Saving the Earth from Climatic Disruption

Saving the Earth from Climatic Destruction

George M. Woodwell* and Richard A. Houghton**

The annual tax on GDP around the world from the climatic disruption has now reached well into the hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of early deaths. While economists have hardly led the world in acknowledging the emergency and in deflecting it, their recent annual field day in Davos produced some lucid and welcome insights. They had a World Bank report and a new World Bank president calling for immediate action.[1]  Christine Lagarde of the IMF was unequivocal in her response to a question:  “Unless we take action on climate change, future generations will be roasted, toasted, fried and grilled.”[2]   The question is what to do.

The popular discussion seems to revolve around accepting a two-degree C rise in the global temperature as tolerable and controllable. The suggestion is that the two-degree goal has been blessed as safe by a consensus of science. It is not a consensus of scientists nor is it correct that a rise to two degrees would be benign. The two-degree threshold was emphasized in the negotiations during the 15^th Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December 2009.  It was an economic and political compromise that appeared to offer some room to establish effective action in reducing emissions globally. It does not have a scientific consensus behind it. It is, unfortunately, an attractive trap in that the current atmospheric burden exceeds the 1992 agreement under the Framework Convention to prevent dangerous interference with the climate system.

           

The warming to date has been about 0.8 degree C and the effects are conspicuous. The glacial melting in particular is moving more rapidly than most scientists had anticipated and considerably more rapidly than assumed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.[3]  A thoroughly detailed report by the US Geological Survey compiled over years and dealing with the world’s glaciers observes that “… since the late 19^th century, all of Iceland’s glaciers have decreased in area and thickness…. Since 1995…the decrease has been quite dramatic…. [They] will virtually disappear by 2200.”[4]   The Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps are also melting much more rapidly than earlier predictions. They contain in total as much as forty feet of sea level rise.[5]  A continuation of the accelerating rise in temperature will melt all the glacial ice and raise sea level by 75 meters, more than 225 feet.

The big issue that forecloses limiting an increase in mean global temperature to 2 degrees C, or even the present 0.8 degree, is the warming itself, most threatening in the Arctic.  It is a double threat in that the warming is greater in the higher latitudes than elsewhere and the Arctic contains a massive quantity of carbon potentially vulnerable to release as carbon dioxide and methane. The largest carbon pool is in the soils and peat of the tundra. There is also a significant pool in the soils and vegetation of the boreal forest. Both are circumpolar. Much of the peat in these landscapes is several too many feet deep. Some of it, containing an estimated 1700 billion tons of carbon,[6] twice the current amount in the atmosphere, has been frozen in permafrost for thousands of years.  Thawed, the carbon in peat and mineral soils is vulnerable to decay with the release of both carbon dioxide and methane.  Substantial quantities of methane have accumulated through slow decay over thousands of years in frozen soils and are released as the thawing proceeds.[7] Some is in crystalline form in shallow coastal waters that are also vulnerable to the warming. The total quantities of carbon dioxide and methane available from these sources are uncertain. They are, however, large enough to affect the current atmospheric burden and to be a major factor in the array of positive feedbacks associated with the warming.[8] 

While the Earth has warmed by less than 1 degree C, the Arctic has warmed by 2-3 degrees, more in some places, and the process of thawing long frozen soils is underway. The thawing of soils is a significant immediate source of methane. If organic decay is also stimulated, it has the potential for flooding the Earth with carbon dioxide far beyond any capacity we have for controlling it by reducing human emissions. 

The alternative is an overt, immediate, effort to stop the warming and ultimately to re-freeze the Arctic.  The first step is a rapid stabilization of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as agreed to by all the nations in 1992 when they signed and ultimately ratified the Framework Convention on Climate Change.  The action now requires reductions in human emissions from deforestation and combustion of fossil fuels.  Ultimately, a reduction in the heat-trapping gas content of the atmosphere will require abandonment of fossil fuels and a major effort at reforestation of the earth to sequester as much carbon as possible over the next decades.

It may not be possible. The Arctic release may not be controllable at this late date.  There is no alternative to attempting to check the process by cooling the earth now with the most powerful and safe methods.

