Important Video: Unsustainable water usage is reaching a crisis point for the Southwestern U.S.

Watch this video, or at least click through to youtube and read the transcript (click on the “…” next to the “save” option). The states that draw water from the Colorado River have very little time to find a way to eliminate one Arizona’s worth of water usage. Failing to do that means 25 million people could lose their electricity, because Lake Meade has almost dried up to the point that the Hoover Dam can no longer generate power reliably. I was recently talking to someone who was shocked that I would suggest we rebuild infrastructure and relocate people to make nationwide mass transit more viable.

The reality is that people are going to have to change and relocate either way, unless they want to be living without electricity in a notoriously hot and dry region, as the planet continues to heat. We are out of time.

Driven to extinction by “leaders” with all the maturity and responsibility of a bunch of drunken frat bros.

So, you may not have heard, but we’ve got a bit of a problem where we’re taking too much stuff out of the ground, and making too much other stuff with it. It almost feels weird to say that when so many people are trapped in grinding poverty, but as I’ve covered before, poverty in 2022 is not due to a lack of resources. The reality is that we’re over-producing. We’re making far, far more stuff than we need to, primarily because capitalism is a way to turn raw materials into money and power, and the folks at the top have less self control than my fucking cat. That’s why we have things like planned obsolescence, and it’s part of why garbage and chemical waste are such a huge problem. It’s also a colossal waste of energy.

None of this is new. None of this is a revelation. Apart from some of the words and perspectives in that paragraph, I could just as well have posted an excerpt from one of the Ranger Rick magazines I read in the 90s.

If we want a habitable planet, we need to dramatically reduce the amount of stuff we’re making. That doesn’t mean a worse life, or even necessarily fewer personal belongings. It means that the personal property we do have will be built as well as it can be. It means producing fewer things of higher quality (more on this theme in a future post). The step before giving up everything is making sure that we’re using the resources we have in a responsible manner. That means no more products designed to break so customers need to buy more. That means much less in the way of “single-use” products, and it also means making sure that when something like a machine no longer works, we salvage the parts to make other machines run.

Since we’re on the topic, I’m personally of the opinion that we ought to halt most of our mining, and return those sites to Indigenous control. That should come with a blank check for cleaning and restoration of the land, and help setting up more sustainable mining practices if that community decides that they want to do so. At the same time, we focus on using and re-using what we’ve already got. We need to actually recycle. We need to mine the landfills and junkyards. The goal is to both reduce the energy expended on extraction, refining, and overproduction, and to take a more active role in healing and supporting the ecosystems that give us life.

I’m sort of just riffing on this, because I want to give an taste of the kinds of conversations we probably should have been having for a while, and we should definitely be having now. You know how I started this with “you may not have heard”? Yeah, that was a joke. I feel like this stuff should be obvious to any halfway reasonable person.

I’m over-explaining now because apparently it’s possible for fully grown adults with real power and responsibility to still not get this shit.

What the fuck is this?

Why is this happening?

What is going on in our society that this doesn’t trigger an immediate investigation for criminal waste of resources?

In what world is this pointless destruction less of a crime than riding dirt bikes in New York City?

We are facing an existential crisis unlike anything in recorded history. We know that we need to use our finite resources more responsibly, and our so-called leaders are performatively destroying functional, efficient vehicles. Because in a city infamous for having its streets choked with cars, dirt bikes are the real  problem. Are you kidding me? Is this a prank show? Did some college kids get drunk and hijack an earth mover?

No, none of that. It’s our responsible, serious leaders destroying perfectly good vehicles and bragging about it.

This would be like incinerating a bunch of PPE at the beginning of the pandemic because you caught non-medical personnel with it. This would be like destroying a few tons of good food during WW2 rationing, because the person who cooked it wasn’t licensed to do so. Even if just taking those people’s dirt bikes was a legitimate use of state power (and of course it’s not), don’t destroy them!

