Eaarth By Bill McKibben

Reviews

Interviews

• on the Colbert Report

Websites

• 350.org

Favorite Quotes

• p. xii: "…rainfall across our continent is up 7 percent,…flood damage is increasing by 5 percent a year….dramatic increases — 20 percent or more — in the most extreme weather events…."
• p. xiv: "…what parts of our lives and our ideologies we must abandon so that we can protect the core of our societyies and civilizations."
• p. xv: "…building the kind of communities and economies that can withstand what's coming. And some of it must be global: we must step up the fight to keep climate change from getting even more powerfully out of control, and to try to protect those people most at risk, who are almost always those who have done the least to cause the problem."
• p. 1: "For…ten thousand years…we've existed in the sweetest of sweet spots."
• p. 3: "[T]otal global rainfall is now increasing 1.5 percent a decade."
• p. 4: "[I]n 2008 both the Northwest and Northeast passages opened for the first time in human history."
• p. 5: "On the last day of 2008, the <i>Economist</i> reported that temperatures on the antarctic Peninsula were rising faster than anywhere else on earth, and that the West Antarctic was losing ice 75 percent faster than just a decade before." More: "The Holocene is staggered,…suddenly reeling."
• p. 6: "By the end of 2008 hydrologists in the United States were predicting that drought across the American Southwest had become a 'permanent condition.' There was a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead, which backs up the Colorado River behind Hoover Dam, could run dry by 2021." More: "…the new aridity and heat have led to reductions in wheat, corn, and barley yields of about 40 million tons a year." More: "Across the planet, rivers are drying up. A massive 2009 study looked at streamflows on 925 of the world's largetst rivers from 1948 to 2004 and found that twice as manay were falling as rising."
• p. 7: "The rhododendrons that dominate Himalayan hillsides are in some places blooming forty-five days ahead of schedule…."
• p. 8: Tim Barnett, climate scientist at Scripps Oceanographic Institute: "In northwest China there are 300 million people relying on snowmelt for water supply. There's no way to replace it until the next ice age." More "One hundred eleven hurricanes formed in the tropical Atlantic between 1995 and 2008, a rise of 75 percent over the previous thirteen years. They're stronger, stranger."
• p. 9: "…acid levels rising ten times faster than expected. Already ocean pH has slipped from 8.2 to 8.1…."
• p. 10: "…the ocean is more acid than anytime in th last eight hundred thousand years…."
• p. 13: "…global warming is a huge experiment. We've never watched it happen before, so we didn't know how it would proceed."
• p. 15: "…'ahead of schedule' became a kind of tic for headline writers: 'Arctic Melt-off Ahead of Schedule'…'Dry Future Well Ahead of Schedule', …'Acidified Seawater Showing Up Along Coast Ahead of Schedule'…. In fact, of course, the 'schedule' was wrong."
• p. 16: "In September 2009 the lead article in the journal <i>Nature</i> said that above 350 [ppm] we 'threaten the ecological life-support systems that have developed in the late Quaternary environment, and severly challenge teh viability of contemporary human societies.'" More: "We're not…going to get back the planet we used to have, the one on which our civilization developed."
• p. 17: "…'changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than a thousand years after carbon dioxide emissions are completely stopped.'"
• p. 19: "An internal paper, leaked to the world's preses, showed that even the UN knew the whole process was half-sham, because the proposed deals would increase temperatures much faster than the official rhetoric described." More: "Copenhagen…a historic failure that will live in infamy."
• p. 20: "So far we've been the cause for the sudden surge in green house gases and hence global temperature, but that's starting to change as the heat we've caused has started to trigger a series of ominous feedback effects." More: "Methane…escaping into the atmosphere… ahead… of schedule."
• p. 21: "…temperatures over eastern Siberia had increased by almost ten degrees in the last decade." [Why doesn't Bill give us units! I assume F….] More: "We … raised the temperature enough to start the process in motion. We're responsible for it, but we can't shut it off."
