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My initial thoughts on it can be found here . . .
In short, I found McKibbin to initially be very gloom and doom which, to be fair, he has a lot of reasons to be. In regards to our environment in general and global warming in particular, shit's on fire yo. While the first half of the book is doom and gloom, the last takes on more of a tone of acceptance and in some ways hope.
To give some perspective on this next part, this book was originally written right after we had our last financial collapse. The real estate market, bank and auto bailouts, that whole mess. As a result, I think there is a bit of a bias in his world view against "big." Big agriculture, big energy, big government. Now that ten years have passed and with it both the additional environmental disasters (remember last years' hurricane season) as well as technological and social developments in environmental maintenance have already changed so much. If you couple that with the outright blow of the recession healing into what best can be called a really nasty limp that flairs on a rainy day, I wonder if he wrote this book today he'd have different ideas.
Anyhow, the final chapter really stuck with me. He's basically trying to talk about how we might figure out how to get by in a post global warming world. In it, he espouses the values of small over big. He brings up a very compelling comparison in banks. During the last recession, the banks that survived were the small banks and even the ones that fell didn't hurt the economy nearly as much as they would have had they been significantly larger. He talks a lot about local farms, local alternative energy, focusing on resources being distributed instead of centralized. He brings up concepts of farmers being flexible, embracing diverse crops and strains, organic farming, and how in a lot of ways smaller is better. All throughout his explanations, he espouses over and over again, sometimes directly and sometimes subtly, the importance of community. Which, to those of you who know me well, that's like one of my favorite words.
This focus is all pretty amazing and it's a pretty refreshing chapter to read after all that doom and gloom, but I do think McKibben is a bit too dismissive on the potential benefits of big organizations. Yes, there is a lot of power and flexibility and stability when you focus on the small, but that's not to say that it's impossible for larger organizational systems to still do good in the world. I think the difficulties lie in A) knowing what those systems are good at and B) them overcoming the two very large hurdles of lack of political and economic will to make tough decisions. For all the faults of larger systems, the amount of power they possess and therefore the amount of potential they hold shouldn't be ignored. Ideally speaking tackling environmental issues should be just as much top down as it is bottom up.
I think though, if I had to say what I find disappointing, is that McKibben did so much research on what went wrong and what we're doing wrong, and only a little bit of research on what we're doing right. He really hit home on sustainable agriculture and sustainable energy, but there's still so much more out there that we're doing, because everyday there are people out there doing absolutely amazing and inspiring work. If he took the amount of attention and focus on what he did talk about and made maybe just one or two more chapters to discuss things like restoration ecology and such, I think his book would go from interesting and compelling to mind blowing and inspiring.
All in all though, it's a great book and one I'd really recommend to pretty much anyone on here. Chances are, you'll take something away from it. It obviously spoke to me, because I felt like writing about it.
user-inactivated · 318 days ago · link ·
WanderingEng, here are some little excerpts that stand out to me. Any thing italicized in the quotes is italicized in the book. His philosophy on local power. Your question on feasibility and cost. A compelling statement on Farmers' Markets This is in the very beginning of the previous chapter, but here's the bit that he said that reminds me of Steady State Economics Durable. Sturdy. Stable. Hardy. Robust. These are squat, solid, stout words. They conjure a world where we no longer grow by leaps and bounds, but where we hunker down, where we dig in. They are words that we associate with maturity, not youth; with steadiness, not flash. They aren't exciting, but they are comforting - think husband, not boyfriend. Like I said, it's a really interesting book and he has a lot of ideas, many of them pretty exciting. I think there are a lot of points he brings up where, if this were a conversation in a living room, people with different experiences or knowledge bases could lean in and say things like "Yes, but blah blah blah" or "We should also keep in mind blah blah blah." Which, if I'm being completely honest, would be great. Can you imagine how awesome it would be if McKibben popped up on Hubski and you and kleinbl00 and me and whoever else was interested and really got into a dynamic conversation? It'd be awesome. Overall though, he has a philosophy, he embraces it and can bring up a lot of points to support it. He does an amazing job painting a picture and while he might not paint the picture you or I see, or he doesn't paint it the way you or I might paint a picture, it's still an easy picture to appreciate.In one sense, though, constructing a huge national green energy system is sort of like buying organic food at the supermarket; it's an improvement, in that the fields where it's grown aren't soaked in pesticides, but that produce is still traveling an enormous distance along vulnerable supply lines. And instead of building stronger local communities, the money you spend buying it just builds the bank accounts of a few huge firms.
