Climate Links: April 2018

'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention. Patrick Barkham, Guardian. Apr. 26, 2018.

We’re doomed,” says Mayer Hillman with such a beaming smile that it takes a moment for the words to sink in. “The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There are no means of reversing the process which is melting the polar ice caps. And very few appear to be prepared to say so.” 

Hillman, an 86-year-old social scientist and senior fellow emeritus of the Policy Studies Institute, does say so. His bleak forecast of the consequence of runaway climate change, he says without fanfare, is his “last will and testament”. His last intervention in public life. “I’m not going to write anymore because there’s nothing more that can be said,” he says when I first hear him speak to a stunned audience at the University of East Anglia late last year. 

From Malthus to the Millennium Bug, apocalyptic thinking has a poor track record. But when it issues from Hillman, it may be worth paying attention. Over nearly 60 years, his research has used factual data to challenge policymakers’ conventional wisdom. In 1972, he criticised out-of-town shopping centres more than 20 years before the government changed planning rules to stop their spread. In 1980, he recommended halting the closure of branch line railways – only now are some closed lines reopening. In 1984, he proposed energy ratings for houses – finally adopted as government policy in 2007. And, more than 40 years ago, he presciently challenged society’s pursuit of economic growth. 

... 

 “Even if the world went zero-carbon today that would not save us because we’ve gone past the point of no return.” 

... 

Without hope, goes the truism, we will give up. And yet optimism about the future is wishful thinking, says Hillman. He believes that accepting that our civilisation is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognises he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives. 

Can civilisation prolong its life until the end of this century? “It depends on what we are prepared to do.” He fears it will be a long time before we take proportionate action to stop climatic calamity. “Standing in the way is capitalism. Can you imagine the global airline industry being dismantled when hundreds of new runways are being built right now all over the world? It’s almost as if we’re deliberately attempting to defy nature. We’re doing the reverse of what we should be doing, with everybody’s silent acquiescence, and nobody’s batting an eyelid.”

Its time to think seriously about cutting off the supply of fossil fuels. David Roberts, Vox. Apr. 29, 2018.

There is a bias in climate policy shared by analysts, politicians, and pundits across the political spectrum so common it is rarely remarked upon. To put it bluntly: Nobody, at least nobody in power, wants to restrict the supply of fossil fuels.

Policies that choke off fossil fuels at their origin — shutting down mines and wells; banning new ones; opting against new pipelines, refineries, and export terminals — have been embraced by climate activists, picking up steam with the Keystone pipeline protestsand the recent direct action of the Valve Turners. 

But they are looked upon with some disdain by the climate intelligentsia, who are united in their belief that such strategies are economically suboptimal and politically counterproductive. 

Now a pair of economists has offered a cogent argument that the activists are onto something — that restrictive supply-side (RSS) climate policies have unique economic and political benefits and deserve a place alongside carbon prices and renewable energy supports in the climate policy toolkit.

If Solar And Wind Are So Cheap, Why Are They Making Electricity So Expensive? Michael Shellenberger, Forbes. Apr. 23, 2018.

Over the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines. 

People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become.  

And yet that’s not what’s happening. In fact, it’s the opposite. 

Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percent while the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.  

And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.

Underwater melting of Antarctic ice far greater than thought, study finds. Jonathan Watts, Guardian. Apr. 2, 2018.




Crop insecurity: what is the future of our food? Sayed Azam-Ali, FT.com. Apr. 6, 2018.

The scale of the challenge is formidable. A rising global population coupled with a warming planet will lead to increasingly scarce water and energy resources — what Sir John Beddington, formerly the UK’s chief scientific adviser, has called a “perfect storm”. Demand for food and animal feed is set to at least double by 2050. Rural populations are moving to cities and arable land is being degraded. As our climate changes, green revolution technologies will become riskier, costlier and more demanding on the planet. We will need not one but several solutions to transform agriculture so that it nourishes us without diminishing the natural resources on which we all depend. 

... 

In his Nobel Peace Prize speech “Peace and Humanity”, Borlaug described the green revolution as: “A temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space.” Fifty years later, this space is running out.

The Dangerous Belief That Extreme Technology Will Fix Climate Change. Aleszu Bajak, HuffPo. Apr. 27, 2018.

It’s no surprise that geoengineering is such an easy sell. Relying on a technological fix that’s just over the horizon avoids the mountain moving required to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, bring hundreds of countries into agreement on how to limit and clean up emissions, and alter the consumption habits of an entire civilization. Those are systemic complexities ingrained in our economies and cultures. Propping up glaciers to limit sea level rise, sprinkling iron dust into the oceans to encourage plankton growth to absorb carbon, or spraying the skies to reflect the sun’s heat just seems simpler. And, as Wake Smith shows, increasingly feasible. 

But the problem with the way geoengineering is discussed today, lamented John Ehrenfeld, former director of the MIT Program on Technology, Business, and Environment, is that it doesn’t address the societal issues that got us in this mess in the first place.

