Give it some time, the trees will start listening to you. A device once used only to track growth rates is now the seed of something else, a quiet grafting of the forest into the cloud.
Dendrometers (used to measure the growth of trees and other plants by monitoring changes in diameter) have gotten a recent boost in applicability for more than just forest management teams. Thus far, they’ve allowed forest managers to cut down site visits needed to gather data on tree growth and carbon capture rates, but because of a recent innovation, much more is possible and I want to paint a picture for you.
As per usual, what begins as a gesture to efficiency, a nod to preservation, may warp into something far more insidious.
The company Treemetrics, working alongside the European Space Agency, created sensors that link through wide-area networks and satellites, feeding streams of data into a platform called Forest HQ. If your tree is growing, Forest HQ knows. The forest becomes an extension of the cloud, feeding numbers related to diameter growth, height, location—change of all sorts. So, the forest is no longer a place. It is a feed. The company calls this project the Internet of Trees.
The logic is seductive: better measurement equals better care. Carbon accounting strengthens climate response. Carbon credits for the cap-and-trade markets gain more authenticity. But inside that necessity lies a governance architecture: every tree, instrumented; every growth curve, visible; every beat of the forest, rearranged as data. A swarm of data waiting to be further monetized or weaponized—unfortunately, humans do one or the other. Often both.
I know what I will soon describe may seem altogether far fetched, but it does not take much imagination to see the scope widen in the way I expect given the right amount of time.
The slope is not hard to imagine. Already, forests are wired with listening devices meant to detect chainsaws, trucks and any other prohibited criteria. Artificial intelligence runs on-site, flagging the sounds of illegal logging before they reach the cloud. It is admittedly clever, even noble. But anything involving criminalization soon collapses into categories: nuance is stripped, anomalies are flagged, people are reduced to signals.
We’ve seen this arc before. The Global Positioning System was once sold as a gift for navigation: finding your way home, never getting lost. Now it’s the backbone of precision strikes and geofencing. Closed-circuit television cameras were rolled out for “public safety.” Now they’re stitched together in networks that can track a face across an entire city and can even recognize your gait amongst a crowd. Social media began as a way to connect with friends and now it’s a sprawling apparatus of profiling, targeted persuasion and behavioral nudging.
Each began as benevolent. Each hardened into control.
For a good number of technologies, the arc of applicability tends to bend toward something darker. Monetized until meaningless or weaponized against anyone not in control of the weapon.
What begins as protection of ecology can just as easily become the monitoring of people. A hiker’s footsteps, a group of protestor’s chants; any human activity can be parsed as anomaly, pinged to headquarters. With the right contracts, the forest becomes surveillance infrastructure, camouflaged in green.
What if Forest HQ evolves from tracking growth to performing guard duty? What if the forest ceases to be wild and becomes a grid, mapping bodies as much as making bark?
Conveniently, this year a viral post showcased a new service from XFinity that uses WiFi signals to detect motion in your home, “without relying on sensors or cameras.” The technology has existed for years, but only now is it being pitched as household convenience. Tracking once reserved for homes and offices will soon extend to the wilderness.
You can opt into this service, which routers and WiFi connected objects around you don’t give the option to opt out?
This shift matters not only technologically but culturally. What happens when forests are no longer trusted as wild refuges, but feared as watchtowers? What happens to the human imagination when trees are not symbols of mystery or sanctuary, but extensions of a monitoring state? Jokes about birds not being real will lose their humor. Children will hesitate or outright refuse to climb a tree.
Surveillance always arrives dressed as care. It comes with drones, dashboards and dragnet data streams in the name of stewardship and security. But benevolence, left unexamined, can harden into coercion. The trees will stop watching silently; they start reflecting, transmitting, bearing witness.
And so the question lingers: at what point does monitoring, however noble its pitch, become policing?
Throughout our history, the wild was once where we went to disappear. Now it has the potential to be where we are found most easily.
For more reading on how technological advancement affects our interaction with nature and cultivated products, see The Products of a New Environment.
Even though the farmer is the man, the farmer has a few friends to thank. The crops and various yields we concern ourselves with, or at least the ones we place the highest value on, severely depend on interactions with other creatures that we tend to overlook or altogether neglect.
As of late, the neglect is reaching a potential maximum that may herald in a world in which some recipes seem too costly or altogether impossible to alter for sake of substitution. Bats, bees and other pollinators are invaluable aids to humanity, yet they’re slowly and quietly going into the long night…moreso than the TV screens care to tell you.
Going Batty
Bats (those cool, nocturnal insectivores) are being wiped out across 40 states by Pseudogymnoascus destructans (white-nose syndrome), a fungus that shatters their hibernation, fat reserves and wings. The result: millions dead, entire colonies erased. Their absence carries a price tag. Bats provide $3.7 to $53 billion in pest control services each year by eating the insects that would otherwise chew through corn, cotton, rice and other staples. In field studies, excluding bats from cornfields meant 60% more pests and 50% more crop damage in just two nights (Kunz et al, 2011). Counties hit by the fungus see $2.84 per acre rental declines, idle farmland, a 31% jump in pesticide use and a 7.9% rise in infant mortality which ends up costing society $39 billion. Still today, the fungus spreads. Tangentially, they’re also the largest pollinator group of agave, the basis of tequila; so maybe enjoy it while you got it?
