Introduction 
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THE RENEWABLE DEAL
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” -Buckminster Fuller
“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologican
Climate change, energy security, and economic development should be viewed as “breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.” -Common Cause founder John Gardner
“A reversion to the normal pattern of human existence, based on village life, extended families, and local production for local consumption - especially if it were augmented by a few of the frills of the late industrial period such as global communications - could provide future generations with the kind of existence that many modern urbanites dream of wistfully.” -Richard Heinberg, Peak Everything
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” -Henry David Thoreau
“Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.” -Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Book One, III: 10
The Renewable Deal is a program with two aspects which are necessary to each other’s successful implementation.
“Restoration of ecological integrity” represents the restoration of Wildeor-ness: Wilderness comes from the Old English: Wil: willful + Deor: beast, animal + Ness: place; thus, self-willed animal place. As Disney cinematographer Lois Crisler said, “Wilderness without animals is dead - dead scenery. Animals without wilderness are a closed book.”
Aspect Two: Adopt technologies, practices and policies to produce a human civilization compatible with ecological integrity: The “planks” of the Renewable Deal describe the public policies, energy and food production technologies, and management practices which are capable of producing a zero-net-carbon, non-nuclear high-tech human civilization by the year 2050. The means to this end are all current Best Available Technology and Best Available Management Practices. In a universally-applied system, they are capable to producing more quads of energy and calories of food than the current fossil and nuclear fuel-based energy production and agricultural systems, without increasing greenhouse gas loading of the Earth’s atmosphere or producing fugitive chemical toxins into the environment. In fact the evidence suggests that universal application of these technics would sequester carbon, restore hydrologic function in watersheds, and encourage natural restoration of biodiversity in agricultural lands.
The two aspects are mutually necessary because restoration of environmental integrity must be achieved to restore the “ecosystem services” which constitute our “life support system” in the long run. Our current technologies and management practices have been “mining” topsoils, vegetation, and other resources, diminishing overall biological productivity, resilience, waste recycling, and hydrologic functions of the planetary toposphere. In order to pursue ecological restoration, we must embrace a system of technologies and management practices that ceases our net consumption of “natural capital.” The components needed for that system of technologies and management practices already exist, as do the management practices needed to facilitate restoration of ecological integrity in natural ecosystems. The Renewable Deal planks serve as a “blueprint” for how to apply these components on a nationwide, systemic way.
Adopting the system of “green” technologies and management practices by itself will not adequately facilitate necessary ecological restoration to occur. Pursuing ecological restoration projects without abating the competition of the industrial growth culture seeking to consume the last natural capital available is inefficient if not futile. The Renewable Deal calls for the simultaneous pursuit of installing the suite of “post carbon” technics which allow our society to “make other arrangements” for meeting human needs, and of implementing continental-scale connectivity for all the life-forms with which we share the planet. As the classic metaphor puts it, “One hand washes the other.”
The Earth Restoration Projects under way are described in the subdivision of the Renewable Deal under the Aspect One heading. Projects are organized into Chapter One, terrestrial wildlands network/ecological integrity restoration; Chapter Two, terrestrial rangeland restoration involving domestic livestock production; and Chapter Three, aquatic ecosystem restoration and conservation. Each description contains contact information through which the organizations conducting the project can be contacted for further information or offers of reader support.
The Renewable Deal Planks are described in the Aspect Two subdivision of the Renewable Deal. The planks are presented in an outline form. Within each plank links direct the reader to the “white papers” which contain detailed information concerning how the objectives of the plank can be accomplished. The white papers synthesize information about the technologies, practices, or policies which the Renewable Deal advocates be adopted on a continental scale. Within the white papers, hot links or other references direct the reader to source material contributing to or supporting the white paper’s descriptions of Best Available Technology and Best Available Management Practices..
The Renewable Deal is keyed to the United States of America’s legal and regulatory system. The Renewable Deal is applicable to other nations and regions in principle. However, a Renewable Deal proposal for the European Economic Union would differ from that of the United States in some respects because the EEU has already adopted several of its planks, and operates under a different legal and regulatory system than does the United States. Some variations in the expression of a Renewable Deal would occur if the nation it was applied to had a legal system based on the Napoleonic Code instead of English Common Law, or contained tropical ecosystems instead of temperate ones. We are hopeful such applications will occur in various ecoregions around the world, and we will be pleased to recognize such efforts and provide contact links to them in the Earth Restoration Website.