For that matter, I thought our society was all about protection of property! I thought destruction of property was supposed to be a bad thing!

I am beyond fed up with public officials who act like this is all a game, or a play or something. They’ll do performative bullshit that demonstrably makes the world worse, and then expect us to praise them for it.

I think I’ve mentioned once or fifty times that repetition is an important part of getting any message across. I think another important part is knowing to whom you’re speaking. There are a lot of people out there who will not change their minds no matter what we do, and I’m sorry to say that a great many of them are the ones running things. I think it’s worth it to keep repeating most of the actual statements I’ve made in this post, but I do not think repeating them to people like NYC mayor Eric Adams will do any good. I feel the same about most of our leaders.

No, the repetition I’m building to is this: We have to take power away from these people. We’ve seen what they do with power when they have it, and I can’t think of a better metaphor for that than the braggadocious destruction of these dirt bikes.

We have to take power away from these people, and that means we have to build collective power. Organize, train, and practice taking action in coordination with other groups in other locations.

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Breaking news: Repeated exposure to natural disasters may harm mental health!

This is pretty groundbreaking, are you ready? Researchers have linked repeated exposure to hurricanes, to adverse psychological symptoms:

Findings, published online today in JAMA Network Open, are critical for understanding the psychological impacts of recurring natural disasters, particularly in the context of the escalating threat of climate change. Rather than individuals becoming acclimated to repeated exposure to disasters, results demonstrated that over time, responses to subsequent hurricanes become more negative.

“We show that people are not likely to habituate, or get used to, climate-related natural disasters that will increase in frequency and severity in the years to come. Our results suggest a potential mental health crisis associated with those who themselves directly experienced the storm or knew someone who did, as well as those who spent several hours engaged with media about the hurricane,” said Dana Rose Garfin, UCI assistant adjunct professor of nursing and public health, and first author of the report.

That matches with everything I’ve learned about trauma – it doesn’t “toughen” or “strengthen” us, it wounds us internally, and unless we can take the time to heal, that wound will keep getting worse. Again, it feels like this should be obvious. We’ve all had times when the hits start coming and they don’t stop coming, and it absolutely sucks. We don’t get stronger, we get closer to a complete breakdown. We start lashing out at people, or isolating ourselves, or any number of other things in a mostly subconscious effort to make the bad feelings stop. Trauma doesn’t make us more resilient against trauma any more than stab wounds make us any more resilient against knives.

The first-of-its-kind longitudinal study was conducted by Garfin and her colleagues, Roxane Cohen Silver, Distinguished Professor of psychological science, medicine and health; E. Alison Holman, professor of nursing, both from UCI and principal investigators of the research; Rebecca Thompson, Ph.D., UCI postdoctoral scholar in psychological science; and Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, Ph.D., assistant earth system science professor, and center fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University. The team assessed Florida residents in the hours before Hurricane Irma made landfall and examined those same individuals again following Hurricanes Irma and Michael to detect any mental health changes that might have occurred over time. Both were Category 5 storms that hit in succession – Hurricane Irma in September 2017 and Hurricane Michael in October 2018.

The team found that repeated exposure to the threat of catastrophic hurricanes was linked to symptoms of post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety and ongoing fear and worry. In turn, these psychological symptoms were associated with greater social- and work-related impairment, including difficulty interacting with others, and performing work tasks and other daily activities.

“Some distress is normal following traumatic and extremely stressful events,” Garfin said. “Most people will recover and display resilience over time. However, as climate-related catastrophic hurricanes and other natural disasters such as wildfires and heat waves escalate, this natural healing process may be disrupted by repeated threat exposure. Moreover, we followed people longitudinally over two hurricane seasons, and our data show that as people experience multiple occurrences over time, psychological symptoms accumulate and intensify, potentially portending a mental health crisis.”

