Separation Manifested in Economics

                                                                                             written 23 July 2023

                                                                                         published 30 July 2023

                                                                                                 

            Last week saw lethal flash flooding in northeastern US, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and South Korea.  Very large hail, three to five inches in diameter, was reported in Missouri, Minnesota, and Italy.  Western China hit 126°F, a new national record, and severe heat advisories were issued in 16 Italian cities, with temperatures approaching 120°F.  Phoenix has experienced three weeks with highs over 110°F, and 10 days with lows over 90°F.  Wildfires rage in Canada, Greece, and Switzerland.

            As mentioned last week, the ongoing climate crisis is an extreme symptom of a deep cultural flaw: the illusion of separation.  After centuries of religious indoctrination that everything is "us versus them", rather than a unified whole, it is no surprise that our economic systems should also express "siloed thinking".

            These days, money has little real-world tangibility, a concept with no inherent value, and easily distorted.  Money is therefore a confidence game, in all the meanings of the term.  Loss of societal confidence expresses as inflation.  With misplaced confidence, economic dealings become fraudulent activity, such as Bernie Madoff, who stole $65B over 39 years before being caught.  

            Enron was a posterchild for this foolishness, changing from a darling of Wall Street to complete bankruptcy in a matter of weeks, as honesty in accounting was sacrificed to the goal of narrow short-term profits.  Another example is the accounting practice of discounting the value of the future in cost benefit evaluations, because the quantification is uncertain.  Consequently, killing the planet for short term profit seems "justified". 

            In the last few years, the growth of exclusive gain by the ultra-rich (the top 0.004 percent) captured almost two-thirds of all the world’s new wealth, creating a wealth inequity higher than it was before the crash of 1929.  Over the last century, the "purpose" of a corporation has shifted from including consideration of workers, suppliers, customers, and social good, to become exclusively focused on short term profits for executives and shareholders.  

            Insurance helps the economy manage risk, but insurance companies set rates using the past to predict the future, assuming a stable environment.  As climate conditions are rapidly changing, models dependent on past data have become unreliable.  The California wildfires of 2017 and 2018 resulted in $29 billion in insurance claims, but insurance premiums generated only $15.6 billion.  Texas had three 500-year floods in five years and Florida hurricane damage keeps increasing.  US insurance companies are abandoning areas which risk financial ruin, which currently includes California, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. 

            Focusing on short-term profits, banks perpetuate and accelerate the climate crisis by suppling fossil fuel companies with the cash, credit, cover and counseling to sustain and grow their operations, underwriting bonds, offering loans, and advising on mergers and acquisitions.  JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America have financed the industry with trillions of dollars, capitalizing the profits for themselves while socializing the risks for everyone, because degrading the climate eventually degrades the entire economy.

            Fossil fuels have been the backbone of the economy for so long that people chose to deny the climate problem rather than considering changing their economy.  Coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels, is on the decline world-wide, being outcompeted economically by renewables, yet entire regions and states deny any problems exist.  Parts of Wyoming and Montana developed large coal deposits and electrical production facilities, funding entire communities.  For the most part, the stockholders don't live locally, so, at some point, they will take their profits, declare bankruptcy, and leave vast areas economically destitute.  

            In America, land of rugged individualists, economic separation belief manifests in the demonization of anything "socialist", believing everything should be privatized, making the maximum profit possible.  The reality is that collective ownership, especially for essential services, are more cost effective, as the primary goal is quality of service, not maximizing profits, ensuring a healthier society by including everyone.  

            What is missing in our dominant economic model is whole systems thinking.  Difficult problems are simplified by breaking them down into smaller parts, and solving those parts.  But the whole is more than just the sum of the parts.  Without including consideration of the whole system, over long time frames, even the most brilliant partial solutions will fail.  The climate crisis results from ignoring the fundamental global interconnection of our physical reality.  Humans are now too numerous, and too technologically powerful, to survive much longer living the suicidally ignorant illusion of separation.

