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[TARA YARLAGADDA, 4-7-2021, "1 big pro and 4 cons of solar geoengineering," ] WL

Combating the climate crisis seems simple: We have to reduce global greenhouse emissions and keep temperatures from climbing more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Achieving this goal, however, has proved difficult. That’s why some experts are advocating more extreme, technology-driven measures like solar radiation modification (SRM). However, as scientists argue in a paper released Monday in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, actually implementing SRM could trigger various “impacts and risks.” What is geoengineering? Forest fire and smoke in Australia A forest fire near the Blue Mountains in Australia. Climate change has exacerbated this fires, but some scientists think solar geoengineering could help solve this problem. Getty Geoengineering broadly refers to the concept of using technology to alter climate on a large scale using emerging technologies. According to the study, there are two main types of geoengineering: Carbon dioxide removal Solar radiation modification Carbon dioxide removal, also known as carbon geoengineering or carbon capture, uses machines to suck greenhouse gases out of the air and counteract the effects of global warming. The technology has been around since the 1970s, but it only became popular in recent years. Carbon capture has become widely accepted by climate scientists and policymakers — including President Joe Biden — though some argue that it remains prohibitively expensive. Despite the cost, the effects of carbon dioxide removal are relatively straightforward and easy to explain. That’s not exactly the case for solar radiation modification. How does solar geoengineering work? Solar radiation modification, more commonly known as solar geoengineering, involves reflecting the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface. The goal is to increase surface albedo, the fraction of sunlight reflected by the surface of the Earth. “Surface albedo is the same as the reflectivity, shininess of the Earth's surface as seen from space,” climate strategist Jørgen Randers previously told Inverse. “Bright surfaces like snow and ice reflect most of the incoming energy from the Sun.” The idea is that, by increasing the albedo or reflectivity of Earth’s surface, scientists can use solar geoengineering to deflect a certain amount of sunlight and stabilize the planet’s surface temperature. Within the larger category of solar geoengineering are different schemes, like stratospheric aerosol scattering — also known as stratospheric aerosol intervention (SAI). What are the different types of solar geoengineering? An illustration of one type of solar geoengineering stratospheric aerosol intervention (SAI), from a March 2021 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Solar geoengineering can take many forms, including: Marine cloud brightening involves dousing clouds with seawater to increase their brightness, ultimately helping the clouds reflect sunlight back into space and away from Earth. Cirrus cloud thinning entails injecting ice crystals into certain high altitude “cirrus” clouds, which trap heat and warm the planet. The ice crystals allow for heat to escape from the clouds. Space-based techniques involve not only researching the effects of sunlight on Earth’s ozone layer but also installing giant sun shields to reflect sunlight away from Earth. This latest PNAS study discusses the final technique: stratospheric aerosol intervention (SAI). This hypothetical technique introduces reflective material, such as sulfate aerosols, into the stratosphere — the Earth’s upper atmosphere. These aerosol particles would then reflect sunlight away from Earth and back into space. SAI works in a similar way to volcanoes, which cool the Earth by releasing gaseous aerosols into the stratosphere after an eruption. Some scientists suggest that a “cocktail” or mixture of these various geoengineering approaches is the best way to combat the climate crisis. The benefits of solar geoengineering The scientists in the PNAS study describe SAI — a type of solar geoengineering — as a “scheme that is likely to have a large impact on Earth’s surface temperature.” Ultimately they agree it could induce one major benefit: lowering Earth’s global temperature. That’s essentially the point of solar geoengineering — reducing temperatures and offsetting the costs of global warming. A 2019 Nature study suggests the right “dose” of solar geoengineering could cut massively cut the planet-warming induced carbon dioxide emissions. “Previous work had assumed that solar geoengineering would inevitably lead to winners and losers... our work challenges this assumption,” the Nature team argued in a statement. By reducing global temperatures, solar geoengineering could mitigate the impacts of natural disasters. The same Nature study finds that solar geoengineering could offset the increased risk of tropical cyclones from carbon dioxide emissions. Cooling temperatures could even help reduce income inequality, according to a 2020 study published in Nature Communications.

[Fred Pearce, 5-29-19, "Geoengineer the Planet? More Scientists Now Say It Must Be an Option," Yale E360, ] WL

Once seen as spooky sci-fi, geoengineering to halt runaway climate change is now being looked at with growing urgency. A spate of dire scientific warnings that the world community can no longer delay major cuts in carbon emissions, coupled with a recent surge in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, has left a growing number of scientists saying that it’s time to give the controversial technologies a serious look. “Time is no longer on our side,” one geoengineering advocate, former British government chief scientist David King, told a conference last fall. “What we do over the next 10 years will determine the future of humanity for the next 10,000 years.” King helped secure the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, but he no longer believes cutting planet-warming emissions is enough to stave off disaster. He is in the process of establishing a Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge University. It would be the world’s first major research center dedicated to a task that, he says, “is going to be necessary.” Technologies earmarked for the Cambridge center’s attention include a range of efforts to restrict solar radiation from reaching the lower atmosphere, including spraying aerosols of sulphate particles into the stratosphere, and refreezing rapidly warming parts of the polar regions by deploying tall ships to pump salt particles from the ocean into polar clouds to make them brighter. “We are running out of time to mitigate catastrophic climate change,” says one scientist. United States scientists are on the case, too. The National Academies last October launched a study into sunlight reflection technologies, including their feasibility, impacts and risks, and governance requirements. Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said: “We are running out of time to mitigate catastrophic climate change. Some of these interventions… may need to be considered in future.” The study’s prospective authors held their first meeting in Washington, D.C., at the end of April. Speakers included David Keith, a Harvard University physicist who has developed his own patented technology for using chemistry to remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere, and Kelly Wanser of the Marine Cloud Brightening Project, which is studying the efficacy of seeding clouds with sea salt and other materials to reflect more sunlight back into space. The project is preparing for future field trials. China too has an active government-funded research program. It insists it has no current plans for deployment, but is looking, among other things, at how solar shading might slow the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers. Geoengineering the climate to halt global warming has been discussed almost as long as the threat of warming itself. American researchers back in the 1960s suggested floating billions of white objects such as golf balls on the oceans to reflect sunlight. In 1977, Cesare Marchetti of the Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis discussed ways of catching all of Europe’s CO2 emissions and injecting them into sinking Atlantic Ocean currents. Various geoengineering methods could help lower global temperatures. In 1982, Soviet scientist Mikhail Budyko proposed filling the stratosphere with sulphate particles to reflect sunlight back into space. The first experiments to test the idea of fertilizing the oceans with iron to stimulate the growth of CO2-absorbing algae were carried out by British researchers in 1995. Two years later, Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb, proposed putting giant mirrors into space. Still, many climate scientists until recently regarded such proposals as fringe, if not heretical, arguing that they undermine the case for urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A group of scientists writing in Nature as recently as April last year, called solar geoengineering “outlandish and unsettling… redolent of science fiction.” But the mood is shifting. There is broad, international scientific agreement that the window of opportunity to avoid breaching the Paris climate target of staying “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), is narrowing sharply. A pause in the rise in CO2 emissions that brought hope in 2015 and 2016 has ended; the increase has resumed at a time when we should be making progress toward a goal of halving emissions by 2030, says Johan Rockstrom, science director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere — the planetary thermostat — are now at 415 parts per million (ppm) and rising by almost 3 ppm each year, reaching levels that have not been seen in 3 million years. “We have two years left to bend the curve” downward, says Rockstrom. A plume of exhaust extends from the Mitchell Power Station, a coal-fired power plant built along the Monongahela River, 20 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, in New Eagle, Pennsylvania. How far can technology go to stave off climate change? Read more. Some experts contend we may be approaching a moment when nothing other than geoengineering can meet the international community’s promise — made when signing the UN Climate Change Convention at the Earth Summit in 1992 — to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Myles Allen of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute says: “Every year we are not even trying to reduce emissions is another 40 billion tons of CO2 dumped into the atmosphere that we are blithely committing future generations to scrub out again.” One researcher says that geo-engineering’s potential to promote conflict “is likely to be substantial.” Possible geoengineering schemes and schedules are now being discussed. Take this plan published last fall by Gernot Wagner, executive director of Harvard University’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program: In 15 years’ time, as the impacts of warming worsen, planes loaded with sulphate particles start taking off from airfields around the world. They fly to 65,000 feet, well above existing air lanes, and spray their loads into the stratosphere: 4,000 flights in the first year, 8,000 in the second, 12,000 in the third, and so on until, after another 15 years, fleets of purpose-built, high-altitude tankers are making 60,000 flights annually. The thickening shroud of particles would fight climate change by mimicking the output of volcanic eruptions that deflect solar radiation streaming into the atmosphere. Famously, the eruption of sulphate particles from Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 caused a global cooling of up to 0.6 degrees C for the following two years. The planned 15-year human-made “eruption” would shave 0.3 degrees off warming, halving the likely increase during that time.

[Robert Litan, 10-26-22, “The Time for Geoengineering is Now”, Foreign Affairs, ] WL

Geoengineering” can mean a number of things, but it usually refers to the attempt to offset the rising global temperatures that result from the greenhouse effect by introducing particles in a systematic and sustained way into the earth’s atmosphere so that it better reflects the sun’s rays. Although the idea sounds futuristic, the basic concept has been around for a long time. In 1965, a group of scientific advisers to U.S. President Lyndon Johnson suggested that some kind of tinkering with the planet’s mechanics might be necessary. “The climatic changes that may be produced by the increased [carbon dioxide] content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings,” they noted. “The possibilities of deliberately bringing about countervailing climatic changes therefore need to be thoroughly explored.” They weren’t. Over the years, interest in geoengineering has periodically surged. But it has never attracted as much official attention or private investment as other methods of preventing climate change, mitigating its worst effects, or adapting to it. Now, however, as the pace and destructiveness of extreme weather events seem to be quickening beyond even some of the most pessimistic forecasts, geoengineering might finally have its moment. Scientists are confident that geoengineering would have the desired effect because periodic volcanic eruptions, which spew all kinds of particles into the air, have cooled the earth in the past. But human intervention in the earth’s natural systems raises questions about the potentially dangerous impacts it could have on the weather and the oceans. There are also concerns about the moral hazard created by encouraging continued or even greater use of carbon-dioxide-emitting fossil fuels by suggesting the harm they do can be avoided. This potential consequence, in particular, explains the strong opposition to geoengineering from climate change activists and governments intent on addressing climate change by reducing fossil fuel emissions. For decades, such concerns could remain merely theoretical. But the time has come for governments and the private sector to address them and to more seriously commit to applying geoengineering techniques while greatly increasing research to monitor the risks they pose. IT’S GETTING HOT IN HERE For many across the globe, recent months brought the summer from hell. Places such as China, Pakistan, and Europe saw record heat, drought, wildfires, and flash floods. In the United States, the sudden intensity of Hurricane Ian, which caused devastation across southwestern Florida, made it abundantly clear that the effects of climate change have arrived sooner and with greater ferocity than even many climate change activists had been expecting. As Steven Bowen, the former head of catastrophic insight at Aon, a leading property and casualty insurer, recently acknowledged, “The modeled climate impacts we assumed were 25 to 50 years away are in some cases already occurring today.” Fortunately, in the United States, this summer also brought legislative progress on climate change. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in August, included record-setting green technology subsidies. But no one should rely on such policy measures to avert future shocks from severe weather driven by climate change. Reducing the rate of growth of emissions will certainly be helpful over the long run, but it will not help the world avert extreme weather crises any time soon for several reasons. For one thing, the United States accounts for only about 15 percent of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions, and emission reductions there are likely to be easily overtaken by increases in emissions from the rest of the world—especially developing countries, as they use fossil fuels to power their economic growth in future decades. For example, the public policy professor Jack Goldstone has calculated that if per person carbon dioxide emissions in Africa reach India’s level by midcentury, Africa’s annual emissions will equal all of the United States’ annual emissions today. This calculation doesn’t count the huge growth in emissions expected in India, too. The United States accounts for only about 15 percent of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. More fundamentally, the earth’s atmosphere has already absorbed enormous amounts greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, which trap heat and warm the planet. These gases have accumulated over the course of human history but especially over the past several decades of fossil-fuel-driven economic growth. As a result, continued extreme weather is already baked in, regardless of the world’s efforts between now and 2050 to reduce the growth of new emissions. Natural and technological methods for sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere will not work in time to rescue the world from more decades of severe weather. Growing huge quantities of trees, which remove carbon dioxide naturally through photosynthesis, would help, but it would require acreage as large as the United States and Canada combined to make a material dent in existing carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations. Carbon dioxide can be sucked out of the air with technology, either directly, known as “direct air capture,” or indirectly, by taking it out of ocean water, giving the oceans the capacity to absorb more of it. Both technologies are very expensive, however, and are years away from being implemented at the scale required to make a difference in global temperatures, even with the generous subsidies for carbon capture technologies provided in the Inflation Reduction Act. Writing for the Environmental Defense Fund earlier this year, the journalist Joanna Foster noted that the United States alone may need to vacuum up as much as 1,850 million tons of carbon dioxide annually to hit its zero-emission target. But there are only a small number of direct air capture plants operating in the United States and Europe, and even the most advanced ones, such as the recently opened Orca plant in Iceland, can remove just 4,000 tons per year. To be clear, all the above measures are necessary in the long run to tackle climate change, but they will not work fast enough to avert continued severe weather. The time has come for a more radical solution. FAST, CHEAP, AND LITTLE MORAL HAZARD In 2009 and again in 2013, a team of climate and foreign policy specialists led by the energy expert David Victor noted in Foreign Affairs that geoengineering research was not where it should be. They argued that it was time to substantially boost scientific research about geoengineering to combat climate change. Since then, the physicist David Keith has considerably fleshed out and tested one particular technique that has been studied most: introducing sulfur particles into the atmosphere so that it better reflects sunlight and thereby cools the planet. According to Keith, the rewards of this technique, which he calls “Stratospheric Sulfate Injection” (SSI), outweigh the risks. In The New York Times in October 2021, Keith wrote: “While limited, the science so far suggests that the harms that would result from shaving a degree off global temperatures would be small compared with the benefits. Air pollution deaths from the added sulfur in the air would be more than offset by declines in the number of deaths from extreme heat, which would be 10 to 100 times larger.” According to Keith, this method of geoengineering is “cheap and acts fast.” Gernot Wagner, an economist who specializes in climate change, and Wake Smith, a climate intervention lecturer, estimate that SSI would cost the world about $2 billion to $2.5 billion annually for 15 years, an amount the United States alone could easily afford even if no other countries shared the cost. Recognizing the benefits of this technology does not mean dismissing the risks it could pose. SSI would likely increase oceanic acidification, which could harm coral reefs and sea life as the sulfites being sprayed fall back to the earth. It could also alter weather patterns in unknown ways. That is why SSI deployment must be accompanied by continuous monitoring of its effects and substantially more research into the possible use of other, more benign particles. Scientists should also study ways to offset oceanic acidification by, for example, introducing base elements into ocean water. National security imperatives should offset moral hazard concerns about geoengineering. Fortunately, Keith has calculated that the efforts required to deploy SSI are manageable: “Less than two million tons of sulfur per year injected into the stratosphere from a fleet of about a hundred high-flying aircraft would reflect away sunlight and cool the planet by a degree.” And importantly, SSI can be dialed down by reducing sulfur injections or stopping them altogether if the risks look too great or other means of cooling the planet or removing carbon from the atmosphere prove more cost effective. One of those alternatives might eventually be a less risky form of geoengineering: cloud brightening (spraying saltwater into clouds to make them more reflective of sunlight) or cloud thinning (inserting ice into clouds to shorten their lifespan and thus allow more heat to escape from the earth). At this point, however, both of those alternatives are in the experimental stage and 15 to 20 years away from deployment. Meanwhile, recent world events are mitigating the concerns about moral hazard that, up to now, have discouraged even research into geoengineering. Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Saudi-led OPEC+ reduction in oil production, which is expected to drive up energy prices, are stark reminders of the national security dangers of relying on other countries for fossil fuels. For years, national security arguments in the United States have been used to promote domestic oil and gas drilling so that the country won’t be so dependent on potentially unreliable Middle Eastern energy sources. But with the Russian economy’s reliance on fossil fuels, and with the U.S. economy and even the U.S. political system continuing to be subject to the whims of OPEC, the more the United States and other countries move away from fossil fuels, the less exposed all economies will be to future fossil fuel supply interruptions and oil price hikes. Indeed, the Biden administration’s recently released National Security Strategy makes the transition away from fossil fuels an integral part of the U.S. national security agenda. In short, current national security imperatives should considerably, if not entirely, offset moral hazard concerns about geoengineering. The United States and its allies and partners have more reasons than ever before to avoid increasing their carbon emissions through more fossil fuel consumption. GO IT ALONE In an ideal world, the United States would not begin geoengineering without an international agreement and a global system of governance to supervise the effort. But our world is not ideal, and it is unimaginable that global consensus on geoengineering could be reached any time soon. Accordingly, the United States should begin by cooperating more narrowly with like-minded countries on implementing geoengineering. Europe and much of the developed world, which this summer experienced firsthand the ravages of climate change, should cheer on this effort and maybe even join in. Although China may not cooperate or share the modest costs of implementing SSI, it, too, suffered this summer from climate-change-induced drought and flooding, and Chinese leaders would likely look the other way while other countries attempt to cool the planet. The only dissenting major power would probably be Russia, which is counting on more climate change to thaw Siberia, expanding arable land for agriculture, and to further melt the Arctic, allowing more opportunities for oil exploration. But in a scenario in which China is on the sidelines and the rest of the world is supporting geoengineering, Russia, already a global pariah, would just have to stew. Almost everything in life involves tradeoffs. Responding to climate change is no exception. The world can continue to suffer through decades of tragic natural disasters and extreme weather events, or it can take the measured risk of changing course, given the changed circumstances. As the saying goes, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”

