Drought, conflict and famine foreshadow the future

An email from Oxfam alerted me that this is happening:  An unprecedented number of people, 20 million in 4 African countries, are at risk of famine--the most since WWII. This is exactly the future that the climate maps of mid-century drought foretell. It is already underway. Where drought and political instability coincide, the people suffer and die. The climate factor is easily overlooked in the news. These are people who have contributed almost nothing to climate change. The call for $4.4 billion to avert this famine is tiny compared to military expenditures, but the world, and the U.S., has not responded.  Not long from now, as such droughts drive people to the coastal cities, they will be met by millions coming the other way, driven by rising seas.
      Some excerpts from "Climate Change as Genocide," Tom Clare on Truthdig, 4-22-17.   http://www.truthdig.com/report
    Not since World War II have more human beings been at risk from disease and starvation than at this very moment. On March 10th, Stephen O’Brien, under secretary-general of the United Nations for humanitarian affairs, informed the Security Council that 20 million people in three African countries—Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan—as well as in Yemen were likely to die if not provided with emergency food and medical aid. “We are at a critical point in history,” he declared. “Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the U.N.”  Without coordinated international action, he added, “people will simply starve to death [or] suffer and die from disease.”  ...
      Major famines have, of course, occurred before, but never in memory on such a scale in four places simultaneously. According to O’Brien, 7.3 million people are at risk in Yemen, 5.1 million in the Lake Chad area of northeastern Nigeria, 5 million in South Sudan, and 2.9 million in Somalia. In each of these countries, some lethal combination of war, persistent drought, and political instability is causing drastic cuts in essential food and water supplies. Of those 20 million people at risk of death, an estimated 1.4 million are young children.  ....
    Climate change is also intensifying the dangers faced by the poor and marginalized in another way.  As interior croplands turn to dust, ever more farmers are migrating to cities, especially coastal ones.  If you want a historical analogy, think of the great Dust Bowl migration of the “Okies” from the interior of the U.S. to the California coast in the 1930s. In today’s climate-change era, the only available housing such migrants are likely to find will be in vast and expanding shantytowns (or “informal settlements,” as they’re euphemistically called), often located in floodplains and low-lying coastal areas exposed to storm surges and sea-level rise. As global warming advances, the victims of water scarcity and desertification will be afflicted anew.  Those storm surges will destroy the most exposed parts of the coastal mega-cities in which they will be clustered. In other words, for the uprooted and desperate, there will be no escaping climate change.  As the latest IPCC report noted, “Poor people living in urban informal settlements, of which there are [already] about one billion worldwide, are particularly vulnerable to weather and climate effects.”

Public Transit, Ridesharing, and the role of Public Ownership

       Last year about this time, a battle was in full swing on whether the City of Austin could exert some control--mainly on the question of whether they could require drivers to be fingerprinted-- culminating in a vote on Prop. 1 on May 7. Uber lost. But many aspects of the ridesharing transportation model were examined.
           Please remember that Uber, Lyft, and the like envision a future where they control a basic need--transportation.  And remember that they envision this system operating in the not-too-distant future with driverless cars, already being tested in tech-visionary Austin.  Their dream:  no drivers to be paid, and no competition. They would be positioned to transfer a slice of the ongoing cost of every person's transportation needs out of Austin and into their corporate profits, indefinitely.    

        This report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance and McKinsey & Company  came out last October.  Here is a statement from that report: "Electric shared autonomous vehicles will revolutionise transport  in the world’s cities over the next 15 years”  (from An Integrated Perspective on the Future of Mobility, 10-11-2016.) The full report is here: “An Integrated Perspective on The Future of Mobility .” 

     This corporate vision raises many questions: 

• Would such a dispersed system displace rational and affordable public-transit route design? 
•  Alternatively, could a system managed by urban policy provide an affordable well-designed interface between public transit and a driverless network? 
•  Could Austin Energy optimize charging-discharging driverless-cars' batteries to utilize the fleet, and electric buses, as a dispersed battery storage system for a clean-energy future for Austin?
• Is there a potential for Austin to have a first-class public transit system, affordably serving the Austin- and Travis-county residents who are most dependent on public transit,  maximizing instead of displacing the efficiency of buses (which can also be electric), while self-driving cars fill the gaps that buses serve less well?

       This Jacobin article https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/against-sharing/  offers a great perspective on what's wrong with ride-sharing as it currently operates. " 'Sharing economy' companies like Uber shift risk from corporations to workers, weaken labor protections, and drive down wages."
        In addition, we should consider this:  The reason there is a market for rideshare companies is that Austin, like most American cities, lacks a comprehensive public transit system good enough to compete with owning cars. Uber spent  uber-amounts  of campaign money in Austin to make an example of us and scare other cities into capitulation--like Genghis Khan obliterating a village but leaving a survivor to go tell other villages that resistance is futile (pardon my mixing of Genghis Khan with Star Trek metaphors here). 
      Transportation is a basic necessity--I hate to see any mega-corporate ridesharing company sucking profits via the power imbalance over the drivers and riders. Ridesharing companies should meet very high standards as a regulated industry or better yet, it should be a public-private partnership, or best yet, a city-owned utility just as Austin Energy is a city-owned utility, responsive to public debate and values, and providing profits to the City's coffers. 

