Climate Links: June 2018

Leaked UN draft report warns of urgent need to cut global warming. The Guardian. Jun. 15, 2018.

IPCC says ‘rapid and far-reaching’ measures required to combat climate change

Atmospheric greenhouse gases continue inexorable rise – 2017 was sixth consecutive year CO2 rose by 2 ppm or more. Jim at Desdemona Despair. Jun 9, 2018.

What happened last time it was as warm as it’s going to get later this century? Howard Lee, ars technica. June 28, 2018.

Even if we succeed in limiting warming this century to 2ºC, we’ll have CO2 at around 500 parts per million. That’s a level not seen on this planet since the Middle Miocene, 16 million years ago, when our ancestors were apes. Temperatures then were about 5 to 8ºC warmer not 2º, and sea levels were some 40 meters (130 feet) or more higher, not the 1.5 feet (half a meter) anticipated at the end of this century by the 2013 IPCC report. 

Why is there a yawning gap between end-century projections and what happened in Earth’s past? Are past climates telling us we’re missing something?

One big reason for the gap is simple: time. 

Earth takes time to respond to changes in greenhouse gases. Some changes happen within years, while others take generations to reach a new equilibrium. Ice sheets melting, permafrost thawing, deep ocean warming, peat formation, and reorganizations of vegetation take centuries to millennia. 

These slow responses are typically not included in climate models. That’s partly because of the computing time they would take to calculate, partly because we’re naturally focused on what we can expect over the next few decades, and partly because those processes are uncertain. And even though climate models have been successful at predicting climate change observed so far, uncertainties remain for even some fast responses, like clouds or the amplification of warming at the poles. 

Earth’s past, on the other hand, shows us how its climate actually changed, integrating the full spectrum of our planet’s fast and slow responses. During past climate changes when Earth had ice sheets (like today) it typically warmed by around 5ºC to 6ºC for each doubling of CO2 levels, with the process taking about a millennium. That’s roughly double the “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity” (ECS) values used in climate model projections for 2100, which are calculated mainly from historical observations. 

“We do expect the Earth System Sensitivity (change CO2 and have all the systems react—including ice sheets, vegetation, methane, aerosols etc.) to be larger than ECS. Work we did on the Pliocenesuggested about 50 percent bigger, but it could be larger than that,” Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told me. 

Or, as Dana Royer of Wesleyan University put it, “In short, climate models tend to under-predict the magnitude of climate change relative to geologic evidence.” 

Part of that greater magnitude is simply down to Earth’s slow responses, which produce a net warming. Even if greenhouse gas emissions were to cease completely tomorrow, sea levels are committed to keep rising for centuries from thermal expansion and melting glaciers; ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are also committed to keep melting from the heat already built into the climate over recent decades. And because CO2 lasts a long time in the atmosphere, in the absence of geoengineering to remove it, the world will overshoot any of our end-century temperature targets and stay elevated for centuries. 

But those don’t explain the entire gap, which suggests we’re missing some other amplifying feedbacks. As the 2017 US National Climate Assessment put it: “model-data mismatch for past warm climates suggests that climate models are omitting at least one, and probably more, processes crucial to future warming, especially in polar regions.”

... 

Our present window of opportunity may not be open for long—scientists are scrambling to see if ice sheet collapse is starting in one of the largest glaciers of West Antarctica. “Things are changing now very, very fast relative to a lot of what we see in the geological record,” said Eley. “I would love to think that we’re not going to end up with some of the worst-case scenarios, but we’re already, I think, on a path to hitting those sorts of levels.”

Green technology to burst 'carbon bubble' in catastrophe for fossil-fuel economies, new research predicts. Ben Chu, The Independent. June 4, 2018.

Researchers’ model suggests between $1tn (£750bn) and $4tn could be wiped off value of global fossil fuel assets by 2035 

Trillions of dollars of fossil fuel wealth will be wiped out at some point over the next 17 years even if governments fail to impose binding carbon emissions limits on industry to curb global warming, according to a major new study. 

Environmentalists and policymakers have long warned of the threat of a “carbon bubble” and “stranded assets” for listed energy companies, based on the possibility they will never be able to realise the value of their vast stores of oil, gas and coal if politicians actually deliver on their decarbonisation promises. 