 

 

Separation Manifested in Religion

                                                                                                 written 16 July 2023

                                                                                             published 23 July 2023

   

            Last week saw massive flooding in the northeastern US, Colorado, Mississippi, China, India, Japan, Mongolia, Russia, Spain, and Turkey.  Extreme heat baked Europe, with surface temperatures in Spain hitting 140°F.  Phoenix, after suffering two weeks over 110°F, hit 117°F, with 17 percent humidity, giving a heat index of 120°F, and a low of 93°F.  Ocean temperatures in the Florida Keys reached 98°F, meaning any tropical storm that makes it into the Gulf will explode into a hurricane of great size and strength.  Farmers Insurance abandoned Florida, the fourth company this year.   

            The climate crisis is global, affecting everyone.  As bad as it is, the climate issue is only a symptom of a deeper structural problem: believing the illusion of separation.  This dates back centuries, and manifests in most cultures. Metaphysics and quantum physics affirm a unified reality, but institutions everywhere operate in denial of this truth. 

            Consider Christianity.  According to the Bible, Matthew 22:37-39, Christ said the greatest commandments were to "Love God, and Love thy neighbor".  Simple, loving, and inclusive.  I admire and embrace those commandments, and strive to experience them in my life.  But I have never identified with "Christianity" because of all damage religious organizations have done "in His name".  

            Several centuries after Christ, the Bible, formalized by men, become the sacred text of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the state religion of the Roman empire.  Despite being the namesake of the religion, Christ's words are only 6 percent the New Testament, which is only 40 percent of the Bible.  In those patriarchal times, women and Mother Nature were denigrated, as males were deemed more valuable than females, starting with the "original sin" of Eve.  Logic was more valid than feelings, and personal power more desirable than partnership, giving rise to using judgement, guilt, and fear, to "guide" the faithful. 

            As an agent of the empire, the Catholic Church quickly grew in political and economic power, justifying war against other religions and heretics as "sanctioned by God".  Over several centuries, eight crusades were waged against Islam in the Holy Land.  The Inquisition finally drove the Islamic empire out of Spain, using book burning, terror, and torture to "purify" the land of heretics.  The Pope then divided the world between the Spanish and Portuguese empires, commanding them to go forth, capture land, and convert or kill the natives.  In the US, 90 percent of the indigenous people were exterminated. 

            The eventual Protestant reaction to the corruption and greed of the Catholic institution ignited centuries of slaughter between "Christians", with killing on both sides.  Within the various Protestant sects, intolerance was rife, and many of the religious pioneers to the New World had been driven out of Europe.

            To this day, the Catholic Church is still dealing with coverup of the ongoing pedophile priest issue, and the abuse and death of Native American children in church run schools.  Methodist and Baptist conferences divide over "allowing" women in the ministry.  Hard line evangelical extremists, with rabid hatred of gays and transgender folks, support the death penalty for gays in Africa.  The religious right aided Republicans in packing the Supreme Court to further the rights of the billionaire class, and oppress women with vastly unpopular abortion bans. 

            To be fair, "Christian" religious organizations are not the only one's guilty of institutional hatred and oppression in the name of a loving God.  Islam arose, became a religious organization, and rapidly expanded into a political/economic empire, with extremists who are still intolerant, and institutionally misogynistic.  When the Prophet died, a power struggle between his wife and nephew grew to become the Shia/Sunni conflict, killing people to this day.  There are sects within Judaism where men begin each day giving thanks for not being a woman.

            All three of the major western religions have spiritual roots in a loving God and the Golden Rule of loving thy neighbor: a unity message.  While many of the faithful strive to live that message, religious organizations, distracted by political and economic power, often do not.  A hundred generations have been indoctrinated into accepting separation as "God given", shaping everything into a conflict between "us" and "them", including how we deal with the natural world.

            Until all who understand, and live the spirit of unity, call out their religious "leaders", we will continue as a divided species, and the unity expressed in the unaddressed climate crisis will overwhelm everyone.

