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Two weeks back, there was a rousing bit of good news out of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. According to work done by 240 independent researchers (analyzed by the folks at Yale), severely damaged ecosystems don't take as long to recover as previously suspected.
The average devastated forest can recover in 42 years, while the average sea-floor environment took about 10. Even better, eco-systems only facing one threat—say an oil spill or the invasion of an invasive species, got back on their feet in under five. Even ecosystems facing multiple threats from multiple angles can bounce back in 56 years.
And this brings me to the saddest bit of environmental news to emerge as of late—Obama's newly revised US fuel standards for 2016.
I know everyone has been cheering these standards. Holy shit, 35.5 miles per gallon, what a freakin' victory.
But here's the thing-there are currently a 100 models of European cars that get more than 35.5 miles-per-gallon. In fact, here in the gas-guzzling USA, Ford's Hybrid, Mercury's Milan Hybrid, Toyota's Prius, Honda's Insight, and the Mercedes Smart Fortwo all meet these requirements and all are available today.
Why is this bad news? This is bad news because shouldn't we be setting our sights a little higher. If there are over 100 automobiles available that already meet the targets we've set for five years from now—are these actually targets?
35 mpg is misdirection. It's a fancy gown worn by an ugly pig.
Let me give you another example. Last week, DARPA, the pie-in-the sky research arm of the DoD, released it's Strategic Plan 2009. This was a 57-page list of all the places DARPA is putting its energy. Now DARPA does not function like most US agencies. Instead of setting small goals (like say 35 mpg) it sets huge goals because the agency realizes there's advancement in failure.
Take Project Vulture. Vulture is DARPA's dream of a plane that can stay aloft for five years. They've dreamed up the project to solve surveillance needs, but it's the spin-off technologies that have people most excited.
That's because 5 years is a very long time to keep a plane aloft. To make it happen they're building a solar plane out of incredibly durable materials. This will occur by a number of means-the first is that it will require adopting a satellite (most satellites stay aloft for 5 years) paradigm and applying it to airplane technology. So we'll get super durable planes. We'll also get radical advances in solar materials (they will have to get much lighter for them to work in a plane) and far better energy storage materials.
These are no small measures. That energy storage will most likely be accomplished by sodium-lithium batteries capable of doubling the storage capacity of anything on the market today.
So what happens if Vulture fails? Well, the military has to find another way to spy on "hostiles" for one. But the rest of us will get better batteries, better solar panels, and more durable planes (and as someone who has spent a lot of my life sitting on a runway because something small broke this alone is worth the price of admission) and all three would go a very long way towards solving current ecological problems.
And now, for the first time, we actually know these problems are solvable. Not in our grandchildren's lifetime, not even in our children's lifetimes, but in our own. We made this mess and what the folks at Yale are saying is we can fix it.
So what happens if we make those standards hard, say 60 mpg, say 100. What about if we also mandate that every car built has to run for 20 years. What if we say that they need to last 20 years, get 100 mpg, and be built out of entirely compostable materials.
Well, we might fail, but as the lessons of Vulture tell us, that failure would get us much farther along than the meaningless win we'll call 35 mpg.
