The UN climate conference in Poznan, Poland came to a disappointing conclusion on December 12th.   The ‘spin’ of press releases coming from official UN sources, which were picked up unquestioningly by new media around the world claimed a successful conclusion.  They alluded to the conference concluding with a (paraphrase) ‘clear statement of what now needs to be done’.  In other words, the conference ended with a restatement of the same things that had been decided and stated the year before in the ‘Bali Roadmap’.  There may have been minor ‘progress’, but that could hardly be lauded in respect of the vast distance that remains between what has been stated and achieving an unambiguous agreement, strong and comprehensive enough to avert the worst of what is to come in the climate crisis ahead.

It would be more honest had they said that nothing substantial had been accomplished, and that the the world had, once again, been held hostage by the limited national interests of certain countries, and often by the conflicts-of-interests created by the coziness or collusion of governments with the fossil fuel and other industrial lobbies.

Some news outlets did look further and draw more appropriate conclusions.  And there were articles which acknowledged the lack of real progress in the negotiations.

It was a sad day for the future of the world.  We now have but one year remaining until the final round of negotiation to take place in December 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark.  Between now aand then there will be 3 additional meetins of the parties, most likely in Bonn, Germany and Geneva, Switzerland.  And then there remains much work for us to do.

Over the coming year the people of the world, perhaps lead by the very youth who were so brilliant at this year’s conference, will need to be alerted to the danger at hand, and will have to rise in spontaneous (or planned and coordinated) public protest and civil disobedience.  Governments must be told in clear and unambiguous terms that we are aware, in ways they may as yet not be, that the future of life on Earth depends upon their actions.  That they must abandon personal interests, and must rise above limited and limiting national interests, to reach a vantage point where they can see clearly the true interests of their children, their people, their nation, and the future that they will commit us all to.

I will now turn my attention more fully to what I have determined to be our best and last chance to get it right.  I will be promoting the film The Age of Stupid, which I discussed in an earlier post.  I welcome anyone reading this who wants more information about the film, or wishes to help in its reaching the widest possible audience, to email me at the.age.of.stupid@gmail.com, for the sake of Life on Earth.

“Dana, you do NOT sound trite.  That is precisely the question.  My answer at the moment is

1. Redouble your efforts of what you are already doing.  The effects may be small, but walking the walk is critical, especially if those of us who know what lies ahead are to create a recognizable path for others to follow.
2. Find your voice.  That is, figure out how to make this a daily conversation with everyone you meet… walking the walk helps make it a constant topic.  For instance, every time you refuse a plastic bag at the checkout, and vocally remark at the 60,000 bags a second used in the US alone, you engage at least 2 or three other people in the paradigm shift.
3. Raise your voice with government at all levels. Democracy does not mean voting once every 4 years.  You vote every day with every purchase you make.  Vote only for things that improve our prospects of survival on the Earth.  Personally, I feel that you can largely forget about the online petitions.  They are a ‘feel-good’ thing and I believe they divert us from REAL action by making us think we ‘gave at the office’, so to speak.  If you like being among the, say, 100,000 people who responded ‘thus and such’ to ‘so and so’, that is fine.  But they are too easy to do, to easy to fake (I can sign 30 times as 30 different online people) and most of all, too easy to dismiss.  Get phone numbers and make calls… often… to the feds, the state, your local government.
4. Get into the boardrooms of the world… buy one share of stock (not for the investment) of any corporation you see creating the problem (which is most of them).  That makes you one of their stockholders with as much standing to say your mind as any… then use that.  Again do it by phone which is the most potent.
5. Be prepared to demonstrate, to take to the streets.  It is my contention that within a few years there will be massive protests around the world, and I am in fact planting seeds toward that eventuality.  That is a final resort in a way, but my sense is that it will come to that.  That is what ended the War in Vietnam.  We must return to those tactics to avoid ending all Life on Earth in a climate catastrophe of unthinkable dimensions.

