[imc-st.louis] Consume Like There's No Tomorrow

[Fitzdon at aol.com]

http://counterpunch.org/fitz04142007.html

Consume Like There's No Tomorrow

By DON FITZ

Would someone please tell the Sierra Club Exec Board that the idea of an 
"environmentally friendly car" makes as much sense as a "non-violent death 
penalty?" While the vast majority of those concerned with global warming consider 
reduction of unneeded production to be at the core of a sane policy, the Sierra 
Club has endorsed a plan that includes virtually no role for conservation.

In January 2007, the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) released the 180 
page document, Tackling Climate Change in the U.S. Typical of big enviro 
analyses, it assumes a corporate dominated growth economy. Its novelty is its highly 
technical studies which claim to compute how much CO2 emissions can be offset 
by energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Teaming up with ASES to present the study to Congress, the Sierra Club 
enthusiastically wrote that "energy efficiency and renewables alone can achieve a 
60-80% reduction in global warming emissions by 2050." Adding the key word 
"alone" in the first paragraph of its release indicated that the Sierra Club wanted 
to be sure that politicians and corporate donors understood that it has no 
intention of criticizing the large quantity of unnecessary junk created by 
corporate America.

What ain't there

Solar power, wind power and energy efficiency (EE) play vital roles in 
reducing CO2. The rub is the role of conservation, or reduction of total production. 
For "deep greens," the most basic goal is social change that would foster the 
reduction of energy. For "shallow greens," conservation is, at best, 
something to give lip service to while tunnel visioning on eco-gadgets.

More blatant than the typical corporate enviromental analysis, the 
ASES/Sierra report trivializes conservation as "doing without" or "deprivation." It 
presents a vast array of technological playthings, some of which are quite good 
and some of which are less than environmental. What is most revealing is what it 
does not include. It discusses transportation without using the word 
"bicycle" or "walking."

It looks at efficient building design with no discussion of using empty 
buildings or designing buildings to last longer than 50 years. The report that Carl 
Pope boasts is "now the official Sierra Club global warming strategy" has an 
extended discussion of home heating and cooling without mentioning the word 
"tree." George Monbiot's recently-published Heat concludes that manufacturing a 
ton of cement creates a ton of CO2, a fact not emphasized by proponents of EE 
buildings.

In the analysis of energy efficiency, the phrase "organic agriculture" never 
appears and there is no mention of the massive use of petrochemicals or 
factory farms and there is zero concern with the fact that the average American food 
item travels 1300 miles from farm to plate. The strange approach to EE does 
not question the cancerous growth of household appliances, planned 
obsolescence, or corporate creation of artificial desires for unneeded products. 

The authors have no comment on enormous waste in medical care or huge 
insurance buildings which drain energy while creating nothing of value. The chapters 
on transportation, such as plug-in hybrid electric cars, ignore the fact that 
air traffic in the United Kingdom will double by 2030, at which time it will 
have more effect on global warming than automobiles. The call for a 10 fold 
increase in biomass says nothing about effects of monocultures, deforestation, 
genetic engineering or pesticide usage. 

Those approaches left out of the big enviro plan for energy efficiency share 
something: they are common sense low tech or no tech solutions which involve 
reducing the quantity of production and energy use with no decrease in the 
quality of life. They have something else in common: they do not involve the 
swelling of corporate profits via increased manufacture.

When is energy efficiency not efficient?

Almost as much as solar and wind power, energy efficiency is becoming the 
unquestioned mantra of solutions to global warming. Refrigerators that use 75% 
less energy are a plus. Even better would be the German-designed Passivhaus, 
which is so well insulated that it has zero heating and cooling systems.

EE is good. But projections about what it can offer sometimes border on 
hallucinations. This is the case with the ASES/Sierra claim that EE can offset 
global warming by 57%.

The first limitation on EE is the old maxim that the more parts there are to 
a system, the more parts there are to break. The ASES/Sierra report reads like 
an encyclopedia of techno-fix gadgets for buildings, cars and holes in the 
earth. Each item involves increased industrial interdependence. As resources 
come to be in short supply from exhaustion or wars or hoarding, the future is 
likely to see a decline in the ability to patch up interconnected systems. 
Becoming more dependent on them more begs for industrial breakdown. 

