The concentrated ills of concentrated agribusiness

A review of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry.

Also published on Resilience.

If you are a government-approved American hog farmer, you drive: a) a dusty pickup truck, from your barn to your local small-town feed store; b) a huge articulated tractor, through your thousand-acre fields of corn and soybeans; c) a private jet, which you fly from your midwestern corporate headquarters to a second or third home in Florida.

Barons, by Austin Frerick, published by Island Press, March 2024.

If you’ve read Austin Frerick’s new book Barons (Island Press, March 2024), you’ll pick the private jet. The hog farmer won’t drive to a small-town feed store, because small towns in agricultural areas are losing most of their businesses. The hog farmer won’t use a big tractor to till fields of corn and soybeans; as a hog specialist who raises no grain, he or she will buy feed “inputs” from big grain farmers who raise no animals.

But as two prominent US Department of Agriculture secretaries advocated, farmers should “get big or get out”. And a hog farmer who has really “got big” will want that private jet, either to get to a second home on the Gulf Coast or to make quick trips to Washington to lobby for subsidies and tax breaks.

In his highly readable book, Frerick describes the businesses of barons who dominate seven sectors of the US food industry. In the process he illuminates much in recent American history and goes a long way towards diagnosing environmental ills, socio-economic ills, and the ill health of so many food consumers.

Although two of the barons, Cargill Inc. and JAB Holding Company, are well over a hundred years old, all seven barons have seen explosive growth in the 40 years since the US government switched to very lax anti-trust regulations. Except for JAB (a little-known Luxembourg-based company that has recently swallowed coffee supply chains around the world), all the highlighted barons are US-based, and all are very much involved in international trade.

One of the companies is neither a grower, processor, nor retailer of food – its core businesses are in marketing and in owning and licensing genetics. Driscoll’s is the major brand of strawberries and several other berries sold in supermarkets in the US as well as in Canada. (Frerick writes that they control about one-third of the US berry market.) The company buys from 750 growers in two dozen countries, employing more than one hundred thousand people. The growers work to Driscoll’s specifications, but Driscoll’s has no legal responsibility to those hundred thousand workers.

Now that American consumers have learned to buy fresh – albeit nearly tasteless – fruit twelve months of the year, it’s essential for Driscoll’s to have suppliers in countries with different seasons. This has other business advantages, Frerick writes: “the Driscoll’s model is based on shifting farming out of the country to companies that don’t need to worry about US minimum wage laws or environmental regulations.”

For two of the barons profiled, most of the production as well as most of the environmental damage occurs closer to home. Jeff and Deb Hansen, who own that private jet from the opening paragraph, rule an empire known as Iowa Select which brings five million pigs to market each year. “Today,” French writes, “Iowa raises about one-third of the nation’s hogs, about as many as the second-, third-, and fourth-ranking states combined.”

Dairy barons Sue and Mike McCloskey own a vast complex in Indiana called Fair Oaks Farms. Besides being an (indoor) home to 36,000 dairy cows, and the midwest’s largest agri-tourism destination, Fair Oaks produces about 430,000 gallons of manure every day.

The huge hog, chicken, dairy or beef operations favoured by the current rules of the game share this problem – they produce far more manure than can be safely used to augment local soils. The result, in many locations across the country, is polluted groundwater, runoff that disrupts river and lake ecosystems – and an overpowering stench for residents unlucky enough to live just downwind.

For workers in the hog, dairy, berry, slaughter, and grocery businesses profiled by Frerich, working conditions are often dangerous and the pay is low. The book reflects on Upton Sinclair’s century-old classic The Jungle, in which immigrant workers toil for meagre wages in filthy and dangerous Chicago slaughterhouses. In the decades after Sinclair’s book became a runaway bestseller, workers unionized and working conditions and wages in slaughterhouses improved dramatically. Today, however, many of the unions have been defeated, many slaughterhouses have moved to small towns where there is little other opportunity for employment, and most workers once again are new immigrants who have little ability to fight back against employers.

The most widely recognized name in Barons is Walmart. The mega-retailer is far and away the largest grocer in the US. As such, there are obvious advantages in buying products in huge, uniform quantities – in short, products that barons in the hog, dairy, grain, and berry sectors are ideally suited to provide. It matters not whether these products are truly nutritious. What matters is whether the products are cheap and, in line with WalMart’s directives to suppliers, cheaper year after year. Still, French explains, not cheap enough for WalMart’s own employees to afford – WalMart employees in many states require government assistance just to feed their families.

Barons is not a long book – under 200 pages, not including the footnotes – but Frerick covers a lot of ground. He does not spend a lot of time discussing solutions, however, beyond some very good ideas sketched briefly in the Conclusion. Still, for people not already deeply familiar with industrial agribusiness and its associated environmental, labour, health and political ills, Barons is a compelling read.

Image at top of page: “State of the art lagoon waste management system for a 900 head hog farm,” photo by Jeff Vanuga for the United States Department of Agriculture, public domain, accessed on Wikimedia Commons.

Essential voices for the turn away from car dependency

A review of When Driving Is Not An Option

Also published on Resilience

In forward-thinking municipalities across North America, elected officials and staff members can learn important lessons by taking on the Week Without Driving Challenge. As Anna Letitia Zivarts describes it, “participants have to try to get around for a week without driving. They can take transit, walk, roll, bike, or ask or pay for rides as they try to keep to their regular schedules ….”

When Driving Is Not An Option, published by Island Press, May 2024

In most municipalities, the challenge leads to a difficult but eye-opening week. That’s because in most areas getting around without driving is inconvenient, dangerous, very time-consuming, or next to impossible. As Zivarts writes,

“Even for participants who might already bike, walk or take transit for some of their weekly trips, we’ve heard that the experience has helped them comprehend the difference between taking the easy trips and taking all trips without driving.” (all quotes from When Driving Is Not An Option, Island Press, May 2024.)

Zivarts is a low-vision mom with the neurological condition nystagmus, and a wealth of information and insight about mobility. She started the Disabled Mobility Initiative in Washington state in 2020. “My first goal was making nondrivers visible,” she writes. “I was tired of hearing from elected leaders that ‘everyone’ in their communities drove, so spending more money on bus service or sidewalks just wasn’t necessary. I knew it wasn’t true ….”

In fact, many studies have shown that in most areas of the US, approximately 30% of residents do not drive. When Driving Is Not An Option makes clear that nondrivers are a varied group. Some don’t drive because they have a disability, some because they are too young to drive, some because they can’t afford to drive, some because they have entered the last seven to ten years of life during which an average American can no longer drive safely.

If transportation departments and urban planning staff do not include the voices of nondrivers, they are unlikely to develop policies and infrastructure that will reflect the needs of their whole communities.

In particular, Zivarts notes, planning departments must take care to listen to involuntary as well as voluntary nondrivers. She describes voluntary nondrivers as “people who have the financial resources, immigration status, and physical ability to own and drive a vehicle but choose not to.”

While she makes a strong case for a coalition that includes both voluntary and involuntary drivers, her book highlights “the expertise and lived experience … that comes from involuntary non-drivers, with an emphasis on the expertise of low-income, Black, Brown, immigrant, and disabled people, caregivers, and queer and trans people.” And she does a superb job of bringing us the insights from this wealth of expertise.

For much of my adult life I’ve been among the voluntary nondrivers. I have also had periods when due to disability I’ve been unable to drive, and as a senior I anticipate a time, coming soon, when I won’t be able to drive. But in recounting the experiences of the wide range of nondrivers she has worked with, Zivarts offers many perspectives that were new to me.

The problems and shortcomings – with existing infrastructure, municipal planning policies, traffic engineering standards, and university curricula for would-be planners and engineers – are manifold. Zivarts’ book is excellent in describing specific problems, and equally good at linking the issues of mobility justice to other struggles. So we learn about the connections between car-dependent transport policies and housing affordability, the inequitable distribution of environmental hazards, and the challenges of climate mitigation and adaptation.

The book’s subtitle is “steering away from car dependency”, and to accomplish that goal we need not just clear knowledge but also an effective coalition that draws on as many groups as possible. Zivarts quotes former Seattle mayor Mike McGinn:

“Politics runs on power, and those defending and benefiting from the status quo have power. Whether those directly benefiting from the billions spent on road expansion or those who have their transportation choices and convenience deeply subsidized, not just by dollars, but by the lost lives, lost health, and lost opportunity of those most damaged by overbuilt roads and pollution. To beat that kind of entrenched privilege and power takes more than white papers, it takes organizing.”

Zivarts lays out the stakes and the hope in a concluding paragraph that needs to be quoted in full:

“As the sky turns orange, the storms get stronger, and the waves higher, we are reminded of the immediacy of the threat and the moral prerogative to disrupt failed mobility and land use systems that are locking us into decades of carbon emissions. We also need to be reminded of the immediate daily and cumulative public health and environmental harms from tire dust, noise pollution, and traffic violence/enforcement, harms that wealthier, Whiter, nondisabled people are largely able to avoid. But those of us who can’t drive, because of disability, age, or income, see every day how automcobility is failing us. And we also believe that it must be changed. With our guidance, and a recognition of this leadership, we can and will create a different future.”

Photo at top of post from getarchive.net, public domain.

Do Ruddy Turnstones ask Red Knots for directions?

A review of The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth. 

Also published on Resilience.

A half-century ago, radio telemetry pioneer Bill Cochran heard something surprising while listening to migrating songbirds: when a Swainson’s Thrush called, a Veery answered. 

