The Hames Report

The Next Dust Bowl

Which impact of anthropogenic global warming will harm the most people in the coming decades? I believe that the answer is extended or permanent drought over large parts of currently habitable or arable land — a drastic change in climate that will threaten food security and may be irreversible over centuries.

A basic prediction of climate science is that many parts of the world will experience longer and deeper droughts, thanks to the synergistic effects of drying, warming and the melting of snow and ice.

Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. What precipitation there is will probably come in extreme deluges, resulting in runoff rather than drought alleviation. Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temperature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a US state. Finally, many regions are expected to see earlier snowmelt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season. Added to natural climatic variation, such as the El Niño–La Niña cycle, these factors will intensify seasonal or decade-long droughts. Although the models don’t all agree on the specifics, the overall drying trends are clear.

I used to call the confluence of these processes ‘desertification’ on my blog, ClimateProgress.org, until some readers pointed out that many deserts are high in biodiversity, which isn’t where we’re heading. ‘Dust-bowlification’ is perhaps a more accurate and vivid term, particularly for Americans — many of whom still believe that climate change will only affect far-away places in far-distant times.

Prolonged drought will strike around the globe, but it is surprising to many that it would hit the US heartland so strongly and so soon.

The coming droughts ought to be a major driver — if not the major driver — of climate policies. Yet few policy-makers and journalists seem to be aware of dust-bowlification and its potentially devastating impact on food security. That’s partly understandable, because much of the key research cited in this article post-dates the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Raising public awareness of, and scientific focus on, the likelihood of severe effects of drought is the first step in prompting action.

I first heard of the risks in a 2005 talk by climatologist Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona in Tucson. He pointed to emerging evidence that temperature and annual precipitation were heading in opposite directions over many regions and raised the question of whether we are at the “dawn of the super-interglacial drought”.

The idea wasn’t new. As far back as 1990, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenomenon by mid-century.

Events are starting to bear out these worrying predictions. Snowpack reduction, early snowmelt and a decrease in dry-season river flow in the American West, forecast more than two decades ago, have now been measured. In much of the northern Rockies, the peak of the annual stream runoff is up to three or four weeks earlier than it was half a century ago. Heat and drought — coupled with the greater impact of destructive species, such as bark beetles, aided by warming — have increased forest die-off and the risk of wildfire.

The palaeoclimate record dating back to the medieval period reveals droughts lasting many decades. But the extreme droughts that the United States faces this century will be far hotter than the worst of those: recent decades have been warmer than the driest decade of the worst drought in the past 1,200 years.

And much warmer conditions are projected. According to a 2009 report of the US Global Change Research Program, warming over mid-latitude land masses, such as the continental United States, is predicted to be higher than the forecast average global warming: much of the inland United States faces a rise of between 5 °C and 6 °C on the current emissions path (that is, ‘business as usual’) by the century’s end, with a substantial fraction of that warming occurring by mid-century.

A 2007 analysis of 19 climate projections estimated that levels of aridity comparable to those in the Dust Bowl could stretch from Kansas to California by mid-century. To make matters worse, the regions at risk of reduced water supply, such as Nevada, have seen a massive population boom in the past decade. Overuse of water in these areas has long been rife, depleting groundwater stores.

Of course, the United States is not alone in facing such problems. Since 1950, the global percentage of dry areas has increased by about 1.74% of global land area per decade. Recent studies have projected ‘extreme drought’ conditions by mid-century over some of the most populated areas on Earth—southern Europe, south-east Asia, Brazil, the US Southwest, and large parts of Australia and Africa. These dust-bowl conditions are projected to worsen for many decades and be “largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stopped.”

The concept of drought has not been ignored by the IPCC and other scientific groups; there is even a United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. But the cumulative risks don’t seem to have been fully recognized by the public and by policy-makers. And key questions remain to be answered, ideally in a dedicated report by an organization such as the US National Academy of Sciences or the IPCC.

Most pressingly, what will happen to global food security if dust-bowl conditions become the norm for both food-importing and food-exporting countries? Extreme, widespread droughts will be happening at the same time as sea level rise and salt-water intrusion threaten some of the richest agricultural deltas in the world, such as those of the Nile and the Ganges. Meanwhile, ocean acidification, warming and overfishing may severely deplete the food available from the sea.

What are the implications of dust-bowlification for energy generation? After agriculture, energy generation is responsible for the majority of freshwater withdrawals, and two key strategies for generating additional potable water — wastewater purification and desalinisation — are both energy intensive. Future energy systems will need to be low on greenhouse-gas emissions and on water use. In particular, thermal power plants, including nuclear, may need to switch from evaporative or ‘wet cooling’  systems to dry cooling techniques, which, unfortunately, tend to be less efficient.

From an ecological perspective, what will be the effects of dust-bowlification on the global carbon cycle? In the past six years, the Amazon has seen two droughts of the sort expected once in 100 years, each of which may have released as much carbon dioxide from vegetation die-off as the United States emits from fossil-fuel combustion in a year. More frequent wildfires also threaten to increase carbon emissions. And as habitats are made untenable, what will be the effect on biodiversity?

At the same time, drought models need to be improved. They successfully chart the hydrological changes seen in the US South-west and the drying seen at the global level, but regional predictions can be disturbingly variable. Some models forecast an increase in precipitation for East Africa, whereas others correctly predicted in 2010 that warming of the Indian Ocean would lead to drought in the region, such as this year’s devastating drought in Somalia. The models need higher resolution and a better understanding of precipitation, sea surface temperature and the effects of vegetation.

Human adaptation to prolonged, extreme drought is difficult or impossible. Historically, the primary adaptation to dust-bowlification has been abandonment; the very word ‘desert’ comes from the Latin desertum for ‘an abandoned place’. During the relatively short-lived US Dust-Bowl era, hundreds of thousands of families fled the region. We need to plan how the world will deal with drought-spurred migrations and steadily growing areas of non-arable land in the heart of densely populated countries and global bread-baskets. Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.

These predictions are not worst-case scenarios: they assume business-as-usual greenhouse-gas emissions. We can hope that the models are too pessimistic, but some changes, such as the expansion of the subtropics, already seem to be occurring faster than models have projected. We clearly need to pursue the most aggressive greenhouse-gas mitigation policies promptly, and put dust-bowlification atop the world agenda. The time to act is now.

This piece was written by Joe Romm and first published in the journal Nature on 27th October 2011. It is reprinted here with the author's permission. Joe is a Fellow at American Progress and is the editor of Climate Progress, which New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named one of the 25 "Best Blogs of 2010." In 2009, Rolling Stone put Romm #88 on its list of 100 "people who are reinventing America." Time named him a "Hero of the Environment″ and “The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger." Romm was acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, where he oversaw $1 billion in R&D, demonstration, and deployment of low-carbon technology. He is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT.

 

 

The Veiled Impediment

Consider if you will three situations in which different groups of people have been tasked with changing the status quo in various ways (each according to a specific context) in order to deliver “better outcomes”. The first is enacted at a local community level, the second at a corporate level (which may or may not have international ramifications) and the third at a global level. 

Case 1. The Government Taskforce

Somewhere on the planet this week a government will appoint a taskforce or establish a Royal Commission to enquire into a matter of grave concern to the local community. The issue might be one of police corruption, the decriminalisation of drugs, food security, or the welfare of indigenous youth - but investigations will generally follow a similar path:

• Terms of reference will be set by bureaucrats in such a way as to circumscribe the investigation, and thence relevant evidence to be collected, while validating present assumptions (about the nature of the problem and its resolution)
• Designated experts will be dutifully summoned to repeat opinions already on the public record
• A panel will be convened to hear “new” evidence
• The community will be consulted - in at least one of two favoured ways:
  • Town Hall meetings may be organised to allow locals to vent their collective feelings - though these gatherings usually serve only to inflame previously known attitudes
  • Individuals will be invited to respond to a survey containing a number of predictable, tick-the-box, questions in which pre-ordained expressions of the problem are implicit.
• More likely than not the findings will avoid advocating substantial change, recognising governments' reticence in this regard, and merely reinforce current notions regarding what should be done.

Sometimes considerable public funds (the item most likely to attract the ire of talk-back radio hosts and the tabloid press) will be spent on these enquiries. Meanwhile relevant Ministers will be hoping to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat by confirming novel, more effective, solutions for addressing the matter in question. The community's trust in government policy and decision-making is at stake. Reprisals for failure will be discernible via the ballot box at the next election.

Case 2. The Executive Leadership Team

As predictable as the annual migration of Pacific salmon, in at least one week every year, thousands of executive teams will seek prolonged sanctuary in their Boardrooms. Those from more profitable enterprises will probably zoom off to more exotic locations. The task ahead of them? To recast their strategy for the coming year.

Almost certainly they will be hoping to arrive at distinctive ways for increasing profits, strengthening their brands or driving alignment around a new operating model. Any strategic imperatives will have been decided in advance by the CEO - with appropriate input from the leadership team. Quite possibly they will be following advice from consultants who will have been asked to provide economic and industry forecasts for the next three years. These same advisers may also be facilitating the retreat using a generic process their associates developed for this purpose.

Over the course of two or three days participants will examine current results and productivity targets relative to their competitive position in the market, receive briefings on new products in the pipeline, and review any mergers or acquisitions in the offing. Other items, fitted in between social and sporting activities, may include, for example, talent management and customer satisfaction polls.

Following the retreat these business leaders will return to the more familiar routine of running their divisions - invigorated by their collegial commitment to the new plan and equally buoyed by the realisation that their strategic responsibilities are over for yet another year. At risk is the company's future performance, financial results and reputation, as well as shareholder value. Reprisals for failure (reflected in the marketplace and the stockmarket) could result in the sacking of the CEO and the replacement of key executives.

Case 3. The United Nations Summit

Towards the end of June, twenty years after the original Earth Summit, thousands of delegates from national governments, the private sector, NGOs and community groups will descend upon Rio de Janeiro once again for the UN’s Conference on Sustainable Development. Official discussions will focus on two main themes: How to build a green economy to achieve sustainable development (and lift people out of poverty) and how to improve international coordination for sustainable development.

Representatives at Rio+20 will be hoping to come away with renewed commitments as to how we can work together more effectively to reduce poverty, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection on an increasingly crowded planet.

On the Rio+20 website there is a noticeboard where messages of hope for successful outcomes from the summit have been put. These posts come from all over the world and from all sectors of society. They resonate as a collective cry of anguish - pleading as one for commonsense to prevail. Imploring far fewer words in favour of more urgent action, demanding a more courageous commitment to change, expressing unity as a species and concerns for future generations, these notes, many just brief epigrams, are a poignant reminder of how much faith we put in our elected leaders to know what to do in times of trouble and to put into action what needs doing.

In this instance risk is both extreme and existential - in that we are running out of time to make fundamental changes to ingrained patterns of industrial production and consumption. Failure in this context is too terrible to contemplate. It might mean we have forgone one of the best opportunities to tackle climate change and poverty. Reprisals for failure will be taken by nature. We might complain about the lack of political will. But ultimately the game will be out of our hands... 

The Veiled Impediment

In all three examples it is highly probable we will regard almost any achievement as limited and disappointing, or at least much less than most of us would have wanted and expected. There are good reasons for this. Most importantly there is an obstacle in the way that inhibits more effective and enduring change. It is hidden from view - which is why I call it the "veiled impediment".

But first I want to dismiss some of the more fallacious charges we are prone to use when reprimanding others. Especially an increasing tendency to blame people for less than satisfactory outcomes. I learned long ago from the great W. Edwards Deming that the majority of problems we encounter result from what statisticians refer to as common-causes rather than special-causes. Common-causes are the normal, historical, predictable and quantifiable variations in a system, whereas special-causes are unusual, not previously observed, non-quantifiable variations. In other words it is reasonable to suppose there is something inherently flawed about the processes we use, rather than any overt individual incompetence or negative interference.

