The Keystone XL Pipeline
08/05/14 | 52m 5s | Rating: TV-G
Calvin DeWitt, Professor Emeritus, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, UW-Madison, focuses on the Keystone XL pipeline proposed by TransCanada to move bitumen from northern Alberta to Nebraska and ultimately to Port Arthur, Texas. DeWitt presents his analysis in the context of climate change, the carbon economy of the biosphere and public policy.
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The Keystone XL Pipeline
cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at UW Madison's Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it's my great pleasure to be able to introduce to you Professor Cal DeWitt. He is not only with the Nelson Institute, he was the pioneering member of the Nelson Institute back in the very early 1970s. He was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and graduated from Calvin College there in Grand Rapids, and then went to the University of Michigan for his advanced degrees, was also on the faculty there, and then made the mistake of doing a sabbatical in Madison.
LAUGHTER
And he saw the-- Anyway, he had no intention, he told me, of ever coming back to Madison, but we hired him from Michigan. And part of that was helping to set up what is now called the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Tonight he'll be talking with us about a very complex issue, and that's what he specializes in and that's cross-disciplinary research. He's going to be talking about the Keystone XL, analysis and context of climate change and public policy. Please join me in welcoming Professor Cal DeWitt to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
APPLAUSE
>> Thank you, Tom. Thank you for your welcome, all you good people here. I'm reminded of my 126 class, which was a class I taught here for 40 years in environmental science. That was the university course. And tonight I'm dealing with the Keystone XL, and I began to work on this particular topic with my students. I was an active person not only in science but also in policy relevant science, and my students came from many different disciplines. Typically, I had 24 different majors represented in each class I taught. And they now are around the world and everywhere. There are thousands of them. But one of the things we did was an assignment I made to them, and that was to do a source to sink analysis of the Keystone pipeline. They were astounded at what they found. This was just a couple of years ago. And several of them wrote articles and letters, and one of their letters to the editor of a local newspaper was actually published. So what I'm doing tonight for you is giving you an analysis of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal which is being made by TransCanada to bring bitumen petroleum products from northern Alberta across the United States. As a scientist interested in public policy and land stewardship, climate stewardship, and the stewardship of the entire biosphere, you get into such marvelous science here and there. You must get into meteorology, micrometeorology, climatology. You have to get into soils and geology, ecology, atmospheric physics, and it all syncs together in a kind of a harmonious biospheric symphony. I hope you'll sense some of that as we proceed tonight. This is the area of particular immediate interest in Alberta, Canada, shown here on the right. And on the left are the major
oil sands deposits
the Peace River oil sands, the Wabasca oil sands, the Athabasca oil sands, and the Cold Lake oil sands. Before we proceed, you might have heard the word bit-chew-man rather than bit-to-men. The American pronunciation is bit-to-men, and the British pronunciation is bit-chew-man. So they're both the same thing. And another thing you should know is that bitumen, as it penetrates and combines with the sand, forms a concretion. Concrete is a binding together of usually stones, sands, and gravel to form a concretion. And this is what bitumen does as well in the oil sands. And, for that reason, it's very similar to the asphalt on our highways because that is not in fact asphalt, it's asphalt concrete or it is called, as many of you know, bituminous concrete. In front of our house we've just had a section of bituminous concrete laid, and, excitingly, it's got half the bitumen in it that is found in the oil sands. It has 5% in contrast with the 10%. There are some countries, for example Ireland, who instead of just repaving over old roads, they have a machine that goes through and actually melts out the bitumen in their asphalt, reconstitutes it right in the vehicle, and then puts it back down. So here is kind of the setting. The dotted yellow line on top is one possible route through Nebraska. The orange one is another possible route. But the destination you can see here is Port Arthur and Houston. I'm going to leave Houston out tonight because you can do the same analysis there, but also because Port Arthur really sings here in many ways as the real destination of the first arch, and that is from Port Morgan to Port Arthur via a keystone. It is our first arch. This is what things look like on the land in northern Alberta. This is a photograph from June 18, 2013, from Suncor's Millennium mine, oil sands operation north of Fort McMurray in Alberta. This was taken by Ryan Jackson of the Edmonton Journal. And here is tar pit number three in Alberta. The source of this is a really remarkable website entitled priceofoil.org. You can see that there's a lot of vegetation that is left remaining by the magnificent greenery here.