Here is Aiguo Dai's (National Center for Atomospheric Research) 2010 drought research updated in 2012, showing drought projections through the end of the century.  It is the near-term maps up to mid-century that are dreadfully worrisome, given the amount of time one can assume it would take to transition an entire global economy from it's fossil-fuel foundation to a renewable economy.  James Hanson expresses concern that large-scale multi-country multi-year droughts would create many millions of climate refuges and could make the globe "ungovernable."
http://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/2904/climate-change-drought-may-threaten-much-globe-within-decades

 

Creating Political Will.

Checking in from New York City-- I'm here for the People's Climate March.  Tomorrow there are workshops and sessions all over the place.  Sunday, we march!

Drought Maps

I have been showing many people these maps projecting very serious global drought areas by around mid-century.  To see them, click on the "Drought Maps" tab above, or on a smartphone, it may be on a dropdown menu from the "home" bar.  Or, just use this link:
http://getrealgogreen.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_7.html

I've made every effort to show the primary and secondary sources for these two maps.  But in their sources, they are difficult to extract, and if you want to download copies to print, it will be easier to do it from my page.

100% renewable in U.S. is feasible and affordable

A Stanford scientist has proposed that the United States can be 100% free of fossil fuels by 2050.
Here is an excerpt from the Singularity Hub website:
Stanford University researchers led by civil engineer Mark Jacobson have developed detailed plans for each state in the union that to move to 100 percent wind, water and solar power by 2050 using only technology that’s already available. The plan, presented recently at the AAAS conference in Chicago, also forms the basis for The Solutions Project nonprofit.
Link is at:
http://singularityhub.com/2014/03/08/100-renewable-energy-is-feasible-and-affordable-stanford-proposal-says/
This article about the 50-state plan is from the Stanford News website:
The motivation for the 50-state plan, he said, is to address the negative impacts on climate and human health from widespread use of coal, oil and natural gas. Replacing these fossil fuels with clean technologies would significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming and spare the lives of an estimated 59,000 Americans who die from exposure to air pollution annually, he said.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/fifty-states-renewables-022414.html
Jacobson does tackle the difficult problems of storing and dispatching renewables on a grand scale in a 2011 journal article.  For the reference and abstract, please see my earlier post (same date as today).

Article: 100% renewable energy is feasible and similar to today's costs

This 2011 article in the Energy Policy journal by Mark. A. Delucchi and Mark Z. Jacobson proposes that that a 100% renewable-energy world (wind, water and solar power) is feasible and that the cost of energy would be similar to the cost today.   
      Jacobson has followed up on this work with a 50-state strategy to convert the U.S. to 100% wind, water and solar power by 2050.  I will put information on that in the next post.
       Meanwhile, this 21-page PDF document is part 2 of 2 parts, and focuses on "reliability, system and transmission costs, and policies."   It is in a dense, scholarly style, but a useful reference.  I haven't worried much about finding Part1, because this part is the one that deals with the most important barriers to renewables-- the issues of reliability, storage, dispatchability and such.   Here is the title and the abstract, followed by the link:

Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part II:

Reliability, system and transmission costs, and policies

 Mark A. Delucchi,

       Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA

Mark Z. Jacobson

       Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4020, USA

 Article history:

Received 3 September 2010

Accepted 22 November 2010 

 abstract

This is Part II of two papers evaluating the feasibility of providing all energy for all purposes (electric power, transportation, and heating/cooling), everywhere in the world, from wind, water, and the sun (WWS). In Part I, we described the prominent renewable energy plans that have been proposed and discussed the characteristics of WWS energy systems, the global demand for and availability of WWS energy, quantities and areas required for WWS infrastructure, and supplies of critical materials. Here, we discuss methods of addressing the variability of WWS energy to ensure that power supply reliably matches demand (including interconnecting geographically dispersed resources, using hydroelectricity, using demand-response management, storing electric power on site, over-sizing peak generation capacity and producing hydrogen with the excess, storing electric power in vehicle batteries, and forecasting weather to project energy supplies), the economics of WWS generation and transmission, the economics of WWS use in transportation, and policy measures needed to enhance the viability of a WWS system. We find that the cost of energy in a 100% WWS will be similar to the cost today. We conclude that barriers to a 100% conversion to WWS power worldwide are primarily social and political, not technological or even economic.

Here is the link: 

 http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/DJEnPolicyPt2.pdf