By Grant Cooke

UNDERSTANDING WHY THE PLANET IS GETTING HOTTER each day isn’t hard — all you have to do is look in the mirror.

This is particularly true if the person looking in the mirror lives in the U.S., because it is our fossil fuel-intensive, carbon-generating lifestyle — and our total disregard for the planet’s atmosphere — that is causing the looming crisis.

We Americans need to start acting like responsible adults, and stop using the atmosphere as a garbage can. If we don’t, it will not be us who pay the price — it will be our children and grandchildren.

The Earth is a fragile planet with a sensitive ecosystem. There’s just so much garbage we can shove into the atmosphere before we do significant and irreparable damage.

The reason most people don’t understand climate change is probably that it is caused by gases, which are hard to see and smell — unless of course you live in a large city that sits under a blanket of smog.

So what is a “greenhouse gas” — and why does it threaten our idyllic Benicia lifestyle?

Generally, a gas that traps heat in the atmosphere is called a greenhouse gas, or GHG, because the effect is similar to a garden greenhouse that can trap heat and grow vegetables during cold weather.

The four most common GHGs are:

• Carbon dioxide (CO2): Carbon dioxide comes from the burning of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal), solid waste, trees and wood products, and also as a result of other chemical reactions such as the manufacture of cement.

• Methane (CH4): Methane is emitted during the production and transport of coal, natural gas and oil. Methane emissions also result from livestock and other agricultural practices and by the decay of organic waste in municipal solid waste landfills.

• Nitrous oxide (N2O): Nitrous oxide is emitted during agricultural and industrial activities, as well as during combustion of fossil fuels and solid waste.

• Fluorinated gases: Hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride are synthetic, powerful greenhouse gases that are emitted from a variety of industrial processes.

Carbon dioxide — and to a lesser degree the other gases — occur naturally. In small quantities they can be absorbed by plants and other organisms. None, however, can be absorbed in the quantities they are now being emitted, mostly through human activities.

Like most things in life, these gases in a reasonable amount wouldn’t be a threat, but in the massive quantities that our fossil-fueled economies are generating them, they cause a warming effect in the atmosphere. Naturally, as the Earth’s land mass warms, temperatures rise, droughts occur, ice caps melt, sea levels rise, hurricanes and tornadoes become more frequent and storms are more intense.

Climate change is not new. The Earth’s climate has gone through numerous changes over the ages. The planet has always been subject to violent changes in climate from natural catastrophes like volcanoes and meteor impacts.

But these changes have been intensifying at an alarming rate since the late 1700s, when humans began the gradual move toward large-scale manufacturing, and as societies based on trade and agriculture that had been dependent on tools and animals began to rely more and more on machines and engines.

This was called the First Industrial Revolution and it was propelled by the steam engine, invented by James Watt. Originally powered by wood, Watt’s engine converted the chemical energy in wood or coal to thermal energy and then to mechanical energy.

Coal quickly displaced wood as the fuel for the steam engine. Soon it was used to produce heat for industrial processes, to drive engines and to create propulsion, as well as to warm buildings.

With Ben Franklin and his kite, people began to understand, harness and commercialize electricity. Power and energy shifted from steam and coal to oil and the internal combustion engine. (Oil was used in the mid-1800s, several years before electricity. It was burned as kerosene in lamps and small stoves, replacing whale oil.) Manufacturing grew and the assembly line made it possible to mass-produce automobiles.

Except for the brutal wars in Europe, Russia, and Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries — and the relentless genocide of the world’s aboriginal natives — the planet’s population, overall, expanded. With this expansion came greater distribution of products and increased dependence on fossil fuels.

Society evolved to require greater and greater amounts of energy for light, heat, locomotion, mechanical work, and communications; and then for smart phones, computers, televisions, microwaves, washing machines, coffee makers, and all the other technology and gadgets that make for “modern living.” Since the 1700s, these energy requirements have primarily come from fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide.

Fossil fuels opened the world to the wonders of the personal transportation device. At first, fossil fuels allowed for the transition from an agrarian society to an urban one and provided a way to make electricity. But when used to fuel a car, fossil fuels allowed urban workers to leave their city apartments and settle in the suburbs. This led to the need to construct highways and build housing developments, and created the foundation for America’s car culture.