Now the bees…
Between mid-2024 and early 2025, U.S. beekeepers lost 62% of their colonies, totaling over 1.1 million hives gone. These pollinators add $34 billion annually to U.S. agriculture; almonds alone require 1.4 million hives each spring, with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in pollination contracts. The causes are hardly mysterious: Varroa mites, viruses, pesticide exposure, habitat loss, and extreme weather (Goulson et al., 2015). In Texas, heat and drought drove a 66% colony collapse; a staggering loss far beyond the norm. Globally, inadequate pollination already reduces fruit, vegetable and nut production by 3–5%, contributing to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year from diet-related disease. Fewer pollinators mean smaller harvests, higher prices and a poorer diet for millions.
Cattle Craze
In early 2024, H5N1 appeared in U.S. dairy herds. A trade group quickly pushed to rename it Bovine Influenza A Virus (BIAV), softening the optics even as infections spread to 17 states and hundreds of herds. Viral shedding was found in milk and wastewater, human cases were recorded, and federal surveillance quietly receded. The direct food-safety risk is managed through pasteurization, but the economic risk comes from reduced production, herd health declines, and tighter export margins in an already tariff-heavy trade environment (USDA ERS, 2024).
Poultry Problems
The same virus has hit poultry far harder. Since 2022, over 166 million birds have been culled nationwide, across all 50 states and Puerto Rico—marking the largest, longest avian influenza outbreak in U.S. history. The fallout has been rough, to say the least. Wholesale egg prices more than doubled in early 2025, retail prices hit $5–$9 per dozen and store shelves in some areas went bare between shipments. In February 2025, the USDA launched a $1 billion response plan, including $500 million in biosecurity upgrades, $400 million in farmer relief and $100 million for vaccine research. Wholesale egg prices later fell 64%, retail by 27% and still the USDA forecasts a 41% increase in egg prices for 2025 overall. Meat production also tightened as infected flocks were destroyed, pushing poultry prices upward and reshuffling supply chains.
None of this even covers the detriment to pest management we owe to millions of other birds we’ve lost to H5N1 recently; they may be bird species we don’t ingest but their contributions to food production shouldn’t be dismissed.
The Hidden Truth Beneath Rising Prices • Bats gone = higher pest pressure, greater crop losses. • Bees gone = pollination deficits, reduced yields, higher produce prices. • Cattle infected = production hits, export challenges. • Poultry culled = eggs and meat scarce, prices surge. We call it inflation, trade friction, “market shifts,” but the ledger is ecological and measured in wings lost, colonies collapsed and flocks erased. These losses don’t happen in a vacuum. They’re amplified by poor government stewardship: from underfunded wildlife agencies to reactive rather than preventative biosecurity. Corporate malpractice often doubles the damage, whether through chemical overuse, disease mismanagement, or lobbying for optics over truth (Food Tank, 2024). Climate disruption compounds every weakness, making winters too warm for pest cycles to break, summers too hot for bees to forage and droughts too long for forage crops to survive (IPCC, 2019). And all of this is made more volatile by consumer demands for cheap, abundant, uniform products causes pressure for producers to cut corners in ways that weaken ecological resilience further. The true cost of our food is not just in the grocery bill. It’s in degraded ecosystems, distorted market signals, and an agriculture system that burns through its biological capital faster than it can be replenished.
The runaway printing of fiat isn’t helping either but ultimately, the more we ignore the interlocking causes, the more expensive eating will become. Whether it’s denoted in dollars, observed in personal health or in the declining stability of the systems that feed us, we’ll see the cost sooner rather than later and it won’t be easy to stomach.
On the surface & even from a distance this new ordinance seems fickle, overreaching, unnecessary or long overdue – the opinions vary as greatly as the personalities & cultures of California itself.
Unbeknownst to most, this new ordinance is a sign of the times to come. An indication of the veracity with which the governing bodies & authorities are willing to display in their endeavor to see predetermined plans finally implemented across the populous.
Just this past week, the neighboring City of San Diego enacted their own legislative frameworks regarding bikes too! Mayor Todd Gloria, members of SANDAG & affiliated organizations presented the 2022 edition of the Climate Action Plan, even though only weeks prior, what was reported to be over 4,000 citizens expressed discontent & preferences requesting the withdrawal of the plan altogether.
For those that have already read my post, “Environments & Requirements”, you may skip this video from a 2009 city council meeting in San Carlos, CA showing council members ignoring the words of the citizenry & implementing an ICLEI-derived plan. For those now coming across this site, I’d recommend watching & comparing the disregard of the San Carlos council members to the disregard of our politicians today as far climate legislation is concerned.
The folks seen in 2009 & the folks seen last week are of like mind: they simply wish to oversee their lands themselves; they uniformly wish to see the lands & its resources benefit the locals to the greatest degree. The politicians seen in 2009 & today are the same: they wish to see their plans fulfilled, no matter the cost as increased taxes will foot the bill.
Proposed taxes & suggested economic frameworks of San Diego’s 2022 version of CAP range from gallon per capita water limits, an increase in funding for tree rebate programs I covered a bit in “The Products of a New Environment” & transportation ordinances that all relate to a 2050 plan the City of San Diego has been pushing since at least 2010 involving…you guessed it: bikes. If you look to page 56 of the 2022 CAP, under Strategy 3: Mobility and Land Use, you see the City’s obsession with bikes & disdain for internal combustion engine vehicles at once:
“Shifting away from a car-centric transportation system starts with a loading priority for our roadways, prioritizing and protecting the most vulnerable modes such as walking and biking, and enhancing public transit for improved efficiency and performance. The loading priority concludes with shared, commercial, and personal electric vehicles, underscoring a commitment to the full transition of all vehicles from combustion engines and fossil fuels. The City will reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for trips through transportation infrastructure and technology improvements, transportation demand management (TDM) programs, and land use changes.”
