The Bush administration plans to announce an agreement today with seven countries to slow global warming and harvest an otherwise wasted fuel by capturing emissions of methane, a heat-trapping gas, from landfills, coal mines and oil and gas fields and pipelines.
The agreement would mainly work by funneling money and expertise from wealthy countries that have already started stanching their methane leaks to poorer ones, where small investments could quickly produce benefits, both in curbing climate change and conserving methane, a clean-burning fuel that now goes to waste, administration officials said.
Michael O. Leavitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said the administration would propose spending $53 million over the next five years, although he said the project had not yet been included in any budget request. He said the goal of the participating countries - Australia, Britain, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico and Ukraine - would be to inspect sites for leaks and, by 2015, capture nine million metric tons of the gas annually, to sell (methane is the main ingredient in natural gas) or to burn directly as a source of heat.
Russia plans to participate as well, but has not formally joined the partnership, White House officials said.
This is definitely eco-HOT - methane is 21x as powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and its mitigation will involve the transfer of technology, expertise, $$, jobs, and energy to developing countries. At this (admittedly early) stage, it sounds like a great plan, and it is in fact exactly the kind of project envisioned by Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism, whereby industrialized countries would be able to purchase credits on the emissions market by investing in greenhouse gas mitigation projects in the developing world, enhancing the market by allowing firms to reduce emissions wherever it's most cost effective to do so - and, in the process, encouraging technology transfer and sustainable economic development. While the CDM has been muddling through excruciating thickets of UN red tape in anticipation of that treaty which will probably never come into effect, G-Dub forges ahead, 'typically'.
This story came my way via the excellent Crumb Trail eco-thinkingblog, which also pointed me towards this mind-blowing article on PANARCHY, a kind of 'theory of everything' for the social sciences that provides a framework for describing and studying ecological/social/political/personal transformation:
The whole article is obviously recommended, and come to think of it, we would do well to keep this kind of thinking in mind as the US puts together some sort of alternative vision of climate change policy, which should maximize our ability to adapt (and ultimately transform) by taking a more flexible, 'experimental' approach to emissions-reducing technologies and policies that reflects both the real diversity of economies in the world as well as the real uncertainty in the science. Crumb Trail!!The book Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Gunderson and Holling 2002) describes our efforts to integrate theories and examples from ecology, economics, and social systems. It started with the results of decades of examination of ecosystems and the effects of management on their ecological and social components. That led to an image of change that recognized, across all examples in living systems, the existence, at some scale or scales from cell to biome, of the four principal phases that the elements of a system can cycle through: entrepreneurial exploitation, organizational consolidation, creative destruction, and re- or destructuring.
Each phase of those cycles creates the condition for the next phase. A pattern of two phases of growth is generated, followed by two phases of reorganization. The first two form a familiar, slow, fairly predictable pattern of growth called the "forward loop"; the second two constitute a less familiar, unpredictable, and, in ecosystems, more rapid "back loop" of reorganization. [Think of an infinity sign!]
It is the two together that make the cycle adaptive. Novel elements can accumulate, largely unexpressed, during the forward loop. Then, in the back loop, they become the seeds for the novel combinations that launch the next cycle. However, the ecosystem cycle is embedded in a set of those cycles that cross scales in space and time from leaves, to trees, to patches, to stands, to forests, to biomes.
Those adaptive cycles and their relationships are not limited to the dynamics of ecosystems. I see them even in my own life. I happen to have had a pattern of 7- to 10-yr cycles of unplanned intellectual growth, frustration, and renewal that has been both great fun and provided a great sense of discovery. Westley (2002) describes her interview of an outstanding resource manager in Wisconsin, showing how his successes and failures were very much part of the phases of his own personal cycle of change, which involved interorganizational groups, formal organizations, and politics. His plans and interventions both paced the vulnerability in each cycle of that hierarchy of cycles and, in some instances, created the vulnerability needed for change.
The world of humans has witnessed only three or four such major pulses or periods of transformation in its evolution: agricultural settlement by the first hunter-gatherers, the industrial revolution, and, now, the global interconnected communications-driven revolution. Society is now at a stage in history in which one pulse is ending and another beginning. The immense destruction that a new pulse signals is both frightening and creative. It raises fundamental questions about transformation. The only way to approach such a period, in which uncertainty is very large and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living...
That leads, then, to a strategic sense of how to proceed. Do not try to plan the details, but invent, experiment, and build. Although this may sound easy, at such times existing centers of local power resist larger opportunity because of the threats they perceive in the unknown. Consequently, it is essential to do the following:
* Encourage innovation through a rich variety of experiments and transformative approaches that probe possible directions. It is important to encourage experiments that have a low cost of failure to individuals, the environment, and careers, because many of these experiments will fail.
* Reduce inhibitions to change, which are common when systems get so locked up.
* Protect and communicate the accumulated knowledge and experience needed for change.
* Promote discourse among all parties involved to try to understand where we are going and how to achieve it.
* Encourage new foundations for renewal that build and sustain the ability of people, economies, and nature to deal with change, and ensure that these new foundations consolidate and expand our understanding of change.
* Allow sufficient time. This pulse is a global phenomenon, and it could potentially affect all levels of the hierarchy, all the way up the chain, from the individual/family to national and global systems.