Nov 3, 2023·edited Nov 3, 2023Liked by Jason Anthony
Thank you for this well thought out piece. It is a very painful set of choices confronting us.
In making those choices, I think it's important we recognize that emitting carbon into the atmosphere isn't the only way we harm the climate. We also damage climate whenever we damage land. This is because land surfaces directly affect the temperature, humidity and air flow above them, hugely, as has been recognized for decades. So when a forests is cut for a solar array, it is not only ecologically damaging but climatically damaging. By the same token, the forest fires we are seeing are as much a result of their being dehydrated by relentless logging and monocropping as due to carbon in the atmosphere. Old, mossy forests with well developed, moisture-holding soil are naturally resistant to fire. They also help create rain, cool their regions and effect regional and global atmospheric circulations.
Unfortunately, this broader, physical AND biological understanding has been left out of the official narrative leaving us with an incomplete playbook.
In any case, your effort to thread the needle here is admirable, especially your points about utilities and the lack of rooftop solar.
I really appreciate your realistic approach with actual do-able ideas to this issue of renewables. There really is no perfect solution yet solutions we must find!
Excellent article - really appreciate the tone, data, and thoughtful reasoning. I especially appreciated grasping the points about the opposition of utilities to clean energy as the key factor. Thank you for the work you do.
Nov 28, 2023·edited Nov 28, 2023Liked by Jason Anthony
I'm catching up on some of your past writings and loving this series. I just wanted to jump in on the bird-death issue with wind energy. I spent a year in law school compiling California counties' wind power permitting applications to the state department of fish and wildlife. Because of the well-recognized harm to state and federally protected species, any potential wind power approvals had to receive what was more or less a variance from the wildlife agency. I worked for a large nonprofit wildlife advocacy group at the time, and I think what distinguished the windpower-death thing from the cat-death and glass building-death thing, at least to them, was that raptors, many of which are in decline or endangered, were particularly vulnerable to wind power deaths, while the cat and window issues are more indiscriminate in their bird impacts. As I recall, the particularities of siting windmills in just the same windy zones raptors like to soar, at just the right height where the wind flow is best but which is also where they like to glide and eyeball the earth for prey, means that they are not looking ahead to see and avoid turbine blades. It's a conundrum, for sure. I think there's also something to the fact that the proponent of a particular wind power project is easy to identify and negotiate with, while with skyscrapers and pet cats, what entity do you even talk to about the problem? The owners of skyscrapers? Everyone in the US who has a free-roaming cat? It's a pretty tough predicament to which I don't pretend to have any answers. Just some thoughts from someone who's been stewing on this for a number of years.
Nov 4, 2023·edited Nov 4, 2023Liked by Jason Anthony
This quote is from the Frontiers' report:
"Large population size and continued growth are implicated in many societal problems. The impact of population growth, combined with an imperfect distribution of resources, leads to massive food insecurity. By some estimates, 700–800 million people are starving and 1–2 billion are micronutrientmalnourished and unable to function fully, with prospects of many more food problems in the near future."
This quote is from today's Washington Post:
CHOTYIEL, South Sudan — It was 1 p.m., her children still hadn’t eaten, and every item on Nyaguey Dak Kieth’s “long to-do list” pertained to surviving another day. So Nyaguey grabbed a plastic bucket and an empty sack and set off from her village surrounded by floodwater. Those waters had upended her life, but also provided a food option — not a desirable one, but one of the few left.
Water lilies. They’d been keeping her family alive for two years.
They were bitter. Hard to digest. They required hours of manual labor — cutting, pounding, drying, sifting — just to be made edible. Nyaguey could still remember her initial shock at eating them, figuring they’d be a short-term measure. And now, with the floodwaters holding their ground, she could trace a two-year arc of distress in what the lilies had become: sustenance so vital that people were slogging farther and farther into the waters to find them, before someone else did.
What I find particularly admirable about your posts (in addition to the clear and incisive prose) is your continued optimism about the situation and your continuous efforts to either find or develop solutions. I'm afraid I don't share your optimism, however. Humans are individually clever but collectively quite stupid (and greedy), so I doubt we will be able to pull ourselves out of this hole. I was proud of us as a species when we successfully addressed the ozone hole, and I thought then that we would be able to be grownups again about global warming. Apparently not. All indications are that we are headed for ecological and societal collapse in the next few decades (and it could come sooner, and quite suddenly). Such a collapse will be both preceded and followed by mass migration and conflict (in fact, those things have already started). So, I hope you're right and I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
What Jim said. Just a few short comments (instead of my usual long winded rants.
1. No amount of DNA preservation or bio-bsnks can restore a lost species. All species evolved as ensembles- dependent on fellow travelling communities of plants animals and microbes. To have guaranteed success with one, you must bring back them all.
2. As James Taylor sung, "No one's going to save us now..". Our own greatest obstacle from changing course is the NIMBYism inherent in our stupid addiction to politics. We'd rather fight wars than save ecosystems. We can swear off the booze for a while and take tentative steps to cleaning up our species's act. But then we fall off the wagon and another million species are lost irreversibly.
3. Fastest and surest road is voluntary reduction of our population to below 1 billion worldwide and keeping it low voluntarily.
4. Antarctica will NOT be submerged by melting and rising oceans! 😉. In fact in 300 years or so most of us will be living there! Palm trees, golf courses...
