Transition for my town

This is scheduled for the 12/31 issue of the Morgan Hill Times.

The history of the Santa Clara Valley is one of constant transition. Long gone are the days when the Union Pacific RR advertised it as the Valley of the Heart's Delight. Some of the agricultural economy has remained but the structure has radically changed. No longer do we have packing sheds next to the railway. Morgan Hill is not even just a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, as it was when I moved here over 30 years ago. Rather we are transitioning to something new and don't really know just what that will be.

One of the most important drivers for the past transitions has been the value of our land. How do we use it? How do we tax it? Is it more valuable for agriculture or for industrial development. You have only to examine the office parks along Cochrane Rd. to appreciate how we have answered those questions.

It seems obvious that we may not always answer those questions in the same manner, or that we will start asking new question. As our economic life changes, there will be new drivers for local decisions.

In a recent NY Times column, Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman discusses the new economic normal. “Oil is back above $90 a barrel. Copper and cotton have hit record highs. Wheat and corn prices are way up. Over all, world commodity prices have risen by a quarter in the past six months.” With changes like this, perhaps it will become more valuable to maintain agricultural land in close proximity to where we live.

Krugman gets right to the point. “What the commodity markets are telling us is that we’re living in a finite world, in which the rapid growth of emerging economies is placing pressure on limited supplies of raw materials, pushing up their prices. And America is, for the most part, just a bystander in this story.”

That is a big change from that past vision of America. How do we adapt to the reality of a finite world, one in which resources are limited, access to them is increasingly expensive when transportation costs are added, and America no longer has an inexhaustible supply. Politicians talk about meeting out energy needs through the exploitation of oil shale, but they never mention the costs, direct and indirect, that oil shale operations have. There is probably no single process that would destroy more watershed than a massive exploitation of the shale deposits in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. This is water that would go to the Colorado River and make that water supply unusable.

There are other drivers that we have to consider; a changing climate is just one. The frequency of extreme weather events that we are currently experiencing around the world is on of the predicted results of increased greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere. New York has been hard hit by a blizzard while Greenland continues to warm. In the Southern Hemisphere, South Australia has experienced their worst drought while Queensland had record rainfall and flood this week. It may rival the flood from Pakistan but affect fewer people. Remember: a warmer atmosphere will hold more water and that will fall somewhere.

We can no longer count on our state and federal governments to prevent future catastrophic events, or even to adapt to them after it happens. There is neither the fiscal capacity in either Washington or Sacramento nor the political will act if it costs money. We can only raise taxes so much and I doubt that the incoming Republican House of Representatives, filled as it is with new Tea Party members, is gong to do much of anything productive about energy or climate change.

Morgan Hill has to recognize that the future of this community depends on what we do, collectively, here and now. There is a good model for this cooperative community action in the Morgan Hill Community Emergency Response Team. (http://www.mhcert.com/) This is how we take local action to deal with a sudden emergency because we know that immediate help will not be coming form State or Federal agencies. This is not because those agencies don't want to help, it is because the can't.

How will we deal with events that are not sudden, but rather assert themselves over time. There is a model for this as well. Morgan Hill is uniquely positioned to be a Transition Town, developing a local resilience that will see us through, transitioning to a newer reality. You can find more information about Transition Towns by following Hopedance, an online journal published by Bob Banner of Santa Barbara. (http://bit.ly/huvptZ)

The key objective of a Transition Town is to provide that local resilience. They begin by asking different questions: What is the true cost of consumerism? How willing are we to push down other people in order to maintain our idea of American Exceptionalism? How do we best adapt to this new world we have created? These are moral questions as well as economic ones.

Civil Disobediance Pt. 2: People before Polar Bears

Yesterday, I received a mailer from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that was trying to raise money to act on behalf of the polar bears. After all, climate change threatens their very existence. You can even buy polar bear shopping bags at an inflated, gotta raise money somehow, price.

I used to think that way myself. Those days are long gone. The situation is a lot more drastic and the specie being threatened is homo sapiens. Don't think that climate change is something that we have until 2050 to deal with. It is happening now and we had better recognize that fact.

If you click Read more! I will give more detail on three events that I don't hear Greens talking about, but they should be at the very top of the list: the dust storms that swept across eastern Australia, the Dutch experts who are advising California on methods to protect San Francisco Bay and California Delta, and my finally getting around to read The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis published by the Global Humanitarian Forum, headed by Kofi Anan. Each of these underscores the fact that Climate Change is real, it is here now, and people are being affected every day while the US twiddles its thumbs and the Senate can not yet pass a climate change bill.



