* * *
Since it was early June the grass was high all around Kirk’s house, and since the leading edge of a rainstorm was blowing in from the west the grass swirled like the surface of a lake. Most of the farmers in the valley had already taken a first cutting of hay—the round bales were sitting in the fields, waiting to be fed to cows come winter. “We’ll get it all cut at least once here, too,” said Kirk. “And I’ll bale a little bit of it—my godson is raising goats and they can use it. Most of it we’ll just cut and leave, though. I know there are lots of farmers who view that with disdain—the grass is going to waste. But after just a single year you can see the fertility returning to this place. It gives you a real feel for just how much nutrition you take off a place when you feed all the grass to the cows, especially if you don’t get the manure back on the soil.”
I’d been pestering Kirk to tell me about the second great innovation in his beekeeping. A decade after he’d become the first apiarist in a generation to build a year-round queen-raising operation in the north, he shocked many in the profession in 2002 when he stopped treating his hives with chemicals—even organically approved treatments. And he did it in the face of the invasion of the dreaded varroa mites, which were killing off entire beeyards. I needed the story for reasons of my own, as you’ll see—I was groping for ways to reorient our climate work.
“I’d always hated treating bees,” he said. We were sitting at his table, driven inside by the rain, which we could hear pounding on the roof as we drank sweet tea. “But when the first mites—these were tracheal mites—arrived in the nineties, the predictions were so dire that I thought I had to use something or lose all my hives. So I used menthol, which was organic, and maybe not so objectionable, but even so it messed up the hives. The vapors were so strong that once it got a little warm it could just drive all the bees out of the hive, they wouldn’t take care of the brood. So I stopped. And after a few years, I’d hear stories of other people not treating their bees, and they survived, too. I think if I hadn’t had that experience I might not have had the courage to stop treating when the varroa mites came along—because the varroa mites were far, far worse.” So bad, in fact, that their scientific name is varroa destructor. Tiny red specks, they feed on larvae, and in a few weeks they can destroy an entire hive.
“At first I treated my hives again, because people were saying that no colonies can survive otherwise,” said Kirk. “And it was almost true, because the bees had no previous experience with this threat. It was like smallpox and the Native Americans. Actually, I was pretty sure some bees would survive—but I wasn’t sure I’d survive as a beekeeper. The more I thought about it, though, the more I sensed it was risky either way. If I kept treating my hives, it would leave me dependent the way every other part of our farming economy has gotten dependent on chemicals. And that’s a nightmare. I didn’t want it happening to my favorite creature if there was any other way.” He experimented with leaving a few colonies untreated. “As expected, they all perished.” But he kept at it. He figured the small queen-rearing colonies, though the cornerstone of his system, were the least vulnerable to mite infestation because they weren’t breeding continuously, which would starve the mites at certain points along the cycle. Beginning in 1998 he stopped treating those hives, and it more or less worked.
“But I wouldn’t have been able to do it for the whole apiary without the Russian bees the USDA started importing,” he says. “It was a rare piece of brilliant work that they did down there at the government bee lab in Baton Rouge.” As the varroa mite started decimating the country’s hives in the mid-1990s, a researcher named Tom Rinderer journeyed to the Russian Far East, along a rugged stretch of the Pacific called the Primorsky Territory. It had been settled a century before by, among others, Ukrainians, who’d brought their European honeybees with them to this new land near the Chinese border. The hives thrived, in part because the forests were filled with basswood trees, a great honey producer. But the area was also infested with the varroa mite, which had long coexisted with the Asian bee. “They crossed over, and when the beekeepers sent queens back to the rest of Russia that’s how varroa originally broke out of its enclave and spread to Europe,” Kirk explained. “But it also meant that this was the part of the world where European honeybees had had the longest time to work out some resistance to varroa—they’d lived together for a hundred years.”
And so Rinderer brought back some Russian colonies, and after they spent a couple of years in government quarantine, he was ready to release them to a select few breeders. Kirk bought two of the first available breeder queens the first year they were available—for $500 apiece, which ounce for ounce must make them among the most expensive animals ever traded. But it wasn’t just the money he was risking. These were different bees, in some ways quite unlike the Italian strains that had dominated America’s beeyards since the mid-nineteenth century. (Our continent had no indigenous honeybees—the only fossilized remains predate the last Ice Age.)
“The Italian bee has a whole series of characteristics that make it suitable for apiaries,” says Kirk. “It’s gentle, it’s fertile, it builds up great big gigantic colonies. And they don’t swarm nearly as much as other bees.” They came from a warm country filled with plants that blossomed most of the year; winters were mild; life was good. “They almost mimic the stereotypes of the Italians,” he said. Whereas the Russians—well, they’re mimics, too. “They’re more conservative,” he said. “Once they’ve put up some honey in a sealed cell they have to be at death’s door before they’ll open up that cell and eat it.” And they’re used to a long hard winter.
