‘Bermuda should be the model for clean energy for the world’

Leading US conservationist Larry Schweiger, president of Virginia-based National Wildlife Federation visited Bermuda as a special guest speaker at the Bermuda Environmental Alliance’s ‘Latin Night for Planet Earth’ gala last Friday.

Mr Schweiger spoke about climate change and the impact it is likely to have on low-lying land and islands, such as Bermuda, and pointed to ways that the Island can be a ‘clean energy’ model for the world.

Here is a shortened version of Mr Schweiger’s speech:

We need to look north to see our future.

The Arctic is warming faster than any other place on earth. It has warmed more than twice as fast as the global average in the past fifty years. The Arctic has lost 20 percent more summer ice in 2012 than it did in the record-setting year 2007. We could see the complete loss of summer ice by the end of this decade. Dark open water or barren ice-free Arctic lands increase the amount of solar radiation absorbed and further speed the melting process.

Nearly the size of continental United States, Arctic ice is vital for temperature regulation in the Arctic region as it bounces about 90 percent of the sun’s energy as albedo. Open water absorbs 80 percent of the energy thus changing a giant reflector into a massive energy absorbing system. As the Arctic region warms, it thaws the nearby tundra and releases carbon dioxide and methane.

Open water is an important threat because it will heat deep Arctic waters that release methane and spawn the decay of nearby Arctic tundra that has the potential to triple the carbon in the sky through rapid decomposition of the organic matter. As permafrost soils decompose they release massive amounts CO2. Warm Arctic waters and warming thermokarst lakes and ponds also releases large quantities of extremely potent greenhouse-gas methane that further accelerate climate change, as methane is a potent greenhouse gas.

As the Arctic warms, Greenland warms and becomes the source of enormous amounts of runoff. It is an island covered by two-mile thick ice that is being impacted by Arctic warming. During 2011, Greenland dumped 100 billion tons of ice and water into the ocean. In 2007 the worst year on record, about 40 percent of the Greenland surface was experiencing melt. This past summer about 97 percent of the island was experiencing melt. The total volume of water released in 2012 is not yet available but it’s increasingly clear that the Greenland ice sheet may soon pass a point of no return as the Arctic ice disappears.

What happens in Greenland will not stay in Greenland. Added to the expansion-driven sea-level rise caused by warming waters, sea level rise from melting glaciers and Greenland is a rapidly approaching reality for islands, coastal communities and mega-delta regions of the world. Worldwide, a one-metre rise in sea level will displace 100 million people.

Warming ocean waters also produce more atmospheric moisture and breed fewer but bigger hurricanes. Powerful climatological shifts caused by an overheated Arctic will have unpredictable but certainly far-reaching consequences to Bermuda and other low-lying regions of the world.

We are already experiencing strong signals that climate change is happening now. Forest fires happen four times as often in the US and burn six times more acres. Massive droughts have been affecting critically important agricultural lands. Mega storms worldwide are increasing damages by about one percent per year. All these climate-driven trends added together signal a challenging future for us all.

Since the island of Bermuda is experiencing sea-level rise three times the world average rates and since it is in the path of hurricanes that are expected to become stronger and stronger, Bermuda should be the model for clean energy for the world. Working together we can decarbonise our energy supplies and avoid the worst.

This is doable. Since electric energy production in Bermuda is primarily produced by expensive imported oil, I believe Bermuda can create an efficient, clean energy path at equal or less cost than consumers are currently paying for electricity. Solar panel prices for example, have declined by 50 percent last year and LED lights and other efficiency measures can dramatically cut energy demand and save money.

We need to have unprecedented international cooperation to move away from carbon emitting fossil fuels to advanced efficiency measures and spawn serious investments in clean energy sources such as solar, wind, wave and current energy. More

 

Is the Natural Gas Fracking Industry Paying Off Scientists?

Last week the University of Texas provost announced he would re-examine a report by a UT professor that said fracking was safe for groundwater after the revelation that the professor pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Texas natural gas developer. It’s the latest fusillade in the ongoing battle over the basic facts of fracking in America.

