkers warn that civilization is faced with a perfect storm of ecological and social problems driven by overpopulation, overconsumption and environmentally malign technologies.

In the face of an “absolutely unprecedented emergency”, say the 18 past winners of the Blue Planet prize—the unofficial Nobel for the environment—society has “no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us”.

The stark assessment of the current global outlook by the group, who include Sir Bob Watson, the British government’s chief scientific adviser on environmental issues, US climate scientist James Hansen, Prof José Goldemberg, Brazil’s secretary of environment during the Rio Earth summit in 1992, and Stanford University Prof Paul Ehrlich, was published in February 2012 on the 40th anniversary of the United Nations environment program (UNEP). The paper, which was commissioned by UNEP, will feed into the Rio +20 earth summit conference in June.

Apart from dire warnings about biodiversity loss and climate change, the group challenges governments to think differently about economic “progress”.

“The rapidly deteriorating biophysical situation is more than bad enough [to get our attention], but it is barely recognized by a global society infected by the irrational belief that physical economies can grow forever, disregarding the facts that the rich in developed and developing countries get richer and the poor are left behind. And the perpetual growth myth is enthusiastically embraced by politicians and economists as an excuse to avoid tough decisions facing humanity.”

“The perpetual growth myth … promotes the impossible idea that indiscriminate economic growth is the cure for all the world’s problems, while it is actually the disease that is at the root cause of our unsustainable global practices”, they say.

“The shift of many countries, and in particular the United States, towards corporate plutocracies, with wealth (and thus power) transferred in large quantities from the poor and middle-classes to the very rich, is clearly doing enormous environmental damage.”

The group warns against over-reliance on markets, and instead urges politicians to listen and learn from how ‘poor’ communities all over the world see the problems of energy, water, food and livelihoods as interdependent and integrated as part of a living ecosystem.

“The long-term answer is not a centralized system but a demystified and decentralized system where the management, control and ownership of the technology lie in the hands of the communities themselves and not dependent on paper-qualified professionals from outside the villages,” they say.

“Community-based groups in the poorer most inaccessible rural areas around the world have demonstrated the power of grassroots action to change policy at regional and national levels…. There is an urgency now to bring them into mainstream thinking, convey the belief all is not lost, and the planet can still be saved.”

The answer to addressing the critical issues of poverty and climate change is not primarily technical, but social, say the group. “The problems of corruption, wastage of funds, poor technology choices and absent transparency or accountability are social problems for which innovative solutions are emerging from the grassroots.”

To transition to a more sustainable future will require simultaneously redesigning the economic system, a technological revolution, and, above all, behavioral change.

“Delay is dangerous and would be a profound mistake. The ratchet effect and technological lock-in increase the risks of dangerous climate change: delay could make stabilization of concentrations of CO2 at acceptable levels very difficult. If we act strongly and science is wrong, then we will still have new technologies, greater efficiency and more forests. If we fail to act and the science is right, then humanity is in deep trouble and it will be very difficult to extricate ourselves.”

The paper urges governments to:

  • Replace GDP as a measure of wealth with metrics for natural, built, human and social capital—and how they intersect.
  • Eliminate subsidies in sectors such as energy, transport and agriculture that create environmental and social costs, which currently go unpaid [and therefore unappreciated].
  • Tackle overconsumption in the rich world, and address population pressure by empowering women, improving education and making contraception accessible to all.
  • Transform decision-making processes to empower marginalized groups, and integrate economic, social and environmental policies instead of having them compete.
  • Conserve and value biodiversity and ecosystem services, and create markets for them that can form the basis of green economies.
  • Invest in knowledge through research and training.

“The current system is broken,” said Watson. “It is driving humanity to a future that is 3-5 degrees Centigrade warmer than our species has ever known; and it is eliminating the ecology that we depend on for our health, wealth and sense of self.”

Source: The Guardian (UK), 20 February 2012, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/20/climate-change-overconsumption>  John Vidal is the environment editor for The Guardian. This report appeared in the environmental section of The Guardian’s website titled “Global Development”. The report is based on a synthesis paper created from individual papers written by the past 18 winners of the Asahi Glass Foundation’s Blue Planet Prize. The Blue Planet prize is reported to be the “unofficial Nobel for the environment”.

• Source document: <http://www.UNEP/Blue-Planet-Synthesis-Paper>

• The Blue Planet Prize: <http://www.af-info.or.jp/en/blueplanet/about.html>

FROM THE TEXT OF THE UNEP PAPER

Demographic Challenges

The global population (which has now passed 7 billion people) and the average per capita energy consumption have both increased sevenfold over the past 150 years, for an overall fifty-fold increase in the emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And both are still increasing.