For the most part the intentions of taskforce panels, executive teams and UN summit delegates are honourable - their aspirations similar to our own. They are upholding their values and fighting for what they believe to be true and fair. Appreciating this, and the significance of common-cause variation, compels a fundamental reframe as it shifts emphasis away from personalities to the issue of design.

So what is it about contemporary process design that is so defective? I believe the unchallenged culprit is habit. We generally comprehend a given situation using knowledge previously acquired and tested. It is actually quite rare for us to deliberately create new knowledge or fabricate new tools to deal with new problems. But that means we can only ever know what worked before and only ever use tools and techniques ordinarily available. We then rationalise these habits as "best practice". And who in their right mind would opt for second-best?

In the case of our protagonists almost all the information they acquire will point to them being on the right track. Even against the odds they probably anticipate success – otherwise why would they embark upon such ambitious endeavors in the first place?

But here’s the rub: in each of my three cases the level of deeper awareness (of integral consciousness) from which they are viewing their issues, the individual knowledge and collective understanding they bring to these matters, and the language and methods they are using to make sense of the information being thrown at them from all quarters, are utterly inadequate given the profound complexity of the matters with which they are dealing.

Worse still, they do not realise this. In fact it is highly probable they have convinced themselves the job they are doing is entirely acceptable, if not exceptional. This would be comic if it were not for the fact that literally billions of people’s lives depend on a new vision for humanity out of the UN summit; thousands of people will be impacted by any discrete strategic plan that lacks resilience in the face of change; and the community at large will suffer if a government taskforce or Royal Commission fails in its mission. 

Designing Better Outcomes

Much depends on what we mean by “better outcomes” of course and context is vitally important in this regard. Personally I interpret “better outcomes” to refer to three ostensibly discrete yet intimately related factors. Depending upon the depth of enquiry and the intensity of integral interrogation:

1. Better outcomes at level 1 means that enduring solutions (socially beneficial, culturally empathic, ethically apposite and economically feasible) can be found and applied to our most obdurate problems today

2. Better outcomes at level 2 means that upgraded means of sensing and making sense of the human condition are continuously incorporated into learning and enquiry processes - thereby leading to a situation where fewer problems of the type we are witnessing today are likely to re-occur in the future

3. Better outcomes at level 3 means that individual and collective epistemologies evolve onto higher planes of appreciation such that optimal expressions of what it means to be human (creativity, compassion and courage) find congruence in a new wisdom of panarchic communion that touches us all.

The implications are profound. Thinking-as-usual is a veiled impediment to progress. Like rats trapped on a treadmill it will get us nowhere and achieve little but for exhaustion and frustration.

Instead, we need to incorporate new ways of perceiving, clarifying, interpreting, conversing and responding to a myriad, continuously mutating, features within our many cogent constructions of the human story. And we need our design charrettes to evolve in alignment with this new consciousness.

In other words genuine progress (in government enquiries, corporate strategy development and international symposia alike) depends upon our ability to:

• discover more sophisticated ways of expressing what we are seeing, thinking, and feeling
• ensure tacit assumptions underpinning individual expressions of reality are transparent to others
• create more inventive and accurate methods for synthesising and liberating wisdom (including advanced pattern-finding techniques)
• imagine more inspiring futures that provide emotional continuity with our past yet liberate the human spirit and draw upon our innate desire for empathy, cooperation and unity in diversity
• expand and improve our use of real-time, granular, broadband intelligence from multiple sources
• compose a new vernacular for interweaving deeper reflection with collaborative action as well as the past with the present and the possible.

At a minimum there are ten principles we must incorporate and embed into our routine practices when planning and implementing change:

1. Design charrettes that include and connect all salient features - even when these are considered to be nominally beyond the scope of our enquiry as defined by others
2. Questions deliberately crafted to probe our innermost values, beliefs and assumptions in order to reveal and open up entirely fresh options and alternative pathways
3. Dialogical cycles that recursively and iteratively explore our individual and collective interiors (psychologies and cultures) as well as the more palpable exteriors (of the built environment, human behaviours, technologies and systems) we erroneously believe we can control
4. Immersive decision theatre facilities in which the most intricate scenarios can be visualised and played out in ways that surface a range of future strategic options
5. Analytical methods (quantitative and qualitative) that purposefully trawl across the “expanded now” of our total life experience (a compaction of past, present and possible future states of the natural or business ecosystems that concern us) in order to “include and transcend” potential pitfalls, flawed routines, outmoded stratagems, etc.
6. Mechanisms for accelerating our individual and collective learning metabolisms while institutionalising these to effect faster yet more considered trajectories for intentional evolution
7. Procedures to enable our attention density to remain constantly attuned to new or unanticipated developments in the broader world-system
8. Methodologies for using real-time intelligence to navigate changing conditions so that strategy becomes a continuous process of resilient design, review and recalibration
9. Shared narratives for portraying a range of possible futures and for guiding collective action within preferred futures
10. Tools and vocabulary that can be used to develop a mature capability for strategic leaning - rather than the contemporary bias for an immediate response when our senses warn us of an impending situation that needs our attention.

Unintended consequences

It seems to me that these ten design criteria must be critical attributes of any learning system intended to ensure that what we are doing and how we are doing it, today and into the future, is sustainable and relevant. Yet these design criteria are precisely what the protagonists in my three cases lack. It is also the reason I know not to expect “better outcomes” from their activities – irrespective of any extravagant promises made to the contrary - however much I hope that is not the case.

The sad truth is the final result from most strategy retreats, government taskforces and globally-sponsored summits, are predictable for their triteness, absence of imagination, the esteem accorded banal generalities, and a seemingly infinite recycling of clichéd aims and objectives dressed up in novel slogans.

Because of this inadequate systemic and self-awareness, the inability of current modes of enquiry to include and transcend such astonishing variety, the lack of an inclusive language for depicting complex patterns, and the impoverished methods we habitually use in place of thoughtfully designed, bespoke architectures, the pace of change towards an intentionally empathic future for humanity is incredibly and frustratingly slow.

The gradual awakening of citizens to various forms of oppression and injustice we are witnessing today in so many different forums and events around the world, especially in terms of how we deal more effectively with embedded corruption, political dictatorships, terrorists, peak oil, a rampaging banking sector, food security, climate change and the like are now mirrored in a similar prerequisite for transcending orthodoxies concerned with how we perceive, interpret, talk to each other and act upon such matters.

Without transformation of the principal means we use to comprehend the truth of our situation at any moment we may simply fall into the trap of assuming we know what is best and of reproducing what has already failed. If we do that for too much longer we should not be surprised if the collective voice of humanity rises up against those in authority to threaten a terrible retribution.

The Third Industrial Revolution

Our industrial civilization is at a crossroads. Oil and the other fossil fuel energies that make up the industrial way of life are sunsetting, and the technologies made from and propelled by these energies are antiquated. The entire industrial infrastructure built off of fossil fuels is aging and in disrepair. The result is that unemployment is rising to dangerous levels all over the world. Governments, businesses and consumers are awash in debt and living standards are declining everywhere. A record one billion human beings - nearly one seventh of the human race - face hunger and starvation. Worse, climate change from fossil fuel-based industrial activity looms on the horizon, imperiling our own species’ very ability to survive.

Since the beginning of the Great Recession in the summer of 2008, governments, the business community, and civil society have been embroiled in a fierce debate over how to restart the global economy. While austerity measures and fiscal, labor, and market reforms will all be necessary, they are not sufficient to re-grow the economy. Let me explain by way of an anecdote. Just months after arriving in office, the new Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, asked me to come to Berlin to help her administration address the question of how to create new jobs and grow the German economy in the twenty-first century. I began my remarks by asking the chancellor, “How do you grow the German economy, the EU economy, or, for that matter, the global economy, in the last stages of a great energy era and an industrial revolution built on it?”

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Second Industrial Revolution is dying and that industrial induced CO2 emissions are threatening the viability of life on Earth. What we need now is a bold new economic narrative that can take us into a sustainable post-carbon future. Finding that new vision requires an understanding of the technological forces that precipitate the profound transformations in society.

A New Economic Narrative

The great economic revolutions in history occur when new communication technologies converge with new energy systems. New energy revolutions make possible more expansive and integrated trade. Accompanying communication revolutions manage the new complex commercial activities made possible by the new energy flows. In the 19th century, cheap steam powered print technology and the introduction of public schools gave rise to a print-literate work force with the communication skills to manage the increased flow of commercial activity made possible by coal and steam power technology, ushering in the First Industrial Revolution. In the 20th century, centralized electricity communication - the telephone, and later radio and television - became the communication medium to manage a more complex and dispersed oil, auto, and suburban era, and the mass consumer culture of the Second Industrial Revolution.

Today, Internet technology and renewable energies are beginning to merge to create a new infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) that will change the way power is distributed in the 21st century. In the coming era, hundreds of millions of people will produce their own renewable energy in their homes, offices, and factories and share green electricity with each other in an “Energy Internet” just like we now generate and share information online.

The establishment of a Third Industrial Revolution [TIR] infrastructure will create thousands of new businesses and millions of jobs and lay the basis for a sustainable global economy in the 21st century. However, let me add a cautionary note. Like every other communication and energy infrastructure in history, the various pillars of a Third Industrial Revolution must be laid down simultaneously or the foundation will not hold. That’s because each pillar can only function in relationship to the others.

The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are (1) shifting to renewable energy; (2) transforming the building stock of every continent into micro–power plants to collect renewable energies on-site; (3) deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies; (4) using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy internet that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of renewable energy locally, on-site, they can sell surplus green electricity back to the grid and share it with their continental neighbors); and (5) transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell green electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid.

The creation of a renewable energy regime, loaded by buildings, partially stored in the form of hydrogen, distributed via a green electricity Internet, and connected to plug-in, zero-emission transport, opens the door to a Third Industrial Revolution. The entire system is interactive, integrated, and seamless. When these five pillars come together, they make up an indivisible technological platform—an emergent system whose properties and functions are qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. In other words, the synergies between the pillars create a new economic paradigm that can transform the world.

The public/private financing of the Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure build-out across the world will be at the very top of the agenda for the international banking and financial community in the first half of the 21st century.

The Shift To Lateral Power

The Third Industrial Revolution is the last of the great Industrial Revolutions and will lay the foundational infrastructure for an emerging collaborative age. Its completion will signal the end of a two-hundred-year commercial saga characterized by industrious thinking, entrepreneurial markets, and mass labor workforces and the beginning of a new era marked by collaborative behavior, social networks and professional and technical workforces. In the coming half century, the conventional, centralized business operations of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions will increasingly be subsumed by the distributed business practices of the Third Industrial Revolution; and the traditional, hierarchical organization of economic and political power will give way to lateral power organized nodally across society.

Lateral power is a new force in the world. Steve Jobs and the other innovators of his generation took us from expensive centralized main-frame computers, owned and controlled by a handful of global companies, to cheap desktop computers and cell phones, allowing billions of people to connect up with one another in peer-to-peer networks in the social spaces of the internet. The democratization of communications has enabled nearly one third of the human population on earth to share music, knowledge, news and social life on an open playing field, marking one of the great evolutionary advances in the history of our species.

But as impressive as this accomplishment is, it is only half of the story. The new, green energy industries are improving performance and reducing costs at an ever accelerating rate. And just as the generation and distribution of information is becoming nearly free, renewable energies will also. The sun, wind, biomass, geothermal heat and hydropower are available to everyone and, like information, are never used up.