The Internet of Animals, by Martin Wikelski, 272 pages, published by Greystone Books on May 14, 2024.

This observation helped inspire a lifetime’s work for Cochran as well as for the much younger scientist and author Martin Wikelski. In The Internet of Animals, Wikelski recounted one of the many unconventional theories suggested by the Thrush-Veery call-and-response:

“The constant chirping back and forth in the night sky indicated that even though the birds had some innate tendency to migrate coded into their genes, they still communicated constantly on their journey. An even more radical interpretation of Bill’s data was that the only innate tendency the birds needed to have in their genes would be the drive to fly toward warmer areas in fall. … All the birds would need to do to find their way south to Central and South America would be to follow others flying along the nocturnal highway.” (The Internet of Animals, page 17)

Wikelski’s book, to be released on May 14, describes many successful radio telemetry projects, and offers tantalizing hints at what we might learn if the promise of the far more ambitious “Internet of Animals” is realized. But the hurdles to be surmounted are daunting.

For example, scientists around the world have had to develop communication tags that are light enough to be comfortable for diverse species of animals, durable enough to last an animal’s lifetime, powerful enough to communicate with orbiting satellites, and cheap enough to be manufactured in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

The current versions of the tags typically contain: a GPS receiver, so that the tag can report its geographic position at any time; sensors that measure acceleration and magnetic fields in three dimensions; temperature, humidity and altitude sensors that report what kind of weather the animal is coping with; a battery to power a transmitter to send all this data to a satellite up to 465 miles (750 km) away; and a tiny solar panel to keep the battery charged. In Wikelski’s summary, “In just two decades we went from a battery-powered collar with a beeping transmitter with a limited life to an intelligent smartphone-style ear tag powered by the sun that an animal could wear all its life.” (p. 151)

No less daunting has been the challenge of securing cooperation from the space science establishments in several countries, some of whom are now in military conflict.

For years the team worked on permission to attach an antenna to the International Space Station. The antenna was installed and tested, and in 2021 “we started to get amazing data”:

“Our red-footed falcons were on their way from Angola back to Hungary; the Hudsonian godwits were making their nonstop flights from Chile across the Galápagos and Guatemala into Texas; the supposedly stationary black coucals, an African cuckoo, were migrating more than 620 miles (1,000 km) from southern Tanzania to northern Democratic Republic of Congo ….” (p. 151)

And then, in early 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, scuttling scientific co-operation between Russia, Western Europe and the US. Wikelski’s team had to devise a new method for receiving transmissions, settling on the use of CubeSat satellites yet to be launched. 

A Long-Billed Dowitcher, left, and Hudsonian Godwit, right, at Bowmanville Marsh on the north shore of Lake Ontario, October 5, 2022. Hudsonian Godwits, part of a family of ultra-long-distance flyers, are thought to make the migration between arctic and sub-arctic Canada and southern South America with as little as one rest stop. The appearance of this bird brought people from all across southern Ontario, many of them hoping to see a rare visitor for the first time. The Long-Billed Dowitchers nest in the western Canadian arctic and on the Alaska coasts, but they migrate only as far as the southern US and Mexico for the winter.

In his first discussions of a worldwide animal-tracking system made possible through satellites, Wikelski wryly recalls, he thought that it could be implemented in four years. He made that guess in 2003; if all goes well the system will start living up to its potential later this year, after the launch of a CubeSat antenna device. The hope is to have a second CubeSat receiver in orbit in 2025, and a third in 2026. “The goal,” he writes “is to have enough receivers in space to deliver near real-time data transmission ….” (p 215)

The Internet of Animals could give us much greater understanding of the behaviours of many animal species. In Wikelski’s vision, however, the benefits both to animals and to humans will go far beyond merely learning more about migration routes and timing.

If we can follow the daily movements of many animals from birth to death, he writes, we’ll have much better understanding of the decisions they must make and the challenges they must face – and therefore we’ll be better able to take effective actions to protect many species and the environments they live in.

It is also possible that through changes in behaviour, animals far from the sight of any humans may give us advance warning of potential new pandemics, or earthquakes, or severe weather:

“[I]f collectively animals tell us that something has changed in the environment, that their world now feels more dangerous, then we should listen. … [T]he natural intelligence of animals, the collective interaction of the most intelligent sensors we have on this planet, is perhaps our most important early warning system to help us anticipate natural catastrophes, at least on a local level.” (p 184)

One of the mentors Wikelski credits with inspiring the Internet of Animals was radio astronomer George Swenson. Much of Swenson’s career was spent developing instruments capable of collecting and sifting through radio waves that might turn out to be communications from an extraterrestrial intelligence.

Yet the legacy of Swenson’s work, Wikelski writes, might be that we get in touch with another intelligence, the collective intelligence of the many other animals that share this planet with us:

“Listening to animals might actually change our human way of thinking more profoundly than any unlikely message from outer space. As we start receiving messages from animals and truly listen to them, humans would also be more disposed to losing their culturally ingrained perception (at least in the Western world) that they are the God-give pinnacle of all life forms.” (p. 221) 

If such an enlightenment occurs, Wikelski believes the Anthropocene could be succeeded by “the Interspecies Age,” in which “we will be considering other living species when we make decisions about what happens next on our planet.”

“We are going to link the knowledge these other species have to our own knowledge,” he adds. “We are going to become partners.” (p 182)

The Internet of Animals relies on the latest products of high-tech manufacturing, and it is vulnerable to the turbulence of human power struggles. But at its heart the project is the life’s work of dedicated scientists simply doing their best to learn from animals.

Photo at top of post: Red Knots and Ruddy Turnstones make a brief stop at the Port Darlington breakwater on Lake Ontario, June 5, 2022. While both species nest in the high arctic, Red Knots migrate to southern areas of the southern hemisphere, while Ruddy Turnstones nest along temperate zone coasts throughout North America as well as further south.

Counting the here-and-now costs of climate change

A review of Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World

Also published on Resilience.

R. Jisung Park takes us into a thought experiment. Suppose we shift attention away from the prospect of coming climate catastrophes – out-of-control wildfires, big rises in sea levels, stalling of ocean circulation currents – and we focus instead on the ways that rising temperatures are already having daily impacts on people’s lives around the world.

Might these less dramatic and less obvious global-heating costs also provide ample rationale for concerted emissions reductions?

Slow Burn by R. Jisung Park is published by Princeton University Press, April 2024.

Park is an environmental and labour economist at the University of Pennsylvania. In Slow Burn, he takes a careful look at a wide variety of recent research efforts, some of which he participated in. He reports results in several major areas: the effect of hotter days on education and learning; the effect of hotter days on human morbidity and mortality; the increase in workplace accidents during hotter weather; and the increase in conflict and violence as hot days become more frequent.

In each of these areas, he says, the harms are measurable and substantial. And in another theme that winds through each chapter, he notes that the harms of global heating fall disproportionately on the poorest people both internationally and within nations. Unless adaptation measures reflect climate justice concerns, he says, global heating will exacerbate already deadly inequalities.

Even where the effect seems obvious – many people die during heat waves – it’s not a simple matter to quantify the increased mortality. For one thing, Park notes, very cold days as well as very hot days lead to increases in mortality. In some countries (including Canada) a reduction in very cold days will result in a decrease in mortality, which may offset the rise in deaths during heat waves.

We also learn about forward mortality displacement, “where the number of deaths immediately caused by a period of high temperatures is at least partially offset by a reduction in the number of deaths in the period immediately following the hot day or days.” (Slow Burn, p 85) 

After accounting for such complicating factors, a consortium of researchers has estimated the heat-mortality relationship through the end of this century, for 40 countries representing 55 percent of global population. Park summarizes their results:

“The Climate Impact Lab researchers estimate that, without any adaptation (so, simply extrapolating current dose-response relationships into a warmer future), climate change is likely to increase mortality rates by 221 per 100,000 people. … But adaptation is projected to reduce this figure by almost two-thirds: from 221 per 100,000 to seventy-three per 100,000. The bulk of this – 78 percent of the difference – comes from higher incomes.” (pp 198-199)

Let’s look at these estimates from several angles. First, to put the lower estimate of 73 additional deaths per 100,000 people in perspective, Park notes an increase in mortality of this magnitude would be six times larger than the US annual death toll from automobile crashes, and roughly tw0-thirds the US death toll from COVID-19 in 2020. An increase in mortality of 73 per 100,000 is a big number.

Second, it seems logical that people will try to adapt to more and more severe heat waves. If they have the means, they will install or augment their air-conditioning systems, or perhaps they’ll buy homes in cooler areas. But why should anyone have confidence that most people will have higher incomes by 2100, and therefore be in a better position to adapt to heat? Isn’t it just as plausible that most people will have less income and less ability to spend money on adaptation?

Third, Park notes that inequality is already evident in heat-mortality relationships. A single day with average temperature of 90°F (32.2°C) or higher increases the annual mortality in South Asian countries by 1 percent – ten times the heat-mortality increase that the United States experiences. Yet within the United States, there is also a large difference in heat-mortality rates between rich and poor neighbourhoods.

