Tuesday, June 13, 2017
The Sun Dims, Three Billion Years Early
The world has failed at the task of CO2 mitigation. It is a consequence of a conceptual split from the natural world which many would argue goes back to the neolithic, when we became settled farmers with stores of grain to guard and distribute. Out of this came the fortified granary -the polis - the treasury, and a new, more complicated sense of us and them, beyond tribalism - though it persisted as well. Hamilton cites Jacob Burckhardt (198), who wrote that history is “the break with nature caused by the awakening of consciousness.” Or in biblical terms, the Fall.
It is “inconvenient” to curb greenhouse gases in our greedy pursuit of a status quo which now consumes all of the Earth's annual output by early August, as of last year. We ignore it, but every act has a moral component, and our failure to wean ourselves from fossil fuels is a moral one. Our split from nature, which began as conceptual, has become reinforced until it is also a moral stance, consciously chosen (baldly stated in several Renaissance-era texts and speeches). Amazingly, the 2012 London Olympics dramatized this in the opening ceremony, where the figure of Caliban comes to the stage and speaks poetically of his love for his island, its beings, sounds, breezes, and textures, only to be rudely replaced by Industrial Man and his smog-belching factories. The 2012 Olympics celebrated this. We are conscious of our vaunted exceptionalism, blessed in the book of Genesis when its author says that Y-hw-h loves us above all creation.
But as the Bible also tells us, we are only creatures of clay, adamas, and as such, subject to the same natural laws as all other living things. And now the petri dish on which we live, this poor Earth, is overcrammed with humans, and we are not only reluctant to check our numbers (be fruitful and multiply), but our covetous hunger for food, the built environment, and toys. Believing in the infinite power of our intellects, fired by god-like imaginative powers, we now dream of mass-producing steaks without the cows, and our most fashionable philosophers speak of a human realm that has no need for the natural world.
The distinction men have drawn between “natural history”- a series of events that occur on the scale of millions of years – and “human history”- a series of events that occur on the scale of years, decades and centuries – has collapsed (D. Charkabarty). “With the Anthropocene, humans have become a geological force so that the two kinds of history have converged...”(Hamilton, 198). Anthropogenic climate change affects the atmosphere, the chemical composition of the oceans via acidification, the biosphere, via habitat loss and species extinction, the cryosphere, melting ice mass, and the lithosphere itself through vast mining projects and mountaintop removal (and the now-flooding New York subway system). If you're not yet convinced that we are, in the words of Brian Swimme, a “planetary power,” consider this: geologists project that unchecked global warming will cancel the next Ice Age, perhaps three of them, altering the planet's climate for up to 500,000 years.
Since we have known for decades now that fossil fuel burning causes atmospheric warming, anthropogenic climate change is now deliberate, even if the effect of our action may not be. (161) Anthropogenic climate disruption is creating biospheric and social problems, but instead of accepting the challenge of changing behavior, “we live in societies predisposed to seek technological answers to social problems.” (174) And the technocrats have a huge backing among the economists, who see geoengineering as far cheaper than restraining our fossil fuel consumption. Newt Gingrich is typical of political figures on the right in his summation, “Geoengineering holds the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year. Instead of penalizing ordinary Americans, we would have an option to address global warming by rewarding scientific invention...Bring on the American ingenuity. Stop the green pig.” (168)
As an example, Hamilton outlines in detail the efforts of governments and large fossil corporations to create carbon capture and storage (CCS), which was initially considered quite feasible. As with the Vietnam War, the effort was continued (and continues still) long after it was apparent it would not be workable. In doing so, companies like Exxon hoped beyond hope to assuage their guilt for being complicit in creating the conditions for climate disruption. The result, Hamilton notes, was a “lost decade” in working for emissions reductions. The dilemma now is that pursuing climate engineering will similarly make emission reductions less likely to be pursued, and the lost decade will quickly turn into three. Hamilton sums up the issue succinctly: “But if climate engineering is inferior to cutting emissions (in the sense of being less effective and more risky) then merely by choosing to engineer the climate instead of cutting emissions we succumb to moral failure.” 162
Our moral failure is huge, and we would atone for it by playing God on a scale beyond the many precursors to the ultimate move of managing the global climate. My question is, when have we ever looked at a new technology and refused it? I have already reviewed at this site a book which emphatically answers “never”: Too Smart for Our Own Good. But there have been hesitations along the way to our status as the “God Species.” Hindus claim that they discovered rocket science during the Vedic era, but that the brahmin priests decided it would create too much mischief. More recently, the NYRB reviewed a collection of letters between the German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg and his wife, in which the scientist describes how he and his colleagues passively resisted Hitler's pressure to develop the atomic bomb after discovering nuclear fission in 1939. Heisenberg was a brave and thoughtful man.