• p. 25: "'a perfect storm' of food and water shortages could hit by 2030." Rosamond Naylor, who ocnducted some of the most recent calculations: 'I think what startled me the most is that when we looked at our historic examples there were ways to address teh problem within a given year. People could always turn somewhere else to find food. But in the future there's not going to be any place to turn.'" More: "We're running Genesis backward, decreating."
• p. 29: "International Energy Agency [said] production in current oil fields is falling by about 7 percent a year…."
• p. 30: "So does modernity disappear along with the oil? It's a question worth asking, when six of the twelve largest companies in teh world are fossil-fuel providers, four make cars and trucks, and one, General Electric, is, as its name implies, heavily involved in the energy industry."
• p. 31: EROI = Energy Return on Investment. Oil Well = 20:1. Canadian tar sand EROI = 5.2:1; Corn ethanol for oil? You're lucky to break even. Solar panels: somewhere between 2.5 and 4.3:1.
• p. 33: "…any increased reliance on coal is enough to guarantee that we'll never get back to 350. Cue doom."
• p. 34: "Reduced winter ice cover means that evaporation will proceed year-round, and hence the water level in Lake Erie could fall between three and six feet in the next seventy years…."
• p. 37: "…the president of the Maldives announced that his low-lying nation was planning to save a billion dollars annually from its tourist income so that it could buy land and relocate the population to Sri Lanka or Australia before the ocean finally rose too high for its survival…. A few months later, the Pacific island nation of Kiribati announced a similar plan."
• p. 38: "We don't really know where to turn, because the planet we now inhabit doesn't work the way the old one did."
• p. 39: "…the Amazon managed to move water much farther inland from the oceans than the rain would normally fall…. The forest, in essence, is 'a gigantic irreplaceable water pump'…."
• p. 40: "Argentina…gets no less than half its rain couresy of the rainforest…."
• p. 41: "[T]he Sierra … snowpack …has shrunk by more than 10 percent…." More: "…when rain falls in the winter in Sierras, bad things happen…. in 2008 the state's energy planners started conducting drills for dealing with epic floods." More: "…the average California fire season runs seventy-eight days longer than it did in the 1970s and 1980s…. It's not just more fires but bigger ones."
• p. 43: "Milder winters since 1994 have reduced the winter death rate of beetle larvae in Whoming from 80 percent per year to less than 10 percent. You need stretches of thirty or forty degrees below zero up in the mountains to kill off the beetles, and that doesn't happen much anymore. (In Glacier National Park, for instance, only 25 of the 150 glaciers that were there in 1850 still exist, and all of them are shrinking rapidly.)
• p. 45: "The cedars of Lebanon — you can read about them in the Bible — are now listed as 'heavily threatened' by climate change."
• p. 47: "…our most ingrained economic and political habit was growth; it's the reflex we're going to have to temper, and it's going to be tough."
• p. 49: "Al Gore and UN secretary-general Ban Kimoon cowrote an essay for the Financial Times…."
• p. 50: "Friedman is right: 'We don't just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover.'"
• p. 51: "Smart people are starting to understand the size of the problem, but they haven't yet figured out that the latest science shows that <b>this wave is already breaking over our heads</b>."
• p. 52: "If I had money, I'd give it to Al Gore to invest in start-ups." More: "Windmills will sprout across the prairies. It will be exciting." But it's not going to happen fast enough to ward off enormous change…. <i>I think the system has met its match.</i>"
• p. 54: "'The hisorical verdict is unassailable… energy transitions in large economies on a global scale are inherently protracted affairs.'"
• p. 55: sunk costs: "'the existing fossill fuel infrastruction' is worth at least $10 trillion, and scheduled to operate anywhere from ten to fifty more years before its capital costs can be paid off. If we shut it down early, … someone will have to eat that cost." More: "Exxon has spent the last decade underwriting an elaborate disinformation campaign to sow doubt about climate change and with reasonable success; 44 percent of Americans believe global warming comes from 'long-term planetary trends' and not the pumps at the Exxon station."
