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Role Model Bhutan Takes Zen Approach To Climate Change
HughPickens.com writes: Matt McGrath writes at BBC that Bhutan, the strongly Buddhist country where up to three-quarters of the population follow the religion, is the only country in the world considered a role model by the Climate Action Tracking organization. Bhutan has put forward the concept of "Gross National Happiness", that represents a commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's culture based on Buddhist spiritual values instead of western material development gauged by gross domestic product (GDP). Bhutan's Constitution mandates its territory to be at least 60% covered by forest – the vast carbon sink a boon for its balancing of humanity and nature. Right now over 70% is under trees, and so great are the forests, that the country absorbs far more carbon than its 750,000 population can produce. As well as inhaling all that CO2, the Bhutanese are pushing out large amounts of electricity to India, generated by hydropower from their fast flowing rivers. The prime minister says that their waters hold the potential to offset 100 million tonnes of Indian emissions every year. That's around a fifth of Britain's current annual outpourings.
Bhutan has embraced electric vehicles and the government envisages the capital city Thimpu, as a "clean-electric" city with green taxis for its 100,000 citizens — Bold plans for a city that at present doesn't have any traffic lights! "We see ourselves on the one hand being able to use electric cars for our own purposes, to protect our environment, to improve our economy, but also to show in a small measure that sustainable transport works and that electric vehicles are a reality," says Tshering Tobgay. ""In Bhutan the distances are short, electricity is very cheap and because of the mountains you can't drive exceedingly fast, so all these combined to provide us with the opportunity for the investment."
According to Dr Marcia Rocha, it's not just a question of Bhutan being spectacularly endowed with natural advantages. "I think they are a country that culturally are very connected to nature, in every document that they submit it's there, it's just a very important focus of their politics." "We may be small, our impact not huge, but we always try many conservation projects," says Kinlay Dorjee, mayor of capital Thimphu. However the modest Bhutanese Prime Minister rejects the idea that his country is the leader of the climate pack. "I feel that calling Bhutan a role model is not appropriate, every country has their own sets of challenges and their own sets opportunities."
Bhutan has embraced electric vehicles and the government envisages the capital city Thimpu, as a "clean-electric" city with green taxis for its 100,000 citizens — Bold plans for a city that at present doesn't have any traffic lights! "We see ourselves on the one hand being able to use electric cars for our own purposes, to protect our environment, to improve our economy, but also to show in a small measure that sustainable transport works and that electric vehicles are a reality," says Tshering Tobgay. ""In Bhutan the distances are short, electricity is very cheap and because of the mountains you can't drive exceedingly fast, so all these combined to provide us with the opportunity for the investment."
According to Dr Marcia Rocha, it's not just a question of Bhutan being spectacularly endowed with natural advantages. "I think they are a country that culturally are very connected to nature, in every document that they submit it's there, it's just a very important focus of their politics." "We may be small, our impact not huge, but we always try many conservation projects," says Kinlay Dorjee, mayor of capital Thimphu. However the modest Bhutanese Prime Minister rejects the idea that his country is the leader of the climate pack. "I feel that calling Bhutan a role model is not appropriate, every country has their own sets of challenges and their own sets opportunities."
Forests are a Zero Sum Game.
All the CO2 they consume during growth they reproduce when the trees die and rot.
The idea to have more forests in the country makes sense ... the article or the summary makes not.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Good for Bhutan.
In the 1990s, Bhutan expelled or forced to leave most of its ethnic Lhotshampa population, one-fifth of the country's entire population, demanding conformity in religion, dress, and language .[55][56][57] The decision was motivated by the concern that the fast-growing Nepali minority were starting to revolt for a separate independent state, recalling similar events that caused the collapse of the nearby kingdom of Sikkim in 1975.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
While the trees are alive, the CO2 is stored and trees have long life spans.
Another way to rephrase: if trees are a zero sum game, is there CO2 locked up in the trees or not?
Your statement would be valid if you applied it to, say, a plant that dies each year. But trees don't.
But all in all, humans are pretty ignorant about the environment --- ocean plant life is by far the biggest producers of oxygen and consumer of CO2. So trees are relevant, but not a major role player.