It should be noted that this 2022 plan is simply a foundation for the 2050 plan titled “Riding to 2050: The San Diego Regional Bicycle Plan” but there are a number of proposed actions relating to Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions & other climate issues that will be enacted along the way as 2035 is a mid-point target year from now to 2050. Among the myriad of proposals to curb GHG emissions, one of marked interest is found in the 2022 edition of the CAP on page 69:
1) Reduce GHG emissions and water use of total beef, pork, chicken, turkey and dairy purchases by 20%.
2) Increase local, healthy, and sustainable foods to 20% of total food purchases prioritizing locally sourced, valued workforce and animal welfare.
Interestingly enough, in the entire CAP document, only one page is devoted to “Measure 5.3: Local Water Supply” & simply discusses the aforementioned gallon per capita limit; in one week the Federal government is going to impose water restrictions on 40 million people due to the state of the Colorado River basin, yet the City of San Diego has apparently nothing to say on the matter.
At the moment, the City of San Diego is primarily focused on regulator technology & economic frameworks that will advance the 2050 plan. In all fairness, San Diego has been this way since it entertained ICLEI & other entities; in the 2010 version of “Riding to 2050: The San Diego Regional Bicycle Plan”, published while Jerry Sanders was Mayor, on page 49, “encouragement programs” are proposed as an economic method of enticing, to some perspectives coercing, citizens & businesses into participating in these programs where ride-sharing & biking are the preferred forms of transportation.
Encouragement programs are generally characterized by their focus on encouraging people to bicycle more frequently, particularly for transportation. Encouragement programs increase the propensity for bicycle trips by providing incentives, recognition, or services that make bicycling a more convenient transportation mode. The following encouragement programs are recommended for implementation in the region and described in more detail in the remainder of the section:
⁃ Bike Sharing Program
⁃ Pilot Smart Trips Program
⁃ Employer Incentive Programs
⁃ Bicycle Friendly Community Designation
⁃ San Diego Region Bike Map
⁃ Identification and Way-finding Signage
⁃ University-base Bike Orientation
In the version published in 2011, the concept of ride-share programs is expanded & marginally defined a bite more with examples like the Guaranteed Ride Home Program (which I had no clue existed until today) & iCommute, a vanpool program with a subsidy of $400 per month per vanpool. By 2015, under the direction of then Mayor Kevin L. Faulconer, the ride-share programs expanded into a contract with DecoBike but ended in 2019 after the City of San Diego claimed a breach of contract occurred on the companies end – though this is disputed by DecoBike.
In terms of high occupancy transportation, all versions of the climate plans advocate for electric vehicle fleets; the most common form is tied to K-12 & collegiate school bus programs. This past July, a San Diego based company, Nuvve Holding Corp., announced a joint venture with San Diego Gas & Electric where eight electric school buses in the Cajon Valley Union School District will connect to the grid & serve as a pilot program for the next five years, not only for state-wide school transportation use but also for the federal Build Back Better plan as Nuvve Holding Corp. announced a Memorandum of Understanding with the US Department of Energy some time ago regarding V2G & V2X technology.
An often overlooked aspect of the V2X technology that appeals to governing bodies is the “connected vehicle” nexus & data mining capabilities thereof. In these evolving iterations of climate plans related to the years 2025, 2030 & 2050, digital details are a prerequisite of all vehicles that will be on the road for a consortium of reasons that summarily present as regulatory technology. In early plans, connected vehicles simply refers to vehicles capable of emitting wireless data vehicle-to-vehicle & vehicle-to-infrastructure so as to aid in the flow of traffic; as we’ve seen with newer plans & in European counterparts, intelligent speed limits, excessive tracking & the aforementioned prioritization of biking civilians are the culmination of these mandated advances in vehicle technology.
I have yet to address the cost of all these mandated applications of higher-end vehicle-to-everything technologies; I’ve considered making a whole post on the expected costs incurred for civilians in the wake of these subnational & national mandates stemming from international contractual agreements but I’ll simply point out that the average all-electric bus costs $400,000 & in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, eligible “clean” vans, SUVs & pickup trucks qualify for a rebate of $80,000 upon purchase & other vehicles for $55,000. I really can’t imagine how much these all vehicles will cost in total but if the rebates are already close to some people’s yearly income, I can imagine most will not be buying these vehicles, unless on an already strained credit line.
So, I guess we’ll all bike to work, right?
But what if your bike breaks down & you live in a city like Los Angeles where you can’t rely on your local handy-folk to lend a helping hand anymore because of a city ordinance? Guess you’ll pull out your card anyways & pay for a ride on an EV bus, rent a ride-share bike or pay for a ride on the rail transit system.
From what I can gather, the Guaranteed Ride Home Program only covers three rides per year; seems like baseball, three strikes & we’re left outside.
Amazingly, the word “homeless” shows up only one time in the entire 2022 San Diego Climate Action Plan, whereas the word “bike” shows up 49 times. I wonder, if one is left outside, what is the plan, what are the options & allowances afforded by a City that can’t even type the word “homeless” more than once in a 238 page document?
Are you certain that you’ll reap what you’ve sown?
