Or, why the smog?

Beijing in 2003

I spent a ton of time over in China in the early 00's.  My passport has two add-on visa packs and a buttload of customs stamps from the Beijing airport.  I think that I have lived there for about a year all told.

So the recent "revelation" that China has an air pollution problem is almost comical to me.  Hell, up top  is a picture that I took out of my hotel window back in 2003.  This was taken on a not so clear day in November.  The buildings that you barely see in the background are less than a quarter mile away.

We, as a country. like sneering at China.  The current round of sneering comes at the expense of the pollution that a newly industrialized country is enduring.  We are so over that here in the US.  Well we should be, the jobs that currently employ Chinese used to be the jobs that caused smogs like this in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles in 1948

We have fresh air because the high-pollution heavy industry isn't located here in the US anymore.  So the smog in Beijing is there because of all the crap that we buy from them.  A major chunk of the pollution is the price China pays for selling us salad shooters.

Another big part is the huge differential between the rich and the poor in this erstwhile "Communist" country.  The rich live in houses that Martha Stewart would approve of.  The poor live in ramshackle, Soviet-era concrete blockhouses or ancient hutongs (though, by the time I left they had been tearing up the hutongs to make way for more skyscrapers) None of which were well heated.   This being said, the poor folk, which constitute around 85% of Chinese use little coal fired heaters burning pressed coal blocks that look like this:

So, the smog produced by actually having a manufacturing policy and wealth distribution that is bad, but might be more equitable than ours, we have pollution.  Stop sneering.

MetalHeads

Following on my prior post, I want to spend some time on the idea of the technologies used in cleaning up the toxic messes left by industry and us consumers.

Metals are nasty things, there are some soils out there that are scary contaminated with lead or arsenic from lazy and/or primitive manufacturing technologies.  But, as in the last posting, the use of these technologies is sadly absent.  I really find the article written for the New York Times back in 1992 to be sadly instructive.  While the technology is there, it just hasn't been deployed at the level needed to fix the problems.  Again, I would posit that the effect that the work has on a corporation's bottom line is much more important than the effect the technology has on the soil.

But what I find most interesting is the little blurb written innocuously at the bottom of this 2005 report by the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

In 2000, a patent was filed by the University of Maryland on the use of alpine pennycress for the phytoextraction of cadmium from soil, and a patent has been granted in Australia. No other similar technologies currently exist for remediation of cadmium contaminated soils using plants.

So, now you begin to see the problem in a bigger picture.  The University of Maryland own the rights to one's use of Pennycress to clean up cadmium.  And if you think for a minute that the University of Maryland isn't dialed into the corporate structure of Dow and the likes, I have a bridge for you.

So, the first obstacle to this is the reluctance of corporations to clean up after themselves, the second obstacle is that the current structure of power will make sure that one pays for the privilege of cleaning up the mess.  That is going to make it tough, but it is surmountable.

My biggest concern is the issue of extracting the metals and returning a safe plant residue into the ecosystem.  A great deal of the time, the sites being cleaned up are slag heaps.  Residue from a prior attempt to glean the metals from a different source.  If the metals are to be removed from the soil, they have to be safely taken from the plant matter prior to recycling the biomass back into the process.

I have run into a dead end trying to find a process that will do this.  Maybe someone is out there who can help.  My only clue is this little graph in an article from China discussing the washing of soils to reduce cadmium and phenanthrene.  I am thinking that this will be the way to process the contaminated plants for return to the system (ain't chelation grand).

Taken from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749108003254

CH3XXX

Try going over to the Archdruid and read his post on what he sees as the necessary technologies for the future.  Now as usual he writes well and his points are well taken.  But in a rare moment of conflict, I find myself in disagreement with the laundry list of technologies that he espouses.