Ha ha, the US will crush naive countries like this underfoot! USA! USA! USA!
is to not worry about it.
It's better than sending the government out to bully people, police their energy choices, and burden them with higher energy bills that only rich Tesla drivers can afford.
Bhutan is not a role model for anybody.
They exported or exterminated their ethnic minorities in the 1980's and 1990's to make a racially pure, and religiously uniform society. They banned television until the early 90's. Their king and queen routinely scout European tourists for orgies.
Modern Bhutan is the equivalent of the United States exporting or exterminating its blacks (the lowest achieving socioeconomic group), banning immigration and only allowing the most beautiful tourists in for sexual abuse, and then reaping the rewards. Modern liberal societies do not participate in this behavior.
Is there a way to filter off all articles posted by samzenpus?
Here we have GBH: Gross Koch Happiness.
tourist trap. just imagine if the sky were left to clear itself up for a bit.... or just make it worse every day... https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wmd+weather+starvation ... with our fake history & heritage all bollixed & no longer a secret just whois our role models?
GDP is not bad. The reason it's commonly used is because you need a certain level of productivity to sustain a population. You need to be able to produce enough food, clothing, and shelter for each person, so a certain minimum level of productivity per capita is required. Productivity beyond that can go to a variety of uses, ranging from research into new medical procedures, development of new technology which increases productivity even more, or (on the flip side) materialistic things like solid gold toilet seats.
While happiness should be a goal, it can never be the primary goal because it is not self-sustaining. You can dope up the entire population on morphine and they will be extremely happy. They will also die within a month because nobody is producing the food they need to survive.
Productivity was easier to measure back in the hunter-gatherer days when each individual had to collect enough food to feed himself, and build his own clothing and shelter. The entire reason the modern economy developed is because having each person learn every trade like this is extremely inefficient. It's much better to have one person devote himself solely to farming, another solely to hunting, another solely to building homes, and another solely to making clothing. When you split tasks up like this, each person can concentrate on and learn more about their sole task in depth, improve upon it, and productivity per capita increases.
But then it's no longer possible to directly compare people's productivity. How many bushels of corn equals a house? That's where money and the market economy come in - those allow you to value different kinds of productivity using a common currency. A bushel of corn is worth $x, a house is worth $y, and now you can figure out how many bushels of corn equal a house. And when you add up the productivity of everyone in the country, you get GDP. Divide it by the number of people and you get productivity per capita, which is then comparable to productivity when each person had to be completely self-sufficient and do everything himself.
If you wish to factor in things like pollution and CO2 emissions, you simply add them as negatives to productivity. Sure there will be a lot of debate over exactly how much a negative a pound of CO2 emission is. But ditching GDP entirely is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
deep voodoo & chicken feathers .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpS2N_9fHiA .. followed by pain? .. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wmd+chemtrail+ingredients
...Has Bhutan been seized by Buddhist Fundamentalists?
Reading that Bhutan is a role model for the climate, I can't stop wondering what a role model is. I used to think that is a somebody other people should copy. However here the role model is producing electricity with hydro powerplants. This requires water at a high level, which goes downhill. This is easy to find in mountains and Bhutan is nothing but mountains. However in other to copy that, the country copying it must have mountains as well, making it useless in great parts of the world. Japan has a great unused potential here due to their terrain, but with a prime minister, who shuts down construction of renewable energy sources to ensure there is no alternative to nuclear power, it's an open question if they will use it anytime soon.
Another issue is the claim about having lots of forests. Sure it's good, but it's not as easily copied either. They only have 19.9 people for each square km, making it one of the least populated countries in the world. For comparison Germany has 230. This naturally affects the trees to population radio. Also the low population density results in low power usage, making it easier to feed the population entirely with hydro power.
I would dare to say that Bhutan is as much a role model as Iceland. Iceland use geothermal power like no other country in the world and can supply all buildings with heat and electricity. They even have heated roads to make them clear of snow and ice. While it sounds great on paper, Iceland is the only place on the planet where a geothermal hotspot sits on top of a crack in the tectonic plates. This mean their geothermal power is unique, making it impossible to copy paste their power supply buildings to any other country. Iceland is also great for hydropower, though volcanos under the glacier have a history of flash flooding, which wash away everything in their path. Powerplants are at risk and bridges have been lost.