• p. 56: "Almost every environmentalist around the world is working to raise the cost of fossil fuel, in the hopes that higher prices will accelerate the switch…. But…that works only if the price of energy rises enough to take some existing piece of hardwae out of service."
• p. 57: "capital costs of new conventional atomic reactors [that] you're talking seventeen to twenty-two cents per kilowatt hour…. And that's if the plant gets built on time."
• p. 59: "[P]roponents insist … that new 'fourth generation' nuclear reactors can be built quickly and cheaply. (And eat nuclear power waste to boot!) …[T]he same bottom line: it's expensive, and it takes a long time to even try to replace our fossil fuel system — <i>and that's on the old planet</i>."
• p. 61: "… a series of internal reports by Canadian government agencies warning that 'climate change was threatening critical infrastructure across the country,' and that urban water infrastructure in particular 'has the potential to suffer the greatest damages or losses associated with climate change unless proactive adaptation actions are taken.'"
• p. 64: "In the spring of 2008 the U.S. Department of Transportation issued a study on the effects of a twelve-inch rise in sea level along the Atlantic Coast, a figure most scientists would now dismiss as laughably small. Even so, it predicted that such a rise would be enough to 'frequently' flood the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. Rail lines and airports would have to be moved — and 'about a quarter of homes and other structures within 500 feet of the U.S. coastline … will be overtaken by erosion during the next sixty years.'"
• p. 67: Swiss Re, world's biggest insurance company, commissioned a report by Harvard's Center for Health and the Global Environment (<A HREF="http://www.hc-foundation.org/Documents/external/ccf_report_oct_06.pdf">the Climate Change Futures: Health, Ecological and Economic Dimensions Project</A>: "But their second, more real-world simulation predicts that as storms and other disruptions become more frequent, they 'overwhelm the adaptive capacities of even developed nations; large areas and sectors become uninsurable; major investments collapse; and markets crash.' Pay careful attention, despite the bland phraseology: 'In effect, parts of developed countries would experience developing nation conditions for prolonged periods as a result of natural catastrophes and increasing vulnerability due to the abbreviated return times of extreme events.'"
• p. 71: "The link to climate change couldn't be clearer: not only do warmer temperatures extend the geographic range of the mosquito (up to half the world's population is now at risk), but <i>Science Daily</i> reports that global warming 'also reduces the size of <i>Ae. Aegypti's</i> larva and, ultimately, adult size. Since smaller adults must feed more frequently to develop their eggs, warmer temperatures would boost the incidence of double feeding and increase the chance of transmission. In addition, the time the virus must spend incubating inside the mosquito is shortened at higher temperatures. For exampe, the incubation period of the dengue type-2 virus lasts 12 days at 30C, but only seven days at 32-35C. Shortening the incubation period by five days can mean a potential three-fold higher transmission rate of disease.'"
• p. 73: "..not only do summer temperatures extend the geographic range of the mosquito (up to half the world's population is now at risk), but Science Daily reports that global warming 'also reduces the size of Ae. aegypti's larva and , ultimately, adult size. Since smaller adults must feed more frequenntly to develop their eggs, warmer termperatures would boost the incidence of double feeding and increase the cnace of transmittion. In addition, the time the virus must spend incubating inside the mosquito is shortened at higher temperatures. For example, the incubation period of the dengue type-2 virus lasts 12 days at 30C, but only seven days at 32-35C."
• p. 81: "Global warming, though, is a negotiation between human beings on the one hand and physics and chemistry on the other. Which is a tough negotiation, because physics and chemistry don't compromise."