Thank you for this well thought out piece. It is a very painful set of choices confronting us.
In making those choices, I think it's important we recognize that emitting carbon into the atmosphere isn't the only way we harm the climate. We also damage climate whenever we damage land. This is because land surfaces directly affect the temperature, humidity and air flow above them, hugely, as has been recognized for decades. So when a forests is cut for a solar array, it is not only ecologically damaging but climatically damaging. By the same token, the forest fires we are seeing are as much a result of their being dehydrated by relentless logging and monocropping as due to carbon in the atmosphere. Old, mossy forests with well developed, moisture-holding soil are naturally resistant to fire. They also help create rain, cool their regions and effect regional and global atmospheric circulations.
Unfortunately, this broader, physical AND biological understanding has been left out of the official narrative leaving us with an incomplete playbook.
In any case, your effort to thread the needle here is admirable, especially your points about utilities and the lack of rooftop solar.
I really appreciate your realistic approach with actual do-able ideas to this issue of renewables. There really is no perfect solution yet solutions we must find!
Another splendid article, Jason.
Excellent article - really appreciate the tone, data, and thoughtful reasoning. I especially appreciated grasping the points about the opposition of utilities to clean energy as the key factor. Thank you for the work you do.
I'm catching up on some of your past writings and loving this series. I just wanted to jump in on the bird-death issue with wind energy. I spent a year in law school compiling California counties' wind power permitting applications to the state department of fish and wildlife. Because of the well-recognized harm to state and federally protected species, any potential wind power approvals had to receive what was more or less a variance from the wildlife agency. I worked for a large nonprofit wildlife advocacy group at the time, and I think what distinguished the windpower-death thing from the cat-death and glass building-death thing, at least to them, was that raptors, many of which are in decline or endangered, were particularly vulnerable to wind power deaths, while the cat and window issues are more indiscriminate in their bird impacts. As I recall, the particularities of siting windmills in just the same windy zones raptors like to soar, at just the right height where the wind flow is best but which is also where they like to glide and eyeball the earth for prey, means that they are not looking ahead to see and avoid turbine blades. It's a conundrum, for sure. I think there's also something to the fact that the proponent of a particular wind power project is easy to identify and negotiate with, while with skyscrapers and pet cats, what entity do you even talk to about the problem? The owners of skyscrapers? Everyone in the US who has a free-roaming cat? It's a pretty tough predicament to which I don't pretend to have any answers. Just some thoughts from someone who's been stewing on this for a number of years.
Micro grids, and #NationwideHighSpeedRail along with passive solar design, are essential.
This quote is from the Frontiers' report:
"Large population size and continued growth are implicated in many societal problems. The impact of population growth, combined with an imperfect distribution of resources, leads to massive food insecurity. By some estimates, 700–800 million people are starving and 1–2 billion are micronutrientmalnourished and unable to function fully, with prospects of many more food problems in the near future."
This quote is from today's Washington Post:
CHOTYIEL, South Sudan — It was 1 p.m., her children still hadn’t eaten, and every item on Nyaguey Dak Kieth’s “long to-do list” pertained to surviving another day. So Nyaguey grabbed a plastic bucket and an empty sack and set off from her village surrounded by floodwater. Those waters had upended her life, but also provided a food option — not a desirable one, but one of the few left.
Water lilies. They’d been keeping her family alive for two years.
They were bitter. Hard to digest. They required hours of manual labor — cutting, pounding, drying, sifting — just to be made edible. Nyaguey could still remember her initial shock at eating them, figuring they’d be a short-term measure. And now, with the floodwaters holding their ground, she could trace a two-year arc of distress in what the lilies had become: sustenance so vital that people were slogging farther and farther into the waters to find them, before someone else did.
From <https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/11/02/south-sudan-climate-floods-war/>
What I find particularly admirable about your posts (in addition to the clear and incisive prose) is your continued optimism about the situation and your continuous efforts to either find or develop solutions. I'm afraid I don't share your optimism, however. Humans are individually clever but collectively quite stupid (and greedy), so I doubt we will be able to pull ourselves out of this hole. I was proud of us as a species when we successfully addressed the ozone hole, and I thought then that we would be able to be grownups again about global warming. Apparently not. All indications are that we are headed for ecological and societal collapse in the next few decades (and it could come sooner, and quite suddenly). Such a collapse will be both preceded and followed by mass migration and conflict (in fact, those things have already started). So, I hope you're right and I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
What Jim said. Just a few short comments (instead of my usual long winded rants.
1. No amount of DNA preservation or bio-bsnks can restore a lost species. All species evolved as ensembles- dependent on fellow travelling communities of plants animals and microbes. To have guaranteed success with one, you must bring back them all.
2. As James Taylor sung, "No one's going to save us now..". Our own greatest obstacle from changing course is the NIMBYism inherent in our stupid addiction to politics. We'd rather fight wars than save ecosystems. We can swear off the booze for a while and take tentative steps to cleaning up our species's act. But then we fall off the wagon and another million species are lost irreversibly.
3. Fastest and surest road is voluntary reduction of our population to below 1 billion worldwide and keeping it low voluntarily.
4. Antarctica will NOT be submerged by melting and rising oceans! 😉. In fact in 300 years or so most of us will be living there! Palm trees, golf courses...
Thanks for another thoughtful and sane article.