Biodevastation

A string of scientific studies in the past few years suggests that this risk has so far been greatly underestimated,” wrote scientists in a letter to Nordic governments

Technological fundamentalists … have no doubt that human knowledge is adequate to run the world. But to claim such abilities, we have to assume we can identify all the patterns in nature and learn to control all aspects of nature. … Our future is fewer and less.

Under each of the three most recent presidencies, Republican and Democratic alike, U.S. oil and gas production was higher at the end of the administration’s term than at the beginning.

It is September and throughout Italy the heat and dry conditions continue. It has been the hottest two months ever recorded. What little rain we have had has hardly penetrated the hard ground. There are food shortages already. The prices in the supermarkets are higher. In the south, the citrus crop is threatened; there is fungus on the lemons and the orange harvest is plagued by insects.

Smil’s approximation of how much of the US land area it would take to replace all fossil fuel use (at the 2012 level) with wind and solar power: 25%. The way to control power density is to lower our demands for energy.

There are several areas where we are facing big challenges in India’s big cities. I suppose similar challenges are faced in other countries too, but for now, I am using Hyderabad as a reference point. The principal cause is the availability of a cheap energy source to capitalism. First it was coal, and in the 20th century it became petroleum. The invention of converting heat into motion – ‘the heat engine’ – coupled with this easily available source of heat, took the exploitation of the earth’s resources and exploitation of labour to another level. Today, we are facing a poly crisis of global warming, ecological degradation, extreme climate events and social unrest. We have reached a tipping point where all life on earth is endangered. Several species have already become extinct.

Clouds of red dust rise into the sky and hang in the air as the truck roars past. It’s impossible to breathe as the dust gathers in the folds of villagers’ clothes, settles on rooftops, and coats the forest’s green leaves. The next truck goes by, and another cloud rises up in its wake. They carry massive tree trunks felled in the rainforests of the Congo Basin. The Baka people struggle to breathe every day, as logging companies from China, France, Italy, and Lebanon descend on the tropical forests and cut everything in their path. Fortress conservation has pushed the Baka people from the rainforests of the Congo Basin into villages bordering the national parks of southern Cameroon, while the logging that truly threatens the forest continues.

The colonial idea of solar-paneling the Sahara for Europe’s benefit is only deemed necessary because European leaders are unwilling to countenance a shift away from energy-intensive industry and capitalist systems of endless production.

My gut reaction 15 years ago to Vilsack’s manure digester panacea to global climate change remains true today—why pay to fix a problem that doesn’t even need to exist? Countless studies have shown that the most cost effective, eco-friendly, and often quite profitable form of animal husbandry—including dairying—is managed rotational grazing. If animals are just allowed to enjoy pasture outside (as they prefer and are meant to do by mother nature) and then also allowed to deposit their manure in a healthy perennial ecosystem, one does not end up with a methane crisis. It is only when one decides to confine thousands of animals in a warehouse, offer them nothing but TMR to consume (with dubious components like feather meal and ethanol leftovers), liquefy millions of gallons of their manure, and then store it in massive anaerobic lagoons, that one creates a pollutant 80+ times worse than carbon dioxide. Sure, one can always capture and burn the methane that doesn’t leak from a CAFO digester to make electricity or run a vehicle (which means more greenhouse gas pollution), but you still have the leftover sludge (aka digestate) to deal with. This is loaded with nitrates, phosphorous, and—depending upon what other