The beginning and end of life

I have a sense of foreboding about the unabated BP gas and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The sugar-sand beaches at risk, from Pensacola east and south on Florida's gulf coast, are among the most beautiful beaches in the world.

If this disaster continues, what can my children expect to see when they go to the Redneck Riviera on their college spring break? Instead of coping with red tide, will they be forced to swim between bobbing tar balls, the shallow gulf waters devoid of life?

My thoughts turn darker: is man reversing in his short tenure on earth what took hundreds of millions of years of natural improvisation to bring to life in the seas and oceans?

Stromatolites are the first building blocks of earthly life, the single-celled organisms (see the picture) that can be found fossilized in ancient mud. You are looking at a life form billions of years old. And the key constituent ingredient making such life possible is oxygen.

Until these cyanobacteria were producing oxygen on their own through the very first photosynthesis--thereby promoting further experimentation with life--carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane and other gases unfriendly to life predominated in the atmosphere.

What the latest evidence says about the spill is that oxygen could be the first casualty. If oil and gas globules are deeply submerged and suspended in ten-mile-long blobs, how could marine life not be at threat of asphyxiation?

We simply don't know yet what the outcome is.

New BP logo--"Bum Pump"

No, "Bum Pump" isn't strong enough. How about "British Plunder."

The BP fiasco calls for a gas pump boycott by all who care about the environment, future energy policy, and corporate accountability.

One BP station off I-75 in Georgia covered the sign (logo) with a huge hood, better to conceal from motorists the true brand identity of the station. Sure wish I'd taken a picture.

As of this writing there is no end in sight of uncontrolled gushing from the broken pipe.

Take back the tap

Annie Leonard has done it again, creating a masterful animated video about bottled water, corporate greed, and the harm we do to ourselves and the environment when we unconsciously follow the dictates of mass marketing and advertising. Double click here:

The Story of Bottled Water

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On the backburner

Has a perfect storm of events robbed advocates of a green economy the moral and tactical high ground?

It would seem so, at least temporarily.

The combination of an economy turned south, an unusually frigid winter, evidence of massaged climate data, the Wall Street meltdown, and alarming budget deficits has clearly chilled the plans of climate change activists and emboldened global warming deniers.

It’s fair to say the prospects for a stronger governmental role in shaping market incentives for alternative energy and industry-wide carbon mitigation appear to have significantly cooled.

In fact, the promises of green technology, a green jobs boom, reduced carbon dioxide emissions, and renewable energy for all, a kind of clean power Shangri-la, seem as far away from realization as ever.

Witness the deflation in Congress over cap-and-trade legislation, once thought to be possible economy-wide, is now only talked about in minimalist terms of a phasing-in over many years, with utilities being impacted first.

And then there’s the ideological counteroffensive of climate change naysayers who call the connection between man-caused emissions and potentially catastrophic warming patterns and other environmental impacts “one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated on the American people.”

This blog remains open to contrary views, so, against type, I picked up the latest issue of Newsmax, the cover story devoted to showing the IPCC has it all wrong, that we’re actually in a cooling phase, not a warming one.

The evidence for the contrarians is well-known: cloud science is too complicated to base predictions on, deep ocean currents may do more to counteract warming than is acknowledged, and sun spot activity may be helping plunge us into a new ice age.

Interesting points all, and they should prod us to redouble our efforts to understand and be careful about the science and scientific method undergirding our theories.

But let’s be clear: the reversal of fortune, and the change of public mood, have more to do with the bad economy, an upswing in anti-tax and anti-big government sentiment, and the politics of reaction than anything else.

Stakeholders in the status quo smell blood. And analogous to the health care reform debate, doing nothing about a subject as complex and controversial as climate change (and a scheme as difficult to understand as cap and trade) looks better than doing something.

They were wrong about health care reform, and they are wrong about the necessity of government devising strong market-driven incentives for a low-carbon economy.