We need time to heal. To go back to the knife analogy, it makes sense that being stabbed and surviving it would make it easier to cope with being stabbed again in the future. But if you’re stabbed on a regular basis? If you’re stabbed just after you get out of the hospital from the last stabbing?

Your brain will be focused entirely on avoiding more stabbing, because you can’t heal if you’re still getting stabbed.

We need time to heal.

Sometimes I feel like “research with entirely expected results” is its own category. When studies like this come out, I usually see reactions ranging from “yeah, no duh” to “I can’t believe somebody wasted money researching something so obvious”. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that regular major disruptions in life aren’t great for one’s mental wellbeing, especially when those come with things like personal danger and property damage. Do we really need research to tell us something so obvious? I get it. Sometimes I feel that way too.

Then I think about what I’ve seen, and I realize that we’re in our current climate crisis because there is no end to what some people will lie about to suit their aims. They will claim that weedkiller is safe to drink. They will claim that people whose homes are being consumed by the sea can just sell them. They will claim that society’s problems are all being caused by those with the least amount of power.

Of course they will claim that nothing needs to be done about the mental health impact of climate change and the disasters it spawns. So of course we will need to have research like this to point to, for those mysterious folks among us who somehow think it’s plausible that people will just get used to hurricanes.

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This post has a cat picture!

Today was lovely, and I had to wait outside for a delivery, so I decided to bring His Holiness out with me. I chatted with neighbors and read about swamps, and he explored the village and had some salad. We live in a cul-de-sac sort of arrangement (it was literally the only flat we could get – the rental market in Dublin is not OK), which means that our singularly un-athletic cat only has two ways to get out, and has shown little interest in either of them. That means we get to let him explore a bit, and eat grass to his heart’s content.

Our recent trip the the vet confirmed that his hips became a bit deformed in his childhood on the street, and that he needs to lose a couple kilos. We’ve been regulating his food intake for a while, since it became clear early on that his fondest ambition is to become Orb. Apparently it hasn’t been enough, so we’ve scaled back a little more, and I’m trying to let him out more so he’ll get exercise. We’ve tried string, laser pointers, and all the other stuff, and he’s just too lazy to actually put in the effort.

But put him outside? The amount of tail twitching alone probably burns a calorie or two. He’s got his favorite clump of grass, but he samples all around the village. I was worried initially that he might eat something unhealthy, but he’s shown no interest at all in anything but grass. The dude just wants his salad.

He’s shown a great deal of interest in birds, but this area is filled with more athletic cats than he, so while I do monitor him, I’m not particularly worried that he’ll catch one. He’s a great companion, but a mighty hunter he is not.

The image shows a British Shorthair cat with stripey shoulders and head, white legs and neck, and a white muzzle. His white fur looks velvety soft (it is), and his white paws have a little dirt on them. He is lounging on grass dappled by sun and shade

Taking a break between circuits of the village

 

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Video: The U.S. Supreme Court may be about to preemptively block the E.P.A. from regulating things like carbon emissions

It may surprise you to hear this, but some things about the way the U.S. government has handled environmental regulation over the past few decades have actually been fairly sensible. That’s not to say that they’ve done their job in protecting the environment or human health. They’re unquestionably better than nothing (as we may soon discover to our sorrow), but they don’t do nearly enough, compared to what needs to be done. They do, however, operate independently from Congress. If they see a pressing need to enact a regulation, Congress has given them the authority to take action based on their expertise. This is good, because not only are our politicians unlikely to know anything at all about science, they also don’t have the time to learn everything they’d need to pass every individual regulation through Congress.

And that’s assuming they wanted to. I think we all know that most of them don’t.

So, the responsibility for environmental protection has been delegated to those who can make it their full-time job. Obviously corruption is as much of a problem in the EPA as anywhere else in the US, but the way it’s set up is downright ideal compared to what we may be facing:

The TL:DW is that Justice Fratboy decided a while back that that delegation was a bad thing. It appears that in addition to its attack on reproductive rights, the Supreme Court is also poised to implement a blanket ban on all environmental regulations, unless they’re explicitly created by Congress. Do I need to explain whose interests this would serve?

