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September 23, 2023
We are diverted from addressing one of the surest, and probably the closest to a root cause - apart from human nature - of our forthcoming widespread extirpation and then possible extinction. We may die by nuclear war, the danger of which may be exacerbated by conditions connected to global warming, but that might not with certainty be said to be the prime cause of such a war. Our species, and many others may meet our demise from human overpopulation, but that could happen even on a climatically very benign planet as could death from a brutal and treatment resistant virus. However, many calamities are much more likely to occur because of the chaos in weathers caused by - as far as we can tell - the unprecedented speed of introduction of atmosphere warming gases since Earth’s formation. The weathers have caused soil eroding floods and winds. While it is true that both naive and short term profit obsession, combined with various chemical based technologies added mightily to the diminution of organic soil fertility, the failure of crops by ill timed weather anomalies has increased the reluctance of larger scale farmers and marketers to venture into the slow recovery provided by many of the otherwise efficacious regenerative practices for the most degraded of soils. The warming of the oceans and glacial meltwater from Antarctica, Greenland, mountain ranges, and now ice from permafrost are already inundating fertile deltas and otherwise CO2 sequestering seaside marshes. We put energy, including of the fossil fuel kind, into preventative measures which in many cases, won’t survive for many decades, let alone centuries, no matter the enormity of many of these projects. The seas creep up, with gathering speed, and so do the waves, the force of which have done much damage in places humans value. At the same time, the combination of ocean warming and acidification from manmade agricultural, industrial and sewage runoff has destroyed or changed the location of fish stocks, requiring larger vessels to catch declining harvests and impoverishing communities or starving others of their main source of protein. On land, climate change is a huge factor, though hardly the only one, in the mismatch, much as in the sea, of the timing of arrival of feeders and pollinators with food source, due to factors such as changed signals of temperature affecting some but not others in the food chain which might go by hours of daylight instead. While many difficulties and crises we are now experiencing as societies arise from overpopulation or our technical prowess and greed exceeding caution and wisdom, there is little doubt that without global warming we would not be in so dire and urgent pickle, and would have more time to correct our behaviours, assuming we would have it in our capacity. To give ourselves and other sentient creatures a chance to save at least a portion of the next few generations, (and maybe a fair number of adults alive today,) to live a full and worthwhile span, we must prioritize climate mitigation. No doubt many industries are only too happy to have us talking about or addressing important social justice issues such as the housing shortage, the need for more vaccines and hospitals, let alone the minor issues and climate warming urges for travel, large trucks, exotic foods, and all manner of bling that the human mind can conjure. In the meantime, these distractions, some of great importance, others of great irrelevance or quite harmful, take away aiming for necessarily modest lives with fewer emissions, whether from fossil fuel use or the burps of cattle and other ruminants we enslave then murder. Nor do they facilitate more effort for finding and scaling up a practical way of taking much of what green house gases we have already emitted out of the atmosphere, or finding a way to safely reduce the solar radiation broiling much of our planet. All of us need to be told this repeatedly until we get our priorities right. The worst social injustice is and will be the poor and vulnerable suffering and dying first from climate change they may not have caused, while enjoying few material benefits the middle classes in the ‘first world’ thus still do.
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March 20, 2023
Species Imperialistic Genocide on top of Murder-Suicide
Newspapers frequently publish letters and some opinion pieces which, perhaps unwittingly, indicate that many people are disinclined or incapable of caring much about almost anything beyond a short time ahead. In varying degrees, our brains tend to discount the awful and inevitable if it is not immediate. In this we have not evolved much from many other creatures’ fight or flight responses. It disempowers and perverts our conscious planning and the direction of employment of our technical skills.
Thus we get encouraged to support fossil fuel consumption, and opposition to densification. The alternative to the latter increases encroachment on the much under appreciated and human supportive natural world. Meanwhile, there is insufficient discussion as to how we navigate the reduced human reproduction and material luxury necessary to save us from over stressing the planet’s ecosystems. The green house gases and myriad forms of pollution resulting will soon more unpleasantly reduce our complacency than if we were to advance the process in a less chaotic manner than that which nature is only beginning to visit on us.
