Tennessee Legislators: Do the Right Thing

Thanks to the Johnson City Press for printing my letter Sunday:

Mountaintop mining

There is a grave injustice in our land. Its name is mountaintop removal strip mining. Five hundred mountains have had their tops blown off and the rubble disposed into streams. Forests are destroyed. Habitats are destroyed. Streams are polluted. Human lives are ruined.

It leaves devastation and poverty in its wake as well as fat profits for coal companies. It is coming to Tennessee unless our legislators act now.

This is not a jobs vs. environment issue. This destructive mining practice has reduced the number of mining jobs. This is not an economy vs. the environment issue. Our economy thrives on the natural beauty of our mountains and the industries that benefit from them such as tourism, hunting, and fishing. Some of the poorest counties in our nation are those with mountaintop removal strip mining. Mountaintop removal benefits the profits of outside coal companies. That’s it.

This is not merely an environmental issue. This is a moral issue. This is an issue of right and wrong regarding our descendants and stewardship of creation. This current generation has no right to destroy these mountains for short-term gain and for profit. Blowing off the tops of our mountains is not economically viable. It is not energy sustainable. It is not environmentally responsible. Mountaintop removal strip mining destroys lives, habitats, homes and leaves your grandchildren and mine with desolation.

The majority of Tennesseans do not want our mountaintops destroyed for coal. I call on our senators and representatives each to examine his or her moral compass.

You know this is wrong. Do the right thing.

THE REV. JOHN SHUCK

First Presbyterian Church

Elizabethton

Big Coal Buys Out Control of Vista Act

Here is an excellent opinion piece by Robert Houk of the Johnson City Press in today's Press, Big Coal Has Bought Out Control of Vista Act.

A popular mantra among many Republicans has been, “Drill, baby, drill!” Now we are hearing: “Blast, baby, blast!”

There are many in this state who don’t want to see the tops of their mountains blown off to get to a little bit of coal. Unfortunately, they are not represented in the state General Assembly.

The issue came up again last week when a bill that was originally written to expressly prohibit mountaintop coal removal in Tennessee was amended and passed in the state Senate’s Energy and Environment Committee to allow for the opposite. Sponsors of the amendment to Tennessee Scenic Vistas Protection Act say their measure adopts the U.S. Department of Interior’s definition of mountaintop removal.

Now really, what could be wrong with that? After all, opponents of the mountaintop coal removal ban have long argued that Tennessee law already forbids the practice. This harmless little amendment to a bill that the mining industry has held up in committee for years just further codifies what is already in the law.

Don’t be fooled by the clever semantics that are being used to distract from the real purpose of the amendment. The truth is the Tennessee Scenic Vistas Act has been hijacked by Big Coal to allow mining companies to blast off the tops of mountains in Tennessee.

One local environmentalist told me last week the amendment would allow mining companies to remove mountaintops as long as ‘they pile the rubble back on to re-form the original contours.”

This is a practice known in the industry as cross ridge mining, and as long as valley fill is not involved then it is not classified as “mountaintop removal.”

Whatever you want to call it, the end results are the same. Dawn Coppock, the legislative director for LEAF (Lindquist Environmental Appalachian Fellowship), said the amended bill repeats a federal law on what coal companies can do with “overburden,” which she calls a “sad industry pseudonym” for what is left of a mountain after it is blasted apart.

If the amended Tennessee Scenic Vistas act becomes law, environmentalists fear the measure will spell doom for ridgelines in Claiborne, Campbell and Anderson counties, where 98 percent of all coal in Tennessee is mined.

“The bill, as amended, says that there is no mountain top removal so long as the coal industry molds the rubble into the ‘approximate original contour,’ ” Coppock said. “The Northern Cumberland Plateau is not known for ‘approximate original mountains.’ It is known for some of the oldest and most beautiful mountains on this earth, molded not by engineers and bulldozers, but by the hands of God himself.”

Not surprisingly, Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey praised the amendment as a sensible compromise that protects Tennessee’s mountains while allowing mining companies to continue to do business in this state.

