GP Canada's Elizabeth May debates Climate Change.

Be it resolved climate change is mankind's defining crisis and deserves a commensurate policy response.

That was the proposition debated last night in Toronto. The participants were:

• George Monbiot: author of the best selling books Heat: how to stop the planet burning;
• Bjørn Lomborg: adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He is the organizer of the Copenhagen Consensus Center
• Lord Nigel Lawson: was Chancellor of the Exchequer between June 1983 and October 1989
• Elizabeth May: L eader of the Green Party of Canada and is an environmentalist, writer, activist and lawyer active in the environmental movement since 1970.

A running blog comment stream came from:

• Dave Roberts (Grist.com staff writer), 
• David Boyd (co-author, with David Suzuki, David Suzuki's Green Guide), 
• Jim Harris (former leader, Green Party of Canada), 
• Nic Rivers (co-author, with Jeffrey Simpson and Marc Jaccard, Hot Air: Meeting Canada's Climate Change Challenge), 
• Peter Tertzakian (Chief Energy Economist of ARC Financial Corporation, Author, A Thousand Barrels a Second), 
• Krystyn Tully (Vice President, Lake Ontario Waterkeeper)

Read the following comments about Elizabeth May's performance. Who in all of the Green Party US has the stature to be invited to debate and the capability to actually deliver?

David Roberts:
Crucial point from May: climate science based on multiple overlapping strands of evidence from multiple scientific disciplines. Not some fragile edifice based on one "hockey stick."

David Roberts:
May is kicking Lomborg's ass. Asks, pertinently, why is it only spending on climate change that he objects to? What about corporate bailouts? Fossil fuel subsidies? Military spending? He's curiously quiet on those.

[Comment From Doug Brown: ]
I agree with Elizabeth on this point -- I've lived and worked in Africa for many years and that is the same observation I would make on this point -- climate change is negatively impacting the very things related to poverty and underdevelopment that we are concerned about

DavidRBoyd:
MAy is getting close to the heart of Lomborg's duplicity. Why is the choice limited to spending money on foreign aid OR climate change? Added together, the amount of money needed to address the UN's Millennium Development Goals and climate change is a substantial yet affordable sum. We can and should do both!

David Roberts:
Good point from May: why aren't we talking about benefits? Efficiency is an oil well we could never exhaust, and provides energy cheaper than any other alternative. Why not tap it?

Krystyn Tully:
When May says we waste energy, she isn't kidding. Generating electricity on the Great Lakes consumes more energy than any other sector. Our current approach to energy creation is incredibly inefficient (p. 248) : http://www.epa.gov/solec/sogl2007/SOGL2007.pdf

Peak Oil? Drill baby drill.

Joseph Romm's Climate Progress site has yet another reminder today that Peak Oil is a real consequence happening to us in real time. This one is based on a new report from Merrill Lynch that says we are there. This is similar to what George Monbiot got out of the International Energy Agency report back in December.




Some are concerned with the relationship of Peak Oil, the current economic crisis and the politics of both. Romm quotes from Greenwire (subs. req’d)

The global financial crisis has put a grinding halt to the frenzy in commodity investing seen for most of 2008.

This morning, CME Group — operators of mercantile exchanges in Chicago and New York — reported that trading last month fell 41 percent compared to January 2008 figures. Trading in energy futures and options at the New York Mercantile Exchange fell by 5 percent.

But output cuts by OPEC and the worsening oil production in countries outside the cartel could set the stage for another spike in energy and commodity prices in the years to come, experts say.

Analysts bullish on the long-term prospects of commodity prices say that oil could return to upward pricing pressure by as early as 2010 once demand growth returns to the world economy.

My response was left as a comment at Climate Progress.

We are now to the place where “drill baby drill” means “die, baby, die”.

We all know that oil is a finite resource. We all know that chasing the chimera of perpetual growth will, over time, increase demand, unless we do things radically different.

Why then do we fall for any effort that would take those resources that are becoming increasingly scarece and valuable and use them up as fast as we can. The only ones who will profit from this are those who are in a position to deliver the alternatives, or as the Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia told 60 Minutes, “Who has more sun than we do?”

When the American Petroleum Institute does their ad that says we have enough oil and gas in North America to fuel our cars and heat our homes for the next 60 years, why is no one asking “then what?”

I have asked this same question since I used it to ridicule Richard Pombo in 2006. The immediate economic gain of using up these resources as fast as we can is not worth the long term cost of having nothing left in the tank. I can think of no set of actions that is more likely to ruin the US economy as well as endanger all our futures, than this insane urge to drill more, use more. It is time to stop digging.