So German physicists, like their “Aryan” forebears in Vedic India, did refuse to pursue a technology. Fatefully, our scientists did not. Robert Oppenheimer, observing the first nuclear test from a bunker in Nevada, compared the mushroom cloud to Krishna revealing himself as an infinite series of beings in the Bhagavad Gita. But the genie was out of the bottle; Oppenheimer's flash of insight was after the fact. Indeed, several of the men who created the bomb were unsure the earth's atmosphere would survive the shock. The Manhattan Project was a technical success. We built the bomb to save Europe – and we used it.
On the micro scale, science is busily sequencing multiple genomes, redesigning DNA in cells by selecting for traits and swapping out genes. Though some called for public debate, there has been essentially none. In Siberia, scientists are busily re-engineering the modern elephant to have some of the traits of the extinct woolly mammoth, so that the spruce forests invading the tundra might be turned back by a pachyderm herd jealous of its own food source – grasslands. This would restore the albedo effect of the vast northern tundra to help mediate the loss of sea ice. Other scientists are keen to create designer genes to meet would-be parents' desire for perfect offspring. As Hamilton puts it, “Life is reduced to a manipulable genetic code” (179).
I have long been disturbed by genetic engineering and dismayed over the lack of public debate. Where is the landmark court case turning back the hubris of great apes playing God by reshuffling the gene pool on a cross-species basis? Where are the preachers citing the magnificent text of Job in the face of our smug hubris (Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?)? And now, after splitting the atom and altering the blueprints of life itself, we are on the brink of managing the entire earth climate. We would re-engineer the global climate to save the “Earth” from global warming – but on our terms, for us, our civilization.
With atmospheric CO2 concentrations headed for 550 ppm and beyond (the upper limit of “safe” climate perturbations is 350-450 ppm), it seems only a matter of time before we have sufficient motivation to start the application of sulfate aerosols in the upper atmosphere. The big question is, who will have jurisdiction over this effort? Will it be an extension of Cold War military gaming? How will the interests of poor vs. rich nations be adjudicated? Will it be overseen by the UN Climate Convention? What could the rest of the world do if a large rogue nation that is not a signatory to the convention decided to go it alone to create a solar filter?
At the very least, there should be widespread debate on the need and feasibility of these plans, including a thorough discussion of the considerable risks (which are on a scale comparable to the risks of a nuclear exchange). But if we have these discussions too soon, then one probable result would be that all efforts at mitigation would cease. The Promethean and Soterian forces remain in opposition, with the Soterians arguing for using this technology only as a last resort in the face of climate emergency. Soterians (I am one) would continue to push hard for emissions reductions, for if we reach the 85-100% reductions needed from current levels (403 ppm), we could ground the planes indefinitely. The question is, how do we determine when we are in a state of climate emergency, given that the process leading to such a state is one of multiple tripping of tipping points, each of which leads to others. Once the process begins – and some scientists argue it already has – it is essentially unstoppable.
Prometheans, who hold the power now, would argue to create the filter as soon as possible, to save money and avoid unnecessary (human) suffering. With this shift, their goal of having the entire earth system under human control would be met, and geoengineering would be a permanent alteration of the heavens.
Any public debate should include scientists, ethicists, public intellectuals. And it shouldn't just be about saving the two-leggeds. It will require as well folks who can speak for the voiceless: poets, artists, musicians and spiritual folk. Perhaps, after such a debate, we will still take the best available option, but at least we will do so with our eyes wide open to the enormous risks. And we will have set the stage for memorializing the earth we leave behind, the whole magnificent biosphere. Once we engineer the climate, second-guessing the Sun, the first god for much of Earth history, we will have completed the process of circumventing wilderness, the Great Commons that once surrounded our human dwelling-places. The End of Nature, which Bill McKibben published in 1989, will be essentially complete, usurped by a full-blown, but not fully matured, Anthropocene. Ultimately, morality and beauty join as our bedrock values, and both will be displaced by a “functional” Earth engineered by our Promethean overlords.