In much of the world we seem to prefer a systemic suicide, whether under some perverted ideology, supposedly democratic or not. Some absurd crippled case might be made, were we to to be affecting only our own kind. However, by advancing climate harms we thereby include a vast diversity and number of other species as collateral damage. This is going far too far in our murderous imperialist human arrogance.
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March 20, 2023
A Hopeful Political Opinion Remains
The oil and gas lobby is meeting with our government almost twice a day for each working day the year, writes Canada’s National Observer. The fossil fuel barons get billions of dollars from us, the taxpayers, while their products can give us pollutants, poisons, asthma and many other diseases, and worse, deadly climate chaos. They produce oil, for example, in the United Arab Emirates, for as little as around $10 a barrel, and sell it for, on occasion, $70 a barrel.
There are 159 litres to a barrel. It is nonetheless a good thing we are buying it at the pump at close to $2.00 a litre. Our health and the lives of our grandchildren are worth a lot more than that. Even with all the taxes in the pump price, the oil companies operating in the Americas, Africa, and Asia are making billions. And with or without high taxpayer subsidies, also here.
The very least we should do is stop subsidizing them, tax their profits more to fix our healthcare, encourage clean energy, and urgently and drastically reduce the rate of global climate change. The present major three parties are unwilling or incapable of either this or preserving our old growth forests, and the health of our soils and oceans.
We get only distractions, failure to cure very important but less so than our ignored existential problem, and empty promises about after every next election. We should stop accepting half measures with weasel words in the fine print and trust only immediate thorough action rather than the cowardly and comfortable limits politicians pander as the limits of the “art of the possible”.
It’s time to actively support the remaining party which has been by far the most vocal, but hasn’t been given the chance to try to correct the problem. The best among the others looks to continues to be completely insufficient.
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March 20, 2023
The Struggle for a Future
There is no long-term advantage to pretending a 1.5 degrees limit to a warmer planet can be of much use. We are a fraction of that beyond our base data point. However, already the disasters from extreme weather related events generally agreed by science to be caused or enhanced by human use of fossil fuels are increasing in severity and frequency, and building on each other. There is debate as to how long before permafrost stops melting and sea level continues rising if we stop further man made emissions of atmospheric warming gases. Similarly, we cannot be sure how crop losses and other killer weather events
will develop under present CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide concentrations. It does not look good.
We have to move rapidly to reduce the release of these gases, regardless of the conveniences with which the established institutions and markets present to us. If we don’t, even more than the tens of thousands around the world now suffering will die of crop failure famine, and heat, flood, and attendant disease. Even in privileged corners of the world high food prices and shortages of those constituting healthy diets, and zoonotic disease will deteriorate everyones’ living standards by raised health and medical costs and shortages of healthily efficient labour.
Public funds will be short for education and private money for all forms of adaptation, much of which may not be effective for long, but entail the production of significantly more destabilizing emissions. We are already seeing that minimal increases in sea level rise, when combined with stronger winds, are causing large losses to insurers and the rise of premiums, or even elimination of property insurance eligibility in some areas.
Excessive logging, sometimes replacing damaged infrastructure or providing more agricultural land to compensate for smaller and less reliable harvests will only increase warming atmospheric emissions. The occurrence of fatal heat domes, and fires in the remaining forests will thereby increase.
Fossil fuel derived fertilizers and other pollutants are creating areas of insufficient oxygen, acidification, and the increasing heat is moving and changing marine ecosystems faster than to which the animal and plant life can adapt.
Climate change induced problems have been continually happening sooner than scientific modelling has predicted, and greater instability in the jet stream creates unheralded winter temperature plunges within the overall warming which is also proving deadly to many a man and beast.
If governments decisively reduce atmosphere warming emissions and science finds a way to take them out of the air, as is now being researched, chances of a worthwhile life for ourselves and our progeny will greatly improve. Business will make sustainable economies more convenient and cheaper if we take the trouble to persist with initiatives which do less harm to our environment.
Since action is infectious, it therefore is imperative for each of us our priority is to do all we as individuals can, in our own lifestyles as well as by influence on all levels of government with making our most responsible wishes known both in between elections and at the ballot box. We will succeed if we vote for what will work for what we want, rather than merely against what we most fear. Meaningful democracy will not survive without active and thoughtful participation, and neither will we.