Not only did the car become the means to get to work and a measure of success, it also, ironically, became a symbol of rebellious freedom, like the spontaneous romantic exhilaration of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

But just for a moment, visualize all the CO2 that is released from 7 billion people owning 1 billion cars on an environmentally fragile planet. Eventually, a price has to be paid from the cars, from coal- and gas-burning power generation, and from the burning and clearing of forests and outright deforestation of regions in Brazil and Indonesia.

The gases float upward into the atmosphere and wrap themselves like a blanket around the earth. As more and more are added, the blanket gets thicker and warmer. Hence the greenhouse effect — and climate change.

Beware Bessie: The impact of a demanding populace

AS NOXIOUS AS CARBON DIOXIDE IS, methane, or CH4, is 23 times more damaging. Like CO2, methane is released through industrial processes and agriculture as well as petroleum drilling, coal mining, and emissions from solid landfill sites. Yet perhaps the worst generator of methane is Bessie, the favorite neighborhood milk cow.

Livestock gas is high in CH4 as well as nitrous oxide, or N2O. Once CH4 is released into the atmosphere, it traps heat at a much greater rate than CO2. Livestock, and particularly cattle, release both CO2 and CH4 through belching as they chew their cud. Climate researchers estimate that the average cow releases about 600 liters of methane per day. N2O is released through livestock defecation.

According to a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization 2006 report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the world’s livestock sector generates 18 percent more greenhouse gas emissions (as measured in CO2 equivalent) than transportation. Livestock are also a major source of land and water degradation. “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation,” said Henning Steinfeld, chief of FAO’s Livestock Information and Policy Branch and senior author of the report, which notes that the livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful GHGs.

The livestock sector generates 65 percent of human-related N2O, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure. And it accounts for 37 percent of all human-induced CH4 and 64 percent of ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain.

About 30 percent of the earth’s surface is now given to livestock production, the report notes, including 33 percent of the global arable land used to produce feed for livestock. As forests are cleared to create new pastures, livestock production is a major driver of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 percent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.

Unfortunately, the world’s rising middle class wants animal protein (a goal perhaps only second to having a car). Many people believe that a diet rich in animal protein is important for children’s growth and mental development. With increased prosperity, people are consuming more meat and dairy products every year. Global meat production is projected to more than double to 465 million tons in 2050, while milk output is set to climb from 1,043 million tons in 2006.

This rapid growth is extracting a huge environmental price. Steinfeld warns, “The environmental costs per unit of livestock production must be cut by one half, just to avoid the level of damage worsening beyond its present level.”

Livestock isn’t the only source of N2O. The gas is also released as a byproduct of warming temperatures.

According to scientists studying the impact of global warming on the Arctic and the surrounding areas of permafrost, warming temperatures are causing N2O to leak into the atmosphere. A 2009 study from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, a scientific body set up by the eight Arctic rim countries, says the Arctic is responsible for up to 9 percent of global N2O emissions.

Scientists estimate 1.5 trillion tons of carbon is locked inside icebound earth, mostly in Alaskan and Russian permafrost areas. Since the age of mammoths — about 10,000 years ago — N2O from that carbon has slowly seeped into the atmosphere via lakes and rivers. Over the last few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane. Think of it as tons and tons of raw, frozen hamburger slowly defrosting and decomposing.

Climate change and global warming would not have such an immediate and debilitating impact if fewer people inhabited the planet. It is a matter of scale. A few tons of GHGs won’t mean much to the ice cap. The concern comes from the accelerating growth in population and the exponentially increasing number of people entering the middle class.

There are many more of us, and all of us want more of everything. The growing middle classes of the developing world have their eyes squarely on America. They want animal protein and the American lifestyle, with all its extravagant and wasteful excesses and labor-saving devices. People moving up in class want gated communities and McMansions and fast cars to propel them from the suburbs to the inner city. Knowledge and the way out of poverty are a computer and an Internet connection away. Who can blame them?

The earth’s climate is changing dramatically each day, unlike anything seen in recorded time. Science has made it clear that human activity is the culprit. The planet’s population is growing and the earth’s resources are being extracted faster and faster. We have been locked into a fossil-fueled and carbon-based economic and social structure, and not enough leaders are paying attention. We need to switch to a carbon-less economy driven by renewable energy quickly — and we need to do it yesterday.

Grant Cooke is a long-time Benicia resident and CEO of Sustainable Energy Associates. He is co-author, with Nobel Peace Prize winner Woodrow Clark, of “Global Energy Innovation: Why America Must Lead,” which will be published this fall by Praeger Press.