• p. 82: "…even modest global warming will lower the volume of the euphrates River by 30 percent and will shrink the Dead Sea by 80 percent. (A follow-up study in the summer of 2008 predicted that the 'ancient Fertile Crescent will disappear this century.') A one-meter rise in sea level would obliterate at least a fifth of the Nile delta."
• p. 83: Margaret Beckett, speaking during the first ever debate on climate change and armed conflict at the UN Security council. "What makes wars start?" she asked. "Fights over water. Changing patterns of rainfall. Fights over food production, land use. There are few greater potential threats to our economies too…but also to peace and security itself."
• p. 84: The U.S. military…has begun planning for a future where "climate change will require mass mobilizations of the military to cope with humanitarian disasters…."
• p. 85: …history shows that whenever humans have faced a choice between starving or raiding, they raid…. "….As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life." Well, that's a tad grim. Not really the career I trained for, fighting other adult males over the fall harvest.
• p. 86: For Americans, the crucial moment may have come earlier in 2008, six months before the big banks started tottering, at the moment when the economy still seemed to be roaring, but the cost of gasoline suddenly sp8iked to four dollars a gallon…. Suddenly, in fact, you felt a little less confident that you were an Explorer, a Navigator, a Forester, a Mountaineer, a Scout, a Tracker, a Trooper, a Wrangler, a Pathfinder, a Trailblazer. You all of a sudden were in Kansas or maybe in New Rochelle — not Durango, or Tahoe, or Denali, or the Yukon.
• p. 88: "The low-hanging fruit of globalization has been picked," a Morgan Stanley currency strategist waid. Jeff Rubin…was blunter: "Globalization is reversible."…."soaring transport costs…suddenly rendered Chinese-made steel uncompetitive in the US market."
• p. 89: "every country must first ensure its own food security." "It is a massive blow to confidence in the global economy."
• p. 90: …a small group of European industrialists and scientists met in a villa in the Italian capital. Their group — the Club of Rome — proposed to examine interrelated global trends, and they commissioned a report from a team of young systems analysts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [They issued a book called Limits to Growth in 1972]
• p. 91: humanity was very likely to "overshoot" and then collapse…. They concluded three things:
  1. If the present growth in world population, inustrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years.
  2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future.
  3. If the world's people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.
• p. 93: to slow population growth. Educating women turned out to be the best strategy.
• p. 94: [after the election of 1980] the ambivalence about growth vanished, and with it our last real chance to avert disaster.
• p. 95: Reagan took the solar panels off the White House roof, and he froze the mileage standards that had helped cut oil demand by more than a sixth in a decade. (Long before he left office, we stopped driving fifty-five.)…. we repudiated the idea of limits altogether….. Larry Summers: "There are no…limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind any time in the foreseeable future. There isn't a risk of an apocalypse due to global warming or anything else. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error."
• p. 96: "Global per capita production of grain peaked in the 1980s. Total global fish catch peaked in the 1990s…. Graham Turner, looked at every system that the original Limits to Growth had actually examined…"for the first thirty years of the model, the world has been tracking along the unsustainable trajectory of the book's business-as-usual scenario."
• p. 98: "The New Yorker ran a feature on "the new dystopians" — "doomers," it called them — people advising that you buy pistols or hoard gold or corner the market on firewood." "…a society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth and power." …the Anasazi may have died out when the climate shifted, but they didn't make it happen. …most of us don't know how to do very much — in your standard collapse scenario, it's nice to know how to grow wheat."
• p. 99: Either you've got your fingers stuck firmly in your ears, or you're down in the basement oiling your guns. …we might instead to try to manage our descent. That we might aim for a relatively graceful decline.
• p. 101: …we need to figure out what we must jettison. …. We're moving quickly from a world where we push nature around to a world where nature pushes back — and with far more power.
• p. 102: …we embrace the squishy sustainable….
  • Durable
  • Sturdy
  • Stable
  • Hardy
  • Robust
• p. 103: These are squat, solid, stout words. They conjure a world where we no longer grow by leaps and bounds, but where we hunker down, where we dig in.
