Book Review of Hope Jahren's The Story of More(2020)

Hope Jahren PhD is an utterly engaging and easy to read author of scientific subjects. Her first Book “Lab Girl” was a NYT bestseller dealing with her scientific and teaching career.

The Story of More is her latest short book published this year(2020). The sub title”How we got to climate change and where to go from here” is in some ways incomplete but I’ll give you her slow to evolve conclusions: Burning fossil fuels releasing carbon dioxide is generating global warming.  ‘’ll also give you her “where to go from here” segment: USE LESS and SHARE MORE.”:

    The structure of the book is uniquely hers if not anthropocentric. She was born in 1969 in a small town in southern Minnesota whose economy had one big employer, the “Hog Kill”, a meat processor operating in a rural region encircled by corn and soybean fields. She uses her lifetime to show how the world had changed in her 51 years. Early in the book she said we have 4 resources: “Earth, the sky, the ocean and ourselves”. This is not a unique idea as the ancients said the key elements were earth, air, fire, and water. Notice that the ancients did not consider “ourselves” an important element nor do I. I regard “ourselves” as part of the problem.

   Hope breaks her book into 4 parts: (1)Life, who, how and where we are

(2)Food: for these inhabitants: grains, meat fish. (3) Energy: and its impacts on us and the planet and  and (4) more impacts on same, including melting icecaps, rising seas, changing weather etc..

    Her book is an extensive data recital of human resource consumption of the planet and the alterations it has induced. She uses no footnotes but offers a complete source list of her data at the end of the book; She includes no graphs or pictures which might have been useful. Her writing style is conversational at times humorous and digresses occasionally into her upbringing and teaching and research career and unrelated topics such as her chapter on high fructose corn syrup and its impact on diet and health.

   Her conclusions and recommendations at the end mirror the title. She says that the world population has doubled, while energy use has tripled since she was born in 1969 and that it will probably “never have less than 7 billion people.” Her recommendation to solve these looming risks to the planet are an egalitarian sharing of these resources as a means of combating inequality of access to opportunity, health, education and communal happiness.   It is a sunny view of life reflecting her optimistic outlook.

  I feel that as a reviewer I must point out shortcomings and omissions in her treatise.

My biggest critique of her book is that while she has an entire section dealing with energy, she misses its significance on how it altered the world in the last 250 years of the Industrial Revolution. She misses the WHY and HOW of the changes on the earth wrought by the availability of the unexpected but the all too brief energy bonanza of fossil fuels. For example the population explosion occurred first and foremost because of the availability of industrial food production, processing, and distribution of food and goods made possible by the concentrated energy of oil, particularly diesel oil. She also makes the common mistake of how many of these fossil resources remain to be discovered   and consumed as she conflates “resources” and “reserves.” Nowhere in the book does she address the Economy and the role of energy. Bluntly, Energy IS the Economy and  fossil energy consumption is the root of all the positive and negative changes  made to human civilization and the natural world. She may very well be aware of all of this but it is absent from the book. She entirely lacks an ecological perspective of the world and all its living components such as concepts of “carrying capacity” or “Overshoot and collapse.” Reference her statement that “The earth may never have less than 7 billion people.”  Hope Jahren gets many factors well integrated into her arguments but her naively optimistic Kumbaya conclusions at the end of the book were unconvincing to this reader.

   Nevertheless the book is an excellent primer on providing a broad perspective on many of the processes and products altering climate. She concludes by recommending individual responsibility in the developed nations to consume not more but less of the fruits of our industrial civilization.

 

 

The Plastic Problem

          

                                                                                                                                                                         In previous posts I have covered decarbonization of energy and it is high time to continue to look at the  complex interconnected global industrial system focusing on one of its dominant components: Plastics. It is past time to cover Dematerialization of plastics.

      Who can forget the key line of the 1967 movie The Graduate,when Dustin Hoffman got the famous advice for his career: “Plastics.”

Back in 1967 plastics were known and utilized in society but who would have expected that plastics would within 50 years become such a dominant industrial substrate and worldwide pollutant and contributor to species extinction and CO2 emission induced climate change? Plastic pollution is now on the radar of environmentalists but I see little in the way of restricting plastic use anywhere outside of some insignificant silliness like banning plastic straws. Less silly are some decent first steps like banning plastic bags. One nation, Vanuatu, has in fact recently banned plastic bags nationally and is attempting to add many other plastic product bans to their list. Other nations such as Chile have made efforts in the same direction which no surprise has been fought vigorously by the plastic industry.

