Unpacking Extinction Rebellion — Part IV: The Way Forward

Kim Hill

Having published parts I II and III of Kim Hill’s excellent XR Rebellion unpacking series, I’ve really been hanging out for part IV which seemed to take forever to get published…… well, was t ever worth waiting for, it’s a rip roaring article, easily the best of the series. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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Image: Roseanne de Lange

Part I, Part II, Part III

As we’ve seen from the first three parts of this series, the current goals and tactics of Extinction Rebellion and the climate movement are leading us in the wrong direction. An entirely different strategy is needed if we are to have any hope of building an effective movement to end corporate control and the industries destroying the planet and all who live here.

More effective solutions

A movement that is serious about extinction and climate change needs to address the root problems: capitalism, the industrial system, a culture that sees life as a resource to be exploited, and the infrastructure that holds it all together. It needs to have clear goals, that can’t be diluted or used to manipulate and misdirect the movement. It needs to take action immediately, not in several years’ time. And it needs to target the weak points in the system, where it can have the most impact for the least effort.

The misdirection of Extinction Rebellion has come about because most urban dwellers have only an abstract idea of nature, as they don’t depend on it directly for their food, water and shelter. Their relationship with nature is mediated by the economic system, which provides for their needs by stealing resources from elsewhere and selling them on for profit. The rebels are led to believe that the extractive economy is necessary for survival, and that new industries and investments offer benefits to humans and wild nature. So city folks are more than willing to take to the streets to defend the very system that is crushing the life out of us all. It’s a form of collective Stockholm syndrome, on a global scale.

Effective solutions require rebels to have a direct relationship with the natural world. To defend nature requires love, which is a constant, reciprocal relationship, which means listening, observing, giving and receiving, and being in communion on a daily basis.

To be effective, rebels need to identify not as a citizen, consumer or worker, demanding action from business and government, but as a living being, interdependent with all life. To identify with the living world is to see the entire planet as an extension of the self, so action taken to defend nature is an act of self-defence.

Demanding that governments and corporations change will only lead (and has already led) to changes that give them more power. The entire social and legal structure that puts them in a position of power needs to be dismantled. This violent arrangement is not deserving of the respect of polite demands and peaceful protest.

Being effective requires a healthy mistrust of anyone offering technological or market-based solutions, and requires asking a whole lot of uncomfortable questions. The capture of this rebellion has depended on the lack of questioning (and probably more to the point, lack of answers) as to what net-zero emissions actually means, what the rebellion aims to achieve, and what the proposed solutions really entail. Always respond to any proposal with ‘what does this mean in practice? and who benefits from this?’

The burning of fossil fuels needs to stop. Not because it is releasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but because it is powering an industrial economy that is wiping out all life. The impacts of industrialism cannot be offset, decarbonised, decoupled from economic growth, exported to the third world, or made sustainable. Fossil fuels power mining, agriculture, shipping, aviation, road and rail transport, land clearing, manufacturing, plastics, the electricity grid, and imperialist wars. Dismantling the infrastructure of oil and gas would drastically reduce the impacts of these industries. Some possible approaches to achieve this are offered by Stop Fossil Fuels, which “researches and disseminates strategies and tactics to halt fossil fuel combustion as fast as possible.”

The goal needs to be not to Make Your Voice Heard, or cause a temporary, symbolic disruption to industrial activity, but to permanently shut down the industries that are causing harm. A single drone attack on a Saudi oil processing facility this September reduced Saudi Arabia’s oil production by 50%, an action which has had more impact on the fossil fuel industry than the environmental movement ever has. No-one was harmed. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), by sabotaging fossil fuel infrastructure in Nigeria, have been able to reduce the country’s oil production by half. Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek, in burning holes in the Dakota Access Pipeline, were 1000 times more efficient in terms of material impact on oil production than the entire #NoDAPL campaign. And to demonstrate that government and business will never be on board with efforts that genuinely reduce fossil fuel extraction, they are facing more than 100 years in prison, despite harming no-one.

Principles for effective action

Be on the side of the living. The biosphere, endangered species, indigenous cultures and the third world don’t need development, investment, technology, corporate ambition and sustainable infrastructure. They don’t need business opportunities and economic growth. They need all these things to stop. Those on the side of industry advocate for sustainability, aiming to sustain the destructive system for as long as possible, and have brought environmentalists across to their side. The industrial system is a war on people and planet, and taking the side of the living means being willing to fight in defence of life, and oppose efforts to sustain industry and growth.

Learn from history. The rebellion has become disconnected from the struggles of the past, which has limited its tactics to civil disobedience, cutting off the possibilities of using tactics that have been successful in historical campaigns for justice. The book Full Spectrum Resistance offers lessons from movements of the past, and principles and strategies that can be applied to current struggles for social and ecological justice.

Ancient wisdom offers ways to live in harmony with the natural world. Learning about the traditional cultures of your ancestry, as well as those of the land where you live, can provide guidance towards rebuilding a genuinely sustainable land-based culture, and strategies for land and community defence.

Drop the attachment to nonviolence. The culture of industrial capitalism is based on systemic violence. To adhere to individual nonviolence in this context is to be complicit in the ongoing violence of imperialism, patriarchy, and resource extraction. The primary goal of an effective environmental movement needs to be to stop the violence.

Nonviolence is a tactic that is only available to the privileged, those who are not personally experiencing the effects of ecocide. Those who are directly under attack from destructive industries don’t have that option, and need to defend themselves and their land with weapons. Solidarity means being willing to fight alongside them, to follow their leadership and support their tactics.

Adults need to take the lead. The targeting of young people by the corporate-led climate movement has been deliberate. It is easier to manipulate their fears, and they can be convinced that the campaigning tactics used in the past have been ineffective, and that the new way of campaigning is better. This creates a separation between the generations, and interferes with any learning about historical movements. It also presents adults as incapable of taking action themselves, requiring young people to take responsibility for guiding them.

This is not the way to build a healthy culture of resistance. Adults need to take responsibility, and create a world that nurtures the next generation. Teaching young people about all the world’s problems and expecting them to take it all on is morally awful, and also repeating this same tactic for generations is clearly not going to work, if everyone just keeps passing their problems down the line. Children need to enjoy their childhood in a healthy culture. Young people are of course welcome to get involved in resistance work, and their energy and new ideas are essential, but they shouldn’t be made to feel it is their responsibility to guide adults.

Get political. Creating meaningful change requires a solid foundation of understanding of how political power works, and how change happens. By adhering to a principle of being non-political, XR shuts down any discussion of the politics influencing the movement, and prevents rebels from engaging in any political change. Rebels who engage in political discussion or advocate for political goals or strategies get excluded, which of course serves the interests of those who are manipulating the rebellion for their own political goals. Goals that no-one is allowed to talk about, because that would be political. See how this works? Only people with limited awareness of politics can realistically comply with the principle of remaining non-political, and these are the people who are most easily led into supporting goals that oppose their interests.

