Articles by Jon Rynn

The ‘hell’ before the ‘high water’ in the U.S.

I just wanted to alert Grist readers to an excellent post at The Oil Drum called "Fire and Rain: The Consequences of Changing Climate on Rainfall, Wildfire and Agriculture." The author points out that "Current climate change predictions for much of the West show increased precipitation in the winter or spring, along with earlier and drier summers." To summarize his post, the drier summers will have profound impacts on the forests, grasslands, and agricultural areas.

It seems that many kinds of trees are very delicately attuned to particular patterns of precipitation and temperature; changes lead to weakening, disease, and then "megafires" that are much more destructive than "normal" fires. The author discusses the biggest fires in American history, over 100 years ago, that seem to have been caused by the massive deforestation then occurring. A question I have is, is the dessication of the American West similar to the accelerating dessication of the Amazon, both the result of deforestation?

The post also discusses the plight of agricultural areas; basically, you're damned if you depend on rainfall that will be decreasing during the summer, and you're damned if you depend on irrigation, because the aquifers and mountain ice packs are decreasing. He details the effects on grains and other agricultural produce. I didn't know that potatoes, orchards, and vegetables all depend on irrigation for most of their water needs.

I realize that modeling the long-term behavior of the climate is hard enough, but it seems to me that it would be important to model the effects of those changes on our local ecosystems as well.

How to kill coal in 10 years

We know that coal is the enemy of the human race, what with carbon emissions, deadly air pollution, and unsafe and destructive mining practices. The supply of coal is becoming more problematic as well: recently, a Wall Street Journal article described a "coal-price surge," and Richard Heinberg has warned that coal may peak much sooner than most people expect. So what's to like? Not much.

But since coal-fired plants provide almost half of our electricity, we can't get rid of coal unless we find either a way to replace it or a way to reduce the use of electricity. Recently, Gar Lipow has discussed how friggin' cheap it would be to replace coal, and Bill Becker has pointed to several studies that show how renewables could replace coal.

I will argue in this post that if buildings could produce all the space and water heating, air conditioning, and ventilation that they need, we wouldn't need any coal. Heating and cooling buildings and water now consume 30 percent of our electricity and 32 percent of our natural gas.

If, for instance, geothermal exchange units (also known as geothermal heat pumps) were installed under every building, and an appropriate amount of solar photovoltaics were installed on roofs in order to power those units, we wouldn't need to burn 60 percent of our coal because we would not need 30 percent of our electricity. And because we could redirect our natural gas from warming and cooling into electricity generation, we could get rid of the remaining coal, replacing it with natural gas.

In other words, the buildings would both destroy electrical demand and free up natural gas, until renewables come online and replaced natural gas in turn. If we did this within a 10-year timeframe, we could generate millions of green-collar jobs, create new industries, and help the rest of the world kill off the rest of coal.

All of the data that I use in this post is available online in a spreadsheet I created called "EnergyUse." It has tabs for electrical use, natural gas use, my calculations concerning coal, and some notes on the data, all of which comes from the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA).

So let's get electricity literate, and take a look at how electricity (and natural gas) are used in this country, so that we can figure out how to kill coal:

Converting the permanent military economy to a green economy

In the 1960s, the silver-tongued leader of the Senate Republicans, Everett Dirksen, is reputed to have said, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money." According to a recent article by Chalmers Johnson, "Going Bankrupt: Why the debt crisis in now the greatest threat to the American Republic," we may have to replace Dirksen's "billion" with the Pentagon's "trillion." By Johnson's accounting, the military is now spending over $1 trillion a year.

At the same time, Bob Herbert has been arguing for a serious committment to rebuild our physical infrastructure:

The country has been hit hard by lost jobs in manufacturing and construction. As government and political leaders are scrambling for ways to stimulate the economy in the current downturn, infrastructure improvements would seem to be a natural component of any effective recovery plan ... We appear to have forgotten the lessons of history. Time and again an economic boom has followed periods of sustained infrastructure improvement.

The way I see it, we need to understand three things: the nature of the military budget, the needs of the current infrastructure, and how infrastructure renewal could be used to create a green economy.

Green manufacturing could save the economy

Paul Krugman has been a hero of mine during the long, bleak reign of Bush the Younger, articulating arguments against Bush's philosophy and policies oh these many years. Krugman is one of the leading authorities on international trade, however, and so I was holding my breath, intellectually speaking, waiting to see what would happen when there were global economic troubles.

I can exhale, because he's revealed his Panglossian side: our current economic troubles are the result of a "global savings glut" -- that is, the U.S. is the victim of its own success. Foreigners are investing in our country because we are so wonderful, and the problem is that they got snookered into investing in scams like sub-prime mortgages.

What's this got to do with the environment? Krugman's argument, which was made first by now Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke (and the folks at the Cato Institute), distracts attention from what I think is the true problem: the decline of manufacturing. If people would understand the real problem, they might be more open to a greening of America by revving up manufacturing of renewable energy technologies, public transit, and retrofitting, to name a few.

But first let's take a look at what Krugman said: