Post-Carbon Jobs

I talked about some of the thoughts my unemployment is triggering here, more today. So much of our economy is about buying and selling stuff! We don't make as much of the stuff in the US today, instead moving those jobs to places where labor is cheaper. We know we're over-buying. How many of the decorating shows on cable really start with going through and making sure only the stuff you need is in your house?

Imagine then, it's some period in the future and for some set of reasons, peak oil, the US signing on to Kyoto or something even more aggressive, scads of people walk away from retail jobs and buying and instead engage in a new economy.

What might that economy be based on?

A short-term answer might be found in Al Gore's call in September for "...a global Marshall plan to make the creation of jobs around the reduction of carbon the central principle ..." (FT.com 9/27/2007) So that's a whole bunch of people who are at work blowing insulation into walls, insulating basements, replacing windows, and installing tankless waterheaters. And maybe a whole bunch of people administering programs where the energy saving from those efforts goes to pay for them. Also people installing more solar, and perhaps building trades that make additions to buildings like shades and overhangs.

But let's accept that while many Americans would love to have stable blue-collar jobs that paid a living wage and they're willing to do physical labor for it, there's another set of folks who won't.

So a second group of folks is available to re-populate grocery stores. Having more hands might make it economical to have grocery store become a kind of farmer's market... where the bulk of items sold are locally produced and are shelved with a few staples that are mass-produced. We might still do our own checking out, but imagine buying bags of in-store ground wheat.

A third group of people might be enabled to make a living doing creative work like performing music live, innovations in theater, busking, small scale publishing and things like that.

Judging by Gore's accepting a position with the Venture Capital firm Kleiner Perkins, my thoughts are only scratching the surface. What do you think a post-carbon economy would look like?

Talking to Scientists

My Dad is one of those guys who doesn't believe that humans are causing whatever global warming we might be experiencing. Luckily, his beliefs don't translate to an over-consuming lifestyle. He loves the job he's created and the building he bought for it is less than 10 miles from the house. He is an engineer, but he can also mark the day when he canceled the Scientific American subscription he'd had for decades.

Part of his decision came from a trip we made to the Georgetown Loop railroad one summer. The exhibits there included photos of the valley the loop was built to surmount completely bereft of trees as a result of local building and fires. Looking around the now-tree-lined valley, Dad could observe the self-healing nature of the Earth.

And the Earth is self-healing. It will self-correct on a global scale. But the question is whether the new equilibrium it comes to will be hospitable to life as we know it. After all, the cataclysms at the end of the Cretaceous Era that sequestered the carbon we're now releasing nearly did all life in. (Smithsonian Natural History Museum Site, The Paleontology Portal). So, the Earth may find a way to fix herself, but there's no guarantee we'll survive the fix.

So, how to break through the mental block? Dr. Heidi Cullen, Climate Expert at The Weather Channel suggested a solution in December... be strict about presenting the science about climate. What does the science say? According to the American Meteorological Society;

There is convincing evidence that since the industrial revolution, human activities, resulting in increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and other trace constituents in the atmosphere, have become a major agent of climate change.

The American Meteorological Society

She goes on to suggest that the Pew Center's Climate Change 101 site might be a good place to catch up on the science for those who are pressed for time.

What I'm doing April 14th

April 14th is StepItUp, a national day of action for climate change. I will be at a teaching farm in Golden, helping get things ready for planting. I figure this is a great way to begin to understand what sustainable farming really looks like.

I plan to send photos. ;-)

Efficiency & Renewable Energy

I commented earlier this week that I didn't know what it was going to take -- really -- for us to put the brakes on global warming. Turns out the American Solar Energy Society has been asking that same question. In this report (pdf) from their 2006 SOLAR conference, they conclude that it will take a combination of energy efficiency in transportation and buildings, plus renewable energy to avoid the next 1 degree centigrade rise in global temperatures.