[SDCO Partners, 7-28-2021, "How renewable energy can help save America’s struggling farms," Generation180, ] WL

It’s no secret that farms across the U.S. are struggling, made worse by volatile energy and commodity prices, trade tensions with China, and economic losses from the pandemic. The costs of farm inputs—from energy and labor to animal feed—are expected to skyrocket. Meanwhile, farm incomes continue to decline, and bankruptcies are rising (up 20 percent in 2019 to an eight-year high). Small farms, which represent half of the nation’s farmland and 90 percent of farms, are especially hard hit, even though they are critical for the health of both rural economies and local ecosystems. Farmers are also getting a bad rap on the climate front. Agriculture accounted for 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, with the bulk coming from livestock (both from methane that animals like cows and sheep release during digestion, as well as from manure) and emissions from soils. Meanwhile, climate change is making agriculture more unpredictable, with farmers facing water shortages and extreme weather events like droughts and floods. In light of all this, we need to step up efforts to reduce agricultural emissions and to empower farmers through clean energy solutions. Enter renewables Fortunately, over the past decade, more and more farmers have embraced the opportunities of clean energy. Farmers are opting to lease a portion of their land to a wind or solar company in exchange for a monthly payment. The wide-open spaces on farms are ideal for “planting” wind turbines or a solar array (a practice known as agrivoltaics) alongside a crop or livestock. Evidence shows that such dual-use clean energy solutions can be adopted by most farms—regardless of their size, type, or location—and add tremendous value while posing little risk to farmland or surrounding ecosystems. Let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits: A new income stream For struggling farm families, the greatest boon is financial. “It’s not so much about green energy at all, but economics,” said Kerri Johannsen with the Iowa Environmental Council, who notes that wind power is “just another crop, another opportunity to capture resources.” Put simply, leasing ag land for wind or solar makes economic and operational sense and provides an important supplement to farm incomes. According to one analysis, the clean energy “side gig” represents 6 percent of a farm’s gross cash income in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, sometimes exceeding government payments. Landowners who either host wind turbines on their fields or who are near enough to turbines to receive a “good neighbor” payment can earn $3,000 to $7,000 yearly. Research shows farmers who own and farm land with turbines are more likely to have a plan in place to pass their farm on to their children and to invest in the long term, since the turbine income makes farming seem less risky. For struggling farm families, the greatest boon is financial. “It’s not so much about green energy at all, but economics.” In a recent survey of 400 farmers, nearly a third said they had been in discussions with solar companies about leasing their land (usually for a 30-40 year period), and 3 percent already had contracts. Farmers are adopting solar leases at more than double the rate of contracts aimed at using their land for carbon sequestration, since farmers can earn $1,000 per acre or more with solar. In the case of wind installations, lease payments to farms with turbines total $250 million annually nationwide. “[T]he absence of financial stress has been a real game-changer for me…. The turbines make up for the (crop) export issues we’ve been facing,” observed one Kansas farmer. Improved productivity The benefits aren’t just economic. Research has shown that installing clean energy on farms can also help with crop and livestock productivity. “[S]ome food and vegetable crops…have been shown to produce higher yields when grown under the shade of PV panels,” said Peter Perrault with Enel North America. For example, the presence of solar panels in fields has led to: improved vegetation growth and pollinator presence at a solar farm in Minnesota; an increase in celery yields and an increase in land use efficiency for potatoes at a family farm; and an overall increase in land use efficiency of 60-84 percent over two years. A study on a sheep farm found that installing solar panels resulted in about the same level of animal production as not having panels, while providing numerous other benefits. Water and soil conservation By providing a barrier from the wind and sun, solar panels can also help increase water retention in the soil, reducing the need for irrigation by up to 20 percent. In one analysis, the water-saving “microclimate” created under the panels resulted in a 90 percent increase in the grasses that sheep and cows graze on. Another study found that while the shading led to fewer forage plants produced, those that did grow had a much higher nutritional content, which promotes quicker livestock growth. Meanwhile, a German study found that solar structures protect against damage from hail, frost, and drought, thus eliminating the need to protect crops with foils and other materials. In one analysis, the water-saving “microclimate” created under the panels resulted in a 90 percent increase in the grasses that sheep and cows graze on. Farmers also have observed that sheep prefer the shade under solar arrays and that cattle line up in the tall shadows cast by wind towers (shuffling slowly in a formation known as a “bovine sundial“). This reduces the need to build other shade structures, and the animals also require significantly less water. The bigger picture From a clean energy perspective, using ag lands for wind and solar is a better proposition than using them to support other forms of renewable energy like biofuels. Currently, around a quarter of the corn planted in the U.S. is used to produce ethanol fuel for transportation. But research shows that if the same acreage were used for solar generation instead, this could yield as much as 1.8 to 2.5 terawatts of electricity. To put this in perspective, according to some estimates, the U.S. could reach 100 percent clean electricity with around 1.1 terawatts of wind and solar combined. Even better would be to incentivize farmers to combine wind or solar projects with “farms” of native grasses, rather than the extensive cornfields currently used to produce biofuel. This would provide a much-needed opportunity to restore native ecosystems and reduce soil erosion while also addressing climate change. Research indicates that solar projects that support native grasses can sequester up to 65 percent more carbon than cropland alone. Bringing back native grasslands would also boost populations of local pollinators as well as protect soils from erosion and excess water runoff. Overall, combining clean energy and agriculture is a no brainer for many farmers. Not only does it have the potential to improve the economics of farming, but it can boost crop and livestock productivity and help improve the land and soil itself. While clean energy alone won’t revitalize rural communities, it can be a key part of the solution. And importantly, the ag + clean energy combo is both politically and socially palatable, finding support in a broad diversity of communities. It’s time to ramp up our investment in both our farmers and our clean energy future.

[Emily Folk, 7-22-2020, "How Renewable Energy Professionals Can Reduce Erosion," Green Clean Guide, ] WL

Humankind has been trying to prevent land erosion for centuries. From the Incas’ terraced land in Machu Picchu to today’s farmers and their modern solutions, there has been no end to the search for the best way to stop soil erosion. However, as the world continues to develop and deforest land in the name of agriculture and building and powering new structures, erosion has become an even more pressing issue. In the last 150 years, the Earth has lost half of its topsoil. As a result, both the environment and the animals and people that live within it have suffered. The energy and construction sectors must find better ways to prevent soil erosion and protect what little earth we have left. Renewable energy professionals, in particular, have a unique role to play in finding and implementing different solutions. Already, they are charged with installing renewable energy infrastructure, which should, in turn, better conserve the planet and its resources. Yet, when they install wind turbines and solar panel fields, the soil often suffers. This cycle of taking one step forward and two steps back must end if the renewable energy sector wishes to accomplish its goal of improving the environment and public health. HOW DOES RENEWABLE ENERGY CAUSE EROSION? Solar panels and wind turbines may not be as big, heavy or destructive as a city skyscraper. However, they can cause just as much damage if renewable energy professionals don’t actively fight soil erosion. Much like any other kind of infrastructure, workers must first clear the land of trees and vegetation. This deforestation removes root systems that hold the soil together and prevent erosion. Rolling over the area with heavy machinery can also compact the earth and cause the dirt to wear away. Additionally, once the panels are installed, rain dripping from their edges can pool around the foundations and further disrupt the soil. If the dirt is dense and compact or if the panels sit on a slope, rainwater can also carry dirt away, resulting in runoff and severe erosion. Installing wind turbines also requires clearing vegetation and facilitates soil disruption, creating erosion problems in much the same way as solar panels. However, their rotating blades also blow up dirt and generate dust clouds. Naturally, this dust floats to other areas, removing soil from the original location and exacerbating erosion issues around the turbines. THE CONSEQUENCES OF SOIL EROSION Erosion is a natural occurrence. However, when outside forces speed up the process, consequences will inevitably follow. In addition to soil and land loss, erosion can cause an increase in sedimentation in streams and rivers. If there are contaminants like pesticides or other chemicals in the ground, these can leach into waterways, which reduces water quality, decimates fish and wildlife populations and disrupts marine ecosystems. Additionally, erosion may damage renewable energy installations over time. As wind and water carry topsoil away, the dirt underneath can shift and create air pockets, channels, slopes and uneven ground. These formation changes can cause racking systems, cables and other electrical components to move, damaging them or severely inhibiting their power output. Ultimately, this may require workers to replace the systems completely, further damaging the soil and costing the renewable energy sector money. FINDING A SOLUTION Of course, finding and implementing an erosion solution will also cost renewable operations money. However, preventative measures are generally less expensive than paying to fix or completely replace solar and wind systems. Which solution energy pros use, though, depends on the land and climate, the budget and the renewable power setup. IMPLEMENT EROSION CONTROL BLANKETS If the climate is wet and rainy, a company may choose to use an erosion control blanket. These blankets keep soil from shifting or moving during heavy rains and winds, reducing runoff and preventing soil erosion. Keeping the dirt in place with an erosion control blanket also allows for new seeds to take root and enables vegetation to hold the soil together naturally over time. These blankets are one of the most cost-effective erosion control options on the market today. Typically, they’re made of natural or synthetic fibers and are relatively easy to install. Plus, those containing natural materials usually break down over time, meaning there’s no need to retrieve them once vegetation begins growing. HYDROSEED THE LAND Of course, after clearing the land in preparation for installing renewable energy systems, there won’t likely be much new plant growth without a little help from the energy professionals. However, instead of sowing dry seeds, some companies choose to hydroseed. This solution involves applying a mixture of seeds, mulch, fertilizer and water to the land with a pressure hose. Often, professionals will hydroseed to plant grass but may also use this method to grow other types of vegetation like ground cover and wildflowers. While hydroseeding can be cost-effective, there’s always a chance the seeds won’t take root or will need additional irrigation before sprouting. Speaking with a consultant to decide which vegetation will grow best before hydroseeding will likely improve a company’s chances of cultivating this vegetation quickly. MANAGE VEGETATION Once the vegetation has taken root and is growing with little to no help from humans, renewable energy professionals must then focus on trimming and maintaining it. If the site doesn’t receive much rainfall or the chosen vegetation isn’t native, it may require an irrigation system. Otherwise, the plants may dry out and pose a fire hazard, especially around the electrical wiring of renewable solutions. Energy professionals can also prevent fires by trimming vegetation, choosing short groundcover and clearing areas around fire hazards. Clearing a radius around mechanical components will minimize the chance of fire if a piece of equipment fails and sparks go flying. APPLY MULCH Another way to prevent fires and soil erosion is to apply mulch to the site. Layering mulch over topsoil can reduce runoff as the wood chips will absorb excess water from rain and melting snow. Generally, professionals use this anti-erosion solution on flat, even ground, as opposed to slopes and hilly landscapes. Even so, mulching will likely require some maintenance. Heavy rainfall and storms can displace mulch and leave topsoil exposed. When this happens, workers will have to return and replace the mulch in affected areas. Sometimes, they may even have to use heavier forms of mulch made of a mixture of rock and wood chips to better keep it in place. APPLY GEOTEXTILES Alternatively, professionals might apply geotextiles. These permeable fabrics sit right below the topsoil and trap floating sediment while allowing water to pass through. This system encourages proper drainage, mitigating runoff and helping the vegetation grow. Some are even designed to biodegrade after plants have taken root, allowing for more natural erosion prevention. Of course, if the energy system sits on land with a relatively high grade, workers will have to pair geotextiles with diversion ditches to collect water and prevent off-site erosion. Moreover, in cases of sloped land, geotextile fencing may be more effective than ground cover textiles in catching sediment. REDIRECT RUNOFF Solar panels angle toward the horizon and generally allow rainwater to drip directly onto the soil beneath them. While professionals typically install solar arrays on a grade of less than 5%, some renewable experts place them on land with a grade as high as 10%. Doing so often results in runoff and, subsequently, soil erosion. However, by introducing drainages, spillways and barriers to the site, renewable energy professionals can effectively mitigate runoff. For instance, by strategically placing barriers on sloping land, professionals can break up the natural gradient, redirecting runoff and slowing its speed. In turn, this allows the renewable energy sector to build on landscapes it otherwise wouldn’t have due to grade concerns. MAINTAIN CONSTRUCTION PATHS Compact earth is notoriously bad at absorbing water. Therefore, it only makes sense that the more heavy machinery rolls over a site, the more topsoil erosion that will occur. As it rains, the dense earth won’t readily absorb water, which leads to runoff. Additionally, compact soil isn’t ideal for supporting most root systems, making planting vegetation nearly impossible. Renewable energy professionals can avoid these issues by simply building and maintaining roadways and paths both during and after construction. Laying gravel and watering dirt paths can accomplish anti-erosion initiatives by mitigating dust and soil compaction. LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS There are many options available for minimizing soil erosion and prolonging the life of a solar array or wind farm. In most cases, one solution will be more effective than others, so it’s important to survey and understand the soil and vegetation before choosing. Once a company comes to a consensus regarding erosion control, it should implement the solution and continue maintaining it as long as the installment remains. In doing so, renewable energy professionals will lay the foundations for years of erosion prevention and increase the likelihood of more areas adopting renewable power. Moreover, they pave the way for future generations who may discover even more effective methods to conserve the Earth and the rich soil covering it.

