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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS Crash on Demand (2014) is still controversial
“It is a rare occurrence that I disagree with David Holmgren, one of my heroes, and the co-founder of permaculture. While there is much insight in his most recent paper, Crash on Demand, I am troubled by his conclusions [wrote Rob Hopkins, founder of The Transition Movement]. “So what are the paper’s core arguments? In essence, he is thinking that a gradual energy descent isn’t going to happen. Rather than his Green Tech Future scenario which sees a concerted government response for an intentional powering down, he argues that in reality we are moving deeper and deeper into what he calls ‘Brown Tech’. “Brown Tech has emerged because ‘sustained high energy prices have allowed energy corporations to put in place many new [extreme] fossil energy projects [tarsands, deepwater wells, fracking], which ‘generate far more greenhouse gases than the conventional sources they have replaced’. “The world, if it continues to pursue Business-as-Usual, is still on course for a 6 degree rise in temperature, which would be catastrophic. He states that we have left it too late for a planned and intentional ‘Green Tech’ future. He suggests that in this context, ‘severe global economic and societal collapse would switch off greenhouse gas emissions enough to begin reversing climate change’, and that we should deliberately seek to make this happen. That troubles me. I have two key objections to the paper. “The first place the paper comes unstuck for me is in his conclusion that a post growth, climate-responsible world is inevitably a crashed economy. That feels like a huge claim. No research is used to back it up. It’s also a huge leap to state that a post growth economy is unavoidably a crashed economy. If it can be achieved without collapse, prospects for maintaining prosperity are considerably better. When I attended the DeGrowth conference in Venice last year, I don’t remember any presentations by anyone talking about collapse. “It seems to me that what we need to be doing, and what permaculture, Transition, and many other movements around the world are trying to do, is to build resilience and model a post growth economy from the ground up, at community level, the ‘actively parallel economy’ Holmgren describes. For example, in Totnes, we produced a Local Economic Blueprint. Enabling the kind of shift of financial capital from fossil fuels to investment in local resilient economies will be key to enabling this transition. [wrote John Michael Greer] “Holmgren’s piece was quite a sensible one, suggesting that we’re past the point that a smooth transition to green tech is possible, and that some kind of Plan B is therefore needed. Mind you, David Holmgren is a very smart man. It occurs to me that he may simply have decided to try another way to get people to do what we all know we need to do anyway: give up the hopelessly unsustainable lifestyles currently provided us by the contemporary industrial system, downsize our desires as well as our carbon footprints, and somehow learn to get by on the kind of energy and resource basis that most other human beings throughout history have considered normal. “I don’t imagine that anyone in the peak oil scene has missed the discussions of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of coming to terms with impending death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — and their application to the not dissimilar experience of facing up to the death of the industrial age. Bargaining is the next stage. This is good news, because unlike the two stages before it or the one that follows, the stage of bargaining can have practical benefits. I’ll even suggest things that I’m sure to applaud. “First is conservation. That’s the missing piece in most proposals for dealing with peak oil. Nothing available to us can support the raw extravagance of energy and resource consumption we’re used to, once cheap abundant fossil fuels aren’t there any more, so — ahem, we have to use less. “Second is decentralization. In an age of declining energy and resource availability, coupled with a rising tide of crises, the way to ensure resilience and stability is to decentralize instead — to make each locality able to meet as many of its own needs as possible, so that troubles in one area don’t automatically propagate to others. “Third is rehumanization. Industrial societies are currently beset with two massive problems: high energy costs, on the one hand, and high unemployment on the other. Both problems can be solved at a single stroke by replacing energy-hungry machines with human workers. Rehumanizing the economy.” More at: Bioregional movement: politics and economics of place