The following are the facts. The total current releases from human activities are more than 10 billion tons of carbon from burning fossil fuels and from deforestation and degradation of, largely, tropical forests. The deforestation is contributing more than one billion tons of carbon. Burning fossil fuels is the rest, about 9.5 billion tons in 2011.[9]

Of those ten billion tons between 4 and 5 billion tons accumulate in the atmosphere. This accumulation is the immediate problem. It is rising. In the past year it was more than 5 billion tons, the second highest ever.[10]  The remainder of the 10 billion ton release is absorbed into the oceans and into terrestrial vegetation, largely forests. Those marine and terrestrial “sinks” amount currently to about 5 billion tons of carbon annually.  They are vulnerable, of course. Forests are vulnerable to disease and fire and drought as temperatures rise. The oceans absorb less carbon dioxide as the surface waters warm and become more acidic. And yet, we can, at this moment take advantage of the present circumstance to, first, stabilize the atmospheric composition, and, ultimately, to reverse the trends in climate.

There is no escape from reducing the use of fossil fuels. On the other hand, management of land and forests to conserve carbon is essential and will be significant. The first step is to stop further degradation and destruction of primary forests globally.[11]  That single step would remove more than 1 billion tons of carbon from the current emissions and from the annual accumulation.  Second, natural forests can be restored to deforested lands in the normally naturally forested zones.  A newly forested area of 2-4 million square kilometers stores, conservatively, about a billion tons of carbon annually during the phase of maximum growth of trees. Such an area or more can be found globally. Those two steps, desirable in any analysis of beneficial land management policies, would account for more than 2 billion tons of carbon annually from the 5 billion tons in excess currently. Thirdly, in an emergency, harvesting of secondary forests globally could be curtailed to avoid carbon releases during a transition period to ease pressures on use of fossil fuels. The combined effects would absorb and store in plants and soil 3-5 billion tons of carbon, annually, a major increment in starting the return toward the 300 ppm of the atmosphere at the beginning of the 20^th century. Simultaneously, reductions in use of fossil fuels are essential, beginning at once.

Those steps would constitute a totally appropriate recognition of the urgency of stabilizing the biosphere, opening a new era in the industrial age with new industries with local foci, new jobs and new economic opportunities globally. There is no question that the human enterprise can be operated successfully and beneficially on renewable energy.  Within the last five years the cost of wind and direct solar energy has dropped to make it attractive in many circumstances on the basis of price alone. The transition must be now and rapidly advanced to deflect the drain on national GDPs from climatic disruptions now underway.  Uncorrected, environmental chaos will consume the last vestiges of global GDP and the world will be redefined by cascading environmental, economic and political catastrophes.[12]  

             

Notes and References

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[1] J.Y. Kim, president of the World Bank, offered a strong statement based on the report: http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2012/11/18/new-report-examines-risks-of-degree-hotter-world-by-end-of-century

[2] J. Romm. 2013. ThinkProgress 2/6.  http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/02/05/1546471/imf-chief-unless-we-take-action-on-climate-change-future-generations-will-be-roasted-toasted-fried-and-grilled/

[3] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.   Rahmstorf, S., Foster, G., Cazenave, A. 2012. Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011. Environmental Research Letters 7:044035. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/044035

[4] Williams, R.S., J.G. Ferrigno, B.H. Raup., J.S. Kargel. 2012. Glaciers: The Earth’s Dynamic Cryosphere and the Earth System. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1386-A. Washington, DC.  http://thinkprogress.org/wpcontent/uploads/2012/12/WAIS.jpg

[5] USGS. 2012. State of the Earth’s Cryosphere at the Beginning of the 21sr Century: Glaciers, Global Snow Cover, Floating Ice, and Permafrost and Periglacial Environments. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1386-A. Washington, DC. A 461.

[6] Hugelius, G., Tarnocai, C., Broll, G., Canadell, J. G., Kuhry, P., and Swanson, D. K. 2013. The Northern Circumpolar Soil Carbon Database: spatially distributed datasets of soil coverage and soil carbon storage in the northern permafrost regions. Earth System Science Data. 5:3-13, doi:10.5194/essd-5-3-2013

[7] Anthony, K.W., P. Anthony, G. Grosse, J. Chanton. 2012. Geologic methane seeps along boundaries of Arctic permafrost thaw and melting glaciers. Nature Geoscience 5:419-426. doi:10.1038/ngeo1480

[8] Woodwell, G.M., F.T. Mackenzie, R.A. Houghton, M.J. Apps, E. Gorham, E.A. Davidson. 1995. Will the Warming Speed the Warming? in  G.M. Woodwell and F.T. Mackenzie (Eds). 1995. Biotic Feedbacks in the Global Climatic System. Oxford University Press, New York. p 406.

