A Coming War We Must Strive to Prevent

Some anger smolders over generations. It depends on the offense. Whatever the eldest of the Paddock boys endured because of his father's criminal legacy could have been behind his one-man orgy of slaughter at an improvised Las Vegas shooting gallery.

Seething over the same time frame, the bitter anger of North Koreans against America for the devastation caused by bombardment in the Korean war could soon lead to a torrent of violence that makes Mr. Paddock's high mark all but forgotten. Violence could be unleashed by nuclear missile(s) hitting Guam or Japan. It wouldn't stop there, since not for nothing has the U.S. brooded over its thousands of nuclear eggs these many decades.

A second Korean war is not inevitable. There are some intricate diplomatic maneuvers that could resolve or de-escalate the conflict. Less certain is whether a war with China is likely nonetheless. Though Graham Allison's historical analysis of what he calls Thucydides's Trap allows him to claim that we aren't necessarily Destined for War, when you compound the Fourth Turning of our secular cycle with the historical probability that China will fight the U.S. for its place as King of the Hill, the chances of a war occurring look better than 75%. That a war with Korea could be the spark for this unimaginable war between great powers underlies a somewhat hopeful assessment by Oriana Skylar Mastro describing a possible Chinese takeover of the country.

If, instead of fighting over dwindling resources, China and the U.S. craft their economic strategies around sustainability, China's ascent may be reversed and the U.S. could relax and tend to its own transition. This would require recognition by the obtuse political class that global economic growth is ending. However, Richard Heinberg, author of The End of Growth (2011), is no more sanguine than other analysts noted here on preventing a war with China. An excerpt:

Unfortunately, rising costs and flagging returns from resource conflicts will not guarantee world peace. History suggests that as nations become more desperate to maintain their relative positions of strength and advantage, they may lash out in ways that serve no rational purpose.

Again, no crisis is imminent as long as cool heads prevail. But the world system is losing stability. Current economic and geopolitical conditions would appear to support a forecast not for increasing economic growth, democracy, and peace, but for more political volatility, and for greater government military mobilization justified under the banner of security.

Regina - Bitter Memories of Childhood - photo by Ted McGrath

War with China would very likely be big and radioactive. Old Blowhard's China hand, Peter Navarro, doesn't seem to see that as a reason not to rumble. The slim chance of avoiding a war with China in the next few years should occupy as much of our capability as necessary. Treading lightly with Korea should be part of that effort. Another part should be reshaping the political climate in the U.S. to one that is more civil and less fascist, whatever that takes.

Apocollapse Now

I may have missed it, but in my twelve years as a cost analyst for the Department of Defense, including the highest level of certification from the Defense Acquisition University, I never once heard of Baumol's Cost Disease. Nonetheless, the late William Baumol was famous for his discovery of how the cost of services rises implacably while the cost of goods decline. Cost analysts could be spared much consternation through this principle, but it also clarifies the situation for the man on the street.

When you look at the declining productivity gains over the past few decades, much of the slowdown can be attributed to this "disease," wherein more and more employment has shifted away from manufacturing and into services. Manufacturing processes are more easily automated than most service jobs, so the shift to large-scale, centralized manufacturing has improved efficiencies and profits in that sector.

From Albert Bates at The Great Change

I have built my projection of our economic future on the concepts in The Limits to Growth, which, at this point in our catabolic collapse would begin to exhibit a remission of the cost disease, i.e. as we retrace the stages of our rise to the information age, we will revert to more manufacturing employment, albeit on a more local, less automated level. This regression will make the price of goods rise at a rate comparable to the price of services.

The changes coming to manufacturing also apply to farming, since our farming is almost all conducted on factory farms nowadays. The graph that tells the story of the world's predicament has appeared here before, but looking at the details of when peaks occur in food production, then other industrial output, and finally services per capita shows the order in which we should expect to see prices rise. Even now, we are seeing the price of food rise faster than inflation. Those rising prices, first in food and then other manufacturing, will attract more entrants into the production sectors. Entrepreneurs start locally. Most of those new businesses will not easily scale as they will struggle with the same growth limiting forces that gave them an underserved niche in which to launch their business.