Set clear goals. Having vague goals that can appeal to a wide range of people is useful if the only purpose of the movement is to appeal to a wide range of people, but those who actually want to get things done need to be specific on what they want to get done. The goals need to be clear so that they can’t be used to redirect the movement, and there needs to be a realistic strategy for how they will be achieved.

You don’t have to include everyone. The principle of inclusion is promoted by the corporate campaigners because it prevents any real change. When all political views are included, there is no possibility of forming shared goals or effective strategies. Serious activism requires people who are dedicated and willing to take risks for the cause, and should only include people who have integrity and can take on the responsibilities. Everyone is of course welcome to support and contribute, but including people who are not fully committed will only hold back those who are.

Being included in the climate movement has set back indigenous struggles, as indigenous people are expected to set aside their own causes to focus on the goals of climate action, which are often in opposition to their interests. Rather than aiming to include indigenous people, third world movements, and other marginalised groups, predominantly white movements would do well to instead offer support and solidarity to autonomous struggles, to avoid co-opting or reinforcing existing power dynamics. A principle of inclusion is embraced by the white middle-class people leading the rebellion as it makes them feel good about their identity as inclusive people, but this comes at the expense of those being included. Inclusion of marginalised people in white-led capitalist movements is colonisation. White people need to position themselves as the back-up rather than the centre.

It should go without saying that the inclusion of corporations, the World Economic Forum, banks, and the military and police force that exist to defend them, is a barrier to forming a movement that can dismantle these institutions. When ‘we’re all in this together’, those who are being exploited by capitalism are required to align themselves with those who are profiting from their exploitation. This arrangement only serves the interests of those in power, and perpetuates the system. XR claims that “we live in a toxic system, but no one individual is to blame”, which renders invisible the industries and structures of power that created the toxic system, and refuses to acknowledge that there are individuals who benefit from keeping it in place. Which leaves ordinary people identifying with the destructive economic system and blaming themselves, rather than collectively detoxifying by eradicating the entire capitalist economy.

Noticeably absent from all this performative inclusivity are the billions of living beings under threat of extinction, those whose interests XR claims to represent, yet whose names and needs for defence I’ve never heard mentioned in any of the rebellion’s discussions.

Abandon climate as an issue to rally around. Climate change is an effect of capitalism and the industrial system, and only one of many. It is not a separate issue that can be addressed on its own. Effective action needs to address the root causes. The climate issue has been thoroughly obfuscated by those who seek to benefit from manipulating the discussion. Studying and debating climate change is distracting us from taking action to address the underlying structural causes of ecological collapse.

Organise, not mobilise. XR’s strategy is predominantly based on mobilising — getting large numbers of people to come together in mass actions as individuals, rather than organising collectively on creating change on issues that directly affect them in their own neighbourhoods. The majority of rebels are simply part of a crowd at an action, rather than participating in political education, developing personal agency and leadership skills, and engaging with the wider community. Mobilising has some value as a tactic, but needs to be just one part of a broader strategy, and is unlikely to be effective on its own. Focusing exclusively on mobilising reinforces power structures and doesn’t lead to the necessary social changes.

Engage in decisive rather than symbolic actions. Standing in the street holding a banner and shouting slogans at no-one is not going to change the world. XR’s strategy of civil disobedience by blocking traffic has the effect of disrupting the lives of ordinary people on their way to work to earn a living. Effective action needs to target not working people, but the corporations and industries that are causing environmental and social devastation. Capitalism is already making people’s lives difficult enough without the rebels’ contribution. Making people aware of the issues doesn’t lead to change in itself. Decisive action means directly targeting the physical infrastructure of the industrial system, and undermining the legal and social structures that sanction it.

Create the future. Stopping the destructive system and creating a better world starts with believing that things can get better, and collectively we have the power to make that happen. Grieving the future is not going to get us there. Grieve for what has been lost, sure, but getting stuck in negativity about the future can create a global nocebo effect: if enough people genuinely believe we’re all going to die, then that’s probably what will happen. We don’t have to stay trapped in a culture of violence, isolation, suburbia, employment, junk food, debt, electricity, toxicity, traffic jams, social media and antidepressants. We can envision and create a world without these things, where humans live in healthy communities within their natural environments, not separate and imposed over top of them.

The way forward

Many people involved in XR are seeing the cracks in the green façade. There are some in the rebellion who support the goals of economic growth and the fourth industrial revolution, and don’t care about the natural world. But there are many more who care deeply, and are willing to take direct action and risk their own lives in defence of the greater web of life.

Every rebel needs to make a choice: are you on the side of the industrial economy, or on the side of the living planet? Because you can’t have both, and if you choose the economy, you’re taking away the future of every living being (including yourself), and that’s really not very nice. And there’s no room for half measures. More than 90% of the world’s rainforests have been lost to deforestation. Over 300 tons of topsoil are lost every minute. Corporations dump five million gallons of toxins into the ocean every day. One species goes extinct every 15 minutes. More than 90% of large fish in the oceans are gone, and there is 10 times as much plastic as phytoplankton in the oceans. There’s definitely no space here for economy-saving Climate Action.

The movement is already huge, and momentum is building. The economy is failing, and on the brink of collapse. An organised, committed, strategic movement that targets the critical nodes of the economic system has the potential to take it down completely.

We have millions of years of evolution on our side. Our ancestors have fought off predators and forces that could have destroyed them, and survived long enough to reproduce. Every person reading this has this heritage. We can fight for our lives and survive this. We’ve been doing it for millions of years, and with a collective act of self-defence, we can keep on for millions more.

Be guided by the courage of your wild heart, not the fears of your domesticated mind. Ask the wild creatures what they would do if they had your resources. And listen. Then act. Always, always, speak and act on behalf of those who can’t. Those who would take down all the structures that stand in the way of life.

No expectations that the government or business will save us. No demands. No compromise. No shiny illusions of net-zero, carbon-neutral, future-proofing, renewable, climate-friendly bullshit. No green capitalism, clean growth, decarbonised economies or whatever other meaningless marketing slogans corporations use to sell fake protests.

An effective movement to reverse the trend of ongoing extractivism that’s leading us toward total extinction won’t be dependent on governments and businesses taking action in response to street protests. It will require communities to work together to take down the infrastructure of the extractive industries in their own neighbourhoods, and rebuild a culture based on living in harmony with the land that sustains us. It requires an allegiance to the living world, not to the system of laws and proper channels that exist to protect those who benefit from extraction, exploitation and extinction.

The path to a better world won’t come from a fear of atmospheric gases, and demands for investment in infrastructure and industry. It needs to come out of a place of love for the natural world, and from ancient wisdom. It will come from listening to the land where you live, and taking action to defend it. Let the Earth and those who maintain relationships with their land be our teachers and guides.

Unpacking Extinction Rebellion — Part I: Net-zero Emissions

Kim Hill

Sep 13 · Originally published by Medium, a very important article needed to be read very widely……..

The Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement has taken off around the world, with millions of people taking to the streets to demand that governments take action on climate change and the broader ecological crisis. The scale of the movement means it has the potential to have an enormous impact on the course of history, by bringing about massive changes to the structure of our societies and economic systems.

The exact nature of the demanded action is not made clear, and warrants a close examination. There is a long history of powerful government and corporate interests throwing their support behind social movements, only to redirect the course of action to suit their own ends, and Extinction Rebellion is no exception.

With the entirety of life on this planet at stake, any course of action needs to be considered extremely carefully. Actions have consequences, and at this late stage, one mis-step can be catastrophic. The feeling that these issues have been discussed long enough and it is now time for immediate action is understandable. However, without clear goals and a plan on how to achieve them, the actions taken are likely to do more harm than good.

Extinction and climate change are among the many disastrous effects of an industrial society. While the desire to take action to stop the extinction of the natural world is admirable, rebelling against the effects without directly confronting the economic and political systems that are the root cause is like treating the symptoms of an illness without investigating or diagnosing it first. It won’t work. Addressing only one aspect of the global system, without taking into account the interconnected industries and governance structures, will only lead to worse problems.

Demand 2: net-zero emissions

The rebellion’s goals are expressed in three demands, under the headings Tell the Truth, Act Now and Beyond Politics. I’m starting with the second demand because net-zero is the core goal of the rebellion, and the one that will have enormous political, economic and social impact.

What does net-zero emissions mean? In the words of Catherine Abreau, executive director of the Climate Action Network: “In short, it means the amount of emissions being put into the atmosphere is equal to the amount being captured.” The term carbon-neutral is interchangeable with net-zero.

Net-zero emissions is Not a Thing. There is no way to un-burn fossil fuels. This demand is not for the extraction and burning to stop, but for the oil and gas industry to continue, while powering some non-existent technology that makes it all okay. XR doesn’t specify how they plan to reach the goal.

Proponents of net-zero emissions advocate for the trading of carbon offsets, so industries can pay to have their emissions captured elsewhere, without reducing any on their part. This approach creates a whole new industry of selling carbon credits. Wind turbines, hydro-electric dams, biofuels, solar panels, energy efficiency projects, and carbon capture are commonly traded carbon offsets. None of these actually reduce carbon emissions in practice, and are themselves contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, so make the problem worse. Using this approach, a supposedly carbon-neutral economy leads to increased extraction and burning, and generates massive profits for corporations in the process. Head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital, Louis Redshaw, predicted in 2007 “carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market, and it could become the world’s biggest market overall.”

The demand for net-zero emissions has been echoed by a group of more than 100 companies and lobby groups, who say in a letter to the UK government: “We see the threat that climate change poses to our businesses and to our investments, as well as the significant economic opportunities that come with being an early mover in the development of new low-carbon goods and services.” Included in this group are Shell, Nestle and Unilever. This is the same Shell that has caused thousands of oil spills and toxic leaks in Nigeria and around the world, executed protesters, owns 60 per cent of the Athabasca oil sands project in Alberta, and intends to continue extracting oil long into the future; the same Nestle that profits from contaminated water supplies by selling bottled water, while depleting the world’s aquifers; the same Unilever that is responsible for clearing rainforests for palm oil and paper, dumping tonnes of mercury in India, and making billions by marketing plastic-wrapped junk food and unnecessary consumer products to the world’s poorest people. All these companies advocate for free trade and privatization of the commons, and exploit workers and lax environmental laws in the third world. As their letter says, their motivation is to profit from the crisis, not to stop the destruction they are causing.

These are XR’s allies in the call for net-zero emissions.

The nuclear industry also sees the net-zero target as a cause for celebration, and even fracking is considered compatible with the goal.

Net-zero emissions in practice

Let’s look at some of the proposed approaches to achieve net-zero in more detail.

Renewable energy doesn’t reduce the amount of energy being generated by fossil fuels, and doesn’t do anything to reduce atmospheric carbon. Wind turbines and solar panels are made of metals, which are mined using fossil fuels. Any attempt to transition to 100% renewables would require more of some rare earth metals than exist on the planet, and rare earth mining is mostly done illegally in ecologically sensitive areas in China. There are plans to mine the deep sea to extract the minerals needed for solar panels, wind turbines and electric car batteries. Mining causes massive destruction and pollution of forests and rivers, leading to increased rates of extinction and climate change. And huge profits for mining and energy companies, who can claim government subsidies for powering the new climate economy. The amount of fossil fuels needed to power the mines, manufacturing, infrastructure and maintenance of renewables makes the goal of transitioning to clean energy completely meaningless. Wind and solar ‘farms’ are installed on land taken from actual farms, as well as deserts and forests. And the energy generated is not used to protect endangered species, but to power the industries that are driving us all extinct. Not a solution. Not even close. In the net-zero logic of offset trading, renewables are presented as not an alternative to fossil fuel extraction, but instead a way to buy a pass to burn even more oil. That’s a double shot of epic fail for renewables.

Improving efficiency of industrial processes leads to an increase in the amount of energy consumed, not a decrease, as more can be produced with the available energy, and more energy is made available for other uses. The industries that are converting the living world into disposable crap need to be stopped, not given money to destroy the planet more efficiently.

Reforestation would be a great way to start repairing the damage done to the world, but instead is being used to expand the timber industry, which uses terms like ‘forest carbon markets’ and ‘net-zero deforestation’ to legitimize destroying old-growth forests, evicting their inhabitants, and replacing them with plantations. Those seeking to profit from reforestation are promoting genetically engineered, pesticide-dependent monocrop plantations, to be planted by drones, and are anticipating an increase in demand for wood products in the new ‘bioeconomy’. Twelve million hectares of tropical rainforest were cleared in 2018, the equivalent of 30 football fields a minute. Land clearing at this rate has been going on for decades, with no sign of stopping. No carbon offsets or emissions trading can have any effect while forest destruction continues. And making an effort to repair past damage does not make it okay to continue causing harm long into the future. A necessary condition of regenerating the land is that all destructive activity needs to stop.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is promoted as a way to extract carbon dioxide from industrial emissions, and bury it deep underground. Large amounts of energy and fresh water are required to do this, and pollutants are released into the atmosphere in the process. The purpose of currently-operational carbon capture installations is not to store the carbon dioxide, but to use it in a process called Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), which involves injecting CO2 into near-depleted oil fields, to extract more fossil fuels than would otherwise be accessible. And with carbon trading, the business of extracting oil becomes more profitable, as it can sell offset credits. Again, the proposed solution leads to more fossil fuel use, not less. Stored carbon dioxide is highly likely to leak out into the atmosphere, causing earthquakes and asphyxiating any nearby living beings. This headline says all you need to know: “Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than Sequestered”. Carbon capture for underground storage is neither technically nor commercially viable, as it is risky and there is no financial incentive to store the carbon dioxide, so requires government investment and subsidies. And the subsidies lead to coal and gas becoming more financially viable, thus expanding the industry.

Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is a psychopathic scheme to clear forests, and take over agricultural land to grow genetically modified fuel crops, burn the trees and crops as an energy source, and then bury the carbon dioxide underground (where it’s used to expand oil and gas production). It would require an amount of land almost the size of Australia, or up to 80% of current global cropland, masses of chemical fertilizers (made from fossil fuels), and lead to soil degradation (leading to more emissions), food shortages, water shortages, land theft, massive increase in the rate of extinction, and I can’t keep researching these effects it’s making me feel ill. Proponents of BECCS (i.e. fossil fuel companies) acknowledge that meeting the targets will require “three times the world’s total cereal production, twice the annual world use of water for agriculture, and twenty times the annual use of nutrients.” Of course this will mostly take place on land stolen from the poor, in Africa, South America and Asia. And the energy generated used to make more fighter jets, Hollywood movies, pointless gadgets and urban sprawl. Burning of forests for fuel is already happening in the US and UK, all in the name of clean energy. Attaching carbon capture to bioenergy means that 30% more trees or crops need to be burned to power the CCS facility, to sequester the emissions caused by burning them. And again, it’s an offset, so sold as a justification to keep the fossil fuel industry in business. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (in the three most likely of its four scenarios) recommends implementing BECCS on a large scale to keep warming below 2°C. Anyone who thinks this is a good idea can go burn in hell, where they can be put to good use as an energy source.

This is what a decarbonised economy looks like in practice. An enormous increase in fossil fuel extraction, land clearing, mining (up to nine times as much as current levels), pollution, resource wars, exploitation, and extinction. All the money XR is demanding that governments invest in decarbonisation is going straight to the oil, gas, coal and mining companies, to expand their industries and add to their profits. The Centre for International Environmental Law, in the report Fuel to the Fire, states “Overall, the US government has been funding CCS research since 1997, with over $5billion being appropriated since 2010.” Fossil fuel companies have been advocating net-zero for some years, as it is seen as a way to save a failing coal industry, and increase demand for oil and gas, because solar, wind, biofuels and carbon capture technologies are all dependent on fossil fuels for their operation.

Anyone claiming that a carbon-neutral economy is possible is not telling the truth. All of these strategies emit more greenhouse gases than they capture. The second demand directly contradicts the first.

These approaches are used to hide the problem, and dump the consequences on someone else: the poor, nonhuman life, the third world, and future generations, all in the service of profits in the present. The goal here is not to maintain a stable climate, or to protect endangered species, but to make money out of pretending to care.

Green growth, net-zero emissions and the Green New Deal (which explicitly states in its report that the purpose is to stimulate the economy, which includes plans to extract “remaining fossil fuel with carbon capture”) are fantasy stories sold to us by energy companies, a shiny advertisement sucking us in with their claims to make life better. In reality the product is useless, and draws us collectively into a debt that we’re already paying for by being killed off at a rate of 200 species a day. With exponential economic growth (a.k.a. exponential climate action) the rate of extinction will also grow exponentially. And the money to pay for it all comes directly from working people, in the form of pension funds, carbon taxes, and climate emergency levies.

The transition to net-zero

There are plans for thousands of carbon capture facilities to be built in the coming years, all requiring roads, pipelines, powerlines, shipping, land clearing, water extraction, pollution, noise, and the undermining of local economies for corporate profits, all for the purpose of extracting more oil. And all with the full support of the rebellion.

To get a sense of the scale of this economic transformation, a billion seconds is almost 32 years. If you were to line up a billion cars and run over them (or run them over) at a rate of one car per second, you’d be running for 32 years non-stop. That’s enough cars to stretch 100 times around the equator. You’d probably need to turn entire continents into a mine site to extract all the minerals required to make them. And even that wouldn’t be enough, as some of the rare earth metals required for batteries don’t exist in sufficient quantities. If all these cars are powered by renewables, you do the math on how much mining would be needed to make all the wind turbines and solar panels. Maybe several more continents. And then a few more covered in panels, turbines, powerlines, substations. And a few more to extract all the oil needed to power the mining and road building. Which all leaves no space for any life. And all for what? So we can spend our lives stuck in traffic? It’s ridiculous and apocalyptic, yet this is what the net-zero lobbyists, with the US and UK governments, and the European Union, have already begun implementing.

Shell’s thought leadership and government advisory schemes appear to be going great, with the US senate passing a number of bills in recent months to increase subsidies for oil companies using carbon capture, and a few more, to subsidise wind, solar, nuclear, coal, gas, research and development, and even more carbon capture, are scheduled to pass in the coming months.

The UK government, with guidance from the creepy-sounding nonprofit Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, is implementing a transition to net-zero, involving carbon capture, nuclear, bioenergy, hydrogen, ammonia, wind, solar, oil, gas, electric cars, smart grids, offset trading, manufacturing and the obligatory economic growth. And offering ‘climate finance’ to third world countries, to impose this industrial horror on the entire planet. All led by their advisors from the fossil fuel and finance industries, with input from the CCS, oil, gas, bioenergy, renewables, chemical, manufacturing, hydrogen, nuclear, airline, automotive, mining, and agriculture industries.

The European Union, advised by the corporate-funded European Climate Foundation, are implementing a similar plan, aiming to remain competitive with the rest of the industrialised world. The EU intends to commit 25% of its budget to implementing so-called climate mitigation strategies. Other industrialised countries also have plans to transition to a decarbonised economy.

Net-zero emissions is also the goal of the councils that have declared a climate emergency, which now number close to 1000, covering more than 200 million citizens.

This is the plan the rebellion is uniting behind to demand from the world’s governments.

Jevons Paradox strikes again….

Automated vehicles: more driving, energy wasted, & congestion

Posted on August 1, 2019 by energyskeptic

Preface. There’s no need to actually worry about how automated vehicles will be used and their potential congestion, energy use, and whether there are enough rare earth minerals to make them possible, because they simply can never be fully automated, as explained in this post, with articles from Science, Scientific American, and the New York Times: “Why self-driving cars may not be in your future“.

There are two articles summarized below.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

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Taiebat, M., et al. 2019. Forecasting the Impact of Connected and Automated Vehicles on Energy Use: A Microeconomic Study of Induced Travel and Energy Rebound. Applied Energy247: 297

The benefits of self-driving cars will likely induce vehicle owners to drive more, and those extra miles could partially or completely offset the potential energy-saving benefits that automation may provide, according to a new University of Michigan study.

Greater fuel efficiency induces some people to travel extra miles, and those added miles can partially offset fuel savings. It’s a behavioral change known as the rebound effect. In addition, the ability to use in-vehicle time productively in a self-driving car — people can work, sleep, watch a movie, read a book — will likely induce even more travel.

Taken together, those two sources of added mileage could partially or completely offset the energy savings provided by autonomous vehicles. In fact, the added miles could even result in a net increase in energy consumption, a phenomenon known as backfire.

Traditionally, time spent driving has been viewed as a cost to the driver. But the ability to pursue other activities in an autonomous vehicle is expected to lower this “perceived travel time cost” considerably, which will likely spur additional travel.