Which companies are the dominant polluters of our oceans and waterways. Greenpeace and some other environmental organizations have compiled worldwide oceanic surveys and here are worst of the worst:

1. Coca-Cola
2. PepsiCo
3. Nestlé
4. Danone
5. Mondelez International
6. Procter & Gamble
7. Unilever
8. Perfetti van Melle
9. Mars Incorporated
10. Colgate-Palmolive

As soon as the spotlight was on them, many of these companies scrambled through their PR Departments to pledge better recycling in the future but virtually none offered to remove plastic entirely from their packaging. This is patent nonsense of course. Most plastics are not recycled and many countries starting with China have stopped accepting unsorted plastic trash for recycling. The whole recycling movement is largely a bogus feelgood scam to make consumers assuage their guilt about plastic use in their lives. This writer’s opinion is that most plastic recycling is a waste of time and energy and does nothing to reduce the USE OF PLASTIC in our lives. Another factor is that the price for Ethane, the feedstock has hit rock bottom in the past several tears making recycling economically pointless. Here is a recent graph from the EIA of current prices for the main natural gas liquids:                         

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/_hydrocarbon-gas-liquids/prices-for-hydrocarbon-gas-liquids.php.     The only way to get rid of single use plastic pollution is to stop producing it! Who are the biggest producers of  PE/PP plastics?

Top Plastic Manufacturing Companies in USA – Manufacturers of Plastics and Plastic Goods

Table 2 – Summary of top U.S.A plastics manufacturers

Name	Headquarters	Annual Revenue (Billion $)**	Mkt Cap (Billion $)***
Exxon Mobil	Irving, TX	237.16	308.87
Chevron Corp.	San Ramon, CA	134.78	215.82
DowDuPont Inc.	Midland, MI	62.37	146.67
Eastman Chemical Company	Kingsport, TN	9.51

There are no surprises here if you are familiar with the feedstock for single use plastic: Fossil Fuels. Specifically natural gas. More specifically the Ethane fraction of natural gas which undergoes conversion to Ethylene which becomes the precursor to Poly ethylene(PE), polypropylene(PP) and a myriad of others. It is the polyethylene plastics that are called “Food grade” that dominate plastic pollution and the shocking fact of PE production is that these big oil and gas and chemical companies have been on a massive multi-billion dollar factory construction binge in the past few years primarily along the US Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana to meet the “increasing demand.” One new factory in Texas built by Dow claims to be the world’s largest facility:

HOUSTON (ICIS)–DowDuPont Materials Science, the business division of DowDuPont to be named Dow, on Thursday announced the start-up of its new integrated world-scale ethylene production facility and its new ELITE enhanced polyethylene (PE) production facility, both in Freeport, Texas.

The units will continue to ramp up through the third quarter and are expected to reach full rates in the fourth quarter of 2017.

The ethylene production facility has an initial nameplate capacity of 1.5m tonnes/year. As part of a next wave of investment, capacity will be expanded to 2m tonnes/year, “making it the world’s largest ethylene facility”, the company said.

Exxon Mobil in Baumont Texas has also just completed an enormous facility to produce PE : Here is the PR announcement:

ExxonMobil begins production on Beaumont high-performance polyethylene line

IRVING, Texas – ExxonMobil said today it started production on a new high-performance polyethylene line at its Beaumont, Texas polyethylene plant. The expansion increases plant production capacity by 65 percent or 650,000 tons per year, bringing site capacity to nearly 1.7 million tons per year.

ExxonMobil begins production on Beaumont high-performance polyethylene line

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• Increases polyethylene plant production capacity by 65 percent or 650,000 tons-per-year
• Project supported more than 2,000 temporary jobs and approximately 40 permanent jobs
• Expansion makes Texas the company’s largest polyethylene producer.

Notice that this enormous highly automated computerized facility not only will produce 1.7 million tons of PE but it has created 40 permanent jobs to boot!

If you go on the Industry organization websites you might be aghast as I was to see no sign of industry guilt or responsibility for causing worldwide plastic pollution. It’s not their fault. It harks back to the old NRA phrase that “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Dow doesn’t cause plastic pollution. People cause plastic pollution.

