Life with 1=10th the Fossil Fuel Turns Out to Be Awesome Peter Kalmus January 21, 2016 The opinions herein are my own. I do not speak on behalf of NASA or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Contents Part One: The Roots of Our Predicament 2 1 Introduction 2 Going deeper .............................. 4 Head, hands, and eyes ......................... 5 Be-cycling ............................... 6 Straightforwardness .......................... 7 Why walk on the path? ........................ 8 Limits, patience, and grief ...................... 11 Overview of the rest of the book .................... 12 Lifting the illusion ........................... 13 2 A New Language: Beyond Green 14 Let's not go green ........................... 14 Recycling ................................ 15 Environmentalism ........................... 16 Biosphere, biospherism ........................ 19 Sustainable ............................... 20 Low-energy ............................... 21 Independence and self-reliance .................... 22 Re-minding and mindfulness ..................... 23 Problem, predicament, challenge ................... 23 Happiness ................................ 24 Saving the planet / saving the world . 25 3 What We Know About Global Warming 26 The weight of this knowledge ..................... 27 The year of climate departure ..................... 28 i CONTENTS ii Peak temperature: why mitigation is crucial . 30 The physical basis for warming .................... 33 Outlook for the future ......................... 61 4 The System of Corporatocracy 72 The money vortex ........................... 73 The corporatocracy is us ........................ 74 Mechanisms of the corporatocracy . 75 Life, liberty and the pursuit of profit . 78 Climate stalemate ........................... 79 How did we get here? ......................... 81 Five suggestions ............................ 82 5 Growth Always Ends 85 Explosive exponentials ......................... 86 Population ............................... 88 Peak food ................................ 91 Peak fuel ................................104 Living without growth . 108 Perceiving predicament . 111 Translating this to action . 112 6 Our Mindset 114 The myth of progress . 114 The illusion of separation . 118 Habits of our lizard brains . 120 The great re-minding: from wanters to miracle-seers . 124 Part Two: Be-Cycling 128 7 Be-Cycling: a Middle Path 128 Be-cycling and your partner . 129 Trailheads into be-cycling . 130 8 Like to Bike 133 Getting back on my bike . 133 Why I like to bike . 134 CONTENTS iii Climate impact of biking vs. driving . 136 Why are there more bikes in Europe? . 137 Biking is actually safer than driving . 139 Sharon's perspective . 141 Some suggestions ............................142 9 Tyranny of Luminescent Screens 144 Screen time ...............................145 How TV affects us like a drug . 145 Luminescent screens as a barrier to change . 147 A middle path .............................147 10 Losing the Fossil Fuel 148 U.S. mean climate pie . 151 Action with traction . 153 Making the estimates . 154 Climate impact of common actions . 167 Low-energy living saves money . 171 Flying and the quest for sustainability . 172 Accepting my intertwined-ness . 175 11 Meditation: A Foundation of Change 177 The mind's basic habit . 178 The practice ..............................179 Meditation and the brain . 184 A universal path... 186 ...That isn't for everyone . 187 Separation and connection . 187 Meditation and our predicament . 188 12 Low-Energy Travel 190 Bicycle travel ..............................190 Driving on veggie oil . 193 Crossing the ocean on a container ship . 205 Crossing the ocean on a sailboat . 208 Implications of the end of cheap air travel . 209 Travel powered by creativity . 210 CONTENTS iv 13 Chickens 212 Every egg is a miracle . 212 Feeding chickens ............................213 Birth and death ............................214 Housing chickens ............................216 Rats ...................................217 Training chickens . 217 Factory farming ............................218 Instinct and compassion . 218 14 Bees 220 15 Growing Food (Becoming) 232 How I grew to love the plant kingdom . 232 A few of my favorite plants . 234 Labor saving practices . 238 The vibe: easy does it . 242 The soil .................................243 Learning to grow food . 244 Get out there and grow! . 245 16 Growing Soil (Returning) 246 How to compost humanure ......................247 Hygiene .................................248 Nose to nose with the pile . 250 Safer than septic systems . 250 Safer than biosolids . 251 Greenhouse gases from sewage treatment . 252 One man's waste ............................253 A few practical tips for humanure . 