[Vladimir Tarakanov,, July 25, 2022, "What is Soil Erosion? How Can Nuclear Techniques Help to Identify and Mitigate It?," No Publication, ] WL

Soil erosion is a threat to agriculture and food production. It is the most significant contributor to land degradation, which affects 1.9 billion hectares of land worldwide, close to two thirds of global soil resources, threatening global food supply. (Image: A. Vargas/IAEA) Soil erosion, the most common type of land degradation, is a process that removes the upper layer of soil, from which plants get most of their nutrients and water. When this fertile layer, called the topsoil, slides away, the productivity of land decreases and farmers lose a vital resource for growing food. Unlike the wind or the sun, soil is a finite, non-renewable resource, which is degrading at alarming rates. Different types of land degradation are affecting approximately 1.5 billion people, particularly in developing countries. But soil has an unexpected ally — nuclear science. Nuclear techniques can help experts better understand the causes and the mechanisms of soil erosion, identify erosion hotspots and assess the impact of various land management practices on erosion rates, in order to make soil more resilient to the effects of climate change and to protect soil for the future. Using nuclear technology, such as the fallout radionuclide (FRN) technique and the compound specific stable isotope (CSSI) technique, the IAEA helps to assess soil erosion, so that the right strategies to protect soil can be implemented. Jointly with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the IAEA helps countries strengthen capacities in using nuclear and isotopic techniques to combat soil erosion, preserve soil resources and support sustainable agricultural production. What are the causes? What are the effects? Although soil erosion is a natural process and it occurs on all continents, human activities have greatly accelerated it. In general, soil erosion is more common on steep, sloping land. It is often caused by natural factors, including strong wind or heavy rains; however, unsustainable human activity, such as deforestation or improper land management, can accelerate this process by two to three orders of magnitude. Soil erosion makes land vulnerable to the loss of fertile topsoil and this, together with the losses of associated nutrients and chemicals, is a threat to agricultural production, food security and the environment, mainly water resources. Soil is the source of as much as 95 percent of all agricultural production, so its health and availability impact the quality and quantity of our food. Approximately a quarter of the world's population directly depends on food produced on degraded land, and every year the rate of degradation is increasing, leading to the annual loss of millions of hectares of land worldwide. Eroded soil also affects water quality and aquatic life, since soil can be transported by runoff to water courses, such as rivers and lakes, clogging water reservoirs and causing the nutrients washed from the fields to accumulate in water and lead to algae outbreaks. This jeopardizes water quality and harms the habitats of aquatic life. In addition, even in larger reservoirs, such as oceans and seas, sediments may accumulate in large enough quantities to increase turbidity and reduce visibility in nearby waters, further threatening the sustainability of aquatic ecosystems and often leading to die-offs among the flora. Other consequences of soil erosion include degradation of ecosystem functions, amplified risks of landslides and floods, significant losses in biodiversity, damage to urban infrastructure and, in severe cases, displacement of human populations. How can nuclear techniques help? Eroded soil may not replenish for generations, which is why it is important to assess soil erosion and deposition rates, as well as to improve land management and implement soil conservation measures. This is where nuclear techniques can help. The FRN and CSSI techniques are most used to tackle soil erosion. The FRN techniques help to assess and quantify soil erosion rates, while the CSSI method identifies areas most affected by erosion. Based on the results of these nuclear applications, soil conservation measures can be implemented, such as terracing, contour cropping, strip cropping, minimum tillage, no tillage, mulching, cover crops, erosion ridges and erosion furrows. See examples from Madagascar and Uganda. Fallout radionuclide (FRN) method Fallout radioniclides (FRNs) are deposited on the ground with rain. The amount of FRNs in soil is very small and harmless to humans, but measuring the precise quantities with nuclear techniques can help to estimate soil erosion rates. (Image: A. Vargas/IAEA) FRNs are dispersed all over the world. The most common FRN is caesium-137 (Cs-137), which was released primarily during nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s-1960s. It was dispersed in the atmosphere all over the world, then was deposited by rain and incorporated into topsoil over time. Although the amount of FRNs in soil is very small and harmless to humans, it can be measured by sensitive gamma spectrometry, and its quantities can be used to estimate soil erosion rates. When the topsoil is affected by erosion, the Cs-137 concentration is reduced, and as a result, where eroded soil is deposited, Cs-137 concentration is increased. Tracking the FRN redistribution allows experts to determine how much soil has been removed from one location and deposited in another location. To interpret the data, a site that has not been impacted by erosion or deposition needs to be identified. This site, where the amount of FRN has been reduced only by radioactive decay, represents the baseline. The eroded and deposition sites are then compared to the reference site to calculate the amount of eroded or deposited soil. Apart from Cs-137, two other fallout radionuclides are also used for soil erosion tracking, lead-210 (Pb-210) and beryllium-7 (Be-7). Using FRNs for soil erosion assessment is more convenient, cheaper and less labour intensive than conventional methods, such as volumetric measurements of soil removal or measurements of sediment export at spatial scales on different-sized land plots. The FRN techniques are useful especially in studying the impact of land use on soil erosion and the efficiency of soil conservation measures. This information is indispensable for developing soil conservation strategies, selecting suitable conservation measures and implementing soil conservation programmes. Compound specific stable isotope (CSSI) method Scientists can track the presence of stable isotopes, such as carbon-13, in the soil to determine soil erosion hotspots and identify the impact of different land uses and crops on the distribution of erosion. (Image: A. Vargas/IAEA) The FRN techniques cover many, but not all dimensions in soil erosion assessment. For this reason, when identifying the origin of sediments and erosion hotspots in larger areas, such as watersheds, compound-specific stable isotopes (CSSI) method is used — it was designed specifically for these purposes. The CSSI technique measures the carbon-13 (C-13) stable isotope to distinguish different sources of soil organic matter. This is because each plant has a different C-13 signature, which is preserved in the soil when plant tissues decay. This enables identification of ecosystems and land uses, which contributes to soil organic matter. C-13 analysis requires constituents of plant tissue, which are stable and do not decompose in soil. Fatty acids, originating from plant roots, are most suitable for this purpose. When plant tissues decay, the fatty acids become part of the soil organic matter. They have unique stable isotope signatures, which can be analysed and used like fingerprints. Using the CSSI technique, scientists match the “fingerprints” of the compounds in the soil to those in the ecosystems occupying the selected study area. By taking a sample of an eroded area, scientists can identify the sources of eroded soil and sediment in water reservoirs, as well as the areas particularly prone to it. This information is valuable for precise targeting of soil conservation measures. See an example of a project in Myanmar.

[Marcin Frąckiewicz, 4-1-2023, "The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Predicting and Managing Soil Erosion in Agriculture," TS2 SPACE, ] WL

As agricultural practices become increasingly more complex, farmers are looking for new ways to maximize their yields while minimizing the risk of soil erosion. Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a powerful tool to help farmers predict and prevent soil erosion. AI can help farmers understand the complex dynamics of soil erosion and how it affects their crops. By analyzing historical data, AI can detect patterns and trends in soil erosion and provide farmers with detailed predictions of how their land may be affected in the future. This can help farmers plan ahead and make informed decisions about how to manage their land. AI can also be used to identify areas of land that are at risk of soil erosion. By analyzing satellite images, AI can detect subtle changes in the landscape that may indicate soil erosion. This can help farmers identify areas that need to be protected or managed more carefully. In addition, AI can be used to develop strategies for reducing soil erosion. By analyzing data from different soil types, AI can help farmers identify the best practices for reducing soil erosion. This could include planting cover crops, using mulch, or planting vegetation to reduce runoff. AI is becoming an increasingly important tool for farmers looking to maximize their yields and minimize the risk of soil erosion. By leveraging AI, farmers can gain a better understanding of their land and make informed decisions about how to manage it. The Benefits of Using Artificial Intelligence to Manage Soil Erosion in Agriculture The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to manage soil erosion in agriculture is becoming increasingly popular among farmers and agricultural professionals. AI technology is helping to reduce the environmental impacts of soil erosion, while also increasing crop yields and improving overall agricultural productivity. Soil erosion is a major environmental issue that affects agricultural land around the world. It can lead to decreased crop yields, soil degradation, and even water pollution. AI technology can help farmers and agricultural professionals to better manage soil erosion by providing detailed data and insights into soil erosion patterns. This data can be used to identify areas of land that are most vulnerable to soil erosion and to develop strategies to reduce the impact of soil erosion on crop yields. AI technology can also be used to monitor soil erosion in real-time. This allows farmers and agricultural professionals to quickly respond to changes in soil erosion patterns and take action to reduce the impact of soil erosion on crop yields. By using AI technology to monitor soil erosion, farmers and agricultural professionals can reduce the amount of time and resources needed to manage soil erosion. In addition to helping to reduce the environmental impacts of soil erosion, AI technology can also help to increase crop yields. AI technology can be used to analyze soil data and identify areas of land that are most suitable for growing certain crops. This data can be used to inform crop selection and planting decisions, helping to maximize crop yields. Overall, the use of AI technology to manage soil erosion in agriculture is becoming increasingly popular among farmers and agricultural professionals. AI technology can help to reduce the environmental impacts of soil erosion, while also increasing crop yields and improving overall agricultural productivity. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in predicting and managing soil erosion in agriculture is becoming increasingly important. AI has the potential to provide more accurate and timely predictions of soil erosion, as well as more efficient and effective management strategies. However, there are several challenges associated with implementing AI in this context. First, AI requires a large amount of data in order to make accurate predictions and decisions. This data must be collected from a variety of sources, including satellite imagery, weather forecasts, and soil samples. Collecting and processing this data can be a time-consuming and expensive process. Second, AI algorithms must be tailored to the specific needs of each agricultural system. This requires a deep understanding of the system and the ability to develop algorithms that can accurately predict soil erosion. This is a difficult task, as soil erosion is a complex process that is affected by many different factors. Third, AI algorithms must be regularly updated to reflect changes in the environment. This requires a continuous monitoring of the system and the ability to quickly adjust the algorithms as needed. Finally, AI algorithms must be able to interact with other systems, such as irrigation systems, in order to provide the most effective management strategies. This requires the development of sophisticated algorithms that can interact with other systems in real time. Despite these challenges, AI has the potential to revolutionize the way we predict and manage soil erosion in agriculture. By leveraging the power of AI, we can more accurately predict soil erosion and develop more effective management strategies. The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Soil Erosion in Agriculture As the agricultural industry continues to evolve, the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on soil erosion is becoming increasingly apparent. AI technology is being used to identify areas of land that are prone to soil erosion, as well as to monitor and predict changes in soil composition over time. This technology has the potential to significantly reduce the amount of soil erosion that occurs in agricultural areas, helping to preserve soil fertility and protect crops from the damaging effects of erosion. Soil erosion is a major problem in many agricultural areas, as it can lead to a decrease in soil fertility and crop yields. Erosion can occur due to a variety of factors, including wind, water, and human activities. AI technology can be used to identify areas of land that are at risk of soil erosion, as well as to monitor changes in soil composition over time. This technology can also be used to create models that predict how soil erosion will affect crop yields in the future. AI technology can also be used to develop solutions to reduce soil erosion. For example, AI-based algorithms can be used to identify areas of land that are most vulnerable to erosion and to develop strategies to protect them. AI can also be used to create systems that monitor soil composition and predict changes in soil erosion over time. This technology can help farmers to identify areas of land that are at risk of erosion and to take steps to reduce the impact of erosion on their crops. In addition to helping to reduce soil erosion, AI technology can also be used to improve crop yields. AI-based algorithms can be used to identify areas of land that are most suitable for certain crops, as well as to monitor changes in soil composition over time. This technology can help farmers to optimize their crop yields and reduce the amount of soil erosion that occurs in their fields. The impact of AI on soil erosion in agriculture is clear. AI technology can be used to identify areas of land that are at risk of erosion, as well as to monitor and predict changes in soil composition over time. This technology can also be used to develop solutions to reduce soil erosion and to improve crop yields. As the agricultural industry continues to evolve, the use of AI technology is likely to become increasingly important in helping to protect soil fertility and preserve crop yields. Exploring the Possibilities of Artificial Intelligence in Predicting and Managing Soil Erosion in Agriculture In recent years, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in agriculture has been gaining traction as a way to improve crop yields and soil health. AI has the potential to predict and manage soil erosion, a major threat to agricultural productivity. Soil erosion is a natural process that occurs when wind and water remove soil particles from the surface of the land. Over time, this can lead to soil degradation, reducing crop yields and increasing the risk of soil-borne diseases. It is estimated that soil erosion costs the agricultural industry billions of dollars each year. AI can help to predict and manage soil erosion by providing more accurate data on soil characteristics, such as texture, structure, and composition. This data can be used to create models that predict the rate of soil erosion in a given area. AI can also be used to develop strategies for reducing soil erosion, such as changing tillage practices or planting cover crops. In addition, AI can be used to monitor soil erosion in real-time. This can help farmers to identify areas of high erosion risk and take steps to mitigate the problem. For example, AI-based systems can be used to detect areas of high soil loss and alert farmers to take action. AI is also being used to improve the accuracy of soil mapping. By combining satellite imagery with machine learning algorithms, AI can provide more detailed and accurate maps of soil characteristics. This data can be used to identify areas of high erosion risk and develop strategies to reduce soil loss. The potential of AI in predicting and managing soil erosion is clear. By providing more accurate data and better monitoring capabilities, AI can help farmers to reduce soil erosion and improve crop yields. As AI technology continues to advance, it is likely that its applications in agriculture will continue to expand.