But today a group of scientists and analysts from Cambridge, Nijmegen, Macao and the Open University take that warning a step further by arguing that these assets are destined to be stranded regardless of official policies to discourage the use of fossil fuels because clean energy technologies are now developing so rapidly that those polluting assets will be worthless in any case.

Last Exit to the Road Less Traveled. J.D. Alt, New Economic Perspectives. Jun. 9, 2018.

We now stand where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one less traveled by—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

Rachael Carson, Silent Spring

What’s important to keep in mind in this quote from Rachael Carson’s 56-year-old warning shot over the bow of corporate civilization is that there are two roads being traveled now. We are no longer at a fork. The fork is half-a-century behind us. The goal is not to get the superhighway to somehow re-route itself and follow the path less traveled. It can’t. The superhighway will, and must, continue accelerating in its inevitable direction, simply because the greed and power of the people driving that highway will not allow them to alter course. But if there is any truth to Rachael Carson’s warning (and there seems to be growing evidence of it) the other path—the Road Less Traveled—will become the surviving branch of our evolutionary diagram. The present goal, therefore, should be to create as many exits from the superhighway as possible—and to encourage and enable as many people as possible to take those exits to explore and follow the other path.

Caroline Lucas on Heathrow and climate change: ‘The apocalypse is happening’. The Guardian. Jun. 16, 2018.

“If you measured impact on climate change by each individual action then you’d never be able to talk about the cumulative impact of a set of actions on the climate. We know aviation is one of the fastest growing sources of emissions; we know emissions at altitude are a lot more damaging to the climate than they are at ground level; we know that if Heathrow expands then it’s almost like an arms race between the different airports across Europe, because they’re all in a fight for passengers.” 

But we keep being told we must not concede a competitive advantage to rival European airports. She counters wearily: “If you were talking to campaigners in Charles de Gaulle [airport in Paris], they’d tell you they’re told exactly the same thing: don’t concede defeat to London! We’re all being pitted against one another in this incredibly dangerous race to the bottom. If we were to follow the logic of those people who think every time we build a runway our economy miraculously benefits, then why would you not just cover the whole country in concrete? That’s the logic of that argument. The bottom line is that aviation is a very good example of why you can’t say: ‘We’ll have a demand-led approach’ – because the demand will go on. I think there needs to be a mature conversation about limits to growth. I think we need to ask: growth for what?” 

Growth for jobs? Growth for our kids to leave home and afford a mortgage and enjoy the living standards our parents took for granted? “Growth that is not tackling inequality,” she rejoins. “Growth that’s destroying the planet we depend on. Growth that we know, by simply measuring prosperity in terms of GDP growth, is an incredibly blunt instrument. GDP simply measures the circulation of money in the economy, not whether or not the outcome of using that money is positive or negative. A major pile up on the M5 is wonderful for growth, because it means people go out and buy more cars. But by any other measure of what’s useful or helpful, a pile up on the M5 is bad news.”

Hottest May on record in U.S. leaves dust bowl in the dust. Jim at Desdemona Despair. Jun. 4, 2018.


Trees That Have Lived for Millennia Are Suddenly Dying. Ed Yong, The Atlantic. Jun. 11, 2018.

The oldest baobabs are collapsing, and there's only one likely explanation.

Scientists underestimated how quickly oceans are losing oxygen. Kay Vendetta, Earth.com. Jun. 11, 2018.

Prof Andreas Oschlies is head of the marine biogeochemical modelling group and speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 754 at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (GEOMAR) and Kiel University, Prof Peter Brandt is professor of physical oceanography at GEOMAR and Kiel University, and Dr Lothar Stramma and Dr Sunke Schmidtkoare senior scientists in the physical oceanography group at GEOMAR.


Guest post: How global warming is causing ocean oxygen levels to fall. Carbon Brief. Jun. 15, 2018.


Antarctic ice loss has tripled in a decade. If that continues, we are in serious trouble. Chris Mooney, WashPo. Jun. 13, 2018.

Antarctica is melting faster than anyone thought, and we're not ready for the sea level rise that's coming. Kevin Loria, Business Insider. June 16, 2018


Rate of Antarctic Ice Loss Has Increased Three Times Since 2007. Ian Welsh. June 15, 2018.

So, yeah. Again, as I have said for a long time, the consensus reports are always wrong and when new data comes in it is almost always worse than predicted. There appear to be self-reinforcing cycles involved.

...