For the moment, I seek to address those in the southwestern portion of the United States of America & ask those reading from elsewhere to keep an open mind & an open eye. We’re just about halfway into our summer season but we’re nowhere near close to beginning the actual battles that’ll come in respect to water rights & land rights for those in the southwest & eventually the entire nation.
Though one could dive deeper into the legal acumen involving water use, I will not be doing that here. I am admittedly more concerned with the present nature of genetic ownership in regards to gardening & farming – I find the issue to be a bit more murky than Leak Mead is at the moment & I believe predetermined agreements between corporations & legislative bodies will exacerbate any water issue regardless of civilian conservation efforts going forward.
Are you certain the things you’ve grown are things you own?
To illustrate the point of a future scuffle regarding “right to grow”, one must only look to existing laws that provide precedent for such an incident.
“Nonetheless, with the data that can readily be gleaned publicly, our analysis of mapped and referenced patent sequences across the three crop genomes revealed DuPont and its affiliates as the holder of the largest collection of gene patents. It holds more gene patents than Monsanto or the rest of the US industry—including small and medium biotech companies and governmental research institutes and universities—put together (Fig. 1).
Uniquely in the United States, plants and their products can be protected by patents and by other IP mechanisms at the same time. Plant varieties can be protected by a specific plant patent under the Plant Patent Act of 1930 for asexually reproducible plants; by a plant variety protection (PVP) certificate under the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 for sexually reproducible plants or tuber-propagated plant varieties; or, since 1985, by utility patents.
Because several types of protection can be granted at the same time—for example, either a plant patent or a PVP certificate with a utility patent—and exclusive rights extend for 20 years, any IP right holder on any of the crops can in principle benefit not only by enforcing their IP rights but also by holding off competition in the market and potentially delaying innovation on certain technologies, especially when the granted rights are under utility patents. Utility patents have a broader scope, including protection on the plant itself, its diverse uses, its progenies and the method used to produce it, and they have an impact on follow-on innovations.”
The commercial aspect of gardening, rife with rebranding & business-to-business marketing schemes like any other discernible industry has notably unique moments wherein legislation concerning biological conservation can be tweaked or outright ignored.
While most Californians by now are aware of the issue of the moderately invasive nature of the Eucalyptus globulus (Tasmanian Blue Gum) & the impact it has on soil erosion & fueling fires, certain corporations that operate in the southwest are tactically circumnavigating subnational & national legislation meant to curb the sale of invasive species & they’re becoming increasingly bold in their endeavors.
In all honesty, I work for a large nursery that supplies plants to a number of states & I thoroughly enjoy my job so I won’t be disclosing business practices I can directly speak to that correlate here. Sorry Too Short, this is the one time I don’t want to blow the whistle. That said, I will do my best to display the matter as a basic schematic so as to allow application to any business that potentially falls under the model to be properly scrutinized in a like manner.
Linked here are the 6 agencies overseeing the invasive species list; if you live in California, look at one of the lists the next time you go shopping at a store that has a garden center. For the past year & change that I’ve worked in the industry, a number of the listed plants have been available for purchase & the number of invasive species being sold on the market is growing.
Through genetically manipulating invasive species, commercial growers are able to market the plants as “new varieties” or “regional friendly” – no determinations, to my knowledge, are required by legislation to assess the nature of hybridized or genetically modified plant varieties in regards to local impact on the environments where these lab-produced plants are introduced & established. As the Non-GMO group put it in their blog post, “nothing in nature exists in a vacuum, and it is unnatural to assume that it would.” So it could be said that these lab-produced edible & non-edible plants on the market are potentially as detrimental as the organisms they are based on, unfortunately only time & focused attention will tell.
At the present time, companies like SDG&E are facilitating programs wherein “qualifying SDG&E customers can receive a $35 rebate for planting or potting a 1- or 5-gallon tree/plant species.”
Specifically, under the “native trees” category, the Black Willow is native to the East Coast of the US, not the Southwest; furthermore, the other two Willow species listed are more commonly found in wetlands as their root systems take so much water that is advised not to plant them near septic tanks or drainage fields. Intriguing choices to say the absolute least, though when you look to the “regionally-friendly” trees & see the number of invasive species, it doesn’t seem to matter much anymore. Either SDG&E is misinformed or they’re willing to let the public stay misinformed about the future cost of those $35 since it’s all for “local biodiversity, improving air quality, and sequestering carbon.”
That “sequestering carbon” bit is how a lot of these GMO trees are being pushed on the market & into the ground lately & why the Lorax is one of my favorite films of all time.
Artificial Trees & Grasslands Please
Mass sapling-planting campaigns are nothing new; most of anyone who could read this is probably aware of at least 1-3 moments wherein a company or country just threw a bunch of saplings in the ground. My mothers homeland just went crazy with the idea last year & planted 350 million of them.
Without a doubt, the only certainty at all, is that the most interesting & equally terrifying campaigns are the ones that involve the interplay between genetically modified trees & the cap-and-trade carbon-credit scheme.
MasterCard, a proponent of the cap-and-trade scheme, has a credit card called Aspiration: Zero Carbon Footprint where they “plant a tree every time you make a purchase—and let you round up to plant one too. Using this card just once a day can plant enough trees that, once grown, will counteract your daily negative carbon footprint (unless you’re a real gas-guzzler). Spend daily with Zero to neutralize your footprint and earn up to 1% cash back. Use your rewards to plant more trees or receive a statement credit.”
Call me crazy whatever way suits you, merely afford me a bit more of your time if you’ve yet to read Part 3 of “The Volumes on Vitality” specifically the section on utility tokens.