A retrenchment from globalism will drive much of this return to small scale. The current administration's overt and inadvertent dismantling of trade and foreign relations will facilitate this retrenchment. In that respect, their steps and missteps will aid the transition to localism. There is a difference, however, between localism and nationalism. Old Blowhard promotes the latter, but has no interest in the former. Additional steps must be taken with respect to commerce that will foster localism in order to keep employment up and pollution down as we revisit industrialism and later descend into agrarianism.

Growing Pains

At one of our county's workshops for updating the comprehensive plan, a survey of the audience indicated that growth was perceived as the greatest challenge facing the county. Most, if not all, of those who gave this answer were implying that we should be making extra effort to ensure that the county grows economically. My own view is that economic growth is not in the cards, as our nation is already stagnating and the fuel for its growth (cheap oil) is past peak production. There are other ways in which growth is possible, but if the majority insist on government banging their heads against the glass wall of making America great again, efforts to collectively grow in more sublime ways will be foregone

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I was prepared to read a speech detailing my vision for the county's future up to 2040, but it turned out that the workshop was not structured as an open forum. Nonetheless, I emailed a link to the transcript, which follows, to the planning department for consideration.

By sometime in the next decade,
Neither the population or the county government grow. Emphasis has shifted from building a strong local economy to building a resilient one.
The ambitious economic benchmarks in the earlier plan are laid aside in order to accommodate the new realities of zero growth and to recover from the geopolitical and economic trauma of recent decades.
Federal government employment remains strong, but most Federal employees in our county telework more often than they commute.
We selectively abandon maintenance of roads, as ownership and ridership in motorized vehicles dwindles in the post-fossil fuel age. For long distance travel, we begin to use waterborne transport and a railroad built over one side of route 4, with the other side a two-way road for small vehicles and light trucks.
The Cove Point gas plant gets converted into a farm of climate-controlled, giant greenhouses fashioned out of the frames that once supported the dozen or so huge tanks that never found a use as the natural gas fracking boom quickly petered out. The biomass output of these greenhouses dwarfs anything that could be produced from conventional farming and serves as raw material for several indigenous industries, as well as for food. The nutrients for the rapidly growing crops in these greenhouses comes from thermogenic composting of treated sewage at a facility co-located with the Appeal wastewater treatment plant.
From the inception of this updated plan, our efforts turn to transitioning to a prolonged period marked by simpler living. Consumerism is out. Working in step with nature is in. Our most popular pastime shifts from going shopping to staying home making. Entrepreneurs organize ten-acre farms instead of cell phone game companies. Able-bodied citizens engage in physical labor instead of watching television. Local government and developers replace our expanding suburban wastelands with compact, walkable towns. We conduct more plays, concerts, sing-alongs, and puppet shows and put aside national television extravaganzas and world-wide web entertainment. We learn to make things of quality by hand instead of buying car loads of stamped out plastic widgets guaranteed to fall apart by next week.
Environmental restoration, including greenhouse gas reduction, becomes everyone's concern.
We realize that holding back the rising ocean is infeasible. We become proactive in moving away from coastal development in areas at risk from inundation or erosion by the bay and tidal waters. Investment is channeled, instead, to upland areas, while low lying waterfront properties grow flood-mitigating living shorelines that will gradually migrate inland, keeping pace with the rising tides.
Calvert County's landscape is characterized by forests, fields, farms and villages, surrounded by a healthier river and bay.  Habitat destruction by new land development is stymied by government-imposed barriers and enforcement of laws and regulations allowing no net loss of forests.
Cottage industries emerge to serve local needs in ways that are ecologically compatible. Many of these are in the realm of agroforestry, meaning forest garden ecosystems sustainably supply a large portion of all of our products. In addition,

