Global warming: stuck on anger. Wilbur Wood writes about the Northern Plains' Annual Meeting in the Billings Outpost

A Nobel Prize laureate came to Billings on Friday, Nov. 9, but did you hear about it? Perhaps the local TV stations gave a couple of minutes to his keynote speech at Northern Plains Resource Council’s 36th annual meeting, at the Crown Plaza Hotel, but I didn’t catch the news that night, and I saw nothing about it in either the Saturday or Sunday Billings Gazette.
Perhaps this lack of interest by the media had to do with the subject of Steve Running’s power point enhanced presentation: global warming, climate change, and its effects on Montana. Have we all heard enough about that?

I don’t think so. As temperatures keep warming and our diminishing mountain snowpack melts off earlier and earlier, streamflows peak earlier too – two to three weeks earlier in just the last 20 or 25 years. This leaves less and less water in summer to irrigate croplands, support viable fish populations, supply municipalities and ever-expanding subdivisions, and, oh yes, to cool thermal power plants old and new (if Montana actually builds any new thermal power plants).

And as our winters increasingly lack those protracted periods of 20 or 30 or 40 degrees below zero, which kill off bugs that feed on trees that are stressed from drought, more and more trees turn into standing dead fuel and at the first spark burn, leaving less ground cover to capture what rains do fall.
Over most of Montana less rain is falling, and everywhere in Montana less snow is falling. So all of us are affected. It’s pretty much the same picture all over the western United States. And, yes, we do need to hear about it.

Maybe it’s an East-West Montana thing. Steve Running’s from Missoula, where he teaches and does climate research at the University of Montana, and sometimes the perspectives of Missoulians are discounted in Billings, and certainly the opposite is also true. The two parts of our state don’t always talk easily with each other.
While I could find no local coverage of Steve Running’s talk in the Nov. 11 Billings Gazette, I did find an Associated Press piece on page 11A headlined “Panel to draft key U.N. document on warming.” This referred to the impending “fourth and last report on the state of global warming” by the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was created in 1988 to assess the science of
global warming.

Steve Running, a scientist at the University of Montana, is a member of this panel, and he shares this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with his fellow IPCC members, as well as Al Gore. This final IPCC report will distill the previous reports into a palatable 30 pages “that summarizes the complex science into language that politicians and bureaucrats can understand.”
Negotiators meeting in December in Bali, Indonesia, will use this report as a point of departure as they decide on a course of action to recommend to all nations, to slow down human-generated greenhouse gas emissions – largely from the burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas.

Beyond science to solutions

At the Northern Plains meeting, Running’s charts flashed by on a large screen, showing CO2 and temperatures inexorably rising, interspersed with photos of dwindling glaciers and forests in flames. Running said that he and his fellow IPCC climate scientists believe they have “delivered enough information to society about what is happening”; about all they can do now is track the changes, measure how fast ocean temperatures are rising, sea and land ice is melting, stronger storms are brewing, energy demand is ballooning, global oil reserves dwindling.
It’s time to “hand off this football,” he said, to the next set of players: technologists for innovations in energy efficiency and renewable energy, and political and cultural leaders for changes in policy.
Running offered a “grandiose prediction” that within 10 years we’ll have the technological capability to solve global warming. But he fears we’ll lack “the international leadership and governance for the global response  needed.”

The audience of nearly 100 was amused when he clicked a final chart on the screen. Playing off the psychological formulation of the “five stages of grief,” here are The S. Running 5 Stages of Climate Grief:

1. Denial – It’s not getting warmer. Even if it is, it’s not our fault.
2. Anger – I don’t care, I’m not going to change my lifestyle.
3. Bargaining – Warming will make things nicer, not worse.
4. Depression – It too late; we’re doomed.
5. Acceptance – Let’s get to work.

Running said too many of his friends are stuck in stage 4, while it’s clear from the hate mail he’s received recently that many people are mired in stage 2.
Most of the people at the Northern Plains meeting seemed to have moved into stage 5, acceptance, with much of the rest of the meeting dealing with how to get to work effectively.

Green building, good neighbor

Two efforts by Northern Plains itself pointed that way. Architect Ed Gulick and landscape designer Linda Inverson described the indoor and outdoor features of the group’s new headquarters at 220 S. 27th St. in Billings that helped it accumulate the fourth highest point total so far, and a “platinum” rating, in the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED certification program.
LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and the building, a transformed former grocery store now called Home on the Range, is so energy efficient that it uses just 21 percent of the energy used by a comparable structure, built to code, while the grasses, forbs, bushes and trees surrounding the building are native or naturalized species that are generally drought tolerant.

The other effort is not a building but a contract, called the Good Neighbor Agreement, between on the one hand Northern Plains and two of its local affiliates, Stillwater Protective Association and

Cottonwood Resource Council, and on the other hand the giant platinum-palladium producer Stillwater Mining Corp. Stillwater Mining employs about 1,500 union miners at two sites, 900 near Nye and another 600 (along with 65 private contractors) at its more recent East Boulder River mine south of Big Timber. As described by CRC member Jerry Iverson, one of the four main components of the agreement surely has saved lives, reduced pollution and traffic congestion, and preserved the rural character of this place by keeping workers from flooding the roads in private cars, and instead bussing them to and from the mines.

Conservation easements have further preserved rural flavor by preventing all private lands owned by the company from being subdivided.
Another element is the commitment to employ innovative new technologies, as they arise, to prevent waste and pollution, but perhaps the most important is that water quality has been protected through standards more stringent than those required by either the state or the federal government.