[9] Le Quéré et al. 2012. The global carbon budget 1959-2011. Earth System Science Data Discussions 5:1107-1157.

[10] CO2Now.org. Feb. 2013.

[11] The World Commission on Forests examined that question extensively and found that at that time (the late 1990s) there would be no serious influence on the availability of timber or fiber globally. 1999.  Our Forests Our Future: Report of the World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development.  Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. While growth in all aspects of the global economy may have changed that conclusion, the need for action on climate has become acute.

[12] Oreskes, N., and E.M. Conway. 2013. The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. Daedalus. Winter. p 40.  See also Ehrlich, P R., and A.H. Ehrlich. 2013. Can a Collapse of Global Civilization be Avoided? Proceedings of the Royal Society B 280(1754):20122845.

*G. M. Woodwell is Director Emeritus of the Woods Hole Research Center and currently Distinguished Scientist, Natural Resources Defense Council, 40 West 20^th St., New York, NY 10011.

**Richard A. Houghton is Senior Scientist, Woods Hole Research Center, 149 Woods Hole Road, Falmouth, MA 02540.

What to Do on Climate

What to Do on Climate?

George M. Woodwell

            Bill McKibben and his 350 organization are correct……and as close to effective as anyone can be in pushing a distracted administration to constructive action. 

            But what action? 

            What can we tell the administration to do right now after rejecting the Keystone Pipeline and withdrawing all support for the disastrous Canadian tar sands project?

            The answer is straightforward, well defined, and already ratified by the Congress of the US and by the rest of the world.  We must implement the agreement reached in 1992 when we and all other nations signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change. All agreed to stabilize the composition  of the atmospheric burden of heat-trapping gases at levels that would protect human interests and nature.   While we have passed that level, the objective remains and stabilization remains the first step in correcting a disastrous trend.

            We, the US, can take large further steps in reducing emissions, celebrate the steps already taken that are effective, and announce an aggressive series of policies in moving  rapidly toward other steps.  The steps must include reduction in methane as well as carbon dioxide emissions, but they require no further action by the Congress which has made the Convention the law of the land.

            The moment is now and the initiative is in the hands of our presidential leadership.

            Let’s remind him that he’s in charge and the stakes are very high.

                                                            Woods Hole,  June 7, 2013

President Obama at the 150th Meeting of the National Academy of Sciences

President Obama at the 150^th Meeting of

the National Academy of Sciences

George M. Woodwell

          It was an overflow crowd in the Auditorium in the newly renovated building of the National Academy at 2101 Constitution Avenue on the 29^th of April. It was first come, first served and some had been waiting for hours to hear the President of the United States address the Academy on its’ 150^th anniversary. Electronics expanded the audience to those far away who could listen as I did.  Many remembered when John F. Kennedy as President had taken the same podium just 100 years after Abraham Lincoln had founded the Academy.   John Holdren, President Obama’s Science
Advisor and a member of the Academy, said a few brisk, well spoken words of introduction before Ralph Cicerone, President of the Academy, introduced Mr. Obama.

            Expectations were high. There has never been a moment when a sitting president  faced more intense scientifically defined and obviously dangerous challenges to the public welfare than this president faces at this moment.  The global addiction to fossil fuels has been allowed to run its course beyond the limits of safety to the moment when the climatic change is tipping beyond the point of reversibility. Once that point has been  passed, if it is in fact real as experience suggests and many believe, the feedbacks will be in control and the earth will warm by many degrees despite our attempts to mitigate the process. We will have made a commitment to a rapid warming that can melt all the glacial ice in the world and raise sea level by considerably more than 200 feet.  Continental centers, already afflicted by persistent droughts, will be parched.  Regions will be periodically flooded. Millions will starve. Chaos will reign. The timing for these changes is not the indefinite future. It is now, today, conspicuous, and it is the next decades and the lifetimes of people now living.   

            To deal with this catastrophe we have powerful resources in the form of scientific insights and talents and energy. But all of that must be led and fed with political insights and skill, which is the realm of government. The initiative lies uniquely with the President of the United States and the Congress. It is true that this president has been repeatedly rebuffed by a House of Representatives dominated presently by vandals, a faction of Republicans, who do not believe in government and have done their best to dismantle it. But no one should yield to such vandalism, least of all a president. And a president addressing the pre-eminent scientific institution can assume he is among staunch friends and supporters. He can and must call on those colleagues to join him in a rapid national, and ultimately international, shift away from fossil fuels toward a world of  renewable energy and landscapes carefully managed to preserve their massive carbon stores in plants and soils.  Scientists can, and must, join in leading the way with new technology and existing insights into global biophysics, now ignored.  

