The future has arrived - it's just not evenly distributed.

                                                           - William Gibson

Spiegel, the German news magazine, has a fascinating interview with Pan Yue, China's Deputy Minister of the Environment. It is strikingly candid and blunt, quite unusual for Chinese officials. He cites brutal facts throughout, and is clearly working to draw attention to a serious and growing problem.

An excerpt:

SPIEGEL: Still, each year China is strengthening its reputation as an economic Wunderland.

Pan: This miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace. Acid rain is falling on one third of the Chinese territory, half of the water in our seven largest rivers is completely useless, while one fourth of our citizens does not have access to clean drinking water. One third of the urban population is breathing polluted air, and less than 20 percent of the trash in cities is treated and processed in an environmentally sustainable manner. Finally, five of the ten most polluted cities worldwide are in China.

SPIEGEL: How great are the effects of this environmental degradation on the economy?

Pan: It's massive. Because air and water are polluted, we are losing between 8 and 15 percent of our gross domestic product. And that doesn't include the costs for health. Then there's the human suffering: In Bejing alone, 70 to 80 percent of all deadly cancer cases are related to the environment. Lung cancer has emerged as the No. 1 cause of death.


China's population growth has placed them at the forefront of environmental pressures, a window on the world's future. They are approaching or hitting the ceilings of available resources in several critical areas - water, fuel, food. How they deal with this will be instructive for the rest of the world.

Hopping over to the United Kingdom, we have an essay by Dominic Kennedy that claims walking to the shops damages the environment more than going by car. The essence of the argument:

"Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes."

Note: I am not advocating that people become couch (or mouse) potatoes!

The essay goes on to examine other forms of environmental calculus. It's very difficult to get a handle on the full impact of any given product or practice, because there are so many linked variables.

But all of them are rooted in one fixed fact - too many people chasing after limited resources. We can buy time by becoming more clever at using those resources efficiently, and developing alternative resources. We will do that.

But ultimately we will either learn to reduce and manage our own numbers, or war, famine and disease will do it for us. We *can learn* by watching what happens in regions under severe environmental pressure. Whether we *will learn* from those lessons remains to be seen.

When Jane Goodall was first studying chimpanzees in the Gombe region of Africa during the early sixties, the surrounding area was sparsely inhabited. In over four decades, that has changed, and now the park where the chimp community she studied lives is surrounded on three sides by humanity. Goodall recognizes that protecting chimps means looking out for the people around them, and thus supported this coffee venture for farmers in the area. The coffee is sold by Green Mountain, who have a track record for providing fair trade and organic coffee. This is a win-win-win deal - for the chimps, for the farmers, and certainly for the customer - it's great coffee. Hit the picture to order some.

I remember seeing an image somewhere that depicted a fake cave wall drawing showing little stick-men warriors chasing a car with spears in hand.

I'd love to buy or make a poster from it, but I can't remember where I saw it and I don't seem to have a copy of it on my system, either. Can anyone point me to a source?

The biggest driver of global warming is a gas, carbon dioxide - CO2. Six billion+ human beings generate a lot of it, and that wouldn't be a big problem except for one thing - the stuff sticks around.

The CO2 you generate today will outlive you. It remains in the atmosphere for about 100 years. It acts like the blanket on your bed, trapping heat. The blanket is getting thicker, and the thermometer is rising. When enough CO2 builds up that it triggers a runaway greenhouse effect, you get Venus - a poisonous atmosphere with ground temperatures of 900 degrees.

Back before 1800, when there were a lot less people around burning fossil fuels, we know that the level of C02 in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million. Doesn't sound like much, does it? But just as a little salt makes a big difference in the taste of your french fries, the impact of C02 is much greater than its proportion would suggest.

In the ocean of pre-1800 air, 280 ppm works out to 645 billion tons of CO2-based carbon. 645 gigatons.

Double this amount - almost 1300 gigatons - is considered the ceiling. If we go beyond that we are playing, literally, with fire. So suppose we take that as our limit.

Right now, we've got 380 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, which translates into 869 gigatons.



To stay under our safety limit, we need to limit ALL future CO2 emissions to 660 gigatons. Just over half of this would remain in the atmosphere, giving us about 1,210 gigatons, or 550 ppm by 2100.

If we use fossil fuels for another 100 years, staying below the ceiling means the world would be limited to an average of 6.6 gigatons of carbon emissions per year.

We spit out an average of 14.6 gigatons throughout the 90's, half from burning fossil fuels.

So we are already churning out more than twice as much CO2 as we should be if we want to remain under the safety limit.

The global population is expected to hit 9 billion by midcentury.

No, the situation is not hopeless. But it is damned serious, and we need to be considering it that way.

Adapted from Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers

Just how much carbon do you generate, and what can you do about it? Find out here.

It goes from 0 to 60 in four seconds.
It gets 50 miles per gallon.
It runs on biodiesel created from soybeans.

It was built by five kids in an after-school auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School.

We can do this - if we separate corporation and state.

Amory Lovins like his bananas, and as you can see here, his tropical garden is certainly a fine place to grow them. What's unusual is, this tropical garden is up in the Rocky Mountains, where winter temperatures go as low as -47. The entire home is 4,000 square feet. His electric bill?

Five dollars a month.

Lovins has a fondness for a few other things, like facts and solutions. He's a very straightforward guy, with a very straightforward message; we can do a lot better on energy management, and it wouldn't even be that hard to do. He doesn't just talk about it - he shows how to do it. The evidence is pretty compelling - how many people do you know who can grow bananas in the Colorado mountains on the cheap?

Discover magazine has a writeup on Lovins and his thoughts about how the U.S. can be smarter about energy production and be better off. If we had a guy like Lovins running the Department of Energy in a Gore presidential cabinet, it would be a whole new ballgame in America.