If the distinction between natural history and human history fully collapses, then the sublime, that which gives humans awe and humility in the face of the unknowable and unimaginable will similarly move one step away, into the vast reaches of space over which we still have no control. But the sublime will haunt our move to control the planet. The ”silence of vast space(s)” which Pascal feared will remain our destiny, postponed perhaps for a bit. But the Earth, our home, will be eclipsed. Oh terrible, sad, smudged fate!
Labels: " genetic engineering, "The God Species, Anthropocene, Bill McKibben, Clive Hamilton, geo-engineering, Heisenberg, Manhattan Project, Newt Gingrich, Oppenheimer, Pascal, solar filter, UN Clilmate Convention
Friday, August 24, 2012
Requiem for a Species: An Unfolding Tragedy
Australian
ethicist Clive Hamilton's Requiem for a Species is both deeply
sobering and salutary, in the sense that it awakens us not only to
the climate war we have shrunk from engaging, but its likely result
if we do not. As the climate data gets more and more alarming while the international political response remains gridlocked, he states
what many of us deeply sensed at the time, that Copenhagen December
2009 was the “last hope for humanity to pull back from the abyss.”
“Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change.” Hamilton answers the book's subtitle in a series of no-nonsense chapters: growth fetishism, addiction to consumer life, denial in a myriad of forms, and the “new foundation” (Descartes) upon which the others are built, disconnection from Nature. Each of these chapters is compelling, but I found the one on denial particularly enlightening. I have blogged about one of the cornerstones of recent Republican policy, climate denialism, trying to understand the curious phenomenon ("Why Educated Republicans Are in Denial about Climate Change” - see April 25). Hamilton's searching analysis takes us into its historical roots with the fall of the Berlin Wall, closely followed by the breakup of the Soviet Union (1989-91), to reveal how quickly the conservative right seized upon a new enemy, environmentalism: “America did not fight and win the wars of the twentieth century to make the world safe for green vegetables” (Richard Darman, the elder Bush's OMB director).
My post argues in terms of Nietzsche's will to power (conservatives embrace it and liberals don't), but Hamilton's analysis is more telling. The twin ideas of progress and mastery of nature “define modernity itself” for conservatives, and progress is identified for them with unfettered growth. He goes into detail tracing the conservative think-tanks, initially founded by nuclear war hawk-scientists, and how they have systematically and effectively worked to undercut the liberal critique of human overreach. And if there is collateral damage, it can easily be managed by geo-engineering, whose origins lie with those same military-scientific heroes of the right.
Hamilton outlines where we are headed in a chapter entitled “The Four-Degree World.” It is the briefest in the book, for he relies on Mark Lynas's brilliantly documented Six Degrees. I am reading that as well, and am in the midst of the terrifying long chapter “Three Degrees.” In Requiem, all that Hamilton needs to do is point to what is now the consensus view of climate scientists of where we are headed – 4 degrees Celsius warming - which he gets from attending a pre-Copenhagen global conference in Oxford of climate scientists with which he frames the chapter. As opposed to public statements, these sober and shaken researchers shared among themselves their deepest fears based on the dawning truth that global civilization was not coping with a situation that the scientists were finding was much, much worse than the two-degree world they had initially assessed.
“Relinquishing our rosy view of how the future will unfold is a task more difficult that it may appear because the vision of a stable and sympathetic future undergirds our sense of self and our place in the world.” (210) “Awakening to the prospect of climate disruption compels us to abandon” our comfortable beliefs. Thus begins a powerful final chapter in which Hamilton argues that we must “despair, accept, act.” Earlier, he acknowledged the adaptive quality of unrealistic illusions about the future; they keep hope alive, producing action (Shelley Taylor, Positive Illusions). But he seizes upon Taylor's key distinction, “Illusions respond and adapt as reality forces itself upon us, while delusions are held despite the evidence of the outside world...evidence that large -scale climate change is unavoidable has now become so strong that healthy illusion is becoming unhealthy delusion” (131-32).
Many of us have had exposure to Joanna Macy's despair and empowerment work. Hamilton enlists her approach in conclusion, founded upon the necessity of admitting despair when honest hope has been exceeded by planetary events. As those of us who have trained with Joanna know, allowing despair, we can work through it to a more realistic ground for action. Denying negative emotion slowly shrivels the amplitude of positive emotion as well. We may continue to act, but with less and less belief in our own actions. Our energy dries up, for it is fueled by the internal lie of false hope.