Nothing we are doing is more effective than a spit into a hurricane. The Paris Accord is a joke: It wouldn’t be enough even if implemented, it’s not mandatory, and most countries won’t make their voluntary targets.

There are a lot of moving parts, the most important of which will be the arctic methane release (once that starts, it will self-reinforce and the game will be over), but for people on the ground it’s going to be about heat, rainfall, and water. Also, about water. And water.

This can no longer be stopped, in any meaningful sense, but we could prepare and try to mitigate. We aren’t even doing that.

Capitalism is killing the planet and needs to change, says investor Jeremy Grantham. CNBC. June 13, 2018.

"Capitalism and mainstream economics simply cannot deal with these problems. Mainstream economics largely ignore [them]," Grantham says. 

"We deforest the land, we degrade our soils, we pollute and overuse our water and we treat air like an open sewer, and we do it all off the balance sheet," he adds.

US Still Subsidizing Fossil Fuels To Tune Of $27 Billion. Joshua Hill, Clean Technica. June 6, 2018.

Ahead Of G7 Meeting, Investors Urge An End To Coal Power & Fossil Fuel Subsidies. Steve Hanley, Clean Technica. June 5, 2018.

Officials about to attend the G7 meeting in Toronto later this week expect to get an earful from environmentalists. What they don’t expect is to get blasted by 288 major institutional investors — including Allianz Global Investors, Aviva Investors, DWS, HSBC Global Asset Management, Nomura Asset Management, Australian Super, HESTA, and some several U.S. pension funds including CalPERS — which are calling on leaders of the US, Canada, France, the UK, Japan, Germany, and Italy to eliminate coal-fired generating stations within their borders and ramp up actions designed to cut carbon emissions more aggressively.

Energy and Climate Change: No progress in 20 years. Gerardo Honty, Climate and Capitalism.June 26, 2018.

BP statistics show we are far from meeting the emission reduction targets adopted in the Paris Agreement. In 2017, we took a step backwards.

The principal conclusion that can be reached from a review of the data presented for last year is that we are far from fulfilling the goals of reducing the threat of climate change according to the objectives of the Paris Agreement. In 2017, we have taken a step backwards with respect to the timid advances that appeared in the two preceding years: the use of fossil fuels continues to grow, the increase of the share of renewable resources is much lower than what is needed and the emissions are increasing rather than decreasing.

... 

Often one loses sight of the fact that, while the source of energy may be renewable, such as sun or wind, the technology necessary for its capture is not. The minerals, metals and other raw materials necessary for making photovoltaic cells, windmills and batteries are finite, not renewable and in some cases are rare. Their exploitation brings growing economic and energy costs – in addition to environmental damage

The most depressing energy chart of the year. Dave Roberts, vox. June 16, 2018.

not this one, depressing enough:

not this one either, also not very encouraging:

this one:

yup, we still use as much coal, globally, as a % of fuel used for power gen, as 20 yrs ago; 

ditto for oil and gas... 

and, of course, while the %s haven't diminished as one might have hoped, the absolute amounts, after 20 yrs of global population and economic growth, are much higher than 20yrs ago

more here:
In-depth: BP’s global data for 2017 shows record highs for coal and renewables. CarbonBrief. Jun. 15, 2018.

Renewable energy grew by the largest amount ever last year, while coal-fired electricity also reached a record high, according to new global data from oil giant BP. 

However, set against continued rapid rises in energy demand fuelled by oil and gas, renewables were not enough to prevent global CO2 emissions rising significantly for the first time in four years, the figures show.

2017 Was Another Record-Busting Year for Renewable Energy, but Emissions Still Increased. GreenTechMedia. June 4, 2018.

The legal fight to leave the dirtiest fossil fuels in the ground. John Abraham, The Guardian. Jun. 14, 2018.

Tar sands are the worst. Not only are they really hard to get out of the ground, requiring enormous amounts of energy; not only are they difficult to transport and to refine; not only are they more polluting than regular oils; they even have a by-product called “petcoke” that’s used in power plants, but is dirtier than regular coal. 

This stuff is worse than regular oil, worse than coal, worse than anything. Anyone who is serious about climate change cannot agree to mine and burn tar sands. To maintain climate change below critical thresholds, tar sands need to be left in the ground. 

... 

If you care about climate change, then it is not logically possible to approve any pipeline or other infrastructure that may further worsen our climate. We are already screwing up the climate enough as it is.