Even in homes that have air-conditioning (globally, only about 30%), low-income people often can’t afford to run the air-conditioners enough to counteract severe heat. “Everyone uses more energy on very hot and very cold days,” Park writes. “But the poor, who have less slack in their budgets, respond more sparingly.” (p 191)

A study in California found a marked increase in utility disconnections due to delinquent payments following heat waves. A cash-strapped household, then, faces an awful choice: don’t turn up the air-conditioner even when it’s baking hot inside, and suffer the ill effects; or turn it up, get through one heat wave, but risk disconnection unless it’s possible to cut back on other important expenses in order to pay the high electric bill.

(As if to underline the point, a headline I spotted as I finished this review reported surges in predatory payday loans following extreme weather.)

The drastic adaptation measure of relocation also depends on socio-economic status. Climate refugees crossing borders get a lot of news coverage, and there’s good reason to expect this issue will grow in prominence. Yet Park finds that “the numerical majority of climate-induced refugees are likely to be those who do not have the wherewithal to make it to an international border.” (p 141) As time goes on and the financial inequities of global heating increase, it may be true that even fewer refugees have the means to get to another country: “recent studies find that gradually rising temperatures may actually reduce the rate of migration in many poorer countries.” (p 141)

Slow Burn is weak on the issue of multiple compounding factors as they will interact over several decades. It’s one thing to measure current heat-mortality rates, but quite another to project that these rates will rise linearly with temperatures 30 or 60 years from now. Suppose, as seems plausible, that a steep rise in 30°C or hotter days is accompanied by reduced food supplies due to lower yields, higher basic food prices, increased severe storms that destroy or damage many homes, and less reliable electricity grids due to storms and periods of high demand. Wouldn’t we expect, then, that the 73-per-100,000-people annual heat-related deaths estimated by the Climate Impact Lab would be a serious underestimate?

Park also writes that due to rising incomes, “most places will be significantly better able to deal with climate change in the future.” (p 229) As for efforts at reducing emissions, in Park’s opinion “it seems reasonable to suppose that thanks in part to pledged and actual emissions cuts achieved in the past few decades, the likelihood of truly disastrous warming may have declined nontrivially.” (p 218) If you don’t share his faith in economic growth, and if you lack confidence that pledged emissions cuts will be made actual, some paragraphs in Slow Burn will come across as wishful thinking.

Yet on the book’s two primary themes – that climate change is already causing major and documentable harms to populations around the world, and that climate justice concerns must be at the forefront of adaptation efforts – Park marshalls strong evidence to present a compelling case.

Reckoning with ‘the battering ram of the Anthropocene’

Also posted on Resilience

Is the word right on the tip of your tongue? You know, the word that sums up the ecological effects of more, faster and bigger vehicles, driving along more and wider lanes of roadway, throughout your region and all over the world?

If the word “traffication” comes readily to mind, then you are likely familiar with the work of British scientist Paul Donald. After decades spent studying the decline of many animal species, he realized he – and we – need a simple term summarizing the manifold ways that road traffic impacts natural systems. So he invented the word which serves as the title of his important new book Traffication: How Cars Destroy Nature and What We Can Do About It.

The field of study now known as road ecology got its start in 1925, when Lillian and Dayton Stoner decided to count and categorize the road kill they observed on an auto trip in the US Midwest. The science of road ecology has grown dramatically, especially in the last 30 years. Many road ecologists today recognize that road kill is not the only, and likely not even the most damaging, effect of the steady increase in traffication.

Noise pollution, air and water pollution, and light pollution from cars have now been documented to cause widespread health problems for amphibians, fish, mammals and birds. These effects of traffication spread out far beyond the actual roadways, though the size of “road effect zones” vary widely depending on the species being studied.

Donald is based in the United Kingdom, but he notes there are relatively few studies in road ecology in the UK; far more studies have been done in the US, Canada, and Western Europe. In summarizing this research Donald makes it clear that insights gained from road ecology should get much more attention from conservation biologists, transport planners, and those writing and responding to environmental impact assessments.

While in no way minimizing the impacts of other threats to biodiversity – agricultural intensification and climate change, to name two – the evidence for traffication as a major threat is just as extensive, Donald writes. He cites an apt metaphor coined by author Bryan Appleyard: the car is “the Anthropocene’s battering ram”.

Traffication has important implications for every country under the spell of the automobile – and particular relevance to a controversy in my own region of Ontario, Canada.

A slow but relentless increase

One reason traffication has been understudied, Donald speculates, is that it has crept up on us.

“These increases have been so gradual, a rise in traffic volume of 1 or 2 per cent each year, that most of us have barely noticed them, but the cumulative effect across a human lifetime has been profound.” … (All quotes in this article from the digital version of Traffication.)

“Since the launch of the first Space Shuttle and the introduction of the mobile phone in the early 1980s,” Donald adds, “the volume of traffic on our roads has more than doubled.”

Though on a national or global scale the increase in traffic has been gradual, in some localities traffication, with all its ill effects, can suddenly accelerate.

That will be the case if the government of Ontario follows through with its plan to rapidly urbanize a rural area on the eastern flank of the new Rouge National Urban Park (RNUP), which in turn is on the eastern flank of Toronto.

The area now slated for housing tracts was, until last November, protected by Greenbelt legislation as farmland, wetland and woodland. That suddenly changed when Premier Doug Ford announced the land is to be the site of 30,000 new houses in new car-dependent suburbs.1 And barring a miracle, the new housing tracts will be car-dependent since the land is distant from employment areas and services, distant from major public transit, and because the Provincial government places far more priority on building new highways than building new transit.

Though the government has made vague promises to protect woodlands and wetlands dotted between the housing tracts, these tiny “nature preserves” would be hemmed in on all sides by new, or newly busy, roads.

As I read through Donald’s catalog of the harms caused by traffication, I thought of the ecological damage that will be caused if traffic suddenly increases exponentially in this area that is home to dozens of threatened species. The same effects are already happening in countless heavily trafficated locales around the world.

“A shattered soundscape”

Donald summarizes the wide array of health problems documented in people who live with constant traffic noise. The effects on animals are no less wide-ranging:

“A huge amount of research, from both the field and the laboratory, has shown that animals exposed to vehicle noise suffer higher stress levels and weakened immune systems, leading to disrupted sleep patterns and a drop in cognitive performance.”

Among birds, he write, “even low levels of traffic noise results in a drop in the number of eggs laid and the health of the chicks that hatch.” As a result, “Birds raised in the presence of traffic noise are prematurely aged, and their future lifespans already curtailed, before they have even left the nest.”

Disruptions in the natural soundscape are particularly stress-inducing to prey species (and most species, even predators, are at risk of being someone else’s prey), since they have difficulty hearing the alarm signals sent out by members of their own and other species. To compensate, Donald writes, “animals living near roads become more vigilant, spending more of their time looking around for danger and consequently having less time to feed.”

A few species are tolerant of high noise levels, and seldom become road kill; their numbers tend to go up as a result of traffication. Many more species are bothered by the noise, even at a distance of several hundred meters from a busy road. That means their good habitat continues to shrink and and their numbers continue to drop. Donald writes that half of the area of the United Kingdom, and three-quarters of the area of England, is within 500 meters of a road, and therefore within the zone where noise pollution drives away or sickens many species.

Six-hundred thousand islands

When coming up to a roadway, Donald explains, some animals pay no attention at all, others pause and then dash across, while others seldom or never cross the road. As the road gets wider, or as the traffic gets faster and louder, more and more species become road avoiders.

While the road avoiders do not end up as roadkill, the road’s effect on the long-term prospects of their species is still negative.

When animals – be they insects, amphibians, mammals or birds – refuse to cross the roads that surround their territories, they are effectively marooned on islands. Taking account of major roads only, the land area of the globe is now divided into 600,000 such islands, Donald writes.

Populations confined to small islands gradually become less genetically diverse, which makes them less resilient to diseases, stresses and catastrophes. Local floods, fires, droughts, or heat waves might wipe out a species within such an island – and the population is not likely to be replenished from another island if the barriers (roadways) are too wide or too busy.

The onset of climate change adds another dimension to the harm:

“For a species to keep up as its climate bubble moves across the landscape , it needs to be able to spread into new areas as they become favourable . … In an era of rapid climate change, wildlife needs landscapes to be permeable, allowing each species to adapt to changing conditions in the optimal way. For many species, and particularly for road-avoiders, our dense network of tarmac [paved road] blockades will prove to be a significant problem.”

Escaping traffication

Is traffication a one-way road, destined to get steadily worse each year?

There are solutions, Donald writes, though they require significant changes from society. He makes clear that electrification of the auto fleet is not one of those solutions. It’s obvious that electric cars will not reduce the numbers of animals sacrificed as road kill. Less obvious, perhaps, is that electric cars will make little difference to the noise pollution, light pollution, and local air pollution resulting from traffication.

At speeds over about 20 mph (32 km/hr) most car noise comes from the sound of tires on pavement, so electric cars remain noisy at speed.

And due to concerted efforts to reduce the tailpipe emissions from gas-powered cars, most particulate emissions from cars are now due to tire wear and brake pad wear. Since electric cars are generally heavier, their non-tailpipe emissions tend to be worse than those from gas-powered cars.

One remedy that has been implemented with great success is the provision of wildlife bridges or tunnels across major roadways. In combination with fencing, such crossings have been found to reduce road kill by more than 80 per cent. The crossings are expensive, however, and do nothing to remedy the effects of noise, particulate pollution, and light pollution.

