Celebrated scientists and development thinkers today warn that civilisation is faced with a perfect storm of ecological and social problems driven by overpopulation, overconsumption and environmentally malign technologies.

In the face of an "absolutely unprecedented emergency", say the 18 past winners of the Blue Planet prize – the unofficial Nobel for the environment – society has "no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilisation. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us".

The stark assessment of the current global outlook by the group, who include Sir Bob Watson, the government's chief scientific adviser on environmental issues, US climate scientist James Hansen, Prof José Goldemberg, Brazil's secretary of environment during the Rio Earth summit in 1992, and Stanford University Prof Paul Ehrlich, is published today on the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the UN environment programme (Unep). The paper, which was commissioned by Unep, will feed into the Rio +20 earth summit conference in June.

Apart from dire warnings about biodiversity loss and climate change, the group challenges governments to think differently about economic "progress".

"The rapidly deteriorating biophysical situation is more than bad enough, but it is barely recognised by a global society infected by the irrational belief that physical economies can grow forever and disregarding the facts that the rich in developed and developing countries get richer and the poor are left behind.

"The perpetual growth myth ... promotes the impossible idea that indiscriminate economic growth is the cure for all the world's problems, while it is actually the disease that is at the root cause of our unsustainable global practices", they say.

As many as a half-billion trees may have died across Texas from the effects of the 2011 drought, the state's forest service says.

A survey released Monday by the Texas Forest Service estimates 100 million to 500 million trees, or 2% to 10% of the state's 4.9 billion trees, have been killed by the severe drought, which began last year.

Although it will take several years to obtain enough data to determine the full effect of the drought, "ultimately, Mother Nature is going to dictate what will happen," said Chris Edgar, a forest resource analyst.

So far, early estimates show the effects of the drought are numerous and widespread.

"Large numbers of trees in both urban communities and rural forests have died or are struggling to survive," said Burl Carraway, head of the forest service's Sustainable Forestry Department.

As a chart from ExxonMobil’s new 2012 Outlook for Energy (via Gregor McDonald) shows, the vast bulk of our oil comes from those older, easier-to-drill fields, with more recently discovered supplies playing a smaller and smaller role:

As ExxonMobil details in its report, more than 95 percent of today’s oil comes from fields discovered before 2000. About 75 percent comes from pre-1980 discoveries. While many massive, older fields can keep gushing for decades — Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field, first tapped in 1951, still hums along at 5 million barrels per day — they seem to be dwindling overall. As Exxon’s chart shows, reserves discovered in the 1960s and before maxed out around 1980 (even as oil companies are trying to recover additional oil from older wells with better technology). What’s more, it seems to be getting tougher to squeeze oil out of newer finds.

The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.

Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this "lock-in" effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change, the world's foremost authority on energy economics has found. If this is not rapidly changed within the next five years, the results are likely to be disastrous.

"The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried – if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."

If the world is to stay below 2C of warming, which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then emissions must be held to no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the level is currently around 390ppm. But the world's existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that "carbon budget", according to the IEA's analysis, published on Wednesday. This gives an ever-narrowing gap in which to reform the global economy on to a low-carbon footing.

If current trends continue, and we go on building high-carbon energy generation, then by 2015 at least 90% of the available "carbon budget" will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure. By 2017, there will be no room for manoeuvre at all – the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for, according to the IEA's calculations.

ALTHOUGH Pakistan makes international news for terrorist attacks, anti-American demonstrations and its alleged support for insurgents in Afghanistan, it is the basic inability to switch on a light that is pushing this volatile country closer to the edge. Popular anger over Pakistan’s crippling electricity shortage boiled over on to the streets this week, with riots that paralysed whole cities, unleashing running battles with the police and causing widespread damage to government offices...

The suburbs do not create wealth, they destroy it. The American style of building our places is simply not productive enough to continue.

Beijing used to be famous for the millions of bicycles thronging its streets. But it is the success of the motor car there and in other Chinese mega-cities that has now tipped the number of cars in the world over the 1bn mark.

According to a report by the trade journal Ward's, 35m new cars and lorries were sold worldwide last year – the second-biggest increase ever recorded. That is 95,500 extra vehicles being added to the global traffic jam every day.

Almost half of the new growth is in China, which recently overtook the US as the world's biggest car market thanks to the sales of 13.8m new passenger vehicles. Despite the surge in sales, car ownership in China is still only half the global average.

But hopes that the country will also become a pioneer in the shift towards "clean car" technology have suffered a setback as the Chinese show little sign of interest in electric and hybrid vehicles despite ambitious government plans. Last year, Toyota managed to sell only one Prius – the world's most commercially successful hybrid car – in the fastest-growing market. Sports utility vehicle sales, by contrast, are surging.