Australian Dust Storms:
If you have not yet seen the effect of this, you have to watch this video. Otherwise, you might not believe it.

This is climate change in Australia. It is also what is forecast for the Southwest of the United States. We have already begun to see some effect in the mountains of Colorado as they are reporting red snow .

It is, sadly, probably too late to save much of Australia. But it is not too late to save the U.S. Southwest and other key regions in or near the subtropics. We can still prevent the worst. (Joe Robb at Climate Progress)

Dutch Engineers to save the Delta?
This is climate change mitigation right here in California. No, it did not make the local news. It was not on television, absorbed as it is with all things political unless it is a crime story. It did, however, make the San Mateo County Times and was carried in its sister paper, the Contra Costa Times.

The inevitable effects of climate change in California, and how cities can adapt to them, are starting to get more attention from Bay Area planners. While no one knows exactly how sea level rise will play out 100 or 200 years from now, analysts agree that more severe and frequent floods are going to be a part of it.

Avoiding sea level rise is by now impossible. The Bay has risen 8 inches since the start of the 20th century, and scientists worldwide agree that the Bay Area in particular can expect to experience sea level rise of as much as 16 inches by midcentury and as much as 55 inches by 2100.

Here is a link to a map of the Bay / Delta with a sea level rise of just 1 meter... 39 inches rather than the 55 mentioned in the quote above.

This should begin to give you a feel for the fact that mitigation of the effects of climate change is going to be very, very expensive. You know that the Conservatives in Congress, both Republican and Democrat, will sing the song that after bailout and a big impact Health Care bill, we just can't afford to tackle climate change now. It would do too much damage to the economy.

Don't let them sell you that line. It just is not true. If the money for levee repairs in New Orleans had not been spent on a new freeway exchange to allow access casino boats, perhaps the 9th Ward would not have flooded. It would have been so little.

Paul Krugman is already labeling this a big lie.

So the main argument against climate action probably won’t be the claim that global warming is a myth. It will, instead, be the argument that doing anything to limit global warming would destroy the economy. As the blog Climate Progress puts it, opponents of climate change legislation “keep raising their estimated cost of the clean energy and global warming pollution reduction programs like some out of control auctioneer.”

It’s important, then, to understand that claims of immense economic damage from climate legislation are as bogus, in their own way, as climate-change denial. Saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.

The costs are right in front of our faces and California's politicians do not have the cojones (a Madeline Albright term) to take action now. They can't even pass a rational budget.

The Human Cost of Climate Change
It is not about polar bears, it is about people. Those who are fortunate to live in California can probably withstand whatever comes if we were on our own... and we just might be. However, there are hundreds of millions of people who don't have that ability. There people are the subject of Global Humanitarian Forum's Anatomy of a Silent Crisis.

We testify here to the human face of this dangerous problem. The first hit and worst affected by
climate change are the world’s poorest groups. Ninety-nine percent of all casualties occur in developing countries. A stark contrast to the one percent of global emissions attributable to some 50 of the least developed nations. If all countries were to pollute so little, there would be no climate change.

So, how bad is it. Here are some statistics from that report.

The findings of the report indicate that every year climate change leaves over 300,000 people dead, 325 million people seriously affected, and economic losses of US$125 billion. Four billion people are vulnerable, and 500 million people are at extreme risk.

Even Anan admits that there is an element of error in these numbers. But how big do they have to be to get our attention? This is no longer an economic or technological question. It is now a more imperative. The time for talking in pleasant drawing room tones has long passed.

What to do?
I was somewhat surprised when Dr. James Hansen of N. A. S. A. not only called for civil disobedience, but actually went to the Appalachians to try and block yet another mountain top removal coal mining effort. Recently I read a paper by Dr. John Lemons. He also considers this a question of ethical behavior and, like Hansen, suggests that it is time for civil disobedience. If not, he is very pessimistic.

As a natural scientist I have been engaged in global climate change issues since the early 1980s, particularly with respect to the integration of science with public policy and ethics. However, at this point in time there is little that I see that is a cause for optimism in the battle to solve global climate change on an ethical basis, to reduce immediately and significantly the emissions of greenhouse gases based on the best available scientific information.

