Thoughts for Earth Day 2013: There is a price to pay

Andrew Alden at About Geology notes today that he hosted an Accretionary Wedge on Earth Day in 2008. I had only been blogging a few months at the time, but I contributed, and in reading over my post from back then, I see that things haven't changed all that much. In just two months, I'll have the chance to return to my favorite spot on the planet at Cedar Mesa, and hopefully it will look as pristine as it did five years ago. Thanks, Andrew, for the reminder!

Here is my post from April, 2008:

This month's Accretionary Wedge (Accretionary Wedge #8 ) is hosted by Andrew Alden at About Geology, and the entries involve our responses to Earth Day. Mine is a bit late in coming; I reward myself with a blog entry if I get my other work done, and this has been finals week. It's been a bit hectic!

I offer today a picture of my most sacred spot on the planet (so far): the edge of Cedar Mesa at Muley Point. The cliff below the rocks drops 800 feet straight down to a flat plain which is then carved by the San Juan River into intricate canyons some 1,200 feet deeper still. Monument Valley and the Raplee Anticline lie in the distance, as well as the towns of Cortez CO and Farmington NM. It is a precious place to me, full of mystery, beauty and solitude. Ghosts of the Ancestral Pueblo people lurk here, and the fossils of Permian reptiles as well.

But...hidden in the bottom of the deep canyon is the greatest upstream extent of the artifical evaporation pond of Lake Powell. On a 1964 topographic map of the National Recreational Area, there is a notation at Muley Point: "slated for development". In the distance, at Mexican Hat, oil wells pump the black liquid from the ground, and around Farmington, a GoogleEarth view reveals hundreds or thousands of gas wells. Coal is mined from Black Mesa, off to the south, and evaporite minerals are torn from the ground to the north of Canyonlands National Park. Power lines criss-cross the region. My favorite place is under siege.

Of course, we need all these things to live, but the point of my entry today is this: there is a price to be paid. The price takes many forms, from high prices on commodities, in foul air, polluted rivers, extinct plants and animals, and in the almost never recognized loss of the wild places of our planet, the gauntlet in which our ancestors survived and thrived. We have lost touch with the earth that gave us our birth, and which continues to nurture us, despite our abuse. And our abusive ways are about to come to an end, one way or another: we will finally destroy the last of the wild places, drill the last drops of oil and shovel the last lumps of coal, we will melt the last glaciers, and deplete the last soils. Or, we will choose not to do these things, and exist on our planet in a new way: a sustainable existence that finds a way to give something back to our planet.

The environmental movement on our planet has been demonized, trivialized, and marginalized, because, I suppose, it has always threatened the perceived profits of somebody. What have environmental groups tried to do since the hey-day of the 1970's and the first Earth Day? A short list might include:

• Increase mileage standards and encourage the use of mass-transit
• Encourage the development of alternative energy resources
• Decrease emissions from our vehicles, including greenhouse gases and ozone destroying compounds
• Encouraged laws to protect our water, air and soil
• Protect the wild places that still remain on our planet

Environmentalists have been the visionaries and the prophets for our planet. They have seen the things we do today to abuse our planet, and offer an alternative path for the future, one based on sustainability. Such ideas run counter to the profit motive of particular industries, and thus environmentalists are attacked as elitists and flakes, while the money continues to flow into the coffers of the energy companies and the developers. But the bills for all of us are coming due...

The oil is running out, and thus the price spikes. We will never see cheap oil again. The mass conversion of agricultural fields to the growth of biofuels is causing grain prices to spike, and we are becoming less and less able to feed the hungriest people on the planet (Malthus is in the air; "Running Out of Planet to Exploit," ). The prices of metals are climbing.

Change is possible, and I sometimes see hopeful signs, and part of my optimism comes from Earth Day, and the works of good people to bring awareness to those who are waking up to the spectre of high prices and resource limits. We have a choice though...we can let the decisions about the future to be made by energy companies and their political lackeys, or we can demand a future based on sustainability. It will take education, and an end to the corporate media's obsession with Britney and Paris, and kidnapped white women, and American Flag Lapels. People, when given the right information, can make the right choices.

Those are my thoughts this week. You are welcome to comment!

Only a Little Planet...

I'm kind of hesitant about writing about Earth Day, 2012. There are many things I could talk about concerning our occupancy on planet Earth and what we a doing to ourselves and the ecosystem to which we belong. But I feel a certain sense of hopelessness, like I am trapped in a bus hurtling towards an abyss, and I am not in the driver's seat. In fact I am sitting way in the back, and no one seated up front is aware of what is happening. They're not paying attention, and wouldn't believe their peril if they were. The drivers of the bus have different priorities. I don't know if it is ignorance, or recklessness, but they are driving ever faster and faster, sure in themselves that they can make the turn before going over the edge.

The original Earth Day in 1970 caught businesses and politicians off-guard. Before they knew what was happening, Congress much to their own surprise had passed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and formed the Environmental Protection Agency. They passed the Endangered Species Act. And it made a difference. Our air and water are cleaner, despite vast numbers of more people and cars on the road. Dams and power plants and other mass developments have to consider their affect on the environment before they can proceed. It made a difference, and the enemies of this progress have been counter-attacking with a vengeance. 

