Excerpt:

“… Given the extreme challenges we face in implementing solutions—
whether trying to make mass transit work, fixing the problem of existing
buildings, building enough renewable energy to power our operations, or
driving federal action on climate policy—it’s worth asking the question: what
will motivate us to actually pull this off? How will we become, and then
remain, inspired for the long slog ahead? Because this battle will take not just
political will and corporate action; it will require unyielding commitment
and dedication on the part of humanity. We need to literally remake society.
We can intellectualize the need for action all we want, but in my experience,
in the end our motivation usually comes down to a cliché: our kids
and, for want of a better word, our dignity. Journalist Bill Moyers has said,
“What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient
Israelites called ‘hocma’—the science of the heart…the capacity to see…to
feel…and then to act…as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.”
Moyers, who is an ordained Baptist minister, taps into something positively
religious about the possibilities in a grand movement to protect Earth.
Climate change offers us something immensely valuable and difficult to find
in the modern world: the opportunity to participate in a movement that,
in its vastness of scope, can fulfill the universal human need for a sense
of meaning in our lives. A climate solution—a world running efficiently

on abundant clean energy—by necessity goes a long way toward solving

many, if not most, other problems too: poverty, hunger, disease, water supply,
equity, solid waste, and on and on.
Climate change doesn’t have to scare us. It can inspire us; it is a singular
opportunity to remake society in the image of our greatest dreams.”

Brad Udall is a research scientist and the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration–funded Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado. He studies the impacts of climate change on the Colorado River and the West.

Excerpt:

“We are already seeing the effects of climate change in Colorado and around the West. Temperatures have warmed by over two degrees Fahrenheit since 1970. Spring runoff is occurring earlier in almost all snowmelt basins in the West. A greater proportion of our annual precipitation is now coming as rain instead of snow, even at our highest elevations. Forest fires in the West since 1986 are significantly bigger, longer, and more destructive, and these changes highly correlate to warmer temperatures. Droughts are more severe and last longer. The recent mountain pine beetle epidemic—caused partly by climate change, partly by natural cycle, and partly by human fire management—is now at 2 million acres and is fundamentally changing our
mountain landscapes and mountain hydrology. Recent state-of-the-art studies have attributed many of these western effects to warming caused by greenhouse gases.

All of these impacts have a strong connection to water. In fact, changes in water availability, not higher temperatures, will be the delivery mechanism for many of the most significant impacts of climate change. Additional heat will fundamentally alter the water cycle—the vast solar-powered cycle that evaporates huge quantities of water from the oceans and moves that water to land every day. The water cycle, the primary mechanism for redistributing heat on the planet, moves heat from places where there is too much, like at the equator, to places where there is too little, like at the poles. Big ocean currents, such as the Gulf Stream, and water vapor carried in storms are two critical mechanisms used by the Earth to transport heat poleward. These very large movements of heat determine our weather. With additional heat due to climate change, we will experience significant changes in the patterns of weather and water in the twenty-first century, the very definition of climate change. The western United States will experience
the brunt of these changes…”

As I type these words, electrical pulses in a notebook computer somehow
translate the mechanical thrusts of my fingertips into New Times Roman on
a flat-screen monitor. The laser printer hums to my right, the dishwasher
and washing machine rumble from different corners of the house. There
are lamps, phone chargers, a garage refrigerator/freezer keeping unhealthy
foods and bags of elderberries in a state of suspended animation. The furnace
just kicked on, turning Rocky Mountain methane—four hydrogens
mobbing a carbon, derived from photosynthesizers that haven’t bagged a
photon in 50 million years—into blue flames and parched, sustained gusts
from grated holes in the floor.