When Internet communications manage green energy, every human being on earth becomes his or her own source of power, both literally and figuratively. Billions of human beings sharing their renewable energy laterally on a continental green electricity internet creates the foundation for the democratization of the global economy and a more just society.

Distributed Capitalism

Energy regimes shape the nature of civilizations - how they are organized, how the fruits of commerce and trade are distributed, how political power is exercised, and how social relations are conducted. To understand how the new Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure is likely to dramatically change the distribution of economic power in the twenty-first century, it is helpful to step back and examine how the fossil fuel–based First and Second Industrial Revolutions reordered power relations over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Fossil fuels - coal, oil, and natural gas - are elite energies for the simple reason that they are found only in select places. They require a significant military investment to secure their access and continual geopolitical management to assure their availability. They also require top down command and control systems and massive concentrations of capital to move them from underground to the end users. The ability to centralize production and distribution - the essence of modern capitalism - is critical to the effective performance of the system as a whole. The centralized energy infrastructure, in turn, sets the conditions for the rest of the economy, encouraging similar business models across every sector.

Virtually all of the other critical industries that emerged from the oil culture - modern finance, telecommunications, automotive, power and utilities, and commercial construction - and that feed off of the fossil fuel spigot were similarly predisposed to bigness in order to achieve their own economies of scale. And, like the oil industry, they require huge sums of capital to operate and are organized in a centralized fashion.

Three of the four largest companies in the world today are oil companies - Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, and BP. Underneath these giant energy companies are some five hundred global companies representing every sector and industry - with a combined revenue of $22.5 trillion, which is the equivalent of one-third of the world’s $62 trillion GDP - that are inseparably connected to and dependent on fossil fuels for their very survival.

The emerging Third Industrial Revolution, by contrast, is organized around distributed renewable energies that are found everywhere and are, for the most part, free - sun, wind, hydro, geothermal heat, biomass, and ocean waves and tides. These dispersed energies will be collected at millions of local sites and then bundled and shared with others over a continental green electricity internet to achieve optimum energy levels and maintain a high-performing, sustainable economy. The distributed nature of renewable energies necessitates collaborative rather than hierarchical command and control mechanisms.

This new lateral energy regime establishes the organizational model for the countless economic activities that multiply from it. A more distributed and collaborative industrial revolution, in turn, invariably leads to a more distributed sharing of the wealth generated.

The extraordinary capital costs of owning and operating giant centralized telephone, radio, and television communications technology and fossil fuel and nuclear power plants in markets is giving way to the new “distributed capitalism,” in which the low entry costs in lateral networks make it possible for virtually everyone to become a potential entrepreneur and collaborator, creating and sharing information and energy in open commons. Witness twenty something young men creating Google, Facebook, and other global information networks, literally in their college dorm rooms and thousands of small businesses converting their buildings to green micro power plants and connecting with one another in regional electricity networks.

What I am describing is a fundamental change in the way capitalism functions that is now unfolding across the economy and reshaping how companies conduct business. The shrinking of transaction costs in the music business and publishing field with the emergence of file sharing of music, eBooks, and news blogs, is wreaking havoc on these traditional industries. We can expect similar disruptive impacts as the diminishing transaction costs of green energy allow manufacturers, service industries, and retailers to produce and share goods and services in vast economic networks with very little outlay of financial capital.

Democratizing Manufacturing

For example, consider manufacturing. Nothing is more suggestive of the industrial way of life than highly capitalized, giant, centralized factories equipped with heavy machines and attended by blue-collar workforces, churning out mass-produced products on assembly lines. But what if millions of people could manufacture batches or even single manufactured items in their own homes or businesses, cheaper, quicker, and with the same quality control as the most advanced state-of the-art factories on earth?

While the TIR economy allows millions of people to produce their own virtual information and energy, a new digital manufacturing revolution now opens up the possibility of following suit in the production of durable goods. In the new era, everyone can potentially be their own manufacturer as well as their own internet site and power company. The process is called 3-D printing; and although it sounds like science fiction, it is already coming online, and promises to change the entire way we think of industrial production. Think about pushing the print button on your computer and sending a digital file to an inkjet printer, except, with 3-D printing, the machine runs off a three-dimensional product. Using computer aided design, software directs the 3-D printer to build successive layers of the product using powder, molten plastic, or metals to create the material scaffolding. The 3-D printer can produce multiple copies just like a photocopy machine. All sorts of goods, from jewelry to mobile phones, auto and aircraft parts, medical implants, and batteries are being “printed out” in what is being termed “additive manufacturing,” distinguishing it from the “subtractive manufacturing,” which involves cutting down and pairing off materials and then attaching them together.

3-D entrepreneurs are particularly bullish about additive manufacturing, because the process requires as little as 10 percent of the raw material expended in traditional manufacturing and uses less energy than conventional factory production, thus greatly reducing the cost.

In the same way that the Internet radically reduced entry costs in generating and disseminating information, giving rise to new businesses like Google and Facebook, additive manufacturing has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of producing hard goods, making entry costs sufficiently lower to encourage hundreds of thousands of mini manufacturers—small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) - to challenge and potentially outcompete the giant manufacturing companies that were at the center of the First and Second Industrial Revolution economies.

Already, a spate of new start-up companies are entering the 3-D printing market with names like Within Technologies, Digital Forming, Shape Ways, Rapid Quality Manufacturing, Stratasys, Bespoke Innovations, 3D Systems, MakerBot Industries, Freedom of Creation, LGM, and Contour Crafting and are determined to reinvent the very idea of manufacturing in the Third Industrial era.

The energy saved at every step of the digital manufacturing process, from reduction in materials used, to less energy expended in making the product, when applied across the global economy, adds up to a qualitative increase in energy efficiency beyond anything imaginable in the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. When the energy used to power the production process is renewable and also generated on site, the full impact of a lateral Third Industrial Revolution becomes strikingly apparent. Since approximately 84 percent of the productivity gains in the manufacturing and service industries are attributable to increases in thermodynamic efficiencies - only 14 percent of productivity gains are the result of capital invested per worker - we begin to grasp the significance of the enormous surge in productivity that will accompany the Third Industrial Revolution and what it will mean for society.

Near Zero Cost Marketing and Logistics

The democratization of manufacturing is being accompanied by the tumbling costs of marketing. Because of the centralized nature of the communication technologies of the first and second industrial revolutions - newspapers, magazines, radio, and television - marketing costs were high and favored giant firms who could afford to devote substantial funds to market their products and services. The internet has transformed marketing from a significant expense to a negligible cost, allowing start ups and small and medium size enterprises to market their goods and services on internet sites that stretch over virtual space, enabling them to compete and even out compete many of the giant business enterprises of the 21st century.

Consider Etsy, a brash, web start-up company that has taken off in the past seven years. Etsy was founded by a young New York University graduate, Rob Kalin, who made furniture in his apartment. Frustrated that he had no way to connect with potential buyers interested in hand-crafted furniture, Kalin teamed up with a few friends and put up a website designed to bring individual craftsmen of all kinds, from around the world, together with prospective buyers. The site has become a global virtual showroom, where millions of buyers and thousands of sellers from more than fifty countries are connecting, breathing new life into craft production—an art that had largely disappeared with the advent of modern industrial capitalism.

Connecting multitudes of sellers and buyers in virtual space is almost free. By replacing all of the middlemen - from wholesalers to retailers - with a distributed virtual network of sellers and buyers and eliminating the transaction costs that are marked up at every stage in the marketing process, Etsy has created a new global craft bazaar that scales laterally rather than hierarchically, and markets goods collaboratively rather than top-down.

Etsy brings another dimension to the market - the personalization of relationships between seller and buyer. The website hosts chat rooms, coordinates online craft shows, and conducts seminars, allowing sellers and buyers to interact, exchange ideas, customize products, and create social bonds that can last a lifetime. Giant, global companies mass-producing standardized products on assembly lines operated by anonymous workforces can’t compete with the kind of intimate one-to-one relationship between artisan and patron.

Although still in its infancy, Etsy is a quickly growing enterprise. In 2011, Etsy’s sales topped nearly $500 million. In a recent conversation, Kalin told me that his mission is to help foster “empathic consciousness” in the global economic arena and lay the foundation for a more inclusive society. His vision of connecting up “millions of local living economies that will create a sense of community in the economy again” is the essence of the Third Industrial Revolution model. Etsy is only one of hundreds of global Internet companies that are bringing together producers and consumers in virtual marketing spaces and, in the process, democratizing marketing costs across the global economy.

As the new 3-D technology becomes more widespread, on site, just in time customized manufacturing of products will also reduce logistics costs with the possibility of huge energy savings. The cost of transporting products will plummet in the coming decades because an increasing array of goods will be produced locally in thousands of micro-manufacturing plants and transported regionally by trucks powered by green electricity and hydrogen generated on site.

The lateral scaling of the Third Industrial Revolution allows small and medium size enterprises to flourish. Still, global companies will not disappear. Rather, they will increasingly metamorphose from primary producers and distributers to aggregators. In the new economic era, their role will be to coordinate and manage the multiple networks that move commerce and trade across the value chain.

New Business Models and Jobs in the 21st Century

Germany is leading the way into the new economic era. The Federal Government has teamed up with six regions across Germany to test the introduction of an energy internet that will allow tens of thousands of German businesses and millions of home owners to collect renewable energies on site, store them in the form of hydrogen, and share green electricity across Germany in a smart energy internet. Entire communities are transforming their commercial and residential buildings into green micro-power plants. To date, more than 1 million buildings in Germany have been converted into partial green micro power plants. Companies like Siemens, Bosch and Daimler are creating sophisticated new IT software, hardware, appliances and vehicles, that will merge distributed Internet communication with distributed energy, to create smart buildings, infrastructure, and green mobility for the cities of the future.

The transition to the Third Industrial Revolution will require a wholesale reconfiguration of the entire economic infrastructure of each country, creating millions of jobs and countless new goods and services. Nations will need to invest in renewable energy technology on a massive scale; convert millions of buildings into green micro power plants; embed hydrogen and other storage technology throughout the national infrastructure; lay down a green energy internet; and transform the automobile from the internal combustion engine to electric plug-in and fuel cell cars.

The remaking of each nation’s infrastructure and the retooling of industries is going to require a massive retraining of workers on a scale matching the professional and vocational training at the onset of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. The new high tech workforce of the Third Industrial Revolution will need to be skilled in renewable energy technologies, green construction, IT and embedded computing, nanotechnology, sustainable chemistry, fuel-cell development, digital power grid management, hybrid electric and hydrogen-powered transport and hundreds of other technical fields.

Entrepreneurs and managers will need to be educated to take advantage of cutting edge business models, including distributed and collaborative research and development strategies, open source and networked commerce, performance contracting, shared savings agreements, and sustainable low-carbon logistics and supply chain management. The skill levels and managerial styles of the Third Industrial Revolution workforce will be qualitatively different from those of the workforce of the Second Industrial Revolution.

The lateral scaling of the Third Industrial Revolution shifts the fulcrum of power from centralized global companies to distributed small and medium size enterprise networks. The rapid decline in transaction costs brought on by The Third Industrial Revolution are leading to the democratization of information, energy, manufacturing, marketing, and logistics, and the ushering in of a new era of distributed capitalism that is likely to change the very way we think of commercial life. The Third Industrial Revolution offers the hope that we can arrive at a sustainable post-carbon era by mid-century. We have the science, the technology, and the game plan to make it happen. Now it is a question of whether we will recognize the economic possibilities that lie ahead and muster the will to get there in time.

This article was written by Jeremy Rifkin and is reprinted here with his permission. Jeremy is the author of The New York Times best selling book, The Third Industrial Revolution, How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. He is an adviser to the European Union and to heads of state around the world. He is a senior lecturer at the Wharton School’s Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania and the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, D.C.