His first wish is bioremediation.   All well and good, but it is a complete technology.  Whe really do know what we need to know.  I was the chief chemist for a bioremediation firm back in the early 90's.  We did fine work are were easily able to clean up sites contaminated with organics.  All this technology takes is time.  Even the most refractory sites can be cleaned of organics by just treating them like a big garden and plowing and fertilizing the hell out of them.  Hell, we even proved that you can get rid of organics in groundwater by injecting nutrients and amino acids into the aquifer.  All the bugs need is some thing to go with the contaminants and they will be happy to suck the stuff up.

But this is necessarily a slow process, for what you are doing is creating a system of controlled evolution that forces the bugs to eat the nasties that you have put there.  The Archdruid seems to think that the technology isn't there or there isn't a complete set of tools to do the job.  The truth is, we have everything we need to fix the organic contamination process.

No, the issue with cleaning up sites contaminated with organics is there, what is not available is the ability to make the people who made the mess clean up after themselves.  Folks who are willing to fuck up the planet are notorious for being unwilling to reverse the damage.

Nope, I think that, when the time comes, and the fossil-fuel industries start grinding down and the world begins to change, the organics will be comfortably accelerated in the cases where it is useful and will self-clean over the course of a couple of centuries in the cases where it isn't.

Now, this little post only applies to organics contamination.  Metals or radioactive contamination is another deal altogether.  I will work on a post to address the problems there.

Dave's on a Downer

I really like Dave Cohen over at Decline of the Empire.  He does write a mean criticism of modern civilization,  but as is the tendency of most folks who dabble in the realm of truth, he does tend to get a little gloomy when he presents the hard numbers (but, who doesn't)

World population milestones (USCB estimates)

Population (in billions)	1		2		3		4		5		6		7		8		9
Year	1804		1927		1960		1974		1987		1999		2012		2027		2046
Years elapsed between milestones	––		123		33		14		13		12		13		15		19

Now, even with my empathy meter for Dave's depression set on high, I still can't quite get to the point where "humanity is fucked".  Because, truth be told, the astronomic numbers for growth of population and CO2 just doesn't seem to be an issue to me because I doubt that they will ever be achieved.

You have to consider the issues in tandem, along with resource depletion, and loss of arable land/fertility.  The greater bulk of humanity is not going to be offered an opportunity to replace itself in the near future.  This simple fact is due to we will soon be approaching hard limits to the ability to feed new population.  The green revolution is petering out and the ability to conjure food out of petroleum will be limited along with the supply of petroleum.   The warming of planet earth due to the waste products of the now-getting-limited petroleum will start to whittle away at the arable land, further decreasing the carrying capacity of the planet.

When the scenario outlined in the previous paragraph (I am referring to this as the "that's going to leave a mark" scenario) starts getting traction, there will be a continuing set of adjustments to population.  Malnutrition will have infant and child mortality skyrocketing.  Malnutrition will also start limiting the birth rate in countries where the birth rate is out of control.   Wars will begin to get access to resources (read here: food), diseases like attacking weakened prey.  The population will decrease.  It will suck.

Population by continent

Continent name	Density (inhabitants/km2)	Population (2011)	Most populous country	Most populous city
Asia	86.7	4,140,336,501	China (1,341,403,687)	Tokyo (35,676,000)
Africa	32.7	994,527,534	Nigeria (152,217,341)	Cairo (19,439,541)
Europe	70	738,523,843	Russia (143,300,000; approx. 110 million in Europe)	Moscow (14,837,510)
North America	22.9	528,720,588	United States (313,485,438)	Mexico City/Metro Area(8,851,080 / 21,163,226)
South America	21.4	385,742,554	Brazil (190,732,694)	São Paulo (19,672,582)
Australia/Oceania	4.25	36,102,071	Australia (22,612,355)	Sydney (4,575,532)
Antarctica	0.0003 (varies)	4,490 (non-permanent, varies)[18]	N/A[note 1]	McMurdo Station (955)[19]

The truth of the matter here is that Professor Ehrlich has always been right.  Population biology will hold to human populations as well as rabbit populations.  Technology won't make a silk purse out of the sow's ear.