The “statement credit” Zero Card is vaguely proposing in lieu of planting more trees is rather reminiscent of the utility token FreeWater quickly mentioned on their own site & digital advertisements, along with carbon credits as a whole. Aspirations’ “join us in our mission to plant 125 Million trees by 2030” remark on their website, coupled with the self-implementation of a carbon-credit schematic makes it clear they are probably aware of one of the contracts I mentioned in the blog post that precedes this one. Good old “market forces”!
Another company, Living Carbon, genetically modifies trees in a way that causes “modified poplar trees [to] store up to 53% more carbon than control trees.” In the interview for the article, the CEO Maddie Hall said, “if we were to double the acreage that we have today up until 2030, we would be able to actually plant enough trees to remove 1.66% of global emissions in 2021.” I can’t wait to see how many companies try to buy these GMO trees, then reason to the government & relevant regulating bodies that the trees in question warrant greater carbon capture credit values than purchases of regular trees.
It’s odd though – there is a respectable amount of science regarding carbon capture practices that point out that grass is more of a reliable carbon sink than trees for two reasons: grass grows faster & grass stores the carbon in the soil unlike trees that store carbon in their wood above soil. The carbon above the soil line is pure fuel in the event of a forest fire & hardly the safer choice considering a sizable portion of the US is in a drought & is expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. All this considered, we have a stark prevalence of tree planting campaigns across the globe & across the market & water restrictions across the Southwest that directly impact civilian grass lawn upkeep. It seems as though not all things are considered equally, I should say.
Due in large part to the unequal use of water from the Colorado River Basin, one can see exactly what it looks like when water is continuously taken from one environment & used/left in another. The canopy alongside the canal that exists now is a testament to what Lake Mead will look like(check out 12:16-17:08) in due time, should the water levels continue to recede at the rate they have as shown in the beginning of the video.
But as a whole, what will our collective future be like in regards to water rights & land rights? I often wonder, did the people who wrote the film adaptation of the Lorax just get oddly lucky in retrospect or were they prematurely portraying a theoretical situation where GMO trees modified to capture increased levels of carbon replace natural trees in a system where carbon credits & debits become commonplace across the globe?
Will we prevail through this unifying struggle or will we communally fail, leaving behind only remnants of our attempts to simply survive, much like the Hohokam people who long ago built the canals that the city of Phoenix, Arizona finds inspiration from today?
I don’t imagine these compounding issues can be swept under the rug – we’re talking about the earth itself, where can we sweep it? There needs to be better application of the best practices available to every region afflicted with constrained access to the basics of life, greater attention paid to the outcome of our efforts & actual transparency between civilian, regulator & market. The cool thing is, the civilian is the foundation of the coupled latter & Dr. Seuss said it well enough, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
This is not to say we all need to memorize the list of invasive species & self-impose restrictions; on the contrary, in a world where the morality of consumption is debated & designed by market forces & legislation that can oftentimes be overreaching (hello & goodbye 18th amendment) we, the consumer, must become pickier & demand more of the persons seeking to make off with our hard earned money. We must work to see our own requirements met, soon, before there comes a time, for some maybe August 15th, when the only requirements met are those set outside of our control.
Jefferson, O., Köllhofer, D., Ehrich, T. et al. The ownership question of plant gene and genome intellectual properties. Nat Biotechnol 33, 1138–1143 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3393
Millison, Andrew. “The Canal That Accidentally Grew a Forest in the Arizona Desert.” Andrew Millison, YouTube, 29 Nov. 2021, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jf8usAesJvo.
Assumptions aside, before progressing any further into this text, I’d recommend reading my post, “Environments & Requirements” – it serves as a backdrop for this discussion of ambiguous terminology employed by myself & others of far greater influence.
Admittedly, I was extremely reductive in my total description of the dissenting Justice’s vague reference to “market forces” that economically enacted the moderation sought to be legislatively achieved through the Clean Power Plan of 2015. I was pressed for time in a number of ways & opted to employ a tone as cryptic as the parties involved & for that I apologize.
Across the United States of America & most nations across the globe, contractually binding agreements focused on the years 2025, 2030 & 2050 are actively being implemented & exercised in ways that, more often than not, circumnavigates a nations domestic legislation & overtly neglects public opinion.
Nonetheless, we’re all pressed for time.
By a design I hope to properly explain henceforth, these contracts are primarily fulfilled through utilization of actors in two distinct groupings:
• individual members of domestic governments on the local or national level, party to, or at the very least aware of the contract & beholden to it’s terms. Throughout this text, we’ll refer to them as “domestic actors”.
• individual members of corporations & non-government organizations party to, or at the very least aware of the contract & beholden to it’s terms. Throughout this text, we’ll refer to them as “foreign factors”. (The video I have linked at the end of “Environments & Requirements” is a documented example of the second scenario.)
This aforementioned contract, oftentimes discussed as though singular in nature, is actually a consortium of contracts contingent upon an original that essentially grows through these compartmentalized amendments.
In 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, described as a treaty of nations, was the foundation of the Conference of the Parties (COP) & the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the latter being an international contract signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on June 5, 1992 and entered into force at the end of 1993. A majority of the 196 parties signed the contract immediately or soon after; the rest signed later in the early 2000’s with the latest being the nation of Andorra on February 4th, 2015. As simply as it is, nations involved are the Conference of the Parties.