LAUGHTER
oil sands deposits
It's very, very easy to be quickly cynical about these things, but when you realize we have well over 100 square kilometers that will be transformed, there's reason for some repulsion at these sites. There is another technique being used, and it has less surface damage. What it does is to pump steam down into the McMurray formation at a temperature high enough to melt out the bitumen and then pump the bitumen back up and then put it into a tank and it then is usually transported as diluted in an organic solvent. Now, in looking at the Keystone XL pipeline in the context of climate change, it's going to be very helpful for us to use source to sink analysis. I think this is a term that's actually used somewhere, but maybe it isn't but everyone does it who's a scientist. And my presentation on this and my use of this technique is informed very much by conversations I've had with Sherwood Rowland. Sherry Rowland was a professor of chemistry at University California-Irvine, and he and I had been invited to a society of environmental journalists meeting to speak. And one of his sessions I attended, and no one else showed up, which shows maybe something about the interest of people in his work, which was the ozone layer. But this was at Robert Redford's ranch. And then the other component to this source to sink analysis is the invention by James Lovelock. James Lovelock is the person you probably recognize as the person who came up with the idea that's now called the Gaia hypothesis. That Earth itself is a regulating organism of a sort. But he's a great person, a great scientist, an independent chemist, and the inventor of the microwave oven as well as the inventor of the electron capture device used in gas chromatographs. The electron capture gas chromatograph is particularly good at identifying chlorinated and fluoridated, halogenated carbon compounds, and one of the things he did was he took his newly built chromatograph with him on a cruise. Rowland, for his work, along with Mario Molina, received the Noble Prize. And Lovelock took his gas chromatograph onto a ship. This is not the ship. It's the successor of the ship he took. Both of them called Shackleton. This one called the Ernest Shackleton, and the other one the RRS Shackleton, the Royal Research Ship Shackleton. Here's James Lovelock, a really pleasant fellow. I know him quite well because he responded to a presentation I made at Windsor castle at the invitation of a group of 24 scientists and thinkers. I presented the case for stewardship as a good model, and he presented a case against it.
LAUGHTER
oil sands deposits
And then there were two other speakers, a theologian and a philosopher. And then the Saturday morning which ended our conference, the winner in this was asked to give a final lecture, and I gave that lecture.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
oil sands deposits
But Lovelock is an amazing person. I should tell a little story here because I was a guest of the canon of George's Chapel at the castle, and I stayed with him, had dinner with him and his wife, and he was the canon of the castle and he was supposed to be attending the services every afternoon. But the Queen was away, and he had other things to do. And he said, why don't you go over and you can sit in my seat. So I sat over in the canon's seat, looked across at where the Queen would have been sitting, and as I sitting there, James Lovelock came in and sat next to me, which is a rather surprising thing to have happen. And as we were walking away from the chapel toward our residence, I said, Jim, I thought you were an agnostic. He said, of course I am, that's why I go to church.
LAUGHTER
oil sands deposits
He's a really good thinker. Here is his chromatograph. It's obviously pretty simple. What happens is that gas from the atmosphere is brought in, it goes through a column with an adsorbent in it, some material that slows up the passage of various gases, and then at the other end he can measure blips that don't show here because this is then linked to a chart recorder and shows blips for various chemical substances that are in the air. What he found on this ship, we'll go back to his ship. what he found on this gas chromatograph was from a trip, a cruise he took from on the RRS Shackleton from UK to Antarctica he found this blip during the entire passage. And he discovered that this blip was freon 11, which is a chlorofluorocarbon. It has three chlorines and one fluorine attached to a carbon, and it is one of the chlorofluorocarbons. What happened is that in Sherry Rowland's lab, he was seeing the same blip at the University of California in Irvine. The same thing. And it was due to the same substance. Lovelock discovered where it came from. From fire extinguishers, refrigerants, of course freon is a refrigerant. It was used also as a propellent and for making plastics, for making foam plastics. And it was also indestructible. Sherry Rowland tried very hard to break it down, and it was kind of a gaseous Teflon. Teflon's a very closely related chemical substance, of