Texans aren’t the only ones having their fracking conversations shaped by industry-funded research. Ohioans got their first taste last week of the latest public-relations campaign by the energy policy wing of the US Chamber of Commerce. It’s called “Shale Works for US,” and it aims to spend millions on advertising and public events to sell Ohioans on the idea that fracking is a surefire way to yank the state out of recession.


The campaign is loaded with rosy employment statistics, which trace to an April report authored by professors at three major Ohio universities and funded by, you guessed it, the natural gas industry. The report paints a bright future for fracking in Ohio as a job-creator.

One co-author of the study, Robert Chase, is poised at such a high-traffic crossroads of that state’s natural gas universe that his case was recently taken up by the Ohio Ethics Commission, whose chairman called him “more than a passing participant in the operations of the Ohio oil and gas industry,” and questioned his potential conflicts of interest. As landowners in a suite of natural gas-rich states like Texas and Ohio struggle to to decipher conflicting reports about the safety of fracking, Chase is a piece in what environmental and academic watchdogs call a growing puzzle of industry-funded fracking research with poor disclosure and dubious objectivity.

“It’s hard to find someone who’s truly independant and doesn’t have at least one iron in the fire,” said Ohio oil and gas lease attorney Mark F. Okey. “It’s a good ol’ boys network and they like to take care of their own.” More

 

 

 

The End of Growth Update Part 2

The social dimensions of the end of growth are coming into clearer focus with each passing month—from last year’s Occupy uprisings, to the recent NATO demonstrations in Chicago, to mass demonstrations in Spain, and on and on. Also clearer is the desperate strategy of the powerful, which consists primarily of the militarization of the police and the criminalization of dissent.

Yet what else besides unrest and revolt is to be expected from soaring youth unemployment rates, falling living standards, and still-increasing levels of economic inequality?

 

By now it is also becoming clearer that the social impacts of contraction serve as a reinforcing feedback to the economy, worsening the debt crisis. A revealing phrase is being used to describe Europe’s financial mess: “the street has taken control.” As people express fears about the future of the euro by taking their money out of banks, the banks weaken and demand more backstops from governments, which have to run even bigger deficits in order to provide bailouts. Further, as people lose faith that government can address economic problems, they stop paying taxes—as is happening in Greece—thus making government even less effective.

 

Lack of social cohesion is itself a cost to the economy. It’s hard to make a formal economy work at top speed if it is being sabotaged, or if a significant proportion of its output has to go toward keeping people from deserting it in favor of a growing informal economy of black markets, subsistence, and barter.

 

War is a timeworn solution to economic problems. Surplus young males are kept off the streets; idle manufacturing capacity is engaged; dissent can be ruthlessly swept aside. But in our current global circumstances war is itself becoming increasingly costly, and the US (which is typically at the center of any international conflict du jour) is extremely war-weary. Apart from threats and counter-threats over Iran’s nuclear program, there are few signs yet that strategies of desperation are about to be deployed on a broad scale. But with economic tensions nearing the breaking point geopolitical rivalries could escalate very quickly.



The social consequences of economic contraction are discussed in more detail in my recent essay “The Fight of the Century.”



The economy needs fuel . . . and more of it all the time

To most commentators, the current economic dilemma appears to have emerged solely from problems within the global financial system. But, as I argued inThe End of Growth, there are deeper and—in the long run—much more important factors at work. The economy requires ever-widening streams of resources in order to grow, and many key resources are becoming more expensive to produce. This is particularly true with regard to energy resources, especially oil.

The 2011 [disaster] total was undoubtedly much higher due to the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns, which by themselves caused roughly $1 trillion in damage

Blowing in the wind

In The End of Growth I argued that the direct financial costs of environmental disasters (principally, droughts and floods, together with large-scale industrial accidents) are rising to the point where they will soon overwhelm economies and make growth impossible. I cited the Haitian earthquake, the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, extensive wildfires in Russia, and deadly floods in Pakistan, all occurring in 2010; the monetary costs to the global economy that year (as figured by the insurance industry) totaled $250 billion. The 2011 total was undoubtedly much higher due to the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns, which by themselves caused roughly $1 trillion in damage (I have yet to see a final figure that takes into account other catastrophic events last year). More