• The embodied power—the emergy of devices divided by their replacement lifespan—is roughly equivalent to their wall-socket power consumption.  That is, looking at wall-socket electricity ignores half of actual energy use for computing devices.  Specifically, we estimated that the total wall-socket power use of the Internet is between 83-144 GW and the embodied power is between 87-164 GW.
• The total power use of the Internet, which we estimated to be between 170-307 GW, is about 1-2% of global energy use.  We were a bit surprised by this, because we thought it might be higher than that.  (Though it’s a larger percentage if we were to consider electricity use alone.)
• It might be reasonable, then, to focus more attention on how the Internet can substitute for other energy-intensive societal functions.  We did a simple calculation for the obvious example—transportation.  Suppose we were to replace 1 out of every 4 air trips with a video conference (we assume business trips that consist of 5 one-hour meetings).  Doing so would decease global energy use by about 285 GW, which is on the order of the Internet’s entire energy consumption.  (And the potential increase in the Internet’s energy use for carrying extra video traffic would only be about 2 GW.)

The bottom line is that the few previous studies that existed were ignoring a large piece—roughly half—of the energy use in question.  Despite this, it seems worth it to keep the Internet going as long as we can because it may help us, for a time, keep our energy use down.  In future posts, I’d like to consider where else looking at emergy can yield insights and reveal shortsightedness.

By the way, "emergy" = embodied energy, i.e. energy used in producing desktops, laptops, phones, servers, routers etc.

It's well worth reading the full post at Contraposition.

Only 70% of the incident sunlight enters the Earth’s energy budget—the rest immediately bounces off of clouds and atmosphere and land without being absorbed. Also, being land creatures, we might consider confining our solar panels to land, occupying 28% of the total globe. Finally, we note that solar photovoltaics and solar thermal plants tend to operate around 15% efficiency. Let’s assume 20% for this calculation. The net effect is about 7,000 TW, about 600 times our current use. Lots of headroom, yes?

When would we run into this limit at a 2.3% growth rate? Recall that we expand by a factor of ten every hundred years, so in 200 years, we operate at 100 times the current level, and we reach 7,000 TW in 275 years. 275 years may seem long on a single human timescale, but it really is not that long for a civilization. And think about the world we have just created: every square meter of land is covered in photovoltaic panels! Where do we grow food?

Now let’s start relaxing constraints. Surely in 275 years we will be smart enough to exceed 20% efficiency for such an important global resource. Let’s laugh in the face of thermodynamic limits and talk of 100% efficiency (yes, we have started the fantasy portion of this journey). This buys us a factor of five, or 70 years. But who needs the oceans? Let’s plaster them with 100% efficient solar panels as well. Another 55 years. In 400 years, we hit the solar wall at the Earth’s surface. This is significant, because biomass, wind, and hydroelectric generation derive from the sun’s radiation, and fossil fuels represent the Earth’s battery charged by solar energy over millions of years. Only nuclear, geothermal, and tidal processes do not come from sunlight—the latter two of which are inconsequential for this analysis, at a few terawatts apiece.

But the chief limitation in the preceding analysis is Earth’s surface area—pleasant as it is. We only gain 16 years by collecting the extra 30% of energy immediately bouncing away, so the great expense of placing an Earth-encircling photovoltaic array in space is surely not worth the effort. But why confine ourselves to the Earth, once in space? Let’s think big: surround the sun with solar panels. And while we’re at it, let’s again make them 100% efficient. Never-mind the fact that a 4 mm-thick structure surrounding the sun at the distance of Earth’s orbit would require one Earth’s worth of materials—and specialized materials at that. Doing so allows us to continue 2.3% annual energy growth for 1350 years from the present time.

At this point you may realize that our sun is not the only star in the galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy hosts about 100 billion stars. Lots of energy just spewing into space, there for the taking. Recall that each factor of ten takes us 100 years down the road. One-hundred billion is eleven factors of ten, so 1100 additional years. Thus in about 2500 years from now, we would be using a large galaxy’s worth of energy. We know in some detail what humans were doing 2500 years ago. I think I can safely say that I know what we won’t be doing 2500 years hence.

Global power demand under sustained 2.3% growth on a logarithmic plot. In 275, 345, and 400 years, we demand all the sunlight hitting land and then the earth as a whole, assuming 20%, 100%, and 100% conversion efficiencies, respectively. In 1350 years, we use as much power as the sun generates. In 2450 years, we use as much as all hundred-billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Vertical notes provide historical perspective on how distant these benchmarks are in the context of civilization.