This blogger has a pessimistic outlook of any meaningful chances for measures to mitigate climate change because of the lack of leverage and pressure points to alter the growth paradigm but I feel that that is not the case with plastic pollution. There are many measures that we as individuals can do and many individuals and organizations now having an effect at the local and state level. There needs to be a national and international initiative to END ALL USE OF SINGLE USE PLASTICS WORLDWIDE. That means that any new plastics factories being built to produce single use plastics need to be stopped. This will be a hard sell given  the obvious political power of the globalized oil and chemical companies in Texas and Louisiana. The only high paying jobs in the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana are in the petrochemical and Oil and gas industry.  These existing factories might be able to reconfigured to producing different plastic: multiuse, durable and long lasting and not single use garbage. These companies are arguably indifferent to the ecological damage they have caused to the planet for decades and until they are brought to heel by concerted consumer driven pressure, they are unlikely to yield their power and influence. The national grocery chains could play a big role if they leaned on their suppliers en masse and ship their products in bulk, paper or glass and metal. That is the way it was done just 50 years ago and it could be done again. No beverages should be bottled in single use plastic and that includes the worst offender: bottled water. Most people remember the French Bottler Perrier and their iconic light green 1 liter bottles. If plastic containers could be returned for refill and reuse just the way that coca cola reused their beautiful sexy glass  coke bottles, plastic containers could remain in circulation. Put a deposit on the containers. British Columbia has a 10 cent deposit on glass and plastic bottles ut to one liter. Put deposits on containers of all sizes so they can be returned for reuse or incineration! The problem of course is that sterilization and reuse of plastic containers is problematic at least for polyethylene which disintegrates rapidly compared to many other plastics. It disintegrates into smaller and smaller particles and is  eventually ingested by all living organisms in the food chain. I read recently that most samples of Sea Salt are now contaminated with microplastics.

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Since recycling of plastics is largely a failure, the obvious solution in my opinion is to burn most plastics in efficient furnaces which could include co-generation and electricity generation. It is possible to burn plastics cleanly if they are not co mingled with other household trash because remember: Polyethylene comes from a natural gas fraction:ethane, and any plastics in that family could be burned to generate heat and electricity. David Reed in a letter to the Guardian Newspaper had this to say about burning plastics: “The effort of collecting, transporting and cleaning plastics for possible recycling has largely failed, created much more pollution and contributed massively to climate change. The idea of burning plastics and using the energy to heat our homes was proposed by the plastics company Dow more than 30 years ago: it suggested treating all plastics as “borrowed oil”. At that time, ordinary domestic waste had a calorific value of low-grade coal, so the suggestion was that this plastic waste should be burned in efficient plants with heat recovery and treatment of the gases produced, perhaps even trapping the carbon dioxide produced, rather than trying to recycle the complex (and dirty) mix of plastics.  Today, with higher use of more complex plastics, this makes even more sense. Mixed plastics cannot really be recycled: they are long-chain molecules, like spaghetti, so if you reheat and reprocess them, you inevitably end up with something of lower performance; it’s called down-cycling.”

      This approach to stopping worldwide plastic pollution can succeed using a region by region approach applying pressure at the local and regional level long enough that the packagers and producers will be forced to do the right thing. They are certain to fight tooth and nail using the legal system, the Interstate Commerce Rules and lobbying their political toadies to preserve their wealth and power. If the consumer stops buying their garbage, they will be forced to stop selling it.

Growth is the Cause of Global Climate Change

           