… When I accompany my daughters to their Montessori school, I bring
along 5,600 pounds of fossil-fired Chrysler Town & County. When I return,
I employ a device that uses a tiny propeller to atomize beans grown thousands
of miles south of Denver, and another to heat water somewhere below
the boiling point to strip vital stimulant from the carnage. And I think nothing
of it, generally, any more than I spend time thinking about all those liters
of blood flowing through my body, or about what my pancreas is up to at the
moment, or that I’m breathing.
Energy is so fundamental, so abundant, so pervasive, it has no real
meaning to us. Noticeable only when it disappears, it is classic infrastructure.
But unlike a road, we have no sense of energy as a thing in itself—only
its products: light, heat, work, motion.

…. What would reducing 80 percent of my carbon output mean? I think
about scarcely roughed-up coffee beans producing lukewarm swill, twohour
workdays, a January thermostat set to forty-two degrees. About driving
my preschoolers 25 percent of the way to school—to the convenience store
at Eleventh Avenue and Yosemite, roughly, from which they’d walk, through
rain, snow, and sleet, like little postal workers.

…

The National Park Service (NPS), in recent years, has emerged as an undisputed leader among public
land-management agencies in terms of climate-change action and education.
Perhaps that’s because all the best science points to a Glacier National
Park without its glaciers, a Joshua Tree National Park without Joshua trees,
an Everglades National Park without everglades. A Saguaro without saguaros,
a Cascade without cascades, a Mesa Verde not so verde.

At risk are beaches in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, ancient
petroglyphs in Olympic National Park, forests in Yellowstone National Park,
and almost all of historic (and low-lying) Jamestown, Virginia, in Colonial
National Historic Park. Imagine Rocky Mountain National Park without its
snowcapped peaks, or Isle Royale without its wolves and moose.

….

Excerpt:

The beetles, experts say, will have their way and only be checked if bitterly
cold weather returns to the Rockies—which hasn’t happened since the 1980s.
While Montana has seen a million acres killed or dying, in northern
Colorado and southern Wyoming the crisis in the states’ lodgepole pine forests
is historically unprecedented.
“We’re seeing exponential growth of the infestation,” says Clint Kyhl,
director of an incident-management team in Laramie, Wyoming, set up to deal
with the crisis caused by the huge swath of dead forests in northern Colorado
and southern Wyoming. In 2006, there were a million acres of dead trees. Last
year, it was 1.5 million. This year, it is expected to total over 2 million.
In the next three to five years, Kyhl says, virtually all of Colorado’s
lodgepole pine trees over five inches in diameter will be lost, about 5 million
acres. “Already, in many places every lodgepole over five inches is dead as
far as the eye can see,” he says. (There’s not enough food in a tree to sustain
the beetles if it’s less than five inches tall.)
Lodgepole pines are largely confined to high altitudes. But the beetles
have moved into ponderosa pine forests on Colorado’s Front Range, Kyhl
says, which means they could kill forests around homes in the densely populated
region.
In the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, the problem
is most severe of all, the largest known insect infestation in the history
of North America, according to officials. British Columbia has lost more
than 34 million acres of lodgepole pine forest, and a freak wind event last
year blew beetles over the Continental Divide to Alberta.
Cold weather always kept the beetles from crossing over. To keep the
bugs in check, several days of temperatures that touch forty below zero are
needed. But warmer temperatures and the wind changed the beetles’ range,
and experts fear they could travel all the way to the Great Lakes.
So many trees have died in British Columbia, and so much carbon from
the dying trees has been released into the environment, that experts say the
forests have gone from a carbon sink to a carbon source.
The death of the forests worries the tourism industry across the West.
Because of the hazard of falling trees, many ski areas have had to cut down
their forests and revegetate. At Vail Resort, for example, which has been
particularly hard-hit, workers have removed thousands of dead trees and
planted new ones.
The dead trees that blanket the mountains are shifting ecosystems as
well. In Yellowstone, for example, the beetles are killing the whitebark pine
trees, which grow nuts rich in fat that are critical to grizzly bears. Biologists
say streams will flood because live trees will no longer catch snow and allow
it to slowly melt, and thus the epidemic could injure salmon.