So basically, this article says that even if we surrounded every star in the Milky Way galaxy with a sphere of 100% efficient solar panels (pretty much impossible) we'd only buy the human race 2,500 years of growth, assuming levels of 2.3% growth in energy consumption per year (which is less than the average since the start of the industrial revolution).

Strike two against the Obama administration was the permission it granted early in the president’s term to build a pipeline into Minnesota and Wisconsin to handle oil pouring out of the tar sands of Alberta. (It came on the heels of a Bush administration decision to permit an earlier pipeline from those tar sands deposits through North Dakota to Oklahoma).  The vast region of boreal Canada where the tar sands are found is an even bigger carbon bomb than the Powder River coal.  By some calculations, the tar sands contain the equivalent of about 200 parts per million CO2 -- or roughly half the current atmospheric concentration. Put another way, if we burn it, there’s no way we can control climate change.

Jared Diamond, author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel, talks to ClimatePrep.org about the twelve main challenges facing our civilisation today of which climate change is only one.

One of the interesting issues raised by Diamond in this short clip (and discussed in more detail in his book, Collapse) is what happens when a wealthy elite is insulated from the consequences of the decisions it makes. This is what tipped the ancient Mayan civilisation into collapse and it is also arguably happening today in developed Western industrial civilisation.

Robyn Williams: Chris Skrebowski, formerly of BP and the Institute of Petroleum in London, now an oil consultant, with Jonica Newby of Catalyst, who managed to score an exclusive with the man himself in Paris. Fatih Birol is the chief economist of the International Energy Agency.

Fatih Birol: The news is not very bright. On the one hand we see that the global oil demand will increase substantially, mainly driven by the transportation sector, cars, and also by China as a country. Today in China 30 people out of 1,000 people owns a car, and in the United States 700 people out of 1,000 people owns a car. And the Chinese, with the increasing income levels, they are going to buy cars, which is justified, and therefore the demand for oil will increase substantially.

On the one hand we have this pressure on the demand side, but when we look at the production side the prospects are a little bleak. We think that the crude oil production has already peaked in 2006, but we expect oil to come from the natural gas liquids, the type of liquid we have through the production of gas, and also a bit from the oil sands. But in any case it will be very challenging to see an increase in the production to meet the growth in the demand, and as a result of that one of the major conclusions we have from our recent work in the energy outlook is that the age of cheap oil is over. We all have to prepare ourselves, as governments, as industry, or as a private car driver, for higher oil prices.

Jonica Newby: Do you think governments, including my own, have been in denial on this?

Fatih Birol: I think governments in general are not well prepared for the difficulties we are going to face in the oil markets, because the bulk of the growth is coming from the transportation sector, and if we have to find the solution to the oil problems, we have to find a way to change our mobility habits. The only way I see, and it is well documented in our book, is that to move from an oil-based to an electricity-based mobility system we should lower the oil demand growth and therefore comfort the oil markets. But it will be too optimistic to say that any of the governments, yours or mine, or many of the OECD governments are ready to face this challenge.

Jonica Newby: How urgent is it?

Fatih Birol: I think the important thing here is the prices, prices may go up substantially...

Jonica Newby: How much?

Fatih Birol: Today we have about $90, which is still a significant amount of money we are paying. For example, in Europe we are facing this financial crisis. The amount of increase in the oil import bill in Europe, it is only the increase in the oil import bill in Europe, is equal to the government budget deficit of Greece plus Portugal put together. So only the increase where we have $90. If it increases further, which we believe it will, at least 20%, 30% higher than now in the next few years to come, and this would mean additional pressure on the financing of many governments who are the oil importers.

Jonica Newby: Again, how close is that? How soon might we get that..?

Fatih Birol: Increase in the prices?

Jonica Newby: Yes.

Fatih Birol: It will depend on the economic recovery. If the economic recovery starts to happen sooner rather than later we can see difficulties in markets in two, three years time, and this in turn may mean strangling the economic recovery efforts because higher oil prices means putting your pressure on the trade balance, and through the economic recovery efforts it can be well strangled. So this is a big challenge.

IEA chief economist Fatih Birol being interviewed on the Science Show on Australian radio network, ABC.

Speaking to priests and community leaders about what's driving people to leave the land and move into shanty-towns inside mega cities at a rate not seen in human history, there's an interesting and complex answer.

Top if the list is tornadoes: they are devastating agriculture and they usually take three years to filter through into economic impacts. You are seeing not just the young but also the elderly leave the land now because the rural economy is too fragile to cope with the effects of natural disasters.

