Category Archives: global climate change

A surprising link between superintelligent robots, global warming, and mass extinction? Nope, not really

by AlphonsoChauncy Posted on September 9, 2015

A surprising link between superintelligent robots, global warming, and mass extinction? Nope, not really

By on 9 Sep 2015commentsShare

Hold on to your tinfoil hats, folks: Robots are taking over the world after climate change forces global mass extinction. Or, rather, with enough conjecture, coincidence, and frivolous shoehorning, you too could wring that argument out of a new paper by researchers at the IT University of Copenhagen and the University of Texas–Austin. If that’s what you wanted to do with your afternoon.

But you don’t need to — that’s what The Washington Post is for:

We’ve already heard of all the nasty consequences that could occur if the pace of global climate change doesn’t abate by the year 2050 — we could see wars over water, massive food scarcity, and the extinction of once populous species. Now add to the mix a potentially new wrinkle on the abrupt and irreversible changes – superintelligent robots would be just about ready to take over from humanity in the event of any mass extinction event impacting the planet.

In fact, according to a mind-blowing research paper published in mid-August by computer science researchers Joel Lehman and Risto Miikkulainen, robots would quickly evolve in the event of any mass extinction (defined as the loss of at least 75 percent of the species on the planet), something that’s already happened five times before in the past.

In a survival of the fittest contest in which humans and robots start at zero (which is what we’re really talking about with a mass extinction event), robots would win every time. That’s because humans evolve linearly, while superintelligent robots would evolve exponentially. Simple math.

Woahhh, boy. Easy. Have a sugar cube.

Climate change is bad, bad, bad news bears. But it’s probably not going to wipe out all the people. Don’t get me wrong: Rising sea levels, security threat multipliers, Peabody is the devil, keep it in the ground, carbon fee and dividend, etc., etc. But implying mass human extinction due to a warming climate is counter-productive in a country in which half the political populace suggests the threat is overblown.

Side note: Even if we did “start at zero,” presumably that would imply actually starting at zero. As in, no humans and no robots. In which case you can exponentiate zero until the robocows come home, and you’ll still be left with an arithmetic donut. Mother Earth wins every time — the deserts, the oceans, the bacteria — not the ‘bots. End side note.

There’s a lot going on in Lehman and Miikkulainen’s paper, but none of it is about climate change. (Dominic Basulto, the author of the WaPo piece, acknowledges as much.) The study itself is a relatively straightforward piece of computer science: Dump some biologically inspired learning algorithms into a population of simulated robots, tack on an evolution-mimicking step, kill off a bunch of digital bots (that’s the mass extinction), and see what happens. The researchers demonstrate that after unplugging a good chunk of the robots, “evolvability” accelerates; that is, the extent to which and the rate at which the digibots are able to fill abandoned niches increase. It’s an interesting result, and one that warrants discussion in the context of biological evolution.

But back to climate change, mass extinction, and the coming robopocalypse. Let’s assume “start at zero” means “start at roughly equal numbers of robots and humans, who are at roughly equal levels of intelligence, and who are more or less randomly geographically distributed, and then inexplicably normalize this undoubtedly high-dimensional description of the scenario to ‘zero’.” (Forget the difficulties of meaningfully quantifying intelligence and consciousness.) There are a handful of robots and a handful of humans. It’s basically Burning Man out there. Then, the argument goes, the robots really take off:

Think about it — robots don’t need water and they don’t need food — all they need is a power source and a way to constantly refine the algorithms they use to make sense of the world around them. If they figure out how to stay powered up after severe and irreversible climate change impacts – perhaps by powering up with solar power as they did in the Hollywood film “Transcendence” — robots could quickly prove to be “fitter” than humans in responding to any mass extinction event.

They also might just sit around and rust in the sun. What’s motivating them to survive? Part of the problem here is that we also don’t really know what “evolvability” is. A 2008 review in Nature Reviews Genetics by Massimo Pigliucci states that, traditionally, “the term has been used to refer to different, if partly overlapping, phenomena.” It’s also unclear whether or not an organism can actually evolve evolvability.

