``How is that supposed to undo the coalition of capitalists, trade unions, and major environmental organizations for market-based solutions, which are non-solutions?'' Yoshie
``As for your zapping remark, ACT-UP was a very effective and impressive organization. They learned the science, figured out all the business angles, and actually influenced policy. People are alive who might be dead thanks to them.'' Doug
``...is it an entirely bad thing to have big capital showing signs of taking climate change seriously, and trying to push the U.S. government into action?'' Doug
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First to the last point. Yes it is a very bad thing. And big capital is buried deep in all the regulatory agencies, conferences, papers, and a whole industry of energy R&D. The energy producer/supplier sector of the economy has been very busy for decades. They have very effectively steered policy or non-policy. And let's remember in this context, what makes capital bad is its systems only have one goal, make money, and that goal will very likely find itself in deep conflict with the necessary goals the society needs to adopt in order to survive and evolve in any reasonably habitable form.
Yesterday I blew off the day reading up on the carbon cycle. Go here if anybody is interested:
http://www.carleton.edu/departments/geol/DaveSTELLA/Carbon/carbon_intro.htm
This is a detailed development of a mathematical model on the carbon cycle. Along the way of developing this model, a great deal of detail on the carbon cycle is discussed. Unfortunately there isn't a conclusion or a test run, probably because the guy ran out of money or never had any. But it is worth going through the details to get a large scale picture of what we are dealing with.
Go here for a simplified version or to gain a general view first then go to the model above to develop the details:
http://www.marietta.edu/~biol/102/ecosystem.html
As I was reflecting on these models I realized we do not know how carbon is processed through our human built systems with the same detail as we know how it is cycled through the environment. And most of the carbon cycle models do not have a model for human society's systems that generate atmospheric carbon. In other words we haven't studied ourselves with the same detail as we've studied ice cores, the oceans, etc. We have evaded our knowledge of our own systems, by a default position, that the increases in atmospheric CO2 are our contributions. Fair enough, but how? It's just assumed the answer is fossil fuels and therefore focused on fossil fuels. But this is not the only source. I suspect we are saturated with sources and fossil fuel is just one maybe large component.
I got to thinking that's kind of odd. Shouldn't we be figuring out how we work into this natural system? Perhaps this lack of knowledge is just a consequence of a general attitude, what's to know? But I don't think so. I suspect this is exactly where we meet big capital's interference routines, especially big energy. And I'll bet a lot of the data necessary to figure out how to model our carbon activities is locked away in corporate R&D labs.
Let's take an easy example of greenwashing, let's take ethanol. Do we know using ethanol as a fuel helps to reduce carbon additions? We just assume it does. I am sure there are mountains of data on the combustion properties and products that show that ethanol burns cleaner than gasoline. But that isn't the whole ethanol story. Ethanol is produced from growing corn, probably GM corn at that, on vast agricultural-industrial tracks of land. How about all that part of the production system, what are all the component of that production adding and how to the carbon cycle?
Here is an abstract from a paper on this issue:
T. W. Patzek
Thermodynamics of the Corn-Ethanol Biofuel Cycle Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences, 23(6), 519-567, 2004
Abstract
In this paper I define sustainability, sustainable cyclic processes, and quantify the degree of non-renewability of a major biofuel: ethanol produced from industrially-grown corn.
First, I demonstrate that more fossil energy is used to produce ethanol from corn than the ethanol's calorific value. Analysis of the carbon cycle shows that all leftovers from ethanol production must be returned back to the fields to limit the irreversible mining of soil humus. Thus, production of ethanol from whole plants is unsustainable. In 2004, ethanol production from corn will generate ~11 million tonnes of incremental CO2, over and above the amount of CO2 generated by burning gasoline with 115% of the calorific value of this ethanol.
Second, I calculate the cumulative energy (available free energy) consumed in corn farming and ethanol production, and estimate the minimum amount of work necessary to restore the key non-renewable resources consumed by the industrial corn-ethanol cycle. This amount of work is compared with the maximum useful work obtained from the industrial corn-ethanol cycle. It appears that if the corn ethanol energy is used to power a car engine, the minimum restoration work is about 7 times the maximum useful work from the cycle. This ratio drops down to 2.4, if an ideal fuel cell is used to process the ethanol.
Third, I estimate the U.S. taxpayer subsidies of the industrial corn-ethanol cycle at $3.5 billion in 2004. The parallel subsidies by the environment are estimated at $2.0 billion in 2004. The latter estimate will increase manifold when the restoration costs of aquifers, streams and rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico are also included.
Finally, I estimate that (per year and unit area) the inefficient solar cells produce ~100 times more electricity than corn ethanol. We need to rely more on sunlight, the only source of renewable energy on the earth.
* * *
[BTW, I think the reference to the Gulf of Mexico refers to the agricultural and refining pollution dumped into the Mississippi and its tributaries which drain the whole Midwest, the region involved in ethanol production.]
I've only done a brief search and I have found very little on agricultural contributions to the carbon cycle and very little on analyzing the sort of industrial agriculture the US does. How do I explain this problem? After going over the carbon cycle model, I discovered that only the first foot or so of topsoil is involved in the sequestration of atmospheric CO_2, through the metabolic and respiratory processes of micro-organisms---and according to the carbon cycle model the amount of CO2 sequestered is more than what is produced. But this sequestering process or the ratio is reversed once the topsoil is `mined' or stripped. See reference above on humus. Humus refers to the soil below the immediate microbe rich layer.
Hence this layer of soil microbes are the primary land source of scrubbing CO_2, with plankton playing a similar role in the oceans.