• p. 104: …our time has been the time of bigness… starte castles for entry-level monarchs. Stomachs and breasts and lips, cars and debts, portions and bonuses. Can we imagine smaller?
• p. 105: Alan Greenspan: "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity…. The whole intellectual edifice collapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk management models generally covered only the last two decades, a period of euphoria." …. On a larger scale our whole civilization stands on the edge of collapse because the data inputted into our risk management models come from the last couple of hundred years, a very atypical time. A giddy time, high on oil.
• p. 121: …of the seven hundred thousand federal employees who were rated in 2001 using a pass-fail rating system, just 0.06 percent failed. Of the eight hundred thousand who were rated on a five-point system, just 0.55 percent were rated as either "minimally successful," or "unacceptable," while 43 percent were rated "outstanding." Heckuva job, Brownie.
• p. 123: After a long period of frenetic growth, we're suddenly older. Old, even. And old people worry less about getting more; they care more about hanging on to what they have, or losing it as slowly as possible.
• p. 124: …the size of your institutions and your government should be determined by the size of your project…. The project we're now undertaking — maintenance, graceful decline, hunkering down, holding on against the storm — requires a different scale. Instead of continents and vast nations, we need to think about states, about towns, about neighborhoods, about blocks.
• p. 125: …the transition from a system that demands growth to one that can live without it will be wrenching. But the most wrenching part will be the simply idea of decline…. Ever since Jimmy Carter first hinted at it in the 1970s, we've been desperate to flog our economy back to life. …(I suspect global warming is teh planetary equivalent of the dread "erection lasting more than four hours" that we're about on the TV commercials.)
• p. 127: …we had better figure out how to share some of [our wealth] with the people already suffering the environmental woes our profligacy caused.
• p. 128: Food that comes from closer to home, not through an endless and vulnerable chain. Energy from your roof or your ridgeline — energy that doesn't yield quite the power of a barrel of oil, but that doesn't require an army to keep it flowing.
• p. 133: Access to endless amounts of cheap energy made us rich, and wrecked our climate, and it also made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors. … Our economy, unlike any that came before it, is designed to work without the input of your neighbors. Borne on cheap oil, our food arrives as if by magic… you can order most of what you need and have it left anonymously at your door. We've evolved a neighborless lifestyle….Transition Town movement: people are building barter networks, expanding community gardens.
• p. 135-137: "Slow Money movement"… "Farmers Diner" … Think Globally — Act Neighborly."
• p. 139: A team of socialogists recently followed shopers around supermarkets and then farmers' markets. You know the drill at the Stop-n-Shop: you come in the automatic door, fall into a light fluorescent trance, visit the stations of the cross around the perimeter of the store, exit after a discussion of credit or debit, paper or plastic. But that's not what happens at farmer's markets. On average…people were having ten times as many conversations per visit…. farmers' markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy.
• p. 140: The most avant-garde adventures in localizing economies may be the proliferating local currency projects — four thousand of them around the world. Most of these are small, the notes accepted by a few progressive-minded business in college towns. (If you want a buckrub from a vegan, you may be in luck, but try buying a stapler.)
• p. 145: If you think about the cramped future long enough, for instance, you can end up convinced you'll be standing guard over your vegetable path with your shotgun, warding off the marauding gang that's after your carrots. (Police have already reported upswings in the theft of solar panels, and in game poaching, with "gangs from town rampaging through the countryside with guns, crossbows, snares.)"
• p. 146: We are going to need to split up, at least a little, if we're going to avoid being subdued by the forces we've unleashed.
• p. 147: [In the face of disasters] The official fears of looting and chaos are almost always dramatically overblown, and instead people figure out how to feed and clothe and shelter victims. "Paradises built in hell," she called them. …. Such crises, she says, "reveal mutual aid as a default operating principle."