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March 20, 2023
It's Crunchtime for Technology Control
Technology has become dysfunctional for the way developed societies are now institutionally constructed. The rich are getting richer as never before, and those at the bottom of the heap are of less value to the rich than in times past. Neither their labour, nor their consumerism is as important as before. Robotization amplifies this, as goods available to the richer will need shorter production runs to make them worthwhile to invest i in. We are moving from the individual craftsman through the early “ one size fits all” of early production runs such as in the Ford T1 to the vehicle options and variations emerging in more flexible roboticized runs now available in other goods affordable only for the well-heeled. We are in a situation where a stable planet requires fewer human interferences with the healing abilities of the rest of nature, whether they be from housing, agriculture, transportation, pharmaceuticals, or objects of entertainment. Tough love in our governance, and stricter climate and habitat preservation is first priority for the health and survival of humans and most chordate creatures. If we are to halt the downgrading of the poorer from a potential market to an inconvenience and then an existential consuming and polluting threat to those at the top of the economic heap, we must reorder society. We must not only do it in a manner that keeps our atmospheric gases in optimal proportions, but vitally ensures all of us are given an adequate share of the direction of the wealth produced by entrepreneurs and technology mavens. Future cheaper products, less intrusive on the world, such as cultured meat, other foods and 3D substances are only half the cure. Human reproduction must be further reduced. At the same time educated, engaged, and truly democratic control of stronger government powers must be established very quickly. We can no longer survive laissez-faire and libertarian self-indulgence due to the severe environmental constraints which we no ignore at great peril. __________________________________________________________________________________
March 20, 2023
Rant
We are allowing our leaders to murder us.
We don’t like paying high taxes, or changing our
habits. But if we wish to live and thrive we must
do both. Our leaders don’t want to upset us, and
besides, they and other elites will begin to suffer
later.
Some think they’ll remain immune. not realizing
how much they depend on our work and all of
over stressed nature to support them.
If we care for our young we must make it clear
we will pay higher taxes to reduce the myriad
of problems which contribute to our destruction
via climate change we have caused.
We will stop voting for the same old parties that
stuff the pockets of oil and gas corporations and
allow useless bling to clutter our closets. We will
shun neoliberal alliances and denounce self-
contradictory budgets
We will vote for a truly climate focussed party,
which restricts multimillionaires, and businesses
with little essential social purpose through stiff
enforcement of severe regulations and laws, for
they must stop diverting us with toys and gadgets.
Our food supply and our safety from wind
and wave and flood and fire depend on our leaving
unfettered production and extraction in favour of
supporting each other. If this is left un-tackled, there
will be violent competition for increasingly scarcer
resources.
We must mend our ways or face losses that are
already worse in parts of the world than even
Putin’s cruel madness. This can be stopped
long before the increasing curses of climate
change are halted at our doors.
We have more than one kind of war to fight.
They require reducing our thoughtlessness and
subduing power hungry instincts, for each enables
the other.
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November 12, 2022
Hope, Curiosity, the Limitations of Evolution, Spirituality, Technology, and Tipping Point Arrival
As hope to substantially delay a 6th extinction fades it is, for me, being replaced by deep curiosity as to how it will all spiral down.How much, if at all, that impacts lifespans is in itself another matter for curiosity. And for what as well as how intensely the hope was felt might make a difference to lifespan. Indifference, however, appears to be the norm, most notable amongst the powerful, when it comes to concern for the preservation of life much beyond that of grandchildren of one’s own.
Whether in the atheist or the religious, spirituality does not appear to consistently engender a lot of practical action that changes habits or interrupts comfort in the service of quelling climate chaos. Money, status, and scientific curiosity more obviously do .
We have, in short, only slightly progressed beyond toolmaking and herd living. Perhaps this is where evolutionary mechanisms become either inept or irrelevant in protecting our kind, and lottery odds face our chance of acting with the urgency and thoroughness required to save any or but a few of us from the dust or coal bin of geologic history. The time for success may be past anyway, with a multitude of tipping points reached beyond our technical prowess, let alone our will.
However, there will be more to be both curious and hopeful about if we just keep trying to behave better to save ourselves, and many other species.