A partial but significant remedy can be achieved wherever there is a concerted program of auto speed reductions:

“Pretty much all the damage caused by road traffic – to the environment, to wildlife and to our health – increases exponentially with vehicle speed. The key word here is exponentially – a drop in speed of a mere 10 mph might halve some of the problems of traffication, such as road noise and particulate pollution.”

Beyond those remedies, though, the key is social reorganization that results in fewer people routinely driving cars, and then for shorter distances. Such changes will take time – but at least in some areas of global society, such changes are beginning.

Donald finds cause for cautious optimism, he says, in that “society is already drifting slowly towards de-traffication, blown by strengthening winds of concern over human health and climate change.”

There’s scant evidence of this trend in my part of Ontario right now,2 but Donald believes “We might at least be approaching the high water mark of motoring, what some writers refer to as ‘ peak car ’”. Let’s hope he’s right.

1 A scathing report by the Province’s Auditor General found that the zoning change will result in a multi-billion dollar boost to the balance sheets of large land speculators, who also happen to be friends of and donors to the Premier.

2 However, there has been a huge groundswell of protest against Premier Doug Ford’s plan to open up Greenbelt lands for car-dependent suburban sprawl, and it remains unclear if the plan will actually become reality. See Stop Sprawl Durham for more information.

Note to subscribers: the long gap between posts this summer has been due to retina surgery and ensuing complications. It’s too early to tell if I’ll be able to resume and maintain a regular posting schedule, but I do hope to complete a post on transforming car-dependent neighbourhoods as promised in May.

How parking ate North American cities

Also published on Resilience

Forty-odd years ago when I moved from a small village to a big city, I got a lesson in urbanism from a cat who loved to roam. Navigating the streets late at night, he moved mostly under parked cars or in their shadows, intently watching and listening before quickly crossing an open lane of pavement. Parked cars helped him avoid many frightening hazards, including the horrible danger of cars that weren’t parked.

The lesson I learned was simple but naïve: the only good car is a parked car.

Yet as Henry Grabar’s new book makes abundantly clear, parking is far from a benign side-effect of car culture.

The consequences of car parking include the atrophy of many inner-city communities; a crisis of affordable housing; environmental damages including but not limited to greenhouse gas emissions; and the continued incentivization of suburban sprawl.

Paved Paradise is published by Penguin Random House, May 9, 2023

Grabar’s book is titled Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. The subtitle is slightly hyperbolic, but Grabar writes that “I have been reporting on cities for more than a decade, and I have never seen another subject that is simultaneously so integral to the way things work and so overlooked.”

He illustrates his theme with stories from across the US, from New York to Los Angeles, from Chicago to Charlotte to Corvallis.

Paved Paradise is as entertaining as it is enlightening, and it should help ensure that parking starts to get the attention it deserves.

Consider these data points:

  • “By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person.” (page 71; all quotes in this article are from Paved Paradise)
  • “The parking scholar Todd Litman estimates it costs $4,400 to supply parking for each vehicle for a year, with drivers directly contributing just 20 percent of that – mostly in the form of mortgage payments on a home garage.” (p 81)
  • “Many American downtowns, such as Little Rock, Newport News, Buffalo, and Topeka, have more land devoted to parking than to buildings.” (p 75)
  • Parking scholar Donald Shoup estimated that in 1998, “there existed $12,000 in parking for every one of the country’s 208 million cars. Because of depreciation, the average value of each of those vehicles was just $5,500 …. Therefore, Shoup concluded, the parking stock cost twice as much as the actual vehicles themselves. (p 150)

How did American cities come to devote vast amounts of valuable real estate to car storage? Grabar goes back to basics: “Every trip must begin and end with a parking space ….” A driver needs a parking space at home, and another one at work, another one at the grocery store, and another one at the movie theatre. There are six times as many parking spaces in the US as there are cars, and the multiple is much higher in some cities.

This isn’t a crippling problem in sparsely populated areas – but most Americans live or work or shop in relatively crowded areas. As cars became the dominant mode of transportation the “parking problem” became an obsession. It took another 60 or 70 years for many urban planners to reluctantly conclude that the parking problem can not be solved by building more parking spaces.

By the dawn of the twenty-first century parking had eaten American cities. (And though Grabar limits his story to the US, parking has eaten Canadian cities too.)

Grabar found that “Just one in five cities zoned for parking in 1950. By 1970, 95 percent of U.S. cities with over twenty-five thousand people had made the parking spot as legally indispensable as the front door.” (p 69)

The Institute of Transportation Engineers theorized that every building “generated traffic”, and therefore every type of building should be required to provide at least a specified number of parking spaces. So-called “parking minimums” became a standard feature of the urban planning rulebook, with wide-ranging and long-lasting consequences.

Previously common building types could no longer be built in most areas of most American cities:

“Parking requirements helped trigger an extinction-level event for bite-size, infill apartment buildings …; the production of buildings with two to four units fell more than 90 percent between 1971 and 2021.” (p 180)

On a small lot, even if a duplex or quadplex was theoretically permitted, the required parking would eat up too much space or require the construction of unaffordable underground parking.

Commercial construction, too, was inexorably bent to the will of the parking god:

“Fast-food architecture – low-slung, compact structures on huge lots – is really the architecture of parking requirements. Buildings that repel each other like magnets of the same pole.” (p 181)

While suburban development was subsidized through vast expenditures on highways and multi-lane arterial roads, parking minimums were hollowing out urban cores. New retail developments and office complexes moved to urban edges where big tracts of land could be affordably devoted to “free” parking.

Coupled with separated land use rules – keeping workplaces away from residential or retail areas – parking minimums resulted in sprawling development. Fewer Americans lived within safe walking or cycling distance from work, school or stores. Since few people had a good alternative to driving, there needed to be lots of parking. Since new developments needed lots of extra land for that parking, they had to be built further apart – making people even more car-dependent.

As Grabar explains, the almost universal application of parking minimums does not indicate that there is no market for real estate with little or no parking. To the contrary, the combination of high demand and minimal supply means that neighbourhoods offering escape from car-dependency are priced out of reach of most Americans:

“The most expensive places to live in the country were, by and large, densely populated and walkable neighborhoods. If the market was sending a signal for more of anything, it was that.” (p 281)

Is the solution the elimination of minimum parking requirements? In some cases that has succeeded – but reversing a 70- or 80-year-old development pattern has proven more difficult in other areas. 

Resident parking on Wellington Street, South End, Boston, Massachusetts. Photo by Billy Wilson, September 2022, licensed through Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0, accessed at Flickr.

The high cost of free parking

Paved Paradise acknowledges an enormous debt to the work of UCLA professor Donald Shoup. Published in 2005, Shoup’s 773-page book The High Cost of Free Parking continues to make waves.

As Grabar explains, Shoup “rode his bicycle to work each day through the streets of Los Angeles,” and he “had the cutting perspective of an anthropologist in a foreign land.” (p 149)

While Americans get exercised about the high price they occasionally pay for parking, in fact most people park most of the time for “free.” Their parking space is paid for by tax dollars, or by store owners, or by landlords. Most of the cost of parking is shared between those who drive all the time and those who seldom or never use a car.

By Shoup’s calculations, “the annual American subsidy to parking was in the hundreds of billions of dollars.” Whether or not you had a car,

“You paid [for the parking subsidy] in the rent, in the check at the restaurant, in the collection box at church. It was hidden on your receipt from Foot Locker and buried in your local tax bill. You paid for parking with every breath of dirty air, in the flood damage from the rain that ran off the fields of asphalt, in the higher electricity bills from running an air conditioner through the urban heat-island effect, in the vanishing natural land on the outskirts of the city. But you almost never paid for it when you parked your car ….” (p 150)

Shoup’s book hit a nerve. Soon passionate “Shoupistas” were addressing city councils across the country. Some cities moved toward charging market prices for the valuable public real estate devoted to private car storage. Many cities also started to remove parking minimums from zoning codes, and some cities established parking maximums – upper limits on the number of parking spaces a developer was allowed to build.

In some cases the removal of parking minimums has had immediate positive effects. Los Angeles became a pioneer in doing away with parking minimums. A 2010 survey looked at downtown LA projects constructed following the removal of parking requirements. Without exception, Grabar writes, these projects “had constructed fewer parking spaces than would have been required by [the old] law. Developers built what buyers and renters wanted ….” (p 193) Projects which simply wouldn’t have been built under old parking rules came to market, offering buyers and tenants a range of more affordable options.

In other cities, though, the long habit of car-dependency was more tenacious. Grabar writes:

“Starting around 2015, parking minimums began to fall in city after city. But for every downtown LA, where parking-free architecture burst forth, there was another place where changing the law hadn’t changed much at all.” (p 213)

In neighbourhoods with few stores or employment prospects within a walking or cycling radius, and in cities with poor public transit, there remains a weak market for buildings with little or no parking. After generations of heavily subsidized, zoning-incentivized car-dependency,

“There were only so many American neighborhoods that even had the bones to support a car-free life …. Parking minimums were not the only thing standing between the status quo and the revival of vibrant, walkable cities.” (p 214)

There are many strands to car culture: streets that are unsafe for people outside a heavy armoured box; an acute shortage of affordable housing except at the far edges of cities; public transit that is non-existent or so infrequent that it can’t compete with driving; residential neighbourhoods that fail to provide work, shopping, or education opportunities close by. All of these factors, along with the historical provision of heavily subsidized parking, must be changed in tandem if we want safe, affordable, environmentally sustainable cities.

