A Brief History of Environmental Activism in Ojai

A Brief History of Environmental Activism in the Ojai Valley

The citizenry of Ojai has a long history of successful fights against major development proposals which threatened to change the nature of the Ojai Valley.  This brief summary presents an overview of the biggest campaigns that Ojai residents have led over the past half century.

Some of these campaigns opposed specific projects slated for the Ojai Valley. Others contested proposals outside Ojai, whose air quality impacts would have led to greatly reduced air quality in the Ojai Valley. Air pollution blows in to Ojai from the direction of the ocean and gets held there by the hills that surround the valley.

  Any history of environmental campaigns in Ojai must begin with Pat Weinberger, who moved here from Akron, Ohio in the early 1960’s with her neurosurgeon husband Dr. Larry Weinberger.

  Pat jumped into activism right away. Among her early campaigns were those that stopped the construction of a freeway through Ojai, from Carpinteria to Santa Paula, on the Hwy 150 route; and the blocking of 2 of 4 proposed electric generating units for Southern California Edison’s Ormond Beach plant, reducing by half the proposed air quality impacts on the Ojai Valley.

  Perhaps the campaign Pat is most proud of was the creation of the Teague Memorial Watershed around the edge of what was then the new Lake Casitas. Pat found out that the watershed was zoned for 10,000 single-family homes, which would have meant a new city of some 25,000 residents on five square miles of land west of the lake.

  She enlisted the help of Congressman John Seiberling of Ohio, who she had grown up with and who was in a position in Congress to move federal legislation to establish the protected watershed. (Congressman Seiberling was a longtime champion of National Parks and wilderness areas.) The watershed was thus protected from development and the lake’s water quality was preserved from a substantial source of contamination.

  Pat also led a later campaign in the late 1990’s, to protect Lake Casitas’ water quality from being contaminated by the opening up of the lake to swimming. Body contact with the lake would have introduced dangerous bacteria into our water supply.

  The other really big campaign that Pat Weinberger led was the opposition to US Gypsum’s proposal in the early 1970’s to construct open-pit phosphate mines on the south slope of Pine Mountain, at an elevation of 6,000 feet, east of the summit of Hwy 33 between Ojai and Lockwood Valley.

  The beautiful mountainside that forms the northern rim of Sespe Creek’s watershed was to have been floodlit all night to allow the 24-hour mining of a 5-mile stretch of hillside. Half a million gallons of concentrated sulfuric acid was to have been stored on site, and Godwin Creek, a Sespe tributary, was to be dammed to hold highly acidic mine tailings.

  As with the current sand and gravel mining plans for the Cuyama Valley, the main impact on Ojai of the phosphate mines would have been the convoys of up to100 truck and trailer rigs coming down Hwy 33 through Ojai every day – 24 hours a day.

  The US Dept of Interior held an all-day public hearing on the phosphate mining proposal at Nordhoff High School, attended by California’s two Senators (Cranston and Tunney) and 1800 concerned citizens. In the end, the project was dropped when an enormous new deposit of phosphate was discovered elsewhere, causing the world price of phosphate to drop substantially. Without local opposition, which slowed the project down, the mines would have been in operation long before this price drop occurred.

  Pat Weinberger also put a stop to a motorcycle race track past the top of Dennsion Grade, and to a proposal for an Albertson’s supermarket on the open field on Hwy 33 opposite the Nordhoff stadium.

  She founded, organized and led two important environmental organizations – the Citizens to Preserve the Ojai and the countywide Environmental Coalition, both of which then had many hundreds of members who could be counted on to get involved and show up at public hearings.

  Ojai was also very fortunate in those days to have an activist owner/editor of the Ojai Valley News. Fred Volz covered the development battles in great detail, and editorialized loudly and clearly on the inside pages about any number of threats to the Ojai Valley.  The vitality with which Fred Volz engaged the citizens of Ojai through the Ojai Valley News has been unmatched in the recent years of the paper’s absentee ownership – and is sorely missed.

  By the mid-1980’s Pat Weinberger grew less active in environmental causes, chiefly due to her need to focus on the care of a daughter and later a husband, both with terminal ailments. Nobody that knows her would say that Pat ever retired, though!

  Development proposals that rankled many Ojai citizens continued to be proposed through the 1980’s and 1990’s. The Palmer property, behind the Nordhoff bleachers, was the site of a proposed big box Vons store and a TG&Y on 9 acres – with 20 acres of new housing in back. Rich Handley and Wini Hirsch were instrumental in opposing that project, starting in 1981.

  Shopping center opponents first had to work to get candidates elected to the Ojai City Council who were against the project. The Ojai City Council rejected the project and the developer appealed to the courts. The CA Supreme Court declined to hear the developer’s final appeal – and he went bankrupt.  Other proposals for the property were put forward, but only in 1999 did the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy acquire the land as a permanent open space preserve – the Ojai Meadows Preserve.

  Following a similar pattern, a developer by the name of Schuck proposed 150 town houses on Besant Meadow, between the Ranch House Restaurant and Meiners Oaks Elementary School, around 1986. This proposal eventually failed and the owner also went bankrupt. Rich Handley led this campaign too, and this property as well was finally preserved in 2000 when acquired by the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy as part of the Ojai Meadows Preserve. Instrumental in the collapse of the Besant Meadows townhouses project was CalTrans’ designation of the Hwy 33 rush hour bottleneck through Casitas Springs as Level F – their worst category of congestion. This led to Ventura County Supervisors voting to put a moratorium on new subdivisions in the Ojai Valley – until Hwy 33 is improved.  The moratorium was backdated to where it prohibited the Schuck townhouses.

  The early 1980’s saw the threat of uranium mining in the Lake Casitas watershed, which was opposed by a group of Ojai citizens under the banner SUN – Stop Uranium Now.

  The expansion of the Petrochem oil refinery adjacent to the 33 freeway also came up in the 1980’s. This would have led to major air quality impacts on the Ojai Valley. Stan Greene was a leader of the opposition to this proposal. Petrochem is now permanently shut down.

  The early 1990’s saw a proposal north of the Ventura River and east of the 101, near the ocean. Taylor Ranch was slated for a CalState University campus, with as many as 35,000 residents. Once again, the air quality impacts on the Ojai Valley were considerable. This proposal also went down, and the CalState Channel Islands campus was developed instead.

  The biggest campaign of the last two decades in the Ojai Valley was the opposition in the 1990’s to Weldon Canyon as West Ventura County’s main landfill. In spite of clear and detrimental air quality impacts from the hundreds of trash truck trips per day, the powers were moving along the Weldon landfill proposal, to be operated by Waste Management Inc. Weldon Canyon is situated south of the 33 Freeway and west of Casitas Springs.