The threat to climate change mitigation posed by the abundance of fossil fuels. Filip Johnsson, TandF online. Jun. 19, 2018. PDF version

Abstract 

This article analyses the trends in primary demand for fossil fuels and renewables, comparing regions with large and small domestic fossil fuel reserves. We focus on countries that hold 80% of global fossil fuel reserves and compare them with key countries that have meagre fossil fuel reserves. We show that those countries with large domestic fossil fuel reserves have experienced a large increase in primary energy demand from fossil fuels, but only a moderate or no increase in primary energy from renewables, and in particular from non-hydro renewable energy sources (NHRES), which are assumed to represent the cornerstone of the future transformation of the global energy system. This implies a tremendous threat to climate change mitigation, with only two principal mitigation options for fossil-fuel-rich economies if there is to be compliance with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement: (1) leave the fossil fuels in the ground; and (2) apply carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. 

Combinations of these two options to exploit their respective possibilities synergistically will require strong initiatives and incentives to transform a certain amount of the domestic fossil fuel reserves (including the associated infrastructure) into stranded assets and to create an extensive CCS infrastructure. Our conclusion is that immediate and disruptive changes to the use of fossil fuels and investments in non-carbon-emitting technologies are required if global warming is to be limited to well below 2°C. Collective actions along value chains in business to divert from fossil fuels may be a feasible strategy. 

Key policy insights

• The main obstacle to compliance with any reasonable warming target is the abundance of fossil fuels, which has maintained and increased momentum towards new fossil-fuelled processes.
• So far, there has been no increase in the share of NHRES in total global primary energy demand, with a clear decline in the NHRES share in India and China.
• There is an immediate need for the global community to develop fossil fuel strategies and policies.
• Policies must account for the global trade flow of products that typically occurs from the newly industrialized fossil fuel-rich countries to the developed countries.

Struck by a Hockey Puck: Renewable Energy’s Big Canadian Black Eye. Renewable Energy World. June 8, 2018.

... 

As the world moves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change renewable energy deployment will need to be an ever-increasing part of the solution. Yet as the Ontario experience has demonstrated, there’s a tangible limit on ratepayer willingness to pay for a cooler planet. Let’s just hope that policy makers around the world learn from Ontario and strive not to repeat its mistakes. Otherwise, we’ll all be shoulder high in water from rising seas with nothing more to show than many black eyes and a collection of hockey pucks.

Appalachia’s $84 billion secret: China and U.S. plan massive petrochemical hub in West Virginia. Natalie Stickel, Blue Ridge Outdoors. June 13, 2018.

“Most people have no clue how much more damage is coming if it doesn’t stop. The industry doesn’t want people to know about this.” 

The biggest energy project you’ve never heard of commonly goes by the acronym ASTH—the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. This massive petrochemical hub in West Virginia and Pennsylvania would be the largest infrastructure in the region’s history, consisting of hundreds of miles of pipelines, fracked gas processing facilities, and underground storage of petrochemicals and fracked gas liquids.

Carbon Ironies. Wen Stephenson, The Baffler. June 13, 2018.

ADDRESSING AN IMAGINED READER in the all-too-likely “hot dark world” of our all-too-near human future, William T. Vollmann begins his two-volume, twelve-hundred-plus-page Carbon Ideologies (the second volume of which was published last week) with a curious and characteristically audacious gambit. In the opening pages of Volume I: No Immediate Danger, as he sets out upon this tome concerning fossil fuels and nuclear energy, Vollmann explains: “I do my best to look as will the future upon the world in which I lived—namely, as surely, safely vanished. Nothing can be done to save it; therefore, nothing need be done. Hence this little book scrapes by without offering solutions. There were none; we had none.” 

Some twelve hundred pages later, near the end of Volume II: No Good Alternative—having heard from coal miners and refinery workers, oil executives and nuclear engineers, fracking enthusiasts and carbon lobbyists, politicians and industry-captured regulators, residents of variously poisoned communities and even a few beleaguered activists—Vollmann beseeches his future reader to go easy on him and us. “If you could end up saying, ‘well, yes, we might have made the same mistakes as you, if we’d been lucky enough to live when you did,’ I’d feel that Carbon Ideologies had accomplished some of its purpose,” Vollmann writes. “How you judge us can mean nothing to us who are dead, but to you it might mean something, to accept that we were not all monsters; and forgiveness benefits the forgiver, so why wouldn’t I prefer you to call our doings mistakes instead of crimes?” But Vollmann suspects this is a bit much to ask. “Most likely,” he wearily admits, “you are a hard, angry person. . . . Beset by floods, droughts, diseases and insect plagues . . . fearing for your children in the face of multiplying perils, how can you feel anything better than impatient contempt for my daughter and me, who lived so wastefully for our own pleasure?” 