             Alas, the President offered none of that. It was friendly talk. No challenge, no inspiration, no hope beyond soft platitudes.  He urged scientists to generate “science-based initiatives to help us minimize and adapt to global threats like climate change”.  It was a gracious, fine talk.  But on the most important scientific issue of his time in office and the next century he gave the day, and possibly the world, to the Republicans and their congressional and corporate friends.

Woodwell is  Distinguished Scientist at the NRDC and Emeritus Founder and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center, Woods Hole, Massachusetts.  He is a member of the NAS.e is He is

The Ultimate Subsidy: Giving the World Away

The Ultimate Subsidy:  Giving the World Away

George M. Woodwell

            There has been a great deal of discussion of just how we subsidize the various segments of the fossil fuel business.  The basic assumption is that the energy is a necessary public resource and the corporations providing it do a public service. Access to the  raw material is facilitated at modest cost to the companies. Taxes are often either not assessed  or minimal. And mines and drilling sites are often not regulated or controlled to protect other resources or even the workers. In some cases direct subsidies are provided nominally to encourage production. Mines are notorious for disasters, all of which are predictable and preventable in well run operations. Similarly, oil and gas drilling are noteworthy for spills and  for air and water contamination as well as for serious accidents. The BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was the worst of many, but was also the product of careless management. These “accidents” all carry public costs that are not assigned to the industry but are virtually all accepted by the public as part of the cost of having the industry and the convenience of  cheap energy. They are in fact, public subsidies paid by all of us, but some more than others..

            In other cases direct financial subsidies have been provided by legislatures, including the US Congress to encourage local businesses.

            But the largest subsidy of all is the acceptance of the wastes of the industry,  the carbon dioxide and methane and black carbon and noxious hydrocarbons dumped into the atmosphere globally at no cost to the industry and without limit.  The cost is appearing now: it is the cost to the public of the corruption of climate globally. Inasmuch as the climates of the earth are both result and cause of the natural communities that are the biosphere,  this corruption undermines all life on earth.  It threatens human welfare globally, destroys agriculture, increases mortality rates, and renders increasing areas uninhabitable for part or all of  the year.  Worse, the warming triggers feedback systems that speed the warming and make it more severe. If the warming continues it will melt all the ice on earth and  raise sea level by more than 200 feet. This subsidy is the ultimate in subsidies, the whole earthly environment, handed free of charge, to the fossil fuel industry to feed industrial profits. And those industries have not hesitated at all to deny the effects, obscure them, and insist on continuing the corruption as long as they can.

            We have handed the fossil fuel industry the entire future of the earth and all of human welfare. And we have done it willingly and openly, accepting the arguments of the industries that it should be that way.

            It is time now for an abrupt change starting with heavy taxes on fossil fuels as we close down their use rapidly and totally. Globally.

Dear President Obama

                                                                                                      February 27, 2013
Dear President Obama:

    We are scholars long involved in exploring the causes, effects and potential cures of the climatic disruption  We are certain that you are  aware that the crisis of climate is devouring the GDP’s of nations, and human welfare outside the GDP’s, as inexorably as its swollen storms and rising seas are filling New York’s subways. We deplore the hoax of Adaptation, and its forlorn corollary of muddling through, advanced by corporate interests in preserving the lucrative fossil fuels business as long a possible. We observe that you are, uniquely,  in the most powerful position at this moment to check the momentum and start a correction of the chaos that will end this civilization. The long-term objective, of course,  is a re-stabilized climatic system and a revitalized civilization built around renewable energy.  But for the moment we urge:

1.    Reject immediately the proposal for any pipeline or other innovations to support the tar-sand oil development.
2.    Simultaneously announce a  major US effort to meet the objectives agreed to by all nations under the  1992  Framework Convention on Climate Change, namely, stability in the composition of the atmosphere.
3.    That objective must be supplemented by a national program designed to help all nations join us in reducing the atmospheric burden of heat-trapping gases, especially carbon dioxide, over the next century, to 1900 levels.
4.    That objective will require an abrupt turn away from fossil fuels and their further production anywhere. Developing the alternatives opens large opportunities to industry that the US can subsidize and encourage in various ways, using those opportunities to leap over the fiction of a US financial crisis.
5.    The initiative will require a revision of forest management to the world’s everlasting advantage.  All remaining  primary forests must be preserved to avoid further releases  of carbon from deforestation. Second, forests can be restored to all normally naturally forested regions. That  is a necessary step to provide in part for the continued removal of  carbon from the atmosphere over the next decades. (The human benefits in land and water management globally are prodigious.)