  Hundreds of people turned out at the public hearings before the Ventura County Board of Supervisors. Major opponents of the landfill were Nina Shelley, then a longtime member of the Ojai City Council, and Ojai resident John Nava.

  In the end County Supervisor John Flynn changed his position (his Oxnard constituents had housed the previous west county landfill – it was someone else’s turn now, he said) and voted against the Weldon landfill, which doomed the project.

  The other big development proposal defeated in the 1990’s was the Farmont Golf Club proposal north of Hwy 150 and west of Rancho Matilija. The writer of this column was the main opponent of this proposal, which dragged on throughout the 1990’s. A lot of help came from Russ and Pat Baggerly, who also were both actively involved for over twenty years in keeping a close eye on our local government, and voicing their concerns. Another major ally was Ojai/Ventura Voice editor Jeff San Marchi, who printed over 50 articles about the Farmont proposal, over a decade. 

Most of the Farmont property eventually was purchased largely with funds set aside for open space preservation from a California voter-approved bond measure – and is now owned and managed by the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy as the Ventura River Preserve.

There’ll be an entire article sometime soon in the Ojai/Ventura View on the Farmont. The quick story goes like this – in the late 1980’s, Kagehisa Toyama, owner of a conservative radio station in Japan, initially proposed a Camp David West on his Ojai property, an exclusive, golf course and hotel for world leaders to meet at. County Supervisors voted it down as hotels are prohibited in open space zoning. Mr. Toyama then scaled it down to an exclusive golf course and clubhouse. Local opposition grew over the water needed for a golf course in an area of diminishing well capacity. County Supervisors voted for the project; opponents appealed to the courts. Eventually Mr. Toyama ran out of steam, and died before the property could be sold. The land was purchased by a New York developer, who later sold it (mostly) to the open space Ventura River Preserve and (partly) to a farmer who lives in Rancho Matilija. 

The first decade of the new century has been relatively quiet regarding big development proposals in the Ojai Valley. But as we saw with the creation of the “Stop the Trucks” Coalition, opposing dozens of gravel trucks from passing through Ojai from Lockwood Valley, Ojai residents are ever ready to protect their beloved valley.

20 Incontrovertible Truths About Global Warming

20 Incontrovertible Truths about Global Warming –

A Comprehensive Look at a Global Challenge

by Alasdair Coyne

 

The story of global warming is a complicated one.  A proper understanding of it requires considering the long-term repercussions of how we are today altering the life-sustaining ecological balance of the Earth.  Scientists are now saying that we must stop the current annual increase in global emissions of climate changing gases in as little as seven years from now.  Meanwhile, life around us seems to go on as usual – people driving and flying and shopping, all of which contribute to climate change.  There’s not much indication yet that the necessary changes will come about in the next seven years.

In the following article, I’ve selected twenty points which will hopefully be useful to bear in mind as you learn more about global warming, and each of those points is discussed fairly briefly.  It would be easy to write a chapter of a book on each point, but this is meant to be a quick but thorough introduction to the topic.  Future articles will focus on some of these points in detail.

Politicians often simply don’t know how to respond to climate change.  There are some champions out there, but most elected officials haven’t talked the time to grasp the importance of the changes to our planet’s life support systems that we are causing by our fossil fuel powered lifestyles.  Nor do they understand that ignoring the issue is guaranteed to make those coming changes even more severe and permanent.

One important approach is grassroots education.  Millions of Americans must absorb enough information about global warming that they begin to reevaluate their priorities, make appropriate changes in their own lives, and demand far-reaching and comprehensive political responses.

People must understand that the web of life that supports them with their food, water and shelter is undergoing such dynamic changes that these things will actually become less available to their children.  The lifestyle of the developed world, heavily based on fossil fuels, is not the only way to live on this planet.  Climate change requires us to reinvent how we provide the energy for humanity’s basic needs.  In the next seven years.  It’s time to start shouting from the rooftops.

 

(1) Global Warming is caused by a build-up of minor gases in the atmosphere that retain heat from the sun very effectively.

Global warming gases are produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels, the engines of modern industrial society.  They are also produced by cattle and by deforestation, among other things.  The predominant greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, CO₂.  Nitrogen and oxygen, the major gases in our atmosphere, do not retain heat.

The buildup of these minor gases in our atmosphere has led to a warming of both the air and the oceans.  This warming has disrupted what had been a relatively stable climate over recent centuries, and our continued reliance on fossil fuels is guaranteed to increase climate instability over decades, even centuries to come.  Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can remain there for up to 500 years.

Some results of climate instability are rising oceans, melting glaciers, shrinking ice caps over Greenland and parts of Antarctica, fiercer hurricanes, shifting rainfall patterns and long term droughts, and the extinction of a large percentage of plant and animal species, those that cannot adjust to the speedy rise in temperatures in their home environment.

 

(2) Global Warming has come about largely as a result of our increasing and widespread use of cheap oil and gas since the end of WWII.

The late 1940’s saw the start of the great expansion of oil production from the Middle East, which still holds the world’s largest remaining oil reserves.

This flow of oil was cheaply enough extracted and marketed to allow for the manufacture and distribution of the plethora of consumer goods now enjoyed by the world’s wealthier peoples.  Advertisers joined in to create needs these people didn’t know existed and which we now take for granted.  In a nutshell, this is how we’ve got to where we are today, with fossil fuel usage at such a heightened level that it’s changing our stable climate.  Our modern industrial civilization depends even more on a stable climate than on the fossil fuels that it is currently addicted to.

(3) Most people in the richer countries are each responsible for tons of carbon dioxide released annually into the atmosphere.

There’s a little chemistry lesson needed here.  When the carbon in fossil fuels burns, it reacts with oxygen in the air to create carbon dioxide, CO2.

Oxygen in our atmosphere is in itself not a greenhouse gas that absorbs heat.  But when fossil fuels burn, each carbon atom joins up with two oxygen atoms to form CO2, multiplying the weight of the resulting greenhouse gas far beyond the weight of the carbon that was burned in the fossil fuel.

That’s how using a gallon of gas in your car releases 20 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  100 gallons of gas release a whole ton of carbon dioxide; and filling up with 10 gallons of gas a week gives you a “carbon footprint” of 5 tons a year for your car, or around the US average.

Add to that the electricity you use at home, and the furnace and air conditioning, and the energy taken to transport the food and other stuff you buy from their origins to the stores you bought them all at, and the average American’s greenhouse gas releases total about 20 tons a year.