The U-M researchers estimated that the induced travel resulting from a 38% reduction in perceived travel time cost would completely eliminate the fuel savings associated with self-driving cars.

“Backfire — a net rise in energy consumption — is a distinct possibility.

Mervis, J. December 15, 2017. Not so fast. We can’t even agree on what autonomous, much less how they will affect our lives. Science.

Joan Walker, a transportation engineer at UC Berkeley, designed a clever experiment. Using an automated vehicle (AV) is like having your own chauffeur. So she gave 13 car owners in the San Francisco Bay area the use of a chauffeur-driven car for up to 60 hours over 1 week, and then tracked their travel habits.  There were 4 millennials, 4 families, and 5 retirees.

The driver was free.  The study looked at how they drove their own cars for a week, and how that changed when they had a driver.

They could send the car on ghost trips (errands), such as picking up their children from school, and they didn’t have to worry about driving or parking.

The results suggest that a world with AVs will have more traffic:

1. the 13 subjects logged 76% more miles
2. 22% were ghost errand trips
3. There was a 94% increase in the number of trips over 20 miles and an 80% increase after 6 PM, with retirees increasing the most.
4. During the chauffeur week, there was no biking, mass transit, or use of ride services like Uber and Lyft.

Three-fourths of the supposedly car-shunning millennials clocked more miles. In contrast to conventional wisdom that older people would be slower to embrace the new technology, Walker says, “The retirees were really excited about AVs. They see their declining mobility and they are like, ‘I want this to be available now.’”

Due to the small sample size she will repeat this experiment on a larger scale next summer.

Collapse early, avoid the rush……

How long have we got?

published by matslats on Fri, 07/26/2019 – 03:02

Last month I expressed personal alarm at the weather and the unexpected speed of change. Since then the global weather continues to break records, and I’ve thought of something slightly more constructive to say.

The asteroid which brushed passed the earth on Thursday was only identified as such the day before. Presumably our instruments calculated that it wasn’t a risk and the alarm wasn’t raised. But had the trajectory been six earth diameters to the side, how much notice would we have had to prepare ourselves for a 30 Hiroshima-bomb impact somewhere on the earth? What if the authorities decided not to tell anybody because there wasn’t time to prepare and it would just cause unnecessary panic?

Sometimes climate change feels like that. We know time is running out, but governments are failing to tell the truth (for whatever reason) so we don’t have the information or the political power to respond appropriately. No wonder people are waking up to the shortness of time and wondering how long they’ve got.

But the question in that form is poorly articulated perhaps because of the panic behind it. Who is we? What do we need time for? Do we really need to know? Might living in unknowing be wiser than planning for one specific possible future?

This post is an attempt to answer for myself. I want to avoid conflict and oppression in my own life and contribute to attempts to reduce harm. How long do I have for that?

It seems to me that no-one wants to be so irresponsible as to make a prediction too short. The shortest predictions are the most dangerous and potentially embarrassing, because they invoke the maximum panic and will be proven wrong the soonest. Mavericks like Guy McPhearson are marginalised and even belittled for advising us that “Only love remains“.

At the more respectable end of the panic spectrum the UN is pushing countries to make 2050 commitments which could be even more irresponsible. This date could be even more irresponsible and less accurate if by being slow to incorporate the latest science, it gives anyone the impression that we have wiggle-room.

So how long have we got? If someone would just give us a clue, we might make better decisions. If I knew an asteroid might hit my city 24 hours from now I might try to escape the impact zone, or seek or construct some kind of shelter; but if I had ten minutes I’d be lucky to get my children out of the building and underground. Less than that, and at least I could follow the advice of the Chinese/World government in the apocalyspse action thriller The Wandering Earth to go back to my family and be with my loved ones.

However climate change is not a Newtonian body in constant motion through space, but a very large and complex system which has yet to be accurately modeled by computers. We don’t know how long we’ve got or what event we dread. Every number you hear representing a target, threshhold or deadline, such as 12 years, 1.5 degrees, ‘2050 tipping point’ is chosen by Public Relations advisors as a strategic target for policy makers and should be taken with a large pinch of salt. The body which has promoted most of those numbers has failed us badly by implying those things were knowable, and then placing them far too far in the future. But even if the models were accurate it wouldn’t help very much because our well being depends in large part not on the weather but on society, another complex system which is premised on the first. That’s not including the economy, another system which nobody understands, and which is designed to fail suddenly, unexpectedly and catastrophically.

The future most of us should be concerned about is not death in a heatwave or hurricane, or drowning in a rising tide, but social and political failure in a civilisation unable to adapt to changes in its environment.

So how long have we got – until what? I’m concerned that there’s too much vague fearmongering and not enough thinking about how our society is most likely to fail. It probably won’t be a distinct ‘event’ as its known in prepper-speak, a jump from capitalism to cannibalism, but could unfold in different ways and lead to different outcomes, some more preferable than others. Fiction can help us imagine possible futures like the charred landscape and fearful encounters of the The Road or living in a sealed dome of Logan’s Run. The best prediction we can hope to make is to project forwards from now in a straight line, and for me Children of Men is the movie that does that best. Notice the police and the public, the dirt and decay, the slim hopes! 

The continuing shocking weather will lead to poor harvests this year and probably poorer next year. Kudos to AllFed for their work on food security already. Around that time, maybe the year after, global food markets will go crazy as the rich countries begin hoarding food in earnest. It won’t be the shortage itself so much as the political handling of it which will be brutal. Even now many humans are already starving for political reasons while food rots in vast warehouses. Lloyds of London predicted that Africa would be hit hardest and soonest. Maybe we could feed ourselves for a few years, but without improved yields it wouldn’t be long before we saw food rationing in developed countries and governments using emergency rhetoric, political repression and of course debt-slavery to maintain order.

This at least seems like the harsh direction of the capitalist road we are on. The self-entitled, super-wealthy business and political classes will requisition everything to sustain themselves in militarised island ecovillages.

They would manage the rationing system while infrastructure decayed and schools and hospitals services failed and closed. Growing numbers of unemployed destitutes would be left to fend for themselves, dying younger than their parents from poverty related causes, including disease and violence.

So if I told you how long you had, would you wait until the last minute? One thing is for sure that you don’t want to get caught in the rush for the exit. Once everyone else starts to panic, considered, conscientious action becomes much harder.

In his Deep Adaptation paper Jem Bendell put his neck out and guessed we had 10 years before ‘societal collapse’. After a year of reflecting on this and of reading alarming science, I’m currently guessing that widespread food panics will come to dominate international politics in the next 2-4 years. The introduction of rationing will herald the crumbling of our political and financial freedoms.

So in my mind as a Western European, that 2-4 years is my window to do whatever I think necessary, desirable or possible with relative freedom. After that I think life will become harder, and choices narrower.