We have heard it all. especially here in California where our Senator Boxer Chairs the Senate Committee that has to write and approve any legislation. So far, she has delivered speeches and little else. Likewise, Governor Schwarzenegger has gotten a reputation as a Green Governor, but many of his actions have been ecologically destructive and none of them, even his expensive plans for dams and a peripheral canal, have begun to address the problems of rising sea levels for the Bay and Delta regions. Even here, he is solving the wrong problem and still screwing it up.

When I was a very little boy, stocking were filled with candy and fruit if you were good and with coal if you were bad. Maybe it is time for Schwarzenegger and Boxer to receive their stockings full of coal.

Californians do not have coal mines to block. The few we did have (e. g. near Parkfield) have long played out or are too dangerous to enter. But, we can do some things. For starters, buy no foods that were not produced in California... better yet... grow your own. It might put Trader Joe's out of business but they need a new business model anyway. It does not make sense in a warming world.

The place for Greens to follow the news is with EcoAction Committee's Facebook Pages. If you know of opportunities for action of any kind, post a comment on this post.

George Will v. Paul Krugman - Idiocy of GOP v. DEMS

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, is my favorite "liberal" columnist. His column, "State of Paralysis" about California published on May 25th in the New York Times was not his best work.

George F. Will has been a pompous partisan Republican at the Washington Post for nearly forty years. It's not surprising to see such dreck from him as "No More California Dreaming" on May 3rd or "The Coming California Bailout" on May 21st. But I hoped for a deeper analysis from Krugman.

George F. Will says:

California is exporting talent while importing Mexico's poverty. . .

Flinching from serious budget cutting and from confronting public employees unions, some Californians focus on process questions. They devise candidate-selection rules designed to diminish the role of parties, thereby supposedly making more likely the election of "moderates" amenable to even more tax increases. . .

California has become liberalism's laboratory. . .

Paul Krugman says:

The seeds of California’s current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state’s budget in a straitjacket. . . For California, where the Republicans began their transformation from the party of Eisenhower to the party of Reagan, is also the place where they began their next transformation, into the party of Rush Limbaugh.

With all due respect. Will and Krugman are both wrong. It says something about just how pernicious is this notion is that every political question that exists, has existed, or ever will exist anywhere in the universe boils down to a struggle between so-called conservative Republicans vs. so-called liberal Democrats.




George F. Will would have us pretend that forty years of Republican "conservative" domination, including the last ruinous years of Our Dear President Bush, just didn't happen. You would never know from such rants that our current economic depression was not caused by teachers, social workers, or Mexican immigrants, but by greedy bankers and businessmen. And you would never know that up till now, most calls for electoral "reform" in California has been by those seeking to elect more Republicans.

Paul Krugman ignores the inconvenient history of Prop 13. When Prop 13 was passed in 1978, homeowners, especially those on fixed incomes, really were getting squeezed by property taxes calculated from soaring housing prices. The problem with Prop 13 is that the situation has drastically changed. First, the housing bubble has burst and the real estate market is in a depression. Also, commercial business interests over time, as always, have learned to "game the system" by buying and selling the owners of commercial property rather than the property itself. The problem is not Prop 13, but the utter failure of the political class to adapt to changing conditions -- the very quality that defines "leadership."

Krugman either does not know or likely, does not care about the creepy politics of California Democrats. Barack Obama, the popular elected new Democratic president says:

...those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government...

Alas, the Califonia Democratic Party does not know the meaning of these words.

As I write this, the California State Supreme Court has just handed down a decision upholding Proposition 8's ban on gay marriage. Republicans put Prop 8 was put on the November 2008 ballot in a futile effort to draw more bigots to the polls to vote for McCain-Palin. Democrats let Prop 8 win because, as always, they lacked the guts to fight for unpopular minorities who, in any event, Democrats smugly assume will keep voting for them as the "lesser evil." Mark my words, over the next days and weeks, the horror of California's bipartisan misgovernance will be overshadowed by another battle in the "culture war." And hyping the "Culture War" is the one thing the so-called conservative Republicans and so-called liberal Democrats really know how to do.

The "California Dream" was based on an economy and a society enjoying cheap land, cheap water, and cheap energy. Here nobody cared where you came from because everybody was always on the move to being something else somewhere else. Those are the "Good Old Days" that are gone forever. The great challenge of California's leadership is not to raise more taxes or spend more money but to present a more noble, more green vision for the future. And for sure, neither Republicans nor Democrats are even beginning to talk about that.