Now, perhaps this is unfair, but it occurs to me that Vollmann’s imagined reader, sweating and hungry beside a dead, acidic ocean, may be entitled to ask why the author spent years of his comfortable (as he never tires of confessing) carbon-powered life writing a twelve-hundred-page book about energy and global warming without offering more than a dismissive hand-wave in the direction of “solutions” like solar, wind, geothermal, batteries, smart grids, etc.—at the very moment in history when such renewable energy technologies and their economics were beating all expectations. Well, it seems Mr. Vollmann simply doesn’t believe there’s anything we humans can do about a problem as big and complicated as climate change—after all, as a friendly pastor in West Virginia said to him, the Earth is so large! And even if there were, it would almost certainly require people like himself to engage politically and make some kind of sustained collective effort, which would be tedious and boring and difficult. And while it’s possible that the logically fallacious (see tu quoque) obsession with his own carbon complicity and supposed “hypocrisy” may offer him a convenient excuse for not lifting a finger, it may also be the case that he simply doesn’t want to look like the sentimental chump who falls for some hope-mongering twaddle about fighting for humanity and not giving up on each other, and all of that. Whatever the reason, he tells his misfortunate reader: “I am sorry.”

... 

And yet, for all that I find enjoyable and admirable in Vollmann’s project, I’m also sharply opposed to his brand of climate fatalism, which seems to be symptomatic, a kind of irresistible temptation, among intellectuals and other expensively educated types these days. And it’s this sense of utter futility and resignation in the face of our human emergency which would seem to warrant a reply. Because Vollmann is correct on some important level, but only up to a point. To borrow the phrase he used in Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), his seven-volume moral treatise on violence—which, along with Poor People (2007), he considers a companion to Carbon Ideologies—his “moral calculus” here is fundamentally flawed, based as it is on a common misunderstanding or mischaracterization of the climate catastrophe.

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And there’s a good bit that Vollmann gets right, or so it seems to me, in terms of the moral calculus on climate. This is especially the case in his vivid, often affecting, unerringly humane portraits of ordinary people caught up in the carbon system—and nowhere more so than in West Virginia, where the people he meets, at all social levels, have been literally poisoned by that system, indoctrinated and deceived by its ideologues, sacrificed on the altar of limitless profits and the so-called patriotic duty to “keep the lights on.” He knows there’s no moral equivalence between these folks and the executives, lobbyists, politicians, and revolving-door regulators who do everything in their considerable power—including pitiful appeals to victimhood—to keep the system humming along. So it’s satisfying when he drops all sarcasm near the end of the book and lays it on the line:

Those who found themselves compelled by economics to be complicit in the production, distribution and consumption of harmful energies . . . were not especially at fault. For them, fossil fuels constituted sheer subsistence. . . . Even less could I accuse those who had not been educated to understand the almost invisibly approaching misery.  

However, I began to believe that those who selfishly, maliciously or with gross negligence did harm ought to be singled out, shamed and maybe even . . . punished.—What constituted gross negligence? A parent who left a loaded gun in reach of a baby was surely responsible for the result. Those West Virginia officials, Colorado lobbyists and Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce types who publicly advanced the agendas of their chosen fossil fuels but refused to even acknowledge questions about global warming stood convicted, in my mind at least, of authoritarian partisanship. I would have heard their side; they were not even willing to tell me theirs, much less ask about mine. And they had power. . . . These are the ones, my friend. These are the ones who laid you low.

... 

Nevertheless, for a writer so finely attuned to the nuances of moral reasoning, Vollmann displays a surprisingly simplistic and binary view of the climate catastrophe.

Just how fucked ‘we’ or ‘they’ will be—that is, what kind of civilization, or any sort of social justice, will be possible in the coming centuries or decades—depends on many things. 