We can not now prevent a massive die-off of all that sustains us, starting with the insects now, expanding to the fish, trees, and surely also the grasses we depend on for food. However bleak the outlook seems – it could be worse. Maybe we’ll go extinct and maybe we won’t; wise choices could make the difference between the two. It is still possible to reduce the coming anguish and suffering; to reduce the mess and leave opportunities for the cockroaches to thrive after us; to face the future with dignity and open eyes.

I think many of us should be looking at quitting our jobs in the commercial machine, preferably with a spectacular act of nonviolent industrial sabotage, cashing in our pensions and investing in real things we care about, whether it be survival, justice, personal or collective redemption, or just pleasure.

I believe there may still be important political/collective options which would both lessen the suffering and increase our survival odds. Neither of those things seem to matter to many people I talk to, but Extinction Rebellion is closest to my way of thinking right now. To me the wonder of the universe is enough to make me want more of it, so I expect I’ll be working on system change as long as there is a system to change – not only with the hope to make things less bad, but because that is what I do.

The monster that is industrial agriculture….

It’s No Wonder Folks Think Cows are Bad… 30 July 2019   This was the light bulb that came on after listening to a couple podcasts where there was some discussion over cow size, and it’s attribution to the current agricultural system today. It’s funny how the more I think about these things, the more I see how a lot of the dots start connecting with each other.  I’ve talked about the environmental concerns that people have over cattle grazing. I’ve also heard quite a bit about concerns regarding the fact that grains are commonly fed to cattle, particularly to those that are being finished during the last few months of their lives. There’s also quite the lamenting about how much cows eat, how much they defecate, the methane they emit, generally the amount of stuff that is put into them to meet consumer demand for beef and milk.   What’s ironic is that while many people are busy pointing out how cows are bad with this issue and this issue, very few have pointed out how the modern cow has gotten so big compared to what cows were like over 100 years ago. And fewer still—have connected the dots in reasoning out why the majority of North American 21st century cows have an average body weight of 1600 pounds (720 kg), why they’re eating and pooping so much, and why they’re even being fed grain in the first place.   If we look back to the cattle that populated the West back over 100 years ago, they were quite a bit smaller. They average cow size then was only around 800 to 1000 pounds. Those were truly some “rangy” cattle; they didn’t need grain and thrived on forage only.   But why the significant change in cow size? And why do we have “modernized” cows now that basically can’t be as productive without that little extra supplemental grain every so often? I may not have all the pieces of the puzzle in hand to explain this, but I will do my best.A Brief History of the Shift of North American Beef ProductionA lot of things happened that shifted agriculture from the organic, animal-powered, manual labour, subsistence agricultural model to one that we have today. The only thing that comes to mind was the discovery of fossil fuels, and I’m not just talking about coal. Some marketing genius saw the future use of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal extraction) booming to the point that we’ve become so incredibly and heavily reliant on it today it ain’t even funny.   I mean, look at all the things that were invented just so that farmers could buy into using (and purchasing) more fossil fuels: the “iron horse” or now known as the tractor, and the various implements associated with it, including the now-rare moldboard plow; the discovery of four “essential” nutrients plants need to grow (NPKS—nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur), and the Law of the Minimum to go along with it; the conversion of ammonium nitrate from being used in bombs during the Second World War to being used as nitrogen fertilizer for farmers (now illegal in most countries because of the ease of use in terrorist activities); and the markets and marketing that has grown up around all that comes with growing annual crops. I probably missed a few items there, but that’s the gist of it.   Many farmers got sucked right into the popularity of having a tractor with a whole lot of implements to go with it and the ease of applying fertilizers so much that the amount of grain that was being produced was becoming far beyond what most people could even eat. With quite the glut of grain, someone else had to come up with a solution. The best solution was to start feeding all that excess grain to animals, primarily pigs, chickens, and cattle.   While it was pretty easy to change diets of monogastrics like pigs and chickens to be eating grain in a confinement operation, with the cows of the 1950s, it wasn’t so easy. It’s really hard to convert a ruminant that thrives on grass to one that can gain well on grain and not get so butterball fat so quickly.   That’s what was happening to those smaller-type feeder cattle back then. They would be pushed on, I would guess an 80% grain-based diet prior to slaughter. The resulting amount of fat that the packers needed to trim off would’ve been incredible, so much that the meat packers really didn’t like it.  Even today, if there’s a beef carcass that runs through the commercial meat packer facility and has a lot of excessive extra-muscular fat (and even intramuscular fat)—or, more fat than meat—it gets docked in price quite heavily. That’s not good for the feedlot’s bottom line.   The conundrum though, is that what the meat packers and feedlots want is not what the beef cow-calf producer wants. Let me explain: where the packers want a good sized, fairly lean carcass that doesn’t have much fat to trim off, and came from a feedlot where those cattle kept that lean muscling throughout the finishing period, the cow-calf producers would sooner have an animal that gains easily on just forage with little to no grain supplement, isn’t generally so big, and has no trouble being bred back on time to have another calf the following year.   So, on one end of the spectrum there’s the meat-producing machine the meat packers want. On the other end is the easy-fleshing, maternal, smaller, fertile bovine that doesn’t need the grain nor to be so big and muscly. Somehow, these stubborn cow-calf guys needed to be convinced that they need to change their cows to satisfy the meat packers… not only that, but for the growing companies that were making their big bucks on fossil fuels.   In my view — and I may not get this totally right, so forgive me if I get some things out of whack — there were a few key strategies at play to get the beef cow-calf producers to succumb to the modernized beef market demand and give up their grass-based, small-sized, easy-fleshing cows.   One primary strategy was to target consumers and convince them—mainly the housewives—that lean beef was far superior to the fatty, heavily-marbled stuff; the assistance with that was the “science” that was behind demonizing saturated fat, or just animal fats in general as being “unhealthy” and the cause of all sorts of nasty metabolic diseases. (Sadly, many people still believe in this today…) The second was to force reduced market prices on small-sized weaned calves. Any cow-calf producer would suffer and start to re-examine what kind of cattle he’s running if and when he was to sell a bunch of calves and find that almost all of them went for a lot less than those bigger, much more muscly cattle. He wouldn’t be too happy, let me tell you. That in itself would force him to start changing his herd to where he would be focusing quite heavily on pounds of calf weaned, just so he can “ring the bell at the sale barn” and come home with a decent cheque.     The third, mainly as a result of the second, was to heavily promote the hell out of the “continental” European breeds that were being imported into Canada and the United States in the 1970s. Breeds like Charolais, Simmental, and Limousin were those big, muscly, lean type of cattle that the packers were looking for. They were marketed such that they would give producers calves that would bring them the most money. Conveniently so, though, the promotions never really mentioned that these big animals needed to have some supplemental grain to keep them in shape…     Since then, the packers and feedlots haven’t let up on their demand for large cattle that gained well with not a whole lot of extra-muscular fat to trim off—the United States Department of Agriculture actually formed a grading standard to tell producers and packers what kind of “muscle-to-fat ratio” was desirable. As a result, cow size has increased dramatically since then. Producers have done well to convince themselves that focusing on weight, and to get as big of calves as possible sold through the auction to the feedlot is the best way to go. This is certainly still something that’s alive and well today.   So far I’ve only focused on beef production. What about dairy production?The Big, Modern, Dairy Cow. The dairy cows haven’t stayed small either. The average size of a dairy cow (predominantly Holsteins) today is much the same as what the average size of a modern beef cow is. The story that goes with seeing an increase in cow size for dairy cows is pretty parallel with beef cattle, except that it wasn’t this need to convince any cow-calf guys to get bigger, not-so-grass-based cows. The explanation is a bit simpler than that. With a higher demand by consumers for more dairy products, dairy farmers needed cows to produce more milk. I think I’m safe to say that the larger the cow that was also genetically selected for the highest milk production possible, generally the heavier milker she would expected to be. Holstein-Freisian cattle are the heaviest (and most popular) milk-producing breed in the world to date. And they’re not small cattle either. They may not have much for muscle, but they are certainly tall… With dairy cattle, though, the selection must be for milk production, not size as in muscling ability. Some of the poorest milk-producing cows out there, like Charolais, are the best, well-muscled animals. In other words, if you’re going to be selecting for milk production, you might as well kiss the genetics for muscling good-bye.   Undeniably, the modern dairy cow has also been selected over time to be needing grain in order to not just produce milk, but also meet her body’s metabolic needs. She’s been basically turned into a fossil-fuel guzzling (indirectly, mind you), milk-producing genetic freak of a machine.     As for the modern-day big beefy girls, sadly, they’re not much different. So, Why are Cows & Cattle Fed Grain?? I’ve spent some time showing how commercially raised cows today have become so big and even grain-needy today. Now, it’s time to show you the why.   It’s actually pretty simple. Much of the cattle today have been selected for higher productivity—more meat, more milk—and as a result, their nutritional requirements have increased. These animals actually need more nutrition than their ancestors did just under 100 years ago. Their metabolisms have changed such that they can’t meet their body needs and be as fertile, milk-producing and/or muscling on just grass or forage, without some kind of extra supplement to meet their needs in terms of energy (carbohydrates), proteins (mainly non-protein nitrogen and amino acids), as well as minerals and vitamins, otherwise they will literally “fall apart.”   By “fall apart” I mean they lose weight, and aren’t as milky, reproductive, nor meat-producing as a farmer would hope for. If they are not properly fed, they can die of malnutrition. It’s that bad.   You know, sadly it’s become an established norm to feed cows grain or some alfalfa cubes or range pellets, even just a few pounds per head every second or third day, “just to keep ‘em friendly.” Not many people have stopped to think why it’s so normal to give cattle that extra supplement while they’re out on pasture, or even that they have to add grain to the diet during the winter months.   I know that if I told them that they weren’t allowed to feed their cattle any kind of grain or pelleted supplement, they’d look at me like I was crazy, and then they’d give me a good talking-to as to why those cows *need* to be fed some grain… let me guess, so that those animals don’t go downhill on you, right?   It’s no secret that the majority of cows and cattle today are fed grain of some amount. It’s no secret either that the bigger the cow, the more she’ll eat. But I don’t think that’s near as much of a concern as just the fact that the petroleum industry has forced producers’ hands time and time again to have big cows that can’t be productive without eating some grain every now and then.   It’s no wonder people think cows are so bad. We’ve turned them into fossil-fuel consuming, milk/meat-outputting machines, not the genuinely beneficial, grass-based, pasture-raised ruminant herbivores that they really should be. And that’s a right shame. ​​​

Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Most people think that selling your car, avoiding flights and going vegetarian are the best strategies for fighting climate change, but in fact, according to a study into true impacts of different green lifestyle choices, having fewer children beats all those actions by a very long margin…….

I’ve been saying this for years and years, but the graphic below might just about convince anyone……..

The greatest impact individuals can have in fighting climate change is to have one fewer child, according to a new study that identifies the most effective ways people can cut their carbon emissions.

The next best actions are selling your car, avoiding long flights, and eating a vegetarian diet. These reduce emissions many times more than common green activities, such as recycling, using low energy light bulbs or drying washing on a line. However, the high impact actions are rarely mentioned in government advice and school textbooks, researchers found.

Carbon emissions must fall to two tonnes of CO2 per person by 2050 to avoid severe global warming, but in the US and Australia emissions are currently 16 tonnes per person and in the UK seven tonnes. “That’s obviously a really big change and we wanted to show that individuals have an opportunity to be a part of that,” said Kimberly Nicholas, at Lund University in Sweden and one of the research team.

The new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, sets out the impact of different actions on a comparable basis. By far the biggest ultimate impact is having one fewer child, which the researchers calculated equated to a reduction of 58 tonnes of CO2 for each year of a parent’s life.

The figure was calculated by totting up the emissions of the child and all their descendants, then dividing this total by the parent’s lifespan. Each parent was ascribed 50% of the child’s emissions, 25% of their grandchildren’s emissions and so on.

The graphic shows how much CO2 can be saved through a range of different actions.

“We recognise these are deeply personal choices. But we can’t ignore the climate effect our lifestyle actually has,” said Nicholas. “It is our job as scientists to honestly report the data. Like a doctor who sees the patient is in poor health and might not like the message ‘smoking is bad for you’, we are forced to confront the fact that current emission levels are really bad for the planet and human society.”

Besides, who in their right mind would want to bring children into this dysfunctional world? Oh wait……  nobody is in their right mind!

Meet Joel Salatin……

I’ve been following Salatin for years, and he is truly inspiring…….  my goal is to run the Fanny Farm as a scaled down version of Polyface Farm……. I do wish he wouldn’t put all ‘greenies’ in the same basket though!

The following post originally appeared on the Polyface Farms Facebook page.

Cows at Polyface Farm. Photo by Amber Karnes.

The recent editorial by James McWilliams, titled “The Myth of Sustainable Meat,” contains enough factual errors and skewed assumptions to fill a book, and normally I would dismiss this out of hand as too much nonsense to merit a response. But since it specifically mentioned Polyface, a rebuttal is appropriate. For a more comprehensive rebuttal, read the book Folks, This Ain’t Normal.

Let’s go point by point. First, that grass-grazing cows emit more methane than grain-fed ones. This is factually false. Actually, the amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside. Whether the feed is eaten by an herbivore or left to rot on its own, the methane generated is identical. Wetlands emit some 95 percent of all methane in the world; herbivores are insignificant enough to not even merit consideration. Anyone who really wants to stop methane needs to start draining wetlands. Quick, or we’ll all perish. I assume he’s figuring that since it takes longer to grow a beef on grass than on grain, the difference in time adds days to the emissions. But grain production carries a host of maladies far worse than methane. This is simply cherry-picking one negative out of many positives to smear the foundation of how soil builds: herbivore pruning, perennial disturbance-rest cycles, solar-grown biomass, and decomposition. This is like demonizing marriage because a good one will include some arguments.

