refuGeum - the blog of mrpaul

Great movie commemorating a great loss; it really helped to humanize Michael Jackson.  It made me a little jealous of him.  He got to check out before the climate really changed and we are left holding no option but to adapt or die.  Expressive, expansive, belated tip of the hat to you, MJ.

But I didn’t mean to write about a movie.  I meant to write down the dissertation idea that finally fit.  This is it:  How National Environmental Policy Act environmental review would change if Carbon Dioxide (CO2) were named a criteria pollutant.

It crystallized out of unrelated Friday conversations at work.  One was with my supervisor Janeen Spates, debating whether activities that add CO2 to the atmosphere cause physical change to the environment. 

Harris County and HUD have always assumed that using federal grant money to support public services such as ambulance rides or bus ride vouchers for ill patients produced no physical changes to the environment and were thus exempt from NEPA environmental review under 24 CFR Part 58.  On the other hand, constructing new apartment buildings or a new park with play equipment for the kids would produce physical changes to the environment, triggering full environmental assessment under the same federal regulations.

However, the plastic “Donald Duck” play seats that Diana and I used to love to swing on at Marquette Park on Lake Michigan in the 1960s have already cracked up and either joined all that trash in the landfills or is by now well on its way floating serenely toward the great Pacific Ocean garbage flow.  A permanent physical change to the environment?  Certainly, even though no physical evidence of the play equipment remains on the beach less than fifty years after installation.  But the CO2 that left the tailpipe of our car as we happily wheeled down Lakeside Drive to cavort on that same beach is still with us.  So is the CO2 expended in constructing the “Donald Duck” swing equipment, in manufacturing the plastic seats themselves, in transporting them from wherever they were made to the beach where they were used by countless happy kids, each of which transferred over a pound of Carbon (2.5 miles * conservatively .9 lbs of carbon dioxide/2ish kids per car) to the atmosphere on the way there, and after wiping off their sandy feet, again on the way back.  About half that carbon dioxide was absorbed by the world’s waters, acidifying them, and the other half is still up in the air, for a century or more, helping raise the mean temperature of earth during the entire time.

So if the Carbon emissions produce more permanent change, and arguably more adverse change, to the environment than the plastic and metal remnants of the disused 1960s play equipment of my youth, why is CO2 still generally discounted in the federal environmental review process?

That part of the NEPA environmental review process that I work with almost daily is HUD’s interpretation of the statute codified in federal regulations at 24 CFR 58.  Another Friday conversation was with one of my two planners, Jared Briggs, who fresh from recent training relayed the sense that HUD is moving away from narrowly defining its community development mission as safely housing people with less toward a broader view of real community building.  In lifting its view from only those traditionally underserved to the whole community, a move that has been underway at least since the welfare reforms of the Clinton era, opportunity exists for adopting a more generally holistic view that is consistent with the postmodern American city and country. 

Houston can be a tough crowd for an ecocentrist.  Yet even Dr. Stephen Klineberg’s evenhanded Rice University Houston Area Survey finds increasingly that the population considers the threat of global warming as “very serious,” passing the majority mark in 2008.  The Houston Area Survey found consistently that between the 1980s and the 2000s people agreed (ranging between 61% to 72%) with the statement, “Protecting the environment is so important that continuing improvements must be made, regardless of cost.”  If they’re saying that in the (petroleum) energy capital of the world, how much more acutely must the rest of the world feel this?

After last night’s sleep, I thought that if we gave long-lived greenhouse gasses their shrift in environmental review, our assessment of what produces beneficial and adverse environmental effects would change quite radically.   My wife Donna, upon hearing it, told me to write it down this morning before I forget, which is her quite meaningful stamp of approval.  Ha-ha, forget a real dissertation hook into the climate change adaptation planning that I have been working toward at TSU since 2004 and also lets me engage Dr. Ibitayo on my committee?  I wrote it down.

(تَكْبِير) “Allahu Akbar” in deed. If in place of Allah you substitute the profane belief that “might makes right”; that the direction of violence can ever project a force for justice. Not even the most coldly ironic human can make sense of the massacre that took place in the military heart of Texas on Thursday afternoon. Yet I believe that such was bound to happen eventually. The fundamental illogic of training in the martial arts, of knowing to kill in order to deny the land to those you dislike, and to dominate and dehumanize others so that their way does not impede your way, this day is cruelly exposed like a giant raw nerve at the heart of a beast.