Yes, of course, we’re fucked. (Though it’s important to specify the “we” in this formulation, because the global poor, the disenfranchised, the young, and the yet-to-be-born are certifiably far more fucked than such affluent, white, middle-aged Americans as Vollmann and myself.) But here’s the thing: with climate change as with so much else, all fuckedness is relative. Climate catastrophe is not a binary win or lose, solution or no-solution, fucked or not-fucked situation. Just how fucked we/they will be—that is, what kind of civilization, or any sort of social justice, will be possible in the coming centuries or decades—depends on many things, including all sorts of historic, built-in systemic injustices we know all too well, and any number of contingencies we can’t foresee. But most of all it depends on what we do right now, in our lifetimes. And by that I mean: what we do politically, not only on climate but across the board, because large-scale political action—the kind that moves whole countries and economies in ways commensurate with the scale and urgency of the situation—has always been the only thing that matters here. (I really don’t care about your personal carbon footprint. I mean, please do try to lower it, because that’s a good thing to do, but fussing and guilt-tripping over one’s individual contribution to climate change is neither an intellectually nor a morally serious response to a global systemic crisis. That this still needs to be said in 2018 is, to say the least, somewhat
disappointing.)

As experts (and other people, like me) have been saying for years now, it is almost certainly too late to prevent highly disruptive and, in many places, catastrophic climate change within this century, with all the human misery and death that will bring. But it’s also the case that rigorous analyses (though you won’t find them in Carbon Ideologies) show how most of the world’s energy systems could in fact be radically decarbonized in the coming decades; that the barriers are not technological or economic; and that there are now signs of the political and economic winds shifting globally, in spite of (and in response to) Donald Trump’s election. Are they shifting fast enough? Not even close. Is the carbon lobby still doing everything it can to obstruct and delay? Yes, by all means. And even if the world somehow miraculously moves as fast as possible between now and mid-century, as scientists are calling for, will it prevent dangerous and destabilizing climate disruption for centuries and possibly millennia to come? Probably not. In fact, achieving the vaunted Paris Agreement goals would actually require “negative emissions” technologies, capable of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere on a vast scale, which remain largely speculative (not to say fantasy).

So, yes, Vollmann and other doomists are right that it’s a no-win situation—depending on what you mean by “win.” If you mean “stopping” or “solving” climate change and preserving the world as we’ve known it, then the climate fight was “lost” a long time ago, maybe before it began. And yet science also tells us that, even at this late date, some versions of “losing” could look far worse than others. We can still lose less badly! Not the most inspiring battle cry, perhaps, but when you understand the stakes—human survival—still a cause worth lifting a finger for.

Scientists don’t really know with precision (which means William T. Vollmann doesn’t really know) where the atmospheric tipping points actually are, and whether we’ve already crossed some of them or soon will—see, for example, the accelerating collapse of Arctic sea ice and the melting permafrost—making worst-case scenarios unstoppable. Climate experts will tell you that every fraction of a degree of warming we prevent could be well worth the effort. So is it too late to prevent many catastrophic impacts across much of the world? Almost certainly. Is it too late to prevent the worst-case scenarios and thus even greater suffering of billions more human beings? Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t know. And that’s the point. As for the politics, maybe the obstacles really are insurmountable. But maybe they’re not. History shows that revolutionary change, both political and technological, is almost never foreseen—or even believed possible—by those living in the historical moment. Again, that’s the point. We don’t know exactly when it will be “too late” (“too late for what?,” we should always ask), or what may be possible if we keep pushing hard enough.

If you’re comfortable throwing up your hands and doing nothing in the face of this kind of uncertainty, very well; it’s your choice. Vollmann won’t think any less of you, and quite honestly, neither will I. Political action, sustained commitment, sacrifice—these are a lot to ask of anyone. But please don’t take moral comfort from assurances that there is nothing to be done. There’s plenty.

Which is one reason it’s too bad that Vollmann, though he does profile a few seemingly isolated activists fighting the Carbon Goliaths in West Virginia and Colorado and Bangladesh, never acknowledges the existence of the global grassroots climate movement that has become a serious force over the past decade. In case you’re unaware, this is the bottom-up movement that has not only stopped fossil-fuel mega-projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, Pacific Northwest coal export terminals, and regional fracked-gas infrastructure in the Northeast, with thousands of ordinary citizens putting their bodies on the line—and hundreds of thousands coming into the streets—to do so. It’s also the movement that’s pushed global institutions with more than $6 trillion in assets to divest from the fossil-fuel industry, fundamentally altering the conversation on climate and carbon—bringing concepts like “stranded assets” and “carbon bubble” into the mainstream (but not into Carbon Ideologies)—putting the industry’s political culpability and its criminally reckless business model front and center, even beginning to hurt its bottom line. These are no small accomplishments.

