Some of you may know that I live in Chicago. As a Midwestern transplant I read as much as possible about our region – its successes, cleaner Great Lakes, for example. And, its failures, stock piling petcoke, the by-product generated during the manufacturing process of tar sands/crude oil into refined oil for gasoline. In my mind, we are taking tiny steps forward and, unfortunately, giant steps back.  The debate about climate change rages on endlessly, even when over 90% of scientists in the Western Hemisphere agree that humans are the cause of climate change acceleration. What’s worse, even with damning evidence and, in many cases, irrefutable proof, there is still the power of lobby groups and politicians to tip the scale the wrong way.  Tessa Stuart writes about this in the March/April issue of Audubon. She talks about fracking and how we not only harvest natural gas, but release “a brew of toxic byproducts” that ultimately get into our groundwater. Sadly, we don’t know just how much because of “legal prostitution.”  A lot of this, of course, is happening here in the Midwest, hence my interest.

Did you realize that the energy industry is exempt from certain portions of our major environmental laws which include the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act?  Yup.  Get this:  “The fracking industry emits an estimated 127,000 tons of air pollutants – including proven carcinogens such as benzene and ethylbenzene from more than 25,000 wells every year.” Frankly, I’ll bet it’s more than that, but we can’t get an accurate number because the EPA refuses to release this information. Here’s the real kicker, the legal prostitution:  the fracking industry has been able to stay off the inventory list of the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) through legal maneuvering. State attorney generals get cozy with big energy and make sure local laws exempt them from complying with TRI. For example, just last year Texas Governor Greg Abbott, when the attorney general (and whose two attorney general campaigns raked in $2.5 million in contributions from energy companies), ended access to the hazardous chemical inventory.  This is one example.  There are at least seven other states where the same kind of legal shenanigans happen. Ridiculous.  Don’t attorney generals have a legal, if not moral, obligation to protect their constituents?  If they don’t have a moral obligation, isn’t their legal obligation to follow the law, not interpret or debate what it ought to be, but to follow it? Money and politicians, right?

I really meant to begin this column on carbon cycle, using the abuse as a demonstration of human influence in climate change that has affected the rise in concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.  Over the years I’ve written about the full list outlined by Andrew Revkin in another issue of Audubon (September/October 2014): “Melting ice and rising seas, hotter heat waves, and heavier downpours, less predictable storm patterns, disrupted ecosystems and water supplies.” No sense talking about it any more because, in my view, we are responsible for all of these changes.  Therefore, if anything good is to happen we have to change the way we think which means we have to change our part in our relationship with nature.

If you agree that we are in the Age of Anthropocene, the age of us, the challenge is really how we cooperate with the natural system.  So far, we have been anything but cooperative, particularly since the industrial revolution, say, beginning in 1865, at the end of the Civil War.  There has really been a competition between ourselves and what we want, material goods, food, water, energy and nature. Let’s assume that you accept that climate change is real and more complex because of trying to reverse the carbon dioxide process. Interestingly, scientists now believe that the increased heat added to the earth’s surface by the greenhouse effect has gone into the ocean.  This sounds like a wonderful solution, but not so fast.  Read David Archer’s The Long Thaw, “a sobering book that lays out why, despite our focus on real-time weather events, we ain’t seen nothing yet.” (For the life of me, I don’t understand why the CD’s of the world don’t get it!)

I have rambled a bit, but I hope you catch my drift. Just one more example of how our natural system is disrupted by climate change.  Have any of you followed the spread of the pine beetle out in the west?  (CD lives in Colorado, and all he has to do is drive west on I-70 to Vail to see the devastation. It is so sad.) In an article in this year’s April issue of National Geographic, Hillary Rosner explains that the epidemic now covers more than 60 million acres of forest, 60 million mind you, from Northern New Mexico north and west all the way through Alberta, Canada into British Columbia. The sad part is everything dies with it. Food webs of nutrition, local economies that are dependent on timber, increased wild fires, closing of campgrounds, and so on; all of this, because the pine beetle is destroying the forest.

Interestingly, the Rosner article explains that the pine beetle wasn’t an immigrant like Asian carp or kudzu (I have written about this before).  The pine beetle is native to our western forests but until the dramatic climate change over the last 15 – 20 years, lived in harmony, in small amounts, dying off during cold winters and fires. Rosner explains, “we’ve eliminated forest fires – thereby turning the woods into beetle buffets. When the crisis began, British Columbia’s forests were packed with three times as many mature pines as there would have been had they been allowed to burn naturally. Like mountain pine beetles, fire is native to western forests and it’s as important as rain to their health.” Harmony, baby. Get it? So the forests out west were vulnerable.

Not enough fires, natural or controlled, and too much warmth have encouraged rapid beetle movement through the western forests.  First fracking and second, beetle battle, all affecting harmony.

As Andrew Reukin says, in his wonderful column in that September/October issue of Audubon:
Given these climate and human realities, how do we develop a sustainable, two-way relationship with the atmosphere and climate? How do we limit warming and gird ourselves smartly for the future? First, it would help to conceive of global warming less as a problem to be solved and more as a legacy issue to be consistently addressed. Too often we’ve heard calls to “seal the deal” (on a binding treaty) and “solve the climate crisis” in ways that imply this is the task of a single president or generation. A more realistic view is that we need a new relationship with energy to go with our evolving new relationship with climate. Addressing both sources of emissions and sources of societal and ecological risk is something to do as routinely, and passionately, as we work on poverty reduction and health care.  It took a century to get deep into the fossil era; it will take decades to get out.

Second, it would help to abandon expectations that pressing the science case for warming ever louder or more cleverly will build a groundswell of concern that vaults us at last toward clean energy choices.  Science literacy matters, of course, but we have to get comfortable with the idea that humans will inevitably have a wide range of reactions to climate change.

I agree with these comments philosophically and believe I can build a practical and realistic solution for our industry by using energy, renewable energy, as the process forward.

I am ever mindful that here in America we don’t have an energy policy, much less a renewable energy policy. I’ve written about this in the past. While it is and will be easier to sell my theory in Europe, I think with the right partners here in America we can succeed.
In my next column, I’m going to describe the next steps forward for a wasteless industry, using renewable energy as the catalyst. Shipping byproduct to India and China and other underdeveloped economies is not the solution, in my opinion.  Think of the carbon footprint in that process. Using byproduct to create a wasteless industry and building renewable energy is not only creative but economically viable.

Read the rest of the story in my next column!

Another Letter from the Earth.



Calvin Frost is chairman of Channeled Resources Group, headquartered in Chicago, the parent company of Maratech International and GMC Coating. His email address is [email protected].