Occupy Your Mind

Regular readers will recall it is my occasional habit to reprint articles of particular consequence in The Hames Report. In that spirit I recently asked my US-based friend and colleague Dr David Martin if I could print a piece he had just published on his BlogSpot Inverted Alchemy. He did not hesitate.

But then I read this important piece again. And again. I realised that merely reprinting David’s article would not satisfy the insatiable desire I had to elaborate on some of his most critical points. Consequently I am publishing David’s article in italics below and then making some further comments of my own.

Returning from Salt Lake City to Charlottesville via Chicago provided a suboptimal venue to listen to the audio of Ken Wilber’s interview conducted by my friend Todd Goldfarb. It turns out that cheap courtesy headphones from a hotel gym have no sound dampening value to overpower the engines on a CRJ-700. The good news was that the audio quality was so dreadful that I had to concentrate. So, I sat next to the window, focused on the ground passing below and listened to Ken describe the passage of humanity’s transitions. And it was in the observation of the millions of acres of industrial farmland over which I was passing at 38,000 feet that I settled in on the puzzle: Is it possible to perceive human transformation as a first person actor or are evolutions of consciousness only discerned in retrospect?

Let me provide a bit of background. Todd and Ken were discussing the notion that we are on the edge of a new inflection of the human experience. This edge is, in part, defined by previous inflections (from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to modern to post-modern, etc.) and has several particular characteristics that are noteworthy. In his description of the ‘Integral’ transformation, Ken suggested that, in contrast to previous inflections, rather than rejecting past human narratives, a hallmark of this inflection is the explicit inclusion of wisdom and experience from all previous epochs. And, for a moment over Iowa, I found myself trying to reconcile this vision with the reality from which I had just come.

You see, I had just been at a board meeting where I had heard representatives from one of New York's leading investment banks talk about the merits of fixed income investments and had heard them discuss the fact that they were encouraging investments in revenue-based instruments (like water) rather than debt issued by cities and counties. After all, they argued, even unemployed poor people have to drink! The neatly groomed fields below me, the echo of merchants peddling water as a safe investment, and Ken all converged in an unholy trinity between Cedar Rapids and Oxford Junction. I can recall the moment. Ken was in the middle of one of his many “never before in human history” generalizations…

Who do we think we are? We have got a real problem. I have described with effusive affection my respect for Karl Popper on numerous occasions so I will not belabour his criticism of our Occidental hubris again. As I have commented in my recent posts on the Occupy movement, what I find most disturbing about our present consensus delusional state is the intersection of our belief that we access information and our resulting belief that we’re informed.

Has capitalism ‘worked’ when:

1. The largest communist country on earth actually owns a controlling interest in our debt and supplies a considerable amount of our consumables

2. There has never (since the Land Act of 1820 and the Morrill Act of 1862 to our modern military, technology, and service profit-subsidized government procurements of today) been a phase in US history where we actually had open, unsubsidized free markets; and,

3. Our income distribution and growth is at its all time greatest asymmetry?

Has our social conscience evolved when:

1. Ken Wilber describes our evolution past slavery, for example, at a time when there are more humans (per capita) in slavery today than at any recorded period of history

2. When we continue to promote 19th century narratives about wisdom traditions ranging from Egypt to Peru to Mongolia without consideration of the possibility that these civilizations actually may have out-engineered our self proclaimed modern marvels; and,

3. When ‘hope’ and ‘change’ has led to more remote control assassinations than the notorious Bush / Cheney regime?

It would be lovely to imagine a world in which we would hold ourselves to an abiding commitment that ‘evolution’ might actually involve some notion of improvement. Improvement of the means by which we interact with the Earth. Improvement in the manner in which we engage cultures diverse from our own. Improvement in how we assess the qualities of ourselves and our ecosystems. Improvements in how we engage in dialogue and discourse holding genuine respect for alternative points of view.

Alas the evidence shows us that we seem to be more drawn to evolution that involves the selective repression of ever larger numbers of voices – voices who have long memories and have alternative views to our own. Is humanity at a tipping point or are we walking past the masses from whom our ignorance has extracted humanity?

The fulcrum around which a real tipping will occur will be discerned when it is set into place by the hands of all tribes, communities, families, and peoples. We will know it by their presence; not tell them in their absence.

If one explores below the surface of this highly considered response to an experiential dilemma the implications in David Martin’s cautionary thesis appear to me to be profoundly disturbing. Not only do they call into question the degree to which we are actually sentient individuals (in comparison, say, with herd animals possessing relatively uncouth instincts and unvarying habits) they also point to Occidental “maturity” as a delusion in which many of us are still trapped.

This may be partly to do with the hubris arising from our recent technological prowess and subsequently assumed moral authority – though the latter (if it ever existed) is clearly in a state of rapid collapse today. It may even have something to do with the so-called six “killer apps” (i.e. competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the Protestant work ethic) identified by the economic historian Niall Ferguson as an explanation for the West’s prominent (now declining) position in the global world-system over the past 300 years or so.

More ominously, I suspect, is an ingrained belief that those of us with an Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage are somehow smarter, wiser and creatively superior than others. This is not just arrogance. It is intensely foolish. Yet if we needed evidence we have only to recall the number of occasions during the past half century where assumed Occidental superiority has led to our military powers trampling over the cradles of our civilisation in Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East. As David Martin queries: Who do we think we are?

I am reminded of some research undertaken by professor Robert Sternberg at Yale University who undertook and extensive study of stupidity, which he identified as a lack of applied wisdom rather than the absence of intelligence. Sternberg argued that specific aspects of life as a smart person actually cultivate stupidity. In other words that it sometimes takes a really smart person to do something truly stupid.

Sternberg concluded there are four main tendencies that lead us into this quandary:
1. Egocentrism – the fallacy whereby we foolishly come to believe that because we are so smart, the world does and should revolve around us
2. Omniscience – the fallacy whereby we foolishly come to believe that part of the reason the world revolves around us is we know much more than we do, or even all we need to know
3. Omnipotence – the fallacy whereby we foolishly believe such knowledge makes us invincible. We can do whatever we want and get away with it
4. Invulnerability – the fallacy whereby we foolishly believe we can get away with it because our intelligence makes us invulnerable to attack and even to criticism.

We move into a very vulnerable space indeed when we are either too smart (believing we know everything we need to know and that we can get away with any act) or too dumb (to realise we lack the cognitive capacity to recognise and overcome our stupidity). I suspect one of these characteristics are present in the majority of people occupying leadership roles today.

Of course the worst possible scenario would be if the world were led by really stupid people. However the situation gets almost as ludicrous when smart people use their intelligence or influence to quarantine themselves from the very feedback that would appraise them of the reality of a situation. This is commonplace in the corridors of power.

Furthermore, if we have already arrived at a point where we believe other people, or nations, or cultures, or social groupings, are less capable of defining a collective future for humanity and that consequently it is incumbent upon us to re-establish a future in which our failing social, economic, political and commercial systems continue to endure, then our collective stupidity is profoundly entrenched.

Like David Martin I fail to understand how we can imagine our society (i.e. we are implicitly referring to the so-called developed world remember) has reached the zenith of its evolution as a civilised global community, and that we are consequently approaching an inflection point that will enable us to include and transcend all previous experiences and knowledge, when we still reach for the sword before the pen; still fiercely exclude those who hold differing beliefs to us; still feed an industrial war machine that can easily annihilate humanity; are still fearful enough of the unknown as to worship primitive deities; still innately disengaged from the natural environment that sustains all life; still arrogant enough to believe our ways of knowing outweigh alternative epistemologies; and still bound up with our own overwhelming sense of individual pride and self-importance.

The single, most important, feature for enabling intentional evolution is expressed within David’s final paragraph. He says: The fulcrum around which a real tipping will occur will be discerned when it is set into place by the hands of all tribes, communities, families, and peoples. We will know it by their presence; not tell them in their absence.

Because of our tendency to deliberately exclude others we are not at a global tipping point by any stretch of the imagination. For that we need a critical mass of the world’s citizens to be able to convey new possibilities within a fresh narrative for humanity arising from a higher consciousness and sense of self-awareness. That will be a new human story.

In contrast we are still content to perpetuate ideas, principles, models and values that were outmoded long ago. Can anyone really state that our collective state of being (our empathic consciousness) is more advanced than that which existed fifty years ago?

That is not to deny a palpable feeling of anticipation, articulated by many in words and deeds and expressed in the Occupy Wall Street and other similarly motivated movements, that numbers of concerned people in Western society may be coming out of their hubristic slumber and awakening to the realities of the human condition. They may be challenging the linearly-constrained models that are still in play across our society and that have given rise to astonishing affluence and opportunity on the one hand and ingrained poverty, hunger, injustice and inequity on the other. They may be standing up and shouting “enough is enough” and that we must craft new intentions regarding our relationship to each other and to planet Earth if we are to survive the extinction of our species. But all of this in no way adds up to a universal tipping point.

I grew up in the United Kingdom immediately following World War II. Through my public school education I was inducted into a Western empirical culture that strongly believed in its own superiority and invincibility. As I became more accomplished and comfortable in that social milieu it did not dawn upon me that I was illiterate when it came to alternative cultures. Only later did I begin to comprehend that I existed in a bubble of blissful ignorance.

Vast numbers of people are in a similar state today. In an age of unprecedented travel they do not journey far from home. Their views are parochial. They watch the kind of infotainment on television designed to keep them docile, content and compliant. Inducted into a way of life they do not challenge they have little conception of what poverty or hunger (for example) actually means. Nor do they really appreciate the freedom, democracy or liberty they supposedly have in abundance.

As an Australian living in Asia while working across the Global South I am constantly dismayed and frustrated by the continuing conceit I perceive in the US-Eurocentric view of how things are and how they should be. Occidental traditions are relatively young in comparison with the great Amerindian, Indigenous, Oceanic, Indic and Sinic cultural mindsets. The sooner we are able to embrace these alternative traditions and benefit from their wisdom the sooner we may reach a genuine tipping point for the authentic advancement of humanity. That will be the moment we are able to shift from involuntary to intentional evolution. I hazard a guess that a shift of this nature, entailing a new inflection of the human experience, will not be triggered from those trapped in Western mindsets. In fact you can bet on it!

Old King Coal: A letter to my grandchildren

Dear Eglantine, Addie, Bodhi, Rafael, Roman and little Mia (who is still preparing for her entrance into the world)...

I am sitting at home in my study in inner Bangkok looking out over Sukhumvit. Most of the central plains of Thailand are inundated with flood waters. It is raining heavily and the run-off from the north is fast encroaching on the city’s canals. The death toll currently stands at 289 and the economic cost is already running into billions of baht. At this stage 187 districts in 26 provinces are still under water, causing untold misery to more than 2.2 million people. Many citizens have been hording goods and supermarket shelves are now emptied of bottled water, rice, meat, fish and other staples. Watching the unfolding drama over the past few days it is so evident that officials are powerless to do much against the forces of nature. Parts of this city are sinking at a rate of 3 centimetres annually. It is no longer difficult to imagine a time when Bangkok becomes the Venice of the East once again!

Meanwhile my thoughts are with you, my grandchildren. In our sun-burnt country the government has been congratulating itself on passing legislation that puts a price on carbon. The bill is intended to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This is crucial if we are to combat global warming. It has been a struggle to get this far. But don’t be fooled. The legislation is all but meaningless - full of exceptions and loopholes that encourage the maintenance of the status quo in those very industries that should be at the forefront of the transition to a carbon-constrained economy. The new law cannot possibly wean us off our irrational dependence on oil, gas and coal. It does not promote investment in the adoption of cleaner energy. In fact it does quite the opposite.