As a global average, total fertility rates (TFR) are decreasing, as a result of more females completing primary and secondary education, along with availability of fertility control. But this global average conceals many local difficulties. In some parts of the world fertility remains high—and decline in these countries is by no means certain. More than 200 million women in developing countries still have unmet needs for family planning, and increased investment in reproductive health care and family planning programs along with education programs will be critical. Although the desire and the need [for family planning] are increasing, it is estimated that funding decreased by 30% between 1995 and 2008, not least as a result of legislative pressure from the religious right in the USA and elsewhere.

The ageing of populations in many countries around the world is also a relevant sustainable development issue. The economic, social and environmental implications are as yet unclear—but this trend will undoubtedly have an impact. Whether it is positive or negative depends to a large extent on how countries prepare; e.g., in evaluating what an ageing population will mean for economic productivity, consumption of goods and services, and in terms of urban planning, financial, health and social care systems.

Both culturally and genetically, human beings have always been small-group animals, evolved to deal with at most a few hundred other individuals. Humanity is suddenly, in ecological time, faced with an emergency requiring that it quickly design and implement a governance and economic system that is both more equitable and suitable for a global population of billions of people, and sustainable on a finite planet.

 Economic Challenges

Uncontrolled economic growth is unsustainable on a finite planet. Governments should recognize the serious limitations of GDP as a measure of economic growth and complement it with measures of the five forms of capital, built (produced), natural, human, social and institutional/financial capital, i.e., a measure of wealth that integrates economic, social and environmental dimensions and is a better method for determining a country’s productive potential.

The failure of the economic system to internalize externalities leads to the continuation of environmentally damaging activities. If externalities are uncorrected then markets fail: they generate prices that do not reflect the true cost to society of our economic activities.  Emissions of greenhouse gases represent a market failure as the damages caused by emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are not reflected in prices. The price of fossil fuels should reflect the true cost to society, resulting in a more level playing field for environmentally sound renewable energy technologies, and a stimulus to conserve energy.

There are a number of other relevant market failures that must also be corrected if we are to manage the risks of climate change. For example, there are failures in the provision of information, and there are failures in valuing ecosystems and biodiversity. In addition, environmentally damaging subsidies in areas such as energy, transportation and agriculture, which total about $1 trillion per year, cause further market distortion and are in general leading to environmental degradation and should be eliminated.

The benefits that we derive from the natural world (biodiversity and ecosystem services) are critically important to human well-being and economic prosperity, but are consistently undervalued in economic analysis and decision-making. Recognizing the value of ecosystem services would allow the world to move towards a more sustainable future, in which the benefits of ecosystem services are better realized and more equitably distributed.

Technology Challenges

The over-reliance on fossil fuel energy (coal, oil and gas) and inefficient end-use technologies has significantly increased the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. We are currently putting one million years worth of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere each year. Recent efforts to reduce the carbon intensity (CO2/GDP) were made in a large number of countries particularly in China and Russia where the carbon content has declined significantly in the last 30 years (albeit from very high levels). However the carbon intensities of India, South Africa and Brazil (including deforestation) have not declined significantly in that period. It is therefore clear that all countries have to take serious measures to reduce their CO2 emissions in the next few decades.

Socio-Political Challenges 

There are serious shortcomings in the decision-making systems on which we rely in government, business and society. This is true at local, national and global levels. The rules and institutions for decision-making are influenced by vested interests, yet each interest has very different access to how decisions are made. Effective change in governance demands action at many levels to establish transparent means for holding those in power to account. Governance failures also occur because decisions are being made in sectoral compartments, with environmental, social and economic dimensions addressed by separate, competing structures.

The shift of many countries, and in particular the United States, towards corporate plutocracies, with wealth (and thus power) transferred in large quantities from the poor and middle-classes to the very rich, is clearly doing enormous environmental damage. The successful campaign of many of the fossil fuel companies to downplay the threat of climate disruption in order to maintain the profits of their industry is a prominent example.

Cultural Challenges 

The importance to reducing inequity in order to increase the chances of solving the human predicament is obvious (just in the differences in access to food and other resources) caused by the giant power gap between the rich and the poor. The lack of funding for issues (such as the provision of family planning services) contrasts sharply with the expenditures by the United States and some other rich nations to try to assure that oil flows to themselves are uninterrupted. The central geopolitical role of oil continues unabated despite the dangerous conflicts oil-seeking already has generated and the probable catastrophic consequences its continued burning portends for the climate.