Can anyone condemn the soldier who turned on his mates who can also abide what those slain and unslain were either commencing or finalizing at the Soldier Readiness Center of Fort Hood, the “largest active duty armored post in the United States”? (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,572305,00.html).

If the string of domination by violence noted in the Bible beginning with Cain and his brother and continuing to Saul’s thousands and David’s tens of thousands had continued unbroken to this day, how many of us would be yet alive? सत्याग्रह Satyagraha, my gentle readers.

I, for one, hope that youth will again revolt and again demoralize the dead weight of conformity that now lies upon us.
- Howard M. Jones

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
- Blaise Pascal

Most people would rather be certain they're miserable than risk being happy.
- Robert Anthony.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
- Martin Luther King Jr.

I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
- Garrison Keillor

"War is not an acceptable energy policy"
- Cynthia McKinney (2008 Green party candidate)

Re-posted from David M. Bailey

Go David!

 

Promote financial inclusion to make [Phil in the Blank] more available.

Always a good idea, promoting financial inclusion spreads the risks more evenly.  Of course, the ultimate risk spread is via taxation, to all people.  The Association of British Insurers in their January 2009 Preparing the UK for climate change:  ABI's new adaptation strategy included this as the 11th strategy, noting:

"adaptation investment can be very cost effective: for example flood defence expenditure in the UK has a cost-benefit ratio of 7:1, much higher than for other public sector capital investments. Adaptation needs to be pursued with more energy."

i woke up at exactly 2 am twice this week so far...and it is only Tuesday!

Tonight, I rose to arrange my things for tomorrow into their customary places, rather than the scattered places where they sat.  Then I climbed back into bed.  No sooner had I been comfortably mummified again in the winter darkness than my dear cat Lucky softly barked a cheery hello bedside, waited for dramatic effect, and jumped lightly onlo my chest.  Half an hour of mutual petting time later, he hopped down and disappeared as stealthily as he had come in, a black cat into darkness.

I began to think about my Sunday morning atheist's meditation experience (which Donna called a birth of faith in me, apparently a huge step for someone who only knows what he knows).  It had begun as a dream in the dark early Sunday morn and was so pleasurable that it reminded me of the flying described in Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide, that one should purposefully not think about anything at all or the unusual human ability to fly would be immediately lost.  The thoughts that had triggered a sparkling huge universe inside my self were those of the von Hagens Body Worlds 3 exhibition we had viewed at the Houston Museum of Natural Science the day before, of the physicality of our existence, of settling old coflicts unilaterally, of self-forgiveness and peace.  Quite suddenly the fizz of that experience had lit into being, some of which still remains in the side ways of my mind like the background temperatures of the big bang itself.  Now two mornings after, the cat gone, having turned over next to my wife in my warm bed, I thought about it, longed for it like an adolescent longs for an unknown life partner.  I gently remembered the clear sparkling vastness inside of me, mentally patted it  to be sure it was there, safe, protected, deep.

In my night mistiness I began to have a random thought about a little bug in a Venus fly trap.  I wondered what the bug's experience of the rest of its life would be.  Assuming it were self-aware, what would it feel about itself, its circumstances, life, the universe, everything?  I tried to put myself in that poor bug's shoes, a substitutionary transposition.  I came up with an idea for a short story about a man living his life in the cup of one of those digesting flowers that one cannot climb out of and making the best of it, and could not rest until I put it to metaphoracal paper.  Hence, this somewhat silly message to my gentle reader, at 4 AM Tuesday morning.  The story begins, "Peculiar, he thought, how smooth the sunlight shown on the great high walls of his world."

aloha ‘āina.

It's rather basic.

Love and care for the land, for it is the land that cares for you.

It's supremely complex.

Caring for the land, and by extension it's living inhabitants from the most endangered species to ourselves, means ensuring that everything else remains in or regains its dynamic balance.  So loving the land means caring for the air, water, fire, and ice, because it literally all works together.  We have not the computing capacity to analyze or learn, let alone adequately model or manage or optimize everything involved with Earth's systems.  

