- We all have idols, and last week, I got to listen to one of mine. It was partly the ground-breaking Club of Rome work that influenced me away from my intended career and on to population, environment, and climate change. With such an important message, why weren’t all the City decision makers there at the talk? How do we get other cities to listen? Dr. Meadows had read our Sustainable Santa Fe Plan- great! - and while he congratulated us on its importance and value, he said that if population and consumption levels are not included in a climate plan, we can not become sustainable. It’s true. If we cut our emissions, for example 50%, but double the number of people, we have not become more sustainable.

For those of you who have been reading Climate Today for at least a year will not have had any surprises- his talk covered Peak Oil, population growth, the lag time of climate change, the need for local adaptation and relocalization, voluntary simplicity with reduced consumption, etc.

Here are a few gems from his talk that are worth remembering and sharing:
- 50% of all the oil consumed by humans has been consumed since 1984, creating a world we now view as normal, but this high energy usage can not continue.
- We are moving into the “Post Petroleum Age.”  In 2006, 9 billion barrels of oil were discovered, but we consumed 31 billion barrels that year. World consumption of oil is currently 5 to 6 times the amount that is being discovered, so we are using up our savings account, which can not continue.
- Prepare yourself for less available energy. It appears now that the government in the coming years will have to resort to some kind of rationing or quotas, similar to World War II. Just raising prices harms the poor.
- The “biocapacity” of the earth has been surpassed, and we are currently overshooting, which, if continues, is always followed by collapse. We are now consuming 140% of resources with demands accelerating against the world’s ecosystems. These trends include not only fossil fuels but also groundwater, greenhouse gases, the destruction of agricultural soils, the degradation of natural resources, the gap between the rich and the poor, the supply of fish, etc.
- Embodied energy is the energy used to create and ship the things that we import. We have to fully recognize the energy and resources used in other places like China if we are to reach sustainability.
- The world’s population will be going back down this century. It is only a matter of how.
- It is unlikely that waiting for the Federal government will work. Politicians want to get re-elected, and therefore fail to make the essential significant structural changes required to convert to sustainability.
Thank you Dr. Meadows for speaking so frankly. - Editor

- Again, when real full-cost accounting is used, our polluting ways will clearly be revealed as disastrous financially. The $120 billion versus $3 billion is striking! And if it’s your child struggling with damaged lungs, the dollars issue seems trivial. Shutting down more polluting coal plants needs to be a promise- not a threat! - Editor 
EPA: Clean-air rule would overturn Bush-era plan
The Obama administration is proposing a new rule to tighten restrictions on pollution from coal-burning power plants in the eastern half of the country. The Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday the new rule represented its most consequential effort yet to tackle deadly pollution that contributes to smog and soot that hangs over more than half the country. The proposed reductions should save more than $120 billion a year in avoided health costs and sick days and save thousands of lives each year, Jackson said. Those benefits would far outweigh the estimated $2.8 billion annual cost of compliance, she said. Environmental groups hailed the new rule as a step toward taming pollution from coal-fired power plants. But industry groups said it will boost power prices and force many older coal-fired power plants to be closed.
For a fact sheet- http://www.epa.gov/airtransport/pdfs/FactsheetTR7-6-10.pdf
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g90-40S6CjhfALdoGfm7_KUUn7MAD9GPS4J04

- The Gulf devastation going on right now is causing deep anguish in many of us. A speaker on the radio yesterday said that he was seeing people in Florida actually getting sick because they knew they were watching the death of the ecosystem they loved so deeply. It helps your soul to take action. This Saturday, you can visibly support NO offshore drilling and YES to clean energy. - Editor

 

Hands Across the Sands
Hands Across the Sand is a movement made of people of all walks of life and crosses political affiliations. This movement is not about politics; it is about protection of our coastal economies, oceans, marine wildlife, and fishing industry.  Let us share our knowledge, energies and passion for protecting all of the above from the devastating effects of oil drilling.
A Message To The World
Hands Across the Sand is now international. Any person in any country may plan events on this website. This is a peaceful gathering of the people of the world. Planning an event is as simple as this:
 Go to your beach (or city) on June 26 at 11 AM in your time zone.
 Form lines in the sand and at 12:00, join hands.
The image is powerful, the message is simple.  NO to Offshore Oil Drilling, YES to Clean Energy.
http://www.handsacrossthesand.com/