* Agriculture has been transformed from its former industrial mode, though some of the new forest gardens approach farm scale as they grow
* Flowers bloom all over the place
* Fruits and nuts swell on trees everywhere and other foods grow along your path - you even know all their names and how to use them
* Citizens are educated and active stewards of the land and surrounding waters
* Fishing is better
* Previously isolated forest fragments are linked to each other
* Our habitations and surroundings are starting to look, feel, and function more naturally, enabling us to feel healthier, more alive, and more connected than we had for generations

Holding onto the elusive dream of continuous growth hurts our future environment because decision makers give a back seat to changes that don't have the imprimatur of progress. It is difficult for them to accept that diminishing returns are beginning to fall short of increasing costs to upgrade or build traditional infrastructure such as wastewater treatment plants or dams, especially if one factors in the historical costs of failure under stress. By holding onto these flawed architectures, they only close off opportunities for better, albeit less sophisticated, solutions such as humanure composting and wild rivers. Such regressive measures are considered defeatist and are rejected out of hand, even if that leads to ruining the environment and the economy.

The spike in sewage overflows caused by Superstorm Sandy may have to be experienced again in Hurricane Matthew, and more storms before someone with enough common sense makes a decision to avoid such spills in the future by recycling this valuable waste without dumping treatment chemicals into our bays and rivers.

Habitat for Non-Humanity

Where do we start in preserving biodiversity? Over half our world's lands have lost enough species to jeopardize the future of life on earth. Life includes plants that we cultivate. It should not surprise us, then, that agriculture, rather than urbanization, is the human activity behind most of the species losses.

Even as a gardener, I would like to eliminate some members of certain species, such as the groundhog who doesn't respect my fences or the deer who don't appreciate the beauty of my roses. Unlike the animal lovers who volunteer at my neighborhood's Orphaned Wildlife Rescue Center, I chase deer away and endeavor to kill varmints that steal the fruits of my labor. Perhaps they need to rescue orphaned wildlife because of the likes of me, but first they are going to have to rescue their organization against allegations of animal cruelty, e.g. attempting to save creatures that should have been euthanized.

If we let our hearts win out over or heads, saving mammals and other larger animals may be how we attempt to preserve wildlife. Yet, is it not natural to regard like creatures as competitors in the food chain, if not outright enemies to our species? The mistake we have made in horticulture is not only did we carry out armed conflict against nuisance mammals, but lesser phyla are treated with almost no care at all, save plants we wish to grow. Arthropods and microorganisms, for example, are so innumerable that industrial farmers don't mind applying pesticides that kill beneficial species more than the relatively few harmful ones.

Just as important as our poisoning of the environment is our elimination of natural habitat that supports biodiversity. Habitat is largely formed by physical structure, so insects become significantly more diverse in a canopied forest rather than a cultivated field. Likewise, soil biota flourishes in the fractally constructed caverns of a biochar particle. Nature enables wilderness to grow into rich structural forms at all trophic levels, providing habitats for a most diverse set of plants, animals, and fungi. Revered biologist E.O Wilson offers the prescription for our global biodiversity crisis that we should set aside half the planet as wilderness. He even tells us where we stand the best chances of success.

Photo by Pete Warner

Wilderness necessarily excludes development. We have many forests in Calvert County, Maryland that, if appropriately joined, could constitute wilderness to contribute to the half-Earth goal. Fostering more growth and development won't help. "Keeping Calvert Country" isn't about nostalgia. It's about supporting mankind's survival.

Mitigating Sprawl

Photo by Matt McGuire (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The information session on the rewrite of Calvert County's Comprehensive Plan offered many insights on the process, current viewpoints, and the situations we face. Attendees were given an opportunity to submit views on paper regarding the top challenges, changes witnessed, and delights of living in Calvert County. Mine were soil tilth, invasive species, and nature, respectively. The presentation that covered some of the trends since the last major plan rewrite in 2004 brought a related problem to light - land use.