“After years of controversy on this issue, I believe we have finally reached a point that all honest stakeholders in this process can be proud of,” said Ramsey, who has collected more than $195,000 in campaign contributions from coal companies in recent years.

Not so fast. Some of those “stakeholders” say Ramsey is not being honest when he says all interested parties have had an equal place at the negotiation table. They say the coal mining industry has clearly purchased a seat at the head of the table.

Meanwhile, environmental groups weren’t allowed anywhere near the bargaining table.

“He (Ramsey) appears to be is calling the advocates of protecting our ridgelines, like LEAF, dishonest,” Coppock said. “This is ironic in light of the circumstances.”

Coppock said LEAF and other organizations will continue to oppose any efforts to allow mountaintop coal removal in Tennessee. She said the group’s efforts to ban the practice “is not a shell game or semantics.”

The bill is expected to move through the General Assembly with ease, now that it has been buoyed by the pro-mining industry amendment.

This is no longer a bill to protect Tennessee’s precious vistas and watersheds from molestation and contamination. It’s now about jobs and profits. As Ramsey famously told a TV reporter in Nashville a few years ago, “Profits are not a bad word.”

But despite all the talk of the coal mining jobs that would be protected by the amended Tennessee Scenic Vistas Act (which is estimated to number 400 at this time), I’ve not heard a single word regarding what the bill’s passage will cost Tennessee in regard to lost tourism dollars. Torn up mountains are not exactly conducive for growing the state’s emerging eco-tourism industry.

Robert Houk is Opinion page editor for the Johnson City Press. He can be reached at rhouk [at] johnsoncitypress.com 

Time For A Rebellion

On Sunday I preached what I think was my most important sermon.   At least I think I said what was most heartfelt.   The future (at least in the coming decades and perhaps the next couple of centuries) looks to be very rough for humanity.   If you wonder why I say that, I refer you to a common theme on this blog, the problem with "growth".   

Here is a film that captures in 34 minutes the basics of the problem.  It is produced by Incubate Pictures in cooperation with The Post-Carbon Institute.  It is your midnight movie.

The next couple of centuries will be rough. We are currently at the beginning but in the zone of this major change, which is overshoot due to exponential growth. Whatever happens to me is no big deal. I plan on dying. That is a darn good plan since I will die at some point regardless of my plans.

Given death, or to put a positive spin on it, given that one day I will enter The Great Peace, I would like to live this life in a way that matters. I would like to be, in the words of Nancy Abrams, an "honorable" ancestor.

I am not completely sure what "honorable" might mean. I have no idea what I should do or what I should say. I think at least I should care. The best epitaph I can think of for my tombstone is:

Well, at least he gave a shit.

I do care. I care about the twenty-somethings and younger who will inherit this mess in the immediate future and will have to roll with the crumbling of industrial civilization however that cookie happens to crumble. Their offspring will be born into a very different world than the one most of us know today.

I care that human beings will somehow manage to survive all the catastrophes ahead and preserve enough knowledge and hope to keep eating, breeding, and surviving, so that a remnant may start again in a few centuries and be the green shoot that will flourish for millions of years.

Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams who will be my guests on an upcoming radio program compare this burst of human growth in the last two centuries with cosmic inflation in the first second of the universe. It is an analogy of course. But the idea is that after the cosmic inflation, the universe grew steadily and slowly. In alike manner, after this industrial inflation in which the human population shot up from a billion to seven billion (and growing), it too, will settle into a long, slow period of growth.

I don't know. I find that interesting and hopeful.

What I think is my task, and perhaps you have thought along similar lines, is to encourage each other to talk about that which we don't talk about much, our future, our long-term future, our thousands of generations in the future future. Not only talk about it, but imagine it. And then, maybe get our politicians to imagine it. 

Fossil-fuel powered growth is a dead end.  A. literal. dead. literal. end.   They talk incessantly about continuing it.   Not one tells us the truth.   Let us tell the truth they cannot yet tell.