  

 

 

 

Killing The Economy For Profit

                                                                                                 written 9 July 2023

                                                                                           published 16 July 2023

  

            Over the last few decades, several questions have arisen about the climate crisis.  Is it real?  When will it arrive?  Is it man made?  Can it be fixed?  Will we fix it?

            While some people believe Earth is flat, and the climate crisis is a hoax, the hottest day ever recorded on Earth was July 3rd, 2023, immediately broken on July 4th, 2023, and yet again on July 6th, 2023.  This record is expected to be broken repeatedly.  Since May, half of the US has faced extreme weather events.  NOAA estimates infrastructure damages from climate extremes cost the US more than $850 billion in the last five years, with more impact unaccounted.  Most of the US agrees the climate crisis is real, and already here.   

            Scientific consensus is the climate crisis is man-made.  In the few hundred years since the beginning of the industrial revolution, atmospheric CO2 increased 10 times faster than in the geologic record.  Additionally, isotopic analysis confirms fossil fuels are the source.

            For weeks, I have been presenting information from "Climate Restoration", by Fiekowsky and Douglis, detailing how humanity can respond, and even reverse the climate threat to humanity.  By completely decarbonization the global economy within the next 20 years, and removing 30 percent of the existing atmospheric carbon dioxide, returning to 300ppm by 2050, we would insure leaving a habitable planet to our children.  

            The technology to decarbonize the economy is already proven, already being manufactured, and beginning the rapid growth and price decrease that comes with increased mass production.  The change is being driven by growing climate concerns around the world, the inflationary and political unpredictability of diminishing finite fossil fuels, and the economic advantages of the more energy efficient renewable technologies.   

            Increasing climate impact expenses include not only replacing damaged infrastructure, but also the accelerating insurance costs on all infrastructure.  The financial world is beginning to see that a toasted planet is bad for business, and risks human extinction.  While there is still a long way to go, some feel the decarbonization transformation is now inevitable.

            We can also remove significant quantities of existing atmospheric carbon dioxide.  With sufficient funding, known systems can be scaled up in the next few years to begin returning to levels proven to be habitable for humanity within two decades.

            However, all this hinges on the last question, WILL we fix it?  Many reasonable people feel the answer is NO.  There is still too much well-funded institutional resistance.  We know that ExxonMobil researchers affirmed the climate problem 45 years ago, but the company chose short-term profits, despite risking killing the economy, and began funding climate denial.  ExxonMobil even funded think tanks to draft legislation cracking down on climate protests.  Utility companies like Florida Power & Light use their political power to slow down clean energy solutions like rooftop solar panels.  A recent article in the Ukiah Daily Journal detailed the resistance to divesting California public employee pension funds from fossil fuels, because "fossil fuel stocks make more money in the short term", without even considering the long-term costs of cooking the economy.

            Think about that for a moment.  Rather than work to make the planet habitable for our children, the goal is to maximize short term profits: killing the economy for profit.  Bring it down to personal terms.  Would you want to make more money knowing that somebody else would die young as a result?  Would you want more money if it caused you, or your children, to die young?  How would you feel if somebody else made more money by causing your kids to die young?  How important is a habitable planet for your future?  How about your kid's future?

            Our economy has been coopted by the idea that making money is the ONLY important issue.  Corporations are pressured to maximize short term profits for shareholders and executives, above all else.  B corporations, a special form of corporation, had to be created to allow for consideration of worker safety, customer safety, and environmental safety, in the face of shareholders lawsuits.

            This becomes especially ludicrous with the climate crisis, where there are no long-term economic winners, only losers.  Everywhere. 

            Some resistance is ignorance, some is political partisanship, and some is grotesque greed.  Each of us needs to decide: is a habitable planet worthwhile?  Then make sure that our elected leaders know our choice, and elect new ones if necessary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Methane Oxidation

                                                                                               written 2 July 2023

                                                                                           published 9 July 2023

    

            Last week, another round of Canadian wildfire smoke poured southward into Midwestern US and then moved east, affecting 1/3 of the country with unhealthy air quality.  Record heat attacked the southern US like a blowtorch, bringing temperatures comparable to the Sahara or the Persian Gulf.  Northern Mexico experienced 122°F, with 10 Mexican states reporting power shortages, leaving tourists and locals without air conditioning or fresh water.  For the first time, there have already been two tropical storms in the Atlantic in June.  