Reading Hamilton, Lynas, and Joanna Macy's latest book, Active Hope (co-authored by psychologist Chris Johnstone), I have been forced to admit that, though I had worked through Joanna's circle of gratitude, despair, and re-imagining more than once, I was stuck once again in denial and powerlessness. The bad news has helped me bottom out once again, and my acceptance has deepened and ripened into renewed action. That action is directed at helping others get on with the process while remaining alert to opportunities for effective public demonstrations, including civil disobedience as I am led.
Despair, accept...Act! After accepting the immensely challenged state of affairs -read Lynas on the projected death of the Amazon in a three-degree world for a snapshot (Six Degrees, 137-42) - we have one final chance. Like Bill McKibben in his masterful piece in Rolling Stone, Hamilton calls us to mobilize a mass movement “to build a countervailing power to the elite and corporations that have captured government,” thus holding the catastrophe to something within the reach of our imaginations. Though it is tempting to think of a benevolent dictator who might achieve results more rapidly, we really “must democratise survivability” through a new radicalism that “aims to shift the ground of politics itself.” To the ramparts, planetary citizens!
“Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change.” Hamilton answers the book's subtitle in a series of no-nonsense chapters: growth fetishism, addiction to consumer life, denial in a myriad of forms, and the “new foundation” (Descartes) upon which the others are built, disconnection from Nature. Each of these chapters is compelling, but I found the one on denial particularly enlightening. I have blogged about one of the cornerstones of recent Republican policy, climate denialism, trying to understand the curious phenomenon ("Why Educated Republicans Are in Denial about Climate Change” - see April 25). Hamilton's searching analysis takes us into its historical roots with the fall of the Berlin Wall, closely followed by the breakup of the Soviet Union (1989-91), to reveal how quickly the conservative right seized upon a new enemy, environmentalism: “America did not fight and win the wars of the twentieth century to make the world safe for green vegetables” (Richard Darman, the elder Bush's OMB director).
My post argues in terms of Nietzsche's will to power (conservatives embrace it and liberals don't), but Hamilton's analysis is more telling. The twin ideas of progress and mastery of nature “define modernity itself” for conservatives, and progress is identified for them with unfettered growth. He goes into detail tracing the conservative think-tanks, initially founded by nuclear war hawk-scientists, and how they have systematically and effectively worked to undercut the liberal critique of human overreach. And if there is collateral damage, it can easily be managed by geo-engineering, whose origins lie with those same military-scientific heroes of the right.
Hamilton outlines where we are headed in a chapter entitled “The Four-Degree World.” It is the briefest in the book, for he relies on Mark Lynas's brilliantly documented Six Degrees. I am reading that as well, and am in the midst of the terrifying long chapter “Three Degrees.” In Requiem, all that Hamilton needs to do is point to what is now the consensus view of climate scientists of where we are headed – 4 degrees Celsius warming - which he gets from attending a pre-Copenhagen global conference in Oxford of climate scientists with which he frames the chapter. As opposed to public statements, these sober and shaken researchers shared among themselves their deepest fears based on the dawning truth that global civilization was not coping with a situation that the scientists were finding was much, much worse than the two-degree world they had initially assessed.
“Relinquishing our rosy view of how the future will unfold is a task more difficult that it may appear because the vision of a stable and sympathetic future undergirds our sense of self and our place in the world.” (210) “Awakening to the prospect of climate disruption compels us to abandon” our comfortable beliefs. Thus begins a powerful final chapter in which Hamilton argues that we must “despair, accept, act.” Earlier, he acknowledged the adaptive quality of unrealistic illusions about the future; they keep hope alive, producing action (Shelley Taylor, Positive Illusions). But he seizes upon Taylor's key distinction, “Illusions respond and adapt as reality forces itself upon us, while delusions are held despite the evidence of the outside world...evidence that large -scale climate change is unavoidable has now become so strong that healthy illusion is becoming unhealthy delusion” (131-32).
Many of us have had exposure to Joanna Macy's despair and empowerment work. Hamilton enlists her approach in conclusion, founded upon the necessity of admitting despair when honest hope has been exceeded by planetary events. As those of us who have trained with Joanna know, allowing despair, we can work through it to a more realistic ground for action. Denying negative emotion slowly shrivels the amplitude of positive emotion as well. We may continue to act, but with less and less belief in our own actions. Our energy dries up, for it is fueled by the internal lie of false hope.