- With natural gas being touted as the “bridge fuel,”  we need to look seriously at what this really means. We strongly recommend you watch and share with everyone the video “Split Estate”  (http://www.splitestate.com/buy_dvd.html) and now you can add an East Coast version with the 11 minute Vanity Fair video “Know the Drill.” We think that we know the costs of natural gas or petroleum, yet these new expansions right in people’s yards and using new technologies are revealing themselves to be horribly expensive, both in dollars IF we did full-cost accounting, and to life itself. Real estate prices are dropping along the Gulf as well- see Gulf property sales slide further on oil fears-  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100623/ap_on_bi_ge/us_oil_spill_real_estate . Shall we make our planet worthless bit by bit? Aren’t those solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars looking more and more beautiful? And more and more affordable when we total the true costs of fossil fuels? - Editor

A Colossal Fracking Mess 
As drillers seek to commence (natural gas) fracking operations in the Delaware River basin watershed and in other key watersheds in New York State -all of which sit atop large repositories of natural gas trapped in shale rock deep underground- concerned residents, activists, and government officials are pointing to Dimock as an example of what can go wrong when this form of drilling is allowed to take place without proper regulation. Some are pointing to a wave of groundwater-contamination incidents and mysterious health problems out West, in Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming, where hydraulic fracturing has been going on for years as part of a massive oil-and-gas boom, and saying that fracking should not be allowed at all in delicate ecosystems like the Delaware River basin.
 
The Sautners (who have drilling right next to their house) now rely on water delivered to them every week. The value of their land has been decimated. Their children no longer take showers at home. They desperately want to move but cannot afford to buy a new house on top of their current mortgage.
“Our land is worthless,” says Craig. “Who is going to buy this house?”

The people who have been burned badly by their firsthand experience with what you might call the New Natural Gas, and who have not gone silent, are spreading their message of acute disillusionment, ecological destruction, land-value decimation, and serious health concerns. As I sit and talk with the members of Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, news reports from the tragic Deepwater Horizonleak in the Gulf pop up from time to time on their computers. The disaster serves as a grim backdrop to our conversation, reinforcing the hazards of pushing forward with experimental forms of drilling whose risks are not well understood.
For the video- Know the Drill
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/06/fracking-in-pennsylvania-20100

“Wasting away again in Petroleumville, hoping for my addiction to halt.
Some people claim that there’s an oil rig to blame and I know it’s my own damn fault!”
http://climateprogress.org/2010/05/24/luckovich-cartoon-bp-oil-spill/

QUOTES
“No one goes and tries to drill in a mile of water if they can think of somewhere easier to do it,”
Chris Skrebowski, a former strategist for British Petroleum
and
“If you want to drill less, you have to significantly decrease your demand for the stuff.
 Patting ourselves on the back for fining BP, increasing safety standards, making more areas off-limits to drilling doesn’t get at the fundamental problem . . .
which is our high consumption of oil.”
Peter Maass, the author of the 2009 book, “Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil.”

Gulf spill reminds America- The era of ‘easy oil’ is over
To meet the world’s boundless thirst for oil, drillers are searching in the sand and mud of remote western Canada, the tough shale rock of North Dakota and more than a mile under the seas off the southern U.S. coast, where a drilling accident has sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. Why are we going nearly to the ends of the earth and the bottom of the seas for oil?

The answer, say many experts, is that we’re consuming as much oil as we ever have but the era of “easy oil” is in our rearview mirror and receding fast. Production from onshore oilfields in the U.S. has been declining since the 1970s, and near-shore production along the Gulf of Mexico peaked more than a decade ago.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/07/93754/gulf-spill-reminds-america-the.html

QUOTES
“No one goes and tries to drill in a mile of water if they can think of somewhere easier to do it,”
Chris Skrebowski, a former strategist for British Petroleum
and
“If you want to drill less, you have to significantly decrease your demand for the stuff.
 Patting ourselves on the back for fining BP, increasing safety standards, making more areas off-limits to drilling doesn’t get at the fundamental problem . . .
which is our high consumption of oil.”
Peter Maass, the author of the 2009 book, “Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil.”