It is time for everyone, the whole world, to care about our long-term future and to plan together for it. This past Sunday I used this passage from the book written by Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel Primack, The New Universe and the Human Future. I found it inspiring. Maybe you will as well.

Here is a hypothetical fragment of an origin story from the distant future.

“Everyone in the Galaxy came from one little planet called Earth. The cooperative genius of a small group of ancient earthlings made them rebel against the robotic march to death that the majority was on—to use up the planet with no plan for the future. It was the acquisition in the early twenty-first century of the ability to see into the cosmically distant past and thus project far into the future that allowed the rebels to grasp the meaning of their own evolution from the first available scientifically cosmic perspective. The rebels saw the implications of what a few scientists were already suggesting but had not yet fully appreciated: that intelligent beings on Planet Earth were cosmically central, living at a pivotal moment in time, and had a potential destiny as vast as the cosmic past if they would only protect it. This awakening led to the great conversion from short-term fragmented identities to the first serious long-term species identity. Those early rebels changed the course of history and led to the Galactic community of our time.”

Let’s keep that story possible.

Be a rebel.

Time in a Bottle

In this segment, Dr. Albert Bartlett uses an illustration from the Boulder, Colorado city council to show how steady growth leads to catastrophic outcomes.

When he was making this video (1999), city council members were discussing what would be an acceptable population growth rate. One figure considered was 5% per year. 70/5% means that the population would double every 14 years. If that growth rate were to continue, Boulder, in one lifetime would be about the size of Los Angeles.

As he points out, you couldn't fit LA into the Boulder valley. Obviously, Boulder's growth will stop.

The only question is will we be able to stop it while there's still some open space or will we wait until it is wall to wall people and we're all choking to death?

He put up this interesting headline from the Denver Post:

Colorado has a three percent growth rate...that's like a third world country with no birth control.

Dr. Bartlett says:

We send foreign aid--family planning assistance--to countries that have smaller population growth rates than Colorado has.

Dr. Bartlett uses this example to show how short-sighted we are in regards to growth and how even city council members do not understand basic arithmetic. Then Dr. Bartlett talks about bacteria.

Imagine bacteria growing steadily in a bottle. They double in number every minute. At 11:00 a.m. there is one bacterium in the bottle. At 12:00 noon the bottle is full.

It has a doubling time of one minute. It is in a finite environment of one bottle. He asks three questions:

1) What time was the bottle half full?

Answer: 11:59.

The bacteria double every minute. Second question:

2) If you were an average bacterium in the bottle at what time would first realize that you were running out of space?

Before he gives the answer he reminds us that this type of steady growth is the centerpiece of the entire global economy.

To answer question two, he provides this table:

Table II. The last minutes in the bottle.
11:54 a.m.	1/64 full (1.5%)	63/64 empty
11:55 a.m.	1/32 full (3%)	31/32 empty
11:56 a.m.	1/16 full (6%)	15/16 empty
11:57 a.m.	1/8 full (12%)	7/8 empty
11:58 a.m.	1/4 full (25%)	3/4 empty
11:59 a.m.	1/2 full (50%)	1/2 empty
12:00 noon	full (100%)	0% empty

He returns to the Boulder argument. Someone wrote a letter saying that growth in Boulder is not a problem because there is 15 times the amount of space that Boulder has already used.

So what time is it in Boulder? The answer? Four minutes before 12, when the bottle is 1/16 full.

Suppose that at 11:58 some of the bacteria realize they are running out of space. So they launch a great search for new bottles. They search offshore on the outer continental shelf, in the overthrust belt and in the arctic, and they find three new bottles.

This is an amazing find. They have four times as many bottles. Surely, this will give them a sustainable society, says Bartlett. Right? Question 3:

3) How long can the growth continue as a result of the discovery of three new bottles; this quadrupling of the proven resource?

Answer:

At 11:59 the bottle is half-full.
At 12:00 the bottle is full.
At 12:01 two bottles are full.
At 12:02 all four bottles are full.

Game over. Dr. Bartlett tells us that we don't need any more arithmetic than that to address what we hear from the experts that we can go on growing and increasing our consumption of fossil fuels because we will discover new resources to meet the requirements.

