In one of the most influential Green books, Natural Capitalism (1999), Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins propose replacing industrial capitalism, which “liquidates its [natural] capital and calls it income,” with a natural capitalism based on higher efficiency in everything, biology-inspired industrial processes, a focus on services instead of products, and restoration of the all-sustaining envelope of natural systems. It’s a good book with a helpful metaphor.
Whole Earth Discipline
An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
Stewart Brand
8 bookmarks- ISBN
- 9780670021215
Notes & Highlights
A population with that birthrate halves in of forty-five years, and then halves again in the next forty-five years. In one formulation, that means more resources per person—good news both for the people and the resources. But from another angle, it could mean perpetual economic crisis, which would be terrible news for the environment. In an economic crisis, there is neither money nor attention for responsible stewardship. There is no long-term thinking or action. Wars become more likely, and wars are deadly for the environment.
Possible to see this reaction happening in real time. Oil shocks following the invasion of Ukraine have already led the Biden Administration to authorize another round of fossil fuel projects.
As climate change unfolds, cities will be on the frontier of human response. Taking the danger zone as 30 feet above sea level, Columbia University study reported in Science says that two thirds of all cities with population over 5 million are “especially vulnerable” to rising sea levels and “weather oscillations.” The Thames Barrier protecting London from flood tides was raised twenty-seven times between 1986 and 1996, and sixty-six times between 1996 and 2006. Some are forecasting that it will be overwhelmed by 2030.
Wondering what the current status of the barrier is?
Infrastructure makes cities possible, and it has to be rebuilt every few decades. According to a report in 2007 by the infrastructure consultants Booz Allen Hamilton, “Over the next 25 years, modernizing and expanding the water, electricity, and transportation systems of the cities of world will require approximately $40 trillion.” What would infrastructure totally rethought in Green terms look like? China is currently building 170 new mass transit systems. High-speed rail is finally coming to the United States. With the coming of “smart grids” and microgrids, the distribution of electricity will be reshaped toward greater adaptability as well as efficiency.
A nice thought experiment, but high-speed rail still hasn’t arrived and there’s major political obstacles to rebuilding the grid. One of the ways that technological solutions fail to sufficiently address the crisis is that they don’t account for cultural or social forces that might impede their adoption.
A 1-gigawatt nuclear plant converts 20 tons of fuel a year into 20 tons of waste, which is so dense it fills just two dry-storage casks, each one a cylinder 18 feet high, 10 feet in diameter.
By contrast, a 1-gigawatt coal plant burns 3 million tons of fuel a year and produces 7 million tons of CO2, all of which immediately goes into everyone’s atmosphere
In another passage, Brand notes that the footprint of a nuclear plant is in the order of a square mile.
I find this input/output calculation to be the most appealing aspect of nuclear power. The arguments about not overthinking the waste problem weren’t as convincing, since we do need a mechanism for holding long-term thinking accountable. But comparing the waste is generates against CO2, it seems like a vastly better alternative.
“Perfect order” is how anthropologist Stephen Lansing describes it in his talks and books analyzing the Balinese water temple system. The elaborate array of ninth-century tunnels and rice paddy terraces in steep volcanic mountains is managed from the bottom up through a system of what are called subaks. Each subak is a group of men with adjoining rice fields that share a water source. Their meetings are democratic, dispensing with the otherwise powerful caste distinctions of Bali, and subaks are connected to one another through the hierarchic water-temple network. “The Balinese call their religion Agama Tirtha -the religion of water,” says Lansing. “Each village temple controls the water that flows into nearby rice terraces. Regional water temples control the flow into larger areas.”
The Balinese system is similar to what Powell proposed in his western water management plan.
Book dates itself to 2009, and there it is fully fixed. I wonder what Earth Policy Institute guy thinks about this book. It’s very Obama era thinking, very technocratic thinking.
Brand makes these arguments without really reckoning with the social/cultural aspects that make these projects difficult right now. There’s still huge headwinds preventing transition, including pandemic induced economic shocks and political instability.
How are we doing at any of these goals stated in the book?
What conditions is the army corp preparing for? Are they ahead or behind of the best predictions?
As for comparing full-life-cycle, everything-counted greenhouse gas emissions, a study published in 2000 by the International Atomic Energy Agency shows total lifetime emissions per kilowatt-hour from nuclear about even with those of wind and hydro, about half of solar, a sixth of “clean” coal (if it ever comes), a tenth of natural gas, and one twenty-seventh of coal as it is burned today.