In fact, in 2008 the Institute for Local Self-Reliance published a series of studies that showed half of all American states could meet their energy needs entirely within their borders, "and the vast majority could meet a significant percentage." Wind turbines and rooftop solar panels could provide 81 percent of New York's power, for instance, and almost two-thirds of Ohio's. But since North Dakota could provide 14,300 percent of its power needs, almost entirely from windmills, you might think the most logical course would be to simply concentrate on building turbines near Fargo and then ship the energy to Akron and Dayton; after all, it's 30 percent cheaper to spin those blades in the Dakotas than in Ohio. But it turns out the math is more complicated. For on thing, the new transmission lines necessary to carry that wind power east would run at least $100 billion. The institutes analysis found that once you factor in the cost of building the transmission lines, and subtract for the amount of electricity that's lost by sending it long-distance, the cost to Ohio consumers would be "fifteen percent higher than local generation with minimal transmission upgrades."
Eliminating all the middlemen that take most of the agricultural dollar would keep prices affordable. By some estimates, seventy-five cents of every dollar spent on supermarket food covers the cost of advertising, packaging, long-distance transport, and storage; at a farmers' market, by contrast, 95 percent of the price goes to the farmer growing the food. For poor people, the price is particularly right; since inner-city supermarkets typically charge a third more than suburban ones, and since the produce on the bodega shelf usually defines wilted, urban farmers' markets allow what one story called "ready access to wholesome and cheap food." When such a market is nearby, the consumption of fruit and vegetables increase, and recent immigrants are often the most enthusiastic customers (perhaps because they can remember what actual food tastes like). They also save money because the food's fresher: a local vegetable "might last a week in the fridge, whereas one that'd traveled might last only two days, since it's aged" says the Tufts University analyst Hugh Joseph. Since one out of four fruits and vegetables never makes it to the table because it spoils, that adds up."
We lack the vocabulary and the metaphors we need for life on a different scale. We're so used to growth that we can't imagine the alternatives; at best we embrace the squishy sustainable, with its implied claim that we can keep on as before. So here are my candidates for words that may help us think usefully about the future.
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WanderingEng · 316 days ago · link ·
I like his ideas about being durable rather than continued growth (with "like" as a synonym for "I attempt this myself in some fashion already"). I do like a farmer's market. It makes me think maybe a problem with grocery stores is they offer so much choice. Do I really need bananas from Guatemala? Limiting options to what is available in the local growing season seems "better." I think my hangups with approaches like this is they don't really offer a path forward. They point out the (very real) flaws today, describe a utopia, and then leave as an exercise for the reader how to get there. I mentioned Hunt for Red October yesterday in pubski. There's a scene where Alec Baldwin is trying to guess how the submarine captain is goingto get the crew off the boat. "They have to want to get off." On the same token, people have to want to have fewer options and more times of scarcity. It a scenario I just don't see happening until they're forced to.