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November 11, 2022
Forest Preservation, Energy, Happiness and Footprint
Let ‘s halt the majority of our B.C.logging, especially lower elevation old growth and logging for pelletization. It is contributing to considerable climate harms and ecocide. There are many happy societies with modest standards of living and much smaller footprints per capita than ours.
Alberta is in a great position to exploit solar and wind technologies, and likely more geothermal sources than many provinces in the country. It is the wealthiest of our Provinces, I recently read, though the metric was not stated. It has no more need to perpetuate coal production any more than does B.C.
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November 11, 2022
Batteries, Geothermal, Abundance Abuse
Reports abound in the energy storage circles of new and emerging battery storage solutions much cheaper , safer, and long lived than the present dominant Lithium ion technology. Some of these are for vehicles, but just as importantly, they are for the use of continuous heating, cooling, lighting and work power in factories, homes, and assorted businesses. An emerging technology out of a small Vancouver company is predicted to cost one fifth per unit of energy of that of present Lithium ion technology.
Given the intermittent nature of solar and wind power production, and the significant portion of overall cost of battery storage in many grid systems - and much more so in stand alone projects, cheaper, safe more abundant, and less harmful sourcing of materials promises to be a game changer in the availability of renewable and cleaner tech to all, especially poorer economies. It will also significantly reduce the need not only for dirtier and more Earth warming technologies for “peaker” power, when solar and wind are dormant, but will reduce extensive development of solar panels and wind turbines. Volatility will be less of an impediment to handling the shutting the connection between surges of renewable contribution and a grid frying over production in time of low demand. Unfortunately, this initially less capital intensive path may slow the development of the long term better route of deep geothermal power usage.
We must then control our instincts to abuse abundance with further destructive demands of the Earth’s carrying capacity.
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November 11, 2022
Rights of Nature Are Necessary
A legal construct of the rights of nature is derivable from several strands of cognition and attitude related to our love of our own life and dependence on the fecundity, variation, and stability of lifeforms in various ecosystems.
It serves our own selfish purposes for survival and the mental health derived in part from delight in, affection for, and awe of so much of nature's offerings.
As a herd species, for so long never fully predator, prey, or in control of our surroundings, we had sufficient humility with our limited wisdom to have regard for nature which could morph into spirituality, fanciful attempts at explanation, and religious observance to provide an illusion of security.
We lost that humility as our technical prowess developed, but now finding it again as the stark realities of our impetuous meddling and massive numbers have thrown our life supports out of balance.
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November 10, 2022
How Genuine are Companies Espousing the Paris Agreements?
If many companies support the Paris Agreements, how is it that their industry associations do not? If the fossil fuel business is only about 10% of the economy, and shrinking, how is it their viewpoint prevails?
One may wonder how important this is, and in what way. Perhaps in lobbying the government and advertising funds being paid for by all association industries, rather than just fossil fuel businesses.
But the question may also be asked why those businesses claiming to support the Paris Agreements do not either assert their influence or set up their own associations, and find way so collaborate in furthering more sustainable practices, in part by lobbying separately for the appropriate government mandates.
What may be reluctance to spend time and cash on such initiatives may be seen as greenwashing, idleness, or fixation on short term earnings rather than longterm survival.
Whatever the characteristics, this is a serious matter, given the useless stances of many of our governments in what is clearly within their bailiwick and power to take much more action on, and that in spite of the brakes that the judiciary is inappropriately systemized to apply.
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October 24, 2022
Humanism and Democracy Being Tested
Democracy is in itself hugely ethically attractive construct, to which we should all pay allegiance. However, its practicality is being brought into question as we react to the probabilities of a sixth extinction manufactured in crucial aspects by human action. The toleration and open-mindedness implicit in a meaningful democracy hobbles fast, thorough response, as is necessary in existential crises such as we are now experiencing. There is a temptation amongst many to wish for a more authoritarian process so what must be done immediately, actually happens. But whether it will or not depends on the authority. The recent record in authoritarian regimes is as mixed as amongst the more democratic ones, and different egalitarian or technical development metrics are far from conclusive either. In Canada, it might be worth asking what do our government’s leaders really want to do that is essential to our pulling our weight to overcome the dire threat with which human and other sentient species are now confronted. It cannot be achieved by supporting fossil fuel businesses or pipelines. But in this democracy, at this time, do our governments believe, and is it true, that the public won’t willingly make living standard sacrifices now to optimize well being later, and prevent much greater misery and depletion of life’s abundant variety in the not too distant future? Each one of us must make it pointedly clear which is our priority. That is a minimal essential for democracy, including, particularly now, between elections. Contact all representatives directly.