Roughly 36 percent of the world’s commercial energy comes from oil. While shares for the other fossil fuels—coal (27 percent) and natural gas (23 percent)— are on the rise, the flow of oil proves tough to replace. And that flow, at plus or minus 84 million barrels a day, is enormous.

How big? If you ever cross the bridge over the Colorado River in the
western Colorado town of Glenwood Springs during late July, look down.
The river rushing below roughly equals the amount of oil the world is
consuming at that moment in time.

In the United States, close to 70 percent of the 19 million barrels we
consume daily runs our transportation system. Within that transportation
sector, the largest share goes to gasoline, then diesel and jet fuel. Oil consumption in power plants declined from 17 percent in the early 1970s to 2 percent today. This means that cutting down on our oil use revolves tightly around our transportation system, not the power-generation sector.

Oil Scarcity
We’re not running out of oil, either in the United States or around the world. But we’re running out of options to steadily increase the available supply. In fact, before the 2008 recession, it was getting tough just to maintain oil production at then-current levels. Declining annual production in older fields was catching up to the more-publicized gains in new fields coming on line. Then, after the last fast growth period (2003 to 2004), production flattened.

With increasing frequency, new countries join the unfortunate club
of oil-producing nations in which production has slipped into permanent
decline. Among the world’s twenty largest oil producers (the Big 20), which
produce most (84 percent) of the world’s oil, the first to decline was the
United States (1970), then Indonesia (1977), the United Kingdom (1999), Norway (2001), and Mexico (2004). Figure 1 shows that over half of the Big 20 are either experiencing flat or volatile production (including Russia, Iraq, and Nigeria) or have passed their peak production and are in decline. While the remainder still grow their supply, some nations (including China and Azerbaijan) are approaching their peak production era; declines will follow soon.

Eventually, the math dictates that declines will more than offset gains.
At that point, world oil production will have hit an all-time high, a peak.
In May 2009, a report by the respected investment analyst firm Raymond
James & Associates stated that “peak oil on a worldwide basis seems to have taken place in early 2008.” They concluded that “reaching peak oil still represents a transformative moment in the history of the oil market…it is only a matter of time before prices begin to reflect the reality that oil scarcity may become a fact of life in the not-too-distant future.”

Raymond James is only the latest to reach this conclusion. In Denver,
in the spring of 2009, widely respected oil-industry financial analyst Tom
Petrie said, “you can make a good argument” that world oil production won’t
ever exceed last summer’s peak. Capital funds manager T. Boone Pickens
agrees. Back in the fall of 2007, Sadad Al-Husseini, retired vice president for
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, stated that world oil production
was within a year or two of hitting a final plateau. Christophe de Margerie,
chief executive officer of France’s oil giant Total, said in the winter of
2009 that world oil production would probably never exceed 90 million barrels per day—a level only marginally above last summer’s high (87 million barrels per day). Other companies and organizations identifying oil scarcity as a near-term concern include Toyota, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Aerospace, Volvo Trucks, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the World Resources Institute, and the nation of Sweden, among others.

Excerpt:

The prospect of climate-change–induced flow variations adds additional
uncertainty. While there is a wide range of results in the different published
studies, all suggest a future Colorado River with less streamflow. In a 2007
report, the National Research Council of the National Academies concluded
that “the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that warmer future
temperatures will reduce future Colorado River streamflow and water supplies.”
In late 2008, the Colorado Water Conservation Board issued a synthesis
report on climate change specifically targeted toward water managers.
This report warns that “climate change will affect Colorado’s use and
distribution of water. Water managers and planners currently face specific
challenges that may be further exacerbated by projected climate changes.”
The study concludes that “all recent hydrologic projections show a decline
in runoff for most of Colorado’s rivers.”