The contract created by the CBD is the foundation of a number of other contracts & compartmentalized sub-organizations – for the sake of time & clarity, I’ll be focusing on overall elements & intermittently addressing specifics that will best discuss the “market forces” alluded to all too often.
The degree of obligation parties to the contract are subject to are clearly stated in Article 5:
Each Contracting Party shall, as far as possible and as appropriate, cooperate with other Contracting Parties, directly or, where appropriate, through competent international organizations, in respect of areas beyond national jurisdiction and on other matters of mutual interest, for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity.
As well as Article 10:
Each Contracting Party shall, as far as possible and as appropriate:
(a) Integrate consideration of the conservation and sustainable use of biological resources into national decision-making;
(e) Encourage cooperation between its governmental authorities and its private sector in developing methods for sustainable use of biological resources.
Frequently, the competent international organizations are subgroups that have been delegated authorities vested by these two Articles – entities like the Wildlife Project, Cities With Nature, & the financial arm of the CBD, the Global Environment Facility, in charge of about $5.33 billion from government & corporate investments, all stem from the contract itself while various organizations like ICLEI (the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, the subject of the linked video) are granted jurisdiction & provided impetus by way of the CBD contract.
Furthermore, through manufactured fragmentation of the UNCCC into the aforementioned subgroups & others I’ve opted to forego in the interest of time, individual members from each of the original UNCCC subgroups bestow upon each other & new subgroups a false sense of authority in the eyes of a subnational government & the general public. This inorganic networking founded upon disingenuous representation serves as a way to also build rapport with a subnational government, often the focus of these UNCCC subgroups, through a multitude of domestic actors.
From the state level to the federal level, most nations have members of government party to the contract by association with one, if not more, of the UNCCC subgroups. By my estimate however, there are more members of commerce in leadership positions party to the contract considering the private sector is where the implementation of the carbon credit cap-and-trade system began.
In your own time, pay attention to the prevalence of corporate commitments to sustainability efforts related to the years 2025, 2030 & 2050; it is more than likely that the board of directors, in part or full, are aware of the CBD contract, specifically Article 11:
Each Contracting Party shall, as far as possible and as appropriate, adopt economically and socially sound measures that act as incentives for the conservation and sustainable use of components of biological diversity.
In no clearer terms, this is the foundation of the cap-and-trade system in relation to carbon emissions & other economic sustainability tools like Sustainable Aviation Fuel being spearhead by Shell Corp & Boeing. The actions taken by corporate interests & universities that mirror the SDGs set forth by the UNCCC are in summation the market forces the Justices briefly mentioned – the individuals working in government (e.g. mayors, city council members, directors/chancellors of state universities) while also representing these extrajudicial entities are the domestic actors.
For a few examples, here in the United States of America, since 06/21/22 the point of contact (domestic actor) between the GEF & the U.S. Department of the Treasury is Ms. Abigail Mary Demopulos who has worked as an economist for the Department since 2004, as far as public record states.
If one hyper-focuses on the iCAP objectives (or any of the other versions at USA state universities), it is clear that they essentially copied the framework of essentially every other UNCCC-derived economic climate plan:
Objective 2.2.1: Improve efficiency of space use by minimizing the square footage per person and updating the Space Policy in the Campus Administrative Manual (CAM) by FY23.
Objective 3.3: Establish an Electric Vehicle Task Force to identify key goals for supporting the use of electric vehicles on and off campus by FY22.
Objective 8.1: Develop a coordinated urban bio- diversity master plan by FY24 to make the Champaign, Urbana, Savoy, and campus metro area a model for biodiversity.
In light of this exceedingly shrouded information, to what degree, if at all, can you be certain that your representatives in government are observing only the constitutional laws of your nation? To what degree are markets truly free?
Again, I’d like to apologize for my preference to discuss these matters from an American/North American standpoint – please do not misconstrue omissions of other nations as indications of absence of this schematic, to reiterate, all nations of the globe are party to the contract as of 2015; from that point forward, all nations were essentially operating in a form of lockstep that is founded upon external influence & market manipulation by way of self-imposed fossil fuel/carbon emission restrictions well before advent of constitutionally observed legislation & incentivized programs for entities that opt to follow the 2030 Agenda.
Essentially, since 1992, even prior depending on the length of research of done, the events & the lifestyles of 2025, 2030 & 2050, regardless of the country, were being planned for precise results. Predetermined forms of economics & reimagined realities await us; in just 3 years from now, our lives will begin to bear greater resemblance across national borders & social groups as our restrictions become unified under a global framework centered around carbon emissions.
Over the next few weeks, I hope to discuss this concept of market forces in further detail & with more focused points of discussion; this post itself, I imagine, has a bit too many links for most readers & still has a bit of ambiguity plaguing it, thus we’ll be returning to this topic numerous times.
In the meantime, research your local entities – determine their unspoken goals & decide for yourself if they are the same goals you & yours seek to achieve.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or anecdotes regarding this text.
In an another example of the Supreme Court redefining & restricting regulatory rights of an agency we see that these Justices, for some time now, have been potentially pondering some sort of idea that the federal government has done enough or what it can. Odd to say, considering this is an extremely active time for the Court as they’ve made a total of 7 decisions since June 23rd of this year; some would say that’s more than enough & some of what’s been done is more than unnecessary.
Solely focusing on the EPA matter though, considering what this decision may mean for our collective future, I wonder if we may witness the beginning of a reinvigorated battle between state economies & the likelihood of various sustainability development goals set by the UN being met by the United States of America by 2030.
