Goodbye Cruel World

Jeremy Rifkin
The Guardian

Recently, I came across a frightening report published by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) – the nation’s most august scientific body. Yet, because there was no visually provocative content, the report had received only a couple of short paragraphs tucked away inside a few newspapers.

Here is what the academy had to say: it is possible that the global warming trend projected over the course of the next 100 years could, all of a sudden and without warning, dramatically accelerate in just a handful of years – forcing a qualitative new climatic regime which could undermine ecosystems and human settlements throughout the world, leaving little or no time for plants, animals and humans to adjust.

The new climate could result in a wholesale change in the earth’s environment, with effects that would be felt for thousands of years. If the projections and warnings in this study turn out to be prophetic, no other catastrophic event in all of recorded history will have had as damaging an impact on the future of human civilisation and the life of the planet.

The NAS concludes its report with a dire warning: “On the basis of the inference from the paleoclimatic record, it is possible that the projected change will occur not through gradual evolution, proportional to greenhouse gas concentrations, but through abrupt and persistent regime shifts affecting subcontinental or larger regions – denying the likelihood or downplaying the relevance of past abrupt changes could be costly.”

Global warming represents the dark side of the commercial ledger for the industrial age. For the past several hundred years, and especially in the 20th century, human beings burned massive amounts of “stored sun” in the form of coal, oil and natural gas, to produce the energy that made an industrial way of life possible. That spent energy has accumulated in the atmosphere and has begun to adversely affect the climate of the planet and the workings of its many ecosystems.

If we were to measure human accomplishments in terms of the sheer impact our activities have had on the life of the planet, then we would sadly have to conclude that global warming is our most significant accomplishment to date, albeit a negative one.

We have affected the biochemistry of the earth and we have done it in less than a century. If a qualitative climate change were to occur suddenly in the coming century – within less than 10 years – as has happened many times before in geological history, we may already have written our epitaph.

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Pacific Northwest Hydropower

Tom Robertson
Energy Resources

The issue of Energy Returned on Energy Invested on Pacific Northwest hydropower is critical to the region and the nation. Because most of those plants were build quite a while ago, the energetic cost of their construction can be considered as sunken and the only energy costs currently chargable to those plants would be their operation, maintenance, and ongoing or new environmental costs.

This means that Pacific Northwest hydro power may be some of the most energetically profitable in the nation, if not the world, with virtually no possibility of replacement or substitute–except possibly by additional hydropower.

While the loss of indigenous fish and agricultural use of water may bother some, and others may try to capitalize on such loss as a means of publicising possibly dubious environmental concerns, there is a real need to build a clear, complete and sufficiently accurate model of the NW hydro system as part of the NW energy, environmental, and cultural system, (where culture includes diverse attributes of: economics and finance; politics and governance; science and technology; production, trade and markets; arts and humanities; education and entertainment; and other value processes including religion.

Such a model, which could be build by people who live in the region and are active in energy issues there, must, after some intial development phase, be constantly open to public scrutiny as it will not only allow the people of the Pacific Northwest to see the relative merit of hydro, but of all other parts of their energy, ecological, and cultural systems as well.

It is also interesting to note that such a model, easily developed with currently available PC and Internet communications systems, would provide everyone privy to such models, from households, businesses, industries, and the region at large, with a far more complete and accurate understanding of what will and will not work in the region, with very good and credible measures to support decision makers from the public to their leaders.