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· 3:20 am

2011: A Year of Weather Extremes, with More to Come by Janet Larsen and Sara Rasmussen

The global average temperature in 2011 was 14.52 degrees Celsius (58.14 degrees Fahrenheit). According to NASA scientists, this was the ninth warmest year in 132 years of recordkeeping, despite the cooling influence of the La Niña atmospheric and oceanic circulation pattern and relatively low solar irradiance. Since the 1970s, each subsequent decade has gotten hotter—and 9 of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the twenty-first century.

Each year’s average temperature is determined by a number of factors, including solar activity and the status of the El Niño/La Niña phenomenon. But heat-trapping gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, have become a dominant force, pushing the Earth’s climate out of its normal range. The planet is now close to 0.8 degrees Celsius warmer than it was a century ago. Hidden within annual averages and expected variability are startling instances of new temperature and rainfall records in many parts of the world—weather extremes that would once be considered anomalies but that now risk becoming the new norm as the Earth heats up.

Worldwide, 2011 was the second wettest year on record over land. (The record was set in 2010, which also tied 2005 as the warmest overall.) Heavier deluges are expected on a warmer planet; each temperature rise of 1 degree Celsius increases the amount of moisture the atmosphere can hold by about 7%. Higher temperatures also can fuel stronger storms.

Brazil started the year with the deadliest natural disaster in its history: in January, a month’s worth of rain fell in a single day in Rio de Janeiro state, leading to floods and landslides that killed at least 900 people. That same month, flooding in eastern Australia covered an area nearly the size of France and Germany combined. Overall, it was the third wettest year in Australia since recordkeeping began in 1900.

The most expensive weather disaster of 2011 was the flooding in Thailand in the second half of the year, which ultimately submerged one third of the country’s provinces. At $45 billion worth of damage—equal to 14% of Thailand’s gross domestic product—it was also the costliest natural catastrophe the country ever experienced.

In October, more than 100 people died as two storms—one from the Pacific and the other from the Caribbean—pounded Central America with rain. In western El Salvador, nearly 1.5 meters of rain (almost 5 feet) fell over 10 days. And in December, Tropical Storm Washi hit the Philippines, creating flash floods that killed more than 1,200 people.

The 2011 Atlantic hurricane season had 19 named storms. Hurricane Irene brought extreme flooding to the northeastern United States in August, with total damages topping $7.3 billion. The year was the wettest on the books for seven states in the country, while it was among the driest for several others. Although the extremes appear to balance out, making for a near-average year, in fact a record 58∞ of the contiguous United States was either extremely wet or extremely dry in 2011.

Indeed, as is expected on a hotter planet, while some parts of the globe were overwhelmed by rain in 2011, others were distinguished by dryness. A severe drought in the Horn of Africa that began in 2010 devolved into a crisis situation in 2011, characterized by crop failure, exorbitant food prices, and widespread malnutrition. Exacerbated by chronic political instability and a belated humanitarian response, the death toll may have exceeded 50,000 people. The same happened in the Sahel (southern Sahara)  region of Africa, where the desertification disaster is still unfolding.

Back in North America, a drought that began in late 2010 and worsened over 2011 led hundreds of farmers from northern Mexico to march to that nation’s capital in January 2012 to draw the government’s attention to their suffering. Nearly 900,000 hectares of farmland (some 2.2 million acres) and 1.7 million head of livestock were lost due to the dryness—the worst in Mexico’s 70+ years of data collecting.

Scorching heat, drought, and wildfires across the U.S. Southern Plains and Southwest caused farm, ranch, and forestry damages that exceeded $10 billion in 2011. Wichita Falls, Texas, experienced 100 days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit—far more than the previous record of 79 days set in 1980. Oklahoma and Texas had the hottest summers of any states in history, breaking by a wide margin the record set in 1934 during the Dust Bowl. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, writes that the likelihood of such extreme heat waves “was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming.” Texas also had its lowest rainfall on record. Invigorated by the heat and drought, wildfires burned across an estimated 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) in the state.

For the continental United States, summer 2011 was the second warmest in history. Nearly three times more weather stations hit record highs than lows in 2011, in line with a trend of increasing heat extremes. Whereas in the middle of the 20th century there were close to the same number of record highs and lows—as would be expected absent a strong warming trend—in the 1990s highs began outpacing lows. In the first decade of this century, there were twice as many record highs as record lows.

Worldwide, seven countries set all-time temperature highs in 2011: Armenia, China, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Republic of the Congo, and Zambia. Interestingly, Zambia also was the only country to experience an all-time low temperature when it dropped to -9 degrees Celsius (16 degrees Fahrenheit) in June. Kuwait experienced the year’s highest temperature, with thermometers measuring a searing 53.3 degrees Celsius (127.9 degrees Fahrenheit), the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth during the month of August. Even more threatening to health than daytime highs are extra hot nighttime minimum temperatures, which do not allow any respite from the heat. The world’s hottest 24-hour minimum ever—41.7 degrees Celsius (107 degrees Fahrenheit) —was recorded in Oman in June 2011.