(4) To reduce climate instability, we must speedily reduce our global consumption of fossil fuels.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports to the UN with its findings.  The IPCC is a consensus organization, which means that all its reports are approved by all of the 2,000 scientists from 100 countries that sit on the panel.

The IPCC’s best estimates of how to slow global warming recommend that the developed world reduce its reliance on fossil fuels by the year 2050 by a factor of 80%, based on what was consumed in 1990.

So far, eighteen years into this sixty-year timespan, global consumption of fossil fuels is still rising – and rising pretty fast.  We are not yet at the peak of fossil fuel usage, let alone returning to 1990’s levels, let alone reducing that level by 80%.  You could say that this is the bad news.

California, which if it were its own country would have the world’s sixth largest economy, has recently taken a lead in planning to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.  Legislation passed in 2006 requires the state to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 25% between 2006 and 2020.

(5) Peak oil and global warming are both coming to a head at the same point in our history.

Oil is the overwhelmingly dominant fuel choice for global transportation by land, air or sea.

Experts who study how much oil is still available to be extracted are in broad agreement that our global ability to produce oil will start to shrink within the next few years.  The phrase “peak oil” refers to the time at which the volume of oil production begins a permanent decline.  At the same time, demand for oil will still be rising, especially in fast-developing nations such as India and China.

This can only lead to one thing – steep, permanent and ongoing increases in oil prices.  The same is true for natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel in terms of climate change.  Coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel in terms of climate change, is plentifully available.

Items such as plastics and fertilizers, which are made from oil and gas, will also go up in price. Just as we need drastically to be reducing the use of oil and gas to limit climate change, their prices will be going up.  We will have to use less of them because we won’t be able to afford to buy as much of them as we do now.

We must focus on two things that will help us address both problems – climate change and more expensive fossil fuels – namely, the use of alternative, renewable fuels and the greater application of efficiency to how we use fuels of all sorts.  If you can perform a task – heating your house, or driving to work – with half the energy you use now, then you’re still getting the job done, but you’re only using half the energy you used before.  That’s what efficiency is all about.

 

(6)  The USA remains the Key to responding to global climate change.

We are, taken together, the energy hogs of the planet.  With around 5% of the world’s population, the US is responsible for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

You might be surprised to learn that the US still has 30% of the 700 million cars in the world today – and that these cars produce half of the greenhouse gases of all cars everywhere.  That’s because our cars get worse mileage, and because we drive them further than do drivers elsewhere.

The US also is home to one in six power plants worldwide.

Quite apart from that, US media broadcast the American way of life across the planet on TV screens and at the movies.  The whole world, just about, gets glimpses of the lifestyles of the rich and famous here in the USA, and as people in other countries get wealthier, they generally seek the large house, the cars, and the electronic gadgets that they’ve seen on those TV shows.

Which makes it doubly important for Americans to turn away promptly from the culture of consumption and the culture of affluence, and to demonstrate leadership in addressing climate change.

If we retain our current energy-intensive lifestyle (which doesn’t produce the promise of happiness that it is sold to us with), there won’t be much incentive for the fast-growing middle classes in India and China to aim for anything less.  And the planet simply can’t support another billion people living the resource-consumptive lifestyles that we “enjoy” here in the US.

It’s about time for TV shows and movies to reflect the reality of the era of human development that is now upon us – the dawning of the conservation society, where natural resources, including energy, are used sparingly rather than inefficiently and frivolously.  This will be the message, and our way of life, for the indefinite future, like it or not.

By the way, Europeans enjoy a lifestyle comparable to that in the US, while using only half the electric consumption of Americans, mainly due to their smaller houses and appliances.  Currently, the US is second last of around 56 developed nations in its response to climate change.  Leaders in this tally include Germany, Sweden – and Mexico.

 

(7)  The marketplace is not SET UP to address climate change on its own.

Big business is geared to the short-term quarterly reporting of profits.  On the other hand, a wide-ranging response to global climate change requires many avenues of planning and action over multiple decades.

British Petroleum, recently advertising itself as “beyond petroleum,” is boosting its extraction of oil from coal tar sands, which will actually increase global warming because the processing is so energy-intensive.

And agriculture and energy interests are working to turn more and more of the US corn crop into ethanol, which is inefficient because of the energy already used by the fertilizers and farm equipment to grow the corn.  What’s more, a global shortage of corn has already resulted in widespread hunger, even food riots, in poor countries.  “Done wrong, ethanol could wreak havoc on the environment while increasing greenhouse gases,” editorialized the New York Times on 2.24.08.

Of course, the nuclear industry is pushing hard for new nuclear power plants.  But these are so costly – and inevitably plagued by large cost overruns and decades of construction time – that available funding needs to be focused instead on efficiency programs, which make a large difference in very little time.

Now there are big businesses that are taking climate change seriously and that are making radical changes towards carbon neutrality (which means emitting no greenhouse gases, when a business’ entire operations are considered as a whole). Google recently pledged millions of dollars for a project that will produce enough renewable energy to power all of San Francisco at a price cheaper than coal.

However, the momentum of big business is not yet positioned or ready to take the steps required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally.  This is where legislative direction is vital, as well as consumer pressure.

Then there are the climate change denial corporations, chiefly Exxon-Mobil, who have spent millions of dollars over many years, to sow seeds of doubt about the reality of global climate change in the minds of both politicians and the population at large.  I can imagine conscious, determined efforts like these, which may have set back a full scale response to climate change by a decade in the US, being classified some day as crimes against humanity, or more correctly, crimes against life on Earth.

(8)  You need to educate yourself and your children, family and friends, about global warming.

The growing threat to climate stability posed by global warming requires the involvement of an informed public.  Otherwise politicians and the corporations that so many of them are friendly with will work to spend enormous sums on measures which won’t help slow global warming very much – if at all.  Two examples are corn-into-ethanol and oil from coal tar sands both mentioned above.

The scientific consensus on global warming says we have less than ten years to turn things around.  This is not a lot of time!

            Remember, the Bush Administration has just wasted the first seven years of the new century in denying the reality of climate change – and then funding big business to turn corn into ethanol, which is good for big business profits, but not for averting climate change.

If you are not actually changing the amount of energy you, it is guaranteed that you will be forced by circumstances to make these changes more hurriedly and more drastically, down the road.  Be smart about this.  In the same way that you plan for the kids going to college, or for your retirement, you need to plan for climate change and how it will affect you.  Don’t delay.  Doing nothing about climate change is not an option.

 

(9)  One Family’s Climate Change Actions are Both Important AND a Mere Drop in the Bucket.