Ecologism

With a protracted economic downturn stymieing efforts to combat global warming, it might be time to reflect on the spirit of the times and whether, as some say, the ecological movement, or that part of it believing industrial civilization should be re-ordered, is the "Communism of the twenty-first century."

Take this passage lifted from a passage lifted from French writer Guy Sorman:

"No ordinary rioters, the Greens are the priests of a new religion that puts nature above humankind. The ecology movement is not a nice peace-and-love lobby but a revolutionary force."

While Sorman is actually critiquing environmentalism (or what he calls "ecologism") from the socialist left--for its failure to confront capitalism as the real cause of planetary spoliation--it is hard to miss how his caricature of the green lobby might complement the picture drawn by free market Republicans in Congress trying to deep-six cap-and-trade legislation.

One of the most interesting debates today, so far largely unacknowledged by the mainstream media, is over the question of whether world capitalism is equipped to solve the enormous challenges of global warming and climate change. Marxist philosophers, of course, think not, owing to the inexorable raw material-exploiting, profit-maximizing logic of the capitalist system.

Most thinkers who are taken seriously on the subject of the climate crisis fall squarely into the capitalist camp, vowing to mitigate things by only modifying the existing rules of the game. The thought of changing the game doesn't occur to them.

Masses to the Massif

The long lines forming (and long wait times) at the cable ride of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is more proof that China's middle class is growing, getting flush with extra cash, and using it to see the world.

But with economic prosperity comes increased concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Worldwide average atmospheric temperature rise and diminished monsoonal rains are causing Asian glacial ice to melt and retreat.

According to China expert Orville Schell, Baishui Glacier No. 1 on the flanks of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain has receded more than 800 feet in two decades. It is also visibly dirty from aerosols spewed by wood and coal burning in surrounding Lijiang County.

The Chinese tourists are mostly educated and aware of what's happening, but few seem overly concerned about the future of their mountain glaciers which have existed for thousands of years. One woman told me, "we have more." After all, there are an estimated 18,000 more glaciers in the Tibetan-Himalayan region, all feeding rivers as diverse as the Irrawaddy, Mekong, Yellow, and Yangtze.

But facts and projections are scary. One Chinese glaciologist says at the current rates of above average temperatures, warming and melting, two-thirds of the region's glaciers could be gone by 2050.

This is no minor development for what's called "The Third Pole," the perennial Asian land ice that ranks in size behind the Arctic and Antarctica. As many as two billion users rely on water that originates from The Third Pole and they could be fighting scarcity wars in the coming decades.

What struck me as a cavalier attitude by the woman from Shanghai actually reflects a realistic calibration of personal and national culpability in the crisis of climate change. That's because while Chinese factories and coal plants are churning out huge volumes of carbon dioxide emissions (driven by U.S. and European demand for Chinese products), the present crisis is the cumulative legacy of the industrializing West.

It's not too far off to suggest that the current crisis might bear the label "Made in the U.S.A."

Check out Orville Schell's piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/opinion/26Schell.html?scp=1&sq=Schell%20on%20Lijiang&st=cse

See a glacier while you can

Maybe because I live in Florida, a giant sand bar, I am especially fascinated by the vertical.

But I have always loved mountains, beginning in my youth with Mount Hood, the 11-thousand foot "colossus" in Portland's backyard.

I climbed it at age 16, a rite of teen passage I've never forgotten.

So imagine my thrill at taking an aerial cable ride to a "glacier park" at the 14-thousand foot level of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in China, a massif at the edge of the Tibetan plateau.

There is a long wooden walkway that allows you to view a glacier up close as it breaks up into pinnacles cascading over the mountain side.

If you were to climb to the summit from the viewing platform at the end of the cable, you'd have another 4,000 feet to go.

I suffered no acute mountain sickness, mainly because I gave myself time to acclimatize to high altitude in Lijiang, the ancient Naxi people's town near the base, which sits at about 8,000 feet.

This area of northwestern Yunnan province is truly "wild China," and it is clearly one of the best travel adventures for the money.

What kind of adventure did I come to see? Let's call it the unfolding drama of climate change.