Wu Wei and Carbon Mania

Wu Wei is a wonderful philosophy alien to modern civilization, though at times we get a glimpse of it.

A rough translation is action by not acting. Westerners can't stand this one. We are so sure we can fix the universe.

We, armed our science and bucket of vague and filtered facts, are sure we can fix everything by tinkering and making plans. Sometimes, action is required, but often sitting and watching is better.

An old story provides advice for someone standing in a muddy pool who had dropped a thing of value - don't go walking and grabbing the mud. That will make things impossible to resolve. Rather, just stand quietly and wait. Your best chance will be when you can see the bottom, as the mud settles out. I suppose Wu Wei is related to the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Flash forward to now.

The WSJ has a piece on what has happened after the geniuses in Washington signed into law sweeping and expensive legislation pushing ethanol and biofuels. Two studies were proffered to explain the switching to such fuels will INCREASE CO2 in the atmosphere. Click on the title to read the article in full. Yes, INCREASE. Don't fog over on me, here. Try to focus on negative feedback.

The first study is from ecologists at Woods Hole. Below, is the WSJ summary:

Prior studies had never credited the carbon-dioxide emissions that arise when virgin forests, grasslands and the like are cleared to grow biofuel feedstocks. About 2.7 times more carbon is stored in terrestrial soils and plant material than in the atmosphere, and this carbon is released when these areas are cleared (often by burning) and the soil is tilled. Compounding problems is the loss of "carbon sinks" that absorb atmospheric CO2 in the bargain. Previous projections had also ignored the second-order effects of transferring normal farm land to biofuels, which exerts world-wide pressure on land use...

...In the long term, it will take 167 years before the reduction in carbon emissions from using ethanol "pays back" the carbon released by land-use change. As they say, it's not easy being green.

The second study:

The second study comes out of the University of Minnesota and the Nature Conservancy and explores what the authors call the "carbon debt" when native ecosystems are converted to biofuel stock. Until the debt is repaid, biofuels from those fields will be greater net emitters than the fossil fuels they replace. The authors find that the debt for corn ethanol in the U.S. is between 48 and 93 years. In Indonesia and Malaysia, which have a 1.5% annual rate of deforestation to produce palm oil for Western European biodiesel, the debt is as high as 423 years. Yep, that's four centuries. Even Fidel Castro won't last that long.

It gets tiring pointing to the foibles of the well-intentioned green movement and sneering at the pandering politicians, so I give up. I won't say, "Told you so." It is almost pointless to bring this data to the zealot's attention as it never filters through to the brain. This is the clue that we are dealing with a religion.

Eventually, science will actually do its job, as people's reputations and long term careers can be short-circuited by being documented participants in our time's irrational tulip craze. The last blog entry, I think, demonstrated how some folks in Canada wanted to publish their concern that an ice age is coming, the ultimate warming heresy, Amen. (so give us funding - at least the causative impulse is the same. Left, Right, UP or Down - show me the money.) Don't think they published these reports without considering their academic positions.

The real problem is the politicians who have no sense of linear thought and bounce from opinion poll to opinion poll. They change the target when wrong (witness Senator Pelosi on Iraq) and forget what they said earlier on, knowing the media will never refer to their own archives.

There is no talking to them, either, so we need to just get them out. Forget about party denominations, get the weeds out of our garden. A weed is a weed is a weed.

I have developed a notion of a virtual term limit. After two terms, a Congress person, either house, now has the burden of proof of convincing constituents that they are worthy of keeping - a job review. IF the person does not come forward with convincing evidence of what they did in Washington, you vote against them. Period. It should not be up to us to cut through the vague crap to figure out what they did. Vagueness is their greatest weapon.

Anyway, non-ado is the heart of the Tao. Keep to the voice of nature, as you find it within you, and not much can go wrong. You won't make things much worse, for sure.

Leave nature alone, either as an abuser or fixer. The former is human ignorance and greed; the latter our arrogance and hubris. The answer is not in the stars, but within ourselves. It is up to us to find those stars within our own spirit.

It is certainly not found mob panic.