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	Today Russia, Tomorrow the World by Gwynne Dyer   Aug 2010   It cannot be proved that the wildfires now devastating western Russia are evidence of global warming. Once-in-a-century extreme weather events happen, on average, once a century. But the Russian response is precisely what you would expect when global warming really starts to bite: Moscow has just banned all grain exports for the rest of this year.   At least 20 percent of Russia"s wheat crop has already been destroyed by the drought, the extreme heat -- circa 40 degrees C (104F) for several weeks now -- and the wildfires. The export ban is needed, explained Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, because "we shouldn"t allow domestic prices in Russia to rise, we need to preserve our cattle and build up supplies for next year." If anybody starves, it won"t be Russian"   That"s a reasonable position for a Russian leader to take, but it does mean that some people will starve elsewhere. Russia is the world"s fourth-largest grain exporter, and anticipated shortages in the international grain market had already driven the price of wheat up by more than 80 percent since early June. When Putin announced the export ban, it immediately jumped by another 8 percent.   This means that food prices will also rise, but that is a minor nuisance for most consumers in the developed countries, since they spend only about 10 percent of their income on food. In poor countries, where people spend up to half their income on food, the higher prices will mean that the poorest of the poor cannot afford to feed their children properly.   As a result, some will die -- probably a hundred or a thousand times as many as the thirty-odd Russians who have been killed by the flames and the smoke. But they will die quietly, one by one, in under-reported parts of the world, so nobody will notice. Not this time. But when food exports are severely reduced or banned by several major producers at once and the international grain market freezes up, everybody will notice.   Two problems are going to converge and merge in the next ten or fifteen years, with dramatic results. One is the fact that global grain production, which kept up with population growth from the 1950s to the 1990s, is no longer doing so. It may even have flat-lined in the past decade, although large annual variations make that uncertain. Whereas the world"s population is still growing.   The world grain reserve, which was 150 days of eating for everybody on the planet ten years ago, has fallen to little more than a third of that. (The "world grain reserve" is not a mountain of grain somewhere, but the sum of all the grain from previous harvests that is still stored in various places just before the next big Northern Hemisphere harvest comes in.)   We now have a smaller grain reserve globally than a prudent civilisation in Mesopotamia or Egypt would have aimed for 3,000 years ago. Demand is growing not just because there are more people, but because there are more people rich enough to put more meat into their diet. So things are very tight even before climate change hits hard.   The second problem is, of course, global warming. The rule of thumb is that with every one-degree C rise (1.8 degrees F) in average global temperature, we lose 10 percent of global food production. In some places, the crops will be damaged by drought; in others by much hotter temperatures. Or, as in Russia"s case today, by both.   So food production will be heading down as demand continues to increase, and something has to give. What will probably happen is that the amount of internationally traded grain will dwindle as countries ban exports and keep their supplies for themselves. That will mean that a country can no longer buy its way out of trouble when it has a local crop failure: there will not be enough exported grain for sale.   This is the vision of the future that has the soldiers and security experts worried: a world where access to enough food becomes a big political and strategic issue even for developed countries that do not have big surpluses at home. It would be a very ugly world indeed, teeming with climate refugees and failed states and interstate conflicts over water (which is just food at one remove).   What is happening in Russia now, and its impacts elsewhere, give us an early glimpse of what that world will be like. And although nobody can say for certain that the current disaster there is due to climate change, it certainly could be.   Late last year, Britain"s Hadley Centre for Climate Change produced a world map showing how different countries will be affected by the rise in average global temperature over the next fifty years. The European countries that the Hadley map predicts will be among the hardest hit -- Greece, Spain and Russia -- are precisely the ones have suffered most from extreme heat, runaway forest fires and wildfires in the past few years. The main impact of global warming on human beings will be on the food supply, and eating is a non-negotiable activity. Today Russia, tomorrow the world.   * Gwynne Dyer"s latest book is "Climate Wars".