We MUST make it clear to all people we know that 2015 is the deadline by which humanity MUST start REDUCING the total carbon emissions (not merely slowing the rate of growth as is currently being negotiated in Poznan, Poland) or we are ‘dead meat’ as the saying goes, along with the majority of species of Life on Earth.  The funeral will come later, but the despicable deed will be done by 2015.  This is NOT hyperbole.  It is the reality of the situation as I see it (along with the UN IPCC although they do not engage in the colorful metaphors that I do), and I believe I see it clearly after studying it and being intimately involved for some years now.

It is not a pretty message, but it is one that must guide our dayly actions.  We who know and feel this deep calling must become ‘climate warriors’… peaceful warriors.  There is at present no higher calling in my humble opinion.

For the Earth – §

From my vantage point here in Poznan, I am daily beset by the realization that the chance of our ‘getting it right’ either in Poznan this year or in Copenhagen next year are not good.  Within the climate science community (IPCC and others) there appears to be a consensus that humanity must start to decrease global CO2 emissions by 2015 in order for us to ‘dodge the bullet’.  In this case, the bullet is passing tipping points by which we may no longer be able to stablize the climate within the 2 degree Celsius limit considered the maximum safe limit for global climate to rise.  These markers are all the ‘best guestimates’ that science can offer in these uncharted waters.  In short, it does not look to me like we will make an agreement strong enough in Poznan to bode well for that necessary goal.

So what is needed is for humanity, and here we are talking about everyone from Bill and Belinda Boardroom to Joe and Josephine Sitsback, to have the immediate realization that humanity, and all Life on Earth, is in grave danger… and that each and every one of us MUST shake ourselves out of our lethargy, catatonia, denial, avoidance, or whatever other term captures the reason for our lack of involvement in the battle for planet Earth that is currently waging, and not presently being won.

The Age of Stupid is the most effective vehicle for capturing the heart and mind of each viewer and turning it into indignation and action.

Now, I will relinquish your kind attention and ask you only to spread the word… both of my blog, if you feel it is valuable, and of The Age of Stupid, due out in theaters everywhere in early 2009.  When it is in a theater near you, see it.  If it is not in one, or you wish to put on a screening of your own, contact me at stuart.h.scott@gmail.com .  Again, this blog can be accessed at http://climatecorps.wordpress.com/, for passing to your friends.

Here’s the link to The Age of Stupid video trailers.  Have at it!

For the Earth – §

My two first choices turned out to be less than personally interesting, standing room only notwithstanding.  So I happened into a third one which caught my eye in the Daily Programme as being co-hosted by Columbia University, my alma mater.  It was one I had rejected on my initial triage due to the title. Climate Risk Insurance.  For me that title was a non-starter, since I admittedly have the personal bias that insurance companies are the leeches of modern society, draining off the financial life-blood of individuals and organizations in support of their bloated payrolls, buildings, corporate jets and executive salaries and ‘perks’.

So it was a bit of an eye-opener and bias-buster for me to listen to a speaker describe and detail absolutely legitimate matters of managing the risks associated with climate change for subsistence farmers in underdeveloped nations.  I may not be able to reconstruct much of what he presented (when one negates the validity or usefulness of an area one does not develop the intellectual capacity to comprehend the area… thus insurance is like ‘social studies’ to me…), but I will try to give an example.

Say an area or country is prone to a dry year one out of every five.  If that dry year is likely to increase in severity, threatening the farmers with hunger or a catastrophic decline in their level of capacity (more on that in a moment), then a valid approach to risk management would be to construct a program whereby payouts during that bad year can be offset by premiums paid in the ample years.  Too bad pharaoh hadn’t had risk insurance.  But then he might never have met Joseph, and never let the Jewish people go to the promised land.

In addition to any specific programs that might have been discussed at the session (I left early to attend to other matters), even the idea that good minds were seriously engaging the challenges of climate change in the area of adaptation and risk management, and were trying to anticipate the kind of things that could happen and ways of coping with the potentially devastating outcomes that are possible.   An interesting image arose in the talk I feel compelled to share here.  A hypothetical farmer was described and the particular risk mentioned was a year in which yields were so poor that the farmer might be forced to kill and consume his plow animal.  This is the level to which even the insurance industry is searching in its own mission to make a difference.