Though it is an exaggeration to say “parking explains the world”, Grabar makes it clear that you can’t explain the world of American cities without looking at parking.

In the meantime, sometimes it works to use parked cars to promote car-free ways of getting around. Grabar writes,

“One of [Janette] Sadik-Khan’s first steps as transportation commissioner was taking a trip to Copenhagen, where she borrowed an idea for New York: use the parked cars to protect the bike riders. By putting the bike lanes between the sidewalk and the parking lane, you had an instant wall between cyclists and speeding traffic. Cycling boomed; injuries fell ….” (p 256)

A street-wise cat I knew forty years ago would have understood.

Photo at top of page: Surface parking lot adjacent to Minneapolis Armory, adapted from photo by Zach Korb, August 2006. Licensed via Creative Commons BY-NC-2.0, accessed via Flickr. Part of his 116-photo series “Downtown Minneapolis Parking.”

What we know, and don’t know, about bees

Also published on Resilience

It will be several more weeks before bees start visiting flowers in my part of the world. But while I wait for gardens and meadows to come alive again, it’s been a joy to read Stephen Buchmann’s new book What a Bee Knows. (Island Press, March 2023)

Buchmann sets the scene in his opening chapter, describing how a ground-nesting bee cautiously emerges from her nest after looking and listening for possible predators:

“The female bee briefly shivers the powerful flight muscles within her thorax to warm up. Ready, she launches herself skyward and hovers in midair. Performing an aerial pirouette, she flies left, then back to the center, and then to the right of her nest. She repeats these back-and-forth, ever-wider zigzags, all while facing her nest and flying higher with each pass. In fact, she is memorizing the locations of the physical landmarks around her nest. These could be small stones, live or dead plants, bits of wood, or similar debris. She quickly creates a mental map of her home terrain. In less than a minute, she has memorized all the visual imagery, the spatial geometry, and the smells of her immediate surroundings.” (What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees, page 2)

Bees use a wide range of senses to navigate through the world, sometimes in ways we can scarcely imagine. As a pollination ecologist with decades of research experience, Buchmann is an ideal guide to this world, at once both familiar and alien, in our own backyards.

Let’s start with that word “knows”. Buchmann cites his own experience and the work of many other researchers to make the case that bees form, memorize, and use mental maps; they can count; they feel pain; they can react to changes by enacting new plans, even when the plans will not bear fruit for most of a bee’s lifetime; and they can likely pass some cognitive tests that are beyond the ability of dogs and cats. All very impressive, for a group of insects whose tiny brains have hardly changed in structure for a hundred million years.

That brain must manage a range of sensory inputs. A bee’s eyes – far larger, proportionally, than ours – see in three colours, ultraviolet, green and blue. In some respects a bee’s vision is low-resolution, but it provides high-speed imagery which allows a bee to distinguish flowers, and other insects, while zooming through meadows at 20 kilometers/hour or faster.

Honey Bee at Borage flower. Buchmann writes: “Compared with the size of their heads, bee have immense faceted eyes. Their vision, however, is much coarser than our own; they can recognize the shape of a flower only from a few inches away. Bee color vision is shifted into the ultraviolet (UV) part of the spectrum, but they are blind to red colors. Astonishingly, they can recognized patterns of polarized light across an otherwise uniform blue sky.” (What a Bee Knows, p 47)

Nearly all species of bees are vegans, though they evolved from predatory wasps. These wasps dined on tiny thrips, which tended to come with a tasty dusting of nutritious pollen. Over time, the prevailing theory goes, proto-bees learned to stop chasing thrips and just go straight to flowers for meals of pollen and nectar. Today bees attach a tiny ball of “bee bread” – a mix of nectar and pollen – to each egg, and this supplies all the nutrients a hatching larva needs to develop into an adult flying bee.

Though most flowering plants need bees and/or other pollinators, and bees need flowers, the relationship is complex.

Bee laden with Yellow Salsify pollen. Buchmann writes: “we need to remember that plants and bees have very different evolutionary goals. Bees must collect pollen and nectar to feed their larvae and themselves. … Flowering plants want to minimize pollen wastage.” (p 77)

Flowers need to ensure someone will carry pollen from one flower to another of the same species. That service comes with costs:

“About 3 percent of a flowering plant’s total energy budget is invested in the production of nectar. Pollen, floral oils, resins, and floral scent molecules are even more costly for plants to produce in their strategies for attracting, keeping, and rewarding pollinating bees.” (p 86)

Bees will happily move from flower to flower, picking up and losing pollen along the way. But if a bee takes pollen from a salsify flower, visits a fleabane next, then goes to a dandelion, not many of the pollen grains will make it to the right blossoms to fertilize those flowers. From a flower’s point of view, it’s important that a bee visits mostly flowers of one species on a given day.

Bumblebee on catnip. Buchmann writes: “[Researchers found that] bumblebees had an intermediate level of floral constancy. Bumblebees are considered to be less faithful foragers than honey bees.” (p 137)

Richly attractive scents help flowers keep bees coming back. But how does the bee detect that scent? More to the point, where is a bee’s nose? Buchmann tells us:

“The honey bee’s paired antennae are her nose. Both antennae are covered with thousands of sensory hairs, most of which respond to airborne odors. … Bees’ antennae … provide directional information. Think of smelling in stereo. Their antennae can move independently; therefore, unlike us with our fixed noses, bees can get a three-dimensional impression of an odor field.” (p 59-60)

But if flowers smell so good they keep bees coming back to their species, and only their species, that brings up another problem for bees to solve. How can a bee ensure, before she zooms in for a landing, that another bee hasn’t recently made off with all the pollen?

The answer may be that bees, which pick up a positive electrostatic charge while flying, are able to sense changes in the electrostatic charges of flowers – allowing them to sense which flowers have been recently visited.

Honey Bee on Aster. Buchmann writes: “Plants typically bear flowers at or near their growing tips, and these tips develop the strongest negative charges over an entire plant’s surface. Positively charged flying bumblebees and likely other bees can detect the negative charges on flower surfaces. Across their petals, stamens, and styles, flowers possess fine patterns of differing electrostatic charges.” (p 68)

What a Bee Knows is stuffed with fascinating information. Why does a male bee (drone) have no father, though he does have a grandfather? (It’s because a queen bee lays some fertilized eggs and some unfertilized eggs. All male bees are born from the unfertilized eggs, while all female bees, including queens, are born from fertilized eggs.)

How do honey bees make precisely-engineered, energy- and material-efficient honeycomb cells from beeswax? (Partly through careful teamwork in producing, chewing, and depositing tiny flakes of wax – and partly through the emergent, self-organizing physical properties of beeswax when it is heated to a range of  37°–40°C.)

We might guess that for a scientist with a career in bee research, one of the most satisfying recurring phrases in the book is “we don’t know” – many mysteries remain for bee students to explore. I wish, though, that the book were not so wholly reliant solely on the western scientific tradition, or at least that it had clearly acknowledged that many peoples around the world have likely known things about bees long before any western-trained scientist “discovered” these things. Indeed, much knowledge about bees has likely vanished in recent centuries, along with the traditions and languages of many human cultures.

One other question kept coming to my mind as I read through the book: what about the widely-reported problem of diminishing pollinator populations, which I can see even in my own back yard? As Buchmann reveals in the Epilogue, he too has been concerned about this problem – for decades. In 1996 he co-authored a book entitled The Forgotten Pollinators, and in past twenty-seven years, “unfortunately, things have only gotten worse for pollinators.” (p 211)

For 100 million years, bees and their relatives have made the most of their marvelously capable sensory organs, and a relatively simple, efficient brain. They have adapted to changes in ecosystems while also engineering changes in those ecosystems.

The great majority of flowering plants, including those responsible for most human food, depend on bees and other pollinators – but by our actions we are rapidly killing them off.

As Buchmann puts it, “It’s simple: we need bees more than they need us.”

Will some species of bees find ways to survive, either in spite of us or after we are gone? Will we humans carry on with the practices that are driving so many species towards extinction, thereby promoting, also, our own extinction? The answer to those questions, too, is simple.

We don’t know.

Photos used for this review taken by Bart Hawkins Kreps in Port Darlington, Ontario. Image at top of page: Green Metallic Sweat Bee on Echinacea flower (full-screen image here).

A road map that misses some turns

A review of No Miracles Needed

Also published on Resilience

Mark Jacobson’s new book, greeted with hosannas by some leading environmentalists, is full of good ideas – but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

No Miracles Needed, by Mark Z. Jacobson, published by Cambridge University Press, Feb 2023. 437 pages.

The book is No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air (Cambridge University Press, Feb 2023).

Jacobson’s argument is both simple and sweeping: We can transition our entire global economy to renewable energy sources, using existing technologies, fast enough to reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions at least 80% by 2030, and 100% by 2050. Furthermore, we can do all this while avoiding any major economic disruption such as a drop in annual GDP growth, a rise in unemployment, or any drop in creature comforts. But wait – there’s more! In so doing, we will also completely eliminate pollution.

Just don’t tell Jacobson that this future sounds miraculous.

The energy transition technologies we need – based on Wind, Water and Solar power, abbreviated to WWS – are already commercially available, Jacobson insists. He contrasts the technologies he favors with “miracle technologies” such as geoengineering, Carbon Capture Storage and Utilization (CCUS), or Direct Air Capture of carbon dioxide (DAC). These latter technologies, he argues, are unneeded, unproven, expensive, and will take far too long to implement at scale; we shouldn’t waste our time on such schemes.  