	Why Not Frack? by Bill McKibben New York Review of Books USA   In one sense, the analysts who forecast that “peak oil”—i.e., the point at which the rate of global petroleum extraction will begin to decline—would be reached over the last few years were correct. The planet is running short of the easy stuff, where you stick a drill in the ground and crude comes bubbling to the surface. The great oil fields of Saudi Arabia and Mexico have begun to dwindle; one result has been a rising price for energy.   We could, as a civilization, have taken that dwindling supply and rising price as a signal to convert to sun, wind, and other noncarbon forms of energy—it would have made eminent sense, most of all because it would have aided in the fight against global warming, the most difficult challenge the planet faces.   Instead, we’ve taken it as a signal to scour the world for more hydrocarbons. And it turns out that they’re there— large quantities of coal and oil and gas, buried deep or trapped in tight rock formations or mixed with other minerals.   Getting at them requires ripping apart the earth: for instance, by heating up the ground so that the oil in the tar sands formation of Canada can flow to the surface. Or by tearing holes in the crust a mile beneath the surface of the sea, as BP was doing in the Gulf of Mexico when the Deepwater Horizon well exploded. Or by literally removing mountaintops to get at coal, as has become commonplace across the southern Appalachians.   Or, in this case, by “fracking” the subsurface geology in order to make natural gas flow through new cracks. The word is short for “hydraulic fracturing”.   In the words of Seamus McGraw, it works like this: having drilled a hole perhaps a mile deep, and then a horizontal branch perhaps half a mile in length, you send down a kind of subterranean pipe bomb, a small package of ball-bearing-like shrapnel and light explosives. The package is detonated, and the shrapnel pierces the bore hole, opening up small perforations in the pipe.   They then pump up to 7 million gallons of a substance known as slick water to fracture the shale and release the gas. It blasts through those perforations in the pipe into the shale at such force—more than nine thousand pounds of pressure per square inch—that it shatters the shale, allowing the gas embedded in it to rise under its own pressure and escape.   This new technique has allowed the industry to exploit terrain that it had previously considered impenetrable.   The emerging movements against fracking, and the science that informs them, raise three key concerns. In ascending order of importance they are:   First, how much damage is being done to water wells and underground aquifers from methane migration and the chemicals mixed with water and then injected into fracking wells under high pressure? You might call this the “flaming faucet” question, and it has understandably and rightly galvanized many of the local people fighting fracking. The industry claims that there’s no problem—that the cement casings they put in the wells keep the chemicals out of layers of soil where drinking water might be found. But rigorous scientific study has been scant, in part because since 2005 (at the urging of then Vice President Dick Cheney, whose former company Halliburton is a major player in the fracking boom), drilling companies have been exempt from federal safe drinking water statutes and hence not required to list the chemicals they push down wells.   Preliminary research from Duke University seemed to indicate that indeed methane was showing up in drinking water; in December, the EPA released its first thorough study, conducted in the Wyoming town of Pavilion, where residents had reported brown, undrinkable water after nearby fracking operations. The EPA concluded that the presence in the water of synthetic compounds such as glycol ethers and the assortment of “other organic components” were “the result of direct mixing of hydraulic fracking fluids with ground water,” and told local residents to stop drinking from their wells.   The company involved insisted that the EPA had introduced the contaminants itself; Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, best known for decrying global warming as a “hoax,” added that the EPA report was part of “President Obama’s war on fossil fuels.” But the evidence from Pavilion was a powerful indictment of the industry, and it led several leading doctors to call for a moratorium on fracking pending more health research. “We don’t have a great handle on the toxicology of fracking chemicals,” said Vikas Kapil, chief medical officer at the National Center for Environmental Health, an arm of the Centers for Disease Control.   December, then, was a tough month for the fracking industry, and it ended on a particularly low note—on New Year’s Eve a magnitude 4.0 earthquake in Youngstown, Ohio, was blamed on the injection of high-pressure fracking water along a seismic fault, a phenomenon also documented in Arkansas and Oklahoma.   