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October 13, 2022
Funding Parallels in Health and Climate Affairs
About 5% of the health care budget is spent on preventative measures, the rest on curative associated activities.
Similarly, governments and electorates respond more readily to the implementation of adaptive responses to climate difficulties rather than to reducing problems’ causes.
These ill-advised, expensive and insufficient approaches are understandable. If the curative or adaptive methods are employed, then the immediate victims are readily known or easily guessed at. Not so much when trying to predict which smoker or neighbourhood industrial pollutant inhaler will succumb to lung cancer and which will die in road accidents or something else unrelated, or go on to a ripe old age in spite of similar external risks in their lives.
In general we know, as do insurance companies, that cigarettes and driving fast or "under the influence" are associated with shorter life spans, and private insurers know fees must be raised to make crop insurance a viable business in climate chaos, and it’s not profitable to insure homes in low lying flood vulnerable areas of increasingly hurricane susceptible Florida.
Unfortunately, their time horizons, like those of the rest of us, are too short for the general good, so they will still , if in diminishing numbers, underwrite fossil fuel projects with short term prospects of viability, in part, perhaps, as it will increase insurable adaptation ventures, though also in the longer term reducing the number of dollars and people around to give them business. Analogous factors apply to political and insurers’ interests dealing with health care.
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October 7, 2022
Done with the Cheery Today
To beat which of the horrors we can that climate change is sending the world we have to face some realities that almost all politicians and many scientists are not telling us as they should.
The more one reads of the science as it evolves the more it becomes apparent that we have to put almost all our energies into stopping our green house gas emissions and sequestering all those of nature we can capture. This will necessitate huge drops in the convenience and standard of living in societies such as ours, with the wealthy reducing the most.The alternative will be far less bearable, eventually for the richest as well as the rest.
Few will be pleased to hear messages of trial and tribulation from their politicians, and these whose job entails such communications will shrink from it. Meanwhile most entrepreneurial and job interests will crave the prospect of cheerful expansion. Reality is a bitch, and the prospects rarely worse than now. But to avoid dealing with them only makes them worse. Most of us know that we must start now.
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October 6, 2022
It Can and Will Happen Here. Let's Slow It
An astounding 30% of U.S. citizens residence moves were prompted by worsening weather exacerbated by climate change, according to a recent survey of 2,000 households by Forbes Homes. Canadians may soon be similarly affected, as forms of climate chaos move poleward. Death tolls here from flood, fire and heat stress are of minor consequence compared with what is happening elsewhere, but it will soon affect us more.
Their droughts, famines, and retreats from salinization compromised food producing deltas, wind and soil erosion despoiled areas will affect our food availability too. We already have increasing harvest unreliability, and soil nutrient depletion from the notable overuse of chemicals which kill the organisms providing our best fertility and resilience. Farmers are loathe to abandon these as recovery takes time and care. The next crop usually dominates their concerns. Meanwhile, adaptations from new infrastructure to alleviate more immediate risks produce more green house gases and other pollutions, making matters worse.
We must therefore all do our best to reduce our use of fossil fuels and contaminants, Stay and source food grown as locally as possible, and demand our governments assist us in this. Voting for parties least vulnerable to the lobbying of large business and some union interests is the way to get the powers to act responsibly.
We have to do this now, otherwise, lag times for GHGs to take full effect suggest the next decade will be far worse than the next year, and the latter might be bad enough.
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October 6, 2022
Business for immigration. Pure Water, Not So Much
How long might it be before Canada has an influx of U.S. citizens seeking refuge from heat and drought further south?
Historically much immigration from our neighbour has been to seek gold or avoid political and social censure and persecution or the dangers of war. Now we can meet expats seeking leave of liberty as expressed in so much of U.S. culture, and hoping for a little more of “Peace, Order, and Good Government,” which they imagine they will find here.
