Oh Boy, Just What We Needed

Apparently, the global economy is not the only thing that is “melting down.” Remember that “other crisis,” that “global warming thing”? Okay, we know the seas are rising, desertification is claiming arable land, wildfires are increasing (right now there are raging fires all over California – in chi chi Montecito near Oprah’s house, Yorba Linda, Sylmar, all over the place, homes burning and people getting hurt), aquifers are drying out – it’s almost all bad. But when you look at one narrow area – like California – and apply research and numbers to the expected crisis, well the costs are staggering.

The University of California at Berkeley just released a study – California Climate Risk and Response by David Roland-Holst and Fredrich Kahrl – that actually runs the costs, line by line, sector by sector, for the State of California. According to the summary, the value of real estate (slammed by this financial crisis) will be impacted the most: “[T]he state has $4 trillion in real estate assets, of which $2.5 trillion are at risk from extreme weather events, sea level rise, and wildfires, with a projected annual price tag of $300 million to $3.9 billion over this century, depending on how warm the world gets. If no action is taken in the face of rising temperatures, six additional sectors, including water, energy, transportation, tourism and recreation, agriculture, and public health, would together incur tens of billions per year in direct costs, even higher indirect costs, and expose trillions of dollars of assets to collateral risk.”

Can we adapt and hence survive? Multiply this report times every sector and every area where climate change spells disaster. All over the earth. The costs are financially incalculable. It’s more that beach homes eliminated – entire coastlines will move miles inland – or the loss of habitat or water… the very essence of every region on earth will dramatically alter. Temperate areas will become deserts, disease-laden insects will migrate to regions where immunities have not developed, frozen wasteland will become farmland (hmm? Arctic farming?)… and people without means… well, they die.

But with our current economic collapse, who can worry about this “distant” future… or is a decade or two for huge differences that distant? Cheap fossil fuels (trust me, this is very temporary) and tight credit make some of these dreams seem too tough to contemplate now. Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens touted a massive Texas-based wind-turbine farm (electrical power generation) as his vision of what America needs to do to achieve a near-term significant reduction in the use of expensive and polluting energy from “burning.” You may have seen his ads on television. Unfortunately, because of the above factors, Pickens is delaying his effort, called the Pampa Wind Project, which was supposed to become the largest wind farm in the world, generating 4,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 1.3 million homes. That’s too bad.

The economic collapse allows us to create new jobs that use the environment better, generate power without damage to our planet and apply sensible consumption standards to every nation on earth. We need to move forward with job-creation with projects like Mr. Pickens’ dream, and as quickly as our economic leaders get us on this path, the faster we solve our economic malaise and reinvent our relationship with nature. Maybe economic contraction can also allow humanity to contract its waste and pollutants… some by not being able to afford to drive or heat our homes because of cost… and hopefully mostly because we will have invented and designed better ways to live within both our financial and our environmental means.

Hard to juggle so many mega-problems at once, but when you are rebuilding anyway, doesn’t it just make sense to rebuild in a way that just makes sense? We should factor in the environment in each choice we make to “recover” our economy. It just might save our lives. Just look at Southern California right now if you think the problem is off in the distant future. Your region is on the list, one way or another.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.