Turning to energy, Bartlett quotes former energy secretary, James Schlesinger:

In the energy crisis, "we have a classic case of exponential growth against a finite resource." (Time Magazine, April 25, 1977).

How much oil is there? When do we use it? In the 1960s and 1970s the consumption was 7 percent per year. Doubling time = 10 years.

This percent growth did not continue because OPEC raised its prices. But say it did continue. How long would 7% consumption last?

In 1973 we consumed 20.4 billion barrels of oil. 334 billion barrels since oil was discovered approximately 100 years before that, leaving us with 1765 billion barrels. That is data. The rest is projection of 7% per year.

Year	Barrels Produced	Cumulative Use	Amount Left
1973	20.4	334	1765
1981*	35.1	559	1540
1991*	69.1	1078 (half gone)	1022
2001*	135.9	2100	0

Had we continued at 7%, in 1981 we would have had three times as much left in reserve than we would have used in all of history. A lot of oil. From our bacteria in a bottle example, what time is it when you have three times as much reserve compared to what was used? Two minutes before twelve.


Doubling usage every ten years (7% increase in production per year) would have depleted the oil in two decades.

The segment concludes at this point. We will pick this up next time.



Questions for discussion:
1) Where are we now in real numbers of barrels of oil?
2) What is our percentage rate of growth?
3) What time is it?

Zero Population Growth Will Happen

In this next installment, Dr. Bartlett continues with examples of the exponential function. He talks about world population.

On July 7, 1986, the news reports indicated that the world population had reached 5 billion people growing at a rate of 1.7% per year.

That doesn't sound like much. You calculate the doubling time 70/1.7% = 41 years.

In 1999, the world population had reached 6 billion, but growing at 1.3% per year. Doubling time = 53 years. However, Earth adds 80 million new humans every year.

Dr. Bartlett extrapolates this modest 1.3% per year growth to the future.

If this modest 1.3% per year could continue, the world population would reach a density of one person per square meter on the dry-land surface of the earth in 780 years. And the mass of people would equal the mass of the earth in just 2400 years.

Dr. Bartlett points out that we smile at that. We know that won't happen. Why? Because, eventually zero population growth is going to happen. We can debate whether or not we like it. Regardless, it will happen. Today's high birth rates will drop and low death rates will rise far sooner than 780 years.

Then he asks, "What sort of options are available if we want to address the problem?" He offered this

Table of Options

Increase Populations Decrease Populations

Procreation	Abstention
Motherhood	Contraception Abortion
Large Families	Small Families
Immigration	Stopping Immigration
Medicine Public Health Sanitation	Disease
Peace	War
Law and Order	Murder Violence
Scientific Agriculture	Famine
Accident Prevention	Accidents
Clean Air	Pollution (smoking)
Ignorance of the Problem

The items on the left are the good things we do that lower the death rate. But anything we do that lowers the death rate makes the problem worse. The things on the right are those things that are going to solve the problem. We have a dilemma. Those things on the left we regard as good and sacred. Those things on the right (murder, war, famine, disease) we do not want.

Now, the point. We eventually are going to reach zero population growth. Nature will choose from those items on the right. Dr. Bartlett says:

We don't have to do anything except be prepared to live with whatever nature chooses from that right hand list. Or we can exercise the one option that is open to us: choose something from the right hand list that we can go out and campaign for.

Nature is already choosing. AIDS is one example. Famine and war are others. He asks an interesting question: where is education on this table? Is it on the right hand column or left? He thinks that so far, it is on the left. Education has not addressed this problem.

He doesn't mention religion, but I'll let you be the judge.

It appears to me that the best item on the right would involve decreasing birth rates. It seems that we ought to be campaigning for contraception and family planning and reorient our values so that every child born is a wanted child.

Or we can let nature take its course. And it will.

The Meaning of Life, Part 9

"Sustainable growth is an oxymoron, because if you just look at the arithmetic of steady growth, the numbers become astronomically large in modest periods of time, so you can't have steady growth."
--Dr. Albert Bartlett


On the sidebar, I have two resources of interest.