course. And it was this thing that you couldn't break down. And then it occurred to him and his postdoc Mario Molina that perhaps ultraviolet radiation would break it down, and it did. And then when they looked for intense UV on the surface of the Earth, there was none to be found. They had to conjecture. They had to hypothesize that this was being broken down in the high atmosphere, in the stratosphere. And, of course, it was. They did some really remarkable things and other people with them, which we could get into. I did get to the notes that Sherry Rowland took when he was sitting in a lecture given by James Lovelock. And here are Sherry's notes. Lovelock's data. CCL 3 F. Freon 11. Inert gas and spray cans. And then he has a point on the bottom, crews of the RRS Shackleton, November 1971. It was cool to find this. And what happened was he and Molina, Mario Molina, wrote a paper in 1974 in Nature, a major scientific journal, and this is
a quote
"The dissociated chlorofluoromethanes," this really is carbon which could have four hydrogens on it, which would be methane, but it has four halogens on it, so he's calling it chlorofluoromethane, "the dissociated chlorofluoromethanes can be traced to their ultimate sinks." Now, this is the sink side of my source to sink analysis. Lovelock determined the source, but Sherry Rowland and Molina were committed to finding the sink. What happens to it. And what they wrote in this 1974 article is an extensive catalytic chain reaction leading to the net destruction of O2, which is ozone, and O, atmospheric oxygen, occurs in the stratosphere. They have a lot of equations in their article, but this is the first one. Chlorine, free elemental chlorine combines with ozone, O3, to yield chlorine oxide, which is kind of an unknown chemical, plus oxygen, and the chlorine oxide then combines with atmospheric oxygen to produce chlorine atoms and oxygen. So it destroys the ozone in the process, but it also releases, in step two, another elemental atom of chlorine, and it can be done over and over and over and over again. This is the picture of the first page, and I thought, wow, I've certainly done something wrong here because the title of the paper is "Stratospheric Sink for
Chlorofluoromethanes
Chlorine Atom-Catalyzed Destruction of Ozone," and somehow this typo got all the way to final publication. So when you're doing your editing of your paper, also look at the title.
LAUGHTER
Chlorofluoromethanes
So we'll remind ourselves where we are at, and what we're going to do now is to look at the source. It's really quite exciting to look at the source, especially when you look at it with the very broad interdisciplinary analysis, because if you look at the history of the Earth, which is a time of the lower Cretaceous, just before that period is the Jurassic out of which Jurassic Park comes. So there were dinosaurs on the Earth, the Cretaceous tertiary extinction had not yet occurred, green plants were present, and spermatophytes, the flowering plants, already were started at this time, and the place where the tar sands are, the oil sands, was at the interface of the land and the epicontinental sea. Epi meaning on top of the continent. And if you look at these, I'm not going to get into them in detail. Look at the upper one. This is estuarine bay fields. There were drops in elevation. The sediments that were formed by decaying organisms went into those depressions, and they combined with sand and they converted into what we now call bitumen. Bitumen is just an odd mixture of absolutely everything. Even includes some methane, but mainly is polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. So we have all these different wetland systems, and on the left, there are rises and falls of sea level, which, of course, make for various lenses of this material being deposited. This is another illustration. The scientist here is named Heine. He's referenced at the bottom. And these are other descriptions of how these riverine, estuarine, coastal ecosystems, very shallow seas eventually produce bitumen, which is the remains of the decomposed organisms that once lived there. I did look up these organisms. In fact, I have a big list of them that I decided not to put in this presentation because I'm a zoologist too and I really like those organisms and it was really, really neat to look at all these little worms and things. Anyway, it was a beautiful place, but people weren't around. There were dinosaurs around but nothing like homo sapiens. So what I'm going to do with you at this point is I'm going to go back to Antarctica. The first trip we took was with James Lovelock so that we could test out his electron capture gas chromatograph. But now we're back again, and there are some dots here I'd like you to look at. One is the Vostok dot. That's a Russian research site. V-O-S-T-O-K. And this one Law Dome. Those are two locations, and those two locations, there are other ones too, but these two locations are the sites of major ice cores. At Vostok, it's amazing. A drill, that's at a higher elevation than Law Dome, and