 It is time to get serious about Global Climate Change by looking at the root cause: GROWTH. Global climate change/Warming has been the focus of world wide demonstrations primarily by the youth kickstarted by Times’s person of the year, Gretta Thunberg.  Children will inherit this mess. Most adults don’t get it, especially my baby boomer generation. Almost no politicians get it and most don’t even understand it with many including our president  calling  climate change, the consequence of growth a “hoax”. 37% of adults in a recent poll  said the warming came from increased solar radiation! In this short essay my goal is to show that climate change is merely the symptom. The root cause is exponential increases of population and material consumption what we call GROWTH which has altered the climate. This growth of the economy accelerated exponentially with the onset of the industrial revolution which began two centuries ago and really took off within the past 150 years. This growth was fueled by the discovery and utilization of fossil energy, initially coal followed by oil and gas.  The unprecedented  economic boom after WW 2 in the US was the poster child for this massive transformation in living standards. The ditty at the time urged us to buy and consume, to see the USA in our Chevrolet flying on newly constructed smooth glossy highways linking the shining new sprawling suburbs.  All of the energy for this growth powered by virtually free fossil fuels pouring gasses into the air. Virtually no one then paid attention to the “externalities” of air pollution, loss of farmland, and certainly CO2 emissions which to many of us was just vapor from dry ice in a high school science lab. Initially, few were talking about any negatives to this newly discovered nirvana. Incomes were rising lifting all boats. Income inequality was minimal and except for the beginning of smog in Southern California, what was there not to like about life in America? We were the model and the envy of the world with expanding opportunities, universal education and improving public health. Atmospheric CO2 measured at Mauna Loa was 320 ppm in 1972.. It is important to note that Ice core samples now go back almost 3 million years and no readings exceeded that number.(Ed note: today it is 413 ppm)There were a few brilliant minds who began to question this economic model including a group in Italy called the club of Rome started by David Rockefeller, Aurelio Peccei, and Alexander King  and a group of scientists at MIT led by Jay Forester. There was a growing awareness in the scientific community that unlimited growth on a limited planet was unsustainable. Using the newly developed science of System Dynamics and early modeling on freezer sized IBM computers, the group attempted to explain the likely trajectory of 13 different scenarios of growth examining five different factors which allowed or limited growth: population, pollution, industrial production, agricultural production and natural resources.  In 1972 they published their results in a book called The limits to Growth. It was a  an environmental blockbuster hailed by many, assailed by others.The books central conclusion was that  a finite world could not support infinite growth and expansion without  collapse. The different scenarios’ model runs looked at outcomes when sustainable development was instituted and compared it to outcomes where current development remained unchanged. Now almost 50 years later we can see that the world has followed the unsustainable version and we are entering a period of decline which will result in a collapse of growth this century. It is too late to institute a” sustainable” growth program to prevent collapse. That is not to say that policies to reduce greenhouse gasses shouldn’t be enacted to reduce impacts of climate change. They absolutely should! But to reemphasize my original statement:Global climate change is the  symptom of unlimited growth, not the cause. The lag periods inherent in the biophysics of these myriad  feedback loops guarantee that climate change will continue the rest of this century. If nothing is done to arrest the process, the ultimate outcome could be far worse for the world’s climate. Every ecosystem has a carrying capacity for its members and when that carrying capacity is exceeded there continues to be  overshoot of the population followed by collapse. This is the period we are entering based upon this 50 year old model. Critics of the original model then as well as today refuse to believe the model. As Gore said, it is an inconvenient truth. One group doesn’t want to believe that there are limits to the human experience. Many believe that technology can extend or abrogate these limits if they in fact even exist.  Another group simply doesn’t care and think there is still time to party and loot the environment for profit heedless of the consequences. Some of the rapacious “one percenters” do get it and are fleeing to their fortified island sanctuaries to save themselves leaving the rest of us to our fate.

      It is a mistake that  just climate change has been the sole focus in worldwide demonstrations. Gretta Thunberg  is exceedingly bright and and must certainly grasp that climate change is the symptom and not the cause. In her direct and forceful voice she utilizes shame to try to force emission reductions  as  way of  reducing GROWTH,  which is the cause. The recently concluded  COP25 in Madrid was yet another doomed  conference focusing on a symptom of the problem because at this point  the world is not ready for a conference limiting growth because limiting growth could shrink living standards, cause a depression, shrink the wealth of many countries, corporations, and powerful individuals.  I get it that this is a hot potato so she has attacked the problem indirectly through the back door by seeking to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Green house gas concentrations are increasing because of increasing population, increasing production leading to increasing material consumption fostered by burning fossil fuels to support that consumption. It’s as simple as that. But the growth and “Progress” model is baked into the world’s economic, social and political cake and that is why absolutely nothing has happened to reduce emissions or growth. Bill Clinton once said “no one was ever elected promising less.”