Second, the impact of land reform: the government gives land to the farmers, but they have no money so they sell it immediately to agribusiness and move into the town.

Third, food security. Thirty percent of the rural population goes literally hungry at night, but 10% in the towns. In some ways you have to begin to see megacities as a survival response - all over the globe - to the climate and financial crises.

What does all this mean? Maybe it means - as the NGOs claim - that the global food system is beginning to break down.

Worth reading the full post from Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight's Economics editor at the link above. He touches on the complex array of factors which affect food supply and the growth of slums in mega-cities. Looking forward to the full broadcast on this.

By Andrew Nikiforuk, TheTyee.ca
20 May 2011

Wildfires ripping through Alberta's boreal forest or what government officials call "freakish" firestorms are really a snapshot of how warming global temperatures and intensified insect infestations will change the nation's boreal forest, say scientists.

In the last week nearly 100 wildfires, battled by 1,000 forest fighters, have shut in billions of dollars worth of oil and gas facilities and forced the evacuation of 2,000 oil workers from Fort McMurray to Peace River.

One raging inferno, driven by 100 kph winds, destroyed a third of the community of Slave Lake north of Edmonton. That smoky region is also chock full of dead trees killed by the mountain pine beetle, another harbinger of changing global weather patterns.

Alberta's wildfires are very "consistent with what we'd expect for climate change," says Mike Flannigan, a senior fire researcher with Natural Resources Canada. "We are beginning to see fire episodes that are much more severe and much more common and not just in Canada."

Annual temperature changes in northern forests have risen two to three degrees over the last three decades due to warmer winters and springs. The temperature rise in turn has increased the risk of high fire danger from Siberia to Alaska.

In 2010 Russia experienced catastrophic wild fires that killed hundreds of people and blackened millions of hectares, while Australia experienced a similar calamity in its drought stressed forests in 2009.

Despite expenditures of $800-million a year and some of the world's best fire fighting crews, the amount of forest area burned in Canada has doubled since the 1970s due to global warming. That now amounts to 2 million hectares a year, an area half the size of Nova Scotia. But the area burned by fires varies from year to year.

"Climate change is already impacting our forests," adds Flannigan. According to his research the annual area destroyed by fire could double again by the end of the century. Some fire forecasts for Alaska, B.C. and the Yukon expect fires to increase five-fold, and all due to warming temperatures.

More and More, the Boreal Will Burn

A new report into conditions at Apple's manufacturing partner, Foxconn, has found slave labour conditions remain, with staff complaining of being worked to tears, exposure to harmful disease, pay rates below those necessary to survive and military-style management that routinely humiliates workers.

Workers toil at one of Foxconn's factories in China. Photo: Reuters

In compiling its report, Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) visited Foxconn factories in Shenzhen, Chengdu and Chongqing and interviewed 120 workers in March and April this year. SACOM is a non-profit Hong Kong-based organisation formed in 2005 to monitor and improve working conditions in Chinese factories.

Following about 13 suicides at Foxconn factories last year, Apple visited China and concluded that Foxconn had taken appropriate measures to improve conditions. Despite this, SACOM in its research found that onerous and in some cases illegal working conditions remain.

Workers required to sign no-suicide pacts

Local and mainland Chinese university students play dead to highlight the cause of Apple factory workers. Photo: AP

Conditions at Foxconn's two Chengdu factories, which exclusively produce Apple iPads, were among the worst reported. While nets have been installed to catch suicidal workers, factory staff are reportedly required to sign "no-suicide" pacts which also give licence to Foxconn to institutionalise them if it sees fit.

Workers at Chengdu say they are routinely humiliated and scolded by management. One was forced to stand in a corner with his hands behind his back because he giggled with a colleague. Others have been required to write confession letters to their supervisors after making mistakes and in some cases read the letters out in front of colleagues.

"Some of my roommates weep in the dormitory. I want to cry as well but my tears have not come out," said 19-year-old Chengdu worker Chen Liming.

May 7 was declared "Global Action Day" - a protest against Apple and conditions at Foxconn factories. Photo: AP

Ah Ming, 19, who produces cases for the iPad, said he stands for at least 14 hours a day. He wakes up at 7am to queue for the bus to the factory and it is 9pm by the time he returns home every evening.

"I [am] just like a robot repeating the same motion. I don't have to use my brain ... it's routine: sleep, work and eat," Ming said.

It's well worth reading the detailed report by SACOM (Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour) which underpins most of this news item:

http://sacom.hk/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/2011-05-06_foxconn-and-apple-fail-...