Climate Change: A City, County, Nation, and World In Denial

Many pines throughout the west have been killed by pine beetles after being weakened by drought and heat thought to be related to climate change. This summer, I witnessed many thousands of acres of forests from Oregon to the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming with some 50% of the trees dead or dying. These dead lodgepoles (Pinus contorta) were on the upper North Fork Malheur River, Baker County, Oregon September 25, 2018.
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In This Issue 
Climate Change: A City, County, Nation, and World In Denial
Walden/McLeod-Skinner Debate
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Climate Change: A City, County, Nation, and World In Denial

As President Trump is in the process of pulling the US out of the Paris climate agreement while increasing our drilling for oil, and as the Baker 5J School District offers voters a plan that abandons neighborhood schools in favor of extensive fossil fuel hungry busing of children to a new elementary school on the north end of town, the IPPC has issued a new report designed to awaken, but not unduly alarm, a sleeping population to the unexpected "substantial consequences" of our continuing to take a lackadaisical approach to climate change.

It is worth noting that the current pledges of nations to reduce CO2 emissions are not nearly enough to avoid disaster, and unfortunately, the situation appears to be worse than the IPPC summary lets on, as many painful details contained in the body of the report are not reflected in the summary. Additionally, given the current social and intellectual environment, the prescriptions offered as remedies to prevent the coming "substantial consequences" appear to be unrealistic, at least in the US and Australia, and probably in other major industrialized nations like China and India, whose population pressures will be demanding increasing fossil fuel use.

For example, the National Geographic article, "Climate change impacts worse than expected, global report warns," describes some of what the report calls for just to stabilize warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius:

"These solutions all require unprecedented efforts to cut fossil-fuel use in half in less than 15 years and eliminate their use almost entirely in 30 years. This means no home, business, or industry heated by gas or oil; no vehicles powered by diesel or gasoline; all coal and gas power plants shuttered; the petrochemical industry converted wholesale to green chemistry; and heavy industry like steel and aluminum production either using carbon-free energy sources or employing technology to capture CO2 emissions and permanently store it.

In addition, depending on how fast emissions are cut, between 0.4 and 2.7 million square miles (1-7 million square kilometers) of land may have to be converted to growing bioenergy crops and up to 3.86 million square miles (10 million square kilometers) of forests added by 2050. And still that won’t be enough, the report warns. Every pound of CO2 emitted in the last hundred years will continue to trap heat in the atmosphere for hundreds of years to come. By 2045 or 2050 there will still be too much CO2 in the atmosphere. More forests or some form of direct capture that takes CO2 out of the atmosphere will be essential to stabilize global temperatures at 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius), the report says." [Emphasis Added]

Underlying the climate change problem is population growth, especially in industrialized consumer nations like the US. People consume and pollute, and much of their consumption requires burning fossil fuels with the resultant CO2 pollution. People and their activities also displace and destroy the habitat of other species of animals that we share the earth with. We were warned about the perils of unrestrained population growth decades ago by people like Paul Ehrlich but he and others who gave the warning were demonized and and then largely ignored. One of his concerns was the effect of unrestrained human population growth on the other species that inhabit the earth with us:

The Annihilation of Nature

The US had essentially reached a stabilized "zero population growth" state in the mid 1970's, but that feat was destroyed by people who promoted the immigration act of 1965 which set the stage for mass immigration to the US. Instead of growing to a population of around 245 million and then slowly declining, population growth, the vast majority due to immigration and the children produced by immigrants, was put on an ever upward trajectory. Today we, the US, have added an extra 85 million more people than we would have, and are almost up to 330,000,000 (330 million), with a net gain of one person every 13 seconds. The world population is over 7.5 Billion (7,500,000,000). Everyone of us is consuming, polluting, depleting resources, destroying habitat, and contributing to climate change.

How long can it go on? 2030? 2050? 2100? Time will tell.

See also:

Review: Facing the Limits to Growth

 

 Walden/McLeod-Skinner Debate

Representative Walden and his challenger, Jamie McLeod-Skinner, squared off in their first, and apparently only, debate last Friday.  News articles and OPB reports seem to want to focus on Walden's apparent refusal to have a second and third debate, without reporting on any substantive difference on the issues, and KTVZ-TV hasn't yet provided a YouTube video. The Bend Bulletin did however write up the following summary of the get together:

Walden, McLeod-Skinner debate issues facing Congress