While things seem to be destined to get much worse, for along time, before the vast inertia and momentum of the global climate system can be set in a right direction, it is of some hope that some of the best minds on the planet are presently working on that huge effort.

For the Earth – §

I am not much of a party person, let me say, but would quickly learn to be one if I lived in Poznan.  The young set here (hard to dimension that generality) runs a cumulative social life around mobile phones, and so coordinates movements and party going.  The UN crowd does not have that, uh, level of communication, so a mention in the daily ECO (the daily publication of the Climate Action Network, but another post on that topic – see ECO of the past, Omen of the future).  The place was mobbed from 9 pm when I arrived and was still hanging in there at 4 when I left.  Oh yes, I spent the first few hours of my birthday there after midnight as well.

Actually, as is my bent in the first place, the party was both a spiritual and a worldly experience for me.  The beer flowed; the DJ was terrific so the music was right in the groove, to use a metaphor of my youth.  It seemed that everyone was in the same space of comfort talking with anyone they chose to (highly subjective judgment that!).  My mental model for the party was that this group (or most of it) spent their whole days working together, passing one another in the halls, and meeting rooms, eating at the next table, standing together at the security points, coat checks, lunch lines… basically imprinting each others’ faces… all in the service of the Earth… trying to forge an elusive consensus on addressing global climate change mitigation and adaptation (more on that to come)… briefing one another, debating one another, supporting one another and seeking common ground… toward trying to avoid societal and individual suffering now and in the future.  That common purpose creates a sense of unity in the group, and that manifests as the best damned party in Poland on that particular Saturday night.

Actually, now that I think of it, the NGO party was the first thing about the conference I heard about from the young woman I sat with on the train from Berlin to Poznan when I asked her for a summary of the meetings I should be sure to attend, as there are literally meetings numbering in the thousands from which to choose over the course of the conference.

For the Earth – §

I gained admission to COP-14 as the ‘guest’ of the Ecology Center, out of Berkeley California (another long story that one, since we were mutually strangers in the great climate change cloud before the conference).  Their primary message here in Poznan relates to the closely related false-solution/true-solution pair of waste incineration and recycling.

There are those here at the conference who would like the incineration of garbage to be counted as a ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ (CDM), and so be subsidized activities under the terms of that ‘mechanism’.  This idea is a travesty.  It essentially gives another subsidy and incentive to a completely unsustainable practice, the incineration of the hugely bloated waste stream of our voracious global, consumerist economy.  It does not take a PhD to understand that the true solution, in contrast to this distorted idea, is that somehow humanity must find a way of reducing the very waste stream that would be incentivized otherwise, designing and creating products which last far longer than is currently the case (and is tolerated by the sleeping masses who have grown accustomed to this inherent planned obsolescence), can be repaired economically rather than the norm of being discarded as trash, and to recycle ever single stitch of that waste stream that can be recycled.  The concept of cradle-to-cradle must become the ‘law of the land’.  Every company in the world that creates a product must find a way to redesign that product so that is utilizes a minimum of the resources of Creation as feedstock and energy, that anticipates the re-use of every possible component and material, and then be held responsible for creating individual or shared ways of collecting those products as they reach their extended useful lifetimes for the reclamation, reuse and recycling of its components.

Talk about a paradigm shift from the current norms!  Yes, this may be a Utopian idea, but it does not take a Nostradamus to predict that such ideas will evolve into the mainstream as humanity foolishly continues to rape the planet of her stores of raw materials, and to foul both the air and the water with the products and by-products of our foolish, blindly short-sighted ways.

For the Earth – §

At a meeting I attended this past week which was billed as an ‘engagement of the youth’, a meeting with Yvo de Boer and others of similar stature and vision, a young lady Anna Keenan from Australia, also a member of Al Gore’s Climate Project, gave an inspiring brief presentation in her 5 minutes.  She told of how she and 4 of her compatriots made the journey from Australia to Poznan, Poland entirely overland save for the brief crossing of straits that could not be avoided.  She spoke of the thousands of other young people, members of the Youth Delegation and others, whom they met along the way.  Many of them wanted to join her here in Poland, but few could do to the constraints of their lives, not least of which is funding.