This is not just about some economic calculation. It is more like a political calculation. The economic point referenced above give no consideration to the costs of non-action on global warming. They seem to be issued with a prayer that the deniers be proven right. And in this, our "environmental" Senator Barbara Boxer says that there will be no action from Congress this year on Global Warming. I want to write:

Dear Senator Boxer,
When you grand children come to ask you what you were doing when you had a chance to make a difference, will you really feel good to say, "I did my best but there were just too many others who didn't want to go along." You are the one whose vote in the most recent farm bill was governed by the fact that, as you said, "We have our rice people and our cotton people." When it comes to climate change, what about our real people?

Are you willing to put your hold on this seat on the line in order to do what is right?

Yours truly,
Wes Rolley, Citizen.

Maybe we can all write a version of that… with a copy to your local paper, of course.

The Venus Syndrome:

Dr. James Hansen (N.A.S.A.) gave a major speech at the annual convention of the American Geophysical Union. He changed the title of his talk after the program was complete, and so had to explain that fact. It is now entitled:
Climate Threat to the Planet: Implications for Energy Policy and Intergenerational Justice.

Those who are so inclined may download both the PowerPoint presentation
or as a PDF file. I have much more to say, and will call attention to those sections that really brought me up short. Click Read more! to understand just how dangerous these times are.



I want to talk about a single term from Dr. Hansen's title. Intergenerational Justice is not a phrase that I have heard before, but the implications are self evident to anyone who has read / heard Winona talk about our obligations to the 7th Generation.

For those who have talked about Ecological Wisdom on this list recently: Les, Howard, Linda, this is not new what is new is the following from Dr. Hansen's notes:

I will argue that we have a much sharper knowledge of global climate sensitivity than is usually stated.
Also the Faustian bargain that we have cut for ourselves is nastier than has been recognized.
And I will emphasize some important missing observations.
The scientific method and perspective have relevance that reaches beyond pure science. The urgency of implications for energy policy is not yet adequately recognized by governments, but it must be. The implications for intergenerational equity deserve greater attention.

There is a sense of urgency in what he says now, a tone that was not there before. In fact, the email that he sent out tonight with the links to his material was given the subject: The Venus Syndrome. Venus, the planet where a run-away greenhouse gas effect keep the surface temperature far higher than would allow human life to continue.

As I plowed through Hansen's presentation, I came to this point (Chart 43) where Hansen tells us what he really thinks about our "Faustian bargain."

In my opinion, if we burn all the coal, there is a good chance that we will initiate the runaway greenhouse effect. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale (a.k.a. oil shale), I think it is a dead certainty.

From that event, there would be no return, no human life.

I stop at this point, not because I want to scare you, but rather because I want to call attention to an interview that Georges Monbiot conducted with Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency. I suggest that you watch the video that the Guardian put together. In this interview, Birol admits that for many years, his agency has been forecasting peak oil based on a rate at which existing oil fields are being depleted. In 2008, for the first time, they actually measured it and the difference was almost double. In other words, we will hit peak oil between 2020 and 2030 no matter what we do. According to Monbiot:

So burn this into your mind: between 2007 and 2008 the IEA radically changed its assessment. Until this year's report, the agency mocked people who said that oil supplies might peak. In the foreword to a book it published in 2005, its executive director, Claude Mandil, dismissed those who warned of this event as "doomsayers". "The IEA has long maintained that none of this is a cause for concern," he wrote. "Hydrocarbon resources around the world are abundant and will easily fuel the world through its transition to a sustainable energy future." In its 2007 World Energy Outlook, the IEA predicted a rate of decline in output from the world's existing oilfields of 3.7% a year. This, it said, presented a short-term challenge, with the possibility of a temporary supply crunch in 2015, but with sufficient investment any shortfall could be covered. But the new report, published last month,
carried a very different message: a projected rate of decline of 6.7%,which means a much greater gap to fill.

The alternatives that Birol was willing to discuss were to tap the Canadian tar sands.

Birol says we need a "global energy revolution" to avoid an oil crunch, including (disastrously for the environment) a massive global drive to exploit unconventional oils, such as the Canadian tar sands.

In other words, he is willing to strike the Faustian bargain that Hansen fears so much. If there were ever a time when we need to change our consciousness, when we need to call out again for a 7th Generation Amendment to our Constitution, that time is now. If not now, there may never be a 7th Generation.