The final chapter helps to understand both the hits and misses of the previous chapters. In “My Journey”, a teenage Jacobson visits the smog-cloaked cities of southern California and quickly becomes aware of the damaging health effects of air pollution:

“I decided then and there, that when I grew up, I wanted to understand and try to solve this avoidable air pollution problem, which affects so many people. I knew what I wanted to do for my career.” (No Miracles Needed, page 342)

His early academic work focused on the damages of air pollution to human health. Over time, he realized that the problem of global warming emissions was closely related. The increasingly sophisticated computer models he developed were designed to elucidate the interplay between greenhouse gas emissions, and the particulate emissions from combustion that cause so much sickness and death.

These modeling efforts won increasing recognition and attracted a range of expert collaborators. Over the past 20 years, Jacobson’s work moved beyond academia into political advocacy. “My Journey” describes the growth of an organization capable of developing detailed energy transition plans for presentation to US governors, senators, and CEOs of major tech companies. Eventually that led to Jacobson’s publication of transition road maps for states, countries, and the globe – road maps that have been widely praised and widely criticized.

In my reading, Jacobson’s personal journey casts light on key features of No Miracles Needed in two ways. First, there is a singular focus on air pollution, to the omission or dismissal of other types of pollution. Second, it’s not likely Jacobson would have received repeat audiences with leading politicians and business people if he challenged the mainstream orthodox view that GDP can and must continue to grow.

Jacobson’s road map, then, is based on the assumption that all consumer products and services will continue to be produced in steadily growing quantities – but they’ll all be WWS based.

Does he prove that a rapid transition is a realistic scenario? Not in this book.

Hits and misses

Jacobson gives us brief but marvelously lucid descriptions of many WWS generating technologies, plus storage technologies that will smooth the intermittent supply of wind- and sun-based energy. He also goes into considerable detail about the chemistry of solar panels, the physics of electricity generation, and the amount of energy loss associated with each type of storage and transmission.

These sections are aimed at a lay readership and they succeed admirably. There is more background detail, however, than is needed to explain the book’s central thesis.

The transition road map, on the other hand, is not explained in much detail. There are many references to scientific papers in which he outlines his road maps. A reader of No Miracles Needed can take Jacobson’s word that the model is a suitable representation, or you can find and read Jacobson’s articles in academic journals – but you don’t get the needed details in this book.

Jacobson explains why, at the level of a device such as a car or a heat pump, electric energy is far more efficient in producing motion or heat than is an internal combustion engine or a gas furnace. Less convincingly, he argues that electric technologies are far more energy-efficient than combustion for the production of industrial heat – while nevertheless conceding that some WWS technologies needed for industrial heat are, at best, in prototype stages.

Yet Jacobson expresses serene confidence that hard-to-electrify technologies, including some industrial processes and long-haul aviation, will be successfully transitioning to WWS processes – perhaps including green hydrogen fuel cells, but not hydrogen combustion – by 2035.

The confidence in complex global projections is often jarring. For example, Jacobson tells us repeatedly that the fully WWS energy system of 2050 “reduces end-use energy requirements by 56.4 percent” (page 271, 275).1 The expressed precision notwithstanding, nobody yet knows the precise mix of storage types, generation types, and transmission types, which have various degrees of energy efficiency, that will constitute a future WWS global system. What we should take from Jacobson’s statements is that, based on the subset of factors and assumptions – from an almost infinitely complex global energy ecosystem – which Jacobson has included in his model, the calculated outcome is a 56% end-use energy reduction.

Canada’s Premiers visit Muskrat Falls dam construction site, 2015. Photo courtesy of Government of Newfoundland and Labrador; CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license, via Flickr.

Also jarring is the almost total disregard of any type of pollution other than that which comes from fossil fuel combustion. Jacobson does briefly mention the particles that grind off the tires of all vehicles, including typically heavier EVs. But rather than concede that these particles are toxic and can harm human and ecosystem health, he merely notes that the relatively large particles “do not penetrate so deep into people’s lungs as combustion particles do.” (page 49)

He claims, without elaboration, that “Environmental damage due to lithium mining can be averted almost entirely.” (page 64) Near the end of the book, he states that “In a 2050 100 percent WWS world, WWS energy private costs equal WWS energy social costs because WWS eliminates all health and climate costs associated with energy.” (page 311; emphasis mine)

In a culture which holds continual economic growth to be sacred, it would be convenient to believe that business-as-usual can continue through 2050, with the only change required being a switch to WWS energy.

Imagine, then, that climate-changing emissions were the only critical flaw in the global economic system. Given that assumption, is Jacobson’s timetable for transition plausible?

No. First, Jacobson proposes that “by 2022”, no new power plants be built that use coal, methane, oil or biomass combustion; and that all new appliances for heating, drying and cooking in the residential and commercial sectors “should be powered by electricity, direct heat, and/or district heating.” (page 319) That deadline has passed, and products that rely on combustion continue to be made and sold. It is a mystery why Jacobson or his editors would retain a 2022 transition deadline in a book slated for publication in 2023.

Other sections of the timeline also strain credulity. “By 2023”, the timeline says, all new vehicles in the following categories should be either electric or hydrogen fuel-cell: rail locomotives, buses, nonroad vehicles for construction and agriculture, and light-duty on-road vehicles. This is now possible only in a purely theoretical sense. Batteries adequate for powering heavy-duty locomotives and tractors are not yet in production. Even if they were in production, and that production could be scaled up within a year, the charging infrastructure needed to quickly recharge massive tractor batteries could not be installed, almost overnight, at large farms or remote construction sites around the world.

While electric cars, pick-ups and vans now roll off assembly lines, the global auto industry is not even close to being ready to switch the entire product lineup to EV only. Unless, of course, they were to cut back auto production by 75% or more until production of EV motors, batteries, and charging equipment can scale up. Whether you think that’s a frightening prospect or a great idea, a drastic shrinkage in the auto industry would be a dramatic departure from a business-as-usual scenario.

What’s the harm, though, if Jacobson’s ambitious timeline is merely pushed back by two or three years?

If we were having this discussion in 2000 or 2010, pushing back the timeline by a few years would not be as consequential. But as Jacobson explains effectively in his outline of the climate crisis, we now need both drastic and immediate actions to keep cumulative carbon emissions low enough to avoid global climate catastrophe. His timeline is constructed with the goal of reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2030, not because those are nice round figures, but because he (and many others) calculate that reductions of that scale and rapidity are truly needed. Even one or two more years of emissions at current rates may make the 1.5°C warming limit an impossible dream.

The picture is further complicated by a factor Jacobson mentions only in passing. He writes,

“During the transition, fossil fuels, bioenergy, and existing WWS technologies are needed to produce the new WWS infrastructure. … [A]s the fraction of WWS energy increases, conventional energy generation used to produce WWS infrastructure decreases, ultimately to zero. … In sum, the time-dependent transition to WWS infrastructure may result in a temporary increase in emissions before such emissions are eliminated.” (page 321; emphasis mine)

Others have explained this “temporary increase in emissions” at greater length. Assuming, as Jacobson does, that a “business-as-usual” economy keeps growing, the vast majority of goods and services will continue, in the short term, to be produced and/or operated using fossil fuels. If we embark on an intensive, global-scale, rapid build-out of WWS infrastructures at the same time, a substantial increment in fossil fuels will be needed to power all the additional mines, smelters, factories, container ships, trucks and cranes which build and install the myriad elements of a new energy infrastructure. If all goes well, that new energy infrastructure will eventually be large enough to power its own further growth, as well as to power production of all other goods and services that now rely on fossil energy.

Unless we accept a substantial decrease in non-transition-related industrial activity, however, the road that takes us to a full WWS destination must route us through a period of increased fossil fuel use and increased greenhouse gas emissions.

It would be great if Jacobson modeled this increase to give us some guidance how big this emissions bump might be, how long it might last, and therefore how important it might be to cumulative atmospheric carbon concentrations. There is no suggestion in this book that he has done that modeling. What should be clear, however, is that any bump in emissions at this late date increases the danger of moving past a climate tipping point – and this danger increases dramatically with every passing year.

1In a tl;dr version of No Miracles Needed published recently in The Guardian, Jacobson says “Worldwide, in fact, the energy that people use goes down by over 56% with a WWS system.” (“‘No miracles needed’: Prof Mark Jacobson on how wind, sun and water can power the world”, 23 January 2023)

 

Photo at top of page by Romain Guy, 2009; public domain, CC0 1.0 license, via Flickr.

Profits of Utopia

Also published on Resilience

What led to the twentieth century’s rapid economic growth? And what are the prospects for that kind of growth to return?

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, was published by Basic Books, Sept 2022; 605 pages.

Taken together, two new books go a long way toward answering the first of those questions.

Bradford J. DeLong intends his Slouching Towards Utopia to be a “grand narrative” of what he calls “the long twentieth century”.

Mark Stoll summarizes his book Profit as “a history of capitalism that seeks to explain both how capitalism changed the natural world and how the environment shaped capitalism.”

By far the longer of the two books, DeLong’s tome primarily concerns the years from 1870 to 2010. Stoll’s slimmer volume goes back thousands of years, though the bulk of his coverage concerns the past seven centuries.

Both books are well organized and well written. Both make valuable contributions to an understanding of our current situation. In my opinion Stoll casts a clearer light on the key problems we now face.