• p. 153: The amount of stockpiled grain on the planet…has fallen from 130 days' worth of eating in 1986 to about 40 days' worth in 2008. Forty days sounds almost biblical. So, too, do the food riots in thirty-seven countries, and the rapid rise in malnutrition, which added 75 million people to the rolls of the malnourished in 2007. That is, the number of people with too little to eat is now rising instaead of falling, and rising fast.
• p. 154: "…hotter temperatures will seriously diminish the world's ability to feed itself."
• p. 155: …by 2030 Indian laborers would be 30 percent less productive, simply because of increased heat. …. "Extreme precipitation events" across teh United States have increased 36 percent as we've warmed the climate. …. 70 percent of the water we use goes for irrigation, and irrigated fields supply as much as 40 percent of the world's food.
• p. 156: Steven Chu: "I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen…. we're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California… I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going," either. That's not the kind of thing cabinet secretaries usually say.
• p. 157: It takes the equivalent of four hundred gallons of oil annually to feed an American, and that's before packaging, refrigeration, and cooking. In 1940, our food system produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil fuel it consumed. Now, says Michael Pollan, "it takes ten calories of fossil energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food." … the Green Revolution lured us into a kind of ecological debt we're only starting to comprehend.
• p. 158: "Our food supply is now more dependent on globally traded grains than at any time in our history. This makes it inherently unstable and vulnerable to the kind of catastrophic meltdown that threatened the banking industry."
• p. 159: Our food supply…is too big to fail. And it's failing. … The Highfields Institute … "brought livestock mortality composting to Vermont." … here's the recipe: an eighteen-inch base of wood chips, a six-inch layer of sawdust, a thin layer of corn silage, the carcass, and then a cap of silage.
• p. 160: "Soil is the frontier of where we need to be going," says Gilbert.
• p. 163: You begin with peasants who "typically know to build their own houses, grow and cook food, tend to animals, and make their own clothing…. They do it all, and their abilities are deeply impressive. …. modern economic growth, as he points out, is "accompanied first and foremost by urbanization."
• p. 165: For a very long time, in places like China, people replenished the soil by returning thei excrement to the fields — "night soil" it was called. …. The organic content of soils on the northeast China plain dropped from 9 percent early in the century down to 5 percent in the 1970s and 2 percent in the 1980s. Only fossil fuel in the form of synthetic fertilizer keeps it — or the Great Plains, or the Punjab, or the other grain-growing belts of the planet — functioning. …. Dennis Avery: "Unless we starved half the humans, we'd displace the remaining wildlife" by cutting down all the forest to grow more forage for the cattle whose manure we'd require.
• p. 166: it's possible to produce lots of food on relatively small farms with little or nothing in the way of synthetic fertilzer or chemicals.
• p. 167: "Hidden between the ros of corn were rows of green beans; the technical name for this is intercropping, and it's as old as farming. But we've forgotten how, because if you've got a huge tractor to drive….
• p. 169: The key in many of these farms was a new crop, velvet-bean, which farmers learned to grow between the rows of corn. "It fixes vast amounts of nitrogen, and you use the lpant as a so-called green manure. You put it on the soil, it rots down, and it effectively creates a new soil on top of the old one. Many fields will triple or quadruple their yields — and all you have to do is learn to manage a mixed crop."
• p. 171: …the United Nations Environment Programme issued a report showing that yields across Africa "doubled or more than doubled where organic or near-organic practices had been used." …. double-dug beds: "little has to be done for the next two or three years.
• p. 173: Mary-Howell Martins (on organic farming): "We see it as just as much precision farming as any other kind. But we substitute observation, management, planning, and education for purchased inputs." …. "We'd definitely need a mosaic," adds Klaas. "Diversity is everything. It goes all the way down to a handful of soil — which has more species, more biodiversity, than a whole square mile above ground."