Setting those difficulties aside, in assessing the Robo-Climate Wars scenario, we’re still left poking at the unparalleled uncertainty that hovers around the Singularity — the term used to describe the moment at which runaway artificial intelligence surpasses that of mankind. Some researchers argue the moment could come within the next ten years. Others say it won’t be less than a hundred (if ever). Basulto’s argument in The Washington Post rests on the temporal convergence of a climate-change-induced mass extinction and the dawn of superintelligence. Which seems a tad unlikely. And even if you buy, say, 2050 as an extinction date and as the hockey stick uptick for the Singularity, we’re still left with the assumption that human evolution and robot evolution will somehow be qualitatively and quantitatively different from one another. Which should give us pause.

While Basulto writes that “humans evolve linearly,” that idea is not at all settled in the evolutionary biology community. (Nor is “linear evolution” particularly well-defined in the first place. Linear? By what metric?) Some futurists argue — and it’s mostly futurists having these conversations — that as soon as we’ve developed robots capable of superintelligence (which ostensibly implies nonlinear evolution) we’ll have cracked the code of our own brains. In which case the same argument that applies to the robots in Lehman and Miikkulainen’s paper will apply to us, too, and we should spend more time worrying about climate change and less time worrying about the rise of our robot overlords.

Besides, by 2045, we’re supposed to be able to upload our brains to achieve immortality. As long as we’re cherry-picking futurist tidbits, we might as well cling to that one.

Source:

Extinction Events Can Accelerate Evolution

, PLOS One.

The strange link between global climate change and the rise of the robots

, The Washington Post.

How mass extinctions can accelerate robot evolution

, Kurzweil AI.

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A surprising link between superintelligent robots, global warming, and mass extinction? Nope, not really

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, global climate change, Hagen, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A surprising link between superintelligent robots, global warming, and mass extinction? Nope, not really

Thomas Friedman: The world is hot

by AugustTCKaxuwc Posted on August 19, 2015

Thomas Friedman: The world is hot

By on 19 Aug 2015commentsShare

In his New York Times column on Wednesday, Thomas Friedman began with a bet:

Here’s my bet about the future of Sunni, Shiite, Arab, Turkish, Kurdish and Israeli relations: If they don’t end their long-running conflicts, Mother Nature is going to destroy them all long before they destroy one another.

We may not know the stakes, but it is a provocative wager nonetheless. I like to imagine Friedman, steeped in cigar smoke, sitting around a poker table with Netanyahu, Erdoğan, half a dozen sheikhs, and Julia Roberts. Julia is there because when I hear “Mother Nature,” I cannot but hear her intone, “I have been here for eons”:

This is Julia at her fiercest. But I digress. Friedman was writing on the relationships between climate and state fragility in the Middle East. It is a story of extreme drought, the politicization of air-conditioning, and revolutionary sparks. He concludes with a call for cooperation:

All the people in this region are playing with fire. While they’re fighting over who is caliph, who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad from the seventh century — Sunnis or Shiites — and to whom God really gave the holy land, Mother Nature is not sitting idle. She doesn’t do politics — only physics, biology and chemistry. And if they add up the wrong way, she will take them all down.

The only “ism” that will save them is not Shiism or Islamism but “environmentalism” — understanding that there is no Shiite air or Sunni water, there is just “the commons,” their shared ecosystems, and unless they cooperate to manage and preserve them (and we all address climate change), vast eco-devastation awaits them all.

In a move that should shock few, Friedman glosses over some salient points here. Climate change and political fragility are intersectional, but they don’t have the same solutions. You can’t convert from Shiism to environmentalism. (They’re also not mutually exclusive.) Moreover, it’s the Islamic State that’s bulldozing the Middle East, not “all the people in this region.” Preaching the promise of “shared ecosystems” in a world of Daesh is naive. The lack of distinction here also ignores the fact that most people in the Middle East are just trying to live their lives, not actively fighting over who is caliph.