If we go back to asking what a role model is, it should be a template to copy. Where I live the terrain offers none of those options, which mean I can't use such role models for anything. A useful role model would be something like burning garbage and turn it efficiently into electricity to reduce the fuel needed in powerplants or something like that. That particular example used to be a role model, but now it has been copied so much that it is more like "that's how it is", which in turn requires new role models to copy. A useful role model would be to use waste heat from industry (like major internet servers) or powerplants to provide heat for houses, hot tap water or heat requiring industry. It is being done, but there is a huge unused potential here. Alternatively it could be something as simple as a new turbine for powerplants, which reduce fuel consumption and emission by 20% for the same power output. (no, I did not make up that number. That really is the difference between standard and high efficient plants).
Seems like a pretty concrete approach to me. They have resources that allow them to produce electricity and sell it. They also have a manageable population and a no-immigration policy that they strictly enforce. They also acknowledge that if you consume all of a resource, you will no longer have any of that resource.
This is not Zen, nor is it rocket science.
One in the same, aren't they?
* not all buddhism is zen buddhism
* there's nothing buddhist or enlightened about the mentioned policies and approaches
* fucking shit eating headline, it should be forcibly changed just for the stereotypes
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I do not think that works. They would be ashamed if somebody exposed their pr0n habits I would think. Or if their average waistline went down. But behaving responsibky - neee, that would not do.
I'm sure all of the wildlife that live in the rivers take a different point of view to lots of rivers being blocked and used for electricity... or for the animals that lived in the areas flooded.
Or did people forget that not so long ago, it was environmentalists that opposed damming rivers?
The motto of the true environmentalist should be : first, do no harm... it would avoid so many mistakes being made today by people claiming to help "the environment".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hydropower is evil. It kills fish and alters the flow o rivers downstream (holy rivers to some). And it screws up the natural distribution of sediments and nutrients to land downstream.
At least that's what all the fish huggers tell us about our hydropower.
Have gnu, will travel.
The massive deforestation of the European continent (from 90% prehistoric to less than 10% today) has been a huge contributor to carbon in the atmosphere, both due to its initial release and due to its greatly reduced carbon capture over centuries. This is an inconvenient truth for Europeans, because if you take that into account, Europeans would have to massively reduce their carbon emissions in order to pay down their carbon debt. Naturally, Europeans prefer to ignore this massive historical carbon debt and instead pretend as if everybody started with a clean slate a decade or two ago; it's a massive economic and political game, and Europeans aren't playing fair.
One cannot even light up a cigarette in Bhutan. That's tyranny. To not allow the population to smoke should they desire to do so in their homes or designated places is tyranny, full stop.
It's easy to be a role model if you happen to win the geography lottery. My closest example would be Norway, which has both hydropower and oil, so they can sell the fossil fuel for nice profits while living off clean energy themselves.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Bhutan has a population density of 18/km2, the world land population density is 47/km2, including infertile areas. So what applies to Bhutan may not apply to everyone unless we decide to reduce world population by 2/3.
They's just an excuse for nobody ever doing anything to make the world better. Presumably you throw litter in the street, because after all, you as one person couldn't possibly make a difference.
Who will make these electric cars?
Not the Bhutanese: they do not have the heavy industry required to extract the basic elements for a rechargeable car, make the components, or assemble them into a whole. If they want to keep all that closeness to nature, they won't want to develop a complex heavy manufacturing, ore processing, chemicals processing, based industry.
That will be done somewhere else. Bhutan will be fine. China, or India, or Vietnam, or USA, won't.
This plan is just as selfish as the USA importing cheap iPhones made in environmentally-degraded China.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Do you think coal was placed into an unchanging earth 6000 years ago before some puny God retired or do you think the earth is a changing thing with ongoing processes such as buried vegetation becoming coal?
