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Your Host Committee for the evening
Rich Rainaldi and Martha Records, Jerry Conover and Jacquelyn Wonder, Laurie and Marty Zeller

Special How the West Was Warmed Author Host Committee
Beth Conover, David Akerson, Diane Carman, Megan Castle, Mark Eddy, Jill Hanauer, Peter Heller, Jocelyn Hittle, Susan Innis, Kirk Johnson, Todd Neff, Laura Pritchett, Josh Radoff, Hillary Rosner, Auden Schendler, Ken Snyder, Tim Sullivan, Brad Udall, Florence Williams

Colorado Conservation Voters turns conservation values into Colorado priorities.  Online at www.coloradoconservationvoters.org.  The first $50 of eligible contributions will directly support pro-environment candidates through the CCV Action Fund – Small Donor Committee.

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.