[JobOne, 6-22-2023, "Eleven critical climate change and global warming tipping points defined," Job One for Humanity, ] WL

Introduction "Crossing a negative tipping point is a mega-consequence that will usually crash an area so thoroughly that it will be nearly impossible to reestablish the pre-crash level. If you are eventually able to recover from a crossed tipping point crash, it will be so expensive, difficult, and slow --- you will curse the day you let any area go beyond its tipping point." Lawrence Wollersheim While you are learning about key global warming tipping points, it is critically important to understand that no compensatory calculations for the effects of any global warming tipping points being crossed were ever included in the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC,) calculations for precisely how much we have to reduce our global fossil fuel use to save ourselves from extinction. This is important because the IPCC's global fossil fuel reduction calculations are currently being used by all of the member governments of the United Nations (about 190 countries,) for setting their own internal national fossil fuel reduction programs. This horrific failure to include crossing any global warming tipping points in our current global and national fossil fuel reduction calculations is also true for the world's most recent 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. As you will soon discover this omission of including proper calculations for crossing global warming tipping points as the world continues to warm is the recipe for mutually assured destruction. Yes, this failure to include allowance calculations for crossed tipping points also means that the national fossil fuel reduction programs of every member of the United Nations using the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement targets is also based on incomplete and inaccurate calculations. In other words, our current global fossil fuel reduction calculations are based on the inconceivable belief that "everything will work perfectly within our rapidly warming climate systems all of the time and we will never crossing any key global warming tipping points." Unfortunately, the immutable laws of mathematics and physics also do not work that way, particularly as we simultaneously continue to add massively more carbon and methane to our atmosphere each year. We all know how "everything always goes perfectly as planned all of the time" so, there's nothing really to worry about here or, is there? As you explore the key global warming tipping points described below the shocking meaning to your future well-being of our government's not including crossing any global warming tipping points in their calculations for how much we have to reduce our global and national fossil fuel use to prevent extinction will become much clearer to you... Why global warming tipping points are important to your future: If we can determine where the global warming tipping points are, we can better predict system collapses and future catastrophes and prepare for them, as well as locate other interconnected tipping points. Tipping points can create highly dangerous positive feedback loops. Positive feedback loops—endless, self-reinforcing cycles can speed a global warming process so much that it will jump from a gradual, linear progression to a very steep, exponential progression or a falling off a cliff progression or complete system collapse which can lead to mass human extinction within our lifetimes. The global warming tipping point information disclosed below presents a grave extinction threat for humanity as well as animal and biological species. To avoid triggering extinction-producing climate tipping points we will have to reduce our global fossil fuel use to the levels described on this important page to our futures! What is a global warming tipping point? Tipping points do not occur only within the climate. They can and will occur in almost any area of life, causing large and unexpected changes. Knowing when they're coming is essential if you do not want to be blindsided by catastrophic global warming consequences. This document contains everything you need to know about global-warming-related tipping points. Because of the complexity of tipping points and their initiating processes, this document may be more challenging, but you do not have to understand everything about tipping points perfectly!. By the time you finish this, you will have gleaned enough about the critical and dangerous role of global warming tipping points to understand their high potential impacts both on your present day-to-day life and your future. To make this document a bit more manageable, the most complex science has been placed just before the end along with a humorous 11-minute animation link to help you visualize important tipping points and principles. Although this page is science-filled, it is essential reading to understand the depth of our current climate change emergency and the Climageddon Extinction Scenario global warming prediction model. The simple definition of a global warming tipping point is: The point where some process or new stimulus causes a sudden and significant change in the status of the ongoing process or system, causing it to jump from one state to a new, significantly different state. This sudden change is not only significant; it is often extreme! As an example of a sudden and significant change, imagine a wine glass tipping over and going from the state of being full to empty. After the wine glass tipping point has been passed, a transition to a new state quickly occurs. Like the falling of the wine glass, tipping points can often lead to the sudden collapse of a process. If you think about a tipping point on a graph causing a steep slope change, you will understand why knowing when tipping points will occur is so important. (See the Tipping Points Have Points of No Return graph below for what a tipping point does to the slope of a graph line.) Tipping points are often also irreversible, comparable to wine spilling from the glass. No matter how hard you try, standing up the wine glass will not put the wine back into it. Similarly, many global warming tipping points are also irreversible or almost irreversible in any time frame relative to a human lifespan! For example, the West Antarctic ice shelf appears to have passed its tipping point and is now in an irreversible melting process. Once escalating global warming is finally ended, it may take tens of thousands of years to restore that ice shelf—if it ever could even happen. Points of no return Before a tipping point is reached, there is another key milestone in the process. It is the point of irreversible process momentum toward that tipping point, or what is commonly known as the point of no return. In simple mechanical systems like in the wine glass example, the point of no return can occur very close to the actual tipping point. Even though the point of no return may be close to its tipping point, the two are separate parts of the tipping point process. In complex climate, human, biological, or geological systems, the point of no return can occur long before the actual tipping point. This is because global warming and our climate are complex adaptive systems. The developmental processes that eventually trigger a tipping point usually involve many factors and many processes beyond a single mechanical balance point or a simple mechanical falling process as in the wine glass spilling example. (If you're curious, at the end of this document you will find a section that provides more information about the complex qualities and nature of complex adaptive systems). Chapter_4_Tipping_Points_Have_No_Return.png In the wine glass example, the point of no return is the moment of directional motion and momentum where the forward-falling glass is no longer able to teeter backward and maintain or return to its original upright position and stability. In the wine glass tipping scenario, the point of no return is quite visible. Once it falls past this last balancing point of still reversible direction and momentum and crosses its point of no return, it can no longer stop itself from falling further and crossing the wine glass’s last balancing point, thus irreversibly tipping and spilling the wine out of the glass. By contrast, global warming points of no return tend to be largely invisible—i.e., irreversible fates are set in motion before we know they are happening. However, if you can determine the point of no return for any global warming tipping point, you can “buy” yourself critical forecasting capabilities that can give you some warning for approximately when that tipping point will be crossed. Being aware of global warming process points of no return will be extremely useful in preparing for and predicting global warming tipping points and catastrophes. "Tipping points are so dangerous because if you pass them, the climate is out of humanity's control: if an ice sheet disintegrates and starts to slide into the ocean there's nothing we can do about that." —James Hansen Contrary to what many people believe, tipping points are not just rare high-impact events. Knowing global warming, climate, human, and biological tipping points as well as how and when they will occur will be the key to creating all future planning as global warming escalates, and our global climate continues to destabilize. The 11 major climate change and global warming tipping points within the climate, human, and biological systems There are many global warming system and subsystem tipping points within the climate, human, and biological systems. The key process that directly or indirectly causes the global warming tipping points to be crossed is increasing heat, as is implied in the term global warming. When global warming tipping points are crossed, one or more of them can trigger processes leading to: sudden large-scale catastrophes in climate, human, and biological systems, irreversible global warming, irreversible climate destabilization, and/or extinction-level climate destabilization. The major global warming tipping points (other than increasing temperature,) within the interacting climate, human, and biological systems are: The total amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Water vapor is the gaseous state of water. It is the most important natural greenhouse gas. When it condenses onto a surface, a net warming occurs on that surface. In the atmosphere, water vapor increases as heat increases. Increased heat evaporates more water from oceans, lakes, and rivers, which creates more water vapor and heat in an endless self-reinforcing cycle—another positive feedback loop. At some point, this positive feedback loop triggers a tipping point, and the process goes from a gradual linear heat-producing progression into a steeper exponential progression. The result is that the average global temperature increases even faster. Humans cannot survive if the air is too moist and hot, which would happen for the majority of human populations if global temperatures rise by 11–12 °C, as landmasses warm faster than the global average. The total amount of melting ice. Increased heat melts more sea ice, ice shelves, and glaciers, resulting in more water flowing into our oceans and increasing sea levels. This process repeats with each increase in temperature in an endless, self-reinforcing cycle—a positive feedback loop. At some point, this positive feedback loop triggers a tipping point, and the increased heat and ice melting process can go from a gradual linear progression (1, 2, 3 ,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) to a far steeper exponential progression (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048, 4,096, 8,192, 16,384). The albedo effect. The whiteness of polar ice reflects heat away from the planet. This is called the albedo effect. As the polar ice melts, significant areas darken and therefore absorb more heat rather than reflecting it outward. At some point in this melting process, a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop occurs, which again reduces the albedo effect’s total heat-reflecting capabilities. This in turn further increases global warming. As before, this self-reinforcing cycle of loss of reflectivity and increasing heat will eventually move from a gradual linear progression to a steep exponential heat-increasing progression. The release of methane from the warming of polar permafrost and tundra. As the temperature continues to increase, a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop triggers a permafrost and tundra methane release tipping point, leading eventually to the exponential progression mentioned before. This could be a very critical tipping point because methane produces 20 to 100 times the heat-creating effect in the atmosphere as compared to carbon dioxide. This increased methane within our atmosphere will also remain there from three years to decades before it decays back into simple carbon. To emphasize how dangerous this is for our future, in February 2013, scientists using radiometric dating techniques on Russian cave formations to measure melting rates warned that a 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) global rise in temperature compared to pre-industrial levels was enough to start a general permafrost melt. (From David Spratt’s Climate Reality Check). We are almost at 1.5° Celsius right now, and even higher temperatures are inevitable. Please also note that melting permafrost in tundra also has the potential to cause local and global pandemics caused by ancient viruses and bacteria being released from the permafrost. Already in Siberia, they have had anthrax and smallpox outbreaks because of melting permafrost and tundra. The die-offs of carbon-eating and oxygen-producing sea plankton are because of the warming, carbonization, and acidification of the oceans. As this continues to intensify, it also creates a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop, which triggers a tipping point, and the die-off process goes from a gradual linear progression into a steeper exponential progression. This results in sudden and rapidly increasing die-offs in the ocean fish populations that live on this plankton, as well as sudden and rapidly increasing drop-offs in the ocean’s oxygen-producing capabilities. (Oxygen-producing plankton are critical to our future. They produce 50% - 80% of the world’s total oxygen supply). The ever-increasing atmospheric heat is captured and stored by the oceans and sent to lower levels of the ocean. These captured and stored masses of deep warm water can suddenly rise to the surface again. This will release a massive amount of additional heat directly into the atmosphere and quickly spike the average global temperature. The loss of the atmospheric carbon-eating forests because of heat, drought, wildfires, and timber-harvesting or agriculture-related clearcutting. As temperatures rise and droughts, heat, forest fires, and clearcutting kill trees, we lose our essential carbon-eating forests, which increases the carbon and heat in the atmosphere. This process eventually triggers a tipping point and the forests’ loss of carbon-eating capabilities goes from a gradual linear progression into a steep exponential progression of forest loss and escalating carbon in the atmosphere. This results in a sudden additional spike upward in average global temperature. Soils that normally absorb carbon begin releasing it back into the atmosphere from their previously-stored or inherent carbon because of the escalating heat. This increasing heat-induced release of carbon by the soils creates a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. This triggers a soil carbon release tipping point and the process goes into a more exponential progression. This also results in a rapid increase in average global temperature. The changes in major ocean currents help to stabilize our weather and seasons. Research is now expanding on how increasing heat will affect currents like the North Atlantic current. Because of global warming, if the North Atlantic current were slowed down or diverted from its presently established pathway, it would create very significant changes in weather patterns, which would affect growing seasons, rain, snowfall, and temperature—all of which have strong effects on vital crop yields. The global warming-caused pandemic potential. When ancient ice, glaciers, permafrost, or frozen tundra melts, it releases still-living bacteria and viruses never seen before. This means we could soon be unleashing the ultimate global pandemic. So many different types of new bacteria and viruses could be released at once that even our best scientists would not be able to create and distribute the vaccines needed in time to contain disease outbreaks or a growing global pandemic. Total weight of rising seas and melting ice shifting. Although research is sparse in this area, it has been posited that the total massive weight change from all ice melt areas (where ice covers land masses) as well as the heating, expanding, and shifting weight effect on seas caused by global warming can move existing tectonic plates. This plate motion could cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions at an unprecedented scale. If the shifting of these tectonic plates causes numerous or massive volcanic eruptions around the planet, we could also go into a volcanic winter. If the shifting of tectonic plates triggers a supervolcano-like eruption, the years that the sun would be blocked could kill off most of the human population. Chapter_4_Global_Warming_Tipping_Points.png There are many other known and unknown tipping points in both climate and biological systems not mentioned above. The 11 above are only the ones that are the most important and the ones we know the most about. When you are thinking about the collective and individual impacts of the above 11 tipping points, you must also add in their impact on human social, economic and political systems and the tipping points within those unique systems. For example, as we continue to cross more of the 11 tipping points mentioned above, we will first experience the severe system crashes which normally occur when the tipping point is crossed, and then our social, economic, and political human systems will begin experiencing extreme stress. This will then also push them over their own internal tipping points. One way this could happen is as follows. As crops fail from droughts, rain bombs, and extreme temperatures, food prices will skyrocket, populations will riot and then, law and order will break down as more people die. Eventually, the weaker countries will collapse under the weight of these internal climate catastrophes and resource conflicts. Next, as the weaker nations collapse, they will create more desperate climagees (climate migrants rushing into the stronger nations.) As this happens, the strongest nations will also experience a breakdown in law and order, and, in the later phases of the Climageddon Extinction Scenario, they too will experience a complete social and political breakdown.