Perhaps our climate in both the geographical and mental spaces will remain a little cooler, at least for a while, though climate models have been unable to keep up with the speed of change for the worse in the real world. For a country reputed to be the best in the world in endowment with fresh water, it is surprising and unnerving to read that a number of hydrologists are averring that we are beginning to run short of it in many places, and that they are not just talking about the stuff safe enough to drink straight from the stream.
This is but one consideration which might determine the size and shape of the welcome mat for immigration from many a country. Factors of food supply for home and export revenue, stresses on housing supply and farmland and wilderness encroachment may also come into play. But one thing likely to continue: many politicians and businesses will seek ever increasing power or profits from a larger population.
October 6, 2022
Human overpopulation and rising numbers are reducing the chances for continuing generations to lead rich lives in familiar biodiversity and living standards most of us in the developed world take for granted.
There are immense ethical dilemmas posed in the alternative ways we can address attempts to save ourselves and offspring here and around the world from death or lives hardly worth living. Do we do all we can to raise the presently diseased and famine, fire, and flood victims from lives of misery? This entails, with present techniques, the emission of more GHGs from transport and the building of shelters. In evolving climate and weather irregularities they will often be placed in newly inhospitable areas.
Do we try to provide anything like our comforts and healthcare in the name of social justice either to people remaining in their own lands, or those who we admit as immigrants, and from whose applicants we selfishly select the ones whose training is most sorely needed whence they came?
Meanwhile, the dire necessity to immediately and drastically reduce climate changing and toxicity raising activities, for which the technologically advanced are mostly responsible, demands we double down on reducing our emissions and greater future deaths, maybe including stopping supplies entailing plastic packaging and micro-biome depleting fertilizers.
Whatever we do there will be trade offs and great sins committed. To do enough of it all at once in all manners is asking much of both amoral corporate capitalism and human nature itself.
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October 6, 2022
Chaos is a prime characteristic of climate change. This is bad for all species, especially for those with limited mobility and Inability to swim in floods or dig themselves rapidly and find sustenance in the ground beneath the reach of fire, or fly to a supportive ecosystem.
Our lives and food sources are at risk because weather patterns and extreme events are neither stable from year to year, nor predictable.
One of the very important things science has got right about climate change is that it costs huge amounts of money and effort to repair infrastructure, and though this may raise the gross domestic product, it leaves less for health, wealth, and happiness for the great majority of us.
Amongst the things which scientists continue to get wrong is the frequency, number, location, variety, and severity with which more weather disasters and their knock on effects occur. It is worse than some wish to tell us, or have predicted.
Hurricane Ian was unexpectedly worse, Fiona’s severity went further north than thought likely. A typhoon travelled from near Japan to devastate a stretch of the Alaskan coast, sparsely inhabited by humans.
While flooding in Pakistan is record shattering, others strip valuable topsoil on a par with winds. The Arctic ocean is acidifying four times faster than the rest in the world, and the summer melt of snow cover with surface fresh water layer can enable more harmful effects from toxins.
On it goes. Without mitigation our temporary adaptations are totally insufficient.
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October 6, 2022
Auto manufacturers are in no hurry to abandon their existing infrastructure of internal combustion manufacture.
Meanwhile many buyers are still unnecessarily drawn to big status symbols of which many more luxurious appointments and “featuritis" add little or nothing to safety or long term ride enjoyment or utility but often increase greenhouse gases and the depletion of planetary resources. for this they pay tax proportional to the price, as with most goods.
An additional purchase tax should be imposed upon ICE vehicles for private or "for profit" corporate use proportional to their fuel efficiency and GHG and particulate emissions per mile, It could be supported by annual costs when insurance is renewed based on the fuel efficiency of the vehicle and the the mileage recorded. For this, odometers need to be made tamper profound checkable.
The federal money thus raised can be used to subsidize the purchase of electric buses by transit authorities and school boards, the placement of ev fast chargers where needed, and research into lifecycle emissions and pollution of various road surfaces and tire materials from wear and tear.
Perhaps that will slow internal combustion sales enough to hasten a little the availability and adoption of cleaner vehicles while providing much needed revenue to the government and reduce the ridiculous oversizing of many vehicle purchases.