Our systems have failed us. 

Lonerbox takes a look at the history of modern “western” beauty standards

My brain is not cooperating on the blog post I wanted to have up today, so instead I’ll leave you in the capable hands of my favorite Scottish youtuber.

I am far from the first person to address this, even on this network, but I think that this look at the history of “beauty” as a concept is actually pretty important in thinking about a number of important issues in society. It’s easy to feel like the way things are is basically how they’ve always been, but the reality is that we’re a complex and chaotic species. It’s a good case study in how people can twist themselves and the concept of “citing sources” into truly impressive knots to justify how angry it makes them that reality doesn’t conform to how they think it should work. It’s also a good overview of how we got to where we are in this regard.

Methane leakage from biogas facilities underscores the importance of doing things right.

I feel like I spend a lot of time talking about what it means to “get it right” on the environment. Solar panels are great, but less so if the silicon mining destroys habitat, or the copper mines and refineries for the power cables poison the land around them. We can’t just replace fossil fuels with other power sources and change nothing else. We have to change not just how we generate and use power, but also how we extract resources, how we process them, how we transport them, and how we dispose of the waste generated in every part of that system.

Climate change isn’t the only major environmental problem we face; it’s just the most urgent one. We need to stop being so sloppy in general, but you’d think that folks involved in renewable energy production in particular would understand that. Unfortunately, it turns out that biogas facilities, while certainly more renewable than fossil sources of gas, are still leaking a lot of methane into the atmosphere.

The new Imperial study, published in One Earth journal, found that supply chains for biomethane and biogas release more than twice as much methane as the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s previous estimation. It also reveals that 62 per cent of these leaks were concentrated in a small number of facilities and pieces of equipment within the chain, which they call ‘super-emitters’, though methane was found to be released at every stage.

The researchers say urgent attention is needed to fix the methane leaks, and knowing precisely where the majority of them are happening will help production plants to do so.

Lead author of the study Dr Semra Bakkaloglu, of Imperial’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Sustainable Gas Institute, said: “Biomethane and biogas are great candidates for renewable and clean energy sources, but they can also emit methane. For them to really help mitigate the warming effects of energy use, we must act urgently to reduce their emissions.

“We want to encourage the continued use of biogas and biomethane as a renewable resource by taking the necessary actions to tackle methane emissions.”

The researchers note that compared to the oil and gas industry, the biomethane industry suffers from poorly designed and managed production facilities as well as a lack of investment for modernisation, operation, and monitoring. Because oil and natural gas supply chains have been primarily operated by large companies with huge resources for decades, they have been able to invest more in leak detection and repair.

Honestly, I’m reluctant to blame the people involved in biogas production. This seems to be yet another symptom of the broader systemic disease – people in power don’t take climate change seriously. So of course biogas doesn’t get the funding it needs. As much as I wish it were otherwise, it always comes back to politics. This is just another small part of the massive change we urgently need. The only real upside is that every small part we deal with, will both reduce the size of the task ahead, and make other aspects of that task easier.

Dr Bakkaloglu said: “To prevent biogas methane emissions negating the overall benefits of biogas use, urgent attention is needed including continuous monitoring of biogas supply chains. We believe that with the proper detection, measurement, and repair techniques, all emissions can be avoided. We need better regulations, continuous emission measurements, and close collaboration with biogas plant operators in order to address methane emissions and meet Paris Agreement targets.”

“Given the growth in biomethane due to national decarbonisation strategies, urgent efforts are needed for the biomethane supply chain to address not only methane emissions but also the sustainability of biomethane.”

Co-author Dr Jasmin Cooper, also of the Sustainable Gas Institute and Department of Chemical Engineering, said: “Addressing the fundamental design issues and investment problems within the biofuel and methane industry would be a good starting point for stopping these leaks and preventing more from arising.”

