Someone Asked Me About Cap and Trade...

Well, I guess the short answer is yes. But it depends on how it is done. I think cap and trade is good as long as the cap is real and firm and not a "floating" cap that allows certain companies to basically opt out of it. That does no one any good. Cap and trade has been proven already in the limits placed on sulfur dioxides (the main culprit behind acid rain). We still have acid rain but nowhere near the levels we had before. The reason that system worked is because they finally realized the way to do it is to leave it up to the companies to figure out how they do it. Rather than saying, OK, you all have to install this specific scrubber system, etc., etc., they said, here's the deal, your levels have to be below X. How you do it is your problem. It caused a lot of innovation and 3rd party development, research, etc. And in the end the cost was much, much lower than ever anticipated. They need to do the same sort of thing with carbon.

Saying that reducing carbon emissions will accomplish nil is silly and can only come from sources directly related to the fossil fuel industries. First, let's say that it's too late. It is. The cycle is in place and climate change (global warming is an unfortunate moniker and should never have been used, but what are you going to do?) is inevitable and already occurring. But that doesn't mean you don't try and make the effects less devastating. A substantial reduction in carbon won't prevent most of the outcomes that are predicted, but it can put them off for a time. That's worth something. The challenges include the inability to definitively predict what those outcomes are and what degree they will manifest themselves. Current predictions are not pretty. And many of these things will occur in our lifetime and will certainly change our children's future dramatically. The world of our own childhood is already gone. Our kids live in a very different world, even if we think it's subtle, it really isn't.

A huge obstacle is the "why should I if they don't?" syndrome. The U.S. has been adamant about not following worldwide greenhouse gas emissions limits because they don't want to limit themselves if other countries (who are trying to play "catch up" in an industrial sense) aren't required to make the same limitations--even though at their most consumptive levels they use a mere fraction of energy per person that we do. Somewhere along the line (our generation, basically) the U.S. decided to stop being a leader and to be a spoiled brat instead. Look where it has gotten us. "We shouldn't have to make economical cars! Whaaa! We shouldn't have to make quality vehicles! We should impose import tariffs on foreign cars instead!" That has been our mindset. We have known for some 50 years that petroleum was reaching its peak and would become less abundant and more expensive. But we don't think we should have to do anything about it because that would be like sacrificing something and we deserve anything and everything we can have no matter what the rest of the world is like. Thirty plus years ago the warnings about climate change and greenhouse gas emissions were being sounded. Scientists have gone before Congress many times over that period and always we refuse to do anything substantive about it because we are entitled.

Even under this administration, which many of us had hopes for but see them diminishing daily, any legislation will get watered down to cater to the fossil fuel lobbies until they do very little good. They'll continue to cave in to the pressures of the coal lobby (there are no redeaming values to coal usage other than the fact that it is relatively abundant and--thanks to HUGE government subsidies--cheap, cheap, cheap. Take away the billions upon billions of dollars in subsidies to fossil fuel companies and direct even a fraction of that money to alternative sources and it would take no time at all for those alternatives to be more than competitive costwise.

And don't get me started on Big Agriculture and corn subsidies and the way Monsanto is striving to destroy our entire food chain. Biodiesel and ethanol are fine and dandy, but not if they are produced with an utterly inefficient crop like corn. It takes as much energy to make it as you get out of it--and that's with the subsidies! There are far better sources for that which won't require turning our entire nation into a toxic waste corn and soybean field.

Water. Where do we even begin with water?

No nation on earth wastes water like we do. We take it for granted on a scale otherwise unimagineable. Something like 2% of the world's population has running water. Seems crazy, right?

In the future, our wars will only be tangentally based on religion (er, I mean, politics, yeah, politics, that's it). As climate change continues the most sought after commodity on the world market will be clean, fresh drinking water. A large majority of the world already has to struggle to obtain it. What happens when ocean levels rise, millions and millions of people are displaced from now-coastal regions into already impoverished inland regions (already experiencing unprecidented desertification)? No food. No water. A shitload of anger--a lot of which will be directed at those who use these resources frivolously and consider it their devine right to be able to waste, waste, waste.