Our incremental inputs to this planet will reverberate harmonically for a very long time, and it is questionable whether such inputs can be counteracted in any beneficial way.  In many ways, dynamic balances and harmonic cycles so far identified in the Earth are becoming degraded from levels that were prevalent during most of human development.  We don't currently have the capacity to understand Earth systems holistically. but it gives those of us alive today an ultimate objective and high aspirations.

Perhaps the most important work today contributes to a better understanding of how the Earth works altogether, and how best through human action to support that environment for life.  I am not at the front lines pushing the limits of human understanding of our Earth.  I believe that I have identified how I can fit into that grand mission, by learning and applying and re-teaching as much as I may to those who have eyes or ears or hands or feet, and encouraging them to do the same.

You can be any religion or none in America. That is one of the many rights that protectors of the amended Constitution admire in the U.S. No one truly admires uncritical thought, whether it be on the part of religious adherents or "my-country-right-or-wrong" zealots. That is one of the freedoms, obliquely, for which you may have fought; if so, our countrymen and women thank you for your service.


-- Paul M. Suckow

Hey friends!

Since this blog is my most personal, I thought I'd write of my experience buying an up-to-date replacement for my obsolete (3 year old) Compaq laptop PC. It's been good. Here's the background.

I'd started last July to provide GIS services and training to Roberta F. Burroughs and Associates, an excellent African-American woman-owned planning consultancy in business for the past 20 years. So for the past half year, my pay has been quite bountiful (compared to near nothing during most of the Bush administration) and in early 2008 I could consider updating our computing capacity. 

It is hard to believe that it was eight years ago that I began, tentatively, to record my thoughts on the WWW.  These thoughts were mainly public observations rather than personal disclosures.  My blogging peaked prior to the shocking 2000 U.S. general election, and again during the pileup that erupted in the disastrous Iraq war.  As you can read back in my blog I didn't much dwell on the personal consequences of my political awakening, so let me outline some here.

By the time the 2000 election was "settled" by a one-vote majority of the Supreme Court, I was determined to catch a bus to Washington DC to attend the "W" inauguration in protest.  One month to the day after 9-11-2001, my contract employment ended.  I became increasingly despondent over my future prospects in the world as it was then developing.  Once or twice family and jobless pressures reached the level of considering suicidal preparations.  Fortunately, I could not find sufficient redeeming value in out and out quitting, and resolved myself not to accept death until my life's work was one way or another complete.  I made application to the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs Urban Planning-Environmental Policy Program in 2003, and entered into my doctoral degree studies the following year at TSU. 

I had been increasingly concerned about the implications of global heating for the human and built environment since reading Lovelock and Myers around 1982.  During 2003, the global warming misinformation campaign had peaked and I wanted the unvarnished scientific record available to me.  I wanted to determine my future career endeavors around planning for the public interest in what I saw as the biggest global issue of my remaining time on earth.

I met an online friend, then two, then more, in China.  Though India and Indonesia also contain world-altering populations, as goes China, so goes the world.  In China it will be determined whether earth life as we know it will continue much into the future or, simply, not.  My original and closest Chinese friend has developed a very meaningful bond with me.  I just sent to her in Chongqing a handmade 120-page book of our poetry that we created in an online collaboration.  It is illustrated by me in watercolor and prismacolors.  I feel as concerned for her family as if they were my own, to some consternation in my own dear wife of 17 years.

Yes global average temperatures have cycled naturally, not over days but over eaons, with primarily the planet's orbit providing the tiny push, multiplied by a zillion liquid feedbacks that the Earth system uses to keep itself stable in one of two climate regimes known from the fossil record. These two are the more pervasive hot state (like the last one that ended with the dinosaurs), or at around ten degrees C cooler, the cool state most recently exhibiting long ice age- short interglacial age- long ice age behavior in which our species has ever existed. The way we are used to seeing weather vary season to season is about to be overridden five to ten times greater on the hot side within the lifetimes of our immediate families, counting grandkids. And you don't have to take this armchair scientist's word for it, because you can read words of Dr. Hansen instead (from his Dec.6 2005 speech before the American Geophysical Union). If you have the time, it is an interesting exercise to follow the figures in your own spreadsheet as he lays them out in this speech.