The researchers are now focusing on the super-emitters within supply chains to better understand how to reduce them using the best available technologies.

As always, it’s good that we know about this. I think I’ve been advocating for biogas as part of our new energy “portfolio” for longer than I’ve been talking about the whole “getting it right” thing. This tech means that every human population can have a reliable source of flammable gas that’s proportional to the number of people feeding into the sewage system. I hope the leak problem gets fixed soon, because I don’t think we can afford to squander useful energy, and I know we can’t afford to be letting more methane into the atmosphere.

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The health benefits of… plastic pollution?

Oh boy, that’s a fun headline, isn’t it?

A couple weeks ago, I talked about the minor misery of how every bit of good news we get these days seems to be some form of, “well, it’s not as bad as we thought”. This isn’t one of those stories. From everything I can tell, plastic pollution is still a huge problem, both for the biosphere, and for ourselves. As I’ve said before, we don’t just need to deal with climate change and habitat destruction, we also have a global cleanup project ahead of us that will likely be the effort of multiple generations at least. Mine waste, landfills, electronic waste, runoff, and the list just goes on and on.

That said, another major theme of this blog is the importance of finding ways to work with nature, and to get nature to work with us. The biosphere is changing in response to everything we’ve done over the last few hundred years, with bacteria evolving to eat substances that never existed before we made them. Things like that are likely to be useful when dealing with plastics, and it turns out that evolution in response to plastic pollution might actually have some beneficial results:

Scientists estimate between 5 and 13 million metric tons of plastic pollution enter the oceans each year, ranging from large floating debris to microplastics onto which microbes can form entire ecosystems. Plastic debris is rich in biomass, and therefore could be a good candidate for antibiotic production, which tends to occur in highly competitive natural environments.

To explore the potential of the plastisphere to be a source of novel antibiotics, the researchers modified the Tiny Earth citizen science approach (developed by Dr. Jo Handelsman) to marine conditions. The researchers incubated high and low density polyethylene plastic (the type commonly seen in grocery bags) in water near Scripps Pier in La Jolla, Calif. for 90 days.

The researchers isolated 5 antibiotic producing bacteria from ocean plastic, including strains of Bacillus, Phaeobacter and Vibrio. They tested the bacterial isolates against a variety of Gram positive and negative targets, finding the isolates to be effective against commonly used bacteria as well as 2 antibiotic resistant strains.

“Considering the current antibiotic crisis and the rise of superbugs, it is essential to look for alternative sources of novel antibiotics,” said study lead author Andrea Price of National University. “We hope to expand this project and further characterize the microbes and the antibiotics they produce.”

This is still preliminary research, but it makes sense to use environments that never existed before to find antibiotics that nothing can resist yet. Obviously this in no way changes the urgent need for environmental cleanup, but it’s a good reminder to pay attention as we’re doing it, and learn as much as possible from the process.

We’ve inherited an absolute shit-show of a world. We live in the proverbial “interesting times”, but it’s worth remembering sometimes that can throw something good our way.

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When it comes to flooding in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region, hurricanes barely rate

When I was a kid, the most exciting weather event I encountered was Hurricane Bob. If memory serves, we went inland when it came, and I think we were staying with a family friend. I remember seeing the dramatic footage of floating cars along the Massachusetts coast. I remember intense winds, and the surreal calm of the eye passing overhead. It cemented hurricanes in my mind as Serious Business, and nothing I’ve seen since then has dissuaded me of that view.

I also remember Nor’easters, with their cutting cold and violent winds, but we never left town to avoid one of those. To me, they were exciting events, that often knocked out the power for a while, which meant we got to light everything with candles. It turns out that for all the attention paid to hurricanes, in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, almost all coastal flooding events come from non-tropical storms.

The most recent paper was published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology and compared extreme coastal flooding events from tropical cyclones and mid-latitude weather systems in the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays from 1980-2019.