1. Chris Martenson's Crash Course.
2. Dr. Albert Bartlett's Arithmetic, Population and Energy.
   

The first is a helpful summary of economics, energy, and the environment. It is done in a series of twenty lectures of varying length. To watch it all will take about three hours. Martenson is an interesting guy.

This is from his web page:

First of all, I am not an economist. I am trained as a scientist, having completed both a PhD and a post-doctoral program at Duke University, where I specialized in neurotoxicology. I tell you this because my extensive training as a scientist informs and guides how I think. I gather data, I develop hypotheses, and I continually seek to accept or reject my hypotheses based on the evidence at hand. I let the data tell me the story.

It is also important for you to know that I entered the profession of science with the intention of teaching at the college level. I love teaching, and I especially enjoy the challenge of explaining difficult or complicated subjects to people with limited or no background in those subjects. Over the years I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

After I watched the first couple of segments, I skipped to number 20 What Should I do? He doesn't provide particulars, but he offers a commonsense way of evaluating your present situation so you can make decisions and begin the process of coming to terms with what we very well could be facing in these next twenty years.

After that, I went back to watch the rest of the presentation. Because it is divided into easy to navigate topics, you can go back particular areas. His website has many resources for you to discover more about an issue.

If you haven't heard of this guy before, I am glad to offer his crash course to you as a Christmas present as he has given it to us and someone gave it to me.

It may not be helpful for you. You may reject his information. You may accept his information but decide it is too bothersome and depressing and you would rather hope for a miracle. Or you may need to take time for it to sink in and take root. Whatever you decide, you will be making a wager. He explains that in chapter 20.

The second resource is a 70 minute lecture in eight nine-minute youtube videos by Dr. Albert Bartlett. You can read a transcript of Arithmetic, Population, and Energy as well. Dr. Bartlett taught physics at the University of Colorado. The lecture on YouTube is one he gave to college students. He offers information on population, exponential growth, and energy. It isn't hard to follow.

Again, you can argue with it and reject it. You can accept it and get depressed, or you can accept it and say, "Time for an adventure." Here is a nineteen minute video interview with Dr. Bartlett at the 2005 ASPO Conference (Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas). The real issue he is addressing is human population.

There are many, many resources regarding these issues on the internet. Martenson is a good place to start as he has taken the last four years to research and present this information in an easy to follow format. Bartlett's lecture has stood the test of time. He continues to present and update the lecture he first gave in 1969.

These two resources offer good basics. Again, Martenson's Crash Course takes a little over three hours. Bartlett's video takes a little over an hour. From there, we can explore all over. It is possible that you are way ahead of me on this and can offer resources and wisdom of your own. I welcome that.

What do I hope to get from blogging about this?

I have some beliefs. They include:

1. We are in for massive change within the next few decades, in my lifetime.
   
2. Our institutions (education, government, media, corporate, church) are in denial. Apparently, it is in their short term interest not to educate the public about what we are facing.

Those are two of my beliefs. I might be wrong. I could end up looking very foolish if none of the things Martenson, Bartlett, and others describe come to pass. It is possible that the invisible hand of economics and technology will allow us to consume and grow as we have been doing indefinitely. If I am wrong about my beliefs, I'll eat a crow and will gladly do so.

I have three more beliefs.

1. Human beings are creative, compassionate, hopeful, and industrious. When they know what they are facing, they can deal with it.
2. One hundred years from now, our descendents will enjoy a sustainable relationship with Earth if our generation doesn't destroy it because of ignorance and fear.
3. The institutions I named above may implode or become severly weakened before they can help. It is wise for us to think in terms of lifeboats, both individually and socially.
   

Lifeboats are the commonsense actions we can take individually and collectively so that we can be supports rather than burdens or helpers for those who will need help.

I also have some spiritual beliefs and practices. I know this might sound spooky for my atheist friends, but I will try to put it in secular terms.