(he shows that based on current knowledge of the fossil record, the next century will take us back to a climate that last existed at the Pliocene, about 3 million years ago)
"The potential human forcing with a “business-as-usual” scenario dwarfs the forcings that
have existed during the past hundreds of thousands of years...
If we follow a business-as-usual scenario, we will be creating a hammer hitting the Earth faster and harder than it has ever been hit. Except perhaps when the Earth was hit by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs."

and

"In summary, with regard to regional climate: as with global climate and sea level, business-as-usual scenarios will produce basically another planet. How else can you describe climate change in which the Arctic becomes an open lake in the summer and fall, and most land areas on Earth experience mean warming this century that is 5-10 times larger than the standard deviation of the past century?"

My own remaining questions about climate change are whether and how quickly we can expect the Earth to remove the current and still increasing conditions of imbalance to restore energy stability at either the 12 degree C cold state we are adapted for, or at the 22 degree C hot state that has not existed since the K-T boundary event 66 million years ago, or at some other level extraneous to the fossil record.

And a bit closer to home, there have been three big sea level increases at 15,000; 12,800; and most of all the Lake Agassiz subglacial outburst flood(s) that ran about a year 8,450 years ago. I have been wondering how any societies that existed then decided to handle their settlements and populations (all of which are under water today) as conditions ripe for those sudden innundations approached. I guess the biblical Noah story (from the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, and present in the mythology of many recent cultures around the world that orally remembered the 8,450 ybp event) is the closest thing that Western culture has to say about that.

Please actively help the US move into a leadership role producing the efficiencies that will allow life as we know it to continue in some recognizable form, and no that is not hyperbole.

I'll try to be brief. The question needs to go beyond our predilection for violent "solutions" and vicarious role-playing, to the basis of our current civilization. Is not the world view of many who simply accept war and aggression as part of "human" nature based on the concepts of scarcity and a malevolent, or at least, impartial universe?

Our whole world is economically basing its decisions on relative shares of finite goods, including that addictive sweet crude oil the American infrastructure is geared to require. What will help humanity to move beyond scarcity and hording, to abundance and sharing?

Our whole world is rife with future expectations, current examples and historical records of dogs eating dogs, might making right, and extinction of the unfit as seen through the periscopes of those who survived. What will help humanity to move beyond opposing an evil "other" or even "fighting the whole world" toward more open love in meeting its simultaneous desire for more dominion and greater ease?

I'm sure the answers to these questions are global and local, progressive and historical, systemic and personal. These are the cultural questions I wish we could see more creation around.

I understand that for an indeterminate time, but something on the century scale or perhaps finer, the feedbacks will continue to accelerate each other until repeated, major disasters bring tightly bound periods of ruin upon human and other natural activity. At least, that seems to be the message of the paleo-record, which is now considered reliable at the annual scale for about half to one million years into the past, and at lesser resolution even earlier. I am fascinated by Meltwater Pulse 1A and the two later global floods that apparently wiped clean human memory of what sustained megalithic ("fat lady") ice age civilizations may have accomplished prior to these.

Dr. Hansen's excellent and accessible presentations on the science of climate change (about 5.5 mb, both the talk and slides: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/~jhansen/keeling/keeling_talk_and_slides.pdf give a clear sense of the in-progress nature of the current meltdown. As anyone who uses electricity, drives a car or holds a job in America can tell you, greenhouse gasses continue to climb in concentration.

Science reports the rate of global increase to have breached 2 ppm CO2 annually. Dr. Hansen believes that all available science tells us that we still have a window approximately ten years wide to actually decrease human carbon emissions by more than sixty percent. I see nothing but wishful thinking countering the assertion. Here in Houston I also see daily popular resistance to even thinking about the issue.