In the not-too-distant future, it is estimated that the Colorado River (and, coincidentally, Lake Michigan) will see an approximate 30% decrease in water levels. As damaging as dams are (no matter how much care is put into their design and construction there are always negative environmental impacts), there will be no choice but to build more dams in order to create more resevoirs in order to supply water to areas that simply don't have any. We are seeing this in Arizona, Nevada, California, etc., right now. There are too many people living here and we all expect to have all the water we want whenever we want it. And, by god, we want a big lush lawn while we're at it! And fountains! Big fountains. I just saw a satellite image presentation looking at Las Vegas--it showed images over the space of 25 years and clearly showed an amazing growth in land usage and an equally amazing decrease in available water sources. If it wasn't for water from the Colorado River and the Central Arizona Project canals, Phoenix and Tucson would not be able to exist as they currently do. [Yes, I am fully away that I am very much a part of all of these problems.]

I hadn't heard about the farmers in California, but it would not surprise me if water rationing from the Colorado River will become a huge point of contention in the future. Before the Hoover Dam was built (well, and at times after) there were big battles over who gets the water. There was actually an "almost" war between Arizona and Nevada once upon a time. The Hoover Dam was built to control flooding and subsequent water distribution to farmers, not to generate power.

In the end, everything will cost money. No way around it. But we have to get our heads around the fact that what we spend now--if we spend it wisely and actually do something substantive--will be far less than what the cost will be if we wait and don't do anything at all. Most of our economic problems, if you ask me, can be directly attributed to the viewpoint that profit now is what matters, the future consequences be damned. We are not a farsighted nation. Maybe it's because we are a very young nation, who knows. But we have a nasty habit of putting our immediate gains ahead of our future well-being. We need to get over that and we need to get over it soon. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that's happening.

The Future

There's no reason to believe my grandchildren won't see the end of this century. And if I and science hold out, I just might see the middle of it. I think of the changes I have seen and the social changes that happened around me, whether I was all that aware of them at the time or not. For instance, I was a young kid in Detroit during the days of the equal rights movement and I have vague memories of the race riots happening only a few miles from my home. I remember the National Guard driving down my street, though I had no idea why--I just thought it was cool that "the army guys" were driving in front of my house. I didn't know why my mom wouldn't let us out on the street to watch, though.

In 1973, the year we moved from Detroit to Traverse City, the American Indian Movement was under siege at Wounded Knee. I was ten years old and had absolutely no concept of what was going on. I thought it was cowboys and Indians. I suppose it was that same old story, but back then I was ignorant enough not to realize whose side I should have been on.

In April of 1970, just a few days past my seventh birthday, we celebrated the very first Earth Day. It was an age of environmental awareness and, despite all of the bad things that would follow Richard Milhous Nixon to his grave, despite that he really was, in some ways, a crook, he was also a pretty damned good environmental President. A lot of our clean air and water can be directly attributed to the acts of Dick Nixon.

And it's the environment that spurred this post. I started it on my other blog and somehow it got off on television and playing outside and all of that, but the original intent was to ruminate a bit on the future of the world from an environmental position. You see, science clearly tells us that fifty years from now we will be living in a world very much different than the one we occupy today. Oh, sure, it will be the same size and shape, as long as a huge meteor doesn't strike us somewhere along the way. The continents will generally be where they are now, though they will be just a bit smaller as sea levels rise and much of our current coastline sinks below the waves. Global climate change is occurring and there's little hope of stopping it, or abating it in any significant way.

And that's what worries me. What will the world be like for my grandchildren? Millions of people will be displaced around the globe, mostly in regions that are already stricken by poverty and a lack of food. Fresh water will be a concern not just in those places, but right here as well. Many people--people we should be listening to, by the way--tell us that fifty years from now our concerns will not be for petroleum, they will be for clean, fresh drinking water. You can, however inconvenient it may seem, live just fine without petroleum. Try living without fresh water. It doesn't work. Water will be the most valuable commodity, followed closely by food. It is for these two things that the wars of the future will be fought.

We live in a world of nearly 6.8 billion people. The United States has a mere 300 million of those people and we use 25% of the world's resources. By 2050--a year I could conceivably see as a babbling, senile, all but useless 87 year old man--the world population is expected to be over 9 billion people. Some say as high as 10 billion. We are already living, well, most of the world beyond our borders, anyway, in a world where resources are stretched thinly and are nearing the breaking point. If you start eliminating coastal regions due to flooding and storm damage brought about by climate change, you're looking at a lot of hungry, thirsty, displaced people who are going to be looking for better digs. We is the better digs, folks.