            The book "Climate Restoration" makes the case that, for a habitable planet, we must not only completely decarbonize the economy, but also aggressively sequester much of the carbon already in the atmosphere.  Synthetic limestone, kelp cultivation, and fertilized ocean phytoplankton are all systems that use natural living systems to bring us back to historically proven habitable levels.  However, there is another significant greenhouse gas that must also be addressed: methane.

            Methane is 40 times more potent than carbon dioxide, but naturally breaks down within a decade.  Atmospheric methane concentration, now two and a half times preindustrial levels, increased 0.1ppm in the last decade, the warming equivalent of 4ppm of CO2.  Since CO2 grew 25ppm last decade, this addition is another 16 percent increase.

            Methane comes from melting permafrost, natural wetlands, rice paddies, landfills (1/4 of Ukiah's greenhouse gas contribution), cow burps, and the production and transportation of oil and natural gas.  Such diversity makes reducing methane at the source difficult. 

            Climate Restoration reports on a process that accelerates the natural methane oxidation rate: Enhanced Atmospheric Methane Oxidation (EAMO).  A fine aerosol mist of iron-chloride is added to the air.  Wind mixes it with methane, and sunlight powers the oxidization reaction.  This is 100,000 times more efficient than any other oxidation technology.  EAMO could restore pre-industrial methane levels by 2028 by doubling the rate of natural methane oxidation, addressing both natural and human-made methane.

            While current methane production rates are problematic, a more serious concern is methane stored in the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean.  The East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS), with an average depth of 120 feet, is estimated to hold at least 1,400 billion tons of frozen methane hydrate, kept solid by the cold temperature of the Arctic sea floor.  

            Frozen methane is like dry ice (frozen CO2), in that it changes directly from solid to gas.  As climate change warms the Artic, summer sea ice has diminished, allowing the dark ocean water to warm.  This area is now "violently boiling", as methane begins reaching the surface.  The concern is that at some point large amounts of frozen methane will warm into gas, and burst to the surface.

            Geologic record indicates this happened about 56 million years ago, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.  Carbon dioxide level were rapidly rising, melting seafloor permafrost, and a methane burst produced a severe and rapid temperature spike, leading to the extinction of about 30 percent of life forms alive at the time.  Carbon dioxide levels are rising 10 faster today.

            If just 50 billion tons of methane, less than 4 percent of that estimated in the shallow ESAS, were to burst into the atmosphere, global temperatures would rapidly spike by another 50 percent.  Bursts could be 2 or 3 times this size.  Like predicting an earthquake, timing is anyone's guess, with expert opinion ranging from within the next decade to beyond our lifetime.  But given the magnitude of impact, it is worth humanity considering what can be done to prepare.  By developing an EAMO system now, building the capacity to cut existing methane in half, we would be in a better position to ramp up to respond to an Arctic seafloor burst, preventing methane from building to extinction levels.

            Development is underway to build simple ship born systems, injecting iron-chloride into the exhaust stacks to facilitate mixing.  There is good reason to think EAMO is safe, as it mimics natural processes, and the same method is used to purify drinking water.  Funding is estimated at $1 billion a year, which is modest enough to appeal to the insurance industry, which has an economic stake in preventing climate disasters.