A second concern has to do with the damage being done to rivers and streams—and the water supply for homes and industries—by the briny soup that pours out of the fracking wells in large volume. Most of the chemical-laced slick water injected down the well will stay belowground, but for every million gallons, 200,000 to 400,000 gallons will be regurgitated back to the surface, bringing with it, McGraw writes, not only the chemicals it included in the first place, but traces of the oil-laced drilling mud, and all the other noxious stuff that was already trapped down there in the rock: iron and chromium, radium and salt—lots of salt.   The question is what to do with that volume of bad water. If it leaks into small streams, disaster results: the classic case is Dunkard Creek, which rambles for forty miles along the Pennsylvania–West Virginia border. In Wilber’s words, “its clear, green eddies and swimming holes, shaded by hemlock and sycamore trees, attracted generations of anglers, paddlers, picnickers, and nature lovers” who enjoyed the 161 aquatic species found in its waters.   In September 2009, however, pretty much everything died in the course of a few days—everything except an invasive microscopic algae that normally lives in estuaries along the Texas coast. This bloom of “golden algae” that killed everything else was a mystery—how could a species that usually lives in brackish water on the ocean’s edge have survived in a freshwater Appalachian creek? The answer emerged swiftly: drilling companies had been illegally dumping wastewater in the region, turning it into brine.   Instead of simply dumping the water, the companies could have sent it to the local sewage treatment plant—but these were generally not set up to handle high volumes of briny water. Along the Monangahela River, for instance, when treatment plants started accepting tanker trucks loaded with waste-water, “workers at a steel mill and a power plant in Greene County were the first to notice something strange: river water began corroding equipment.” The state eventually had to put the Monongahela on a list of “impaired rivers,” and 325,000 residents of the region were at one point told to drink bottled water.   As Ian Urbina reported in the Times last February, the water returning from deep underground can carry naturally occurring “radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for…treatment plants to handle.” Despite a 2009 EPA study never made public, the federal agency has continued to allow “most sewage treatment plants that accept drilling waste not to test for radioactivity.” And most drinking-water intake plants downstream from the sewage treatment plants, with the blessing of regulators, have not tested for radioactivity since 2006, even though the drilling boom began in 2008.   Industry, as usual, is unconcerned, at least in public. “These low levels of radioactivity pose no threat to the public,” said the CEO of Triana Energy. They are “more a public perception issue than a real health threat.” But as Urbina pointed out, a confidential industry study from 1990, which looked at radium in drilling water dumped into the ocean off the Louisiana coast, found that it posed “potentially significant risks” of cancer for people eating fish from those waters.   The natural gas wells can cause air pollution problems too: Wyoming, for instance, no longer meets federal air quality standards because of fumes seeping from the state’s 27,000 wells, vapors that contain benzene and toluene, according to Urbina.   In sparsely populated Sublette County in Wyoming, which has some of the highest concentrations of wells, vapors reacting to sunlight have contributed to levels of ozone higher than those recorded in Houston and Los Angeles.   In a county without a single stoplight, regulators this time last year were urging the elderly and children to stay indoors.   There are steps that industry could take to reduce some of the pollution—wastewater, for instance, can be captured in huge on-site tanks and pushed back down so-called “injection wells,” precisely the process that apparently set off the Youngstown temblor. Even this process, however, leaves large quantities of salty residue, and the wells can keep oozing out their toxic load for many years after drilling is done. Some enterprising drilling companies have, Urbina wrote, “found ready buyers [for wastewater] in communities that spread it on roads for de-icing in the winter and for dust suppression in the summer. When ice melts or rain falls, the waste can run off roads and end up in the drinking supply.”   In any event, overmatched regulators who can’t even keep an accurate count of the number of wells are having a hard time coping with waste products—especially since the political power of the industry just keeps growing. Pennsylvania inaugurated a new governor last year, Republican Tom Corbett, who had taken more gas industry contributions than all his competitors combined. Not only did he quickly reopen state land to new drilling, he claimed regulation of the industry had been too aggressive. “I will direct the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to serve as a partner with Pennsylvania business, communities and local governments,” he said.   