Like Thailand, Australia is in the front-line of global warming. Yet most politicians, their staffers and economic advisers do not really comprehend what is happening to the climate system on our planet. Indeed there are still those in parliaments around the world who remain convinced that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy or possibly a hoax perpetrated by the scientific community. Special interest groups and corporate money have hijacked the agenda, finding one excuse after another to keep polluting Earth while profiting from their activities.

Which is why I want to say sorry. I am sorry because my generation has failed you miserably. We have not been courageous enough to acknowledge our failure nor humble enough to take urgent corrective action. I am deeply ashamed to admit this to you and I realise I cannot expect your forgiveness. At the same time I want you to know that I did my personal best to draw attention to the reckless stupidity of my generation’s imprudent and arrogant intransigence.

Occasionally I have glimpsed hope. In far away places like China, Brazil, Africa and South East Asia my words have had significant impact. Prominent community and business leaders, government officials and parliamentarians have been gracious enough to listen, to reflect and to act on the basis that, even without complete knowledge, it is wise to take precautions when it comes to a complex issue like climate change.

In our country of Australia these same words have fallen on deaf ears – mainly it seems (ironically) from those who have been charged with the responsibility to lead. I have been branded an outlier. An alarmist. Even a heretic. Such labels are not personal, you must understand. People are simply afraid. When all is said and done there is nothing more terrifying for a leader than the imperative to act without any certainty about what to do. My powers of persuasion have been inadequate to overcome addiction to a system in which considerably more value is put on immediate economic benefit than on your future health and well-being. No other case can be put to those who value money more than human life. They remain oblivious to their ignorance and selfishness and we should not expect that to change. This means you must take matters into your own hands. You cannot wait for governments to act or for business to change.

So the legacy I pass on to you, my beloved grandchildren, is far from the abundant, promising one I inherited. It has been poisoned by rampant materialism, in-built obsolesence, and a culture of declining frugality. To make matters worse our thirst for material goods is aided and abetted by a vast public relations machine inciting us to buy more and more stuff we do not really need.

In 1945, the year of my birth, there were barely 2 billion people inhabiting our planet. The future for humanity was one of hope and optimism. Later this month, somewhere on the planet, a child will be born. He or she will become the 7th billion citizen of planet Earth. Yes the six billionth child is only 11 years old. By the time you leave university there will be 8 billion of us, all struggling to achieve a better quality of life, a dream that has become all but impossible to achieve - even in the world's most developed countries. The huge demographic shift in the human population since the end of World War II has had a devastating impact on the environment. A tidal wave of humanity is migrating into the cities. Crushing poverty is everywhere. We are locked-in to human-induced atmospheric pollution (from carbon dioxide, methane and aerosols) that will trigger more frequent and extreme weather events. Nutritious food, potable water and energy are becoming more scarce. Sovereign indebtedness and social inequalities put entire nations at risk. And if all of that wasn’t terrifying enough we are beginning to witness the collapse of life-critical ecosystems necessary to provide for our future well-being.

Yet amongst all this chaos the most affluent of us tenaciously aspire to even greater wealth and greater power. If this situation persists the demand on Earth’s finite resources will be excessive, conflict will increase and climate refugees will be counted in the millions!

I hope you will appreciate that, like many others, I did not realise how much damage I was doing. But now, having lived what many of my friends in Soweto, Belo Horizonte, Chennai and even Shanghai would term a profligate lifestyle, squandering so many of the vital resources you will need to ensure a healthy, stable and secure existence without so much as a second thought, I see that my extravagant ways have made things very problematic for you. It is not just me you understand. All of us with knowledge are culpable. Politicians and their advisers, industry leaders, courts, the media...

Politicians are paid to protect us but also to safeguard your future well-being. Instead, they repeatedly lie to us, cheating you of a secure future by advocating phoney carbon offset schemes, spinning fairy tales about “clean coal”, setting ineffective targets and legislating in ways that allow the dirtiest, most toxic, industries to continue polluting the atmosphere. Why? Because far too many people are profiting financially from our addiction to fossil fuels.

With leadership in abeyance, any pretence of a moral imperative quickly fades. In a situation where there is such a dearth of honest leadership from those in power there is no question that many corporations will feel free to continue plundering and scarring the environment, driving species to the point of extinction, ignoring grievances from local communities and writing off the destruction of nature as inconsequential to their mission. Driven purely by profits I have no doubt their intention is to extract every last drop of oil and gas from tar sands, shale and tundra. Unless, that is, the community rises up as one and demands that they stop committing ecocide.

The media is even more guilty of intergenerational crime. Instead of advocating the truth they routinely wheel out a few of the usual cranks and crackpots to cast doubt on the integrity and validity of scientific knowledge. As a consequence our most eminent scientists have become wary of giving policy advice to governments for fear of being labelled impractical idealists, dishonest or incompetent.

And even as the science community struggles to find better ways of communicating the urgency to those who have their heads stuck in the sand, we are racing towards an impending catastrophe that is not of your making and can still be avoided. This is my generation’s bitter legacy to you. You are now left with the problems we have knowingly created.

The real tragedy is we already know what must be done. Furthermore we have the technology to turn things around. The coal, oil and gas industries argue their continuing relevance based upon cost and availability. As far as the latter is concerned they are correct. There are vast amounts of coal still in the ground. But if we factor in the incalculable damage done by coal to people and their health, in addition to the various subsidies and licences granted the coal industry, it is patently clear that half-truths, subterfuge, vested interests and apathy on our part are the only things keeping “Old King Coal” a merry old soul.

Preventing runaway climate change and thus avoiding ecosystem collapse is avoidable if you act quickly. But you will need political will and huge amounts of investment capital. You must also be prepared to fight for your future. Peaceful civil resistance may yet be needed to overcome organised opposition from the fossil fuel lobby.

Here is what you must do. Stop mining coal as quickly as possible. Recent estimates point to around 170,000 deaths annually world-wide from coal burning-based electricity generation. It is by far the most dangerous fossil fuel in use. Phasing-out coal emissions and moving to solar, wind, thermal as well as 4^th generation nuclear energy (together with greater energy efficiency) is the safest and least costly route to a sustainable planet. But you cannot stop there. You must also outlaw hydrofracking, strip mining, mountaintop removal and similar ecologically-devastating practices. Find ways to limit or extend the use of conventional oil and gas. Restore the world’s forests and oceans. Impose strict mining constraints on unconventional fossil fuels such as methane hydrates and tar sands. Finally, but most importantly, reject the loophole-ridden “cap and trade” game in favour of a comprehensive “fee and dividend” system. No exceptions and no trade-offs. Only by these means can each citizen choose how to change their living habits so as to become more sustainable.

Alas there are many people with special interests who will try to stop you, stall progress and create other distractions. Possibly they do not have grandchildren. Or perhaps they are so selfish that any integrity they once had was sacrificed on the altar of money long ago. Be prepared for a huge outcry from the fossil fuel lobby. But do not be deceived by their crocodile tears. Eradicating fossil fuels as rapidly as possible will create more jobs, generate a far healthier economy, restore a safe climate and evolve a sustainable planet for you and for your children.

Massive change of this kind is your last chance. I am sorry it has come to this.

With love to you all

Grandpa.

Forget the Facts

The sea hare is a gelatinous lump ordinarily found grazing on coral reefs, home to many far more eye-catching creatures. Nonetheless, the one captive in the aquarium at Heron Island Research Station, on the Great Barrier Reef, provides a mesmerising spectacle as it chomps through great bouquets of red algae plucked from the reef flat and delivered fresh each morning by a young marine scientist.

''We used to have two hares in the tank,'' she explained, ''but when there are two, they just shag continuously, fail to eat, then they die.'' We conclude that herein lies a powerful warning about the risk unrelenting pleasure-seeking poses to any species aspiring to long-term survival.

I've been thinking a bit about the sea hare this week while observing the fallout from the Climate Commission's report, The Critical Decade. Wondering, too, about primitive human biology, about what factors interfere with our survival instinct - fear, fun, greed, legacy, even good old distracting lust.

The report is a powerful enunciation of what science now knows about climate change and the risks it poses. That the atmosphere and the oceans are warming, ice is being lost from glaciers and ice caps, sea levels are rising and the biological world is changing. ''We know beyond reasonable doubt that the world is warming and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary causes.''

In the nuanced language of science, it doesn't get much stronger. As the American scientist Naomi Oreskes has observed, ''History shows us clearly that science does not provide certainty. It does not provide proof. It only provides the consensus of experts, based on the organised accumulation and scrutiny of evidence.'' And here we have it.

So how do you respond to such confronting news? Do you weigh the credentials of the speakers, study the evidence? Or do you switch it off, turn the page, scream and shout? According to psychological research by the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale University, your reaction either way will have little to do with the strength of the arguments or the calibre of the science. It will have everything to do with whether it gels with, or offends, your deep-seated views about morality and how the world ought to work.

Yale law professor Dan Kahan's ''cultural cognition of risk'' theory attempts to explain public disagreement about the significance of empirical evidence by plotting individuals on two scales of cultural belief: individualists versus communitarians, based on the importance people attach to the public good when balanced against individual rights; and hierarchists versus egalitarians, based on their views of the stratification of society. Simply explaining the science to these audiences, he finds, will only serve to wedge the two sides.

The sliding scales are not unfamiliar. Think Tony Abbott as the archetypal suit-and-tie individual hierarchical - values clustered around free-market enterprise, personal achievement, industry, regard for authority (though not, it seems, scientific authority), traditional family, personal freedom; and Bob Brown is out there as your sandal-wearing communitarian egalitarian, protesting that pretty much everything Abbott cherishes damages all he holds dear.

Put a scientist in front of an audience of individual hierarchicals saying that global warming is high risk, and only 23 per cent of the audience will buy the speaker as trustworthy and knowledgeable. Same message, same scientist, and 88 per cent of egalitarian communitarians nod their heads.

Have the same author change tack to argue that warming is no great drama, and the Abbotts now lap it up (86 per cent), and the Browns wander off (46 per cent). The well-oiled machinery of manufactured denial knows how to push all these buttons.

Yale's audience testing finds the only factor likely to interfere with our psychological gatekeeping is if someone within our ''camp'' - someone we perceive as sharing our world view - says something unexpected. (Hence the reverberations in industry and markets when BHP chief Marius Kloppers last year urged rapid action to put a price on carbon emissions.) In short, evidence from someone you identify with will sway your view; science - facts - won't.

Same as it ever was, maybe. But new media helps us contrive a self-affirming information bubble, an echo chamber in which only our own beliefs are broadcast back to us. Debate in the US on the Yale findings prompted the reflection that our instincts in this regard mean - as one political scientist observed - ''we are not well-adapted to our information age''.

The findings also confirm that for all our modernity, tribal leaders remain critical. Leaders of all persuasions - political, religious, industrial, social - have immense power in influencing responses to the most diabolical of problems.

In the foreword to a new book debunking scepticism of science - Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand - Oreskes argues that fear is the major driver of denial. ''Fear that our current way of life is unsustainable. Fear that addressing the issue will limit economic growth. Fear that if we accept government interventions in the market place … it will lead to a loss of personal freedom. Or maybe just plain old fear of change.''

As economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed, all great leaders share one common characteristic - ''the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time''.

This guest blog was written by Jo Chandler. It was first published in the Melbourne Age on Saturday 28th May 2011 and is re-printed here with the author's permission. Jo Chandler is a senior writer for the Age and the author of Feeling The Heat, which tracks climate field scientists.