    This transition is an essential turn in human affairs if we are to avoid a cascade of substantially irreversible changes in the structure of the biosphere that will make it far less congenial as a human habitat as the arctic and boreal zones warm over the next years and flood the world with carbon  The world is no longer large enough in proportion to human needs for us to shrug off corporate profligacy  and assume all will be well. Our world is now, as the subways of New York,  yielding and shrinking before a rising sea of troubles.

    Yours truly,     s/ 7.2 billion of us

GUNS

GUNS

2013

            Guns have one purpose.

            There was a time when I, as a young naval person stood deck watches in port on a small oceanographic ship. The Officer of the Deck normally carried a gun as part of his badge of office. But the rule was never to remove the gun from its very secure holster unless you intend to load it and use it. In my three years of experience it was never removed from the holster by anyone on duty.  

            Several months back I had an occasion to stay overnight in Riverside, California. The morning paper announced that the previous day two young men had been killed, shot dead , by two different police officers  in two different parts of town. Both young men had been driving and each had been stopped for a traffic violation. Each got out of his car carrying a gun. Each police officer, well trained, aware of well defined assumptions about guns and their only purpose, did his duty. Two armed fools died, killed by their own guns.

            Carrying guns does not provide safety or security. It opens a large new realm of hazards, insecurity, that few gun owners have given much thought to at all and the gun culture, gun clubs, and gun salesmen all want to deny. Further it invites the more foolish to treat guns as toys and indulge in play that can easily turn accidentally lethal, if not criminally so.

            And there are guns that should not be allowed at all. Automatic weapons have no use in hunting. Anti-aircraft weapons have no business in public circulation. 

            Cars have the same lethal potential. We register them and license their drivers. We also tax both.  We regulate the quality and safety of cars and the competence of drivers. There is every reason to do the same with guns and those who own or use them for any purpose. And the ammunition can be labeled as well, each projectile and shell can be marked indelibly so there is no question as to ownership. These innovations are not intrusions on freedom. They are an obviously necessary step in protecting the freedom of all, the health and safety of the public. Such regulations are an essential part of civilization, a reason for establishing and maintaining competence in governments.

            The size of the gun lobby and the magnitude of the economic interests in guns only confirm the propriety of putting the entire industry under a clear and fair regulatory regime immediately. We must do that to avoid the obvious dangers we all face from an unregulated industry that is poisoning society as surely as any other unregulated industrial poison that can circulate in the biosphere and corrupt all life.

                                                            G.M.Woodwell.

                                                            Woods Hole. Massachusetts

                                                             January 10, 2013

  

           

HAITI 2013

 HAITI 2013

            Why?

            Why does Haiti remain, year after year, leader after leader, hope after dashed hope, program after program, perpetually a candidate for the top place, the most impoverished and wretched of the three or four conspicuously failed nations of the world?  Why is there no reprieve despite the millions, billions in fact, in aid and the activities of  countless benevolent agencies and the sympathy of all the world? Why? Why? Why?

            Philippe Girard, an historian with a background of experience in the French Caribbean, has provided a richly detailed political and economic history of the nation in a 2010 book: Haiti: The Tumultuous History – From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation.. It is a fluent, astonishing account of the contagion of corruption including mass murders that have dogged successive regimes in Haiti’s 500 year history.  Even Aristide, who started as an humble priest, three times arrived as President and found himself drawn into the murderous culture of his predecessors and competitors in ultimately losing attempts to stay in office.  

            The erosion of public purpose and public welfare in favor of personal interest and welfare was persistent if not universal.  Over-population and a chaotic free market destroyed the landscape, the fuel supply, the water system, the fisheries and ate all the agricultural land under slums and erosion. Storms, the flood of September 19^th 2004 following tropical storm Jeanne, washed soils off the treeless slopes and filled valleys with feet of sediments. Three hundred thousand were said to have been left without housing.[1] Fifteen hundred were killed. It was but one storm.