As for his notion that it takes too much land to grass-finish, his figures of 10 acres per animal are assuming the current normal mismanagement of pastures. At Polyface, we call it neanderthal management, because most livestock farmers have not yet joined the 20th century with electric fencing, ponds, piped water, and modern scientific aerobic composting (only as old as chemical fertilization). Hence, while his figures comparing the relative production of grain to grass may sound compelling, they are like comparing the learning opportunities under a terrible teacher versus a magnificent teacher. Many farmers, in many different climates, are now using space-age technology, biomimicry, and close management to get exponential increases in forage production. The rainforest, by the way, is not being cut to graze cattle. It’s being cut to grow transgenic corn and soybeans. North America had twice as many herbivores 500 years ago than it does today due to the pulsing of the predator-prey-pruning cycle on perennial prairie polycultures. And that was without any corn or soybeans at all.

Apparently if you lie often and big enough, some people will believe it: Pastured chicken has a 20 percent greater impact on global warming? Says who? The truth is that those industrial chicken houses are not stand-alone structures. They require square miles of grain to be carted into them, and square miles of land to handle the manure. Of course, many times that land is not enough. To industrial farmers’ relief, more often than not a hurricane comes along just in time to flush the toilet, kill the fish, and send pathogens into the ocean. That’s a nice way to reduce the alleged footprint, but it’s devilish sleight of hand with the data to assume that ecological toxicity compensates for the true land base needed to sustain a factory farm.

While it’s true that at Polyface our omnivores (poultry and pigs) do eat local GMO (genetically modified organism)-free grain in addition to the forage, the land base required to feed and metabolize the manure is no different than that needed to sustain the same animals in a confinement setting. Even if they ate zero pasturage, the land is the same. The only difference is our animals get sunshine, exercise, fresh pasture salad bars, fresh air, and a respectful life. Chickens walking on pasture certainly do not have any more leg sprains than those walking in a confinement facility. To suggest otherwise, as McWilliams does, is sheer nonsense. Walking is walking — and it’s generally considered to be a healthy practice, unless you’re a tyrant.

Interestingly, in a lone concession to compassion, McWilliams decries ranging hogs with rings in their noses to keep them from rooting, lamenting that this is “one of their most basic instincts.” Notice that he does not reconcile this moral imperative with his love affair with confinement hog factories. Nothing much to use their noses for in there. For the record, Polyface never rings hog noses, and in the few cases where we’ve purchased hogs with rings, we take them out. We want them to fully express their pigness. By moving them frequently using modern electric fencing, polyethylene water piping, high-tech float valves, and scientifically designed feed dispensers, we do not create nor suffer the problems encountered by earlier large-scale outdoor hog operations 100 years ago. McWilliams has apparently never had the privilege of visiting a first-rate, modern, highly managed, pastured hog operation. He thinks we’re all stuck in the early 1900s, and that’s a shame because he’d discover the answers to his concerns are already here. I wonder where his paycheck comes from?

Then McWilliams moves on to the argument that economic realities would kick in if pastured livestock became normal, driving farmers to scale up and end up right where we are today. What a clever ploy: justify the horrible by eliminating the alternatives. At Polyface, we certainly do not discourage scaling up — we actually encourage it. We think more pasture-based farms should scale up. Between the current abysmal state of mismanagement, however, and efficient operations, is an astronomical opportunity to enjoy economic and ecological advantages. McWilliams is basing his data and assumptions on the poorest, the average or below. If you want to demonize something, always pick the lowest performers. But if you compare the best the industry has to offer with the best the pasture-based systems have to offer, the factory farms don’t have a prayer. Using portable infrastructure, tight management, and techno-glitzy tools, farmers running pastured hog operations practically eliminate capitalization costs and vet bills.

Finally, McWilliams moves to the knock-out punch in his discussion of nutrient cycling, charging specifically that Polyface is a charade because it depends on grain from industrial farms to maintain soil fertility. First of all, at Polyface we do not assume that all nutrient movement is anti-environmental. In fact, one of the biggest reasons for animals in nature is to move nutrients uphill, against the natural gravitational flow from high ground to low ground. This is why low lands and valleys are fertile and the uplands are less so. Animals are the only mechanism nature has to defy this natural downward flow. Fortunately, predators make the prey animals want to lounge on high ground (where they can see their enemies), which insures that manure will concentrate on high lookout spots rather than in the valleys. Perhaps this is why no ecosystem exists that is devoid of animals. The fact is that nutrient movement is inherently nature-healing.

But, it doesn’t move very far. And herein lies the difference between grain used at Polyface and that used by the industry: We care where ours comes from. It’s not just a commodity. It has an origin and an ending, start to finish, farmer to eater. The closer we can connect the carbon cycles, the more environmentally normal we will become.

Second, herbivores are the exception to the entire negative nutrient flow argument because by pruning back the forage to restart the rapid biomass accumulation photosynthetic engine, the net carbon flow compensates for anything lost through harvest. Herbivores do not require tillage or annuals, and that is why all historically deep soils have been created by them, not by omnivores. It’s fascinating that McWilliams wants to demonize pasture-based livestock for not closing all the nutrient loops, but has no problem, apparently, with the horrendous nutrient toxicity like dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey created by chemical fertilizer runoff to grow grain so that the life of a beef could be shortened. Unbelievable. In addition, this is one reason Polyface continues to fight for relaxing food safety regulations to allow on-farm slaughtering, precisely so we can indeed keep all these nutrients on the farm and not send them the rendering plants. If the greenies who don’t want historically normal farm activities like slaughter to occur on rural acreage could understand how devastating these government regulations actually are to the environmental economy, perhaps McWilliams wouldn’t have this bullet in his arsenal. And yes, human waste should be put back on the land as well, to help close the loop.

Third, at Polyface, we struggle upstream. Historically, omnivores were salvage operations. Hogs ate spoiled milk, whey, acorns, chestnuts, spoiled fruit, and a host of other farmstead products. Ditto for chickens, who dined on kitchen scraps and garden refuse. That today 50 percent of all the human edible food produced in the world goes into landfills or greenie-endorsed composting operations rather than through omnivores is both ecologically and morally reprehensible. At Polyface, we’ve tried for many, many years to get kitchen scraps back from restaurants to feed our poultry, but the logistics are a nightmare. The fact is that in America we have created a segregated food and farming system. In the perfect world, Polyface would not sell eggs. Instead, every kitchen, both domestic and commercial, would have enough chickens proximate to handle all the scraps. This would eliminate the entire egg industry and current heavy grain feeding paradigm. At Polyface, we only purport to be doing the best we can do as we struggle through a deviant, historically abnormal food and farming system. We didn’t create what is and we may not solve it perfectly. But we’re sure a lot farther toward real solutions than McWilliams can imagine. And if society would move where we want to go, and the government regulators would let us move where we need to go, and the industry would not try to criminalize us as we try to go there, we’ll all be a whole lot better off and the earthworms will dance.

AND here’s a lecture Joel gave in Australia last year……..