Another factor that works against EE is the law of diminishing returns. 
Joseph Tainter explained that societies begin to collapse when resources are 
drained to meet the needs of increasing complexity. Similarly, the biggest impact of 
discoveries come when they are first introduced. That's when there is the 
greatest energy returned on energy invested. Additional refinements tend to cost 
more and yield less. Oil was cheap and easy to obtain when it oozed to the 
surface. As time goes on, oil becomes more expensive to pump, the available 
quantity decreases, and the quality worsens. The biggest impact of drugs came with 
antibiotics. Now we are bombarded with ads for new drugs that cost more to 
research but have fewer advantages over the previous generation of drugs.

Technocrats tend to have faith in unlimited potential for EE. The truth is 
that we have probably seen most of the largest efficiency impacts and future 
changes will mainly be refinements that offer less and less improvement.

The most important difficulty for EE is the market economy, which corporate 
environmentalists love so much and understand so little. Corporations do not 
compete to make less money. They compete to increase their profits. Market 
forces compel each corporation to expand production as rapidly as possible. When 
more efficient heating is available, corporations selling it will encourage 
customers to turn up their thermostats and run around in their underwear in the 
middle of winter. 

People live commuting distances from work. The automobile has lengthened that 
distance. Fuel efficient cars will do nothing to affect that distance or the 
expanding miles of road, the loss of habitat that accompanies road 
construction, space for parking or energy used in manufacturing cars. 

It is not hard to visualize yuppies feeling so smug about their EE apartment 
in New York that they buy an EE home in Phoenix, an EE condo in Chicago, a 
hybrid car for each city, and a helicopter modified to run on biofuels for 
shuttling between cities. Energy efficiency is not efficient when some individual 
items are more efficient, but the overall quantity of items increases so much 
that the total mass of energy used goes up instead of down. Like it or not, that 
is the irredeemable compulsion of market economics.

This is not to say that EE plays no role in preventing the planet from 
frying. It is to say that EE must be accompanied with an intense program of 
conservation, economic redesign and governmental regulation. Without these, EE in a 
market economy is not merely worthless, but will likely result in expanded 
production and increased global warming.

Invasion of the techno-babblers

Anyone who has ever fought an incinerator, cement kiln or coal plant knows 
that you've lost the struggle if you ever let industry suck you into an argument 
about which pollution control device should be tacked on after toxins have 
been created. The only genuine solution is the easy one - to prevent the 
creation of the poisons in the first place.

If someone tries to sell an incinerator or an EE system that's too 
complicated to understand, that could indicate it's a bad idea. Making things simple is 
typically the route of greatest efficiency.

A narrow focus on technology seeks to replace a gee-gaw with a doo-dad, and 
when that doesn't work, come up with a gizmo. Techno-babble sputters forth from 
the belief that social problems can be solved in a quest for the ultimate 
gadget. Oblivious to social reasons for global warming, the ASES/Sierra report 
claims that whatever greenhouse gas problems remain after EE can be solved with 
six renewable technologies: "concentrating solar power, photovoltaics, wind 
power, biomass, biofuels and geothermal power." The last three of these are 
techno-babble.

"Biomass" is largely an effort to turn whatever wildlands remain on this 
planet to energy crop monocultures. Not surprisingly, the word "ecology" does not 
appear in the biomass chapter. What is surprising is the subsection on "Urban 
residues" which discusses the use of municipal solid waste as feedstock for 
heat conversion to electricity. This is a polite way of saying that 
environmentalists should endorse spewing incinerator poisons into city air and abandon the 
notion of not generating waste.

"Geothermal power" does not have such offensive associations. But less than 
0.1% of geothermal energy is within three kilometers of the surface, which 
makes it currently recoverable. Suggesting that yet-to-be-perfected techniques of 
recovery might allow geothermal to provide 20% of US energy is pure 
speculation. It cannot be part of a serious energy strategy.

One of the more shameful chapters of the report concerns "Biofuels." It has 
nothing against corn ethanol. It only rejects using corn grain to produce 
ethanol on the basis that the 10 million gallons of ethanol which could be 
manufactured from US corn would represent only 5% of this country's gasoline demand. 
It pays no attention to issues brought up the same month in a Scientific 
American article that (1) refining ethanol uses more energy than it produces, and 
(2) ethanol requires "robbing food crops to make fuel." The lack of concern with 
either ethanol efficiency or world hunger renders the Sierra-endorsed report 
as less ecologically-minded than Scientific American, the prototype of 
techno-hype publications.

The chapter clings to the hope that ethanol could be produced if, instead of 
using corn grain, "residues from corn and wheat crops" made up the feedstock. 
There are several problems with this "cellulose" strategy. First, as with 
geothermal, making ethanol from cornstalks is so highly speculative that it has no 
place in long term projections. If it could be done, it would be from 
genetically engineering corn to make it more amenable to separating sugars from 
lignin. There has already been plenty of genetic contamination of foodstocks. 
Additional genetic engineering is exactly what agriculture does not need.