     I am pessimistic that there is any hope that our globalized industrial system will ever reach a consensus on limiting growth or industrial emissions.  For one, the human race has a short discount rate baked into our genes and our brain. We have a short time horizon. We focus on the immediate and discount the distant . The economy and political system operates exactly the same way. Corporate CEOs are rewarded not by the long term success of their companies but by quarterly increases in the stock price or profits. This is greed at work and not a strategy to grow the company long term. Political decisions have  followed that paradigm. We may know that upfront costs might promote benefits down the line to our descendents but up front costs are too expensive costing jobs or profits or increased taxes so the proposals wither and die. That is exactly what has happened with for example the Kyoto accords which were tepid, mild and minimal to begin with. Almost no countries have come close to meeting their obligations and some countries like the US and Canada have scorned the accords and exited in high dudgeon. My pessimism has an important theoretical basis. We now have a  complex globalized interconnected  economic system and not just a disparate collection of independent  countries and the world economic system is like some giant single organism. It is self regulating , and beyond any national control. It is like a shifting amoeba controlled by central banks and mysterious algorithms utilizing incomprehensible derivatives constructed by unknown viziers behind the curtain, like the wizard in the Wizzard of Oz. If Gretta and her supporters want to find where the pressure  points or leverage points are to enact change, where would they look? They are desperately trying to start a worldwide revolution by forcing major change on the entire world. I am afraid this movement will fail just like the Occupy Wall Street movement failed 8 years ago. If she just stuck with trying to enact simple measures to limit greenhouse gas increases it might be possible for the movement to have some impact.  I have some limited simple measures that could be enacted as possible partial solutions. Simply put, my first proposal is to increase the cost of fossil energy.  Reduce emitting carbon from all fossil fuels. Forget carbon offsets. The second is:  soak up this carbon. The first way to reduce emissions is to borrow from Donald Trump’s playbook and put tariffs on fossil fuels. Trump is threatening to put a tariff of 100% on French wines. A federal tariff of 100% on oil gas and coal would be a minimal first start. For example the tax on aviation gas is 19 cents and only 24 cents on commercial jet fuel. State taxes on diesel and gasoline are a fraction of the per gallon cost in the US. Even with a minimal 100% tariff on fuel, the per gallon cost would still be under $5/gallon. The tariff should be raised in stages but it can and should be done immediately .Fuel surcharges in this range have been the rule in European countries for many decades and their energy use per capita is about ½ of Americans as a consequence. The second and more effective way to cut worldwide emissions is to soak it up in plants and soil. A professor at the University of New Mexico in an article a year ago estimated that human generated emissions only account for about 8% of the world wide CO2 rise. This was an astounding assertion.  This is a potential solution big enough to have real impact and yet right now nations are still removing mangroves, draining swamps and marshes and clear cutting forests. These activities must cease and pressure brought to bear on those individuals, companies and nations engaging in these destructive practices to world health. Degradation of the soil by industrial agriculture also contributes mightily to emissions by the application of chemical agents which sterilize the soil, reduce tilth, increase compaction, decrease the percolation and promote wind and water erosion. For example Roundup the most popular herbicide is a potent antibiotic and kills bacteria and fungi in tiny concentrations. Trees and plants not only pull CO2 out of the air to build their stems , roots and leaves and fruits. They pass carbon- rich root exudates which nourish the bacteria, fungi, protozoa,  nematodes, and worms in a healthy humus rich soil. Roundup stops this process cold by sterilizing soil and thereby blocking this carbon transfer. Ban roundup and related herbicides. Simple, Just a stroke of the pen.

   There. I have laid out two possible concrete proposals entirely absent from COP25. What do you think the chances of my proposals being enacted even if proposed by Gretta Thunberg?                                                                                                                             

      I have explained why I think the world is going to ride this horse into the ground because the individual has little impact on the globalized system. That doesn’t mean that there is nothing that an individual can do this century. I have no doubt that this is the century of  decline  and collapse. All civilizations have collapsed but after collapse there will be a chance of rebirth of new ones. Collapse will not be uniform and some regions may experience only mild forms while others experience Armageddon. What we can do is to build resilience into our physical environment  and our cultural and social systems.  Build resilience into our consumption patterns by buying only things of high repairable quality that we absolutely need. Don’t buy new when serviceable used products are available. Build resilience into our soils by organic permaculture practices and consume only locally produced foods cooked in our home kitchens. Limit our travel to essential trips. Avoid flying on the aluminum bird. Build walkable communities with mixed use downtowns. Make sure all new structures are  insulated heavily and oriented properly to the sun to allow solar heating of the interiors and the hot water. This is truly making use of sustainable renewable energy. Forget  government subsidized giant windmills and massive solar farms which have been a failure worldwide delivering only a fraction of their nameplate output to electrical grids not designed for their erratic input. Since 2014, the amount of new “renewable” electric energy has lagged the annual increases in electric consumption. In other words, renewables are not replacing fossil energy. They are not even keeping up! Emissions are continuing to increase. There is nothing green about most forms of this new “green” energy. All of it is built , transported and maintained using only fossil energy to generate only electricity which is merely an evanescent carrier of energy.  Build resilience into the social and cultural fabric by paying attention to neighbors and family needs. Real happiness is getting what you want. If you’re not happy you are not getting what you want. Don’t confuse needs with wants. These simple aphorisms have been the basis of civilizations and religions long before we started burning coal and oil and should form the basis for a new society.

     I am a student of energy and I am well aware of the consequences of my recommendations. The industrial revolution was launched by the sudden one time availability of a new form of concentrated energy which has generated vast increases in wealth, amazing tools and machines, new professions, improvements in public health and education and vast enlargement of commerce and trade worldwide.It is now cooking the planet. In a very real sense, Energy IS the economy. There will be no equivalent substitute for this fossil energy.  Implementation of Gretta’s recommendations would face an array of powerful interests and nations who like the way things are and will fight to keep their wealth and power enabled by cheap energy. 

 I just reread Limits to Growth after 48 years and the accuracy of its World Model predictions is stunning. Read it.