Even with supply chain problems, where there is a will, there is often a way, including for zero emissions vehicles. Climate concern must supersede so much else.
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October 6, 2022
When and how do we begin to take drastic measures to reuse or more efficiently use our domestic water supplies?
We can recycle our grey and black water, as as space exploration technology has proven, though the cost may be astronomical, and possibly remain stratospheric.
If needs are far from the ocean and it is more expensive to desalinize and transport ocean waters perhaps reversing fossil fuel flows with desalinated water will prove viable.
In the meantime, there are substantial savings still to be made in the more effective provision of smaller quantities of water being provided for crops, the substitution of less water hungry plant matter, and the diversion of water from providing food to animals destined for our dinner table.
It is remarkable and ironic we need to discuss this in a large country blessed with many large lakes and rivers, and such a relatively sparse population. However, we had better start addressing this soon as we have vast expanses where there is not enough to supply ourselves with aquatic food sources, and riparian cooling, oxygen providing and toxics absorbing trees and vegetation..
Furthermore, we should help other poorer lands utilize water saving technologies, chiefly as acts of humanitarian charity. Also it will reduce pressures from legal and illegal climate immigration on a scale that with the best will we may not be able to provide for as long as we have weather extremes which our home building technologies and food productivity may fail to match.
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August 10, 2022
The Biggest Climate Challenge After Overpopulation:
Our food system is said to contribute three times more than previously thought to green house gas emissions, about half being from transportation, and about 30% of man-made totals.
Demand for foods seasonally unobtainable, locally, and their needed refrigeration increase emissions. We must therefore grow as much as we can on our private home lots and put up food for the winter as in former times if we are to slow the advent of more crop failures from increasingly unproductive temperatures and precipitation patterns.
Food gardeners and smallholders may soon be seen as amongst the heroes contributing to our survival.
But it does not end there. We must support vertical farming on buildings to decrease temperature extremes and improve air quality, and support indoor farming technologies to control harmful weather and climate effects on food supplies, as well as more closely adjust nutrient delivery to plants, whether hydroponically or not.
It is also easier to make sure pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer are not lost into ecosystems where they can do more harm than good when, as is frequent, they are misapplied. Valuable pollinators are killed, algal blooms reduce water oxygen below levels supporting animal life, and the variety of plant life is reduced, providing insufficient habitat for life dependant on particular species.
Not least, production and consumption of plant based meat imitating foods, and research and development and scaling of cell based meat technology must increase to avoid animal suffering, GHG emissions, and the use of over a quarter of the earth’s surface for pasture. This ridiculous amount of land would better be used where possible for increasing forests and much more calorie and nutrient human food cropland.
It is astounding that 90% of the bulk of mammal animal life on the plant is composed of the relatively few species raised to provide mankind with meat and milk rather than the vast number of wild species confined to ever decreasing habitats suitable for their survival and the richness and stability of our surrounds.
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August 5, 2022
On Auto Manufacturing
Auto manufacturers are in no hurry to abandon their existing infrastructure of internal combustion manufacture.
Meanwhile, many buyers are still unnecessarily drawn to big status symbols of which many more luxurious appointments and “featuritis" add little or nothing to safety or long term ride enjoyment or utility, but often more to depletion of planetary resources and greenhouse gases. For this, they pay tax proportional to the price, as with most goods. Environmentally, it may not be enough, especially given how much many of them create further fossil fuel production.
An additional purchase tax should be imposed upon ICE vehicles for private or "for profit" corporate use proportional to their fuel efficiency, GHG and particulate emissions per mile. The tax could be supported by charges when insurance is renewed based on the fuel chemistry, the efficiency of the vehicle, and the mileage recorded. For mileage monitoring to work, odometers need to be made tamper-proof and checkable.
The federal money thus raised can be used to subsidize the purchase of electric buses by transit authorities and school boards, the placement of EV fast chargers where needed, as well as research into lifecycle emissions and pollution of various road surfaces and different tire materials during wear and tear.
The heavier the vehicle, the more small particles of synthetic rubber are worn off, so the passenger load and numbers should be factored into overall estimates of sustainability. Tire wear pollution is thought to be a serious problem which spreads afar from the road bed.