The Renewable Deal is an “open source” effort at defining a plan for ecological restoration of both the natural environment and of human socioeconomic systems. On the Renewable Deal Planks aspect, reader constructive criticism is solicited to either identify errors and misleading language, or to draw our attention to additional source materials which are not included. On the Earth Restoration Projects aspect, reader comments concerning errors or omissions in our descriptions of these initiatives are welcome. Aspect One and Two of the Renewable Deal report and synthesize the thinking and successful efforts of others. Our reportage must be factually accurate and the language of our presentation must not mislead the reader as to the character of the project we are describing. Readers with interest in or issues with individual earth restoration projects being described should contact the project itself through our link to it to pursue such issues with the project’s principals.
Production Efficiency versus Conservation: Understanding the Design Parameters of the Renewable Deal: The reader will note that the Renewable Deal takes official agency projections of the amount of energy needed by 2040, for example, and then describes a feasible renewable energy system that can account for that number of quads of energy in 2040. The Renewable Deal’s authors choose not to preach the virtues of customers demanding and using less energy, buying less “stuff,” instead seeking gratification from community involvement, skills development, and pursuit of intellectual curiosity, although we personally agree with this idea on moral, philosophical and practical psychological grounds. Instead, we accept the challenge of whether or not we can produce a costed-out blueprint for a renewables-based, ecologically compatible system capable of providing for human survival needs and material comfort without having to assume a radical change in what the mass of human consumers choose to use. We believe we have met that challenge.
In the Renewable Deal planks and chapters, we do describe to an extent the effect of changes in consumer demand, and in human population, on the cost and feasibility of sustainable production systems. We also describe the evidence that changes in the technics (“infrastructure”) used by a civilization leads to changes in the cultural norms of that civilization, and to changes in human reproductive decisions by individuals within that civilization.
In the end, we confine ourselves here to describing how we can obtain the same number of lumens from a light source while using less energy to produce the light; we do not preach the virtues of turning off the light, or question why someone would want to have a light there in the first place. We leave that moral debate to others. The Renewable Deal is a technological blueprint which describes how it is feasible to supply our existing civilization with energy, food, water, transportation, communication, health, and education within the context of an “Ecozoic” (ecological-systems based) paradigm, without having to resort to further consumption of non-renewable natural resources and enabling a deliberate program of restoring ecosystem integrity throughout the world including reducing the atmospheric load of greenhouse gases to within a “safe” limit which prevents run-away secondary global warming effects.
A Historical Note: Writing the Renewable Deal was initiated in April, 2004, at a meeting of conservation biologists and ecologists which launched what is now called the “Spine of the Continent Ecological Restoration Initiative.” The Spine Initiative seeks to connect the wildlands network conservation plans for the various ecosystems along the Rocky Mountain cordillera from the southern tip of the Sierra Madre in Mexico to the Brooks Range in Alaska into a continental-scale ecological restoration program which identifies fractures in the landscape which block the movement of wildlife and removes these fractures, making the landscape transparent to the movement of wild germ plasm from one end of the North American continent to the other. The participants, which included the authors of Conservation Biology, Continental Conservation, and Rewilding North America, realized that a continental-scale program of ecological restoration and conservation that was in competition with the industrial growth culture for the last scraps of “natural capital” in wildlife core habitat and connectivity corridor areas was not likely to achieve much progress.
The Renewable Deal therefore describes how to build a renewables-based, materials-efficient human economy in North America that can meet human needs without having to compete with a continental-scale ecological restoration program which conserves and creates wild ecosystems. The Renewable Deal links ecological restoration with transformation of the human economy: they are of one piece as the formula for repairing the life-support system for all organisms for whom Holocene epoch conditions are suitable habitat.
infrastructure - the means of obtaining and processing necessary energy and materials from nature, e.g., the “means of production”
According to Harris, fundamental changes occur in cultures due to changes in infrastructure. When infrastructure changes, structure and superstructure (politics and religion) change to deal with changed ways of processing energy and materials to meet human needs.
The renewable deal prescribes a paradigm shift in the infrastructure of human society.
A Background Note: The value of having an alternative plan to a fossil-fueled economy:
Agro-economists in Cuban universities had been advocating a national transition to a localized, labor-intensive, organic agricultural system for some time before the collapse of the Soviet Union cut off Cuba’s supply of subsidized petroleum. When the Soviet Union’s collapse in the early 1990's produced national shortages of fuel and agricultural chemicals from petroleum, Cuba’s agro-economists were given free rein to implement their system to replace the fossil-fuel and petrochemical-input-based industrial agricultural system in Cuba. To produce more farmers and get farmers on the land, Cuba’s colleges and universities added organic agronomy courses. The state adjusted wages so that farmers earned as much as engineers, medical doctors and other professionals. Today over 400,000 Cubans make their living just from urban agriculture, in which a majority of the produce, eggs, milk and meat consumed by a Cuban city is grown within the boundaries of the city on small, labor-intensive plots of land.