 

Second Chance

Today President Barack Obama announced the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. After eluding capture for almost ten years, and following months of top-secret surveillance and detailed planning by the Pentagon, he was killed by a member of the US military's SEAL Team Six - with some reluctant assistance (or perhaps none at all) from the Pakistani government. Reaction to the news of Bin Laden’s death (at least in the West) appears to be one approaching almost total euphoria. That is understandable. For many people justice has at last been done. But it is not quite as simple as that.

Before we get too carried away we should take stock of a global system in which little has fundamentally altered. While the iconic value of Bin Laden’s death is self-evident it is by no means a strategic game-changer. In some respects it is irrelevant. Like the many-headed mythical Hydra of Greek mythology Al-Qaeda has spawned a global network of agile affiliate enterprises hell bent on disrupting lives and causing havoc wherever they can. While this ideologically networked group of fanatical offspring may still pledge symbolic allegiance to the Al-Qaeda “brand”, myriad smaller cells increasingly act autonomously, receiving nothing in terms of financial or logistical support from the parent organisation.

The death of Bin Laden may well provide an emotional setback for some of these terrorist groups and their interests. But to a great extent his messages and influence were already discredited, even in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Indeed the most radically anti-Western polemic (even from Muslim religious leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran) categorically rejected the Takfir doctrines pursued by Al-Qaeda’s conservative leaders years ago. Far more pertinent are the peaceful protests currently sweeping across the Arab world. These uprisings have shown young people everywhere that liberation from persecution and serfdom is in the hands of those who seek it. The so-called Arab Spring has made Bin Laden’s darkly doctrinaire views utterly irrelevant to all but a few hardened zealots.

The genesis of terrorism goes back centuries of course. It has been part of the human condition throughout recorded history. On September 11, 2001, however, human progress seemed to descend into an altogether darker void.

But as most of the Western world watched in horror at the scenes being played out on the East coast of the US a far deeper tragedy was unfolding – a tragedy which some of us are still trying to express and from which recovery is by no means certain. For the tragedy to which I refer is the folly of man’s inhumanity to man, the utter futility of conflict and the mindless calls for vengeance. This is the deeper tragedy, arising from our most primitive instincts, we must all ultimately confront.

The images of 9/11 are incised into the mind. Like the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, everyone has a story of where they were that fateful day. Yet now, when one chapter closes and we look with hope towards a future where we can all live together in peace, the real legacy of 9/11 hangs like a shadow over our civilisation.

Ten years ago Al-Qaeda's high profile figurehead provided the US administration with the pretext to commence its calamitous hostilities across the greater Middle East. Predictably Washington's wars provided terrorist outfits everywhere with new recruits and burgeoning support as well as prolonging a cycle of violence that appeared to know no end. Today, once again, Osama Bin Laden presents us with the pretext to think again - but to do things differently this time.

Fresh opportunities have emerged and we must seize the day. The choice is stark. We can persist in our bloody and humiliating way to continue prosecuting this so-called “war on terror” – a war without end, executed in a mood of compounding fear and desperation and from which the most sane among us accept it will be impossible to extract victory. Or we can reimagine our collective purpose and the relationships we most desire with our fellow human beings by celebrating the integral nature of what it means to be compassionate human beings.

If we set our minds to it we can envisage a far less violent and more tolerant future. For example we could enter constructive dialogue with those whose views run counter to our own, seeking to include and transcend differences, rather than waging war as an economic imperative and as a knee-jerk reaction to difference. We could build schools and hospitals rather than expand our arsenals. We could make innovative technologies and medicines available to those less fortunate than ourselves rather than continuing to deny them the most basic of life’s necessities.

I recognise that will take courage and a spirit of generosity that we will need to consciously nurture. But surely that is what leadership is all about? Besides there are far more serious, potentially catastrophic, failures we need to attend to with a similar level of passion and commitment: food and water shortages, climate change, pollution, declining oil reserves....

Of course to pursue peace rather than conflict is not solely our decision. Similar opportunities to think differently and to change direction have been afforded others, particularly those in countries like Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been ravaged by war. It is quite feasible, for example, that leaders of the Taliban may now be more receptive to negotiating some form of power-sharing arrangement in exchange for closing terrorist training camps and curtailing the use of their lands for the export of terror. It is equally possible that the focus of the powerful US industrial war machine will shift to Pakistan, especially given the level of support and protection Bin Laden possibly received from certain sectors of the Pakistani intelligence and military communities.

Whatever happens Bin Laden’s name, his aura and his perceived martyrdom will continue to resonate for a few years yet. In the long term, however, it is not the hunting down and slaying of one man that matters but rather the various autopoietic transitions taking place across Arab and Muslim societies. The most effective power is that wielded through peace. Ordinary people protesting peacefully against oppression and injustice will eventually close history’s page on Al-Qaeda’s particular brand of terror.

In the meantime we have a profoundly important role to play. We must do our utmost to ensure these transitions occur peacefully and compassionately, even if our own current “brand” of democracy is not the end result. Putting an end to the excessive waste, collective insanity and moral failure of endless conflict by eradicating the militarisation of democracy is the most important challenge facing us. If we cannot change our priorities there can be no hope for a brighter future. The war-mongering of old empires will continue to impede real progress by turning the world upside down.

A Tale of Death & Resurrection

As I grow older, more tolerant of a variety of cultural mindsets, more accepting of diverse views, faiths and belief systems, I detect an alternative wisdom reaching out to me with a persistence that has become irresistible. This wisdom is at once profoundly unsettling and intensely reassuring. Indeed such ambiguity makes it tough establishing which of these effects is the more authentic. An unresolved tension between them seems both palpable and necessary – a finely-poised attractor between contradictory forces that redefines human purpose and meaning.

I cannot lay claim to this being a new wisdom, though it manifests as such to me. I am deeply aware that human empathy and a benevolent ethos arise from a common impulse, innately grasped by many indigenous groups, for example, and which I will refer to as communion for simplicity’s sake, and that contemporary science as well as various social experiments have validated its critical importance to the future of the human species.

This wisdom is hard for me to fully digest and even more difficult to describe; partly because it emanates from emotionally charged convictions I find awkward expressing but also because of its relatively ineffable nature - a genesis arising not from Cartesian logic or rationalism but from a common bond illuminating and reflecting the sacredness of life.

Traumatic incidents during childhood (my father deserted me and my mother when I was eight years old and the suffering of losing the person I idolized most still intrudes upon my life in so many subtle ways) led to my avoiding any expression of intimacy with others lest these were misinterpreted, exposed my vulnerability, or were seen as a sign of weakness. But no longer. For some considerable time I have felt the compulsion to speak my mind. I have been branded a heretic, zealot, contrarian, amateur and an outlier. I suspect none of these were meant as compliments.

The world into which I was born, immediately following the second World War, was one of a strange and disquieting serenity – at least to a young boy growing up in rural England. After a century or more of unbridled nationalism and six years of bloody conflict across Europe and Asia a feeling of cautious optimism prevailed. Naturally life was still tough for many, including my family. We were very poor. In England at the time there was food rationing and recovery was slow at first. Gradually, however, a new normality emerged. I mostly recall unpretentious pleasures: train spotting at Uckfield railway station, harvest picnics in the fields at summer’s end, carpets of bluebells in the woodlands, gathering mushrooms in the misty dawn, cricket matches on the recreation ground, charcoal burners in the woods, itinerant gypsies in their brightly painted caravans, growing currants, raspberries and strawberries in our allotment and waving to the Breton garlic sellers as they cycled through the village...

In 1945 there were fewer than 2 billion people on planet Earth. Jubilation of having achieved victory in a war that shattered the ceremony of innocence dominated newspaper headlines. Confidence was at an all time high. There were scars to get over, their recovery assisted by the new movies celebrating heroics and creating myths that willingly distorted the truth. The futility and savagery of war received scant attention. A few people started to protest over the threat of a nuclear Armageddon but there was no mention of global warming, climate change, population growth, unsustainable consumer trends, endemic poverty or state terrorism. Early warning signals of an impending disaster went unnoticed. The future looked bright.

The distraction provided by wealth creation and the acquisition of goods grew exponentially. Affluent parish elders distracted ordinary men and women by organizing coach excursions to Brighton or Bognor Regis for those who had no other means of taking a holiday. Meanwhile big business, backed by a resurgent advertising industry, turned its attention to manipulating a gullible public and facilitating an explosion of productivity.

The stage was set although few people recognized this at the time. Distraction came in the form of peace. And possessions. From a situation where even sugar and meat were in short supply we rapidly moved into a situation where literally anything could be manufactured and bought. Televisions, automobiles, fashionable clothes, exotic fruit, vacations and experiences. Tools and gadgets to fulfill every possible desire began to saturate the market.

To be well-to-do back then meant owning a farm, small business, or having a car and being able to commute to the nearest town. School, too, seemed pleasurably humdrum. All the world’s problems had been solved. I sat in geography classes facing maps of the world where most countries, or so it seemed, were colored pink. The pink of the British Empire upon which the sun never set. A world in which anything now seemed possible and where certainty insinuated itself into every crack and crevice of community life.

Of course that world no longer exists – if it ever did. For the most part it was a comforting illusion. But one issue now dominates the future of human progress – an existential and potentially disastrous issue that few people saw coming. A global population fast approaching seven billion inhabitants, most with aspirations of increasing material wealth based on assumptions of continuing economic growth, had to be set against a progressively volatile context in which deteriorating environmental conditions, higher food costs, less available energy, escalating socio-economic and geopolitical failures and iniquitous gaps between the rich and the poor formed a potentially catastrophic fusion.

Today the situation is clear. The condition we created, deliberately and without conscience, is forcing us to face a new destiny. It now exposes the vulnerability of our thinking and points to the need to embrace an appreciative communion of interconnectedness and cooperation in stark contrast to more conventional mores and expectations (habitually driven by greed, envy, scarcity, competition and fear) resulting from the globalized system of industrial economism.

Seeing a new reality demands both foresight and conviction around a renewed purpose and intent. Accepting this as essential to human progress is tough enough. Redesigning society in order to practice a more appreciative collective wisdom is an entirely different proposition. Transformation and reinvention are pivotal as is the acceptance of physical constraints and finite natural resources. This, in turn, means relinquishing many of the assumptions we have long held regarding what is fundamental to human prosperity and what is not, what value we should place on economic factors in comparison with health, relationships, cultural well-being and contentment, and what is viable praxis rather than simply foolish habit.

So how does this wisdom of communion manifest? I can only speak for myself. I am more conscious of patterns, more able to map connections between scraps of information that were previously disparate, that seemed relatively unimportant at the time, or that somehow I simply convinced myself to discount. I recognize that sets me apart from many others, although I sense a growing affiliation around such wisdom.

Accordingly I and those of a similar outlook and persuasion are becoming more attuned to a reality (and its consequences) that many others seem unready to accept, unable to perceive or simply shy away from for fear of its more confronting implications. It is as though a veil is suspended between them and the improbable reality of a future existence in which it becomes both possible and desirable for all living beings to share equally in Earth’s available resources in a sufficient, altruistic and loving manner.

In truth my gradual awakening to an alternative wisdom, enabled by the thinking of new friends as much as personal reflection, has become a burden to me as well as a privilege I feel bound to honor. It is also a challenge I cannot avoid. As the birth of my new son, a gift in every sense of that word, draws closer I am conscious of an expanded sense of self and my purpose in life. This expanded consciousness goes far beyond anything I have previously experienced. It has transitioned me into a more empathetic and loving state uniting emotion with cognition.

The truth is never enough of course. Immunity to the reality of the human condition (through the spin and widespread deception of a vigorous public relations machine) is so inculcated in society it is easy to live an illusion and ignore contradictory evidence. But as each day reveals more of a truth that will determine our fate on this planet, I also feel more and more frustrated by the status quo and a greater compulsion to do something (anything) to disrupt thinking-as-usual.