Gulf spill reminds America- The era of ‘easy oil’ is over
To meet the world’s boundless thirst for oil, drillers are searching in the sand and mud of remote western Canada, the tough shale rock of North Dakota and more than a mile under the seas off the southern U.S. coast, where a drilling accident has sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. Why are we going nearly to the ends of the earth and the bottom of the seas for oil?

The answer, say many experts, is that we’re consuming as much oil as we ever have but the era of “easy oil” is in our rearview mirror and receding fast. Production from onshore oilfields in the U.S. has been declining since the 1970s, and near-shore production along the Gulf of Mexico peaked more than a decade ago.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/07/93754/gulf-spill-reminds-america-the.html

The real causes of the disaster go much deeper. Having consumed most of the world’s readily accessible oil, we are now compelled to look for fuel in ever more remote places, and to extract it in ever riskier and more damaging ways. The Deepwater Horizon well was being drilled in five thousand feet of water, to a total depth of eighteen thousand feet.  This year, the United States’ largest single source of imported oil is expected to be the Canadian tar sands. Oil from the tar sands comes in what is essentially a solid form: it has to be either strip-mined, a process that leaves behind a devastated landscape, or melted out of the earth using vast quantities of natural gas.

Meanwhile, as everyone knows, no matter where oil comes from or how it has been extracted, burning it is destructive: oil combustion accounts for nearly a third of the greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States. A report issued last week by the National Academy of Sciences called on Congress to enact legislation to dramatically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, by, among other things, “reducing oil use.”

The President needs to set higher standards - or his Administration, for Congress, and for the country. Earlier this month, an energy bill was finally unveiled in the Senate. It is deeply flawed: for a start, it would increase the incentives for offshore drilling, and preempt the E.P.A.’s ability to enforce parts of the Clean Air Act. Obama should return to the Gulf and, against the backdrop of the grotesque orange slick, explain to the public why he wants more ambitious legislation. Then he should spend the summer working to get an energy bill passed. He’s not going to get a better opportunity—or so, at least, we have to hope.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/05/31/100531taco_talk_kolbert

- This is an interesting twist. Federal pols try to gain support by allowing states to make some decisions, but then the Senator fears the wrong decision! - Editor
 

Florida Senator Nelson threatens to vote against climate bill
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, made it clear today that he will not support the climate change legislation proposed this week because of provisions that Nelson believes could allow additional oil drilling off Florida’s Atlantic Coast. Nelson fears that gives too much power to Florida’s Legislature which last year nearly passed a bill to allow drilling within 3 miles of shore.
http://politicalinsider.blogs.heraldtribune.com/11203/nelson-threatens-to-vote-against-climate-bill/

Even after the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, many politicians continue to insist that the United States must expand offshore oil drilling despite the huge health, economic, and environmental damages in the event of a blowout, saying “more environmentally responsible development of America’s energy resources,” code words for more offshore oil drilling. They assert that this oil is essential for U.S. economic health and national security.  But where does that oil actually go?  An analysis found that a large portion of the oil produced in the Gulf Coast region is actually exported to other nations, and this undoubtedly includes some of the offshore oil produced there.
The BP oil disaster exposed the enormous costs of a serious offshore blowout, and it begs the question: Does it make sense for the United States to bear the health, economic, and environmental costs of this offshore production for oil that is shipped elsewhere? If our oil needs are so great that we must open sensitive, formerly protected areas to drilling, this oil should remain in the United States for domestic consumption. But not all of it is.
The most cost-effective way to address our oil needs is to reduce oil demand via significantly more fuel efficient vehicles, alternative fuels such as advanced biofuels and natural gas, and investments in public transportation. This approach poses far fewer risks than drilling for oil a mile under the ocean’s surface where a blowout like the BP oil disaster can cause billions of dollars of economic damage. Provisions to significantly reduce oil use must be part of any bipartisan comprehensive clean energy and climate bill.
http://climateprogress.org/2010/05/06/nearly-half-of-gulf-coast-oil-was-exported-in-2008/#more-24393