[Henry Bodkin, 9-25-2019, "Climate change now irreversible due to warming oceans, UN body warns," Telegraph, ] WL

Climate change is now irreversible, thanks to ocean warming crossing a “tipping point”, UN experts have warned. A new report predicts that, even with significant emission cuts, sea levels will rise by the end of the century, with serious coastal flooding becoming hundreds of times more frequent. The planet has warmed to 1C above pre-industrial temperatures, and around 90 per cent of that excess heat has been absorbed by the oceans, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. It means rapidly melting ice in Antarctica and Greenland is now pushing up sea levels by 3.6mm a year, at twice the rate of the Twentieth Century. Despite commitments by the UK, French and other governments to achieve net-zero carbon emissions in coming decades, the analysis predicts that there is too much heat in the oceans to prevent disruption for hundreds of millions of people. Unveiling the latest report in Monaco on Wednesday, panel-member Valerie Masson-Delmotte, said: “Climate change is already irreversible due to the heat uptake in the ocean. “We can’t go back, whatever we do with our emissions.” According to the new forecasts, approximately 70 per cent of the world’s permafrost will thaw if emissions continue to rise. This in turn could free up “tens to hundreds of billions of tonnes” of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, further heating the planet. Sea levels could rise by around 30cm to 60cm by 2100 even if greenhouse gases are rapidly cut and global warming is kept to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, but around 60-110 cm if emissions continue to increase, the analysis found. Meanwhile annual coastal flood damages are projected to increase 100 to 1,000 times by 2100, and some island nations are "likely to become uninhabitable". Hans-Otto Portner, another IPCC expert, said: “There are large uncertainties about tipping points that may be ahead of us, but for some systems, especially biological evidence in the oceans, we have already evidence that the tipping point has been passed.” The warnings come as the UK government announced international coalition to push for at least 30 per cent of oceans to be in protected areas by 2030. Ministers say the move helps sensitive species such as seahorses, turtles and corals to thrive, and can fight climate change by protecting key habitats for storing carbon such as mangrove forests and seagrass meadows. Historically the Antarctic Ocean has an ice-free September only once every 100 years or so, however if global temperatures rise to two degrees above pre-industrial levels this would become as frequent as every three years, the panel said. The 2015 Paris accord commits signatories to adopting policies intended to keep warming to within 1.5 degrees. However, Donald Trump has since withdrawn the US from the agreement. In one of her last acts as Prime Minister, Theresa May set a legally-binding target to cut greenhouse gasses to net-zero by 2050 in June. Last year a separate IPCC report called for 45 per cent reductions in carbon emissions by 2030. "If we reduce emissions sharply, consequences for people and their livelihoods will still be challenging, but potentially more manageable for those who are most vulnerable," said Hoesung Lee, chair of the body, on Wednesday.” Professor Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, said the report had failed to mention the "very serious threat" of methane rising from the seabed of the Arctic continental shelf as its permafrost thaws, potentially contributing large amounts of extra greenhouse gas.

Technology to remove the planet-warming greenhouse gas CO2 from our atmosphere must be urgently ramped up, leading climate experts say in a new report. Scientists say big cuts in CO2 emissions won't be enough to limit global warming. And nature alone will not remove enough of it from the air. CO2 is the most important gas warming the planet, and is emitted when fossil fuels such as gas and oil are burnt. "To limit warming to 2C or lower, we need to accelerate emissions reductions. But the findings of this report are clear: we also need to increase carbon removal too," says lead author Dr Steve Smith from Oxford University. "Many new methods are emerging with potential." There's consensus among scientists that the world is warming primarily because emissions of CO2 (estimated at 33 billion tonnes in 2021) far exceed the amount that is being removed (this report suggests two billion tonnes a year). Until emissions and removals are balanced - so called "net-zero" - global temperatures are predicted to rise. But getting there won't be easy. The latest UN climate reports say to fully achieve "net zero" there will need to be some CO2 removal, so called "negative emissions", to compensate for sectors that can't easily decarbonise. Currently almost all of the world's CO2 removal occurs through natural processes. That's primarily plants and trees taking in CO2 from the air, and the soil absorbing and storing it. But there are limits to how much nature can do. For example, how much more of the world can realistically be given over to forests? Some optimistic scenarios suggest that natural CO2 removal could be doubled by 2050, but that's still only about 4 billion tonnes of CO2 a year. Technological solutions? This new report titled "The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal" says that to restrict and reduce global temperatures in the future there needs to be investment in developing technological solutions now. The methods it cites are all fairly new, and at different stages of development and deployment. Put together they currently only make up a tiny fraction of the worlds CO2 removal. One, known as BECCS, involves incorporating CO2 capture into biomass-based electricity-generation, in which organic matter such as crops and wood pellets are burned to produce power. Other options include: huge facilities where the carbon is extracted from the air before being stored in the ground; the use of specially treated charcoal (biochar) that locks in carbon; and "enhanced rock weathering" - loosely based on the carbon removal that occurs with natural erosion.

It is already clear that significant progress on mitigating climate change can be achieved through a move to zero-carbon energy, reducing deforestation and adjusting how we grow food and what we eat. Renewable energy is increasingly becoming cheaper to produce than fossil fuels – one recent Oxford University study suggests that replacing fossil fuels with clean energy could bring global savings of up to $12 trillion by 2050. And the International Energy Agency has found that there is now more employment in ‘clean energy’ – including renewables, electric vehicles, energy efficiency and nuclear power – than in the fossil fuel industry, so the economic argument alone should provide sufficient incentive for rapid decarbonisation of the energy system.

We also know that a transition away from fossil fuels would bring significant benefits for health and wellbeing through reduced air pollution and shifts towards more active lifestyles and balanced diets. And a commitment to net zero can also reduce social inequality, particularly in already highly unequal societies, if investments are made in, for example, affordable and reliable low-carbon public transport, urban green spaces, and homes with more efficient cooling and warming.

Technology has a critical role to play in mitigating climate change. It can help us to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Climate change is a global problem that requires global solutions. Technology can help us to reduce our emissions by making our processes and products more energy-efficient. Introduction Technology has always played a role in climate change. For example, the invention of the steam engine led to the industrial revolution, which in turn led to increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Over the past century, the burning of fossil fuels has been the main driver of climate change. The combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These gases trap heat and cause the Earth’s temperature to rise. As the world has become more industrialized, the use of fossil fuels has increased and so has the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In 2018, human activities emitted about 43.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. This was a new record high and represented an increase of about 1.4% over the previous year. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, we need to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This will require a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Technology can help us achieve this goal. For example, renewable energy technologies like solar and wind power can help us reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. And new technologies like electric vehicles can help us further reduce our emissions. But it’s not just about developing new technologies. We also need to use the technologies we have more efficiently. For example, we need to use less energy to heat and cool our homes and buildings. We also need to use more efficient transportation options like public transit and bicycles. Also Read: How Does Technology Help Sustainability Causes of Climate Change Climate change refers to a broad array of environmental degradation that is predicted to result from increasing levels of atmospheric CO2, including global warming, alterations in precipitation, sea level changes and more extreme weather events. There are many causes of climate change, both natural and anthropogenic. Natural causes include changes in the sun’s intensity, volcanic eruptions, and variations in the Earth’s orbit. Anthropogenic causes include deforestation, burning fossil fuels, and agricultural practices. The most significant cause of climate change is the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. Burning these fuels releases CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere and cause the Earth’s temperature to rise. Deforestation is another major cause of climate change. Trees absorb CO2, so cutting them down decreases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Deforestation also decreases the Earth’s ability to reflect sunlight, which further contributes to global warming. While the causes of climate change are varied, the most significant cause is human activity. To combat climate change, it is essential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by changing our energy sources and practices. The Role of Technology in Climate Change Technology has always played a role in climate change. For example, the development of agriculture allowed humans to manipulate the landscape and release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The industrial revolution led to a dramatic increase in emissions, as factories pumped out large amounts of greenhouse gases. Satellites and other technological advances have allowed us to track and measure greenhouse gas emissions, as well as their effects on the environment. This data is critical in developing policies to reduce emissions and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Lastly, technology can help us to adapt to the changing climate. For example, new construction methods and materials can help buildings to withstand extreme weather events. And innovative agricultural practices can help farmers to cope with changes in temperature and precipitation. Overall, technology plays a vital role in our fight against climate change. By helping us to understand the problem, develop cleaner energy sources, and adapt to a changing climate, technology will be critical in protecting our planet for future generations. Technology has always been a key driver of economic growth and human development. The Agricultural Revolution led to the domestication of plants and animals, which allowed for the growth of civilizations. The Industrial Revolution spurred on the development of new energy sources and production technologies, leading to unprecedented economic growth. And now, in the 21st century, we are on the cusp of a new era of technological change that has the potential to once again transform our world – this time, by helping us to fight climate change. There are a number of ways in which technology can help us to combat climate change, both by reducing emissions and by adapting to the impacts of a changing climate. Reducing Emissions One of the most important ways in which technology can help us to fight climate change is by reducing emissions. This can be done in a number of ways, including: Improving energy efficiency: By developing and deploying more energy-efficient technologies, we can reduce the amount of energy we need to produce, which in turn reduces emissions. Increasing the use of renewable energy: Technologies such as solar, wind and hydro power have the potential to replace fossil fuels as our primary source of energy. This would lead to a significant reduction in emissions. Developing carbon capture and storage: This is a technology that can be used to capture carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and other industrial facilities, and store them underground. This would prevent the emissions from entering the atmosphere, and help to reduce the overall levels of greenhouse gases.

Despite all of the doom and gloom that surrounds climate change today, there has never been greater cause for optimism about the future of the environment. The reason why is that we already have the tools we need to meet this formidable challenge. But some tools are better than others, and if we get distracted by the wrong ones we could lose trillions while failing to solve the problem, so it is crucial that we stay focused and use the right tools for the job. Climate change represents a genuine existential threat to our civilization that is rivaled in magnitude only by global pandemics, nuclear war, or an astronomical event like an asteroid strike. Nevertheless, the end is not nigh. Climate change is a problem we can solve. And contrary to whatever else you might have heard, we can do so without torpedoing the global economy and dialing the clock back on modern civilization to the 1800s. Indeed, the only way we can solve climate change is with prosperity. In a recent TEDx Talk that I presented in Glasgow ahead of COP26, I shared a story about my 8-year-old daughter, Misora. She has learned about climate change in the environment and sustainability curriculum in her school, and she understands it is a crisis that humanity now faces. Not long ago, she asked me, “Daddy, why do we have climate change?” She wasn’t asking why greenhouse gases change the radiation balance of the atmosphere, or why a rise in mean global temperature increases the incidence of severe weather events. What she was really asking was, “what did we do to deserve this terrible thing that is happening to us?” I told her, “it’s because some of the tools we use to make life nice for people hurt the Earth.” She frowned and thought about this for a moment. And then she asked, “Daddy, why don’t we just use better tools?” I have spent the last ten years trying to do what my daughter did effortlessly in ten seconds: cut through all the noise to the very heart of the climate change challenge. I am still reeling at how profound her insight was. The solution to climate change is better tools. Laying down our tools is not the answer OK, so what are tools? They are simply the practical knowledge we use to achieve goals and solve problems. We see the world is one way, we wish it were another, and so we transform it using our know-how. We have used our knowledge to solve countless problems, great and small, throughout history. The most pressing problems of our ancestors – where to find shelter, food, water, warmth, light – are now trivial to us. And future generations will of course look back on our problems the same way. The key to my daughter’s insight is the word better. The solution is not no tools, not less tools, not different tools. It is not a return to traditional tools, nor is it more judicious use of today’s imperfect tools. The solution is better tools. In principle, it should come as no surprise that the solution to any problem is more and better knowledge, not ignorance. But in the case of climate change, a strange inversion of reason has gained sway, and many people have come to believe that the best way to reduce our emissions is to use tools less or stop using them altogether. Even worse, many have come to believe that tools themselves are inherently bad. At first, this might seem silly – who in their right mind would demonize knowledge and tools? Yet, swap the term tools for technology, and it becomes instantly clear that this is no exaggeration. Part of the explanation for widespread antipathy towards technology is simply cynicism. Clean tech has long been promised, and its failure to emerge as quickly as one would hope has jaded many observers. Safe nuclear power never became “too cheap to meter”, and nuclear fusion has been “20 years away” for over 70 years. Even affordable solar panels have been a long time in coming. Another is that new technologies can create new problems that we must tackle in turn. The Internet, for example, disrupted information and communication in countless ways, and transformed civilization and the global economy so drastically that it is now difficult to imagine a world without it. But alongside the astounding social and economic benefits the Internet has delivered, new problems have emerged as well – from cybercrime and misinformation campaigns to cyber-bullying and political polarization. There is no going back But perhaps the most pernicious source of antipathy towards technology is a misguided romanticism about the past and the primitive. It may come as a surprise, for example, that automobiles were originally celebrated as a solution to urban environmental problems – namely, that the streets of densely populated cities like New York and London were often covered in several feet of horse manure which posed a grave threat to public health and killed hundreds of thousands worldwide each year in the absence of modern sanitation technology. If we tried to use horses to move the quantity of people and goods we routinely transport with vehicles today, the entire surface of the Earth would look like the streets of New York in 1894 – a noxious hellscape of knee-deep manure and corpses. Life wasn’t nearly so rosy in the past as nostalgia might tempt us to believe. Before the chlorination of water supplies, for example, waterborne diseases from natural sources of freshwater such as wells and rivers killed countless millions – mostly infants and children under 5 – and even today still cause over 2 million deaths each year. And before gas and electric stoves, the smoke from perfectly natural wood and biomass-fueled cookfires inside homes caused more disease and death than all other sources of air pollution combined – an environmental problem that still kills over 4 million people per year. In a similar vein, it is all too easy to romanticize the traditional practices of indigenous cultures. There are certainly examples of such practices that are more sustainable than their modern counterparts, but the problem of selective memory applies here too because traditional practices were not always benign. Burning and clear-cutting forests is not a modern invention, nor is hunting species to extinction or allowing livestock to overgraze the landscape resulting in soil erosion and desertification, to take just a few examples. Ultimately, we do both ourselves and the environment a disservice by indulging the illusion that there is a trouble-free Edenic past to which we might return if only we were willing to make the necessary sacrifices. There is no viable path to sustainability that involves using less knowledge or more primitive technology instead of more knowledge and better technology. Just consuming less will not solve climate change Alongside the notion that the past and the primitive are viable guides to sustainability, there is the even more misguided belief that humanity can solve climate change simply by reducing consumption. Now, of course, it goes without saying that we should be less wasteful. But thinking we can solve climate change by “cutting back” or otherwise embracing frugality and austerity is like thinking we can save a burning building by putting out some of the fire. It just won’t work. Even if we were to extinguish the flames completely by magically cutting consumption to zero, that still wouldn’t solve the problem. You aren’t done saving a burning building when the fire is out, you’re only done once the building is fully repaired. For climate change, that means we must not only reach net-zero emissions, but we must go far below zero and actively withdraw carbon to restore the atmosphere and oceans to their healthy pre-industrial condition as well. Since no amount of belt-tightening will pull even a single gram of carbon out of the atmosphere or oceans, austerity is no real solution at all. We already have the tools we need Almost 90% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from just three things: energy, transportation, and food. So, the solution to climate change cannot be less energy, transportation, and food. It can only be clean energy, transportation, and food. Better tools. Thankfully, the news here is nothing short of spectacular. Our research at RethinkX has shown that all three of these foundational sectors of the global economy are poised for disruption by eight key technologies. In energy, the disruptive clean technologies are solar power, wind power, and batteries (SWB). They have passed the tipping point and are now cheaper than fossil fuels in many instances. A decade from now, they will be overwhelmingly competitive almost everywhere – especially throughout much of the global south where solar resources are abundant year-round. Today, SWB is growing exponentially worldwide, following the same s-curve pattern of disruption that technologies of all kinds have followed throughout history. For the incumbents, the end is nigh. The weakest link in the incumbent energy technology chain – namely, coal in the advanced industrial economies – has now snapped, and the rest of the conventional energy sector worldwide will follow suit over the next 15 years. In transportation, the technologies are electric vehicles, autonomous driving, and ridesharing. These are rapidly becoming cheaper, more capable, and are now on the exponential portion of the disruption s-curve as well. Like the disruption of horses by cars a century ago, combustion engine vehicles that cannot drive themselves will be wiped out by autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs) over the course of just 15 years or so. In food, the technologies are precision fermentation and cellular agriculture. These methods of making animal products without killing animals are vastly more efficient than conventional farming and fisheries. The first commercial products have just reached the market. Despite predictable skepticism, early products such as the Impossible Burger have proven hugely popular. Following the same pattern of disruption, these technologies are growing exponentially on their s-curve and will wipe out traditional animal products from livestock and seafood products over the next two decades. Our research at RethinkX has analyzed each of these three sector disruptions in detail, as well as their combined implications for climate change. What we have found is that, together, these disruptions have the potential to reduce net emissions 90% by 2035, on target to going below zero before 2040 – if we make sensible decisions and choose to embrace and accelerate the adoption of these new technologies, rather than resist them to prop up the incumbent industries they threaten to wipe out. All eight of the disruptive technologies we analyze exist today and are already being deployed to market. They are science fact, not science fiction. Contrary to what is widely believed, we don’t need billions of dollars and decades of additional R&D. We don’t need nuclear fusion or warp drive or other science fiction technologies to get out of this mess. We can slash ongoing emissions with these eight clean technologies, and then go a step further by using the cheap, clean, superabundant energy and machines they provide to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere and oceans affordably. These disruptions, therefore, open the door to a truly complete solution to climate change – they will let us go beyond just mitigation, to repair the damage our past emissions as well. Moreover, these technologies will not be expensive. Disruptions happen because the new technologies are so much cheaper, and their overwhelming economic competitiveness drives their adoption as well as the abandonment of the older, more expensive (and in this case dirtier) technologies that can no longer compete. Indeed, once these technologies pass the tipping point of cost parity, we will save money by adopting them. What we don’t need: ineffective and unaffordable tools These same dynamics of disruption imply that technologies like nuclear power, hydropower, geothermal power, tidal power, and hydrogen energy storage will not play a significant role in decarbonizing the energy sector. They are simply too expensive and lack a realistic pathway to ever become cheap enough to compete with solar, wind, and batteries. If policymakers don’t get technologically literate, they could end up sinking trillions of dollars into inferior tools that simply aren’t effective, and don’t provide real solutions. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and hybrid vehicles, for instance, lack a realistic pathway to becoming economically competitive against battery electric vehicles. They will not play a significant role in decarbonizing the transportation sector. Likewise, for the food sector, Band-Aid solutions like feeding cows seaweed and teaching them to use lavatories to reduce methane emissions will simply be too expensive to compete with precision fermentation and cellular agriculture products that use 10 times less water, 10 times less material inputs, up to 100 times less land, and that can be produced 20 times faster. Across all three sectors we now see the familiar historical pattern of incumbent industries scrambling to promote compromises and half-measures that would allow them to repurpose some of their assets and expertise, and avoid complete destruction. It is important that societies don’t fall for the often very slick and well-funded propaganda advocating for these alternative “solutions”. Focus, deploy, and scale We already have the better tools we need to solve climate change. Our task now is to focus on deploying and scaling these eight key technologies as rapidly as possible to accelerate the disruption of energy, transportation, and food. This is a responsibility we all share – as individuals, as industries, as entire nations. We can end the zero-sum tradeoff between humanity and nature and build a brighter future where both people and planet prosper, but there is no time to lose. We must start building it today, and we must build it together.