This group of young people represents both the future hope of the planet in their wisdom and energy, and the unfortunate inheritors of the mess that those who’ve gone before them have made and continue to make of the world.  They meet every morning to plan their activities of the day; they meet every evening to assess their success and impact, and to learn for the next day’s battles.

They turn up in countless places and have cross-representation within other NGOs and ancillary defenders of the Earth as well, like the Climate Action Network, Al Gore’s climate project, which tragically has missed the opportunity of furthering their mission with a presence in Poznan, the press corps (both official and unofficial), and others.

There is so much to say in praise of this group that it is difficult to know where to start.  But let me do something else entirely.  Let me brief you on a question and answer exchanged within the ‘youth engagement’ meeting mentioned earlier.  After all presenters had had their 5 minutes to speak, an audience member posed a question to Yvo de Boer, who, as Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) is essentially the host of this whole big Save the Planet party here in Poznan.  They young questioner asked what is he to bring back to his home country in terms of direction and hope, when the youth of the planet is not allowed standing in the talks, and thus their interest, perhaps the highest of all in the human dimension of this crisis, is under-represented at best, and completely marginalized as worst.

As mentioned in an earlier post, my impression of Mr. de Boer is that he is a wise soul rightly entrusted with this vast responsibility of leading the minions of 6 billion humans, as well as the countless beings represented by the collective, composite noun as Life on Earth.  His responses were most interesting and I offer them to all my readers (or shall I say ‘both of them’) in the hopes that this under-reported facet of COP-14 will inspire more to right action.  Three of his answers, there may have been more, as I remember their spirit without the benefit of notes and taking liberty with the actual prose with which they were delivered, were as follows:

• Don’t wear business suits, wear the garb of your youth and suitable to your cultures and positions to that you will be better noticed
• Speak loudly, yell if you can, scream if you must.  Do what ever it takes to gain the notice of your governments and elders in business and commerce
• There are 3 delegations that include youth membership in their official ranks.  Increase this number.  Demand representation of you interests and ideas from your governments.

The youth of our lonely planet will inherit the Earth, at least from an anthropocentric point of view, in all of its beauty and glory, as well as in its much-compromised state.  This youth is not at all meek.  Let us hope that the ecological sins of the fathers are not visited on the children for a thousand generations as is described in that problematic parable known as the Bible.  Let us hope to turn the Bible upside down by visiting the good thoughts and deeds of the children upon the sins of their parents.

Neither this year’s conference in Poland, nor next year’s COP-15 in Copenhagen will solve the problems, at least not the vast majority of them.  It will be a meager continuation down the path of planetary healing.  Many have come to view humanity as a disease of the organism, the sum of all consciousnesses, human and other, of the planetary ecosphere called Gaia.  Perhaps global warming is the fever that Gaia is taking in order to shed this disease, or at least put under control the vast proliferation of offending individual disease pathogens.  I for one only express the tearful hope that we will not, in the folly and waste of our ways, be the agent of the extinction of all Life on Earth, which is a distinct possibility under some future scenarios.

On the other hand, we may in fact be capable of rising to a level of cumulative wisdom to avoid what appears to be the increasing probability of our dim fate.  We may learn new paradigms by which ‘more’ is replaced by ‘enough’ in our hearts and souls; by which ‘me’ is replaced by ‘we’ in our notion of who we are; and by which that ‘we’ grows to include both future generations of homo sapiens sapiens AND all other forms of life on our tiny blue-green planet floating in the vast reaches of interstellar space.
For the Earth – §

Greenpeace (“you gotta love ‘em”) have been brave and inventive defenders of the planet for decades now.  It is their members who risk arrest, injury and death (Google the quoted search term “Rainbow Warrior” and “ship” some time) shining the light of day on the nefarious practices of unrelenting greed.  Several weeks ago some of their British contingent encamped 50 meters or so above the ground, clinging with climber’s gear to the sides of a smokestack in the UK through which thousands of millions of tons of CO2 have fouled our atmosphere and blanketed our shared Earth.