• p. 175: For a hundred years we've substituted oil for people…. organic farms need 4.3 workers per 250 acres, double the number on a conventional field.
• p. 176-177: …by some estimates, as much as half of global warming gases can be tied to the livestock industry, with its huge demands on our grain crops. But it makes a few big corporations rich, and it keeps the price of food incredibly low, and that bargain — enshrined in one federal farm bill after another — has prevailed for two generations. … I was born in 1960, when the average citizen of the developed world at 116 pounds of meat annually. That's grown to 187 pounds in just fifty years…. It takes eleven times as much fossil fuel to rais a pound of animal protein as a pound of plant protein. … Big Honking Slab culinary technique favored by Americans. … 61 percent of the billions in farm subsidies that we pay each year go to the largest 10 percent of American farmers.
• p. 180: …in a world with less oil, we need the kind of small mixed farms that can provide their own fertilizer, build their own soil.
• p. 183: So there will be dinner, if we're resourceful and clever…. It won't be easy; as flood drought, and pests spread, we'll be pressed to keep up.
• p. 184: …we need to cut our fossil fuel use by a factor of twenty over the next few decades. ….a barrel of oil equals about eleven years of manual labor.
• p. 188: For two decades some farmers have built CSAs, or community-supported agriculture operations, where members pay an annual fee for a share of the produce. Now advocates like Greg Pahl are talking about CSE, or community-supported energy…. Wind turbines and rooftop solar panels could provide 81 percent of New York's power…. you might think the most logical course would be to simply concentrate on building turbines near Fargo and then ship the energy to Akron and Dayton; after all, it's 30 percent chaper to spin those blades in the Dakotas than in Ohio. But it turns out that the math is more complicated.
• p. 189: …the main force holding back distributed power — the microgrid — was the simply reluctance of big utilities to surrender their monopolies.
• p. 191: …progress would come faster if the government stopped subsidizaing the fossil fuel industry and instead enacted policies like "feed-in tariffs" that force utilites to buy the juice from people's rooftops at a decent price.
• p. 194: [on wood to generate power]: Middlebury should see its investment returned within five years. …. David Brynn: "Our forests produce just under four cords of wood per person in the state every year in terms of new growth," and about half that is already being harvested. "We are not awash in wood." We'll need those new stands of willows — and we'll need the rapidly expanding "cowpower" initiative that takes methane from manure piles….
• p. 195: So now we're (theoretically anyway) well fed and warm. We can turn, then, to what may be the hardest part for most of us moderns to imagine about the future I'm describing, the greatest worry of all. If we're staying home, tending the garden, working with our neighbors, won't life be a tad … dull?
• p. 197: The internet can take waste — that empty seat next to the driver, that old Ping-Pong table — and convert it into something useful [and vice versa!]. …. it's decentralized. And that's why I like it.
• p. 203: Keith Hampton: "I don't think people will create silos and hide in houses to shield themselves from hard times," he said. "They're going to look for people to help solve these problems. Those tend to be your neighbors."
• p. 205: We can no longer afford to ignore our neighbors; they'll be key to our survival. … I'd keep the juice flowing to the Internet even if I had to turn off everything else.
• p. 210: [A Cameroonian man] and his neighbors … planted 350 trees on the edge of the village, hung a small sign, and took a picture. This gesture nearly made me weep. People in Cameroon have done nothing to cause global warming; they will be hammered by its effect….
• p. 211: Rajendra Pachauri, the United Nation's top climate scientist, who had accepted the Nobel Prize alongside Al Gore for his work in leading the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, endorsed our goal. "What is happening, and what is likely to happen," he said, "convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target." [ppm of CO2]
• p. 212: The momentum of the heating, and the momentum of the economy that powers it, can't be turned off quickly enough to prevent hideous damage. But we will keep fighting, in the hope that we can limit the damage. …. Eaarth represents the deepest of human failures. But we must live on the world we've created — lightly, carefully, gracefully.