You can do everything you can to reduce what is called your “carbon footprint” – getting a vehicle with much higher mileage, putting solar panels on your roof to generate electricity, buying locally grown food, reducing your air travel and road trips – and still the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be increasing.  You have to get others involved.

There’s no idyllic backwoods to run off to, to get away from the effects of global warming.  The issue requires action on a wide range of fronts – personal, family, community, school, work, local and state and national politics.

Because you can’t just sit back in satisfaction, when you’ve taken some big steps yourself to reduce your carbon footprint, and ignore the fact that the rest of your street, or your acquaintance, is still proceeding in blissful ignorance of the changes global warming will bring.

Doing what you can makes a negligible difference until millions of others do the same.

We all need to start thinking and talking about global warming!

(10)                Citizens and Governments must Work Together Now – To Reduce Global Warming Down the Road!

Whilst it may still take years for the broad public “inertia to change” to lessen, with respect to global warming, there are a number of very important steps that need to be taken right away to avoid a massive waste of time and resources that will worsen climate change.

A combination of informed citizen activism and forward-thinking political action must ensure that new power plants are designed to be as efficient as possible, and likewise for new vehicles.  Power plants have a useful lifespan of around 30 years, so we need to design and build them with efficiency in mind, or we’ll be stuck with their wasteful consumption of fossil fuels for decades to come.  Stable tax policies to support renewable energy are vital to enact as soon as possible.

One shining example of doing the right thing is Los Angeles Unified School District’s current project of constructing 130 new schools – and designing them to be green.

Governments around the world are not acting fast enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  “Attempts even to slow the rate of increase of carbon emissions have paralyzed world politics for more than a decade,” editorialized the LA Times on 3.15.08.

 

(11)       Global Warming Requires Us To Question – and Change – The Status Quo of Today’s Consumer Society.

The cheap oil that society has undoubtedly benefited from over the past decades is coming to an end soon.  We’ve all grown used to cheap transportation, cheap food, cheap clothing, cheap consumer goods, shipped from across the world to whatever stores we frequent.  Cheap oil has given us car-dependent suburbs and big box stores.  And relentless advertising has drummed into our heads that buying stuff is the key to happiness.

Most of us would probably agree that the comforts and consumer products of our modern lifestyle in developed countries represent the pinnacle of human evolution.

Now, however, global warming comes along and makes us realize that this is most decidedly not the case.  Remember, it’s not nature that is the problem here, it is our worldwide intensive use of fossil fuels that is heating up the atmosphere.  How we’ve fueled our lives is simply not sustainable.  It’s time to change, to see how much less we can use of the available consumer goods that we don’t really need.

 

(12)                We are at the Threshold of a Conservation Society.

From now on, the wasteful and inefficient use of fossil fuels represents an unconscionable contribution to the worsening of global climate change.

Let’s look down the road to where global sea levels are rising, devastating storms are both worsening and more frequent, and food is in short supply because of droughts and changing climate.

How are you going to look your children and grandchildren in the eye and apologize to them for not acting earlier to reduce your carbon footprint?  For being so busy that you didn’t pay attention?

The world we need to build, as soon as possible, is one where our long-term use of resources is tied to our basic needs for food, clothing, shelter and limited personal transportation.  Just about everything will be both recyclable and actually recycled.

We won’t be buying everything from China for very long.  This will require us to focus again on “Made in the USA,” because the fossil fuels required for today’s level of international trade will either be unavailable or too expensive, or both.  Economies will need to focus largely on local markets.

 

(13)                The Scientific Consensus on Global Warming Could be Way too Conservative.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a consensus-based organization.  This means that its reports are necessarily pretty conservative, because if one or several of the 2,000 scientists on the panel object to a particular sentence in a report as being too strongly worded, they can change it, tone it down.

The IPCC’s recommendation that, to avoid the worst excesses of global change, we must by 2050 reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% of 1990’s levels, may in fact be too conservative – by far.

What if we find we have to do this in half the time – say by 2025?  Taking 50 years to reconstruct global society is doable, if we all get involved.  Finding we have to change drastically at very short notice is more likely a recipe for the collapse of our global civilization.  Let me explain.

The IPCC’s analysis of global warming chose not to address some important factors, because of the variables and uncertainties involved, according to James Hansen, the nation’s leading climate scientist, who spoke at UCSB in February 2007.  Two of those factors are the rate of melting of the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets.

Currently, some parts of Antarctica are warming while other parts are cooling.  It was thought that the Greenland ice sheet would take centuries to melt.  Now it’s melting twice as fast as it was only 5 years ago.

If too much freshwater from ice melt in Greenland pours into the North Atlantic, it will eventually cause the warm Gulf Stream current to stop flowing, which keeps Northern Europe at habitable temperatures.  Studies have shown that the Gulf Stream has in fact stopped in the distant past, and quite abruptly.  It’s not in our power to turn on a Gulf Stream current again, if it quits.  While most of the rest of the planet heats up, we’ll be looking at Northern Europe with its agriculture failing and its people shivering and attempting to migrate south.  But that’s not all.

Melting the Greenland ice sheet will raise the oceans by twenty feet worldwide.  That means goodbye to world trade as we know it, right there.  Where will the resources come from to rebuild every harbor and port in the world multiple times, eventually to twenty feet higher up?  Or to shelter the 300 million people whose homes will be flooded, worldwide, by a permanent twenty-foot sea level increase?

These are examples of “tipping points,” where specific conditions change rapidly and irreversibly.   Climate change is not a smooth process so much as a set of changes that includes sudden and severe shifts.

A study just published this fall shows that carbon dioxide levels are indeed increasing faster than expected – due both to China’s continuing industrialization, based on dirty coal-fired power plants, and to the fact that the oceans seem to be absorbing less carbon dioxide than they have up until now.

The IPCC not long ago estimated that the Arctic would be ice free in summer by around 2100 – but more recent estimates say this could occur around 2013.  Things are changing much more quickly than expected.

The long and short of it is that we are unwise to rely on the conservative estimates of where global warming will take our planet.  It is only prudent to plan for worse and sooner.  Again, that’s why you need to get involved, educated and active right now.  Time is not on our side.

It’s entirely possible that our world, that seems so stable in our everyday lives, could change beyond recognition within a lifetime.  It’s a sobering consideration, to say the least.  It’s worth working to stop such drastic change from occurring.  Our children will definitely thank us for this.

In September 2007, the International Institute for Strategic Studies issued a report warning that the effects of unchecked climate change will be catastrophic “on the level of nuclear war.”