1. Lightheartedness. Here is a wonderful definition: Lightheartedness is the ability to keep your sense of humor as you face life’s most difficult challenges. It is a spiritual quality associated with inner strength, faith, and the ability to face life’s adversities with a positive mental attitude. Finally, it’s a sign of courage and the ability to inspire others when, together, you are facing a difficulty that is overwhelming.
2. Deep compassion. This is the quality that allows us to feel with others--to be present to those who are suffering. The Bodhissatva who refuses nirvana in order to serve others is a good example. Of course, Jesus is an example of compassion in the Christian tradition.
3. Non-violence. This will be especially important as governments beat war drums over resources. It is also a personal discipline that refuses to harm in word or action other living things.
4. Detachment. Also called letting go, this discipline allows us to accept change and not cling to old habits, beliefs, or entitlements. In the Jewish tradition it refers to making no idols out of impermanent things or ideas.
   
5. Hope. This is the discipline to work toward a future we will personally never experience. It is to live and work for one's descendents seven generations in the future. It allows us to deal with reality while keeping us from self-concern for our own survival.
6. Awe and Delight. Related to lightheartedness, this practice of being aware opens us to the joyous, unexpected, marvelous existence all around us.
7. Creativity. Synergy may be another word for this. This allows for the possibility that we have strengths yet untapped and that together we can produce outcomes greater than the sum of our individual efforts.
   

Whew. Wordy today. Give a preacher a blog and the night never ends. I know I offer this a lot. But I never get tired of The Galaxy Song!

I Wish We Had Listened

We all know the phenomenon of remembering what we were doing when major events happened. We know what we were doing when we first heard about 9/11 for instance. These events are important enough to be burned into our memories.

I remember this event, although I didn't think of it until today, as an event like 9/11, the moon landing, and the start of the Gulf War. I remember it clearly.

I was fifteen and sitting on the couch next to my mother. My father was in his chair. We were watching television. On the screen was President Jimmy Carter. He was very serious. My parents were serious as they watched. It was Jimmy Carter's energy speech.

Jimmy Carter was the only president to tell us the truth. We rewarded him by voting him out of office and electing an actor who told us what we wanted to hear even though it was a lie. No president including our new president-elect has told us the truth about our economic and energy situation.

Had we listened in 1977, we could be in a very different place than where we are today. Instead we wasted 30 years and the problem has increased exponentially. It would be great if Obama gives a speech like Carter's within a week or so after his inauguration (updated of course to reflect current realities). I am not holding my breath. He appears to be as committed to deceiving us as much as all of our presidents since Carter.

It is up to us to suck it up, get informed, and tell others. Most people will not listen. But, a few will. Our current economic situation may make people more susceptible to listen. What we can listen to if we will is not opinions (although there are many opinions) but facts. This information is available all over the internet. It is a click away. This is not conspiracy stuff. It is basic factual information an elementary student can understand.

The reason we cannot hear it is because we are not emotionally equipped to listen. We cannot let go of our illusion. We cannot let go of our feeling of entitlement. We cannot bear the thought of what these changes might mean.

In order to face this, we have to face it as though we are in exciting times and that we are on an adventure. We have to step back and not let our emotions control us. We have to be somewhat philosophical and connect with that reservoir of spiritual strength.

I am 47. I consider that I have lived my life. Thanks to this 150 year petroleum blip in human history, I have lived (as have you) like the kings and queens of old. Now I am dedicated to our future generations.

If I have a mission it is to use my credentials as a minister to tap into our emotional and spiritual courage so we may listen to those who are presenting us with the facts of our current situation.

The most important thing is to be emotionally prepared.

Unless we are emotionally equipped to face reality we will rationalize facts to fit an illusion that gives us comfort--even if it kills us.

In addition to the usual nonsense I post on this blog, I am going to be reporting about what experts have been telling us and showing us about our future. Hopefully, I am going to present it in such a way that we can see it as an adventure. The future will need cool heads and creativity.

Here is the speech from Jimmy Carter.

The President's Proposed Energy Policy

Jimmy Carter, April 18, 1977

Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.

It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century.

We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.

We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us. (read more)