Although neither book explicitly addresses the prospects for future prosperity, Stoll’s concluding verdict offers a faint hope.

Let’s start with Slouching Towards Utopia. Bradford J. Delong, a professor of economics at University of California Berkeley, describes “the long twentieth century” – from 1870 to 2010 – as “the first century in which the most important historical thread was what anyone would call the economic one, for it was the century that saw us end our near-universal dire material poverty.” (Slouching Towards Utopia, page 2; emphasis mine) Unfortunately that is as close as he gets in this book to defining just what he means by “economics”.

On the other hand he does tell us what “political economics” means:

“There is a big difference between the economic and the political economic. The latter term refers to the methods by which people collectively decide how they are going to organize the rules of the game within which economic life takes place.” (page 85; emphasis in original)

Discussion of the political economics of the Long Twentieth Century, in my opinion, account for most of the bulk and most of the value in this book.

DeLong weaves into his narratives frequent – but also clear and concise – explanations of the work of John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Polanyi. These three very different theorists responded to, and helped bring about, major changes in “the rules of the game within which economic life takes place”.

DeLong uses their work to good effect in explaining how policymakers and economic elites navigated and tried to influence the changing currents of market fundamentalism, authoritarian collectivism, social democracy, the New Deal, and neoliberalism.

With each swing of the political economic pendulum, the industrial, capitalist societies either slowed, or sped up, the advance “towards utopia” – a society in which all people, regardless of class, race, or sex, enjoy prosperity, human rights and a reasonably fair share of the society’s wealth.

DeLong and Stoll present similar perspectives on the “Thirty Glorious Years” from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, and a similarly dim view of the widespread turn to neoliberalism since then.

They also agree that while a “market economy” plays an important role in generating prosperity, a “market society” rapidly veers into disaster. That is because the market economy, left to its own devices, exacerbates inequalities so severely that social cohesion falls apart. The market must be governed by social democracy, and not the other way around.

DeLong provides one tragic example:

“With unequal distribution, a market economy will generate extraordinarily cruel outcomes. If my wealth consists entirely of my ability to work with my hands in someone else’s fields, and if the rains do not come, so that my ability to work with my hands has no productive market value, then the market will starve me to death – as it did to millions of people in Bengal in 1942 and 1943.” (Slouching Towards Utopia, p 332)

Profit: An Environmental History was published by Polity Books, January 2023; 280 pages.

In DeLong’s and Stoll’s narratives, during the period following World War II “the rules of the economic game” in industrialized countries were set in a way that promoted widespread prosperity and rising wealth for nearly all classes, without a concomitant rise in inequality.

As a result, economic growth during that period was far higher than it had been from 1870 to 1940, before the widespread influence of social democracy, and far higher than it has been since about 1975 during the neoliberal era.

During the Thirty Glorious Years, incomes from the factory floor to the CEO’s office rose at roughly the same rate. Public funding of advanced education, an income for retired workers, unemployment insurance, strong labor unions, and (in countries more civilized than the US) public health insurance – these social democratic features ensured that a large and growing number of people could continue to buy the ever-increasing output of the consumer economy. High marginal tax rates ensured that government war debts would be retired without cutting off the purchasing power of lower and middle classes.

Stoll explains that long-time General Motors chairman Alfred Sloan played a key role in the transition to a consumer economy. Under his leadership GM pioneered a line-up ranging from economy cars to luxury cars; the practice of regularly introducing new models whose primary features were differences in fashion; heavy spending on advertising to promote the constantly-changing lineup; and auto financing which allowed consumers to buy new cars without first saving up the purchase price.

By then the world’s largest corporation, GM flourished during the social democratic heyday of the Thirty Glorious Years. But in Stoll’s narrative, executives like Alfred Sloan couldn’t resist meddling with the very conditions that had made their version of capitalism so successful:

“There was a worm in the apple of postwar prosperity, growing out of sight until it appeared in triumph in the late 1970s. The regulations and government activism of the New Deal … so alarmed certain wealthy corporate leaders, Alfred Sloan among them, that they began to develop a propaganda network to promote weak government and low taxes.” (Profit, page 176)

This propaganda network achieved hegemony in the 1980s as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher took the helm in the US and the UK. DeLong and Stoll concur that the victory of neoliberalism resulted in a substantial drop in the economic growth rate, along with a rapid growth in inequality. As DeLong puts it, the previous generation’s swift march towards utopia slowed to a crawl.

DeLong and Stoll, then, share a great deal when it comes to political economics – the political rules that govern how economic wealth is distributed.

On the question of how that economic wealth is generated, however, DeLong is weak and Stoll makes a better guide.

DeLong introduces his discussion of the long twentieth century with the observation that between 1870 and 2010, economic growth far outstripped population growth for the first time in human history. What led to that economic acceleration? There were three key factors, DeLong says:

“Things changed starting around 1870. Then we got the institutions for organization and research and the technologies – we got full globalization, the industrial research laboratory, and the modern corporation. These were the keys. These unlocked the gate that had previously kept humanity in dire poverty.” (Slouching Towards Utopia, p. 3)

Thomas Edison’s research lab in West Orange, New Jersey. Cropped from photo by Anita Gould, 2010, CC BY-SA 2.0 license, via Flickr.

These may have been necessary conditions for a burst of economic growth, but were they sufficient? If they were sufficient, then why should we believe that the long twentieth century is conclusively over? Since DeLong’s three keys are still in place, and if only the misguided leadership of neoliberalism has spoiled the party, would it not be possible that a swing of the political economic pendulum could restore the conditions for rapid economic growth?

Indeed, in one of DeLong’s few remarks directly addressing the future he says “there is every reason to believe prosperity will continue to grow at an exponential rate in the centuries to come.” (page 11)

Stoll, by contrast, deals with the economy as inescapably embedded in the natural environment, and he emphasizes the revolutionary leap forward in energy production in the second half of the 19th century.

Energy and environment

Stoll’s title and subtitle are apt – Profit: An Environmental History. He says that “economic activity has always degraded environments” (p. 6) and he provides examples from ancient history as well as from the present.

Economic development in this presentation is “the long human endeavor to use resources more intensively.” (p. 7) In every era, tapping energy sources has been key.

European civilization reached for the resources of other regions in the late medieval era. Technological developments such as improved ocean-going vessels allowed incipient imperialism, but additional energy sources were also essential. Stoll explains that the Venetian, Genoese and Portuguese traders who pioneered a new stage of capitalism all relied in part on the slave trade:

“By the late fifteenth century, slaves made up over ten percent of the population of Lisbon, Seville, Barcelona, and Valencia and remained common in southern coastal Portugal and Spain for another century or two.” (p. 40)

The slave trade went into high gear after Columbus chanced across the Americas. That is because, even after they had confiscated two huge continents rich in resources, European imperial powers still relied on the consumption of other humans’ lives as an economic input:

“Free-labor colonies all failed to make much profit and most failed altogether. Colonizers resorted to slavery to people colonies and make them pay. For this reason Africans would outnumber Europeans in the Americas until the 1840s.” (p. 47)

While the conditions of slavery in Brazil were “appallingly brutal”, Stoll writes, Northern Europeans made slavery even more severe. As a result “Conditions in slave plantations were so grueling and harsh that birthrates trailed deaths in most European plantation colonies.” (p 49)

‘Shipping Sugar’ from William Clark’s ‘Ten views in the island of Antigua’ (Thomas Clay, London, 1823). Public domain image via Picryl.com.

Clearly, then, huge numbers of enslaved workers played a major and fundamental role in rising European wealth between 1500 and 1800. It is perhaps no coincidence that in the 19th century, as slavery was being outlawed in colonial empires, European industries were learning how to make effective use of a new energy source: coal. By the end of that century, the fossil fuel economy had begun its meteoric climb.

Rapid increases in scientific knowledge, aided by such organizations as modern research laboratories, certainly played a role in commercializing methods of harnessing the energy in coal and oil. Yet this technological knowhow on its own, without abundant quantities of readily-extracted coal and oil, would not have led to an explosion of economic growth.

Where DeLong is content to list “three keys to economic growth” that omit fossil fuels, Stoll adds a fourth key – not merely the technology to use fossil fuels, but the material availability of those fuels.

By 1900, coal-powered engines had transformed factories, mines, ocean transportation via steamships, land transportation via railroads, and the beginnings of electrical grids. The machinery of industry could supply more goods than most people had ever thought they might want, a development Stoll explains as a transition from an industrial economy to a consumer economy.

Coal, however, could not have powered the car culture that swept across North America before World War II, and across the rest of the industrialized world after the War. To shift the consumer economy into overdrive, an even richer and more flexible energy source was needed: petroleum.

By 1972, Stoll notes, the global demand for petroleum was five-and-a-half times as great as in 1949.

Like DeLong, Stoll marks the high point of the economic growth rate at about 1970. And like DeLong, he sees the onset of neoliberalism as one factor slowing and eventually stalling the consumer economy. Unlike DeLong, however, Stoll also emphasizes the importance of energy sources in this trajectory. In the period leading up to 1970 net energy availability was skyrocketing, making rapid economic growth achievable. After 1970 net energy availability grew more slowly, and increasing amounts of energy had to be used up in the process of finding and extracting energy. In other words, the Energy Return on Energy Invested, which increased rapidly between 1870 and 1970, peaked and started to decline over recent decades.