In the March 2004 issue of Scientific American, National Aeronautics and Space Administration global-warming expert James Hansen notes that greenhouse gas emissions and global-warming projections are “consistently pessimistic.” Hansen suggests that projections do not take into account the lower carbon dioxide and methane emissions that have resulted from technological advancements. He explains that the lower carbon dioxide emissions result from increased energy efficiency following the energy crisis in the 1970s and the lower methane emissions, from technological changes in agriculture.

Hansen’s essay concludes on an optimistic note, saying “the main elements [new technologies] required to halt climate change have come into being with remarkable rapidity.” This statement would not have surprised economist Julian Simon. He saw the “ultimate resource” to be the human mind and believed it to be best motivated by market forces.

For many years, we’ve heard that economic growth and environmental protection are in conflict. However, there is growing and compelling evidence that this simply is not the case: A strong economy and a healthy environment are not only complementary, but each depends on the other.

The Economic Case for Climate Action

[Phil Boas, 10-4-22, "A recession for sure, nuclear war a possibility: Our world just got more frightening," ] WL

A recession for sure, nuclear war a possibility: Our world just got more frightening I remember shortly before the pandemic struck North America, a Phoenix radio host was making jokes about it – something about coronavirus and Corona beer. He had no idea that a bug then plaguing mostly China and northern Italy would soon be on our doorstep. That it would disrupt American lives more than any other event in our generation and kill over a million people in this country. Sometimes things far away and barely understood can wreak destruction on us. In the last two weeks, two events, one deep beneath the Baltic Sea and one in the more prosperous and metropolitan parts of Russia, have emerged and presented that kind of threat. They have the potential to bring home troubles that are well beyond our daily concerns. Combine that with a looming global recession and we find ourselves at one of those historic junctures in which events could soon mess with our lives in unimaginable ways. Our country is changing. We all know that. Change has arrived with political polarization and extremists left and right who want to define what America will be tomorrow. Opinion polls register our angst almost weekly as we wonder what comes next. The world is also changing. On Sept. 21, the Russian government announced that it is mobilizing young men to join the ongoing “special military operation” in Ukraine. These men would be conscripted not from the rural and ethnic heartland, but from the more prosperous metropolitan regions, cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg and Rostov-on-Don. The war in Ukraine is finally coming home to middle-class Russians, an unmistakable sign that Russia, one of the great powers of the last century, is in trouble and that its leader, Vladimir Putin, is desperate. Putin made one of the great blunders in modern history when he invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, thinking Russian tanks could quickly bridle the Ukrainian people who see their future in democratic Western Europe, not Putin’s autocratic East. That Putin would now call for mobilization of some 300,000 men, a number many Russians suspect is really a million, is an admission that Russia has stumbled badly in this war. It’s also an enormous gamble on his part that he can take control of four of the most resource-rich regions of Ukraine, call a truce and wrap up the conflict before his own people turn on him. At the moment, Russians are growing more nervous and irritable. Protesters have burned a number of recruitment centers, and someone shot a recruitment officer. The Russian people refer to the call-up as the “mogilizatsia,” a combination of the word “mobilization” and “mogila” or “grave,” reports Foreign Affairs. While the Russians are soothed daily with Kremlin happy talk, the high price of Putin’s war is coming into focus. In August, some 70,000-to-80,000 Russian troops have been killed or injured fighting the Ukrainians, according to Pentagon reports. As Putin announced his mobilization and annexation, he called for a “holy war” against the West and rattled his nuclear warheads at Western Europe and the United States. He taunted Western powers with his reminder that the United States set the precedent for using nuclear weapons when it bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To understand how he got here, you have to understand the public humiliation Putin has endured, the undressing of his vaunted Russian army by the Ukrainians, and the public rebukes from friendly world leaders. On Sept. 10 when Putin was on Russian TV christening a new 460-feet high Ferris wheel in Moscow, his troops were suffering a humiliating defeat in the city of Izium, which the German news magazine Der Spiegel describes as critical to Russian strategy for taking control of the Donbas region of Ukraine. “The images from Moscow were ... disastrous,” reported Der Spiegel. “A commander-in-chief dedicating a Ferris wheel as the front disintegrated was not a good look.” Russian army veteran and former Federal Security Service officer Igor Girkin, writing under his pseudonym “Strelkov” on the social media app Telegram, said that apparently Moscow is celebrating the transfer of Izium to Ukraine. A week later, Putin had begun to feel the cold shoulder of world leaders in the geographic East such as China’s Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The latter issued a public warning that “Today’s era is not of war.” Putin’s mobilization is a stark development in the Russian-Ukraine war. It fundamentally alters his regime, reports Der Spiegel. Strange seismic readings in Scandinavia On Sept. 26, seismic stations in Scandinavia picked up the tremoring lines of some kind of powerful event beneath the Baltic Sea. Almost immediately pressure began to drop to zero in Nord Stream 1 and 2, a series of four pipelines built to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany. In what most European authorities now believe was an act of sabotage, explosives destroyed three of the Nord Stream lines, making them inoperable. Meanwhile the leading consensus in Europe is that it was the Russians, either using a submarine, underwater drone or ship to place the charges, perhaps months before they were detonated. Further consensus suggests that the Nord Stream sabotage is so sophisticated, it almost certainly was carried out by a state actor. If it was Putin, and it is hard to imagine any other world leader with the technical capability who is so willing to infuriate and disrupt the West, he was likely sending a message that Ukraine's Western allies and their critical infrastructure are touchable. Some Americans have begun to raise doubts. Columbia economics professor Jeffrey D. Sachs told Bloomberg Financial News he believes the United States possibly with Poland sabotaged the pipelines. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor told Andrew Napolitano on his podcast that it is preposterous to believe the Russians did this. As the world awaits the results of ongoing investigations, Sachs said we find ourselves in "the most unstable geopolitical era in many decades." A tyrant with the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons is an existential threat to the globe. When he is embarrassed by his own flagging war he is a powder keg capable of anything. It’s not yet kitchen table talk in American homes, and even the U.S. media have been slow to awaken, which prompted American journalist Matthew Yglesias to tweet, “Everyone is surprisingly chill about the clearly elevated risk of nuclear war.” The New York Times' Ross Douthat has noticed. “The world is probably now closer to the use of nuclear weapons than at any point in decades.” The coming global economic crash We have already felt the Russian invasion of Ukraine in America through the disruption in global supply chains and high price of gas and other goods. While hardly the only reason for our present inflation, it has exacerbated the problem, especially with soaring oil prices. Much of the inflation we’re experiencing today comes from years of suppressing interest rates following the Great Recession and during the pandemic. With inflation rising rapidly, the Federal Reserve has finally begun to raise interest rates to try to put the brakes on soaring prices. The correction back to normal could take a decade. Bank of America has published research that shows between the years 1980 to 2020, inflation that rose above 5% in rich economies took roughly 10 years to return to 2%, The Economist reports. The Fed is expected to reach its benchmark rate of 4.4% by the end of 2022, says its chairman, Jerome Powell. In raising interest rates, the Fed estimates that 1.2 million people will lose their jobs, reports CBS News. "I wish there were a painless way to do that," Powell said. "There isn't." A 2023 recession could be 'really bad' "We're in deep trouble," billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller said at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha Investor Summit in New York City Wednesday. “I will be stunned if we don’t have a recession in ’23. I don’t know the timing but certainly by the end of ’23. “I will not be surprised if it’s not larger than the so-called average garden variety,” Druckenmiller said. “I don’t rule out something really bad.” Druckenmiller explained that “extraordinary quantitative easing and zero interest rates over the past decade” led to an asset bubble. “All those factors that cause a bull market, they’re not only stopping, they’re reversing every one of them.” Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., told a conference that “storm clouds” are moving in. “I said they’re storm clouds, they’re big storm clouds here. It’s a hurricane.” At the moment we’re in a lull, he said. “It’s kind of sunny, things are doing fine. Everyone thinks the Fed can handle this. That hurricane is right out there down the road coming our way. We just don’t know if it’s a minor one or Superstorm Sandy. And you've got to brace yourself.” A broken American political culture If we do face a crashing economy, we’ll do so with a political culture that is deeply divided. Americans are already on edge with conservatives accusing liberals of rigging elections and liberals accusing conservatives of semi-fascism. How would such a tinder-dry culture manage an economic crisis with a federal government that has fewer tools to buffer the impact than in crises past? How would it manage the twin burdens of inflation and unemployment? Economic pressures could severely stress our brittle system and provoke even greater conflict. The world has always been a dangerous place Every generation faces its crises, from WWII to ICBMs to Vietnam to Sept. 11 to COVID-19. We are creatures hardwired to worry about the future, to let our imaginations run wild. In the coming weeks and months we’ll need to focus on how we cope with a Russian tyrant who has 6,300 nuclear warheads. We'll need to think about how we would weather a recession without losing our minds. Our 30th president Calvin Coolidge had some coping skills to deal with this. “If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.” The trick is to do all you can to help them find the ditch. Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him a phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

[Alex Katsomitros and Alessio Terzi, 1-9-2023, "“Degrowth would lead to authoritarianism"," European Magazine, ] WL

