Have you read Monbiot's book Heat? It paints a rather different picture. Also, what does the ms say about jet travel? Monbiot thinks it will be a thing of the past in our future.

If you want to be taken seriously, I suggest a method other than being a troll. It's just common sense.

And what does it have to do with solutions to Global Warming? Seriously. Why does this dirty hippy image keep on getting raised when it hasn't been representative since the 70s, if then. So why do environmentalists feel the need to apologise before they make a point? It sets the movement back decades, and alienates the centre. (Unfortunately, I think it just goes to show a fundamental human reality: that self-image trumps truth, when it comes to choosing ideologies.)

But anyway...while not knowing much about this book, I do sometimes worry about the issue being flooded by disorganized, cobbled-together compendiums of fact and lists of miraculous new technology. The thing that makes Amory Lovins stand out is that he seems to have a good grasp of nature, economics (which would be our ecosystem, btw), and has a very good grasp of design. He understands deeply that it's not the technology that's important, but how it dovetails with human culture.

On the other hand, I recognise that it's still early days in the "adaptation" debate and that we're still very much in the brainstorming phase. We could still use plenty of opinions to chew on, even if they do wind up getting spat out.

I will say, to anybody interested in solving the world's problems: please read liberally from Amory Lovins (RMI) and Bill McDonough. For their apporach, if not their actual solutions.

Jones,

Hair shirts have nothing to do with hippies, dirty or otherwise.

For centuries, extremely pious and/or guilt-ridden Christians (although possibly others too, not sure) have worn these to cause themselves pain as a punishment for their (perceived) sins.  Usually it's figurative, as in this case; the point is that we should not feel guilty or punish ourselves, but rather should from this day forward stop doing the dumb thigs that got us into this in the first place.  A philosophy, I believe, that lends itself to widespread success as soon as we get our heads out of the various undesirable places where they currently are, which will be approximately when Hell freezes over if history is any guide. :)

Following the lead provided by the excellent quote, you stumble on this, which is highly relevant since we are not going to cool anything unless and until we examine the mad program that we are busily following, the growth-solves-all-problems subroutine . . . .  Nice to see.
===============
Economics for Humans
Julie A. Nelson
Cloth, $16.00
The University of Chicago Press

NEW September 2006

Order from University of Chicago Press

Is it asking too much to demand that businesses be socially and environmentally responsible? When child care and elder care are commercially supplied, is caring turned into just another commodity? Many, believing that economies are cold and heartless systems that operate outside human control, would answer yes. But in this impassioned and perceptive work, Julie A. Nelson debunks theories that teach us that our economic lives are somehow separate from our moral values and our human relationships.

The impediment to envisioning a more considerate economic world, Nelson demonstrates, is a particular assumption that is shared by both neoliberals and the Left. Despite their seemingly insurmountable differences, they both make use of the metaphor, first proposed by Adam Smith, of "the economy as machine." This pervasive idea, she argues, has blinded us to the qualities that make us work and care for one another--qualities that also make businesses thrive and markets grow. We can wed our interest in money with our justifiable concerns about ethics and social well-being. And we can do so if we recognize that an economy is not a machine, but a living, beating heart that--when healthy--circulates blood to all parts of the social body while also serving as the seat of compassion and care.

Nothing less than a manifesto, Economics for Humans will both invigorate and inspire readers to rethink the way they view the economy, its possibilities, and their place within it.

"A stunning rebuke of conventional assumptions that describe our economic system as a robot-like machine. In this deeply intelligent and personally engaging book, Julie Nelson emphasizes the tremendous influence of ethics and emotions on economic outcomes. She challenges both the Left and the Right to think more creatively about the relationship between love and money. Everyone who studies care--or cares about social science--should read this book."
-- Nancy Folbre, author of The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values

"Economics, as it is often taught today, portrays us as homo economicus--someone who doesn't vote in presidential elections, doesn't return lost wallets, and doesn't leave tips when dining out of town. Julie Nelson reminds us that most people aren't really like that. She helps point the way to a richer, more descriptive way of thinking about economic life."
-- Robert H. Frank, author of Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess

"Julie Nelson cares. She cares enough about her home discipline, economics, to demand that it jettison the crippling assumption that the economy is a clockwork machine. She cares enough about people to insist that we recognize the full range of our economically valuable activities, from the unpaid provision of personal care to the ethical management of corporations. In this sparkling, passionate, personal book Nelson shows how to humanize economics without abandoning its commitment to rigorous description and explanation."
-- Viviana A. Zelizer, author of The Purchase of Intimacy

ISBN: 0-226-57202-1

Julie A. Nelson is an economist and senior research associate at the Global Development and Environmental Institute at Tufts University.

