Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Fucked up buddhists. Everybody knows that money==happiness. What are they teaching their children?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
All the CO2 they consume during growth they reproduce when the trees die and rot.
Actually not all the carbon will be released. The dead plants will rot and slowly turn to soil. Some of the carbon will be trapped in the soil and slowly over time go deeper and deeper. The coal and oil burned today are mostly rainforests plants and they grew like 300 million years ago (if I remember correctly). Regardless of specific age, it's way before the dinosaurs and the saying about burning dinosaurs for fuel is not based on facts.
Also if they release as much carbon as they consume in their lifetime, they would take up the oxygen they released, leaving nothing to animals or humans. Clearly plants release more oxygen than they consume.
It's not a given that forests act as carbon sinks, or at least as good ones. See for example this article;
"Conventional wisdom has long held that tropical rainforests act as a sink for carbon dioxide, cleansing the atmosphere of a major greenhouse gas. However, biologists studying the forests of Costa Rica are finding that rising temperatures are causing trees to grow less and to pump out more carbon dioxide, adding to an accelerating pattern of global warming."
Added to variations in the amount of carbon sequestered by trees are variations in soil emissions. Warmer climates can cause the organisms in the soild to release more carbon dioxide and methane from the soil. Complicated stuff.
Oh no... it's the future.
The coal and oil burned today are mostly rainforests plants and they grew like 300 million years ago
Actually, they are mostly plants that grew in swamps, with water that had very little oxygen or nitrates. When the plants died, and sunk into the muck, they didn't decompose because of the lack of oxygen. This does not happen in rainforests. Rainforest soils contain very little organic material, which is one reason they quickly erode when the vegetation is cleared or burned off.
Clearly plants release more oxygen than they consume.
This is only true if you ignore the CO2 exhaled by the animals that eat the plants. A mature forest sequesters a lot of carbon, but it does not continue to sink more.
One scheme to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, is to plant fast growing pine trees on plantations, harvest them every decade or so, and burn them to produce electricity, and then sequester the resulting CO2 in shale formations where the CO2 reacts with the rock to form solid carbonates. The trees are then replanted. There are plans (heavily subsidized by British taxpayers) to do exactly this.
...Has Bhutan been seized by Buddhist Fundamentalists?
burden them with higher energy bills
Since 2010, I have cut my home energy use in half. I switched to all LED lighting, added insulation to my attic, replaced the central heater & A/C with spot heating/cooling, and bought a Samsung Smartthings hub to turn off unused devices. This did not cause "higher energy bills". Due to tiered pricing, my energy bill is about 1/3rd of what it was five years ago.
whoosh!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Surely Bhuta must be like a paradise, unless you are a Lhotshampa. You want that kind of shame or the carbon kind?
It's easier to get great reductions on improvements if your house is poor to begin with
My house was not inefficient to begin with. It was about average. I know this because PG&E includes a comparison on every bill, telling you how you compare to other houses in your neighborhood. I went from about 50% to the top 5%. Last month I was at 4%. Once my teenage daughter moves out, I expect to move to the top 2%.
Cutting my energy consumption in half was not particularly hard. It is fun, in a geeky way, to be able to turn things on and off with just my voice. The smart hub has a published API, and I have written some scripts. For instance, my son rides his bike home from school, and then uses a personalized code to open the front door. If that code is not entered by 3pm, I get an alert on my cellphone, letting me know there could be a problem. I think the scriptable home may be the next big thing.
I spent about $500, but I save about $80 per month on my gas/electricity bill, so the payback is very quick.
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.
Complicated stuff indeed, and not at all the "zero-sum" that angel'o'sphere imagines.
There's also the various uses of wood that man has. When it's burned it may release CO2, but it's better than digging coal out of the ground and releasing that CO2. When it's used for building or other manufacture, it locks away carbon for decades or potentially centuries in the item.
You did all that for only $500? Did you miss a zero?
No. The SmartThings hub was $99 on Amazon. LED bulbs are $2 each on eBay. The attic insulation was loose fiber, and I rented the blower from Home Depot for $40.
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.
So why don't we cut down forests, bury the carbon our own way, and then plant more trees?
The fact that it's a poor country makes it all the more creditable that they are taking climate change seriously.
What's America's excuse?
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"
I was wondering this myself. It sounds nice, "National Happiness" and all that, but I wonder how they treat those who dissent. On the point of Buddhist Theocracy, I am always a bit surprised that people have such a positive opinion of the Dalai Lama, as what he wants to return that country to is exactly that. Why would a Buddhist Theocracy be a good thing, but a Muslim Theocracy (for example Iran) but bad?
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.
Wrong on all accounts.
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
Neither is the puny amount of wood burned any comparison to the amount of oil/coal burned nor are we down to 10% of woods.
In fact we are up to 60% - 80% again since decades, depending on country.
This is an inconvenient truth for Europeans, because if you take that into account
Wrong.
Europeans prefer to ignore this massive historical carbon debt
There is no such dept. All wood on earth burned today would add less than a one year CO2 pollution mankind is doing every year.
You are an idiot.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
a slave plantation, for example, would have a pretty decent income per capita.
Case in point: Equatorial Guinea looks like a first world country by per capita GDP, but the majority of the people live in extreme poverty.
This space intentionally left blank
Well, I'm glad you at least agree implicitly that countries ought to be held responsible (1) for the carbon released by deforestation relative to natural, prehistoric levels, and (2) need to be charged for the capture deficit resulting for the forest cover that is missing relative to natural, prehistoric levels.
One can quibble about the percentages later, but suffice it to say: no matter how you look at it, Europe clearly has undergone massive deforestation at the hands of its inhabitants, and the resulting carbon that was released into the atmosphere, as well as the missing carbon sequestration capacity should be treated just like emissions.
Actually, forests hold more carbon than the entire atmosphere. ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/0...
They also capture the equivalent of 30% of all man-made emissions (about as much as oceans).
Not to mention the fact that Bhutan doesn't even practice Zen buddhism. It follows Vajrayana Buddhism.