they were able to drill down through the ice, layer upon layer upon layer for 800,000 years of ice deposit. It's just astounding. And at the Law Dome, the reason I'm really interested in Law Dome is they've done detailed measurements for the last 2,000 years. Longer as that as well. 10,000 years. But the detailed measurements of the last thousand and 2,000 years are really exciting to me. I've done a lot of work in regulatory physiology in organisms, and what's interesting is when you see these graphs, you'll think of the regulatory physiology of planet Earth. We'll take a look here at the set up. It's a cold place, and inside these buildings they're taking the ice cores. This is an ellipse ice drill, and one of the cores is horizontal here. There's a man lifting it up to kind of look at it. There is a Byrd, B-Y-R-D, named after Admiral Byrd, repository for these at Ohio State University, which is a great big freezer building where they do a lot of the slicing work and analysis of the oxygen, CO2, and other gases. The drill head with a piece of ice core is shown here, retrieved at another place called Dome Concordia. And this ice is from a depth of 2,873 meters and is about 491,000 years old. It's really cool, isn't it? I can get kind of excited about this. This is the cover of Science magazine. The ice core contains a continuous record of greenhouse gases over the past 650,000 years. Isn't that fun? And to get the stuff out, boy, it takes really careful scientists to do this. You'd see that if you looked into the methodologies. From the Vostok core, I have these data from 800,000 years ago to the present. And what you'll see on the right, you'll have to look at this carefully, here's 800,000 years ago here. There's 700,000 years ago, 600,000, 500,000, 400,000, 300,000, 200,000, 100,000, and the present. And here is CO2 concentration in parts per million. This is done by volume. Parts per million. And you can see that lowest here is somewhere around 185, maybe. The highest is around 280, sometimes 282. And then you'll see on the bottom, there's a temperature difference record as well which can be deduced from the data. And you see they track rally quite well. But the important thing to realize here is that, first of all, you see it's cyclic. That's why it's called the Ice Age cycle because this concentration of carbon dioxide changes from glacial to interglacial period and back to glacial. But you can see that it doesn't drop below 180. It's really crucial. T.C. Chamberlain, who has a building named after him up the street a little bit, said it's remarkable, the Earth has never gone to zero CO2 because all these green plants would have perished. It's absolutely crucial that the CO2 levels do not drop so far that it threatens green life on the planet or we're really doomed. And if you go too high, we get an enhanced greenhouse effect. But here there's quite a bit of oscillation for 800,000 years. Moving from 180 to 280, roughly. I downloaded the data from the Law Dome cores, and I plotted the data for 2,000 years. I started with, my computer won't graph very well, but I started with zero. That's actually 2,000 years ago. And coming up to, I'm sorry, it's 1,000 years ago. This is 0 AD and 400 AD, 800 AD, 1,200 AD. So this is a thousand year span up until the start of the Industrial Revolution. As a regulatory physiologist, I was really interested in this because what I did is I compared this with body temperature regulation, and I found out this was more precise than body temperature regulation in human beings. Really astounding. So I'd like you to remember this
number
280. It's kind of like remembering 98.6, or 37 C. 98.6 is the average, but we oscillate around that quite a bit. But here we're holding it within one, two, three parts per million for 2,000 years. And the next slide I continue in my plot, and this is the same data but I go beyond 1600 into 1700. And then look what happens. It's just astounding. It does not happen for the last 800,000 years. Anything like this. And it would be fun at this point to take you on a little trip back to 1859 to the Royal Institution in London where they had lectures just like this. Mostly every Friday night. And in 1859, John Tyndall gave a lecture. It was a great lecture. It was a demonstration lecture, and what he demonstrated was carbon dioxide absolutely blocks out infrared radiation. That was the first experimental data that we had available, but it was 1859. But I'm not going to tell that story. I was even thinking of talking to Tom and saying, do you think we could set up that same apparatus here and do that experiment? I could do it for you. We would need cow's eye.
LAUGHTER
number
Because what he presumed was that we couldn't see this radiation because our vitreous and aqueous humor were absorbing it. So he cut open a cow's eye and poured it into his container made out of rock salt and showed that cow's eye humors stop the transmission completely. So we can't see IR, at least if we're anything like cows. Oh, I really miss teaching my 126 because I could pick up on this tomorrow then.