Luckily, on the climate front, the world recently came one step closer to the cooperation hinted at in Friedman’s throwaway parenthetical: “and we all address climate change.” On Tuesday, a group of leading academics released the first Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, a call to the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and Muslim countries to “increase their efforts and adopt the pro-active approach needed to halt and hopefully eventually reverse the damage being wrought” on the environment.

The declaration calls for an “equitable and binding” climate agreement in Paris this December, financial support for developing countries, preferably a 1.5 C target, and commitment to a zero-emissions strategy as soon as feasibly possible. And while it’s safe to say that the declaration was not signed by members of ISIS, this type of call for cooperation — from within the Muslim community — is already fostering the kind of environmental dialogue that Friedman asserts is absent.

The body of research linking climate and conflict is formidable and growing — as Friedman is well aware — and the triggers and threat multipliers that tie together drought, rising temperatures, and political unrest are very real. Something as abstract as climate change is made more tangible when viewed through the lens of political conflict, but that lens doesn’t get you any closer to solutions. And it certainly doesn’t get you any closer to pacifying the political and religious woes of the Middle East.

Friedman is right about Mother Nature, though: She is not sitting idle. As Julia Roberts once said, “I have fed species greater than you, and I have starved species greater than you.”

Source:
The World’s Hot Spot

, The New York Times.

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Oceans 15


This chef built her reputation on seafood. How’s she feeling about the ocean now?Seattle chef Renee Erickson weighs in on the world’s changing waters, and how they might change her menu.


How do you study an underwater volcano? Build an underwater laboratoryJohn Delaney is taking the internet underwater, and bringing the deep ocean to the public.


How much plastic is in our oceans? Ask the woman trying to clean it upCarolynn Box, environmental program director of 5 Gyres, talks about what it’s like to sail across the ocean, pulling up plastic in the middle of nowhere.


How catching big waves helped turn this pro surfer into a conservationistRamon Navarro first came to the sea with his fisherman rather, found his own place on it as a surfer, and now fights to protect the coastline he loves.


What seafood is OK to eat, anyway? Ask an expertWhen it comes to sustainable seafood, you could say director of Seafood Watch Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly is the ultimate arbiter of taste.

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Thomas Friedman: The world is hot

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Islamic Leaders Issue Bold Call for Rapid Phase Out of Fossil Fuels

by Myrna Posted on August 18, 2015

Religious scholars, experts, and teachers from around the world unite to call for climate action. ssuaphotos/Shutterstock Islamic leaders have issued a clarion call to 1.6 billion Muslims around the world to work towards phasing out greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and a 100 percent renewable energy strategy. The grand muftis of Lebanon and Uganda endorsed the Islamic declaration on climate change, along with prominent Islamic scholars and teachers from 20 countries, at a symposium in Istanbul. Their collective statement makes several detailed political demands likely to increase pressure on Gulf states ahead of the Paris climate summit in December. “We particularly call on the well-off nations and oil-producing states to lead the way in phasing out their greenhouse gas emissions as early as possible and no later than the middle of the century,” it says. Clear emissions reductions targets and monitoring systems should be agreed in Paris, the statement says, along with “generous financial and technical support” for poorer countries to help wean them off fossil fuels. Read the rest at The Guardian. More here:   Islamic Leaders Issue Bold Call for Rapid Phase Out of Fossil Fuels ; ; ;

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Islamic Leaders Issue Bold Call for Rapid Phase Out of Fossil Fuels

Posted in alo, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, global climate change, LAI, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Islamic Leaders Issue Bold Call for Rapid Phase Out of Fossil Fuels

Australia files joke of a climate pledge to the U.N.

by KamDennison87 Posted on August 11, 2015

Australia files joke of a climate pledge to the U.N.

By on 11 Aug 2015commentsShare

To raucous applause of denialists everywhere, Australia submitted its climate pledge to the U.N. on Tuesday. The plan — immediately and nearly universally hailed as weak by climate hawks, climatologists, and most other reasonable people — is one of twenty-six voluntary greenhouse gas emission reduction pledges, covering more than fifty countries, filed in the run-up to the climate negotiations in Paris this December. While currently non-binding, these Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) are considered indicative of countries’ levels of ambition in responding to the global climate change dilemma.