As a matter of perspective, at the peak of World War II, U.S. Victory Gardens produced 40 percent of the vegetable supply of the nation.
If Cuban agro-economists had not had a plan for conversion from petrochemical-input farms to localized organic agriculture as a way of meeting Cuba’s food supply needs, with analysis of the economic and nutritional advantages to be gained from that conversion, then Cuba might have suffered a severe food security crisis when the national supply of low-cost petroleum was lost. In a similar way, we hope that the Renewable Deal will serve to guide the conversion of our fossil-fueled, unsustainable industrial growth consumerist economy into a sustainable, ecologically-restorative economy which affords superior opportunities for individuals to pursue “life, liberty, and happiness.”
In the January/February 2009 World Watch magazine, Gary Gardner and Michael Renner editorialize that “Regulating urgent needs to the sidelines until the economic crisis is resolved is a luxury we cannot afford. The perfect storm of today’s economic, environmental, and social ravages requires a robuts, multi-pronged response. Indeed, the challenge for global political leadership, including U.S. President-elect Obama, is not merely to kick-start the global economy, but to do so in a way that creates jobs and stabilizes climate, increases food output using less water and pesticides, and generates prosperity with greater equality of incomes.”
“This broad approach will require a conceptual blueprint evocative of America’s 1930s New Deal - but more audacious in scope and vision.” ...”a Global Green Deal that shifts the focus from growth to development, geared less to providing consumerist superfluities than to ensuring that nobody’s true needs go unmet.”
Worldwatch’s Global Green Deal has several strategic objectives:
Transition to a renewable energy economy: “Make renewable energy sources the dominant feature of the world’s energy system, and systematically phase out reliance on fossil fuels.”
Launch an efficiency revolution: “Doing more with less is one of the surest paths to wealth creation, and environmentalists have a great many ideas to raise energy and materials efficiency. Indeed, some European analysts have asserted that a tenfold increase in resource productivity is possible.”
Invest in green infrastructure: “Revolutionizing the electrical grid, creating transportation systems that are less reliant on automobiles and embrace rail and mass transit, and encouraging settlement structures that are compact, not sprawling, will stimulate economic activity, create millions of jobs, and free us of unnecessarily high levels of energy and materials use.”
Make materials circulate: “Analyst Walter Stahel of the Product Life Institute has pointed out that the front end of an economy - extractive activities such as mining, logging, oil drilling, and fishing - tends to use less labor and create more pollution than manufacturing and maintenance activities. A circular economy emphasizes durability, repairability, recycling, and remanufacturing, squeezing more value out of the resource base and generating greater employment.”
Work for a fairer distribution of wealth within and across borders: “According to the International Labour Organization, two-thirds of countries for which data are available underwent an increase in income inequality in 1990-2005 between the top and bottom 10 percent of wage earners.”
“Translating these goals into reality will require smart regulations, tax shifts, subsidy reforms, mandates, incentives, and an ecologically inspired industrial policy. A powerful first step is for governments to ensure that prices ‘tell the ecological truth’...”
“Carbon taxes and similar measures accomplish this goal. Governments can use the resulting revenues to lighten the tax burden falling on labor in the form of payroll taxes. Such an ecological tax shift, which has been carried out on a limited basis in Europe, would encourage job creation.”
“A second idea is to use government procurement power to create large-scale markets for green technologies and employment generation.” Government procurement has played a critical role in ramping up economies of scale that have rendered innovations cost-competitive, e.g., transistors, computers, lasers.
“Public works programs, a third tool in government’s tool-box, may be useful in both urban and rural settings, at least on a temporary basis. In rural areas, they could focus on reforestation and measures to halt soil erosion and adapt to climate change. Coupled with promotion of organic agriculture as well as land reform, such programs can help create more resilient rural economies. In urban areas, they could focus on efforts to establish green belts, rehabilitate park and other green areas, modernize infrastructure, and build or expand pedestrian zones and biking lanes.”
“Fourth, retrofitting existing buildings will slash heating and cooling needs and would be a boon for the world’s 111 million construction industry jobs. Germany’s experience - government and private investments to weatherize apartments created or saved 140,000 jobs for a five-year span - is instructive.”
Finally, Worldwatch advocates for development of “...sustainable credit programs. In a greening economy, advantageous credit terms would be made available for weatherizing houses, installing solar panels, purchasing more durable and efficient goods, and other transactions that promise green dividends.”