Although this recent Court decision emphasizes the States’ right to discern appropriate levels of emission reduction over periods of time, external forces besides the federal government are pushing to incentivize States to move away from coal as much as possible, as soon as possible.
Summarily, the Supreme Court denied the EPA, emboldened by the Clean Power Plan introduced by the Obama Administration in August of 2015, the regulatory power to implement a cap-and-trade economy centered around carbon credits & compliance costs through the form of increased energy prices that would begin this year. The goal of the Clean Power Plan was to reduce carbon emissions by 32% by 2030, a legislative example of a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDCs) spoken of in the Paris Agreement that was adopted in December of 2015.
Every five years, nations that are party to this agreement submit NDCs that detail how their governments will steer their respective nations towards achieving various sustainability development goals set by the UN & its various subgroups like the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) & IMO (International Maritime Organization).
Provided here are the two NDCs the USA has submitted since the inception of the Paris Climate Agreement:
In a portion of the dissenting opinion provided by Justice Kagan, supported by Justices Breyer & Sotomayor, it is said “the effect of the Court’s order, followed by the Trump administration’s repeal of the rule, was that the Clean Power Plan never went into effect. The ensuing years, though, proved the Plan’s moderation. Market forces alone caused the power industry to meet the Plan’s nationwide emissions target-through exactly the kinds of generation shifting the Plan contemplated.”
The “market forces” vaguely presented as proof of some inevitable generation shift are more aptly described in full as the corporate compliance with a global cap-and-trade carbon credit system established by non-government organizations & various conglomerates in the banking & energy industries.
Earlier this year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres spoke at a Powering Past Coal Summit, urging members to reduce coal use in electricity generation “by 80% below 2010 levels by 2030” by “cancel[ling] all global coal projects in the pipeline and end[ing] the deadly addiction to coal, end[ing] the international financing of coal plants and shift investment to renewable energy projects & jump-start[ing] a global effort to finally organize a just transition, going coal plant by coal plant if necessary.”
While the United States federal government itself is not a member of the Powering Past Coal Alliance (a coalition of governments, businesses and organizations) representatives of California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania & Washington state all attend the Summits & act as intermediaries, to a degree, that facilitate the economic & legislative maneuvers these international agreements seek to enact.
Cognizant of these extrajudicial environments that enumerate new requirements implemented through “market forces” just about every year, five years at the minimum accounting for NDCs, I have to wonder, what exactly did the Supreme Court do?
For decades, these UN sub-groups have been affecting governments on the micro & macro level; here’s a San Carlos, CA city council meeting from 2009 that showcases the process by which they circumnavigate democracy through “rapport building”:
Growing up, I’d heard that someday there would be water wars. Conflicts centered around physical domination of a resource that is already depleting or diminishing in value/utility. I’d heard this from immediate family members, those I’d randomly encounter over the course of a day & the a few forms of content available on the web like this NPR piece from a while back that’s always stuck in my mind.
Though I accept this unfortunate possibility of nations warring over waterways & dams, I often wonder to myself, “what’ll lead up to that? What will the economics of water look like over the course of my lifetime & further on?”
Along the way, going through life with these random thoughts, I’ve come across tidbits of innovation & determinations that I believe paint an abstract picture of what the economics of & around water could look like.
As far as California goes, around 65%, give or take seasonal changes, of the surface water available is in Northern California, hence the mentioning of the basins in the NQH20 index. Most of that water is pumped from the north to south or transported by other means; the rest of the water needed in the south is pumped from groundwater basins regulated by the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 & other legislative actions.
To do a bit more in depth research & also try my hand at trading the NQH20 contracts, I contacted the CME Group & one of their registered brokers to open an account but was told I do not possess the capital required to participate in the market. I guess I should cry a river & then trade futures on that supply of water.
In all seriousness, not just because my humor lacks refinement by any standard of the word, I bring this up to echo the sentiment Pedro Arrojo Agudo made when he said, “water is increasingly being treated as a mere commodity and even as a financial asset, undermining the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation and the sustainability of the environment.” at the UN General Assembly on October 20th, 2021. If I myself, a “middle-class” citizen, can’t access the potential profits from a water market, what sort of hope or outlook should I hold for my future financial status & the mobility of my money? Will it stretch worse in a world where water prices are speculated on by those who won’t even drink that exact water? Or will those gains “trickle down” too & it’ll all be okay?
About a week ago or so, my fiancé brought to my attention a startup company called FreeWater based in Austin, Texas that markets aluminum bottles & paper-based cartons of “free” water “paid for by ads that are printed directly onto eco-friendly cans and cartons. Ten cents per beverage is donated to charity.”
The 10¢ per beverage is donated to WellAware a non-profit based out of Austin, Texas as well that “fund[s] and implement[s] lasting clean water systems to drive development and empower communities in East Africa.” After a bout of equal parts boredom & being nosey, I perused their IRS audits from 2017 & 2020 & noticed the non-profit WellAware, pays a for-profit company called WellBeyond, which is owned by the same individual, also based in Austin, for “project consulting and execution services for the Organization’s program services in Kenya” to the tune of “$237,460 in paid expenditures and $124,823 of in-kind contributions and expenses,” in 2020.