Even the Arctic had a notably warm year, with the 2011 temperature a record 2.2 degrees Celsius (4 degrees Fahrenheit) above the mean for 1951–80. Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost U.S. city, spent a record-breaking 86 consecutive days at or above freezing, far more than the previous record of 68 days set in 2009.

In fact, over the last 50 years temperatures in the Arctic have risen more than twice as fast as the global average, melting ice and thawing permafrost. Arctic sea ice has been shrinking more rapidly, falling to its lowest volume and second lowest area on record during the 2011 summer melt season. With the summertime ice loss outpacing wintertime recovery, Arctic sea ice has thinned, making it increasingly vulnerable to further melting. Scientists expect a completely ice-free summertime Arctic by 2030 or even earlier.

As the reflective ice disappears, it exposes the dark ocean, which more readily absorbs solar energy, further warming the region. This sets forth a climate cascade, accelerating ice loss both in the ocean as well as on nearby Greenland, which contains enough ice to raise global sea level by 7 meters (23 feet) if it completely melted. The warming also thaws Arctic permafrost, releasing carbon dioxide and methane, further accelerating global warming.

Even without fully incorporating such climate feedback, models show that continued reliance on fossil fuels could raise the global temperature by up to 7 degrees Celsius (over 12 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. Such an elevated temperature would amplify temperature and precipitation extremes enough to make the weather events of recent years look tame in comparison. Only a rapid, dramatic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions can hold future temperatures in a range bearing any resemblance to what civilization has known. 

Source: Earth Policy Institute, January 31, 2012  <www.earth policy.org/indicators/C51/temperature_2012> Media Contact: Reah Janise Kauffman (202) 496-9290 ext. 12 | rjk@earthpolicy.org

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· 3:16 am

Governments Spend $1.4 Billion Per Day to Destabilize Climate by Lester R. Brown

Perverse subsidies distort reality

We distort reality when we omit the health and environmental costs associated with burning fossil fuels from their prices. When governments actually subsidize their use, they take the distortion even further. Worldwide, direct fossil fuel subsidies added up to roughly $500 billion in 2010. Of this, supports on the production side totaled some $100 billion. Supports for consumption exceeded $400 billion, with $193 billion for oil, $91 billion for natural gas, $3 billion for coal, and $122 billion spent subsidizing the use of fossil fuel-generated electricity. All together, governments are shelling out nearly $1.4 billion per day to further destabilize the earth’s climate.

The government of Iran spent the most on promoting fossil fuel consumption in 2010, doling out $81 billion in subsidies. This equaled more than 20% of the country’s gross domestic product. Saudi Arabia was a distant second at $44 billion. Rounding out the top five were Russia ($39 billion), India ($22 billion), and China ($21 billion).

Kuwait’s fossil fuel subsidies were highest on a per capita basis, with $2,800 spent per person. The United Arab Emirates and Qatar followed, each spending close to $2,500 per person.

Carbon emissions could be cut in scores of countries by simply eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. Some countries are already doing this. Belgium, France, and Japan have phased out all subsidies for coal, for example. As oil prices have climbed, a number of countries that held fuel prices well below world market prices have greatly reduced or eliminated their motor fuel subsidies because of the heavy fiscal cost. Among those reducing subsidies are China and Indonesia. Even Iran, which was pricing gasoline at one fifth its market price, dramatically reduced its gasoline subsidies in December 2010 as part of broader energy subsidy reforms.

In contrast to the $500 billion in fossil fuel supports in 2010, renewable energy received just $66 billion in subsidies—two thirds for electricity generation from wind, biomass, and other sources, and one third for biofuels. Not only do fossil fuel subsidies dwarf those for renewables today, but a long legacy of governments propping up oil, coal, and natural gas has resulted in a very uneven energy playing field.

A world facing economically disruptive climate change can no longer justify subsidies to expand the burning of coal and oil. The International Energy Agency projects that a phase-out of oil consumption subsidies by 2020 would cut oil use by 3.7 million barrels per day in that year. Eliminating all fossil fuel consumption subsidies by 2020 would cut global carbon emissions by nearly 5% while reducing government debt. Shifting subsidies to the development of climate-benign energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal power will help stabilize the earth’s climate. 

Source: Earth Policy Institute press release, January 19, 2012, <www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2011/highlights24> This data highlight is adapted from World on the Edge by Lester R. Brown. For more data and discussion, see the full book at www.earth-policy.org. 

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