In my view it ultimately comes down to fairness and morality. The critical domain requiring our unconditional attention comprises those established patterns of globalized production, distribution and consumption that have become utterly unsustainable - given the changing context. The mode of economic thought we take for granted, indeed blindly insist on pursuing, is enshrined within this exploitative system. At its extreme it is epitomized by the US model of capitalism. This model, so easily corrupted as we have recently observed, is an expression of rules based upon assumptions that are deeply flawed though seductive, nevertheless, in the overall scheme of things: namely that scarcity and competition drive human behaviour and that continued economic growth is necessary in order to maintain the social order.

Those last three words the social order are crucial to any proper comprehension of the situation we are facing. The rules as applied are crafted quite deliberately to benefit a small sector of society - namely the wealthiest individuals, corporations and nation states. It is a relentlessly iterative and untenable formula: by fostering competition for business and trade between countries, corporations pay lower taxes and produce more goods for consumption on world markets. Thus economic growth drives material wealth simultaneously mesmerizing entire communities and resulting in an unprecedented psychological lock-in to excess, greed and waste. Coincidentally it also destroys many of the social, cultural, environmental and spiritual conditions vital for human contentment, health and well-being while undermining the rights of workers and marginalizing the poor who remain slaves to this system.

We are only just awakening to the veracity of our predicament. Since the 1920’s a well-oiled public relations machinery, arising from an unholy alliance between governments, the media and corporations, and exploiting Freud’s research into our psychological motivations, has manipulated public opinion, keeping us compliant customers instead of alert citizens. In the words of Walter Lippmann it has “manufactured consent” and it has done this extremely efficiently by playing to our unconscious desires.

Sadly the mass production and consumption of goods we are taught to want but rarely need has instigated the crises we see all around us today – from the rising cost of food, to ethnic conflicts, the provision of energy from finite resources, the impact of a global monetocracy upon indebted states and individuals, the despoiling of the natural environment and the criminal practices of dictators, autocrats and unprincipled politicians and industrialists.

The need to speak out has become overwhelming. A new narrative is required; one of hope and happiness rather than hate and humiliation. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed differently. If, instead of competing on the basis of scarcity, we were to encourage collaboration to generate new knowledge, grow uncommon capabilities and share skills within a spirit of abundance and self-sufficiency. Of course competition would still exist, but in a transformed setting governments and corporations alike would compete in providing economic and socio-political security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, a decent education and a healthy and sustainable environment.

Most of today’s grassroots social activists and young entrepreneurs are desirous of such a shift. Furthermore they now possess infinitely more computing power on their laptops and iPhones than the entire US government had at the time of the moon landing. All we actually require is to generate trust, unity and a sophisticated appreciation of how best to liberate this new moral energy of communion in order to achieve success.

If collective power can be wielded with empathy and integrity, with coherence and conviction, corrupt and unsustainable practices will be dealt a death blow and elected officials will be kept honest. We will not need to jump through hoops in seeking common ground with those that currently ride roughshod over our humanity or despoil nature in pursuing their own selfish ends. We can change the world. I know it. You know it. So what is stopping us?

Middle East Protests & Oil Addiction

Gasoline prices have been rising this winter in the US even though we are well outside the summer driving season with its traditionally highest price level. Among the reasons for today's higher gasoline and crude oil prices is the high demand for heating oil during this extra cold winter, as heating oil in some northern parts of the world is a life-and-death commodity. This can put some pressure on gasoline supplies as refineries might attempt to maximize heating oil output, although refining requires producing a constant balance of light, medium and heavy products, at fairly high utilization of capacity.

Crude oil prices have been moving toward the $100 per barrel mark. The actual price for crude and petroleum products is much higher in some nations due to subsidies (direct and hidden), keeping prices artificially low. But the official price of oil seems on the way to break the $147 / bbl record from July 2008.

Whether the emerging economic powerhouses China and India are the main reason for higher oil prices is academic, when the whole world is affected by developments in price and supply anywhere. The stability of countries such as Egypt and other Arab states has been proven illusory. When the right geopolitical event in the Persian Gulf (perhaps connected to the Tunisian, Egyptian and Yemeni trends now in play) interrupts oil supplies by as much as 10% or more of global demand, the effect on the oil market may well be as if Hubbert's peak oil bell curve became a cliff that we have already jumped off.

A revolution in Saudi Arabia has been my favorite example for years, in terms of illustrating what can spark a return to the 1970s' skyrocketing oil prices, panic buying and hoarding. As grocery shelves will be emptied in a few days when a major oil supply crunch hits, as the late Matt Simmons reminded us, what difference does it make how many billions of barrels of crude are really off Brazil's coast?

Now, when people didn't expect it but should have, we see that Arab peoples have indeed been chafing under dictatorship for decades. Arabs, as in most places, have been biding their time for liberation. Whether certain regions can soon attain it is another matter, when many have far outstripped their besieged ecosystems' carrying capacities. In Middle Eastern countries the water and soil situations are generally poor and getting worse. Food shortage and food riots can flow from ecological deterioration, especially as new weather patterns (or non-patterns) have been increasingly disruptive for agriculture.

This is one argument for activists in Arab lands to remember there is no liberation or equality on a dead planet. Although the Egyptian uprising or revolution is hundreds of miles removed from the Persian Gulf, where 18% of the world's total trade in crude its shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, a common spirit of rebellion has spread in the region. It can take a sharp anti-American or anti-corporate turn and thus affect oil exports to the U.S.

In Saudi Arabia where the monarchy is extremely repressive, demonstrators have dared come out of the woodwork after Tunisians sent their dictator packing. International emphasis on military security in the region has been on huge ships and the Persian Gulf itself, but numerous facilities on land in Arab countries and nearby nations are vulnerable to attack and closure. Also, the Suez Canal sees one million barrels of oil pass through each day from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.

The number of separate but linked oil facilities, extent of damage, or days of closure do not have to conform to some arithmetic model for there to be a massive reaction in the world oil market. The perception of supply shortage, with real instances affecting deliveries, is what drives oil prices on the world market, much as the stock market sometimes has a herd mentality. So far we are talking about what most observers would consider a temporary oil supply disruption resulting in a price spike. However, if the disruption and spike are strong enough, severe effects can shut down much of the global economy and simultaneously stop much local activity.

Petrocollapse - the exacerbated and lasting failure of the world oil market to meet demand, and the paralysis and collapse of most of the economy's infrastructure relying on petroleum - does not need to follow a formula or specific pattern of oil industry breakdown or a certain depletion schedule of oil reserves. We will only be sure when petrocollapse hits. Because peak oil has been attained, we can say that the petrocollapse process has begun and just needs a catalyst to tip the whole economy and trigger famine on a scale as large as some future climate disaster.

I don't believe the "Transition Town" or less-known "Stair-case slow collapse/catabolic" viewpoints take into account adequately the extreme vulnerability of and to the oil market. The Transition Town and Stair-case adherents' views, hopes, dreams and assumptions may actually refer to social change from civilization collapse, when they may think they are referring to the post-peak oil downslope, or vice versa. But this may make no difference as events may accelerate, and collapse and die-off throw theory and wishes out the window.

In my oil analysis career at Lundberg Survey, we accurately predicted the Second Oil Shock based on our finding that in March 1979 there would be a 9% shortfall of gasoline for U.S. demand. It was a time of billions fewer humans and rising oil production (extraction). The world also seemed poised to follow through with stringent conservation and development of alternative fuels. After Jimmy Carter's failure to catch fire with those strategies, energy efficiency actually reversed direction with the SUV phenomenon. But any slight per capita gains, had they been consistently in the right direction for conservation, are offset anyway by growth, while efficiencies paradoxically end up adding to more consumption.

Since 1979, aggregate energy demand has not been tamed in the least, and growth of the global oil infrastructure has dangerously proliferated. Peak oil extraction happened worldwide around 2006, according to the International Energy Agency, although "peak" is not a single year due to the advent of nonconventional crudes and biofuels over time. Peak oil is the main reason we are living in very different "oil times" since 1979: growth of crude supply has turned a corner, starting downward. Compared to past years, even conventional crude (light, sweet, easily extracted) - besides unconventional and expensive, extra-polluting oil replacements - is far more expensive to exploit, with lower net energy obtained for newer fields.

Petrocollapse will not be limited to the U.S., as we shall see when dominoes fall. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. The popular faith in renewable and other alternative fuels to "save us" from dwindling oil reserves or from a loss of Middle Eastern or OPEC oil ought to be shattered prior to the rude and crude awakening from a significant supply crunch. The alternatives are not ready on a large scale, and generally only provide electricity rather than liquid fuels or petrochemicals or other materials. We will only wake up en masse when chaos starts to rapidly unfold - as if it hasn't already.

One is constantly cautioned to never conclude on a sour note. So I will point to the silver lining of collapse as a liberator far more fundamental than regime change. This is because basic relationships in society will be radically altered by extreme lifestyle change brought about by the loss of petroleum and by having to painfully face the recent separation from natural cycles that modern technological societies have achieved.

The U.S. is still thought to be the richest country in the world, but increasingly this fact requires the caveat of a greater and greater gap between the rich and poor. According to the CIA World Fact Book, the US is ranked as the 42nd most unequal country in the world. In contrast, Tunisia is far better off, ranked the 62nd most unequal country. Yemen is ranked 76th most unequal. And Egypt is ranked as the 90th most unequal country! And inequality in the U.S. has soared in the last couple of years.

The New York Times published on 31 January that in Egypt "long-simmering resentments have burst into open class warfare." As poor as the Arab peoples are who are rioting and replacing regimes, and as important as this is for Arabs and all people under oppression, it is even more urgent for US citizens to focus on questioning their own circumstances vis-a-vis petroleum dependence.

Fossil fuels do not make us safer or healthier. Besides getting soft from sitting in our cars, before the TV and under the influence of many pharmaceutical drugs made from fossil fuels, US citizens seem to still want to believe all is more or less well. As to energy, many still believe "they will think of something." But some of us would rather "Imagine" and create now a radically more liberating and equitable world and way of living, as John Lennon did with his song of that name.

This article was written by Jan Lundberg and was first published in Alternet on 1st January 2011. It is reprinted here with Jan's permission. Jan is founder of Culture Change and was an oil industry analyst at Lundberg Survey before joining the grassroots environmental movement in 1988.

Climate Cranks: Time to Fight Back

I didn't realize it at the time, but my daughter was born at a momentous turning point in history. She arrived on a sunny San Francisco afternoon in April 2005. All the nurses kept remarking on how alert this baby was, so her mother and I decided to name her Chiara, which means "clear and bright" in Italian.

I had been covering the climate story for fifteen years by then, and when Chiara was almost six months old, I went to London to interview Sir David King, then the British government's chief science adviser. The interview changed my life. King, who had done as much as anyone except Al Gore to awaken the world to the dangers of climate change, helped me understand that the climate problem had undergone a profound, largely unexpected paradigm shift that carried the gravest of implications for little Chiara and all the world's children. No longer was climate change a preventable future threat; it was now a punishing current reality, one that was guaranteed to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before it got better.

My interview with King led me to write HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth  which has just been published. My hope was to find a way for my daughter and her peers around the world to cope with all that lies in store for them. After four years of investigation that took me across the United States and around the world, I'm heartened to report that there are many practical steps we all can take—as individuals, as communities, as countries—to protect our societies and our young people from the changes in our climate that are unavoidable over the coming decades.