A recent IPCC report on global climate change, issued in mid November 2007, really put the challenge clearly.  The global carbon emissions which are still growing in magnitude will have to STOP growing within only seven years from now, and then decrease in magnitude rapidly, to avoid the extinction of up to a quarter of all plant species on Earth.

The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon implored political leaders to enact changes.  “If the (IPCC) panel’s most severe projection comes through, much of the Amazon rainforest will transform into savannah.  These things are as frightening as science-fiction movies.  But they are even more terrifying because they are real.”

There is no more time for climate change complacency.

 

(14)                Climate Change Will Be Constant, Over Centuries

The climate changing effects of a build-up of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are slow to take place.  The storms, droughts and melting ice we are seeing now are tied more closely to the greenhouse gases emitted a decade or so ago than they are to this year’s emissions.

The increase in climate change from today’s emissions of greenhouse gases will not be apparent for maybe another 20 years.  And, as we’ve seen, global emissions of these gases are still rising.  Even if, as needs to happen, these emissions begin to level off and to drop to 1990’s levels, hopefully before 2050, their cumulative effects on our climate will still grow. 

The IPCC says the world’s oceans will be rising for 1000 years.

There simply isn’t a scenario out there where Planet Earth will return to the relatively stable climate of, say, 100 years ago – not for centuries, if ever.

We’ve already upset the climate balance and set in motion a series of changes that are unstoppable.  What we must do is to slow down the rate of change and thereby soften the worst of what is otherwise to come down the road.

Which makes it all the more important to do as much as you can, as soon as possible, to limit greenhouse gas emissions from your way of life.

 

(15)                Population Growth is a Climate Changing Factor

As the world’s population grows, and as that population naturally seeks to improve its standard of living, more fuel will be consumed.

Therefore providing both family planning services and education to women in the Third World (where most of the population growth takes place) is key to addressing global climate change.  These two factors have been shown to be vital components of slowing down population growth.

It is also important to provide renewable energy, such as solar power, to help Third World inhabitants to develop without relying on fossil fuels.  Generally, the poorest of the world’s poor are disproportionately affected by climate change, although they contribute almost nothing to it.  In fact, 2007’s worldwide appeals to the UN for food aid were all but one related to climate change.

 

(16)                There is no One Solution to Global Warming – The Answers Are Many

There just isn’t any one magic formula that will replace fossil fuels in all their multitude of uses, from power generation to heating, from transportation to the manufacture of plastics and fertilizers.

The solutions are and will be many.  Solar and wind power can generate electricity for households, but neither is available 24/7.  Storage capacity is therefore needed, and being developed.  Wave and tide power are useful near the oceans – Portugal is aiming for something like 40% of its power from these sources.

More efficient vehicles, more efficient heating and cooling units, more insulation and the like will all help to lessen the demand for power in the first place.  Massive investment and improvements in subways, buses and trains are needed to wean us out of our individual cars.

While corn ethanol production will fuel world hunger as well as vehicles, ethanol from other specific crops, grown on land not currently cultivated, can help to power some vehicles without jeopardizing the world’s food supply.

Eating less meat is important, because the amount of grain needed to feed farm animals can directly feed many more people instead.  In climate terms, 8 oz of beef steak requires 16 times more fossil fuel input than a dinner of 8 oz rice and 6 oz vegetables.  Globally, farm animals now consume one third of the world’s grain supply.

And buying less stuff eliminates the energy required to manufacture that stuff and to ship it to you.

 

(17)                The Efficient Use of all Fuels is Vital.

Efficiency is the closest solution out there to a magic bullet.  It is always the cheapest way to reduce fossil fuel consumption – even before installing solar panels and building wind farms.  Efficiency alone, over decades, can probably reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 50%.  Efficiency programs have the added benefit of not crimping your lifestyle at all.

For instance, California, fast-growing in population as it is, has managed to keep the state’s electricity usage around the same for the past three decades by conservation and efficiency improvements.  Meanwhile, electricity usage elsewhere in the US has grown by 50% over the same period.

In early 2006 it was reported that California is currently spending $2 billion on further efficiency measures, which will save $3 billion in fuel costs, avoid the need to build 3 new large power plants, the equivalent of taking 650,000 cars off the road.

Because of advances in efficiency, electricity only amounts to 20% of California’s carbon dioxide emissions.  For the rest of the US the figure is 40%.

To balance the picture, Californians drive more than other Americans, leading to 40% of statewide carbon dioxide emissions coming from transportation.  For the rest of the US the figure is 33%.

Efficiency allows us to do more with less fossil fuels, thereby cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

It is bizarre to realize that it has been our inefficient use of fossil fuels that has led to climate change.  This leads us back to oil’s supremacy as, until recently, such a cheap, plentiful and versatile fuel.  Our way of life on planet Earth is now in jeopardy largely because of how much fuel we waste in driving inefficient vehicles, and in using inefficient furnaces to heat homes that are poorly insulated.

 

(18)                We already Have The Technology to Move away From Fossil Fuels.

Though future advances in technology will obviously be of tremendous benefit as we work harder to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions down the road, it is a fact that we do not need any technological breakthroughs to take action now.  Without funding nuclear power, corn ethanol or oil from coal tar sands.

Solar and wind power will come down in price as mass production grows, but we need to be funding and installing renewable energy systems to power homes and factories in towns and cities across the world.

Germany, a world leader in this field, has already reduced its overall carbon dioxide emissions by 18%, by investing in efficiency and renewables.

Frito-Lay is currently doing a green retrofit of a factory in Casa Grande.  When completed in 2010, its use of water and electricity will have been reduced by 90% and its use of natural gas by 80%.  The goal at the Casa Grande factory is eventually to be “net zero” in carbon dioxide emissions.  50 acres of solar concentrator mirrors will be installed behind the factory, to heat water to 500° F to power a steam generator.  Since 1999, Frito-Lay has reduced its water use company-wide by 38%, its natural gas use by 27% and its electric consumption by 21%, saving $55 million a year in utility bills.

Adam Steiner, head of the UN Environment Program states that “stabilization of emissions can be achieved by deployment of a portfolio of technologies that exist or are already under development.”

What is needed, then, is the political will power, backed by widespread public support and adequate funding.

The costs may seem high.  A UN Conference in September 2007 recommended the dedication of $200 billion a year in additional funding to reduce the growth in carbon dioxide emissions.

But compare the cost of our war in Iraq.  A UCSB professor recently calculated that for the price of the Iraq War, solar power could have been installed on every home in the US.  Are we going to go to war over oil again and again?  Or, are we going to elect leaders that will quickly, meaning in the next few years, lead us away from fossil fuels, their increasing costs and the climate change they create?  Renewable energy provides real energy independence.