Australia committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26–28 percent of 2005 levels by 2030. Compare this target to the European Union’s: 40 percent of 1990 levels — when global emissions were much lower — by 2030. While Australia’s pledge may look similar to that of the United States, which committed to a cut of 26–28 percent of 2005 levels by 2025, analysts at Australia’s Climate Institute project that the U.S.’s pledge will amount to a 41 percent reduction on 2005 levels by 2030. Canberra’s five years of wiggle room make for a significant break for fossil fuel companies.

Weak target aside, “even worse is the lack of policy instruments outlined to get us there,” argued Yannick Spencer, an Australian Master of Public Policy candidate at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, in an email to Grist. “In fact the policy instruments in place will get us nowhere near there, while being highly economically inefficient.”

The Australian INDC leans heavily on the government’s US$1.86 billion Emissions Reduction Fund, the country’s main climate strategy, even though analysts expect it to be “fully eroded” (read: out of money) by next year. The fund operates via a reverse auction, in which companies offer to undertake emissions-cutting projects and bid for taxpayer dollars to fund those projects. Not only is the fund running out of money, but its impact is dubious. The policy suite will allow Australia’s top 20 polluters to actually “increase their carbon emissions without penalties,” reported the Australian Financial Review.

Despite the backlash, the Australian government stuck to its coal-fired guns. “Australia is making a strong and credible contribution to the international effort to tackle climate change,” said Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a statement. “We are committed to tackling climate change without a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme that will hike up power bills for families, pensioners and businesses.”

Ignoring the fact that the INDC is neither strong nor credible, the position is at least a step up for Abbott, who previously called climate change “absolute crap.” (The PM also notably said, “I won’t be rushing out to get my daughters vaccinated,” but we’ve only got time to cover one type of denialism today.)

Coal made up more than 60 percent of Australia’s energy mix in 2014. Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest private-sector coal company, quoted Abbott in a recent submission to the White House Council on Environmental Quality protesting the inclusion of greenhouse gases in National Environmental Policy Act analyses:

As Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently explained, … “Coal is good for humanity. Coal is good for prosperity. Coal is an essential part of our economic future here in Australia.”

The same can’t be said for the rest of the South Pacific. “If the rest of the world followed Australia’s lead, the Great Barrier Reef would disappear,” said Tony de Brum, foreign minister for the Marshall Islands, in a statement addressing Australia’s INDC. “So would my country, and the other vulnerable atoll nations on Australia’s doorstep.”

Source:
Australia Sets Emissions Goal, but Climate Scientists Say It Falls Short

, The New York Times.

Anger as Australia unveils ‘weak’ climate pledge

, RTCC.

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A huge, toxic algae bloom is basically eating the West Coast alive

by DeloresLamson Posted on August 7, 2015

spoiler alert!

A huge, toxic algae bloom is basically eating the West Coast alive

By on 7 Aug 2015commentsShare

Remember that big algae bloom that was sweeping the West Coast a few weeks ago? Here’s an update: It’s still there, and it’s bigger, denser, and more toxic than anyone suspected. You know what this means, don’t you? Welcome back to Spoiler Alerts, where we bring the worst news from our changing climate, straight to you.

This kind of toxic algae bloom — sometimes called a “red tide” — is not uncommon. But scientists have never known one to be this bad before, according to Reuters:

The bloom, which emerged in May, stretches thousands of miles from the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and has surprised researchers by its size and composition.

“It’s just lurking there,” Vera Trainer, research oceanographer with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Washington state, told Reuters on Thursday. “It’s the longest lasting, highest toxicity and densest bloom that we’ve ever seen.”

“It’s just lurking there.” Is it just me, or does that sound like the beginning of a creature feature flick about mutant mollusks? Before you ask, we’re not certain climate change is fully to blame — but we’re pretty sure we could be seeing more of these supercharged red tides in the future:

Researchers have yet to determine whether longer-term global climate change from rising levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions are playing a role, but the massive bloom may be a harbinger of things to come in any case, she said.