But, in my patented "that's going to leave a mark" scenario, the population of good old planet earth will take a tumble.  My guess is that in around 2200 CE the earth will be looking at an principally agrarian human population of around 750 million souls.  All of whom will refer to the period of time from 1900 to 2025 as "Those Fucking Idiots".

But among those 750 million souls will be philosophers, whores, farmers, carpenters, singers, thieves, politicians, religious fanatics, doubting Thomas's. and clowns.

No, the human race will be just fine, hell, we may even learn something from this.

Evolving as a goal

So, there was an article in Der Spiegel recently with an interview by Dennis Meadows, one the authors of  "The Limits to Growth".  Now, those of you who have the poor time management skills needed to make the  effort to regularly read this blog will be fully aware of my abiding respect for this work.  That being said, this isn't a work about how my opinion has changed, but rather, a set of observations on the way that the author and the blogosphere view the world.

The interviewer posits the standard set of questions to Dr. Meadows.  They are all well pitched softballs about the usual suspects:  Human ingenuity, the unexpected advent of a "imagine the profits that would accrue to the inventor of a new, clean and limitless source of energy." scenario.   They are all just ways or trying to make the interviewee look like a gloomy Gus, which in this age of mandatory "power of positive thinking" is the same as painting him a nut.

But there is one quote that stood out in my mind.

Meadows: The problem that faces our societies is that we have developed industries and policies that were appropriate at a certain moment, but now start to reduce human welfare, like for example the oil and car industry. Their political and financial power is so great and they can prevent change. It is my expectation that they will succeed. This means that we are going to evolve through crisis, not through proactive change.

 Now, I can see nothing wrong with this statement.  Homo Sapiens has always evolved in exactly the fashion described.  It is the way of the world, it is no big deal.  We have to reduce the population of the world by quite a significant amount.  What is happening now is that we are trying to definehttp://theautomaticearth.com/Earth/quote-of-the-year-and-the-next.html the method to be used in the cull.  Our problems lie in the arenas of energy use, resource depletion, and overpopulation.  We tend to fixate on a secondary characteristic of financial crisis, but in truth, that is merely an epiphenomenon secondary to the big three.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when Raúl Meijer over at the Automatic Earth took a look at the same article.  He did steal my end piece by getting there first and anticipating my conclusions, and then he had the gall to write them down in a more polished and erudite manner than I possibly could.

We evolve the way Stephen Jay Gould described evolution: through punctuated equilibrium. That is, we pass through bottlenecks, forced upon us by the circumstances of nature, only in the case of the present global issues we are nature itself. And there's nothing we can do about it. If we don't manage to understand this dynamic, and very soon, those bottlenecks will become awfully narrow passages, with room for ever fewer of us to pass through. 

As individuals we need to drastically reduce our dependence on the runaway big systems, banking, the grid, transport etc., that we ourselves built like so many sorcerers apprentices, because as societies we can't fix the runaway problems with those systems, and they are certain to drag us down with them if we let them.

 So here is the nub of the matter.  We are going to be going through a evolutionary bottleneck in the not-too-distant future.  Perhaps I will live to participate, perhaps not.   But if you spend some time reading the works of Darwin and Wallace it seems to me that if Homo Sapiens is going to survive or evolve, it is going to be necessary to adapt quickly and in groups.  That being said, it becomes apparent to me that surrounding oneself with the accouterments of the society that is already failing (read here:  Band-aids, Beans, and Bullets) would not give one any adaptational or evolutionary advantage.

The standard preppers fare is a way to defend a lifestyle that is being killed by reality.  A defensive position will always be overrun.  Especially when the opponent is something as implacable as natural selection.  What is needed is not a physical redoubt, but a mental attitude capable of adapting to change.

Finally:  I found this graph and it made me giggle.  I thought that I would share with you.  A hearty call out to the Sub-Dude