Still, I am saddened and angry that we find ourselves in this position in the first place. After all, humanity's failure to take action in time against global warming was a conscious decision, a result of countless official debates where the case for reducing greenhouse gas emissions was exhaustively considered and deliberately rejected. Much of the blame for this unfortunate outcome belongs to people I have come to refer to as climate cranks—the corporate lobbyists and right-wing ideologues who for twenty years have done all in their power to keep this country, especially the government, from seriously addressing the problem.

In my journalism I have frequently pointed out the nefarious role the climate cranks have played in our national politics, but I confess I have often wondered how much good this did. I revere the profession of journalism and have long believed that it is best kept separate from activism; each of these callings has its own role to play in the endless struggle to make a better world. But I am not only a journalist. I am also a father. And as a father who during all of my now 5-year-old daughter's life has been watching governments, especially my own, do next to nothing about the climate catastrophe hurtling toward us, I have come to feel obligated to reach beyond the tools of journalism, vital as they are. Like my colleagues Bill McKibben and Mike Tidwell, two journalists and fathers who have also come to embrace climate activism, I now feel compelled to take more direct action. If Chiara and her peers around the world are to have a decent chance of inheriting a livable planet, the status quo cannot stand. We need transformative change, above all in Washington, and we need it quickly.

Which is why I will go to Washington the week of February 15 to confront the climate cranks—in Congress, in the media and in the corporate sector—and try to stop them from further sabotaging our response to the climate crisis. My partners in this effort will include the group Kids vs Global Warming, whose iMatter march aims to put a million kids in the streets on Mother's Day to demand that our leaders address climate change as if our children's future matters; Grist, America's leading environmental news website; The Nation; and other organizations still to be determined.

On the ground in Washington I will be joined by local young people—activist members of Generation Hot. Our plan is to confront the climate cranks face to face, on camera, and call them to account for the dangers they have set in motion. We will highlight the ludicrousness of their antiscientific views, which alone should discredit them from further influence over US climate policies. And we will show how our nation could still change course—for example, if the federal government were to use its vast purchasing power to kick-start a green energy revolution that would create jobs and prosperity across the land. We welcome your help and constructive suggestions for how to achieve these goals and invite you to join us.

But now let me turn to the question of why such direct action has become necessary. From the time global warming emerged on the public agenda in the late 1980s, it was regarded as a grave but distant future threat and, crucially, one that could be neutralized if humanity acted quickly enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I shared these assumptions until my October 2005 interview with David King shattered them. The science adviser told me that in fact global warming had already triggered outright climate change, and had done so a hundred years sooner than even the most concerned scientists had expected. One early manifestation, according to three British scientists writing in Nature, was the record heat wave that brutalized Europe in the summer of 2003. King cited government statistics indicating that the heat had killed 31,000 people, making it "the deadliest disaster in modern European history." Yet this turned out to be an underestimate. An epidemiological study conducted in 2008 for the European Union—reported here for the first time—concluded that the 2003 heat wave had caused at least 71,449 excess deaths, a toll considerably higher than the United States suffered during the Vietnam War.

As a new father, most alarming to me was King's next point: this newly triggered climate change is bound to intensify for the rest of my daughter's life. The inertia of the climate system—that is, the laws of physics and chemistry—guarantee that average global temperatures will keep rising for decades to come, no matter how fervently humanity might embrace solar energy, electric vehicles and other options for reducing emissions. And as temperatures rise, this global warming will unleash still more climate change: deeper droughts, stronger storms, wilder wildfires and so on, as well as faster sea level rise.

"No, no, it's not too late," King hurried to reply when I asked if this paradigm shift means all is lost. But the early arrival of climate change does transform the nature of the problem, as paradigm shifts tend to do. To wit, humanity now faces a double imperative. The traditional goal of climate policy—to reduce global warming—has now become more urgent than ever, for if global temperature rise isn't halted soon, it could gain too much momentum ever to reverse. Yet at the same time, humanity has no choice but "to adapt to the impacts that are in the pipeline" over the coming decades, said King. In short, we have to live through global warming even as we try to reverse it.

All of this makes my daughter an involuntary member of what I call Generation Hot. In fact, every child on earth born after June 23, 1988, belongs to Generation Hot, roughly 2 billion young people in total. I choose that date because it was the day humanity was put on notice that human activities were unwittingly raising temperatures on this planet. The warning was in NASA scientist James Hansen's testimony to the Senate, boosted by the decision of the New York Times to publish the story on the front page, thus making "global warming" a common phrase in newsrooms, government offices and households the world over. But Hansen's and countless subsequent warnings have gone unheeded, largely because of stiff resistance from the carbon lobby, to borrow author Jeremy Leggett's term—the energy and auto companies that profit from carbon dioxide emissions, the politicians and propagandists these companies sponsor and the right-wing ideologues who share their antigovernment sympathies.

My daughter and the rest of Generation Hot are fated to pay the price for this foot-dragging. One of the most unpleasant facts about climate change is that, once triggered, it cannot be turned off anytime soon. Even if humanity somehow stopped emitting carbon dioxide overnight, King told me, "temperatures will keep rising and all the impacts will keep changing for about twenty-five years." Since it is likely to take us at least a quarter-century to leave fossil fuels behind, the reality is that we're locked in to at least fifty more years of rising temperatures and the harsher climate impacts they bring. Thus the young people of Generation Hot are condemned to spend the rest of their lives coping with a climate that will be hotter and more volatile than ever before in our civilization's history.

You want specifics? By the time she is my age, Chiara may well not have enough water to drink here in California, because much of the Sierra Nevada snowpack will have melted. Children in today's Washington, DC, are likely to witness in the course of their lifetimes sea level rise combine with stronger storm surges to regularly ring the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials with moats and submerge half of the National Mall. By 2050 the record heat that made the summer of 2010 so wicked will become the new normal in New York City and much of the East Coast. Overseas, the impacts will be punishing as well, especially for the poor. In Bangladesh, sea level rise is already making the soil and water in southern coastal regions too salty to produce decent yields of rice, the staple crop for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, the inexorability of sea level rise ensures that many such low-lying areas worldwide will have to be evacuated, unleashing vast streams of climate change refugees. Military experts warn that this will pose not only humanitarian challenges but recurring threats to peace if the refugees attempt to cross national borders.

Precisely how much blame the carbon lobby and climate cranks deserve for the fate of Generation Hot cannot yet be scientifically determined. In theory, it's possible that global warming would have prematurely given rise to outright climate change even if the United States and other countries had scaled back their emissions beginning in the late 1980s. After all, it is the historic accumulation of greenhouse gases, not the annual emissions, that drives global warming. Scientists are still debating exactly when global warming sparked climate change, as well as the related question of how much responsibility global warming bears for any particular climate impact. (In their Nature study of the 2003 heat wave, for example, the three British scientists estimated that global warming was responsible for about 75 percent of the excessive heat Europe experienced that summer.)

But these are scientific nuances. As a practical matter, there is no denying that the large amount of greenhouse gases emitted since June 23, 1988—about 40 percent of humanity's total emissions since the Industrial Revolution—made global warming worse. That, in turn, increased the likelihood of unleashing climate change. Viewed in this context, the obstructionism of the carbon lobby and climate cranks played a decisive role.

Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, the climate cranks blocked our government from taking serious action against emissions. By doing so, they also stalled international action (since other countries were understandably reluctant to reduce their emissions when the world's biggest polluter was unwilling to do so). Thus limits on global warming were avoided at the very time they would have mattered most. "Had some individual countries, especially the US, begun to act in the early to mid-1990s, we might have [avoided dangerous climate change]," Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at Princeton who ranks among the world's most eminent climate scientists, told me. "But we didn't, and now the impacts are here."

"This was a crime," Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Germany's former chief government adviser on climate told me. But the wrong people are being punished. My daughter and the rest of Generation Hot have been given a life sentence for a crime they didn't commit. Meanwhile, the perpetrators are reaping record profits, enjoying prominent media coverage (and not only on Fox) and even gaining control of the House of Representatives, where they plan to launch an inquisition against climate scientists who don't share their loony ideas.

It is outrageous that these climate cranks have the upper hand in Washington. The plain truth is that they have no more scientific credibility than the Flat Earth Society, and that should discredit them from exercising any influence over our climate policy, much less holding it hostage to their ideological and economic agendas. But someone has to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes.

Don't rely on our media to rise to the occasion. The protocol of mainstream news coverage leads Washington journalists to refer to these people as climate skeptics. They're not skeptics. They're cranks. True skepticism is invaluable to the scientific method, but an honest skeptic can be persuaded by facts, if they are sound. The cranks are impervious to facts, at least facts that contradict their wacky worldview. When virtually every national science academy in the developed world, including our own, and every major scientific organization (e.g., the American Geophysical Union, the American Physics Society) has affirmed that climate change is real and extremely dangerous, only a crank continues to insist that it's all a left-wing plot.

One crank recently took me to task for supposedly having no respect for science. In my reply, I assured him I respected science as much as anyone who lives in the modern world, where we take for granted air travel, Wi-Fi Internet, modern medicine and a host of other blessings. Then I asked, "If you respect science so much, how do you explain the fact that virtually every major scientific body on earth disagrees with you about climate science? Are they all in on the conspiracy?" He never replied, but of course that is the logical implication of his camp's insistence that they do too have science on their side. The scientists who say otherwise are all part of a conspiracy to—well, take your pick: to keep the research dollars flowing, to expand government control of the economy, to dismantle modern society and return us to hunter-gatherer primitivism. As I said, these are the ravings of cranks.

You can hear much the same from Congressional Republicans, starting with Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the vice chair of the House Science Committee, who will be leading the charge to debunk mainstream climate science. "I personally believe that the solar flares are more responsible for climatic cycles than anything human beings do," Sensenbrenner has opined, repeating a talking point favored by many climate cranks but definitively refuted by many peer-reviewed scientific studies. For his part, the new Speaker of the House, John Boehner, is so scientifically illiterate that he apparently thinks the environmental complaint about carbon dioxide is that it's a carcinogen. Uh, no, Mr. Speaker, that's actually the rap against those cigarettes you like smoking (and whose manufacturers you've defended all these years).

Newly emboldened by the midterm elections, the Republicans are gearing up to put environmentalists and climate scientists on the defensive and block progress against global warming for the rest of Obama's presidency. It's time to turn the tables on them. The first step is to connect the cranks to the terrible consequences they have set in motion, and thereby discredit them from further influence over the nation's climate policies.

How? Our initiative, Confront the Climate Cranks, will do just that: confront the cranks on camera and accompanied by some of the children they have put in danger. We will video all of our confrontations and then quickly make them available to the public—by posting them on YouTube and sharing them with mainstream and alternative media and the social networks of our partner organizations. (In the run-up to these confrontations, we will invite the participation of the members or readers of The Nation, Grist, Kids vs Global Warming and the other partnering organizations, polling them on which cranks to target, what questions to ask and so on. Thus we hope to build momentum before arriving in Washington, as well as generate continuing attention and activism after the confrontations.)

By no means is our initiative alone sufficient to turn the tide in the climate fight, but we believe it can make a valuable contribution, especially if others lend a hand. By naming and shaming the climate cranks, we hope to shift the political terrain of the climate fight. By highlighting the specific climate impacts that have already begun and will intensify in the coming years, we aim to shift the debate away from abstract ideology toward the actual consequences the cranks have wrought for Generation Hot. And by conveying our message through children and parents, we can reach the ordinary Americans whose support is essential to overcoming the power of money and insider status in Washington. We hope you'll join us.

This blog was written by Mark Hertsgaard, the environment correspondent for The Nation. Mark is the author of six books, including "Earth Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our Environmental Future." This article is adapted from Mark's latest book HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, published in January by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. You can get involved in Mark's work by visiting the Generation Hot Facebook page)