Today, we face some of the greatest challenges ever faced by our species: the deeply intertwined problems of energy use and global climate change. Unfortunately, instead of facing the crisis head on, we instead have to listen to politicians deny the very existence of a problem. Despite the clear record of sea level rise, loss of glaciers worldwide, and direct measurements of worldwide temperatures, the politicians listen to their corporate lobbyists who pay for their re-election campaigns and then impugn the motives of climate scientists and environmental groups. The Supreme Court is complicit in this, with their recent Citizens United ruling that allows unlimited donations by corporations to political candidates. Our politicians represent their corporate sponsors, not their constituents.

We don't have many tools to fight back with. There is education, but political support for education is also disappearing. For all their words about competing in a global economy, politicians are letting our universities, colleges and high schools wither on the vine.

We still have the right to vote, but politicians are attempting to restrict that right to those who will vote they way the politicians want. Not enough people vote these days anyway, and many who do are "low-information" voters who are ignorant of the issues, and are easily swayed by sophisticated and well funded media campaigns.

So here I am, a blogger with a few hundred readers, and a teacher with a few hundred students each year. Did I say hopeless? Yeah, that's the way I feel sometimes. But I also know that education is a powerful tool, and I have to believe that politicians can only deny what is happening right before their eyes for so long (and then when the predicted catastrophes occur, they will say "no one could have foreseen this"). And change will come.

I wish the change wouldn't be wrenching. I wish it could be planned and carried out in a way that upholds human dignity and doesn't result in suffering, starvation and permanent economic depression. We will have to leave petroleum and fossil fuels behind, and embrace renewable energy if our standard of living is to continue as it is now, if there is to be an economic future for the children being born today, and if there is to be a healthy ecosystem on our planet. There is still time to plan, if the politicians would learn from someone besides their corporate sponsors.

Get involved and make a change! We did it in 1970, we can do it again.

Nukes in the Central Valley: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, oh, and a few questions...

Jobs, jobs, jobs! 11,000 of them in an economically depressed area! Water, water, water, in a drought-stricken area! Clean energy! And it will "...not be located in seismically active or cultural areas..." It's obviously a no-brainer.

It's come to my attention through the twitter universe (thanks @RL_Miller for the catch) that a business group wants to put a "Clean Energy Park" in western Fresno County (The Business Journal, April 7). This park will begin with the construction of wind turbines and a 150-megawatt solar thermal plant, which is a probably a great idea. But the other phase is the construction of two nuclear reactor plants. The plan is to pump up brackish groundwater, desalinate it, and make it available to agriculture in the region to the tune of 1 million acre-feet per year.

I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking this a little bit, but a couple of questions occurred to me as I read about this plan. I realize that brackish groundwater is useless for most human and agricultural uses, but have they considered the effect of removing 1 million acre-feet of water from underground in this area? The south end of the Central Valley has a long history of pumping water from deep aquifers, and one of the more profound outcomes is a serious level of subsidence, i.e. the sinking of the ground surface. In some places, the ground sank 30 feet or more. This, in a flat valley that is barely above sea level. I'm no expert on groundwater issues in that particular area, but how sustainable is removing 1 million acre-feet every year?

Then there is that issue of being located in what is not a "seismically active" area. It takes only a moment to find western Fresno County on the California Geological Survey's online interactive fault map (screen shot below). Um...that's California's Coast Ranges, one of the geologically youngest mountain ranges on the planet, which is riddled with fault lines. The San Andreas, of course, off to the west, but also the Hayward/Calaveras system, the Ortigalita zone, and the O'Neil fault system, and maybe the most worrisome system, the San Joaquin fault. Worrisome because it is not well mapped or understood.

The earthquake history of California is riddled with surprises. Many, or really most of California's earthquakes take place on faults other than the San Andreas. And many damaging earthquakes have taken place on faults that were thought to be inactive, or which were not mapped or known at all. The Coalinga quake of 1983, a few miles to the south of this area, was one of those surprises.

Well, at least the nuclear power plant will be safe from tsunamis. It apparently will be on a floodplain, though, and there are growing concerns of the possibility of a megaflood brought on by an atmospheric river storm (ARkstorm). Will this energy park be ready for something like that?

And of course there are those pesky concerns about "clean" nuclear energy. If we gear up and build dozens more nukes across the country, where will the uranium be coming from? Will the mines be as clean and tidy as the power plants? And where are they going to store the waste? It's been fifty years, and we still don't know where to put highly radioactive spent fuel rods. And when they do decide, do you want the railway system or highway system that they will use to transport those fuel rods to run through your neighborhood? Oh yeah, and what about that whole terrorism thing that certain political parties want us to always worry about? Do you trust that the rent-a-cops they will hire to defend the nuclear site will be up to the job?