            As the climate crisis builds, people are beginning to see this is real, despite Republican and industry obstructionism.  The good news is, working with natural systems, we can restore the planet to insure human habitability.  Are we intelligent enough, with sufficient political will, to make the effort?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Restoring The Oceans

                                                                                            written 25 June 2023

                                                                                          published 2 July 2023

                                                                                                 

            It's hot!  Much of Texas was over 110°F, with Corpus Christi enduring 125°F heat index after nine consecutive day of heat index above 115°F.  Oklahoma experienced 3" hail, and an EF-3, 150mph, tornado hit Mississippi.  NOAA declared a Category 5 marine heatwave, with sea temperatures as high as 9°F above normal, affecting 40 percent of the ocean, threatening to disrupt not only all sea life, but global wind and sea currents as well. 

            In the last 50 years humans have added as much atmospheric CO2 as the change from the last ice age to the current period when civilization thrived.  A habitable climate for our children requires we decarbonize the economy and sequester 1,000 billion tons of CO2, as soon as possible.  This is the thesis of the book "Climate Restoration", by Fiekowsky and Douglis, which suggests 4 paths to achieve this sequestration goal.

            The third plausible method of returning to 300ppm by 2050 is Ocean Iron Fertilization (OIF): cultivating ocean phytoplankton with iron fertilization.  Phytoplankton, which can photosynthesize carbon 40 times faster than trees, are the foundation of the entire ocean food chain.  In the open ocean, growth can be limited by lack of critical nutrients, specifically iron.  But when iron is added naturally, from volcanos or wind-blown terrestrial dust, these "desolate zones" bloom.  What is not eaten falls to the sea floor, sequestering the carbon for centuries.

            Dr. John Martin, former director of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, first seriously promoted intentional OIF decades ago, and small-scale testing demonstrated the process works, showing best results in natural ocean eddies, which kept the iron from rapidly dispersing, and areas where iron was the only limiting nutrient.

            In 2012, Russ George, working with the Haida First Nation in British Columbia, completed a larger OIF experiment 200 miles off shore, with the goal of helping restore the native salmon run.  They spread 110 tons of iron over 10,000 square kilometers.  Within hours the ocean turned green, and within days, thousands of seabirds were diving, whales beyond count arrived, and massive schools of albacore tuna showed up, fattening from emaciated to sashimi grade within two weeks.  The bloom lasted for months, eventually expanding to 35,000 square kilometers.  The following year, the returning salmon run was the largest on record, and the next year the local orca population enjoyed a "baby boom".

            Ocean life had flourished and megatons of carbon had been removed from the atmosphere.  Applying OIF to just one percent of the ocean, funded by licensing the fishing industry, could enhance ocean life and sequester 50 billion tons of carbon each year.

            However, the 2012 experiment stirred great controversy, with concerns of unintended consequences.  Some feared the success of OIF would give the fossil fuel industry no reason to curtail their toxic industry.  However, rapidly depleting fossil reserves, economic advantages of EV transportation, reduction of air pollution health issues, and reduction of geopolitical stress, will support sustained public pressure for decarbonization.

            Some fear OIF would "turn the ocean into a pea soup with toxic algae blooms".  Yet toxic algae blooms are a product of near shore human nutrient runoff, and deep ocean blooms are already a natural occurrence.  Further, the OIF blooms would dissipate in a few months, as the eddies dissolves.

            There is concern that "dumping vast amounts of iron into the ocean is reckless".  But the amount of iron needed, 10 pounds per square mile, is 1/10,000 the amount in coastal waters.  Commercial farming adds 90,000 times as much on corn crops.  To sequester enough carbon to get to 300ppm by 2050 would affect about one percent of the ocean, while agriculture uses 37 percent of the land.

            Important issues are still unclear.  Much of the phytoplankton is eaten, so how much carbon is actually sequestered, and for how long?  Will large blooms critically deplete other essential nutrients, creating "dead zones"?  Will this change distribution of fish and whale populations?  How will results be verified?  

            However, the climate crisis, a consequence of a perspective that assumes only humans are important and money is all that "counts", is already adversely impacting the planet, threatening all life.  A habitable future is worth taking a risk.  This process nourishes life, with a goal of returning to a condition we know has supported humans: atmospheric CO2 at 300ppm.  We have to make a start, understanding we must carefully monitor the process, and adjust over time.