European Commission economist Alessio Terzi speaks to Alex Katsomitros about his vision for green capitalism, and explains why degrowth would be a bad idea Is continuous economic growth compatible with keeping our planet habitable? It’s an old question that has preoccupied economic science ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and has now come back to haunt a new generation of economists courtesy of climate change. One of them is Alessio Terzi, an Italian economist who works for the European Commission. In his book Growth for Good: Reshaping Capitalism to Save Humanity from Climate Catastrophe, Terzi charts a path for the transition to a green economy that is both geopolitically realistic and fair, while lambasting radicals who advocate for a reversal of economic development. And Terzi is not afraid of using his own country as an example of the perils of anaemic growth. I recently caught up with him to speak about the inevitability of carbon border taxes, the necessary overlap between policies tackling inequality and climate change, and why economists and scientists need to talk to each other more. Alex Katsomitros: A big part of your book is a critique of “degrowth”, a rather fringe economic theory. Why do you think that degrowth would lead to authoritarianism? Alessio Terzi: It is a fringe, but increasingly popular theory. Greta Thunberg’s new book includes articles from degrowth theorists who see capitalism as the root cause of climate change. Usually economists dismiss degrowth on the grounds that it will cause a recession, which people would never vote for. This is rather shallow, because the degrowth movement argues that it’s only involuntarily shrinking of the economy that generates bad effects like unemployment. My theory is that degrowth rests on the idea of voluntary scarcity, an old concept that starts with Plato’s theory of finding happiness in human relationships, rather than material consumption. Many religions, including Christianity, use similar rhetoric. So degrowth scholars believe they will succeed where Jesus Christ didn’t. If you cannot persuade people that this is good for them, you need a government to dictate what they are allowed to do in granular detail, because every activity generates CO2 emissions. That’s where authoritarianism comes in. AK: A counter-argument would be that we cannot go on like that, because our resources are finite. We only have one planet. How would you respond? AT: I agree. I am not defending the status quo – my book’s subtitle is Reshaping Capitalism. We cannot keep pumping up emissions. We have to solve the problem within planetary boundaries, but that does not necessitate degrowth, because every activity has an impact on nature. It’s about managing this relationship and finding a balance. If a resource becomes scarce, we substitute it. When England ran out of trees, people switched to coal, which led to the Industrial Revolution. We will follow a similar path to address modern scarcity and switch away from fossil fuels. AK: Many pro-degrowth economists believe that it can solve two problems: climate change and inequality. What’s your take? Can we tackle climate change without exacerbating inequality? AT: If we leave it to market forces alone, the green transition will exacerbate inequality. Currently, we are trying to jumpstart a new green industrial revolution: reinventing the whole of production, consumption, transport, agriculture. Past industrial revolutions rendered whole sectors, professions and skills irrelevant. So it is fundamental to use policy to contain inequality. If not, people will oppose it, even if this goes against their interests, because climate change affects the poorest the most. We saw that with the Yellow Vest movement, and also Brexit – regions that voted for Leave were receiving EU cohesion funds. So policy must be used to offer these regions a clear role in the green economy. AK: You argue that economic growth is the answer to both climate change and inequality. What about digital growth, which is relatively carbon-free. Is that a solution? AT: We do see rapid dematerialisation. An example is Netflix – we used to have VHS cassettes. It will help, but it is not the main solution. We cannot switch to the Metaverse and detach ourselves from material reality. These sectors also require energy, so we still need to invest in renewables. It’s complementary, but not a substitute for green policies. AK: In the book you discuss Italy as an example of a country where the lack of growth has had grave consequences. It’s also one of the few countries where some form of universal basic income has been tested. Was this experiment successful? AT: It’s hard to say, given the short timeframe. The general perception is that it mostly went to people in need and decreased extreme poverty. But it wasn’t a game-changer for the economy, so I am agnostic about it. Having a “citizens’ income” programme is not at odds with our economic system, but just an alternative social welfare policy. I don’t have anything against it, unless it is used to argue that we don’t need economic growth, just redistribution. That’s not a revolution in welfare policy, especially in a country like Italy. Redistribution is not a substitute for growth. With no growth you have fewer resources, so redistribution becomes harder, because you have to persuade some people that it’s worth taking from them. Redistribution is always a zero-sum game. In an expanding economy, you can redistribute the extra income. Slow growth was the norm before the Industrial Revolution and there was not much redistribution, or if there was it was from the poor to the rich. So in a slow-growth economy, power relations become more entrenched. AK: You claim that global cooperation is a pipedream and suggest that we should focus on national policies. Why is that? Is there something wrong with the Paris Agreement? AT: Ideally, we want a globally coordinated green transition. But we don’t have a global government, and climate change makes it even less possible. People say that global problems require global solutions, but these are difficult to implement. Tensions between countries will increase, including between rich and poor countries. At the COP27 conference, developing countries argued that floods ravaged Pakistan although it generates little carbon emissions, and that developed economies created the problem and should pay for it. Rich countries will pay a bit, but that will not solve the problem, due to constrained budgets. Take the UK: during a crisis, the first thing governments cut is foreign aid. So the more global cooperation the better, but don’t count on it to be the main avenue to address climate change.

[Paul Crider, 12-12-2022, "Degrowth: Neither Left Nor Right, But Backward," Liberal Currents, ] WL

Degrowth currents “Liberal degrowth” may sound like an oxymoron at first, but degrowth has a rich history in the liberal tradition. John Stuart Mill himself advocated an eventual move toward a “stationary condition of capital and population,” though he envisaged ever progressing improvements in the art of living, culture, and such industry as directly improves the human condition. John Maynard Keynes and John Rawls, both pantheon-stature liberals, likewise advanced versions of degrowth. Julie Rose, a Dartmouth political philosopher, extends liberal degrowth in the tradition of Mill. For Rose, economic growth is normatively orthogonal to promoting freedom and well-being. While respecting diversity of thought, we should directly foster the freedom and capabilities of individuals—such as health, education, civic equality, safety and environmental quality—without regard to whether economic production or trade are expanding or contracting. Growth may happen by accident, but even in this case we should resist thinking of this as a “happy accident” and simply be agnostic. Expanding human capabilities is what matters. Degrowth, liberal and otherwise, offers good reason to be suspicious of the normative “hegemony of growth.” We face an ecological catastrophe that can only be seriously met by sharply reducing our social metabolism. Material economic growth requires ever increasing imposition on the natural world. This is most acute with the fossil fuels on which global economic growth has depended since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Yet the possibilities for decoupling energy production—and thus the economy generally—from greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels have turned markedly more hopeful in the last decade, as renewable energy sources are primed to overtake coal by 2025 and as solar power costs continue to plummet. Plans to achieve net-zero carbon emissions are ambitious but no longer pie-in-the-sky, and the realization of big clean energy infrastructure moves are beginning to be demonstrated with President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, to take one promising recent example. But even a successful decoupling from carbon would not be enough for degrowth. Other environmental risks have come before—my youth was filled with frightening headlines about the depleting ozone layer—and more will follow even if we successfully decouple growth from carbon, as the rare metals mined for batteries and solar panels introduce their own novel crises. From the degrowth perspective, combatting the environmental havoc wrought by industrial expansion with yet more industry seems like an ever more perilous house of cards. Other currents of the degrowth movement largely recycle timeworn critiques of capitalism. A society aiming toward economic growth reduces human interactions to soulless commerce, replacing relationships with transactions. The hegemony of growth—capitalism—alienates human beings from their toil as workers are instrumentally treated as just another “factor of production” in capital accumulation. The relentless pursuit of production has ushered forth a consumer society of mass-produced stuff, cheap, gaudy, ephemeral. That even environmental achievements like carbon decoupling that fall short of a whole hog reversal of industrialization suggests these more old-fashioned critiques of capitalism are more load-bearing than they first appear. Anyone unmoved by these antique criticisms of capitalism will find them no more persuasive under the “degrowth” heading. Degrowth makes a sharper point by observing how GDP proceeds regardless of real welfare, social equality, or democratic health. GDP increasing apace while inequality yawns, economic precarity deepens, and democracies backslide into oligarchy or worse serves as a vivid reminder that rising economic growth is often decoupled from human flourishing. A moment’s reflection shatters any surprise this might hold; after all, slavery and Jim Crow—regimes constituting full, dehumanizing oppression—coexisted comfortably with economic growth. The picture of languishing amidst growth is captured well by Deva Woodly, a scholar of the New School for Social Research, in a chapter of The Political Economy of Justice: Woodly cites the American writer Alissa Quart, who describes a “middle precariat” raised to believe their education, training, and middle class social position would ensure their secure standing in the economic middle class, but instead find themselves “‘fronting’ as bourgeois while standing in a pile of debt.” To the extent that degrowth strives to sever the association of economic growth from notions like welfare, development, and flourishing, it provides a helpful corrective. But the claim is not only that growth isn’t the whole story, but that it is either (to pragmatists like Rose and Woodly) irrelevant or (from harder left perspectives) positively harmful. For all of the growth-agnostic qualifiers from liberal degrowth, the main thrust of the many currents in degrowth is anti-capitalist, anti-industrial, anti-abundance, and ultimately anti-liberal. For liberal degrowth, this may amount to little more than a quixotic wing of social democracy. But the more literal, thoroughgoing degrowth threatens more than windmills. Degrowth, unfreedom We pursue common purposes through collective action when it promotes the general welfare or general security against great dangers. We impose mask and vaccine mandates to ward off a deadly virus, and even that provokes backlashes. We shift industry to wartime footing, commanding the production of weapons and materiel when invasion or humanitarian catastrophes abroad threaten. And yes, we collectively submit to rules and regulations to protect our natural environment. Yet in all of these cases the measures implemented are for some tangible greater good, worth the abridgments to freedom even by the lights of those making sacrifices. Degrowth imposes limits for the sake of limits, on the abstract postulate that extending our frontiers and expanding our capabilities is intrinsically suspect. On the degrowth view, growth subjects—ordinary people living ordinary lives in liberal democracies—must be taught to narrow their sights and dim their dreams. Why do you want to try new things, ideas, foods, sports, etc? Why do you want to see the world? Why do you want to consume so much media, read so many books, eat exotic foods, explore expensive hobbies? “Want” itself is the object of suspicion. In degrowth Need is king. Degrowth requires a radical reorientation of human life—individual and social—from the liberal openness of dreams and aspirations to the stagnant closet of necessity. Human beings should be satisfied with having their basic needs met, on a generous basis to be sure, and must learn to think of this as true freedom. Degrowth explicitly commends a bottom-up, democratic social transition away from growth and rejects violence and tyranny in pursuing its ends. But pursued to its logical ends degrowth must turn to central planning and social control. Under degrowth the natural propensity to pursue our wants by truck, barter, and trade is held in suspicion or even contempt. Seeking profit, investing, consuming, and even saving are all pursued to better our own conditions and possibilities or those of our families, friends, or communities. Because the urge to improve our lot in life is so primal and so strong, these activities must be sharply guided or outright controlled. There is no conceivable, stable scenario where the great preponderance of individuals, business interests, and governments choose to reduce wealth and productive capacity—to become poorer—voluntarily. Individuals will resist this for the sake of their own comfort and the welfare of their families. Businesses will resist decreasing profits and production as an existential matter; they risk going out of business. Politicians will resist imposing limits on growth for basic budget logic, and will resist curtailing consumer comforts lest they draw the ire of their constituents. Governments will shun deindustrialization for fear of losing geopolitical position and security. A degrowth advocate could readily retort that human “freedom” is just the price that must be paid to avert ecological catastrophe. But even on its own terms degrowth is destined to fail to meet the basic needs it centralizes. Few economic or historical lessons have been harder learned than the inability of centrally planned economies to provide the basic needs or protect the basic rights of its subjects. Lest my charge of central planning be mistaken for red-baiting at the hint of an enlarged public sector, I’ll say now that mitigating climate change demands massive public spending, and a greatly expanded public sector providing “public options” for healthcare, child care, banking, transportation, and other necessities could provide a solid basis for all individuals to live productive and flourishing lives. This may or may not be socialism but it is not central planning. Central planning enters the picture when everyday consumption choices and entrepreneurial ventures are treated with suspicion, presumptively forbidden without special approval from “democratic” councils. The presumption of freedom—to do what we like, buy, sell, and trade what we like, and toil how we like—is replaced by the presumption of needing approval from authorities. This is the political economy of the homeowners association at the local level, and at the national (and international) level it is picking and choosing whole sectors of the economy that need to be purged for the “common good” of degrowth. For the industries that remain, political powers must choose what products and which producers are truly necessary and which must be cut as wasteful excess. Organizing society according to the mercy of official approval will empower busybodies at best, and truly tyrannical personalities lusting for domination at worst. It’s also fertile soil for corruption, as those with connections on the councils will just happen to be the most essential entities. Corruption in turn augurs ineffective governance as public purposes—say, degrowth—are subverted in favor of the leaders’ personal aims. It’s worth dwelling on what a shift to a command-and-control economy would look like in human terms. Degrowth may involve a universal job guarantee, but choice of work would radically diminish. Do you want to move to be with your family? Do you want to escape a lousy work environment? Do you want to study German literature or economics at college? These sorts of decisions may need approval from planners, especially as five-year degrowth plans begin missing their targets. Degrowth imagines a dramatic shift to less work and more leisure overall, but in moving from profit and freedom to choose to strictly necessary labor and wealth reduction, work incentives will plague degrowth. Some degree of compulsion will likely be necessary; in the best case, this looks like compulsory national service. Shopping would look different as well. An economy organized around the notion of sufficiency will tend not to produce wide variety. Coupled with the knack central planned economies have for denuding their store shelves of goods, the periodic trip for supplies after degrowth promises to be a dreary experience—where it isn’t replaced with bread lines. In all of this, human nature will not stop rearing its head. Human creativity will doggedly sprout; black markets will erupt like mushrooms. Doubt about the necessity of the compulsory elements of degrowth will fester, producing constant protests and creative sabotage. To the extent degrowth takes the hard, illiberal track, it will have to crack down in classical authoritarian fashion. Growth as freedom This has been a negative case for economic growth. We should not pursue degrowth because to do so would cost too much in the coin of basic human freedoms. But material economic growth also directly expands human capabilities. Greater wealth, greater productive capacity, and the institutional machinery of innovation multiply the effective options individuals have to pursue their respective projects and ends. Growth makes freedom possible; freedom makes growth possible. They are inseparable. It’s trivial to think of inventions that have radically improved human capabilities. A personal favorite is the birth control pill, which has perhaps done more to liberate women into public life and to undermine patriarchy than the entire edifice of feminist thought. But this required a base level of economic capabilities to achieve and to produce to scale. Hormone therapy for trans people might not have been developed had we started degrowth in J.S. Mill’s time. Covid would have hit differently without remote capabilities to continue work (which would be necessary to some extent even in a degrowth regime) and the readily deployed industrial capacity to churn out millions of doses of made-to-order mRNA vaccines. The Green Revolution enabled industrial agriculture to feed billions and genetic engineering promises to continue that tradition. Cutting edge technologies like CRISPR promise revolutionary health advances and as a kind of health platform technology it will likely roll out a whole new industry. In all these ways, growth fosters freedom. Yet promoting freedom will also lead to economic growth, even if that is not the explicit policy objective. Philosopher Brian Kogelmann has argued that the standard academic accounts of the causes of economic growth all correspond to policies and institutions we ought to support for the independent reasons of freedom, rights, and good governance. On one account, economic growth arises from “inclusive” political and economic institutions, where ordinary people are empowered to make more decisions about their lives. Growth tends to be hindered where “extractive” institutions prevail, where wide swathes of the people are expropriated or coerced to labor for the privileged few. Extractive institutions stick around because they benefit already powerful classes, but they’re condemned in the abstract by everyone from degrowth advocates to normie liberals. But we’re likely to see economic growth persist as inclusive institutions proliferate, especially in low income countries. In a similar vein, social justice conduces to growth. Heather McGhee has compellingly argued that racism has poisoned our political capacity to provide public goods and invest in public services. We fight racism because it is the right thing to do, but doing so also promotes prosperity. The extraction of disproportionate and unremunerated domestic and care labor from women should be opposed because of its transparent injustice. Yet sharing that necessary labor more equitably and developing a care infrastructure can also strengthen the liberal market order. On another account economic growth owes primarily to the increasing stock of human knowledge, and thus the freedom of inquiry and resources required to extend scientific and technical frontiers. This particular inheritance of the Enlightenment is invaluable on basic humanistic grounds, even within a degrowth paradigm, and yet well-equipped free minds working on scientific problems are bound to produce innovations which go on to provide the foundation for further technical developments and increased production—or growth. Degrowth may remain hostile to other suggested roots of economic growth, such as the greater esteem bestowed upon the commercial classes, but modern growth most plausibly obtains from a combination of factors, many of which degrowth would wish to foster for the sake of humanitarian or Enlightenment values. Thus, even someone partial to degrowth should consider an openness to the possibility of growth, or at least embrace the liberal growth agnosticism of J.S. Mill and Julie Rose. We do not and cannot know what technologies are just around the corner that could be just as important to us as birth control or mobile telephony. We can acknowledge that material economic growth has these attractive features without thereby committing ourselves to maximizing GDP at all costs. As we have seen, GDP alone can mask inequality, precarity, and languishing. We can and should supplement GDP with other objective metrics for public health outcomes, natural resource wealth, environmental quality, and the like. With such measures, it will remain that case that, all else being equal, growth in productive and innovative capabilities represents a positive good that policymakers have every reason to cultivate as custodians of the general welfare. Parties of abundance The genuine problems with “capitalism” are already recognized as problems in much of the left and center, and they’re fully analyzable and mitigable without muddying the conceptual waters with a “hegemony of growth.” The good ideas in degrowth (buy-nothing groups, libraries, universal basic services, the whole gamut of social justice causes) are easily apprehended in normal growth-friendly terms. Degrowth adds only rotten ideas: central planning, suspicion and politicization of everyday economic and lifestyle choices, and a profound lowering of human aspirations, no longer to boldly build, explore, and better ourselves but to crouch and huddle in the familiar. A degrowth exponent might respond that however well mainstream “growth hegemonists” understand the problems of capitalism, those problems persist. It’s a common refrain in degrowth rhetoric that we’ve been trying growth all along and it’s not working. That’s debatable. How well prosperity is shared in the modern world varies with time and place, regime and policy. What’s undeniable is that there is abundance, providing for greater numbers of human beings living at far higher standards of living than could even be imagined before the onset of modern economic growth. Degrowth insists on a false binary choice between sharing a shrinking pie and growing that pie for the benefit of the rich at the accelerating pauperization of everyone else and growing peril to the planet. Ecomodernists, abundance liberals, and fully automated luxury socialists insist to the contrary: we should not turn the engines of plenty off, but turn them toward discovering, building, and engineering solutions to the global problems we face. Degrowth is correct in one trivial sense. The earth and its resources are finite. As we continue to create, innovate, and expand our reach—as we continue to grow—we will encounter new problems, some emerging out of our clever solutions to problems of yore. If we solve climate change by continued growth and technological adaptation then the next problems will be waiting just around the corner, even more fearsome. But this is simply the permanent problem of the human condition. We don’t know the future and how we will meet its challenges. Degrowth imagines it has found a way out of this continuous conundrum. By stopping the economic motor and shifting into reverse, we can solve the problems we know and avoid creating new ones. This is an illusion. The social controls necessary to stop the engines of progress introduce greater problems than they purport to solve. The remedy threatens to kill the patient. Degrowth is an ideology of surrender. Its advocates see the economic and ecological challenges of the modern world and determine they are simply too vast, and we must turn back. Against the challenge of degrowth, abundance liberals must prepare for radical solutions to climate change and the global collective ecological problems that will follow. In the case of climate change, that means colossal public investments in zero- and negative-carbon research, infrastructure, and marketable technologies. It means something like a Green New Deal to execute such projects and equitably share the verdancy dividend. And it means a Green Marshall Plan to proliferate green technologies to low-income countries who have contributed disproportionately less to climate change but suffer more of its consequences. Like degrowth, abundance liberals countenance radical action against the ecological permanent problem. Unlike degrowth, we look forward.