            The earthquake of  January 12, 2010 was worse. It may have killed 250,000. It  left the government and the public in a hopeless chaos of collapsed buildings and homeless citizens, broken families and thousands of severely injured survivors.  Water supplies were non-existent or contaminated with sewage. Early in the efforts at recovery  cholera, not surprisingly, entered the mix and added to the mortality[2]. Haiti, the nation, had no resilience, no capacity to restore itself, no effective governmental leadership and no potential to implement a plan if a plan for recovery were available. The free market system sold food to those who could pay, wherever the food came from. Others starved. 

            Murderous, brutal governmental corruption in Haiti appears to be contagious and universal and extends to the destruction of the government itself and its potential for restoration of the public welfare as a purpose. One cannot avoid a comparison with current political trends in the US as historic barriers are crossed by political leaders in and outside government.  In elections distortions and slander on one side invite similar  responses from opponents. The process moves to a newly depraved low in performance  and in expectations. Inside government, when civil rights are abrogated by an administration, as they have been, a new administration, although committed to correction, finds it difficult to impossible to stop the machinery established earlier and the corruption becomes the new standard, the new status quo. The quality of government erodes and the erosion becomes irreversible.

            Education is ever a victim and has been in Haiti. A viable democracy requires an educated populace aware of the issues and capable of  understanding the reasons for having a government and how a government must behave to assure the public welfare. Starving school systems of money, even closing schools, is an excellent way to destroy all public purpose and deflect resources to enrich those in office.  So, too, in the US efforts to defund school systems and issue “vouchers” to be used in any “school” are clear steps in that direction…. and intended to be.      

            The solutions to the Haitian nadir by historical economists including Girard are stereotyped:  move a simple factory to Haiti and hire the unemployed to build an economic success which will enable a political and economic recovery.   South Korea is the example, a glowing one, so far successful.  But South Korea had not reached the depths of the Haitian debacle with a virtually totally dysfunctional landscape vulnerable to any storm and a complete breakdown of social and political order. There are real environmental limits on economic and political ventures.  One essential resource is a reliable system for supplying clean water. Another is food for all at prices and in circumstances that assure that those who need food are fed.  Both require the functional integrity of the landscape, the physical, chemical, and biotic integrity of land and water. The requirement is even more demanding on an island where resources are obviously finite and the marine resources are a part of the support system of the entire island. In Haiti the marine resources have been destroyed by the siltation of coastal waters carried from the eroding landscape. It is a futile hope that civilization can be restored  through a few jobs from a shot of industrial exploitation without a comprehensive plan for restoring a functional landscape and accommodating all the human population.

            The answer to “why” is too complicated, too expensive, and too intrusive in that it will require a renovation in land use, a restoration of  functional landscapes, drainage basins that are stable, land appropriate for small scale agriculture, the re-establishment of public schooling for all, and rebuilding the infrastructure, the roads and public buildings required for contemporary civilization. And it will require a renewable energy supply system. All of these innovations will be futile if there is no acknowledgement of the necessity for limiting the human population and a plan for doing so. The challenge is of the order of, but far greater than, the original Tennessee Valley Authority, to rebuild a landscape and its occupied places into a sustainable future.

            Interest in success extends well beyond the geographic boundaries of the nation.  The world shares not only the human misery of a failed state but must also respond to the inevitable and continuing hegira in search of alleviation  in any degree.. Few nations are prepared to accept the human overflow which is turned back to intensified misery at home. Beyond that, the nation is a necrotic sore, a  biophysical as well as a social and political and economic burden  on the world as a whole. The world does not need a model of national failure. Quite the opposite. It needs an example of  restoration, the Pearl of the Caribbean restored as a model for the New Post-Industrial World of  self-sufficiency, renewable energy, and closed-cycle living. Where better to do that than on an island? And who can better do it than the wealthy industrial world as it moves into the post fossil fueled age?

            It can be done, but the challenge is a large one, far larger than most economic historians or even practicing politicians are willing to contemplate. It is an appropriate new vision, a mission for science, politicians and economists, all focused on rebuilding civilization in the ultimate failed state. No one is in a better position to show us all how than Jim Kim in the World Bank as he sets forth in the next stage of his longtime mission in advancing human welfare.  The world needs an example of that sort of success.

            Now.

                                                                        GM Woodwell

                                                                        Woods Hole

                                                                        January 6, 2013

             

           

                                                                                      

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[1] Girard, P. 2005. Haiti. Palgrave Macmillan. New York. p203.

[2] Farmer.P. 2011. Haiti After the Earthquake.  Perseus Books, NY