Protecting water quality - and quantity - was a large theme in a Saturday panel on Montana’s water future, in which all three speakers acknowledged the present and probable future trend of dwindling supplies. In the face of this, controlling coal bed methane development is crucial, since CBM de-waters coal seams to release the pressure that holds methane gas in the seam.
Instead of re-injecting this water into the same (or a nearby) seam, where feasible, developers either stash it in a reservoir (where it evaporates) or dump it down a stream. This water, generally full of minerals, can overload streams with salt and eventually ruin irrigated fields. Perhaps even worse, de-watering the aquifer can dry up wells and springs crucial to semi-arid regions like Montana.
One panelist, Laurie Kelley, heads up the Rosebud Watershed Group, which is essentially neighbors convening to manage its valuable riparian zones.  Rosebud County passed a local ordinance by an overwhelming majority that essentially bans coal bed methane development, at least as commonly practiced today.

Keeping it local

Local action was a theme of another Saturday panel dealing with biofuels, focusing especially on community scale bio-diesel. Northern Plains Resource Council’s Billings area affiliate, the Yellowstone Valley Citizens Council, has been pushing for local city and county government fleets to begin using bio-diesel – which is one way to establish a market and encourage production.
But there are two ways to produce bio-diesel and also ethanol: a few large scale, centralized, corporate-financed, absentee-owned facilities or many smaller scale, decentralized facilities owned by local people, using feedstocks produced by local farmers, and responding first to local needs.
All three of the biofuels panelists supported this decentralized model.  Ben Brouwer of AERO – the Helena-based Alternative Energy Resources Organization – placed it in the larger context presented in AERO’s recently published “Repowering Montana: A Blueprint for Homegrown Energy Self-Reliance” which argues that Montana eventually can handle all its in-state energy needs – heating and transportation fuels, electricity – through aggressive, cost-effective energy conservation and clean renewable sources:  sun, wind, flowing water, growing plants, and geothermal energy.
(Disclosure: I am one of the nine authors of this 106-page document.)

Jeff Birkby, an author and energy consultant from Missoula, pointed out lack of resilience of all large centralized energy facilities, from coal plants to large hydropower dams to biodiesel plants. He noted that a massive biodiesel plant planned for Grays Harbor, Wash., would use no local feedstocks but instead import palm oil from faraway tropical lands, produced in plantations that stripped away existing forests and undercut local diversified agriculture – and incidentally raised the price of palm oil so high that local people, who use it for cooking, can no longer afford it.
Now that facility could also be in trouble because the skyrocketing price of a feedstock that it counted on buying cheaply. Birkby advocated public policies that stopped subsidizing such centralized endeavors and instead provided incentives for community-based systems.
Cliff Bradley – microbiologist, energy-agriculture consultant, co-owner of Montana Microbial Products (based in Bozeman and Missoula), and author of the biofuels chapter in AERO’s Blueprint – placed biofuels in a global context.

Acknowledging that replacing our present excessive consumption of fossil fuels with biofuels is not possible - “biofuels will not replace Saudi Arabia” - he agreed that our first priority is to cut consumption through cost-effective energy conservation.

However, he insisted that biofuels, done right, offer one immediate solution to human-caused climate change. Since plants take up carbon from the atmosphere, fuels made from plants are essentially “carbon-neutral”: CO2 released by burning biofuels is taken up by next year’s crops.
“We have to stop using fossil carbon and instead meet our energy needs using current carbon,” Bradley said. “Waiting around for the hydrogen economy is not an option.”

The question is how to do this both sustainably and with economic equity?  Bradley urged that we need to look at biofuels, first, in the context of agriculture, not energy policy; that our priorities are to use plants for food first, then medicine, then probably high-value lubricants, and finally fuel.

The case for biofuels

In AERO’s Blueprint, Bradley said, we asked this question. Is it feasible for biofuels produced in Montana to make a dent in Montana’s consumption of fossil fuels? “The answer is clearly yes,” he said.
Here is a capsule is Bradley’s, and the AERO Blueprint’s, case for biofuels:
Montana has 12 to 15 million acres of cultivated lands. They now produce mostly grains and hay, but Montana once devoted 2 million of those acres to an oilseed and fiber crop, flax, and could grow oilseed crops again, particularly since they work well in rotation with wheat and other grains.
With that land base and the proper mix of crops, Bradley said, Montana does have the potential to produce enough ethanol – probably from residues of malting barley and various cellulosic sources – to replace the 500 million gallons of gasoline sold at retail each year in this state. And enough bio-diesel could be produced, from dryland oilseed crops like canola, camelina and others, to replace the 370 million gallons of petroleum-based diesel sold at retail each year.

“Montanans pay $1.5 billion each year for fossil fuels,” Bradley said, “and most of that leaves the state. Yet $1.5 billion is enough capital to build an 870 million gallon biofuel capacity (both biodiesel and ethanol) in this state.”

Investing that billion and half dollars in decentralized facilities around the state could reinvigorate Montana’s rural economy and revive its small towns.
As Steve Running pointed out, the climate scientists have spoken. The technologies are already here. Now what is needed is the social and political will to put those technologies and our money and ingenuity to work.

NOTES: Repowering Montana: A Blueprint for Homegrown Energy Self-Reliance is available on AERO’s website: www.aeromt.org. A workshop on Oilseeds for Fuel, Feed and the Future, sponsored by NCAT, the National Center for Appropriate Technology, is scheduled for the MSU-Billings College of Technology campus on Jan. 9-10. Contact Holly Hill at (406) 494-4572 or hollyh@ncat.org

for more information.