What is the effect of this surge of gas on national and global efforts to cope with climate change? Though New York and other states will make their decisions on drilling largely on the basis of local effects, this may be the most important question of all, since the implications will extend far beyond the borders of particular geologic formations or specific watersheds. Four years ago, when word of the spectacular potential scale of the gas finds began to filter out, many environmentalists were thrilled. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for instance, who founded the Waterkeeper Alliance and who has been a leader in the fight against mountaintop removal coal mining, wrote an Op-Ed for the Financial Times in the summer of 2009 declaring that “a revolution in natural gas production over the past two years has left America awash with natural gas and has made it possible to eliminate most of our dependence on deadly, destructive coal practically overnight.”   The reason environmentalists prefer gas to coal is simple: when burned, it produces about half as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy. That is, if we could convert our coal-fired power plants to natural gas (which in most cases is not that hard to do), carbon emissions would drop. But it’s actually not that simple. Natural gas—CH4—in its unburned state is a remarkably powerful greenhouse gas itself, molecule for molecule many times stronger than CO2. So if even a little bit leaks out to the atmosphere in the drilling process, gas, according to some estimates, can cause even more global warming than coal.   The data showing just how much it would do so are scarce. An early study from Robert Howarth at Cornell found that fracked gas might do 20 percent more damage to the climate, at least over the next few crucial decades, than coal; earlier this winter another Cornell team, using different leakage rates, found that it might be only half as bad as coal. More data may eventually clarify the extent of the threat. But fracked gas is not as clear a winner in this fight as many had originally assumed.   There’s a deeper question still. If we increased the use of natural gas, it would replace some coal from the planet’s power-generating mix. But it would also crowd out truly low-carbon sources of power: abundant and cheap natural gas would make it that much harder to get sun and wind (or, if it’s your cup of hot water, nuclear power) up and running on a large scale.   As the International Energy Agency reported last summer, the numbers are significant: their projections for a “Golden Age of Gas” scenario have atmospheric concentrations of CO2 peaking at 650 parts per million and temperature rising 3.5 degrees Celsius, far higher than all the experts believe is safe. In September, the National Center for Atmospheric Research tried to combine all the known data—everything from methane leakage in coal mines to the cooling effects of coal-fired sulfur pollution—and concluded, in the words of the scientist Tom Wigley, that the switch to natural gas “would do little to help solve the climate problem.”   As a result of such findings, and of all the on-the-ground problems in Pennsylvania and out west, environmental groups are backing away from their earlier support for gas. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for instance, has grown increasingly critical; and at the grassroots tens of thousands of highly organized activists with visible and articulate spokesmen (the actor Mark Ruffalo has been especially notable) are making an impressively strong stand against further drilling.2 Their efforts come up against the staggeringly deep pockets of the fossil fuel industry, which is used to winning battles. Bowing to that pressure, and trying to ward off the appeal of the GOP’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric, the president praised fracking in his State of the Union address, promising to “develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk.”   The rush to exploit “extreme energy,” and to rip the planet apart to get at it, knows no national boundaries. Urbina reported last year that the big energy companies have spread the fracking technology around the planet, finding new shale deposits in more than thirty countries.   One can reasonably expect that if regulators are overwhelmed in Pennsylvania, the same may be the case among the shale deposits in Papua New Guinea. In any event, it should by now be clear that fracked gas is not a “bridge fuel” to some cleaner era, but a rickety pier extending indefinitely out into a hotter future. This is one of those (not rare) cases where abundance may prove a great problem.
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