Through pessimistic lenses critical of foreign conglomerates granted unilateral rights of a resource or location, I look at this “free water” scenario as a possible foundational step towards a future where the 1999-2000 water wars of Cochabamba, Bolivia are replayed with new characters. The protests over the wells & water costs inspired a film called (in English) “Even the Rain” that I saw some years ago now; as summer is upon & droughts continue, various scenes from the film cross my mind as of late, especially so when I think of the creeping normalization of water as a commodity.
FreeWater, in their FAQ section, says they’ll be launching “a new type of utility tokens called the FreeWater token.” Ignoring the application of a currency not scrutinized by external securities aspect (hello crypto), I’ve sat wondering how many energy resources will someday have respective “utility tokens” created by large conglomerates; I eventually wonder, will there be tokens or other company-based credit systems for electricity too? Mastercard already has a card in Sweden with a company based there that “not only helps users track and measure CO2 emissions associated with their purchases, but also puts a limit to the climate impact of their spending with a carbon footprint limit.”
Hear me out, I’m not saying blockchain currencies won’t be a part of the future with my jab earlier towards cryptocurrencies in a general way. Earlier this week, Shell Corp., American Express Global Business Travel & Accenture announced a joint partnership to create a company called Avelia Solutions, that facilitates a “blockchain powered book-and-claim solution that provides you with fully traceable environmental attributes of SAF (sustainable aviation fuel) to help decarbonise your air travel.” I see these continued applications of blockchain pay systems & corporate tokens to be indicative of the fact that they’ll be the norm at some point.
As far as innovation besides blockchain tokens & the like goes, technology related to water & other liquids necessitates further discussion on the levels of access & uses of water.
Over the last decade & change, the desalination industry has made improvements in technology & production costs to combat the decreasing level of access of freshwater, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a method using microbes to clean both organic contaminants and salts from hydraulic fracturing wastewater, while producing renewable energy & countless other examples can be given but my favorite comes from even further back in time: MagnetoHydrodynamics (MHD).
Popularized by a few Tom Clancy books, MHD systems can be found discussed & funded at length by parties like the US Dep of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, NASA & the HIT-SI lab, part of the William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at the University of Washington.
I’d wager, if this technology that utilizes water as a fuel component becomes widespread with multiple applications (as far vehicles go) water will become even more scarce but truly live up to its designation of “platform of mobility”. In a way, it’s like we might go from ancient, disconnected seafaring peoples that eventually learned flight to evolving into spacefaring peoples that will use water as much as our ancestors did before us, maybe even more.
In my mind there’s a war between all these thoughts; possibility versus possibility, only settled by time passed. Hopefully, we enter a future ultimately lacking in strife that is abundant with the needed resources for us all to equally enjoy the gift of life. I hope we all someday look at a glass completely full, instead of bicker about the determined or perceived volume.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. leave a comment! Tell me of your goals, expectations, concerns for 2022; I hope to create an area where it can all be hashed out.
P.P.S. are there water restrictions where you live too?
For the next few posts, I’ll be devoting time to discussing water in a multi-part series we’ll call “The Volumes on Vitality”.
In the Northern Hemisphere, where I’m writing this from, the first day of summer starts tomorrow!
When I was really young, my mother made a point to use my summer breaks from school in hotter-than-hell Arizona to take trips to Ethiopia as that’s where she’s originally from; she would always say it’s a trip to see extended family & to see how the rest of the world lives with my own eyes.
Even though it lies north of the equator, due to large mountain ranges & high elevation most of Ethiopia is subject to two rainy seasons: a short one that lasts from February to April, and a longer one that lasts from mid-June to mid-September. I essentially skipped the summer season over five times just by traveling to a place where the four season schematic is not descriptive of the climate-I jokingly call this a life hack from time to time.
On the other hand, my father’s side of the family is from a tiny town called Wardell, Missouri of about 390 people per the last U.S. census where “natural gas [came]…in 1966 or 1967 and a sewage system was installed in 1976. Although public water had been available since 1962, each individual had to install his own cesspool or septic tank,” as Eva Welch wrote in “History of Wardell”. (The Mr. & Mrs. W.O. James mentioned at the end of paragraph 6 are my great grandparents.)
When I review my ancestral roots, I always marvel at the similarities my two families displayed in regards to their experiences with water even though they were genuinely worlds apart, 7,858 miles to be exact.
On one side, I see Amharas walking with jugs of water on their backs for miles & on the other, I see Americans doing the same thing; the only real difference is the timeframe in which these events took place.
Large bodies of water are prevalent aspects of both parties & their stories of success, failure & demise. Wardell itself lies about 10-14 miles from the Mississippi River & Ethiopia itself is home to the Nile River; both are foundational in the formation of various cultures to date like the people of Egypt & the people of the Sioux nation in America & both have storied histories of both floods & droughts.
This summer, besides moving from one state to another with my fiancé & two cats, I plan on being a bit more aware of water & the things water accompany. This blog aside, I’ve been finding myself in a recurring position where I utilize water & begin thinking about these molecules strung together perfectly that create this world we inhabit, in all its variety. A repetitive motion of, “water my plant, think about water, realize I have other plants to water, repeat process” that admittedly hasn’t done much other than help me recall memories where I’m at a body of water with family & friends or I think about humanity in general.
I encourage whoever is reading, the next time you use water, think about the water for a bit. “Where has it been?” “Where will it go?” The next time you take a sip, think to yourself, “what else did it give further life to, before me?”
Thanks for reading.
P.S. leave a comment! Tell me of your goals, expectations, concerns for 2022; I hope to create an area where it can all be hashed out.
P.P.S. are there water restrictions where you live too?
The Rumination Compilation 