 

(19)                Eventually, the Global Response will rise to the Challenges of global warming.

What’s holding up faster and more wide-ranging action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is the still shallow response by most politicians.  As public awareness grows and as climate change conditions worsen, it is inevitable that eventually the public clamor for appropriate action will reach the primacy of place on the political agenda that it should already hold today.  What is not clear is how much further damage to climate stability will be inflicted by that point, by ongoing, wasteful greenhouse gas emissions between now and then.

The fact that politicians are not yet wide awake to the threat to our future that is posed by climate change, is probably because so many of them are still more disposed to protect automobile and oil industry corporate profits, than to provide for the needs of the American people when the survival of their way of life hangs in the balance.

It also helps to think in terms of ecological systems, which most politicians are not trained to do.  It won’t be possible to protect every segment of our global consumer society as we shift to a simpler lifestyle powered by renewable energy.  Further delaying our response to climate change will only result in more drastic instability in the climate and the economy.

Congressman John Dingell (D-Michigan), chair of the House’s Energy & Commerce Committee, has for years refused to consider meaningful increases in passenger car miles-per-gallon standards, thus guaranteeing a massive flow of inefficient vehicles onto our nation’s highways.  He certainly hasn’t been thinking or acting with global climate change in mind.

Our choice is to act aggressively as soon as we can, or to be forced to adjust more drastically to worsening climate change later on.

I think there’s a valid analogy here to how British and American civilians rallied behind their national war efforts in WWII.  An adequate response to global climate change requires the mass of the population to support efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: the focus of research and manufacture on the mass production of the necessary equipment – in this case, mainly solar and wind power and improvements in efficiency; a nationwide commitment to frugality and the conservation and recycling of resources; increased production of food in home “Victory Gardens.” If we don’t move fast enough, someday we are also likely to be faced with the rationing of fossil fuels.

Where this wartime analogy becomes invalid, though, is in the lack of an external “enemy” to fight.  The enemy in a changing climate is our past and present wasteful use of cheap fossil fuels.

(20)                An Emerging Spirit of Global Cooperation Has the Potential to unite the Peoples of Earth As Never Before.

Imagine a world, in the near future, where people in all countries are working in their own ways to reduce and adjust to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.  This is more than just a dream – it’s vital that we make it happen.

As changing weather patterns reduce the rainfall that agriculture and cities depend on, we’re going to be struggling as never before to feed the world’s people.  And to protect coastal cities from rising sea levels.  And to rebuild areas devastated by hurricanes.  And to house mass migrations of people.  At some point the resources won’t be available to do the above and to maintain the enormous cost of the military-industrial complex that the US now supports. It is also important that we elect leaders who won’t go to war to maintain oil industry profits.

Either the military-industrial complex will have to transform to develop and produce the peaceful energy technologies that are needed to combat climate change, or it will wither away from withdrawn funds.  By popular demand.

Beyond that, the level of global goodwill that will develop and grow between peoples working on the same issue – global warming – all around the world, will lessen the ability of aggressive politicians to determine the “other,” a necessary prerequisite to war.  With global climate change, we are all in the same boat.

Interestingly, a mass global popular response to climate change has the potential to unite humanity as never before, moving away from intensive, inefficient energy consumption to a world powered safely by renewable energy – a kind of energy that’s comparatively decentralized and highly unlikely to lead to wars.  A world focused on slowing climate change will also be a world with less and less air and water pollution.

This may sound like a picture of a New Age.  But it’s not going to happen while we sit back – we have to make it happen.  Starting now.  Bearing in mind that the global environment is likely to change in drastic and unpredictable ways in the coming years.

A Personal Response to Climate Change

A Personal Response to Climate Change

As our world gets slowly and belatedly among on the complex transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, leading climate change scientists give us a mere five years to radically change how we power our industrial civilization without causing runaway global warning.

Implicit in belonging to the nation with the largest historical contribution to global warming is the imperative to drastically reduce our own and our family’s carbon dioxide footprint.  This is something that people can do regardless of the slow response by many business and political leaders to the serious planetary changes expected as climate change speeds up.

In the coming decades, energy production will need to be more localized, gasoline usage will shrink – perhaps as much due to the peak oil phenomenon as to climate change mandates – and air travel will decline. People will need to work towards producing more of the energy and goods they need closer to home. Recycling will become even more important than it is today – as will using the collected recyclables as a feedstock for local industries. The amount of energy consumed by transporting current volumes of world trade is simply not sustainable.

While many Americans are feeling the pinch as our current recession deepens, and reducing their consumption accordingly, others of us have already been voluntarily simplifying our lives and our consumption patterns in order to reach a more sustainable level of usage of the planet’s resources (forests, minerals, fossil fuels, agriculture, water, etc.).

Our nation is in a pinch – high household debt levels have been welcomed by politicians as the driving force behind the past decade’s growth. As in President Bush’s request for us all to keep shopping after 9/11. The LA Times recently stated that consumer spending represents 70% of the US economy.

Meanwhile it’s imperative to meet the goals of drastically-reduced fossil fuel consumption in order to slow runaway climate change, which will seriously reduce our future availability of resources. It’s really a question of making gradual adjustments soon – or facing horrendous and inevitable changes to our lifestyles later. As one example, global warming is partly responsible for the current shrinking of winter snowpacks in the Sierras, upon which California’s cities and agriculture depend for water in the hot summer months. As these snowpacks lessen, farmers and homeowners will all need to make do with much less water supply. This change will be continuous, to be measured in generations, so it can be accurately stated that living more simply, in terms of resource consumption, is the only future that lays ahead of us. Building an entire sustainable economy that does not depend on constant growth in raw material consumption is going to pose quite a challenge – but individuals and families can start adjusting their carbon dioxide impacts right now.

ONE FAMILY’S GREEN HOME

Our family was fortunate enough to be able to build our own home six years ago. Making it a green structure was neither  hard nor prohibitively expensive. A lumber company in Santa Barbara located a certified, sustainably-harvested lumber package from the forests near Santa Cruz, which fit on one delivery truck. We used a tremendous amount of recycled fixtures, as well as a beautiful tongue and groove ceiling that was diverted from the dump.

Six solar panels on the roof supply almost all our electricity – our annual electric bill is under $30. The solar electric system, which I installed under the supervision of a local solar contractor, cost a little over $5,000 after the state rebate. Currently the best rebates are federal. If you use modest amounts of electricity, solar power can be very affordable. It can also be installed by a competent  handyman homeowner.