Given the current demands on Colorado River water resources, even
a small change in the mean natural flow at Lee’s Ferry will cause serious
problems. Among the most optimistic of the climate-impact studies published
is the 2006 paper by Niklas Christensen and Dennis Lettenmaier.
This study suggested modest reductions in the mean flow at Lee’s Ferry in
the range of 6 to 10 percent. Most recently, a project by the Western Water
Assessment to narrow the results of the various studies suggests the floor for
the estimated flow reduction is about 10 percent.

Three credible studies that model the current operation of the Colorado
River with a sustained 10 percent reduction on natural flow at Lee’s Ferry?
The recent environmental impact statement (EIS) on the lower basin shortage
criteria included an alternative hydrology appendix that used estimated
flows at Lee’s Ferry published by Connie A. Woodhouse, David M. Meko,
and Stephen T. Gray in 2006. The paleohydrology-based trace for the period
from 1620 to 1674 is illustrative. This period has an estimated mean flow
at Lee’s Ferry of approximately 13.5 maf per year. The model output shows
a number of unacceptable and shocking results. For example, the Central
Arizona Project (CAP) would experience forty-seven straight years of shortages,
including a number of individual years when the project would divert
no water at all. Lake Mead would drop below and stay below the minimum
level for the Las Vegas Valley Water District to pump water to its customers
(1000’msl) for a period of close to twenty years. California, which has the
most senior of the prior perfected rights in the lower basin, would experience
occasional large shortages.

In the upper basin, Lake Powell would operate below the minimum
storage level necessary to produce hydroelectric power over 60 percent of
the fifty-year period, and there were two periods, one of five years and one
of twelve years, when Lake Powell would be empty and the upper-division
states would have been unable to meet their obligations to the lower basin
under the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

The lesson is that without major changes in how we currently manage
the Colorado River, even a modest decrease in system streamflows on the
order of 10 percent could cause significant unacceptable impacts throughout
the basin.

This essay was adapted from one originally written for Portland Magazine.

Excerpt:

… New professions, new skills supersede Old Western wisdoms. Men and
women no longer need to know where to cut a ditch to bring runoff to alfalfa
fields, when it’s worth following a vein of ore into a mountain, or how to fell a
200-foot western red cedar. Now, it’s more important to have a flair for cooking perfect omelets at the SkyRidge Bed and Breakfast. Or a knack for teaching freshly retired baby boomers to fly-fish the Rogue River. Or a gift for pairing ranchette properties with the dreams of refugees from the San Fernando Valley.

The professionals around the log table at that bed-and-breakfast wear
cell phones in their holsters. They ride sport-utility vehicles with bumper
stickers that say New York, Paris, Aspen, Moab. The regional economy
depends more on the Dow Jones average than on the price for beef calves at
the autumn auction in the county seat.

Newcomers start here, on their first giddy encounter with the West. Later,
they may come to understand the deeper souls of these places. They may even
learn enough to move comfortably to the dry plains of eastern Montana or
the moonscape Dakota badlands, to sagebrush valleys in Nevada filled with
silence, or to slickrock alcoves of Zen simplicity on the Colorado Plateau.
When they reach these rural corners of the West, they encounter places
that skipped the twentieth century, where the twenty-first century overlays
the nineteenth century. In the language of geologists, the New West lies
unconformably over bedrock—the mythic Old West and the arid land itself.
The New blankets the Old—with a gap, a disruption of continuity.
This is the future, where dissonant, unconforming western identities
begin to blur and blend, where New Westerners energized by espresso join
with ranchers and Indian people to create new stories—twenty-first-century
stories. And where everyone learns that they depend, ultimately, on spring
snowpack in the local watershed.

Change has become our political mantra. In the West, change is more
than a slogan. Drought tempers our dreams of booming growth. We can no
longer take the land for granted. As the climate warms, as forests move up
mountainsides, alpine ecosystems and species move with them—pushed off
the summits, with nowhere to go.