The original poster of this article says the "followers of the religion" but Buddhism is compatible with atheism, agnosticism, antitheism, it's not even a religion as much as a bunch of philosophies.
Example: Sam Harris, is an atheist (actually he doesn't like that word though) who supports much of buddhism ideas (but is also critical of some of buddhism)
Buddhism and non religious people are compatible with each other... becuase buddhism is not about worshiping an invisible man in the sky
Disclaimer: I am not a buddhist and don't want to be, as I reject the label.
You are holding a nation with the population of a small city, but with less infrastructure, up to a measure that a small city cannot match either.
Why?
You know you're on Slashdot when the troll posts are indistinguishable from normal behaviour.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
So, you didn't RFTA, which clearly says the DO have lots of Hydro electric power.
So I suppose wind and solar violate the second law?
Moron.
http://www.governing.com/topic... "Several large dams block migrating fish from reaching their spawning grounds. Dam reservoirs impact flows, temperatures and silt loads of rivers and streams. Over the years, these factors have drastically reduced fish populations. At one time, the Klamath River in Oregon and California had salmon runs in the millions. The construction of four dams along the river reduced the fish runs to a fraction of that."
Hydropower doesn't even count as renewable energy in USA..
http://www.governing.com/topic...
"Several large dams block migrating fish from reaching their spawning grounds. Dam reservoirs impact flows, temperatures and silt loads of rivers and streams. Over the years, these factors have drastically reduced fish populations. At one time, the Klamath River in Oregon and California had salmon runs in the millions. The construction of four dams along the river reduced the fish runs to a fraction of that."
"That’s why hydropower doesn’t count toward utilities’ renewable energy mandates in most states—that, and the fact that there is already so much hydro out there"
You know you're on Slashdot when the left wing liberal hippies post stuff to the firehouse that appears to be nice and liberal, while actually thinking about it deeper means killing all the fish in our oceans, rivers, and lakes. You also know when you are on slashdot when you get a bunch of people upvote all the comments that encourage damaging the environment in massive scale, because it seemed liberal and right at the time... you know you are on slashdot when you see people downvoting anyone who criticizes this damage to the environment as "a moron" and "a troll". Because left wing liberal hippie slashdotters can't distinguish what's actually good for the environment, and what isn't. Go out and buy a Tesla car - it'll save the environment! No, wait, let's think about this carefully.
Seriously, nobody cares.
The usual 'climate change' article of the day. There will probably be a second one, after all, they have an agenda to push!
www.climatedepot.com
www.wattsupwiththat.com
The O2 in the air doesn't come from CO2.
The oxygen in the air comes the from the water H2O in photosynthesis. The CO2 gets incorporated into sugar.
However, I refuse to live in a place which, for all practical purposes, is a Third World theocracy - the kind of regime (sans the tree-hugging aspect) that the GOP seems to be striving to turn the USA into.
Yes, it's about denial of the obvious via an edge case that reduces the magnitude but does not refute the argument (forests act as carbon sinks) at all.
It's also a bit of goalpost shift because nobody was suggesting 100% of the carbon in a tree ends up in the ground.
So merely a deliberate distraction that is worth contempt. Lukewarm misdirection to try to get suckers to believe an outright lie.
Did they suck you in or is your politics telling you to spread the lie?
Either way, it's best you see it as it is - either so you can defend the 6000 year old earth idea where God set everything up and left, so that you can be a useful idiot for those that want to push that view or so that you can see how you are being manipulated.
So have you been tricked or are you one of the ones doing the manipulation with your eyes open?
you are an idiot making symbolism over substance same as article. People like you are the real reason nothing is done, because you only go for emotional victories rather than anything with technical merit
It matters what the big producers of this planet do, China, Japan, USA, etc.
No. People like me are why things ARE done. Because I act personally, and I campaign, and I congratulate those who do the right thing.
You do nothing. Because you couldn't give a shit.
You are self-deluded, nothing you have done is of any consequence to reducing world's pollution or changing the growth of fossil fuel use. That lies in the realm of engineering, of people like me. I have done work in power plants that have zero carbon emissions, that's actual real step toward the goal. "Activism" is not.