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user-inactivated · 316 days ago · link ·
I've had a long day at work, so I apologize in advanced if this is hard to read because I'm not explaining myself well. It's easier to think of the ideas being offered not as "a path forward" but as "an eye towards possibilities." When we look back at people's ideas of what the future might look like, both cynical and optimistic, even when they're based on data and the best information possible, they're often at least partly wrong. We can never really predict "a path forward" because what's around the bend is obscured by hills, trees, and dense fog. When we think about the future in less defined terms of figuring out what will be and in more vague terms of musing over what might be, we allow flexibility, creativity, and awe to take hold and suddenly the sense of possibility is what drives us. I disagree with quite a few things McKibben said, some on particulars and some on philosophies, but I still come away from the book with a sense that we have a chance of making things work. I had a wonderful conversation with a new friend earlier this week. One of the themes we touched upon was carelessness and awareness. We talked about one of the reasons people are careless, both in the sense of heedlessness as well as apathy, is that it's because it's impossible to care about something if we know very little about it, much less if we know nothing at all. Personally, I'm an optimist on the issue, but I think in regards to the environment I don't think we have to wait until things become so horrible that we run out of options and then must be forced to accept things. Yeah, we have some real problems with weather right now, in terms of hurricanes, droughts, etc. Same with biodiversity and a whole host of issues. But I think we're reaching a greater and greater awareness every year. Case in point, when McKibben wrote this book ten years ago, I don't think you could use the word Greenwashing in a room with a hundred people and expect anyone to know what you're talking about. Today though? I bet you'd get at least a few people knowing what you mean without explanation. I think this is because the activity is becoming more common, which points to A) the activity is increasing among companies to the point that they're starting to bow to very real market pressures and B) they're responding to it so much and enough people care about the world enough, that the very idea of Greenwashing being an issue means that there's a greater awareness of environmental issues in the public in general. I pulled up Youtube and typed in "Compost." The first five videos I came across have a total of over 3.5 Million views together. The first five videos I came across for "Urban Farming" have a total of over 1.8 Million views together. The first five videos "Solar Panels" similarly have over 4.1 million views together. I doubt any of the people who watched those videos did so because they felt forced to. I very much think they did because there's a part to each one of them that very much cared to.I think my hangups with approaches like this is they don't really offer a path forward. They point out the (very real) flaws today, describe a utopia, and then leave as an exercise for the reader how to get there.
On the same token, people have to want to have fewer options and more times of scarcity. It a scenario I just don't see happening until they're forced to.
WanderingEng · 319 days ago · link ·
Caveat: my statements are my own and may not reflect those of my employer. Does he get into the feasibility/cost of his proposal? It seems like he's mostly talking about resilience. Resilience was a hot topic in the electric power industry a few months ago when Rick Perry's DOE requested FERC create an order that coal and nuclear plants must be subsidized as they're less prone to fuel disruption. FERC politely told them no, but the concept has stuck around. The electric industry operates around the idea that any one problem must be reliable. Any power line should be able to trip without blacking out San Diego (cough APS WECC IID). Any generator should be able to come off. Food is pretty reliable: any grocery store or trucking company or processing plant or farmer could close with no significant impact on me. Resilience adds a different element, essentially allowing that broad problems will occur while trying to keep the impacts to a minimum. Perry's proposal wasn't totally stupid in this regard. Having a pile of coal or a reactor full of uranium means broad external issues are unlikely to impact the ability to generate. The power system started as many small systems, and over time they merged together to more effectively share resources. I suppose food has largely done the same thing. I can get a tomato from several different states and Mexico just as my electricity can come from a local coal plant, nuclear plant in the next state, or wind turbine two states away. My biggest complaint with the Perry DOE proposal was it didn't define the problem. It just said "there can be problems, and this is the solution." I sort of have the same problem here. Is local renewable energy less likely to be impacted by a major power system problem? Probably. There's probably one off grid guy in San Diego who loves talking about the blackout. Is an off grid system practical for everyone? The difficulty is determining whether the solution is "best." Whether it's wind or solar electricity or vegetables, the local availability varies. That variability is smoothed out with wider geographic areas. There are undoubtedly good arguments for more sustainable practices, whether energy or agriculture or just about anything, but limiting solutions to only local things may not be the most feasible way or the lowest cost way.
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The fundamental drive of Eaarth is that we're going to have to do more with less, and that externalities are disguising the true cost of lots of things. You probably know him primarily as the hippie who uses charts and tables to demonstrate that nuclear power isn't cost-effective once you get rid of the externalities and that actualized costs of nuclear power are always far greater than theoretical costs. As far as food, he uses an example of a local butcher he tries to get involved in making local bacon - which they beg off of, because they can't make bacon for less than $14/lb. The fundamental point McKibben makes is that $14/lb bacon is okay because it's something we can eat indefinitely, while $3/lb factory-farmed bacon is not because of the externalities. His take on power generation is similar: if you can't do sustainable power for 45 cents/kWh, you need to use less power. Perhaps most importantly, his basic stance is that these are not choices we get to make. These are choices being made for us and we can choose to plan for them or we can get smacked upside the head by them.