Scientists have been telling us these things for several decades now--it's not just some crazy idea that Al Gore thought up. Al Gore just happens to be one of those rare people who was in a position to get accurate, factual information about what's coming down the pike and he got scared enough to use his influence to try and do something about it. But a lot of people who like their current lifestyle and don't feel like changing anything so some kids in the future can maybe be happy once in a while have done everything in their power to vilify him and try to make the rest of us think he is nuts and all the global warming science is a myth. Well, it's not.

We are in the midst of the next great extinction. We have been for at least a century. They come around every couple hundred million years or so. Anywhere from 75%-90% of species generally die off during these events. That's what happened to the dinosaurs. There are estimates that as many as three species go extinct every hour. Every. hour. Plants, animals, etc. It's an estimate, yes. And probably not easily confirmed since a lot of the species are rainforest species that might not have even been cataloged yet! There were over a thousand species of mammal on the IUCN Redlist in 2008. Their report "has confirmed an extinction crisis, with almost one in four [mammals] at risk of disappearing forever." It is much more than likely that I have seen animals that my grandchildren will never see. By 2050 we'll be living in a much different world; even if we change every single bad habit we have as a species, some of these events are already in place and inevitable. It's quite possible that American wildlife will be little more than white-tailed deer, coyotes, possums, rats, sparrows and black birds, vermin, and not a whole lot more. Diversity is dwindling and not just in the suburbs.

Somewhere in the middle of this I have to have hope. I have to hope that something will happen and we'll get ourselves on track before it's too late and maybe, just maybe, we'll preserve some semblance of a decent world to live in. I want happiness for my grandkids. I want them to be able to go out for a hike and see animals. Different animals. And not just in zoos. I want them to be able to see more plants and insects than they can readily identify. I want there to be some mystery to their world. Something exotic in a pleasing way. I want them to live a life where they can have a varied and healthful diet and clean water to drink and I want them to be able to have these things not at the expense of people around the world. There's a way for all of us to live sustainably. We just need to find it. To, first, look for it and strive for it. The future is now, as they say, and it's high time we all start looking for ways to break out of our paradigm and start shifting things around because our sense of importance is completely upside down.

Forget Me Not Memorial Garden

The first of its kind, Memorial Pulping of America (MPA) has opened Forget Me Not Memorial Garden. They hope the test facility is one of many more to come. With concerns about global warming growing and the determination that cremation releases heavy metals into the atmosphere and standard burials involve toxic chemical use and vast amounts of inefficiently used land, the founders of MPA set out to rehabilitate the business of death and the ancient problem of what to do with our dead.

Moving beyond the "natural" burial concept, which forgoes the chemicals and sealed caskets, MPA has devised a method which allows the bodies of loved ones to essentially be pulped, processed, and bagged as fully compostable fertilizer in less time than a cremation or standard burial. The customer can then take a small bag of nutrient rich fertilizer home where plants of nearly any variety can be grown as an everlasting memorial to the dearly departed--with no adverse effects on the environment.

MPA admits that the greatest hurdle to success will be perceptual. Bix Ascof, lead founder of MPA, reports: "It's not as if we're throwing your loved one into a wood chipper or anything as crass as that. Yes, the body is pulped, but it is done in a very dignified way. It's the perfect way to show your commitment to a green future and honor your loved one in a single, simple, cost effective step."

SCI, the largest funeral home operator in the United States, has held up the opening of Forget Me Not Memorial Garden for over a year. It has tried a variety of attacks, everything from health and safety issues to a red herring attack using the stigma of Soylent Green. None of these tactics has been successful so they are now pinning their hopes on the aforementioned perception issues. They are confident that few people will be willing to subject the remains of loved ones to the process of pulping. Ascof points out that the process, however you view it, is no worse than that of cremation and you are left with a safe, useable product at the end of the process.

A separate facility is being built that will focus on pets that have passed on. This segment promises to be readily accepted. In an effort to display the results of their process, Ascof and MPA have partnered with the American Humane Society and has used pulped pet product fertilizer to feed and nurture a huge demonstration garden behind the Forget Me Not location. The second purpose of this garden is to show the wasted land use of a standard cemetery.

Ascof and company are confident that the pet service, due largely in part to the agreement with the American Humane Society, will be an almost certain success. The question remains on how quick the general populace will be to embrace this new technology for their own loved ones. "As global warming advances and resources become more and more scarce, the sense of this will be clear." In the end, simple economics may pave the way to Ascof's success. Land use and maintenance and the rising cost of materials used in coffins will make common burial an increasingly expensive endeavor. This is the future according to Bix Ascof, and he's counting on this future to help push what he sees as the only responsible way of caring for our dead.