Reading Hamilton, Lynas, and Joanna Macy's latest book, Active Hope (co-authored by psychologist Chris Johnstone), I have been forced to admit that, though I had worked through Joanna's circle of gratitude, despair, and re-imagining more than once, I was stuck once again in denial and powerlessness. The bad news has helped me bottom out once again, and my acceptance has deepened and ripened into renewed action. That action is directed at helping others get on with the process while remaining alert to opportunities for effective public demonstrations, including civil disobedience as I am led.
Despair, accept...Act! After accepting the immensely challenged state of affairs -read Lynas on the projected death of the Amazon in a three-degree world for a snapshot (Six Degrees, 137-42) - we have one final chance. Like Bill McKibben in his masterful piece in Rolling Stone, Hamilton calls us to mobilize a mass movement “to build a countervailing power to the elite and corporations that have captured government,” thus holding the catastrophe to something within the reach of our imaginations. Though it is tempting to think of a benevolent dictator who might achieve results more rapidly, we really “must democratise survivability” through a new radicalism that “aims to shift the ground of politics itself.” To the ramparts, planetary citizens!
Labels: Active Hope, Bill McKibben, climate denial, Copenhagen, death of the Amazon, geo-engineering, Joanna Macy, Requiem for a Species, Rolling Stone, Six Degrees, will to power
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Alberta Tarsands Pipeline: Keystone to Our Tombstone?
With the world's oil reserves dwindling, and production at a plateau for the last 4 years, oilmen view putting into production the world's huge tarsands deposits as key to averting peak oil and the harrowing descent on the other side. Mining these tarsands was not economical until the price of oil rose to its recent highs above one hundred dollars a barrel. Now their moment has come. Alberta and Venezuela, with the richest deposits, have estimated reserves of 3.6 trillion barrels, compared to remaining global conventional deposits of 1.75 trillion barrels. Venezuela has had political problems in organizing the capital-and-technology intensive process of harvesting these reserves, but Alberta has aggressively moved to successfully mine, seperate, recombine and finally export as heavy crude the little globules of bitumen. They have been doing this during those four years, keeping the flow of oil going in the face of steady diminishment. Canada's tarsands project is the finger in the oil dike, allowing the global economy to continue its addiction to petroleum, just barely.
The problem is that our fossil fuel habit is rendering earth atmosphere suffocating through the steady increase in CO2. Burning fossil fuels is the chief contributor to accelerating climate change. Getting these little bituminous globules, nicknamed tar, into a form that can flow through a pipeline is complicated and expensive, both in dollars and in carbon emissions. The globules are mixed with sand, clay and low-grade ores, and must be “fracked” by using high-pressure steam, which requires a lot of water. Canada has plenty of that, but exporting drinking water and channeling it into agriculture, which a warmer, drier world is going to be even more desperate for, might be more important uses (never mind the forests and lakes and birds who need it). In addition, miners must burn natural gas to liquify the viscous oil sufficiently so it will flow through the pipes. Overall, emissions from tar sands production are 3x that of conventional crude.
But this is only the beginning of the problems of utilizing this marginal source of oil. It contains 11x the nickel and sulfur, 6x the nitrogen, and 5x the lead of conventional oil. What happens with these pollutants when you refine this crude (after hydrofracking) into gasoline? You guessed it. When the Soviets were forced to abandon their client Cuba, the Cubans needed to use local deposits of heavily sulfured petroleum to run their power grid. Burning it has created severe air pollution.
Mining tarsands is an environmental catastrophe, its toxic tailing ponds visible from space. When fully implemented, the surface mining will strip away a total area of forest and peat the size of Florida. Alberta alone creates more CO2 than 145 nations. Put another way, it stands sixth among nations in emissions. As Ryan Salmon, energy policy advisor to National Wildlife Federation put it, the site of extraction constitutes “wholesale destruction of the ecosystem.” It is the single most destructive project on earth.
Alberta is remote, far to the west of Canada, so how do they get this heavy crude to market? Though there are nearer ports, the big refinery complex around Houston is an attractive target for extension of an existing pipeline to Oklahoma. Another has been built to Wisconsin (jauntily and ironically named the Alberta Clipper), with the Great Lakes nearby for shipping, but the proposed Trans Canada pipeline, called the Keystone, would complete a pipleline running through the heartland to Texas. It seems to be key to reaching a global market, with the oil-starved US being the first beneficiary.