“Whether this is or is not due to climate change, I think it provides a window to the future of what we could see happen under climate change scenarios,” Trainer said.

What we do know for sure is that it’s costing us big time:

NOAA said in a statement that the closure of a Washington state razor clam fishery resulted in $9.2 million in lost income and has also damaged the state’s $84 million commercial crabbing industry.

First, with the salmon, then with the razor clams and crabs. It’s as if climate change is trying to turn us all into vegetarians — though that’s maybe not the worst idea, it’s not great news for my cioppino habit.

Source:
Massive toxic algae bloom reaches from California to Alaska

, Reuters.

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America’s Dirtiest Power Companies, Ranked

by LonnaBuley599 Posted on July 14, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Coal-fired power plants are the single biggest driver of global climate change in the United States. That’s why President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is moving quickly to put the finishing touches on a new set of regulations, called the Clean Power Plan, that aim to reduce the nation’s overall carbon footprint 30 percent by 2030 by cracking down on emissions from the energy sector.

Unsurprisingly, many power companies—particularly those that rely on coal as their main source of fuel—are crying foul. Recently, one major coal company and a dozen coal-reliant states tried to block the new rules in federal court. (The court decided last month not to hear the challenge, since the rules haven’t yet been finalized.) And this week, executives from two of the country’s biggest power companies met with White House officials in an attempt to persuade them that the crackdown would be “too much too soon.”

As it turns out, those same two companies—Duke Energy and American Electric Power—emit more carbon pollution than any other power producers in the country. That’s according to a new report released from a coalition of environmental groups and power companies, which draws on public data from the EPA and the Energy Information Administration to reveal the carbon footprints of the 100 biggest power producers in the nation. Many of the names in the database, like AEP or California’s Pacific Gas & Electric, might be familiar from your monthly bill, depending on where you live. The list does leave out some big utilities, like New York’s Con Ed, that primarily distribute power they purchase wholesale from someone else. That said, the database offers a pretty comprehensive snapshot of the companies most responsible for producing climate-changing emissions in the US.

The chart below shows the top 10 climate offenders from the database, according to two different metrics, and where each company ranks nationwide in terms of total power production. The first chart shows total carbon dioxide emissions in 2013. Unsurprisingly, that list is comprised mostly of the country’s biggest power companies, such as Duke, Southern, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. These companies produce a huge amount of power, and much of it comes from coal. Duke, for example, gets about 45 percent of its power from coal; for AEP, it’s about 60 percent.

The second chart shows the companies that are the most carbon-intense—that is, the companies that emit the most carbon dioxide per unit of electricity generated. Many of these are small, regional producers that rely almost exclusively on coal. While these companies generate relatively little power overall, what they do generate is exceptionally dirty, climate-wise. Big Rivers Electric, for example, provides power for a patch of western Kentucky with four coal-fired plants, the newest of which came online in 1986. Big Rivers declined to comment for this story. But a spokesperson for Great River Energy pointed out that the dataset may not fully represent a company’s portfolio, because it accounts only for power plants that the companies own and not for contracts with third-party wind and solar farms.

Tim McDonnell/Climate Desk

Take another look at the top chart. You might have noticed that while many of the country’s largest power producers appear on the list of major carbon polluters, a few big names are absent. That’s important, and it illustrates the huge climate benefit of using low-carbon fuels. In some cases, these companies have avoided significant carbon emissions because their energy generation portfolio is made up mostly of nuclear (which practically zero-carbon) and/or natural gas-fired plants (which release relatively little CO2). For example, the nation’s number-two power producer is Exelon, which gets 59 percent of its power from nuclear. The number-four producer, NextEra, gets 52 percent of its power from natural gas, 27 percent from nuclear, and 16 percent from wind. In other words, the carbon footprint ranking is essentially a proxy for which power companies are most reliant on coal.

