On October 20 came the bombshell-but-utterly-unsurprising news that Total, a French oil and gas company similar to Exxon, Shell and BP, has known about the climate crisis since 1971, and covered it up, just like the others did.
A smaller bombshell is my recent discovery, buried in a book from 1982, that an art museum in a small German town was addressing the climate crisis in that year, in a small but substantial way. The story involves Joseph Beuys, arguably the most important European artist since World War II and, oddly enough, Andy Warhol, the closest there is to an American equivalent of Beuys.
Campaign poster by Warhol for the Green Party in Germany (“for the Greens”, 1980); explanation of climate change from a German art museum (1982)
Can we say “we told you so” now? Ignoring ecologists’ warnings about bad land management – along with poor governance and costcutting – caused those deaths at least as much as the climate crisis did.
Last week twice as many people died in floods in one small area in rural Germany than die in the entire U.S. in an average year of floods and hurricanes combined. In the media and the general public the climate crisis is taken to be a primary cause of the disaster and its 242 deaths, 184 of them in Germany. This is factually incorrect.
Although the climate crisis is well on its way to being the biggest environmental catastrophe in human history, in this case it’s being used as a scapegoat to deflect attention away from decades of bad land management, flood planning and disaster preparedness. Germany flagrantly and consistently ignored the most basic principles in these areas, defying the urgent pleas of experts in many disciplines. This left the region vulnerable to a degree most people can’t imagine could even exist in a modern country.
Here’s how we know this. Hurricane Sandy, the largest in North American history, affected the entire eastern U.S. and Canada and the Caribbean over ten days, whereas the European storm affected a region with a tiny fraction of the area and population (maybe 1/1,000th?) over just two days. But Sandy only caused twice as much damage and two and a half times as many deaths.
Raw sewage flows into the waterways in Berlin and many other cities on a regular basis. Some are doing more about it than others.
When you flush a toilet anywhere in central Berlin during a moderate-to-heavy rainstorm, much of the waste goes directly into the Spree river that runs through the city, or into one of its several canals. This happens on 30 to 40 days each year, sometimes as many as 60. This post is a documentation of just a few of the 120-odd outlets where the untreated sewage enters the waterways. Continue reading “In Berlin the toilets flush directly into the river (but it’s not just Berlin)”
Second in the EYAWTKA series. This post is an annotated and tightly edited list of resources on green infrastructure for managing stormwater, water pollution and urban climate adaptation that I don’t think you can find all in one place anywhere else. It began just as some reminders to myself and then I figured maybe others might find it useful. It’s far from comprehensive but it is highly selective – for every link here, many less optimal ones were weeded out. Specialists may want to skip to the BMP tools and databases farther down.
Green infrastructure is a set of methods for cities to prevent flooding and water pollution by incorporating nature in built structures instead of fighting it by just building ever bigger structures with ever more concrete. It’s a subset of what is often called nature-based solutions, best management practices (BPM) or low-impact development(LID). These terms aren’t identical but they overlap considerably, and further, they don’t have standardized definitions, although green infrastructure itself arguably has a more specific and distinct definition than the others. That being said, green infrastructure has an entirely different meaning in the US than it does in Europe, where it refers to any and all parts of the landscape that are not built – forests, parks, meadows, gardens, lawns, everything. In the US it means built structures that use natural processes.
Recently I was asked for recommendations of books on degrowth, which is the socio-economic transformation that will have to take place to due planetary limits on the amount of water, land, energy and materials. If everyone used as much of these things as Americans we would need five earths in order to meet the demand. So something will have to give. Technology and efficiency won’t solve the problem because it’s been shown that when you make things more efficient people just increase their consumption and so the total use – of electricity or raw materials or whatever – doesn’t actually go down.
Degrowth will mean separating human well-being from the notion of infinitely eternally expanding economic growth and effiency, which is such a ridiculous concept I can’t believe anyone ever bought into it. It’s been demonstrated that this simply can’t work, from economic and physical standpoints. I was specifically asked for books rather than websites or articles so here you go…
While green infrastructure has been booming for two decades in cities around the world – big, small, “green”, not green – it’s barely on the radar at all in Berlin. How could the capital of one of the world’s most prosperous countries not have gotten the memo?
Berlin’s been talking about the necessity of stormwater-capturing raingardens for twenty years but has none to speak of except for a few isolated exceptions, primarily in outer suburbs. By contrast, New York City, to name just one example among many, began building nearly a thousand of them every year starting around 2014 and continues to do so. Other cities started ten years earlier. I wanted to understand what’s going on and began by observing whether Berlin would have space for them.
To say that Berlin is lavishly endowed with public space that is manifestly unused despite being paved is an understatement. I’m pretty sure Berlin has higher proportion of unused paved space than any other major city. (If you can think of one, let me know in the comments.) I am not talking about parking lots, plazas that are actually used, any areas with significant foot traffic, or vacant lots suitable for buildings. I mean inexplicable empty stretches along buildings and at streetcorners that aren’t used by pedestrians; sidewalks extravagantly and desolately out of proportion to their foot-traffic load; and large traffic islands and medians. Continue reading ““Usage Conflicts”: Berlin debates whether it has enough space to adapt to climate change”
Despite its plentiful lakes, rivers and canals and its reputation for rainy weather, Berlin is in many ways as dry as Spain or Texas. Yet it uses more water than is refilled to its supplies every year, and hundreds of millions in fines are looming due to ongoing violations of E.U. water protection laws. Solutions will be tough: Berlin has 13 mayors and a bizarre water supply system, the only one of its kind in the world.
Berlin is always seen as a watery place: everyone loves the abundant waterways and lakes and hates the grey damp winter; panic – most of it without basis in fact – over basements being flooded by a high water table is something of a municipal religion. They say it has more bridges than Venice (hardly an accomplishment given that the whole city of Venice could fit inside Berlin’s airport alone and Berlin has 14 times as many people ). The surprising truth, though, is that Berlin is a very dry place with dried-up forests, shortages of water, and extremely low rainfall, in fact less rain than pretty much all of the United States including Texas and Florida apart from the deserts, and less than many parts of Spain and Italy. Berlin probably a has negative water balance, which means more water is leaving the city than is coming in – in other words, the supply is dwindling and will someday run out if drastic action is not taken, although we can’t be sure because the authorities themselves have neither the data needed to find out nor the staff or funding to collect it. The climate crisis is not the main cause of any of this and the problems existed before climate change became severe, although this fact is known mainly among scientists and almost completely ignored by the media and the administration.
Drought risk. Berlin is rated medium-high (red, 4 out of a maximum possible 5), along with Cuba, Haiti and eastern Mexico. “Drought risk” factors in population density and demand for water along with supply of water.
Finally, some good environmental news from Germany, whose status as environmental leader has dwindled in recent years from its peak in the 90s and 00s when it made great strides in areas such as renewable energy, green roofs and recycling. Since that time, the country has been “jeopardizing its reputation as a global leader” and “spectacularly missing its 2020 climate target” as the state news network put it – so imagine what others are saying. However, there is at least one large sign of improvement. Last week the environment minister introduced a strong and decisive climate action bill which is the country’s first-ever specific legislation for greenhouse gas reductions with quantitative targets and penalties for noncompliance. Continue reading “After a lull, signs of movement on climate change in Germany”
Kiel University in Germany has a plan to be climate neutral by 2030 with zero net carbon emissions in the areas of electricity, facilities management and mobility: Climate Neutral University
Purple area shows their carbon emissions have already declined, about 5% from 2013 to 2104.