“The past century has been marked by the rise of globalization in every sense of the word – through production, culture, agriculture, consumption and more. This trend has brought great wealth and opportunities to many people – but what have we lost and forgotten through this process? “In this Reality Roundtable, Nate Hagens is joined by members of the bioregional movement to discuss the necessity of reconnecting to our local places for the sake of addressing our ecological, social, and economic challenges. How deep are the historical and indigenous ties of humanity to the bioregional way of life? In what ways can individuals begin to engage with their local bioregions and contribute to a regenerative future? “There’s no need to wait for further collapse. Bioregionalism and bioregioning is available to all of us right now. It’s about a different way of seeing and being in that place and reclaiming ouragency. Bioregioning is something that are humans and early pre humans have done since the beginning of time. And it means living in a place, understanding that you’re part of the natural systems of the place, and in a sense working with those natural systems. “So we haven’t actually described what a bioregion is. But it’s a coherent, geographical entity, a landscape, not politically defined. It has a coherent geology and landform type and fauna and flora and rainfall and human history, in the terms of economic history and social history and political history. Some of us are talking about organizing a North American Bioregional Congress in 2026, and it would be the first one to take place here since 2009.” More at: Indigenous wisdom episode #8: with Alson Kelen
“This podcast is about bringing forward the perspectives of Indigenous communities as we reckon with the consequences of a global, industrial society built on growth, extraction, and colonialism. “Despite facing the most challenging forces of colonialism, Indigenous communities are still here, still persisting with resilient cultures. An extreme example of this is what the Indigenous people of the Marshall Islands have faced. People there have endured U.S. colonialism, nuclear testing, and now the climate crisis. “The Marshall Islands nuclear bomb tests comprised nearly 80% of the total nuclear yields detonated by the United States. These nuclear tests amounted to the equivalent of detonating 1.6 Hiroshima sized bombs every single day for 12 years. Today, cancer is pervasive among the population, and many of the islands remain uninhabitable. “Alson is an authority on traditional ocean canoe construction, and has done much to perpetuate Marshallese culture and traditional knowledge among the younger generations where he lives. It felt particularly prescient to speak with an expert traditional navigator, to hear how that only functions as a result of every person on the islands, as well as his crew, doing their part. What better analogy for how each of us might navigate these times?” More at: LG Energy battery storage fire at Moss Landing CA
“Power company Vistra’s flagship grid battery project erupted into flames 11 days ago, and prompted nearby residents to evacuate from Moss Landing, California. The evacuation affected some 1,200 people, and shut down roads including a section of the fabled Highway 1. There have been no injuries reported in the fire, which is being allowed to burn itself out as is standard procedure for such fires. “Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church called the incident a ‘Three Mile Island event’ for the industry. Church added it is the fourth fire at the site, a former Pacific Gas and Electric facility, since 2019. The American Clean Power Association (ACP) disputed Church’s Three Mile Island comparison, calling it ‘misleading and dangerous’. According to ACP, fire-related incidents at BESS sites are incredibly rare, with 20 incidents in the last 10 years at U.S. operating energy storage facilities even as energy storage deployments have grown by more than 25,000% since 2018. “Vistra installed 300 megawatts/1,200 megawatt-hours at the site in 2020, later added a another 100 megawatts/400 megawatt-hours, and subsequently expanded the facility in 2023, to a total of 750 megawatts/3,000 megawatt-hours. For all three phases, the company used NMC batteries manufactured by South Korea’s LG Energy Solution. PG&E also built its own storage facility next door, a cluster of Tesla Megapack enclosures called the Elkhorn project. “Matthew Paiss, a technical advisor for battery materials and systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, began his description of the fire risk by explaining ‘thermal runaway’, in which a fire that can spread from one module to entire racks of batteries. “So how do system designers reduce the chances of thermal runaway? Most, battery storage systems being built today look like rows of shipping containers that sit outdoors. Flames would need to burn through the container’s shell and then leap across an outdoor space and burn through the shell of a nearby container. “In contrast, the systems that have now caught fire multiple times at Moss Landing are indoor installations. Another significant fire risk factor is battery chemistry. The part of Moss Landing that caught fire housed lithium-ion batteries that used a nickel manganese cobalt, or NMC. NMC batteries have lost market share in favor of lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, a chemistry that has lower energy density. “The battery plant fire on the shore of Monterey Bay is also situated next to environmentally sensitive areas such as Elkhorn Slough, designated a ‘wetland slough of international importance’. Researchers at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories have detected microscopic particles of nickel, cobalt and manganese in the mudflats and tidal marshes at Elkhorn Slough at levels roughly 100 to 1,000 times higher than normal.” More at: Billions of energy funds embargoed by executive orders