But there’s plenty to be done, too, for those who can’t see themselves as climate activists—because the basic political struggles for democracy and human rights, in this country and around the world, are as central to our climate future as the fights to keep carbon in the ground. For those who must try to adapt and live through what’s coming—including Vollmann’s daughter and my own kids—there won’t be any climate justice, or any justice at all, no matter what the global temperature may be, if we lose our democracy.

Unfortunately, many of the sort of educated, literate folks Vollmann is writing for don’t seem to understand all this. Or maybe they don’t want to understand. Perhaps they prefer to look away. It’s so much easier to tell oneself the game is up, that nothing can be done, that nothing ever could have been done, so why bother? It’s perversely comforting to wallow in tragic-ironic guilt over one’s carbon complicity, using it as a pathetic excuse.

The fact that there’s no purity and no “solution” (a word that should be struck from the climate lexicon) in the simplistic binary sense doesn’t mean that nothing can or should be done, even at this late date, even in the face of catastrophe on some unknowable schedule and scale—especially if you care at all about your fellow human inhabitants of this planet, as William T. Vollmann most clearly, and unironically, does. If nothing else, just holding onto our humanity as we sweat in the dark ought to keep us busy.

Losing the Buzz. Bruce Munro, OTD. June 18, 2018.

A cataclysmic decline in insects is taking place, virtually unnoticed. Bruce Munro talks to renowned entomologist Anthony Harris about love, loss and the impending Sixth Mass Extinction, which could wipe land-based life from the globe. 

SCIENTISTS are wading in with troubling findings of their own. 

Twenty years ago, one billion monarch butterflies made the annual migration from Canada to Mexico. Entomologists say the latest count is 56.5 million, less than 1% of new-millennium numbers. 

In October, last year, researchers revealed that, since 1989, three-quarters of all flying insects had disappeared from nature reserves throughout Germany. 

The findings prompted warnings of an impending "ecological armageddon''. 

... 

The globe's 7.6 billion people account for just 0.01% of all living things. 

And yet our impact on the globe has been enormous - some would say catastrophic. 

According to the Proceedings article, humans are responsible for the possibly irreparable loss of large chunks of the animal and plant kingdoms; more than 80% of all wild animals and half of all plants. 

Anthony Harris finds it deeply disturbing. 

"Farmed poultry now makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% wild,'' he says with a shocked tone. 

"The picture for mammals is worse. Sixty percent of all mammals on earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are humans and just 4% of all mammals are wild.'' 

It is no wonder insects are dying out, he says. 

Industrialised farming is one of the main causes.

... 

Just why the decline of insects is such a catastrophe is perhaps not immediately obvious. 

Here's why, Harris says. They do everything from cleaning up waste to keeping plants alive and feeding us and the animals. 

A study in New York city revealed urban insects get rid of thousands of kilograms of food waste each year. It adds up to less rotting garbage, recycled waste and fewer disease-bearing vermin. 

Insects form the base of many thousands of food chains. ... 

Insects also take a lead role in pollinating flowering plants. About 70% of the human diet comes from flowering plants, which include the staples of most diets worldwide; wheat, corn and rice. 

Insects keep the global ecosystem rolling down the highway of life. 

They may be less the canary in the global mine and more the linchpin that is falling out of the world's axle and will cause the whole bus, with everybody and everything aboard, to suddenly lurch and crash in a spray of sparks and a cacophony of metal grinding on chip seal. 

Without insects, we face total ecological collapse and global famine. It is being called the Sixth Mass Extinction. The Fifth Mass Extinction was the one that killed off the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago. 

Harvard entomologist Prof E.O. Wilson has estimated that, without insects and other land-based invertebrates, humanity would only last a few months. Land-based plants and animals would be next to go. The planet would fall quiet and still. 

The last time the earth was like that was 440 million years ago. 

... 

"Craig and I both feel that humanity is on the verge of precipitating a massive extinction event and that it is the responsibility of both artists and scientists to wake people up.''