LAUGHTER
number
Well, there are other ways we get views of the Earth, and a remarkable one, I think, are the GRACE satellites. This GRACE refers to Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment written out here at the bottom. There are two satellites, and together they can determine the gravitational pull of the Earth. And as groundwater drops, like it is right now in California, they can measure that the Earth is pulling less than it did before and, from that, figure out how much groundwater we're losing. But interestingly, when they go over Greenland or other ice sheets, they can measure the degree to which the ice is diminishing in mass. And it is diminishing in mass, of course. Here is a surface melt on Greenland, for example. And this is mean sea level anomaly. It's a trend that we get from the NOAA laboratory for satellite altimetry, and it runs from the early '90s through to the present. And what it shows is a steady rise in sea level. What are the units here on the left? Millimeters. So this is one centimeter, two centimeters, three centimeters, four centimeters, five centimeters. And 2.5 centimeters is an inch; 32 centimeters, approximately a foot. You can see it's rising, but it's so slow. So what colleagues, this is Weiss and Overpeck at the University of Arizona, have done is they've taken maps from all over. You can actually download their website and do this for anywhere in the nation. And what they've done is they've shown the new land, the new shorelines with a one-meter rise in sea level. One meter, of course, is about, well, it's 39.37 inches, so it's about one yard. But this is what happens. These red areas are now underwater. This is New York City area, Long Beach, Atlantic City, New Haven, and the Hudson River area. Here's the Chesapeake Bay where Tangier Island is right near the mouth. Virginia Beach, Ocean City, Crisfield. And this is what happens. One meter. The reason I'm showing these is that if you deal with a Keystone Pipeline in the context of climate change, if you really deal with it that way, you're going to say more than what the environmental impact is on the peat lands, on the forests of northern Alberta. You'll say more too, you'll say more also than just what are the impacts of the increased carbon pollution that you get from processing the material. You have to also include the material once it's been burned. This is a very interesting one. There are other sites like this for Florida, more recent, but just for consistency, these are the same people that are doing this study. And here's Charleston area and Savannah, Georgia, area, up to Wilmington, Delaware. This is what we got. One meter. And this is Baton Rouge, Lake Charles, Beaumont, New Orleans. This is where Valero refinery is located. It's gone. So a keystone is a central stone in an arch. It holds all the other stones in place and, if removed, the arch crumbles. We know the left leg comes from Alberta. Where does the right one go? And what we do is we come up with Valero, as I mentioned in the introduction. Valero has all of these refineries. There they are. There's one in Aruba. Most of them are in continental US, and one is in Canada. But, interestingly, one of these is at Pembroke right there. And that is in Wales. When you do source to sink analysis, you can extend it to sinks that we also make. They can be societal sinks. So they can be industrial places that take a particular product and transform it into something else. And so the easiest way I found, first I thought I was really discovering things that were secret, but I eventually found you can go right to Valero and get their investor presentation. They say everything you have to know. I'm not sure why they're not actually being read. I suppose the investors are the only people that read this, and they're only interested in the bottom line, not how it works. So here's what they say about themselves. They're the world's largest independent refinery. They have 16 refineries and so forth. They have 6,800 branded marketing sites. One of the largest renewable fuels companies. They have 22,000 employees. Their Gulf coast system is taking advantage of global export opportunities. Our large complex refineries in the Gulf Coast are competitive due to low cost operations, feed stocks, flexibility, and comprise a significant portion of US exports. Strong international demand has been pulling products and paying higher values than in the US. There it is. To whom will you sell the bitumen? Well, probably the people in the US because they're willing to pay a lower price. Export supporting refinery runs on the Gulf Coast. And what is the Valero share of US in gasoline exports? 24%. US shifted to exporter. As a result of the continued shift toward exports, US net exports of petroleum products have increased, as it shows here, from 335 million barrels per day in 2010 to 1,470 million in 2012. Gasoline net imports have fallen. And that's due to our efficiency for efficiency in our cars, efficiency in developing solar, wind, and efficiency in insulation. In summary, acquisition improves portfolio and creates shareholder value for Valero. Its acquisition includes what we see here on the picture on the right. The image from the aerial view on the right is the Valero refinery at Pembroke in Wales. And this is a Texaco station in the UK. And this is also from the Valero website. This is Valero operations in the Atlantic basin. Really international. Branded sites they have focused in areas of supply and cost advantages. Brand is Texaco, in use in the UK since 1916. They have a 20-year agreement to use the brand. And so, why don't we take a trip to Pembroke? This is what it looks like. It's a very beautiful little place. In fact, the mayor is talking about giving Valero a small business loan to help them in their operations.
LAUGHTER
number
This is a picture of the refinery from the sea and from the air. And this is Valero, and these six berths here all hold ocean-going supertankers. And this is a buried valley, a buried fjord that's extremely deep. It's one of the deepest deep water ports in the world, and it's well in from the sea. In the UK, there is UK Tar Sand Network, there is Pembrokeshire Friends of the Earth, Corporate Watch. They're very upset with this. And if you look at this month's issue of Oil Sands Review, you'll see an article called "Flow Through." This is a review written for the oil business, and you can download it easily. It's entitled "Flow Through." "Increasingly, Canada is using US deep water ports as a springboard for tide water market access. Is reexporting going to be the next big thing?"
