The Long Count

The brouhaha over the so-called sustainability plan for Spokane is muddied with problems that illustrate just how far we need to move our collective heads to get way beyond oil. The faux clashing of ideals – radical libertarian “let the country sink or swim” ethos, or the light-weight greens — is discordance in the troubling echo chamber of our bizarre political theater. In one corner, the greens/sustainability proponents have their heads wrapped around the right issues, but they are scattered, mired in a capitalistic system that depends on war and resource exploitation. The other corner, as I have confronted many times, are self-described patriot and Tea Party nihilists who demonstrate how a little misinformation about complex issues – climate change, global warming, geologic and atmospheric tipping points, energy, economics, resource peaks, collapsing systems, poverty, hunger, war – can jam up true progress toward finding “10 technologies to save the planet” The latter backers also showed up June 28 to stymie adoption of the mayor’s Sustainability Task Force report (which passed 5-2), a flimsy document considering where we are at now. Spokane’s Task Force and action plan were flawed from the start because the intent was not to create a living, expanding and applicable set of policies and developmental strategies and technical and entrepreneurial incentives to move Spokane, the county and the region toward a real cutting-edge implementation plan to position us to meet the problems of our time: expensive and more difficult to reach fossil fuels, climate change and basic energy demands. True sustainability is about fixing poverty and making citizens healthy and accessing education and decent housing. The plan has no real vision, no teeth, no real rubber meeting the pavement policies or nuances. No incentives, no department to target investors, venture capital, innovative private-public partnerships. Adoption gives Spokane the chance to at least get to the dance floor to sink or swim when competing for state and federal loans and grants for projects like sewer or rainwater remediation. The current Washington State mandate caveats cities and counties to have “mitigation” measures to reduce greenhouse gasses, but what we need is a complete change in how we get, use and reduce energy. The world itself needs to reduce energy use, develop huge technological advances, and agree to significant lifestyle changes if we are to stop and eventually reverse the rise in greenhouse gasses. After 16 years reading about climate change and talking with experts in dozens of fields, and after spending time in Vietnam working on biodiversity transects and other studies, I understand the science of climate change. (I never spent much time looking at U.N. materials.) We have to do the big projects, the big transition, and, unfortunately, we must employ traditional enemies of the environment like Boeing, Exxon and Halliburton to move forward on wind, solar, wave, and biomass power, as well as electric cars, biochar, and soil and forest remediation. “Some of the technologies in this book will fail,” writes Chris Goodall in “Ten Technologies to Save the Planet: Energy Options for a Low-carbon Future.” “… and it is a reasonable bet that a clear majority of the innovative companies that I profile will not even exist in 10 year’s time. This shouldn’t particularly concern us. All that matters is that those technologies that do eventually succeed are rolled out on a massive scale.” What has been passed by the council is a philosophical treatise with no teeth, no alarms, zero physical blueprints, no funding, and no deep analysis of how Spokane can be a low-carbon partner in a global community that will face many similar issues concurrently and symbiotically. It’s boiler plate language already included in many dozens of other city sustainability action manifestos. Voting against it is like refusing to swallow. The Sustainability Plan is a skeleton of ideas, brainstorming sessions, rumination and hopes and dreams of people who want a better world. Whether 800 individuals had input into “the plan” or 80,000, we are now – or have been for 20-30 years – at the precipice looking over. The main Task Force included 13 members, not a great cross-section. An Avista VP was chair of the committee. Lots of mistakes there. The mayor’s office of sustainability was disbanded soon thereafter. You need teeth, muscle and a constant flow of intellectual, creative and scientific energy in an office of sustainability; much that this city does is a slow, circling the wagons mentality, and fearing being ahead of the pack. Business, academia, government, private local, state, national and international business, and other partnerships must be tapped, nurtured and convinced to sacrifice. Corporations and agencies need to release time for the tens of thousands of people with skill sets and impetus to begin cracking the whip around sustainability. This next 50 years involves much sacrifice, the FDR and JFK kind, and not just the individual –corporations must be stopped from making profits hand over fist in unsustainable businesses. Many people on the “green” side I’ve talked with put tongue in cheek when shown that the real science and work on energy and climate change paints a bleak picture that needs atonement through massive change. The Sustainability Task Force report is feel-good lingo with zero impact on the problem of climate change and peak oil. It’s bizarre to hear Nancy McLaughlin and Bob Apple yammer on about not believing in global warming, saying the world is cooling, maybe believing the Grand Canyon is how their creator made it on the first day. Absolutely obscene really, since I have acquaintances and have interviewed many in the sciences or with development agency work under their belts who know their stuff – like natural history and earth sciences. It’s more than an affront to scientists from MIT, Scripps, Tulane and others to find themselves denigrated by lesser folk who foul the discussion with superstition and ignorance. It’s bad enough that American citizens call scientists Communists or brainwashed by the United Nations when they study crashing ecosystems and degrading life supports. When the county and city pols echo that position, they need the boot. Burning fossil fuel pollutes the atmosphere, and oceans are absorbing carbon dioxide and are becoming more acidic. Forests are being cut down. Methane is being released because of man’s direct handicraft– golf courses, cattle raising, and rice paddies – and because of disturbances of methane and methane hydrates due to drilling and warming tundra. These are dramatic times, with northern sea ice melting, storms increasing in intensity, drought-causing starvation, forests dwindling, crop yields falling. Major rivers in Asia will be dry during summers. We have 600 million cars competing with 7 billion people. None of what these people are working on to figure out how the global community might function as tipping points begin to cantilever sideways has anything to do with a conspiracy to take away individual rights, stop free enterprise or create a one-world government. There are, though, some mighty big swatches of the greenwashing variety smothering real progress.