“It’s a failure to accept complexity of the system, and the system includes people,” Ehrenfeld told me recently over coffee. For decades, Ehrenfeld, who is now retired, researched and promoted the concept of sustainability. But to Ehrenfeld, after all the climate conferences, all the stakeholder roundtables, all the debates on market-driven solutions, the questions and answers being debated never questioned capitalism, civilization, and the notion of progress. 

Tackling a problem as deeply ingrained as global warming, Ehrenfeld said, will require humanity to face an existential question that geoengineering alone cannot address: Are we willing to sacrifice growth to ensure the survival of our species? 

“Absent decoupling growth from progress,” Ehrenfeld said, “we won’t address the core of the problem.”

The African Anthropocene. Gabrielle Hecht, Aeon.





Estimated US Energy Consumption in 2017. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

REVOLUTION IN A WARMING WORLD. Andreas Malm, Climate & Capitalism, March 17, 2018.

Lessons from the Russian to the Syrian Revolutions

... 

Here, then, can be discerned the contours of a third hypothetical configuration: revolution to treat the symptoms of global warming. The Syrian and Egyptian cases are no outliers. Surveys have found that the day-to-day processes of capital accumulation — enclosures, commodification, planning for real estate, centralization of resources — heavily distort most adaptation projects around the world, leaving precisely the most vulnerable people without cushions.[53] But ‘in revolutionary times the limits of what is possible expand a thousandfold,’ recalling Lenin.[54] If social relations block the way to effective pro-poor adaptation, they ought to be overhauled. Here is one more reason to seize every opportunity catastrophes open up. Unlike the two previous configurations, this one would presuppose revolutionaries who consciously act against the impacts of climate change on the terrain over which they can wield influence. But that influence will by nature be constrained. 

Revolution Against the Causes 

Adaptation to three, four, not to speak of eight degrees is bound to be a futile endeavour. No matter how advanced the sprinklers Syrian farmers install, irrigation requires water. No walls can save the Nile Delta from the underground infiltration of the sea. No one can perform any kind of physical labour when temperatures settle above a certain level, and so on. But the proven fossil fuel reserves can be kept in the ground. Emissions can be slashed to zero. ‘Everybody says this. Everybody admits this. Everybody has decided it is so. Yet nothing is being done,’ and this is the rationale for the most exigent type of revolution, the one that, in full consciousness of the roots of the problem, wages a full-scale onslaught on fossil capital, just as the Bolsheviks set themselves the task of putting ‘an immediate end to the war,’ insisting that ‘it is clear to everybody that in order to end this war, which is closely bound up with the present capitalist system, capital itself must be fought.’[55] This is the moment to read the Lenin of 1917 anew and salvage the kernel of the Bolshevik project: 

“We can draw, perhaps, the most striking comparison of all between reactionary-bureaucratic methods of combating a catastrophe, which are confined to minimum reforms, and revolutionary-democratic methods, which, to justify their name, must directly aim at a violent rupture with the old, obsolete system and at the achievement of the speediest possible progress …”[56] 

— speed here being the critical dimension. The dawdling bourgeoisie, meanwhile, ‘as always, are guided by the rule: “Après nous le deluge.”’[57] Policies that would save millions or even billions of lives could be put in place, if only the obstructing interests were removed. ‘The ways of combating catastrophe and famine are available, the measures required to combat them are quite clear, simple, perfectly feasible, and fully within reach of the people’s forces.’ We could begin by updating the Communist Manifesto and list ten:[58]

• Enforce a complete moratorium on all new facilities for extracting coal, oil or natural gas.
• Close down all power-plants running on such fuels.
• Draw 100 per cent of electricity from non-fossil sources, primarily wind and solar.
• Terminate the expansion of air, sea and road travel; convert road and sea travel to electricity and wind; ration remaining air travel to ensure a fair distribution until it can be completely replaced with other means of transport.
• Expand mass transit systems on all scales, from subways to intercontinental high-speed trains.
• Limit the shipping and flying of food and systematically promote local supplies.
• End the burning of tropical forests and initiate massive programmes for reforestation.
• Refurbish old buildings with insulation and require all new ones to generate their own zero-carbon power.
• Dismantle the meat industry and move human protein requirements towards vegetable sources.
• Pour public investment into the development and diffusion of the most efficient and sustainable renewable energy technologies, as well as technologies for carbon dioxide removal.[59] 

That would be a start — nothing more — yet it would probably amount to a revolution, not only in the forces of production but also in the social relations in which they are so deeply enmeshed. Just how thoroughly the phenomenon of CO2 emissions is bound up with class society has recently been highlighted by two striking reports. One tenth of the human species accounts for half of all present emissions from consumption, half of the species for one tenth. The richest 1 per cent have a carbon footprint some 175 times that of the poorest 10 per cent; the emissions of the richest 1 per cent of Americans, Luxembourgians and Saudi Arabians are two thousand times larger than those of the poorest Hondurans, Mozambicans or Rwandans. Shares of the CO2 accumulated since 1820 are similarly skewed.[60] Some ecological class hatred is certainly warranted, and then we have not even mentioned the hard inner core of fossil capital, the Rex Tillersons of this world, the billionaires who swim in money from pulling fossil fuels out of the ground and selling the fuel for the fires