And then it continues
"The old saying where there's a will, there's a way is providing true in spades for North America oil producers, including those in the bitumen belt. The rapid growth of crude by rail has become the most visible evidence of this, but another opportunity is snapping at its
heels
reexporting Canadian oil through American ports." When you're doing source to sink analysis, sometimes you don't really want to discover what you're finding. I mean, you get a kind of sinking feeling when you find some of these things. Here's from 2012. I think it's from Friends of the Earth, who already saw some of this. And Jim Hanson, whom you know as a prominent and vocal NASA scientist just recently retired, says that fully exploiting the tar sands would effectively mean game over for the climate. So let's look at the Keystone in the context of public policy. First of all, are we exporting petroleum? Some of you experienced rising propane and gas prices this year, and I went to the web, and you can do this. There's a CDIAC site. I reference it here, and you can have a copy of the PowerPoint. But the important thing here is to show that we have moved, in 2004, from exporting 400,000 barrels per day of propane, and a close relative, propylene, to about 3,500,000 barrels per day. We're exporting our petroleum already, and the consequence of that export should be to keep prices up and maybe even raise them. The Keystone is the left figure here. This is a figure I've drawn from a verbal sketch written by William Blake, the great poet who writes about one wheel outside of the other wheel. On the left is what he calls the satanic mill. It's the human economy, the small circle, operating or attempting to operate outside creation's economy, which is the big wheel. And what he says in his great epic piece "Jerusalem" is that the little wheel, our economy, must always operate within the economy of the biosphere on the right. I wrote an article about this for a magazine called Sojourners in June, and this is a quote from my article. I found this is my research too. The words of the head of the, I'm sorry, the words of Secretary of State John Kerry in an address delivered in Indonesia in February are appropriate. This is what he said, and this is really quite interesting, I
think
"We just don't have time to let a few loud interest groups hijack the climate conversation. And when I say that, you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about big companies that like it the way it is, that don't want to change, and spend a lot of money to keep you and me and everybody from doing what we know we need to do." That's our Secretary of State. And this is my conclusion in the
article I wrote in June
"In the name of gaining US petroleum independence, more jobs for American workers, keeping US oil at home, reducing injection of carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, and supporting the natural interest, the Keystone XL does just the opposite." Now I'm coming to a conclusion. We all know Wendell Berry, who is this wise essayist. And from all of his thought and
study he says
"The care of the Earth is our most ancient, most worthy, and most pleasing responsibility." So I'm going to move with you just briefly to the Netherlands, where for centuries they've seen the sea as a foe. And very recently they have transformed their thinking about water and they have developed a program called Room for the Water as part of their major effort called Delta Works. The whole country is a big delta, and Delta Works refers to all the dikes and all the other engineering that they have. And what they've decided that their theme will be is working together with water. It would be real interesting here to look at the parallel to climate. Working together with climate. Working together with water. Now, this is a remarkable transition in the Netherlands because what it's doing is it's moving villages off the river sides, more away from the river so that the river has room to flow. That's what is called Room for the River. And here's their hero, Wim Kuijken, W-I-M K-U-I-J-K-E-N, who's been appointed by the government to be the coordinator of it all. He's given a $1 billion budget per year for which he has to account after it's spent. He doesn't write proposals. He acts on needs and then justifies how it was spent. So they are making room for the river by redesigning their cities. Deltas in the Time of Change was a conference held in 2010, and, interestingly, in September, 2014 is their second conference which you might like to attend. It would be inspiring. And it's in Rotterdam, and it has people from all over the world talking about how we transform our understanding of nature as an adversary to nature as a friend with whom we cooperate. The Delta Project is the right figure, on the right, where the little wheel is inside the big wheel. The Valero project is on the left. Stewardship and the stewardship tradition works within creation's economy, shown on the right. And here's a concluding statement. There's one more conclusion after this, but this comes from a recent publication. Planetary resilience is paramount to the world's ability to cope with the multiple changes that are taking place and interact from local to global scales. Planetary stewardship provides a new and more compelling context for social ecological scholarship and for developing strategies that line sustainability science to action. Stewardship also opens doors for new collaborations such as between ecologists, religious groups that share common goals, or between scientists and social psychologists for more effective communication of science with the public. And to conclude with Berry
again
"The care of the Earth is our most ancient, most worthy, most pleasing responsibility." I hope you've enjoyed this time together. There's much more to say and much, much more to do, and I wish us all well as we work to serve the Earth in harmony as it serves us with all these great gifts. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
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