They are, that is, a tiny bit more Kirk-like. Tough, frugal, endlessly hardworking. It was a good partnership. In April 2002 he stopped treating any of his hives and crossed his fingers. There were a few years of bad losses. He paged through his ledger books for me—“In 2004, I only managed to sell fifty-four hives; 2005, only fifty.” But by 2006 things had stabilized. In fact, better than stabilized—there turned out to be a good market for untreated honey, and at a price twice that of the stuff from regular apiaries. And people line up to buy his untreated colonies.
Not, of course, that keeping chemicals out of his hives keeps them out of the bees. As news broke earlier this year that honeybee populations had crashed by half or more, attention turned to a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids that had been engineered into seeds and now appeared to be killing bees. Since, like teenagers, they roam the world, there’s a limit to how much you can protect them. But at least they’d been well brought up.
“I still worry about varroa mite in the back of my head,” Kirk said. “And we do have bigger losses. It’s certainly harder to produce than it was before the mites. But we’re doing fine. It’s a combination of management—my system for northern beekeeping—and genetics, the steady improvement we get from our breeding program.” And most of all it relies on a certain deep faith in the bees, on the idea that they know what they’re doing. A faith that, pointed in the right direction and given half a chance, they’ll figure out how to thrive.
* * *
I knew exactly why I was pestering Kirk about all this. All winter long, the thought kept nagging at me that we needed to shift our course at 350.org. The timing was odd, because people kept telling us how great we were doing—our global climate campaign was the largest thing the environmental movement had even seen; we’d built the first big green movement for the Internet age. The Keystone fight had demonstrated that we could rally people to go to jail. And at least for a little while we’d actually won something.
And yet I was wary. I’d watched how the big green groups had fallen into the trap of fighting the last war—their big Beltway operations were better suited for the 1970s, when they could lobby Congress with some hope of victory. And, more important, I was wary because we were losing. Badly. There were more carbon emissions and higher temperatures every year. The day I’d sat down with Kirk to talk bee genetics, the world’s premier scient
ific journal, Nature, published a new paper authored by twenty-three high-profile biologists and climatologists, warning that we were on the edge of a planetary “state shift” that would leave the earth remarkably different than the one every human had heretofore known. “It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point,” warned Anthony Barnosky, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the lead author of the study. “The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations.”
There was no way, fighting one lightbulb or pipeline at a time, that we could make a dent in that momentum. We had to figure out how to get to the source of the problem. Our strategy had been pretty much the same as everyone else’s—go through the political system. Press the president, lobby the Congress, assemble at UN meetings. But what if we’d aimed wrong? What if the basic logic of our predicament meant we should be shifting focus?
I had an idea—that we needed instead to go straight at the fossil fuel industry. The basic problem we faced was that carbon carried no price—coal and gas and oil companies could pour it into the atmosphere for free, which undercut every effort at conservation or renewable energy. And the industry lobbied and donated and schemed endlessly to maintain that special break. No other business can put its trash out for free. That special privilege meant everything to the oil barons; it’s why they were willing to spend huge amounts of money to maintain their position. (Huge in relation to what we could spend; in relation to their profits, they hardly noticed the campaign contributions and lobbying expenses. The return on investment for buying congressmen is truly remarkable.) So somehow we had to weaken that industry.
And I had an idea how, one that had been growing in the back of my mind for months, ever since that first phone call with Naomi Klein in March. She’d pointed me in the direction of a new study from a small group of UK environmentalists and financial analysts, one that contained three numbers that we thought might upend the stale climate debate.
Those three numbers—2, 565, and 2,795—seemed to offer a way to allow everyone to really understand the desperation of the climate debate, so I’m going to take some space to describe them. They are, I think, the most important numbers in the world.
The first of those numbers is 2 degrees Celsius, which is the only figure the world has ever agreed on about climate change. The only one. Do you remember the grand Copenhagen climate summit in the fall of 2009? If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, Copenhagen would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate. The world’s nations had gathered in the December gloom of the Danish capital for what the leading climate economist, Britain’s Sir Nicholas Stern, called the “most important gathering since the Second World War, given what is at stake.” British prime minister Gordon Brown: “In every era there are only one or two moments when nations come together and reach agreements that make history, because they change the course of history. Copenhagen must be such a time.” Danish diplomat Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the conference: “This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we got a new and better one. If ever.”
Of course, we missed it. Copenhagen failed spectacularly—neither China nor the United States was prepared to offer dramatic concessions, and so the conference drifted aimlessly for two weeks till world leaders jetted in for the final day. Amid considerable chaos (the State Department frantically calling the airport to find their Chinese counterparts), Barack Obama took the lead in drafting a face-saving “Copenhagen accord” that fooled very few. Its purely voluntary agreements committed no one to anything, and even if countries signaled their intentions to cut carbon emissions, there was no enforcement mechanism. Activists were angry (a Greenpeace spokesman: “Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with guilty men and women fleeing to the airport”) and headline writers were brutal: “Copenhagen: The Munich of Our Times?” asked one.