There’s some good news in the data, as well. In the last few years, nationwide coal use has dropped precipitously. That’s mostly a product of market forces, rather than environmental regulation: Natural gas, made cheaper by the fracking boom, has displaced coal in power plants across the country. At the same time, renewable energy sources have boomed.

“What you see in this report is a significant shift to cleaner fuels,” said Derek Furstenwerth, a contributor to the report and the director of environmental services at Calpine, one of the country’s biggest power companies. Like NextEra, Calpine gets the bulk of its power from natural gas. Calpine has also emerged as a major proponent of Obama’s climate plan.

The shift away from coal has had a significant impact on emissions: Since 2008, carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector have dropped 12 percent. Other types of air emissions reported in the database are also way down, driven by regulations from the EPA that took effect prior to the Obama years. Emissions of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide (both of which cause acid rain and other nasty environmental impacts) are down 74 percent and 80 percent, respectively, since 1990. The trends in those emissions offer a bit of a crystal ball into what will happen when the federal limits on carbon dioxide emissions kick in, said Dan Bakal, a contributor to the report and director of the electric power program at Ceres, a group that tracks environmental issues in the private sector.

“At the time, industry really thought reducing NOx and SO2 emissions was not going to be achievable and that it would be much more costly,” he said. “But they stepped up to the challenge and found ways to reduce emissions very cost-effectively. The same thing will happen with CO2.”

Just because carbon emissions are already on the decline, doesn’t mean Obama’s rules are unnecessary. The change isn’t happening fast enough to avert dangerous climate change, Bakal said. But the current trend does show that cleaning up the power sector is possible.

Complying with the Clean Power Plan “will be a bit of a stretch for the industry, which is appropriate for a regulation intended to put us on an improving path,” Furstenwerth said. “But we believe that it’s definitely achievable.”

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America’s Dirtiest Power Companies, Ranked

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Exxon Knew of Climate Change in 1981, Email Says

by Myrna Posted on July 9, 2015

But the oil giant kept funding global warming skeptics. RiverNorthPhotography/iStock ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company, knew as early as 1981 of climate change – seven years before it became a public issue, according to a newly discovered email from one of the firm’s own scientists. Despite this the firm spent millions over the next 27 years to promote climate denial. The email from Exxon’s in-house climate expert provides evidence the company was aware of the connection between fossil fuels and climate change, and the potential for carbon-cutting regulations that could hurt its bottom line, over a generation ago – factoring that knowledge into its decision about an enormous gas field in southeast Asia. The field, off the coast of Indonesia, would have been the single largest source of global warming pollution at the time. “Exxon first got interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia,” Lenny Bernstein, a 30-year industry veteran and Exxon’s former in-house climate expert, wrote in the email. “This is an immense reserve of natural gas, but it is 70% CO2,” or carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change. Read the rest at the Guardian. See original:   Exxon Knew of Climate Change in 1981, Email Says ; ; ;

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Exxon Knew of Climate Change in 1981, Email Says

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Weed Growers Are a Drag on Denver’s Energy Supply

by Myrna Posted on July 9, 2015

The flowering reefer industry is sucking up energy, and the city has no efficiency plans in place to mitigate the problem. Bruce Stanfield/Shutterstock Since states like California, Washington, and Colorado have adopted laws allowing for the legal growth and sale of marijuana, a new reefer madness has taken shape. In some areas, the bud industry has been credited for performing “economic miracles.” In others, it’s to blame for everything from pollution and deforestation to water shortages. And while it has been touted as a possible gateway to reducing racial arrest disparities, that has not been the case so far in Colorado. Charge another social problem to the weed game: It’s getting too high on cities’ energy supply. At least that’s the case in Denver, where the recreational marijuana industry is reportedly sucking up more of the city’s electricity than it may have bargained for. Colorado became the first state to legalize recreational weed use in 2012, and the commercial industry has grown exponentially ever since. But that blooming market has placed a huge burden on the grid that distributes electricity throughout the state, particularly in Denver, where the largest cluster of growing facilities exist. The city’s 354 weed-cultivation facilities sucked up 200 million kilowatts of electricity last year, up from 86 million at 351 facilities in 2012, according to The Denver Post. Read the rest at CityLab. Visit source: Weed Growers Are a Drag on Denver’s Energy Supply

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Weed Growers Are a Drag on Denver’s Energy Supply

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China, Brazil, and the U.S. all unveil new climate goals

by HaroldChappell Posted on June 30, 2015

China, Brazil, and the U.S. all unveil new climate goals

By on 30 Jun 2015commentsShare

Three of the world’s biggest polluters — China, Brazil, and the U.S. — all announced new strategies to tackle climate change today.