George Monbiot's 'Heat' devotes an entire chapter to the Exxon-funded denialist brigade, none of which have any climatological credibility and many of whom, surprise surprise, used to work for British American Tobacco. Back then they spouted the 'tobacco can't hurt you line' and now they're bullshitting away profitably in another arena.

Anyone who quotes junkscience.com to support an argument against the reality of climate change can be safely dismissed out of hand as a fraud or a fool. The site is riddled with errors.

Cheers

Whiskerfish

Thanks to John for this review. To others who commented, I'm in the process of preparing for a form of web publication.

>I will say, to anybody interested in solving the world's problems: please read liberally from Amory Lovins (RMI) and Bill McDonough. For their apporach, if not their actual solutions.

I own  a first edition of Natural Capitalism, and have kept up with the Rocky Mountain Institutes work. However I think the RMI tends to mix what we know how to inexpensively, with what can do now at great cost but will some day be able to do inexpensively, with what we don't know how to do now. I don't think Lovins is essentially wrong, though I have strong reservations about hydrogen . I think a stronger argument can be made for his technical case than he makes. Cooling it is essentially a corrective to Natural Capitalism. It shows that RMI's logic works even if we make much less optimistic assumptions about what is possible than theirs.  It simply adds up products on the market  now, and technology that has been demonstrated, that can take us down the soft energy path without needing cheap solar cells or fuels cells (even though I think cheap solar cells at least are inevitable). It is a corrective only in the sense that it demonstrate that far more conservative assumptions than Amory makes can lead to the same conclusion.

(I also think the Amory and the RMI are way too optimistic about markets and need to respect the need for public works and regulation a great deal more.)

>Have you read Monbiot's book Heat? It paints a rather different picture. Also, what does the ms say about jet travel? Monbiot thinks it will be a thing of the past in our future.

Very eager to read it. I have been following his journalism for some time and have been anticipating the book. In the early stages he mentioned some small wind technology that I knew was quackery, and I wrote him about it. I suspect his own good sense, rather than my letter led him to drop it.

I suspect that Monbiot underestimates the amount of efficiency improvements possible, but will withhold judgement until I read the book. I knew from various things he said that the book was going to be less optimistic than mine - though I've heard hints that the differences are not as great as they seem.

In terms of jet airplanes, I agree with Monbiot. Because of the particular way they contribute to global warming, we will have to reduce their use. There is no technological substitute that will let us continue to fly as much and as fast. We won't have to give them up all together, but we will have to reduce their use a great deal. Basically they produce stratospheric water vapor - which unlike water vapor produced in troposphere is a greenhouse forcing and not a feedback. Running planes on biofuels would do nothing to solve this. Hydrogen would make the problem worse. Our current battery technology, and any electricity storage means we are likely to achieve in the future can't drive large passenger jet planes for a number of reason.

However, there are technological substitutes for flying in most cases. A great many air journeys are over land. If  you are traveling 500 miles or fewer there is a light rail system that can get you to your destination faster than a small plane.  For longer journeys, bullet trains like the ones curently used in Japan will work. Beyond that really long journeys will either take longer or someone will have to make Maglevs work. (Maglev may or may not be more energy efficient than planes. But they are much less greenhouse gas intensive. ) Obviously none of these are useful for large scale journey's over water. The Chunnel is one thing; but taking a train from Washington D.C. to Paris is not part of the forseeable future.

Where you absolutely need to fly jet planes there is one method that can cut their greenhouse effect a great deal. Water emissions tend to stay in stratosphere much more if generated at night than in the day, much more in winter than in summer. So if you minimize night and winter flying, you reduce the global warming effect to a much greater extent than if you reduced flying across the board. This lets us continue to fly at least one third as much as we do now, perhaps even 50%. But that is in absolute terms, which means per capita flying will have to be reduced a whole lot as population increases. Also if you flying more planes fewer hours, you raise capital costs per passenger mile a great deal. (You can't amortize individual planes over as many passenger miles.) That would raise fares even more - by a lot.