After quickly granting the permit to build the pipeline to Wisconsin, the US State Department has called for a series of studies before granting permission for the transcontinental Keystone, responding to protests from environmentalist groups and landholders along the route, including tribes of both the US and Canada. Studies show that a rupture could release 7 million gallons of oil. But that pales in comparison to the environmental costs of the basic operation, which is fundamentally flawed from an ecological point of view. State is calling for a decision by the end of the year. It is ultimately up to the President, and some sources say he will decide by the end of September.
Stopping this project is not going to be easy. It already has a lot of momentum. To encourage President Obama to make the right decision, a politically tough one, Bill McKibben has called for greens to up the stakes. He and 350.org are calling for an ongoing action at the White House gates, running August 20-September 3, waves of protesters, with many each day willing to commit civil disobedience. I am one of them.
This is a key moment for the US and world energy economy. It is also an absolutely crucial moment for maintaining a climate for human life as we know it. If there is no Keystone, then the arch of toxic economy is weakened. Put into place, it may well complete the tombstone of civilization. Think about that as you plan where you'll be during those two last weeks of summer.
The problem is that our fossil fuel habit is rendering earth atmosphere suffocating through the steady increase in CO2. Burning fossil fuels is the chief contributor to accelerating climate change. Getting these little bituminous globules, nicknamed tar, into a form that can flow through a pipeline is complicated and expensive, both in dollars and in carbon emissions. The globules are mixed with sand, clay and low-grade ores, and must be “fracked” by using high-pressure steam, which requires a lot of water. Canada has plenty of that, but exporting drinking water and channeling it into agriculture, which a warmer, drier world is going to be even more desperate for, might be more important uses (never mind the forests and lakes and birds who need it). In addition, miners must burn natural gas to liquify the viscous oil sufficiently so it will flow through the pipes. Overall, emissions from tar sands production are 3x that of conventional crude.
But this is only the beginning of the problems of utilizing this marginal source of oil. It contains 11x the nickel and sulfur, 6x the nitrogen, and 5x the lead of conventional oil. What happens with these pollutants when you refine this crude (after hydrofracking) into gasoline? You guessed it. When the Soviets were forced to abandon their client Cuba, the Cubans needed to use local deposits of heavily sulfured petroleum to run their power grid. Burning it has created severe air pollution.
Mining tarsands is an environmental catastrophe, its toxic tailing ponds visible from space. When fully implemented, the surface mining will strip away a total area of forest and peat the size of Florida. Alberta alone creates more CO2 than 145 nations. Put another way, it stands sixth among nations in emissions. As Ryan Salmon, energy policy advisor to National Wildlife Federation put it, the site of extraction constitutes “wholesale destruction of the ecosystem.” It is the single most destructive project on earth.
Alberta is remote, far to the west of Canada, so how do they get this heavy crude to market? Though there are nearer ports, the big refinery complex around Houston is an attractive target for extension of an existing pipeline to Oklahoma. Another has been built to Wisconsin (jauntily and ironically named the Alberta Clipper), with the Great Lakes nearby for shipping, but the proposed Trans Canada pipeline, called the Keystone, would complete a pipleline running through the heartland to Texas. It seems to be key to reaching a global market, with the oil-starved US being the first beneficiary.
After quickly granting the permit to build the pipeline to Wisconsin, the US State Department has called for a series of studies before granting permission for the transcontinental Keystone, responding to protests from environmentalist groups and landholders along the route, including tribes of both the US and Canada. Studies show that a rupture could release 7 million gallons of oil. But that pales in comparison to the environmental costs of the basic operation, which is fundamentally flawed from an ecological point of view. State is calling for a decision by the end of the year. It is ultimately up to the President, and some sources say he will decide by the end of September.
Stopping this project is not going to be easy. It already has a lot of momentum. To encourage President Obama to make the right decision, a politically tough one, Bill McKibben has called for greens to up the stakes. He and 350.org are calling for an ongoing action at the White House gates, running August 20-September 3, waves of protesters, with many each day willing to commit civil disobedience. I am one of them.
This is a key moment for the US and world energy economy. It is also an absolutely crucial moment for maintaining a climate for human life as we know it. If there is no Keystone, then the arch of toxic economy is weakened. Put into place, it may well complete the tombstone of civilization. Think about that as you plan where you'll be during those two last weeks of summer.
Labels: 350.org, Alberta Clipper, Bill McKibben, ecological catastrophe, fracking, Keystone, peak oil, Ryan Salmon, Trans Canada pipeline
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