China unveiled its long-awaited pledge for the U.N. climate talks to be held in Paris this December. (Such pledges are known in wonk-speak as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs.) The country is committing to a more ambitious goal for cutting the amount of greenhouse gases emitted for each unit of economic growth.

From the BBC:

The statement, released following a meeting in Paris between [Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang] and French President Francois Hollande, said China aimed to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 60-65% by 2030, from 2005 levels.

The carbon intensity target builds on a previous plan to cut carbon intensity by 40-45% by 2020.

The pledge also reiterates China’s intention to halt the rise of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and to get about 20 percent of its electricity from non–fossil fuel sources by that same year, as first announced in a deal with the U.S. in November. That still gives the country 15 years to keep increasing its climate pollution, but Li said China will “strive for the earliest possible peak,” and there are other signs that the country in fact plans to meet and exceed its goals faster than it is committing to. China’s coal consumption has dropped off dramatically. The country is also now one of the world’s biggest investors in renewable energy.

Just a few hours after the China announcement, President Obama and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff — the leaders of the Western Hemisphere’s two most populous countries — came forward with their own climate announcement. The leaders promised to have their countries running on 20 percent non-hydroelectric renewables by 2030. (Brazil gets a lot of its energy from controversial hydroelectric projects.)

“This is a big deal,” Obama climate aide Brian Deese said on a press call. “For the United States, it will require tripling the amount of renewable energy on our electricity grid. … For Brazil, it will require more than doubling.”

Brazil also promised to restore 12 million hectares of forests by 2030 while continuing to put in place “policies aimed at eliminating illegal deforestation.” This, too, is important, as deforestation and the emissions it produces present a double threat to the climate. And the two countries pledged to work together to push for an ambitious outcome at the Paris climate talks.

There have been a lot of signs of progress toward a global climate change deal this year, and today’s developments add to the momentum. But whether these announcements (like, for example, a recent one by G7 countries) are enough to foster an unprecedented level of international environmental cooperation this December is far from clear. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned yesterday that the negotiations are, despite the appearance of enthusiasm on the part of some political and business leaders, moving at a “snail’s pace.” For instance, Brazil, though it made a climate announcement today, still hasn’t produced its INDC.

But China’s increasing engagement is a good sign. It has, in the past, played a central role in scuttling negotiations. That the country has, this time, consistently played a different tune — reflected again in today’s INDC — is encouraging. If China and other big polluters — the U.S. and Brazil among them — stay on track, then maybe Ban’s proverbial snail will ultimately ooze its way across the finish line.

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China, Brazil, and the U.S. all unveil new climate goals

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, global climate change, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on China, Brazil, and the U.S. all unveil new climate goals

We’ll All Eat Less Meat Soon—Like It or Not

by VedaChapman7 Posted on June 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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The great bulk of American beef comes from cows that have been fattened in confined yards with thousands of of their peers, munching a diet of corn, soybeans, and chemical additives. Should the feedlot model, innovated in the United States in the middle of the 20th century, continue its global spread—or is it better to raise cows on pasture, eating grass?

The question is critical, because global demand for animal flesh is on the rise, driven by growing appetites for meat in developing countries, where per capita meat consumption stands at about a third of developed-world levels.

In a much-shared interview on the website of the Breakthrough Institute, Washington State University researcher Judith Capper informs us that the US status quo is the way forward. “If we switched to all grass-fed beef in the United States, it would require an additional 64.6 million cows, 131 million acres more land, and 135 million more tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. “We’d have the same amount of beef, but with a huge environmental cost.”