Perhaps the most important factor was size – our house is just over 1000 square feet in size. A green builder I know in Ojai complained to me recently how many clients want to build enormous green homes. Green implies modest-sized.

A PLEDGE NOT TO TRAVEL FAR

It’s been apparent for a while that the expanding global level of air travel is not sustainable. It is one of the fastest-growing sources of climate changing carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. Likewise, long summer car trips also now represent an unsustainable level of fossil fuel consumption.

About eight years ago I decided to curtail my travel outside Ventura County that was not work-related. For several years, I managed to stay put and only go to Santa Barbara once or twice a year, usually for a family gathering there. That was fairly easy, since I was building our house most weekends for nearly two years. By that time I’d gotten used to this. There have been occasional trips to collect friends at LAX since then, and I went to Sacramento twice a couple of years ago, to provide testimony for Keep Sespe Wild before legislative committees.

My big exception was a trip in October three years ago to Scotland, for a family wedding. Most of my relatives and friends there had not met my wife and children – we managed to visit around two dozen of them in only ten days! While it was a great trip, part of me realizes it may not be repeated. I have lived thirty years in Ojai. In the first two decades I visited Scotland around five times, twice for the funerals of my parents; in the last ten years, only once.

This was not an easy decision to make. I dearly love to travel. I spent many months in Germany, France and Kenya while a teenager, and I really enjoy to visit exotic places and different cultures. In a world without climate change, I guarantee I’d also plan to save up and return to the UK of my youth every few years, for a summer visit. I miss the old familiar landscapes and the many family and friends there. But I also understand the climate-changing cost of air travel.

Most of our family trips are now car camping or backpacking in Los Padres National Forest. The northern half of Ventura County is almost entirely public land, with plenty of trailheads and trails for a lifetime of regular exploring. Of course it helps that our family’s favorite watershed, Sespe Creek, is situated close to home. Ventura County is also fortunate to have a number of excellent beaches.

My decision to stop driving my 1967 El Camino art car a few years ago was also because of climate change – my “newer” red Toyota pickup gets twice the mileage.

Of course one family’s response to global climate change constitutes a mere drop in the bucket. So what else can one do? I make use of the opportunity to spread the word by writing about it. Educating yourself and your family and friends is also important.

 

THEN THERE ARE THE LITTLE THINGS

Most families’ climate change emissions are led by energy consumption in the home and for transportation, in that order.

All our purchasing can readily bear in mind climate change factors. In fact, Japan is instituting a program whereby every packaged item in supermarkets will soon have a panel on the label which uses a standardized formula to calculate the climate change emissions that went into its production.

Even without that level of labeling, buying fresh food in season is what makes sense. Those grapes and summer fruits that arrive from Chile in our winter should instead be marketed closer to where they were grown.

You can also reduce your energy consumption by buying less packaged foods and more unprocessed foods. We are fortunate in southern California to have available such a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables that haven’t been shipped halfway around the world.

Eating less meat is important, as the food and energy required to produce meat is many times more than what’s needed to grow a vegetarian diet. Did you know that the current world production of grains is plentiful enough to feed our burgeoning population? It is the diversion of a large percentage of the world’s grain to feed farm animals – and a further amount to produce corn syrup – that is the root cause of  current food shortages in many nations.

Of course, growing much of your own food is still the most local and sustainable solution. Planting vegetables and fruit trees around your home, and planning for eventually irrigating them with recycled household wastewater is one of the most sensible long-term responses to climate change.

Finally, simply deciding to buy less “stuff” is very important. Finding satisfaction from other activities than shopping. Though this flies in the face of the perceived need to kick-start consumer spending of all types, our American way of life has been largely responsible for global climate change. Our consumer spending is unsustainable both in terms of household debt and planetary resources.

It’s time to devise new economic indicators that don’t depend for success on continuing resource depletion.  A great place to start is building the green economy- putting millions of people to work insulating homes, installing rooftop solar panels, and the like. There’s plenty of this kind of work for decades. The upside of this effort will be the elimination of importing fossil fuels (which will also lessen geopolitical tensions), the slowing of climate change’s impacts on our planetary life-support systems, the availability of clean air to breathe in our cities, and a renewed sense of community around the nation. As America leads, the rest of the world is likely to follow.               

Global Warming Update

GLOBAL WARMING UPDATE

The start of a new year is a good time to look at developments concerning global warming over the past 12 months.

While the topic has certainly stayed central in the minds of many citizens and policy-makers around the world, scientific studies have revealed up-to-date assessments of the risks posed by global warming to the ecological systems that support our resource-intensive lifestyles. The assessments are not good.

Over much of the past decade, climate scientists have estimated that global warming could be limited to a 2 degrees centigrade increase, if global warming emissions were brought under early control and reduced. Emissions have however risen in recent years at a faster rate than ever, and some scientists now say it will be impossible to prevent an estimated 4.3 degrees centigrade of warming. Bear in mind that the last time the planet was 5 degrees warmer was 35-55 million years ago, when swampy forests were the predominant vegetation and alligators lived close to the North Pole.

A climate change study released in early December, which took two years to complete, was produced by the US Climate Change Science Center. As well as predicting long-term drying of the southwestern US, it foresees global sea levels rising by 4 feet this century. This means goodbye to hundreds of cities worldwide as we now know them, from New York to London and Miami, and disastrous losses of human living space in densely populated countries such as Bangladesh.

What’s more, this recent study sounds an alarm about the risk of abrupt climate changes, which are predicted to occur when particular “tipping points” are reached. One example of a tipping point is when the Arctic ice sheet melts so much that the exposed dark mass of sea water absorbs enough solar heat that it does not freeze over again. (This is in contrast to a glaring white ice cap, which reflects the solar heat back into the atmosphere.)  A tipping point marks a permanent shift to a new set of climate conditions.

Tom Armstrong, a senior advisor for global change programs at the US Geological Survey, stated that “there are really no policies in place to deal with abrupt climate change.”

CHINA OVERTAKES THE US

Several developed nations managed to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions in 2007, including Denmark (8%), the UK and Germany (3%), and France and Australia (2%). On the other hand, US emissions rose by 2%. Those in China and India, two emerging industrialized nations, also rose steeply; in China’s case by 7.5%, which is equivalent to one half of the 2007 worldwide increase. China is now the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide.

Another problem is that the planet’s oceans and forests, which were able to absorb a whopping 57% of carbon dioxide emissions between 1959 and 2000, are now absorbing only 54% of these emissions.  In other words, they are getting maxed out in terms of their ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide, which is increasingly going to stay in the atmosphere instead, and speed up global warming.