According to the statistics presented, the amount of both farmland and forest lost in our county over a ten year period is approximately 5%. As of 2007, about 60% of the county was forest or farmland. A 5% loss would have brought that figure down to about 55% as of 2014. The National Forest Service projections for forest land in Maryland under various scenarios are for additional losses ranging from 20 to 30% by 2060. If farmland losses remain in step with forest losses, we are then looking at a combined loss rate in Calvert County that continues at more than 5% per decade and at least 23 square miles (15,000 more acres) sacrificed to the god of growth.

In a talk given to the county's Master Gardeners last year, the crisis of ongoing suburban sprawl was also highlighted, with the point made that this results in a loss of connectivity in our ecosystems, reducing biodiversity. The reason Master Gardeners need to understand this is because increasing biodiverse gardens are one small way to mitigate the effects of sprawl on wildlife corridors. By ubiquitously gardening in islands within the developed landscape, the hope is that many of the threatened wee beasties will be able to find sufficient food and shelter.

I wrote down my three responses to the planning questionnaire (soil tilth, invasive species, and nature) before seeing the statistics on land use. In retrospect, it is easy to see a relationship of these three key indicators to the issue of real estate development. The soil that we grow on must be improved, especially if there is going to be less area under cultivation. Invasive species must be curbed in an effort to mitigate the loss of biodiversity caused, in part, by sprawl. Nature, in general, must be given more consideration and care as we continue to spread out across the land. These are action areas that I would like to see promoted in the next Comprehensive Plan update.

Playing with Fire

I am proud to be a Marylander just for the simple fact that our state is a leader in the fight against climate change.  Maryland's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act (GGRA) rivals the plans of such progressive states as Switzerland in the rapidity envisioned for reducing emissions to fight global warming.  Since GGRA was enacted in 2009, Maryland has actually reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions faster than required by the plan, which calls for a 25% reduction of the 2006 level of emissions by 2020.  We are now at the point where an update to the plan is needed, as the Act must be reapproved in 2016.

Insofar as the real importance of Maryland's plan is not in drawing down emissions, but in showing other states how it is possible to do so while growing the economy, the GGRA is laudable. I do, however, have my reservations as to motives and the ultimate outcome.  It's not that Maryland is just so small as to have little bearing on global warming, it's that, at this point in the game (and more so in 2020, when other states might begin catching on), we cannot reduce atmospheric CO2 enough, fast enough to avoid catastrophe unless we immediately abandon business as usual (and/or put all our hopes in a "hail Mary" geo-engineering program).  By "business as usual," I include the reliance on economic growth for sustainment of the economy.  A major result of capitalistic, exponential growth is that it drives us deeper into fossil fuel dependence, while these limited resources become ever more expensive and environmentally harmful to extract.

Case in point: the Cove Point LNG export facility.  One of the most frequent concerns raised in public hearings held by the Maryland Climate Change Commission was the amount of GHG that would be induced by the facility's operations. Calculations show that this total would negate more than half of the GHG reduction progress made throughout the state since 2006 when the final results of the GGRA are tallied after 2020.  This effect was not included in the GGRA Plan Update, in spite of public input.  Even if it had, much of the effect would be masked by the fact that a good portion of those emissions are "off-shored," either to other states where the gas is shipped from, or to the end users overseas.

To be fair, it seems that Maryland is not in the least in control of whether the Cove Point expansion takes place. The climate commission considered it to be too much of a hot potato to even address it, and even climate-friendly Governor O'Malley wouldn't challenge it during his term.  This gives me little hope that the District Court of Appeals in Columbia, MD will rule favorably toward the environmental petitioners in their suit to require the FERC to re-evaluate their decision to allow the Cove Point expansion.

It's not that the powers that be really care whether Maryland's economy grows under business-as-usual, it's that they want to continue the bubble economy at the national level as long as possible, at least until it becomes apparent that we have no hope to avoid human extinction other than a "hail Mary" play.