The effect seems much like compound interest in a financial world -- humanity's annual contribution of 7.5 billion tons (and increasing on a roughly exponential curve, close to 2% per year recently) of CO2 are absorbed into oceans, plant and animal growth, etc. at an average of 42% of human emissions. Although carbon’s "sinks" have been able to "keep up" this ratio, no one can predict when Earth might pass the tipping point when sinks will lose effectiveness. How long will environmental carrying capacity support further biomass expansion? How soon will oceans kick back-pressured CO2 into the atmosphere if human emissions finally decline? Will sinks simply become overwhelmed by natural magnification of CO2 and methane from decaying organic materials in melted tundra, dying forests overrun by scrub or desert, massive algae blooms, species spikes as predators are lost in hot seas followed shortly by their over-blooming prey, etc? There is no natural parallel in the fossil record of which we can reliably ask these kinds of questions.

The other 58% in any case is quickly compounding Earth's ability to trap (or focus) heat at the surface, melting remaining ice cover at an accelerating rate. This further darkens Earth's albedo, slowing ocean circulation, speeding storms as local heat balances clash, and absorbing yet more heat. Please check the unadulterated science so far as it is known before continuing policy arguments.

I think it well to remember that scientists by nature of the peer review process only issue statements of fact without valuation, inherently understating, not overstating, the case. Thus we have already experienced polar regional warming five times greater than what science predicted, and glacial deposition is already losing to meltwater at a rate twice as fast as the science expected.

A scientist does not report findings from data not yet significantly understood, generally meaning that identified consequences of global warming continually lean from "bad" toward "worse" as each uncertainty is narrowed. Uncertainty itself is becoming rarer as the human project rolls along and scientific models become better attuned to the reality of overlapping, fine scale natural processes that govern rapid climate change past and present.

I do believe that serious people have accepted the scientific consensus regarding the gravity of this problem, and that the survival of human civilization even at a reduced scale now depends upon the development of political will within the United States. I take courage that the Gaia phenomenon which stabilizes conditions for life as we know it has broadly operated in both the hot-box climates (as supported the dinosaur age) and the cold-box climates like "ours," which generated the age of mammals, launched "us" and lasted at least until the present. It's these horrible transition zones that present such a monumental survival challenge to existing species.

I got an email this weekend at the 3rd Iraq War Anniversary from the John Kerry organization, telling me we're spending "over $500,000 per minute on foreign oil." So I looked up the ProjectBillboard figure for per-minute costs of the Iraq War (as reported by USA Today on 8/26/2004): "$122,820 per minute." If 1 + 1 = 2, then we Americans are spending over $ 10,380 per second on foreign oil plus our war of choice to secure same.( Read more... )

Having put much enthusiasm, and I hope some quality of thought, into enhancing NASA's SSPS idea of importing needed energy from solar concentrator and collector arrays located outside Earth's atmosphere, technological solutions may only enhance the problem.

On second thought
Now, taking a broader view, I'm having second thoughts. This idea, like many other worthy technological efforts, intended to drastically reduce the amount of combustible fuel needed to make My Dream of ‘free energy’ everywhere available. Yet, today’s business-as-usual path toward a highly-modified atmosphere and changed global climate makes this solution untenable.( Read more... )

I'm just trying to evolve

so I walk like I'm on a mission
cuz that's the way I groove
I got more and more to do
I got less and less to prove

---

Posted by Crosspost! software.

Interesting quiz. I scored most highly for Paganism. My beliefs are closely aligned with respect and awe for stochastic, self-organizing and nonanthropocentric Nature, as is prevalent in: paganism, Wicca, or a similar earth-based religion. The quiz correctly discovered that I may follow a Native American religious tradition. </td> Paganism 92% Satanism 83% Buddhism 75% atheism 54% Islam 42% Judaism 42% Christianity 33% Hinduism 25% agnosticism 0% Which religion is the right one for you? (new version) created with QuizFarm.com

Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable utilization of the means of production. It is also concerned with the fate of the working classes-that is the majority---as well as with the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and Marxism cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation. For those reasons the system appeals to me, and it seems fair. . . I think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist.

The Dalai Lama in Marianne Dresser (ed.), Beyond Dogma: Dialogues and Discourses (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic
Books, 1996).

Retrieved 19 Feb. 2006 from the World Wide Web at http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html