The biggest problem with cellulosic ethanol is that it assumes that soil 
should be nothing more than a sterile medium for growing crops and that "residue" 
has no part in replenishing soil. Just as the Forest Service under Bill 
Clinton brought us "salvage logging" based on the belief that decaying wood has no 
significance for forest ecosystems, Hillary Clinton might usher in the concept 
that decaying cornstalks have no contribution to soil ecosystems.

Those who fixate on biofuels don't seem to grasp that keeping natural 
fertilizers out of the soil means relying more on petrochemical fertilizers. With a 
straight face they are proposing to reduce oil use in cars by increasing use of 
oil-based fertilizers.

Hard questions/Tough reality

Perpetual motion machines, biomass and biofuels will not halt species 
extinction caused by climate change. Again, efficiency and solar and wind power are 
critical components of a sustainable society. But focusing on them diverts 
attention from the real issues that need to be addressed - how to dramatically 
reduce energy production while improving the quality of life. This is the basis 
for the hard questions that corporate environmentalists avoid.

For example, the US needs to reduce the number of cars on the road by at 
least 95% and make sure the few that are manufactured are hybrids. How can the US 
economy be reorganized so that auto workers and refinery workers have jobs 
comparable to jobs that they now have?

Many poor countries depend on destructive industries such as oil. How can the 
world economy be reorganized so they increase their standard of living while 
altering what they produce?

It is well known that greenhouse gas reduction requires population reduction, 
which can best be accomplished by reducing the gap between rich and poor and 
achieving equality for women. How do we reverse the right wing pattern of 
increasing disparity?

The global economy is increasing production of high-energy goods such as 
roads, cars, airplanes, fast food, meat and endless mountains of consumer crap. 
How do we change this to production of low-energy goods that people actually 
need, such as locally grown organic food, preventive health care and clothes and 
homes that endure?

The creation of artificial wants for new objects is exploding like 
genetically engineered diseases in a bio-defense lab. How do we convince big enviro that 
it is not "sacrifice" or "deprivation" to focus on manufacturing items that 
people actually need and will last?

We all want to believe that our checks to Sierra or the Nature Conservancy do 
some good in the long run and that they are just a little slow to do the 
right thing. The tough reality is that big enviro is doing bad things that lead in 
the wrong direction.

The most basic task for stopping global warming is having a moral, ethical 
and spiritual revolution based on the belief that excessive crap is bad. 
Reduction of unnecessary production is the antithesis of what corporations are all 
about. However destructive it is for the planet, corporations must seek to 
convince people to consume more and more. 

Enter big enviro telling people that excessive consumption is not bad at all 
because it gives the consumer the ability to affect change with purchasing 
power. The erudite techno-magician waves his wand, uttering "Don't look at the 
mounds of discarded junk that go into landfills. Look over here at the fabulous 
eco-gadgets of our corporate friends."

Big enviro may be doing more to preserve the ethos of self-devouring 
consumerism than big corporations could ever do. What a surprise to learn that the 
Sierra Club has a history of obtaining funds from Chemical Bank, ARCO and British 
Petroleum. Big enviro just may deliver to big oil what it most needs - faith 
that a market economy can protect the planet.

Karl Marx once said something to the effect that if there were only two 
capitalists left, they would compete to see which would sell the rope to hang the 
other one. A modern version might be that if the planet was so roasted that 
only two big enviro groups remained, they would compete to see which could get a 
grant from big oil to show that what was left of the world could be saved by 
consumer choices.

Don Fitz is editor of Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social 
Thought, which is sent to members of The Greens/Green Party USA. He can be reached 
at fitzdon at aol.com

Sources

Heinberg, R. The party's over. New Society Publishers, 2003.
Kutscher, C.F. (Ed.) Tackling Climate Change in the U.S.: Potential Carbon 
Emissions Reduction from Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy by 2030. 
American Solar Energy Society, 2007. www.ases.org/climate change
Monbiot, G. Heat: How to stop the planet from burning. South End Press, 2007.
Sierra Club, Renewable energy experts unveil report. Sierra club press 
release, January 31, 2007. Contact Josh Dorner, josh.dorner at sierraclub.org
Tainter, J. The collapse of complex societies, Cambridge University Press, 
1988.
Tokar, B., Earth for Sale. South End Press, 1997.
Wald, M.L. Is ethanol for the long haul? Scientific American. January 2007.

http://counterpunch.org/fitz04142007.html





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