Benjamin Santer, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory calls it “kind of scary” that the recent growth in worldwide carbon dioxide emissions exceeds the highest growth predicted only two years ago by the International Panel on Climate Change.

A global climate change conference Poland in December produced “the bare minimum of what we needed for the talks,” according to Jennifer Haverkamp with the Environmental Defense Fund. Several developing nations offered concrete plans to cut back their carbon dioxide emissions – including Mexico and South Africa. Brazil committed to reduce deforestation by 70% by 2017 – deforestation being responsible for about 20% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Unresolved were basic questions of equitably balancing emissions cuts between rich and poor nations.  The conference in Poland was a stepping stone towards a new international climate change treaty in December of 2009.

AL GORE’S FIVE-POINT PLAN

In a November opinion piece in the New York Times, Al Gore spelled out his five-point plan to repower America, with a commitment to providing 100% of our electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years. This plan would also result in a large degree of independence from overseas sources of oil and gas.

Firstly, the Obama administration and Congress should offer large-scale incentives for solar, wind and geothermal energy sources. Second, we should plan and build a unified, nationwide “smart grid” for the distribution of renewable electricity from its rural sources to the cities where it’s needed. The cost would be around $400 billion over 10 years.

Third, we should convert the nation’s automobile industry to build plug-in hybrids to run on renewable electricity. This has the added benefit of the hybrid vehicles being charged overnight, during off-peak hours.

Fourth, we should get going on nationwide programs to make our buildings more energy-efficient. About 40% of carbon dioxide emissions in the US are from the energy needs of buildings for heating, cooling, and lighting.

Fifth and lastly, we should put a price on the burning of carbon fuels, to encourage greater investments in clean energy both nationally and internationally.  This would include programs to slow deforestation worldwide.

CALIFORNIA CONTINUES TO LEAD THE WAY

In December, California’s Air Resources Board unanimously approved a 134-page plan to reduce our state’s global warming emissions by 15% from today’s levels by 2020. The plan would require one third of California’s electricity to come from renewable sources – far more than any other state has pledged till now.

More than 43,000 comments were received by the Air Resources Board in the 18 months of public hearings that went into the new plan. Cuts to automobile carbon emissions are slated for 31%; cuts through energy efficiency, improved appliances and green buildings will total 20%; cap-and-trade transactions to foster greener energy will save 34% over current usage.

Details of the plan include incentives for local governments to reduce urban sprawl (which requires more car trips); capturing methane at landfills; the manufacture of much more efficient vehicles; and using less energy to transport and to treat water is a key factor – currently this uses up 20% of all the energy used in the state!

It’s anybody’s guess whether California’s ambitious plans can spur the world to a greener future in time to stop severe changes to our planet’s ecosystems that will threaten agriculture and the economy.  California’s energy use – although equivalent to the world’s eighth largest economy – is still only 1.5% of the global total.

 

The end of our full-speed ahead consumer culture 

It would be nice to think that concerned policy-makers were moving as one to address worsening global climate change. In fact, the inertia of business as usual is enormous – the global corporate machinery that devours the planet’s minerals, forests and crops to design, manufacture and transport the plethora of consumer goods we believe we need. Politicians are still largely beholden to political contributions from the oil and gas and defense industries, though the reality of our situation requires a speedy shifting of government subsidies from these industries towards major green infrastructure programs.

Let’s look at it this way – at a growth rate of 3%, the global economy doubles each 23 years. Professor Rod Smith of the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering has shown that “each successive doubling period consumes as much resources as all the previous doubling periods combined.”

In other words, a 3% growth rate between now and 2041 will consume as much natural resources of all sorts, as has been used by all humanity up until 2008. Obviously the goal of incessant growth is up against limited amounts of available natural resources, as well as the risks of global climate change. Herman Daly’s book “Steady State Economics” is a good place to look further into how economics works at the end of growth as we have known it.

IS THE RECESSION A TIMELY NUDGE IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION?

If the richer nations are to drastically lessen their use of energy and resources over the coming decades, in order to limit the growth of global warming, people must first learn to focus their financial resources on what they really need, rather than what advertising has persuaded them to purchase.

It is interesting that the current recession is upon us exactly when it is vital to reduce the fossil fuel energy we consume daily. Perhaps the recession can serve as a reminder of what is more important than the quantity of stuff we surround ourselves with, whose manufacture is causing the planet to overheat.

Certainly, incoming President Obama seems set to focus more determinedly on the problem of global warming than has President Bush. His choice for Secretary of Energy, Nobel-prize winning Steve Chu, is someone who takes climate change seriously.

WHAT ARE WE TO DO?

The list of ways to reduce your carbon footprint is long enough to allow plenty of leeway for approaching the problem in your own way.

First, there’s your house, which on average consumes 40% of our energy in the US. Replacing older appliances, as they wear out, with the most efficient models is straightforward.  Having an energy audit of your home can reveal numerous ways to stop wasting energy. Invest in solar electric panels on your roof.

Second, your transportation energy, which is the next largest chunk of your individual energy consumption. Basically, try to drive less and carpool, or use mass transit or a bicycle more. Then there’s flying, still the fastest growing transportation choice. It’s crazy to be expanding airports at a time of runaway climate change. Help reverse this trend by flying a lot less often, and for shorter distances.

Third, there’s the energy it takes to produce the food and goods you purchase. Buying locally grown foods is a great alternative. Avoid buying summer fruits and vegetables in wintertime, which are often shipped many thousands of miles. Buying more fresh foods also avoids the energy used to process and wrap and ship all the packaged foods in the supermarket.

Step away from the addiction to stuff, whether gadgets, clothes, or whatever. And talk to your family and friends to spread the word.

FOCUS ON THE LOCAL

While global climate change can seem too enormous a problem to confront, a lot of the solutions are local in nature and lend themselves to local activism. Locally, we can support producers of fresh fruits and vegetables. We can support local initiatives to generate renewable energy, at the household and/or community level. We can work to make public transportation more plentiful and available. We can support recycling efforts, and the local reuse of the recycled materials collected locally.

OTHER RESOURCES

  Scientists are taking their climate change message directly to the public at web sites such as: realclimate.org, climatepolicy.org, climateethics.org.

  A informative web site encouraging energy and resource efficient building practices with a focus on Ventura County can be found at:  http://www.builditsmartvc.org/vc/vc6.php

  You can get involved with the Ojai Valley Green Coalition. Check out their web site for more: http://www.ojaivalleygreencoalition.org/