“In the ponderosa pine forests of Colorado and the Rocky Mountain
West, the conservation imperative is to improve the condition of the forests,
to sustain biodiversity, and to build resilience to increased likelihood
of uncharacteristic, catastrophic wildfires. Ponderosa pine forests are the
most rich in biodiversity of Colorado’s major forest systems. Because they
occur at lower elevations and mainly along the Front Range, they are also
the most heavily populated by humans. Ponderosa pine forests, particularly
in lower elevations of the Rocky Mountains, developed in the presence of
fire. Low-intensity, frequent fires killed younger trees and helped maintain
an open canopy and a rich understory of grasses and forbs. The past century,
with a combination of intensive logging, followed by grazing, followed
by decades of fire suppression, has left much of the ponderosa pine forests
densely stocked with trees. These forests are much more susceptible to
intense crown fires that can kill all trees and damage forest soils to the point
that recovery can take decades, even centuries. The risk to both the biodiversity
of these forests and the people who live in them from catastrophic
wildfires is greatly elevated from our past lack of stewardship.

With climate change, the risk to these forests and human communities
is even greater. With just the trend in warmer and mostly drier conditions
in forests across the western United States documented in the past two
decades, the frequency, intensity, and size of wildfires has already increased
significantly. In Colorado, the Hayman fire erupted in the unusually hot,
dry summer of 2002, and caused nearly $40 million in damage, burned
133 homes, and forced the evacuation of 5,340 persons. Because conditions
were so dry and the forest so dense, more than 138,000 acres of ponderosa
pine forest were completely lost. Unlike with the fires these forests evolved
with, recovery from the Hayman fire will take centuries. The combination
of unhealthy forest conditions and the kind of climate conditions we face in
the coming years has already taken a toll on Colorado’s Front Range forests
that will be felt for many generations. How many more fires like Hayman
can Colorado endure?”

Several studies have determined that residents of more compact, diverse
areas drive between 25 and 30 percent less than those in more sprawling
areas. For example, residents in King County, Washington, who live in more
walkable neighborhoods drive 26 percent fewer miles per day.  A meta-analysis
of many of these types of studies shows that people living in places
with twice the average density, diversity of uses, accessible destinations, and
interconnected streets drive about 30 percent fewer miles, even when socioeconomic
status and other factors are taken into account.  This reduction
in VMT [Vehicles Miles Traveled] suggests that emissions reductions of 7 to 10 percent from current levels could be achieved by 2050 through land-use changes alone.  By shifting
60 percent of new growth into more compact development patterns, estimates
indicate that up to 79 million metric tons of carbon dioxide could be
saved each year by 2030. This savings is equal to a 28 percent increase in
federal fuel-efficiency standards and one-half of the cumulative savings of the
new thirty-five miles per gallon corporate average fuel economy standards.
Areas that feature the right combination… include many
existing older neighborhoods, as well as newer mixed-use developments,
transit-oriented development, or traditional neighborhood development.
Increasingly, these types of development are given priority by municipalities
because of high livability and corresponding benefits such as public health
and reduction in obesity, and the developments’ improved ability to fund
regional amenities such as parks and transit.

…In a fortunate confluence of the private market and public benefit, communities
that offer choices in terms of housing, those that offer mixed-use
living, and those with shorter commute times to employment are ever more
appealing to consumers. Studies conducted by real estate researchers and
universities have found that about one-third of all homebuyers prefer “smart
growth–style” communities. For the first time, prices of attached units are
higher than detached single-family dwellings. The Brookings Institution
also has discovered that because demand outstrips supply, the price premiums
on homes in mixed-use developments are 40 to 100 percent.

If two-thirds of the 2050-built environment has yet to be built, and if people
are eager to buy or rent the type of homes, offices, and industrial properties
that help reduce VMT and greenhouse gas emissions, we face a tremendous
opportunity to design this new growth with climate change in mind.