“Donald Mump’s* return to the White House has put more than $300bn of potential federal infrastructure funding at risk. The funds affected were provided under two of Biden’s signature legislative achievements — the Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law — and include almost $50bn in Department of Energy loans already agreed, and another $280bn worth of loan requests under review. “‘The executive orders indicate that federal funding for EV and battery manufacturing will be harder to access, increasing the risk of stranded capital for manufacturing projects already under way’, said Shay Natarajan at Mobility Impact Partners. Investors said they feared another $300bn worth of future federal funding — mostly from the infrastructure law — would also now be frozen by Mump’s* move. “Unlike the money in the loans office, the IRA’s tax credits — the main form of subsidy in the legislation — are unlikely to be affected. The credits have been a primary driver of investment, with manufacturers committing more than $130bn. Nearly 25GW of offshore wind projects, 65% of the US projects in development, are unlikely to progress under the Trump administration.” * Mump regime — Musk plus Trump = Mu…mp. More at: President Musk’s operationally fictitious and illegal DOGE
“Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were hit with three different lawsuits. ‘Currently, DOGE is operating unchecked, without authorization or funding from Congress and is led by unelected billionaires who are not representative of ordinary Americans’, said Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in a statement announcing one of the lawsuits. “Another lawsuit was filed by National Security Counselors, and the third lawsuit came courtesy of Public Citizen. Although DOGE is styled as a ‘department’, Trump lacks the legal authority to create official departments without legislation from Congress. “According to the National Security Counselors’ suit, DOGE’s ‘intended goal is clear – recommendations made by unaccountable outsiders without transparent deliberations which will reduce the size of the federal workforce by whatever means necessary. Grover Norquist, who founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985, declared in 2001: ‘I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub’.” More at: High carbon footprint of fruit juice
“Global orange juice consumption from October 2016 to September 2017 was more than 2 million metric tons. Guzzling that amount of juice, regardless of the flavor, comes with repercussions. For starters, The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo — the world’s two worst plastic polluters — own the leading juice brands in the U.S.: Tropicana, Minute Maid, Simply Orange, and V8. To grasp the total environmental impact of juice, one must consider the resources needed to grow the produce, the food waste associated with juice extraction, the materials used to package it, and the energy required to ship and store it. “To figure the carbon footprint of Tropicana, a half-gallon represented 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide—or about the same amount as emitted by a 5-mile car ride. Tropicana’s citrus industry produces 547 million gallons of not-from-concentrate orange juice and about 537 gallons of frozen-concentrated orange juice per year. The growing process accounts for 60% of orange juice’s carbon footprint, most of that from gasoline (for machinery), nitrogen fertilizers, and water. “According to Tropicana’s press release about the 2009 study, transportation and distribution accounted for 22% of its orange juice’s carbon footprint. The U.S. sources much of its fruit from Brazil, but also from Mexico and Costa Rica, and its pineapple juice concentrate from Thailand, the Philippines, Costa Rica, and Indonesia. Fruit juice typically comes in polyethylene terephthalate (#1 PET plastic) bottles and jugs. According to Tropicana, packaging accounted for 15% of the beverage’s carbon footprint, and consumer use and disposal accounted for 3%.” More at: NYC traffic congestion pricing saving time and lives
“The first week of congestion pricing bucked the years-long trend of increased bridge and tunnel traffic into Manhattan’s Central Business District. Morning commuter times on January 8th dropped an average of 34% on every bridge or tunnel into the tolling zone below 60th Street. Data gathered by Streetsblog NYC indicating a 51% drop in crash-related injuries in the program’s first 12 days. Buses have also seen ‘consistently high trip-time reductions’, largely thanks to lighter traffic on the bridge and tunnel river crossings.” More at: Oklahoma hydroelectric project a biodiversity threat
“Tucked away in southeast Oklahoma, heavily forested Pushmataha County is home to an astonishing array of biodiversity. But a proposed water reservoir and power transmission project is poised to drown nearly 1,500 acres of habitat that imperiled mussels, bats, birds and reptiles depend on. Beyond the reservoirs, the power corporation is proposing to build 76 miles of new transmission lines that would crisscross places where dozens of imperiled species live. “Through every step of the application process, tribes, residents and community groups have consistently opposed the project. But so far, the Southeast Oklahoma Power Corporation and federal government have yet to heed those calls. “The project would siphon off up to 15% of the water from the Kiamichi River, which more than 30 species of freshwater mussels and 100 fish species rely on. This includes three mussels that are protected under the Endangered Species Act. One protected mussel species that’s culturally important to the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma — the Ouachita rock pocketbook mussel — would likely be driven extinct by the project.” More at: | 