So flying is going to have to be reserved for when we really need it, less frequent, more expensive. For business, the trend towards telecommunication substituting for long distance in-person contact will have to continue and accelerate. For leisure, we will have to fly less and move by train and ship more.

Yes, the climate is extremely complex and there is much that we have yet to understand.  

Your point here is unobjectionable, I think:  "This is not to suggest that carbon dioxide does not impose a rising temperature trend on a background of naturally variable climate.  Simply, that GHG alone are insufficient to account for climate variation over the last century."  

But if you agree that we should NOT "continu[e] to increase GHG concentrations", what's the point of your long post on this thread, which is about our capability to change course?

Not sure I follow what point you're trying to make.

Thanks, Gar Lipow, for your interesting comments on travel by jet, etc.

It does indeed seem that our trains, and the whole railroad infrastructure, are under-maintained and under-utilized.  Surely, all our "container"-bearing interstate-traveling trucks are a big problem, standing in need of correction sooner or later.  Most of this interstate freight traffic ought to be borne by trains.  True, there is then an efficiency problem involved in the added task of transferring "containers" or their contents at the railroad stations of cities and towns to trucks for local distribution.  But we may doubt that that is a major obstacle, and that a solution cannot be found.

I had not thought much about jet airplane travel.  But what you say makes a great deal of sense.  If, as I suspect, a major portion of that travel is business-related, then indeed, as new technologies for real-time communications become established and main-stream everywhere, the need for such travel is obviated.

Presumably there will always be a need for an agent/engineer/salesman from Producer A, maker of Widget X, to travel in person, with a Widget X in his/her luggage, to meet the agent/engineer/buyer at Potential Buyer B, in order to explain what Widget X does, and how it works, and why it is a good fit for the Gadgetry Y System that Potential Buyer B currently uses.  Fine.  But so then, why can't the agent/engineer/salesman from Producer A, carrying a Widget X in his/her luggage, travel out to Potential Buyer B by train?  What's the rush?

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

>If, as I suspect, a major portion of that travel is business-related,

Travel for  business and leisure are both significant. Percentages vary fairly widely from nation to nation, and also with the length of the trip. The truth is we are going to have to reduce both.

One of the problems with rail travel (in this country):  It's going to be a long road back to it (pun intended), because we've already committed so heavily to undermining tracks to pay for highways.  Taxes on passenger rail tickets built the interstate highway system, which is why it now appears cheaper, individually, to use those highways.  You still have to pay to use railroads, but even where there are tolls, the amount you pay directly towards highway infrastructure is negligible, so it's hard to convince people trains are actually cheaper for many applications.

The interstate trucking industry is a major catastrophe waiting to happen.  It has expanded greatly in the last couple of decades, but pay has remained fairly static and both company policies and the laws governing the situation are exploitative of the drivers, so what you have is a bunch of relatively inexperienced drivers (because of the demand for ever more drivers, and because retention rates have dropped as drivers realize it's not as good a job as it once was) being pushed way too far (because they can't make any money at all unless they push or break the limit of how far they can legally drive in a given time period), many of them on drugs to combat both the fatigue and the boredom of their lives, and when accidents happen the drivers usually get left holding the bag, as if it's their fault that they're overtired and that people driving cars don't know how to pass them safely.  This state of affairs seems likely to come to some sort of crisis at some point, and while I wish that weren't the case for the drivers' sake, I think it might help get us headed back towards rail freight.  

Local truck delivery from rail terminals is no problem; the trucks are already on the road, and in fact the existing fleet could be greatly reduced if fewer vehicle-miles overall were required.  Of course, that will just compound the already-mind-boggling problem of what to do with a few million more dead Freightliners, since the Freightliner is the Hyundai of the big-rig world, and no one will buy them, so when the leases run out the company parks them and walks away...

As for flying...yes, I think we have to get used to things taking longer again.  

I think electric cars and more widespread solar electricity and a lot of other things are crying out for a major breakthrough in ways electricity can be stored in large, portable quantities.  It's amazing to me that, with all the other things we've invented in the last few decades, basically zero progress has been made on this.

Yes - we are going to have to put tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions into heavy rail for  freight. Not just track and locomotives, but freight yards, and switch yards.

In terms of the electric car, I am now a blogger on Gristmill. I have a couple of minor posts in queue, but I'm going to start blogging on transportation issues next week.