254 Worm composting . 256 Crisis looms and I sit here writing about shit? . 257 17 Opting Out 259 Less is more ..............................259 Food ...................................266 Money .................................274 Changing mindsets . 280 CONTENTS v 18 Carbon Fee 284 We need a new idea . 284 The new idea ..............................285 Carbon fees work ............................286 Advocacy ................................290 Is a carbon fee enough? . 291 19 Sun, Wind, Atoms 293 Sun I: Solar PV ............................294 Sun II: Solar T (parabolic solar trough) . 298 Sun III: Community-scale solar . 299 Wind ..................................300 Atoms ..................................303 WiNS grid ...............................307 Summary: comparing solar, wind, and nuclear . 308 Atoms II: Thorium . 311 20 Community 314 The jungle ...............................314 Thoreau's savages . 315 Asking and giving . 316 Hyperlocal community awareness . 317 Examples of community networks . 318 Money and gift .............................322 Peacemaking ..............................322 Celebration ...............................324 Storytelling ...............................324 21 Love 326 Love and connection . 326 What comes next? . 328 Grief, acceptance, and letting go . 329 Love one another ............................329 Live lightly and be happy . 330 To Braird, Zane, and the rest of Earth's children Part One: The Roots of Our Predicament 1 1 Introduction May the outward and inward man be at one. |Socrates, from Plato's Phaedrus I knew that burning fossil fuels was causing irreversible harm to our planet's life support systems. And yet I continued doing it for years. I tried not to think about this dissonance, and if I did I could always find a rationalization. For most of my life, I haven't thought about global warming. A sixth grade teacher taught me the basic idea way back in 1986, but it had seemed like science fiction, not something that would ever concern me. This was the only time global warming was mentioned over the course of my education and I wouldn't think about it again until I'd become a father almost two decades later. And even after finally grasping the urgency of global warming, it took me five additional years before I began to develop a coherent response. During this five-year period I grew to understand our predicament intellectually, but I had no idea what to do. Without a deeper awareness|without knowing what to do|I felt afraid of the future and alienated from the people around me. I was lost. One of my hopes in writing this book is that it helps others with emerging awareness shorten this period of panicked limbo. I learned the basic science of global warming1 incidentally while working 1I will use the term \global warming" to refer to the increase in the average global temperature of recent decades and to the many changes to the Earth system caused by this warming. \Climate change" is a more general phenomenon, of which today's global warming is but one example. There have been many changes in climate over the course of time on Earth. These previous changes in climate also caused radical changes to the Earth system and its biosphere. 2 1. INTRODUCTION 3 on my PhD in physics in New York City. My early intellectual understanding came with a strong emotional response. How could we keep burning fossil fuels at an accelerating pace when this was clearly leading to the end of our civilization and a compromised biosphere for future generations? It seemed insane. At the same time I was immersed in the culture of industrial civilization, which deeply encodes its belief system into every aspect of our lives. One thing this belief system says is that burning fossil fuels is the only sane thing to do, that someone who refuses to burn fossil fuels is a Luddite, insane. I became obsessed with finding some way to rectify this deep inconsistency. I longed to know how all of the people around me|family members, colleagues, strangers on the street|were dealing with such a glaring contradiction without any apparent difficulty. Did they know about global warming? Had they made peace with it somehow, or did they simply not think about it? I had so much emotional static that I struggled to connect with people. I felt alone with my knowledge. I felt separated. I referred to this visceral mixture of contradiction, confusion, and sep- aration as the \disconnect." Like a splinter in my psyche, the disconnect required me to do something. But what? My initial reaction was to try converting people with facts. The people around me were acting as though there wasn't a problem: perhaps they simply didn't know. Like most attempts to convert, though, mine were sanctimonious and alienating. I felt