This gradual turnaround in net energy, along with the pervasive influence of neoliberal ideologies, contributed to the faltering of economic growth. The rich got richer at an even faster pace, but most of society gained little or no ground.

Stoll pays close attention to the kind of resources needed to produce economic growth – the inputs. He also emphasizes the anti-goods that our economies turn out on the other end, be they toxic wastes from mining and smelting, petroleum spills, smog, pervasive plastic garbage, and climate-disrupting carbon dioxide emissions.

Stoll writes, 

“The relentless, rising torrent of consumer goods that gives Amazon.com its apt name places unabating demand on extractive industries for resources and energy. Another ‘Amazon River’ of waste flows into the air, water, and land.” (Profit, p. 197)

Can the juggernaut be turned around before it destroys both our society and our ecological life-support systems, and can a fair, sustainable economy take its place? On this question, Stoll’s generally excellent book disappoints.

While he appears to criticize the late-twentieth century environmental movement for not daring to challenge capitalism itself, in Profit’s closing pages he throws cold water on any notion that capitalism could be replaced.

“Capitalism … is rooted in human nature and human history. These deep roots, some of which go back to our remotest ancestors, make capitalism resilient and adaptable to time and circumstances, so that the capitalism of one time and place is not that of another. These roots also make it extraordinarily difficult to replace.” (Profit, p. 253)

He writes that “however much it might spare wildlife and clean the land, water, and air, we stop the machinery of consumer capitalism at our peril.” (p. 254) If we are to avoid terrible social and economic unrest and suffering, we must accept that “we are captives on this accelerating merry-go-round of consumer capitalism.” (p. 256)

It’s essential to curb the power of big corporations and switch to renewable energy sources, he says. But in a concluding hint at the so-far non-existent phenomenon of “absolute decoupling”, he writes,

“The only requirement to keep consumer capitalism running is to keep as much money flowing into as many pockets as possible. The challenge may be to do so with as little demand for resources as possible.” (Profit, p. 256)

Are all these transformations possible, and can they happen in time? Stoll’s final paragraph says “We can only hope it will be possible.” Given the rest of his compelling narrative, that seems a faint hope indeed.

* * *

Coming next: another new book approaches the entanglements of environment and economics with a very different perspective, telling us with cheerful certainty that we can indeed switch the industrial economy to clean, renewable energies, rapidly, fully, and with no miracles needed.


Image at top of page: ‘The Express Train’, by Charles Parsons, 1859, published by Currier and Ives. Image donated to Wikimedia Commons by Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

“Getting to zero” is a lousy goal

Also published on Resilience

In an alternate reality, gradually moving toward a zero-carbon-emission economy and arriving there in two or three decades would be a laudable accomplishment.

In an alternate reality –   for example, the reality that might result from turning the clock back to 1975 – a twenty-five year process of eliminating all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions could avert a climate crisis.

But in our reality in 2022, with far too much carbon dioxide already flowing through the atmosphere and the climate crisis worsening every year, knowingly emitting more greenhouse gases for another two decades is a shockingly cavalier dance with destruction.

This understanding of the climate crisis guides the work of Bruce King and Chris Magwood. Their own field of construction, they write, can, and indeed must, become a net storer of carbon – and not by 2050 by rather by the early 2030’s.

Their new book Build Beyond Zero (Island Press, June 2022) puts the focus on so-called “embodied emissions”, also known more clearly as “upfront emissions”. The construction industry accounts for up to 15 percent of global warming emissions, and most of the emissions occur during manufacturing of building materials.

No matter how parsimonious new buildings might be with energy during their operating lifetimes, an upfront burst of carbon emissions has global warming impact when we can least afford it: right away. “A ton of emissions released today,” write King and Magwood, “has far more climate impact than a ton of emissions released a decade from now.”

Emissions released today, they emphasize, push us immediately closer to climate crisis tipping points, and emissions released today will continue to heat the globe throughout the life of a building.

Their goal, then, is to push the construction industry as a whole to grapple with the crucial issue of upfront emissions. The construction industry can, they believe, rapidly transform into a very significant net sequesterer of carbon emissions.

 That goal is expressed in their “15 x 50” graph.

By 2050, Bruce King and Chris Magwood say, the construction industry can and should sequester a net 15 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide annually. Graphic from Build Beyond Zero, Island Press, 2022, page 238.

A wide range of building materials are now or can become net storers of carbon – and those that can’t must be rapidly phased out of production or minimized.

The bulk of Build Beyond Zero consists of careful examination of major categories of building materials, plus consideration of different stages including construction, demolition, or disassembly and re-use.

Concrete – by far the largest category of building material by weight and by current emissions –is a major focus of research. King and Magwood outline many methods that are already available to reduce the carbon intensity of concrete production, as well as potential methods that could allow the net storage of carbon within concrete.

Equally important, though, are construction materials that can reduce and in some cases eliminate the use of concrete – for example, adobe and rammed earth walls and floors.

By far the largest share of carbon sequestration in buildings could come from biogenic sources ranging from timber to straw to new materials produced by fungal mycelia or algae.

Harvesting homes

“Tall timber” is a popular buzzphrase for building methods that can sequester carbon within building structures, but King and Magwood are more excited about much smaller plant materials such as wheat straw or rice hulls. Their discussion of the pros and cons of increased use of wood products is enlightening.

“Assessing the degree of carbon storage offered by timber products is not at all straightforward. Far from being the poster child for carbon-storing building, the use of timber in buildings requires a very nuanced understanding of supply chain issues and forest-level carbon stocks in order to be certain we’re not doing harm in the process of trying to do good.” (Build Beyond Zero, page 111)

First, when trees are cut down typically only half of the above-ground biomass makes it into building products; the rest decomposes and otherwise emits its stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Second, particularly where a large stand of trees is clear-cut and the ground is exposed to the elements, much of the below-ground stored carbon also returns to the atmosphere. Third, even once a replacement stand of trees has grown up, a monoculture stand seldom stores as much carbon as the original forest did, and the monoculture is also a big loss for biodiversity.

To the extent that we do harvest trees for construction, then, “We need to take responsibility for ensuring that we are growing forests at a rate that far exceeds our removals from them. Notice that we are talking about growing forests and not just planting trees.” (page 115)

This careful nuance is not always evident in their discussion of agricultural residues, in my opinion. The “15 X 50” goal includes the conversion of huge quantities of so-called “residues” – wheat straw, rice hulls, and sunflower stalk pith, to give a few examples – into long-lasting building materials. But what effects would this have on the long-term health of agricultural soils, if most of these so-called residues are routinely removed from the agricultural cycle rather than being returned to the soil? What level of such total-plant harvesting is truly sustainable?

Yet there is obvious appeal in the use of more fast-growing small plants as building material. Straw can sequester about twice as much carbon per hectare per year as forests do, while “the carbon sequestration and storage efficiency of hemp biomass is an order of magnitude higher than that of trees or straw.” (page 99)

There are many existing methods to turn small plants into building materials, ranging from structural supports to insulation to long-lasting, non-toxic finishes. It is reasonable to hope for the creation of many more such building materials, if industry can develop new carbon-emissions-free adhesives to help shape fibers and particles into a myriad of shapes. King and Magwood note that existing industrial practices are likely to act as hurdles in this quest:

“Nature provides plenty of examples and clues for making nontoxic bioadhesives in species such as mussels and spiders. However, the introduction and scaling of these potentially game-changing materials is so far hampered in the same way as bioplastics: by an extremely risk-averse construction industry and by a petrochemical industry keen to keep and expand market share ….” (page 162) 

Straw-bale construction project in Australia, 2012. Photo by Brett and Sue Coulstock, accessed via Flickr under Creative Commons license.

We don’t have 30 more years

Build Beyond Zero is a comprehensive and clear overview of construction practices and their potential climate impact in the near future. It does not, however, provide any “how-to” lessons for would-be builders or renovators to use in their own projects. For that purpose, both King and Magwood have already published extensively in books such as Essential Hempcrete Construction: The Complete Step-by-Step Guide; Essential Prefab Straw Bale Construction: The Complete Step-by-Step Guide; and Buildings of Earth and Straw: Structural Design for Rammed Earth and Straw Bale Architecture.

In Build Beyond Zero, King and Magwood offer an essential manifesto for anyone involved in commissioning or carrying out construction or renovation, anyone involved in the production of building materials, anyone involved in the establishment or modification of building codes, anyone involved in construction education.

It’s time for everyone involved with construction to become climate-literate, and to realize that upfront carbon emissions from buildings are as important if not more important than operating emissions during the buildings’ lifetimes. It’s time to realize that construction, perhaps more than most industries, has the capability of going beyond zero to become a significant net storer of carbon.

That opportunity represents an urgent task:

“It has taken more than 30 years for energy efficiency to approach a central role in building sector education …. We can’t wait that long to teach people how to make carbon-storing buildings. If we follow the usual path, the climate will be long past repair by the time enough designers and builders have learned how to fix it.” (page 173)

With global greenhouse gases already at catastrophic levels, we have dug ourselves into a deep hole and it’s nowhere near enough to gradually slow down and then stop digging deeper – we also need to fill that hole, ASAP.

As Build Beyond Zero puts it, “‘Getting to zero,” to repeat one more time, is a lousy goal, or anyway incomplete. You make a mess, you clean it up, as my mother would say. You don’t just stop messing, you also start cleaning.”

Photo at top of page: Limestone quarry and cement kiln, Bowmanville Ontario, winter 2016.