Yeah, 11,000 construction jobs is great, though it will turn into just 400 jobs to run the plant. Solar and wind energy are great ideas, but I just don't know about this one....

"There is No Reason For Optimism"

The age of oil is ending. "Can the political order face up to the challenge? There is no reason for optimism." I don't usually do a lot of politics in this blog, but regarding the elections tomorrow, think about who might represent you, and who represents Big Oil ("drill, baby, drill"). Oil is running out worldwide. We cannot drill ourselves out of our energy problems, and in fact we have maybe at best a five year supply in our own country if we stopped importing oil today. We need tough politicians to represent us; not Republican lies or Democrat timidity. And we need a crash program to develop alternative energy sources. We need a vision for clean energy, because without one, we might end up fighting wars over petroleum resources in places like the Middle East. Oh...wait a minute...

We are represented by cowards on the one hand and dangerously ignorant fools on the other. And I fear tomorrow's elections will make things far, far worse. We need to be working hard for a common goal that will benefit all of us, not ignoring elephants in the room.

BP and BS...Stuff from All Over

The Washington Post gets it right...gas is very...expensive (via Twitter at @clasticdetritus). There is a lot of blood mixed in with the oil we consume. The apology needs to come from us.

A bit of anger from Rant Hour...How good are Tony Hayward's predictions and proclamations? Remember Bagdad Bob ("the Saddam spokesman who coalition forces would never take the capital even as American tanks were visible a few thousand yards from where BB stood")?

A 1962 ad for Humble Oil from Al's Journal, via Huffington Post. Humble Oil became Exxon in the 1970's. Big Oil definitely isn't humble any more...

From Mike Mitchell, via Huffington Post

And, BP continues to block media access to the devastated beaches with the help of the local and federal government...

Gasoline and petroleum are not our only energy related problems...those gas-saving lithium ion batteries in hybrid car also have a problem with resource availability. Lithium has to be mined too.

The Power of a Photograph...

Photography is such a powerful medium. I ran across this article on 30 Photos That Changed The World. All of the pictures are emotionally powerful, especially the 1863 Mathew Brady shot of Civil War dead at Gettysburg. Most of the photos feature people, as well they should, but three stood out for their geological content: the view of the Earth rising over the moon, the shot of Buzz Aldrin walking (dancing?) on the Moon, and Ansel Adam's panorama of the Grand Tetons.

So many things happened in the late 1960's and early 1970's when I was leaving childhood. It was a scary time in many ways, and exhilarating. We worried about life being obliterated by mushroom clouds, but were coming to the realization that we could clean up some of the mess we had made of things. There was a war that was claiming the lives of friends and family, but we were learning that equality of all people was a possibility (even though we still single out groups in our society; it's a long road...). Seeing the Earth for the first time from space, though, had a huge impact on my personal life.

Another event of those years was the 1969 oil spill at Santa Barbara. The disaster was one of the catalysts for the first Earth Day, and led to a moratorium on new oil drilling off the coast of California that has continued for four decades. There are many issues, and it is unfortunate that opponents to the moratorium can say little more than "drill, baby, drill" as if sucking out every last bit of our remaining petroleum would make us somehow more energy independent (the reserves in the U.S. would last us not even a decade if we stopped importing oil today).

Of course, one of the arguments in support of offshore drilling is that with forty years of experience, the process is perfectly safe. It makes the events of the last few weeks all the more heartbreaking. There is an arrogance that accompanies a dependence on a particular technology. We see it with nuclear power as well. When they go wrong, what happens next? We made a choice in the 1980's to pretend that oil would last forever, and the U.S. made no serious efforts for two decades to increase mileage standards or build alternate forms of transportation. So we are forced to import even more oil, or drill for oil in ever more dangerous and unstable environments.

What is the power of a picture?

I really wonder if the "drill, baby, drill" crowd has any sense of introspection at all. Did any of them stop for a minute and wonder if this really the best way forward, before calling for increased drilling? Does an image like this carry the power to overcome apathy and willful ignorance about our vulnerability to energy disruptions? We are running out of time and choices.

Update: Devilstower has some similar sentiments...

Update #2: Famed Oceanographer and Marine Fisheries expert Rush Limbaugh checks in about the oil slick threatening the southern states: ""The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and left out there. It's natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is." He also is pretty sure environmentalists blew up the oil rig.

Update #3: On the other hand, here is what a real petroleum geologist has to say, Rachel at 4 1/2 billion years of wonder (thanks to Jules and Rachel for their comments!).

A Very Tough Ride to a Post-Oil Economy

Check out this opinion piece on our impending energy choices in Salon.com, or the original article at TomDispatch.com. The websites are political, but the data and the discussion seem pretty on target from a geological point of view. It is sobering stuff; our energy choices over the next 30 years are pretty challenging, and the changeover to a post-oil economy is not going to be easy. The recession/depression we are experiencing is putting a damper on oil use; when the economy improves, oil prices will rise too. A lot. It sure would be nice if politicians could see further than their next election, and if they could make some hard choices instead of the politically expedient ones. We are being poorly served as it stands now.