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WanderingEng · 319 days ago · link ·
Using bacon just as an example, is his point that the true cost of bacon is $14/pound and externalities are absorbing $11/lb from factory farms? And that when those externalities fail, bacon will only be available at $14/lb? I'm definitely in the "let's prepare for things to happen" camp. They're going to, and even if it isn't ocean level rising or agriculture collapse, there are always local things like tornadoes or earthquakes. The point that these decisions are made for us is probably a good one as long as it doesn't slip into conspiracy theory territory. I take as a given that public actions will shift slowly. My opinion here is that we're best served by finding solutions that need little or no change from the public, and lacking those, how do we manage the ensuing failures?
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Yeah - his point is that bacon costs $14 a pound because that's what your friendly neighborhood butcher has to charge for it. The $11/lb difference is the stuff that's gonna shake out when things fall apart. Because that's his larger point - things are falling apart, things will continue to fall apart, and when putting things back together again requires the entire planet working together towards a better future, the prudent course is to plan for a fallen apart world. The entire first half of Eaarth isn't that a dark future is an inevitability, it's that the dire predictions everyone is making are likely to come true because that's the direction of inertia and short of a fundamental sea-change in culture, you'd best prepare for the worst. He goes out of the way to argue that everyone should do what they can to minimize that dire future because every little bit helps but also argues that little bits aren't going to get us to the same place that sweeping cultural change will. It's a long damn way from conspiracy theory. He named his environmental organization 350.org because 350ppm CO2 is where we hit irreversible climate change; we've hit 400. The subtitle of the book is "making a life on a tough new planet." This sentence is basically the whole drive of the book. You might like it.My opinion here is that we're best served by finding solutions that need little or no change from the public, and lacking those, how do we manage the ensuing failures?
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user-inactivated · 318 days ago · link ·
WanderingEng, I'm sorry I forgot I had a meeting tonight but I'll try to get quotes to you as soon as possible, but I have like ten minutes before I have to go. I just wanted to add to this real quick because McKibben actually makes a lot of really decent points about local food movements. He tilts some of the ideas in his favor, which is fine, because he's writing persuasively. To touch on a few though, he talks about how Farmers Markets are growing in popularity (at least they were as of ten years ago), how food prices are maintained a bit because middlemen in storage, distribution, and transportation aren't part of the price equation. He also compares large commercial pig farms to smaller local farms where pigs aren't the focus of a farm, but an additional feature, and the massive pollution from commercial pig farms is obviously avoided. He even goes as far to bring up how in Britain there was a local food movement in WWII for obvious reasons and how some communities created pig rearing clubs.
user-inactivated · 319 days ago · link ·
One of the ideas he briefly danced around, and I'll have to see if I can find the part, reminds me a lot of a Steady State Economy. Where, basically maintenance should take over as the main goal of our economic activity. When you combine that idea with, or compare it and contrast it to, Ecological Economics, you could get into a lot of compelling and exciting concepts that are interesting to consider. Personally, I don't think I know enough about economics to give the ideas much critical thought, but it's something a lot of people on here might enjoy wondering about.
user-inactivated · 319 days ago · link ·
I think he touches on a few concepts here and there. I'll try to skim through the final chapter again tomorrow and see if I can't find some excerpts. He does seem to focus a bit more on concepts than facts and raw data though. But I think in his defense, this book was written ten years ago and the amount of data and real world examples we can pull from today is much more vast than when the book was written. In his argument against big power, I do distinctly remember him talking about the challenge of collecting energy from one location only to ship it over power lines to a location far away. Building the infrastructure is costly by itself and due to physics, the longer the distance you transmit electricity, the more you'll lose. So in that sense, he does talk a bit about efficiency and cost. It's an interesting book. If you have a gap in your reading list you want to fill, you might like it.Does he get into the feasibility/cost of his proposal?