I agree with Capper that it would be a disaster to empty the feedlots and put all of the hungry cows out to pasture—that, at current levels of beef production, finding enough grass to feed every cow that now relies on copious supplies of corn would likely prove impossible.

But there’s a deeper question that Capper doesn’t look at: Is the feedlot system itself sustainable? That is, can we keep stuffing animals—not just cows but also chickens and pigs—into confinements and feeding them gargantuan amounts of corn and soybeans? And can other countries mimic that path, as China is currently?

The answer, plainly, is no, according to the eminent ecologist Vaclav Smil in a 2014 paper. Smil notes that global meat production has risen from less than 55 million tons in 1950 to more than 300 million tons in 2010—a nearly six-fold increase in 60 years. “But this has been a rather costly achievement because mass-scale meat production is one of the most environmentally burdensome activities,” he writes, and then proceeds to list off the problems: it requires a large-scale shift from diversified farmland and rainforests to “monocultures of animal feed,” which triggered massive soil erosion, carbon emissions, and coastal “dead zones” fed by fertilizer runoff. Also, concentrating animals tightly together produces “huge volumes of waste,” more than can be recycled into nearby farmland, creating noxious air and water pollution. Moreover, it’s “inherently inefficient” to feed edible grains to farm animals, when we could just eat the grain, Smil adds.

This ruinous system would have to be scaled up to if present trends in global meat demand continue, Smil writes—reaching 412 million tons of meat in 2030, 500 million tons in 2050, and 577 million tons in 2080, according to projections from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Such a carnivorous future is “possible but it is neither rational nor sustainable”—it will ultimately destroy the ecosystems on which it relies.

Smil is no anti-meat crusader. He acknowledges that “human evolution has been closely linked in many fundamental ways to the killing of animals and eating their meat.” But the rise of the feedlot has provided much more meat than is necessary nutritionally—Americans consume on average about 209 pounds of meat per year, while a “wealth of evidence confirms” that bit less than 100 pounds is “compatible with good health and high longevity.”

He calculates that such a level could be achieved globally, without the ecosystem destruction built into the status quo meat production model. Rather than gobble up stuff we could eat like corn and soybeans, farm animals should be fed solely crop residues and food waste. And rather than be crammed into concentrated feedlots, they should be kept on pasture in rotation with food crops. Managing meet production that way, he calculates, would generate more 200 million tons of meat per year—about enough, he calculates, to provide the globe with sufficient meat for optimal health.

Of course, massive challenges stand between Smil’s vision and reality. For one, it would require people in industrialized countries like the United States to cut their meat consumption by half or more, even as consumption in Asia and Africa rises to roughly equal levels. Then, of course, there are the massive globe-spanning meat companies like US-owned Tyson, Brazil-owned JBS, and China’s Smithfield that have a huge stake in defending the status quo.

But ramping up the current system to provide the entire globe with US levels carnivory is hard to fathom, too. If it happens, “there is no realistic possibility of limiting the combustion of fossil fuels and moderating the rate of global climate change,” Smil writes. In other words, like it or not, it’s probably time to get used to eating less meat—pushed by the climate crisis, industrialized societies may have little choice but to ramp down meat production along lines suggested by Smil.

Meanwhile, US meat consumption, long among the very highest in the world, is waning, if slowly. The total annual slaughter peaked at 9.5 billion animals in 2009, and dropped to 9.1 billion by 2013. Interestingly, Paul Shapiro, vice president of farm-animal protection of the the Humane Society of the United States, told me that that the decrease reflects meat eaters’ cutting back, not any turn to abstention—the percentage of vegetarians and vegans among the population has “remained relatively stable” in recent years, he said. (See my colleague Gabrielle Canon’s list of the most common ways in which meat eaters justify their diet here.)

If we can continue this trend, the feedlot, which looks hyper-efficient at mass-producing meat only if you ignore a host of environmental liabilities, may yet prove to be a passing fad.

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We’ll All Eat Less Meat Soon—Like It or Not

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