[Noah Smith, 09-06-21, "People are realizing that degrowth is bad," No Publication, ] WL

The political argument against degrowth Milanovic actually has two excellent posts on the topic of degrowth. In the first one, he lays out why forcing developing countries to stay in poverty would be bad: Enforcing global degrowth would require freezing world income at about $17,000/year. That means that most people in the world would never even come close to current rich-world living standards — instead, they would at best only be able to reach the level currently enjoyed in China or Botswana. Perhaps that’s not such a horrible fate, but as Milanovic notes, this would require impoverishing most of the population of developed countries. He elaborates on this point in his new post, pulling no punches: Milanovic quite rightly waves away degrowthers’ protestations that GDP is not a good measure of human welfare. GDP isn’t perfect, he notes, but it’s close enough where the basic point stands. Demanding that people in rich countries accept absolutely catastrophic declines in their living standards is a political non-starter. Klein, on his podcast, tries to point this out as gently as possible: Milanovic is less gentle, calling this “outright magical thinking”. He is correct. When you look at how much people in America are willing to sacrifice in terms of their material well-being in order to fight climate change, it’s far less than what Klein is talking about. And Klein is really softballing it here — it’s not just giving up beef and SUVs, it’s a dramatic reduction in the size of housing and the amount of food and the ease of transportation and the quality of medical care that people in rich countries enjoy. It is, frankly, not happening. But even this vastly understates the political and practical difficulties of degrowth. Piper adds several key points. First of all, she notes, because developed countries have been decoupling resource use and growth for a while now, curbing resource use will actually cause a lot more restrictions on developing countries than Milanovic’s simple calculations would suggest: This is an incredibly important point. For example, China now produces more CO2 emissions than the U.S., the EU, and Japan combined: (And no, this is not because of outsourcing, as you can see by looking at the trade-adjusted emissions numbers.) Another way of looking at this is that China’s CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP are more than twice America’s, and about five times that of the EU. Any global degrowth plan that actually reduces resource use is going to entail more pain for China than its GDP numbers would suggest, simply because China is at a more resource-intensive stage of growth. Do you think China will accept a substantial diminution of its living standards, in order to satisfy the environmental-economic diktats of activists in Northern Europe? If so, you need to rethink a great many things. Anyway, Piper makes a second crucially important point. So far we’ve been waving our hands and talking about lowering rich-world GDP while raising GDP for poor countries. In fact, economies don’t work like that: Degrowth would thus require deep changes in the entire way that the global economy works. Change happens, but not like that; implementing the kind of reallocation schemes that degrowthers throw around with abandon would require global economic planning that would put Gosplan to shame. Klein points this out, again rather gently: In other words, it is abject fantasy. Taken together, these criticisms are utterly devastating to the entire degrowth project. In its current form, it will not advance beyond a media fad. No matter how shrilly degrowthers quote apocalyptic projections, the things they call for simply will not happen. Luckily, there is a better way to save the planet. And there is a better role for the degrowth movement, if they’re willing to rethink their approach and become more fact-based, reasonable, and humble.

[JesúS Zamora Bonilla, 11-7-2022, "The limits of degrowth," Mapping Ignorance, ] WL

According to theory of degrowth, the only way to save the planet and humanity from catastrophic collapse due to depletion of natural resources would be to radically limit, and even reduce, global production levels and, since there is still a large part of the population living in intolerable levels of poverty, and the only fair thing in order to bring them to the well-being of the others, is if, in the countries that now enjoy a GDP per capita above the average, we agree to reduce our own production and consumption levels by a very considerable magnitude. To put some figures: global GDP per capita is today about $12,000 per year. In developed countries, on the other hand, that figure is approximately three times that one. So, if all the inhabitants of the planet were to enjoy the standard of living corresponding to the global average, in the West we should have to reduce our standard of living to approximately one third of what we currently enjoy, which is equivalent to living with the per capita income that existed in our countries around the 1950s. Furthermore, if we think that global GDP is excessive for the capacity of the planet, and that it would have to be reduced – say – by half in order to guarantee our survival, then we are talking about reducing our level of economic well-being to one sixth, a decrease of more than 80%; that is, more or less to the levels of the mid-nineteenth century. It is not surprising that such an economic policy proposal falls short of arousing enthusiasm in any democratic election. Like almost all delusional ideologies, degrowth theory is based on something that sounds like an absolute no-brainer: the thesis that unlimited economic growth cannot occur on a planet with limited natural resources. If to this statement we add the idea that capitalism can only persist under permanent and exponential economic growth, we easily arrive at the most important conclusion that degrowthists ultimately want to lead us to, that it is absolutely necessary to put an end to capitalism. Unfortunately for believers in this new religion, the truth is that both premises of the argument are highly misleading. The first premise, that infinite progress is not possible on a finite planet, contains three main flaws. In the first place, the progress that really matters to us is not that of total GDP, but that of GDP per capita. If in the coming decades the rate of demographic growth continues to decline, and the world population begins to decline, it could well be that in the next century we will have a global per capita income two or three times higher than today, with a total GDP only slightly higher than nowadays. Second, GDP does not measure the amount of natural resources that are used, or something like that, but the economic value of the products made using those resources. In this way, economic progress does not consist only, nor even mainly, in enjoying more things (although getting out of poverty also requires a lot of that), but above all in having much better things at our disposal – safer, healthier, easier to use, less polluting, or that can be manufactured at a much lower cost and use of resources. And, in fact, the economic progress of the last few decades is proceeding largely along that path. And thirdly, and probably even more important, no one is looking for something like unlimited or infinite economic progress: what we want is just that the standard of living of humanity progresses a lot (for example, that the economic well-being of the vast majority of the population at the end of this century were similar to what countries like Finland or Denmark now have), but that is infinitely far from being “infinite”, and therefore there is no reason a priori to think that the limited natural resources available in the planet, used intelligently, will be insufficient to allow just that. The second premise, that capitalism requires exponential economic growth, also hides several fallacies. The most important one is that the concept of capitalism that is used in it is nothing more than a conceptual wimp, one that, rather than help us understand how the economic system really works, is limited to accumulating without rhyme nor reason any of the aspects that many people dislike about the current economy (inequality, the existence of poor countries, globalization, the destruction of the environment, or the inauthenticity of consumerism). The truth is that our economic system has many features that it is appropriate to designate as “capitalist” (for example, that production is carried out mostly by private companies, that consumption and investment decisions are usually done in more or less free markets, that the search for profits is the main engine of companies, and that earning a lot of money, in general, is considered by almost everyone as one of their main objectives in life), but we must not forget that this same economic system also has many fundamental characteristics that make it absurd to consider it as a purely capitalist system (above all, the fact that in most advanced countries the state collects practically half of all private income in the form of taxes, provides numerous public services, employs directly or indirectly about a quarter or a fifth of the active population, and regulates almost all economic activities to a greater or lesser degree). When the preachers of degrowth tell us to end capitalism, it is often unclear exactly which of those things they think it necessary to end, although it seems reasonable to suspect that a project such as theirs, whose goal is to drastically impoverish almost everyone in the developed countries, it will be impossible to carry it out except with something very similar to an absolutely centralized management of almost all economic activities, and not only at the level of one state, but at the same time throughout all the world, that is, through a kind of world economic dictatorship. And, since it is also quite difficult to imagine that the vast majority of the population is willing to voluntarily advance along that path, it is also logical to suspect that a project such as degrowth would have no choice but to do without, not only “capitalism” but, what is much more important, without democracy itself. Convinced (like so many other visionaries throughout history) of the absolute sanctity of their ends, degrowthers stubbornly refuse to think seriously about the profound large-scale political infeasibility of their proposals and take refuge behind a wall of further fallacious arguments. For example, the argument that degrowth “is not an option”, but that we will have to go towards it “by hook or by crook”, that is, either by accepting it now and putting ourselves in its benevolent and wise hands or waiting for environmental collapse to come and suffer much worse consequences. But the truth is that the fear of a catastrophic collapse worthy of the name is far from justified, and, in any case, the current political-economic system is much more likely to allow us to circumvent the worst environmental problems and the possible lack of resources, than a kind of fanciful global degrowth dictatorship, one that deep down nobody knows how we could manage to make it work for more than a few weeks, nor do we have the slightest certainty that the attempt to institute it would not lead humanity to a global conflict infinitely more terrible than those of the past century. Lastly, another of the fallacies of degrowthers (like that of almost every totalitarian ideology) is to pretend that, in fact, true democracy is the one they intend to establish, since it would eliminate any accumulation of political and economic power by current oligopolies and would let the true voice of the people be heard for the first time, or anything like that. In addition, they often resort to the strategy of showing that, when an assembly is organized with ordinary citizens who can freely deliberate on these issues, the result tends to be that everyone ends up agreeing that on reducing energy consumption, restricting the use of private transport, limiting air travel, eliminating plastics, eating much less meat, stopping deforestation, and a long list of similar beautiful wishes. However, the fact that most people do not voluntarily follow these recommendations in their private lives, and that they prefer not to vote for parties that propose to make such measures mandatory, this fact does not seem to be able to convince degrowthers that what people supposedly “freely and reflectively agree” in those “Playmobil assemblies” (as I have called them elsewhere) is not what people really want and think, but only the result of subjecting a small group to the pressure of trying to show off as “good fellows” before officiants who present those dreams as the only possible moral truth.