Well, a similar action was mounted here in Poland, at a coal-fired power plant not all that far from Poznan.  Clearly the intent was to divert some of the attention being received by the attempt to fix the problem through a consensus-based negotiation of 192 parties, large and small, both ‘franchised and disenfranchised, with an vast but not incomprehensible, array of prominently divergent interests.  That is did, attracting attention both here and in the international press.

Their banner was simple and clear, “Come Clean, Stop Coal”.  The police were out in force, but the demonstration was met with the kind of respect shown to dissidents when the world is watching.

If you can afford to fund only one environmental movement, I would seriously consider your directing those funds to Greenpeace.  Long live Greenpeace, long live Life on Earth!

For the Earth – §

Apparently there are pockets, or pools, of very black soil in the Amazon region called ‘terrapreta’ in Portuguese.  These are the result of carbon being worked into the soil over time by indigenous peoples.  This soil is know to be much more fertile than surrounding areas of ‘normal’ rainforest soils, known to be exceptionally ‘washed out’ and nutrient poor.  But more important perhaps, is that the carbon is stable in the soil, and thus represents a sequestration of carbon by ancient peoples.  So we are rediscovering this old ‘technology’, dusting it off, and calling it biochar.  Granted we will likely create the ‘char’ in a more efficient manner, but I am tempted to quote the old adage that there’s ‘nothing new under the sun’ (pun intended).

Biochar can be made from any biomass feedstock, wood, agricultural waste (including manure), greenwaste from households or landscaping, etc.  It is made by a process called ‘pyrolysis’, the heating of the material in the absence of oxygen.  It differs in the method used to create ordinary charcoal in that the gasses that are emitted from the pyrolysis are captured and used.  These gasses would ordinarily be released into the atmosphere where they contribute to the greenhouse warming of the earth.  Or if the biomass were to be burned, such as is done daily in developing nations around the world, the gasses would become indoor air polution causing resperitory and other health problems.

But the capture gas can be used in one of several ways.  They can be burned to help fire the continued production of biochar; they can be captured for use as cooking gas or other heating gas; they can be liquified to become something now known as bio-crude, which is feedstock to refineries which can produce liqued transportation fuels; and more promising still, they can be fractionally distilled to search for applications to any number of valuable uses.  I am told that one of the ingredients of Chanel No. 5 perfume is a fractional distillate of Brazilian rosewood, for example.  Who knows what ‘cancer cure’ (figuratively speaking) may be locked up in some biomass feedstock for biochar.

This is an amazing potential win-win-win-win process.  It is early in its research and development stage, and people are seeking to have it listed as an approved CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) solution in terms of the climate change treaty under negotiation here in Poznan.  This approval could not come soon enough in my humble opinion.

The speakers were Debbie Reed, from the International Biochar Initiative, Jim Fournier from the Biochar Energy Corporation,
Johannes Lehmann, Cornell Soil Scientist and leading expert on biochar in US and likely in the world.

Folks, this is a big winner and its proliferation could not be more important as a distributed solution to many problems at once, carbon sequestration, soil productivity (food) in developed and developing nations, water conservation in agriculture (the char helps soils retain water better), alternative energy production, and potentially countless other valuable side-products as yet to be discovered.

For the Earth – §

Through my connection with Al Gore’s Climate Project, I was interviewed several days ago, over the Internet.  It was a wonderful chat I had with Greg Mattison, from Poland to New Jersey, over the Internet, with no time delay at all… like he was in the next room.  I suppose my surprise at this minor miracle may surprise some.  But let’s just say that we should not take any of this technological miracle for granted.

The entire pre-edited conversation is a a bit long, but is, as Greg states at one point, “theater of the mind”, which you can access at the following address… http://newlygreens.com/_content/uploads/shared_files/NewlyGreens.com_StuartScott.mov

As always, I invite your feedback and comments (please be gentle ;^)

For the Earth – §