The two-page voluntary accord did contain one scientific number, however—in fact, it contained it twice. In paragraph one it noted that “we shall, recognizing the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius … enhance our long-term cooperative action to combat climate change.” And in paragraph two, it noted once more, “We agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required according to science, and as documented by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] Fourth Assessment Report with a view to reduce global emissions so as to hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius.” By insisting on 2 degrees, the Copenhagen accord ratified positions taken earlier in 2009 by the G-8, and the so-called Major Economies Forum. It was as conventional as conventional wisdom gets.
The number was first suggested, in fact, by a German panel in 1995, at a meeting chaired by Angela Merkel, who was then the German minister of the environment and is now the chancellor. It’s not a hard and fast scientific line, of course. “There’s no hard numbers to support 2 versus 2.2 or 1.8 degrees,” said Josep Canadell, the executive director of the Global Carbon Project. So far, we’ve raised the temperature of the planet just 0.8 degrees, and that’s caused far more damage than any scientist expected: half of the summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, and the oceans are 30 percent more acidic. Given those impacts, many scientists have come to think that 2 degrees is, in fact, far too lenient a target. MIT’s Kerry Emmanuel, the leading authority on hurricanes, wrote, “Any number much above 1 degree involves a gamble, and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up.” Thomas Lovejoy, the World Bank’s chief environmental adviser, put it like this: “If we’re seeing what we’re seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, 2 degrees is simply too much.” NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet’s most prominent climatologist, was even blunter: “What the paleoclimate record tells us is that the dangerous level of global warming is less than what we thought a few years ago. The target that has been talked about in international negotiations for 2 degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster.”
If anything, environmentalists were even more dismayed by the target than the scientists. I was in Copenhagen as a volunteer campaigner lobbying various delegations, and I’d spent most of the two weeks wandering the vast conference center with a button in my lapel that read “1.5 to Stay Alive,” a campaign mounted by the low-lying nations whose very existence was at risk. Dr. Albert Binger, the director of the Center for Environment and Development at the University of West Indies, emerged as a spokesman for the Alliance of Small Islands States: “Our ports, airports, roads and settlements will no longer be able to survive two degrees. Some countries will flat out disappear. You have a problem in the Pacific. Kiribati, Tuvalu, islands in Papua New Guinea and Fiji, across Asia and the Maldives.” In Africa, beset by serial drought, some leaders urged even tougher targets. When Sudan’s Lumumba Di-Aping, the chair of the G-77 group of developing countries, told African delegates at the conference that a two-degree rise in temperature was a “suicide pact” for Africa, many of them started chanting, “One degree, one Africa.”
But environmentalists lost that fight. In the end, political realism bested scientific realism, and the world settled on the two-degree target—as I said, it’s the only thing about climate change the world has settled on. By January 31, 2010, which was the deadline for signing on to the Copenhagen accord, 141 countries representing 87.24 percent of the world’s carbon emissions had endorsed the two-degree target, and many more were added later. Only Sudan, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have rejected it; the signatories include not just the United States and China, but also the rising powers India, Brazil, Russia, and Indonesia. Even the United Arab Emirates, which makes most of its money exporting oil and gas, signed on to the target. The official position of planet Earth at the moment is that we can’t
raise the temperature more than two degrees Celsius—it’s become the bottomest of bottom lines. Two degrees.
The second of the three numbers is 565 gigatons. That’s—again roughly—how much more carbon dioxide scientists say humans can pour into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. “Reasonable,” in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than Russian roulette with a six-shooter.
This idea of a global “carbon budget” emerged about a decade ago, as scientists began to calculate how much oil, coal, and gas could still safely be burned. As I said, we’ve so far increased the earth’s temperature about 0.8 degrees, which would mean that we’re less than halfway to the target. But, in fact, most computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing carbon dioxide now, the temperature would rise another 0.8 degrees—for the moment, that heat is being stored in the oceans, but it is working its way back into the atmosphere. That means we’re actually more than three-quarters of the way to the two-degree target.
How good are these numbers? No one insists that they’re exact, but few dispute that they’re generally right. Tom Wigley, an Australian climatologist now at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, began making such calculations in 2001, with his colleague Sarah Raper. They looked at the futures envisioned by many of the giant computer simulations of the climate that have been painstakingly built at universities around the world over the past few decades, and tried to find where they converged. There are open questions, of course—precisely how sensitive is the climate to carbon emissions? How much carbon will the earth’s oceans and forests soak up? These are hard to calculate, but as more data comes in the range of possibilities steadily narrows. The 565-gigaton figure actually comes from a 2009 paper written by one of Wigley’s former postdoctoral students, Malte Meinshausen, who now works at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. In the years since, universities around the world have continued to publish new simulations of the planet’s climate. “Looking at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all,” said Wigley. “There’s maybe fifty models in the data set now, compared with twenty before. But the numbers are pretty much the same. We’re just fine-tuning things. I don’t think much has changed over the last decade.” Bill Collins, who runs the climate science department at the University of California, Berkeley, agreed: “My personal gut sense is that the median has been robust for some time.… We’re not getting any free lunch from additional understanding of the climate system.” At current rates of carbon burning, we’d blow through that 565 gigatons in about fifteen years—before a baby born today makes it through high school.
Oil and Honey Page 13