So here is what I mean by understanding how our own human built systems work. Our destruction of ocean fisheries (which map to plankton rich areas) and the destruction or exhaustion of topsoil through whatever means, has possibly significantly added to our carbon emissions, by their absence. In other words we have taken some possibly a significant amount of these natural scrubbers out of the carbon cycle. How much? I don't know, and not sure anybody does. (Some of this might be wrong. The detailed relationships are tricky to get sorted out.)
Then there is the production of cement from mined and milled limestone, which is cooked to produce cement or concrete. What do we know about that source or other mining and material refining processes? What about the production of plastics?
``In 1955, 8% of materials in products were petroleum-based (plastics). By 1980, 32% of materials in products were petroleum-based...''
(http://telstar.ote.cmu.edu/environ/m3/s4/matindususe.shtml)
How about our whole waste deposal systems? What do we know about how they function or interface with the carbon cycle?
And another thing. All this talk about energy is somewhat misleading. How much of our production of energy is devoted to just moving things around, how much is devoted to heating? Heat and motion are different forms of energy. We just intuitively imagine these forms of energy are synonymous with fossil fuels, but in fact they are not. We have to start re-thinking the basic physical science here as applied to our different needs and uses. The basic reason we have developed carbon based systems to produce various forms of energy is because carbon bonds are used by living systems, through plant photosynthesis and therefore they are easily available to us for various forms of combustion. We've been using them since the invention of fire. But obviously there are many other ways to produce motion or heat that don't require burning carbon bio-mass.
Anyway these are questions about how our world works, rather than how the environment works, and it seems to me that the primary method of obfuscation exercised by the energy giants is performed by this kind of indirection---shifting the focus away from how big capital has developed our society into fouling up the planet. The problem is the environment and not industrial capitalism. Oh what to do? And then the energy giants have all these neat tricks they can do for us, provided we pay them more to develop these tricks that will save us all. Some where in the propaganda mix the word sustainable becomes eladed into the neoliberalism of the free market, and the profitability of these developments. That's what capital means by sustainable, sustaining capital itself at our and the planet's expense.
I think this is where the political attention needs to get focused---how we work as a society, and how we have to change the basic political economy in order to survive as a society. Obviously I agee with tfast and .d. on this. The environment isn't the problem, we're the problem. And not only that, but we can only control and change our society, we can't control the way the planet works, except very indirectly by changing our systems.
Step one in my program is purging the US government regulatory agencies and research programs of their corporate energy sector plants. These guys are everywhere, like roaches in the stove and they have been very busy sowing their oil/nuclear/energy friendly crap, misdirection, and denials for decades. There is a complete revolving door between academic research, state/federal research agencies, corporate sponsored research, regulatory agencies, federal legislation, consultants and lobbyists. There is a whole power elite class of these fuckers who just cycle through these bureaucratic systems to make sure they all work together to do nothing. Where? Oh, DOE, EPA, FDA, NSF, USDA Interior, NASA, FAA not to mention practically every House and Senate subcommittee that oversees these executive branch activities.
Just as an example of what I mean that much of US government research is highly untrustworthy, especially in the energy sector, go here, download the pdf and look at it. It is a pretty, short, and well presented slide show that proves beyond a shadow of doubt that developing an ethanol industry in Iowa will save the planet:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/gen/fy02/31792.pdf
In other words this government-industry presentation completely contradicts the findings of the bio-science abstract posted above.
Anyway, I think you can model the necessary political overhaul or at least begin to understand how to do that through the political economy, by looking at the detailed explanation cited above on the carbon cycle itself. Each of the components of the carbon cycle has a human built systemic interface through government and the economics of what we do with the land, the sea, and the air. In almost every point, you will find some big sector of capital interest involved. In each case you will find a department or agency of government stuff full of corporate-academic-professional assholes working overtime to keep it all on the market/capital friendly track---and make sure that basic knowledge of how to change our human built world is never really opened up to question.
The basic idea is to use our knowledge of the natural carbon cycle in the environment to organize and understand our human built political economic interface with it. The result should be what could be called the human world carbon cycle, or the radicalization of the carbon cycle. This is some really radical ecology, and it is a basic knowledge that I don't think we know or understand at all. We know bits and pieces, but I am thinking about a much more systematic, comprehensive and organized view. I think gaining that view is essential, and I am almost certain the development of this kind of knowledge will be met with a massive reaction from capital, across the board---because this kind of knowledge is very very threatening. Even at first blush it smacks of regulation and central planning---all evils of socialism.
This is not just a matter of cutting down fossil fuel emissions. This is a matter of understanding how human society's economic/production/development systems work in co-evolution with the vast natural cycles of the biosphere, and how to sustain ourselves in that changing environment. Gobal warming is just part of the picture. Figuring this out is not going to be easy, and it's made a lot more difficult by the capital interest bias that has been built into the very institutions we need to use in order to figure this stuff out.
I realize such an idea sounds like typical 60s Gaia hippy bullshit--an almost certain to be used dismissal by any well educated reactionary, energy sector stooge, or grease marketing spokeswoman. But trust me, anybody who thinks that's were such a knowledge base will end, has never been at the table, bar, or at home with some serious bio-science/physical science types when they get started on brain storming shit like thermodynamics, the carbon cycle and its human world interface. There are plenty of very difficult to answer science questions and some very radical conclusions to be found. The short abstract above on looking at these systems as problems in thermodynamic/statistical mechanics modeling should be a clue. A lot of these methods and brainstorming went into developing our understanding of these natural cycles in the environment. Now its time to apply the same methods and sciences to understanding how our human built world (which is a template to its natural analogue) works, and then how to change it.
CG