Callahan looked at the past 40 years of measurements from several National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tide gauges in the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. This helped him to quantify the storm surge — the rising sea as the result of atmospheric pressure and winds associated with a storm — from these large weather events.

While coastal flooding from tropical weather events tend to get a lot of media attention — and actually have a higher average surge level — Callahan said that midlatitude weather events can produce flood levels just as severe and occur much more frequently in the Mid-Atlantic.

“About 85 to 90% of our coastal flooding events here in the Mid-Atlantic come from the midlatitude events; they don’t come from the tropical cyclones and the hurricanes,” said Callahan. “You can get strong nor’easters that have just as high coastal inundation levels and cause just as much — if not more — damage than tropical cyclones.”

One of the reasons that the midlatitude events can cause so much damage is that, unlike the tropical systems that commonly impact coastal areas in the southeastern United States before hitting the Mid-Atlantic, the intensity and size of midlatitude events are most difficult to forecast and can strengthen quickly without much warning. Also, while tropical systems usually peak and are well-formed storms before reaching the Mid-Atlantic, a nor’easter can strengthen quickly right on or just off-shore of the region. Additionally, mid-latitude systems are often bigger in size, move slower, and remain over our region for longer periods of time.

That makes a lot of sense to me. Hurricanes are huge, easily visible, move over the planet almost like some kind of entity. They make for great television, in part because you can spend weeks tracking them from formation – usually off the coast of western Africa – until they dissipate. The disparity in coverage and perception seems to be from a combination of the incentives of our news entities, and the nature of the storms.

Because they happen frequently in the cold season — from November to March — not much attention is paid to how nor’easters cause coastal flooding. Instead, more attention is paid to the amount of ice and snow and wind that the nor’easters bring and not as much focus is on the coast.

“Our attention is diverted between these other impacts or factors of these storms in the winter and spring, but this is where most of our coastal flooding comes into play,” said Callahan.

I also have to imagine that flooding is more dangerous. It’s possible that the colder water means fewer chemical reactions, so less of that danger, but the risk of hypothermia is astronomical in those conditions, and all that ice in the floodwater can also do direct kinetic damage to things. I’d be inclined to think the increased frequency is responsible for the higher numbers from mid-latitude storms, but the authors also point out that even if we’re just looking at the biggest disasters, hurricanes don’t even make the halfway mark.

Of the top 10 largest coastal flooding events in the Mid-Atlantic, tropical weather systems account for only 30-45% in the Delaware and upper Chesapeake Bays and 40-45% in the lower Chesapeake Bay. If you expand out further, tropical systems make up approximately 10-15% of all coastal flooding events.

The authors go on to make the shocking prediction that as sea levels rise, coastal flooding will get worse.

I think this is a valuable lesson in how to think about climate change. We’re still living in the society that created this problem, and that is trying to avoid solving it. The things we’re shown aren’t always the things at which we need to be looking. That’s true in all areas of life, of course, but I think it’s particularly true with climate change. A lot of what’s happening is invisible to us until it’s too late to do anything but fight for survival. Science lets us see that stuff, but we’re actively discouraged from looking closely. There’s a miasma of propaganda that makes it hard to tell what’s going on, and I’m worried that that’s going to lead us to overlook some pretty important things

It’s good to have this information, and I hope more people become aware of it. In terms of overlooking things, all we can really do is pay attention and, as always, organize.

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Philosophy Tube: The Social Contract

So I foolishly took on too much today, and while I did get a lot of things done, a publication-ready blog post wasn’t one of them. Now it’s a little after midnight, I’m burned out, and my neighbor’s small white dog is barking under my window. I think it’s time to cut my losses, and balance things better tomorrow.

That said, I’d feel bad leaving it at that, so I’ll share the video I’m currently watching. So far it is both entertaining and informative, and I think it touches on some important issues. Philosophy tube is generally well worth your time.